The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2017

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Patriot Post® · Mid-Day Digest

Aug. 17, 2017 · https://patriotpost.us/digests/50839

IN TODAY’S EDITION

Predictably, leftists are now calling for monuments of our Founders to come down.
Trump lost the support of numerous executives after the Leftmedia fanned the flames.
What’s the deal with the Left’s infatuation with Communism?
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“It is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.” —Thomas Jefferson (1823)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Rise of the Antifa Iconoclasts1

In the wake of the Charlottesville riot2, several cities witnessed mobs of people tearing down Confederate memorial statues3. Those who tore down these monuments justified their actions by claiming to be fighting against racism and white nationalism. In his press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump wondered4 where the call for monument removals would end: “Is George Washington next week? And Thomas Jefferson the week after?” The answer may be sooner than that.

On Wednesday, professional race-baiter Al Sharpton was asked by Charlie Rose, “Should they take down the Jefferson Memorial?” Sharpton responded, “When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds, you’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family. I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background. You have private museums, you have other things that you may want to do there.”

Let’s be abundantly clear: Racism is wrong. Those who justify condemning, excluding and hating others based solely and primarily due to their race or ethnicity are wrong. Those who hold views that espouse one’s race to be of greater significance than their common humanity with other races are wrong. This is why both white supremacists and Black Lives Matter activists are wrong. They have chosen to see and interpret everything through the lens of race rather than the reality of our shared common humanity. They have chosen to highlight both real and perceived grievances as justification for holding racist views, and they justify animosity toward anyone who rejects these race-based perspectives.

The Left for years has steadily fueled a grievance culture, especially among racial minority groups — all for political gain. But now this grievance culture is threatening to set the nation on fire, in some cases literally. Various ideas and symbols are and can be offensive, but when people are taught that to be offended is to be oppressed, people will rise up to fight. Now we have leftists calling for removal of symbols of America’s history, all because they have chosen to identify these symbols with only negative and offensive ideas. The truth is that America’s Founders were flawed men, as all individuals are, but they worked to produce the greatest, freest country on earth. And Americans today and people around the world have benefited immeasurably from their contributions. Eradicating their history and historical contributions to appease ill-conceived notions of oppression is to do violence to history and truth.

Trump Loses the Business Class5

Lost in the fog of the controversy over Charlottesville2 this week was a seemingly small but significant development: the disbanding of two of Donald Trump’s economic advisory councils. Trump tweeted, “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!” Both councils had already lost several members, who publicly objected to Trump’s response4 to Charlottesville, and the strategy and policy council had notified Trump that is was disbanding on its own.

As The Hill reports6, “The controversy that plagues the president proved too much for some in business leadership, who have carefully cultivated images as socially conscious leaders trying to make the world a better place through corporate positions.” That’s a polite way of saying these CEOs are subject to leftist boycotts and trashing at the hands of social justice warriors. And with Charlottesville, the Leftmedia threw gas on the fire, practically extorting these businesses to stand against Trump by deliberately distorting the meaning of his remarks. The CEOs thus couldn’t subject their companies or shareholders to the ensuing firestorm if they didn’t object. The Boy Scouts board suffered similar pressure over the issue of the gay merit badge7.

Unfortunately, rather than defending these corporations at risk of boycott at the hands of intolerant leftists, Trump attacked the CEOs as “grandstanders.” And parts of his agenda may suffer. The Hill notes, “Trump’s administration is also hoping to pass a sweeping tax reform overhaul in the autumn, which would benefit from unified support among the nation’s top executives.” Instead, he’s chased them off.

Top Headlines8

FBI reopens FOIA case on Loretta Lynch-Bill Clinton meeting9. (The Washington Free Beacon10)

NAFTA renegotiation begins. (The Washington Free Beacon11)

NBC and BBC: There were violent leftist protesters in Charlottesville. (Hot Air12)

Virginia state police say they didn’t find weapons caches in Charlottesville despite McAuliffe claim. (The Washington Free Beacon13)

House Dems offer resolution to censure Trump over Charlottesville remarks. (Hot Air14)

UC Berkeley chancellor unveils “Free Speech Year” as right-wing speakers plan campus events. (Los Angeles Times15)

“Stress reduction policies” let students choose their own grades. (The Daily Signal16)

The federal government has been subsidizing phone and Internet access for dead people. (Reason17)

Wyoming judge appeals to nation’s highest court after losing job for being a Christian. (The Federalist18.)

