Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime

Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272892/jussie-smolletts-hate-crime-mark-tapson

February 18, 2019

On October 25, 1994, a frantic young South Carolina mother named Susan Smith told police that her car had been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her two boys, aged three years old and 14 months. For nine days, with a nationwide search underway, she made tearful pleas on television for their safe return. “I wanna say to my babies,” she sobbed with her distraught husband by her side, “your mama loves you so much.” Finally her story unraveled and she confessed to intentionally sending her Mazda into a nearby lake with her two young sons strapped inside.

Apart from the unconscionable drowning of her own helpless children, Susan Smith’s story contained a racial dimension that tore at the nation’s social fabric: her false accusation that a black man had victimized a young white mother and murdered her innocent babies. It was an ugly but shrewd lie that exploited bigotry for sympathy in order to conceal her own evil.

On January 29, 2019, Jussie Smollett, a 36-year-old, gay black actor on the Fox drama series Empire, told police he had been assaulted outside his apartment building at 2 a.m. on a snowy Chicago night by two men in ski masks who identified him as the Empire actor, hurled racial and anti-gay slurs at him, draped a makeshift noose around his neck, and tossed some bleach on him before disappearing. TMZ reported that sources claimed the attackers had boasted to Smollett, “This is MAGA country”; he confirmed this in a follow-up interview with the police.

The story instantly made big news, but anyone not consumed by hatred for President Trump and his supporters immediately suspected a hoax because Smollett’s narrative lacked any credibility whatsoever. A pair of Trump supporters were walking the icy streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. with a noose and bleach (which inexplicably did not freeze in the literally sub-zero weather) when they recognized a little-known (to anyone but Empire fans) actor from a TV show no white supremacist would watch, assaulted him without causing any more physical damage than a scratch on his cheek but managed to get a noose around his neck, and then made sure to announce that “This is MAGA country”? Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago is “Make America Great Again” country? Who knew?

But Democrat politicians and celebrities predictably leapt to Smollett’s defense and denounced the Trump-inspired white supremacism that clearly was the culprit. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, both 2020 presidential hopefuls who have taken the art of grandstanding to a stratospheric level, described the attack as a modern-day lynching. Booker wasted no time pushing Congress to pass the federal Anti-Lynching Bill he and Harris co-sponsored (because apparently our porous border isn’t a national emergency, but lynching is). Rep. Maxine Waters took a quick break from chanting “Impeach Trump!” to blame him for “emboldening” racists. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the incident undeniably a racist, homophobic attack that reflected “what is happening to our country.” Her Congressional colleague Rashida Tlaib tweeted hyperbolically that “the lies of the right wing is [sic] killing and hurting our people.” Yet another 2020 Democrat hopeful, Joe Biden, pontificated that “racism and homophobia have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another noted pontificator, called the attack an “affront to our humanity.”*

The Progressive media, also predictably, rushed to judgment as well because that’s what they do when they see an opportunity to demonize Trump and/or his supporters (recall the hysterics over the Covington Catholic high school students?). ABC’s Good Morning America granted Smollett the kind of lengthy sit-down interview usually reserved for presidents (more on that below). Joshua Rivera at GQ, ostensibly a men’s style magazine but actually a leftist propaganda rag, race-baited that “Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame,” and that Smollett’s attack proved “racist homophobes [are] stalking the streets of your city, who want you to know that they could lynch you if they really wanted to, and maybe get away with it too.” Kevin Fallon, a senior entertainment reporter for the Daily Beast, tweeted, “People in MAGA hats recognized and then beat and poured bleach on Jussie Smollett, calling him that ‘faggot’ from Empire. Anyone who thinks supporting You Know Who isn’t tantamount to providing artillery for weaponized bigotry needs to take a hard look in the mirror.” In light of new developments, it looks like Fallon is the one who needs to take a hard look in the mirror – but he won’t. Neither will Rivera or ABC or anyone else who wasted no time slamming white conservatives.

