-We begin today’s rattle with an interesting story about an Indian-or Muslim, depending upon PR needs of the open borders squad-athlete who was ushered into this country by our very own Senator Chuck Schumer. Unfortunately, this gifted sportsman is also a sex offender. Perhaps this isn’t quite as bad as having an alien interning for your office who is also a registered sex offender, but it does make you question the collective wisdom of our Democratic friends in Congress. Maybe we shouldn’t be taking their advice, vis-a-vis, controversial immigration decisions made by the Executive branch.

-In a reminder that there are actually rational people living in The People’s Republic of Vermont, the voters of Rutland have just turned out their incumbent mayor, Chris Louras, after he attempted to deluge their town with Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq. While ignoring the public’s deep discontent with our government’s refugee resettlement programs-when not imputing racism and bigotry to Americans who express reservations about these schemes-is the norm, even the alternative weekly was forced to concede the enormous political consequences of this decision.

-For those of you who were wondering whatever happened to the thousands of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to enter into this country, wonder no more. According to an in-depth backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, our government has absolutely no clue what it’s doing. While over 80 percent of their sponsors are illegal aliens, 44 percent of the UACs in question were ordered deported. Have the vast majority of these children been deported? Of course not, silly!

-You may ask yourself, “Why is this important?” It’s a good question. After all, it’s not as if these individuals will bring brutal Central American inter-gang warfare to the placidity of our nation’s suburbs, right? Well, I have some bad news for you on that score. It turns out that Latin American gangs, including MS-13, one of the most prolific and ruthless criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere, has actually established a pretty firm beachhead in our own backyard. Naturally, almost all of these gangbangers are criminal aliens. In an ironic twist, the moniker of the man who made an abortive attempt to unify the Mara Salvatrucha within the United States is, you guessed it, Dreamer.

-For those of you who think Europe’s approach to immigration is any less self-defeating and preposterous than the United States, I give you France. A nation where municipal authorities in Calais are attempting to prevent thousands of migrants from recreating the notorious refugee camp known as The Jungle. The biggest proponents of turning The Camp of the Saints into reality are, of course, other Europeans who believe Western civilization is uniquely evil. The ostensible plight of migrants from the third world is simply a cudgel with which the Gramscian left-with the help of corporate bean counters-can beat native Europeans into submission.

-After all, what are a few dozen, or a few hundred, honor killings in the grand scheme of things? Is the systemic dehumanization and murder of girls in nations which were responsible for the idea of religious toleration and freedom of conscience too high a price to pay for erecting the beautiful mosaic? When bad whites are saying intemperate, obnoxious things about people who are off-white, doesn’t that negate their entire philosophical worldview?  Even if that perspective is confirmed multiple times every single day?

-Everyone knows that the real reason millions of Muslims across the world support ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar jihadist networks is because there isn’t enough inclusion in Hollywood casting decisions. See, the real villain isn’t Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s those bastards who refused to green light an all-Muslim reboot of Star Trek!

-The cognitive dissonance at work in the mind of an an open borders leftist must be overpowering. They want to live in a high-trust, quasi-collectivist techno-utopia-along the lines of something created by Gene Roddenberry-yet simultaneously support policies which make this already far-fetched goal virtually impossible. The mentality of a social justice warrior in high dudgeon can be found in this VICE piece, which laments the role homeless shelters have been playing in the deportation of migrants. The traditional liberal concern for the working class and the poor is discarded when it conflicts with the categorical imperative, i.e. preserving diversity. The spiritual hollowness and intellectual vapidity of this type of leftist ‘thinking’ was brilliantly and caustically skewered by George Orwell nearly a century ago. It’s good to know that some things haven’t changed all that much.

-I’d like to leave you on a good note, so here’s some refreshing news to come out of Austria. 8 Iraqi men have been convicted of the gang rape of a tourist. Unlike the Middle Eastern cab driver in Halifax who was, to all intents and purposes, high-fived by a Nova Scotia judge for raping an unconscious passenger, these rapists were actually given (relatively) stiff prison sentences. What’s more, we’ve discovered that these horrific incidents actually constitute an anomaly within the Islamic immigrant community.

