Another Bernie bro who’s a gulag fan

A couple of weeks ago we met Kyle Jurek, an Iowa field organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign who, thanks to the brilliant hidden-camera reportage of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, was exposed as a bloodthirsty Communist who sees the Sanders candidacy as the first step in a much-needed revolution – indeed, as the prelude to a “Reign of Terror” which he and his comrades will kick off by gunning down some of their ideological enemies and shipping others off to a Gulag.

Of course, as we pointed out in our account of Jurek, the fact that this nutbag is a fan of totalitarianism who looks forward to putting into practice the most sanguinary lessons of Lenin and Stalin doesn’t necessarily mean that Bernie shares his views. Then again, it says something that the Sanders campaign would have a guy like this on the payroll – and it said something, too, that, after the Project Veritas exposé of Jurek, the campaign refused to comment. At this writing, there’s no indication that Jurek has been cut loose.

And now there’s this. Jurek, it turns out, is not unique. The other day, after releasing two mind-blowing reports on Jurek, O’Keefe put out one about another Sanders staffer – namely, one Martin Weissgerber, who works as the campaign’s South Carolina field coordinator. This guy, it turned out, made Jurek look like an amateur. “I’m a communist,” Weissgerber told Project Veritas’s hidden-camera operative, who was posing as a journalist who shared his views. Weissgerber said that after Sanders’s inauguration, the Senate, House, and judiciary should be dissolved and Sanders should assume dictatorial powers. He said that he looked forward to “send[ing] the rich to the guillotine” and that he planned to “learn how to shoot” so that he could take an active part in the coming revolution. In this connection, he praised the Soviet Union for having developed the greatest gun ever, the AK-47, “the destroyer of imperialism and colonization.”

Like Jurek, Weissgerber is a fan of the gulags, which, he said, were much more humane that they’re given credit for. They were, he claimed, “re-education camps.” Like Jurek, he wants to bring them back, and fill them with Republicans and billionaires. Indeed, Weissgerber maintained that the USSR generally has been given a bum rap. “The Soviet Union was not horrible,” he claimed. It had great “women’s rights.” It was “progressive.” Weissgerber made it clear that he’s all about “complete seizure of the means of production.”

Who is this Weissgerber? He provided his interlocutor with a bit of personal history. He studied Soviet history in college. Both his parents are Communists, too. His dad is a Belgian who “took part in Paris 1968.” His mother, Kathleen McKenna, works for WBUR, an NPR station in Boston, where she is obliged to “keep her politics to herself.”

Weissgerber adores Bernie. He finds only one problem with the old fella: he’s not far left enough. Still, he’s a big step in the right direction.

And what does Bernie think of Weissgerber? Valerie Richardson answered that question in The Washington Times on January 23. When Project Veritas called a Sanders field office in South Carolina to ask for a comment on the staffer’s remarks, the Sanders people phoned the North Charleston police and accused Project Veritas of harassment. A police officer then called Project Veritas and told them that the Sanders people would have no comment. “They are aware of videos you guys took, the undercover stuff,” said the cop. “It’s one of those things where they wish he hadn’t said that, but they’re still standing by him or whatever.” As for Jurek, Richardson reported that “Sanders state director Missy Rebik tweeted last week that Iowans ‘don’t care about political gossip.’” In short, the Sanders campaign is standing by both of these Communists. What more do we need to know?

As we said in our piece on Jurek, we’re not in the habit of taking sides in elections. But the Sanders outfit isn’t just another campaign. Jurek and Weissgerber are useful stooges of the first order. How many more of them are there in the ranks of Sanders’ people? If we feel obliged to help draw attention to O’Keefe’s revelations, moreover, it’s because virtually the whole mainstream media has done its best to ignore them. And if there’s one thing we know at this site, it’s that ignoring useful stooges in positions of power is never a good idea.

