NSA LEAKER: ‘Being White Is Terrorism’

That’s according to a tweet the alleged leaker, Reality Winner, sent in February. Winner, who is herself white, tweeted at rapper Kanye West that he should make a shirt declaring whiteness an act of terror.

“@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, ‘being white is terrorism’,” she tweeted.

Winner’s social media history is filled with left-wing messages and support for progressives like Bernie Sanders, as The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has previously documented.

The majority of her recent tweets are angrily directed against President Donald Trump, in particular rehashing the liberal trope about “tiny hands.” She has also called the president an “orange fascist,” a “cunt” and bashed his selection of “Confederate General” Jeff Sessions amounts to racism. Sessions is head of the agency currently prosecuting Winner.

Winner held a Top Secret security clearance for her job at Pluribus International, an NSA contractor. She reportedly is the source for The Intercept’s Monday report about previously unknown Russian interference in the 2016 election.

It seems she had quite the progressive education.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. After London Bridge, The World Is Sick Of Politicians Downplaying Terrorism: Our political leaders are basically telling us that this kind of terrorism, random and deadly, is the price we have to pay for their policies of multiculturalism and political correctness.

The sad truth, and getting sadder with every attack, is that the political class has little interest in doing what would really be necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, let alone talk about it. They don’t want to talk about how Britain’s lax immigration policies over decades led to hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country with varying degrees of willingness to assimilate and adopt Western values. They don’t want to openly criticize the blatant problems with the multiculturalism the UK has pursued for years and the obvious impact it has had on the immigrant population.

Oh no. This would cost them too much. It would shatter the façade of political correctness that’s been constructed over our “civilized” western world, and destroy the illusion, so vital to the political class, that Western values are universal. . . .

There’s little to no tolerance in polite society for the kind of honesty for which many in the West are hungry. The Washington Post ran a headline Sunday that read, “World Leaders Call For Unity After London Attack. Trump tweets the complete opposite.” The article chastises President Trump for not joining in the fake condolences and platitudes of the political elite, and praises those elites for their messages of hope. But what, exactly, are they saying we should be hopeful for?

Trump, who is often wrong, was correct in tweeting Sunday that, “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people.” A growing number of those people are scared, and sick of turning on the news to hear of yet another heartbreaking attack then hearing the same meaningless bromides from their leaders.

They want a leader who doesn’t just try to inure them to this kind of random violence but stands up and says that we’re not going to take it, that this isn’t an acceptable status quo. Whether Trump is that leader is highly debatable, but at least he’s making a nod toward it.

Indeed.

ANDREW MCCARTHY ON wishful thinking and the London attacks.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

LAST STAND FOR CHRISTIANS IN IRAQ: The disappearance of first Jews and now Christians from most parts of the Middle East means the termination of the historical Middle Eastern mosaic of peoples.

Despite periods of violence and persecution, coexistence between ethno-religious groups on the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, Christians, Shabak, Yazidis and Kaka’i, has over the years been marked by pluralism and cooperation.

This coexistence also used to include Jews.

When I recently visited the town of Alqosh, where Jews and Christians lived together for a thousand years, I had the honor to visit the tomb of the biblical prophet Nahum. The last Jew leaving Alqosh 1948 left the keys to a Christian family. It was this very family that helped us visit the synagogue and the tomb upon my visit.

The disappearance of first Jews and now Christians from most parts of the Middle East means the termination of the historical Middle Eastern mosaic of peoples. The result will be a region rapidly going into a dark age – with no hope for peace and stability for a very long time.

A Middle East without Christians will no longer be able to rely on a group which for centuries has been able to act as a broker between ethnic or religious groups. The risk of irreconcilable conflicts between remaining groups will be even higher if and when Christians are gone forever.

Given the level of religious cleansing throughout the Islamic Middle East, I’m afraid that’s considered a feature, not a bug.

LEFT-WING VIOLENCE IS ROOTED IN A LACK OF CONSEQUENCES: The Roots of Left-Wing Violence. “The victims and perpetrators of recent violence are hardly who Rensin makes them out to be. ‘The poor and oppressed’ are not students at Claremont McKenna College (est. 2017–18 tuition: $52,825), and Muhammad Ashraf, the Muslim immigrant who owned the limousine burnt out on Inauguration Day, is not ‘the company’ stamping its vulgar capitalist boot upon the downtrodden.”

They want to represent the poor and downtrodden? Take their money with lawsuits and tread them down with criminal prosecutions. See how long their enthusiasm lasts.

