Friday, November 06, 2020

Communism and Equality of Outcomes

"All communist regimes have experimented with a variety of systems of remuneration and distribution in the attempt to reduce inequalities of outcome or condition among citizens. One thinks here, for example, of early Russian drives towards the levelling of wages and benefits; of the short-lived hopes of substituting moral for material incentives in post- revolutionary Cuba; and of periodic (sometimes catastrophic) attempts in China to restructure the allocation of rewards without inducing either economic stagnation or administrative chaos...

Having conceded that inequalities of outcome, although perhaps diminished, would continue to be a necessary feature of socialist societies for the foreseeable future (at least if economic growth were to be secured), elites then offered the alternative argument that socialism nevertheless promoted distributive justice by giving people more equal access to unequally rewarded positions, in a society still (temporarily and regrettably) characterized by a hierarchy of offices carrying different levels of material advantage...

One obvious illustration is provided by Soviet policy towards entry into higher education, which alternated between egalitarian and meritocratic initiatives. What we now call positive (or reverse) discrimination was often practised in the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes in the distribution of university places. Children of workers and peasants were compensated for cultural and other disadvantages by being awarded studentships irrespective of their educa- tional achievements. At other times, performance in competitive exam- inations was the principal criterion of admission, and the concerns of individual merit were given priority over those of class preference. In this instance, as in other attempts to resolve the tensions between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, most socialist governments pursued a middle course - 'retaining the promise of greater equality in the future, and claiming that much of it has been achieved, while citing the socialist performance principle as a contemporary guide to reward...

Marxist sociologists have been loath to discuss equality of opportunity, on the grounds that Marx himself regarded this as a bourgeois ideal that was irrelevant to the classless communist societies of the future...

In their review of the history and functions of social mobility under real socialism, Wesolowski and Mach (1986: 30) observe that

During the first stage of a socialist regime, a stress on equality of positions as the main characteristic of the new order is of strategic importance for those in authority."

--- Was Communism Good for Social Justice?: A Comparative Analysis of the Two Germanies / Gordon Marshall

Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Links - 3rd November 2020 (Biden & Harris)

I am very far behind in sorting out my links and won't finish the time-sensitive ones before the US election, but here is the current backlog:

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ MrsCaliBlonde™ on Twitter - "The American people deserve to know what Donald Trump is hiding in his tax returns."
"@JoeBiden Weird. Most of America wants to know how your son Hunter.. made billions with zero education, skills and still had time to knock up strippers. Let’s hear THAT story.. Creepy Grampa."

Eric Weinstein on Twitter - "A surprising number of Left-leaning people are confiding to me that they are planning to vote for Trump for two different stated leading reasons:
A) Biden’s Mental decline.
B) What is happening in the Pacific Northwest w Democratic Mayors/Govenors experimenting w non-policing.
Anyone else seeing this? It’s two different reactions. Both of them indicating that there is something catastrophicly wrong with this process. All of them previously *bitterly* opposed to Trump, and many even to the Republican Party."

Melissa Chen - "Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
Basically, what he’s saying is, all Asians look alike.
Looks like it is *he* who can’t distinguish between Americans who can tell Asians apart and Americans who can."

π’œπ“ƒπ‘”π‘’π“⚔️π’²π’Άπ“‡π“‡π’Ύπ‘œπ“‡πŸ¦π’―π“‡π“Šπ“‚π“… on Twitter - "Biden promises to “transform “ the United States if he is elected. He’s been in politics for decades, the White House for 8 years & NOW he’s going to save America??? Raise your hand if you disagree with #SleepyJoeBiden 🏻‍♀️ #Trump2020Victory"

Joe Biden voted to give Robert E. Lee his US citizenship - "Joe Biden, who last week blasted President Trump over a protest to bring down a statue of Robert E. Lee, voted to restore the Confederate general's citizenship early in his Senate career.In 1975, Biden joined a unanimous Senate vote to restore citizenship to Lee, 110 years after the Virginian surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to the Union general and future President Ulysses S. Grant... Voting along with him were segregationists or former segregationists such as Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia — all Democrats — and Sens. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, both Republicans. Biden was a prominent opponent of busing, designed to stop the segregation of schools, and even embraced the concept of segregation in 1975, claiming it was a matter of "black pride." He had recently boasted of his friendships with segregationists... "If you look at what I said, you will see that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general," Trump said. "Whether you like it or not he was one of the great generals. I've spoken to many generals right here at the White House, and many people thought of the generals they think he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.""

Biden Asks Black Reporter If He’s A Junkie On Cocaine - "When a CBS News correspondent on a Yahoo! News panel asked presidential candidate Joe Biden if he was ever tested for “cognitive decline,” Biden dodged the question by asking the black reporter whether or not he took a drug test before participating in the panel... Despite previously claiming that he is “constantly tested” for cognitive decline and even challenging President Trump to compare results on an IQ test, Biden enthusiastically denied that he needed testing and that he was ever tested... Biden’s answers grew increasingly more odd as he stumbled over his words trying to communicate that he is capable of debating Trump."
If Trump had said that...

Federalist Perspectives - Posts - "Black Woman: "I'll NEVER vote for you!"
Joe Biden: "Then, I am afraid... YOU AIN'T BLACK" *sucks the blackness from her*"

Scott Pas - ""Three hardest jobs in America right now
1) Police officer
2) Alaska crab fisherman
3) Sign language interpreter for Joe Biden"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "In the debate last night Joe Biden said that non-violent offenders should not be put in jail. Under that rule no white collar criminal would be sent to prison — Bernie Madoff, Paul Manafort, Gen. Flynn, Martin Shkreli, etc."

Joe Biden's disastrous plans for America's suburbs - "Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned. Starting in 2015, President Barack Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development floated a cookie-cutter requirement for “balanced housing” in every suburb. “Balanced” meant affordable even for people who need federal vouchers. Towns were obligated to “do more than simply not discriminate,” as a 2013 HUD proposal explained. Rather, towns had to make it possible for low-income minorities to choose suburban living and provide “adequate support to make their choices possible.”Had the rule been implemented nationwide, towns everywhere would have had to scrap zoning, build bigger water and sewer lines to support high-density living, expand schools and social services and add mass transit. All pushing up local taxes. Towns that refused would lose their federal aid."

Joe Biden: Democratic candidate apologises for 'racist' comments about Black community - "'What you all know, but most people don’t know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things.'... Biden’s statement plays into a dangerous trope that implies Blackness is a monolith, with Black people seen as a homogenous mass rather than individual actors with their own agency, opinions and agendas. It also pitted two marginalised communities against each other and, as one person pointed out, using the term ‘African American’ can other the Black American community by implying they are not ‘wholly’ American... Biden has historically been enormously popular with Black voters in the US; his political ‘resurrection’ in the race to be Democratic nominee was ‘powered’ by Black voters in South Carolina.But in recent weeks Trump has gained the support of more Black voters, closing the gap between them with that demographic to only an 8 per cent margin."
The euphemism treadmill has progressed!

To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim | The Babylon Bee - "We're tired of trying to out-parody things like "I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to reach in the pool and rub my leg down and watch the hair come back up again" and "Corn Pop was a bad dude."... laugh at these hilarious Babylon Bee headlines from our new best satirist, Joe Biden:
Biden: 'Poor Kids Are Just As Bright As White Kids'
Joe Biden Says All Men And Women Are Created By You Know The Thing Presidential Candidate Nibbles On His Wife's Fingers
Joe Biden: 'I'm Going To Beat Joe Biden'
'Go To Joe 30330' Says Joe
Biden Tells Campaign Rally 'We Choose Truth Over Facts' Joe
Biden Calls Iowa Man 'Fat' And A '[FLOWERBED] Liar'"

Equality For The Elderly: Grampa Simpson Will Now Be Voiced By Joe Biden | The Babylon Bee - "In an ongoing effort to make sure cartoon characters are only voiced by actors who are exactly like them, Abraham "Grampa" Simpson will now be voiced by Joe Biden in all future episodes of The Simpsons. Dan Castellaneta said he would be stepping down from the role in order to make space for a real elderly person with dementia to take the part. As a result, Castellaneta will now only voice approximately 1,429 characters on the show. "Characters with dementia should be voiced by actors with dementia," said a spokesperson for Fox. "It was ableist and discriminatory for us to allow Castellaneta to voice the role for so long without seeking out real, flesh-and-blood people who act exactly like Grampa Simpson in their everyday speech and mannerisms.""

