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Sunday, August 30, 2020

The Whiteness Problem of White Wine

By On August 30, 2020
In the Black Lives Matter era, everything is too problematically white, including white wine.

As every single industry from cereal to dental supplies engages in its own ritual reckoning with a country so systemically racist that every part of its system is hysterically confessing to racism the way teenage girls in Salem confessed to witchcraft, the hangover is hitting wine country.

The whining about the whiteness of wine is overflowing at every high end publication.

"Too White Wine," moaned the Financial Times.

The column by Jancis Robinson, who received an Order of the British Empire for writing about wine, began by tweeting her, "shame at the lack of ethnic diversity in the world of wine."

Perhaps Jancis could give her FT column and her OBE to a more deserving minority.




Articles warn, The Wine Industry is Overwhelmingly White.” and they frantically urge, "It’s Time to Decolonize Wine" and "It’s Time: Diversity in Wine".

Wine is actually very diverse. Not only does wine come from all over the world, but it comes in different colors and shades, it originates from different cultures and exists in different languages. It’s mentioned in the Bible, in ancient Chinese poems, and in 2,000 year old verses from India.

But now wine, the universal solvent of cultures across human history, is not diverse enough. At least not once George Floyd’s death while high on fentanyl cast light on the whiteness of wine.

"In the two months since the June George Floyd protests, some Black winemakers have called out the racism in their industry," Mother Jones exclaimed.

What does Floyd have to do with wine? Not a whole lot.

But Julia Coney, who writes about wine and racism, posted an Instagram video titled, "Racism and the Wine Industry: Your Silence is Betrayal." Coney, who described herself as a leader on “race and wine”, jabbed one finger at her webcam, “Wine industry, shame, shame on you!”

The other appeared to be holding a glass.

Then Coney insisted that those members of the wine industry who hadn’t been supporting her shouldn’t rest because black people killed by the police were not resting in peace.

It was enough to make a man turn to strong drink.

In the months since Floyd’s death, this warmed-over race-baiting had hijacked every industry. The wine industry, which caters to and includes wealthy lefties, and had been laboriously trying to diversify by ushering in the likes of Coney to indict them as racists, was feeling the squeeze.

It didn’t take long for the whining about the whiteness of wine to turn into political witch hunts.

A survey contended that 84% of professionals in the wine industry are white, while only 2% are black. And the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) claimed that “In terms of $$$, the U.S. wine industry overwhelmingly supports Trump.”

The targets were a few industry figures, notably Marvin Shanken, the Jewish publisher of Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado, who has raised a fortune for children with autism.

But he also donated to President Trump.

The American Association of Wine Economists did not seem very interested in the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vineyard makes her the fourth-richest Californian in Congress or that Governor Newsom has his own winery which stayed open for tastings even as he ordered wineries in much of the state to shut down. And then there’s John Legend, a black leftist celebrity and Biden fundraiser, who owns the LVE–Legend Vineyard Exclusive wine label.

The point of this viniter witch hunt was spreading accusations of conservative politics, racism, and generating wine boycotts against the enemies of the politically correct people.

"It’s important that we share values with people and businesses we support… and purchasing decisions will be impacted by this list," a San Francisco winery replied.

Wineries whose owners had donated to President Trump were put on the defensive, forced to plead their support for diversity, even as an elitist white lynch mob accused them of racism.

Concern for the opposed minorities of the wine industry had given way to the true agenda.

And how oppressed are those minorities, some of whom own vineyards in Napa Valley where an acre can cost a quarter of a million dollars, by the white man of the white wine trade?

"The wine industry has long been enigmatic, cloaked in whiteness, wealth and privilege," Style Weekly bleated.

The wealth and privilege part is just as true of the black participants in the industry.

“But the problem with racism? Add another 30-pound bag, at least. Instead of carrying three, I have to carry four.” Dan Johnson, a San Francisco lawyer who boasted of winning a $265 million verdict against Verizon, complained.

Johnson has his own winery and three acres in Napa. Quite a few Americans of all races would like to carry what he’s carrying.

Turning Black Lives Matter into Black Wineries Matter and the death of George Floyd into the dearth of black millionaires with their own vineyards exposes the privileged position of corporate black nationalism which exploits the deaths of poor black people for black and white elites.

The absurdity of mobilizing a witch hunt in George Floyd’s name in the wine industry ought to have brought down the entire Black Lives Matter shakedown industry in gales of laughter.

But everyone’s too afraid to laugh.

Instead the Court of Master Sommeliers was browbeaten into no longer having its members be addressed as, "Master." At some point the Court will also be forced to drop the full name.

And the Hue Society was promoted as a safe space for black wine drinkers.

There are scholarships, diversity initiatives, and statements of fealty from the wine industry.

"The team and directors at the Oregon Wine Board have been processing, reflecting on and discussing our responsibility in the fight for racial equity in America. We must recognize the power of our platform and our potential to help build a just, equitable and thriving Oregon wine industry that in turn contributes to a just, equitable and thriving Oregon," the aforementioned organization declared in its BLM statement.

What does the Oregon Wine Board have to do with George Floyd, or Black Lives Matter, or race? Nothing. But in Communist China, rocket scientists were required to quote Mao, in the Soviet Union, they had to quote Lenin, and now in what used to be America, every undertaking must begin with a tribute to BLM and a vow to embed “anti-racism” into the organization.

The wine industry is being warned that, like all else, it must get on the right side of history.

"Wine is pretty much an upscale beverage for white people of European heritage," Steve Heimoff, a former editor for Wine Enthusiast Magazine, claimed. "I don’t see Latino or Hispanic people drinking wine, and the same goes for Asians and Blacks."

This would have come as news to everyone from Omar Khayyam to Christopher Columbus. The crews of the maligned discoverer of America imbibed wine heavily. And brought Hispanic people from their European origins to a new world where they became indigenous people of color.

When Joseph was entombed in an Egyptian prison with the Pharaoh’s wine steward, we are reminded that wine played an important role in ancient Egypt and its North African precincts.

But admittedly beyond there, wine did not play much of a role in ancient Africa.

And by the bigoted illogic of Black Lives Matter, there must thus be something wrong with wine. Despite its use by nearly every ancient civilization across history, wine is not diverse enough. It’s only something that upscale people of European heritage drink. Like Heimoff’s ancestors.

China is the world's fourth biggest wine importing country. Japan is in sixth place, Hong Kong, on its own, is in eleventh, and Singapore is in fifteenth place.

But the Asians, as usual, don't count when it comes to diversity.

The United States exports millions of dollars a year in wine to Mexico. Mexicans actually do drink wine just to spite progressives.

And despite demographic changes, wine consumption in the United States continues to increase. Either white people are drinking more wine, or everyone’s drinking more wine.

Wine consumption nearly doubled between 1995 and 2017.

Not only isn’t wine doomed, but it’s more popular than ever. And in a country where wine is being accused of lacking diversity, you can understand why. After reading through the latest episode of the madness with which leftists have afflicted yet another pleasant element of human life, you may be in the mood for a drink. 

And hopefully you won’t mind if I join you.







Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

California’s Green Energy Dark Age

By On August 27, 2020
The Bay Area has the single largest concentration of ‘green’ businesses in the country. It was also the first to feel California’s rolling outages caused by the state’s messy infrastructure of solar panels and wind turbines, faulty and erratic, tied together by ‘virtual power plants’.

The real color of ‘green energy’ is black.

The Bay Area and surrounding areas are ground zero for the massive graft and grift of ‘green energy’ businesses with companies selling, reselling, manufacturing, consulting, certifying and investing in the bubble crowded in skyscrapers and office parks next to each other. And some of those ‘green’ businesses went dark when a wind farm failed and the power outages rolled out.

The real victims of the evening outages in northern California were senior citizens tethered to breathing machines who sat in the dark, watching the remaining battery power and hoping they would survive, families taking the elevator down only to be trapped inside, restaurants, already battered by lockdowns and riots, losing power and watching food go bad and customers leave.




Why is a region associated with the tech industry suffering from third world problems?

The California Independent System Operator, a state-controlled non-profit that defines the flow of power to most of the state, blamed, among other problems, a wind farm going dark.

The ‘renewables’ around which Democrat ‘green energy’ is based aren’t so renewable after all.

ISO board members, appointed by Governor Newsom, had warned that moving to 33% renewable power had left the state's power supply in a precarious position. The logjam was the solar grid. And during a weekday heat wave, power demands rise as people come home and the sun begins to set. That's why the outages had happened in the evening. No sun, no power.

