Category Archives: Media

UPDATED (12/2): Puerto-Rican Politicians & Activists Using POTUS As Their Piñata

Debt, Donald Trump, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Media

The American media and manipulative Puerto-Rican politicians are using President Trump as a piñata. Poke and pound him and the American taxpayer enough until, stateside, everyone is soon apologizing for merely existing, and coughing up into the coffers of corrupt representatives.

By all means, help the largely tax-exempt Puerto Rico territory. But realize, admit and quit the cover-up of the fact that Puerto Rico is a socialized, fiscally bankrupt, systemically corrupt “welfare state with a labor force participation rate one-third less than in the United States.” Wondering why there’s no power and water? “The major Puerto Rican state-owned or controlled enterprises are all losing money, including the power authority which is insolvent”:

… Puerto Rico has a bloated government with far too many employees, unstainable pension obligations, and an intolerable level of corruption. The proper solution to the Puerto Rican debt problem is for the U.S. government to establish a “control board,” which Congress has the authority to do. This past Friday, Rep. Jeff Duncan, South Carolina Republican, of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to his fellow lawmakers advocating a control board for Puerto Rico, much like the one they created for the District of Columbia a couple of decades back, when D.C. was in danger of default because of mismanagement.

Puerto Rico needs fundamental restructuring of its pension and civil service systems. It needs to sell all of its interests in the fully or partially state-owned enterprises. That is, privatize them. (How many more hundreds of years will we need before the political class learns that socialism — i.e. state-owned enterprises — always fails)? In Hong Kong, even most of the transportation infrastructure is in private hands — and it is clean, efficient, attractive, and works without government subsidies.

Puerto Rico needs to radically reduce government spending, taxes and regulation so it begins to attract foreign capital again rather than driving it away. Puerto Rico is now a welfare state with a labor force participation rate one-third less than in the United States. Many of the most productive Puerto Ricans have moved to the mainland — but could be attracted back with their high-level job skills if the economic environment was made attractive again. Puerto Rico needs to embrace the Hong Kong economic freedom model, rather than the Greek model of too much government. …

MORE: “Puerto Rico Is America’s Greece By Richard W. Rahn.”

UPDATED (12/2):


Even Virginia, cradle of the American republic, has gone blue.

Why Is Nigel Farage Campaigning For American Politicians & Not For Brexit?

America, Britain, Ethics, Media, Morality, Nationhood

Why doesn’t anybody question Nigel Farage for appearing to be more involved with the dummies at Fox News and with campaigns for American politicians, than with his own country’s stalled battle for Brexist?

There is something obscene about the specter of a once-heroic British politician coming to fight for Trump, when Farage ran on, and became famous for, being an English patriot. I wonder how Nigel Farage’s former British constituents feel about him tweeting out MAGA and raging against the Republican establishment.

Can you imagine Steve Bannon campaigning for this new UKIP leader (UK Independence Party)? It’s the same thing, except I can’t see Bannon doing it. Unseemly.

I once admired Mr. Farage. Not so much any longer.

See:

Brexit: It takes Brains To Understand Liberty
The Third Degree à la Germany: Answering To Junge Freiheit

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

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.

UPDATES (8/16): Real Donald Trump Reemerges, Standing Up For Deplorable Heroes & History

Donald Trump, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Republicans

Make no mistake. Robert E. Lee was a great American hero. As was Stonewall Jackson.

Excerpts from a press conference, 8/15/2017, where the real Donald Trump reemerged (courtesy Fake News):

“What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging them? Excuse me. What about the alt-left that came charging at the — as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? … Let me ask you this. What about the fact they came charging — that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

“I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it. And you have — you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group — you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.”

“Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee.”

“So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all — you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

“You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left — that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.”

“Well, I do think there’s blame — yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at — you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. … But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. … You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

“Are we going to take down the statue (of Jefferson)? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what? It’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

“George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down — excuse me — are we going to take down — are we going to take down statues to George Washington?”

“And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You’ve got — you had a lot of bad — you had a lot of bad people in the other group.”

BRAVO BIBI JR.


Let Them Foam at the Mouth, Mr. President:


Cucks reemerge:


Fox & Federalist Neocons: