By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight@theBFD 7/11/19]

It’s obvious that the Democratic Party is committing suicide by the hand of its own rank corruption; duplicity, deceit, double-dealing and above all, its humiliating lack of self-awareness, have brought it down to the unfathomable depths of political depravity that we are currently witnessing.  

Another thing that’s obvious is this latest attempt to impeach President Trump over a phone call with Ukraine’s Zelensky is nothing more than an extension of the exorbitant, taxpayer funded Russia Collusion inquiry, which yielded nothing more illuminating than that a handful of memes were bought on Facebook.  Now it’s the Ukraine Collusion inquiry. Everyone is forgiven for yawning.

Rather than fight the Republicans at the ballot-box in 2020, it has become so clear to Democrats that they can’t win that they have to invent a “high-crime and misdemeanour” charge to hang on the President instead. This is so dirty a tactic, especially when one considers that former Democratic VP Joe Biden actually boasted on camera that he blackmailed the previous Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating his son’s dealings with corrupt gas company Burisma, by threatening to withhold a billion dollars-worth of U.S loans when he was in office.

President Trump wanted Ukraine to make inquiries into what they knew about the digital firm CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the Democratic National Committee which claimed that the Russians hacked the DNC server, kicking off the Special Counsel’s inquiry into President Trump’s 2016 campaign and any Russian collusion. James Comey admitted in his June 2017 testimony that the FBI failed to examine the DNC servers and relied on a third-party contracted by the DNC: CrowdStrike, who “confirmed” the Russians hacked the server.

CrowdStrike were hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign counsel, Marc Elias.  It was also Marc Elias who hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to write the fake and lewd “dossier” on Donald Trump using information gleaned from the Russians. In other words, the DNC engaged in Russian collusion to bring down a political opponent, then projected their deceitful tactics onto that opponent.

Frankly, it would be utterly remiss of President Trump to not try to get to the bottom of these questions about the troublesome DNC server, especially if he has information that Ukraine have access to it and the FBI admit to failing to examine it.  These scurrilous tactics formed the basis of an attempted coup to bring down his presidency. The Dems are now using the president’s curiosity into these happenings in order to stage yet another coup attempt against him, this time in the form of impeachment over “the phone-call.”  They’re that desperate and afraid of the next election. The  nervous breakdown they suffered after the 2016 election result has now developed into full psychosis. 

Democrats know they cannot get the president convicted with their fully partisan impeachment attempt, because the Republican-dominated senate will block it, but Dems just want his name smeared relentlessly through the grist of the media-machine for the next entire year in order to draw any attention away from his spectacular achievements, such as: the record low unemployment rate, rising wages, sweeping prison reform and a renewed sense of vigour and American patriotism re-energising the Republican Party.

Driven to hysteria by their hatred for the president, the far-left of the Democratic party foolishly unmasked itself and came out swinging in the form of the blatantly communist “squad,” led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing their Green New Deal policies and more: no airplanes, no cows, no meat-eating, no petrol or diesel cars, no nuclear energy, no oil drilling, no policing, no ICE, no borders – and definitely no capitalism!

Old-school Democrats who still want to vote for a half-sensible, working-class champion now have no candidate within the ranks of the Dems to back. They may have found one in Hawaiian congresswoman and war vet Tulsi Gabbard, but she has been smeared by Hillary Clinton and her posse, displaying their vindictive insanity once again, as another “Russian asset” – whatever that means. This is actually so bad that it’s good since Gabbard is friendly toward the Green New Deal, indicating that at heart she is for co-opting a great economy to make it resemble something akin to Venezuela’s.  I did say ‘half-sensible.’  

So those old-school Dems will most likely vote for Trump in 2020.

If folks need any instruction as to what America would look like if the Dems ever got hold of all the levers of power again, look no further than the great liberal experiment that is today’s California.

Only a couple of weeks ago, 2 million Californians were left without power as PG&E, the state’s largest utility company (which has recently filed for bankruptcy), shut down its power transmission so as not to spark fires in the strong seasonal winds.  These fires swiftly turn deadly because the state is not clearing the copious, tinder-dry dead brush and trees from its forestlands due to environmental policies enacted over the last 45 years. 

PG&E blamed the preemptive power cuts on “climate change.”