Joe Biden Says He's Running For 'United States Senate' While In South Carolina; Supporters Say It's Rhetorical - "supporters of the Sanders and Warren campaigns went so far as to describe Biden's confused remarks as an example of "elder abuse.""

Here's Joe Biden waving to an empty field 🀷‍♂️ | Not the Bee

Howie Carr: Media continues to cover up Joe Biden's mental decline

WATCH: Famed Marxist Activist Says Biden Candidate Most Prone To Being ‘Pressured’ Into Caving To Leftist Demands - "Marxist activist Angela Davis told a Russian-state propaganda media organization that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would be easier to pressure into caving to the demands of the radical Left than President Donald Trump."

Steve Cioccolanti on Twitter - "BREAKING:A man is reported as dead in an active shooter situation after an attack on a police officer in CaliforniaThe Sheriff's Deputy who was shot is in serious but stable conditionThere is a war on police in America and the Democrat Nominee for President is silent.RT!"
"The reason Biden’s silent is the strategy works 4 him. “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on police in the run up 2 the October Revolution.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn"

Joe Biden Mistakenly Says 120 Million Americans Have Died of Coronavirus - ""If I ever said something so mortifyingly stupid, the Fake News Media would come down on me with a vengeance. This is beyond a normal mistake. Why isn't the media reporting it?" Trump wrote in a tweet with the video... "He just falsely claimed 120 million Americans (more than one-third of the country) died from the coronavirus. This is after he previously claimed 150 million Americans died from guns. He's not playing with a full deck, folks. #BarelyThereBiden"... in May he made a similar mistake during a live-streamed virtual round table on PBS, when he confused the number of lives lost and the number of jobs lost due to the virus."We're in the middle of a pandemic that has cost us more than 85,000 jobs as of today," he said. "Lives of millions of people, millions of people, millions of jobs."... Biden also recently mixed up the name of where the coronavirus is believed to be originated as he referred to Wuhan, China as "Luhan," as well as calling the new virus "COVID-9" instead of COVID-19."

Potential Biden VP Pick Tammy Duckworth Signals Openness To Tearing Down Statues Of Founding Fathers

CNN says Biden campaign gave it edited photo for biographical special - "Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign gave CNN a photo that appears to have edited off the Washington Football Team's former logo to air as part of its recent biographical special on the candidate... D.C.'s  NFL team said in July it would be retiring its “Redskins” name and logo after years of criticism that it is a racist name that refers to Native Americans."
The left has a long history of doctoring photos to falsify history, after all

Former White House stenographer says Biden has 'lost a step' - "Joe Biden’s former White House stenographer said the Democratic presidential nominee has “lost a step” and isn’t as mentally sharp as he was four years ago.“It is a complete difference from what he was in 2017,” Mike McCormick, who worked with the former vice president from 2011 to 2017, told the Washington Free Beacon. “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the same mental acuity as he did four years ago.”“He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy”... McCormick, whose book “Joe Biden Unauthorized” chronicles his time in the White House, told the publication that Biden had a talent for clicking with audiences and would often go off-script, something the nominee doesn’t do anymore. “He’d just make a big joke out of it, and go straight from the hip. And notice, he’s not doing that anymore. He read that [Democratic National Committee speech] verbatim … it’s not Joe Biden anymore,” McCormick said, noting he looks “lost” during interviews now.The Beacon notes how Biden has been sticking to his teleprompter so closely that he reads cues noted in his scripts out loud."

Amid evidence of scripted campaigning, questions about Biden mental stamina, acuity multiply - "President Trump on Thursday chided rival Biden for a nearly seven-second delay in Biden's answer to a video question from a barista in a virtual AFL-CIO Labor Day event. Unable to immediately answer the barista's question, Biden delayed and struggled to find words, instructing an off-camera handler: "Move it up here." It was an apparent request for a more rapid scroll down inside the teleprompter script... Biden also drew questions after Porsche Bennett, an activist with Black Lives Matter, went off-script at a Biden listening event at a church in Kenosha, Wisc. last week because she said she wanted to tell Biden "the truth" about race relations. "I'm just going to be honest, Mr. Biden," Bennett said at the event, held in the town where police shot Jacob Blake, an African-American male. "I was told to go off this paper, but I can't. You need the truth, and I'm part of the truth.""

'Fact check: True': Trump’s approval rating surges during Biden’s convention - "On the Rasmussen Twitter page, it was noted how rare it is to see the other party’s candidate ratings surge during convention week."

Judicial Watch Files Suit after Secret Service Admits to Destroying Records Related to Alleged Biden Altercation with Secret Service Agent - "an unidentified Secret Service agent was suspended for a week in 2009 for “shoving Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him.” “The situation got so heated … that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President”"

Fact Check: Biden Claims 'A Black Man Invented the Light Bulb' During Kenosha Town Hall - "Lewis Latimer, the inventor Biden was probably referring to, is credited with improving Edison’s light bulb but not creating the light bulb itself. “We gotta give people facts,” Biden said during the town hall. “Teach them what’s out there.”"

Biden Supporters Use Guillotine to Chop 'Trump's' Head Off - "I can remember four years ago, people in Indiana had an offensive effigy of Barack Obama in a parade. It became a national news story. All Republicans were forced to denounce it. All Trump supporters were smeared over it, including Trump himself... HERE ARE SOME WHITE JOE BIDEN SUPPORTERS CALLING A BLACK COP 'UNCLE TOM' and WATCH THESE BIDEN SUPPORTERS MAKE A 7-YEAR-OLD TRUMP SUPPORTER CRY AND STEAL HIS HAT. I kinda doubt we'll see any media coverage tough. If this was a MAGA supporter sharing a meme on Facebook, than maybe.
CNN FACT-CHECK: They didn't chop Trump's head off in effigy. They only stuck his head in the guillotine and threatened to chop his head off.
Also, how exactly does the guillotine get to these places? Someone would need to put it in a truck or some other big vehicle, drive it to the protest, assemble it ... with no one noticing. A torture device gets dragged through the streets of liberal cities, and no one thinks twice. Especially in Washington, D.C., where you can't carry a gun ... but you can carry a guillotine.Yet if someone was shows up at a Trump rally with mean words written on a piece of cardboard, we need to have a national conversation about it."

Meme - "The DNC couldn't even find 30 people to cheer for Joe Biden, so they duplicated multiple livestreams..."

TIL Joseph Robinette Biden, 47th Vice President of the United States, is the 5th generation descendant of Maryland slave owner Jesse Robinette through his paternal grandmother Mary Biden (Robinette). Jesse Robinette owned 16 slaves. : BlackLivesMatter

Watch: Joe Biden Stumbles Through Disastrous TV Appearances - "Biden appeared alongside Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and the candidate left Gupta and host Anderson Cooper to stare blankly into the camera as he muttered gibberish.
   BIDEN: “Um, you know, there’s a uh, during World War… Two, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that uh, you know, was totally different than a, than the, the, it’s called, he’s called it a, you know, the World War Two, he had the World, the War Production Board.”...
During the same appearance, he seemed to have difficulty recalling 2001, the year of the terrorist attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania... Biden suffered another awkward moment during his scripted town hall meeting, where he referred to the coronavirus as “COVID-9.”"

Facebook - "Escape The Echo Chamber:
Politicians misspeak. It goes with the job. Biden didn’t used to utter these kinds of nonsensical sentences. At least not that I recall.
——-
“Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 year, look, here's, the lives, it's just, when you think about it.""

