Tuesday, January 22, 2019

The Shaming of Karen Pence


The Outline

"Will no one speak up for Karen Pence other than her husband?"

"In scarcely a week, the vice president’s wife has become a public face of hate. CNN’s John King suggests that what Mrs. Pence has done is so grievous maybe taxpayers shouldn’t fund her Secret Service security protection. The American Civil Liberties Union says she’s sending “a terrible message to students.”
. . .
"Will no one speak up for Karen Pence other than her husband?

"In scarcely a week, the vice president’s wife has become a public face of hate. CNN’s John King suggests that what Mrs. Pence has done is so grievous maybe taxpayers shouldn’t fund her Secret Service security protection. The American Civil Liberties Union says she’s sending “a terrible message to students.”

"The Guardian sees in Mrs. Pence a reminder of “the vice-president’s dangerous bigotry.” During a Saturday night performance in Las Vegas, Lady Gaga told her fans that what Mrs. Pence has done confirms she and her husband are “the worst representation of what it means to be Christian.” A former Washington Post editor and senior writer for Politico tweets: “How can this happen in America?”

"So what is this terrible thing Mrs. Pence has done? She plans to teach art part-time at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. This is a small private K-8 academy where Mrs. Pence has taught before. It adheres to a biblically rooted view of human sexuality." . . . 
It would be a shame if Mrs. Pence were to allow the mob to keep her from teaching art to those children at Immanuel Christian School. But however it turns out, her experience surely tells us which orthodoxies today are truly sacred and beyond question.
To her shame, Lady Gaga interrupts performance to trash the Pences
. . . "So what is this terrible thing Mrs. Pence has done? She plans to teach art part-time at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. This is a small private K-8 academy where Mrs. Pence has taught before. It adheres to a biblically rooted view of human sexuality." . . .

Sorry; this picture posted by mistake. I was looking for the Penses under "Families destroyed by Democrats" and didn't realize I clicked on this one:

 
More bitterly anti-Democrat material posted in The Tunnel Wall

Now Pelosi Owns the Shutdown

RealClearPolitics

 
"On Saturday, Donald Trump shrewdly flipped the table on Nancy Pelosi in the government shutdown standoff. He has now proposed a grand bargain on immigration: legalization of some 1 million so-called Dreamers -- the foreigners who were brought into the U.S. illegally by their parents -- and an immediate end to the shutdown, if she agrees to expand funding to $5.7 billion for the wall.

"It's the kind of checkmate political maneuver that may guarantee his re-election.
 
"It's smart because it now puts the onus on Pelosi to open the government. It also puts the pressure on Pelosi to act on immigration reform. For 25 years, Democrats have preferred to politicize the immigration issue -- and treat Hispanic voters as political hostages -- rather agree to a bipartisan solution to deal with the 10 million illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.

"There's no good option for Pelosi now." . . .

"Free and unfettered" press fettered by left-ism

Rich Terrell
What the right should learn from Covington Catholic flap  . . . "Washington Post, CNN, and the rest were prepared to ruin the lives of some adolescents, who had come to Washington to march for life, to score a cheap political point.
"The National Review’s coverage of the Covington flap mirrors its treatment of the Trump presidency. Its editors, like those at the erstwhile Weekly Standard, have been playing by the left’s rules since the National Review denounced the John Birch Society nearly 60 years ago. Said one editor at the time in the way of explanation, “We can’t afford to jeopardize the grudging status we’ve earned in the Liberal community.”
"Still worried about their “grudging status” among liberals, many of those prominent on the right insist that Trump and others honor all the left’s silly totems, even if they are as contrived as the old man’s beating the drum. If a conservative fails to do so, his more respectable betters will join the left’s shaming posse even if the ones being shamed are 16-year-old pro-lifers."

Why hasn’t Twitter banned the accounts of users who called for death of Covington students?
The social media platform certainly had no qualms about banning a Christian pastor who had written a book promoting traditional marriage, claiming it to be “hate speech.” In October of last year, Twitter banned ten conservative accounts, giving no reason at all.
Busted: The shameful tactics used against the Covington Kids have a long history

Covington Catholic High School closes Tuesday ‘to ensure safety’  . . . "The American Indian Movement Chapter of Indiana and Kentucky is holding a 10 a.m. protest outside the Diocese of Covington.

Leftist Activism 101: Get in someone’s face and then play victim for the cameras

Legal Insurrection
This tactic was used against me and pro-Israel students at Cornell, and appears to have been used by an activist against a high school student in D.C.

