Sandmann sues CNN

The New Neo Posted on by

Suing CNN is a good idea:

“CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than The Washington Post. And CNN goes into millions of individuals’ homes,” attorney L. Lin Wood said this weekend on Fox News.

“They really went after Nicholas with the idea that he was part of a mob that was attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites, yelling racist slurs at the Black Hebrew Israelites. Totally false,” he added. “Now you say you’ve seen the tape; if you took the time to look at the full context of what happened that day, Nicholas Sandmann did absolutely nothing wrong. He was, as I’ve said to others, he was the only adult in the room. But you have a situation where CNN couldn’t resist the idea that here’s a guy with a young boy, that Make America Great Again cap on. So they go after him.”

As far as I can tell, CNN and so many others didn’t just fail to follow accepted journalism standards. They followed no standards at all, except for those of the mob. But the MSM has in many cases become indistinguishable from the mob. The full video of the incident was available quite early in the game, and they ignored it. Nicholas Sandmann was not only a private citizen, he was an underage person. A lawsuit is highly appropriate.

I hope Sandmann wins this suit. I tend to doubt he will, but I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Ethiopian crash raises safety questions

The New Neo Posted on by

Sunday’s crash of an Ethiopian airliner is a terrible tragedy in which 157 people lost their lives. The scenes of anguish and destruction are horrific and heartbreaking.

Air travel’s safety record has improved tremendously, but any crash feels intolerable and everyone would like to completely eliminate such occurrences. This particular crash raises exceedingly disturbing safety questions because it appears to echo the circumstances of another recent crash that may have had something to do with the design and operation of the plane model involved, the Boeing 737 MAX, which is a relatively new design although substantially similar to an older one:

The accident drew immediate parallels to the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air plane that plunged from the skies in Indonesia and into the Java Sea, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.

A new MAX 8, an upgraded, more fuel-efficient aircraft from Boeing’s popular 737 line, also was involved in that calamity. In both instances, the pilots tried to return to the airport a few minutes after takeoff but were not able to make it back. And both flights experienced drastic speed fluctuations during ascent.

But experts warn that doesn’t mean the reasons they plummeted were the same.

But it’s hard to believe there wasn’t a connection, until proven otherwise. Air crashes have become less common than ever, but it’s my impression that crashes are particularly unusual with new planes and clear weather unless some sort of design flaw or error-encouraging design glitch is involved.

More:

The cause of the Lion Air disaster is still being examined 4½ months later, but investigators are looking into whether an incorrect reading from a sensor activated an automatic command to lower the plane’s nose. The pilots had tried to reverse the command.

Boeing did not take the costly step of retraining pilots on that new feature of the flight control system when it introduced the MAX 8 in 2017, based on the argument that the new models flew essentially the same way as the familiar 737s. Pilots complained that neither the company, the airlines nor the Federal Aviation Administration informed them of the change.

After the crash, Boeing sent out an advisory telling pilots how to override the software upgrade that created the problem.

American and Southwest currently fly the plane, but it’s a very small part of their fleets, 24 out of 1000 for American and 31 out of 750 for Southwest.

RIP all those who have perished, and condolences to all their their relatives and friends.

Leftism as a religion with its rules about blasphemy

The New Neo Posted on by

There were some comments recently that were so insightful I thought I’d repost them here, to draw attention to them. The first was in the knitting post. In case you haven’t read that post, it was about a big dust-up in the online knitting community—a community I never even knew existed till now, since I’m definitely not part of it—in which a knitting blogger was chided nastily for some innocuous remarks about India that were deemed insufficiently culturally-sensitive by the mobbish powers-that-be, and she ended up offering an abject apology.

The first comment was from “Henry”:

The interesting thing about this set-to is that it shows how the old laws about blasphemy – which everyone (who counts) had so disdained – have been resurrected in the form of “Political Correctness”. The penalties are no longer physical flogging, imprisonment, and torture with an Auto da Fe, but a more extended and public Inquisition. As of old, it ends with a confession of sin, unaccepted repentance, excommunication, and banishment from the fellowship.

It is as much of an abomination today as it ever was.

