Category Archives: BAB’s A List

Was Stephen Paddock Targeting Deplorables? One Perfectly Plausible Theory Of The Crime

BAB's A List, Crime, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Media, Reason, Terrorism

BY JACK KERWICK

As I write this, there is only a small handful of facts, or alleged facts, that all of the talking heads in Big Media seem to agree upon regarding “the largest mass shooting in American history.”

First, 64 year-old Stephen Paddock, a white man and resident of Nevada, appears to have acted alone when he opened fire on over 22,000 country music concert attendees in Las Vegas.

Second, Paddock had a lot of weaponry, guns of various sorts, in the hotel room that he used as a sniper’s nest.

Third, Paddock is a relatively wealthy man who enjoyed gambling and may have accrued quite a bit of debt as a consequence of his vice.

Fourth, the shooter has a girlfriend, Marilou Danley, an Asian woman who has since “returned to the United States from the Philippines.” Initially, police cleared her of any wrongdoing. According to the latest update, however, they still plan on interrogating her when she returns to the states.

Fifth, nearly 60 people are now dead and over 500 people have been hospitalized.

Finally, according to his own brother, Paddock had no political or religious affiliation.

As things always go with these sorts of matters, what we think we know now will inevitably change and, in some respects, undoubtedly change dramatically as more information comes to light. So far, though, this is essentially the extent of the propositions on which the Big Media insiders agree.

Admittedly, I don’t know anything more at the moment. However, I’m shocked (though not particularly surprised) that no one—namely, no “conservative” commentator—has so much as suggested even the possibility that this historically unprecedented massacre just may be the event in which the violent hatred to which suspected Deplorables have been routinely subjected for over a year-and-a-half has reached its bloody climax.

From even before President Trump received his party’s nomination, leftist agitators, mostly fans of Bernie Sanders, began making it a habit to crash Trump’s rallies and assault his supporters. Since this time, literally hundreds of Trump supporters, men, women, and young teenagers—the folks who Hillary Clinton infamously characterized as “deplorables”—have had their person and property abused by leftists of different sorts. Antifa (“Anti-fascists”), BLM (Black Lives Matter), and BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) are some of the more militant leftist organizations that came to be counted upon to attack indiscriminately, and with a range of weaponry, Trump supporters—i.e. veterans, flag-waving patriots, Republicans, Christians, and anyone and everyone else who is deemed “fascist.”

Pepper spray and bear mace; sticks of dynamite and Molotov cocktails; bats, pipes, clubs, and flagpoles; stones, flamethrowers, and bottles; feces and urine—these are among the weapons that have been used against those who have declared their support for “free speech,” Trump, and the American flag.

Some far left members of “The Resistance” have indeed shown up to some events armed with guns, although no one, to my knowledge, has yet used these guns on Trump supporters.

Of course, as recently as June, a Bernie Sanders admirer and avid MSNBC viewer, James Hodgkinson, in an effort to slaughter as many Republican members of Congress as possible, shot several, including and most notably, Steve Scalise. (And shortly before this event, another zealous Sanders fan and Trump opponent, Jeremy Christian, whom the media tried absurdly to depict as a “white supremacist terrorist,” stabbed three men on a Portland, Oregon train, killing two of them.)

In other words, the last nearly two years have established two things:

(a) Violence against anyone and everyone who is suspected of having contributed to the election of President Trump (and the GOP) has been normalized.

(b) This political violence has been normalized by those on the far left.

It also bears noting that Antifa and the like, in affirming their allegiance to “The Resistance,” affirm their ideological and political affinity with all of those “mainstream” Democrats in Congress and the media who similarly raise the proverbial banner of The Resistance. For that matter, the embarrassment of a former presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, also proclaimed her own allegiance to The Resistance some months back, as did former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Democrats own the fringes of their party.

Now, given the patterns of the last two years (to say nothing of the left’s long history of violence), is not the theory that the Vegas killer was but another committed Resister, determined to, “by any means necessary,” “bash the fash” not eminently plausible?

After all, the predominantly white country music fans upon whom Paddock set his sights constitute the collective poster child of the Deplorable, a fact of which leftists, in their ever articulate manner, have spared no occasion to remind us from the moment that word broke of this outrage.