Posted on January 28, 2020January 24, 2020 by usefulstooges 2

Exposed: A Sanders staffer’s dreams of terror

We don’t see it as part of our mission on this site to take sides in American presidential races. But since our whole raison d’être is to call out the fans of totalitarianism, it’s impossible, in the year 2020, to close our eyes to a campaign in which one of the more successful major-party candidates is a self-identified socialist – a man who, for heaven’s sake, actually honeymooned in the Soviet Union and has expressed admiration for the Castro regime in Cuba. To some people who would never vote for him in a million years, Bernie Sanders may seem an innocuous enough figure – like a crazy but lovable grandpa who caught the “progressive” bug in his youth and whose one pleasure, in his dotage, is to rant about capitalism. To his unsettlingly large number of supporters, however, Sanders – who until running for the Democratic nomination was not a registered Democrat but an independent socialist – is a breath of fresh air, an outsider who, like Trump in the 2016 campaign, challenges the two-party system and promises to shake up the status quo. Moreover, it’s not just young people, born after the fall of the Soviet Union and taught by left-wing professors to despise America and admire socialism, who plan to cast their votes for Bernie: only recently, we were dismayed to see the actor and comedian Larry David, who is famous not only for creating Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm but also for playing Sanders (brilliantly) in skits on Saturday Night Live, telling an interviewer that he admires Bernie and that America would be a lot better off with him as president. We thought David – who is no spring chicken – was smarter than that.

Is there any chance that a significant number of Bernie’s fans will peel off after they see the sensational video that was released on January 14 by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas? O’Keefe and his team specialize in hidden-camera exposés of teachers’ unions, media organizations, groups like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, and, not least, political campaigns. In one instance after another, they have shed light on the actual – which is to say, often shabby, corrupt, and reprehensible – agendas behind the anodyne public rhetoric. In the case of the Sanders campaign, they captured on camera Kyle Jurek, an Iowa field organizer for Sanders, calling Trump supporters fascists and saying that “The only thing that fascists understand is violence. So the only way you can confront them is with violence.” If Trump gets reelected, Jurek said, cities will “burn,” because “we have to save f***ing human civilization.” If Bernie doesn’t get nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Jurek promised, he and his cronies will beat up police, because “we” will have “nothing left to lose.”

And if Sanders is elected? Jurek promised a “Reign of Terror.” Even leftist MSNBC isn’t leftist enough for him: he spoke enthusiastically of dragging MSNBC journalists out of their studios and “light[ing] them on fire in the streets.” Mere liberals, he promised, will be sent to a “Gulag”; they’ll “get the f***ing wall first.” Meaning, of course, that they will be lined up against a wall and gunned down, Che Guevara style. “In Cuba, what did they do to reactionaries?” he asked. “They shot them on the beach. Do you want to fight against the revolution? You’re gonna die for it, mother***er.” In a commentary at the end of this explosive video, O’Keefe asked: “Is Kyle Jurek the true but hidden face of the Sanders campaign?” He added that this was only the first of multiple videos about Jurek that Project Veritas would be releasing, and that those to come would be even worse.

Does Sanders share Jurek’s views and aspirations? Well, of course Sanders has never promised a “Reign of Terror.” Then again, he’s expressed fondness for regimes that have engaged in reigns of terror. In any case, one thing is certain: Jurek is not alone. Others who have lined up behind Bernie share Jurek’s extreme politics. And of course the promise of violence is not just talk: groups like Antifa, which are pretty much on the same page politically as Jurek, have staged riots around the U.S., causing physical harm to their political opponents and serious damage to private property. They are cut from the same cloth as the Bolsheviks who murdered the Romanovs, filled the Gulags, and carried out the Holodomor; cut from the same cloth as the Maoists who staged the Cultural Revolution in China; cut from the same cloth as the SS and Gestapo officers who herded Jews onto trains to Auschwitz. The thirst for terror, violence, and tyrannical power never dies; the price of freedom is, as ever, eternal vigilance against aspiring Stalins, Castros, and Che Guevaras. Kudos to Project Veritas for showing us that one of these aspiring Ches can be found performing a not inconsiderable job within a major presidential campaign.

Posted on January 16, 2020January 17, 2020 by usefulstooges 1

Surprise: The Guardian loves AOC!

The Guardian‘s Christmas gift to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a splashy profile running more than 1600 words that could have written by her own PR team. There wasn’t even a pretense of balance: this was a love letter, pure and simple. The paper quoted one “progressive leader” as saying that AOC’s “presence in Congress has been seismic.” She’s “convinced every major 2020 presidential candidate to support her Green New Deal” (never mind that it’s a ludicrous set of proposals rooted in extreme socialist ideology rather than in any realistic understanding of anything), “galvanized opposition to a deal with Amazon in New York” (hence depriving tens of thousands of New Yorkers of terrific jobs), and inspired innumerable would-be AOCs around the country to, as another fan put it, “challeng[e] the status quo – by taking on politics as usual in Washington.”

