Saturday, August 29, 2015

Hillary Takes "Responsibility" for Email Abuses

My article from the August 28, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:




Hillary Takes "Responsibility" for Email Abuses

By Matthew Vadum

Now that her presidential campaign is taking on water, a disingenuous former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that she was accepting "responsibility" for illegally using an insecure private Internet server to transmit emails containing top-secret classified U.S. government documents.
Whatever that means in Clinton-speak.
Hillary claimed previously that she was taking responsibility for the Benghazi fiasco in 2012 that left four Americans dead. Nothing happened to her. We still don't even have an official cause of death for Ambassador Chris Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized and murdered by Islamic terrorists.
Although Clinton has tried in recent months to treat her self-created email scandal as much ado about nothing, her admission that she actually did something wrong is new after the endless pious-sounding pronouncements about how carefully she followed applicable laws to ensure she safeguarded U.S. national security. Her new statement smells like a focus group-tested throwaway line, an empty gesture that might be accepted by people who haven't been following the email scandal closely.
What Hillary is doing is pretending to take responsibility for her behavior and piling on legalisms, while at the same time trying to deflect attention from her criminal behavior and wanton disregard for national security, misdeeds that ought to disqualify her from high office.
So don't give much credence to this phony mea culpa tendered by a devious political operator who has been playing the press like a fiddle for decades. Clinton's newfound seeming earnestness about her email predicament may appear refreshing to some, but there is no reason to believe the admission is offered in good faith. This is yet another attempt at misdirection aimed at keeping her floundering campaign for the White House alive. And she's good at lying and distracting, having managed to stay out of the hoosegow through a litany of scandals and improprieties including Whitewater and Travelgate.
Everything is always political with Hillary, the Saul Alinsky disciple, and she never tires of churning out excuses. She has an answer for everything and there are always journalists and other useful idiots willing to believe her.

Friday, August 28, 2015

The #BlackLivesMatter Revolution Will Be Televised

My article in the August 27, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:




The #BlackLivesMatter Revolution Will Be Televised

By Matthew Vadum

Hoping to start a bloody "race war," a black, gay, in-your-face Obama-supporting former TV reporter horrified Southwest Virginia TV viewers yesterday when he stalked and coolly murdered two white former TV station colleagues and wounded a white interview subject during a live broadcast.
The shooter, Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, apparently a registered Democrat and former prostitute, said he attacked the three white people during the "standup" report about local tourism from the marina at Smith Mountain Lake as racial payback for white-supremacist Dylann Storm Roof's June 17 attack in Charleston, S.C. that left nine black churchgoers dead. Roof, who reportedly confessed, also said he wanted to start a race war by committing acts of violence.
Flanagan, who used the name Bryce Williams professionally, left behind a lengthy, rambling, written rant explaining his explicitly race-based motive for the murders. Although the full document was sent to ABC News, it has not yet found its way online. Media outlets have provided highlights. ABC News reports that "A man claiming to be Bryce Williams called ABC News over the last few weeks, saying he wanted to pitch a story and wanted to fax information. He never told ABC News what the story was."
Well, now we know.
Using online accounts created only recently, Flanagan promoted the political murders he committed as well as any team of seasoned, high-priced publicists could have. In the process he demonstrated his diabolical mastery of social media for the world to see. He shot his victims early in the morning and made the morning news. He sent out a horrifying video of the cold-blooded killings and caught the noonday news. He died in the afternoon in time to make the evening news. All the saturation coverage on cable TV news and news-on-dead-tree exposure is a bonus, a sort of contribution-in-kind that media outlets are providing to his cause.
Emulating the cost-conscious Muslim terrorists who flew airplanes into buildings on 9/11, Flanagan got perhaps tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in free media worldwide for his evil cause on what must have been a shoestring budget. Perhaps radical leftist public relations outfits Fenton Communications or SKDKnickerbocker of Anita Dunn fame will teach Flanagan's techniques to incoming employees.
In the empowering age of the Internet, fomenting civil unrest and violent revolution is becoming more affordable. Not that the George Soros-funded Black Lives Matter movement needs the money.

