When The Religious Left Is Occult

By ROD DREHER
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/religious-left-is-occult-pat-robertson-is-right/
June 7, 2019


Dakota Bracciale

Back in the day, the Reverend Pat Robertson kerfuffed the nation by making the following claim about feminism:

[I]t is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Today, the religion writer Tara Isabella Burton —  an Oxford PhD whom I met at Walker Percy Weekend — published a fascinating piece about the rise of occultism among Millennial progressives, that ends with this killer graf:

Back in 1992, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson warned of the dangers of feminism, predicting that it would induce “women to leave their husbands. . . .practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Many of today’s witches would happily agree.

Her reported piece actually justifies this surprising conclusion. She didn’t write it from a particular political point of view, let me be clear. She told me at the festival that this piece was coming. She said that she had spent a lot of time reporting it by hanging out with people in that world, and asking them what drew them to the occult, and why they believe that occult belief and practice can and should be fused with political commitment. I swear, reading this is like encountering the photonegative of the Religious Right. Excerpts:

For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.

There’s the coven of Brooklyn witches who publicly hexed then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the acclamation of the thousands-strong “Magic Resistance”—anti-Trump witches (among them: pop singer Lana del Rey) who used at-home folk magic to “bind” the president in the months following his inauguration. There are organizations like The Satanic Temple —newly featured in Penny Lane’s 2019 documentary Hail Satan—a “nontheistic religion” and activist group that uses its religious status to demand for its black-robe-clad members the same protections afforded to Christians in the hopes of highlighting the ridiculousness of faith-based exceptions (Satanic prayer in schools, say). There are dozens of Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice: the 2018 anthology The New Arcadia: A Witch’s Handbook to MagicalResistance; Michael Hughes’s 2018 Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change; David Salisbury’s 2019 Witchcraft Activism: A Toolkit for Magical Resistance (Includes Spells for Social Justice, Civil Rights, the Environment, and More); and Sarah Lyons’s forthcoming Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism.There are hundreds of thousands of users of witch-popular blogging platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, which at the moment boasts 8.5 million photographs hashtagged “#witch.”

More:

As an aesthetic, as a spiritual practice, and as a communal ideology, contemporary millennial “witch culture” defines itself as the cosmic counterbalance to Trumpian evangelicalism. It’s at once progressive and transgressive, using the language of the chaotic, the spiritually dangerous, and (at times) the diabolical to chip at the edifices of what it sees as a white, patriarchal Christianity that has become a de facto state religion.

Get this:

While New Age practitioners of the 1960s onward often characterized their practice as unfailingly benign—the karmic “Rule of Three,” which predicted that any negative energy sent into the universe would reverberate threefold on a practitioner, was ubiquitous in neo-pagan circles—contemporary witch feminism rebrands occult darkness as a legitimate, even necessary response to a structural oppression. In one Brooklyn zine, author and non-binary witch Dakota Bracciale—co-owner of Catland Books, the occult store behind the Kavanaugh hexing—celebrates the potential of traditional “dark magic” and outright devil-worship as a levying force for social justice.

“There have been too many self-elected spokespersons for all of witchcraft,” Bracciale writes, “seeking to pander to the masses and desperately conform to larger mainstream religious tenets in order to curry legitimacy. Witchcraft has largely, if not exclusively, been a tool of resilience and resistance to oppressive power structures, not a plaything for bored, affluent fools. So if one must ride into battle under the banner of the Devil himself to do so then I say so be it. The reality is that you can be a witch and worship the devil and have sex with demons and cavort through the night stealing children and burning churches. One should really have goals.” As with the denizens of The Satanic Temple, Bracciale uses the imagery of Satanism as a direct attack on what he perceives as Christian hegemony. So too Jex Blackmore, a self-proclaimed Satanic feminist (and former national spokesperson for the Satanic Temple) who appeared in the Hail Satan? documentary performing a Satanic ritual involving half-naked worshippers and pigs’ heads on spikes, announcing: “We are going to disrupt, distort, destroy. . . .We are going to storm press conferences, kidnap an executive, release snakes in the governor’s mansion, execute the president.”

You have to read the whole thing.  This is deeply informed religion journalism, not sensationalism. It’s true that the topic itself is sensational, but after spending a while talking to Tara about this story, and her experiences as a journalist and an observer of that world, I’m convinced that this is a serious phenomenon that deserves attention. If you don’t believe me, read the piece, and see how she traces its influence through popular culture. Tara has a book coming out next year about religion in a “godless” world. Check out her website here.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking since our conversation about this piece, and since reading it earlier today: we should take this as seriously as its practitioners do. 

Under liberalism, many of us have a habit of ironically distancing ourselves from taking religion — mainstream religion, or outsider religion — seriously. For example, we think of religious rites as an expression of how the practitioner feelsabout this or that. Secular unbelievers, obviously, don’t think that there is anythingreal happening with satanic rites, spell-casting, and suchlike. It is nothing more than a form of theater. They also regard Christian rituals in the same way.