As the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant gets shut down and gas plants are closed to meet renewable targets, there will be no power to supplement the overloaded ‘green’ power grid.

Green advocates insist that their ‘virtual power plants’ can still handle everything, routing power from the solar panels on Bob’s roof in Marin to compensate for a wind farm going offline. This power shell game looks very futuristic in presentations, but the energy grid isn’t data. Power can’t just be treated like file sharing no matter how much energy consultants insist that it can.

The Democrats and their media allies who caused this mess are pretending to be baffled.

Governor Newsom promised another investigation which this time really will "get to the bottom of it.” The inept Democrat fumed that, “people should have been told sooner and that is exactly the purpose of this investigation.” Which people? His own appointees had been warning him.

An investigation delving into who knew what and when is a face-saving exercise meant to divert attention from the role of the corrupt and cultish Democrat obsession with ‘green energy’.

"Rolling Blackouts in California Have Power Experts Stumped," the New York Times wondered.

There’s nothing to be stumped by and the view to the bottom is as clear as it is at Lake Tahoe.

California, along with other states, is playing musical chairs across a vast grid that ties together a diminishing number of reliable power generating systems and an increasing number of unreliable power systems. There’s still enough reliable ‘brown energy’, as green grifters call it, to offset the unreliable ‘green energy’ most of the time and most times of the day. And the game of musical chairs moves enough of it around that there isn’t a problem, until there’s a problem.

Like the Titanic, it looks great on the press releases and seems to work until it hits an iceberg.

The metaphorical iceberg sinking California’s energy grid is its heat waves. The ‘virtual power plants’ with their scalable vision of making the power supply of entire cities dependent on ephemeral natural phenomena, like the wind, water and sunlight, not to mention the solar panels awkwardly poking out over Bob’s garage, sound like the future until all the lights go out.

And then there isn’t enough wind speed, enough sunlight, or enough water in the dams.

Virtual power plants, like so much of Democrat governance, are a scam in which ideological boondoggles are credited for the hard work being done by a diminishing productive population. The scam only falls apart when the productive element is overshadowed by the unproductive.

Criminal justice reform wasn’t actually compatible with low crime rates. The overworked police forces were keeping crime rates low. Once Black Lives Matter and its police defunding riots took off, policing collapsed and crime rates went through the roof. Social justice policies weren’t compatible with higher property values. They just looked like they were until the homeless and the thugs overwhelmed neighborhoods and the bubble of the upper middle class began to burst.

The power outages are a taste of the South African blackouts that are coming to California.

Governor Newsom admitted that moving away from fossil fuels had made the energy grid unreliable, even as he insisted that the state would go on "moving away from fossil fuels toward solar and wind."

And that means that it will go on having power shortages.

These are the reasons why our distant ancestors switched from ‘green energy’ to gathering and burning fuel to keep their tribe warm, cook their food, and light the night. Embracing green energy barbarism under the banner of Big Tech buzzwords inevitably leads to Burning Man.

Newsom called the outages, "unbefitting of the nation’s largest and most innovative state.”

That's the problem.

Innovation means moving from less advanced to more advanced, and to more reliable from less reliable, technologies. Putting up windmills and swapping out nuclear for solar isn't innovation, it's like replacing your car with a horse and calling it a renewable smart car powered by nature..

More advanced and innovative technology does more. When it does less, it’s backward.

‘Green energy’ produces less power, less reliably, and more expensively. That makes it backward. Renewables are as innovative as the green ethos of moving to a 19th century Vermont farmhouse and buying fruit at a market stand while pretending to live like farmers. It’s a charming way for a small upper class population to live, but it’s not, as greens say, sustainable.

The real cost of renewables is not having a reliable power supply.

If the green lobby had any integrity, it would admit that switching to wind and solar means living in a world in which your power can and will fail at any time. And that’s the price of environmentalism. Instead, like the criminal justice reformers, who failed to tell the public until last month that the price of their policies would mean the end of public safety, they’re lying.

Governor Newsom falsely claims that California won’t sacrifice reliability for green energy.

Too late.

California now has more people and less power generating capacity. As the state gets closer to the mythical 100% renewables target, it will have more people and even less capacity. A 100% renewable energy grid is a 100% unreliable grid that will be going down on a regular basis.

None of that will be fixed. Instead there will be slogans to make the blackouts seem progressive.

PG&E is already describing its outages as "sharing the challenge." That sounds progressive and empowering. Especially for seniors on breathing machines or children trapped in elevators.

After some noise about investigations, California Democrats will ask the public to recognize that power is finite and go about the job of deciding who deserves to have power and who doesn’t.

The troubling interconnectedness between power and government allowed Mayor Garcetti to cut off water and power to Los Angeles businesses that wanted to remain open during the lockdown and then more recently to homes hosting parties. Companies can treat customers abusively, but a government water empire can cut off power and water for political reasons.

The ‘green energy’ regime will “share the challenge” by creating affirmative action for blackouts, determining which areas lose power and for how long based on racial and economic criteria. The wealthy will buy their own power, while anyone on the grid will be subject to the whims of Democrat political appointees dividing the spoils of a dying energy grid in a collapsing state.

The resource shortages of the green energy dark age will turn its practitioners into barbarians.

California will finally reach its 100% renewables target when its population has learned to cook in wood stoves, read by candlelight, and live in the darkness of ‘green energy’.

And then every day in this bright new dark age can be Earth Day.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Globalism is a Western Idea. The Rest of the World Killed It

By On August 25, 2020
When globalism’s obituary is finally written, and the mourners file past in their crisp suits and pantsuits, the cause of death will almost certainly read, the People’s Republic of China.

China is the most obvious offender. Even before the Wuhan Virus cut off countries from each other, the Communist oligarchy had abused the world economy with massive digital theft, even more massive counterfeiting, product dumping, and every possible form of economic warfare.

That’s why any halfway serious adult on the other side supports Trump’s fight against China.




Last year, even George Soros, the uber-globalist, called Trump's trade war with China his greatest achievement. This year, during the coronavirus crisis, Soros came out against working with the People’s Republic of China against the virus.

The source of Soros' opposition is the fear he expressed at Davos that the PRC's social credit system could "sound the death knell of open societies". By open societies, he meant globalism.

Unlike many, Soros isn’t worried about the loss of personal freedom, but the endurance of the nation state. China, like Russia, has shown that a nation-state with mass propaganda, a censored internet, a powerful secret police, and all the digital toys on sale in stores can survive the pressures of modernity that are fracturing the nations and peoples of the Western world.

But all of that depends on the PRC’s ability to generate wealth and raise living standards.

China is engaging in massive economic warfare, not just for the obvious reasons, but so that the Communist Party can maintain its grip on power by delivering the same lifestyle of digital toys enjoyed by Westerners to the PRC’s middle class and rather more lavish lifestyles for the rich.

What Soros was also implicitly admitting was that globalism faces its biggest threat, not from Western revivals of nationalism, but from non-Western nations that never stopped being nationalistic. Globalism is a Western idea that Non-Western nations never bought into.

The League of Nations was fatally wounded by Japanese aggression against China. The United Nations was fatally discredited when it expelled Taiwan and replaced it with China at the behest of a membership of non-Western Third World nations allied with the Soviet Union.

International trade bodies were heavily tested by Japan and then wrecked by China.

The laws of war and the refugee system, once the moral underpinnings of internationalism,, were brutally exploited by Islamic states to wage terrorist campaigns and funnel colonists into western nations. Erdogan’s Turkey has been the first state to openly weaponize migrants, demanding money and concessions in exchange for not sending migrants into Europe.

The global club was built for Western countries. When non-Western nations were admitted, the club, whether it was trade, travel, diplomacy, or anything else, was inevitably trashed.

And no one is allowed to talk about it.

The nationalistic revivals in America and Europe are not the homegrown outbreaks of bigotry that globalists like Soros like to pretend, but a reaction to these massive global abuses.

Without China’s economic warfare, massive open borders migration, and Islamic terrorism, American politics after the Cold War would have looked very different. And if Britain weren’t overrun with migrants from the rest of the world, would Brexit have even passed?

Globalism is a bad idea. But what made it even worse than the loss of sovereignty and individual freedoms of the nation-state were the widespread abuses of its infrastructure.

Paradoxically, globalism’s greatest supporters and destroyers were both Communists.

Western Communists were some of the greatest advocates for global institutions, even as the Soviet Union, and then Communist China, undermined and corrupted them. What the USSR did on a limited scale in pursuit of its foreign policy goals, China has done on a much larger scale.

China’s model of large scale intellectual property theft had been innovated by the USSR.

