Category: Politics

Bloomberg’s $10M Super Bowl ad posts misleading stat on child gun deaths

Cue the meme generator

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s $10 million 2020 Super Bowl ad includes a misleading statistic concerning the number of children killed in violent gun-related crimes, and inaccurately suggests that an adult victim of gun crime in Texas was a child, Fox News has found.

In the raw and emotional one-minute spot, Calandrian Simpson Kemp recalls her son’s death: “On a Friday morning, George was shot. George didn’t survive. I just kept saying, ‘You cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to, is no longer here.’ Lives are being lost every day. It is a national crisis.”

A statistic immediately appears on the screen: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.” The number is not attributed to any source.

However, a recent report from the Bloomberg-founded group Everytown for Gun Safety came up with that same number — but only when it included teenagers ages 18 and 19 in the calculation. Bloomberg’s advertisement makes no mention of older teenagers and suggests that the statistic is referring to younger children only. Washington Free Beacon reporter Stephen Gutowski found that once adults were removed from the calculation, the number dropped by nearly half.

Additionally, court documents from a Texas state appellate court reviewed by Fox News show that the victim referenced in the advertisement, George Kemp, was 20 years old at the time of his death.

 

Washington: House Committee Passes Mag Ban & CPL Restriction Bills

When I was stationed at Ft Lewis way back when even dirt was new, I applied for and got my first ever CCW permit as there was no such thing, except for Law Enforcement officers,  in Missouri at that time (Missouri is now a permitless carry state, surpassing Washington- sorry  Bob) . The only thing required then was that I could pass a background check. While I have always advised people get as much training as they can handle, having gubbermint mandate it is just another form of a poll tax.

On January 31st, the House Civil Rights and Judiciary Committee voted to pass bills to ban most standard capacity magazines and make it more difficult to obtain a CPL. These bills will now go to the Rules Committee awaiting being pulled to the House floor. Please contact your state Representative and ask them to OPPOSE House Bills 2240 and 1315.

House Bill 2240, as passed out of committee, bans the manufacture, possession, sale, transfer, etc. of magazines that hold more than fifteen rounds of ammunition. This measure is strongly supported by the Governor and the Attorney General. These so called “high capacity” magazines are in fact standard equipment for commonly-owned firearms that many Americans legally and effectively use for an entire range of legitimate purposes, such as self-defense or competition. Those who own non-compliant magazines prior to the ban are only allowed to possess them on their own property and in other limited instances such at licensed shooting ranges or while hunting. These magazines have to be transported unloaded and locked separately from firearms and stored at home locked, making them unavailable for self-defense.

House Bill 1315 requires onerous government red tape and further training to obtain a Concealed Pistol License. Mandatory training requirements are yet another cost prohibitive measure intended to ensure that lower income Americans are barred from defending themselves.

Again, please contact your state Representative and ask them to OPPOSE House Bills 2240 and 1315.

Gun rights advocate Dick Heller, left, and Kentucky U.S. representative, Thomas Massie, get the crowd fired up during a second amendment rally in Frankfort, Ky. on Friday. Jan. 31, 2020

Gun rights advocate Dick Heller, left, and Kentucky U.S. representative, Thomas Massie, get the crowd fired up during a second amendment rally  today at the state capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Signs are raised high during the Second Amendment gun rally at the Capitol in Frankfort, Ky on Friday morning. Jan. 31, 2020

Elizabeth Warren introduces sweeping gun safety bill with licensing, universal background checks, and an assault-weapons ban

‘…unlikely to even get a [committee] hearing in the Senate.’ 
Quite accurate assessment, and because of that being admitted by a noted proggie newspaper, this is just another “Hey! Looook AT MEEEEE!!” from Lieawatha and another indicator her internal polling must be dismal.

Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday introduced comprehensive and aggressive gun safety legislation, including a federal gun licensing system, universal background checks, and a ban on military-style assault weapons, to address what she called the “deadly crisis” of gun violence.

