Why Trump's new travel ban will leave the left helpless

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down President Trump's original executive order banning immigration and travel to the U.S. from a list of seven countries early last month, the president's opponents on the left cheered what looked like a victory for their side.

But what it really did was force the most liberal federal court in America and a bevy of advocacy groups to show their cards and give the White House all the information it needed on how to elude the most serious legal and political barriers to this immigration policy going forward.

On Monday, the Trump team used that information and cashed in.

When the new revised travel ban was rolled out by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, the announcement clearly had the parameters set by the 9th Circuit in mind.

First and foremost, the court's objection to banning entry to people who already had visas to be in the United States was addressed by the fact that the new travel ban excludes those visa holders.

Even though conservative Constitutional scholars have argued that the federal government has the right to rescind those visas, the Trump administration didn't choose to assert that right. And in so doing, the most potent legal aspect in the appeal decision has been defused.

But the case has also been fought in the court of public opinion. And the anti-immigration ban forces wisely latched on to the plight of many Iraqi citizens and ex-soldiers who had fought alongside U.S. forces in the recent past.

The sheer number of those Iraqis is large compared to most other groups seeking asylum, and their stories garner a lot of justified sympathy in and out of the courts. And so, with that card revealed, the Trump team decided to exclude Iraqis from the new ban and thus eluding another problem.

None of this means there won't be new protests against the revised ban in and out of the courts. But the White House has an upper hand now. Its legal opponents will now have to come up with new objections that even the uber-liberal 9th Circuit didn't consider last month...

Orwell's 1984 doesn't explain Trump, but it does reflect the mindset of idiot communist "antifa" protesters

Lots of people have taken to reading 1984 since Trump's election, supposedly to 'understand' his presidency. If someone's an adult and is just getting around to reading 1984 now, that's a bad enough sign, but thinking it explains Trump makes that person an idiot. His presidency isn't characterized by state surveillance of individuals, elimination of individual rights, and a repressive state that suppresses all criticism of its leaders. The massive protests in America prove that Trump isn't doing what communists say his is.

However there are features of the current political climate that 1984 does reflect. Although they aren't so much elements of a dystopian future as much as they were Orwell's observations about communists of his day. Part of it was the cultish stupidity and the need to create enemies to hysterically vilify in service of the cause.

Greg Renouf, a Toronto-based independent journalist, is neither a white supremacist nor a fascist; not in any way. Yet the self-described "antifascists" attacking him are themselves practicing fascism; using violence and intimidation to silence their political opposition. Local communist-aligned groups fear and hate Renouf because he has done a considerable amount of work in exposing them.

We can see that and the political dementia Orwell described in the local communists' deranged attacks on Greg while mindlessly shrieking chants in the video below. The video was taken this last weekend while he was covering the protests for and against a Canadian Parliamentary Motion which condemned Islamophobia. 

The Exhaustion of American Liberalism by Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is one of America's foremost living intellectuals. From The Wall Street Journal: 

The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is...  

Jordan Peterson leads an incendiary discussion at Ryerson U about psychology and group identity politics

Clay Routledge: Why Social Scientists Should Not Participate in the March for Science

Many social scientists are excited about and poised to participate in the upcoming March for Science, which is being described by the organizers as a “celebration of our passion for science and a call to support and safeguard the scientific community.” I realize that this will be a controversial position, but I believe the best way social scientists can contribute to the March for Science is to quietly sit this one out. I am very much pro-science and share some of the concerns people have about cultural and political threats to science. That being said, in my opinion, the social sciences are currently too compromised to help the cause. Even those who have the best intentions risk doing more harm than good.

Why? For one, there is very little political and ideological diversity in the social sciences. It is true that many academic fields lean left, but this especially the case within the social sciences. Check out Heterodox Academy for details. In many social science departments it is easier to find a Marxist than a Republican. In fact, it is quite common for social sciences departments to have no Republicans at all.

Many have criticized social science research for being ideologically biased and, frankly, many of these criticisms are fair. For one, social scientists have spent decades using sloppy empirical methods, or no methods at all, to make the case that conservatives uniquely possess a number of undesirable personal characteristics (e.g., prejudice and intolerance). However, as I discussed in an articlefor Scientific American, recent studies reveal methodological flaws of past research and show that liberals are no more tolerant or nondiscriminatory than conservatives.

Moreover, a number of the psychological concepts social scientists and activists have used to support social justice-oriented interventions and policies have not stood up well to empirical scrutiny. Take, for instance, the concept of stereotype threat. Psychologists proposed that female math performance is undermined by the existence and situational awareness of the stereotype that women are bad at math. However, the stereotype threat explanation of women’s math performance has failed multiple replication attempts. Meta-analyses have offered no support for the idea. And the original supporting research has been widely criticized as having many methodological and statistical problems. Still, many social scientists, activists, and college administrators continue to teach and champion the idea.

Unfortunately, the stereotype threat example is not an anomaly...

Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists

When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person.

Outrage expressed "on behalf of the victim of [a perceived] moral violation" is often thought of as "a prosocial emotion" rooted in "a desire to restore justice by fighting on behalf of the victimized," explain Bowdoin psychology professor Zachary Rothschild and University of Southern Mississippi psychology professor Lucas A. Keefer in the latest edition of Motivation and Emotion. Yet this conventional construction—moral outrage as the purview of the especially righteous—is "called into question" by research on guilt, they say.

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity...

The smug idiocy of the political left

Looking back from the Twenty First Century at the witch trials of medieval Europe and 17th Century America, our generation has a smug feeling of superiority over predecessors we deride as being gripped by stupidity, superstition, and hysteria.

But are we really better?

It's unlikely future generations will take a kind view of masses of our contemporaries who don pussy hats, people dressed as vaginas, lily white "social justice" activists marching at Black Lives Matter events where the organizers refer to white people as sub-human, and histrionic denunciations of anyone who says anything favorable about Donald Trump.

Whether those protesting and denouncing any challenge to the status quo of 'progressive' dogma have any command of relevant facts is immaterial. What's important is that one is perceived to be part of the herd, or else face denunciation and ostracism from all the "goodly, caring folk."

We live in times where not just to saying, but physically embodying in dress and action what the 'socially conscious' are supposed to think has become a form of mass hysteria not witnessed since the panic of the Loudun possessions during the Reformation years in Europe.

This week's Globe and Mail has a column that is completely characteristic of the sort of unthinking idiocy that comprises much of today's leftist zeitgeist.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a thinker, and public figure who dared to challenge leftist doctrine on issues like identity politics, Third Wave Feminism, Islam, free speech and censorship, and conservatism. His appearances on college campuses were often met with violence from leftists who were terrified of his message and his persuasiveness. Yiannopoulos is neither racist nor a fascist, but was characterized that way by ignoramuses who are terrified of what the anti-establishment provocateur represented. Some exceptionally ill-advised, badly phrased comments by Yiannopoulos, which indicated approbation of sex between adults and teenagers, derailed his career last week and that was seen as a great victory by the left. Forget for a moment that leftist darlings like Bill Maher and George Takei have said virtually the same thing as Yiannopoulos without any consequence. What's important is that a witch was burned and we can all rejoice.

Emblematic of the hysteria and stupidity that typifies contemporary leftists is an article in Canada's Globe and Mail, a newspaper which is generally considered the nation's 'newspaper of record.'

A writer named R.M. Vaughan, in denouncing Yiannopoulos' politics, described the object of his contempt as, "a nasty and cruel hate-monger, a vicious creature propped up by the U.S. far-right who enriched himself by selling prejudice, racism and lies."

What is truly incredible is in the subsequent paragraph that Vaughan wrote.

After describing Yiannopoulos as a proponent of racism, and then writing, "no reasonable person could ever condone Yiannopoulos’s writings or the ideas he disseminated," Vaughan actually put in print the admission, "Personally, I am unable to read more than a paragraph of his essays. I cannot bear to watch him on television. And yet, to my horror, I think I now understand what propels a person like Yiannopoulos to make a living off of hate."

There's nothing any critic could say that is more damning than the words the political left crafts on their own. A leftist at one instant decries someone as a racist, a liar, a hatemonger, and professes to understand what motivates him, and in the next proudly admits to not ever reading or listening to a substantial amount of what the condemned person actually ever wrote or said.

Does a trial in which guilt has been pre-established without the need for any evidence sound familiar?

Fanatics and unthinking fools conducted them in the courtrooms of Salem in the 17 Century, and fanatics and unthinking fools conduct them, through the media, in our time. It's not really all that different.