And of course, a more recent type of pseudo-religious belief system that comes to mind is Communism, which reproduced intolerance for the expression of anything that deviated from the Party line in even the smallest of ways, and which featured the public humiliation of and confession from, and in many many cases imprisoned and/or murdered, the offenders. The point was not in order to purge their souls as in medieval times, although perhaps that was the pretense even under Communism, but to cleanse the group and set a stern example for others not to transgress. Come to think of it, those last two were probably operative during the Inquisition as well.

It’s been said many times that leftism is a religion, or rather a substitute for the religious impulse when religion has weakened or fled. Nietzsche wrote in 1882:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

That’s a famous passage and reams have been written about it. But in the context of this discussion and that Nietszche quote, it seems that we’ve invented a great many rituals to replace the old ones, and that one way to look at Communism and all central planning schemes that purport to transform human society into utopia—and fail utterly and completely, accomplishing something quite different—is that they are attempts to “become gods” in Nietszche’s sense.

The second blog comment I want to highlight was at the recycling post, and it was by “RC”:

I really believe that Leftism is the religion* that replaced mainstream Protestantism in America as it drifted away from its faith and became de-supernaturalized.

As “theological liberals” took over the Protestant seminaries in the early 1900’s, the people who still believed in God reacted as conservatives always seem to: Instead of reconquering their own existing institutions through bareknuckle political infighting, they abandoned them, splitting off to form their own new parallel institutions in which they could reassert “the fundamentals of the faith” (like the literal existence of God). They thus became known as “Fundamentalists.”

This meant that the mainline Protestant churches (most especially the Episcopalians, but also the then-differently-named ancestors of PCUSA and ELCA) gradually bled out all their genuine believers, losing them to the newly-launched Evangelical churches and para-church organisations. Two generations later, the mainline leadership consisted almost entirely of persons who didn’t believe but felt that a church was a perfectly fine place to act out their personal inclination for moralizing and social meddling, governed less by Holy Writ than by emotionalism and left-wing politics.

In the last three decades, these churches have seen a profound collapse in membership. The reason is this: Half their remaining members said, “If these leaders don’t believe, why should I?” and started sleeping in on Sundays. The other half said, “If these leaders don’t believe, I’ll go find some others who do,” and departed for other churches…

…[W]what about the folk who started sleeping in on Sundays?

They, too, retained a latent religious instinct. They felt unsettled if they didn’t have:
– a cosmology and metaphysics
– an ethical crusade to participate in
– an apocalyptic eschatology
– a set of rituals to practice
– a way to cheaply buy indulgences to alleviate their feelings of moral guilt
– a sense of community
– a diabolical enemy to struggle against
– a set of sermons to attend

So, their own functional religion evolved, in which those needs were met as follows:
– cosmology/metaphysics: reductive materialism coupled to a purely emotional “spirituality”
– ethical crusade: Save the Planet!
– apocalyptic eschatology: Global Warming Will Kill Us All In Ten Years!
– ritual system: Recycling, Buying Priuses
– buying indulgences: By promoting leftist political policies, I prove that I Am One Of The Enlightened White People, and get a pass on the sin of being white
– sense of community: Left-wing political activism and Following All The People On Twitter Who Exhibit My Same Tribal Markers
– enemy to struggle against: Republicans are demons, and Trump is the devil himself
– a set of sermons to attend: TED Talks and attending lectures during Sex Week on campus

I defy anyone to offer a better explanation of the above behaviors than as a surrogate for the religious instinct they inherited from their grandparents, but for which they had no other outlet.

An excellent summary, and not the least bit limited to recycling and global warming and the like as the quasi-religious causes. It’s also correct as a summary whether or not the threat of global warming is real, because it’s the behavior around it that is quasi-religious, although in the case of AGW that religiosity is wrapped in the cloak of science.

Songs about soulmates

The New Neo Posted on by

In this recent thread, there was an interesting discussion regarding popular music about finding your soulmate (or thinking you’ve found your soulmate).

But no one mentioned the song that immediately came to my mind: “I’ll Know” from “Guys and Dolls.” That was a song I loved as a child. It’s sung by mission girl Sarah and smooth gambler Sky, who are meeting “cute”—that is, they can’t stand each other at the outset, and yet the audience knows, or at least strongly suspects, that before the musical is over, they will be singing another tune.

