Conservative Musings

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Friday, November 30, 2018

When You Can't Argue With Someone, Smear Them

WaPo Columnist: Tucker Carlson Is A 'Neo-Nazi Favorite'

Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for Politicon

ByBEN SHAPIRO

November 29, 2018

On Thursday, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple attacked Fox News’ Tucker Carlson as a “neo-Nazi favorite.” To support this controversial contention, he cited research from BuzzFeed, which found that The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website run by Andrew Anglin, featured articles about Carlson some 265 times, as opposed to 27 about Sean Hannity, four about Laura Ingraham, and two about Lou Dobbs. Wemple explained:

Whereas a host like Hannity, for example, forever parrots Trump’s talking points — the Robert S. Mueller III investigation is a “witch hunt”; the “fake news” media is out to get the president — Carlson has consistently pursued storylines and polemical themes that please racists. Carlson hypes alleged crimes and dislocation caused by immigration; he demands that U.S. elites defend the cliche that diversity is our greatest strength; he circulates bogus material about South Africa’s alleged injustices against white farmers; and he cheers on Trump’s hard-line immigration policies…. Anglin, who runs the site, has issued a number of boosterish statements about Carlson, includingdescribing him as a “machine of ultimate destruction” and “a one-man HOLOCAUST!”

This is pretty despicable stuff from Wemple. Instead of arguing with Carlson’s opinions (which he doesn't), or convincingly linking them to neo-Nazism (which he can't), he doesn’t even bother to make an argument: instead, he simply says that Andrew Anglin likes Carlson, so Carlson must be a neo-Nazi. This isn’t even guilt by association. It’s guilt by proxy. Carlson hasn’t said anything remotely resembling neo-Nazism, so instead, Wemple and BuzzFeed just glom onto the fact that The Daily Stormer likes him.

That’s precisely what Carlson says when asked about such linkages: that just because he’s popular and some bad people like him does not lead to a conclusion about the merit of his viewpoint. But according to Wemple, that response is insufficient:

The reason the question needs to be posed to Carlson is that he has deflected the matter with his characteristic extemporaneous brilliance when it has been presented to him in the past… no one talks his way around a white-nationalist problem as effectively as Tucker Carlson.

Wemple didn’t like Carlson’s answer. Therefore Carlson is a neo-Nazi fellow-traveler.

This tactical dismissal of Carlson by proxy attack is not only logically insufficient and morally odious, it’s wildly counterproductive. It’s a way of lumping together those outside the normal range of conversation and those within it, thus shrinking the Overton Window even further. And unfortunately, it’s becoming common practice for many on the political Left. Take, for example, this article about billionaire Marc Andreessen: he’s labeled an alt-right fellow traveler because he visits the heterodox publication Quillette. Or take this idiotic study linking me with Richard Spencer through four degrees of separation.

If you can’t argue with ideas, smear popular people with those who follow them. It’s an easy tactic. It’s also dishonest, polarizing, and stupid.

Ann Is 100% Spot On!

By Michael W. Chapman | November 29, 2018 | 1:02 PM EST

Ann Coulter. (YouTube)

Best selling author and conservative pundit Ann Coulter -- who early in 2016 predicted Doanld Trump's presidential win -- said that because of changing demographics and the propensity of many young immigrants to vote for liberals, Donald Trump "will be the last Republican president."

In a Nov. 28 interview with Editor in-Chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily, Coulter said, “Every day, more and more immigrants turn 18 and start voting, canceling out all of your votes. It’s about five more years. Trump will be the last Republican president."

"You think, ‘Oh well, we may get another Supreme Court nomination, that will save us,'" she said. "No, no, the Democrats – as we saw in this last election – they can’t wait 10 years for demographics to change, they have to invent the Russia conspiracy. They’re so upset about this brief interregnum with Donald Trump. No."

"Why even fight the Florida or Georgia elections?" she continued. "The whole country will be yours moments from now. No, we can’t wait, we can’t wait."

