A Tale of Two Killings

Chicago erupts in violence over a police shooting, but no outrage attends the far more typical killing of a bystander by a murderous felon.

By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16058.html

July 18, 2018

Protests on July 16, 2018 (www.nbcchicago.com)

Last Sunday, a 59-year-old woman on the West Side of Chicago was killed by a would-be carjacker. The felon walked up to the driver’s side of the car, which was being driven by a 71-year-old man, and pulled his gun. The senior citizen refused to surrender the vehicle and kept driving. The would-be carjacker opened fire at the car, striking the woman in the head and killing her.

The night before, on the South Side, a Chicago officer killed a 37-year-old man whom the officer’s patrol partners had observed behaving in a manner suggesting that he was carrying a gun. The officers tried to question Harith Augustus, and he appeared to pull something from his wallet, according to police body-camera footage, possibly his firearms owner-identification card. One officer tried to grab Augustus (the police report said that he became combative), but he pulled away and ran into the street, where he appeared to reach for the gun holstered on his right hip. One of the officers opened fire and killed him. Augustus’s gun was recovered at the scene.

True to script, the officer-involved shooting sparked violent street anarchy on Saturday night, instigated by Black Lives Matter, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and other anti-cop activist groups. Protesters threw rocks and bottles, some filled with urine, at officers. Four officers were injured. Chants included “How do you spell racist? CPD [Chicago Police Department],” and “Murderers.” Protests have continued, drawing intense local media and political attention. “This department is racist . . . and we’re tired of it,” said one of the organizers.

There were no protests against the taking of the carjacking victim’s life. Carjackings have nearly tripled in Chicago since 2015, averaging two per day in 2017 and close to that in 2018. In August 2016, officers tried to pull over a car involved in an earlier carjacking; someone inside the car opened fire and hit one of the officers in the face. The shooter was on parole for attempted armed robbery. In January 2017, a teen carjacker ambushed a 34-year-old mother in an alleyway where she had been parking her car. His initial blow to her head with his gun was so severe that it temporarily blinded her. “Quit trying to kick back, you white bitch,” the assailant said as he pistol-whipped her. Before the attack, the mother had noticed a van suspiciously idling in the alleyway, but decided to continue about her business, likely second-guessing herself about “racial profiling.” In March 2017, a man with a gun forced a 24-year-old woman into the trunk of her car and raced it around the South Side until crashing into a tree. In August 2017, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and student was fatally shot in his car when he refused to hand it over to the carjacker. In November 2017, a pair of thugs accosted an 88-year-old man and stole his Lincoln at gunpoint. They almost immediately crashed into a semitrailer truck and retaining wall; one of the two felons died in the crash.

In the first six months of 2018, more than 60 children under 15 have been shot in Chicago. In June alone, an 11-year-old boy was shot in the head; a 12-year-old girl was killed as she was carrying her baby cousin; and a 14-year-old boy was gunned down by a passing car. Black Lives Matter activists have nothing to say about this violence because it does not involve police officers. Officer-involved shootings are a minute fraction of Chicago’s ongoing carnage—in 2016, they made up 0.5 percent of all shootings in the city. The foot patrol that accosted Augustus was in the neighborhood—the CPD’s Third District—because the local alderman, residents, and business owners had requested greater police protection. The area had seen an increase in open-air drug deals. So far this year, there have been 69 shootings in the Third District, a little under a dozen a month, 15 of them fatal. A witness reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that Augustus was selling “loosies”—single untaxed cigarettes—a practice that shop owners loathe for its contribution to an atmosphere of street lawlessness.

Black Lives Matter has thankfully lost its sounding board in the White House. But at the local level, away from the Resistance-obsessed national media radar screen, its anti-cop poison continues to distort policing and police-community relations. It is a tragedy for Augustus’s family and acquaintances that he lost his life; the shooting must be thoroughly investigated. If any tactical changes are needed to lessen the risk that a police encounter escalates into the use of lethal force, they should be implemented through rigorous hands-on training. But the officers were right to approach an apparently armed man, especially given the area’s record of shootings. Such proactive policing has dropped precipitously in Chicago, resulting in a sharp rise in violent crime since 2014. (Law professors Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles empirically connect the drop in stops to rising crime in this 2018 paper.)

