Commentary: The Difference Between Free Speech and Violent Rhetoric (It’s Not What You Think)

United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit the airwaves to connect the recent assault on Paul Pelosi with “fascism” and “white nationalism.” She insists that both are now ubiquitous. And both prompt increasing politically motivated violence. (Ocasio-Cortez remains oblivious to the greatest sustained political violence in our recent history; the 120 days of Black Lives Matter and Antifa-fueled rioting, arson, looting, and mayhem of summer and fall 2020—often cheered on or defended by public officials and social media.)

The deplorable violent attack on Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been described as the logical reification of increasing bitter political discourse. Shrill accusations spread even as full details of the attack are still not known. But the general picture of the assailant is one of an unhinged conspiracy freak of all flavors. He seems to have been a lunatic, drug-crazed white supremacist and anti-Semite, a former hemp jeweler, and nudist, who was either homeless or was living in a cluttered hippie-like commune in Berkeley plastered with pride and BLM flags. 

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Commentary: Critical Race Enthusiasts Should Learn the Lesson of ‘Defund the Police’

Crowd of people in the streets, protesting and Black Lives Matter movement

A year ago, “defund the police” activists were having quite a time. Outlets like CNN and Vox were publishing fawning profiles. Social media sensations like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar were leading the parade. Cities like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Austin even approved partial defundings. It was a juggernaut.

Now? A tough-on-crime former cop just won the Democratic mayoral nomination in Bill de Blasio’s New York. Former President Barack Obama is warning fellow Democrats, “You lost a big audience the minute you say [‘defund the police’].” Sen. Bernie Sanders has rejected calls for “no more policing.” And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, a few weeks ago, bizarrely claimed that it was not Democrats but Republicans who wanted to defund the police (because they opposed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill).

What happened? Intoxicated by a few policy wins in deep blue cities, enthusiasm in the left-leaning Twitter echo chamber, and their viselike grip on the national media, “defund” activists overlooked one important detail: Their agenda was deeply unpopular with most Americans. A summer 2020 YouGov poll found that just 16 percent of adults wanted to cut police funding — much less “defund” the police. Indeed, 81 percent of black Americans wanted police to spend as much or more time in their communities. During a year when major American cities saw an unnerving increase in homicides, after years of declines, that reaction was not just understandable, it was wholly predictable.  

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AOC Urges Illegal Immigrant Parents of Children Born in the US to Register for Biden’s Child Care Tax Credit Payments

Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged illegal immigrants who are parents to children born in the U.S. to register for President Joe Biden’s child care tax credit payments on Thursday, video shows.

Parents and guardians will receive checks of $250 to $300 per child monthly until the end of 2021 including undocumented adults who care for children with valid Social Security numbers, according to Ocasio-Cortez.

“These centers are also offering help to undocumented folks with eligible children,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So any child with a social security number is eligible. Do not count yourself out … if a parent and guardian is undocumented.”

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Business Insider Compiles Database to Track Former Trump Officials

President Donald Trump meets with (from left) U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price; Vice President Mike Pence; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan; Dr. Zeke Emanuel; and Andrew Bremberg, Dir. Domestic Policy Council, Monday, March 20, 2017, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Benjamin Applebaum)

A Business Insider list of former President Donald Trump’s officials tracks where these figures are working since departing the administration, warning that like Trump, these former staffers are “nowhere close to being gone.”

Insider said it combed through the interviews, LinkedIn profiles, and public records of over 327 former Trump staffers and compiled a searchable database “to show where they all landed.”

The publication noted that almost 100 former staffers have obtained “establishment” jobs, that over 40 of these former Trump officials still work in the government or in politics, and that at least 85 have gone “off the grid with no information available about their next move.”

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Commentary: Remote Work’s Impending Transformation of Middle America

Computer with video chat on screen and mug next to laptop

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a great deal about America and Americans. Most have acquiesced to anything and everything government bureaucrats asked for in the name of public safety. Masks have been donned, churches have been shuttered, and many of us stayed at home for months, working remotely.

This last item may end up being the largest and most permanent transformation of the United States. The mobility that comes with remote work may end up transforming middle America as left-coast technologists migrate inward. Freed from the work-based ties that bind them to Silicon Valley and New York City, they can now easily take their jobs and their left-wing politics to the heartland, ushering in a transformative moment in American politics.

Thomas Edsall, writing for The New York Times, discusses how many from densely populated urban areas on the coasts are finding that remote work enables them to have big city paychecks while living in suburban or rural areas with lower costs of living. 

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Ocasio-Cortez Praises Nation’s Largest Abortion Provider for Saving Babies

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she is a “Planned Parenthood baby,” praising the nation’s largest abortion provider for saving babies.

The New York Democrat criticized pro-life Republicans and defended Planned Parenthood during a virtual hearing Thursday where she revealed that her mother received prenatal care from Planned Parenthood.

“If we want to talk about Planned Parenthood, let’s talk about how many lives Planned Parenthood has saved and how many babies have been born because of the prenatal care provided by Planned Parenthood,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar Urges Biden Admin to End Contracts Between ICE and Prisons, Calling Treatment of Immigrants ‘Systemic Abuse’

Rep. Ilhan Omar urged President Joe Biden’s administration in a letter Monday to end Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) contracts with prisons and jails.

The letter calls for Biden to issue an executive order to end ICE’s contracts with state, county and local jails due to the treatment of the detained immigrants and the facilities’ conditions. The Minnesota Democrat called the conditions of the facilities “systemic abuse.”

“Conditions in the municipal, county, and state jails and prisons contracting with ICE to detain immigrants mirror the systemic abuses in privately operated immigration detention facilities, including mental neglect, long term use of solitary confinement, sexual assault, and lack of access to legal counsel,” Omar wrote in the letter.

