Links - 2nd May 2019 (2)

Rap Sheet: ***639*** Acts of Media-Approved Violence and Harassment Against Trump Supporters

Trump supporter knocked out at Portland airport protest - "A Donald Trump supporter was knocked unconscious and suffered concussion after he was hit during a protest at Portland International Airport.Grant Chisholm, 39, was with three other members of the Bible Believers Group who were holding a counter protest supporting Trump's immigration ban when he was assaulted."

Trump Supporters Increasingly Face Threats And Violence From 'Tolerant' Left - "A bookstore owner in Richmond, Va., called the cops after a woman started harassing former Trump advisor Steven Bannon, who was browsing in the store. Former Clinton aide Philippe Reines later tweeted out the bookstore owner's contact information, in a thinly veiled attempt to encourage attacks on the store. Reines defended the tweet, saying, "I'm providing a service.""

Violence at Trump Rallies Shows No Sign of Abating - "even before the candidate begins speaking, a tongue-in-cheek audio-recording plays before each rally instructing attendees to "not hurt the protester," but to instead chant "Trump, Trump, Trump" and point to those seeking to disrupt the proceedings so as to notify authorities of their location."
From 2016
What was interesting was that of the 5 instances of violent behavior mentioned in the article, 4 were anti-Trump and 1 was ambiguous. So if there's violence it doesn't seem to be the fault of Trump or his supporters

Political polarization sparks confrontation at Starbucks, triggering online fury - "Palo Alto resident Rebecca Parker Mankey attempted to shame an elderly white man wearing a red Make America Great Again hat as he sat in the coffeehouse — an encounter she later wrote about on social media. Calling him a "hater of brown people," Mankey said she yelled at him and addressed Starbucks customers and employees to join her in her effort. She said she left the store but soon returned and continued to yell at him... She called the man "Nazi scum" and threatened to post pictures of him on social media, which she then did, along with her version of the incident on her Facebook page and on Twitter. She asked the public for help finding him — "I want him to have nowhere to hide," she wrote -- a practice called "doxing," or posting personal contact information to encourage threats and harassment.The incident has had repercussions not only for Mankey, who said on Tuesday she's received death threats and was fired from her job as an accountant, but also for her former employer, Gryphon Stringed Instruments. Staff at the store said they were inundated with angry phone calls and emails Monday and Tuesday.Meanwhile, the 74-year-old Palo Alto man in the MAGA hat, who is Jewish, told the Palo Alto Weekly that he is not afraid of the woman. Rather, he said, her actions are an example of the lack of discourse in the country over differing viewpoint... Mankey, who is an appointed member of Palo Alto's North Ventura Coordinated Area Plan Working Group and co-chairs the Bayshore Progressive Democrats, a relatively new progressive club addressing social-justice issues, exhorted people to confront the man if they see him wearing the red cap."You do not want to be the person who didn't speak up as we slipped into fascism," she posted.On Twitter, she said: "I am going to publicly shame him in town and try to get him fired and kicked out of every club he is in. I am going to go to his house march up and down carrying a sign that says he hates black people. I am going to organize protests where he works to make him feel as unsafe as he made every brown person he met today."... She told him she wanted him to call the police because then she would learn his name and where he lived, his wife's name and where his children had attended school, her Facebook post states.He was surprised that no one said anything to stop the woman or come to his aid."It would've been touching," he said.He wears the MAGA hat regularly, he said, but he never sees anyone else wearing one. Almost everyone who approaches him tells him they want to wear the hats but are worried about repercussions... "Let me ask you: The phrase Make America Great — is there anything negative in it? In the 1952 election, people wore 'I Like Ike' buttons, but no one saw it as a threat," he said."Saying that a hat is pro-Trump or pro-American is absurd. There has always been a picture of the president and the postmaster in the post office. Are we saying now that putting a picture of this president up is considered a provocation?"What's happened around here is that people get the idea that if you're for Trump you are an evil person," he said.He bemoaned the loss of civil discourse over politics and says no one has approached him to have a reasonable debate... He said he would continue to wear his MAGA hat in public as an exercise of his freedom of speech — "until North Korea (or another totalitarian regime) takes over our government."... Margaret Okuzumi, who co-chairs the Bayshore Progressive Democrats with Mankey, expressed concern for Mankey and her family, saying they were doxed Tuesday on right-wing social media and internet channels"
Apparently it's bad to dox people who want to doxx" others

Comic Relief suffers £8million drop in donations for Red Nose Day... is MP David Lammy to blame? - "MP David Lammy blamed for an £8million fall in Red Nose Day donations
Stacey Dooley was labelled a 'white saviour' by the Labour MP over Twitter
Comic Relief raised a total of £63million - compared to £71.3million in 2018...
Mr Lammy criticised Comic Relief for sending white people to Africa to show poverty there saying it was part of a 'white saviour' complex left over from a 'colonial era'... Another tweeter criticised the MP after Love Island winner Dani Dyer's film on Female Genital Mutilation was edited to avoid further 'white saviour' accusations"
Foreign aid is racist!