The anti-cop violence against the CPD for a shooting that, though deeply unfortunate, appears to be justified will further lessen officers’ willingness to intervene in suspicious behavior. A Chicago detective told me, in the wake of Saturday’s violence: “Those who care about law enforcement and a civil society cannot win against willful blindness and straight-up lies. This is an open civil war that goes quite beyond Chicago.” The demoralization of law enforcement continues, and it is the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who will continue paying the price.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops and the forthcoming The Diversity Delusion.

Review: ‘The Equalizer 2' proves Denzel Washington waited for the right time to make his first sequel

By Kenneth Turan

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-equalizer-2-review-20180719-story.html#

July 19, 2018

It starts with the character Washington plays and what the actor brings to it, but it extends to the nature of the plot and story created by the veteran Richard Wenk, who also wrote the first "Equalizer" inspired by the 1980s TV show.

Robert McCall (Washington) presents himself to all and sundry as a modest, cap-wearing Boston Lyft driver given to solitude and the reading of books, with authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marcel Proust getting pride of place. But the reality of his life is considerably different.

A onetime shadowy government agent with unmatched combat skills, McCall has taken advantage of the fact that his former bosses think he's dead to do a very particular kind of good in the world.

The loneliest and deadliest of lone wolf vigilantes, McCall is an avenger who hides his lethal abilities under that bookworm demeanor, someone who doesn't want to be thanked or even known for the wrongs he's righted. When someone uses the phrase "the wrath of God," they might as well be talking about him.

Indisputably one of America's best actors, Washington clearly enjoyed playing this character in the first "Equalizer," but it’s a mark of his dedication to craft that he's not been content with leaving well enough alone.

Instead, the actor has thrown himself more intensely into the role, using his superb gravitas and credibility to elevate and enlarge the character while still allowing McCall to be human enough for us to worry about his safety, death-dealing skills notwithstanding.

In this he's helped by the nature of Wenk's plot, which deals with questions of the morality of violence and has the shrewd idea of making the battles that McCall fights personal in a way they have not been before.

As was the case with the first film, "Equalizer 2" is in no hurry to get to the heart of the matter. The story's essence reveals itself gradually as the film takes time to bring those new to the character up to speed on who McCall is and what he can do.

The opening sequence takes place out of the country, on a train in rural Turkey where McCall, disguised as an imam complete with luxuriant beard, teaches a miscreant a lesson after imparting a bit of personal philosophy: "There are two kinds of pain in the world. Pain that hurts and pain that alters." Point taken.

In addition to warrior skills that are off the charts, McCall has an ability to see a particular situation before it unfolds, a sixth sense of how things will go down. As filmmaker Fuqua has accurately said, "Violence is a comfort zone for him.”

Back in Boston, though he's usually zealous about keeping to himself, McCall takes an interest in one of the tenants in his building, a young high school student with artistic aspirations named Miles (Ashton Sanders, memorable in the Oscar-winning "Moonlight").

McCall is also visited by an old friend from the first movie. That would be Susan Plummer (the always expert Melissa Leo), a colleague from McCall's covert days and the only person, aside from her husband, Brian (Bill Pullman), who knows he is alive.

Still active in intelligence circles, Susan goes off to Brussels with colleague Dave York (an excellent Pedro Pascal) to investigate a death that may or may not be suspicious.

Always careful to not be hemmed in and compromised by human connections, McCall finds that, in ways that are separate and linked, both Susan and Miles are in terrible jeopardy.

How he responds is memorable, and, in the case of Miles, leads to a moment in a crack house hallway that provides both actors with a scene that surprises with its intensity and power.

