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by Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 18/7/19] Nobody could forget the inherent vindictiveness of the female villain in the 90’s movie Fatal Attraction – the proverbial woman scorned played impeccably by actress Glenn Close. The adulterous protagonist, who eventually rejects her advances after “knowing her” in the biblical sense, comes home one day to find his daughter’s beloved pet rabbit boiling on the kitchen stove. Unfortunately, bunny-boilers, with their crazed vindictiveness, are not just confined to fictional tales but often make their way into politics. It seems that some folks have a fatal attraction to harridans in office, perhaps thinking that female political power may lead to more compassionate political outcomes, but nothing could be further from the truth. They just help drive a country further into Hell. Four Congresswomen of colour, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib have made a name for themselves trashing the United States of America. It got them elected to the lower house. AOC famously said in a recent interview, “Where we are is not a good thing…this idea of like ten percent better than garbage isn’t… shouldn’t be what we settle for. And it’s like, it feels like ‘moderate’ is not a stance it’s just an attitude towards life.” Yes, it is clear that AOC despises anything moderate. She’s a radical in every sense of the word, right down to her radically nasal baby-duck quacking voice and ugly-on-the-ear vocal fry. A voice such as Alexandria's could give a listener ear cancer in five minutes. Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, went on record for endorsing the impeachment of President Trump when she said at her swearing-in party (pun not intended), “We’re gonna go in and impeach the mother-fucker!” As irony would have it, there exists a petition with well over a quarter of a million signatories to have Representative Tlaib impeached, for, amongst other things, lying about her place of abode during the primary election and her anti-American, antisemitic and anti-Israel stance. Somalian-born Ilhan Omar has made many antisemitic statements, but it is her constant whining through a buck-tooth grin about America being bigoted against Muslims that really gets the blood – instead of the bunnies – boiling. At a recent Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event, Omar complained about Muslims being treated as second-class citizens. This is a very peculiar complaint considering that she is herself a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who has been elected to Congress, as her Muslim friend and colleague, Rashida Tlaib, also has. Try doing that as a woman in Mogadishu, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The American Congress is hardly the land of second-class citizens. Despite her antisemitism, Omar, unfortunately, also serves on the House Committee of Foreign Affairs. Astoundingly, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Philadelphia vociferated unequivocally into a microphone at the progressive activists’ Netroots Convention over the weekend: "If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice!" Brown face, brown voice. Black face, black voice. This is the very essence of identity politics writ large and the utter antithesis of Martin Luther King’s words: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” I’d wager fairly that King also meant that the colour of his children’s skin would not dictate their political views. Obviously, King’s message was lost on the African-American Pressley. For shame! This squad of bunny-boilers represent the outright hate and racism which jumps off every page of the identity politics playbook. This radical communist clique (they call themselves social democrats – but then communists always do), have unbelievably called for Homeland Security to be dismantled and defunded and have also called for Immigration & Customs Enforcement to be completely abolished. “America is for everyone,” they assert, which is a euphemism for “America is for no-one” since, without a border, without enforceable laws and without legal citizens, there would literally be no country. America’s racist! America’s bigoted! America’s garbage! America’s history stinks! America runs concentration camps! America’s led by a Nazi! America’s ICE agents are Nazis! America’s police are Nazis! America’s deplorable! Capitalism’s irredeemable! America’s homophobic! America’s Islamophobic! America’s sexist! America’s no good! These are the constant cries the harridans’ squad of bunny-boilers shriek out whenever they’re in front of a microphone, as they attempt to turn their country into something way outside the scope of its founders’ benevolent vision. In a long-overdue response of rationality, President Trump finally tweeted out his thoughts about them: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.” “Amen, Brother Trump!” many people breathed aloud. Never mind that most of the squad, except for Ilhan Omar, were born on American soil, the gist of the message from their President was loud and clear – “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” “Seeeeeeeee? The President is a racist!” They screamed with enthusiastic glee, blanking-out the fact that the president’s so-called racism is marked by a very