"So, I assume they’ll pack the court," said Coulter. "It won’t matter how many Trump appoints – he could appoint, replace four Supreme Court justices. Then President Beto [O’Rourke] or President Kamala [Harris] will come in and say, ‘Hey, I think we need four more justices on the Supreme Court.’”

Later in the interview Coulter discussed how close the 2016 race was and why the Trump team cannot plan on running the same type of race in 2020.

“They barely won the last election," Coulter said of the 2016 Trump campaign. "It was very exciting, it was great, everyone remembers election night. You always have this feeling we’re invincible and ha, ha, ha you guys are losers, you lost."

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. (Getty Images)

But "it was really close," she said. "You switch 80,000 votes, mostly in the industrial Midwest, and he [Trump] loses."

“I

told him directly during the transition," said Coulter, "‘If you don’t keep your promises, you run the exact same election four years from now, and just through the process of immigrants turning 18 and block voting for the Democrats, you lose the exact same election.’”

Ann Coulter's latest book, a New York Times best seller, is Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind.

Another Lie The Media Tells

Media's Border Bias Exposed

2018-11-30
Source: TTN
by: TTN Staff

image: https://structurecms-staging-psyclone.netdna-ssl.com/client_assets/trumptrain/media/picture/59b0/6643/6970/2d46/7f7e/0200/content_Obama_handing_over_the_Presidency_to_Trump_23_cropped.jpg?1505487678

**Take the LATEST Trump Approval Poll**

The media is losing their collective minds over the fact that border patrol
used tear gas on the migrants that were storming the border. The hypocrisy
in their coverage became exposed when it was revealed that under the
Obama administration migrants were tear-gassed multiple times while the
media remained silent.

According to Fox News:

Media outlets that are hyperventilating over the Border Patrol's use of tear

gas and pepper spray on illegal immigrants ignored the practice during the

Obama administration, and even now gloss over past precedent in the rush

to condemn President Trump.

...

As a result, CNN and MSNBC have both spent significant time bashing the

use of tear gas under President Trump, but the mainstream media essentially

ignored it when Obama-era Border Patrol agents did the exact same thing.

A search of CNN and MSNBC available transcripts for of reports for tear gas

or pepper spray at the Southern border under Obama yielded zero results.

The Associated Press mentioned it a few times and ABC’s “Good Morning

America” reported it once. Other than that, coverage was limited to local

newspapers and NBC’s San Diego affiliate.

...

During the Obama administration, tear gas was used on the border 26 times

in 2012, 27 times in 2013, 15 times in 2014, eight times in 2015, and three

times in 2016. That compares to 18 times in 2017 and 29 times in 2018

during the Trump administration. As for pepper spray, the Obama

administration used it 95 times in 2012, 151 times in 2013, 109 times

in 2014, 30 times in 2015 and 56 times in 2016, the data shows --

compared to 56 times in 2017 and 43 times in 2018 during the Trump

administration.

It is also being reported that the Obama administration used tear gas
on migrants more than once a month during the latter part of his second
term in office. Another free pass for Obama it seems.

Read more at http://trumptrainnews.com/articles/media-s-border-bias-exposed#4UhH3bKQG5J1KZtZ.99

This Is Not The Way It Is Supposed To Go

FBI Raids Home of Clinton Whistleblower

2018-11-30
Source: AAN
by: AAN Staff

***Take the Presidential Flash POLL***

At least 16 FBI agents raided the home of Justice Department whistleblower, Dennis Nathan Cain, who was in possession of pertinent documents regarding the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One scandal.

Cain had turned them over to DOJ's inspector general and the House and Senate intelligence committees.

According to his lawyer, Michael Socarras, special agents scoured Cain's home for six hours, despite the whistleblower following standard procedure.

The Daily Caller's Richard Pollock has more:

The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.

The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

“The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One,” the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF, noting that he considered the FBI’s raid to be an “outrageous disregard” of whistleblower protections.

...

The raid was permitted by a court order signed on Nov. 15 by federal magistrate Stephanie A. Gallagher in the U.S. District Court for Baltimore and obtained by TheDCNF.