Californian historian and commentator, Victor Davis Hanson, wrote a column last week titled: “Is California Becoming Premodern?” Hanson writes:

“California’s three most powerful politicians — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom — are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas… Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.”

Then there’s California’s homeless crisis, about which Hanson writes: 

“Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.”

Hanson explains that millions of middle-class Californian taxpayers have “fled the state.” Due to millions of welfare recipients and newcomers, who need “enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services,” the stabilising influence of the fleeing middle-class is “sorely missed.”

Out of the state’s 53 congressional seats, Hanson says only seven are held by Republicans – and that makes California a one-party state. Premodern indeed. The poverty and crime stats are so bad for the liberal stronghold of California, to say nothing about the devastation that the wild-fires leave in their wake, it wouldn’t be a surprise in the slightest to see an electoral swing back in favour of Republican governance.  

If this were to happen, along with ‘Blexit’ (the mass black-exit out of the Democratic Party a-la Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk and Kanye West), the Democratic party would be consigned to the dunghill of history, leaving the GOP to naturally fall into two separate factions: the centre (think Ann Coulter and Ted Cruz) and the centre-left (think Geraldo Rivera and Ivanka Trump), leaving the far-left to openly stand for communism (they’ll call it a ‘social democracy’) instead of pretending to be supportive in any respect of a constitutional republic.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

By Olivia Pierson
​[First published on Insight@theBFD 31/10/19]

I’ll never forget the sickening horror that crept into my stomach when Abu Baker al-Baghdadi’s 40,000 ISIS fighters swept through Iraq and Syria and began to slaughter innocent men, women and children in order to establish their blood-thirsty, 7th Century-styled caliphate.  

The filmed beheadings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and many others besides; the genocide and enslavement of Yazidis and Christians; the brutally theatrical burning of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh inside a cage; the torture, rape and murder of Kayla Mueller; the untold severed heads on spikes and crucifixions displayed in the public square of Mosul; homosexuals violently flung down to their deaths from tall buildings and the ripping apart of parents’ bodies between cars as children were forced to look-on.  

These were just some of the savagely barbaric acts unleashed upon humans that al-Baghdadi encouraged with his disgusting war against any form of modernity in Syria and the Levant. 

How can anyone not be glad that we no longer have to breathe the same planetary air as a subhuman beast like al-Baghdadi?

His death is significant, as is the death of his second in command, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir. This closes the chapter on the ambitions of the ISIS caliphate.  

During the peak of its ascendancy, the caliphate ruled from its capital in Raqqa, Syria, over a territory the size of Britain, presiding over 8 million subjugated people with an army of dedicated fighters, which just kept growing in numbers. 

Though many fighters are regrettably still alive – and worse, now residing in the West thanks to Europe opening their borders to the “refugee crisis” of 2015 – the terror-group has lost all of its land and its leadership. The Caliph’s prophetic promise of a revived caliphate of Islamic purity for the Arabs has not come true. He was conquered. So much for being the successor of Mohammad (though he certainly channeled Mo’s bestial savagery).

In the wake of Operation Kayla Mueller, President Trump thanked Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and the Kurds for assisting with the daring mission to kill the ISIS leaders. The CIA has been tracking Baghdadi for a month after a tip-off from one of his arrested wives, along with a courier. While the British and French troops were on the ground with the Kurdish and U.S  forces, Russia and Turkey provided invaluable air cover.

Far from being estranged from the Kurds, after the president’s so-called betrayal of them, the Syrian Democratic Forces on the ground passed important intelligence to the CIA in order to conduct the raid. A Kurdish informant snuck into Baghdadi’s compound to steal his underwear in order to confirm DNA tests that the headless corpse they recovered did indeed belong to the most wanted terrorist in the world.

The covert mission itself was so impeccably planned and executed that U.S generals are reporting they have never seen anything like it. Secrecy was paramount. Amusingly, Democrats are furious that their president did not share any information with them, yet did with Johnson, Macron, Putin and Erdogan. President Trump stated that he couldn’t trust Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, since they consistently leak information to the leftist media machine, and are also trying to launch yet another impeachment investigation to bring down his presidency. Democrats: Bed. Make. Lie.

Under a heavy bombardment of the usual criticism which he has now become quite used to, President Trump sought to do things differently in the Middle East, as he promised America he would during his election campaign.  After Kurdish General Mazloum Abdi of the Syrian Democratic Forces thanked him last week for achieving a permanent truce between the Kurds, Turkey and Russia, President Trump said:

“After all of the precious blood and treasure America has poured into the deserts of the Middle East, I am committed to pursuing a different course, one that leads to victory for America.”