The Soviet Union’s espionage was not only directed at political and military targets, but at economic ones. Communist agents routinely stole and copied Western technology and designs. The Chinese habit of exploring a business deal with a Western company, only to gain access to its trade secrets, had been the default tactic for industries in Warsaw Pact nations.

Where the Soviet Union failed, Communist China succeeded, not only because of a superior work ethic and skill set, but because globalist institutions welcomed in, and the internet allowed it to overwhelm domestic manufacturers in other countries, while hacking their trade secrets.

Globalism’s fatal flaw was the messianic assumption that other peoples shared its worldview. There was no reason for Beijing, Tokyo, Tehran, or Islamabad to share a particular strain of thought whose origins are distinctly European in philosophy, law, and secularized religion.

They’re happy to join the club, exploit it for all it’s worth, and then shrug their shoulders at any moral responsibility to what we would see as a hippie handing out free lunches to everyone.

Now the hippie experiment is drawing to a close because it doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.

Except the people taking the free lunches.

During the Cold War, America fought Communist influence through a global infrastructure with varying degrees of success. After the Cold War, the global infrastructure became the threat with Islamic terrorists arriving at airports as refugees and China picking America’s economy clean.

Globalism has been portrayed as rising, but in reality it’s waning.

George W. Bush ran against nation-building until September 11 reset America back to Cold War rules with Islamism in place of Communism. Barack Obama ran against American power and proved reluctant to engage in military interventions. Obama’s idea of globalism was building leaderless coalitions and he ended America’s role as a world leader on the international stage.

President Trump has been reshaping foreign policy to serve America’s domestic economic needs, while urging allies to coordinate in pursuit of their own domestic political interests. Under Trump, America is much less likely to dictate what other nations should be doing. Instead, it’s been telling the rest of the world to do what it thinks is best with little regard for a global agenda.

The White House and State Department haven’t been shy about leaning on the UK over Huawei, or on Germany over its energy links to Russia, but unlike its predecessors it doesn’t see every single thing other countries do as a piece in a large puzzle that must be measured against international law and integrated into global coalitions. America still throws its weight around when pushing against economic threats from major powers. It’s a return to 19th century diplomacy, while dismissing the failed international experiments of the 20th century.

To leftists, globalism sacrifices international values to American interests and to conservatives, globalism is a problem because it sacrifices American interests to international values.

Either way, it’s unsustainable.

Globalism is being torn apart by the same demographic forces that are destroying the nation-state. The social contracts that govern a country or the international order depend on the willingness of all the participants to believe in the larger community. At the most basic level, that’s represented by the balance of giving and taking through the social contract.

Altruists give more than they take, deadbeats take more than they give, and abusers take everything and give nothing except where it directly serves their short-term interests.

Domestic demographic changes are destroying the social contracts of the welfare state and internationally the social contract and its infrastructure have been hijacked by non-Western nations with no regard for the Western obsession with maintaining an international community.

Globalism was fueled by the myth of a global community that could never exist.

Communist China and the Islamists have spent the last 30 years demonstrating that it can’t and won’t. Communities are built around shared values. When there are no shared values, there’s no community. That’s as true globally as it is in the streets of London and New York City.

Globalists have struggled with the failure of the social contract by blaming those who abide by it, middle-class native homeowners locally, and America and its allies globally. But internalizing the blame doesn’t make a community work. As we’ve seen in major American cities this year, permissively accepting abuses of the social contract out of guilt destroys communities.

A community must have a way of dealing with those who violate the social contract. If it can’t rein in nations and individuals who violate the social contract, then violations become the norm, and people and nations abandon the failed community because it doesn’t protect their interests.

When there are few shared values, then communities have to spend more time and force policing the social contract. That can mean militarized police, surveillance cameras, and DNA databanks in major cities, and a constant state of war and endless military deployments abroad.

The lack of a shared social contract turns life, locally or globally, into a perpetual struggle.

Leftist political philosophies have tried to dodge this crisis by defending the perpetrators and blaming the victims. But no matter whom they blame, their system is still falling apart.

Globalism is dying. The greatest enemies of the Western world are saving it from itself.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

Cannon Hinnant, George Floyd, and Losing the War on Drugs

By On August 23, 2020
The body of a junkie ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was placed in a golden coffin on a horse-drawn hearse while a nation whose cities were burning watched.

Cannon Hinnant was laid to rest quietly in a small funeral home across the street from a gas station. The mourners, some driving pickup trucks, parked out front and made their way through the puddles to hear his youth pastor eulogize the 5-year-old boy who had been shot in the head.

The deaths of George Floyd,a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs, and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North Carolina, are both symbols.

Floyd’s death during a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a political inquisition. Hinnant’s death has been ignored outside the local and conservative media.



The out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer restraining him, but across the country. And Cannon Hinnant’s murder at the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control crime.

The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant’s deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.

After Floyd’s death, it became fashionable to speak of crime and policing as inventions of white supremacists and symptoms of white fragility. Cannon’s small head proved fragile when he was shot, but Hinnant’s father regularly invited Darius Sessoms, his killer, for meals or a beer.

Sessoms had been in and out of prison. The common theme was drugs and guns. Year after year, he would go in for 3 months for possession, and then out again, he appeared to have stolen a gun, and then he had begun maintaining a house for drug activity.

It's a familiar story in Wilson, North Carolina, a half-black and half-white city of under 50,000 which has seen huge drug busts over the years and where the crime logs focus on drug-related crimes by men with three names and no future.

In the age of drug apps, a former president who casually mentioned using cocaine, and a partnership between leftists, libertarians, and some GOPers to decriminalize drugs, focusing on the drug angle is considered politically incorrect. And yet it’s always lurking there anyway.

No one familiar with street level crime was surprised to find drugs in Floyd’s system or Sessoms’ drug charges. This is the world inhabited by police officers who patrol the streets and answer calls, knowing each time what they’ll see before they even arrive at the scene.

The Defund Police movement is right in one regard. We’ve outsourced managing the collapse of our society to men willing to deal with the worst elements of it for $28,000 a year. We have, justly, spent a great deal of time talking about the psychological traumas of veterans, but very little dealing with the state of mind of the men and women fighting the war on our own streets.

But the Defund Police movement and its allies, including top Democrats, insist that there is no crisis. Everything from the drug war to the concept of private property was invented by old white men to keep young black men down. There is no crime problem, only an enforcement problem.

After trying out this theory for a few months, freeing thousands of criminals, refusing to arrest or imprison new criminals, and tying the hands of police, the crime rate skyrocketed. And black elected officials, from the moderates to the radicals, have come out for law enforcement. Every poll shows solid majorities of black people want the police to stay right where they are.

The drug war and its massive police presence were not invented by white racists, they were lobbied for and demanded by black communities who wanted to end the violence. That painful lesson is being relearned at a great cost in human lives. And it’s a long way from over.

After twenty years of hard work and success, too many people forgot what made us safe.

The unhappy truth is that Cannon Hinnant is dead because his killer wasn’t in jail. And George Floyd is dead and a nation is on fire because he wasn’t safely tucked away in prison.

Criminal justice reform didn’t do anyone any favors. Not the criminals or their victims.

Democrats killed Cannon Hinnant, they killed George Floyd, and they’re killing American cities.

Instead of dealing with the disaster, the Democrats continue to treat dead criminals like saints while ignoring their victims. They feed racial narratives, filling headlines with ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’ victims while ignoring stories like Cannon’s murder that don’t fit their racial narrative.

The media is pumping out a steady diet of black victims and white perpetrators. Even if the perpetrating usually seems to involve calling the police in a potentially dangerous situation. But the police forces, many of them run by or filled with minorities, aren’t oppressing black communities, they’re protecting them. Because there are plenty of black Cannons.

Three children are shot on average every week in Philly. The cops aren’t shooting them.

In under a decade, criminal justice reform turned the country’s biggest cities into hellholes. The Democrat media is frantically trying to keep a lid on the biggest scandal in a generation. Even while gang members are racking up a body count that we haven’t seen before in this century, the media keeps shouting that black people are being terrorized by white cops.

That must be why, in a recent Gallup poll, 81% of black people wanted more or the same amount of police. But just having the police patrol neighborhoods isn’t the answer. Arrests are meaningless unless the perpetrators are held until trial, instead of being put back on the streets. Trials have to end in serious prison time for violent offenders, gang members, and drug dealers.

Bail reform, drug decriminalization, and the rest of the criminal justice reform disaster must go.