If materialism is an accurate and complete account of reality, then they’re right: it’s nothing more than emotive pageantry. Still, if that’s all it is, then we should at least take seriously the fact that there are people who wish to express in ritual a desire to “disrupt, distort [and] destroy.” In writing about the believers within these circles, Tara told me that it’s not a joke or a game to them; they really do believe that what they’re doing has an effect, just as much as a Christian faith healer or exorcist does.

Holden Matthews, the young white man charged with burning down three black churches this year in south Louisiana, was reportedly deeply involved with the black metal scene, a genre of rock that celebrates satanic themes, sometimes attracts white supremacists, and whose followers have been linked to church burnings elsewhere. Maybe there’s nothing to it but expressive pageantry, but then again, Mohammed Atta and his crew hijacked airliners and flew them into buildings for religious and political reasons. My point is simply that religion is not always something nice and respectable and life-affirming. All religion might be false, but most of us would rather live next door to Ned Flanders than Holden Matthews.

But what if materialism’s account of reality is untrue? What if there really is something actual going on with religion? That is, what if people who perform religious rites — Catholics, Taoists, witches, everyone — are not simply expressing how they feel, but truly making contact with the numinous, and engaging its power?

I believe that’s what’s happening in most religious rites. Do I believe that all people who participate in them are actually contacting the god or gods they claim to be contacting? No, of course not. I am an Orthodox Christian, not a pantheist. I believe in the cosmos as described in the Bible. I believe in the Holy Trinity, in saints and angels — and I believe that the devil exists, and so do demons. I’ve seen enough with my own eyes, and heard enough testimony from those with more direct experience of malevolent spirits, to be completely assured that this world exists.

Within the Christian world, you can find a lot of diversity of opinion about the spiritual world and its mysteries. Some strict Christians would say that anyone who doesn’t pray explicitly to Jesus Christ is therefore a servant of the Evil One. Others have more complex views. It’s the same in other religions, of course. I don’t want to go into how to parse these things out. That’s an interesting topic, but beside the point I want to make here.

Which is this: what Burton writes about is not something to laugh about — though the way woke capitalism is exploiting the search for divinity via occultism is pretty eye-rolling –n is it something to affirm in that broad-minded, nitwit way in which we cheerfully Celebrate Diversity.™ The Religious Left is not merely about Unitarian Universalists and Social Justice Catholics. It includes an increasing number of people who actually hate Christianity, and wish to harm it. And, as Burton wittily observes, almost three decades after the TV evangelist made his controversial observation, Pat Robertson’s fundraising fever dream has come true.

What do we do with that?

What do you do with that if you are a materialist?

What do you do with it if you’re a liberal Christian, Jew, or Muslim? Does your shared political commitment mean you overlook the occultism? Or what?

What if you’re a conservative Abrahamic theist? How do you respond?

What if you’re someone from an established non-Abrahamic tradition? Is there a line to be drawn between, say, Hinduism and Buddhism on one side, and satanism on the other?

Can a clear and meaningful line be drawn between worshipers in various occult traditions. Wiccans, for example, are not satanists — but would Wiccans reject holding rituals with satanists, or teaming with them for political action? If so, on what grounds? I’m genuinely asking.

The one response that I reject flatly as nonsense is to laugh it off as theater. For one thing, it’s disrespectful to those who take it seriously, just as disrespectful as it would be to dismiss someone who worships in synagogue or masjid or church as nothing more than an actor or a member of the audience. Laughing the mysteries of religion off as theater is what we say when we can’t figure out what to think, and we just want to dismiss the numinous. But the numinous keeps showing up. Read this 2014 essay by Rice University religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal, who talks about how we have a foolish habit of dismissing anything that contradicts the materialist framework out of hand.

Ask yourself, if only as a thought experiment: if the people in Tara Isabella Burton’s report are in touch with actual dark spiritual forces, and trying to invoke or otherwise activate them to affect people and events in the material world, what does that mean? Can your settled pieties, secular and otherwise, afford to take them seriously? is what I’m asking.

Let’s have an interesting, respectful conversation about this, shall we? If you just want to rant, don’t bother, because I’m not going to approve it. Also, let me point out that my own views are not the same views as Tara Isabella Burton. Her piece is reported neutrally, as a work of religion journalism; you should read it before commenting. 

UPDATE: Gang, be serious in your comments.

Book Review: 'The Right Side of History' by Ben Shapiro

Extending Judeo-Christian values and the Greek gift of reason

By John R. Coyne Jr.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/20/book-review-the-right-side-of-history-by-ben-shapi/

March 20, 2019

“This book is about two mysteries,” writes Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of the Daily Wire. “The first mystery: Why are things so good? The second mystery: Why are we blowing it?”

All available data prove that we are living in the most open and prosperous nation the world has known. This is still the nation in which all citizens of every race and religion from anywhere in the world can rise just as high and far as their talents and abilities will carry them. We are, Mr. Shapiro believes, the end product of more than 3,000 years of the efforts of people who accepted Judeo-Christian values and the Greek gift of reason, the combination of which led naturally to the concept of democracy.

