THE FOUNDATION
"It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support." —Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part 2, 1792TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Greece Gets Another Handout With a Bailout
For the third time since 2010, Greece may be spared the full-blown consequences of an economic tailspin of its own making, at least for now. Over the weekend, negotiators reached a tentative bailout agreement that, if implemented, would infuse upward of $96 billion (€86 billion) into the country's floundering economy. Greece would retain its membership with the Eurozone in return for additional, albeit stricter, austerity measures. However, the deal hinges on the approval of Athens' Parliament, and a history of broken promises have fostered a pessimistic outlook. Entitled and disgruntled Greek citizens recently voted against a referendum, the terms of which, ironically, are an integral part of the new bailout. As The Wall Street Journal reports, "Athens's Parliament has to pass pension overhauls and sales tax increases that voters overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum just one week ago." Will that stop lawmakers, who face voters' contempt, from approving the bailout? "Before the country can get better, it will have to get a lot worse," notes Investor's Business Daily. Greece's GDP has dropped roughly 33% since 2009, yet time and again Greeks have demonstrated how reluctant they are to abandon socialist enslavement. "To grow again, Greece will need to make deeper spending cuts, reduce public pensions, introduce free-market reforms, lighten regulations and tackle endemic political corruption," IBD adds. That will be a tough sell, but it's the only way forward.Comment | Share
There's No 'Loophole' in the Background Check System
The New York Times breathlessly reports that Dylan Roof could have been stopped from murdering nine people in Charleston were it not for a flaw in the background check. "A loophole in the check system allowed [Roof] to buy the .45-caliber handgun despite his having previously admitted to drug possession," the Times reports the FBI to have admitted. (The Times story has since been corrected without notation.) The FBI operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, though, listening to Democrats, we know it may be shocking to learn that a nearly universal background check system already exists. What may be even more shocking to the Times is that it wasn't a "loophole." It was human error, plain and simple. Someone at the FBI failed to update the system.The Washington Post, meanwhile, laments, "The disclosure amounts to a heartbreaking admission by the FBI director that the attack on members of a Bible study group at Emanuel AME might have been averted." Perhaps, but perhaps not. Roof was an alleged druggie who killed nine people. Does anyone think there aren't other ways of obtaining firearms than passing a background check? Clearly, the lesson here is twofold: First, enforce the law. Second, there are still times the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
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Unsportsmanlike Conduct Against the Redskins
The Washington Redskins lost more yardage in their drive to protect their name from perpetually aggrieved leftist busybodies. On Wednesday, a judge canceled the NFL franchise's federal trademark registrations. U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee's ruling upheld a previous decision by the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. But the clock hasn't run out yet, and Redskins President Bruce Allen promised an appeal. "We are convinced that we will win on appeal as the facts and the law are on the side of our franchise that has proudly used the name Washington Redskins for more than 80 years," Allen said in a statement. But Lee's ruling presented an opportunity for the Redskins' hometown paper, The Washington Post, to give a full hands-on-hips editorial lecture to the team. "The name is going to have to change," the paper finger-wagged, "and the sooner team owner Dan Snyder puts himself on the right side of history, the better it will be for everyone." That "right side of history" blather is what leftists always use when they have no other argument for their policy preference. But the Post also issued what we view as a veiled threat: "No matter what a court eventually determines about the ability of the team to peddle its gear, the damage caused by using a hurtful name will continue." Because they and their fellow race-baiting travelers will never shut up about it. It's the same with the Confederate flag and those who oppose same-sex marriage — the beatings will continue until you submit.Comment | Share
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
If You're White, Shame on You
By Arnold Ahlert
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| Bless his heart |
As the trailer indicates, the documentary aims to “change the way you think about white history” and urges its audience to “all get uncomfortable together” when dealing with racial issues. In a Facebook post accompanied by the picture of the same young white man apparently reduced to tears in the trailer, Vargas spells out his objective: "We cannot have an honest conversation about race in America until we explore and unpack what ‘whiteness' and 'white privilege' mean in America.”
