As we watch President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence begin their selection process of the next White House administration, one can only hope that the future cabinet is a representation of the interest and benefits of all Americans.
I must admit, I began to worry about that future the moment I heard President-elect Trump had appointed Stephen Bannon as White House Chief Strategist. Stephen Bannon’s ties to the White Nationalist movement have been noted and well documented. Bannon repeatedly pushed stories, while at the head of Breitbart News, that promoted anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism. Reports also proclaim Bannon praised the alt-right as the “smarter version of old school racist skinheads.” Surely, this is not who Americans want as top advisor to the President.
I joined nearly 170 U.S. Representatives in writing a letter to President-elect Trump encouraging him to reconsider his appointment of Stephen Bannon. I strongly oppose this appointment as do many of my constituents in Missouri’s 5th District who called our office and voiced their disapproval. This appointment not only undermines Mr. Trump’s call to be the president for all, it sets an overall discriminatory tone for millions of Americans.
I hope President-elect Trump listens to the American people and is truly sincere about bridging the racial and ethnic divide that is currently brewing in America. No matter how rich, or how big of a media star, or how many people bow down to you, the manner in which you treat fellow human beings, in due course, defines who you really are.
1. Bannon never made any anti-Semitic remarks. His ex wife claimed he made remarks during their divorce in 1997. (See the ADL website and their "5 Things to Know About Stephen Bannon" article)
ReplyDelete2. The Brietbart headline that the media keeps plastering all over the place as proof of Bannon's anti-Semitism, was an article written by a Jewish author who works for Brietbart.
3. Bannon served in the Navy. At sea as a Special Warfare Officer and stateside as special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations.
4. Bannon has 3 degrees. A Bachelors degree from Virginia Polytech, a masters in National Security studies from Georgetown, and an M.B.A. degree with honors from Harvard Business School.
5. Bannon described his role at Brietbart as virulently anti-establishment.
6. Anyone who has known or worked with Steve Bannon claims that he is one of the smartest people they have ever met. They also claim never to have perceived him to be racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic.
Based on his history, the personal testimony of people who actually know him, and the veracity with which he is being attacked by the left, I am willing to give him a chance to prove his character.
Anyone who regularly reads Breitbart.com knows that Cleaver is at best ignorant and simply repeating today's talking points, which in earlier less dishonest days were called the Party Line, or at the other extreme is lying through his teeth.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter, as the Alt Right likes to say, "We Don't Care", and that's certainly true for Trump and Bannon.
One wonders if the Left will ever accept that Trump doesn't play by the rules they've set up to ensure the Right always loses.
1. The left understands exactly that Trump "doesn't play by the rules" of decency or honesty. We've seen him in action during the campaign. We've also notices how he consistently refuses to definitively denounce his KKK supporters - and in fact, dog-whistles to them with racist appointees like Bannon and Sessions.
ReplyDelete2. An ex employee of Beitbart on Bannon:
"Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it," former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro wrote last week on the Daily Wire, a conservative website. "With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with [technology editor Milo] Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers."
(http://www.dailywire.com/news/8441/i-know-trumps-new-campaign-chairman-steve-bannon-ben-shapiro)
3. No one doubts that Bannon is smart, went to college or served in the military. What do these facts have to do with the points that Cleaver makes about his nastier tendencies and his promotion of alt-right nationalism- which are well-documented
He is a White hating racist fake pastor. Who make unsubstantiated claims that he can't back up but true facts just those made up by the liberal-left and their followers.
ReplyDelete1. The Left has absolutely no concept of decency or honesty, except as cudgels to beat up the Right with. Witness the Wikileaks and Project Veritas revelations during this campaign, hard to get lower than paying mentally ill people to foment violence at the other candidates forums to create an appearance that he's the violent one. The lies that you parrot mean nothing to us.
ReplyDelete2. Ben Shaprio is a cuckservative at best, and there's a reason he and his father are no longer employees of Breitbart, the son was part of a ludicrous conspiracy to take out Trump's campaign manager, one trivially disproved by just looking at the multiple video tapes of the "incident". And you say that Breitbart being a go-to site for the Alt Right, that is, the inchoate movement that's among other things dedicated to winning as opposed to movement conservatives like Shaprio's preferred "noble" defeat, is a bad thing.
3. Again, you call out these things like they're bad.
Bottom line is a watch phrase of the Alt Right: "We Don't Care".
And amazingly enough, when the Left went all in on smearing Bannon, the GOPe didn't cave!!!. Not a single one of them! This should terrify the Left and the Democratic Party, they're losing one of their most powerful weapons, the most if you count how many targets it can be applied to, but not as powerful as the lawfare Shaprio and company attempted, which I expect we'll be seeing more of.