"The recent interaction in DC between high school students (one in particular) and an older activist who is Native American reminded me of a warning I once received from a colleague as to how I needed to prepare myself if I ever was in a hostile crowd or confronted.
"A classic leftist/occupy activist tactic, I was warned, was to confront a target and immediately start screaming that the target was being aggressive even though that was not true.Unsuspecting people in the vicinity would not start recording the incident until there was this commotion. The videographers accompanying the provocateur also would edit the video to start when the provocateur started screaming. The target, not knowing what was about to happen, would not be prepared for it, and might even take the bait, such as in pushing the person away physically.
"Regardless of what the target did or didn’t do, you would have video of the innocent target being portrayed as the aggressor, and the provocateur portrayed as the victim.
It happened to me at Cornell in April 2014 after the student assembly rejected a BDS motion


 
. . . That same tactic was used against pro-Israel students at Cornell later in 2014 by the same Ithaca activist and other SJP students, as I documented in Cornell Pro-Israel students taunted: “F**k You Zionist scums”. 
"Look how the provocateur got inches from a pro-Israel student’s face, and started screaming “don’t touch me, don’t touch me” even though she was the aggressor and had not been touched. She then taunted the target to hit her, “slap me, do it, do it.” She also made a spitting sound (not clear if she actually spit) in the target’s face. The targeted student had the composure not to take the bait." . . .
 

When America agreed on a border barrier

BBC  "The battle over the border barrier has shut down the government, but it was not always such a divisive issue."
 

Monday, January 21, 2019

Late Monday commentary on the Lincoln Memorial Dust-up

Trump’s freewheeling past should not lend automatic credibility to the latest media charge against him (which, a nanosecond after hitting the media, was followed by demands for his impeachment). So, too, that a co-author of the BuzzFeed piece, Jason Leopold, had been a confessed felon, had been fired or repudiated by various news venues for alleged unprofessional conduct, and had been an admitted prevaricator did not ipso facto mean that his latest “scoop” had to be immediately written off as false. Just a few hours of gestation would make that clear enough.

Victor Davis Hanson:  From the BuzzFeed Psychodrama to the Covington Video Melodrama  "In the current polarized climate concerning the shutdown, Trump, the media, etc., it would be wise for everyone to take a deep breath and wait at least 24 hours before snap editorializing, in response to the latest sensational morality tale flashing across electronic media.
"In the present climate, one video (or even three or four videos from different angles and elevations) is not necessarily worth a thousand words.
"I doubt we will know exactly what happened at the Washington, D.C., march until more eye-witnesses, videos, interviews, etc. are all collated (other than the fact that different groups were shouting different things, sometimes at each other). But the result will probably be a lot more complicated than the initial narrative of “white spoiled MAGA Catholic youth approached, surrounded, and taunted noble Native American elder,” a narrative that has induced an epidemic of virtue-signaling." . . .
Don Surber considers Covington kids should sue Twitter  . . . "Meanwhile, in news of fools who rush in, Media-ite reported, "Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA-Hat Kids."
" If it looks too good to be true, it is."


Throwing Covington’s Pro-Life Boys to the Crocodiles  . . . "Here’s CNN’s carefully edited footage and one-sided commentary.
. . . Instead, we saw an instant feeding frenzy. One aimed at destroying young men’s lives, based only on … carefully edited footage from screamingly biased media. And our religious leaders, and even some typically canny political commentators, showed an unseemly eagerness to join in.

Apologies Roll In For Catholic School Kids After As Fuller Picture Emerges 
. . . "[National Review] pulled the article on Sunday and published an explanation by editor Rich Lowry.
“Anyway, if not a hoax, this at the very least was not what it initially seemed,” Lowry wrote. “I deleted my original tweet and we also took down a strongly worded post by my colleague Nick Frankovich that relied on the incomplete video. It’s another reminder — even for an old hand like me — that it’s best not to make snap judgments and to wait for all sides of a controversy to have a chance to be heard.” . . .


 
. . . "But then I watched more clips, showing the greater context of the incident. It is not as simple as it has been portrayed. Below is a more complete video account of what happened. In it, one of the Catholic boys is overheard asking, “Does anybody know what he’s doing? Does anybody know what’s going on here.”
"And, in it, one of the Indians with Phillips shouts: “White people, go back to Europe. This is not your land.” He curses the students with f-bombs (video is NSFW). He goes on: “You’re being a white man about it. That’s all you know how to do.”
"You didn’t see that in the news reporting, did you?

"The majority of the apologies and retractions have come from sources that most would consider right-leaning."

Nathan Phillips’ Story Of What Happened Changed From Media Outlet To Media Outlet

Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA-Hat Kids

Blue-Check Twitter Mob Demands The Doxxing And Violence Against High School Junior  Kyle Kashuv :  
The Media has bent over backwards to defend my Parkland High school liberal peers, no matter what outrageous things they have said.
But now they have tried to ruin a high school kid's life, over fake news.
What changed?
The student was a Trump Supporter.