Hollywood leftists, of course, had to chime in because they’re all virtue-signaling posturers who live in walled estates and travel with armed bodyguards. Jussie’s co-star Grace Byers wrote that “hatred, inequality, racism and discrimination continue to course through our country's veins.” Actor Nico Tortorella said the “red hat is the white hood. No ifs ands or buts. If you wear it, you attacked Jussie.” Another purported entertainer who is light-years away from being a household name, Billy Eichner, tweeted, “I want Trump and all MAGA lunatics to burn in Hell.” The insufferable, anti-Christian bigot/actress Ellen Page declared tearfully on Stephen Colbert’s late night talk show that Vice President Mike Pence was somehow to blame. And on and on. Too many celebrities-in-their-own-minds to count.

Smollett, who is also a singer, put on a show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles only a few nights after the incident, where he greeted the crowd by saying he felt compelled to perform because he refused to “let the m*th*rf*ck*ers win.” So brave. The crowd roared in support.

He went on to participate in a (seemingly) emotional Good Morning America interview with Robin Roberts, who asked why he thought he was targeted. Smollett replied, “I come really, really hard against 45 [President Trump]. I come really, really hard against his administration, and I don’t hold my tongue.” Except when it comes to telling the truth, apparently. He also expressed frustration at not being believed. “It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone black I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot much more,” he told Roberts. “And that says a lot about the place where we are as a country right now.”

Actually, what says a lot about the country right now is that the leftist media uncritically accepts and disseminates reports of hate crimes that time and again prove to be hoaxes perpetrated to stoke racial hatred of white conservatives. When exposed, the hoaxers are rarely taken to task, and the media simply moves on to the next fake incident that supports The Narrative. It says a lot about the country right now that long before the Smollett investigation was complete, and on the basis of a story that had less credibility than what I tell my kids about the tooth fairy, a professed Trump-hater can get an interview on network television, rally the national support of celebrities and power-mad leftist politicos, and become the face of identity politics resistance to “hate.”

No Trump supporters victimized by leftist Antifa thugs – truly victimized, with actual evidence such as video footage captured in broad daylight – have ever secured an interview with Robin Roberts on GMA and been asked why they believe they were targeted. (Yes, Nicholas Sandmann, the teenager at the center of the Covington controversy, was interviewed on Today by Savannah Guthrie, but the interview’s angle was that Sandmann was guilty. “Do you feel from this experience that you owe anybody an apology?” Guthrie prodded. “Do you see your own fault in any way?” This would never be asked of someone from one of the left’s Official Victim Categories.)

Police had initially found a grainy surveillance camera image of two persons of interest but no footage of Smollett being attacked. Neither he nor his manager would allow authorities to examine their phones – potentially a critical source of evidence because the two were reportedly in mid-conversation with each other when the attack occurred. The manager said he actually heard the attack, including the phrase “MAGA country” and a racial slur. Eventually Smollett turned over phone records too heavily redacted to be of any assistance in the investigation.

Then Smollett’s story began to unravel. On February 13, police raided the home of the two persons of interest in the surveillance photo. Turns out they weren’t white Trumpsters who get their kicks from sub-zero lynchings, but Nigerian bodybuilders and brothers who just coincidentally happen to know Smollett. They have even acted as extras on Empire. Police found bleach in the residence and evidence that the rope found around Smollett’s neck was purchased at a nearby hardware store. The two men had left the country for Nigeria the day after the incident and were arrested after arriving on a return flight February 13. Sources say that the two are cooperating fully with police and admitted to being paid $3,500 by Smollett to stage the attack before leaving for Nigeria and promised an additional $500 upon their return. As for Smollett, he has hired a criminal defense attorney team.

The whole story has yet to be pieced together. As of this writing, Smollett has neither confessed nor been found guilty of anything. Indeed, he claimed through an attorneys’ statement that he is “angered” and “devastated” by insinuations that he orchestrated the incident. If further investigation confirms that the actor was indeed assaulted by two white, racist Trump supporters, then I will do what practically no one in the mainstream media or the entertainment industry who accepted his story unquestioningly is doing now: publicly apologize. But at this moment, everything points to Smollett having concocted a hate crime, weaponized it in service to the left’s hateful ideology, and milked it for nationwide sympathy and possibly a career boost (a rumor has circulated that Smollett was about to be written off his show).