The 'Ferguson Effect' Spreads

My article from the August 26, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:




The 'Ferguson Effect' Spreads

By Matthew Vadum

A white police officer in the South who was recently beaten bloody and unconscious by a black suspect now admits he failed to defend himself properly because he was afraid if he used force he would have been accused of racism.
This is poignant testimony to the tremendous damage that the racist Black Lives Matter movement has inflicted on the American psyche. Nowadays police all over the country are increasingly reluctant, or in some cases outright unwilling, to perform their duties as law enforcement personnel. They know that government officials, eager to pander to loud, angry lynch mobs in the street, don't have their back. The mainstream media has been playing a supporting role, turning every police shooting of a person of color into a cause célèbre, regardless of the circumstances leading to the shooting. So cops are taking unnecessary chances, ignoring police safety protocols and giving suspects the benefit of the doubt when it is not warranted.
This is the war on police that President Obama, Al Sharpton, and other racial agitators have carefully brought to a crescendo since the Trayvon Martin saga and the case of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black thug, who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, last year as he tried to murder white cop Darren Wilson. There has never been any credible evidence that race was a factor in the shooting yet the Black Lives Matter crowd and the rest of the activist Left continue to lie every single day about Brown's death. Brown tried to seize Wilson's handgun and the officer shot him in self-defense. The popular "hands up, don't shoot" meme was based on a lie a witness told in which it was claimed Brown tried to surrender to Wilson and was mercilessly shot in cold blood. Brown's body was autopsied three separate times to satisfy the angry mob and legions of left-wing conspiracy theorists. Wilson has been been vindicated in every official investigation. The local grand jury refused to indict him. Even Obama's race-obsessed, highly politicized Department of Justice cleared him. 
Yet left-wingers continue to portray Brown as an angel, and Wilson as a villain. Not surprisingly, many Americans of all colors are swallowing this leftist propaganda. Manipulated by the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, many black Americans falsely view themselves as victims of systemic discrimination. They no longer respect police and are willing to beat them senseless on a whim. The Black Lives Matter movement is there on the sidelines demanding "war" against police everywhere.

Black Skin Privilege: The Media's Love of Black Racism & Violence

My article from the August 21, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:




Black Skin Privilege: The Media's Love of Black Racism & Violence

By Matthew Vadum

Editor's note: Below is the fourth article in the FrontPage series "Black Skin Privilege," based on the Freedom Center pamphlet "Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream" by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. (Click the following for Part IPart II and Part III.)
It is a sad commentary on our nation that the mainstream media refuses to take a critical look at the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, and often promotes those activists' depraved view of America, the least racist nation on the face of the earth.
The outrageous, even genocidal, statements issued every day now by hate-filled black nationalists and their radical allies who are part of what is becoming an African-American "Occupy Wall Street" movement, are barely examined at all. In a case of defining deviancy down, these antisocial, anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable.
Black Lives Matter rabble rousers didn't say a peep in protest when the New Black Panther Party offered a cash reward for Wilson "dead or alive." The same group also offered a $10,000 cash bounty for so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot young black man Trayvon Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman too was cleared by the courts and the Justice Department. This is not an exhaustive list of black criminals these activists claim are the real victims. Brown and Martin are far from alone. 
The Wilson and Zimmerman cases are as dead as a doornail, yet these people keep lying about the facts in order to energize their dangerous supporters. To them, Brown and Martin were innocent young, college-bound angels, not vicious thugs.
Let's look at some of the psychotic statements some black radicals routinely get away with in the media.

Hillary Under Siege

My article from the August 19, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:



Hillary Under Siege

By Matthew Vadum

The raging controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's illegal use of an insecure private Internet server to transmit emails containing top-secret classified U.S. government documents continues to put the would-be president's political future in doubt.
Even elements in the Democratic Party establishment are tiring of Hillary's never-ending antics and scandals.
"Clinton is in the midst of a full-scale Democratic freakout due to her faltering poll numbers and ongoing questions about how she has handled her private e-mail server," Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post blogged.
"[Vice President[ Joe Biden is considering running. [Former Vice President] Al Gore's name -- yes, Al Gore -- was even floated!"
Cillizza quoted "one senior Democratic consultant granted anonymity" saying Mrs. Clinton "has always been awkward and uninspiring on the stump. Hillary has Bill's baggage and now her own as secretary of state -- without Bill's personality, eloquence or warmth."
And things just keep getting worse for the anointed Democratic candidate whose digital malfeasance continues to haunt her sputtering presidential campaign.