Shouldn’t someone in Big Media, specifically, in the so-called “conservative” media, at least raise these points?

Can there be any doubt that had this been a rap concert—an event comprised of tens of thousands of black men, women, and children—that, despite being short on verifiable facts, the very media figures who now refuse to indulge speculation as to the shooter’s motive would have wasted no time in speculating about “racism?”

Can we doubt that had the targeted event been a gathering of tens of thousands of Hispanics or Muslims or gays that we would have been treated to endless speculation concerning the likely “racism,” “Islamophobia,” and “homophobia,” respectively, of the shooter?

There is nothing objectionable about posing a hypothesis, as long as the theory is reasonable, rendered plausible (if not true) by the known facts. Intellectually curious people speculate. Speculation is actually preferable to the incessant repetition of talking points with which Americans are relentlessly bombarded by the media whenever events like this occur.

That those in the media now refuse to speculate or, to put it more accurately, that they refuse to advance the most plausible of speculative theories—the shooter, like the 66 year-old James Hodgkinson, who was in his age cohort, was an anti-Republican, anti-Trump zealot—is explained by the likely fact that he shared their animosity toward the same objects.

While I may be proven wrong, I’d bet dollars to donuts that Stephen Paddock was driven by the same homicidal hatred of all things to his right that animated Hodgkinson.

Paddock, I find it more credible than not, saw himself as a member of The Resistance.

***

Townhall.com columnist Jack Kerwick has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Baylor University, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies from Wingate University. He teaches philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas.

Rocket Man & The Messy Calculus Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction

BAB's A List, Foreign Policy, Military, War, WMD

Writes Barely A Blog’s resident physicist Myron Pauli:

Missile defense like the Israelis had against the HAMAS missiles “worked” because:

1. The missiles were poorly guided – hence only a limited number required defense.

2. The missile attack was not near-simultaneous – hence the system was not overwhelmed.

3. The missiles did not have nukes – hence they either fell harmlessly or one or two
hit a home or building with limited damage.

However, 34 years after Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech of March 23, 1983 and half a trillion dollars, we are still as vulnerable to massive damage in a nuclear war.

The other reality is that one cannot decouple “defense” from “offense” in that the US may be more likely to be offensively “reckless” if we think (real or delusion) that we are “invulnerable.”

As to THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence): The Department of Defense contractors believe in them, but then they are just tested in DoD controlled scenarios. Still, China and North Korea think they are aggressive and this might get them to be more on a “hair trigger” to launch if they think the US is going to start a war. It is always a messy “calculus” of mass destruction.

The history of America’s “Hitler of the year” villains like Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad, and now Kim Jong Un is that the US seems incapable of learning from its mistakes. Kim Jong Un learned to never give up nuclear weapons – they are his lifeline. Even if he fired three at Seoul and three at Tokyo and only one got to hit both cities – that is enough of a threat to scare the shit out of everyone. With nukes, it doesn’t matter if you can stop “most” or if a few still get through!

****

Dr. Myron Pauli received his Ph.D. from Cambridge MA (MIT), in 1981, and has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Charlottesville: The Facts vs. The Fiction Of Fake News By Jack Kerwick

BAB's A List, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Propaganda, Race

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Particularly disappointing were “conservative” commentators and showboating politicians who appeared every bit as immersed in the Big Media bubble that they accuse their “liberal” counterparts of inhabiting.—JACK KERWICK

As everyone who cares now knows, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that was held this past Saturday “turned violent.”

It “turned violent” just as did so many of Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, the “free speech” rallies that have been held over the last seven or so months, and Trump’s inauguration.

Of course, it is only within the fantasyland of the Fake News media that any of these rightist (or pseudo-rightist) events “turned violent.” The latter is one of the many stock phrases that Fake Media trots out whenever it is leftist “counter-demonstrators”—another of its terms of choice—crash the events in question with every intention of stopping them by whichever means necessary.

The happenings that unfolded in Charlottesville on Saturday fall all too neatly into a pattern stretching back for the better part of two years, a pattern that has become nearly an ironclad law.