How will all those who rushed to condemn white people, Trump supporters, Mike Pence, America in general, etc. respond if and when Jussie Smollett proves to have staged the attack? Good Morning America and the rest of the mainstream media won’t follow up with an apology. Neither will any of the Democrat politicians who exploited it. Neither will any of the holier-than-thou moral paragons in the cesspool of decadence that is Hollywood. They will find a way to spin the narrative. They will claim that being morally right supersedes being factually correct (as if the two are not inextricably linked), and say that Smollett sparked a conversation that we need to have in this country about our corrosive legacy of slavery, about the rising white cisgender supremacism in the country, blah blah blah. They will not take responsibility, much less question their own ideological fundamentalism.

Unlike Susan Smith, Jussie Smollett didn’t commit a monstrous crime. But like Susan Smith’s lie, Jussie Smollett’s ratcheted up racial tensions in America and drove the wedge deeper between the political left and right. In addition to wasting police resources that could have gone toward legitimate criminal investigations in crime-rotten Chicago, Smollett has betrayed the minority communities that he supposedly championed. He has made things more difficult for actual victims of bigotry. And he has fueled the ongoing demonization of white conservatives in America as the fount of all racism, oppression, and hatred. That’s the real hate crime here.

But this isn’t all on Smollett; Hollywood, the news media, and Democrat Party bigwigs were all complicit. They weren’t taken in by him, because to them it was irrelevant whether his claims were true or not. All that mattered, and all that will matter to them henceforth, was to keep on the offensive, to keep up the pressure on evil President Trump and white America.

* Thanks to Quillete editor Andy Ngo for collating these responses and many more from figures who rushed to judgment about the purported assault.

 Tags: hoax, Identity Politics, Media Bias, Race

The Pat Caddell I Knew

Pat Caddell, who died on February 16, was to me one of the nicest—and most interesting—people I have ever met in politics.  

By James P. Pinkerton

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/17/pinkerton-the-pat-caddell-i-knew/

February 17, 2019

The broad outlines of Pat’s life are well known. Born in 1950, he got his start in politics in the mid-60s, as a self-taught pollster forecasting local elections in Jacksonville, Florida.   

After graduating from Harvard, he got his big break as the pollster for George McGovern’s presidential campaign. And while McGovern went down to a landslide defeat in the 1972 general election, the fact that he won the Democratic nomination as an insurgent outsider is still a considerable achievement—and Pat deserves his share of the credit. 

Later in the 1970s, Pat served as pollster and strategist for Jimmy Carter, another long-shot candidate for the White House. In fact, Pat first met Carter when the latter, then the governor of Georgia, was angling to get on the national ticket in ’72.

Four years later, with Pat’s help, Carter not only won the nomination, but also the November election.  Indeed, Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s campaign manager and future White House chief of staff, told The New York Times in June 1976, “You know why Jimmy Carter is going to be president?  Because of Pat Caddell—it’s all because of Pat Caddell.”

After Carter’s victory, Pat was established as a big wheel in Democratic politics, consulting on dozens of races, including the 1984 presidential campaign of Gary Hart and the 1992 presidential campaign of Jerry Brown.    

In addition, he advised on many movies and TV shows, from Air Force One to Bulworth to The West Wing. He also did corporate consulting, including for the 1985 debut of “New Coke”—admittedly, one of the most disastrous debuts in marketing history.  

From there, Pat seemed to drift to the right. In the 1990s, he was openly critical of the Clinton administration, and in the 2000s, he appeared as a regular on Fox News. He was also well known to Breitbart News readers, having written many articles for this site, as well as appearing many times on Breitbart News’ SiriusXM radio shows.  

Yet in his mind, Pat was always the same man. Till the day he died, he revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was well familiar with Ronald Reagan’s quip, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” And while Pat never left the Democratic Party, he had Reagan’s jaundiced eye toward many Democrats; newer kinds of liberals had supplanted their 20th century commitment to fair play and civil rights, favoring instead avant-garde social issues and sinking into swampy corruption. (Of course, Pat didn’t have any higher regard for most Republican pols.)  