Mr. Shapiro gives us a necessarily selective but solid overview of those centuries, touching on the theories, thoughts, philosophers, movements and religions that shaped our world and culminated in our nation, until very recently routinely referred to by political men and women as “the hope and envy of the world.” But perhaps not so much just now.

As Mr. Shapiro points out, and as our politics reflect on a daily basis, with media large and small providing an increasingly ubiquitous megaphone, “We are so angry at each other right now. That anger is palpable. Where did it come from?”

Mr. Shapiro, who has experienced first-hand the real and vicious mindlessness of that anger by mobs of protesters on campuses like Berkeley where he’s invited to speak — he’s reportedly the country’s most requested campus speaker — believe it’s the result of “the destruction of a common vision. We used to believe in the Founding vision. We used to see each other as brothers and sisters, not ‘the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent’ or ‘the privileged vs. the victims.”

“We weren’t enemies. We were a community, forged in fire and tethered together by a set of values stretching back to the Garden of Eden — a community of individuals working to understand the values of each other as images of God, a community of individuals who believed in our own capacity to change ourselves and the world around us.”

Without question, there has been a fracturing, with a new politics of identity and entitlement being pushed and encouraged by an unusually hostile media and by cynical and opportunistic politicians with no scruples chasing votes.

In this strongly written survey of Western thought and cogent statement of democratic principle, Mr. Shapiro provides an analysis of our current crisis, its causes and potential cures, advocating a return to the basic values upon which our civilization was built.

“It took Western civilization three thousand years to get here — we can lose it all in one generation unless we begin shoring up our foundation,” he writes.

How do we do that? In his case, he writes, he and his wife began by teaching their two children the values passed down to them by their own parents and through generations of parents before them.

“We will do our best to teach them what made our civilization great — and what makes our civilization great still. It is our job to reconnect with both the word of God and with the philosophy of reason and individual liberty — two words that are, after all, inextricably intertwined.”

To underscore the importance of educating our children, he quotes Ronald Reagan: “‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.’”

Mr. Shapiro concludes with a reflection on the larger meaning of the parent/child relationship and a strong note of hope: “I think that the history of Western civilization shows that our parents live on in us when we learn the lesson they teach us, when we recognize their wisdom even as we develop our own, we become a link in the chain of history. Our parents never die so long as we keep the flame of their ideals alive, and pass that flame along to our children.”

• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).

Proposed Voting Changes Are About Power, Not Principles

By Victor Davis Hanson
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/27/proposed-voting-changes-are-about-power-not-principles/
March 27, 2019

Progressive candidates and new Democratic representatives have offered lots of radical new proposals lately about voting and voters. They include scrapping the 215-year-old Electoral College. Progressives also talk of extending the vote to 16- or 17-year-olds and ex-felons. They wish to further relax requirements for voter identification, same-day registration and voting, and undocumented immigrants voting in local elections.

The 2016 victory of Donald Trump shocked the Left. It was entirely unexpected, given that experts had all but assured a Hillary Clinton landslide. Worse still for those on the Left, Trump, like George W. Bush in 2000 and three earlier winning presidential candidates, lost the popular vote.

From 2017 on, Trump has sought systematically to dismantle the progressive agenda that had been established by his predecessor, Barack Obama—often in controversial and unapologetic style.

The furor over the 2016 Clinton loss and the new Trump agenda, the fear that Trump could be re-elected and anger about the Electoral College have mobilized progressives to demand changes to the hallowed traditions of electing presidents.

The Electoral College was designed in part to ensure that candidates at least visited the small and often rural states of America. The generation of the Founding Fathers did not want elections to rest solely with larger urban populations. The Electoral College balances out the popular vote.

The founders were also terrified of radical democracies of the past, especially their frenzied tendencies to adopt mob-like tactics.

In response, the Electoral College was designed to discourage crowded fields of all sorts of fringe presidential candidates in which the eventual winner might win only a small plurality of the popular vote.

Voting requirements have also reflected disdain for radical democracy. Lawmakers have argued that young adults who are at least 18 years old have more experience, are more independent and take on more responsibilities than do younger teenagers living at home. Therefore, they are likely to make more reasoned decisions. Some progressives want to lower the voting age.

Similarly, most states consider the judgment of felons who have committed serious crimes suspect compared with those who have followed the laws. These states have prohibited felons from voting by first requiring completion of their sentences or parole or probation, depending on the nature of their crimes. Many on the Left support measures that would ease voting restrictions on ex-felons.

Progressives deliberately have confused residency with citizenship, as if a person living in America, paying some sales or income taxes, should have the same voting rights as those who are legal citizens.

All these proposed modifications are aimed at changing the nature of the electorate and the method of voting in order to change results. In reductionist terms, new rules and new voters reduce the relative voting clout of law-abiding adult citizens.

Leftists assume that Americans are not sympathetic to their new advocacies. In other words, the current 2019 potpourri of progressive issues might not warrant 51 percent support among the existing voting public in the next election.