The funny thing about this song is that Sarah is saying that she absolutely knows with 100% certainty the kind of guy she’s looking for and with whom she’ll fall in love and live happily ever after. And she has imagined every detail about him, and will recognize him immediately the minute she meets him.

Sarah is most definitely not describing the charming Sky. He, in return, says he’s just going to react to things as they happen and doesn’t have a firm picture of the woman he’ll love, but he is just as sure as Sarah was that he’ll recognize that woman the moment he meets her.

And yet, of course (SPOLER ALERT for anyone unfamiliar with “Guys and Dolls”), after all the play’s entertaining twistings and turnings they end up together.

I tried to find a YouTube video of a good modern rendition of the song in a revival performance, and gave up. I’ve always detested the movie. Marlon Brando tries but he’s not a good singer (Hollywood decided not to dub him, however). And I just don’t care for movie musicals in general compared to the stage versions.

So here’s the stage version that I heard over and over as a child; just the audio. I thought it was beautiful then, and I still think so now. It’s very simple. Isabel Bigley, who played Sarah, has a clear high soprano (the part of Sarah is not an easy one to sing) that has just the right touch of primness. And Robert Alda, father of Alan, who plays Sky, has a voice with a wonderful mellow but slightly brassy timbre, instantly recognizable as unique. The contrast between their personalities isn’t just in the book and the lyrics, it’s right there in their voices.

And yet at the very end, how well they blend:

Here’s the markedly inferior movie version:

Racism in the knitting community

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, the knitting community.

I didn’t even know there was a knitting community. So go figure; learn something new every day. And I even used to be quite a proficient knitter, back in pre-internet (and pre-arm-injury) times.

But the times they have a changed, even in an endeavor like knitting, which used to be pretty peaceful. No more, now that the SJWs of the New Red Guard Thought Police have gotten to it. Here’s a description of what happened to a knitting blogger who was about to go on a long-awaited trip to India and was very happy and excited at the prospect, and wrote something to that effect. There was backlash (the following begins with Ace’s sarcastic description of that response):

The reason why you can’t be too excited to visit a country largely populated by people of a slightly different genetic make-up than you is that you might “exoticize” them and you might expect them to deliver you some kind of spiritual uplift, which forces them to do unpaid labor as your Brown Gurus. And also appropriates their culture for your personal White Journey.

My culture isn’t your Prom Dress, Hater. (This a reference to Social Justice Warriors attacking high school girls who like Asian and Indian fabrics. Apparently Round-Eye isn’t allowed to wear anything but linen and sheephide.)

This story is from a couple of weeks ago but it’s as timeless as suggesting that Jews are motivated by dual loyalty and money and the blood of Christian infants:

In January, Karen Templer, a popular knitting blogger, told her followers about an upcoming trip to India, kicking off the whole debate. The post, which discussed Templer’s excitement about her childhood dream finally being fulfilled, praised India’s culture and food and also noted Templer’s “lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent.”

Her innocuous comments about India were immediately attacked. One commenter, Alex, noted her “words feed into a colonial/imperialist mindset toward India and other non-Western countries.” Vox author Jaya Saxena also jumped on board, saying the tone Templer used, as a white person, “felt like they thought India only existed to be all those things for them.”

After several days of this and other ridiculous abuse, Templer apologized for the post, writing that her earlier post was “insensitive” and that “words matter.”

…All of this proves the point of Peggy Noonan’s column from yesterday, that America is entering a period of Maoist “struggle sessions,” in which people are battered until they confess their toughtcrimes or even knitcrimes.

“Knitcrime.” It’s got a ring, doesn’t it?

It’s so absurd it’s hard not to joke about it, and joking is appropriate. But there is nothing really funny about it. In just a few short years, these SJWs have gone from unhinged and powerful to more and more unhinged and more and more powerful. Knitting is just one community this has infected; there are plenty others.

The precedents are obvious and numerous, and tend to feature leftist-dominated societies and to end in murder. We haven’t gone there yet (and perhaps we never will), but the place to which we’ve gone is bad enough—obligatory self-abasement, and grave threats to freedom of speech. And the road to worse things has been paved and cleared.