MTV President Stephen Friedman doubles down on this invidious nonsense in a press release. "Whiteness often remains unexamined in conversations about race in this country, even as it acts as the implicit norm against which other racial identities are judged,” he insists. "By shining a spotlight on whiteness, we hope 'White People' will serve as a powerful conversation starter that encourages our audience to address racial bias through honest, judgment-free dialogue.”
That would be honest, judgment-free dialogue as long as one concedes white privilege is the baseline from which any conversation about race can proceed. Thus it is completely unsurprising that one of the documentary’s cast members, 21-year-old “Lucas,” is channeling his inner useful idiot, and became, as the press release puts it, "passionate about the topic of race and began teaching white privilege workshops.”
If enough guilty white people visit the film’s website, such workshops may no longer be necessary. It is there they can access the seven-day “bias cleanse” provided by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. It promises to "provide you with the daily tasks that will help you begin to de-bias yourself.”
Thankfully, following the trailer’s posting on YouTube, “White People” received the barrage of negative comments it so richly deserves. "I'm Asian, and I am offended for white people by this show,” said one person. Another got to the meat of the issue. "What it means to be white? Well for starters that I am somehow a terrible racist by default, simply because I am white. That I should feel bad/guilty/apologetic about issues that happened over 100 years ago to people that I have nothing to do with. That somehow everything is magically in my favor, which it is not. Yep. That's how it feels.”
What happened — exactly — over 100 years ago? America became one of the first nations on earth to eliminate slavery.
"Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race,” black economist extraordinaire Thomas Sowell explains. "Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life. No one wanted to be a slave. But their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others. It was just not an issue — until the 18th century, and then it became an issue only in Western civilization.”
It is precisely this part of American history the white privilege hucksters choose to ignore, because the redemptive part of America’s historical legacy is inimical to the America-damning agenda promulgated by the Left. It is an agenda that can only thrive in the atmosphere of ginned up racial divisiveness that has become the Left’s calling card.
But not just divisiveness. We are in the midst of "the therapeutic culture’s hostile takeover of the culture," explains The American Spectator’s Daniel Flynn. "We go for the gut or tug at the heart. Stimulating the mental circuitry strikes as a non sequitur to a generation trained to emote rather than think. The Thought Police put themselves out of business and created a more ominously Orwellian control apparatus: the Feelings Police.”
It is a "police force” comprised entirely of leftists currently dedicated to purging everything with which they disagree from the public square, especially a white Judeo-Christian culture that presents the largest impediment to the “fundamental transformation of the United States” these would-be totalitarians seek to attain.
Toward that end, anything resembling a competing idea becomes either a “microaggression” requiring a “trigger warning,” or something subjected to ad hominem attacks designed to make competing ideas utterly irrelevant, or subservient to name-calling. And when intellectual rigor is abandoned in favor of emotionalism, guilt, or lack thereof, becomes the only currency by which one’s commitment to “the cause” is measured.
And if one feels no such guilt? Shut up and go with the flow — or else.
Radio talk-show host Mark Levin insists, “[W]e’ve had a silent coup in this country.” Levin is wrong. There has been nothing remotely silent about the American Left's insidious intention to destroy people and ideas with which they disagree. Whether it is the demonization of the Confederate flag, the removal of a Founding Father who appears on our currency, or the severe punishment of bakers who won't bake the cake, the message is clear: The people who wish to preserve anything resembling American history, culture or tradition are irredeemable bigots who must be exiled to the fringes of “enlightened” society.
And when the Left’s own odious policies actually get someone killed, such as a lawless sanctuary city agenda that enabled a five-time deported illegal alien to snuff out the life of a 32-year-old woman? Defend the bankrupt notion that Rule of Law takes a back seat to accommodating the sensitivities of illegal aliens and their contemptible enablers. And why not? Recent Supreme Court decisions added a patina of legitimacy to “flexible” interpretations of the law, led by a chief justice who conflates advancing the leftist agenda with protecting the “integrity” of the Court.
