Just not the same world anymore

Townhall

Democrats doing what Democrats do...

Rich Terrell

The Dems October Surprise May be on Them . . . "What they tried to do to Kavanaugh in declaring him a rapist with an absolute lack of evidence, has shown Americans that they do not care who gets hurt in their pursuit of power.  How many male voters thought, “That could be me.”  How many women voters thought, “That could be my husband; that could be my son.' ”  . . .

Citizens may look at [Elizabeth Warren] and think, “If this is all the Democrats have, why should I vote for them?”

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate admits burning state flag during demonstration

That weird silence you get from the Democrats on the Honduras caravan

"Democrats appear to be remaining silent on the issue of the caravan of thousands of immigrants on the march from Central America and unwilling to get into a public debate with President Trump since the midterms are just weeks away."

Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office in California was vandalized Monday . . . "McCarthy, whose local office is in Bakersfield, Calif., posted photos of the suspects and some of the damage. Two young men were caught on surveillance camera outside of the office, which had its window smashed in by a large boulder. “Does anyone know these two guys? They threw a boulder thru our office window and took office equipment,” McCarthy wrote on his Instagram account. McCarthy’s office is not the first GOP office to be vandalized in recent weeks." . . .

New RNC Ad Highlights Disturbing Violence by Democrats  "The RNC has dropped a new ad that rightly frames the Democratic party as the party of mob violence:

Framing the Democratic Party as the party of violent attacks on anyone with whom it disagrees, the Republican National Committee has unveiled a new campaign ad that focuses on Democratic willingness to break boundaries and rules in the name of politics.  And it’s straight from recent headlines.

We cannot have a post about Democrat outrages without mentioning California:

The Left Just Can’t Let Catholic Nuns Decline To Pay For Birth Control  "Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group of nuns dedicated to caring for elderly people in poverty, are back in court over Obamacare’s mandate that all health insurance pay for contraception, including abortifacients. They have intervened in a case brought by six states, including California, against the Trump administration. These states are seeking to strip away the ability of groups like the Little Sisters to function within the bounds of their consciences, after a lower court ruled that exemptions to the contraceptive mandate didn’t provide the notice that was legally required." . . .

The stakes are high in State of California v. Little Sisters of the Poor. California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra is standing against a group led by women who have voluntarily chosen to join an order with vows of chastity. This move is nonsensical yet chilling, because it’s clear that this case isn’t about getting health care to women who want or might need it. Rather, this is about imposing an agenda and ideology onto religious people, at any cost.

Legal Insurrection

What Can’t Be Debated on Campus

Amy Wax

Pilloried for her politically incorrect views, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax asks if it’s still possible to have substantive arguments about divisive issues.

"There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with lip service paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don’t like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.

The op-ed, which I co-authored with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Aug. 9 under the headline, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” It began by listing some of the ills afflicting American society:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

We then discussed the “cultural script”—a list of behavioral norms—that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains and social coherence of that period.” The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

"In what became the most controversial passage, we pointed out that some cultures are less suited to preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society, and we gave examples:

"The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants." . . . More...

Disliking, avoiding and shunning people who don’t share our politics is not good for our country. We live together, and we need to solve our problems together. It is also always possible that people we disagree with have something to offer, something to contribute, something to teach us. We ignore this at our peril. As Heather Mac Donald wrote in National Review about the controversy over our op-ed: “What if the progressive analysis of inequality is wrong…and a cultural analysis is closest to the truth? If confronting the need to change behavior is punishable ‘hate speech,’ then it is hard to see how the country can resolve its social problems.” In other words, we are at risk of being led astray by received opinion.
The American way is to conduct free and open debate in a civil manner. We should return to doing that on our college campuses and in our society at large.

ARMY INVASION: Honduran Caravan Includes Military-Aged Male Migrants From Bangladesh, Haiti and Congo

The Gateway Pundit  

"Thousands of military-aged, virile mostly Honduran males breached the Guatemala border gate over the weekend and stormed the Mexican border bridge; Mexican authorities ultimately let the caravan through.
"A second caravan of 2,000 migrants formed on Sunday and started marching to Guatemala with a plan to reach the U.S. as their final destination.