Recycling: another idea that isn’t going quite as planned

The New Neo Posted on by

Recycling depended on China, it turns out, and China has stopped doing its bit. So now a lot of towns are burying their trash again:

Should that empty soda bottle go in the recycling bin or the trash can? Increasingly, it doesn’t really matter.

A large portion of America’s plastic and paper waste used to go from our recycling bins to China, where it was refashioned into everything from shoes to bags to new plastic products. But since the end of 2017, China has restricted how much foreign trash—er, recycling—it buys, including cutting off purchases of waste paper products, like all the junk mail that goes directly from your mailbox to the recycling bin.

As a result, The Atlantic reported Tuesday, some American cities and towns are sending all those recyclables directly to the landfill…

Some places are stockpiling their recyclables in the hopes that things will turn around—in other words, in the hopes that China will start buying more American refuse again—but the sudden shift in the market has less to do with China than it does with the American fascination with recycling. Even as municipal recycling programs became almost ubiquitous in America over the past few decades, the underlying infrastructure remained economically and environmentally flawed.

“Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits,” wrote John Tierney in a must-read 2015 op-ed for The New York Times that predicted many of the problems facing the municipalities highlighted in The Atlantic’s story—including the slumping demand for recycled goods brought on by lower oil prices and cheaper manufacturing processes.

Please read the whole thing.

Personally, I hate creating so much garbage. For example, packaging (as compared to during my youth)—especially plastic packaging such as those impossible-to-open hard see-through thingees that seem to surround nearly every small gadget one buys these days—has gotten way out of hand. I receive an amazing amount of unsolicited junk mail and it doesn’t seem to be stoppable; that stuff just goes directly into recycling and isn’t even opened. What a waste, and I don’t remember anything even remotely like it even as recently as ten years ago.

I have figured out a way around one problem, though: plastic soda bottles. I drink a lot of club soda, and I use a Sodastream. Great product! It not only does away with the need to recycle bottles, but it has lightened my load on the way home from the grocery store considerably. I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper, too, so it’s win/win/win.

Not to mention the fact that Sodastream is an Israeli company (shhhh—don’t tell Omar).

Pelosi’s defense of Ilhan Omar: poor dear, she just doesn’t know any better

The New Neo Posted on by

Nancy Pelosi is used to making excuses and dancing around issues. In this, she’s no different than most politicians, and as the leader of the House Democrats for years, she’s had a lot more experience at it than most.

The other day, not only did she lose a fight to Ilhan Omar and company, but she had to explain Omar’s use of classic anti-Semitic tropes, and the way Pelosi decided to do that was particularly interesting:

“The incident that happened, I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic,” Pelosi said. “I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realize.”…

“I understand how advocates come in with their enthusiasms.”

“But when you cross that threshold in the Congress, your words weigh much more than when you’re shouting at somebody outside. And I feel confident that her words were not based on any anti-Semitic attitude,” Pelosi continued. “But that she didn’t have a full appreciation of how they landed on other people where these words have a history and a cultural impact that might have been unknown to her.”

So, Pelosi is essentially pleading a combination of cultural relativism and ignorance on Omar’s part. Both are utterly absurd.

First of all, it doesn’t even matter, because much of what Omar said is anti-Semitic on its face. Accusing an entire group of dual loyalty and/or venality isn’t exactly a compliment, and it isn’t a mere policy dispute about Israel. But in addition, look at Omar’s history. She was born in Somalia to what appears to be a relatively comfortable family, left when the civil war there began and she was ten years old, spent about four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and came here at fourteen:

Omar attended Edison High School, and volunteered there as a student organizer. She graduated from North Dakota State University with a bachelor’s degrees in political science and international studies in 2011.

Omar was a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Omar is now 37 years old, so she’s been in this country now for 23 years, close to 2/3 of her entire life. And they were very formative years, as well as years in which she was an active member of secular American society and in fact an activist in politics, as well as studying it intensely—all in the heart of this country. She’s been speaking English quite effectively and immersed in American culture. Whether she embraces American culture or not—and she certainly seems to have embraced politics and conflict—no one can say with a straight face that she is unfamiliar with it. Nor can she possibly be the least bit unfamiliar with the current popular anti-Semitic memes and what they mean, as well as how they’re used.

