Another horrific terrorist attack

The New Neo Posted on by

In a church in France three people are killed – two women and the church sexton – one by beheading:

The French Catholic Church responded to the attack saying that “Christians must not become symbols to be slaughtered.”

The attack took place amid an atmosphere of growing hatred and incitement against France in the Muslim world. Demonstrators in Muslim countries have been staging angry protests over the recent clampdown on Islamist organizations by French authorities following a teacher’s beheading. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused French President Emmanuel Macron of “Islamophobia” for comments following the beheading in Paris. Erdogan was joined in condemnation by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, and other Muslim leaders.

So, if Islamist terrorists murder random people, and the government cracks down on the organizations that foster that sort of thing, that’s a phobia? Hardly. But the terrorist world and the countries that support it have found it very effective to cry “Phobia!! Bigotry!!” and thus to play on Westerners’ kindness, tolerance, and feelings of guilt.

I will add that the French Catholic Church can say that Catholics “must not” become symbols to be slaughtered, but what is the Church prepared to do about it? I doubt the terrorists are taking orders from the Church.

The Democrats’ “Trump’s Katrina” plan continues apace

The New Neo Posted on by

Way back in March of 2020 it was already clear that the Democrats saw the COVID crisis as a wonderful opportunity to ruin Trump’s election chances. I’ve written about that already in this post.

At first, I think the fear of COVID was very real, and the hype was a reflection of that fear. But many months ago the actual statistics were far more reassuring and remain so. However, you wouldn’t know that if you read the MSM or listen to the Democrats, who are still riding the “Trump killed 200,000 people!!” horse for all it’s worth, just a few days before the election.

The continuation of COVID doom talk long past the time when it seemed appropriate had three main purposes for the Democrats. The first was to continue to demonize Trump and thus to hurt him politically. I consider that mission to have been accomplished – and if the talk from my Democrat friends is any evidence, it has been. For them Trump is to blame and almost solely to blame, and he’s not only killing people but the stupid freedom-loving folks who refuse to wear masks are killing people too, and shame on them all. When I have tried to make a few points to counter some of these ideas, I am met with disbelief and even sometimes fury.

The second purpose of COVID – and I believe it’s one that the left also discovered some time last spring – was to change the voting rules to facilitate fraud under the guise of protecting people from COVID. In this case, mission accomplished as well.

The third was to have an excuse for controlling people. And that control and isolation and disruption has, in turn, made many people more unstable and more angry at Trump or at life in general, reactions that also benefit the Democrats. I think the emotional effects of lockdowns may not have been fully foreseen by the Democrats, but at a certain point they perceived that it was happening and they realized it would help them politically and needed to be continued.

Prior to COVID, Trump’s re-election seemed nearly assured, despite the 4-year negative drumbeat of the MSM. But COVID and then continuing COVID propaganda changed all that. I make no predictions about next Tuesday (and beyond, because the election may remain in doubt long after next Tuesday). But I do know that the Democrats got a great windfall with COVID, and they have mounted a vicious and cynical campaign to keep the fear and blame going nonstop at least until Tuesday, when they hope to reap major benefits.

Riots in Philadelphia follow a familiar pattern

The New Neo Posted on by

The governor has called in the National Guard.

This time the supposed provocation was the police killing of a 27-year-old black man named Walter Wallace, who was apparently armed with a knife and coming towards the police, The family says they had called for an ambulance because he was having mental health problems. The police say they got a call “about a man screaming and saying that he was armed with a knife.” The family may have wanted an ambulance, but in a situation so unsafe, ambulance workers are not going to be the first ones to interact with the person. Then:

In video filmed by a bystander and posted on social media, officers yell for Wallace to drop a knife. In the video, Wallace’s mother and at least one man follow Wallace, trying to get him to listen to officers, as he briskly walks across the street and between cars.

Wallace advanced toward the officers, who then fired several times, said police spokesperson Officer Tanya Little. Wallace’s mother screams and throws something at an officer after her son is shot and falls to the ground.

A terrible and tragic situation. And now Philadelphia is falling prey to looters who are using this incident opportunistically.

More on Wallace’s history here (in the NY Post):

Walter Wallace, the mentally ill Philadelphia man whose death sparked riots in cities across the US, had a long history of violent run-ins with the law — and was a newlywed about to have his ninth child, according to reports.

Wallace’s family members, including his father, who witnessed the shooting, are “never going to be the same again,” Fitzhugh said. “They actually sat and watched their son literally get murdered,” he told NBC.

Certainly not “murdered” if a person is wielding a knife. More:

Police had been called to his home dozens of times in recent months, including twice Monday before they returned a third time when he was shot, sources told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Since May, police had received 31 calls about the address — including reports of someone with a weapon as well as assaults, sources told the paper.