Migrants and refugees from other countries expressed concern that the crime will make Austrians hostile toward all newcomers.

“Eight people raping a woman — that’s honor-less! Such a thing doesn’t exist in our religion,” Burhan Akbas, a migrant from Turkey, said.

“When such people come here and screw up like that, then everybody will think that Chechens, Afghans, all refugees from war areas are all the same,” Mansur Salamou, an asylum-seeker from Chechnya, said. “But it’s not like that. For example, the majority of us — we also cause problems, commit crimes. But no rape! Only criminal assaults and robberies.”

See, Europeans?! You only have to worry about being assaulted and robbed by the millions of North African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants making their way towards Europe. What a relief.

Update: Matt Bruenig explains what happened this weekend. 

Michael Tracey raises an interesting question. 

Keith Ellison’s loss is noteworthy for a number of reasons, many of them unrelated to the fact that his victorious opponent will be the first self-identifying Hispanic to preside over the Democratic National Committee. Yes, ethnicity/race did play a pivotal role in this intra-party election, but not in the way that the mainstream media and Democratic shills would have you believe. Perez’s victory is not so much a case of Democrats implicitly rebuking President Trump and his purportedly anti-latino immigration policies as Barack Obama’s man on the inside once again stepping on the Bernie Bros.

The party hatchet-man who did so much to pave the way for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous candidacy, crafting the message which social justice warriors and feminists gleefully vomited at Bernie Sanders and his backers in the Democratic primary, is now in a position to run the Democratic Party. The former President who has done so much to divide his own party, which continues to be riven by the parallel political institutions he created, now has his own Machiavelli steering the course of the DNC.

This is not only a ratification of the open borders, corporatist, elitist vision which animated the Hillary Clinton campaign-progressives be damned-it is yet another slap in the face of African-Americans, i.e. the foundation of the contemporary Democratic Party. How do woke individuals continue to reconcile their support for Barack Obama with the concrete policies and decisions made by a man who, beyond empty gestural politics, has done absolutely nothing for the black community? To the contrary, the legacy of the 44th President is one of neglect and indifference towards the people most responsible for helping him make history.

We have just witnessed an elite cross-section of Democrats from around the country reject someone who is literally a black Muslim in favor of a Brown alum who’s whiter than Steve Bannon, and whose campaign manager would fit in perfectly at a Huffington Post editorial meeting. Don’t expect national Democrats to curtail their moral preening and sanctimony as we enter the Perez  Era. Just as we’re forced to endure lectures attacking this country from a smarmy talking head for The Reconquista whose fame and fortune were given to him by Americans, we will now experience four years of privileged leftists telling us why white people need to check their privilege. Apparently, the new head of the Dems seems to agree that white people are entitled to fewer rights based upon their skin color.

I can’t wait until 2020.

Those of you who’ve read Todd Gitlin’s fantastic account of ’60s Era political activism are well aware of the New Left’s descent into chaos, infighting, and terrorism during the course of that decade. However, I’m not sure how many of you realize just how much destruction the sectarian left inflicted upon our society during the 1960s and the ensuring decade. That’s why this blog post, which explores another book about this tumultuous chapter in American history, is so fascinating. Although I’m not sure I agree that we are on the same trajectory as the baby boomers, there are some unsettling parallels, including the near universal support among the left for using violence against its perceived opponents, and passive acceptance of the terror visited upon completely uninvolved parties who are allegedly obstructing the militant left’s objectives.

Beyond any legitimate critiques of President Trump-whose administration has yet to take any significant executive action-the fact that the left, ranging from conventional liberal apparatchiks to hardcore Marxists, has become completely unhinged is not a good sign for political comity in the days ahead. While some progressives have taken anti-Trump Democrats to task for their hysteria, and even questioned the utility of identity politics, the vast majority seem obsessed with demonizing their opponents and purging those engaged in heretical thinking. It’s a far cry from large scale urban terrorism, but it would still be wise to keep George Santayana’s admonition in mind over the next 4 years.