strange hue when he exhorts them to “then come back” (and show us how it is done). Disagreement with bunny-boilers over anything, makes us all racists and sexists, all of the time. This constant smearing and negative labelling happens to be one of the best-loved Rules for Radicals from Saul Alinsky: 13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. The trouble for this squad of bunny-boilers is that they’re grossly overplaying their hand by forgetting one of Alinsky’s other Machiavellian rules – a very important one: 7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news. Here they’ve royally screwed-up. They’ve desensitised us all to the word “racist” and it is now devoid of any true meaning. When everyone is a racist, no one is a racist – even those who are actually racist. This smear tactic has been deployed too often and for too long. It’s lost its punch. Instead, it makes them look crazed, unhinged and spitefully vindictive, resembling women scorned - the types of women who might boil a family’s pet bunny if they thought it would score a political point. If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 11/7/19] As the chaotic madness of WWII drew to an end, the victorious heads of the Allied Powers, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin, met to restructure the future of the world at the Yalta Conference of February 1945. This resulted in the ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe’, where it was pledged “the earliest possible establishment through free elections, governments responsive to the will of the people.” By July of the same portentous year, Roosevelt had been dead for three months and the presidency had passed to Vice President Harry Truman. Churchill lost his office of Prime Minister to Clement Attlee in the same month. The Potsdam Conference saw Churchill, Attlee, Truman, Stalin and other world leaders embark on plans for what we now refer to as the postwar order. Following on from the Yalta conference, Potsdam formulated a comprehensive strategy to deal with the utter devastation from the war in Europe, while planning a bit more in the Pacific. It was here that the demand for the “unconditional surrender of Japan” was outlined. The first atom-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6th – four days after the conference ended. Although the Soviet Union had helped to conquer the Wehrmacht, Stalin violated the Yalta pledge, which had promised free elections and the corollary of representative governments in the nations of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. This came as no surprise to Churchill or to Truman; both men held deep misgivings about the creep of Soviet communism, and they often fulminated with Cold War rhetoric. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” declared Churchill in his 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech to Westminster College in Missouri. The Truman Doctrine of “countering Soviet expansionism” led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which was formed in 1949 with 12 member countries and today has 29. (New Zealand is not a full member but rather a Major non-NATO Ally and partner.) The major postwar institutions – NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the European Union – were all created for the purpose of encouraging countries to be focused on a shared, global vision rather than on anything resembling nationalistic parochialism, which was deemed to have been the cause of the war. Emerging from its pre-WWII isolation, America intervened in the Korean War (successfully), the Vietnam War (unsuccessfully), then the First Gulf War (successfully) and Bosnia (successfully). These wars were conducted within the framework of willing coalition partners – Britain, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and other nations focused on a view of global peace; where communists and genocidal tyrants don’t get to act with impunity. The postwar order was seen as a great success – the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union broke apart and communist China lifted its bamboo curtain high enough to engage in widespread international trade. The Maastricht Treaty provided open borders in Europe along with a shared common currency. Ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, feminism and indigenous human-rights reparations were heavily pushed by the UN. So why is this 75-year-old international, liberal order ripping apart at the seams? September 11th, 2001, saw the forces of radical Islam destroy the Twin Towers in the heart of America’s financial and cultural capital, Manhattan, along with the deaths of 3000 Americans in one day on their own soil. The 1990's globalist peace-dream came to an abrupt end, at least in the minds of some. Knowledgeable writers with insightful views, such as Oriana Fallaci and Christopher Hitchens, cast their gazes toward the Middle East and saw a nuclear-armed, West-hating Pakistan, a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and a mad, genocidal tyrant in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, vociferating wildly that he was on a path to developing nuclear weapons – so beware! Nobody knew it at the time, but after he watched Saddam Hussein be overthrown, and fearing the Americans were coming next for him (they did under President Obama), Muammar