What you folks do not seem to realize is that there are at least a million and a half more Democrats in this country than there are Republicans and the party is gaining in membership with every person we can get across the border. You Republicans have somewhere between four and six years to bask in your stolen glory until the numbers catch up with you and we take your damned guns away from you.
ReplyDelete7:21 AM: And which of you mice are to bell the cat?
ReplyDeleteYou try that s***, and we'll not only swamp whichever paramilitary forces choose to align themselves with the Federal government, we'll start hunting you, and the number of Democratic voters will very rapidly decrease, although I imagine more through self-deportation and surrender than ending up in mass graves.
And your scheme doesn't match the reported exit polling demographics at all, compared to Romney, Trump's minority votes substantially increased, while the white vote was static. There's no reason to believe that, if Trump is as successful as he's been to date, that all these voting demographics for him won't increase. In the meanwhile, we'll have fun in the political arena sending more of the GOPe back home to spend more time with their families.
But getting back to your threat of mass physical violence, seriously, you don't want to go there, nothing good will come of it. We haven't been buying guns in ever greater month to month numbers just to meekly turn them in.
Anonymous 5:03. Gratuitous name-calling means nothing unless you can document in a way that would convince a neutral, rational human being that Cleaver is a "white-hating racist." Sadly for us all, such documentary evidence of Bannon's white nationalist proclivities indisputably exist.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 5:34. The fact that Bannon is smart, graduated from college and served in the military is not bad. Just not relevant to charges of racism that he has amply justified in word and deed. And calling folks who offer evidence that Bannon promotes racist, white nationalism bad names and making ad hominem attacks against does not disprove their assertions.
You are right that there are indecent and dishonest people on both left and right - although the examples you give seem pretty petty in the light the Trump brigade's many indecencies (and Trump's personal indecencies, frauds, and cons - not to mention his possibly treasonous collusion with Russian interests). It's just that right now the indecent white supremacist brigade is in control of the White House.
Anonymous 7.21.: There are more Democrats than Republicans - witness the fact that HRC is on track to win the popular vote by almost 2 million votes (the count in CA is still continuing). The country is changing demographically - but not because anyone is actively promoting illegal immigration by trying to "get" folks across the border.
Nor is anyone going to take away legally held guns although it would be great if we could regulate gun ownership just to the degree that we regulate driving. I personally don't feel safe when any angry crackpot (felon, terrorist - fill in the blank) can not only acquire a gun but carry it legally in almost any venue.
Anonymous 5:34: Of course the right didn't cave. The Bannon line sadly reflects the identity of a good portion of that right - remember the "basket of deplorables"? Well, it's chock-full.
As long as the GOP elite get a Supreme Court that will ratify the druthers of the folks who pay their bills, and a president who'll sign legislation to roll back Medicare, Social Security, and Obamacare, all's good for them, no matter how nasty the means they've employed to realize these goals - they'll likely go along with race baiting too.
Anonymous 8:13. Your zeal may be commendable in some circles, but don't you feel a little foolish that you've allowed yourself to be baited? You sound downright violent.
There are more Democrats than Republicans - witness the fact that HRC is on track to win the popular vote
ReplyDeleteWhich is absolutely meaningless, because neither candidate ran a campaign to win the popular vote, they went for the Electoral College, seeing as how that's how you actually win. You are Not Even Wrong.
Of course the right didn't cave.
You missed that I'm talking about the GOPe, which has shown itself in deeds and often words to be center-left. That not a single one of them decided it was more advantageous to virtue signal by ritually denouncing him says a lot.
Your zeal may be commendable in some circles, but don't you feel a little foolish that you've allowed yourself to be baited? You sound downright violent.
I consider it giving fair warning, when anyone mouths off about seizing our guns, we need to tell them the consequences if they actually go through with it, so we're morally in the clear when we kill them for their effrontery. And "downright violent?" May have escaped your notice, but Joplin is in the cultural South, and you're absolutely right, if sufficiently provoked by physical threats, me and mine in return can be downright violent. So it's best to not provoke us "downright violent" types with physical violence, right?
I personally don't feel safe when any angry crackpot (felon, terrorist - fill in the blank) can not only acquire a gun but carry it legally in almost any venue.
Flatly false, no felon can so much as legally possess a single round of ammunition.
And with that falsehood, 11:29 AM, you've proven yourself to be grossly ignorant and parroting the lies of the Left's narratives, or worse, you're not going to come even faintly close to convincing us, we're heard it all before, and We Don't Care.