An agent from the FBI's Baltimore division, who oversaw the raid, claimed that Cain possessed stolen federal property.

***Take the Presidential Flash POLL***

Source: AAN

If They Do It Again, They Are Fools

Isn't It Time Heal?

Opinion: What have we learned one month after the Pittsburgh heartbreak?

November 29, 2018

A man reacts at the Tree of Life Synagogue where a shooter opened fire Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. (AP/Gene J. Puskar)

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting shocked the Jewish world, but it’s not clear that it clarified anyone’s thinking about the threat of anti-Semitism.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, Editor-in-Chief, JNS

When an armed man entered the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood during Shabbat-morning services on Oct. 27, the carnage that followed sent shock waves throughout the Jewish world.

The bloodiest attack on Jews in American history took the lives of 11 worshippers, many of them elderly. Yet what happened that day was more than just the latest in a long string of mass shootings that have periodically occurred in the United States in the last two decades. It was the moment when contemporary threats to Jewish security stopped being the source of theoretical arguments and started getting personal.

As we reach the shloshim for Pittsburgh—the traditional end of a 30-day period of bereavement for those who were killed—it’s an appropriate moment to take stock of what American Jews have made of the horror.

The 30 days after the death of a loved one are, according to Jewish tradition, a period of when one gradually emerges from the withdrawal from the world that is part of shiva. But after 30 days, the process of re-entering normal life must commence.

The problem with our communal reaction to this tragedy was that much of the Jewish world did not choose to pause to mourn. Instead, all too many of us immediately raced to try to place the event in a political context that did more to expose our existing partisan divisions than to expand our understanding of the nature of anti-Semitism or even the reasons for this specific crime. Coming right before the heated midterm elections only exacerbated the situation.

Pittsburgh could have provided a clarifying moment in which all Jews should have been able to put aside their differences and come together to mourn and to ponder how we might work harder to prevent future attacks. It is to be hoped that was the motivation for so many people changing their Facebook profile pictures to include the hashtag #TogetherAgainstAntisemitism. But like just about everything else these days, the conversation about Pittsburgh almost immediately turned into a debate about U.S. President Donald Trump.

That was unfortunate and not just because jumping to conclusions about his role did more to confuse the discussion than it did to enlighten it. What was truly wrong about the race to play the blame game in this fashion is that it tended to obscure efforts to commemorate the victims, while also deepening the blue and red divisions that are tearing Jewish communities as much as they are the rest of the country.

As I discussed here the day after the shooting, the fact that some prominent Jewish writers were speaking out to blame Trump or his Jewish supporters for the murders committed by extremist shooter Robert Bowers even before the bloody site had been cleaned up was highly inappropriate. Even worse, it undermined the very notion that what was needed in the aftermath of the murders was even the briefest pause to express grief and pain. Instead, the rush to politicize what happened treated those 11 lost lives as mere political fodder or ammunition to be used against opponents.

Those who lamented the coarsening of American political discourse and the way the president had worsened this problem weren’t wrong. Nor were they wrong to note how in some instances Trump had spoken in a way that might have encouraged extremists—as when he conflated those who opposed the removal of Confederate statues with the neo-Nazis that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August of 2017.

But the willingness to draw a direct line between the president, who not only had repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism and established a record of support for the state of Israel that was unmatched by any of his predecessors, and the extremist that carried out the murders did little to help us understand the killer. Indeed, the murderer and any discussions of his extreme ideology—he blamed Jews for supporting illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, but also opposed Trump for being too close to the Jews because of Israel and his family ties—were downgraded to an afterthought.

So great is the antipathy for Trump among Jews that many of us may not care about any unfairness towards such a divisive figure. But the loser here is a community that quickly became mired in political disputes, rather than confronting the problem of age-old anti-Semitic attitudes that persist on both the far-right and the far-left.

It’s not too late to start listening to each other

In a healthier communal culture, we should have been able to calmly discuss how the scapegoating of Jews—whether under the rubric of opposition to immigrants or those who traffic in intersectional notions about Jews using “white privilege” to oppress non-Whites in Israel or the West—remains an essential part of the toolkit of all anti-Semites.