When it comes to action sequences, Fuqua is as experienced as they come, and his work here, while strong enough to earn an R rating for "brutal violence throughout," never lingers on the carnage. Instead, it presents violence in intense bursts so crisply edited (by Oscar winner Conrad Buff) they almost feel subliminal.

The director is also a fine creator of tension, insisting that the acting be low-key and, along with stunt coordinator Jeff Dashnaw, special effects coordinator Jeremy Hays and visual effects supervisor Sean Devereaux, orchestrating a corker of a finale during a Category 5 hurricane.

Not everything in "Equalizer 2" is successful, including a subplot about a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor played by Orson Bean that misses the mark. But the film is effective where it needs to be, and if there is an "Equalizer 3," in line to see it is where you'll find me.

Kenneth Turan is film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He has been a staff writer for the Washington Post as well as the Times’ book review editor. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he teaches film reviewing and non-fiction writing at USC. His most recent books are “Never Coming To A Theater Near You” and “Free For All: Joe Papp, The Public and The Greatest Theater Story Ever Told.”

Trump Stays Defiant Amid a Foreign Policy Establishment Gone Mad

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/trump-stays-defiant-amid-a-foreign-policy-establishment-gone-mad/

July 20, 2018

President Trump and Vladimir Putin after their joint news conference in Helsinki, July 16, 2018 (Lehtikuva/Antti Aimo-Koivisto/via Reuters)

“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached.

And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all.

Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been called treason, a refusal to do his sworn duty to protect and defend the United States, by a former director of the CIA.

Famed journalists and former high officials of the U.S. government have called Russia’s hacking of the DNC “an act of war” comparable to Pearl Harbor.

The New York Times ran a story on the many now charging Trump with treason. Others suggest Putin is blackmailing Trump, or has him on his payroll, or compromised Trump a long time ago.

Wailed Congressman Steve Cohen: “Where is our military folks? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!”

Apparently, some on the left believe we need a military coup to save our democracy.

Not since Robert Welch of the John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” have such charges been hurled at a president. But while the Birchers were a bit outside the mainstream, today it is the establishment itself bawling “Treason!”

What explains the hysteria?

The worst-case scenario would be that the establishment actually believes the nonsense it is spouting. But that is hard to credit. Like the boy who cried “Wolf!” they have cried “Fascist!” too many times to be taken seriously.

A month ago, the never-Trumpers were comparing the separation of immigrant kids from detained adults, who brought them to the U.S. illegally, to FDR’s concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

Other commentators equated the separations to what the Nazis did at Auschwitz.

If the establishment truly believed this nonsense, it would be an unacceptable security risk to let them near the levers of power ever again.

Using Occam’s razor, the real explanation for this behavior is the simplest one: America’s elites have been driven over the edge by Trump’s successes and their failures to block him.

Trump is deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, appointing record numbers of federal judges, reshaping the Supreme Court, and using tariffs to cut trade deficits and the bully pulpit to castigate freeloading allies.

Worst of all, Trump clearly intends to carry out his campaign pledge to improve relations with Russia and get along with Vladimir Putin.

“Over our dead bodies!” the Beltway elite seems to be shouting.

Hence the rhetorical WMDs hurled at Trump: liar, dictator, authoritarian, Putin’s poodle, fascist, demagogue, traitor, Nazi.

Such language approaches incitement to violence. One wonders whether the haters are considering the impact of the words they so casually use. Some of us yet recall how Dallas was charged with complicity in the death of JFK for slurs far less toxic than this.

The post-Helsinki hysteria reveals not merely the mindset of the president’s enemies, but the depth of their determination to destroy him.

They intend to break Trump and bring him down, to see him impeached, removed, indicted, and prosecuted, and the agenda on which he ran and was nominated and elected dumped onto the ash heap of history.

Thursday, Trump indicated that he knows exactly what is afoot, and threw down the gauntlet of defiance: “The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war,” he tweeted. “They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin.”