But AOC isn’t just taking on “politics as usual.” That’s what Trump is doing. AOC? She’s taking on reality itself. Although she graduated from Boston University with a degree in economics, she seems to have no grasp whatsoever of the most basic economic principles and no awareness of the history of the ideas she’s pushing – which are, in any event, far to the left of the American electorate. Appearing at a Bernie Sanders campaign event in Los Angeles the weekend before Christmas, AOC asked the crowd: “Are you ready for the revolution?” Her goal, and Bernie’s goal, she said, echoing generations of founders of what turned out to be totalitarian regimes, was to “establish a loving society in the United States of America.” America, she insisted, is “not an advanced society,” but is a “fascist” state that, among many other horrible things, “allows people to die because they can’t afford their insulin,” and so on. Emblematic of her intellectual confusion was her ability to charge, in one moment, that America is imperialistic, and, in the next moment, to say that part of America’s duty is to change the world for the better. Among much else, she called for “black liberation” and “queer liberation” and “a policy that honors indigenous wisdom and leadership.” Joining her on the platform, and praised by her lavishly, was Marxist race hustler Cornel West – no surprise there. Such is the company she keeps. Where was that other frequent Sanders stand-in, pro-sharia “feminist” Linda Sarsour?

In Britain, the Labour Party just experienced a historic defeat at the polls because British voters, it turned out, don’t want their government going full Commie. Americans don’t want that for their country either. But the flagship rag of the UK’s Corbynista left doesn’t seem to have learned its lessons. Here’s how The Guardian described AOC’s politics: she’s “wary of the excesses of capitalism” has an “uncompromising clarity of vision,” and is a “political and cultural icon on the progressive left” who “has also transfixed the right.” The Guardian even described her as being “witty,” a word it would never occur to us to apply to AOC, who, when she moved into her new apartment after being elected to Congress, was baffled by that contraption in her sink drain: she had never seen, or, apparently, heard tell of, a garbage disposal. This is the woman who wants to change the entire way in which Americans live their lives – using more or less the same blueprint that has made Castro’s Cuba and chavista Venezuela such roaring successes. Let us hope she ends up on the same trash heap of history to which UK voters, in their wisdom, have consigned Jeremy Corbyn.

Posted on December 31, 2019December 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Mainstreaming Jew-hatred

Before World War II, anti-Semitism was an everyday part of life in most of the Western world. It was understood to take two forms. There was “vulgar” anti-Semitism and “genteel” anti-Semitism. The kind of people who were afflicted with the latter looked down upon the kind of people who were afflicted with the former. The “genteel” anti-Semites would never use certain “vulgar” anti-Semitic words. They might even have Jewish friends, because they distinguished between the Jews who were – how to put it? – clubbable, and those who weren’t. But they also joined “restricted” social clubs and golf clubs, stayed at hotels that banned Jews, and sent their kids to colleges that had quotas for Jewish students.

Many Jews who made it big kept their Jewish identity to themselves, or at least didn’t make a show of it. Jewish performers ditched their Jewish-sounding names and replaced them with WASPy monickers. In the 1930s, Jewish studio heads, producers, directors, and writers in Hollywood were reluctant to make movies about Nazi anti-Semitism for fear of drawing attention to their own Jewishness. For the same reason, the Jewish publishers of the New York Times downplayed news about the Holocaust.

It was, in fact, the Holocaust, when the entire story finally came out, that shone as bright a light on Jew-hatred as one could ever imagine. No, anti-Semitism didn’t vanish, but it was no longer considered respectable, at least not by anybody who wanted to be considered respectable. The Academy Award for Best Picture of 1947 went to Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about anti-Semitism. In pretty much every country in the Western world, memorials were erected to the six million Jews killed in the Final Soultion and Holocaust museums were established. Some of us grew up in a time when anti-Semitism seemed surely to have become a thing of the past.