All his life, Pat’s big idea was that there was a radical middle, ignored or ill-served by both parties. That is, there were millions alienated voters, neither truly liberal, nor truly conservative, mistrusting both parties, waiting to be tapped. And if a politician could reach them, there would be a new burst of positive and constructive energy coming from the vital center. 

Pat once told me once that back in 1976, he had pitched a national political TV show, to be entitled, “We the People”; it would be a sort of national tele-town hall.  It’s the idea that Ross Perot seized upon in his 1992 campaign, and others since, even as the Internet has displaced the telephone.   

In the meantime, Caddell was crafting the identity of a hypothetical hero candidate, whom he dubbed “Senator Smith.” That was an homage to Jefferson Smith, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 Frank Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  

In Pat’s vision, a new Sen. Smith would, as in the film, be both a fearless truth-teller and a fierce populist.  Amusingly, one political figure Pat eyed for the Sen. Smith role was then-Sen. Joe Biden. In fact, Pat worked on Biden’s short-lived 1988 presidential campaign, although Biden didn’t actually make it into 1988; his candidacy dissolved amidst accusations that he had committed weird acts of resumé-fabrication and political plagiarism. Indeed, Pat once told me that more than anything else, it was the Biden race that soured him on the nouveau Democratic Party. (And as for Pat’s opinion of Biden himself, well, that was even worse.) 

As anyone who had ever met him—or watched him on TV—knew immediately, Pat had an intense, even overwrought, personality; to him, everything was “titanic,” or “seismic,” or “unprecedented.” And so when pols failed to live up to his standards, or their standards—or any standards—he wasn’t afraid to call them out. And in politics, that can be costly; as they say in D.C., Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.  And so that’s why Pat lived the last decades of his life in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Yet wherever he went, Pat was always, down deep, an idealist. Borrowing Walt Whitman’s famous phrase, he believed that “America is the greatest poem” and that the nation, rejuvenated with better leaders, would always be a “nation announcing itself”—that is, a nation remade and strengthened.  In that vein, Pat could quote lines spoken by FDR from memory, such as his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic convention: “Let us all … constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.” 

To be sure, Pat was often irascible, even cranky. But he was never nasty. He knew a lot, and had a lot to say—and if most people couldn’t keep up with him, well, that was a challenge he had to overcome, with as much patience as he could muster. As he would say to himself, channeling some childhood memory, “Count to ten, Patrick.” 

So if Pat has now run his last race, there’s still the issue of his America—and our America. In his last years, Pat was troubled by what he saw, but always hopeful about what the country could become.  

Yet perhaps most of all, he was always the keen analyst. As he told The New York Timesin September 2017 about the new Trump administration: 

People in Washington in the political establishment who think we’ll get rid of Trump and go back to normal have made a terrible miscalculation.  That’s not going to happen.  The paradigm shift that we went through in 2016, it’s still in motion.

Yes, America is always in motion, and so, for all of his 68 years, was Pat. And now, finally, he’s at rest.  And this nation is a stiller place. 

Pat Caddell: The Pollster Who Foresaw and Helped Shape Trump’s Victory

By John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/pat-caddell-pollster-foresaw-trump-victory/

February 17, 2019

Pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell died from a stroke on Saturday at the age of 68.

Few people had more to do with Donald Trump’s amazing victory in 2016. The Washington Post concluded that Caddell “first wrote the instruction manual” for Trump when, entirely on his own, he conducted polls showing that the public “was ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House.” No one I know in public life better grasped the angry voter mood that lifted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016.

During National Review’s Alaska cruise in August 2015, Caddell gave a seminar on the updated results of his “Smith Project,” a series of polls he had conducted since 2013 and named after the outsider senator in the 1939 Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I will never forget Caddell self-confidently declaring that the country was “in a pre-revolutionary moment,” with 84 percent believing that political leaders were more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right. Caddell noted that seven out of ten Americans no longer believe that the government receives its authority from the consent of the people, despite  the words of the Declaration of Independence.

In his polling, Caddell had tested a hypothetical Candidate Smith, whom he didn’t identify by party, age, race, or religion. He only said of him:

Candidate Smith’s beliefs are not based on liberal or conservative ideas, just fundamental American common sense. Smith says we can’t change anything with the usual politics, the usual politicians, and the usual interest groups. We need new leaders from mainstream America, like Candidate Smith, who take on the political elites and special interests, and put the American people in charge again.