More than any other group in the region, the killing of al-Baghdadi effects the Kurds most directly. The U.S aided Kurdish military groups in the fight against ISIS, benefiting the Kurdish people most of all, considering they are the ones who live on the land that ISIS tried to claim for its caliphate. Now President Trump is more or less leaving that overseeing to the Russians – who want the job for their own reasons. Islamic terrorism has been a monumental problem for Putin and Syria is practically on Russia’s doorstep. They also have an already well-established alliance with Syria’s president, al-Assad. Assad detests the U.S for trying to have him overthrown – but that was a different presidency. Trump is not Obama or Bush. Trump will leave Assad well alone unless he uses chemical weapons against civilians again. 

So on the very same night when Saturday Night Live was airing an Alec Baldwin impersonation of President Trump “making ISIS great again” and “bringing more jobs back to ISIS,” Trump was in fact embroiled in the Situation Room at the Whitehouse watching in real time the invaluable mission to have ISIS leadership totally decapitated. 

The ill-timed irony of SNL’s clown-show is nothing short of delicious! Truth is always so much more interesting than fiction.

Will this remarkable event end the ISIS peril? Of course not. The ideology will not die so long as it’s ingrained in the heads of ultra orthodox Muslims who believe in obeying their Koranic texts and their Hadith. But the death of al-Baghdadi is a significant blow to their barbaric aims fuelled by superstitious fatuity. 
 
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” as our old friend Voltaire once observed.  The backwardness of the Islamic world is a living testament to the truth of that adage.
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But for now, we should clink our glasses together in a world-wide toast to celebrate the overdue death of a depraved, malevolent monster who leaves only cruelty, death and misery in his wake. Good riddance.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight@theBFD 24/10/19]

Politics is essentially philosophical in nature for it addresses the ethics of a social system by posing the question: how ought men to be governed?

This question of how men relate to each other has lain at the very heart of all human civilisations, from the ancient Sumerians to the modern American Republic and everything in-between, instructing us that above all things, ideas matter, since getting them wrong can wreak destructive havoc on the human spirit, to say nothing of human lives. 

But this question of a social system also draws on other philosophical disciplines, specifically the nature of reality (metaphysics) and the nature of how man acquires knowledge (epistemology).  If a civilisation believes that in ultimate reality man is the play-thing of the gods, gods who demand propitiations to be appeased in order to stave-off plagues and pestilence or cause man’s crops to grow, then bloody human sacrifices can be rationalised, as they have been in many early civilisations, such as the Sumerians, the Carthaginians, the Incas, the Aztecs and the Native American Indians. 

If some leaders believe as the communists do: that individuals exist for the sake of the State (or the collective, or society) instead of for their own independent happiness, then individual human rights are worth nothing and such leaders will sacrifice – without a moment’s hesitation – whole groups of individuals to be slaughtered for their own “more noble” aims, as we saw in the 20th Century under the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tojo and Hitler. 

The individual rights of citizens furnish a civilisation with the principles of liberty. At their most essential these rights are: 

 -the right to freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas, 
 -the right to a fair trial and due process under the laws of a sovereign nation (not        the UN), 
 -the right to defend oneself and one’s property against force and theft, 
 -the right to practise one’s own religion (or not to) without interference, 
 -the right to create an honest livelihood and keep the fruits of one’s labour. 

Without these important rights, our civilisation would be just another shit-hole.  With them intact and jealously guarded, we inherit a cultural climate of incomparable value. 

But these rights are now constantly under bombardment. 
 
There are many examples of this constant attack, but to cite just one: in New Zealand last year, two speakers from Canada, Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, were blocked from speaking to a paying audience when Phil Goff the Mayor of Auckland arrogated himself to the position of Lord and Master presiding over which ideas New Zealand citizens can and cannot hear in a council-owned venue, the Bruce Mason Theatre.

When a privately owned venue was on the agenda for the two speakers, as it had done with the original public venue, Auckland Peace Action (NZ’s version of Antifa – a thuggish, fascistic, activist group of the Left) threatened noisy blockades and protests, which turned the proposed event into a “health and safety” concern. Leaders from the Muslim community had already called on Immigration NZ to ban the pair from entering the country to speak, so Peace Action stood in solidarity with them.