Spot on. Trump is saying: I am going to call off this Cold War II before it breaks out into the hot war that nine U.S. presidents avoided, despite Soviet provocations far graver than Putin’s pilfering of DNC emails showing how Debbie Wasserman Schultz stuck it to Bernie Sanders.

Then the White House suggested Vlad may be coming to dinner this fall.

Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and conflicts with Russia and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this country.

Yet should he attempt to carry out his agenda—to get out of Syria, pull troops from Germany, and take a second look at NATO’s Article 5 commitment to go to war for 29 nations, some of which, like Montenegro, most Americans have never heard of—he is headed for the most brutal battle of his presidency.

This Helsinki hysteria is but a taste.

By cheering Brexit, dissing the EU, suggesting NATO is obsolete, departing Syria, trying to get on with Putin, Trump is threatening the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment with what it fears most: irrelevance.

For if there is no war on, no war imminent, and no war wanted, what does a War Party do?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

One on One w/ Ace Atkins

Review: Ace Atkins’ ‘The Sinners’ a bloody, and funny, trip to the altar

By Colette Bancroft

http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/Review-Ace-Atkins-The-Sinners-a-bloody-and-funny-trip-to-the-altar_169960572

July 18, 2018

There’s always so much to deal with in the weeks before your wedding.

For Quinn Colson, there’s his mother’s threat to sing Elvis karaoke if he doesn’t hire a band, the question of whether his long-gone stuntman daddy will show up at all, his bride-to-be’s questionable plan to serve tofu to wedding guests who expect barbecue. Then there’s that little matter of a simmering crime war between a strip-bar owner and her biker minions and a family of piney-woods marijuana growers who want to step up their drug-dealing game. Given that Quinn is sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., he could get caught in their crossfire before he makes it to the ceremony.

There’s a lot going on in The Sinners, the eighth novel in the Colson series by Ace Atkins. This is the 23rd book by Atkins, a former St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribunereporter who now lives in Oxford, Miss. He has written seven novels in the Spenser series since he was selected to continue Robert B. Parker’s beloved character after Parker’s death.

The Colson books are set in a fictional Mississippi county, around the town of Jericho. Born and raised there, Quinn became a U.S. Army Ranger, returning home after multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan to step into the boots of his late uncle, Hamp Beckett, the county’s longtime sheriff. In The Sinners, Atkins writes, "Nearly ten years Quinn’d been back and he wasn’t sure he’d made a damn bit of difference." But the wry, stoic sheriff soldiers on.

MORE ACE: Netflix movie to star Mark Wahlberg as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser in Tampa author Ace Atkins’ ‘Wonderland’

Back when Hamp was sheriff, he busted Heath Pritchard, a wild-man dirt track racer who was raising marijuana amid the cornstalks on his family farm. After serving 23 years at the state’s notorious Parchman prison, Heath is home and not a bit reformed. As he tells Quinn, he’s sorry Hamp is dead: "My hopes and dreams had been to come back to this town a free man and whip his ass."

Heath’s nephews, Tyler and Cody Pritchard, are none too thrilled to see him, especially when they discover he’s killed someone his first night home. They’ve followed in his footsteps, both as race drivers and very successful dope farmers, but Heath is more than a handful. A simple visit to Walmart, where he marvels at all the flavors Oreos now come in, devolves into a battle royal in the parking lot that ends with the Pritchards driving their pickup over a gaggle of Harleys.

The "scooters," as Heath calls them, belong to the henchmen of local crime boss Fannie Hathcock. Quinn sent her predecessor, the evil Johnny Stagg, off to prison a while back. Fannie is an esthetic improvement over the skeevy Stagg: She’s a red-haired bombshell who wears Chanel Gardenia and totes her handgun in a Birkin bag. But she runs her strip club, Vienna’s Place, and associated criminal operations with an iron fist.

Fannie and Quinn have an uneasy truce, although he declines her offer to host his bachelor party. When the Pritchards try to invade her turf, they all end up crosswise of the Dixie Mafia, a Memphis undertaker-turned-drug-boss named Marquis Sledge and a couple of extremely bad guys who run a trucking company. Worse, Quinn’s best friend (and best man), fellow vet Boom Kimbrough, has unwittingly gone to work driving for that trucking company and is in potentially lethal danger.