The Gun Violence Prevention and Community Safety Act, with companion legislation to be introduced in the House by Representative by Hank Johnson of Georgia, incorporates several existing Senate bills that have gone nowhere in the Republican-controlled chamber.

Warren’s bill also is unlikely to even get a hearing in the Senate, but lays down a marker by the presidential candidate of the steps Democrats would try to take on gun safety if they win control of Congress and the White House in the November elections.

Warren’s pathetic treatment of Chief Justice John Roberts

Her private internal polling on her presidential campaign must put her numbers so rock-bottom that she figures the only thing she has left is to throw chicken$#!+ spitwads like this simply to try and garner more attention.

Elizabeth Warren’s challenge to Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday had about as much value to the impeachment proceedings as Warren’s DNA has Native American ancestry.

Which is to say, not a lot.

Warren’s question to Chief Justice Roberts was truly ridiculous. “At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government,” Warren asked, “does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?”

It was Warren at her truest self: utterly populist, faux-intellectual, and totally obsessed with partisan pageantry.

The question, supposedly seeking a serious response from the House impeachment managers, got the treatment it deserved. Roberts’s calm response showed him for the far superior public servant he is. To his credit, Adam Schiff rebuked his fellow Democrat by answering her question with a defense of Roberts’s honest presiding.

Of course, Schiff has to take the opportunity to spout more of his BS.

Virginia House passes 7 gun-control measures

RICHMOND, Va. — The Virginia House of Delegates has passed several pieces of gun-control legislation, but some of the measures face an uncertain future in the more conservative Senate.

The Democrat-led House approved seven gun measures Thursday, largely along party lines. The legislation will now go to the Senate for a vote, which has already passed its version of some of the measures but has shown signs that others may not survive. Both chambers are controlled by Democrats, but the Senate is the more conservative of the two chambers on gun issues.

Virginia has become ground zero in the nation’s raging debate over gun control and mass shootings as a new Democratic majority has pledged to put strict new limits in place………..

Democratic Sen. John Edwards, head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said he wasn’t sure if those bills would pass the Senate, or if he supports them himself.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Several Senate Democrats have already said they are unlikely to back the governor’s ban on so-called assault weapons, such as the popular AR-15-style rifles – a key part of Northam’s gun-control package. The House version of the bill has also not advanced.

The assault weapons legislation has drawn the fiercest pushback, as gun-rights advocates accuse Democrats of wanting to confiscate such rifles from current gun owners. Northam has said he has no interest in doing so.

An estimated 8 million AR-style guns have been sold since they were introduced to the public in the 1960s. The weapons are known as easy to use, easy to clean and easy to modify with a variety of scopes, stocks and rails.

Guns were a key topic of last year’s legislative elections – particularly after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach claimed a dozen lives – and gun-control groups heavily funded Democratic candidates.

Gun owners, meanwhile, have descended on local government offices to demand they establish sanctuaries for gun rights. More than 100 counties, cities and towns have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries and vowed to oppose any new “unconstitutional restrictions” on guns.

“This is Only the Third Time in History a President Has Been Impeached, and the First Time That Absolutely No One Cares”

People are sick and tired of corrupt partisan hack politicians who will do anything but what they’re actually paid to do.

Podcaster Andrew Espitallier, who hosts a channel called The Right Latino with his friend Alex, took to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to ask average New Yorkers their impressions and opinions on President Trump’s impeachment trial. He traipsed 30 blocks, from Times Square to Union Square, for over three hours, put a microphone in the face of hundreds of people, and couldn’t find a single one who was even remotely interested.

‘Here I am, in the middle of ultra-liberal New York City, and literally no one cares. I was shocked’, he told me.

When my pal Buck Sexton asked if I would come on his radio show to discuss impeachment, I apologized and told him he might want to ask someone else. ‘I haven’t watched one second of it and I don’t plan to now,’ I said. ‘That’s even better. You’re representative of an average American then. Let’s discuss that’, he said.