Listening to the coverage of Charlottesville, one could be forgiven for thinking that those in Big Media, whether “liberal” or “conservative,” were oblivious to the existence of this phenomenon. Commentators struck the unprejudiced observer as either scandalously ignorant or just as scandalously (but predictably) dishonest. Particularly disappointing were “conservative” commentators and showboating politicians who appeared every bit as immersed in the Big Media bubble that they accuse their “liberal” counterparts of inhabiting.

First, while there were indeed some self-styled neo-Nazis that were present among the rally’s attendees, they were, by all appearances, a tiny minority. And they constituted a far smaller fraction of the totality of the group than, say, that which on multiple occasions comprised the totality of Black Lives Matter demonstrators that marched through busy city streets shouting such murderous slogans as, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” and “Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon!”

Second, the Charlottesville demonstrators organized their rally months in advance of its occurrence. Their application for a permit to march was initially denied. To its eternal credit, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a left-leaning organization, came to the organizers’ defense and helped them to appeal this decision. A federal judge eventually ruled that it was illegal for the city of Charlottesville and the state of Virginia to prevent people from exercising their Constitutional right to peacefully assemble.

And this is a crucial point: Those in attendance at the “United the Right” rally did peacefully assemble. They had speakers lined up to speak at Emancipation Park (formerly known as Lee Park).

Hordes of “Anti-fascist” (Antifa) and “Black Lives Matter” agitators assembled to “bash the fash.” As always, it is they who initiated the violence. Even the Washington Post admits that it was the fear of leftist violence that provoked Governor Terry McCauliffe’s State of Emergency. Yet it was this move legitimizing the “Heckler’s Veto” that rendered a lawful event unlawful.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Third, but even then, it wasn’t the rally attendees whose rally was being sabotaged who unleashed the violence. According to reports of those who were on the ground, police turned violent upon some of those who, evidently shocked upon hearing that before things even began they were ended, didn’t leave the area as quickly as the officers—and their superiors—would have preferred. The boys in blue sprayed mace at rally-goers and kicked them.

Then, the police, upon breaking up the group, redirected them out of the park through the sea of Antifa and BLM terrorists who proceeded to besiege them with an arsenal of weaponry, from bricks and bottles filled with cement to baseball bats, bows and arrows, urine, feces, bear mace, and—this is no lie—a “makeshift flame thrower from a spray can.”

A flamethrower.

Fourth, a life was indeed lost on Saturday. A counter-demonstrator was killed when someone who was allegedly one of the demonstrators plowed his car into a mob that had filled the street. The suspect has since been identified as James Alex Fields, a 20 year-old white man from Ohio. About 19 or so others were also injured.

This is the one event of the day on which the media have fixated. No doubt, it was the most serious of events, given that a person was killed. But insofar as it is abstracted and isolated from the context of violence that, to repeat, the Antifa and BLMers had been unleashing long before it happened, it is Fake News in the extreme, a tactic by which the day’s violence can be dropped exclusively upon the shoulders of those who exhaustively pursued legal measures to express themselves.

Confessedly, when I initially heard that “counter-demonstrators” had been struck, I immediately assumed that the motorist’s car was surrounded and his life imminently imperiled. This was the most reasonable assumption given that Antifa and BLM regularly block thoroughfares and subject to violence those who they regard as “fascist” and “racist.”

If the driver is guilty of malice, then, being the proponent of capital punishment that I am, I submit that Fields will deserve nothing less than death for his crime. Yet there is evidence that my initial suspicion is correct. Although he is being blasted as a homicidal neo-Nazi, what we do know for sure of Fields is that he was an active duty service member of the United States Army. Until Saturday, he worked in law enforcement as a security officer, and he has no history of violence.

And, according to a writer for the The Hill, those Charlottesville police officers who she spoke with think that Fields may have not acted with malice, but from fear for his life. Video seems to show a pedestrian hitting Fields’ car with a bat.

The point, though, is that no one knows for sure, at this point, all that happened.

Yet none of the moral exhibitionists who unleashed the tsunami of denunciations of the “white supremacists” (there were some unsavory characters in attendance, to be sure, but many present, and certainly the event’s organizers, explicitly disavow this moniker), uttered a peep concerning the brutality of those who started the violence.

Mike Cernovich, a Jew who reportedly declined an invitation to speak at the Charlottesville rally, reminded his followers this weekend of when he attended a White House press briefing some months back and called out leftist journalists for refusing to disavow Antifa. They still refuse to do so.