But we were wrong. In Britain, the head of one of the two major political parties, Jeremy Corbyn, is an undeniable anti-Semite. In the U.S., unapologetic Jew-haters have been elected to Congress. As the Washington Free Beacon reported recently, one of these House members, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, “was the keynote speaker at a conference hosted by a Muslim organization that traffics in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and that counts among its supporters many who seek Israel’s destruction.” The organization in question is the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and the conference took place in late November in Chicago. Also onstage was Linda Sarsour, the unlikely feminist leader who wears a hijab, hangs with Farrakhan, and fills her speeches with anti-Semitic bile. Yet another speaker was Zahra Billoo, who in a 2014 tweet wrote that “Blaming Hamas for firing rockets at Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist.” Panel discussions at the conference called for the destruction of Israel and for the classification of Zionism as a disease.

In another recent article, this one for the Spectator, Dominic Green took on the curious case of Bernie Sanders, senator and presidential candidate, whose Jewish background – members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust – doesn’t keep him from being more than tolerant of anti-Semitism. For example, he’s a fan of Corbyn, even though the latter “detests the Zionist entity with a near-Soviet passion, and is visibly aroused when he gets to signal his vices by introducing Islamists like Raed Salah, a publicist for the primitive ‘blood libel’ that Jews bake with Christian blood, into the House of Commons.” Sanders, notes Green, has called Corbyn “courageous.” Moreover, Sanders is chummy with Sarsour, who spoke on his behalf at the AMP conference. Addressing the attendees in her role as his designated surrogate, she asked: “How can you be against white supremacy in the United States of America, and the idea of living in a supremacist state based on race and class, but then support a state like Israel that is built on supremacy? That is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else. How do you, then, not support the caging of children on the US-Mexican border, but then you support the detainment and detention of Palestinian children in Palestine? How does that work, sisters and brothers?”

Back in September the New York Post reported that “[p]ressure is mounting on Sen. Bernie Sanders to cut ties with longtime campaign surrogate Linda Sarsour, with critics such as Manhattan billionaire Ronald Lauder citing her long history of anti-Semitic comments.” Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said at the time: “Linda Sarsour is a virulent anti-Semite who has publicly stated that ‘nothing is creepier than Zionism.’ Her views have no place in our political discourse and any candidate who associates with her is guilty of handing a megaphone to anti-Semites around the country.” Indeed, But Sanders shows no sign of cutting her loose. He still, apparently, views her as an asset. Which says something scary indeed about the current resurgence and mainstreaming of Jew-hatred in the West.

Posted on December 19, 2019December 23, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Sanders: praising China

The other day we wrote here about a prominent psychiatrist who, in an interview on CNN, maintained that President Trump is worse than Mao, Stalin, or Hitler. As we observed, to make such comparisons is irresponsible beyond measure, because it diminishes the scale of those tyrants’ destructiveness at a time when many Americans – especially young people – are poorly educated about twentieth-century totalitarianism.

A few days later, a far more famous person than that psychiatrist made an equally outrageous statement. In a late August interview with The Hill, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, while acknowledging that China is growing “more authoritarian” in many ways, claimed that the Communist dictatorship has “made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.”

Is this true? Well, first of all, let’s make two things clear: China is a massive country (it’s by far the most populous on earth, and has been for a very long time) and it has long been a very poor country as well. Yes, it has undergone a major economic transformation. But because it started at almost zero, in the wake of Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, even achieving a middling level of prosperity per capita would have been a big deal. Yes, thanks to its gigantic population, China has managed in the course of a few decades to develop an economy that rivals the size of America’s; but that still means that the average inhabitant of China is nowhere near as affluent as his counterparts in the West.

In any event,what exactly changed? Well, let’s recall, to begin with, that Bernie Sanders loves Communism, and that when he celebrates Chinese accomplishment he is implicitly cheering on Communism. But China has experienced an economic boom not because it has clung to its Communist ideology and systems of social control but because, under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, it abandoned its fierce devotion to Marxist economics and introduced elements of capitalism even as it remained a Communist dictatorship. It helped enrich itself, furthermore, by underpaying factory workers and selling its products abroad at dirt-cheap prices. This policy, which continued under Deng’s successors, was aided by the refusal of Western countries to impose tariffs on Chinese imports – a refusal that resulted in profound damage to large portions of the industrial base of the U.S. and other countries and great suffering on the part of blue-collar Western workers. China’s success also owed a great deal to its currency manipulation and its shameless theft of intellectual property from Western countries. Oh, and it also killed a lot of poor people, which of course is one easy way of eliminating poverty.