The Donald and Nancy Show

Stilton's Place:
 
 
 Stilton's Place  . . . "And finally, we think it's freaking hilarious that President Trump cancelled Nancy Pelosi's overseas jaunt on a military aircraft at the last minute as an act of transparent payback for her attempts to force him to cancel the upcoming State of the Union address. What his move lacks in class, it more than makes up for in style points!" . . .

Native American At Center Of MAGA Student Incident Has History Of Claiming Racism, Disrespect By Students

Daily Wire


"The Native American man at the center of the controversy involving a group of Trump-supporting high school boys from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky has a history of claiming disrespect and racism by students.

"Nathan Phillips of Ypsilanti claimed in April 2015 that a group of students at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) were "racist" toward him after he approached them while they were participating in an American Indian theme party.
 
" 'They had little feathers on, I was just going to walk by," Phillips claimed. "A group of them said 'Come on over, come here.'"

" 'Then started whooping and hollering," Phillips continued. "I said that wasn't honoring, that was racist. Then at that time, it really got ugly."

"Phillips claimed that the students yelled racial slurs at him and threw a beer can at him." . . .

First Ad from ‘Draft Beto’ is as Empty as the Man Himself

Legal Insurrection  "[Robert Francis] O’Rourke hasn’t announced his candidacy for 2020 yet, but the folks at ‘Draft Beto’ have already released an ad, which I guess is supposed to get people excited for his inevitable run.
"The ad is just like Beto, all style and no substance. It’s set to the classic song ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who, which will leave anyone under the age of 40 asking: Who?
"Other than that, it’s just a montage of fast moving clips with a few quotes thrown in about our ‘polarized’ nation.
"The Draft Beto people included this wording in their roll out of the ad:
Right now our nation is deeply divided and in desperate need of inspiration.
We need someone who can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and inspire everyone.
Beto O’Rourke is that person.
"A whisper campaign has been growing about Beto being the ‘white Obama’ and it looks like his supporters are going with that, not that it will work.
"Take a look: 
 

 
"If my analysis of Beto’s first steps seems a bit harsh, wait until you read this take from Nia-Malika Henderson of CNN:
Beto’s excellent adventure drips with white male privilege
. . .

Nathan Phillips Lied. The Media Bought It.

National Review

"There was far more than met the eye to the Covington Catholic story, but that didn’t stop the popular press from vilifying its students."


. . . "It would have been revolting if Nathan Phillips had been minding his own business doing a tribal chant while a gang of kids swarmed around him and started jeering. That’s what many media outlets reported: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” ran a New York Times headline over a story that said “a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys” were “surrounding a Native American elder.”

"That isn’t what happened. Phillips was the aggressor in the situation. It’s a curious feature of our culture that people aggressively seek to be victimized, go out of their way in hopes of getting punched in the face, but here we are. People do that because they know the media hand out condemnation based on perceived ranking in the victim hierarchy. “Old Ypsilanti man” is near the top, while “privileged-looking young white male probable heterosexual in a MAGA cap” is the absolute bottom. The surface appeal of the story short-circuited the reporters’ brains to such a degree that they failed to perform basic tasks such as asking the people they were accusing for their version of events. The Times and other outlets had zero evidence that a “mob” “surrounded” Phillips, except a claim of Phillips that he has since backed away from.
"Phillips has on at least one other occasion gotten himself into what he says was a racist altercation with a group of youths. This one, four years ago, also involved him approaching others, in this case a group of college students. (“Why did Phillips go over to the fence? Why not just walk away?” wondered a reporter. “For me just to walk by and have a blind eye to it,” Phillips said. “Something just didn’t allow me to do it.”)" . . .

Liberal Native American Activist Nathan Phillips Held Drum Protest at Trump Hotel In DC in 2017


NY Times tries to shed proper light:  . . . "In Mr. Sandmann’s statement, which was released by a public relations firm, he said he remained “motionless and calm” in an effort to defuse the situation.
“I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict,” he said.
“I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation,” he said. “I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me — to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.

In a lengthy video posted to YouTube, the Hebrew Israelite activists shouted insults at Native Americans and the high school students. One of the activists, Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan, denied in a Facebook video that his group had been instigators." . . .