12:55: I am very sure that there are some on the right who will never be convinced of anything contrary to their preconceptions, no matter how careful the reasoning or overwhelming the evidence. Thanks to you, I now know why. They "just don't care."
ReplyDeleteMany of us do care, however. Which is why we are so disturbed by folks who think it is acceptable to metaphorically (I hope it's metaphorical) wave their guns in defense of an aspirationally authoritarian presidential administration, well-stocked with overt racists such as Jeff Sessions and alt-right nationalists like Steve Bannon.
You are of course, right about felons not owning guns legally in Missouri, although that remains somewhat tenuous; the Missouri Supreme Court issued a 5-2 split decision that reversed an earlier lower court ruling that read the law as permitting felons to own guns. Of course the prevalence of guns, the lack of controls on the informal transfer of guns among individuals, along with the frequent theft of guns insures that felons carry arms in Missouri.But that's the unpleasant reality here in the new Wild West.
12:55: I just noticed that you think that you would be "morally in the clear" when you kill folks for their "effrontery" in threatening your gun ownership (which doee not,incidentally, necessariy imply violence). Lordy! Didn't your mama, your Sunday school, anybody, teach you anything abot morality?
ReplyDeleteIt amazes me that there is anyone who actually believes that if the Government comes to get your guns, you are going to stop them. But then again, Randy Weaver thought that and so did the BD folks at Waco.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why we are so disturbed by folks who think it is acceptable to metaphorically (I hope it's metaphorical) wave their guns in defense of an aspirationally authoritarian presidential administration, well-stocked with overt racists such as Jeff Sessions and alt-right nationalists like Steve Bannon.
ReplyDeleteOut of which orifice did you pull that?
Up to now, guns have only come up in the context of a post-Trump administration trying to take them away from us.
You are of course, right about felons not owning guns legally in Missouri
I didn't say Missouri, because whatever the state law is, the controlling Federal law is clear, felony conviction, no legal possession for you.
I just noticed that you think that you would be "morally in the clear" when you kill folks for their "effrontery" in threatening your gun ownership (which doee not,incidentally, necessariy imply violence)
If I'd said that, you've be right to call me on it, but since only I said this would come to pass if these people were employing physical violence to try to take them away from us ... well, you're also ignoring the entire point of that bit, that our statements now about the consequences of trying are to give gun grabbers fair warning if they let their their effrontery go to far.
It amazes me that there is anyone who actually believes that if the Government comes to get your guns, you are going to stop them. But then again, Randy Weaver thought that and so did the BD folks at Waco.
I guess you haven't noticed that playing the game by the other side's rules, that ensure you're going to lose, is no longer in vogue, not that we were planning on anyway. I doubt Randy Weaver ever thought such a thing, he just wanted to be left along. Waco, I guess it escaped your notice that that was a bolt out of the blue, the ATF wanted a big, dramatic "rice bowl" raid to help them in budget negotiations with the new Clinton administration.
In both cases, the victims were minding their own business when the Feds showed up and started shooting first. There's not much you can do about that if you're at the top of the list, as Jerry Pournelle put it, "I don't plan on trying conduct a point defense against the government". But if the Left and its government were to be so unwise to change the rules of the game as they play it, to start seizing everyone's guns, we wouldn't cower in our homes waiting for the next available SWAT team to show up. We'd start hunting ... and there are so many more of us, we'd quickly swamp them, and then start addressing the root cause so we wouldn't have to bother with such s*** for many generations.
And it wouldn't be this simple, can you imagine the JPD, with its staunch support of armed citizens, being part of such a debacle? No, they'd be on our side, as would any police department who's members wanted to stay alive, as would large portions of the military, etc. It would be a gigantic, bloody mess, which is why I urge gun grabbers to find something better to do, it would not end well for anyone. In the meanwhile, they're just further polarizing the country, which the last few elections suggest is not a good thing.
Sure the military would be on your side. Just like the Ohio National Guard was on the side of the students at Kent State.
ReplyDeleteSure the military would be on your side. Just like the Ohio National Guard was on the side of the students at Kent State.
ReplyDeleteThe rioting students who'd previously burned down the ROTC building? Who were of the Left?
There's also the issue of the Fed's agent provocateur on site, who in the most recent findings may have been the one who started shooting first, and the minor detail that this was a single, very heated event.
By comparison, the various units and individuals of the military would have plenty of time to decide whether to follow such orders, including whether they'd align themselves with the Right against the Left, as they did at Kent State, or align themselves with the gun-grabbing, civil war fomenting Left. It would be unwise for the Left to assume all of the military would do the latter.