Same thing happened with RT International, who asked me to discuss the latest impeachment news. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not following a word of it’, I said. Even better, I was told. And same with this magazine, when asked if I could do an impeachment story for this week. ‘I took a vow to not pay it any attention,’ I told Dear Leader Freddy Gray.

‘Then that’s your column’, he said.

They’re all correct. Although I understand history and politics geeks being interested in the process of impeachment, I feel bad for my right-wing journalist friends who for two weeks now have had to feign outrage over the proceedings. This is only the third time in history a president has been impeached and the first time that absolutely no one cares. That’s the only interesting thing about it, how disinterested people are. Whereas most journalists run like cats with laser pointers wherever the Democratic party tells them to go, a good journalist ought to assess what is worthy of the public’s attention and everything about the Democrats’ behavior since day one of this presidency points to frivolity and insincerity. It is a historic moment any way you look at it, yet no one can be bothered to give a damn. What a wonderful ‘screw you’ to the establishment. If the media won’t starve the misbehaving, temper-tantrum throwing brats of the Democratic party of attention, then thank goodness the average American is.

Last week, each of the three networks barely managed to crack one million views for the Democrats’ opening remarks, and even that number sounds high. By comparison, daytime soap operas banked 11 million views the same week. While Slurrer of the House Nancy Pelosi was yammering on about Russia conspiracy theories (wait, I thought this was about Ukraine?) and Adam Schiff was doing whatever, many more Americans were more interested in what was happening on Days of Our Lives, where Sarah and Adrienne were in a car accident. Adrienne later died from the injuries, and after Sarah’s baby died, Xander passed off Kristen’s daughter as Sarah’s. Fans of General Hospital were irked that impeachment proceedings pre-empted the show, forcing antsy soap fan blogs to host discussions about whether or not Nina will take back Valentin.

The media is also very ticked off that Americans don’t care. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes appeared on the verge of tears that no one is paying attention. They can’t seem to wrap their minds around why all us hillbillies and rubes just don’t care. Senators were reported to be falling asleep during the proceedings last week and popping out to give media interviews.

‘These peoples’ jobs is to do this. This is literally their job. If you find it too annoying or frustrating or uncomfortable to sit for eight hours and listen, you can resign tomorrow and go get another job’, Hayes whined about the distracted senators. Perhaps that’s better left up to their constituents and not Chris Hayes. It’s also, literally, my job to follow the news and I decided, nah, not this time. Don’t care! Even Dianne Feinstein can’t get canceled for reportedly suggesting this was all a bad idea and they should just get it over with and acquit the president.

Any way you slice it, the Democrats don’t come out looking good once the history books are written, and that’s putting it mildly. The people have spoken, they’ve impeached impeachment. As the crowning achievement of the Democrats’ last four years, that ought to greatly concern them. If there’s anything that points to a Trump mega-landslide in 2020, it is how Americans have turned their back on impeachment. What’s yet to be seen is whether this spectacle was the beginning of new, dark era in American politics, where attempted coups by the opposition party become the norm, or just more free comedy from our bumbling friends on the left.

VEXIT: West Virginia governor invites Virginia counties to join his state amid gun control push back
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice and Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, announced that legislation has been passed to send an open invitation to any Virginia county that wants to join West Virginia amid gun control push back in Richmond.

It’s an interesting idea.

The only problem is that the Virginia legislature as well as the U.S. legislature have to sign off on it too.

Michael Bloomberg Isn’t Really Running For President, And That Should Worry You
The staff, the ad spending, the campaigning — Michael Bloomberg was going to do all of this to defeat President Donald Trump already. Doing it as a ‘candidate’ exempts him from limits on PACs and political donations.