Why wasn’t this guy in custody already? Possibly in some mental health facility?

Wallace had also been in and out of court for nearly a decade, with convictions for crimes including resisting arrest and robbery, the paper said.

He had been arrested in March after he allegedly threatened his child’s mother over the phone, saying, “I’ll shoot you and that house up,” NBC said.

In 2019, he was charged with resisting arrest by “kicking the windows and door panels of a police patrol car.”

In 2016, during a robbery, he allegedly grabbed a woman by the neck and held what she believed to be a gun to her head, NBC said, citing court records. He was sentenced to 11 to 23 months behind bars, WPVI said.

His mother had a protective order against him in 2013 which he allegedly violated when he “threw water in her face and punched her in the face” and “threatened to return and shoot” her, the reports said, again citing court records.

That same year, he pleaded guilty to assault and resisting arrest after punching a police officer in the face, WPVI said. That same year, a judge also ordered a psychiatric evaluation along with mental health treatment, the reports said.

The aspiring rapper’s music also heavily featured guns and rhymes about shooting people, including police, the station noted.

That’s quite a history. And quite different from what the earlier article I quoted – which is from NBC Philadelphia and very lengthy and detailed – would lead us to believe. That NBC article mentions none of Wallace’s violent history, and a reader would tend to think that the fatal incident was sparked by some isolated breakdown in an otherwise peaceful but troubled person.

But actually Wallace had a lengthy rap sheet and a long and repeated history of violence against family as well as other criminal activity. I wouldn’t doubt that he may also have been mentally ill, but whatever previous evaluation and treatment he got in 2013 don’t seem to have done any good, which is no surprise.

This case follows the same pattern as so many others that have been used as propaganda by BLM. What are police supposed to do in such situations, work magic? They can’t fix the complex problems being exhibited here. They can only defend themselves and others, if threatened – and if BLM has its way, even that avenue will be closed.

Is this how the new civil war begins?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]

If Biden and the left win next Tuesday, as the polls predict, there won’t be any need for a civil war on the part of the left. But here’s what’s planned if there’s a Trump victory (which is automatically defined as “stealing the election”):

ShutDown D.C. anticipates that 10,000 protesters from a motley assortment of affinity groups will converge at Black Lives Matter Plaza to engage in “civil resistance” if President Trump tries to “steal the election.” A “Flying Bike Squad” is “coming together as a rapid response team,” according to organizers. If it’s anything like the skateboard squads and soup can squads who’ve used everyday items as weapons to beat Trump supporters, look for more blood to spill in the name of “peaceful protest.” Mass disruptions are planned at train stations and airports, on highways and in residential neighborhoods for at least the first full week after Election Day.

“We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes,” ShutDown D.C. threatens in its outline of a “No More Business As Usual” blockade across the country. “We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter — maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.”

Here’s what has me especially concerned: The “deep state” Trump-haters are openly gearing up to do everything they can from inside the federal government to assist the resistance. ShutDown D.C. is conducting online training this week with public employees in the nation’s capital to undermine election integrity and the day-to-day work of the Trump administration. A protest guide lists the following subversive federal worker groups as key partners: Takoma Park Mobilization, Alt National Park Service, Alt Ed, AltFDA, Alternative NOAA, Alt U.S. Forest Service, AltEPA and BadHombreLands National Park Service.

What to make of this? As I already stated, they don’t seem to be planning much of anything if Biden wins – which is very telling, actually. And I don’t doubt that if Trump manages to pull out a win, this sort of disruption is what they intend. I’m not the least bit naive about the goals of this crew, which is to tear down the entire structure of the US and replace it with some leftist/anarchist/racialist chaos and horror. They have already done plenty of damage.

But I also wonder if they are exaggerating about the number of demonstrators and insider government forces they have who will actually go through with this. I also wonder what the plans of the Trump administration are, because they certainly must have them. The leftists feel they’re in a win/win situation, anyway, because if Trump were to clamp down hard and demonstrators were to get hurt, that would be used to scream “tyrant” at Trump.

A real tyrant, of course, would simply fire on the demonstrators and/or imprison them all and throw away the key. I doubt that sort of thing will ever happen, and the demonstrators probably would agree. They count on the consequences for their actions being relatively mild.

We also know that Trump-hating government employees have already done a lot to harm Trump, and should assume that they would have no hesitation to continue the practice, since virtually no one has been punished. Note this article published in Vanity Fair in February of 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration:

One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.