Nor do they dare to wax indignant over the violence of BLM.

To those who object to any of my assertions, I challenge you to present the video footage of “white supremacists” initiating violence against the thousands of masked agitators who came to greet them with weapons. In this day and age, when everyone has a camera, it shouldn’t be hard to find—if it exists.

That there are plenty of reasons for objecting to both this rally and the ideology that is associated with it is grist for another mill. The purpose here is to establish that the consensus among the “respectable” folks that “white supremacists” are responsible for the bloodshed in Charlottesville while the “counter-demonstrators” are victims or bystanders is a Gargantuan Lie that every lover of truth, decency, and, yes, Constitutional liberty must expose for what it is.

****

Beliefnet columnist Jack Kerwick has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Baylor University, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies from Wingate University. He teaches philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas.

Charlottesville: The Marginalization Of Millions Of White, Christian Americans

BAB's A List, Christianity, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Race, Racism, States' Rights

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

… the only voice that got even remotely close to a rational perspective came from Professor Carol Swain, who distinguished between the very legitimate desires, aspirations and fears of America’s under-attack white majority and the misapprehension that somehow those desires equal inevitably “white racism” or “white supremacy”
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Yesterday, until late at night, the media was filled to overflowing with nothing but lurid and hysterical accounts of the “violence” and the “massacre” by so-called “white nationalists” (alternately identified as “white supremacists” or “white racists”) of those poor, innocent “counter demonstrators” in Charlottesville who were “protesting hate and bigotry.”

That’s it; that’s the narrative that showed up, overpowering everything else, including wall-to-wall coverage on Fox, and spewed forth as if handed down from Mount Olympus by assorted “wise” Republican senators, including most notably—and disgustingly–Marco Rubio, Orrin Hatch, and—of course—John McCain, whose biggest complaint was that Donald Trump somehow did not specify that the violence was exclusively caused by something that is termed the “Alt-right.”

Nary a word about the ultimate and real responsibility of the American Left for a continuing history of violence, nary a word about the responsibility of the so-called “resist Trump” organizations and their actions, nary a word about the uncontrolled rampaging of the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g., Ferguson, Baltimore, etc.), nary a word about the stepped up and planned confrontations by the “antifa” (self-titled “antifascists”) militants. That is, not one word about the history of virulent street action, fire bombing, trashing of private property, and, yes, attempts to kill anyone (e.g., Representative Steve Scalise) to the perceived right of, say, John McCain, anyone who might in any way say a good word about Donald Trump, or defend older American traditions and beliefs.

So, continually, the networks portray what happened yesterday as simply the manifestation of extremism and bigotry from the Right. And practically the only voice that got even remotely close to a rational perspective came from a black professor, Professor Carol Swain at Vanderbilt University, who distinguished between the very legitimate desires, aspirations and fears of America’s under-attack white majority and the misapprehension that somehow those desires equal inevitably “white racism” or “white supremacy.”

As Swain indicated, what has happened during the past few decades is a palpable marginalization of millions of hard working Americans, mostly white and mostly Christian, who have been sidelined and left behind by the advancing progressivist revolution (these last words are mine). They are not naturally “racists” or even “white supremacists,” but rather they seek to guarantee their own survival, and the survival of their families, their communities, and their culture. They have seen the standards, beliefs, traditions, morality and customs that they inherited and have cherished—they have seen them attacked, ridiculed, and, in many cases, banned, even criminalized.

The so-called “Alt-right” march and their demonstration in Charlottesville, then, must be seen as something of a predictable boiling over of that legitimate and simmering sentiment. Protesting the attempt to take down the historic Robert E. Lee statue was not, in this sense, the underlying reason for the Alt-right protest. Rather, it served as a much broader, if much angrier and extreme, reminder of what is and has been occurring in our society, a symbol of the continuing destruction of this nation and its history by those who zealously possess and attempt to impose a world view, a template, which is the antithesis of those beliefs and that faith that millions of us have inherited and which we hold dear and believe.