"According to a Univision correspondent, Bangladeshis joined the migrant caravan before it crossed from Guatemala into Mexico.

"The Daily Caller reported:

A Spanish language reporter who has spent weeks embedded with the migrant caravan said in a Friday report that people from Bangladesh had joined the mass of people trying to cross from Guatemala into Mexico.The Bangladeshis, he said, were detained in an immigration facility, though it’s not clear what happened to them after their detention.

"This is especially troubling because Bangladesh has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world with a very high rate of Islamic terrorism and barbarism.

"Also, according to Judicial Watch, who has a reporter embedded in Guatemala, migrants from Haiti, Congo, Sri Lanka, Angola, Cameroon, and Bangladesh latched onto the caravan." . . .

Sara A. Carter

✔@SaraCarterDC

Mostly men now crossing the #Guatamalen border - rehearsed answer “this is not politics - this is about poverty.” There were women and children but they were at the front of the caravan (smaller numbers). None would say who the organizers are but several said it was organized.

AWFUL! Classless Barack Obama Continues Midterm Campaigning – Compares Trump to “Tin-pot Dictatorship”

The Gateway Pundit
"Barack Obama continued to campaign against Republicans on Monday. The former president broke precedent this year by campaigning against the opposition party after leaving office." . . .
"On Monday Obama took credit for the Trump economy — which is a joke.

"Obama then compared President Trump to a tinpot dictatorship."

Former president Barack Obama was onstage at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Monday, doing a familiar, uncomfortable job.

He was here to rally Democrats and to fight cultural tides the party didn’t quite anticipate…

…Obama spent much of his speech on a long defense of his own presidency, and condemnation of Republican governance.

“When you hear all this talk about ‘economic miracles’ right now, remember who started it,” Obama said. He denounced Trump’s attempts to pressure the FBI and Department of Justice to target political foes.

“That is not how America works. That is how some tin-pot dictatorship works,” he said. . . .

How the Left Colonizes Education

Christopher Chantrill  "I was with a bunch of lefties over the weekend, and would you believe, the big problem in education is the colonialist curriculum. So after the lefties had all tut-tutted about how even now in Africa the educational curriculum was still painfully colonialist, I had to step in.

"Here’s what’s worrying me, I said. It’s the leftification of education.

"Dead silence.

"Because if you are a lefty you have never thought, not for a moment, that the left runs education from stem to stern in the western world. And that is a monstrous injustice.

"Now of course, I could have gone in for the kill, and said that the left’s ruthless and merciless domination of education is the great crime of the last century and shaping up to become the great crime of the millennium. But I didn’t. Because, after all, I was among friends.

"But there is this, from David Brooks, who just put out a piece in the New YorkTimes about the implacable “Rich White Civil War” featuring, on the left, Progressive Activists and, on the right, Devoted Conservatives. Yes, it’s just like the good old days of Folger’s Coffee. The big conflict in U.S. politics are between the two “richest kinds:” Rich liberals, that in Brooks’ study are called Progressive Activists, and rich conservatives, or Devoted Conservatives.

"Now, after I dropped my bomb on my lefty friends about the real problem in education: the colonialist lefty oppression of the children of the West, I could have continued and railed against the monstrous oppression of the leftification of the education system and also the university system that enforces a left-only curriculum by stigmatizing all non-lefty speech as hate speech, and therefore monstrously deplatforms all non-lefty everything, courtesy of the global alliance of all self-respecting SJWs and their mind-robot NPCs." . . .

George Soros and his 'rented evangelicals' outed by Christian leaders

Washington Times "A new video from the American Association of evangelicals reveals how George Soros, through his many funding ventures, has been busily infiltrating the Christian base in America to divide, and ultimately conquer, the religious minded within the Republican Party.

"Truly, with the left, political wars know no bounds. Nothing’s sacred; not when it comes to the leftists’ drive to succeed. 

"Here’s what AAE put out in a press release: “Democrat ministers Rev. Jim Wallis and allies are now touring many states on ‘Vote Common Good’ buses to … split the evangelical vote before the mid-term elections. The AAE video features the newly released voice recording of [Jim] Wallis of Sojourners as he publicly denied that he was a recipient of Soros funding.”. . .  