The Sinners has plenty of breathless suspense and explosive violence, but it’s also a funny book. The series has always had its funny moments, but maybe wisecracking Spenser is influencing Quinn, or maybe the wedding lightens things up. This whole novel is laced with humor, much of it mordant and profane.

Quinn’s fiancee, Maggie Powers, is a fierce ER nurse whom he knew when they were children but lost track of for years. Here’s his story when an FBI agent asks him how they connected again:

"‘Her ex-husband was a bank robber,’ Quinn said. ‘He shot up a titty bar off Highway 45 and then he tried to kill me.’

"‘Hate to say it, Colson,’ Nat said. ‘But you done f---ed up trying to get a Hallmark Movie of the Week.’"

But Quinn really is a romantic, even if he does miss the rehearsal dinner because he’s involved in a firefight.

When his former deputy, the take-no-prisoners Lillie Virgil, now working in Memphis, comes back for the wedding, she warns him not to let married life make him soft.

"‘It’s not over, Ranger,’ Lillie said. ‘The Southern s---bird isn’t exactly an endangered species.’’

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.

The Sinners

By Ace Atkins

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384 pages, $27

Times Festival of Reading

Ace Atkins will be a featured author at the 2018 Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading on Nov. 17 at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Daniel Silva on his new book "The Other Woman"

THE LEFT’S TRUMP-PUTIN MELTDOWN

Just another nail in the coffin of the Leftist establishment’s credibility.

By Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270775/lefts-trump-putin-meltdown-robert-spencer

July 18, 2018

John Brennan on MSNBC

In a press conference with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump refused to validate the findings of a deeply corrupt and compromised intelligence community that has been working assiduously since before he was even elected to discredit and destroy him, and now the sky is falling.

Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, who calls himself a “nonpartisan American” but who voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall for President in 1976, tweeted in all-out hysterical mode: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) outdid even Brennan in hysteria, tweeting a call for a military coup: “Where are our military folks ? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!”

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who once called the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular,” said that the Trump/Putin press conference was “truly unbelievable. On the world’s stage, in front of the entire globe, the President of the United States essentially capitulated and seems intimidated by Vladimir Putin. So it was amazing and very, very disturbing.”

Less hysterically, but in the same vein, 2020 Presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) tweeted: “The whole world just watched as the President sided with Putin over U.S. Intelligence Agencies. There is no doubt that Putin has launched attacks on the very heart of our democracy, and by not standing up to him today, the President has invited him to do it again.”

In response to that, David Horowitz offered a note of sanity: “US intelligence agencies like the CIA headed by John Brennan who voted for Communist Party head during the height of the Cold War, and launched the Russia-Collusion witch-hunt, and Comey’s FBI.” Horowitz also observed: “Long time appeasers of the Soviet empire in the Democratic Party want to re-start the Cold War with a Russia greatly diminished in power and influence rather than see if we can make deals with this thug regime to reduce the dangers of nuclear war, & rein in Iran’s terror regime.”

Longtime foes and targets of the Left should have seen this, but some didn’t: the hysteria was not all on the Left. Newt Gingrich tweeted: “President Trump must clarify his statements in Helsinki on our intelligence system and Putin. It is the most serious mistake of his presidency and must be corrected—-immediately.”

What was Trump’s “treason”? His “high crimes & misdemeanors”? “The most serious mistake of his presidency”? Inthe words of NBC’s Chuck Todd, it was “essentially confessing to the world that he believes Putin more [than] the United States of America and its agencies.

But this was, not unexpectedly, wildly overstated and misleading. President Trump did not say that he trusted Putin more than he trusted the United States of America. He expressed his skepticism at the findings of intelligence agencies that have been shown over the last year and a half to have strayed far from their mission and become deeply partisan, shockingly corrupt organizations bent on finding enough dirt on him to remove him from the Oval Office.