Gaddafi of Libya voluntarily gave up his plans to develop nuclear weapons and helped to expose the nuclear proliferation caused by Pakistani nuclear physicist, Abdul Qadeer Khan (the AQ Khan network). Khan himself confessed in 2004 to selling nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. Had President George Bush not invaded Iraq, President Trump conceivably might be dealing now, not only with a nuclear-armed Pakistan, but also a nuclear-armed Iraq, Iran, Libya and perhaps even Syria. North Korea is a done deal, though a shaky and perhaps incompetent one, but underestimating a tyrant is just as foolish as overestimating him. If this were the state of the Middle East today, telling Saudi Arabia that it can’t follow suit would be akin to screaming at a winter wind. Fighting this war in Iraq kept America soundly in the bad books of Europe and beyond. The war dragged depressingly on and on, while the NATO alliance just left America to it; thus undermining the efficacy of the treaty. Europe, following the lead of Germany, did not pay up for its share of U.S protection from Russian hegemony, even after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and went on to conduct a war inside the borders of Ukraine. Obama twiddled his thumbs on the sidelines and let the hawkish harridans – the alphas of his administration, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers – overthrow an irrelevant Gaddafi in Libya, thus unlocking North Africa’s longest border with the Mediterranean: the gateway to Europe. Meanwhile, Germany sought extended trade deals on Russian gas via the Nord Stream pipe line – and still does. How the Germans get away with bitter criticisms of President Trump’s criticisms of NATO, yet keep wanting to forge trade alliances with Iran and buy copious amounts of gas out of Russia, I’ll never know, but I don’t expect the contradictions to last for very long. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 undermined the globalised financial institutions of the world. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the two government-sponsored financial entities created by Congress to buy mortgage debt from banks, competed with each other buying up debts that, if left to naturally conservative bankers, would never have been given out as loans to begin with. Throughout the 90s, Bill and Hillary Clinton, in order to artificially expand the “American Dream,” made it policy to pressure banks to loan to black people since black home-ownership lagged behind white home-ownership. The DOJ began suing banks who didn’t loan on subprime mortgages. When the crash finally happened, 980 American financial institutions and selected auto companies, such as GM (who never repaid), were bailed out by the government to the tune of 107 billion dollars. (Imagine how small and medium business owners in America, who run their companies day-in and day-out with diligent responsibility, may have felt about that?) Germany, the wealthiest economy of the EU, ran up a 65 billion dollar trade surplus with the United States while imposing anomalous 10% tariffs on US cars being sold into Europe. The US imposes a 2.5% tariff on car imports from the EU, being their number one destination which is worth over 40 billion euros per year to the European market. Why then does Germany fail to meet its 2% of GDP for NATO – an alliance that has ensured its security for over 70 years? Mexico, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), ran up a trade surplus with the US of 71 billion dollars, while both their illegal and legal migrants in the US sent home remittances, that is foreign revenue, amounting to 31 billion dollars. As Mexico grew wealthier and its drug cartels and illegal immigrants ran amok to-and-fro across the Southern border, working-class Americans lost their jobs in manufacturing and low-skilled labour to Mexicans, both inside and outside of Mexico – and also to China. China ran up a trade surplus with the United States of 376 billion dollars while it indulged shamelessly in copyright abuses on intellectual property and technology. It also manipulated its currency on the foreign exchange markets – all against the rules of the WTO, but nobody dared to call them on it because a trade war was considered too overwhelming to even contemplate. The European Debt Crisis of 2009 pushed Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland toward bankruptcy before they were rescued by the European Commission; austerity measures followed and unemployment levels skyrocketed (to 27% in Spain). Tens of thousands of people migrated looking for work abroad. Italy, one of the six founding nations of the EU, struggled too. Just as the European markets started to stabilise around 2014 – 15, Angela Merkel spectacularly opened Europe up to wave upon wave of Third World immigrants pouring through the unclogged Libyan gateway and across the Mediterranean. Between one and two million immigrants (the real number is not actually known) came from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, the Congo and the rest of Africa. Merkel kept welcoming them into Europe (causing many to drown on the perilous journey) then forced other EU member nations to provide for them whether those nations wanted to or not; they were forced to take quotas. 