That Vanity Fair article is entitled “An Anti-Trump Resistance Movement is Growing Within the U.S. Government.” Another excerpt, to give you the flavor of it:

When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinow­ski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual?… There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”

Again, remember the date, and understand that Trump had done virtually nothing at that point. And yet people – one of them in this case being a former Obama administration official going on the record – had no hesitation saying that “the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States” feels that Trump is “a threat to U.S. national security.” He doesn’t feel he needs to illustrate why they might feel this; apparently, it’s self-evident why the entire national security bureaucracy feels threatened (and of course it’s ironic that, as time has gone on, Trump has greatly increased our security rather than the opposite).

So, was it their jobs that were actually threatened? Specifically, were they afraid of a shake-up by General Flynn?

I contend that the latter was a big motive for their fear. Flynn had been sworn in as National Security Advisor on January 22. He has been described many times as intending to streamline and improve the security bureaus, and was also very much hated by the Obama administration that had fired him. The bureaus went to work on Flynn, and we know the rest – forced to resign by February 13, twelve days after the Vanity Fair piece was published. And for the next four years these bureaucracies have been dedicated to the attempt to destroy Trump.

So why wouldn’t it all continue in escalated form for a second term, if Trump gets one? And avoiding this is actually one of the suggestions that has been explicit in the Biden campaign, the basic message being: vote for our team and get rid of Trump and all the turmoil will stop.

If the Democrats win, they plan to make ACB irrelevant

The New Neo Posted on by

I wonder how many people voting for Biden realize the revolutionary leftist nature of the Democratic Party at this point. I know quite a few people who are only focused on hating Trump, and voting for the Democrats they think they know – who are not the Democrats of today.

At any rate, here’s the plan:

But understand they’re not just talking about packing the Supreme Court, they’re talking about packing the whole federal judiciary, that’s why Biden is saying the “court system.”

From Jonathan Turley, one of the few honest Democrats (or at this point, perhaps ex-Democrat – or maybe he was always a libertarian):

What this commission [proposed by Joe Biden] seems designed to do is to give a form of enablement to Vice President Biden and the Democrats. But what is also worrisome is that when you look at what they’re saying, they’re saying if Judge Barrett is confirmed … that will give them license to tear apart one of the most important institutions in the country. It’s like kids saying, “Step over this [line] and if you do, I have a right to fight you.”

Actually, no. It’s not like kids; that’s trivializing it, although I don’t think Turley meant to minimize it. It’s not childish, though. It’s tyrannical. And ACB doesn’t matter; it’s not about her or about approving her. It’s about anything the right will do that gives them any power at this point. The left has decided that the right cannot have even temporary power anymore.

No, it’s not childish. The proper analogy is to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela – and I recently wrote about why that is so.

I made the Bickford’s Big Apple Pancake today

The New Neo Posted on by

And it was delicious.

Bickford’s was a New England chain that’s mainly defunct now, but the pancake was the only thing I ever used to eat there. It’s one of those puffy things, and is great for brunch or just about anything else. Very easy to make, too, although I let the final “broil” setting go a little too long and it got a tiny bit burnt.

But still very yummy. I should have taken a photo, but I didn’t even think of it till now.

Who believes the MSM anymore?

The New Neo Posted on by

With the MSM’s differential treatment of the obviously sketchy – and obviously Russian-sourced – Steele dossier versus the much more convincing evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop, the final stake should have been driven through the heart of the MSM.

From Kurt Schlichter:

Take a look at the Hoover Biden laptop thing. We have a computer that the Toast of Medellin gave to a repair man and forgot about because meth-huffing losers forget about stuff. We got his signature on the papers. We got his ambulance chaser demanding it back. We got the testimony of a veteran with a vaguely Slavic name whistleblowing it, and I was told that it’s literally treason to doubt whistleblowing veterans with a vaguely Slavic name (maybe they have to look like a bratwurst in their uniform for this to apply – it’s hard to keep track of the ever-changin’ rules).
CARTOONS | AF Branco
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And yet we have Leslie Stahl, a licensed, approved journalist of journalism, telling the president that the laptop revelations are not verified.

No verified? If some hobo on a corner took a break from nadlering all over the streets of San Francisco to tell a passing NYT reporter, “I like James Bond movies and I’m pretty sure I saw Putin paying for Don Jr.’s latte at a Starbucks on Castro Street” we’d see a headline the next day reading “Anonymous Intelligence Insider Reports Trump Family Receiving Payoffs From Russian Leader.”

And then there’s this from Bernard Goldberg, whose long-time specialty has been MSM mendacity:

It’s not their reasoning, dishonest as it is, that’s so annoying. It’s the sanctimony of these journalists that’s galling. They’re not running the story because they don’t want to be participants in a smear campaign that might affect a presidential election – and they want us to really believe that?

Let’s make sure we understand that these are the same people who ran story after story about a fake dossier that was packed with lies about Donald Trump.

They’re the same people who ran countless stories informing us that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

These are the same noble journalists who gave Adam Schiff more airtime than their own anchors get – all because he said he had solid proof that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.