Addendum: For some more historical context, here is Ayn Rand on The Return of the Primitive. 

Just to give you a rough summary of what I thought of the first debate, here are a few rather lengthy observations:

Donald Trump dominated the first 20 minutes to half hour of the encounter. Focusing primarily upon trade, the one public policy he’s immersed himself in-and has a mastery of-played to his strong suit. It also highlighted the stunning hypocrisy at the core of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Trumpeting her opposition to CAFTA merely served to emphasize her political opportunism, as this stance was crafted expressly with the purpose of securing her left flank in any future Democratic contest. Supporting one of President Bush’s signature foreign policies would have made her path to victory in 2008 that much more difficult. We should recall that Barack Obama was not on her political radar at the time.

Likewise, her opposition to TTP-a pact she enthusiastically promoted as Secretary of State-was born of political opportunism, not genuine conviction. Even without the surprisingly successful Sanders campaign, endorsing a plan which was almost universally opposed by organized labor-the backbone of the Democratic Party even in its current corporatized, Clintonian shell-could have proved fatal to her presidential ambitions. Her labored attempt at triangulation, combined with Trump’s implicit appeal to disenchanted supporters of her primary opponent, was unquestionably the highlight of the debate from his perspective.

Unfortunately, the discipline and preparation Trump exhibited during the beginning of this debate was squandered over the course of the next hour. We needn’t rehash the explicitly stacked nature of this event, which might as well have been hosted by a Democratic partisan and has been explored in detail throughout the conservative blogosphere over the past 2 days. We all knew beforehand-as Trump should have known-that Lester Holt is not an impartial referee so much as an active participant in the media’s universal quest to install Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office-even as they attempt to delegitimize this self-evident fact.

Even so, Trump seemed at a loss as to how to combat this two-headed attack during the actual debate. Lester Holt’s contrived attempt at connecting the irrelevant Birther issue to the parlous state of American race relations is a perfect example of how Trump failed to seize the initiative. The correct response to this tendentious line of attack was to refuse to play a hand with the stacked deck given to him by the moderator. He should have pointed out this is simply a Democratic talking point crafted with the purpose of arresting his growing popularity among black voters, which has absolutely no relevance to any domestic policy even tangentially connected to race.

While Trump deserves credit for highlighting the grim body count piling up in the city where President Obama made his political bones, as well as the threat posed to African-Americans by our government’s lax immigration policies, he gave more substance to this inane discussion than was necessary, reliving his own involvement in a completely irrelevant issue which has no purpose other than its use as a cudgel against the 1 candidate despised by the fourth estate. Trump could have used this opportunity to simultaneously highlight the bleak prospects of African-American males-who have been shortchanged by our first black President-and the insularity of our wretched journalistic establishment.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton had very few unforced errors. While she didn’t do anything to change her public image, i.e. that of a viscerally unlikable, overly scripted, opportunistic career politician, she didn’t step on any land mines either. She came across as a technocratic, seemingly competent liberal Democrat. She managed to persuasively advance the argument that Donald Trump, the anti-thesis of Bushism and country club Republican virtues, was simply a reincarnation of George W. Bush on tax policy. And that she, a woman desperately trying to attach herself to the Bush family, is somehow an agent of change. Trump rightly pointed out the economic stagnation of the past 8 years, which has nothing to do with the Bush clan, but dropped the ball by not explicitly pointing out that the Bush and Clinton families are part of the same circle of elites which have run this country into the ground over the past 3 decades.

More importantly from Clinton’s perspective, she avoided casting herself as the the candidate of social justice fanatics, despite pandering to them relentlessly throughout this campaign-going so far as to write an open letter to Ella Dawson, otherwise known as herpes girl. The only departures from this appeal to normality were an aside where she accused our country of engaging in systemic racism and her Jezebelesque complaint that Donald Trump likes attractive women. While I’m sure the latter played well with her base of feminist, baby boomer female voters, it also highlighted the fact that she’s alienated from the concerns of anyone who doesn’t belong to the coalition of the fringes, particularly working class white men.