Organized crime in America is largely controlled by gangs, some foreign and some domestic, it’s time we stopped believing the lies that they’re socially deprived oppressed youth, and started treating them like Al Qaeda, instead of a bunch of social welfare cases.

America has to go back to the hoary cliche of the drug war that liberals and libertarians hate so much. And the southern border has to be secured against the cartels and China.

George Floyd was high on fentanyl. The source of the deadly drug is often China.

If Obama hadn’t given China’s drug trade a pass while making sure Americans needed an ID to buy cough syrup, the entire Floyd case might never have happened. The more America goes after foreign drug industries, the less it needs to spend time policing Americans.

Just like Islamic terrorism, we can fight it at the source, or we can try controlling it at home.

If China were shipping IEDs to America that were killing 30,000 people a year, we would have a national response. But it’s just pushing chemicals that are killing 30,000 Americans a year.

The drug war, like the war on terror, is a two way street. Unilaterally surrendering doesn’t work.

We gave up on the war on drugs. And the People’s Republic of China is winning the war on us.

None of this is what the media wants to talk about because it strikes at the heart of the governance failures of their political party. Instead it wants to convince Americans to double down on the same policies that killed Cannon Hinnant, that killed George Floyd, and that are killing tens of thousands of Americans every single year with bullets, knives, and overdoses.

The Democrats embraced criminals, championing their voting rights, their employment rights, and their right not to be locked up for committing crimes. They need to be held accountable.

America can belong to the criminals or to the citizens.

We’ve seen what a country that belongs to the criminals looks like. In Chicago, the city is raising bridges to keep the mobs of looters out of downtown. In Portland, armed mobs besieged a federal courthouse. In New York City, the streets are empty at night. In Minneapolis, the only security comes from private security. Everywhere in the big cities there is fear and death.

The answer lies with the same old three Ps: police, prosecutors, and prisons.

It begins with the simple truth that if Sessoms hadn't been living on Archers Road, Cannon Hinnant would still be alive. The justice system exists to protect children like Cannon from criminals like Sessoms. The Democrats have reversed the equation, fighting to protect criminals from their victims. America will belong to its people again when the criminals are back in prison.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Never Trump Lobbyists and Consultants for Biden

By On August 19, 2020
John Kasich took the virtual stage at the Democrat National Convention as the former Republican governor of Ohio. But that’s what he did for a living. Not what he does now.

Kasich’s current address isn’t in Ohio. It’s in the swamp.

Earlier this year, The Kasich Company, a firm founded by Kasich and Beth Hansen, his chief of staff and the operative who ran his failed presidential campaign, hired a lobbyist to work on coronavirus tax provisions as well as sundry "Federal Regulatory and Legislative Matters".

The Kasich Company doesn’t do such prosaic things as list its clients or give any specifics of what it does and where it does it, but the former governor’s company does promise to, “deliver successful strategies to overcome local, state and federal obstacles”.

The kind of “obstacles” that have to be overcome with the aid of a lobbyist.



Anyone who followed Kasich’s career, his cynical effort to jump on the Tea Party bandwagon, followed by an even more cynical tilt leftward, won’t be surprised to see him in the swamp.

While Kasich, like other Never Trumpers at the DNC, claims to be “Putting Country over Party”, the only thing Kasich ever puts ahead of the party isn’t country, it’s himself. That’s why he came to the DNC. Kasich’s appearance at the DNC isn’t surprising. Not when you consider the qualifications for being a Republican with so little principle as to come out for Joe Biden.

Along with Kasich, Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, came virtually to the DNC. Whitman is a longstanding Kasich ally who endorsed his doomed campaign.

More relevantly, she heads The Whitman Strategy Group.

The Whitman Strategy Group boasts that, "our leadership experience in the public and private sectors makes us the smart choice for engaging regulatory agencies and high-level officials."

You’ve gotta engage those “high-level officials” with Whitman’s “leadership experience”.

Stop me if you see a familiar theme to the DNC’s Never Trumper caucus.

The Whitman Strategy Group consults on environmental issues. That's right up Whitman's alley. Not as an expert on the environment, her degree is in government, not science, but as the former head of the EPA, she certainly knows quite a bit about government regulations.

If you want to consult Whitman and her Strategy Group about the environment, you'll hopefully have better luck than those New Yorkers whom she told after 9/11 that the air was safe.

A bunch of firefighters died. She finally apologized four years ago.

The media won’t be tacky enough to mention Whitman’s past. Though if she were to appear at a Trump event, the media would immediately recollect her false claims that the air was safe.

It won’t discuss the Whitman Strategy Group’s work of finding “cost-effective and timely solutions for all aspects of our regulatory, permitting and strategic planning work.”

Start out running the EPA and then find cost-effective solutions to its roadblocks.

Like Kasich, Whitman, is in the business of turning her political experience regulating companies into cash. While the EPA may call them wetlands, this is the swamp.

The media and Never Trumpers will tout Kasich and Whitman as the embodiments of integrity and rectitude. But they’re swamp creatures who climbed as high as they could, and then set out to monetize their government experience. Why are they touting Biden? Follow the money.

Trump’s rise froze out Never Trumpers like Whitman and Kasich. And that means there are no special favors, no revolving doors into agencies, and no phone calls to Trump appointees.

The only way forward is through the Democrats.

And if you’re going to make overcoming “local, state and federal obstacles” and finding solutions to regulations into your business model, it helps if the Democrats are in office and making more obstacles and regulations. That’s how the government works. Elected officials create obstacles while in office and then leave office to help the companies who can afford it overcome them.

Joining other Never Trumpers at the DNC was top Google lobbyist, Susan Molinari.

That’s not how Molinari, a former GOP House member, was described, but it is more honest considering that she's been a lobbyist for 19 years. Introducing Molinari as a former Republican House member who spoke at the RNC convention in 1996 is like introducing me as a former high school student. It's technically true, but is misleading and misses the entire point.

Susan Molinari isn’t just any old lobbyist. She headed Google’s D.C. lobbying office from 2012 until 2018. Republicans had taken the House in 2010 and lost it in 2018. What’s a girl to do?

Make nice with the Democrats.

This isn’t the stuff that Molinari, Whitman, and Kasich want to talk about. And it’s not what their media enablers want to see driving the conversation.But it’s what Trump ought to speak about.

The Never Trumper swamp creatures claim that they’re “Putting Country over Party”. But people who put the country ahead of their party, also put the country ahead of their personal interests.

They don’t go into business selling their government experience to the highest bidder.

Molinari, Whitman, and Kasich aren’t principled. They’re swamp creatures who are worried that life under Trump won’t be as profitable and that their connections will be harder to monetize.

The DNC and its media allies won’t call their appearances, “Lobbyists Against Trump”.

But that would be a whole lot more honest.

Biden’s choice to make Kasich, Whitman, and Molinari into the face of his GOP support is a good one. He’s a transactional politician who has always found a way to monetize his political status for his friends and family. Whitman and Molinari’s fathers were politically connected GOP figures who were all but born into office, before crawling into more lucrative careers.

President Trump shook their corrupt world. That’s why they hate him so much.

Biden, Kasich, Whitman, and Molinari are the government class that President Trump is running against. He took on the government class of revolving door lobbyists and consultants in 2016. And he won. Now that same swamp is out to stop him, not for the country, but for themselves.

If the Democrats want to unite with Never Trumper consultants and lobbyists, and run as one swamp party, they can trade their blue colors for green, and replace their donkey with a toad.







Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Monday, August 17, 2020

What Do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Have in Common? Sexual Harassment

By On August 17, 2020
“The Democratic Party has become an enabler to sexual predators," Tara Reade, Biden's former Senate staffer, who accused him of sexual assault, recently told an interviewer.

In May, Reade revealed that she tried to get Kamala Harris to listen.

"Kamala Harris is my representative, so I tried to reach out to her in particular for help, like I wanted to get a safe place to tell what happened. And I didn't get a response. So I kept, again, trying to get it out there," she said.

A senior adviser to the Kamala Harris campaign claimed that never happened.

Last year, Kamala Harris had expressed support for Democrat female activists who had complained about Biden touching them inappropriately. Many of the complaints were not new and Biden had not yet entered the campaign.

"I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it," Harris said, and implied that Biden might want to consider the consequences of running.

By next year, she had dropped out and was hoping Biden would pick her as the nominee.

Kamala Harris told a San Francisco Chronicle podcast that she would be "honored" to be chosen and defended Biden against Reade's accusations by praising him as a feminist.

Within the space of a year, Kamala Harris had gone from believing Biden accusers to disbelieving them.