Most Americans are skeptical of reparations. They do not favor legalizing infanticide. They do not want open borders, sanctuary cities, or blanket amnesties. They are troubled by the idea of wealth taxes and top marginal tax rates of 70 percent or higher.

Many Americans certainly fear the Green New Deal. Many do not favor abolishing all student debt, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Electoral College. Nor do many Americans believe in costly ideas such as Medicare for All and free college tuition. The masses do not unanimously want to stop pipeline construction or scale back America’s booming natural gas and oil production.

A cynic might suggest that had Hillary Clinton actually won the 2016 Electoral College vote but lost the popular vote to Trump, progressives would now be praising our long-established system of voting.

Had current undocumented immigrants proved as conservative as past waves of legal immigrants from Hungary and Cuba, progressives would now likely wish to close the southern border and perhaps even build a wall.

If same-day registration and voting meant that millions of new conservatives without voter IDs were suddenly showing their Trump support at the polls, progressives would insist on bringing back old laws that required voters to have previously registered and to show valid identification at voting precincts.

If felons or 16-year-old kids polled conservative, then certainly there would be no progressive push to let members of these groups vote.

Expanding and changing the present voter base and altering how we vote is mostly about power, not principles. Without these radical changes, a majority of American voters, in traditional and time-honored elections, will likely not vote for the unpopular progressive agenda.

The Electoral College Still Makes Sense Because We’re Not A Democracy

By Donna Carol Voss

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/16/the-electoral-college-still-makes-sense-because-were-not-a-democracy/

September 16, 2016

The Electoral College has been on life support since a chad—specifically a “hanging” chad—tipped the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. The painful reality of how our Constitution works was never more apparent. The Gore/Lieberman ticket won the popular vote 50,994,086 to 50,461,092 but lost the electoral vote 266 to 271.

There was a lot more to it, but the punchline is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush the winner because he won the electoral vote. It’s a tribute to the American national character that we weathered that cataclysm without civil war, but it left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouth.

During the 2016 Republican primary, when it looked as if Donald Trump would win the popular vote but still not reach the delegate threshold for nomination, that bad taste turned sour. Riding high on populism and “throw the bums out,” Trump complained that the election was rigged because the people wanted him, and whomever the people wanted, they should get. Fortunately for the country, Trump reached the delegate threshold, and we were spared a debacle that would have made 2000’s cataclysm look like a lemonade stand.

Cue the national election. No controversy, scandal, “info dump,” lie, corruption, defection, or dirty trick has been left unturned. Why would election night go smoothly? Frankly, the plane is going down no matter who wins; it’s only a question of water or land and how many survivors there will be. Chances aren’t looking good for the Electoral College.

“This is a democracy,” the people cry. “It should be one person-one vote, and that stupid Electoral College needs to go!” Poor Electoral College. So misunderstood. If the Electoral College has to go, it has to go, but we should at least buy it dinner first. While we’re at it, we might as well get to know it better.

Trust History: You Don’t Want Mob Rule

The sad lot of the Electoral College is that what you see isn’t what you get. Like the counter-intuitive fact that a tire blowout on the right requires a steering wheel correction to the left, the EC works backwards. What appears to deprive the populace of its power to decide a president is the very mechanism that preserves its power. It works that way because this isn’t a democracy; not a pure one.

“Pure democracy” is just another phrase for “mob rule.” Dictatorship of the majority means 51 percent of the citizenry rule the other 49 percent. That minority has no rights except those the condescending majority grants. It works well for those in the 51 percent, not so much for those in the 49. Plato knew it, and James Madison, who knew his Plato, did too. Plato and Madison both recognized that justice and liberty for the minority is possible only when power is shared between groups in society.

Plato’s “Republic” heavily influenced Madison and the other framers to devise a Constitution that protected the minority. Plato held that the ideal, i.e., just, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between workers, warriors, and rulers. Madison held that the ideal, i.e., American, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between judges, lawmakers, and rulers.

Inspired as it is, our Constitution protects the minority while preserving the best of democracy: we the people elect representatives to run the government (republic) and we do so by majority vote (democracy). Ergo, this is a democratic republic. Ergo, an Electoral College.

The Electoral College Balances Voting Power

The purpose of the Electoral College is to balance voting power across states so no one region of the country can gain too much control. If a president is elected by a simple majority of votes, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region (e.g., Ted Cruz in Texas, Mitt Romney in Utah) can ignore smaller regions and campaign only where large majorities are possible. Or a candidate who kills in California and New York can write off “flyover country” completely.

If, however, the Electoral College elects a president, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region must also prevail in a number of sub-elections to win. The Electoral College ensures a better result for the country as a whole than the democratic power play wherein 51 percent of us matter and 49 percent of us don’t.

Think of the Electoral College like the World Series. One person-one vote equates to the World Series Champions being determined by total number of runs scored. If the Dodgers win the first game 10-0, and the Yankees win the next four games 1-0, the Dodgers win the series. Even though the Yankees bested the Dodgers in four games, it doesn’t matter because the Dodgers scored 10 runs to their 4. One anomalous game decides the whole series. Without the Electoral College, a few heavily populated states decide the whole election.