Hence, yes, poverty in China has declined to a considerable degree. Thanks to the spectacular growth of Chinese industries, the country now has a great many more very rich people than it had a few decades ago. But while its biggest cities now teem with gleaming skyscrapers and its richest citizens travel the world and send their kids to Harvard and Oxford, tens of millions of people in rural areas continue to live at a level of poverty that brings to mind the 1931 Pearl Buck novel The Good Earth. Indeed, the changes that Sanders so enthusiastically extols have resulted in what may well be the most formidable case of economic equality – a topic he frets over endlessly when talking about the American economy – in the history of human civilization. And let’s not forget this small detail: everyone in China is still unfree.

But of course that doesn’t matter to Sanders. He was a fan of the USSR. He loves Castro’s Cuba. Until recently, anyway, he was defending the Maduro regime in Venezuela. As Jim Geraghty noted in National Review, this is a presidential candidate who in 1985, while the USSR was still around, commented: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: The rich get the food, and the poor starve to death.” Well, the fact is that in cities like Shanghai and Beijing and Guangzhou, the new Party-connected super-rich managerial class enjoys a whole lot of first-class cuisine, while out in the sticks there are still millions who are, yes, starving.

Posted on September 3, 2019September 4, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

John Cusack, antisemite

Now 53, John Cusack has been a well-known film actor since he was a teenager. He’s starred in dozens of big pictures, including Grosse Point Blank, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Pushing Tin, High Fidelity, Runaway Jury, 1408, and The Butler.

But like many of the other actors we’ve discussed on this site, he’s also politically active. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and backs him in the current presidential contest as well.

He didn’t pick up the activist stuff in Hollywood; he was raised on it. His parents were political activists too; he has described himself as having grown up with Philip and Daniel Berrigan, the radical Roman Catholic clerics the latter of whom had the distinction of being the first priest on the FBI’s “most wanted” list and ended up behind bars. Cusack has spoken of them in such a way as to suggest that they were role models for him.

Cusack shares his views regularly on Twitter. He is not known, shall we say, for his subtlety of thought and expression. In 2017 he tweeted a photo of President Trump alongside the quote “YER DEAD – GET YERSELF BURIED.” When it caused something of a controversy, he took it down.

Then, a couple of months ago, he retweeted an image of a giant hand crushing a bunch of people; on the shirtsleeve from which the giant hand protruded was a Star of David. Accompanying this Der Stürmer-type image was the following quotation, which was attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Cusack supplemented the quotation with his own comment: “Follow the money.”

The point was clear: Jews run the world. Jews are all about money. Jews are crushing the rest of us. The tweet could hardly have been more stunningly antisemitic. Add to that the fact that the line he quoted about “find[ing] out who you are not allowed to criticize” was a statement not by Voltaire but by an American neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom.

When he was widely denounced for this breathtakingly obscene tweet, Cusack doubled down. “You think Israel isn’t commuting [sic] atrocities against Palestinians?” he wrote. “What planet are you on?” Eventually, however, the criticism got to be too much. At first, bizarrely, and pusillanimously, Cusack blamed his retweet on a bot. “How,” wondered Jewish writer Elad Nehorai, “does a bot get you to write ‘follow the money’ after sharing an overtly anti-Semitic image?” Eventually Cusack owned up to having posted the retweet and issued a wimpy sort-of-apology that only served to prove that he really isn’t terribly sharp. That apology was so lame that he then issued another apology, which also was lame. The response from David Baddiel, a Jewish comedian in the UK, was succinct and right on the mark: “John Cusack says he didn’t at first realise that the image was anti-Semitic. My, it’s a troublesome old blind spot for progressives, isn’t it?”