EXCELLENT: Betsy DeVos appoints Adam Kissel, formerly of FIRE, as Assistant Secretary for Higher Education.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: While National Politics Rage On, Connecticut Democrats Are In A Serious Crisis With The Law.

During the 2016 elections, Democrats cheated at federal, state, and local levels, for which they have been hit with record penalties. In each case, the violations provided them with an unfair advantage and in some cases violated the law.

In 2016, Wikileaks revealed that the DNC actively worked to undermine the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders by conspiring to disrupt his events. Wikileaks also revealed that then Deputy DNC Chair Donna Brazile went as far as to provide Hillary Clinton with presidential debate questions before the debates took place in order to give her an unfair advantage, something to which she now admits after initially denying having done.

But as recent evidence has shown, the lying and cheating by Democrats didn’t stop at the federal level. They cheated their way through state and local elections too. Lets look at Connecticut as an example.

A fish may rot from the head, but the whole thing spoils pretty darn fast.

FLASHBACK: The European Left as the Ichneumon Wasp. It’s not just the European left. . . .

PATRICK POOLE: Today’s Known Wolf…

BRENDAN O’NEILL: After London: let’s start talking about Islam.

Islam now enjoys the same kind of moral protection from blasphemy and ridicule that Christianity once (wrongly) enjoyed. All last week, for example, I received furious emails and messages in response to two articles I wrote about the Manchester attack, telling me I was wrong to defend the use of the phrase ‘Islamist extremism’. That term has an Islamophobic bent to it, we’re told. It demeans Islam and its adherents by suggesting they have something to do with terrorism. You should just say ‘extremism’, not ‘Islamist extremism’. Don’t ever name the extremism, don’t label it, because you might hurt people’s feelings.

This is why our political leaders so rarely use the terms Islamism, radical Islam and Islamic terrorism: because they want to avoid offending Islam and also because they don’t want to stir up what they view as the public’s bovine, hateful prejudices. This censorious privilege is not extended to any other religion. We do not avoid saying ‘Catholic paedophiles’ about the priests who molested children for fear of tarring all Catholics with the same brush. We happily say ‘Christian fundamentalist’ about people who are Christian and fundamentalist. We use ‘Buddhist extremists’ to describe violent Buddhist groups in Myanmar. And yet Islam is ringfenced from tough discussion; phrases which at some level include the word ‘Islam’ are tightly policed; criticism of Islam is deemed a mental illness: Islamophobia.

This is incredibly dangerous. This censorious flattery of Islam is, in my view, a key contributor to the violence we have seen in recent years. Because when you constantly tell people that any mockery of their religion is tantamount to a crime, is vile and racist and unacceptable, you actively invite them, encourage them in fact, to become intolerant. You license their intolerance. You inflame their violent contempt for anyone who questions their dogmas. You provide a moral justification for their desire to punish those who insult their religion.

Yes. Appeasement is provocation.

GREGG JARRETT: Justice Ginsburg Must Disqualify Herself in the Trump Travel Ban Case.

THE CAMPUS CRY-BULLYING REPRESENTS A MINORITY OF STUDENTS WHO ARE INDULGED BY ADMINISTRATORS BECAUSE, FUNDAMENTALLY, THE ADMINISTRATORS AGREE WITH WHAT THEY’RE DOING AND REGARD THEM AS USEFUL TOOLS: New Poll Shows What College Students Really Think About Safe Spaces. “A majority of students do not actively endorse safe spaces on campus, according to a recently-released study. Sixty-two percent of students did not agree with or felt indifferent to safe spaces, according to a poll of 1,659 current college students taken by LendEDU, a student loan consolidation and refinancing organization. Of those surveyed, 37 percent agreed that safe spaces ‘are completely out of touch with reality’ and 25 percent said they were indifferent.”

A BRIDGE TOO FAR: 130 British imams refuse to perform funerals for London, Manchester attackers.

In what is a highly unusual move, Muslim religious leaders from different schools of Islam — both Sunni and Shia — issued a statement late Monday saying their pain at the suffering of the victims of Saturday’s attacks had led to their decision, and they called on others imams to follow suit.

“We are deeply hurt that a spate of terror attacks have been committed in our country once more by murderers who seek to gain religious legitimacy for their actions. We seek to clarify that their reprehensible actions have neither legitimacy nor our sympathy,” the statement put out by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body representing over 500 organizations, read.

“Consequently, and in light of other such ethical principles which are quintessential to Islam, we will not perform the traditional Islamic funeral prayer for the perpetrators and we also urge fellow imams and religious authorities to withdraw such a privilege. This is because such indefensible actions are completely at odds with the lofty teachings of Islam,” the statement continued.