Instead, partisans simply trotted out their favorite political hobbyhorses aimed at delegitimizing foes. For all too many, these have been 30 days of settling scores, not concentrating on healing.

Still, even after this partisan bickering, it’s not too late for us to start trying to listen to each other.

You don’t have to like Trump to understand that the growth of anti-Semitism in our time has been driven by historic trends in which Israel has become the stand-in for the stereotypical Jewish target. By the same token, Jewish conservatives must acknowledge that traditional right-wing anti-Semitism hasn’t died out. Though their numbers are small and marginal, the Internet and social media have magnified their reach.

It’s not too much to ask that Jews stand together against hatred of every variety. The Pittsburgh killer—and those like him who target Jews in Europe or Israel—care only about hurting Jews, no matter their backgrounds, beliefs or political leanings. In that sense, he was an all-too familiar foe, who has risen up against us in every generation. If we can concentrate on that and put aside politics, then our mourning will have greater meaning and purpose than a tawdry effort to weaponize anti-Semitism for partisan purposes.

It Never Seems To End

Europe’s Jew Hatred, and Ours

A new CNN poll reveals that one in four Europeans are anti-Semitic.

By Bari Weiss

Ms. Weiss is an editor and writer in the Times Opinion section.

Nov. 29, 2018

Far-right marchers passed by the Reichstag in Berlin this month on the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.CreditOmer Messinger/EPA, via Shutterstock

Image

Far-right marchers passed by the Reichstag in Berlin this month on the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews. CreditCreditOmer Messinger/EPA, via Shutterstock

Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.

For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.

Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.

Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)

Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.

And this is to say nothing of the nonviolent attacks, which are impossible to keep up with. The desecration of cemeteries. Swastikas painted on synagogues and schools. Calling Jews “apes and pigs” at anti-Israel rallies.

On Tuesday, a CNN poll about the state of anti-Semitism in Europe startled many Americans — and confirmed what Jews who have been paying attention already knew about the Continent.

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Not 74 years since the Holocaust ended, a third of respondents said they knew only a little or nothing at all about it.

The poll, which surveyed more than 7,000 people across Austria, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden, didn’t only discover ignorance. It exposed bigotry.

Nearly a quarter of the respondents said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars. More than a quarter believe that Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in five believe that most anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews. Roughly a third say Jews use the Holocaust to advance their own goals. Just 54 percent say Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.

It’s no wonder that to be a Jew in Europe today is to live your life in the closet.

Many religious Jews in Paris and Berlin wear baseball hats instead of kippot in public. Nearly half of Dutch Jews say they are afraid to identify publicly as Jewish. Every French Jew I’ve ever met who can afford it has bought an apartment in Israe l or Montreal.

How did Europe reach this pass?

In many ways, it never left it. Anti-Semitism has been a fact of European life for more than 2,000 years. The postwar generation who lived with the shame of the Holocaust is dying out. Their children and grandchildren are less abashed when it comes to the old prejudices.

In her forthcoming book, “Anti-Semitism: Here and Now,” the scholar Deborah Lipstadt discusses a 2013 study of overtly anti-Semitic letters, emails and faxes received over the previous decade by the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The studyfound that 60 percent of the messages “came from educated, middle-class Germans, including lawyers, scholars, doctors, priests, professors, and university and secondary school students.” Even more remarkable, most of the letter writers provided their names and addresses.

Bigotry extends to the ballot box. The Alternative für Deutschland, led by a man who dismissed the Nazis as a mere “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise glorious history, is now the country’s third-largest party. The National Front in France, founded by a man who called the gas chambers a “detail in the history of World War II,” got 33.9 percent of the vote in the last presidential runoff elections. The Freedom Party in Austria, founded by ex-Nazis, is now part of the governing coalition. Then there is the rise of Law and Justice in Poland and Golden Dawn in Greece — developments cheered by those countries’ Jew haters.