Meanwhile, in a Boston Jewish publication, a woman named Judy Bolton-Fasman posted an open letter to Cusack. Confessing to having had a crush on him in the 1990s, she said that while she too was a critic of some Israeli actions, “it must be said that Israeli citizens have died in Palestinian suicide bombings on buses, in malls and cafes just because they were Jews. There are frequent rocket attacks out of Gaza.” She asked him: “Have you been to Israel?….I’m not happy about walling off the West Bank where it divides neighborhoods and families. However, Israelis call it a security barrier with good reason. Even the most dovish Israeli will tell you the barrier has drastically reduced the number of terror attacks in Israel proper.” She added that she had “met incredible Israelis and Palestinians who are dedicated to achieving peace” and encouraged him to travel to Israel and meet them instead of just demonizing Jews. Good advice. But since the politics of a man like Cusack have less to do with the real world than with blind, stubborn ideological devotion, Ms. Bolton-Fasman is likely whistling in the wind.

Posted on August 22, 2019August 23, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Snowflake warriors

A decade or two ago, few would have paid attention to any event held by the Democratic Socialists of America. For almost nobody took socialism seriously. People remembered the USSR; they remembered the captive countries of Eastern Europe; they remembered the Gulag; and the memories were not pretty ones.

But America has changed. Memories of the grim reality of twentieth-century socialism have faded, and the old utopian dreams have made a resurgence. In 2019, in many circles, being a socialist is sexy. Young people who were born after the fall of the Iron Curtain are especially susceptible to its dubious charms. No surprise there: a huge percentage of them have learned their “history” from A People’s History of the United States, a patchwork of anti-American slurs by Howard Zinn, a card-carrying Communist, that is the most frequently assigned textbook in that field. Bernie Sanders’s promises of free this and free that during his campaigns for the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nomination brought him millions of followers who have been convinced that capitalism is a nasty, brutal, and heartlessly exploitative system while socialism is the political equivalent of unicorns and rainbows. A poll released in June showed that no fewer than forty percent of Americans prefer socialism to capitalism, and a majority of women aged 18 to 54 – the exact figure was 55% – said they would rather live under socialism than under the present American system.

So it is that when socialists get together nowadays, people listen. But what exactly are they listening to? On August 2-4, the Democratic Socialists of America held their annual convention. Writing in the Spectator, Will Lloyd provided the following summing-up:

How to give you a flavor of the event? Well, note the rules the convention followed:

Quiet rooms available for all attendees – but no aggressive scents in those rooms!

Use the proper doors and exits – no short cuts from the hall!

Wear proper credentials at all times – right-wing infiltrators might be trying to get in!

Try to be chill – take a deep breath!

Don’t talk to anybody – especially if they don’t have credentials!

Don’t talk to anybody from the press!

Don’t talk to the cops for any reason at all!

Please don’t clap – some comrades have sensitive hearing!

Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds, the epic account of the involvement of American socialist John Reed in the founding of the Soviet Union, portrayed Communist Party meetings, both in the U.S. and Russia, at which actual revolutionaries – some of them highly articulate intellectuals, others tough-as-leather labor-union types – fiercely debated strategies and tactics. Whatever their foibles, many of the real-life men and women depicted in those scenes were selflessly (if naively) devoted to their shared ideology, and had no way of realizing just how tragic the ultimate consequences of that ideology would be.

To watch videos of this year’s DSA convention is to view something entirely different. This was a get-together of trust-fund babies – privileged, cartoonishly self-absorbed brats who were born in the wake of a century of horrors spawned by socialism but who have embraced that ideology nonetheless because, in their spectacular historical ignorance and all-around naivete, they think America under a socialist government would allow them to spend their entire lives enjoying the same kind of total dependence they have enjoyed as children. Whereas Lenin, Trotsky, and their crew were scrappy sons of bitches, the DSA whippersnappers are very much of their own generation: they pose as combatants who are ready to take up arms against the USA – veritable Navy SEALs for the socialist cause! – but in fact (as illustrated by those rules about “aggressive scents” and “sensitive hearing”) they’re a flock of lambs, Gen Z snowflakes preoccupied with such contemporary no-no’s as misgendering and microaggressions.

The whole thing came off like a parody, starting with the silliness of them all calling one another “comrade.” At one point some beta male from Sacramento stands up in the audience and says “guys, can we please keep the chatter to a minimum” because “I’m…prone to sensory overload”; then, because Mr. Sacramento said “guys,” another would-be warrior rises to complain about his “gendered language.” Somehow we have the feeling these kids aren’t going to be running the country any time soon. But excessive sanguinity in the face of this foolishness is inadvisable: as the presence in the House of Representatives of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young socialists has demonstrated, a handful of aggressive young people of this ilk can shift the center of the Democratic Party considerably leftward. So we shouldn’t be too dismissive about the destructive socioeconomic potential of these puerile puppy dogs.