Smith’s “favorable/unfavorable” numbers after reading that paragraph to voters was 77 percent favorable and only 11 percent unfavorable. Lee Hanley, the conservative donor and NR friend who financed Caddell’s research, told me on the cruise that “everyone else in politics is ignoring the volcano rumbling beneath them.”

Indeed. While I was impressed with Caddell’s analysis, I didn’t incorporate it nearly enough into my own writing on the 2016 election.

Caddell wasn’t a fan of Donald Trump. He was a fan of giving the sclerotic U.S. political system a kick in the rear and forcing it to respond to the concerns of millions of ordinary voters who felt ignored. In polling he conducted at the very beginning of the 2016 primary season, he found that none of the candidates fully satisfied voters or fit the description he gave of Mr. or Ms. Smith. But he knew that upstarts such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would do much better than anyone thought. He was right.

In September 2016, after Trump won the GOP nomination, Caddell told me that he thought that Trump had a 40 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton, even though he was being vastly outspent and his campaign was unconventional and run by outsiders and novices. As Caddell told The New Yorker at the time: “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be president. He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the ONLY Smith.”

In late 2017, Caddell told an audience at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend conference that it wasn’t clear just how successful a president that Donald Trump would be. But he had no doubt about the power of the message that brought him to the Oval Office. “Make America Great Again was the greatest slogan of my lifetime,” he said. “And I think that the most powerful idea was ‘Drain the Swamp.’”

All of this carries with it a measure of irony, given that Caddell began his career as the 21-year-old Boy Wonder who helped secure liberal George McGovern the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. He was also the pollster for Joe Biden’s remarkable upset victory for the Senate in Delaware that year. Back then, Caddell felt Richard Nixon and the fossilized Democratic establishment were the major obstacles to progress.

McGovern lost in a landslide, but Caddell persevered and found an outsider candidate he felt could overcome the nation’s post-Watergate cynicism: former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. His role in shaping Carter’s anti-Washington message was so successful that in the summer of 1976, his campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, told reporters: “You know why Jimmy Carter is going to be president? Because of Pat Caddell — it’s all because of Pat Caddell.”

Of course, Carter’s presidency didn’t go well, and he lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. Caddell was harshly criticized for urging Carter to deliver his famous “malaise” speech in the summer of 1979, which created the indelible impression of a president accepting an American decline he saw as inevitable.

Though he rarely admitted to any mistakes, Caddell conceded that this speech weakened Carter’s position. But he argued that Carter’s failure was part of the overall problem of the Democratic party’s turning on America and losing confidence in it. He told Breitbart Radio in 2016: “What’s missing is a positive vision of restoring my party to what it once was, truly the party of the common man, as opposed to a hollowed-out party of . . . bicoastal elites that relies on divisive identity politics to win.”

Some Democrats believe that their party would be much better off if they had listened to Caddell. “Pat Caddell was not only a giant of polling and political consulting, he literally created and shaped the current polling industry,” Doug Schoen, a pollster for both Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, told me. “He is in large measure responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

From another side of the political spectrum, free-market pollster Scott Rasmussen praises Caddell’s insights:

He never lost sight of the disconnect between the American people and the political elites. He spent a lifetime raising the alarm about this growing problem and the threat it represented to America. He was a constant irritant to anyone comfortable with the status quo because he knew our nation could be so much better.

As for the future, Caddell may have been estranged from the Democratic party but he had contempt for the Republican party’s leadership. He accurately predicted that the GOP would lose the House in the 2018 midterms, caustically explaining the loss to Breitbart News as follows:

The Republican party is essentially wusses. They will not fight. They don’t believe in fighting. They just lay down and roll over, and usually for their donor class, who are basically antithetical to 90 percent of Republicans and what they want.

Pat Caddell was a man with a short temper, who like many brilliant people insulted some adversaries he might instead have ignored. He angered the establishment of both major parties, ultimately becoming a man without a party. Critics will say he alienated so many in politics that his influence in the circles of the powerful eventually vanished. But he kept surveying people and honing his warnings about an alienated America, even if few would listen.