Everyone was saying he was running just because he’s a narcissistic ass, but figuring it’s personal since they’re both NooYawk billionaires and he hates Trump’s guts is more reasonable. And just because he is a billionaire and apparently doesn’t mind spending a billion here and a billion there doesn’t mean if he can figure out a good deal, he won’t use it.

There is very good reason to believe Michael Bloomberg isn’t actually running for president.

Of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For one, he declared he is. He’s also hired more than 1,000 staff and is still expanding, offering salaries far above campaign averages. This week, he became the first of the declared candidates to have campaigned in all 14 states of March 3’s Super Tuesday primary battle, and he’s spent a quarter billion on political advertising so far. All would point toward Bloomberg indeed running for president.

But here’s the snag: He wanted to do all of this anyway. Everything, that is, but the declaration bit. That, he was loathe to do. But the staff, the ad spending, the campaigning — he was going to do all of this to defeat President Donald Trump already, and we know this because he told us so.

As early as February 2019, the billionaire pledged he’d spend at least $500 million to defeat the president as either a candidate or as what Politico called “a shadow political party for the Democratic nominee.” That massive spend, the report continued, represents “just 1 percent of Bloomberg’s estimated net worth.”

Just a month later, the wealthy New Yorker laughed at the idea he would ever run for president, mocking “Amtrak Joe” Biden for apologizing “for being male, over 50 [and] white,” and Beh-tóh O’Rourke, who Bloomberg joked had “apologized for being born.” Well, a few months later he jumped in anyway. But does the world-renowned winner have any intention of actually winning the nomination?

We might all agree it is strange to hear the hyper-competitive Bloomberg declare he will pay his sizable staff to work on behalf of the people who are supposed to be his primary opponents. His “army of some 500 staffers will march on through the general election in November even if he loses the Democratic nomination, campaign officials [told] NBC News” back when he employed a measly 500 staffers.

Of course, Bloomberg has said the same of the now $2 billion he’s reportedly willing to spend for any campaign to defeat Trump.

This magnanimity in defeat doesn’t seem to square with Michael Bloomberg, cut-throat capitalist billionaire, but it does make sense when viewed in the light of his Bloomberg News empire, which loses money every year. The losses don’t seem to bother Bloomberg, because in this aspect of business he is a man who wants his ideas in the world and is willing to pay to make it happen.

So why declare? Simply put, the billionaire mayor gets a lot more for his money as a candidate than he ever could as a donor or even as the operator of a super PAC.

First, there are limits to what a donor can give a campaign, and $2 billion is way out of the question. Even so, Bloomberg could pour billions into an organization to sway elections, as Charles Koch and George Soros seek to do. Then, there’s something campaigns have that no PAC has — and that’s access to the best rates the market has to offer.

See, super PACs pay more for everything. And not a little more: Depending on the spend, these outfits pay maybe double what a candidate for office must pay for advertisements in digital, radio, cable, newspapers, network television, and even mail.

By law, candidates for office are entitled to the best treatment a station can give. “In the 45 days before a primary and the 60 days before a general election,” Radio & Television Business Report explains, “legally qualified candidates get the lowest rate for a spot that is then running on the station within any class of advertising time and particular daypart.”

If a private entity earned a bonus spot, the ability for his ads to preempt other ads, or any other perks, those must also be made available to the person running for office. Someone is getting a deal for buying in bulk? Then so is the candidate, even if the campaign isn’t buying in bulk. And on and on.

Panic About Peaceful Protest Reveals Gun Controllers’ Bigotry: Erroneous Predictions of Violence at the Richmond Rally Conflated Civil Libertarians With Militant Racists

After a gun rights rally in Richmond came and went last week without the “violence, rioting, and insurrection” predicted by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Talia Lavin could not believe her eyes, and she urged the rest of us not to believe our eyes either. “It seems myopic at best to describe the Monday event as ‘peaceful,'” Lavin wrote in a GQ article about the rally, which attracted thousands of armed Second Amendment supporters energized by Northam’s gun control agenda.