In 2019, she believed Biden's accusers, but by 2020, she was insisting that the "Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women and empowerment of women."

Like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris built her career around powerful men. The most important of these was Willie Brown, the San Francisco political boss whom Kamala had an affair with, who gifted her with a BMW and, more valuably, an introduction to his political network.

Back then, the 60-year-old political boss would "go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other.”

One of the women on his arm was Kamala, then in her twenties.

"I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker," Brown coyly said. "And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco."

But there were women who didn’t fit on Brown’s arm and had a different experience.

In the 90s, two aides filed a lawsuit alleging that Willie Brown had fired them for reporting sexual harassment by one of his allies. They were able to settle their cases for $100,000.

"Under my leadership as speaker, the Assembly adopted a zero-tolerance policy against sexual harassment," Brown claimed.

He neglected to mention that it was zero tolerance for women complaining about sexual harassment. The allegations against Connolly were investigated by a Brown ally and the future mayor took part in strategy sessions to smear the women to get them “to back off or go away”.

“As soon as we complained, the top man in the state Legislature was out to get us so he could protect his friend Tom Connolly," one of the women claimed.

Connolly was sentenced to two years in prison shortly thereafter for taking a 14-year-old runaway to a motel and engaging in sex with her.

When Willie Brown protected Connolly, the Democrat had quite the past with allegations of cocaine use. The San Diego vice squad even caught Connolly with a pregnant hooker in his car.

Brown's cover-up was backed up by future Rep. Jackie Speier who falsely claimed "at no time . . . did Brown become active or intervene". Rep. Speier is a Kamala Harris ally who recently wrote a letter accusing Facebook of sexism for not removing criticism of the California senator.

A year later, a top Brown ally, John Barry Wyatt, was sued by an assistant who accused him of harassing and even assaulting her. The accuser was paid $59,500 to go away.

Wyatt was appointed Brown's director of field operations.

His accuser claims that she was demoted to the typing pool, investigated, and forced to quit her job. The typing pool was where women who complained about harassment were dumped.

Wyatt's accuser claimed that Brown had rejected the settlement and blamed him for what happened to her.

The Brown operative, who had also worked on Ted Kennedy’s campaign, had previously been arrested after being accused of raping a teenage hitchhiker at knifepoint.

This bottomless pit of sleaze was the way things were in the Brown camp. And Brown is the hub around which California’s Democrat politics, from its governor, to its two senators, and San Fran’s current mayor, has been built. They all owe a good deal to Willie Brown.

Did Kamala Harris not know what was going on at the time?

Her connection to these abuses may have been tentative, but that wasn’t the case with another powerful man.

In 2012, Kamala Harris endorsed Bob Filner for mayor. The Democrat politician was running to head San Diego, and he had a compulsive habit of groping and choking women.

A year later, 'Filthy Filner' had racked up seventeen accusers including a great-grandmother, a military veteran, a future congresswoman, and a rape victim.

Attorney General Kamala Harris negotiated a plea deal in which Filner served no jail time and wouldn’t even be listed in the state’s sex offender database.

Kamala had given ‘Filthy Filner’ the Jeffrey Epstein special.

But there was another powerful man even closer to Kamala Harris.

Larry Wallace had spent fourteen years working with Kamala Harris. He had been "a longtime aide and one of her closest professional confidantes" who followed her from job to job.

He ran her security, appeared in her campaign book, and acted as her senior adviser.

Wallace was accused of sexually harassing his assistant. Xavier Becerra, Kamala's successor, settled for $400,000 with a non-disclosure agreement. That allowed Wallace to follow Kamala to D.C. as her senior adviser, until the story came out, and Wallace had to resign.

Wallace then got a job working as a corruption investigator for Contra Costa DA Diana Becton. Becton, who is backed by George Soros, was endorsed by Kamala. Becton has made headlines for profoundly mishandling the criminal justice system and illegally charging a couple who painted over a Black Lives Matter sign with a hate crime.

Becton was so close to Kamala Harris that she had even plagiarized one of her letters.

The Wallace case wasn't unusual. Public records show that Kamala's office looked a whole lot like Willie Brown's office.

Under Kamala, the California DOJ had paid out over $1 million in sexual harassment and retaliation claims covering everything from groping to verbal harassment.

Kamala claimed that she was unaware of the Wallace lawsuit, but Nathan Barankin, her Deputy AG, who would normally have reviewed these matters, went on to become her Senate chief of staff, and then joined her Fearless for the People PAC.

All this made it very clear that nothing was going to change.

In the spring of this year, Senator Kamala Harris had already gotten into the business of covering up Joe Biden’s sexual assault problem.

Unlike the presidency, it’s a job that the new senator is wholly qualified for. Kamala Harris has little national experience and could potentially go from Attorney General of California to President of the United States in four years. But when it comes to stepping out on the arms of powerful men, and playing defense for their peccadillos, Kamala is overqualified.

Between Biden’s long history of inappropriate touching and the assault allegations, Kamala is likely to have her hands full.

Joe Biden’s habit of sniffing, stroking, kissing, and otherwise inappropriately touching women is not likely to improve as his mental condition declines. And it will be his running mate’s job to step out, smile, and repeat the familiar talking point that the, “Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women" while trying to keep his hands away.

This is the job that Kamala has been auditioning for since she was 29 and on Willie’s arm.

Even as the Democrats roll out false accusations of sexism against Republican critics, the real sexism had always been coming from inside their own house. Kamala has spent a quarter of a century looking away from or covering up sexual harassment by Democrat bosses. Her reward is repeating that the “Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women" until the fall of the year or until the day he dies.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard," H.L. Mencken once observed.

Kamala Harris always knew what she wanted. Now she has it.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

You Can Write Anything on the Street, as Long as it’s 'Black Lives Matter'

By On August 16, 2020
What can you write on the sidewalk?

In Washington D.C., two activists with Students for Life were arrested for chalking, "Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” outside a Planned Parenthood abortion facility.

After months in which "Black Lives Matter" along with the names of assorted criminals has been ritually chalked, painted, and splattered on sidewalks and streets across America, the concept of vandalism had been rediscovered for conservatives who defend the black lives yet unborn.



The activists were charged with defacing public or private property for using chalk, that is easily removable, in a city whose mayor had made a point of painting Black Lives Matter on the street leading to the White House in support of the attacks on the nation’s capital by BLM rioters.

And when BLM activists added “Defund the Police” to Bowser’s original racial supremacist slogan, they were not arrested and no law enforcement personnel dared to interfere.

The case of the arrested pro-life activists in Washington D.C. is not unique.

In New York City, Scott LoBaido, a local artist who had been painting American flag murals, decided to paint a thin blue line around a police station in support of the NYPD. And the Department of Transportation ordered him to remove the thin strip of blue paint from the middle of a median because it violates the rules against the “defacement of any street by painting".

Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio has painted a huge Black Lives Matter sign on the street outside Trump Tower and dispatched police officers to guard the racial supremacist message.

According to LaBaido, no permit was ever granted for that.

New York City's DOT is run by Polly Trottenberg, Obama's former Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy. Trottenberg had taken part in painting a similar racist BLM message outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall.

When asked if Women for America First, a conservative group would be allowed to paint, “Engaging, Inspiring and Empowering Women to Make a Difference!” on the street, DeBlasio dismissed the idea that anyone, except Black Lives Matter, should have that privilege.

"Everything’s individual and specific,” the leftist pol insisted. That’s the opposite of equality before the law. A fundamental principle of both American jurisprudence and civil rights.

De Blasio claimed that America was racist and that Black Lives Matter "transcends any notion of politics.”

Not long ago, American transcended any notion of politics and racial supremacism was racist.

The insistence that the racial supremacist message of Black Lives Matter is above politics is clearly false. If it were above politics, there would be no debate or dissent on the subject.

And that’s exactly what the radical backers of the racist hate group are trying to accomplish.

Even as Black Lives Matter bigots have vandalized churches and synagogues with their hateful messages, torn down statues and defaced memorials while going unpunished, Democrat officials have helped them tear down monuments and paint their hateful messages while aggressively punishing those who chalk different messages or erase the BLM message.

Eight people have been arrested in New York for pouring paint on the hateful BLM mural.

That includes Bevelyn Beatty and Edmee Chavannes, two black women from At the Well Ministries who are opponents of BLM, and had previously protested abortion clinics.

"If someone tries to deface it, that's an offense. They'll be arrested, and we will repaint it again," De Blasio warned.

But no charges were pressed against the BLM bigot who vandalized St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In California, a couple who painted over a racist Black Lives Matter mural were charged with violations of civil rights, vandalism, possession of tools to commit vandalism, and a hate crime.