Salon: Mouthpiece of the Racist Left

My article from the August 14, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:


Salon: Mouthpiece of the Racist Left

By Matthew Vadum

The racist Left has found a home at the radical commentary website, Salon, which routinely and viciously attacks conservatives and other patriotic Americans for their beliefs while promoting racist causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.
Salon is the voice of the violent mob in the street; at times it makes the small-c communist Nation magazine seem like a bastion of common sense. Its contributors claim white people, especially conservatives, emerge from the womb hating black people. To reinforce this ugly lie, Salon tries to silence those who threaten the Left and the racial-grievance industry. Salon was so desperate to slime the highly effective conservative investigative journalist James O'Keefe in 2010 that it published a sophomoric error-strewn hit piece by pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal. Even the left-wing Columbia Journalism Review slapped down Salon and Blumenthal.
Nowadays Salon publishes morally reprehensible full-throated defenses of the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter movement whose supporters now openly endorse murdering cops and waging "war" against America. Salon cheered on the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., accepting as gospel the idea that blacks like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were murdered by racist white people running wild. Black violence is routinely dismissed at Salon because it doesn't fit the Left's narrative. Black people are always victims and white people are always evildoers.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Black Skin Privilege: Justifying Voter Fraud

My article from the Aug. 12, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:



Black Skin Privilege: Justifying Voter Fraud

By Matthew Vadum

Editor's note: The following is the fourth article in the FrontPage series "Black Skin Privilege," based on the Freedom Center pamphlet "Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream" by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. (Read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.)
Black Americans today receive preferential treatment in the realm of elections and voting rights because the Left needs them to acquire and keep political power. 
To left-wingers it's 1815, not 2015. Blacks today are unquestionably full citizens unhindered by officially-sanctioned discrimination, but to the Left there are still crosses burning in front of black families' houses while residents cower in terror inside. 
It's a nefarious but brilliant strategy that relies on Republican cowardice.
When "Democrats turn election process rules into racial issues, they know they can get Republicans to shut up and capitulate, no matter how phony the civil rights branding," writes former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams.
"The Left understands the interaction of culture with process," he adds. "The Left knows that new election process rules act as a new set of sails to capture cultural prevailing winds favorable to Democrats."
In other words, process is power.
America's Fearmonger-in-Chief is always spreading alarm about a phony Republican push that threatens to prevent African-Americans from participating in the democratic process. A year ago Obama told Al Sharpton's group that:
The principle of one person, one vote is the single greatest tool we have to redress an unjust status quo. You would think there would not be an argument about this anymore. But the stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago.
Across the country, Republicans have led efforts to pass laws making it harder, not easier, for people to vote. In some places, women could be turned away from the polls just because they’re registered under their maiden name but their driver’s license has their married name. Senior citizens who have been voting for decades may suddenly be told they can no longer vote until they can come up with the right ID. In other places, folks may learn that without a document like a passport or a birth certificate, they can’t register.  
Obama, as usual, is lying. 
It is his party that is assaulting voting rights by aggressively encouraging vote fraud. Democrats oppose photo ID requirements for voting because such laws discourage non-citizens, illegal aliens, disenfranchised criminals, and con artists from voting. Democrats want voting rights restored to disqualified felons -- many of whom are black -- because they vote for Democrats at a rate of 9 to 1. They support same-day registration because it makes fraud easier.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

David Horowitz: "Obama is a traitor, it's a no brainer"

As a young friend of mine would say, there is so much YES in this.

David Horowitz got it right on "Alan Colmes VS" last week. (See the video below.)

President Barack Hussein Obama is indeed a traitor. He seems hellbent on starting World War 3 -- except by the time it starts he won't be around to face the consequences of his actions.



Cruz: 'Foolish' to Criticize Trump

An excellent post by Bradford Thomas at TruthRevolt.

Establishment and even a lot of conservative Republicans just don't get it. Let The Donald be The Donald.

So Many Good Republicans

My article from the Aug. 7, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:


So Many Good Republicans

By Matthew Vadum

The first top-tier GOP candidates' debate last night demonstrated that Republicans have a bumper crop of impressive candidates ready to give the Democrats a tough fight for the White House in the 2016 election.
They all seemed to agree that President Obama's effort to fundamentally transform America is a hideous, colossal flop and that the Constitution, so long ignored by Democrats and Republicans alike, needs to be restored to the central place it used to occupy in our nation's body politic.
The candidates were united in promising to repeal Obamacare because they recognize it is a colossally expensive policy mistake that is both destroying the U.S. healthcare system and impinging on America's historically vibrant civil society while denying patients the freedom to choose.
Immigration was a central issue in the 10-way debate. The candidates didn't agree on every aspect of what to do about the country's immigration policies, but they agreed that at a minimum strengthening America's borders is key to resolving the illegal aliens crisis.