Facebook - Tim Pool: "Trump Landslide coming https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/trump-endorsement-letter.iron-range-mayors.pdf
Historically Democrat cities have just formally endorsed Donald Trump
"The area remains the greatest Democratic stronghold in Minnesota after the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul.""
"As Greater Minnesota Mayors from Democratic cities on theIron Range of Minnesota, we write today to formally endorse the re-election of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.Like  many  in  our  region,  we  have voted  forDemocratsover  many  decades.  We have  watched  as  our constituents' jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting  bad  trade  deals,  politicians  like  Joe  Biden  did  nothing  to  help  the  working  class.  We  lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don't recognize the Democratic Party.It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats.We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us.Yet, four years ago, something wonderful happened. Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, and he stood up to China, implemented tax cuts and fought for the working class.Now, four years later, the Iron Range is roaring back to life and for the first time in a very long time, locals are hopeful because of thisPresident's policies and willingness to fight for us.Lifelong politicians like Joe Biden are out of touch with the working class, out of touch with what the country needs, and out of touch with those of us here on the Iron Range and in small towns like ours across our nation.In  this  election,  there  is  a  lot  at  stake,  but  the  biggest  risk  is  our  jobs,  our  economy,  and  our  way  of life.President Trump delivered the best economy in our nation’s history, and President Trump will deliver for us again. He will continue to fight for every American, regardless of party affiliation and continue to stand up for the working class.Today, we write to formally endorse President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for four more years.
Larry Cuffe John Champa Chuck Novak Mayor of Virginia Mayor of Chisholm Mayor of Ely
Chris Swanson Robert Vlaisavljevich Andrea Zupancich Mayor of Two Harbors Mayor of Eveleth Mayor of Babbitt"

Biden tells coal miners to "learn to code"
Lucky he didn't tell journalists this, or he'd be banned from Twitter

Barack Obama reportedly undercuts Biden's 2020 White House run - "Barack Obama publicly endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden — but has privately expressed grave concerns about his former veep’s 2020 White House run, a report said.“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up,” the former president told an unnamed Democrat, who told Politico about the conversation— reportedly reflective of a strained history between the two... “You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” according to former White House communications director Jen Psaki, who recalled other aides chortling at Biden’s frequent gaffes and lack of discipline.That attitude contributed to Obama’s decision to back Hillary Clinton for the party’s 2016 nomination over Biden... When Biden threw his hat in the 2020 presidential mix last year, Obama kept his distance for months — and continued to talk him down behind the scenes.During the run-up to this year’s Iowa caucuses, one Biden rival told Politico, Obama privately reminisced about the bond he formed with the state’s voters during his 2008 campaign.But Biden struggled to grasp the electorate, #44 reportedly said. “You know who really doesn’t have it?” “Joe Biden.”"

George W. Bush Spox Denies NYT Article Claiming He Won’t Vote For Trump - "much was made of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s announcement that he’d vote for Biden, as if that was shocking news after he voted for Obama twice, and Hillary Clinton. So, is it really earth-shattering news that Colin Powell, who hasn’t voted Republican in the previous 3 elections, won’t in 2020? Is he even a Republican anymore?"

Election 2020: Joe Biden has MORE senior moments at Michigan rally - "'Sleepy' Joe Biden was caught napping twice during a rally in Michigan on Saturday, missing his cue to appear on stage and then forgetting his mask as he walked off it.The 77-year-old was speaking at a rally in Flint alongside Barack Obama when he suffered the 'senior moments', just the latest in a series of gaffes that have dogged his presidential run and raised questions over his mental capacity... During the rally itself, Biden also appeared to stumble over the word 'healthcare' while lining up a shot at the newest member of the Supreme Court - a Trump nominee - Amy Coney Barrett. 'Donald Trump thinks health care is a privilege, Barack and I think it's a right to have badakathcare,' he said... Biden - who was wearing a mask as he emerged before removing to speak - appeared to forget he hadn't put it back on as he departed... Biden slipped up at a rally in Philadelphia - touting his links to the state by boasting 'I married a Philly girl' before pointing to his jacket.'By the way, I've got my Eagles jacket on,' he said, pointing to the logo on his windbreaker.In fact, the symbol was not the Philadelphia Eagles' logo but that of his alma mater, the Delaware Blue Hens... Biden was addressing a virtual concert when he appeared to forget who he was running against, telling viewers 'we need to stop four more years of George.'... It comes just two days after the former Vice President said during a campaign video: 'We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.'"

Biden will bring woke to the White House - "a number of liberal commentators known for their opposition to woke culture have called for a vote for Joe Biden. As the headline in an Atlantic piece written by Yascha Mounk puts it: ‘Hate woke? Vote Biden.’ Many of these writers acknowledge that Biden’s Democratic Party is associated with woke, and that Donald Trump has been a vocal antagonist of it. But they see two positive arguments, specifically related to woke culture, for voting Biden. First, these writers argue that woke is largely a response to Trump... Secondly, they claim that Biden is a moderate, and not supportive of woke... they fail to appreciate how deeply these views are already entrenched within the American liberal elite, including the Democratic Party and Biden himself.For a start, these writers seem to forget that woke began under the presidency of Barack Obama, well before Trump. Many cite 2014, the year of the Ferguson riots and the formation of Black Lives Matter, as the start of the ‘Great Awokening’. As researcher Zach Goldberg has documented, terms such as ‘micro-aggression’ and ‘white privilege’ skyrocketed in use in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post before spreading across elite society... The origins of wokeness can be traced even further back in time, before 2014. In many ways, woke is an outgrowth of identity politics and ‘political correctness’ – phenomena that began in earnest in the 1990s. Though the fundamental concepts underlying woke were established decades ago, what makes woke different from its earlier manifestations is its coercive and punitive character. We have gone from ‘you can’t say that’ to ‘you must say this – or suffer the consequences’. Chatterton Williams and others write about the ‘worst excesses’ of woke. But what about woke isn’t excessive? That is in its DNA. Pluckrose and others refer to ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ social-justice activists. But the entire ideology is radical and extreme in the way it corrodes social solidarity. Woke ideology is built on identity politics, which is the antithesis of the civil-rights movement and other past movements against social oppression. There is no ‘non-extreme’ version of woke that can be salvaged... As I and others argued in 2016, the emergence of Trump was in many respects a response to the elite embrace of political correctness and woke. The vote for Trump was energised, in particular, by Hillary Clinton’s use of the word ‘deplorables’, through which she dismissed vast swathes of the working class for being insufficiently woke... Biden certainly comes from a more moderate, centrist section of the Democrats. It’s also true that he has not been as outspoken in support of woke ideas as, say, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t committed to the ideas that his party and its backers have embraced.A common view is that the threat that Biden represents is that, once in office, he will not be strong enough to withstand pressure from his left. There is an element of truth in this. A vice-president Harris and others will most likely push this agenda. Over his 47 years in politics, Biden has proven to be unprincipled and politically malleable, and he knows which way the wind blows today. More to the point, a vote for Biden is a vote for a huge administrative bureaucracy that will be filled with Democratic appointees infused with this outlook. But this argument misses the more central truth: that Biden himself is fully on-board with these woke ideas. His track record demonstrates that.When you consider Biden’s decisive role in promoting unjust sexual-assault policies on college campuses, he has a strong claim to being called the Grandfather of Woke... As KC Johnson, author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, has put it: ‘Perhaps no major American political figure has so consistently championed the erosion of due process of those accused of sexual misconduct.’ Biden has also been at the forefront of the campaign to promote transgender ideology. In January of this year, he tweeted: ‘Let’s be clear: transgender equality is the civil-rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.’ Not only does Biden declare trans to be the civil-rights issue, but this supposed moderate also adds a characteristically woke note of stridency and menace when he states there is ‘no room for compromise’... Biden is also supportive of today’s racial politics. He has rejected Black Lives Matters’ call to ‘defund the police’, but in most respects he sings from the same hymn sheet. In his first debate with Trump, he notably referred to ‘equity’ – woke-speak for reverse discrimination – as opposed to the traditional progressive call for ‘equality’. The writers with high hopes for a Biden presidency like to point out that he condemned violent rioting. What they overlook is how Biden refused to criticise BLM, Antifa and others, who have been behind the vast majority of violence and destruction, including deaths. Instead, he blamed ‘extreme right-wing militias’ who were ‘aligned with white supremicists’... this ‘anti-woke for Biden’ outlook underestimates the extent to which woke has been incorporated by the mainstream of the American liberal elite. Think of all of the institutions that espouse woke ideas: the New York Times, the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard, Google, even Wall Street banks. Is it likely that Biden will in any way stand up to this? And the woke rot goes far deeper than most elite American institutions. It has infiltrated our communities, in local government and our schools. The other day my son, a high-school teen, received an assignment – in health class – that required him to list his privileges, and thus express his white guilt... The reality is that woke is a major cultural and social phenomenon. In some respects, it is pre-political in nature, calling into question foundational things like child-rearing, religious beliefs and personal relationships – things that were once taken for granted as arenas that allowed for personal autonomy and privacy. And it’s not the government that has been doing most of the cancelling these days. It is companies and other social organisations. Woke is divisive at the local and personal level, setting neighbour against neighbour. To combat the culture war that woke represents, the battle will need to be waged beyond the White House and beyond the political sphere. But that said, the political realm has an impact on the extent to which notions like woke may become institutionalised or not. Since 2016, there has been a balance of power: the illiberal left has dominated the cultural sphere while there has been conservative advantage in representative government. The lords of US culture pretend that the majority goes along with their identity politics on issues of race, sex and gender. But the mere existence of Trump in the White House has been a stark reminder that not everyone in the US shares their outlook... If Biden and the Democrats win, this messy balance of culture and politics will end: cultural and political power will be united in one party and the predominant ideology of that party is woke. Facing less political opposition, it is easy to see how woke ideas will become institutionalised to an even greater extent. The progressives will take Biden’s win as an endorsement of woke. Woke will worsen under Biden."