"And then there was this, from the Blaze, in October 2011: “George Soros sends $150000 to Jim Wallis‘ Left-Wing Group Sojourners.”

" ‘Lest the significance goes unrecognized: The Sojourners is a far-left group that masquerades as a Christian outlet, bent on doing God’s work, but that far more often seems to do nothing but Democrats’ will.

“ 'We are evangelicals, Catholics, Pentecostals and Protestants; progressives and conservatives; blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians; women and men; young and old … [and] seek to discover the intersection of faith, politics, and culture,” Sojo.net reads.

"Sounds honorable enough. But how come that intersection never leads down a conservative path?

There’s nothing pro-Donald Trump, pro-conservative, pro-limited government, pro-Constitution about this group’s goals — or, for that matter, about the Vote Common Good bus tour, currently winding through 31 cities of America.

The White-Privilege Tedium; It’s not a coincidence that many of the loudest critics decrying white privilege are . . . privileged whites.

"Why are current monotonous slogans like “white privilege” and “old white men” finally losing their currency?"

 Current political candidates want to claim non-white privilege, wouldn't you say? TD

Know Your Meme

Victor Davis Hanson

 “I’m a white woman. . . . And my job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt. My job is to shut other white people down when they want to say, ‘Oh no I’m not prejudiced, I’m a Democrat, I’m accepting.’”— Sally Boynton Brown, erstwhile candidate to head the Democratic National Committee

“These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women. They’re protecting a man who is probably guilty.”— Joy Behar, cohost, The View

“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins? . . . Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”— Sarah Jeong, newly appointed editorial board member, the New York Times

. . . "Which whites really do have privilege? If all whites were uniformly privileged, why would so many whites, such as Rachel Dolezal and Elizabeth Warren, strive so hard to construct a nonwhite identity? Why does progressive upscale white male Texas Senate candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke go by the Hispanic nickname “Beto,” as in “Beto O’Rourke? Would he do so in Maine or Montana? Why did California congressional candidate Kevin Leon rather abruptly become Kevin de León, emphasizing an ethnic cachet — if “whiteness” equaled unearned advantage and non-whiteness earned lifelong discrimination?

"In a world of real white privilege, would people not instead be taking DNA tests to “prove” that they were overwhelming[ly] white, and not black, Native American, or other nonwhite supposedly victimized groups? In the days of a prior race-obsessed America, supposed nonwhites sought to “pass” as supposed whites; in the days of a present race-obsessed America, supposed whites seek to “pass” as supposed nonwhites. The common denominator across time and space is to adapt to whims of the race-obsessed establishment that doles out nonmeritocratic concessions on the basis of appearance. 

"Class now means nothing. Working-class people of all ancestries, from Merced to Youngstown, have grown accustomed to TV talking heads, academics, and politicians damning “white privilege.” Poor blacks are accorded no more preference that what is given to wealthy Latinos." . . . 

In sum, Dolezal, O'Rourke, Warren, and Leon want to claim non-white privilege. TD

Superstitious Scientists

Biblical Worldview  "An evolutionary biologist has determined that religion, especially the “Abrahamic religions,” are superstitions. But there’s a flaw in his analysis.

"Coyne wrote:

There are two things that theists always yell at me about: characterizing faith as “belief without evidence” (which in fact the Bible says it is!), and calling religion a “superstition.” I decided to look up “superstition” in the Oxford English Dictionary (University of Chicago online version) to see if religion fit the definition.

"He concludes that Christianity is a superstition because it is irrational, based on ignorance, and reliant upon irrational belief in supernatural forces. One thing he doesn’t do is subject his own beliefs to this same test. That’s presumably because he believes he is rational, and because he uses logic instead of faith to investigate the world, then he is not being irrational.

"I have already shown that Coyne is irrational. Not only that, but he consistently confuses cause for effect — not a quality that instills confidence in his judgment.

TURNING A BLIND EYE

"He, and the modern science establishment with him, refuses to investigate the nature of his own beliefs. He claims to be rational and an adherent to logic and science, but he simply assumes some fundamental things that he hasn’t proven. Mainly, that human logic is a valid tool. He doesn’t try to prove it because he can’t. He will get lost quickly, and his farce will be exposed." . . . Full article

Worldview