So, the poor Electoral College sits condemned before its last meal because its power is misunderstood. How ironic—and tragic if no stay-of-execution arrives—that those who clamor for “one person-one vote” are seeking more power at the expense of power they already have.

Donna Carol Voss is a political commentator and the author of four books, including the recently released "Nothing to Apologize For: The Truth About Western Civilization." Follow heron Twitter.

How Do You Solve a Problem like AOC?

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/20/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-aoc/

March 20, 2019

I first noticed something was up in the New York City backwater called the 14th Congressional District when a friend across the aisle, a well-respected political columnist, tweeted out the news of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “upset” victory against the incumbent Democrat, Joe Crowley, just minutes after it happened.

Who cares? thought I.

Crowley, one of the last of the Irish machine politicians, had safely sailed to reelection to the House for a decade, often without even a primary challenger. But the 29-year-old AOC, as she is colloquially known, beat him in the primary with 57 percent of the vote—a number that sounds impressive until you realize that it was a mere 15,897 votes to Crowley’s 11,761, a difference of 4,136 votes. In the foregone-conclusion general election, she beat the Republican tomato can, Anthony Pappas, 110,000 to 18,000. Pappas was so indifferent to the outcome that he brushed aside offers to help and did not actively campaign.

Naturally, the media went wild immediately. Literally overnight, this former intern for Ted Kennedy, an ethnic Puerto Rican, became a national celebrity; you can tell the stories were prepped and in the can once her victory was assured.

Crowley’s name stayed on the fall ballot, under the rubric of the Working Families Party, but like the GOP candidate, he did not campaign. His reward was to land a choice spot last month as a lobbyist with the law firm of Squire Patton Boggs, whose bipartisan ranks of swamp-dwelling trough snouts include former Speaker of the House John Boehner, former Senator Trent Lott, and other Washington hacks. With his future assured, and his services to the latter-day equivalent of Tammany Hall rewarded, he finally got around to giving up his government parking pass just this week.

In other words, the fix was in. Clearly, somebody was behind the rise of Ocasio-Cortez and that somebody didn’t care much about the niceties of getting her elected—including elements of her “girl-from-the-Bronx” biography, her actual residence, and her campaign finances. Tant pis!

Democratic firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rode into office railing against the influence of big money and hidden donors in U.S. elections. Yet the political operation that helped elect her to Congress was itself less than transparent—exposing her to attacks from conservative foes.

The New York congresswoman raised a hefty $2 million for her 2018 election while refusing to take money from business-related political action committees. Of that, 61 percent came from individuals giving less than $200—the highest rate of small-dollar funding among current U.S. House members.

At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a consulting company for campaign services, providing few details on what the money was for or who ultimately received it.

That’s the question, isn’t it? Two million dollars for 15,000 votes and a shoo-in general election? Her mission accomplished—the first term is the hardest election to win—she’s been “quietly removed” from the board of the Justice Democrats PAC, according to the Daily Caller:

Democratic Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and her top aide are no longer board members of the outside PAC credited with orchestrating her political rise, according to a corporate document filed Friday to a Washington, D.C., agency.

The New York Democrat and her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who served as her campaign chair, joined the board of Justice Democrats in December 2017, according to the political action committee’s website. It also said the two held “legal control over the entity” at the same time it was playing a key role in supporting Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign prior to her shock victory over incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in June 2018.”

“Orchestrating her political rise.” You have to admit the timing was impeccable. The three freshwomyn—AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib need only a fourth to bring on the apocalypse, having quickly established themselves as the new triumvirate of the Democrat Party. The girl named for a city in Egypt, has openly sassed Maerose Prizzi, the speaker of the House, who, when it came time to offer even the most oblique censure of Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, wound up deploring all “bigotry” instead, including “Islamophobia.”

Ocasio-Cortez is, as Obama was when the media invented him, too young to run for president for this cycle, but she can squeak in just under the wire in 2024 if her handlers deem that her time has come. Even then, if the example of Obama is any guide, that might be too soon: imagine if Hillary had been the nominee in 2008 and then a more mature and even more radical Obama had come along in 2016, on the tails of her two “moderate” terms; as it was, he was too inexperienced and frankly, too lazy, fully to implement the plan his backers had in mind for him.

And so, as the Democrats bum-rush to the 2020 starting gates, the two cheeks of their party have swung into view. Yes, they have become the party of peons and plutocrats, but for our purposes—and for AOC’s—they will soon be the party of geriatrics and the turkettes, who loathe their masculine forbears with true “feminist” ignorance and impatience. They know this is the last roundup for superannuated pols like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and even the former Nancy d’Alesandro, the pride of Ballamer, and that the future—one version of it, anyway, belongs to them:

For make no mistake: these neo-Socialists—whether they call themselves national or international and whether white, brown, or black—are all fascist brothers and sisters under the skin, bent on both submission and punishment. Behold how far and how fast even the “moderate” Democrats have adopted such things as reparations, the elimination of ICE, the abolition of the Electoral College, overt infanticide and other extremist positions—if that’s the platform they hope to run on next year, then they have well and truly earned their sobriquet, the Evil Party.