Biden blunders could hand the election to Trump - "A new round of riots in Philadelphia overnight and Joe Biden’s opposition to fracking could swing Pennsylvania to Donald Trump, opening a path for a Trump victory... Law and order has been Trump’s top theme. Middle-class American voters watched nervously as police departments backed away from confronting rioting and looting in dozens of American cities. Thirty Philadelphia police officers suffered injuries the night of October 26 after rioters took to the streets following the police shooting of a black man armed with a knife.Most of the police injuries came from bricks and other missiles hurled at them, suggesting that police were under orders from Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney not to defend themselves. A female police officer was in hospital with a broken leg after a protester driving a pickup truck collided with her... Two-thirds of American voters have told pollsters that public order is a crucial issue for them"

WATCH: Joe Biden pledges to mobilize 'trunalimunumaprzure'

Trump's Non-Stop Campaign Schedule Versus Biden's Basement Strategy Is Paying Off

Is America ready to return to the Obama-Biden foreign policy? - "With some 44 years of collective government service as a U.S. senator and vice president, Joe Biden has amassed a substantial foreign and national security record. An examination of some of his key votes as senator and performance as vice president does not provide a ringing endorsement for his presidential candidacy. Instead, it raises serious questions about whether his votes and decisions detrimentally affected the U.S. economy, U.S. national security, and international peace and security... Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, raised serious questions about Biden’s security judgments. In his 2014 book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” Gates wrote that “he (Biden) has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” In 2000 Biden championed and voted for President Clinton’s initiative to normalize trade relations with China and facilitated its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. China’s economic rise contributed to the closing of some 60,000 U.S. factories.The Economic Policy Institute reported that it also cost about 3.7 million U.S. jobs, mostly in the manufacturing sector.In 2001 and 2002, Biden voted for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars... What did the world look like after eight years of Obama/Biden? The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index provided a general assessment. It reported a decade-long decline in peace, with terrorism at an all-time high, battle deaths from conflict at a 25-year high and the number of refugees at a level not seen in 60 years.The U.S. State Department reported a 34 percent growth in foreign terrorist organizations since Obama/Biden took office in 2009, with about 75 percent of them operating in Muslim-majority countries.Freedom House reported that as of 2016, global freedom had declined for 10 consecutive years, with press freedom at its lowest point in 12 years. Of the world’s 7.3 billion people at the time, only 40 percent lived in freedom and only 13 percent enjoyed a free press."

Opinion | Biden says voters don’t deserve to know his position on court-packing. That’s unacceptable. - The Washington Post - "Biden suggests court-packing is an idea Republicans have come up with to distract the American people during the presidential campaign. Sorry, it was Senate Democrats who raised the prospect last year... Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), said during the primaries that she was “absolutely open” to packing the court. Democratic Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) are all on record saying much the same. And Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) warned just a few weeks ago that if Republicans confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, “Everything is on the table.” It is Democrats, not Republicans, who have raised the issue... Biden instead said the Republican effort to confirm Barrett is “the court-packing the public should be focused on.” Sorry, filling existing vacancies is not court-packing... There is no justification for Democrats to use her untimely passing as one of their pretexts for court-packing — an idea Ginsburg abhorred... Ginsburg was not alone in criticizing FDR’s 1937 court-packing attempt. At a 1983 hearing, Biden called it “a bonehead idea” and a “terrible, terrible mistake” that would have called into question the court’s independence. In a 1987 speech, Biden praised Democrats for standing up to Roosevelt and approvingly quoted the report issued by the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee, which called FDR’s proposal “an invasion of judicial powers … which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of a free people in America.” In a 2005 floor speech, Biden said of FDR’s court-packing gambit, “It took an act of courage on the part of his own party institutionally to stand up against this power grab.”Well, today it is members of his own party in Congress who are pushing this power grab. Will Biden have the courage to stand up to it?Voters deserve to know."

The Biden Town Hall Was a Total Sham, Questioners Included a Former Obama Admin Speechwriter - "If you watched both the Biden town hall on ABC and the Trump town hall on NBC, you likely noticed they couldn’t have been more different. Trump was repeatedly interrupted by moderator Savannah Guthrie, who attempted to fact-check him while he was answering questions, while Joe Biden was given free rein to speak by George Stephanopoulos. Guthrie, before even having any of the voters at the event ask a question, wasted time with questions about Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, QAnon, and repeated the many-times-debunked accusation that Trump hasn’t denounced white supremacy. It was a full twenty minutes before she even allowed the first voter to ask a question... two attendees of NBC’s town hall with Biden were presented as undecided voters, despite having told the network they were Biden supporters. But the mainstream media is less interested in these incidents and have instead focused on the woman who was seen nodding behind Trump throughout his town hall, even though she never asked a question. The anti-Trump bias of both town halls is further demonstrated by the fact that Trump was fact-checked 45 times during his town hall, while Biden was only fact-checked ten times, according to an analysis by USA Today. Guthrie also asked 43 questions of Trump, while voters only got to ask ten."

Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe: Hunter Biden Laptop, Emails Not Russian Disinformation - "Director Of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox Business on Monday morning that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails are not part of a Russian disinformation campaign. "It’s funny that some of the people that complained the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing intelligence and unfortunately in this case, it is Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who as you pointed out on Friday said that the intelligence community believes that Hunter Biden’s laptop and e-mails on it are part of some Russian disinformation campaign," he said. "Let me be clear, the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports and we shared no intelligence with chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It’s simply not true.""

The Biden Family Business: Corruption - "In Profiles in Corruption, Peter Schweizer points out that the Biden family’s wealth “depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.” Biden’s sister has headed up a political messaging firm, to which “two and a half million dollars flowed … from Citizens for Biden and Biden for President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone”... Meanwhile, Biden’s brothers have capitalized on his public “service” through a variety of lobbying gigs and sketchy businesses. Hunter Biden got a million-dollar job on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas firm without a lick of experience in that field. And Biden’s brother James became an executive at a construction firm even though he had little to no experience in construction, according to Schweizer: “James Biden was joining Hillstone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq.” Brother Frank, though he had no experience in education, used his last name to get a job with a dubious charter school management firm that raked in millions of dollars from federal grants during the Obama years — all while his brother feigned opposition to such expenditures."

Inside Hunter Biden's murky history of business dealings in China

Senate report links Hunter Biden to trafficking ring - "a woman who was suing Biden for paternity in Arkansas was a former stripper at a Washington, DC, club that he frequented around the time he was dating the widow of his late brother, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden."

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Biden asks for break every 30 minutes; Trump campaign asks for inspections for ear piece on Biden

Joe Biden And Kamala Harris Both Refer To 'Harris Administration' During Public Speeches

Steve Guest on Twitter - "Joe Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon refuses to deny that Biden uses a teleprompter in interviews"

Leaked Call Reveals Biden Risked National Security To Sabotage Trump - "A recently leaked phone call between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko directly after the 2016 presidential election shows that Biden sought to sabotage the incoming Trump administration before Donald Trump even took office, and much worse... [He] attempted to set up a foreign policy backchannel for himself after he left office as a private citizen, which could violate the Logan Act.The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in U.S. foreign policy, although its constitutionality remains questionable and no person has ever been convicted of violating it since it was signed into law in 1799. Ironically, this is the same act that, at Joe Biden’s suggestion, the FBI accused National Security Advisor Michael Flynn of violating as a result of a discussion Flynn had with the Russian ambassador to the United States around nearly the same time as Biden’s call with Poroshenko... All of this took place while his son, Hunter Biden, was on the payroll of a Ukrainian energy firm for which he admitted he had no related experience."

Biden Promises Fewer Fires, Floods, Hurricanes if He Wins - "Although Biden excoriated Trump for “ignoring the facts” and “denying reality,” he focused his remarks on the wildfires ravaging California, Oregon, and Washington State — fires exacerbated by bad forest management more than any sort of climate change... As Ars Technica’s Scott Johnson reported, a Stanford research team found that about 20 percent of California — 20 million acres — would benefit from controlled burns.Climate activists have opposed the harvesting of dead trees and the aggressive clearing of brush, however. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) vetoed forest management attempts in 2016. California’s forests don’t get the work they need because private landowners fear liability for controlled burns, CAL FIRE doesn’t have enough resources to prioritize controlled burns, and stringent climate regulations make it difficult for proposed burns to get approved. President Trump has encouraged California to use proper forest management to combat the wildfires. He noted that forest fires are “starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”Biden condemned Trump for his common-sense advice, suggesting that the president was blaming the victims... Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, noted that California “has experienced megadroughts lasting as long as 220 years over the past 1,100 years — a period before the advent of SUVs and fossil fuel power plants.”... Although the Midwest did experience devastating floods last year, floods in that area are not exactly new. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, and it came only a few decades after the invention of the automobile... As for hurricanes, many peer-reviewed studies have disputed the notion that carbon emissions make hurricanes worse. Yet Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) suggested that “there were no hurricanes” hitting New York before the devastating impacts of climate change. Yet analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 to 1438, long before the internal combustion engine... California’s rolling blackouts provide concrete evidence that a forced transition to green energy makes energy more expensive and more scarce for a society. Biden’s energy policies could bring California’s rolling blackouts to the rest of America. Far from preventing tragedies, his policies would actually create them."

Biden's Glass-House COVID Criticisms of Trump - "Joe Biden will say anything that scrolls across his teleprompter. How else to explain his reckless charge that Donald Trump is not only responsible for every American life lost to COVID-19 but that “the president failed to do his job on purpose.”Instead of accusing his opponent of murder, Biden should be demonstrating humility since no one knows better than he the difficulty of responding to a global pandemic. In 2009, Biden and President Obama were confronted with the H1N1 virus, which ultimately took at least 18,449 lives... The administration failed to deliver a vaccine as promised. It distributed but never replenished the nation’s stockpile of protective gear, putting us behind the eight ball when COVID-19 erupted. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain summed up the response last year: “We did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time and it is just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass-casualty events in American history. [It] had nothing to do with us doing anything right; just had to do with luck [that the virus wasn’t as deadly as feared].”... Biden and his stenographers in the mainstream media insistently claim that Trump has blood on hands because he did not pursue some mythical perfect response to COVID-19. If we want to play that game, then yes, our death rate would be much lower if Trump had coupled a complete shutdown of the border in January with a massive program of contact tracing and testing. That might be the way to go when the next pandemic strikes.But no public figure, including Biden, proposed such a measure. Instead, Democrats attacked Trump’s efforts to contain the virus. The day after Trump’s Jan. 31 announcement of travel restrictions on flights from China, Biden said: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”... More problematic is their related suggestion that the president’s rose-colored comments and refusal to wear a mask inspired Americans to take reckless risks that resulted in death. This claim might make a smidgen of sense if most of the COVID hot spots weren’t in deep blue areas. Even today, the four hardest hit states are the Democrat strongholds of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Twelve of the top 15 states have Democrat governors – two are led by Republicans, the other is the almost monolithically Democrat District of Columbia. Although the Washington Post gleefully reported on Sept. 3 that this blue state dominance appeared to be ending as “seven in 10 new coronavirus cases are emerging in red states,” the article also reported that half of the cases were appearing in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton"

Joe Biden’s Me-Too Covid Plan - WSJ - "Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal to Americans who have grown tired during the pandemic of Donald Trump’s persona and behavior. The Democratic nominee is also promising a better virus strategy, which would be wonderful if he had one. But the virus plan he’s pushing is little different on the substance than what the Trump Administration is already doing. President Trump’s biggest mistake in the pandemic has been his own shifting rhetorical leadership... It seems Mr. Biden’s main policy difference is that he’d impose a national mask mandate. We’re all for wearing masks in public settings, but businesses and states that mandate them have struggled to enforce compliance. The Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the police powers to do so in any case. A highly contagious and deadly virus is a hard problem for any democracy, as the Obama-Biden Administration learned in its manifest failure dealing with the less deadly H1N1 virus in 2009. Despite his partisan boasts, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made many mistakes in the pandemic, including the catastrophic decision to send Covid-19 patients back to nursing homes. New York state still leads the country by far in the number of Covid deaths."

Iran Behind Hack Attacks, Online Disinformation Campaigns to Boost Biden

STUDY: 150 TIMES More Negative News on Trump than Biden - "If you consider the evening newscasts a reliable gauge of the liberal media at large (cable news, big newspapers, etc.), it means Biden has enjoyed an army of so-called journalists conducting a massive negative information campaign against his opponent, while he is sheltered from any scrutiny. Controversies from the spring, such as allegations from former staffer Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, completely disappeared from his evening news coverage in June and July. Biden’s various policy proposals — which by his own admission would take his administration farther to the Left than the very liberal Obama administration — received a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist. There were no labels of Biden as “progressive,” “left-wing,” or even “liberal” on any of these newscasts, either; reporters also neglected to tell viewers how much the Democrat would raise taxes if he were elected (spoiler: more than $4 trillion).Biden’s plan for $700 billion more federal spending (what he called “investments”), announced July 9, received a scant 40 seconds of evening news airtime (25 seconds on ABC, 15 seconds on CBS, nothing on NBC). When he outlined his massively expensive ($2 trillion) plan to combat climate change on July 14, it received six seconds, all of it on CBS. If the networks weren’t scrutinizing Biden’s policies or his character, what accounted for his 58 minutes of airtime? Conveniently for the candidate, a plurality of it (23.5 minutes, or 40%) consisted of showcasing his near-daily criticisms of Trump. Conversely, only 88 seconds of Trump’s 512 minutes of airtime consisted of relaying his criticisms of Biden (a minuscule 0.25%)... No presidential candidate — not even Barack Obama in 2008 — has ever been on the receiving end of such a wide array of media favors. (While Obama received highly positive coverage, there was no massive media effort to destroy his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain.)"

The China election | Spectator USA - "Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis. Instead of importing democratic accountability, China exported its model of authoritarianism to the world... look no further than the myriad ways the Chinese Communist party has been subtly waging its offensive on various fronts — economics and finance, information, technology, global diplomacy, and education, in what former Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding has termed a stealth war. This version of modern warfare is fought not with bullets and bombs but with bytes and pixels, and dollars and yuans. For the average American, it has and will continue to have a real impact on everyday life, from the availability of jobs to the price of certain goods, from the tech apps you can use to what you can and cannot say on social media (as Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey found out), from the supply of fentanyl decimating our communities to what the internet will look like, from the content of your university courses to the plots of the movies you consume.Racial fault lines and fissures in our culture wars are exploited by armies of propagandists and trolls employed by a Chinese state which seeks to further weaken an already fragile social fabric. This materializes as chaos on the streets and edges the country closer to a civil war. American businesses are learning their lessons too as the CCP escalates corporate intimidation tactics, using access to its huge market as leverage for its political bidding... The Trump administration’s move to ban TikTok and WeChat prompted critical headlines about the end of the open internet and the dawn of the ‘splinternet’, where cyberspace is balkanized into several geopolitical entities circumscribed by digital borders. Such analyses overlook that, from a trade reciprocity standpoint, China has since 2009 banned US social media networks and content platforms including Facebook, Github, YouTube and Netflix. So uncoupling our internet from China’s access is less about ‘sinking to their level’ than it is about enforcing an ethos of openness... For the last four years, the Trump administration’s approach to China has departed sharply from the previous decades of engagement that saw every administration greet the rise of the sleeping giant as, in the words of Joe Biden, ‘a positive development’ instead of as an existential threat... China featured heavily over four nights of the Republican National Convention. Who could forget the moving sight of blind Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Guang Cheng addressing the podium, castigating the policy of appeasement of former administrations which he said had ‘allowed the CCP to infiltrate and corrode different aspects of the global community?’... In contrast, China was barely a single blip on the Democratic National Convention radar. The C words just got one mention in Joe Biden’s acceptance speech."