The Alicia Machado exchange is illuminating for other reasons, including its almost perfect distillation of the central flaw in the reasoning of open borders propagandists. Namely, that we need the millions of people who have been imported from the third world over the past half-century. We are told repeatedly that these immigrants or illegal aliens are essential to our functioning as a republic, yet the men and women who serve as poster children for this policy are without exception terrible people. Or, at the very least, not vital cogs in the machinery of American democracy.

Although Machado might not have been involved in an assassination plot, she is a confirmed philanderess and egregious hypocrite. However, because she intends on casting a ballot for the Democratic presidential candidate, like millions of other immigrants from Latin America, she is by definition an asset to this country. While I can understand why leftists and Democrats would believe that importing men and women who’ll increase the size of the state is good for this country, I fail to see how this is a good thing from an objective, patriotic standpoint. Trump could have challenged the assumption that what’s good for Democrats is good for the country, but conspicuously failed to do so. He could have also pointed out that the woman across the stage had spent decades slandering the reputation of women who had been victims of sexual assault at the hands of her husband.

The cumulative impact of these lost opportunities is hard to quantify, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand. For those of you looking for positives to take away from this debate, Donald Trump’s closing remarks emphasized a key point which could become part of a winning message if articulated in a coherent manner to the American people. The United States should not be the policeman of the world. Even if we were to concede the good intentions of those advocating continuous intervention in countries across the globe, the fact remains that this posture is counterproductive to America’s strategic interests. Our government’s sclerotic invade the world, invite the world foreign policy has been a catastrophic failure and needs to be abandoned.

That should be Donald Trump’s message going forward. Ignore media-generated talking points about personal tax returns and obese former beauty queens. Focus on the central issues of our time and communicate your ideas to the American public. We need to be debating the future of our country, not the trivialities that dominated the Hofstra debate.

For those of you who needed confirmation that gleeful Nazi accomplice and evil billionaire George Soros is a real-life, Hungarian version of Emperor Palpatine, wait no more! According to a leaked memo from his Open Society Foundation, the man whose chief source of protein is human misery believes Europeans should accept the refugee crisis, i.e. effacement of their civilization, as the “new normal.” Congratulations, Germany, France, Sweden, and the rest of Western and central Europe, you have decades of taharrush, unexpected jihadist violence, and random crime to look forward to. Don’t forget the trillions of dollars lavished upon new Europeans who will never be able to reciprocate the favor for very obvious reasons.

Imploding welfare states? Endless civil strife which never existed prior to this grand social experiment? Increasing militarization of civil society and diminution of fundamental liberties? A wholesale reversal of the values cemented during the Age of the Enlightenment? Well, that’s just collateral damage in the war for vibrant diversity, isn’t it? Thank you, Francois Hollande. Thank you Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, and Tony Blair. I’m sure future generations of Europeans will realize what a small price to pay these sacrifices were for a world where the Crypt Keeper can ball out for a wedding ceremony to his 40 year-old gold digger, i.e. wife.

Update: The jihadist truck driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was known to police, naturally. 

English language updates from Michael Horowitz. 

What we know. 

A timeline of the attack. 

The Nice attack: a firsthand account. 

What pathological altruism looks like. 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

Flashback. 

A reasonable solution. 

A column written by Pat Buchanan in the wake of the Pulse night club massacre. 

Let’s not forget the real victims of this horrific event. Muslims who might briefly feel guilty about the massacres of innocent human beings which their co-religionists routinely commit. 

State of emergency. 

More coverage of the ongoing terror attack in Nice. 

A minimum of 60 fatalities. 

What will it take?!

Unconfirmed local reports that the driver has died.

Yet another attempted mass murder in the streets of France. Follow live coverage on Sky News. More photos and video coverage, courtesy of Heavy.