70 percent of said migrants were working-aged males; all were offered welfare on the dime and goodwill of Europe’s citizens. Islamic terrorism, rape, acid attacks and stabbings dramatically increased from France and Germany to Sweden and Norway, prompting the rise of the white Identitarian Movement, which I doubt will be going away any time soon. Suddenly in 2016, two seismic political events spoke volumes about this unravelling postwar order of ours – Brexit and the election of President Trump. Neither of these unforeseen results were the cause of the order being overturned. They were but a dramatic symptom of a smouldering, dissatisfied anger that had been brewing for the last twenty years – and demanded a reckoning. The very concept of democracy demands fairness and equality – not of the maudlin identity-politics sort; those egalitarians who meddle with, and obsess over, forced outcomes – no! Democracy demands citizens who value the fairness and equality of both the Self’s individual sovereignty and the individual sovereignty of the nation state. Only by embracing this guiding principle of how citizens and nations interact with one another, can we be confident about building a future order worth fighting for and preserving. It is not a dangerous rebound back to nationalistic parochialism, as is often printed in the media and spoken about in the corridors of power. Rather, it’s a healthy self-evaluation being taken into account. A grounded re-centring of enlightened, rational self-interest. We are living through a reckoning with the postwar order. Western civilisation can absorb a lot; it’s proven that many times through history as it has evolved. While the world goes through this ongoing change, so must our institutions reflect this change. Some, such as the United Nations, need to be cut away like dead, rotting wood. Stalin paid mere lip-service to the Yalta Conference’s ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe’ – "the earliest possible establishment through free elections, governments responsive to the will of the people.” Russia, under Vladimir Putin, still has nothing of the kind. But what of Europe? It’s possible that, due to its commissioners wielding something more cudgel-like than its highly vaunted soft-power, the EU may yet go the same way as the Soviet Union did. If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" By Olivia Pierson [First published on Incite 4/7/19] US news correspondent and political commentator, Danielle McLaughlin, a left-wing Kiwi living in the United States, used her writing and speaking skills to support Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. More often than not, McLaughlin parrots tabloid news stories which are very light on facts and heavy on psychodrama. Rather than writing columns which could provide a unique or insightful angle, perhaps even with a hint of intellectual prowess, McLaughlin instead panders to the poll-governed herd mentality by only peddling regurgitated ‘fake-news’ – and media outlets such as NZ’s Sunday Star Times continually lap it up. For instance, in 2016, one month out from election day, McLaughlin wrote a piece titled, “It’ll Take a Miracle to Save the Donald Now.” Published here in New Zealand by the Sunday Star Times and then by Stuff, McLaughlin’s article told us that after the lewd Access Hollywood tape-leak, Trump was finished – she even acknowledged the danger of making political predictions while saying this: Predictions are a dangerous game in politics. But absent a miracle, it’s over. With her high-as-a-kite confidence in the veracity of the mainstream polls, McLaughlin launched into the reasons why Trump could not, and would not, win the presidency. The trouble with her “reasoning” lay in the fact that it was mostly second-hand psychobabble and emotional opinion, often typical of the feminist mind. She ended that predictive piece with these words: Trump, the man who ‘cherishes women,’ but has spent decades debasing them, has been hiding in plain sight for the entire election season… Oh, the irony. Looks like he’s about to get trounced by a woman. You’d think that after such a spectacularly amusing misread of America’s body politic, McLaughlin may have learned to pause and perhaps reconsider before confidently following the narrative of mainstream media’s talking heads, but no. Here’s McLaughlin acting out the psychodrama again in her latest hit-piece for the Sunday Star Times (published once more on Stuff), titled, “Trump and Putin picked the wrong time to joke about ‘getting rid’ of fake news.” President Trump’s jocular press sit-down at the G20 summit with Vladimir Putin has caused widespread ire in the press, partly because the president flippantly deflected a question from a reporter about Russian meddling in the American elections by telling Putin in an off-the-cuff manner, “Don’t meddle in our elections,” and partly because, as McLaughlin reports, he quipped about “getting rid” of fake-news. But did he? Here’s McLaughlin: On the anniversary of the worst attack on the press in American history, the US President joked with Vladimir Putin about “getting rid” of the “fake news” at a sit-down at the G20 summit in Japan. Trump suggested Russia did not have a fake news problem. With a chuckle, Putin assured him that it did. McLaughlin’s piece comes to us with a video clip at the top of it, but the clip does not show President Trump