Joe Biden Needs a Kshama Sawant Moment - "In the 1992 presidential campaign, presumptive Democratic nominee Bill Clinton clearly and unreservedly denounced a Black rapper named Sister Souljah who had called for the killing of white people. Moreover, Clinton did so at a gathering of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, where Souljah herself had spoken the previous day. Jackson was furious at Clinton, but the incident reassured voters that the Arkansas governor wasn’t beholden to the furthest left elements of his coalition. Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” became political shorthand for having the courage—and basic tactical good sense—to call out lunatic extremism on one’s own side.Today’s Democratic presidential nominee faces a similar conundrum, though on a far larger scale. The past three months of urban unrest across America—the cost of repairing the destruction, mostly to small businesses, is currently put at $1 billion—has placed Joe Biden and the party he leads in a difficult position, which they seem eager to evade and deny. The early and unquestioned embrace by Democratic Party elites of Black Lives Matter, as well as the broader, inchoate movement seeking what is invariably described as a “racial reckoning” across all sectors of American society, has left many of the party’s spokesmen and elected officials unable to delineate where legitimate protest against police brutality ends and violent anarchism led by black-clad antifa rioters begins. This predicament is worse in cities where Democratic mayors and city councilors sympathetic to BLM and antifa have not only praised the rioters, but in some cases endorsed demands that the police be defunded... While repeatedly denouncing “right-wing militias and white supremacists and vigilantes,” however, Biden declined to call out the far-left groups that have caused the vast majority of the destruction, nor the figures in the media, academy and entertainment worlds who have provided the anarchists and violent looters with ideological air cover. One of the cities worst affected by a summer of chaos was Seattle, where Police Chief Carmen Best—a 30-year veteran of the force and its first Black woman leader—resigned earlier this month after the city council moved to strip her department of 100 officers and slash her salary by 40%. The Seattle chapter of BLM, with whom Best had developed a positive working relationship during her tenure, decried the top cop’s departure as a “loss” and the council’s effort to undercut her as one that “prioritize[ed] performative action that solely suggests the appearance of change.”The main driver behind the effort to expel Seattle’s first Black woman police chief was City Councilor Kshama Sawant. A member of the Socialist Alternative party and supporter of Bernie Sanders in this year’s Democratic presidential primary, Sawant was one of the most prominent public officials to embrace the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone, Seattle’s brief experiment in police-free, utopian living—that Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan originally defended as having a “block party atmosphere” and compared to “the Summer of Love”—and whose signal legacy was the murder of Black teenagers. “Two African American men are dead, at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter,” Best said at the time, lamenting how the city’s politicians were preventing her from doing her job. “But they’re gone, they’re dead now.” Kshama Sawant enunciated a different view. “Though we await confirmation of the details of the killing, there are indications that this may have been a right-wing attack,” she said in a statement after the first shooting, which authorities have since pinned on another Black teenager. Alongside President Donald Trump, Sawant alleged, Mayor Jenny Durkan and Chief Best also “share responsibility for having portrayed our protest movement as violent.”... After the second murder of a young Black man in the “peaceful Capitol Hill occupation” in as many weeks, Sawant blamed the killing on “capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.” Meanwhile, when an Asian American constituent initiated a petition to recall Sawant, whom he decried as “the leftist version of the right-wing version of Trump,” the cinema where he worked fired him. Herewith, then, a modest proposal for the man seeking to defeat Donald Trump: Direct your campaign plane to Seattle, call a press conference with Carmen Best at your side, and unreservedly denounce Kshama Sawant in a speech to the people of Seattle... If he can pull it off, Joe Biden’s Kshama Sawant Moment would be far more powerful than Bill Clinton’s rebuke of Sister Souljah nearly three decades ago. In 1992, Sister Souljah was well outside the mainstream—an entertainer babbling incoherent revolutionary slogans. There was no critical mass of officials within elite institutions backing her call to kill white people. It was political theater... Today, however, bad things are happening—and there are countless Kshama Sawants occupying positions of power and influence in American life. These petty tyrants run entire departments at some of our most prestigious universities, dictate the ethical standards in critical government agencies, and control the curriculum for millions of students in the country’s public school systems. Sawant’s votaries have taken over what used to be the country’s paper of record (where Dwight David Eisenhower, the original anti-fascist, is now referred to as “yet another white male figure from an era dominated by white men”) and rule the roost at most other well-funded media outlets. Corporate titans tremble at their feet; U.S. senators bow down to their will. Next time you’re walking down a deserted downtown street and espy the BLM signs dutifully pasted over the boarded-up store windows, ask yourself: Do those really look like the expressions of solidarity they’re purportedly meant to be? When Sawant likened Carmen Best’s Seattle police force to one in the Jim Crow-era South—“where law enforcement across the country did not lift a finger to stop the KKK’s lynch mobs, and often participated in them”—it read not only like the musings of a collegiate Marxist, but The New York Times op-ed page on any given morning. A few weeks ago, a journalist at National Public Radio interviewed the author of a book in favor of looting as if she had written about hot yoga or any other bourgeois-bohemian hobby. But this was no more ridiculous than the NPR contributor who, earlier in the summer, urged listeners to “decolonize your bookshelf,” a process of “actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.” Only five years ago, most observers rolled their eyes when a mob of Yale undergraduates surrounded a renowned professor in a courtyard and hurled verbal abuse at him for over two hours, all because of an utterly innocuous email his wife had composed questioning the university’s intrusion into the all-important matter of Halloween costumes. “What privileged brats!” seemed to be the broad consensus at the time... Today, the screaming student in the Yale quad is the screaming reporter in the American newsroom. The foisting upon the entire country of crackpot texts like White Fragility and How to Be an Anti-Racist, the abject terror of academics that their careers will be destroyed should they question any aspect of these poisonous bromides, the cynical and transparent efforts by the mass media and leading Democratic politicians like Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi to downplay the rioting (when not ignoring it entirely)—all stand in the way of what should be an easy victory for the former vice president. Biden needs to assure the country that the past four months of cancellations, forced confessions, efforts to revise American history as if it were akin to Nazi Germany, and other attempts by the woke left to coerce ideological conformity within every institution it’s allowed to control, will not be welcome under his presidency... Contrary to the Russiagate dead-enders who have become the Democratic Party equivalent of the QAnon cult, insisting that half the country was duped into voting for Donald Trump in 2016 by a secret conspiracy involving a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook ads and therefore his entire presidency is “illegitimate,” the millions of undecided voters who will determine this election are not actually stupid or deranged: They see with their own eyes how leaders within liberal institutions have wilted when confronted with mau-mauing from the woke left. In June, when a group of Times reporters seized upon a bit of Marcusian jargon that, if implemented in newsrooms, would spell the death of journalism as we know it—the notion that “speech is violence”—and leveraged this against an editor along with the extortionist claim that his publishing a piece of writing they did not like “put black lives in danger,” nothing was stopping Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger from defending the principle of open debate other than his own fear of being called a “white supremacist” by some of the people whose paychecks he signs. Sulzberger’s cowardice was par for the course among the liberal establishment, whose leaders have repeatedly shown what happens when progressives confront them with such tactics: They surrender. That anyone should have to call on Joe Biden to denounce the crazies in an election year itself seems crazy. The vast majority of Americans, including racial minorities, believe political correctness is a problem. Majorities across racial and ethnic groups oppose the consideration of race or ethnicity in college admissions. Only 22% of Blacks think abolishing the police is a good idea"

Kamala Harris believed Joe Biden’s accusers — until she didn’t - "Harris beefed up her #MeToo credentials later, making it clear she doesn’t just believe women accusing Republicans of sexual assault. All women had to be believed, including those who accused prominent Democrats. At a campaign event in Nevada in April 2019, Harris discussed the allegations against Biden, declaring of the accusers: “I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.”So Biden is an abuser — because women have accused him, and all women should be believed. Right?So what has changed since then? Sexual assault and harassment are some of the most serious allegations that can be leveled against a man. Harris now needs to account for why she is comfortable joining an abuser’s 2020 ticket. This isn’t some debate-stage policy disagreement she can just walk back, claiming she has “evolved.” There are only two possibilities. One is that Harris didn’t, in fact, believe Biden’s accusers but claimed she did to score political points against him. If so, she used the very serious issue of sexual assault as a cheap political cudgel.The other possibility is that she still believes the ex-veep’s accusers but is comfortable teaming up with an abuser (not to mention a racist, another charged accusation Harris has thrown Biden’s way). After Harris ended her own bid and Biden emerged as the presumptive nominee, she began subtly backtracking... Note well the new standard: When the accusation is against a Republican foe, a woman is automatically to be believed, period, no questions asked. But when an accusation is less politically expedient, women are owed no more than the right to be “heard,” and the accused men deserve a fair hearing, as well.That’s disgusting. How we treat assault and abuse allegations shouldn’t depend on the personal ambitions of Kamala Harris... For the last several years, progressives have repeatedly claimed they seek the moral high ground against a Republican president with a checkered past with women. That moral high ground is now lost.The fact that Harris so eagerly climbed aboard Joe’s bus says something about her character and what she really thinks about #MeToo. Far from the feminist icon she portrayed herself as during the Kavanaugh hearings, she personifies the left’s weaponization of assault for political ends. The biggest losers in this game are true victims of assault and abuse, who now face an even more daunting climb to being believed.Harris’ addition to the Biden ticket, then, is not a great feminist achievement. Rather, it is a harsh blow to the feminist cause. Her decision to join Biden after accusing him of assault underscores, in a damning and irreversible way, how unseriously her party takes these issues when there are political ambitions at stake."