"Native American Activist Nathan Phillips Is a Poseur . . ."   . . . "Phillips, reportedly a Vietnam veteran, got up in one boy’s face and started screaming and beating his drum inches from the boy’s face.
"Phillips also has a history of setting up similar incidents.
"According to one of the high school boys who was present, a group of black men were taunting the Trump supporters, calling them “shooters” and “crackers” and said the white kids “had everything given to them by their parents.”
"According to a witness, it was at this point that a Native American man showed up “out of nowhere” and began drumming in the high school kid’s face.“We weren’t even chanting at him, we were chanting at the African American guy, but obviously social media made us look bad to get views and stuff,” a witness said.
"Video shows the children were not chanting, “Build the wall!” as Nathan reported.
The media isn’t interested in facts — they want to push their left wing agenda so they doxxed the high school kids.
*"The high school boy was doxxed by the liberal fascist mob." . . . *(Emphasis added by TD)

Why Democrats Said No to Trump’s Border Compromise

Rich Terrell
They view him as a devil they must defeat at all costs.  "Lots of people are wondering just why Democrats rejected President Trump’s plan to reopen government agencies even before he announced the plan. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “non-starter,” and Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin rejected it even though, as the Daily Caller noted, Trump’s proposal to protect immigrant “Dreamers” from being deported “included everything” that Durbin had asked for “just over two years ago.”

"The Washington Post editorial page, normally one of Trump’s harshest critics, was puzzled by the Democratic intransigence:
To refuse even to talk until the government reopens does no favors to sidelined federal workers and contractors. . . . A measure of statesmanship for a member of Congress now is the ability to accept some disappointments, and shrug off the inevitable attacks from purists, if it means rescuing the lives of thousands of deserving people living among us.
"So why are Democrats so dug in? GOP congressman Peter King, who is frequently critical of Trump, says it’s because the issue of a border wall is secondary to their hatred of Trump. “The fear is, among the Democratic leadership, if they make any agreement with President Trump, it’s like compromising with the devil,” he told New York radio station AM970." . . .





Political Cartoons by AF Branco
Townhall

About those kids with MAGA hats that were reported harrassing a native American

More Fake News: No,These MAGA-Hat Wearing High School Kids Didn't 'Hound' A Native American Man  . . . "The scene occurred by the Lincoln Memorial where students from Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Kentucky. They were in the city for the annual March for Life. They’re wearing Make America Great Again hats and they’re doing sports chants. Robby Soave at Reason has a great recap of the incident, where a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites engaged in the provocation, not the kids and not Nathan Phillips, the Native American Vietnam veteran who is at the center of all this. Soave also described the Black Hebrew Israelites as well. It’s a racist, homophobic, and all-around kooky group who thinks their members are descendants from the tribes of Israel (via Reason): . . .

From Reason Magazine: The Media Wildly Mischaracterized That Video of Covington Catholic Students Confronting a Native American Veteran  . . . "One student did not get out of Phillips way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a "hate factory" and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn't quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around.
"And that's all there is to it. Phillips walked away after several minutes, the Black Hebrew Israelites continued to insult the crowd, and nothing else happened.
"You can judge for yourself. Here is video footage of the full incident, from the perspective of the black nationalists. Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.
"It was at this moment that Phillips, who had attended a nearby peace protest led by indigenous peoples, decided to intervene. He would later tell The Detroit Free Press that the teenagers "were in the process of attacking these four black individuals" and he decided to attempt to de-escalate the situation. He seems profoundly mistaken: The video footage taken by the black nationalists shows no evidence the white teenagers had any intention of attacking. Nevertheless, Phillips characterized the kids as "beasts" and the hate-group members as "their prey":" . . .

Covington Catholic Student Begs Local TV News to Tell the Truth About Native American Incident In DC  "A student at Covington Catholic High School sent a letter Saturday to a local TV station that serves that part of Kentucky, Cincinnati-based WKRC-TV, begging the station to report the truth of an incident Friday in Washington, D.C., involving a Native American man and students from Covington Catholic." . . .
. . . "This video shows the beginning of the confrontation by Phillips where he tests several students before selecting one boy wearing a MAGA hat to target for abuse. Phillips is moving freely about and steps up to the student as he bangs his drum in the boy’s face and loudly chants at him in a language the boy does not understand. Phillips does not attempt to speak to the boy. Phillips doesn’t ask him to move nor does he explain what he is doing." . . .
Read this student's statement at the site.   WTVQ covers this student here.
"Here is the full statement:

“I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.
I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.   
When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group. 
The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.  . .Read the entire statement
 MORE media lies’: Looks like there’s a whole lot MORE to story about Catholic students ‘harassing’ Native American protester
More Media Lies There was no mob hounding a Native American Mult Native Americans instigated an incident walking into a peaceful group of kids & taunting one chanting & drumming inches fm his face No one said "Build the Wall" & if anything That kid deserves a peace meda
 Jim HansonVerified account @Uncle_Jimbo Jan 19