That’s the same state where statues of St. Junipero Serra, a Catholic saint, Francis Scott Key, the poet patriot who penned the "Star-Spangled Banner", and Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the South and ended slavery, were torn down without any condemnation by Democrat officials, with no interference by police, and without any actual arrests being made or charges brought.

Selective prosecution for the same offenses based on their political motives is the definition of civil rights violations. And BLM’s Democrat backers are violating civil rights on a massive scale.

If chalking on public sidewalks is illegal, it should be illegal for everyone.

If tearing down statues and defacing monuments is no longer a crime, then throwing paint on Black Lives Matter signs on the street should not lead to arrests, let alone prosecutions.

Democrat politicians have justified these illegal abuses of authority by insisting that the statues of everyone from explorers to founding fathers to saints are “divisive” and that the BLM messages are signs of “unity” while the attempts to erase them are “divisive”.

These are not legal standards. They’re the authoritarian slogans of a totalitarian regime.

When a government declares that the slogans and symbols it deems “divisive” can be destroyed at will, without penalty or prosecution, but that vandalizing its slogans is “divisive” and these divisive perpetrators will have every conceivable law in the book thrown at them, that’s tyranny.

Americans have been told by liberals for generations that there can’t be any law outlawing flag burning because, no matter how much the symbol is cherished, it’s protected speech.

And most Americans accepted the argument.

But now those same liberals loudly insist that their valued symbol supersedes speech. Its desecrators must be fired, prosecuted, and jailed even while murderers are being freed.

Ordinary Americans have been fired all over the country after they were filmed taking down hateful Black Lives Matter signs with the media running videos that helped identify them. Meanwhile the media has resisted turning over footage of BLM statue vandals.

While Black Lives Matter mobs in Portland burn stacks of bibles and flags, police officers are dispatched to protect yellow lines of paint on a Manhattan street.

This is not America. These are scenes out of some Communist dictatorship.

Either we protect all property, public and private, equally. Or we protect all symbols equally.

Equality doesn’t mean a diverse group of activists shouting the same slogans. Rather it means that everyone is treated equally under the law. That is manifestly no longer the case. Instead, leftists are allowed to vandalize private and public property, while conservatives are locked up.

Democrats and their leftist allies have inaugurated a new tyranny of ideas in which their symbols are protected as sacred while American symbols and monuments are torn down like garbage.

That is an insult to the First Amendment and to any notion of a free and equal society.

If the only thing anyone is allowed to chalk on a sidewalk is “Black Lives Matter”, then that hateful slogan represents the tyranny of ideas of a regime and its media propaganda corps.

Resisting that tyranny of ideas is the real civil rights movement. Painting “Black Lives Matter” on a street is an act of oppression. Throwing paint on it is an act of civil disobedience. And that will remain so while politicians treat BLM as the view of the state and repress its political opponents.

America has entered a political culture war in which athletes are forced to explain why they dared to stand for our country’s national anthem, and the statue destroyers demand the right to vandalize our sacred symbols and to prosecute Americans who paint over their racist slogan.

That is not civil rights. It’s the antithesis of it.

The difference between the American and the Communist ideas of freedom used to be summed up by the joke about the American who tells the Russian that he knows that he’s free because he can go to the White House and shout that President Reagan is a jerk, only to be told by the Russian that he too can go to the Kremlin and shout that President Reagan is a jerk.

Like that Russian, Americans can write anything they want on the sidewalk, as long as it’s “Black Lives Matter.”






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Why Did Biden Pick Kamala? Follow the Money

By On August 13, 2020
How much did it cost to buy Biden's VP Spot? About $3.5 million.

That's how much Senator Kamala Harris' virtual fundraiser for Biden brought in back in June.

That not only beat Hillary’s total, but swamped every other Democrat fundraiser for Biden, except the Obama one, which brought in over $6 million for his old incontinent flunky, and Warren, who brought in more money in total, but had the misfortune of being a white woman.

The virtual fundraisers were the real beauty contest for the money hungry Bidens. And Kamala Harris won them in a swimsuit of money long before the official announcement was even made.

Susan Rice could hardly compete with a paltry $24,000 donation to Biden.



"She’s been a fighter and a principled leader and I know because I’ve seen her up close, and I’ve seen her in the trenches," Biden gushed about the California politician.

The trenches that Biden had in mind weren’t in the fields of France, but at high-end fundraisers.

Another one of Kamala’s virtual fundraisers for Biden in July brought in another million.

It’s been estimated that Kamala raised a total of $5 million for Biden.

What was Kamala's secret? She's plugged into a network of wealthy donors who got her to the Senate. And then poured over $40 million into her failed presidential campaign.

The fundraisers showed Biden what Kamala could bring to the party. And it wasn’t just money.

A Kamala fundraiser for Biden featured Diplo, DJ D-Nice, Jermaine Dupri and DJ Cassidy. It probably doesn't hurt that Kamala's husband is an entertainment industry lawyer.

It wasn’t just Willie Brown who got Kamala to the top. It was money.

Kamala had built her political career on tapping into big money in San Francisco and then statewide. She routinely outspent her opponents in her political campaigns. In 2016, she bought the Senate race by raising over $15 million and outspending her opponent almost 4 to 1.

More than half of her presidential campaign was funded by $23 million in large contributions.

That, and not small donors, is what Biden has been running on. After Kamala Harris dropped out, the Biden campaign "aggressively" pursued her donors. Now he doesn't need to. After the DNC’s clown car primary with its obsession with small donors, the jackass party is jettisoning the pretense that it cares about anything other than big donors and their giant wads of cash.

As CNBC notes, "her addition to the ticket could help push the Biden campaign over the top in the cash race with Trump."

Michael Kempner, a top Democrat donor and the head of one of the country’s biggest PR firms, gushed, "she has a strong and active fundraising organization. She will be an important and immediate addition to the Biden fundraising effort. She is a fundraising star.”

It’s about the money. It was always about the money.

Did anyone seriously think that Biden would pick Stacey Abrams, Rep. Karen Bass, or Susan Rice, when he can marry Mrs. Moneybags for her money and the donors that come with it?

Once Team Biden decided that they had to have a black woman in the second spot, there was only one that came with sacks of money. And there was only one who could tap into the massive reserves of California cash that has been used to transform elections nationwide.

Biden vowed to pick a black woman to represent the black community, but he cynically ended up picking a politician with few ties to the black community, but lots of ties to big white money.

Wall Street executives are already cheering the pick. So is Hollywood.

And the black community got played.

But what else is new?

The Democrats picked the daughter of an Indian doctor who was raised in Montreal and claims that her favorite band is “Salt and Pepper” as the new big step forward for African-Americans. They disregarded the almost universal opposition to Kamala’s candidacy by the Congressional Black Caucus, and by virtually every black activist within their own party, because of the money.

The Biden campaign told black Democrats that Kamala’s money matters more than they do.

And black Democrats will be expected to back Kamala up as she spends the entire campaign accusing President Trump and Republicans of racism and sexism for opposing her. These accusations will ring hollow among black voters, just as they did when Kamala was lobbing them at Biden. They fell flat when Kamala tried to keep her campaign going by accusing the entire primary field and the Democrat electorate of racism and sexism for not picking her.

Biden supposedly picked Kamala to appeal to black voters, but he beat her among black voters.

Toward the end of her campaign, Kamala was only polling at 4% among black voters while 20% had an unfavorable view of her.

But the Biden-Harris campaign is ready to reboot the racism and sexism charge all over again as it deploys the liar who accused him of racism to falsely smear President Trump as a racist.

The question that President Trump ought to ask is was Kamala lying then or is she lying now?

Before the official announcement, the Biden campaign was already officially coordinating with the abortion groups, that have killed countless black babies, and Emily's List, to smear Republicans and the Trump campaign as sexist and racist for criticising Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, when Biden's VP search committee asked her about accusing the man at the top of racism, she allegedly, "laughed and said, ‘that’s politics.’"

That’s the level of contempt that Senator Kamala Harris has for the serious charge of racism. All those stories about her plight in “segregated” Berkeley while growing up as the daughter of wealthy upper class parents were a cynical political joke. And black people didn’t buy into it.

The question is whether black voters will buy into it when they’re aimed at Republicans. And whether they’ll let themselves be used as fronts for more false exploitation of racism by Kamala

Joe Biden showed that he cares more about white donors than black voters. And that what he really cares about isn’t race, even as he’s trying to use Kamala’s assumed racial identity to play on white guilt and racial idealism, but money. That’s all the Biden family has ever cared about.