As for genuine privilege, Vargas, and the 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom are demanding to be accommodated, go right to the top of list.
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TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US
- ANALYSIS: Scott Walker — The Status Quo's Likely Foe
- Obama Could Muck Up the Iran Deal After It's Signed
- What (Did) Harry Reid and Donald Trump Have in Common?
- If Sanctuary Cities Were No More...
- Maine Gov. Signs Permitless Gun Carry Into Law
- Humor: Too Many Stars, Not Very Bright
- Meme: The White House
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
- Jim DeMint & Mike Gonzalez: We Need to Recreate Our American Melting Pot
- Burt Prelutsky: Unburdening My Mind
- Peggy Noonan: Donald Trump's Appeal — and Its Limits
OPINION IN BRIEF
Jim DeMint & Mike Gonzalez: "For centuries, America welcomed succeeding surges of immigrants with an invitation to join a unique American culture that includes specific principles and virtues. Then, in the 1970s, our elites decided to reverse course, and started promoting sectarianism. We’ve never really had a debate on what is nothing less than a complete overhaul of the organizing principle of this most diverse of nations. The decisions that led us here were bureaucratic and incremental. Congress passed a law here, federal agencies issued a rule there, and the courts made decisions hither and yonder. Before we knew it, we had shifted from more than two centuries of perfecting the melting pot to a system of adversarial multiculturalism. Rather than welcoming legal immigrants as new members of our national family, today’s coercive diversity works differently: Immigrants are immediately categorized into bureaucratic, pan-ethnic 'minority' groups such as 'Hispanic' or 'Asian,' each with an ascribed set of supposed cultural norms to which they are expected to conform. Those who support such balkanization create a divisiveness that not only flouts our proud tradition of legal and ordered immigration — it puts the whole nation at risk."Comment | Share
SHORT CUTS
The Gipper: "We need true tax reform... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure."Upright: "However I personally feel about Court decisions, on issues that affect the entire country, I don’t believe a 5-4 decision should settle anything. Criminal cases require 12 people to reach a unanimous decision. Even civil cases require a two-thirds vote. So how is it that a mere 55% of the Supremes are allowed to make final life-changing decisions affecting 100% of 320,000,000 of us?" —Burt Prelutsky
The BIG Lie: "I got involved in public life for civil rights. [Same-sex marriage] is the civil rights movement of our generation. This decision is as consequential as Brown vs. the Board.” —Joe Biden
Non Compos Mentis: "'The Cosby Show' lied to its white viewers about the nature of racism, white supremacy, and white privilege in the post-civil rights era United States. It told them of a world of black millionaires — people who were 'just like them.' ... While unintentional, 'The Cosby Show' enabled some of the ugliest Reagan-era fantasies." —Salon's Chauncey DeVega
Superiority complex: "A lot of the traits that make the United States exceptional these days are undesirable, like higher violence and less social mobility. Many of these differences can be attributed largely to the South. ... Minus the South, the rest of the U.S. probably would be more like Canada or Australia or Britain or New Zealand — more secular, more socially liberal, more moderate in the tone of its politics and somewhat more generous in social policy." —Politico's Michael Lind
Dezinformatsia: "[S]hould we ... reoccupy the South with Union forces and restart Reconstruction? ... [O]r ... just let the South go their own way?" —radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann
Alpha Jackass: "[R]ich white people are f—ing insane." —Hollywood director Joss Whedon (An interesting slam considering that Whedon is both rich and white. So rich, in fact, that he’s worth about $100 million." —Newsbusters' Andrew Miller)
And last... "Hillary Clinton told CNN Tuesday she was never subpoenaed to testify on Benghazi. One hour later, House Republicans produced the subpoena they sent her to testify about Benghazi. Democrats won the argument, saying it's just like Republicans to make fun of a woman who suffered a head injury." —Argus Hamilton
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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.
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