Hamas opens fire on Palestinian civilians protesting terror group's oppression - "Footage has emerged of Hamas opening fire on hundreds of Palestinian civilians that were protesting the terror group’s responsibility for economic conditions.In a rare occurrence, Palestinians took to the streets on Thursday in order to protest the high cost of living in Gaza.The brutal response by Hamas security forces on its own people came just hours before two rockets were fired from Gaza targeting Tel Aviv. Hamas has claimed the rockets were fired by mistake, but CUFI UK can reveal that Israeli media sources were predicting on Thursday afternoon that Hamas could initiate a military confrontation with Israel “in order to ensure the social-justice phenomenon doesn’t expand in scope”.Journalists were prevented from filming or taking pictures at the protest, according to a reporter, but scenes posted by social media users show civilians running for cover as shots, apparently live fire, were used to disperse the crowds"
It must be Israel's fault!

Hamas violently disperses demonstrators on 3rd day of internal protests - "A senior Palestinian official said Saturday that the Ramallah-based leadership has asked Egypt to pressure Hamas over the violent suppression of protests during a third day of demonstrations in Gaza against the terror group and the dire economic conditions in the enclave.PLO Executive Committee member Wasel Abu-Youssef told the Times of Israel that the Palestinian representative to Egypt and the Arab League, Diab al-Louh, has called for an emergency high-level meeting of the regional organization to discuss the situation in Gaza. When asked if the meeting would discuss the violent suppression of protests, Abu Yousef said that it would... “This is not the Israeli occupation forces!!”Fatah Central Committee member Hussein al-Sheikh said. “It is the Hamas gangs that are terrorizing and suppressing the hungry in the Gaza Strip.”... The Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, which includes more than 100 charities, said in a statement it “strongly condemned the campaign of arrests and aggression that the security forces launched in Jabaliya in northern Gaza against the right of dozens of citizens.”"

Identity Politics Makes the Candidacy of Pete Buttigieg Toxic, Not Because He’s Gay But Because Any Criticism of Him Will be Dismissed Due to His Sexual Orientation and Any Critic Dismissed as a Bigot - "The politics of the Democratic Party is driven by an ideology that pits one group against another. Blacks against whites. Gays against straights. Women against men. Political agendas and views are often put in that frame. We saw the consequences of this during Barack Obama’s reign as the first black president. If you criticized him, you were called a racist. Almost all statements and judgments regarding his policies and performance were filtered through the lens of identity politics.This was true with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton as well. Democrats tried to put any criticism of her agenda in that context. Women who opposed her were called traitors to their sex. Men who refused to vote for her were inevitably called misogynists who didn’t want a female president.Most of the time these accusations were untrue, but the truth doesn’t matter in identity politics. Character, qualifications, and political philosophies don’t matter. It’s all about the group identity based on the hierarchy of historical victimhood, which elevates anyone who is not a white, straight man to the top of the ticket... My criticism here is not of Buttigieg or his sexual orientation. I’m not opposed to having a gay president — his sex life doesn’t matter to me. His policies do. When I say that the last thing our country needs in an age of identity politics is a president whose stand-out characteristic as generated by the media is that he’s gay, I’m focusing on a cultural problem, not a problem with the candidate... we saw this with Obama. His abuse of executive powers was ignored by those who are now concerned with the same under President Trump — because they were not willing to criticize a black president... The same will happen with a female president, a WOC president, or a gay president. Error, abuses, corruption, and dangerous policies driven by unconstitutional ideologies will be ignored and even championed because the person proposing them is part of an accepted group in the intersectional hierarchy of power."

This professor started a legal clinic for black students accused of rape. She's getting threats. - "Bazelon’s law clinic has taken numerous cases assisting low-income minority male students at California colleges who face expulsion over disciplinary charges. It’s still working with the public defender’s office on a wide range of cases as well.The law clinic got on the national radar when Bazelon published an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this month that expressed support for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s* proposed Title IX reforms aimed at protecting due process.Though Bazelon has argued in favor of due process for accused students before this, the op-ed provoked threatening voicemails and a lot of hate on Twitter... While Bazelon called DeVos’s proposed rules “far from perfect” in the op-ed, she said they would counter a “shameful legacy”: that America has “long over-sexualized, over-criminalized and disproportionately punished black men.”... The law professor called out the American Civil Liberties Union, which is supposed to be defending the rights of disadvantaged people, but “when it comes to these cases, they don’t.”“We are standing up for the Constitution and making sure that these court decisions are being enforced”"
Intersectionality!