But the story of European anti-Semitism isn’t simply a case of the resurgence of the neo-fascist right.

A large number of physically violent acts committed against Jews in Europe are perpetrated by radical Muslims. The incidents at the top of this article were not carried out by far-right goons but by Islamists, most of them young and some of them immigrants.

Now add a third ingredient to this toxic brew: the fashionable anti-Semitism of the far left that masquerades as anti-Zionism and anti-racism.

No political leader in Europe embodies that sentiment more than Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. He paid respects at the memorial of the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He objected to the destruction of a street mural depicting despotic hooknosed Jewish bankers. He participated for over a decade in the activities of a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, which was led by a Holocaust denier. He publicly defended a virulently anti-Semitic vicar named Stephen Sizer. He invited an Islamist preacher who believes Jews use gentile blood for religious reasons to tea at Parliament. And so on.

And yet he adamantly denies being an anti-Semite, on the grounds that he has devoted his life to “exposing racism in any form.”

Anti-Semitism, though, isn’t just a brand of bigotry. It’s a conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil in the world. While racists see themselves as proudly punching down, anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up.

The Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi put it elegantly: “What anti-Semitism does is turn the Jews — the Jew — into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities.” When you look through this dark lens, you can understand how, under Communism, the Jews were the capitalists. How under Nazism, the Jews were the race contaminators. And how for Mr. Corbyn and his ilk on the left, Israel, the Jew among the nations, is the last bastion of white, racist colonialism.

European Jews must now contend with this three-headed dragon: Physical fear of violent assault, often by young Muslim men, which leads many Jews to hide evidence of their religious identity. Moral fear of ideological vilification, mainly by the far left, which causes at least some Jews to downplay their sympathies for Israel. And political fear of resurgent fascism, which can cause some cognitive dissonance since at least some of Europe’s neo-fascists profess sympathy for Israel while expressing open hostility to Muslims.

Now these three strains of hate are beginning to show up on this side of the Atlantic.

The biggest threat is on the far right. This is the anti-Semitism of “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville, Va., and the killer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who ranted against globalists and the “kike infestation.” It is the anti-Semitism of Representative Steve King of Iowa and of alt-right Reddit boards and some of Donald Trump’s supporters.

Islamism is far less of a threat in the United States than in Europe — we do not, contrary to what the president would have you believe, have caravans of terrorists crossing our border. Still, a Muslim-American who expressed hatred of Israel shot six people, killing one of them, at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, in 2006. Four Muslim men were arrested in a plot to bomb two Bronx synagogues in 2009. A Muslim convert was thwarted by the F.B.I. in his plan to blow up a Florida synagogue in 2016. Just last week, Mohamed Mohamed Abdi, a Somalian immigrant, shouted anti-Semitic slurs while trying to run down with his car people leaving a Los Angeles synagogue.

Finally there is the hatred from the left, which comes cloaked in the language of progressive values. This includes the perhaps unwitting anti-Semitism of college professors who refuse to write letters of recommendation for students wanting to study abroad in Israel or who seek to suspend study-abroad programs to Israel entirely, without thinking of sanctioning, say, China or Russia. Or turning a blind eye to unconscionable comments like one from Minnesota’s new congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who tweeted in 2012 “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel” — because she is breaking ground as a Muslim woman of color.

For reasons historic, aesthetic and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far right — and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers. But when Jews point out the other two kinds, we are often dismissed as sensitive or hysterical, or as mistaking legitimate criticism of Israel for something darker.

This is nonsense. The same was said of the Jews in Europe when they sounded the alarm bells. Look where they are now.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer for the opinion section.

More by the writer on anti-Semitism.

Opinion | Bari Weiss

Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.

March 30, 2018

Opinion | Bari Weiss

When Progressives Embrace Hate

Aug. 1, 2017

Correction: November 29, 2018

An earlier version of this article misidentified the event at Copenhagen's main synagogue at which a member was gunned down in 2015. It was a bat mitzvah, not a bar mitzvah.

Bari Weiss is a staff editor and writer for the Opinion section. @bariweiss