Oregon becomes first state to offer free abortions for all, including illegal aliens. (The Washington Times19)

Policy: Tax reform for investment and jobs. (The Heritage Foundation20)

Policy: Don’t believe the hysteria over carbon dioxide. (The Daily Signal21)

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report22.
Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read Antifa v. Alt-Right in Charlottesville — and America2. The coming battles between sociopathic Leftists — the socialist “anti-fascists” and the “alternate-right” anarchists.

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here23.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The American Left’s Infatuation With Communism24

By Arnold Ahlert

This year marks the 100th anniversary25 of the two revolutions that swept through Russia, ending the reign of the czarists and enabling the rise of radical Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Since then communist ideology has precipitated the deaths of more than 100 million26 people — and counting.

The riot in Charlottesville2 last Saturday is a stark reminder of the American Left’s dubious double standard with regard to virulent ideologies. While leftists are correctly contemptuous of the Nazism that forms the foundation of white supremacist hate groups, they retain a soft spot in their hearts for Communism.

And yet both ideologies are flip sides of the same totalitarian coin.

For most leftists, and many other Americans, Hitler’s Third Reich remains the ultimate expression of racist, murderous hate. Yet among the 20th century’s worst mass murderers, Adolf Hitler comes in third — by a wide margin. By most historical estimates, Hitler murdered six million Jews and an additional five million others, bringing his total to 11 million.

Josef Stalin’s total is conventionally put at 20 million killed, with some historians contending it may be twice that number.

Both men pale in comparison to Mao Zedung. Chairman Mao bears responsibility for 40 to 77 million killed, with the discrepancy owing to an ongoing historical argument over whether the mass starvation of millions in China’s great famine (1958-1961) was intentional or not. Most historians lean toward the higher number.

Mao and Stalin were Communism’s superstars, but there were other mass murderers like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979 and killed27 up to two million people. Their ascendance was part of the Communist takeover of the Southeast Asian Peninsula following America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, whose own fall to Communism was aided and abetted by a Democrat-controlled Congress that cut funding28 to South Vietnam’s government from $700 million in 1974 to only $300 million the following year. This enabled Hanoi’s Communist takeover and additional mass murders.

So why is Hitler, as opposed to Mao or Stalin, the embodiment of evil? Because the American Left has never completely rejected its belief in the philosophy of Communism and its radical egalitarian, collectivist worldview. Leftists only wish to paint the American Right as racist, and thus use Nazis as a bludgeon.

Moreover, a certain level of nostalgia remains the order of the day. In a series of articles called “Red Century29,” The New York Times explored an ideology it alternately acknowledged30 as horrific yet “morally complex.”

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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Morally bankrupt is more like it, despite Times columnist and Democratic Socialists of America vice chairman Bhaskar Sunkara’s pathetic attempt to separate the message from the messengers. “We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures,” he insists31.

Such contemptible nonsense courtesy of the Times is nothing new. Reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for singing Stalin’s praises during a Ukrainian famine that killed 10 million in 1932. Yet as Sunkara indicates, Duranty’s apologist take32 — “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” — remains ideologically operational.

It also remains literally operational in Venezuela, whose implosion reveals the rank ignorance of leftist useful idiots like Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and others who hailed the “21st century Socialism” that is devolving into totalitarian tyranny.

The same totalitarian tyranny entrenched in North Korea.

To communist sympathizers and adherents, none of it matters. Nor does it matter that Communism’s founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were avowed racists33 and anti-Semites. Both expressed contempt for Mexicans, politicians with “n—ger-like” features, a quality Engels referred to as a “degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us,” and the “huckstering” Marx referred to as the “worldly religion of the Jew.”

“The progressive blind spot to communism reflects historical ignorance on the part of Americans and Europeans,” columnist Michael Rubin asserts34.

In America, it is cultivated ignorance. Thus 40% of Millennials35 believe it’s acceptable to suppress offensive speech about minorities, while minorities and their equally clueless allies countenance elimination of history itself, emulating36 the Islamic State, as well as the Nazis who destroyed37 any piece of art Hitler found offensive.

And on America’s college campuses, where leftists routinely shut down speech they define as “hate” — employing violence if necessary to do so — they are emulating Communist China’s Red Guard movement that precipitated38 attacks on those whose traditional views were insufficiently “revolutionary.”