And if this is how Biden is treating the black community before the election when he actually needs their votes, imagine how he’ll treat them afterward when he doesn’t need them anymore.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.


Tuesday, August 11, 2020

1619 Project Movie Coming From Studio Building Theme Parks in Slave Labor Countries

By On August 11, 2020
“The 1619 Project was a great awakening and a true history that you probably never learned in school,” Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer falsely claimed, announcing the partnership between the Canadian movie studio, Oprah Winfrey, and the New York Times.

The press release promised that the partnership with the sleazy Canadian studio responsible for Saw, the Hunger Games, and Twilight, will usher in "an expansive portfolio of feature films" and "television series" based on the racist revisionist history promulgated by the New York Times.

There is a reason that the 1619 Project isn't taught in schools. It isn't true and actual historians have taken apart its false claims that America was built on slavery.

Lionsgate though is another story.

Last year, Lionsgate Entertainment World opened on Hengqin Island, in the People's Republic of China. The theme park brought attractions based on Twilight and The Hunger Games to a country whose brutal Communist regime had used famine as a weapon to kill millions back when Jon Feltheimer was in kindergarten.

But there’s a bigger problem than depicting America as a brutal totalitarian regime that uses famine as a weapon in a Communist country that actually did it back in the 1950s.



While Lionsgate is plotting to smear America as a nation based on slavery, the People’s Republic of China was not only built on slavery, but has the most slaves in the world.

With 1,000 slave labor camps and at least a million slave laborers, the Communist dictatorship where Lionsgate has an important presence vastly outstrips 19th century Southern plantations.

Hengqin Island is located in Guangdong province which contains at least three known labor camps. Some of these camps featured in the brutal Guangdong Cultural Revolution Massacre during which fanatical left-wing thugs killed thousands in a culture war that has ominous similarities to the current Black Lives Matter culture war and its lodestone, the 1619 Project.

China's booming economy is fueled by forced labor. Construction work incorporates everything from kidnapping to abused migrant workers. Last year, construction workers deprived of their wages threatened to jump from buildings. The Communists responded by arresting them.

This isn’t the type of story that Lionsgate is likely to tell with an "an expansive portfolio of feature films" or even comment on. And if the development of Hengqin Island into a resort, complete with games based on The Hunger Games, involved any forced labor, no one will talk about it.

Not that Lionsgate cares.

Beyond China, it boasts of the Lionsgate Zone in the Motiongate Dubai theme park. The United Arab Emirates and Dubai are as notorious for the use of slave labor as the People's Republic of China. And much of that slave labor involves migrant workers in the construction industry.

When Lionsgate announced that it was bringing The Hunger Games to Dubai, a commenter noted, "the irony of a hunger games attraction in a city that was built on the back of slave labor."

The greater irony is that a torrent of 1619 Project propaganda is about to flow from a movie studio that is comfortable doing business in slave labor states. A Canadian movie studio is going to lecture Americans about how racist their country is while cheerfully moving projects forward in dictatorships where slavery isn’t a historical artifact, but a present day reality.

The 1619 Project is only able to exist because it’s a lie. Try and release a movie about China’s real life Hunger Games in the Communist dictatorship and you’ll become an involuntary organ donor. The United Arab Emirates won’t let you release films blasting its ruling families.

But Lionsgate knows that in America it can roll out “feature films" based on the deranged ravings of a bigot who claimed that white people are "barbaric devils" and who insisted that African explorers had traded "technology" with the Aztecs, for the entertainment of the elites.

China’s undemocratic ruling class wants to maintain its power and only permits nationalistic movies that depict its country as brave, strong, and moral. America’s corrupt ruling class wants to expand its power by shattering the country’s Constitution with false claims of racism.

Beyond the 1619 Project, Lionsgate made a deal with BuzzFeed to develop "socially relevant" movies for millennials. These movies will inevitably accuse Americans of racism while giving the People's Republic of China and the Islamic nations where Lionsgate does business a pass.

While Lionsgate peddles sleazy revisionist history about America’s founding, its own origins go back to Montreal and its Cinépix era when the secret of its success was a pornographic movie about a nun who becomes a prostitute. Valerie innovated the "genre" known as “maple syrup porn” while being funded by Canadian taxpayers. And things haven’t changed too much.

During the height of the #MeToo movement, Lionsgate's executive vice president of legal affairs accused its general counsel of assaulting her and trying to make her his slave. Literally.

At one point the Lionsgate general counsel allegedly told her, "he wanted me to be his slave."

After coming forward, the former Lionsgate lawyer claimed that the sleazy studio’s execs struck back and prevented her from finding work. There’s probably a movie in that somewhere.

But as CEO Jon Feltheimer said, that’s a history, “you probably never learned in school.”

Who better than a Canadian studio doing business in slave labor countries, whose general counsel allegedly was into enslaving women in this country, to tell the 1619 Project story?

Lionsgate wants to be in the progressive business because there’s lots of money to be made. The politically correct scolds don’t believe anything they’re preaching. They never did.

The Hollywood studios lecturing Americans on their politically incorrect ways turned out to be a den of sexual predators. The only industry that exceeded their abuses of women was the media.

Fortunately, Lionsgate was on it, releasing Bombshell, a #MeToo movie, not about Harvey Weinstein, CBS News, NPR, or its own #MeToo problems, but about FOX News.

The 1619 Project is more of the same cynical hypocrisy from a partnership mediated by Oprah Winfrey, a billionaire who made a fortune lecturing white people on their racism.

Her eponymous magazine, O, which has served as a forum for pushing false claims of sexism and racism against her political opponents, is published by Hearst Magazine. The goddess of political correctness even has an office in Hearst Tower.

Troy Young, the president of Hearst Magazines, was forced out after accusations of sexism.

The New York Times invented the 1619 Project, but a recent investigation found out that its ruling family had Confederates in the attic, including at least one slave owner.

And then there’s Lionsgate, which shifts between doing business in slave countries and lecturing Americans about the evils of slavery, when its employees aren’t enslaving them.

Who better to make a movie accusing America of being built on slavery?






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Monday, August 10, 2020

Austin Voted to Defund the Police, its Murder Rate Rose 67%

By On August 10, 2020
The Austin City Council voted unanimously to defund the police.

"We don't need somebody who's a sworn officer and a gun in order to be able to accomplish what the community needs done," Mayor Steve Adler falsely claimed.

Austin's proposed budget targeted millions in cuts. These included 100 vacant police positions, delaying the next cadet class, delaying the replacement of duty weapons, and there were proposals by some Democrats council members to shut down the police academy, cut the bomb squad budget, and even demolish the city’s downtown police headquarters.

The proposed budget also includes a 3.5% tax increase.



Politicians limited the ability of police officers to use force against criminals and barred them from using pepper spray and tear gas against the violent mobs of Black Lives Matter rioters.

Now Austin is number one with a bullet after its homicide rate increase passed every major city.

Overtaking more violent cities like Chicago, left behind at number two, Philly at number six, and New York at number eight, Austin had the highest percentage homicide rate increase. Like the ‘Miracle on Ice’ in the 1980 Winter Olympics, Austin is the underdog that came from behind to blow everyone away with its ability to rack up bodies even faster than vegan soy hot dogs.

Austin’s percentage rate increased 64% over the year and 67% in June.

It just goes to show that even an underperforming bunch of criminals can really accomplish great things when the politicians get behind them and get the cops off their backs. If you don’t believe that defunding the police works, just stop by an Austin morgue.

Adelaido Bernabe Urias, a 68-year-old Mexican immigrant, was pushing his ice cream cart past a housing project when Marquis Davis, Jermaine Jones, and Devlon Wardy, allegedly pretended they wanted to buy ice cream from him, demanded money, and then shot the elderly man.

When some Karen called the police, the dying Mexican ice cream vendor told officers that he had been shot by three black men becoming an accomplice to the system of racist policing.

The perps were caught after the Austin Greater Crime Commission and the Austin Police Association, who had spoken out against police defunding, put up the reward money.

The Austin Justice Coalition, advocates for police defunding, didn't bother contributing their funds to catching Urias’ murderers. His life was not the kind of life that ‘matters’ to them.

Jermaine Jones had posted a photo with a gun on his Facebook page before the murder.

The police had busted Marquis Davis a few days before the murder for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, but fortunately they let him go because the enlightened progressives of Austin understand that bail is racist and criminals must be freed from prison so they don’t get sick.

Davis didn’t catch the Wuhan Virus in prison. Instead he may have killed someone’s grandpa.