To plead that she’s a neophyte or a newcomer, or gets a pass because of being in some sort of Islamic cultural cloister (mixed metaphor, I know), is absurd.

Martina Navratilova is at a political change crossroads, whether she realizes it or not

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

Navratilova tweeted out before Christmas, “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.” The tweet brought a firestorm and she promised to write more about it when she educated herself on transgender athletes.

She tried to make amends in an op-ed in February by explaining the science she discovered…

It didn’t work. She was dropped from the board of a gay rights advocacy group, and excoriated further on social media. As part of a response to that, Martina wrote [emphasis mine]:

What I really wanted to do was try to open up the debate about equality and fairness in relation to transgender participation in women’s sport. There were too many voices that were silenced and shamed into submission and that is not right. My aim was to encourage a more scientific, rather than emotional, conversation and to search for a solution that would work better than current arrangements…

Well, I certainly stumbled into a hornets’ nest. The support I normally get from ‘my people’, the LGBT community, was replaced by a barrage of quite nasty personal attacks and I was dropped (jettisoned is a better word) as an ambassador for Athlete Ally.

Conversely, some publications and people that I am at odds with on most issues, such as the Washington Examiner (gasp) and James Woods (double gasp), were strongly supportive of my opinions. Those are unwelcome bedfellows. So where did I go wrong? Or did I go wrong?

Most coverage of this story is about the transgender athlete controversy aspects of it. But the portion of Navratilova’s words that I bolded is what caught my attention. What I see here are the glimmerings of at least the possibility of political change on Navratilova’s part, depending on how she answers the questions she posed.

This incident represents an opportunity for her to make a shift, a move that’s incredibly hard to make and that she may reject. You can feel her confusion and hesitation; it’s real and it’s painful. It’s somewhat like what #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka said in the video where he told his change story. At the beginning of Straka’s voicing of a single mild non-PC possibility, he wondered something like why are my friends treating me like that? I thought they were my friends. Why are my enemies treating me nicely? Does that mean I’ve gone over to the Dark Side?

Or maybe it’s not the Dark Side?

Navratilova is experiencing the struggle between emotions and logic. She didn’t think there would be such a disagreement between the two. Her friends are leading with emotion, and she wanted to lead with logic. People like James Woods are defending her out of logic, too, not because they love her. And she is discovering the viciousness of the left towards someone who violates the rules of groupthink.

I wish her well.

Not just a pretty face: Ilhan Omar, the House anti-hate resolution, and the deflection of blame

The New Neo Posted on by

What began as a move to condemn Ilhan Omar’s recent anti-Semitic statements morphed into a much broader statement that didn’t even mention her:

The resolution approved Thursday condemns anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities “as hateful expressions of intolerance.” Omar, a Somali-American, and fellow Muslims Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Andrew Carson of Indiana, issued a statement praising the “historic” vote as the first resolution to condemn “anti-Muslim bigotry.”

The seven-page document details a history of recent attacks not only against Jews in the United States but also Muslims, as it condemns all such discrimination as contradictory to “the values and aspirations” of the people of the United States. The vote was delayed for a time on Thursday to include mention of Latinos to address concerns of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It was inserted under a section on white supremacists who “weaponize hate for political gain” over a long list of “traditionally persecuted peoples.”

Far from being something that will give Omar and her allies pause, it was something she and her supporters managed to turn into a tool they can use to promote one of their favorite causes of all: their own supposed victimhood.

Touché, Ms. Omar! Well done.

This resolution is just a variation on a much older theme. If Omar is accused of saying or doing something bigoted, just turn it into: “No, we are the victims. It’s the backlash of Islamophobia we must be protected against.” And a great many people—particularly those on the left—will bend over backwards to show their tolerance, and to get out of having to condemn Omar for the original offense. In the process, the actual words and deeds of the perpetrator get lost, and the perpetrator can wrap him or herself in the warm cloak of victimhood.

Pallywood, a Palestinian propaganda machine which has been going on for a long long time with marked success (see this), is a prime example of the process. With Pallywood, the incidents of victimhood are actually staged and recorded, and this turns the sympathy of the world to the Palestinians, and the left (particularly in Europe) plays right along to show how noble they are.