The Left’s cultivation of communist ideas has occurred for decades. In 1993, Library of Congress experts traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret records of Communist Party USA activities that had been sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping. They reveal39 irrefutable evidence of cooperation between the Soviets and American leftists from the ‘20s through the '40s. Coded Soviet intercepts known as the Venona Papers confirmed40 that infiltration, vindicating41 much of what Sen. Joseph McCarthy asserted during the '50s, despite his continuing status as the Left’s most enduring icon of evil.

In the '60s, the college students who recoiled in the presence of a swastika did so while wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and singing the praises of Communist Party U.S.A. radicals42 like Angela Davis. It was also a time when future failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was learning and teaching43 the revolutionary tactics of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky — tactics Barack Obama perfected in winning the presidency.

In the '70s and '80s, Democrats pursued their admiration of the Soviet Union with vigor, making peace trips44 to the USSR, often as members of communist-created front groups. And when Ronald Reagan called the Soviets the “evil empire” they actually were, Democrats painted him as a warmonger who would lead the nation to nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the party that currently excoriates Donald Trump for his Russian connections apparently had no problem when Ted Kennedy offered45 to help the Soviets thwart Reagan’s re-election.

Most recently, the Obama administration had at least two communist sympathizers working for it: former White House Communication Director Anita Dunn, who professed admiration for Mao Zedung, and former CIA Director John Brennan, who voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall in 1980. As for Obama himself, a video from 1995 shows him stating46 he was taught about race relations by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis47.

“Until the left, and all the institutions influenced by the left, acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world,” argues48 Dennis Prager.

Of course, as Prager knows full well, the American Left embraces Communism. Moreover, moral confusion is a necessary component of leftist power. When right and wrong are relative, “by any means necessary” becomes a “reasonable” substitute. Exhibit A is a despicable Washington Post op-ed49 by Johns Hopkins University associate professor N.D.B. Connolly, who insists leftist “generic solutions” to racism, etc. aren’t working.

What to do instead? “Start throwing rocks,” he advises.

Thus, 100 years and 100 million deaths later, the American Left’s infatuation with Communism remains undimmed. And as decent Americans recoil in disgust, the historical purges remain ongoing, begging the inevitable question:

When do the book burnings begin?

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

RAISE Act Opposition: Globalism, Diversity and Identity Politics50 — Focusing immigration on bringing in desirable, highly skilled workers is the way to go.
More NFL Anthem Protests Coming This Season?51 The NFL commissioner will not forbid players from protesting the national anthem, so the show will go on.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Victor Davis Hanson: Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons52
Ann Coulter: When Liberals Club People, It’s With Love in Their Hearts53
R. Emmett Tyrrell: Controversy on a Pious Cable News Outlet54

For more, visit Right Opinion55.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Victor Davis Hanson: “One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class. No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn. The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists or diversity lawsuits. Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “The television mind needs to be reminded of what took place years ago, who Hitler was and why he is recognized as evil. The reading mind remembers this quite well and a lot more; it probably has a book or two about Hitler on the wall.” —R. Emmett Tyrrell

Non Compos Mentis: “Anti-choice groups & white supremacists have something … in common: They both want to control women’s bodies.” —NARAL (“NARAL and white supremacists have something in common. They both believe in eugenics.” —David Harsanyi)

The BIG Lie: “People even in some of the most conservative areas of the country who may themselves personally say, 'I would never choose to have an abortion,’ or, ‘That’s not something that’s right for me,’ also absolutely do not believe politicians should be making decisions about pregnancy for women.” —Cecile Richards

Race bait: “It’s easy to condemn Nazis and garden variety racists. What’s hard is owning the uncomfortable: that you knew who he was, yet supported him.” —Joy Reid

Dezinformatsiya: “[Trump] has now officially become the president … not only of America but also of the white nationalist movement.” —Joe Scarborough

Braying Jackass: “Both 1st & 2nd Amendments should be amended again, in my humble opinion. To ban Nazis & reduce gun deaths. … What these Nazis did in Charlottesville is not free speech. If America doesn’t wake up to this fact fast, it is in deep trouble.” —Piers Morgan

Alpha Jackass: “If you hold down the woman while the rapist is raping her, and you didn’t rape her, are you a rapist? I mean let’s just, really, let’s cut the BS and start speaking honestly. … If you put Donald Trump in office, you need to think about this before you kneel down and say your prayers tonight. … If you still support the racist, you are the racist.” —Michael Moore

And last… “The Nazis weren’t merely street thugs — they intimidated people using the power of the state & cultural institutions, just like today’s left.” —Dinesh D'Souza

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.