Police still refuse to enforce law, evict DC occupiers

The U.S. Park Police are standing around McPherson Square talking to each other. They continue to refuse to enforce the law and evict the leftist occupiers who have quite literally destroyed the park in recent months.

The photos below were taken about 3:25 p.m. today.

There used to be lush grass where the tents of the Occupy squatters now sit.

There are plenty of television news crews in place in case something actually happens.

The "Fuck Patriarchy" table is a crowd pleaser.

The tarp no longer covers the equestrian statue of Civil War General James B. McPherson but the Guy Fawkes mask remains on the statue's face.

DC Occupiers Deface Statue of War Hero

The leftists occupying McPherson Square in Washington, D.C. have defaced the statue of Civil War General James B. McPherson.

The occupiers have not only placed a huge blue tarp over the statue of the Union Army hero killed in the Battle of Atlanta in 1864, but they have mounted a Guy Fawkes mask on the late general's head. The Guy Fawkes mask was featured in the 2005 film, V for Vendetta.

I took two photos of the statue at 11 this morning. They are below.

Update: Reports indicate a few minutes ago a man came by and ripped down or attempted to rip down the tarp.

Where's the proof that Romney is a conservative?

I can understand why some Republicans can support Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination but I can't understand why those same people might believe Romney is a conservative.

Where's the proof that Romney is a conservative? He didn't govern as a conservative when he was governor of Massachusetts. He enacted RomneyCare, which became the inspiration for ObamaCare, and even now continues to defend his failing socialistic program to the bitter end.

Some of the most nonsensical defenses of Romney have come from the otherwise sensible Ann Coulter. Her recent columns assume that Romney has long been a conservative but that he's been concealing this conservatism in order to advance politically. He had to do so in order to win in Massachusetts, she argues.

I'm not convinced.

Will Occupiers Get Their Violent Chicago Riot?

Front Page Magazine published this article of mine today:

Will Occupiers Get Their Violent Chicago Riot?

By Matthew Vadum

The anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19.


Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims the movement will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.”


Of course the radicals of the Chicago 8 organized riots at the Democratic Party’s national convention in that city in 1968. Hundreds of police officers were injured.


Adbusters vows that this time the rioters won’t give an inch to the police. A massive occupation of Chicago involving “50,000 people from all over the world” will begin on May 1:

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide. [ellipses in original]

When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting May 19, the movement plans to press its demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters.


And woe to the powers that be if they don’t give in to the radicals’ demands.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear. [ellipses in original]

Soros’s ‘Glee’ Over OWS Violence

Here is an article of mine published on January 26 by Front Page Magazine:

Soros’s ‘Glee’ Over OWS Violence 

By Matthew Vadum

George Soros is delighted that chaos is coming to his adopted homeland.

“In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” the anti-American financier told Newsweek in a recent interview, restating the Alinskyite adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros says. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Like some of the more dimwitted commentators on economics, Soros loves to spew the usual socialist drivel about so-called market fundamentalism running amok as if he were living during the Cleveland administration. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.”

To people like Soros, the mortgage bubble was caused by the Snidely Whiplashes of the financial world, not by venal real-life politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the monstrous financial blunderers known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Free markets are to blame even though they have never been tried.

As the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate, anger will grow and rioting in the streets is sure to follow. “It’s already started,” he says. “Yes, yes, yes,” Soros adds “almost gleefully,” Newsweek writer John Arlidge editorializes.

For years Soros has longed for an opportunity to transform America into a socialist state. “The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” he said in 2009 as he created the Institute for New Economic Thinking with a $50 million endowment.

This Communist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that funds leftist political infrastructure. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

Soros now counts on the armies of street thugs that comprise the “Occupy” movement to ramp up the violence. He praises Occupy Wall Street as “an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” disingenuously distancing himself from the supposedly spontaneous uprising.

DC 'Occupy' Evictions Not Happening So Far

U.S. Park Police gave notice to the socialists, communists, and anarchists of Occupy D.C. that they planned to evict them at 12 Noon Eastern time.

The deadline passed and not much happened.

The site at Freedom Plaza is quiet and there aren't too many people around. The site at McPherson Square, on the other hand, is a beehive of activity. Unfortunately at this point reporters seem to outnumber police at McPherson Square.