There are some signs that such extremism is turning off voters; despite the media’s cheerleading, AOC has seen her popularity polls crater; it seems that the more sensible Americans see and hear of her, the less they like her. Which means there’s hope for the Republic yet—but this is no time to get complacent.

Every socialist demagogue of the 20th century started life as an underestimated figure: Mussolini was expelled from the Italian Socialists as too radical; Hitler was a comic-opera figure who wound up in Landsberg prison; Lenin was exiled twice; Stalin was a seminarian who had lost his Orthodox faith and found a substitute in the writing of Karl Marx. Ilhan Omar may not be the brightest bulb in Minnesota, much less in Congress; Rashida Tlaib’s naked hatred for the West may be jarring; and AOC’s vapid, goofy “Green New Deal” narcissism will strike mature adults as risible and clownish, not to mention ruinous.

Just remember this: they mean it. As Rosemary says in “Rosemary’s Baby”:

Wake up, America. For, as scary as this may sound, after Joe and Bernie and Nancy comes le deluge.

How do you solve a problem like Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez? By making sure their first terms in Congress are also their last.

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and foreign correspondent for Time Magazine, for which he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints (winner, 2004 American Book Award for fiction), and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the recent nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. A sequel, The Fiery Angel, was published by Encounter in May 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @dkahanerules

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Rashida?

By Michael Walsh
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-rashida/
March 13, 2019


Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar

Upon her accession to the U.S. House of Representatives last fall, practically the first words out of Rashida Tlaib’s mouth were: “We’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” The object of the freshman Michigan Democrat’s derision was, of course, President Trump. This sentiment naturally got whoops and cheers from the guests at a MoveOn.org reception, who were there to celebrate the election of the Muslima from Dearbornistan, one of two female followers of Mohammed—the other is Ilhan Omar—now occupying chairs in the Capitol.

The triumphalism was multi-layered: not only had the Democrats—thanks, Paul Ryan!—retaken the House by both hook (free stuff for everybody except old toxic-male white guys, served up piping hot by the media) and crook (ballot harvesting in California that delivered once solidly Republican Orange County over to the Democrats) but, in the guise of “diversity,” they had also put two more co-religionists of the 9/11 hijackers into the Congress. Tlaib and Omar have wasted no time in getting to work against American norms and the republic itself.

Omar, born in Mogadishu, has been getting most of the attention lately; her unfiltered mouth can’t help but spout anti-Semitic drivel, and a recent attempt by a flailing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to rein her via a resolution against Jew hatred wound up as a boilerplate denunciation of “bigotry”—thus handing Omar a propaganda victory. As Britain’s hard-left Guardian put it in a headline: “Everyone’s against bigotry, right? Not 23 House Republicans, apparently.” Well played.

But Tlaib may be the more dangerous of the pair, cannily redoubling efforts to blame some (Jewish) Democrats’ antipathy to Omar’s casual slurs on . . . you guessed it: “I think Islamophobia is very much among the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. And I know that’s hard for people to hear, but there’s only been four members of Congress that are of Muslim faith. Three of them currently serve in this institution. More of us need to get elected, but more of us need to understand as we come into this institution that I have a lot of work to do with my colleagues.”

This is typical Muslim thinking, to always be the aggressor and yet simultaneously the victim as well. Tlaib comes by it naturally. Born in Detroit to Palestinian parents—her father is from Arab East Jerusalem, and apparently spent some time in Nicaragua before winding up in Michigan—Tlaib has been hailed by the Left as “the way forward,” as in this laudatory article in Politico from last summer:

The left—particularly the new-school, say-it-loud-and-say-it-proud democratic socialist left inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary run—has a tendency toward maximalism. And it’s only natural: The progressive project, as both its subscribers and Fox News scaremongers alike would tell you, is revolutionary, seeking to fundamentally remake the relationship Americans have with their government and that the government has with the economy.

In Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, where the former Rep. John Conyers Jr. resigned the seat he’d held for more than a half-century after facing allegations of sexual misconduct, another Sanders-backed candidate scored a primary victory that might prove more ultimately instructive: Rashida Tlaib, a former state legislator who ran on a platform of “Medicare for All,” a $15 minimum wage and tuition-free college.

For years, Democrats have struggled with a top-down, executive-focused approach to electoral politics that has left them with their smallest representation in Congress since the Truman administration—and now, thanks to Donald Trump, no White House to protect them . . . . Tlaib, on the other hand, represents the most logical path for the left to claim its seat at the table, both within the Democratic Party and in national politics: a candidate unabashed in her progressivism, politically skilled enough to implement it, and, most importantly, savvy enough to identify a constituency ready for her brand of unapologetic socialist politics.