The President has repeatedly referred to Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation as a “witch hunt,” and that is exactly what it is. On Tuesday, Trump walked back some of his remarks at the press conference, saying: “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that meddling took place” from Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, but added that the meddlers “could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.” He also tweeted: “Thank you@RandPaul. ‘The President has gone through a year and a half of totally partisan investigations - what’s he supposed to think?’”

Indeed. Just as there are a lot of people who may have meddled in the election, there are a lot of people in Washington, such as Mueller, James Comey, and Peter Strzok, who have been determinedly working to frame him for months for collusion with Russia for which they have been so far unable to produce any evidence. President Trump was right to be skeptical of the intelligence community, and should stand firm on that skepticism – as well as call for a thorough investigation and reform of the FBI.

It is also interesting that the people who are crying “treason” the loudest today never uttered the word when Barack Obama shipped billions of dollars in cash in the dark of night to the Islamic Republic of Iran, even as the mullahs were chanting “Death to America.” Treason is defined in American law as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Wouldn’t billions given to a terror-supporting rogue state be a great deal more aid and comfort to an enemy than some skepticism about our manifestly corrupt intelligence agencies at a press conference? Of course – but the Leftists who are in hysterics over the Trump/Putin press conference are the same Leftists who applauded Obama’s generosity to the Islamic Republic, and fought desperately to preserve their man’s disastrous nuclear deal with that outlaw state.

It’s a classic case of projection: the ones crying loudest about “treason” today are ones who are actually traitors.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Putin Summit May Prove to Be Trump's Finest Hour

BY ROGER L SIMON

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/putin-summit-may-prove-to-be-trumps-finest-hour/

July 16, 2018

Anatoly Maltsev/EPA-EFE/REX

What?  Did you just read that headline correctly?

Yes, you did.  Writing it I assumed people's heads would explode.  It's about as far as you can can get from today's conventional wisdom (i.e. what David Gergen thinks).  Virtually every member of the smart set from Pelosi to McCain to some ninety-five percent of the media, including several cowards on Fox News, to, alas, Lindsey Graham (who should know better) are going out of their minds excoriating Trump for being soft on Putin, even for being "owned" by the neo-Soviet strongman. John Brennan -- once a communist himself, so he should know -- accused Trump of treason.

Okay, time for that familiar cliche -- the thought experiment.  Suppose Trump had done the opposite, exactly what these people demanded -- verbally and viciously assaulted Putin for all his totalitarian tropes from annexing the Crimea to humiliating John Podesta for being so dumb as to fall for a phishing attack (all right -- I'll be fair. For invading the computers of Democratic Party operatives, allegedly to elect Trump) and so forth?

What would that have accomplished? The obvious answer is zilch.  Again the opposite would most likely have occurred.  Things, already bad, would have been set back further.  It's human nature. You don't have to be a personal acquaintance of Vladimir Putin to know that.  You only have to be breathing.

But... but...  then Trump shouldn't have held the summit in the first place.

Oh, really? Although Russia -- the largest nation on the planet -- is in many ways a failing state with an economy barely the size of Texas, it still has a huge percentage of the world's nuclear weapons, about equal with ours, and the capacity to deliver them (and to pass them along to unreliable non-state actors).  It behooves us to have a relationship with them for our survival and everybody else's, to keep our friends close and our enemies closer, as the Godfather would put it. The obvious goal in this is to limit nuclear proliferation and even to reduce, or at least stabilize, the nuclear arsenals as agreements come up for renewal.

If you look at Trump's actions in that context, what he says and what he does aren't so strange. His strategy should be clear by now to all those except those (unfortunately many) who deliberately don't want to understand it. I wrote about it earlier  in "Trump's New Foreign Policy: The Cooptation Doctrine."