FACT CHECK: Trump Never Promoted Kamala Harris Birther Story - "Brian Stelter wants us to believe that anti-Trump media doesn’t exist, but on Friday, his own network published a “fact check” that claims Trump “promoted” a birther conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris... CNN claims that Trump promoted the conspiracy theory, but he wasn’t even the one who brought it up—the reporter did. And he not only said he assumed Democrats would have properly vetted her, but twice he said he only just heard about it and doesn’t know anything about the claims. This is CNN equating Trump answering a question about it with actively promoting it."

Vivian on Twitter - "She could literally be Hitler and the Biden/Hitler combo would still be a better choice than Trump." "neoliberals remain committed to being utterly beyond parody"
Comment (elsewhere): "Leftists: Trump is literally Hitler
Also Leftists:"

Kamala Harris, ‘pranked’ by Russian comedians posing as Greta Thunberg, ‘accepts’ hoax kompromat on Trump - "The duo then claim they have “dirt” on Trump that could prove helpful to Harris, in the form of a recording of the president telling Thunberg “you will never achieve your goal.”... After Greta offers her support to Harris’s campaign, ‘Svante’ tells the senator that the conversation between Trump and his daughter was recorded and asks if the recording would be helpful to her. Harris appears to accept the offer. “That would be wonderful,” she says. She also accepts an offer from ‘Greta’ to testify against Trump... Vovan and Lexus have managed to prank other politicians and get past the usually strict security measures, mainly offering criticism of Trump when they do so. They’ve spoken to both Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California)... Given she’s been one of many Democrats accusing Trump of colluding with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, accepting “dirt” on the man ahead of a 2020 campaign is not a good look, as many on social media have pointed out"

Kamala Harris ripped for flip-flopping on rioters after she asked for donations to bail them out of jail - "Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris asked supporters in June to donate to Minnesota rioters who were arrested, in a tweet now earning her criticism after condemning rioters’ violence this weekend... Over the weekend, Harris and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence seen in recent days, specifically in Portland, Oregon, where one person was shot dead Saturday night... “Kamala Harris helped violent rioters in Minnesota get out of jail to do more damage,” Cotton tweeted. “Don't believe her when she says she ‘condemns the violence’ — look at her record, not her words.”... “Remember: Joe Biden called them ‘peaceful protesters.’ Kamala Harris raised money to bail violent rioters out of jail. And they both continue to oppose @realDonaldTrump's plan to send in the National Guard to finally end these violent riots once and for all”... "As vice president, Joe Biden oversaw cuts to police funding, and now as a candidate, he says he wants to redirect funding away from police. His staff mocked police as worse than ‘pigs,’ called for defunding the police, and now, we know his campaign and Kamala Harris helped bail out violent criminals, rapists, and would-be cop killers"... Support for Black Lives Matter protests has been slipping in recent months, according to a poll out of Wisconsin.Forty-eight percent of Wisconsin residents support Black Lives Matter protests and 48% disapprove, according to a Marquette Law School poll conducted between Aug. 8 and Aug. 9"

Defund the Police? Make the Police VP? : PoliticalCompassMemes

Party Of The Poor And Oppressed Nominates Old, Rich, White Man And Cop | The Babylon Bee - "The party that claims to represent minorities, the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized has nominated an old, rich, white man and a cop, sources confirmed Tuesday."If you want to fight for oppressed minority groups, you must vote for this rich, old, white man who authored the 1994 crime bill and this corrupt police officer who has made a career out of throwing minorities in jail for non-violent drug crimes," said a DNC spokesperson. "It's the only way to fight the establishment." According to sources at the DNC, the old white guy you're supposed to vote for, in order to show that you love and respect women, has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by several women. "Several photos circulating on the internet demonstrate proof-positive that Joe Biden loves women and children very much," wrote Snopes, the internet's premiere fact-checkers."

Appalling Apostolic Memes for Liberty-Minded Teens - Posts - Shaun King: "My friend @jamaltrulove was framed for murder by @KamalaHarris when she was District Attorney of San Francisco. He was sentenced for 50 years to life in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. Spent 7 years in prison before he was exonerated."
Shaun King: "That's it for me. I am incredibly proud to see a brilliant Black woman, and HBCU grad, chosen as a Vice Presidential nominee. I've done political work my whole life. It's rarely things dreams are made of. Kamala Harris is the most progressive VP nominee in American history."

Shaun King on Twitter - "I'll be frank and tell you two Democrats that I am 99% sure I won't be supporting - primarily because of their dismal history on criminal justice reform over the course of their entire careers. Joe Biden & Kamala Harris. They both helped build & advance mass incarceration."

The Victoria Taft Show - Posts - "The American Left went from ‘defund the police’ & ‘remove all monuments to slave owners,’ to ‘let’s elect a cop whose family owned slaves in Jamaica,' in less than 3 months"

Kamala Harris compared ICE officers to KKK - "should the Biden-Harris ticket win, it will be a major dent to immigration enforcement.“CBP’s in a world of hurt. ICE is going to be in a world of hurt if these two prevail,” he said... The KKK exchange is part of an overall record that has seen Ms. Harris stake out a position as one of the most fervent defenders of undocumented immigrants, including during her aborted presidential bid when she flirted with abolishing ICE as an agency, saying it might make sense to “start from scratch.” She later backed away from that.She’s also been one of the harshest critics on Capitol Hill of Homeland Security’s immigration agencies, peppering agency leaders with questions about their training and procedures.Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Ms. Harris’s comparison of ICE to the KKK shows where the Democratic Party is headed on immigration policy.“Someone should ask Vice President Biden whether he agrees with his running mate that federal law enforcement officers are domestic terrorists,” he said... While in California, she authored an opinion that provided “legal cover” for sanctuary cities to refuse to cooperate with ICE detainer requests, said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.“She’s the one who really set the stage for the extreme sanctuary policies in California”... Mr. Biden, for his part, voted for 700 miles of border wall while a senator in 2006, and while vice president was part of an administration that set the all-time record for deportations in 2012. But that administration also created the DACA program, which helps “Dreamers” stay in the country.Mr. Biden has since called the deportations a “big mistake... Mr. Biden has also said he’d revoke the policies Mr. Trump put in place to solve last year’s migrant border surge.Mr. Vitiello said canceling those policies would spur a new surge of illegal crossings.“How are we going to stop the tens of thousands of people?””

Public Defender Jeff Adachi Says D.A. Kamala Harris Blowing Off Crime Lab Scandal - and Him - "San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi sharply criticized District Attorney Kamala Harris' handling of a growing scandal at the San Francisco Police Department crime lab today, saying the city's top prosecutor had ignored repeated requests to meet with him and failed to disclose the full extent of problems at the lab."

Judge rips Harris' office for hiding problems - "San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared... The failure by Harris' office "to produce information actually in its possession regarding Madden and the crime lab is a violation of the defendants' constitutional rights," Massullo wrote."

Hindu groups seek apology from Kamala Harris’ niece for sharing image depicting aunt as Durga - "Hindu groups in the US have sought an apology from the niece of Senator Kamala Harris for tweeting an “offensive” image, which depicted the Democratic vice presidential nominee as goddess Durga... "Your tweeting a caricature of the feminine divine, Maa Durga, with faces superimposed, deeply aggrieved many Hindus globally"... Kamala Harris, depicted as goddess Durga, was seen killing US President Donald Trump, who was depicted as buffalo demon ‘Mahishasura’. The image also showed Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden as a lion, the ‘vahana’ (vehicle) of the goddess."