Lavin’s reality-bending assessment reflects a Manichean attitude, all too common among gun control supporters, that casts sincere policy disagreements as a battle between good and evil. That attitude explains why so many activists, politicians and journalists found it easy to equate a gathering of civil libertarians, organized around the defense of constitutional rights, with an invasion by white supremacists determined to sow chaos and provoke a race war.

Explaining his executive order banning firearms from Richmond’s Capitol Square during an annual demonstration organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, Northam invoked the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which featured explicit racism, clashes between protesters and counterprotesters and deadly vehicular violence. Northam said the VCDL rally, which had been held without violence for nearly two decades, this year justified a “state of emergency” because “credible intelligence gathered by Virginia’s law enforcement agencies” suggested it would attract militant racists bent on “storming the Capitol.”

Northam’s gun ban, which implicated the First Amendment as well as the Second given the obvious expressive value of bearing arms at a rally defending the right to do so, seemed blatantly illegal. A 2012 Virginia law that Northam himself supported as a state legislator bars the governor from using a state of emergency as an excuse to “prohibit the rights of the people to keep and bear arms,” including the “otherwise lawful” public possession of guns. The only exception is for restrictions “necessary to ensure public safety” in “an emergency shelter.”

The factual basis for Northam’s order was nearly as weak. The Associated Press reported that “Northam has grown increasingly concerned about numerous ominous-sounding postings on social media from forces outside Virginia,” but “the state does not have intelligence that the groups are planning a specific act of violence.”

The strongest evidence of incipient violence was the FBI’s Jan. 16 arrest of three Neo-Nazi knuckleheads who had talked about attending the VCDL demonstration in the hope of triggering a “full-blown civil war.” Lavin averred that the men “had planned to open fire into the crowd” — not the smartest strategy given what she described as “a spectacular arsenal of weaponry” possessed by that crowd.

The press nevertheless did its best to make Northam’s nightmare seem plausible. The New York Times mentioned Gun Owners of America, a Virginia-based organization dedicated to defending the Second Amendment, in the same breath as the out-of-state “hate groups” that supposedly planned to turn the rally into a “boogaloo” — “an event that will accelerate the race war they have anticipated for decades.”

The Times also described VCDL President Philip Van Cleave as an “extremist,” based on this Goldwater-esque quote from a letter to the editor he wrote last July: “There’s nothing wrong with being extreme in the preservation of our civil rights. VCDL is proud to be categorized as an extremist organization, and we fully intend to continue being such!” Hence the print headline over the paper’s profile of Van Cleave: “Self-Described Extremist Calls for ‘Peaceful Event.'”

Northam predictably attributed the lack of violence at the rally to his prudent preparations. But while police, per his order, prevented the 6,000 or so protesters who entered Capitol Square from carrying firearms, many more — some 16,000, according to local authorities — participated from outside the perimeter, where guns were very much in evidence.

“Today showed that when people disagree, they can do so peacefully,” Northam said. When the subject is guns, unfortunately, they cannot do so without being tarred as brutal bigots.

Biden Prods Man in Tense Confrontation at Campaign Event: ‘Go Vote For Someone Else.’

One gaffe after another.

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly prodded a man in the chest before telling him to “go vote for someone else,” during a campaign event in Iowa this week, after the man asked about Biden’s stance on gas pipelines.

“I’m gonna support you if you win the nomination because we’ve got to get rid of Trump, but what are we going to do about climate change?” asked the man. “Now, you say you’re against pipelines, but then you want to replace these gas lines, and that’s not gonna work. We’ve got to stop building and replacing pipelines.”

Biden responded by moving in close to the man and prodding his chest, before telling him to “go vote for someone else.”

Sanders Campaign Rocked Again: More Staff Caught Advocating Violence Against Opponents

2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) campaign was rocked again on Tuesday after James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released more undercover footage exposing paid Sanders campaign staffers appearing to advocate for violence against political opponents.