Ilhan Omar and her buddies triumphed yesterday. And they know it. Nancy Pelosi may not have known what hit her.

As for Omar, she’s not wasting a bit of time, and in her newfound sense of invulnerability, look to her to up the ante. Already she’s been joining in mockery of Meghan McCain for “faux outrage” over Omar’s remarks:

McCain had become emotional during the ABC talk show, discussing Omar’s recent criticisms of Israel and its supporters. She said Omar’s remarks were hurtful to many of her Jewish friends.

“It is very dangerous, very dangerous,” McCain added, “and I think we collectively as Americans on both sides, what Ilhan Omar is saying is very scary to me. It’s very scary to a lot of people and I don’t think you have to be Jewish to recognize that.”…

But instead of responding directly to McCain, Omar retweeted a post that criticized McCain for “faux outrage” and referred to past statements attributed to McCain’s late father, U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who died last August at age 81.

“Meghan’s late father literally sang ‘bomb bomb bomb Iran’ and insisted on referring to his Vietnamese captors as ‘g–ks’,” read the post by Medhi Hasan, an “Intercept” columnist and Al Jazeera host. “He also, lest we forget, gave the world Sarah Palin. So a little less faux outrage over a former-refugee-turned-freshman-representative pls.”

Omar’s retweet was praised by many of her followers as a sign that the freshman congresswoman was “standing up to the establishment.”

Note the reference to Omar as a “former refugee”—gotta play that victim card, as though that allows her to say whatever she wants. And also, of course, there’s the quote from McCain’s father John McCain, who is not only irrelevant to whatever his daughter said, but who might be forgiven for referring to his torturers in pejorative terms. Not that Omar cares, but just to set the record straight:

“I was referring to my prison guards,” McCain said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

McCain made it clear that his anger extends only toward his captors. As a senator, he was one of the leaders of the postwar effort to normalize U.S. relations with Vietnam.

And here’s what McCain’s song was about.

None of this has any relevance to Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic remarks, which were most definitely not made about people who had tortured her, nor were they some sort of tasteless joke. And they certainly have no relevance to Meghan McCain and her upset over those remarks of Omar’s. But Omar knows her audience, and it’s those followers who praised her retweet of the “faux outrage” change, and for “standing up to the establishment.”

And that’s not all that Omar has been saying, now that she’s drunk with her own power in the Party. She’s also been dissing that old has-been, President Obama:

“We can’t be only upset with Trump,” the freshman firebrand told Politico Magazine.

“His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,” Omar said.

“And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Those last two sentences could be an excellent description of Ilhan Omar herself. Like AOC, she’s a very attractive youngish woman. This is, IMHO, part of the reason for her political success so far. And although she may not seem “polished” in the same way that Obama was, she is indeed polished in the techniques she’s been absorbing for many many years, techniques she did not originate but at which she is quite skilled. Already, she’s also gotten away with murder, not in the literal but in the political and metaphorical sense.

As for the future, the sky’s the limit. It really all just depends on whether the American public decides to reject or to embrace her methods and “the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Case in point: Saira Rao vs. Nancy Pelosi

The New Neo Posted on by

Another illustration of some of the points I was making just a moment ago:

That’s your intersectionality, hard at work.

I don’t feel the least bit sorry for Pelosi. But I don’t rejoice either, because this is a very alarming general trend. Please don’t underestimate the repetitive power of these sorts of accusations taking hold as a mainstream tactic against just about anyone. The younger generation has been steeped in this sort of thing, and it won’t necessarily cause any alarm in a lot of people.

And if you’re wondering who Saira Rao is, take a look:

Ahead of what is expected to be a pivotal midterm election, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, the longest-serving and only female member of Colorado’s congressional delegation, is facing a primary challenge by a political newcomer who represents anti-establishment angst within the Democratic Party.

“Blue isn’t working. We’ve got to go true blue,” that challenger, Saira Rao, a 43-year-old Indian-American mother of two, said Monday at a campaign event in Denver.

Rao, who has never held elected office, says the Democratic Party nationwide has failed to represent people of color. Here in Colorado, central to Rao’s campaign is being the state’s first woman of color elected to Congress.