Posted on August 13, 2019August 13, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Cuban defectors? Who cares?

We’ve spent plenty of time on this website discussing celebrities from the US and other free countries who have gotten a big kick out of going slumming in Cuba, chumming around with Fidel Castro, and the like. We’ve written about how current New York Mayor (and presidential hopeful) Bill de Blasio honeymooned in Havana. About how another one of the current crop of presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, has praised Castro and visited Cuba. About how the mayor of New Orleans went to Havana for tips on economic development. About Barbara Walters’s cozy relationship with Fidel. About the quasi-romance between Fidel and another American TV “journalist,” Lisa Howard. About a UCLA art professor’s fascination with Che Guevara. About a fun trip made by Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, to the island prison. About how Karl Lagerfeld used rundown Havana as a backdrop for a fashion show. About the movie that director Bob Yari filmed in Cuba. About celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s admiration for the Castro regime. And about heroic whitewashes of Cuban Communism by Time Magazine and other media.

The point has consistently been the same: that it’s easy for people living in democratic countries to romanticize tyranny. It seems especially easy, somehow, for rich and privileged folks who like to make the most of their wealth and their ability to travel at will to any spot on earth. There’s something about visiting a dictatorship and consorting with a dictator that just tickles their fancy. Somehow they’re able to take in the terrible spectacle of fellow human beings living under economic and political conditions that they themselves would chafe under and yet praise the system, and the thugs, that forces these conditions upon them. The whole business is an eternal reality and an eternal puzzle.

Yet however blinkered so many people in the West may be about the reality of a place like Cuba, the Cubans themselves have no illusions. They know what it is to live every of their lives without liberty. So it is that last month, six members of Cuba’s youth soccer team who were in New York on their way from Cuba to the U.S. Virgin Islands – where they were scheduled to play a game on July 17 against the team representing that possession – defected. Six! This was, of course, hardly a unique event: only a month earlier, four Cuban soccer players defected while in the U.S. for a tournament.

This report first appeared in the official Cuban government daily Granma. It was picked up by the news service Agence France-Presse. We read about it at the reliable Babalu Blog, which had found the story at the website of a Pakistani newspaper. A roundabout way, don’t you think, for a story from Cuba to reach American readers? (Even more roundabout, in fact, than the idea of having to go through New York to get from Havana to the U.S. Virgin Islands.) But this is what happens when major Western newspapers simply aren’t interested in such stories – such, alas, is their admiration for, or at very least readiness to cover for, the Cuban system. We checked: even though the defection took place in New York, none of that city’s major dailies appears to have reported on it. Well, disgraceful enough for them. But whether covered in the media or not, there were six Cubans who freer when they went to bed that evening than when they’d woken up that morning – and that’s what matters.

Posted on August 8, 2019August 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Bill de Blasio, Che fan

What can you expect of a mayor who honeymooned in Havana?

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about Senator Bernie Sanders, former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and current candidate for President of the United States. He honeymooned in the Soviet Union. The mayor we’re referring to here, who also happens to be running for President, is Bill de Blasio, the current mayor of New York City.

De Blasio, whose politics are basically socialist, is not popular in New York City; many citizens feel that he’s begun to undo the successes of his two immediate predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, who made the metropolis safer and cleaner and restored its economy. His critics accuse de Blasio not just of misguided policies; they charge him with incompetence and neglect.

As if to affirm the charge of neglect, de Blasio has spent much of the last few weeks outside of the city he’s supposed to be running. Instead of attending to his mayoral duties, he’s been on the campaign trail, trying to secure the Democratic nomination for president. That’s why he was in Miami on June 27 when, addressing an audience of striking workers at the airport, he actually quoted from the Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara. “The eyes of the world are on this airport, the eyes of the world are on Miami-Dade,” he said, concluding his remarks with Che’s most famous line: “Hasta la victoria siempre.”