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Commentary: The Corruption of ‘Politically Correct’ Language Puts Us All Under the Curse of Babel

In C.S. Lewis’s novel about totalitarianism, That Hideous Strength, we find this line, “Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis,” which translates, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.”

This line occurs in a passage during which an elite who dreamed of making themselves masters of mankind find themselves under the “curse of Babel,” unable to speak anything other than gibberish.

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Two Democrats Call for Hearing on ‘Robinhood’s Market Manipulation’ of GameStop Trades

At least two House Democrats are on board to hold a hearing on “Robinhood’s market manipulation,” Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Thursday.

Companies such as GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry recently saw their ticker’s unable to trade on the popular investment platform Robinhood. The stock surge for companies such as Gamestop and AMC, boosted by a group on Reddit, has caused hedge fund managers who held short positions on those companies to lose billions, according to Yahoo Finance.

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Produce Shortages Possible as Workers Strike for Higher Wages over Pandemic Risks

Produce distributed by Hunts Point Produce Market, the largest U.S. wholesale produce market, faces possible shortages as the company’s workers protest in favor of a wage increase, The New York Times reported.

Unionized workers at Hunts Point Produce Market, which plays a central role in New York City’s food supply chain supplying produce to supermarkets and restaurants, entered their sixth straight day of the strike Friday, The New York Times reported. The workers, members of the Teamsters, had asked for an additional $1 per hour wage increase, but the market countered with a $0.32 per hour wage increase.

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Commentary: The Trump ‘CT Scanner’ Exposes the Malignancies of the Elites for All to See

These past four years, Donald Trump, intentionally or not, became a CT scanner that produced three-dimensional images of the innards of elite institutions and people, showing us what is beneath their veneers. He had an eerie manner of replying to critics in such an upstart fashion that those who objected to his supposed crudity proved cruder in repartee than he. And he showcased his successes for America in such a way as to make his enemies wish that successes for their country were failures instead.

If one suspected before 2017 that White House CNN correspondent Jim Acosta was a lightweight blowhard, be now confirmed you had been naïve in such a balanced assessment. 

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Commentary: Are the State-Led Pandemic Shutdowns a Trial Run for the Green New Deal?

At the height of the state-led COVID-19 pandemic economic shutdowns in April, 25.3 million Americans had lost their jobs as businesses shuttered up and families stayed behind closed doors, waiting for the worst of the virus to pass.

While working from home or being furloughed, millions of Americans stayed off the roads, driving much less and monthly fuel consumption down 47.1 percent in April, according to the Energy Information Agency.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Said America Is a ‘Brutal, Barbarian Society’

According to democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Covid-19 pandemic is proving that the United States “is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans.” As evidence of this, she claims that “40% of us couldn’t even afford a $400 emergency” before this crisis, and Covid-19 “is more than a $400 emergency.”

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Omar and Bernie Ask Bezos for Answers About Amazon’s Efforts to Slow COVID-19 Spread

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) sent a letter Friday to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asking for “detailed information” about his plans to protect warehouse workers from the coronavirus.

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Analysis: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Pitch for the Green New Deal Is Unhinged From Reality

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently gave an impassioned pitch for her “Green New Deal” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. After stating that her opponents were misrepresenting the legislation, she read the full text of it into the Congressional Record and claimed that the reason it is “so, so controversial” is “because for years we have prioritized the pursuit of profit at any and all human and environmental cost.”

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Tlaib Says She Sat Next to Omar During SOTU to Hold Hands in ‘Moments of Triggering’

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI-13) said she and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) sat next to each other during the president’s State of the Union address so they could “hold hands” in “moments of triggering.”

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Wall Street Exec. Jamie Dimon Launches an Anti-Socialist Crusade as Students Increasingly Gravitate Toward It

Young Americans, including college students, are increasingly gravitating toward socialism, but one Wall Street executive is pushing back, warning of the system’s potentially irreversible effects. 

A recently published analysis by the top finance school in the United States, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Finance, has found that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan would shrink the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 24 percent by 2060. Meanwhile, the majority of Democrat and Democrat-leaning college students nationwide overwhelmingly favor Sanders as the Democrat presidential nominee over any of the other candidates.

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Moderate Democrats Are Trying to Distance Themselves from Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal

Moderate Democrats who are working on getting reelected in a partisan environment are doing their best to keep a distance from the so-called Green New Deal.

Democratic Reps. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, Henry Cuellar of Texas and Harley Rouda of California are keeping their distance from the GND as they campaign for reelection in Republican-leaning seats. Cuellar called the group supporting the measure “Justice Socialists.”

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Justice Democrats Launched a ‘Movement School’ to Train Next Generation of Progressive Organizers

The political action committee made famous for helping progressives like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar win elections now has a “Movement School” intended to train the “next generation of progressive grassroots campaign staffers.”

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Omar, Tlaib Sign Letter to Trump Demanding Stephen Miller’s Immediate Termination

More than 100 members of Congress sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that he immediately fire senior adviser Stephen Miller, whose “affinity for white nationalism” was the subject of a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Ilhan Omar Endorses Bernie Sanders, Two Other Members of ‘The Squad’ Expected to Follow Suit

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) announced her endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign ahead of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, joining Attorney General Keith Ellison in skipping over hometown candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

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Ocasio-Cortez’s Known Donors From Her Own District Are Nearly Non-Existent, FEC Records Show

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has outraised all other freshmen representatives so far in 2019, but nearly all of her reported contributors to her reelection campaign live outside her congressional district, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings found.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Leaves to Work on Green New Deal

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY-14) chief of staff and communications director are both leaving her D.C. office, but they’re not going far as one will reportedly help her re-election campaign and the other will help push her progressive agenda.

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