He is, as Greg Gutfeld noted on The Five, his own good cop and bad cop all rolled into one.  The good cop part is what we saw with Kim Jong-un and now with Putin -- complimenting tyrants to an almost uncomfortable degree.  It's oddly a Christian love-the-sinner-but-hate-the-sin kind of thing.

The bad cop part is what Trump actually does concretely -- and, as Putin certainly knows, this is far more important than photo ops and press conferences with all the attendant words.  Trump's actions vis-a-vis Russia have been considerably more stringent than his predecessor's -- opening the energy spigots, increasing sanctions, arming the Ukrainians, ejecting 60 Russian agents, etc.  As Walter Russell Mead pointed out, if Trump is in Putin's pocket, he's doing a terrible job of it.

Barack Obama -- although the New York Times would burn down its own building rather than admit it -- did an abysmal job with Putin and was indeed the one who was truly "owned" by the Russian.  And it wasn't just the silly reset button and the embarrassing video of Barack whispering into Medvedev's ear to tell Vlad he -- Barack -- would be more flexible on missiles after the election.  (What a toady!)  Even worse, in his Chamberlainesque ardor to make a deal with Iran's mullahs, Obama let Putin play him in Syria, agreeing not to honor his redline against Assad's use of chemical weapons in order not to endanger the  deal.  Trump never did anything nearly that pathetic.  Actually, he stands up strong.

But the David Gergens of the world yammer on that Trump is doing everything wrong.  He's certainly doing some things wrong -- we all do --  but being gracious to Putin personally while actively opposing what the Russian does in his actions, may be exactly the way to get results.  But Trump's opponents don't care about results. Overwhelmed with hate, they would prefer to see the president wounded and impeached than succeed with Putin and bring about a world safer from nuclear armageddon.  If Trump achieves this, however, it will be his finest hour.  It would be for any president.

Roger L. Simon - co-founder and CEO of PJ Media - is also an award-winning novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.

TOTALITARIANISM IN DURHAM

Government officials attempt to "no-platform" Jordan Peterson.

By Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270763/totalitarianism-durham-matthew-vadum

July 17, 2018

Jordan Peterson and Durham Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson

Leftist city officials in Durham, N.C., are trying to censor conservative academic Jordan B. Peterson by denying him a platform for an upcoming local talk about his bestselling self-help book.

This attack on Peterson is part of a larger assault on conservatives’ free speech rights in the Trump era. Demonstrators have shut down or tried to shut down Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and David Horowitz, to name a few targets. Social media companies brazenly discriminate against conservatives and the crimes of former IRS official Lois Lerner against conservative activist groups remain unprosecuted.

Peterson is a former Harvard clinical psychology professor who is scheduled to speak Sept. 10 at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), which is owned by the City of Durham. Contrary to local media reports, he was not invited to speak by DPAC: he rented the venue.

The date is part of a speaking tour to promote his acclaimed self-help book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Durham won’t be Peterson’s first appearance in an intellectually hostile left-wing urban center in the U.S. Now a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, he has already spoken in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Ore. 

Peterson’s talk on “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege” at a conference held last fall in Washington, D.C., helped to bring his message to a new audience and may have played a role in his meteoric rise. 

The radical office-holders in charge in Durham are terrified of Peterson, what he represents, and what he might say on their turf.

Perhaps for good reason.

If you have any doubt what is motivating this fear among left-wingers, just watch Peterson’s merciless, masterful dismantling of UK’s Channel 4 reporter Cathy Newman’s tired old feminist and leftist talking points. Peterson is utterly fearless, always amply armed with facts, and intellectually intimidating.

This could help explain why Durham Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson posted a unanimously-endorsed city council statement on Facebook in hopes of creating the political pressure needed to shut Peterson down.

The bizarre document amounts to a passive-aggressive defense of free speech protections in the First Amendment. The city council claims to support Peterson’s right to express himself in public but at the same time wants him to refrain from exercising this right.

Peterson attacked the city council statement, calling it "a conceptually brutal mishmash of self-righteousness, indignation and utter moral and political confusion." It is “one of the purest demonstrations I have yet seen of the tendency for the ideologically possessed to use denouncement tactically as a means to amplify and exaggerate personal or identity-group virtue.”