The thug was freed with an ankle monitor. Pro-crime progressives insist that an ankle monitor is just as good as locking up a criminal behind bars. Urias could not be reached for comment.

The Mexican immigrant started selling ice cream after being laid off during the pandemic. Now the ice cream man is gone. And that’s the price we pay for a society that is kinder to criminals and crueler to their victims. We can have ice cream men or criminals on the loose, but not both.

There is lots of good news from Austin.

Not only were murders up 67% in June, but justifiable homicides had gone up 200%. When you defund the police, some people won't lie down and die for the thugs.

Robberies were up 50%, aggravated assaults were up 10%, and incest was up 100%.

Over the year so far, extortion is up 113%, stolen property is up 71%, prostitution is up 138%, and bribery is up 100%. How these may be interrelated is left as an exercise for the reader.

Between the incest and the extortion, the robberies and the bribery, the stolen property and prostitution, things are great. And that’s before defunding the police has even really kicked in.

Austin progressives have finally made sure that the police won’t be shooting anyone.

Like Maurice Pierce, who was shot and killed at a traffic spot ten years ago after he grabbed a knife from a police officer's belt and cut him. Pierce had been one of the suspects in Austin's infamous yogurt shop murders, in which the charred naked bodies of four teenage girls were found in a burned shop. After the latest police reform measures, Pierce would still be alive.

None of this has caused advocates of defunding the police to rethink their position.

"The City has started down the path toward ending this injustice but we have further to go and we must stay the course to redefine public safety in Austin," City Manager Spencer Cronk had boasted.

It’s safe to say that public safety in Austin has been redefined. And staying the course will really redefine it. Defunding the police has helped put Austin alongside Chicago on the growth list of homicides. And while Austin is still lagging its older more murderous brother by a lot, violence is a growth industry and the hipster hellhole is showing real promise.

Austin's Democrat leaders have claimed that they are just giving the "community" what it wants. But most Austin residents are opposed to defunding the police and getting rid of cops.

A poll by the Greater Austin Crime Commission found that 53% of city residents don't want a reduction in the number of cops. Nearly half of city residents think that Austin is on the wrong track and only a third think it's going the right way. The right way being straight to hell.

But as long as they keep voting for radicals, nothing will change. Except for the worse.

Before this year, playing a word association game with Austin would have produced answers like, “annoying hipsters", "vegan bakeries", and "obscure indie bands."

Now that word association game has another answer: murder.

Defund the police and the death rate will follow.





 


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.


Wednesday, August 05, 2020

Coronavirus Rules Don’t Apply to Sharpton’s 100,000 Racists March

By On August 05, 2020
Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced that "anyone coming into Washington, DC from a high-risk state" had to self-quarantine for 14 days. Meanwhile the nation’s riot capital is expecting a 100,000 man hate march organized by Al Sharpton which includes attendees coming from those high-risk states.

Georgia is on Bowser’s quarantine list, but two buses coming from Atlanta and one from Macon are currently listed on Sharpton’s National Action Network site. Ohio is on the quarantine list, but there are three buses coming from Columbus. Texas is on the list, but three buses are scheduled to leave from Houston. There’s also a bus coming from North Carolina despite its presence on the high-risk list.

The buses for Sharpton’s Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march are scheduled to leave on the 27th or 28th of August for a rally that’s supposed to take place on the 28th leaving no time for a 14-day quarantine.

Are D.C. quarantine rules going to apply to Sharpton’s march or will it be deemed “essential”? 



The Sharpton hate rally plans to have participants assemble at the Lincoln Memorial, walking along the reflecting pool, and waiting there for 6 hours before marching to the MLK memorial.

The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks hate rally expects 100,000 participants.

There is no way to safely bring that many people into the area with social distancing while using the Lincoln Memorial as a stage. Washington D.C. guidelines state that people are expected to keep a 6-foot distance from each other. Inaugurations typically feature huge crowds packing into the area.

Getting in 100,000 people with even minimal social distancing requires 15 million square feet of space.

The entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is only a little over 2,000 feet. Fitting in 100,000 bigots with social distancing would require an area of about 300 football fields.

And that’s if none of the racists steps out of their spot over those 6 hours to go to the bathroom.

Passing invalidates the 6 -foot space and would require a 12-foot grid. Calculating that space is left as an exercise for the reader who wants to fall asleep while counting Sharpton’s racists instead of sheep.

All of this is irrelevant anyway because CDC guidelines discourage large gatherings.

But the CDC guidelines somehow only seem to come into play when a church or synagogue wants to open up or President Trump wants to hold a rally, yet mysteriously don’t apply to Black Lives Matter.

Washington D.C.’s own guidelines state that, “mass gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited.”

Except when it comes to Black Lives Matter.

The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks or the Get Your Virus In Our Lungs rally has only made only one concession to the pandemic which has kept ordinary Americans from visiting dying loved ones in the hospital, attending weddings, funerals, and seeing their children and grandchildren.

The Sharpton hate group is telling participants that they have to wear face masks.

As if face masks would do any good when 100,000 people are packed neck to neck and toe to toe listening to a notorious hatemonger and his allies scream about racism in the late August heat.

Today's D.C. temperature was 96 degrees. And it’s not even August yet.

But it's not just Sharpton's National Action Network, a vicious antisemitic hate group feted by every national Democrat from Obama to Pelosi, that's organizing the rally.

Its partners include the American Federation of Teachers.

The AFT, a leftist teacher’s union, has attacked President Trump for proposing to reopen schools. It has falsely claimed that Trump’s proposals are unsafe and laid out a $116 billion or $2 million per school district proposal that might perhaps allow schools to reopen someday.

Randi Weingarten, the left-wing radical running the AFT, accused Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida of denying that the virus exists. "Teachers now are getting scared," she claimed.

Not that scared.

While the AFT claims that it’s too dangerous for teachers to go to work at their schools, it’s not too dangerous for them to board buses and drive to Washington D.C. for a packed Sharpton rally.

It’s too dangerous for AFT union teachers to teach, but not to scream in a 100,000-person crowd.

Any AFT union members who feel that it’s safe to get on board a bus or a plane to head to a mass rally in Washington D.C. can’t claim that their opposition to in-person teaching is due to safety concerns.

After this, they should be expected to come to school and do their jobs. Or get fired.

Other unions partnering with the Sharpton hate mob for the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks rally include the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and the United Auto Workers.

If only Americans had some way of getting the knees of the AFT, AFGE, and AMFSCE off their necks.

Not to mention the American Postal Workers Union which is also joining up with Sharpton’s mob.

Considering the role that postal workers play in delivering mail and interacting with customers, if APWU members participate in a potential super-spreader pandemic event, they could infect many Americans.

Sharpton's National Action Network has also partnered with the Eaton Workshop hotel for accommodations for attendees to its racist rally against America.

The Eaton Workshop is a leftist hotel with UN pamphlets in every room in place of bibles, organic mattresses and crystal healing, which was shut down during the pandemic. Behind all the lefty virtue signaling is the Lo family which has links to China's Communist Party and its state-owned enterprises.

A march spreading the China Virus could have no better place to stay than a Chinese Communist hotel.

But the most troubling partner of the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march, also known as the Commitment March, isn’t a union, it’s a government agency funded by American taxpayers.

The United States Census Bureau is listed as a leading partner of Sharpton’s hate rally.

What does that mean? The Census Bureau may be funding Sharpton’s rally as a co-sponsor, with the elite tier of sponsorships starting at $250,000, or it’s going to direct employees to participate in it.

Either possibility or both is deeply troubling.

Not only is Al Sharpton a bigot whose hateful rallies have been linked to violence against minorities, but his proposed rally and march would almost certainly spread the virus further in Washington D.C.

As the National Action Network advances a plan to bring 100,000 bigots for an extended rally from high-risk states, in violation of Washington D.C.’s own rules and CDC guidelines, there has been no pushback.

I have reached out to Mayor Bowser’s office, but unsurprisingly have not received an answer.

Will the same rules that most Americans have had to live under apply to Sharpton and his Black Lives Matter hate event? Or will the notorious bigot and his racist allies once again be free to do as they please. Are the pandemic rules there for all of us, or are they just intended for ordinary Americans?

Is there one set of laws for all Americans, or are there two sets of books and two sets of rules, with a leftist political elite that is entitled to six-day funeral processions while ordinary people were prevented from attending the funerals of their loved ones, and no weddings, family gatherings, or schools for the rest of us, while unions, Democrats and Sharpton can hold a mass hate rally at the Lincoln Memorial?






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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