Aye, there’s the rub—or rather the nub. With an own-goal assist from the Bush Administration (“Islam means peace”), the Left quickly forged an alliance of convenience with the more respectable elements of Islamic activists in the West, in order to attack their common enemy, Western civilization. Tlaib is unabashed in her defense of “progressive” socialism while at the same time wearing her faith loudly and with a chip on her shoulder.

“We always said the Muslims are coming,” she told an audience from the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago. “We’re not only everywhere in all kinds of different governments but, mashallah, we’re in the United States Congress. And it was after this president, not once, twice but three times issued a Muslim ban against our community."

So it wasn’t surprising that Tlaib immediately led the calls for the president’s impeachment and has continued her agitation. Last week, she warned she and others are preparing an impeachment resolution in the House. For what, you ask? “We cannot allow the pay-to-play to continue. We cannot allow the direct violation of the Emoluments Clause. Anybody else would already be in impeachment proceedings.”

Might as well throw in the Logan Act, spitting on the sidewalk, and picking your feet in Poughkeepsie while we’re at it. It doesn’t matter. For Tlaib as a radical, Trump is an affront to every discredited idea she holds; for her as a Muslim, it’s personal.

Although the old-folks’ home known as the Democratic “leadership” has sought to downplay the likelihood of impeachment, it’s more likely that Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are simply playing good cop to the Omar-Tlaib axis of bad cop. Pelosi has to walk a tightrope between hanging on to her own power and accommodating the infantile demands of her instantly restive kiddie corps of radicals without losing the 2020 election in a landslide of revulsion.

Count on a sympathetic media to cover for the young turkettes:

Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota were hailed as symbols of diversity when they were sworn in last month as the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, Ms. Tlaib in her mother’s hand-embroidered Palestinian thobe, Ms. Omar in a tradition-shattering hijab.

Four weeks later, their uncompromising views on Israel have made them perhaps the most embattled new members of the Democratic House majority. Almost daily, Republicans brashly accuse Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Omar of anti-Semitism and bigotry, hoping to make them the Democrats’ version of Representative Steve King as they try to tar the entire Democratic Party with their criticism of the Jewish state.

The tussle over Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Omar has exposed a growing generational divide within the Democratic Party, pitting an old guard of stalwart supporters of Israel against an ascendant wing of young liberals—including many young Jews—willing to accuse the Israeli government of human rights abuses and demanding movement toward a Palestinian state.

For the Democratic Party, where most Jews have long made their political home, the risks are clear . . .

That was written a month and a half ago. Today, it’s abundantly clear where Tlaib’s sympathies lie, and they’re not with the Jews. Nor are they with traditional American values, although in the Muslim tradition of taqiyya they’re cloaked in benign appeals to the usual suspects: diversity, tolerance, religious freedom, and fairness.

And then recall that in her first public statement she wants to “impeach the mofo.” That tells you all you need to know about her.

Right now, she’s the Democrats’ problem. As Henry Kissinger famously said about the Iran-Iraq War, “it’s a pity they both can’t lose.” Left unchecked and unopposed, however, soon enough she’ll be our problem. And then where are we?

The Clarity Accompanying the Democrats’ Takeover of Congress

By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/07/the-clarity-accompanying-the-democrat-takeover-of-congress/

March 7, 2019

George Will and William Kristol

Months before the midterm elections last fall, several self-described “conservatives” implored Americans to vote for Democrats. Still stung that Republicans ignored their advice to reject Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and unmoved by Trump’s solid record of conservative accomplishments in office, these embittered outcasts claimed that a legislative branch controlled by Democrats would cauterize Trump’s alleged “authoritarian” tendencies.

The most notable of these windmill tilters, attacking an authoritarian impulse that wasn’t there, was George Will. For decades, Will occupied a vaunted perch in the hierarchy of the conservative commentariat. He also was deemed acceptable by media outlets hostile to the Right including the Washington Post, where he now is a contributor. Disgusted at the Trumpification of the Grand Old Party in 2016, Will officially renounced his party affiliation just weeks before the Republican National Convention.

Two years later, in a disorganized rant, Will instructed voters to oust Republicans from power. “In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream,” Will wrote in June 2018. “A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House.”

Other lesser-known commentators jumped on Will’s “Vote Democrat” bandwagon, including author Tom Nichols, losing presidential candidate Evan McMullin, and Will’s Post colleagues, Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. Former George W. Bush aide Michael Gerson argued that a Democratic House was needed because “American politics is in the midst of an emergency.” National Review’s David French announced right before the 2018 election that he no longer was a Republican and would consider voting for third-party candidates.

It’s unclear whether their collective edict had any bearing on the outcome of the November 2018 election and—given that their audience is now so contracted as to include, primarily, Democrats—it is likely that most of their readers needed little persuading. Nevertheless, they got their wish: Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January.

And what a revealing two months it’s been so far.

Will’s prediction that congressional Democrats would be a basket of left-wing deplorables vastly underestimated the reality. What Will, Nichols and other NeverTrumpers encouraged to be foisted upon our nation is a cabal of cretins devoted to crushing the economic, political, and cultural bones of our body politic in the most ruthless and irreversible way.