Stopping someone from speaking is called no-platforming (or sometimes de-platforming). In “Repressive Tolerance,” the late Brandeis University professor Herbert Marcuse, the so-called father of the New Left, favored shutting down non-leftists on the theory that fascists, or those merely smeared as fascists by leftists, are not entitled to free speech.

The city’s complaint begins with an attempt to intimidate Dr. Peterson, along with predictably dishonest leftist drivel about the intellectual content of his work.

We would like to be clear that we respect Mr. Peterson’s right to hold his opinions and to freely state his opinions without government interference. However, we wish to emphasize that a person’s right to free speech does not include the right to a platform or an audience. As many in our community have been disturbed and angered by Mr. Peterson’s racist, misogynist, and transphobic views, we would like to use this opportunity to reiterate our commitments and values to all of you as your elected representatives.

The smearing continues in a kind of municipal mission statement that checks off all the politically correct boxes.

We believe that Durham is a place for all of us - black, white, Asian, Latinx, indigenous, and mixed-race, trans and cis, gay and lesbian, queer, and straight, disabled and able-bodied, young and elderly, women, men, and non-binary, native and immigrant, secular and people of faith. Those who seek to exclude or deny the humanity of others will find no comfort here.

We believe that everyone in our city should have the opportunity to thrive in an equitable and inclusive community. We understand that this opportunity has been intentionally and unjustly denied to many of our residents on the basis of race, class, gender, and other aspects of their identities. We are committed to taking action to remedy these injustices.

 The city council suggests that Peterson is some kind of fascistic control freak whose ideas would somehow turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale.

The city council continues implying Peterson is guilty of a laundry list of offenses, but without providing any evidence:

We believe that violence against women is horrific and unacceptable under any circumstances. Women do not owe anyone access to or any level of control over their bodies or sexuality. We honor trans and non-binary residents and believe that respecting each other requires a commitment to using the names and pronouns that each of us identifies with. We will do all that we can to ensure that trans and non-binary people feel safe and respected in our community.

We invite the Durham community to recommit ourselves to these values as a city and a community and to reject and resist bigotry wherever we encounter it.

In other words, according to this nonsense Jordan B. Peterson is an enemy of the people who must be stopped.

Peterson tore the statement apart.

"Everything that is reprehensible about the radical and ideologically-possessed left – all the moral self-righteousness, the platitudes, the clichés, the mindless celebration of diversity for the sake of the demonstration of tolerance, the naivete, and the appalling malevolence of casual denunciation – is on painful display in this missive," he wrote. 

The leftist hysteria in Durham is more than a little familiar to those of us who witnessed the Left’s apoplectic spasms over the rise of academic Camille Paglia, the refreshingly un-PC liberal lesbian whose 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, spurned outrage on university campuses at the time groaning under the yoke of repressive, male-hating, radical feminism.

Durham is Ground Zero for faddish leftist boycotts.

Last week at least five Durham officials aligned themselves with Antifa as they signed a letter demanding the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In April, Durham became the first American city to bar its police from training in Israel. “The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israel Police have a long history of violence and harm against Palestinian people and Jews of Color,” according to a resolution approved unanimously by the city council.

Last year the Durham City Council cheered on radical groups that unlawfully ripped down a Confederate war memorial at city hall. Prosecutions fizzled out before they even got started.

The toxic leftism of Durham officials has ruined lives. 

No one will soon forget how an overzealous, racist prosecutor and scores of local academics tried to lynch three white members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team after they were accused of the March 13, 2006 gang rape of black exotic dancer Crystal Gail Mangum that never happened. In the end, politically correct button-pusher Mike Nifong (D), the out-of-control district attorney in Durham, was disgraced, disbarred, and found guilty of contempt. Duke and Durham have never recovered from the disgraceful incident whose shadow still hangs over the community.

Clearly Durham has not learned its lesson.