In other words, bullies threatened chaos and possible violence, and everyone cowered to them. Molyneux and Southern never got to speak.

Though not one single member that I know of either agreed with, or even liked Molyneux and Southern (I actually do, though had no intention of going to the event), the Free Speech Coalition then formed in order to uphold an important cornerstone principle of our democracy by taking Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA) and the mayor to court for:

1. Violating the right to free expression in this country, a right enshrined in our Bill of Rights
2. Setting the precedent of a “thug’s veto” by allowing controversial speech to be shut down on the basis of so-called “health and safety” concerns, perceived or imagined.

The appalling upshot of this High Court case was decided a few weeks ago. 

Regional Facilities Auckland won on the basis that they operate as a “private” commercial concern rather than as a public one.  Their clever-dick ownership structure shielded them from public and legal accountability, despite the fact that RFA are subsidised by citizen ratepayers to the tune of 24 million dollars per year in order to serve the public via its venues.
 
Member of the FSC, Dr. David Cumin, wrote:

“This High Court decision sets a dangerous precedent for free speech and provides a blueprint for other public bodies to control public platforms by hiding them under the guise of trusts and CCOs. The High Court basically said that because the venues weren’t owned directly by the Council, they don’t have to consider freedom of speech or the rights of Aucklanders to hear from whom they want to.”

The Free Speech Coalition is appealing this decision, seeking to have it overturned in recognition that this legal precedent in our country bodes extremely poorly for the future of one of our most precious civilisational principles.  

Disgustingly, some libertarians came down on Goff’s side.  

Peter Cresswell of NotPC blogspot (who ought to change its name to VeryPC), wrote that this debacle was never about free speech, then doubled down on that line of argument on the basis of “property rights" after the High Court case was decided. 

The great irony of Cresswell’s argument is that he tries to draw on an example laid out by Ayn Rand in the 1960s (these people can’t fart without a written doctrine prescribed by Rand) when the Berkeley University free speech protests erupted on campus. Cresswell parrots Rand’s view that in a “mixed economy” - as opposed to a fully privatised one - the principle of ownership is “unresolvable” when it comes to the use of a public venue which is funded by the rate-payer. Ownership in these situations is deemed ambiguous.  

Foolishly then, in this shady copse of ambiguity, Cresswell came down firmly in favour of less free speech, rather than of more, which is very sinister when one considers that Goff was hysterically petitioned by the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ (FIANZ) to have Molyneux and Southern decidedly muzzled. The culture of Islam is hardly famous for its tolerance toward freedom of speech, but we ought to have seen a much more vociferous stand for liberty from so-called libertarians, not hair-splitting quibbles about ownership ambiguities in the face of threatened violence.   

To make matters much worse, Cresswell’s multiple posts writing in agreement with Goff having the two speakers de-platformed said not a word about the "thug’s veto," which saw the pair shut-down from speaking in the private venue of Auckland’s  Powerstation.  

The thug’s veto was always the most ominous factor in this whole controversy, but a leading libertarian didn't see fit to pass any public comment on it until October this year, after the FSC lost the case. What really beggars belief is that I’ve just seen a post on his website in which Cresswell recently writes Free Speech Under Attack: “The Thug’s Veto” where he promotes a new book that he has written some chapters for and cites the Molyneux/Southern debacle!  I guess this was about free speech all along, and the very peecee NotPC blogspot happened to be AWOL on it in real time. 

It is up to every free man and free woman to demand that our representative politicians stand up for our essential rights – and more than that – we must each stand up for them ourselves whenever they are disparaged, overridden or not understood, for the world can only ever be what we as individuals make it.

If silent acquiescence is the default position of many peaceful folks who think about liberty enough to know they’re lucky to have it, but flaccidly shrug “whaddya do?” when they see it squelched, then get used to speaking about our civilisation in the past tense as it dies a quiet death from passive neglect. The price of liberty has always been eternal vigilance – and vigilance is the very antithesis of passive apathy.

If exhortations to vigilance are not enough, about the only thing I can repair to is a line of poetry, in this case from the heart of Dylan Thomas, who contemplated all things pertaining to death quite a lot – as poets have a tendency to do:

“Do not go gentle into that goodnight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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