I seem to recall that Calley ordered his troops to cease fire but it is hard to stop a young soldier who has tasted blood frenzy. One of the things you seem to have hung your theory on is that it is only people on the left you would have to contend with. If the military is ordered to take the guns, they will take the guns and it does not matter how many they have to kill to achieve their directives. You seem to believe that just because you are an American, an American soldier would not pull the trigger on you if you refused to disarm. I assure you that is an invalid assumption.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to assume that the military would side with armed civilians. I can assure you that the military does not approve of armed civilians.
ReplyDeleteIf you're correct, and I have absolutely no reason to believe your "assurances" and such, then our military will find out what it's like to operation without a secure rear area. Unless they and their families bunker up inside bases and such, and make real sure their supplies of everything from food to medicines are not interdicted, I suspect there will be some changes of heart.
ReplyDeleteAnd as long as we're now invoking Vietnam, fragging of idiot superiors, and units, however small, going over to the other side. Plus we just don't have the mechanisms that totalitarian armies have to enforce loyalty. And, still, we gun owners, even is you assume only the historic "Three Percent", wildly outnumber them; are they about to start shelling recalcitrant neighborhoods? Because operating just as infantry they lose their biggest advantages and force multipliers.
Or it could get arbitrarily nasty, something very much on the table is our killing big Blue cities wholesale. Which would also drain the swamp of Democrats, you might say. And that's not something the military could stop, although they could get seriously tied down just trying to supply water to keep some alive for a while.
Again, there is no way this ends well, especially for the gun grabbing side.
Meanwhile, continue to let the hate flow, it'll just motivate us to buy more guns and ammo, teach more newbies how to shoot and get them adequately armed, etc. Those numbers are going very badly for your side, just look at the wild increases in concealed carry licenses.
Oh, yeah, "the military", at least under its soon to change management, doesn't like armed enlisted men either, on or off duty. I wonder if all those sentries who are forced to "guard" their positions with unloaded rifles (albeit with a magazine in their pocket or the like, one reason the Beirut barracks bombing succeeded) have the same opinion on armed citizens as their superiors terrified of a not perfect officer efficiency report, perhaps caused by an negligent discharge of one of the men under them.
ReplyDeleteThe military is most certainly not monolithic, starting with the officer and enlisted division.
Or we could just farm it out to Executive Outcomes. I hear they are pretty good as disarming citizen armies.
ReplyDeleteThe Joplin Police Department is 1/20th of Executive Outcomes's size, back when it existed. I'm sure you don't have to draw a very large circle around Joplin before it encompasses more law enforcement officers than the largest number of men they ever had.
ReplyDeleteThere's reasons these things are the remit of nation states, outside of truly chaotic regions like Africa where EO they had their time in the sun. Sovereign immunity is one of them, for example.
The sovereign immunity will be invested with the collectors. Remember that Canada, Australia and Britain all handled the collection without bloodshed. It is amazing how the threat of arrest and asset seizure will motivate most citizens to obey the law.
ReplyDeleteHere is the timeline on weapon confiscation. On 20 January Trump will take office. On 21 January the Capitol Building will burn to the ground. On 22 January the arsonist will be identified as a Mexican Union Member. On 23 January Congress will meet in extraordinary session to pass the Enabling Acts which will allow Trump the authority to arrest and detain both Mexicans and Union Members and, most importantly, the ability to confiscate all civilian owned firearms in the Country. Fast and easy and you will not even realize what happened to you.
ReplyDeleteThe sovereign immunity will be invested with the collectors.
ReplyDeleteJust like it has hasn't been for private prisons? That would require enhancing it, which of course could happen, but the government doesn't like to transfer liability to itself. And there would be a whole heaping helping of liabilities from survivors with innocent family members killed. See Randy Weaver, the money didn't replace his wife and son, but it did hurt the government.
Remember that Canada, Australia and Britain all handled the collection without bloodshed.
In Britain there were very few left after a century of gun control, and all were registered. And obviously since then, there's been no crimes committed with now outlawed guns. I actually don't know the story in detail, but it's a lot easier if you first outlaw effective self-defense, as the U.K. in the courts in the 1950s, and by statute in the 1960s. For some more recent info on that, search on proposals for "have a go" laws.
Canada, I'm not sure there even were any major confiscations? I do know there was massive resistance to the 1993 registration law, and the government dropped the whole thing a few years ago (!!!).
Australia, yes a confiscation, but again massive resistance, it's estimates only a small fraction of the banned weapons were turned in.