And for that alone, perhaps we should thank them. Without the spectacle are now are witnessing, Americans wouldn’t have a realistic grasp on the menace that the modern-day Democratic Party poses to our country. Further, those tempted to imagine that a Democrat in the Oval Office in 2021 might be a much-needed respite from the topsy-turvy news cycle accompanying Trump have been treated to an eye-opener over the past 60 days.

The incivility, immorality, and bullying tactics that NeverTrumpers insist are the reasons why they reject Donald Trump have escalated to a level unseen in American political history. The Democrats are unleashing a Scorched Earth approach that is intentionally raw and shows no attempt to camouflage their destructive pursuits. Fear and intimidation have replaced persuasion and dialogue.

Their compatriots in the media have been similarly emboldened. They don’t care who they hurt, even if it means teenage boys or newborn babies will suffer in the process. Imaginary crimes are adjudicated, imaginary victims are consoled, and imaginary perpetrators are convicted.

It’s anti-American at its unmerciful, tyrannical core. The radicals in control of Congress see this as their moment—folks like George Will helped to see it bequeathed to them.

The insanity isn’t limited to the freshman class of the 116th Congress. Democratic elders and presidential candidates en masse have embraced the dangerous far-left orthodoxy now mainstreamed by telegenic newcomers such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

And it’s not just the typical progressive promises about 70 percent income tax rates or free college tuition that sets this particular Democratic caucus apart from its predecessors. It’s not just their economic ignorance or their unjustified arrogance that makes their unhinged behavior so alarming. It’s how they arethreatening and harassing their way into power. Anyone who dares to challenge their authority is smeared and berated; even a Republican colleague who barely survived an assassination attempt isn’t spared their vile accusations. Shortly after being sworn-in, one new lawmaker referred to the president as a “mother f***er.”

In a moment of candor, Ocasio-Cortez lashed out at critics of her Green New Deal. “I don’t care anymore because I’m at least trying and they’re not,” she complained last month. “The power is in the person who’s trying regardless of the success.” Then she went off the rails. “I’m like, you try! You do it! ‘Cause you’re not! So, until you do it, I’m the boss! Until then, we’re in charge.”

The anti-Semitism that many NeverTrumpers bizarrely tried to pin on President Trump has not just been excused when exhibited by members of the Democratic Party, it now has been normalized. Omar’s repeated and hateful comments at Jewish-Americans remain unpunished as the House on Thursday passed a toothless resolution filled with general commendations about anti-Semitism without mentioning Omar by name.

Many of her colleagues and several Democratic presidential candidates rose to her defense. Sen. Bernie Sanders, himself Jewish, suggested Omar was being “targeted” by Congress and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) warned that any congressional condemnation of the Muslim lawmaker would put her at risk.

Meanwhile, as the Democratic Party devolves into madness, legitimate threats to the country are being ignored. Despite protestations that no illegal immigration crisis exists, news reports and testimony by Trump officials this week told a different tale about the disaster at our southern border.

One million illegals, nearly all from Central America, are expected to arrive at our doorstep this year, bringing drugs, disease, and despair. Public and charitable resources are overwhelmed. Children are exploited and women are terrorized while lethal drugs are smuggled in. “Make no mistake, this chain of human misery is getting worse,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a House committee on Wednesday.

But the real danger, according to most House Democrats, is not criminals seeking refuge in our neighborhoods but law enforcement officials who risk their lives to protect our border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been subjected to allegations of abuse, rape, and even torture while some powerful Democrats want the agency defunded and abolished.

And as Democrats worry about the safety of Honduran children, American infants are of no concern. Forty-four Democratic senators, including six presidential candidates, voted last month against the Born Alive Act which would have required medical professionals to treat babies who survived an abortion attempt. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, who was endorsed by Bill Kristol and his wife, calmly explained how an infant post-delivery would be left to die if the mother so desired.

The criminal prosecution of political opponents, which began under the Obama administration three years ago and was justified by many in the NeverTrump crowd, will continue at great expense to taxpayers while breaching the constitutional protections of innocent Americans whose only offense was supporting a candidate and a president that the ruling class deemed unfit. House leaders are setting the stage for impeachment against the will of the American people, and want to take down the president’s family with him.

So, in a little over 60 days, the Democratic Party has revealed how truly dangerous it is and how much hostility it holds for almost all Americans. Their deep contempt for our traditions, our laws, and our beliefs has little or nothing to do with Donald Trump; it has been festering for decades, gaining traction in boardrooms and newsrooms and lecture halls while many of the NeverTrumpers, like Will, were insouciant.

Now we know, and all Americans finally see, what we are up against in 2020. To that extent, we owe George Will and his outliers a debt of gratitude. Their bitterness might have hastened a reckoning with the Left that only a Trumpified Republican Party is equipped to confront. Will and his fellow outcasts still are invited to continue cohabitating with the Left—we certainly don’t want them back.

But in a twisted way, we should be grateful for their betrayal to their party and really, to the country. Now we have a full picture of the enemy—and they are included among them.