Slash and Burn: How Democrats Defend the Indefensible -- and Why Republicans Are No Match for Them

My article from the Aug. 6, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:


Slash and Burn: How Democrats Defend the Indefensible -- 
and Why Republicans Are No Match for Them

By Matthew Vadum

The Republican congressional leadership's embarrassing failure to open fire on the human body-part wholesalers of Planned Parenthood, a group that is at the very center of gravity of the American Left, is symptomatic of a larger, probably deadly pathogen flowing in the veins of the once-proud party of Lincoln.
The collapse of the barely-there effort this week to deprive Planned Parenthood of taxpayer support for its ongoing, ever-expanding assembly line of horrors in which the group's leaders harvest human fetuses before their time in order to profit from the unquestionably unlawful profit-driven trafficking of tiny livers, eyeballs, hearts, kidneys, and brains of human fetuses, was preordained. It was a depressing confirmation of Sun-Tzu's maxim that the outcome of every battle is determined before the first skirmish.
Planned Parenthood officials were caught red-handed, both literally and figuratively, in gruesome, vomit-inducing sting videos haggling over the market prices of human organs as if these people were Old World fishmongers. Federal law forbids anyone from carrying out an abortion procedure aimed at preserving some fetal organs at the expense of other organs. The law was enacted to discourage precisely what Planned Parenthood admits it is doing.
When one of the group's human organ brokers talked about doing the procedures in a less "crunchy" way, it was an on-camera confession of the crimes that her group commits every day. There was an in-depth discussion about how to terminate the unborn child's life in a more focused way in order to preserve its organs.

Crushing the Poor and Middle Class with the EPA

My article from the Aug. 5 issue of FrontPageMag:


Crushing the Poor and Middle Class with the EPA

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered.
As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, "key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials," the Washington Times reported yesterday.
Collusion between the EPA and the green's isn't exactly breaking news. They've been doing it for years, but the study "makes clear that the EPA and top environmental groups see themselves as deeply intertwined in the push to cut carbon pollution and pursue other pieces of President Obama’s broad, controversial climate-change agenda." 
This and basically everything Obama has done in office are part of a metaphorical war on Americans that hits those at the middle and bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder the hardest. These radicals want to work a fundamental transformation of America by making people suffer.
Obama's stated goal is to crush those companies that generate power and to effectively dynamite the nation's coal mines on the theory that burning coal to generate electricity produces atmospheric pollution that goes beyond arbitrarily determined acceptable levels. This delights the powerful green groups pulling the strings in what used to be the tobacco smoke-filled backrooms of the United States Capitol.
Signaling he would be a tool of the environmentalist movement that for so long has had a death-grip on the policymaking process, early in the 2008 presidential campaign Obama told reporters straight-out that his plans would cause energy prices to "necessarily skyrocket."
"Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money," he told the San Francisco Chronicle
"They will pass that money [sic] on to consumers," the economically illiterate Community Organizer-in-Chief said confusing the concept of money with added production costs.
The report by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is titled "Obama's Carbon Mandate:  an account of collusion, cutting corners, and costing Americans billions."
The committee got its hands on documents from the EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that demonstrate the federal agency's unseemly efforts to avoid accountability in its effort to slap aggressive restrictions on industries that emit carbon dioxide, the same benign gas you exhale from your lungs and that supports photosynthesis, the process by which plants grow. The greens disingenuously contend it is a nasty pollutant that is causing the earth's atmosphere to warm. 
The report states:
These documents reveal excessive email exchanges on not only official government accounts but also use of private or alias accounts by senior EPA officials, meetings at EPA and off-site locations, and phone calls between NRDC and EPA staff dating back to early 2011 ... these exchanges demonstrate how EPA and NRDC sought to push the outer limits of EPA’s Clean Air Act authority and to develop the analysis on which these highly controversial and legally suspect proposals are based. 
Predictably, the perennially dishonest EPA and NRDC say they did nothing wrong and claim that all of this is part of the regular regulatory process. Move along; nothing to see here. Of course, they're lying. That's what Saul Alinsky disciples do.
The documents also showed that "EPA policy makers and environmental activists involved had cozy relationships with each other on not only a personal level but through like-minded activism from years of working together." Though the agency and NRDC may not have always agreed on tactics, "they worked incessantly over the years to develop a unified public message in support of these rules."
Among such efforts were coordination on media responses and discussions with the Obama White House on messaging. The parties involved tried "to shift the public debate away from using cap-and-trade to fight climate change to touting these rules as needed to limit carbon emissions from power plants to ostensibly improve public health."
In 2013 Obama initiated "an all-hands-on-deck climate strategy" in the form of the president's Climate Action Plan "to quiet threats of additional litigation from environmental activists and to set in motion executive action for what he could not achieve through legislation" in order to carry out his campaign promise to tackle climate change.
This is what is called "lawfare," a portmanteau of "lawsuit" and "warfare," a process in which administration allies sue the government in order to achieve a policy objective. In this case the legal proceedings were not unwelcome. Lawfare typically involves what amounts to "hard sell" or high pressure sales tactics. On a contrived, expedited timeline based on a false claim that action is urgently needed, the administration connived with green groups in a "sue-and-settle" arrangement that advanced the groups' objectives. In the process, the EPA excluded "other interested parties and the public and short-circuit[ed] a more deliberate rulemaking process," the report stated.
Critics have assailed Obama's economically suicidal plan that seeks to reduce U.S. power plants' carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent by the year 2030. 
The director of the Cato Institute's Center of Study of Science, Patrick Michaels, tweeted that "Using EPA's own policy analysis model, Obama's Clean Power Plan proposal will prevent a grand total of 0.03 [degrees Celsius] warming by the year 2100."
Another Cato scholar, Paul Knappenberger, decried the plan, noting that the bulk of carbon emissions originate from the developing world and that no matter what the U.S. government does it won't put a dent in emissions overall.
Knappenberger asserted that the plan calls for the deliberate retardation of human development and "the plan's actual impact on climate turns out to be largely undetectable and the public health benefits tenuous, at best."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released a statement describing the policy as "another blow to the economy and to the Middle-Class." These "regressive regulations ... are set to harm struggling workers and families," are are projected to cost billions of dollars.