So any sentient being ought to recognize that the press is not fulfilling any sort of objective function in our society and in our elections. It is the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Actually, that’s been true for a long time. But it’s so crystal clear at this point that to deny it would seem like madness.

And yet it happens every day. And the people who still believe in the veracity of the MSM are often intelligent in many other ways. The persistent power of propaganda is vast, and a mind is a difficult thing to change.

That’s what the MSM is banking on. It’s not so much that, as Goldberg wonderingly writes, “they want us to really believe” what they write, despite the contradictions and the obviousness of the bias. They want enough people to believe it to sway the election. They’re not pitching their approach to you or me. They know their audience, and they are counting on the faithfulness and susceptibility of that audience.

That’s why they do absurd things like pretending Biden was addressing George Lopez when he said “four more years of George…George…”, as the Orwellian/Soviet “fact-checker”at the once-proud WaPo claims. The fact that you can easily find the video and watch it, and see that of course he meant no such thing – he was very obviously substituting George Bush for Donald Trump, for a moment – doesn’t matter to the WaPo and the rest of the MSM hopping on board, although you might think it should. They believe that their audience either (1) won’t watch the clip; or (2) will watch it already having been primed to believe what the MSM says about it rather than their own lying eyes:.

The clip is unequivocal, and Biden is not referring to George Lopez (who was part of the panel he was addressing at the time):

I strongly believe that Joe Biden is the worst major party candidate ever to run for president in my lifetime. He is cognitively challenged, physically old as well and looking frail, corrupt, a long-time liar, not very bright even in his prime, wrong about almost every stand he’s ever taken in his long long political career, and will be putty in the hands of the left.

And yet the press is so eager to facilitate his election that they willingly and eagerly cover themselves with even greater shame than before. But then again, they have no shame.

The new whiteness of the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Please contemplate this:

On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”

Jews can be all things to all Jew-haters: outsider “people of color” when necessary, insider privileged whites when necessary. But the common denominator in these categorizations is that the hate against them does not die. It just takes on different guises. And of course, Farrakhan has always been a spreader of the poison.

Professor Hopkinson is a professor at a traditionally black university, so she’s shaping woke minds in one of the oldest hatreds in the book, under the guise of “anti-racism.” Sweetly Orwellism, is it not?

Here’s her bio:

Dr. Natalie Hopkinson is an assistant professor in the doctoral program in Howard University’s Department of Communication, Culture and Media studies, and a fellow of the Interactivity Foundation. Her work explores questions about the arts, cultural identity and place; postcolonial history, gender, and media. She has been a columnist at the Huffington Post and was formerly a staff writer, editor and media/culture critic at the Washington Post and The Root. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Maryland-College Park and her B.A. in political science from Howard University.

From the Quillette article:

For much of the last century, the liberal position on race in America was that we should eliminate discrimination and prejudice, treat everyone as an individual, and award opportunities on the basis of merit. Some groups, like Jews, Asian Americans, and other minority immigrant groups have flourished under this system, but black Americans continue to be represented in fractions of their societal proportions in many elite settings. In response, the progressive view has evolved. Today it holds that treating everyone the same without regard to race is actually racist because it fails to consider the impact of historic and systemic discrimination. In this way, systemic racism is preserved by judging members of historically marginalized groups as less worthy according to ostensibly race-neutral criteria (for instance, test scores).

The writing of Ibram X. Kendi—professor, Atlantic columnist, and bestselling author of How To Be An Antiracist—provides the intellectual framework for the contemporary antiracist movement. Kendi argues that:

“The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one… there are ideas that express hierarchy and inequality. There are policies that create equity and inequity. The other aspect of it that is troubling is that there’s no such thing as a ‘not racist.’ There is only racist and antiracist.”

Instead of “equality,” progressives like Kendi favor “equity,” a system under which jobs and opportunities are apportioned among different groups in shares mirroring their representation in larger society. In his book, Kendi is clear about how this must be achieved: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

It’s a neat Orwellian trick to substitute “equity” for “equality.” Most people are not into parsing words that carefully, and the words sound so much alike that one can be forgiven for thinking they refer to the same thing. But they most definitely do not. The first corresponds roughly to equality of opportunity and the second to equality of outcome along racial categories.

I’ve written about Kendi before, in particular in this post. His book How To Be An Antiracist presently has about 13,000 reviews, 87% five star and 8% four star. It is ranked number 140 in books (it’s been out for well over a year and I’m virtually sure it has been ranked much higher in the past). Kendi is influencing a lot of people to think this way, and it is a profoundly racist way to think.

[NOTE: And right on schedule, we have a “Jews for Trump” car parade in New York being the target of rock-throwing and other attacks.