USC Students Demand Prof's Firing After He Defends Due Process - "USC Professor James Moore came under fire after he decided to defend due process rights for those accused of sexual assault... Dozens of students immediately called for Moore to be terminated. They organized a group protest and called on the administration to take action against Moore.“Professor James Moore has created a hostile environment in which many survivors of sexual assault do not feel safe. If you feel as we do that this is unacceptable, and that USC must take action to remove this man from his position of power, join us in protest,” the protesters wrote on a Facebook page... “As a female student, I feel very uncomfortable that a male professor whom I have never met is trying to interfere with my access to knowledge about my federal rights,” one female graduate student said in an email.

UC-Berkeley law dean denounces recall effort against judge in Brock Turner rape case - "Many people have spoken in opposition to the witch hunt against the Santa Clara County Superior Court judge who issued a six-month sentence against Brock Turner, the Stanford student convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in public.Among them: the local bar association, Stanford law grads, defense attorneys and even Turner’s accuser, who has been widely praised for her victim impact statement.Now Judge Aaron Persky has perhaps his highest-profile defender yet: the dean of the law school at the University of California-Berkeley. Erwin Chemerinsky writes in The Sacramento Bee that the recall campaign against Persky – likely to be on the June ballot – is both harmful to an independent judiciary and intellectually dishonest.He specifically calls out the Stanford law professor leading the campaign, Michele Dauber, for making false statements and misleading the public about legal procedure:
'[Dauber] began her letter encouraging voters to sign a petition to have the recall on the ballot by declaring: “This week, we saw rape culture in action when Brock Turner filed an appeal.” But every criminal defendant has the right to appeal a conviction. To use that against the judge is unfair and just wrong.'...
Chemerinsky warns of a slippery slope if California voters break 86 years of history by recalling a judge for an unpopular decision: The next recall effort could be against a judge for excluding evidence collected unconstitutionally or ordering the desegregation of a school...
'no one has begun a recall when a judge imposed an outrageously high punishment, such as in the first case I argued in the Supreme Court where my client received a sentence of 50 years to life under California’s “three strikes law” for stealing $153 worth of videotapes'"

This Is How Mass Incarceration Happens - " Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand provided a pertinent reminder that the road to mass incarceration is paved with good intentions. In a trio of tweets, Gillibrand, a likely contender in the 2020 presidential race, expressed her support for the campaign to recall Aaron Persky, the judge who sentenced Brock Turner to just six months in jail for violent sexual assault. She even included a fundraising link to the campaign. “Can you give to help make sure justice wins?” Gillibrand asked, imploring her supporters to “stand with survivors” by financing the recall effort, which has already received enough signatures to go on the ballot in June... the recall campaign against his sentencing judge will not ensure that “justice wins.” Instead, the crusade against Persky threatens to exacerbate injustice by frightening other judges into imposing longer sentences across the board... her attempt to punish Persky via recall is a dangerously misguided mistake, one that will mostly harm lower-income racial minorities... Persky does not seem to have handed out a light sentence because of a personal bias toward young white men. Rather, he appears to have followed the recommendation of the Santa Clara County Probation Department, which suggested six months’ jail time for Turner. An Associated Press analysis found Persky routinely follows the probation office’s sentencing recommendations, imposing relatively lenient sentences across racial and class lines. Palo Alto deputy public defender Gary Goodman told the AP that Persky often issues lighter sentences because he has “progressive ideas” about the potential rehabilitation of first-time offenders... the recall campaign seems unlikely to infuse the judiciary with the feminist values that Gillibrand espouses. Instead, it seems poised to send a ripple of fear through judges who might favor holistic sentencing and rehabilitation over lengthy incarceration.We already know that judicial elections have pernicious effects on the administration of justice. A famous Brennan Center study found that trial judges in Washington and Pennsylvania hand out longer sentences the closer they are to re-election. It also found that state supreme court justices rule less frequently in favor of criminal defendants during election cycles that feature more television ads, and that Alabama judges are more likely to override a jury’s recommendation of life in prison and impose the death penalty during election years... Elected judges know a single “soft on crime” decision can end their careers, so they tend to become more stringent as a re-election fight looms... “The current recall movement,” Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in the New Yorker, “could have the effect of pressuring judges to play it safe by sentencing more harshly—and there is no reason to believe that will be true only in cases with white male rape defendants.”...
'Almost 70 percent of the people in prison in California are Latino and African-American. Those are the groups that would bear the brunt of zealous punishment.'
Many local attorneys have also leapt to Persky’s defense"
This is brilliant, because then liberals can have more 'racism' in sentencing to complain about