So many have opined on Black Lives Matter over the past 3 years that it’s difficult to imagine anything novel being said or written about this organization. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add my 2 cents, if for no other reason than the fact that I’ve never tackled this subject before on this website and my readers are entitled to know what I believe.

There are a number of characteristics that distinguish BLM and its supporters from previous civil rights movements and which identify it as part of the current wave of millennial, leftist political activism, the most prominent being its imperiousness. Like the strident social justice and feminist activism flourishing within this country’s most expensive hug boxes, Black Lives Matter refuses to countenance the idea that the opinions of its critics-or even those who disagree with some of its policy prescriptions-matter. They exist to dictate terms of submission, not debate.

A perfect illustration of this is the spectacle which unfolded at Toronto’s annual gay pride parade, an event effectively shut down while its organizers acquiesced to the incoherent demands of virulent racists. Leaving aside the tactical problem of a culture that comprises less than 3 percent of a country demanding recognition from a governing majority which it insists is systemically bigoted against black Canadians, there’s the question of why they believe this approach will be strategically successful. Based upon an interview with one of BLM’s co-founders north of the border, they seem to believe that if their movement can successfully manipulate language, effectively shaping how we speak, then they will be able to implement their goals-however nebulous they may be-without opposition.

This is not a completely baseless assumption, as the hijacking-to use a triggering word-of language has been essential to the left’s subversion of most cultural and political institutions in the West. In fact, manipulating language, distorting the way we communicate, is at the heart of critical theory, arguably the most destructive intellectual development of the past half-century. Just as past totalitarian ideologies sought to control and wield words in their quest to crush human autonomy-exemplified by the Communist corruption of language-contemporary cultural Marxists recognize how essential this tool is to achieve their political objectives.

It’s not simply a matter of language though. BLM and its advocates seem to inhabit an alternate reality where their perceived enemies don’t have any independent beliefs or philosophies of their own. These activists are not interested in any dialogue, much less debate, but instead want the uniform enforcement of a list of racial diktats they have devised. My only engagement with a white supporter of this movement is emblematic of the problems one encounters whenever he attempts to broach thoughtful critiques of Black Lives Matters.

Even when I explained that black people are not the victims of disproportionate violence at the hand of law enforcement-as Kevin Jackson has pointed out, Native Americans are much more likely to be killed during encounters with the police, to say nothing of whites-he refused to acknowledge this enormous hole in the BLM narrative, after which he chose to block me from his Twitter account. This is a typical response to anyone who tries to challenge blanket statements and irrelevant anecdotal evidence with statistical evidence and concrete, verifiable data.

The idea that rogue police officers might be acting out of a sense of impunity rather than a systemic hatred of black people, or that white people have also been victimized by cops is not even entertained by BLM demagogues. While you can probably recount the names of most black civilians killed by police officers, whether unarmed or armed, peaceful bystanders or aggressive criminals, how many of you remember the names  Zachary Hammond or Jeremy Mardis, an autistic 6 year-old white boy killed by a black police officer in Georgia?

The question answers itself, the reason being that academe, the media, and our cultural gatekeepers are intent upon perpetuating the concept of black Americans being the apex victim within our society. While there are occasionally thoughtful, nuanced national discussions of this subject, they are dwarfed by the institutionalized propaganda portraying minorities, but particularly black men, as eternal victims who are perpetually denied justice. Keep in mind, the previous and current Attorney General, as well as the man ostensibly charged with upholding the Constitution, are African-Americans. Correspondingly, white men are seen as super-predators in this country, continually oppressing their non-white prey through their ubiquitous racism. This meme suffuses American society and popular culture and has been a feature of daily life for at least the past 2 decades. Like the  doctrine of total hereditary depravity, white people are inculcated with the belief that their very existence is contaminated from birth. Their original sin is being born to race which is currently disfavored by our political and social elites.