We now live in a country where the political landscape is almost exactly what he predicted it would be.

The Silent Scream and the Lies of Roe v Wade

By Alicia Colon
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_silent_scream_and_the_lies_of_roe_v_wade.html
February 15, 2019

On my first bus trip to the Right to Life March in DC, the driver put in the tape of the infamous film, The Silent Scream, narrated by Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson was one of the original co-founders of NARAL, (the first abortion advocate group), whose mind was changed about the issue after watching an ultrasound showing the struggle of a fetus fighting for its life.  What I found incredible about the film was a display of the many deadly instruments depicted that would be inserted into the woman’s body.



Ironically, laws here in New York forbade parents from having their children’s ears pierced without parental permission, but Planned Parenthood needed no such admonition about allowing those metal instruments to be inserted into minors requesting termination of inconvenient pregnancies.

According to a repentant Nathanson, Roe v. Wade was decided in the SCOTUS through a series of lies and deceitful testimony. Jane Roe, aka Norma McCorvey, admitted she lied to her attorneys about being gang-raped. One of her lawyers had recently had an abortion in Mexico but told McCorvey she did not know where she could obtain one. She also lied to the court that Ms. McCorvey had sought out many places to have it performed.  Bernard Nathanson admitted lying about the number of back ally abortion deaths, and said the figure of 5,000-10, 000 was completely fabricated. According to health records of 1972 over 130,000 women attempted self abortions; 39 died.

There were more lies to come from abortion advocates in the other case before the SCOTUS, Doe v. Bolton. This case extended the right to abortion from the first trimester to the point of delivery. According to Sandra Cano, “Doe,” she didn’t want an abortion at all. She had come to see her lawyer about a divorce. She never had an abortion nor sought one. Her ACLU lawyer saw an opportunity to advance the cause of abortion so, without telling her client, Ms. Cano, she proceeded to push this case all the way to the Supreme Court. Sandra Cano never knew this was even happening. The case came up with no evidence — unheard of at the Supreme Court. There was presented an affidavit that said that Sandra Cano asserted that she would “go crazy” if she had to have another baby.

The truth is that Sandra was pregnant and wanted her baby. She had already had two babies who were at that time in state care and she wanted them back. She loved babies and wanted to have them. Her lawyer lied and said that Sandra wanted to be sterilized. More lies. Both McCorvey and Cano subsequently became active pro-life spokespersons. They attempted to set the record straight and to dispel the lies surrounding Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Lies, all lies and I wonder if these lawyers should have been disbarred for lying to their clients.
 In her second book, Won By Love, Norma McCorvey wrote about why she changed her stance on abortion:

“I was sitting in O.R.'s offices when I noticed a fetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them. I ran outside and finally, it dawned on me. 'Norma', I said to myself, 'They're right'. I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that's a baby! It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth—that's a baby!
I felt crushed under the truth of this realization. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception'. It wasn't about 'missed periods'. It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion—at any point—was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.”

Dr Nathanson, who had presided over 60,000 abortions as an OB/GYN and performed  over 5,000 himself including his own child by a former girlfriend, became increasing uneasy when he witnessed a live abortion on the newly developed ultrasound. It reminded me of an article I read in Esquire magazine.  It was a page long and illustrated with a picture of what appeared to be a procedure room. It was written by a doctor passing by this room where an abortion was taking place. Another doctor had inserted a saline solution into the womb and the passing doctor viewed with interest the needle protruding from the patient. He watched as the needle started moving back and forth and then watched it move violently as the fetus fought for its life as the killing solution filled the womb. The article was written not long after the Roe v. Wade decision, and the author of the article did not weigh in on the issue in depth other than to suggest that he was disturbed by the fetus's fight for life.

Up until this time, abortionists could argue that the fetus was just a clot of bloody cells, but the new technology showed the fetus as alive, breathing with a heartbeat and feeling pain. Besides Nathanson, McCorvey and Cano, many Planned Parenthood workers have become converts to the respect life movement. The public ignorance about what actually goes on in abortion clinics is coming to an end for several reasons.