The attacks by nearly the entirety of the media—including notably Fox—on the “Alt-right” demonstrators as “white racists” and “white supremacists,” then, is not only misguided scattershot, but it partakes in the dominant and ideologically leftist Deep State establishment narrative which posits as absolute truth that “hate,” “bigotry,” “racism,” ad nauseum, only come from what they identity as the “far” or “extreme” right. And those terms are all-inclusive for anyone who dissents even in the slightest from the ongoing progressivist Revolution.

Thus, when the president condemned violence from “both sides,” it was as if Mount Vesuvius had erupted and had poured down its ash and lava all over Pompei! The Mainstream Media went literally wild in outrage and demanded that he specify by name the “right” and “rightist violence.” And in jumped with both feet the obsequiously sickening Marco Rubio and Karl Rove, obedient to the standard Deep State mindset, urging the president to condemn “white nationalism” and “white supremacy.”

And so it went throughout the afternoon and evening … until I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and switched over to watch John Wayne in John Ford’s 1950 film masterpiece, “Rio Grande.” (It is always a gracious reward at the end to hear the Yankee band strike up “Dixie” as the Union troops pass in review!)

Certainly, the Alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville included some extreme elements. Certainly, a few would advocate a form of “supremacy,” or rather a return to a time when white people had more authority in this nation. And, yes, they were very angry—angry after watching the dozens of violent manifestations by those revolutionaries of the Left, those “resisters” and “antifa” Marxists and Anarchists, those rampaging Black Lives Matter zealots for whom any law enforcement action against any black person is, ipso facto, “racist” and “police brutality,” legitimizing their burning out of whole neighborhoods in Baltimore and Ferguson. And, yes, driving a car murderously into the assembled counter-demonstrators, however much provocation there may have been, was unjustified and counter-productive and criminal.

All of this was predictable and even perhaps inevitable, given what has happened in the country. Indeed, is it not a product of the over-the-top rhetoric, the apocalyptic imagery and the violent reaction from the forces and minions of the Deep State managerial establishment to last year’s election and any attempt to reverse their jealously-guarded domination over us all?

For far too long those—we—middle Americans, we “deplorables,” oppressed and suppressed by an increasingly revolutionary, radically multiculturalist, culturally Marxist overlay that drains out our historic being and essence as a people, have pacifically and more or less obediently acceded to the Revolution and its infectious cancer. Beginning last November, but actually before that, that slumber was interrupted, and millions of citizens, understanding, if intuitively, that their lives and their country were slipping away from their control, stood up and cried: “No further!”

And the dominant forces in our culture have responded furiously. At first those of us who wish to defend our traditions and our historic Western Christian culture sought to meet their assault traditionally, within the accustomed methods and pathways of our republic. But it was they—the forces of the increasingly hysterical Deep State and their stormtrooper antifa street fighters, the Black Lives Matter and its fatuous race hustlers like William Barber, the radicalized and demented university students, and not just them, but the near totality of the Democrat Party and most establishment Republicans, all fatally infected by a Revolutionary progressivist venom—they who first unleashed the violence in words AND in deeds.

Ironically, it is Robert E. Lee who defiantly stands for what was and is admirable and right about America. And his lesson is being lost through all that is currently occurring. A man who despised slavery and freed his slaves (in 1862), a man descended from the Founders of our old Republic and who fully understood what the Founders intended, a man who loved the Union but loved liberty more, a man of a truly Christian and gentle disposition—Lee stands out in our history as one of our greatest figures, respected and deeply admired by such diverse leaders as Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet, he also comprehended what the tyranny of an overreaching Federal government might mean. And he made a momentous decision to stand with his state AND with the American Constitution. In a real sense, he stood 155 years ago against the incipient progressivist Revolution, and despite overwhelming odds, he almost succeeded in leading the Confederate nation against that revolution.

Rather than recur then to some grab-bag terminology the media calls the “Alt-right”—which has yet to be accurately defined and described, other than becoming a “devil” term for the minions of the Deep State—those of us, those deplorables, those who awakened from a silent slumber last November, those of us who wish only to reclaim the right of our people, our culture, our civilization to survive and continue unmolested—we should look to the model of that “chevalier sans peur,” that noble Virginian, Robert E. Lee, who tried to preserve the American confederation, but also understood that there are times when one must, regretfully and painfully, take bolder steps to save that which is admirable and laudable in our history and our culture.

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.