The new video from Project Veritas allegedly shows Sanders campaign South Carolina field organizers Mason Baird and Daniel Taylor advocating for “extreme action” and “militancy” against political opponents and private property.

I Was Wrong – They Want War

Q: Marta, why in the world would you have ever thought otherwise?
A: Look, I’m a veteran. I’ve been deployed to warzones. Violence is the last damn thing I ever want to see – especially violence that tears this nation apart. I wanted every possible, honest, honorable chance to settle this peaceably. But I’m beginning to realize, that’s not what the Democrats want. Period. That’s why.

I admit it – I was wrong.

Last week I advised that the best course of action as the left attacks our rights is to keep a civil course, wow them with facts, decency, and knowledge and defend our rights with knowledge, passion, and eloquence.

I felt that we could win based on logic and rational discourse, but having watched the events of this week unfold in front of my eyes, I realize just how wrong I was.

I thought that after engaging with our political opponents en masse, peacefully stating our concerns, and rationally discussing the issues of due process and Second Amendment rights in Richmond, the Democrats would step away from their insane assault on our freedoms.

I was wrong.

Despite concerns which the Democrats admitted to have had about the proposed “red flag law” during discussions with the press and with gun rights advocates, they advanced this appalling legislation the very next day after the massive rally in Richmond, disingenuously claiming that the measure is “thoughtful” and preserves due process. They jammed through other appalling bills, limiting the ability of peaceable Virginians to exercise their rights, without so much as a second thought, claiming that “elections have consequences.”

A Democratic-led House committee voted Friday for several pieces of gun legislation that a Republican majority has blocked for years. Those bills include limiting handgun purchases to once a month; universal background checks on gun purchases; allowing localities to ban guns in public buildings, parks and other areas; and a red flag bill that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others.

Based on previous interactions with some of these legislators, I thought they would give consideration to the people whom they represent, even if those people didn’t vote for them or disagree with them politically.

I was wrong.

Virginia Democrats are now in the process of jamming bills down our throats that threatens our First Amendment rights. It’s already illegal to threaten to kill, injure, bomb, etc. government buildings or officials in Virginia, but Senate Bill 1627 goes a step further.

The bar for harassment is already as low as “vulgar language” in Virginia’s code 18.2-152.7:1: If any person, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass any person, shall use a computer or computer network to communicate obscene, vulgar, profane, lewd, lascivious, or indecent language, or make any suggestion or proposal of an obscene nature, or threaten any illegal or immoral act, he shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. Bourne’s bill proposes adding the following amendment: A violation of this section may be prosecuted in the jurisdiction in which the communication was made or received or in the City of Richmond if the person subjected to the act is one of the following officials or employees of the Commonwealth: the Governor, Governor-elect, Lieutenant Governor, Lieutenant Governor-elect, Attorney General, or Attorney General-elect, a member or employee of the General Assembly, a justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, or a judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Bourne’s Bill also changes the language of “he shall be guilty” to “he is guilty” of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Not only do the twisted, power-hungry politicians in Richmond want to relieve you of your right to keep and bear arms, but they want to criminalize criticism of the very elected officials Virginians put into office!

Let’s remember, boys and girls. These pernicious ***** work for us, but they’re trying to keep themselves in power by silencing detractors and appealing to fetid ignorami.

And if you think this trend is limited to Virginia, you would be wrong too.

The proglodyte sociopaths have a chokehold on the Democrats, so much that they feel they have to pander to their insanity by promising abortions on demand for biological males and paying off billions of dollars in college loans at taxpayer expense, while screwing Americans who have been fiscally responsible with their earnings.

I thought there were sane Democrats left in this country.

I was wrong.

There may be some decent leftists here and there, but the shrieking, perpetually aggrieved progressive parasites have taken over, and they want you silenced and stripped of any dignity and freedoms.