saying anything about “getting rid of them” [fake-news] as her headline clearly states. In the last few days, I have seen numerous reports on these words attributed to the president in Putin’s presence, from Fox News to the Huffington Post, but no evidence whatsoever that President Trump actually said them. This clip put out as another hit-piece on the president by the Washington Post, shows the two leaders side-by-side during the now deliciously-damned moment, but he that hath ears to hear, let him hear – both the speech and the visual edit. They are clunkier than an MSNBC-produced Democratic primary debate. The narrative seems to have originated from Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacob’s Twitter feed. I challenge McLaughlin to give us some real proof, else, as if her carelessly predictive reporting of the 2016 presidential race weren’t enough for thinking people to pass her commentary by, she ought to be dismissed for a headline that is an outright lie, told in order to make President Trump look as though he supports the murder of journalists (as Putin does). This is simply disgraceful reportage and as a lawyer McLaughlin ought to know better, though perhaps that explains a lot. But here’s the guts of this non-issue, if President Trump did say about the fake-news media, “get rid of them,” who in their right mind would think for a moment that he meant anything other than rid them out of the room and therefore out of his face? He deeply dislikes them, as many of us do. To link these words with murder, as McLaughlin’s dim-witted column has done overtly, makes me wonder if the woman can only ever write when she takes a break from her meds. McLaughlin also wrote these words through the fog of the same grandiose haze: This is personal for me, of course, being a member of a profession generally populated by over-worked, under-paid scribes and storytellers who see the world as it is, but aren’t afraid to talk about the world as it could be. Who endeavour to be fair, and care enough about mistakes to make retractions, but know that some without that moral clarity will take advantage of the truism that a lie will make it around the world before the truth has done up her shoelaces. Has anybody heard McLaughlin, in the name of the moral clarity she likes to boast about possessing, either retract a word or apologise for her false reporting and commentary about Trump not being able to win the Whitehouse? Implying that President Trump treats the press in America the same way that Putin treats the press in Russia, i.e, brutally, McLaughlin ends her latest attack by casting this direct aspersion on the president: The same cannot be said for Trump or Putin, who understand very clearly the job of reporting is to hold them to account, but prefer to use the power of their offices to stifle it. So who watches the watchers? Once again, I challenge McLaughlin to provide her readers with some evidence that President Trump has ever once used his power “to stifle” the freedom of the press. Temporarily banning Jim Acosta from the Whitehouse for obnoxiously hogging press time on a shared microphone does not count, neither does dubbing fake-news “the enemy of the people,” for that is an understatement which is protected by the president’s first amendment right, not an action, though it is clear to me that the new anti-freedom of expression Left have much trouble understanding the difference between words and actions. Though she saw fit to quote him, Thomas Jefferson would spin in his grave if he could read McLaughlin’s charges toward the current president over something he supposedly said. Jefferson wrote to his friend William Munford in 1779: To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement. “To think as we will and speak as we think.” I hate to break it to the folks with TDS, like McLaughlin, but that great dictum includes President Trump’s right to critique the viciously hostile fake-news media, so get over it. I call upon McLaughlin to show us incontrovertibly where President Trump has acted to have a critic from the press silenced, because I can provide real examples of a president who shamefully persecuted political reporters in deed. His name is Obama and I wrote about it here: The persecution of James Rosen of Fox News, James Risen of The New York Times, the Associated Press scandal, the persecution of Sharyl Attkisson over her reportage of the ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal and the persecution which resulted in the imprisonment of political commentator and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza was officially pardoned by President Trump, but not before he’d gone through hell and had a lot more than his first amendment rights taken away. Instead of just being another defeated sour-puss, Ms. McLaughlin needs to cough-up some hard facts as supporting evidence of her spurious journalistic claims - and the Sunday Star Times and Stuff should demand that she does before they publish one more word of her fake-news. If not, she, and they, are to be dismissed as glaring examples of just how impoverished truthful and accurate standards are in the New Zealand press, especially when it comes to covering President Trump’s time in office. If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" |
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