When his Che quote, predictably enough, met with criticism from Miami residents – many of whom are refugees from Castro’s Cuba or the children or grandchildren thereof, and therefore not exactly fans of Che Guevara – as well as from Sunshine State politicians such as Senator Marco Rubio and State Senator Jose Javier Rodríguez, de Blasio claimed not to have known that the line was identified with Che. He actually maintained that he was simply expressing, in Spanish, his hope that the airport workers’ strike would be successful. But there are many ways to convey that sentiment in Spanish. “Hasta la victoria siempre” would not be the first combination of words to occur to an English speaker wishing to communicate that thought. Far from it. It would have been far more likely for someone in his position to say, for example, “Buena suerte con la huelga” – good luck with the strike. Is his claim, then, at all credible? In a word, no.

We’re speaking, after all, about a longtime socialist who helped raise money for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and who, as noted above, honeymooned in Havana (and violated U.S. law to do so). He’s precisely the kind of guy who knows very well that “Hasta la victoria siempre” is a Che line. It’s quite simply beyond comprehension that this hard leftist, this admirer of Castro, is ignorant enough not to have known he was quoting Che. Our guess, rather, is that he’s fatuous enough to have thought that, even in a city known for its large Cuban refugee population, most of the Spanish-speaking airport workers would respond positively to an allusion to Che Guevara. Because the plain fact is that, for a man with de Blasio’s politics, Che is a hero – never mind Che’s history of sadistic abuse and torture, his establishment of concentration camps, and his summary executions of tens of thousands of political enemies, gays, artists, journalists, and business people (plus fellow revolutionaries whom he perceived as rivals). De Blasio simply can’t imagine working-class Latinos not sharing his own outsized admiration for the bloodthirsty Argentinian butcher.

Posted on July 18, 2019July 2, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Anti-white insanity at U.Ga.

He’s a grad student and teaching assistant at the University of Georgia, and presumably he figured that the contemporary academy’s tolerance – and, in many cases, outright enthusiasm – for savage anti-white rhetoric would keep him out of trouble. But Irami Osei-Frimpong, who is studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy, and whose area of specialization is institutional racism, is now in hot water. On February 4, Inside Higher Ed reported that the university was looking into comments he’d made on social media, as well as into “his alleged failure to disclose that he’d previously attended the University of Chicago and had been arrested for trespassing” during a 2011 Occupy Chicago protest.

The online statement that first raised concern about Osei-Frimong, who is known to YouTube viewers as “The Funky Academic,” was this one: “some white people may have to die for black communities to be whole in this struggle to advance freedom.”

But there’s a lot more where that came from. On April 16, he tweeted: “To anyone talking about Bernie donating to charity. You don’t secure rights through charity, you secure rights through good government and political organizing. A culture of charity strengthens the oligarchy.”

Then there was this, on April 18: “I really do think that every school with an African American studies department needs an White American studies department run by African Americans and Native Americans (and Asians in California and Hawaii).”

May 5: “I study philosophy because I think that White schools, churches, and families in America are internally incoherent and provide the resources for their own de-legitimacy. I study politics and psychology because de-legitimacy isn’t enough. We are going to need state guns.”

Same date: “I’m not targeted because I’m Black; I’m targeted because I think the problem with Black America is how we make White people.”

Ditto: “If we want justice for Black Americans, we have to dismantle and replace the engines of White cultural production: their schools, churches, and families.”

And again: “Meaningful integration doesn’t kill blackness, but it does kill Whiteness. Meaningful integration is a White genocide because you can’t meaningfully integrate and keep White supremacy in tact. And make no mistake, White Supremacy IS ethnic Whiteness.”

The organization Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) was founded in 1999 to defend the rights of students and faculty at American institutions of higher education. It spends much, if not most, of its time these days standing up for the speech rights of conservatives whom left-wing administrators or student mobs have tried to silence. But to its credit, FIRE has stood up for Osai-Frimpong, arguing that his right to express his opinions, however offensive, is protected by the First Amendment.

True enough. Osai-Frimpong does have the right to voice his ugly views. What’s disturbing is that his views are only slightly out of the contemporary on-campus mainstream – and that, all over the country, these days, people of color with viciously anti-white prejudices are admitted to, hired by, and given platforms at universities that have, for a generation, systematically excluded conservatives, moderates, and classical liberals.

Posted on May 28, 2019May 15, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

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