The “Wax My Balls” and “Make My Cake, Bigot” woke fascists want war, and they might just get it……….

I thought the Democrats wanted the same things for our nation as we do, and we merely disagreed on the best way to accomplish this.

I was wrong.

They don’t care about human rights, as they claim. They care about giving themselves power over you, over your thoughts, over your achievements and earnings. They don’t consider you human.

They want to burn it all down, and they will do whatever is necessary to ensure that happens. OK, let’s see what happens.

They want you gone. Act accordingly.

Let the word go forth:

This is the most conservative of all the Democratic presidential candidates, note well.

So, as the man says, let’s be clear: if you think it might be a bad idea for biological males to compete against your daughter in the high school women’s sports league, or that biological males do not belong in your daughter’s or wife’s locker room, or even if you dissent from gender ideology at all, as the left-wing feminist J.K. Rowling did publicly late last year — then you are on the same side as Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, and will deserve the hatred you receive.

This is how left-wing identity politics works today. The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell’s dark, provocative new book illuminates how the concept of “civil rights” has been weaponized to demolish constitutional principles. If you’ve heard anything about the book, it’s probably something along the lines of this Jonathan Rauch review in the NYT. Excerpts:

In Caldwell’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, which banned many forms of discrimination, was a swindle. Billed as a one-time correction that would end segregation and consign race consciousness to the past, it actually started an endless and escalating campaign of race-conscious social engineering. Imperialistically, civil rights expanded to include “people of color” and immigrants and gays and, in short, anyone who was not native-born, white and straight — all in service of “the task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out — the top-down management of various ethnic, regional and social groups.”

With civil rights as their bulldozer, in Caldwell’s view, progressive movements ran amok. They “could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them”; the law and rhetoric of civil rights “gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.”

Perhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along. Reading this overwrought and strangely airless book, one would never imagine a different way of viewing things, one that rejects Caldwell’s ultimatum to “choose between these two orders.” In that view — my own — America has seen multiple refoundings, among them the Jackson era’s populism, the Civil War era’s abolition of slavery, the Progressive era’s governmental reforms and the New Deal era’s economic and welfare interventions. All of them, like the civil rights revolution, sparked tense and sometimes violent clashes between competing views of the Constitution and basic rights, but in my version of history, those tensions proved not only survivable but fruitful, and working through them has been an engine of dynamism and renewal, not destruction and oppression. I worry about the illiberal excesses of identity politics and political correctness, but I think excesses is what they are, and I think they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a history of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights movement’s social and moral achievements — before hastening back to “But the costs of civil rights were high.”

Perhaps most depressingly, Caldwell’s account, even if one accepts its cramped view of the Constitution and its one-eyed moral bookkeeping, leads nowhere. It proffers no constructive alternative, no plausible policy or path. The author knows perfectly well that there will be no “repeal of the civil rights laws.” He foresees only endless, grinding, negative-sum cultural and political warfare between two intractably opposed “constitutions.” His vision is a dead end. Unfortunately, it also seems to be where American conservatism is going.

Rauch is not wrong in his description of the most controversial part of Caldwell’s book. Caldwell really does see the Civil Rights regime as where things went badly wrong. But Rauch, in my view, doesn’t take on Caldwell’s actual argument, but only asserts that these conflicts “can be worked through.” Boy, is that ever whistling past the graveyard. However, I have to admit that I never would have read a book that claimed the Civil Rights movement went wrong had it not been written by someone I respect as much as I do Christopher Caldwell. I read the book last week, and I’m glad I did, though I doubt I will read a more unsettling book all year………..

I strongly urge you to read Caldwell’s book, and not to assume that you understand it from reviews. Let me get one thing out of the way now: Caldwell does NOT say that segregation was right. For example, he denounces the Jim Crow South as a confederacy of “sham democracies,” and agrees that its apartheid system had to change. Yet the manner in which the state demolished segregation had dramatic unintended consequences. Caldwell’s argument is more like that of Sir Thomas More in this famous exchange from the Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons:

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Caldwell argues that to get at the devil of segregation, we cut down constitutional principles that are now destroying constitutional principles that few people in 1964 imagined would one day be at risk.