He continued:
They threaten to ship good Middle-Class jobs overseas. They’ll likely make it harder to maintain reliable sources of energy to meet demand. They’ll also likely to result in higher energy bills for those who can least afford them, potentially raising electricity rates by double digits for the people I represent. All this, for what? Not only will these massive regulations fail to meaningfully affect the global climate, but they could actually end up harming the environment by outsourcing energy production to countries with poor environmental records like India and China. They may also be illegal.
The reason for Obama's hard sell is obvious: despite years of warmist propaganda, Americans aren't buying the hype. They remain unconvinced despite the media's nonstop, years-long, global warming propaganda assault and the presence of a radical, lawless left-winger in the White House. The voters can't be bothered to care about this silly, bogus global warming issue.
While many Americans may accept than manmade global warming is real and poses perhaps some kind of minor, vague threat far off in the future, they don't believe the problem is serious enough to warrant spending money, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "The American public routinely ranks dealing with global warming low on its list of priorities for the president and Congress." In 2013 "it ranked at the bottom of the 21 [issues] tested."
The attack on carbon emissions is really an attack on markets and capitalism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, radical left-wingers no longer had what they considered to be a noble cause worth striving for. Socialist and neo-communist activists almost overnight began trying to rebrand their ignoble objectives as common sense moves that would save a planet that doesn't actually need saving.
It needs to be said that environmentalism today is more or less by definition pathological and misanthropic. 
At its core the environmentalist ethos holds that human beings function as destructive parasites whose very existence degrades the beautiful and still relatively pristine planet on which we all live. These activists want to use regulations to limit economic growth because they insist such growth is necessarily bad for all living things, including the earth. Many adhere to the more radical "deep ecology" school of thought, a strain of neo-Ludditism that seeks to de-industrialize the planet and humble arrogant mankind. 
Ignoring earthquakes, tidal waves, and hurricanes, they regard the earth as a virtuous, benevolent living organism and some worship it outright as a deity (Gaia). These de-industrializers don't care that in the future their plans will cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation and other causes as the earth's human population surges. In fact, some of them state openly that the extinction of humans, as opposed to bugs, mammals, and plants, is a glorious and worthy goal.
This hatred of humanity also animates the "anti-consumerist" magazine, Adbusters, which was instrumental in starting the ultra-violent, economically regressive Occupy Wall Street movement in September 2011.
It is depressing that the sane people, among them conservatives, who recognize that markets raise the standard of living and empower people all over the world, are hopelessly outgunned by the enviro-left.
As David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin reported in their book, The New Leviathan, in the world of environmental activism, there are 32 major conservative groups that “promote market-friendly solutions” and 552 progressive groups that “promote radical views that are anti-business.” 
Collectively, the conservative groups have net assets of $38.24 million, a figure that seems insignificant compared to the $9.31 billion figure representing the progressive groups’ combined net assets. The progressive environmental groups enjoy a 37 to 1 advantage over conservative environmental groups in revenues ($3.56 billion compared to $96.17 million).
After Obama has left office, these left-wing green groups will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve the spectacularly ruinous policies he implemented. They will have mountains of cash from anti-American hedge fund manager George Soros to back them up.
Even if a conservative finds his way into the White House in January 2017, it is far from clear if he or she will be able to do much about all the damage Obama has done to civil society, the economy and industry, and the rule of law. 
We're so far gone already, just as our Marxist president always wanted.