So the "lack of bloodshed" has more to do with the governments not pressing the issue, than the sort of confiscation you're talking about.
7:24 AM: And the enabled God-Emperor Trump will then s*** on his base? I think not, as Hitler didn't with privately owned guns of "Aryan" Germans, and the laws were loosened on Nazi Party members. But if you think that sort of thing might happen, despite almost the entire political establishment hating him with a burning passion, perhaps it would be best that you buy a rifle of military utility privately, so you can resist when you'd be otherwise dragged out of your home and put on a bus headed to a camp, like the "Good Germans" Jews who Hitler first seized their registered guns from....
This is of course why we fight registration laws so hard, pretty much all confiscations have been preceded by registration, except for the PRC, where "rifle taxes" were used to dry up the small supply of civilian owned guns (not all that many in a generally dirt poor country).
We don't need registration laws. All we have to do is use NRA membership lists to guide us upon our quest. Additionally some states, such as Illinois use a firearm owner's identification card as a requirement for ammunition purchases. And then there are the list of folks with concealed carry permits which are on file in every sheriff's office. We will find you.
ReplyDeleteDon't be too complacent. Trump is going to dump on his base so bad they will not see it coming.
ReplyDelete12:38 PM: The NRA's membership has never been more than a bare fraction of the nation's gun owners, perhaps 3% right now. Similarly, to date no state has issued CCW licenses to more than 10% of its age eligible population, and the norm is more like 5%, which Jasper county hit a while ago. And the vast majority of the nation's gun owning population doesn't live in mandatory registration states like Illinois.
ReplyDeleteBut, sure, there are ways to guess who owns guns. But the real question here is who will find whom first, if you are so insane as to try this gambit. If you live in a big Blue city, it won't even be personal, we'll kill them wholesale if it gets that nasty, as I noted @1:47 PM.
12:39 PM: On what do you base this claim? Do you think Trump's vanity will allow him to be a failure as a President for something that's so easily avoided?
A lot of us voted for him because we were sure to lose with any other candidate, many also noted that he likes to win, to succeed, and we don't expect that to change once he's in office. Nor have we seen any serious signs to date that he's going to attack his base, which is essentially what you're claiming. What would he gain by doing that??
It is the fact that you are so willing to kill people is the very reason we have to take the guns away from you.
ReplyDeleteIt is the fact that you are so willing to kill people is the very reason we have to try with lethal force to take the guns away from you which will result in us killing you in return.
ReplyDeleteFixed it for you, showing the twisted logic of your argument.
And we're "so willing to kill people" because we know our 20th Century history, we know taking our guns away is only a precursor to killing or imprisoning us in huge numbers. After all, Obama started his political career in the house of two of the most notorious and violent of the cultural '60s "revolutionaries", who made a wild guess 10% of the population would not be capable of reeducation and would have to be killed after they took over.
And anyone who's aware of the raw, seething hatred the Left is displaying towards those of us who voted for Trump can see this attitude, the sort of thing the French Revolution birthed in its modern form, has now been normalized in a very large fraction of the Left. After all, you don't see many figures on the Left telling the most vocal and violent of them to cool it and accept a peaceful transfer of power, do you? And this goes from the top down, starting with Obama himself.
All a part of declaring the Republican party in specific and the Right in general to be irredeemably illegitimate if not illegal since Watergate, remember all the lawfare again the Reagan administration? I'm told the level of political stress we're seeing is as high as it was in 1856-60, and we all know what happened after that, what the mere election of Lincoln started, although it was he who took it to bloody war. You think Hillary was blowing off steam when she explicitly declared a quarter of the nation to be "irredeemable"? I assure you we paid attention to the implicit threat behind such a religious in nature declaration.
So, no, there's no way were going to play this game of yours, by your rules, as you envision. Leave us alone, and we can continue to live in semi-peace, continuing our cold civil war by mostly peaceful means. Weasel word since, for example, Team Hillary was caught paying people to foment violence at Trump events, with the deliberate objective to create the impression he was the violent one, and of course the Left's response to a normal election was to riot in the streets. Albeit in their big Blue cities. Violently attack us, as you propose to do, and we will return it a thousand fold.
You would think the choice to leave us alone or not would be obvious. That it's not explains our posture.
I guess whatever happens is preordained then because we are going to take the damned guns away. And we are going to do it during the last two years of Trump's one and only term.
ReplyDeleteYou see, the majority of gun sales lately have been to minority owners. Therein lies a problem. How do you disarm them without disarming everyone? Do not suffer the illusion that it is only your side which is armed and dangerous.
ReplyDelete