Kamala Harris on Twitter - "@FlaDems On Day 1 as president, I will reenter the Paris Agreement. Make the climate crisis a top national security priority. Ensure communities impacted by the climate crisis get justice. Hold corporations who damage the environment accountable. Pass a Green New Deal. #ClimateCrisisFL"
Of course now we are told she is a moderate

Raheem Kassam on Twitter - "Kamala Harris just admitted to the world that she doesn’t believe what she says, she just says things in certain settings because it’s expected"

Scott Walker To Kamala: You Visited Jacob Blake. How About Visiting Ambushed L.A. Deputies In Your Own State. - "former GOP Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, taking note of the two Los Angeles County deputies who were shot in the head in a cold-blooded ambush as they sat in their patrol car Saturday night, threw down the gauntlet to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who is a senator from California... "She visited someone in WI who was charged with felony 3rd-degree sexual assault and said she was proud of him. She and @JoeBiden need to side with law enforcement and denounce radicals"... attorney Benjamin Crump who is representing Blake reported that Harris visited Jacob Blake and told him that she was “proud of him and how he is working through his pain.”"

Kamala Harris: Biden’s VP Pick & Your Next Candidate to Libel Police & Criminal Justice - "BLM IS COSTING LIVES: Harvard economist Roland Fryer has a new working paper indicating that defunding police can lead to almost 500 additional lives taken a year — which he calculated in just five cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Riverside and Ferguson/St. Louis)... I run data showing 165,000 lives have been saved due to reductions of homicides since the early 1990s, a significant portion coming from adding more police nationwide and locking up criminals. For comparison, 14 unarmed black lives were taken last year by law enforcement along with 25 unarmed white lives.
POLICE ARE MOSTLY FAIR: Control for violent arrests and resisting arrest and any “per arrest” black-white gap in non-lethal use of force is erased, too. Various graphics below will highlight how “fair” the treatment by police is by race, and how rarely force is used —one study indicating it occurs as few as 1 in 1,167 calls for service. So, no, “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, this garbage rhetoric said by you and numerous others ad nauseum is not true and is entirely mythology: “Who doesn’t know that calling the police on black people risks them being shot?” Are you also often hearing from academia or CNN about how black folks are “three times” more likely to be killed by police than white folks? Well, African Americans are also “eight times more” likely to kill or rob others and “three times more” likely to be arrested, too. These things you almost never hear in the media to provide essential context.
STUDIES DEFENDING POLICE BEHAVIOR AGAINST CHARGES OF RACISM ARE BEING ATTACKED & DROPPED DUE TO POLITICS...
The latest DOJ survey (NCVS) report on Tuesday, September 11, showed violent crime is on the rise. It’s telling this came one day after a major presidential candidate offered a plan to change the criminal justice system with a “progressive wish list of policies,” as The New York Times reported, while barely touching public safety concerns like gun violence or sexual assault.The problem with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ “Plan to Transform the Criminal Justice System and Re-Envision Public Safety in America,” inspired by the new consensus direction of the Democratic party, is how it’s hopelessly tethered to mythology. The most glaring myths are the ones that say policing and the U.S. criminal justice are systemically racist or locking up far too many people for profit... Blacks are 27% of arrests but only 25% of people killed by police almost every year since 2015. Blacks are 43% of police killers, according to a 2015 Washington Post analysis (a story, I might add, that will be left on the dustbin of journalism history). African Americans are responsible for about 55% of all robberies and murders, too, and are under-arrested for those crimes... when contextualizing for real behavior, there’s almost no racism at all... “Blacks are arrested at about their reported rate of crime, or the odds benchmarked on arrests show greater anti-White bias, suggesting that Blacks are under-arrested given their rate of reported crime.” Cesario said that given there’s 50 million individuals interacting with police annually, some multiple times, having around 50 killings by police where the victim is unarmed and not attacking, or the officer mistakes a wallet for a gun, is possibly quote low. Or as he calls it a “1 in a million error rate.” Thus, it can be argued that unjustified or “bad shootings” by police are rare and as low as 5% of the total. It is also noteworthy that the majority of those shot in these scenarios are non-Hispanic white... Marijuana arrests are only 5% of arrests and nearly 50% of people in prison are there for violent crimes — the latter figure Harris does touch on in her plan, and never mentions “guns” or “firearm” violence a single time even though they significantly affect the safety within communities of color. Only around 5% of people in prison are “low level” non-violent drug offenders, and less than 1% of people are even in prison for marijuana possession. What is rarely said is a majority of people in prison for “drugs” are professional drug dealers and gang members. Many of those were pleaded down from more violent offenses. Critics of this false standard narrative have also shown that if you remove “drug” convictions from state prisons, the black population drops from 37.5% to 37%... And then there’s the dreaded specter of “private prisons,” which members on the political left constantly say is driving mass incarceration when in reality they’re a response to it. Private prisons hold only 8.5% of prisoners, yet activists constantly bray about the greed of for-profit prisons causing large-scale carceral lockups and comparing it to slavery, as the Netflix special “The 13th” speculated. Professor and researcher Dr. John Pfaff wrote in The Washington Post that it’s a complete myth that for-profit institutions are propelling increases in imprisonment, stating instead that, “Most of those in private prisons are held in just five states, and there is no real evidence that prison populations have grown faster in those states than elsewhere.” A 2019 study titled “Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?” answered conclusively, “No,” and said the doubling of private prison capacity raises sentence lengths by only 1.3%, did not increase the likelihood of conviction, nor did they appear to accentuate existing racial biases in sentencing decisions. Yet when the issue of private prisons is brought up in Harris’ YouTube video, consensus builds in the small group — almost conspiratorially — that “private prisons” are a monstrosity of injustice... a recent study in Georgia said private prisons cost the state 10% more than public prisons per prisoner, yet they didn’t determine if legacy costs of pensions for thousands of prison workers were factored in and some of the methodologies are still in question. And if the costs are the same, which are easier to end contracts and close if the government has a concern: Private companies or public institutions? The answer is certainly the former... “it’s good politics” for people like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris to be against private prisons, even if their sway over incarceration is minimal. “it’s good politics” for people like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris to be against private prisons, even if their sway over incarceration is minimal... “There is some suggestive evidence that there are racial disparities in resistance based on research by Smith and colleagues for the National Institute of Justice. They find that the rate of officer injury is lower when arresting a White suspect than a suspect of another racial group"... Basically, blacks are more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and more often resist arrest, compared to whites... D. Watkins says police have not been held accountable because “they protect and serve the rich.” That’s patently false. The reason they’re in poor minority communities (not rich communities) in Chicago, Oakland (where Harris is from), Detroit, and Baltimore is because Democratic mayors and officials want them there. It’s black police chiefs and commanders who are pushing for more patrols in high crime areas. It’s because they’re listening to the black mothers and grandmothers that wants them there, not elites and progressive activists on YouTube and Twitter. Criminologists like Dr. Goff almost never say arrest rates by race match National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) rates — which reports the percentage of suspects by race and gender. And both those rates also match fatal use of force rates, and are mostly in line with non-lethal force percentages. Media doesn’t make that connection either. Why is that? I argue because stating such facts are intolerable. They would prove the police aren’t racist because they’re arresting and incarcerating populations at nearly the exact rate of crime commission by them. Wagging the finger of “institutional racism” is the only option — and what’s not politically correct to say, as some studies do, is that whites are more likely to be arrested for committing the same crime. But what if murder rates go up 20%, as they have in the past few years? What if Americans start being informed that the per capita murder rate is higher than anytime since 2007? How is that tolerable?... Goff doesn’t release his data to other researchers, which Dr. Fryer called him out for in a footnote where he reported that “blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics.” Goff also had the audacity to censor — or possibly lie about — his own data with the media... Who wants to bet that if the Center for Policing Equity and Google finds data that exonerates police nationally, they won’t release it?When police institutions are reluctant to give up their data, this is one of the major reasons why. They know it will be manipulated to make them look bad. This clearly happened at The New York Times, as well as from The Washington Post and PBS... “For all prisoners released in 2016, the median time served was only 1.3 years; the mean was 2.6 years. For violent offenders the median was 2.4 years, the average 4.7 years.”... Americans are arrested at least 5–10 times before serving time."