Rao, a former Wall Street lawyer who owns a children’s and young adult’s book packaging company that focuses on diversity, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in December 2017, she penned a viral op-ed in which she said she is “breaking up with the party,” by which she says she means the corporate establishment side of the party. Afterward, she said readers told her to run for office. In January, she jumped into the race to unseat DeGette…

…During her fundraiser at the Punch Bowl Social on Broadway in Denver, she described what it’s like to be a woman of color. When she was nine years old, she said she tried to scrub the brown skin off her body with a stone after a boy broke up with her for being “black.” And last year, she said her 7-year-old son, Dar, covered himself in sunscreen and told her that he was finally white.

She says the party is not doing enough to end a “national epidemic” of police brutality against African Americans and disproportionate incarceration rates of people of color. She also wants to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and to defund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Rao lost. This time.

It should come as no surprise that—like AOC—Saura Rao was backed in the 2018 election by the Justice Democrats. I wrote about the Justice Democrats here. They are not inconsequential; in fact, they appear to be the shapers and in some cases the choosers and groomers of many of these radical candidates. They seem to go for a “type” (at least, that’s true of the people affiliated with them who are in the limelight): young, female, very radical, verbally aggressive, and preferably (although not always) attractive.

Democrat infighting: the inevitable clash of the identity groups

The New Neo Posted on by

When a party devolves into a bunch of entitled ethnic groups, and judges a person’s worth by his or her place on the hierarchy of victimhood, clashes are inevitable among those groups. You’ll see some unite against others in a power move, and the party will stick with the ones it thinks will bring them more advantage, and the ones who frighten them the most in terms of possible retaliation. Thus we have the current state of affairs in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats need (or certainly think they need) what has become their base, the far left (otherwise known by the self-designated euphemism “progressives”). It most definitely needs black voters, because without them as a near-unanimous bloc the Democratic Party would be moribund. It also needs Hispanics—although they don’t seem to be particularly embroiled in the current struggle.

The Jews are far more expendable if the other groups decide they have to be tossed under the bus. First of all, they are not very numerous. Granted, despite their tiny numbers, they have a few influential members in Congress—notably, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But note that word: “minority”—because, unlike the House, Democrats do not control the Senate at the moment.

So Schumer has little to say about the radical new members of the more obstreperous House (actually, one wonders at this point if even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all that much to say). Schumer is also what’s known these days as an old white guy, so he doesn’t count in the intersectional hierarchy, because he’s at the very bottom. Note that the Democrats long ago got rid of that even-more-paleo dinosaur otherwise known as “who dis?” Joe Lieberman.

As for the money provided by Jewish donors in the past, I believe the calculation is that it will keep coming, because those donors are generally secular leftists who hold no particular love for Israel and who see no problem with the growing but still mostly-subtle anti-Semitism exhibited by some of its newer members.

From the article:

…[There is] widespread anxiety in the caucus over how to handle the latest bout of remarks from Omar — one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress — after she suggested that pro-Israel advocates had “allegiance” to Israel. The remarks offended multiple top Democrats, who said it alluded to painful, decades-old stereotypes that Jews had “dual loyalties.”

Multiple Jewish lawmakers, including Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) stood up in the caucus meeting to explain why Omar’s latest remarks were so offensive and potentially dangerous. But other Democrats — including a Jewish lawmaker — stood up to defend Omar and say they didn’t see the remarks as deeply offensive…

Omar did not speak in the meeting, multiple sources said, although she was spotted chatting with some Democrats one-on-one and received hugs from others.

Democratic leaders, including Pelosi, are attempting to soothe relations within the caucus after abruptly halting plans to vote on a measure condemning anti-Semitism, which some lawmakers complained would had gone too far in targeting Omar.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is now rushing to rewrite that resolution to condemn hate speech more broadly to win over a group of lawmakers — including progressives and lawmakers of color — who have rushed to Omar’s defense.

They are falling all over themselves to show how tolerant they are of Omar. Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar has moved the Overton window for anti-Semitic statements from members of Congress, just as planned. Will most of the general public even notice?

[ADDENDUM: And this news probably warrants an entire post of its own, but I’m taking a little break at the moment. So please read it.]