Black Skin Privilege: To Be Above The Law

My article from the Aug. 3, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:


Black Skin Privilege: To Be Above The Law

By Matthew Vadum

Editor's note: The following is the second article in the FrontPage series "Black Skin Privilege," based on the Freedom Center pamphlet "Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream" by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. To read the first article in this series, click here
It is true that black Americans are not treated equally by the nation's police forces -- far too often they are treatedbetter than members of other races because police are quite properly terrified of being accused of race-based discrimination.
This preferential race-based treatment of African-Americans fuels violence and social media-driven reigns of terror. It encourages today's race-baiting lynch mobs that troll the Internet to satisfy their unquenchable desire to be offended and outraged. When the cranks and low-rent bigots of the so-called Black Lives Matter movement target an enemy, they get plenty of support from the media, and in many cases, from politicians. Black liberation theology and critical race theory no doubt helped the nation get to this unfortunate place.
America is now at the point where those with dark complexions enjoy what David Horowitz has dubbed "black skin privilege." As Horowitz explained to me recently:
I coined this term because it encapsulated the facts that are indispensable to understanding our national crisis over race and also politically incorrect to so much as mention:  racism -- race privileges and race preferences -- are now the “civil rights” cause of the progressive left. As soon as the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s outlawed racial categories in governmental regulations and laws, the civil rights left began to reverse this historic victory by reintroducing racial categories and privileges into every aspect of public life from job applications to college admissions, to presumptions of innocence and conclusions of guilt. The term “black skin privilege” -- which is an indubitable fact of our social life -- hoists the racial hypocrites on their own petard. You want to talk about racism? Let’s talk about the racist attitudes and policies of progressives and lynch mobs of color that they inspire.
(Horowitz and John Perazzo co-authored the David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlet, "Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream." The PDF version of the pamphlet is available here.)
Nowadays police coddle blacks, refusing to hold them to the same standard of behavior expected of everyone else. This cosseting of a large segment of the population encourages misbehavior because would-be perpetrators know they can get away with a lot. For example, this policy of deliberately going easy on black suspects helps to explain the rise of the so-called knockout game in which young black men viciously prey on unsuspecting white bystanders, violently knocking them to the ground for fun. It also helps to explain why police and their civilian commanders are extremely reluctant to shut down rioting black mobs.

The Left's Fight-for-$15 Scam

My article from the July 31, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:


The Left's Fight-for-$15 Scam

By Matthew Vadum

The current feel-good push for a $15 an hour minimum wage has nothing to do with helping workers and everything to do with advancing the goals of the left wing, especially the labor movement.
This is true despite the occasionally soaring rhetoric of President Obama amid the Left's incessant whining about "income inequality," itself a particularly un-American concept, an imaginary evil that dwells only in the nightmares of left-wingers. The fact gets lost that the minimum wage itself and continuing increases in the minimum wage hurt working people. Period. And as economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, minimum wage laws themselves have an inglorious history, having been used to price minorities out of labor markets. If a racist business owner has a choice between a person whose race he likes and someone whose race he doesn't like and their services cost the same, take a guess whom he'll pick.
Raising the hourly minimum wage, whether to a job-killing $15 or a higher dollar figure, isn't intended to aid those who are financially struggling. It's not compassionate; in fact it's the opposite. It doesn't help the poor. It's a left-wing vote-buying scam that moves money around on an Alinskyite chess board. Democrats desperately want to recapture the House and Senate so they can impose even more destructive progressive policies on the populace. They use the minimum wage, which has become a "motherhood" issue for the Left in recent years. It gets bleeding-heart voters to the polls the way that opposition to same-sex marriage used to get conservative voters to the polls.
Hiking required hourly pay is about redistributing wealth to fat-cat labor unions and recruiting Democratic voters. It allows the gluttonous Left to gorge itself on other people's money.
No serious economist doubts that raising the minimum wage eliminates jobs from the workforce. How it does this is not rocket science.