Democrats ‘Kavanaughing’ Impeachment Trial As Predicted – John Bolton Leak Came as House Case Was Collapsing
We have seen this show before, it’s all designed to pressure a small number of weak Republican Senators to allow Democrats to turn the Senate into a circus in which the process becomes the punishment.

It has been clear for weeks that the Democrats were seeking to ‘Kavanaugh’ the Senate impeachment trial — to roll out with media help a well-timed series of supposed bombshell accusations whose main purpose was to create a media hysteria to pressure Republican Senators to extend the process.

The process for the nominee, or in the impeachment framework the president, becomes the punishment and the Democrat campaign strategy.

That’s what happened in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. Once it because clear that Kavanaugh would be confirmed and the hearings were closed, a series of accusers — Christine Blasey Ford, Julie Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez, plus anonymous accusers — were rolled out to reopen the hearings and prolong the process. The accusations were absurd and contradicted by all known evidence, but that was not the point. The Democrats, having invented and honed the skill of Borking nominees, wanted to punish the nominee and damage his legitimacy as a Supreme Court Justice.

It’s happening with the Trump impeachment trial. The House case collapsed during the presentation, but even more so during the Saturday presentation by Republicans, as described in VIDEO: Trump trial team exposed Adam Schiff’s lies and manipulation behind impeachment:

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Byron York astutely observes that Senate Democrats are taking the same approach they took in trying to block Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination:

Call it the Brett Kavanaugh model of impeachment. During the Supreme Court justice’s confirmation process, a hearing had already been held, and Kavanaugh appeared on the way to joining the court. Then, up popped a new allegation, the Christine Blasey Ford story, and Democrats demanded the case be reopened, witnesses be interviewed, evidence be gathered, and time be taken for more investigation. Republicans acceded to those demands, and the Kavanaugh confirmation careened off course for a while before GOP lawmakers finally got it back on track…………

First it was Lev Parnas, someone under federal indictment for providing false information. Parnas splashed his opinions about Trump involvement in something nefarious on the conspiracy show Rachel Maddow. And now Parnas has secret tapes. But none of it amounts to anything relevent — Parnas shows that Trump didn’t like or trust the Obama-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. So what? Trump has said that himself. And Trump like every president has a right to appoint his own ambassadors, so there was nothing wrong with it. A big nothing no more worthy than the flimsy accusations of Ford (disproven by the people she said were witnesses) and bizarro-world accusations of Ramirez and others.

Now it’s John Bolton through a supposed leak of a portion of his upcoming book to the NY Times. The Times story has no quote from the book, no specific time frame, and nothing that supports impeachment. The “bombshell” is that Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says. That headline is all the Times needed to kick off a media feeding frenzy being used to pressure Republicans to allow Bolton and other witnesses the House never bothered to subpoena. But there is almost no support for that headline in the actual article. This is that only part of the article that purports to paraphrase the Bolton book:

In his August 2019 discussion with Mr. Bolton, the president appeared focused on the theories Mr. Giuliani had shared with him, replying to Mr. Bolton’s question that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine.

That’s about as specific at The Times article gets, and it doesn’t support the nefarious headline. …………

I would expect that tomorrow there’ll be some new nonsensical bombshell.

I mean it really, people need to read that New York times article. There isn’t a single quote in there from the book. It’s what certain people who say they’ve seen the book, how they characterize it, and then the New York times characterizes it. It’s not even third-hand hearsay because nobody told the New York Times a quote from the book, so it’s, and this is now dominating it. This comes out at a critical juncture just like it did for Kavanaugh. This is the Democrat playbook on how to oppose Trump. Use the media to your advantage to roll things out and disrupt what’s going on.