• Underground videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal parts has been confirmed by testimony of an ex procurement technician for biotech startup Stem Express.
•  Last year’s film, Gosnell: the trial of America’s biggest serial killer, largely suppressed in theatrical distribution by the left, is now on DVD and being widely distributed, is an eye-opener to the truth about the filthy and dangerous clinics available to minority women.
• The admission by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam that born alive aborted babies could be killed if parents and physician decided on this choice, shocked people more than the blackface picture in his yearbook.
•  Then, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gleefully signing an abortion bill euphemistically called the Reproductive Health Act that allows abortion till birth, while still claiming his values are part of his Catholic faith since he was an altar boy, brought out calls for his excommunication.

I doubt that the Governor cares about being ostracized from a church he doesn’t even attend, but what might shake him up is when Democrat Catholics change their political registration to Independent or Republican. Perhaps it’s time that the clergy start preaching about how evil it is to kill babies just because they are inconvenient. Perhaps it’s time for Democrat voters to admit the party is not what it was before. Their party believes in infanticide and open borders that threaten our security.

It’s also time for no more lies about the evil of abortion still paid for by taxpayers.

No mas.


Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_silent_scream_and_the_lies_of_roe_v_wade.html#ixzz5fbJllfqS
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around?

Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts."

By TUCKER CARLSON

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-are-these-professional-war-peddlers-still-around-tucker-carlson-max-boot-bill-kristol/

February 15, 2019

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one of the world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.

Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire.”

“The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,” Boot wrote. “The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to Iraq.

“Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

In retrospect, Boot’s words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to 20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.

Things haven’t gone as planned. What’s remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.

In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was “less than two years” from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot’s list as well. Then Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.

“If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein, imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family,” Boot wrote.

Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal, Boot advocated for the military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was unreasonable public opposition to new wars.

“Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering international peacekeeping forces,” he wrote. “Think of American and French troops blown up in Beirut in 1983, or the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of engagement that preclude meaningful action.”

In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn’t that Americans die, but that too few Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign mercenaries. “The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. When foreigners get killed fighting for America, he noted, there’s less political backlash at home.

♦♦♦

American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. “Qaddafi Must Go,” Boot declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot’s telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. “The only way this crisis will end—the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya—is to remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won’t suffice.”

In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times, Boot laid out “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.”

Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would “diminish Iran’s influence” in the region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot’s advice and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran’s most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted “with little risk.”

Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Boot conceded that “it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake of such strikes.” He didn’t seem worried.

Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.

Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.

As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.

Boot’s stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”

It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.

Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.

Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.

Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.

Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.

♦♦♦

Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era. Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism.

The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.

Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled “Saddam Must Go.” If the United States didn’t launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should “get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf.”

After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively collaborating with Saddam’s intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.

Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it’s not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he’s said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump.

Trump’s election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.

Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. “Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.” Most Americans, Kristol said, “grew up as spoiled kids and so forth.”

In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would “take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings” who supported Trump.

By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.  

Tucker Carlson is the host of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight and author of Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (Simon & Schuster). This excerpt is taken from that book.

The Russia Collusion Thud Heard 'Round the World

BY MARK ELLIS
https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-russia-collusion-thud-heard-round-the-world/
February 14, 2019


Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation of potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, June 21, 2017. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

On Tuesday’s show this week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed that he had tried to take the Russian “collusion” accusations and the launch of subsequent investigations seriously for about three months. It is Carlson’s job as a journalist to keep an open mind for as long as possible when such a serious allegation has been made. He apparently kept that open mind for three months, until the ridiculousness of it all could not be ignored.

A majority of the left, the Democrats, and their “mainstream” media arm have pounded the spurious collusion narrative for over two years. How much of that narrative they actually believe to be true is an open question that will someday hopefully be answered.

And then there was that vast swath of the American public that never, not for a moment, believed the charges. For them, the very idea that Donald Trump strategized with Russian apparatchiks, operatives, spies, whatever, was always patently ridiculous. For them, the investigations, particularly Mueller's, which gives new and ironic currency to the phrase “trumped up,” was always what President Trump said it was, a “witch hunt.”

Now, the release of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee’s report has borne out what those millions in the nation’s electorate always believed: there was no coordinated effort between Trump and the Russians to win in 2016.

But the damage has already been done by our long (and unfortunately still ongoing) national collusion nightmare. Especially for younger members of the Trump brigade, or older members who may not have been tuned in to the scorched-earth tactics customarily deployed over the political landscape. Citizens who embraced Trump’s America first ideology and strategy with a degree of idealism and political naiveté. These citizens knew something was wrong in Washington, and across the globe actually, but either hadn’t been around or been engaged enough to track the Watergate scandal, or Ken Starr’s Clinton probe. They might have only had a fleeting sense of how far the two major parties will go to upend the other’s standard bearer.

They know now, and it has been a bruising indoctrination. And this time the damage is worse.

There was never any collusion. The entire debacle has been a Deep State plot to depose a president. The Deep State-promulgated disillusionment about our country’s true power nexus and electoral process has done much to erode the faith of a generation not yet baptized in the fires of partisan destruction.

There are heroes, as it looks as though Robert Mueller too may come up with nada on a collusion fraud that has been perpetrated on the people.

California Congressman Devin Nunes has battled back with legal countermeasures related to congressional oversight from the very beginning. America’s Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, though at times muddling the defense narrative on his cable news appearances, never wavered in his conviction that the entire trope was a lie. In his cable appearances, Trump legal adviser Joe diGenova could barely contain his scorn for the debacle that was taking place. Even liberal Alan Dershowitz has called out the unprecedented prevarication used to float what credible analysts have labeled an “attempted coup.”

On the conservative media push-back front, acknowledgement must go to Sean Hannity, who has indefatigably questioned the collusion accusations and given a platform on his show to many of the most effective truth detectors: author and former Fox host Gregg Jarrett, investigative journalist and Fox News contributor Sarah Carter, and The Hill’s John Solomon, to name but a few.

The villains in this ignominious episode are too numerous to mention, but certain names rattle off: Comey, Brennan, Clapper et al. harped incessantly with assertions and implications that are in grave danger of being exposed as outright lies. The mincing visage of Peter Strzok, the harridan Nellie Orr and the rest, now forever associated with nefarious surreptitiousness.

Regarding the preponderantly leftist media, the Lemons, the Maddows, commentators like Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough; the reality of their unmitigated collusion with the Democratic Party is no longer even subject to debate. Their entire presentation on the alleged Russian connection over the last few years can be summed up in the mantric phrase: “It’s coming.” As a backdrop to their bias, they manufactured an estimated 93 percent negative coverage of the president to augment that presentation.

The Destroy Trump comedians were unrelenting in their collusion “humor.” Late Night’s Stephen Colbert is now forever enshrined in the “cock-holster” position he distastefully ascribed to the commander-in-chief. Bill’s Maher’s comedic obsession with the dossier’s salacious and unverified “golden shower” allegation has put the HBO host himself at ground zero.

It is not “coming,” and the void of substance created by the Senate Intel report is dropping with a thud heard 'round the world.

The dossier and FISA applications were always rubbish They blatantly tried to take President Trump out, and if the designs of this tragic episode’s ultimate elected villain, California Congressman Adam Schiff, gain traction, they will continue to do so.

But the investigatory paradigm has shifted.  And the damage done to the body politic, not to mention the reputations and credibility of a leftist media formerly tarred with bias, and now feathered as rank partisan propagandists, will be lasting.

On a personal note, I can vouch that the Russian collusion madness trickled down into my own neighborhood, a busy intersection at which an unhinged leftist periodically stationed himself and danced around holding a sign depicting a shirtless Vladimir Putin and the words, “Impeach!” It was all I could do not to roll down my window and suggest that he “get help,” but I held fire. The man was obviously deranged.

A great number of citizens across the country believe, and have always believed, that the idea that Donald Trump worked with Russians in a coordinated attempt to win the presidency is insane.

A major investigation has just wrapped, but it is unlikely that any lasting cease fire has been achieved.

As John Wayne used to say, in a simpler time in America, “Mount up!”