The idea that there are no practical consequences to this institutionalized bigotry is absurd. When one race is persistently demonized by academe, the news media and within popular culture, and another is imbued with the sense that it is being exploited at the hands of that racial group, you are creating a toxic society. Beyond the mentally deranged who will exact violent, lethal revenge upon the people who they believe are responsible for their oppression, there are scores of people who aren’t sociopaths that will use the racial narrative they’ve absorbed to inform their daily lives. You need look no further than public opinion polls to discover the depth of this country’s racial divide and ask yourself, who or what is contributing to this philosophical chasm?

It’s ironic the same sort of people who acknowledge the damage false racial narratives inflicted upon black Americans and American society in the past, and even warn us about the danger they pose in the future, gleefully demonize the race they believe threatens their hold on power. The dysfunction that decades of cultural conditioning has created can be seen not only in the supremely narcissistic, myopic BLM but at virtually every liberal arts university in the country, as Jonathan Haidt and Sam Harris have explored far more eloquently than I could ever hope to. Black Lives Matter and its peers in similar affinity groups simply demonstrate the triumph of untethered emotion over reason.  The question is how do you reason with people who don’t recognize the value of reason? We must find an answer before the entire country finds itself living out the screenplays to The Wire.

The Benghazi Report has finally been published, you can read it in its entirety here, which means we’ve been treated to some predictable political reactions, including this illuminating headline from the New York Times. Leaving aside the predictable spin from Hillary boosters in the fourth estate, one of my main problems with the national debate over Benghazi is its tunnel vision, especially as it relates to the former First Lady’s shortcomings as a political leader and decision-maker.

The intentionally deceptive narrative crafted by this administration in the aftermath of the Benghazi assault is simply one of many outrages to stem from this unprecedented attack upon one of our country’s diplomatic outposts. Leaving aside the despicable treatment of the survivors by then Secretary of State Clinton, the private and public treatment of this disaster by the Obama administration demonstrates their policy preferences clearly. Namely, to exculpate Islam from blame for any and all atrocities it’s responsible for, even if the link between the two is undeniable to any rational observer.

Beyond the Orwellian whitewashing of the world’s most violent ideology, the baleful consequences of the invasion which preceded the 2012 sack of America’s Libyan compound continue to be downplayed by its unintended authors. Both by this administration and its supporters, as well as neoconservative intellectuals and politicians who would have us believe that a foreign policy disaster was a brilliant geopolitical move. The fact that a global Sunni jihadist network was given yet another base of operations from which to operate, however attenuated, seems to have made no impression upon the people who charted this catastrophic path. The fact that the invasion of Libya led directly to ISIS atrocities within the heart of Europe, as well as permanently altering the very nature of European civilization, seems to have had no discernible impact on the very people who are responsible for these horrific outcomes.

To the contrary, Hillary Clinton has made the importation of tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from the Middle East-the same sort of refugees responsible for the rape pandemic enveloping Europe-a cornerstone of her campaign. Even as she seeks to displace blame for the fiascos in Syria and Libya onto her former boss, she continues to fully embrace the idiotic policies which have wrought havoc across the Middle East and threaten to devour the continent of Europe-to say nothing of the threat posed to American citizens. The grand policy of invade the world, invite the world will be continued under another Clinton administration, which threatens to make the horrific events currently unfolding around us pale by comparison.

The victims of the Benghazi stretch beyond Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty-and even their bereaved families-all the way across the globe. Anointing Hillary Clinton as the next Commander-in-Chief will not only be an insult to the memories of those victims, it will be an invitation for more chaos, bloodshed, and disasters which we cannot even envision at this point in time. Pandora’s box cannot be closed, but that doesn’t mean we should go searching for new demons and inviting them into our homes.

If you wanted to view a cross-section of the individuals whom Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are trying to enlist in their cause, you could do worse than visit a Donald Trump rally, where the hatred and viciousness of revanchist Mexicans and Hispanic gang members-or Dreamers, as Hillary calls them-is on full display. The Gateway Pundit has a post about a non-Hispanic Muslim thug who decided to join in on the action.

All of this begs the question, where is the safe space for Americans?