I dropped by both sites a little past 1 p.m. today and took a few photos. It looks like it's Occupy business as usual:

McPherson Square:

McPherson Square:

McPherson Square:

Freedom Plaza:

Leftist Mob Mobilizes Against the GOP

Here is my article in today's Front Page Magazine:

Leftist Mob Mobilizes Against the GOP

By Matthew Vadum

In American politics, only the Left mobilizes the mob against its opponents. That’s why history textbooks don’t contain references to marauding bands of Reagan supporters roughing up Mondale backers.


But leftist groups and groups aligned with the Democratic Party have long viewed Republicans as fair game.


The Obama-backed “Occupy” movement has been working nonstop in New Hampshire bullying, intimidating, harassing, and provoking the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. It is the kind of unseemly, Latin American-style political activism that threatens to become a permanent feature of American politics if President Obama wins a second term.


It’s also the classic Saul Alinsky “inside/outside” strategy. Ensconced in the White House Obama appears to remain above the fray while his loyal minions on the outside of officialdom do their best to irritate and embarrass his Republican adversaries.


All of the Republican candidates in New Hampshire have been targeted by the Obama-approved goon squads who work with hippies and labor activists. They have portrayed their number one target, Mitt Romney, as a job-killing capitalist, Newt Gingrich as a monster, and Rick Santorum as a “bigot.”


The activists attend the candidates’ campaign events, shouting and carrying on in an attempt to prevent Republicans from speaking. They’re not interested in honest discussion or debate: their only goal is to silence the opposition. The Occupiers’ tactics are the kind one might expect to see from the Italian squadristi or the German Sturmabteilung, both of which used physical coercion and intimidation to halt the democratic process.


Much of the thuggery is coordinated by Occupy New Hampshire, whose website is an agglomeration of Marxist pabulum. The group announced that it planned to attack Republican candidates in order to focus public attention on the “growing economic inequality and the disproportionate economic and political power of corporate America and the wealthiest 1%.”


At one event, Romney fought back. In a rare outburst, the polite former Massachusetts governor verbally sparred with an activist complaining about the influence of money in politics. “Hey, instead of shouting, why don’t you say what you mean, what’s your view?” said Romney. “Madam, what do you think?”

A Terrorist Returns

An article of mine from the Dec. 27, 2011, issue of Front Page Magazine:

A Terrorist Returns

By Matthew Vadum

Convicted terrorist collaborator Lori Berenson is fortunate that in the United States citizenship is not a license that expires upon bad behavior.



Berenson is back in America for the holidays, nearly two decades after the trust fund baby left to advance communism in Latin America.


A Peruvian court convicted her in 1996 of aiding a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that even now aspires to overthrow Peru’s government by force, but the 42-year-old New Yorker is free on parole. She was granted permission to visit the U.S. and has promised to return to Peru next month and remain there until her sentence is completed.


Berenson was paroled in 2010 after serving 15 years of a 20 year prison term for collaborating with the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) or MRTA. Along with Shining Path, a brutal Maoist guerrilla group, MRTA has long waged war against Peru’s democratically elected government.


Her long and winding quest for so-called social justice began in the late 1980s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the academic home of America-hating anarchist Noam Chomsky. An anthropology student, Berenson said her time at MIT radicalized her. It was “the place where I finally learned the connection between politics and human suffering.”


During an academic exchange program in El Salvador, Berenson met with the late Congressman Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) and future Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). They discussed human rights and conditions in El Salvador, which made Berenson reflect “that the world was much bigger and the suffering was much worse than I had thought.”


In 1989, she dropped out of MIT and started working for the Communist-influenced Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in New York City and Washington, D.C. Two years later she moved to Central America and began working for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), then a Marxist guerrilla group in El Salvador.


Berenson found her way to Peru. Back in 1993, soon after she rented a house in a Lima suburb, it became an outpost for the group. MRTA’s second in command, Miguel Rincon, used one floor of the house as a command post, arsenal, and shooting range. Authorities say Berenson made several visits to the Peruvian Congress, casing it in preparation for a planned attack and identifying lawmakers for future kidnappings.