It would be even better if they’d cooperate with the authorities on identifying the radical religious leaders.

NSA PLUGS A LEAK, ISIS GOES DOWN UNDER, AND AL FRANKEN CANCELS ON BILL MAHER: Liz Sheld’s morning brief has it all.

THIS PIECE IN WIRED QUOTES MY TENNESSEE COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE: Digital Privacy: The Next Frontier in Antitrust Law.

To get a sense of Silicon Valley’s stupefying power writ large, just glance at a list of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies. In the first quarter of 2017, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, and Amazon inhabited the top four spots; Facebook sat just a few rungs below, at number eight and has already climbed up to number five. Companies that were near the top of the heap just a few years ago—big pharma, big box chains like Walmart, the “big four” Chinese banks, oil conglomerates, household names like Nestle or General Electric—are glaringly absent from the mix. The world’s most valuable resource is now data, and Silicon Valley has cornered the market on amassing personal information.

This new world order is one of many reasons why antitrust officials are questioning their methods, even if they’re a bit slow to do so. (Even in the EU, as recently as last fall, Margrethe Vestager, the antitrust czar, was still calling Facebook’s terms of service “a gray area” between privacy and competition.)

If competition policy were working, “we wouldn’t have record wealth inequality,” law professor Maurice Stucke says. “We wouldn’t have market power and monopoly profits.” Stucke should know. He’s a former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division and has published research on algorithmic collusion, big data, and digital cartels.

American antitrust statutes like the Sherman Act are broadly worded and largely centered around competition; they don’t explicitly instruct regulators to account for political realities like income inequality or the effect on wealth creation for small businesses. But the number of new companies started has reached a 40-year low, and profits for some US companies are abnormally high compared to GDP. The cracks in the antitrust establishment are starting to show, said Stucke, and experts are wondering if “the emperor maybe has no clothes.”

If Google isn’t an antitrust worry, what is? What could be?

Stuckey, by the way, is coauthor (with Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi) of Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy, and Big Data and Competition Policy.

MORE ON THE FBI’S ARREST of leaker Reality Winner.

Honestly, I suspect she didn’t even want to keep it secret, and we’ll discover she has an expensive defense lawyer and is going to prepare a defense based on being a whistleblower.

What’s kind of amazing about this is that the Intercept story was published today. So the FBI was able to track her down and arrest her that quickly?

Something is up. Expect more dropping shoes.

Indeed.

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ANOTHER KNOWN WOLF: Why was he on parole – and why was he in Australia at all? Violent, ice-addicted Islamic jihadi who trained in Somalia had been jailed for drug-fuelled home invasion and linked to terror groups before killing spree.

It doesn’t mean much to be “known to the authorities” when the authorities are too pathetic to do anything.

TO BE FAIR, IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH: Roger Kimball: “Pittsburgh Not Paris” Triggers the Eco-Nuts.

Like many international agreements, the unspoken subtext of the Paris Climate Accord is “hamper America. Grab as much of its wealth as you can. Say it’s in the name of ‘fairness.’”

That’s not going to wash with Donald Trump. In this respect, he has returned to a much more traditional view of the role of president. He is not the president of the world. He is the President of the United States. We seek to get along with others, but his first task is to assure the prosperity and well being of the citizens of the United States. America First.

As Andrew McCarthy and others have pointed out, in withdrawing from the Paris Accord, Trump has also returned to a more traditional—which is to say, a constitutional—view of treaties. The Paris Accord was a treaty. But it was never presented to the Senate for ratification. In this respect, it was just another of Obama’s initiatives to circumvent the Constitution and govern by administrative fiat. The reason that the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate to ratify treaties is because treaties can deeply affect the the lives of American citizens.

The use of treaties as a means to end-run the democratic process has been a concern ever since Missouri v. Holland. Some pushback is warranted.

SUZANNE VENKER: Hell hath no fury like a feminist scorned.

WHISKEY AND CIGARS: BEST THING FOR YOU! At Age 111, America’s Oldest Veteran Still Smoking Cigars, Drinking Whiskey, and Loving Life.

HOW TO DECODE PRAVDA: The lack of human agency in this WaPo headline is a pretty good clue about whether it was the left or the right side of the Portland protests that got violent.

BRUCE BAWER: Why I Refuse to Lie About Islam.

FAKE NEWS: CNN Responds To Claims They Staged A Muslim Anti-Terror Protest.