WHY PRO-TRUMP CONSERVATIVE MEDIA SHOULD WORRY: “When I see the newspaper on our front lawn, cocooned in its pristine orange wrapper, I just keep on walking. I’ll pick it up later. Maybe,” Christian Toto writes. “What day is recycling again? Consider that a warning to conservative media outlets serving as Donald Trump’s de facto campaign arm. You’re destroying habits that have been in places for years. In some cases, decades.”
Read the whole thing.
Related: “In the era of Trump, it is interesting and dismaying to see who thinks the limelight — by which I mean ratings, popularity, celebrity, and relevance — is more important than long-held principles, or basic truth-telling.”
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: A.N.S.W.E.R. PROTESTS DONALD TRUMP. The sign being held by an anti-Trump protestor in this AP photo taken yesterday outside of the Hyatt Regency Hotel near SFO hosting the California Republican Party Convention is largely in Spanish, but notice the URL underneath it — it’s our old friends A.N.S.W.E.R.
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), also known as International A.N.S.W.E.R. and the ANSWER Coalition, is a United States-based protest umbrella group consisting of many antiwar and civil rights organizations. Formed in the wake of the September 11th attacks, ANSWER has since helped to organize many of the largest anti-war demonstrations in the United States, including demonstrations of hundreds of thousands against the Iraq War.
Longtime readers of Instapundit will remember A.N.S.W.E.R. behind seemingly every anti-Iraq War protest during the early naughts, which made perfect sense in a way — of course Iraq’s Ba’ath Socialist Party, which Saddam led, would be propped by another group of avoid socialists. Back in October of 2002, Glenn linked to this L.A. Weekly article by David Corn, with some background on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s roots:
If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don‘t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.
This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro‘s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s ”socialist system,“ which, according to the party‘s newspaper, has kept North Korea ”from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.“ The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, ”Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.“
Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.
The IAC, another WWP offshoot, was a key partner with ANSWER in promoting the protest. It was founded by Ramsey Clark, attorney general for President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. For years, Clark has been on a bizarre political odyssey, much of the time in sync with the Workers World Party. As an attorney, he has represented Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a political cult. He has defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, who was accused of participating in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Clark is also a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosevic. The international war-crimes tribunal, he explains, ”is war by other means“ — that is, a tool of the West to crush those who stand in the way of U.S. imperialism, like Milosevic. A critic of the ongoing sanctions against Iraq, Clark has appeared on talking-head shows and refused to concede any wrongdoing on Saddam‘s part. There is no reason to send weapons inspectors to Iraq, he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: ”After 12 years of brutalization with sanctions and bombing they‘d like to be a country again. They’d like to have sovereignty again. They‘d like to be left alone.“
It is not redbaiting to note the WWP’s not-too-hidden hand in the nascent anti-war movement. It explains the tone and message of Saturday‘s rally. Take the question of inspections. According to Workers World, at a party conference in September, Sara Flounders, a WWP activist, reported war opponents were using the slogan ”inspections, not war.“ Flounders, the paper says, ”pointed out that ’inspections ARE war‘ in another form,“ and that she had ”prepared party activists to struggle within the movement on this question.“ Translation: The WWP would do whatever it could to smother the ”inspections, not war“ cry. Inspections-before-invasion is an effective argument against the dash to war. But it conflicts with WWP support for opponents of U.S. imperialism. At the Washington event, the WWP succeeded in blocking out that line — while promoting anti-war messages more simpatico with its dogma.
And in 2016, they’re not letting the presidential election go to waste, either. As David French of NRO wrote yesterday, “We know leftist radicals aren’t shy about taking so-called ‘direct action’ to intimidate opponents. We also know that at least some Trump supporters are spoiling for a fight. Trump himself has been spoiling for a fight. We risk the worst political violence in a generation. Am I wrong to believe that some in the media are thrilled at the prospect — so long as the Left is leading the charge?”
Well, that was certainly the case in Ferguson and Baltimore. French’s article was memorably headlined, “Dear Mainstream Media, Don’t You Dare Whitewash Anti-Trump Violence,” but longtime Instapundit readers will remember that’s precisely what most of the MSM (with a few notable exceptions, such as Corn’s article above) did with A.N.S.W.E.R. Don’t hold your breath watching for them connect the dots in 2016.
Hillary Clinton won’t bow to many demands from Bernie Sanders, according to her supporters.
Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee after a dominating performance in Tuesday’s primaries. She holds a huge delegate lead over Sanders and is focused more than ever on the general election.
Sanders says he’ll stay in the primary fight, but has also signaled a change in his campaign by laying off campaign staffers and talking about the importance of the party platform to be written at the Democratic National Convention.
The signals are the early moves and machinations of a negotiation typical in Democratic contests.
Clinton will want Sanders’s help in winning over his diehard supporters and unifying the party — and Sanders will want something in return.
It’s like it’s all just dirty politics or something.
Microsoft on Friday announced that it would be making cash donations to the Democratic convention but not the Republican one.
The announcement comes as advocates have increased their pressure on technology giants and other large corporations to refrain from sponsoring the Republican convention because of the rhetoric and proposed policies of GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
Microsoft just took sides. They need to be reminded that there are costs to that.
Plus: “Qwabe’s collective denunciation of all white people, and his suggestion that he supports violence against them, have started a backlash online, but Qwabe has refused to back down in any way.”
Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus.
Is it news, or is it The Onion? Who can tell anymore?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Culture itself has become the real religion of our time, absorbing traditional religion as a subordinate part of itself. It offers some of the emotional benefits of religion, without exacting the high price faith demands.”
— Louis Dupré, as quoted by the Weekly Standard’s Maureen Mullarkey in “Look at Mark Rothko — Is there less here than meets the eye?”
DAVID FRENCH: Dear Mainstream Media, Don’t You Dare Whitewash Anti-Trump Violence. “Just imagine for a moment the shrieking outrage if Trump supporters had tried to flip a car outside a Hillary Clinton rally. Imagine the fury at the sight of a bloody man wearing a Hillary shirt. So how did the mainstream media cover the anti-Trump riot?”
With variations on Trump Brings Violence, of course. They know whose side they’re on. Plus:
Nothing Trump has done justifies a violent response. Nothing. Yet the more the media whitewashes this violence and applies its typical double standard to left-wing thugs, the more the violence will escalate. Clearly the media sympathizes with these Mexican flag-waving crowds in much the same way that it sympathized with the rioters at Ferguson and Baltimore. But when you excuse political violence, you tend to get more of it. We know leftist radicals aren’t shy about taking so-called “direct action” to intimidate opponents. We also know that at least some Trump supporters are spoiling for a fight. Trump himself has been spoiling for a fight. We risk the worst political violence in a generation. Am I wrong to believe that some in the media are thrilled at the prospect — so long as the Left is leading the charge?
If violence goes the other way they’ll be all “have you no decency?” But they have none, and people have noticed.
In my continuing quest to define aspects of Mr. Trump’s rise, to my own satisfaction, I offer what was said this week in a talk with a small group of political activists, all of whom back him. One was about to begin approaching various powerful and influential Republicans who did not support him, and make the case. I told her I’d been thinking that maybe Mr. Trump’s appeal is simple: What Trump supporters believe, what they perceive as they watch him, is that he is on America’s side.
And that comes as a great relief to them, because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world. Mr. Obama’s ideological notions are leftist, and indeed he is a hero of the international left. He is about international climate-change agreements, and leftist views of gender, race and income equality. Mr. Bush’s White House was driven by a different ideology—neoconservatism, democratizing, nation building, defeating evil in the world, privatizing Social Security.
But it was all ideology.
Then Mr. Trump comes and in his statements radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again—through border security and tough trade policy, etc. He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period.
Exactly. The average American doesn’t give a damn about either political party. They vote for one party over another simply because one party comes closer to reflecting their views than another, or because one candidate seems more genuine, or less corrupt, than another. They don’t place either political party above their own self-interest, or the nation’s interest. The GOP (as well as the Democrats) has driven most of these independent-minded Americans away by elevating party and politics above country.
Trump’s appeal is grounded in an absence of a rigidly defined, party-centric ideology, and his elevation of country over party. In other words, Trump–the quintessential political outsider–is an average Joe (albeit a very wealthy one).
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “‘She was a very, very religious person—she didn’t smoke, drink or swear, always very polite,’ recalls one Clinton friend, who, like most people who spoke to Newsweek, asked not to be named. ‘A lot of times, Hillary would snap her fingers and go, ‘Gum.’ And Huma would fetch it.’ Abedin took her duties so seriously, the source recalled, that when she learned that Clinton had once carried her own bag up a flight of stairs in her aide’s absence, Abedin nearly burst into tears.”
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