Iran Is Progressing Towards Nuclear Weapons Via North Korea

While the Vienna Nuclear Deal (VND) is focused on preventing (or at least postponing) the development of nuclear weapons (NW) in Iran, its restrictions are looser with regard to related delivery systems (particularly nuclear-capable ballistic missiles) as well as to the transfer of nuclear technology by Iran to other countries. Moreover, almost no limits have been placed on the enhancement of Tehran's military nuclear program outside Iran. North Korea (NK) arguably constitutes the ideal such location for Iran.

The nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries are long-lasting, unique, and intriguing. The principal difference between the countries is that while NK probably already possesses NW, Iran aspires to acquire them but is subject to the VND. Iran has the ability, however, to contribute significantly to NK’s nuclear program, in terms of both technology (i.e., by upgrading gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment) and finance (and there is an irony in this, as it is thanks to its VND-spurred economic recovery that Iran is able to afford it)...

Poll: Americans overwhelmingly oppose sanctuary cities

An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that cities that arrest illegal immigrants for crimes should be required to turn them over to federal authorities.

The poll shows that President Trump has broad public support in his effort to crack down on sanctuary cities.

A survey from Harvard–Harris Poll provided exclusively to The Hill found that 80 percent of voters say local authorities should have to comply with the law by reporting to federal agents the illegal immigrants they come into contact with.

As it stands, hundreds of cities across the nation — many with Democratic mayors or city councils — are refusing to do so.

Trump has signed an executive order directing Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to find ways to starve these sanctuary cities of federal funding. A Reuters analysis found the top 10 sanctuary cities in the U.S. receive $2.27 billion in federal funding for programs ranging from public health services to early childhood education...

Nigel Farage Speaks at CPAC 2017

Meet the terrorist behind the next women’s march

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist...

Do Not Try This At Home

Conrad Black: Parliament can’t simply demand people feel good about Islam

...Islamophobia and religious and racial discrimination generally are contemptible, but they are usually not crimes, and the reasonable Muslim majority can scarcely be surprised at a tendency to regard large swaths of Islam with suspicion, when the Muslim leadership is almost mute about the mistreatment of Christian and Jewish communities in Muslim countries, and shriek like banshees at any suggestion that they are being assimilated to Islamic terrorists when their own efforts to restrain or suppress Islamist terror is so frequently sporadic and ineffectual.

I get around fairly well and I have heard nothing in this country from anyone that has been as abusive as some of the letters and emails to this newspaper two years ago when I wrote that advocates of the existence of a divine intelligence are generally successful in debates with famous atheists. I did not state any religious views of my own (though it is no secret that I am a Christian) and was pilloried by many as a superstitious idiot. But I didn’t petition Parliament or inflict myself on a Human Rights Commission. There are serious limits to what Parliament or government can do in a free country about people’s opinions. The freedoms Ms. Khalid cites include the right to think and speak negatively about other people and groups. Parliament cannot and should not aspire to turn the country into a judgment-free zone, a vast Pleasantville. Democracy is self-government and that cannot occur without the right of everyone to say and believe what they want, as long as it is not seditious, defamatory, or an incitement to illegal behaviour...

Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press

...Obama didn’t kill journalism, but he took advantage of it in its weakness, because he knew the press would do anything to feel relevant again. All those 27-year-olds at the Times, the Washington Post and others hired as bloggers—“who literally know nothing,” as Rhodes told the Times Magazine—when the foreign and national bureaus were closed, they didn’t know it wasn’t OK to be a journalist and a political operative at the same time. They thought it made them more valuable, even patriotic, to put themselves in the service of a historic presidency. And they’d replaced for pennies on the dollar all the adults who could have taught them otherwise.

That’s the raw material out of which the Obama administration built its echo chamber, the purpose of which was to drown out the few remaining vestiges of journalism in order to sell the president’s policies. And there really were real journalists still putting in the hours, still doing the work, but the echo chamber, a relentless, frenzied chorus of incoherent and nearly illiterate prose, shouted them down.

Yes, it would have been nice if the American public had a chance to discuss a policy of vital importance to our national security, like the Iran nuclear deal, but the press congratulated itself for silencing those who dissented from Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative. These weren’t simply critics or opponents of the White House, they weren’t just wrong; no, they were warmongers, beholden to donors and moneyed interests and lobbies, they were dual loyalists.

But it was all OK for the press to humiliate and threaten Obama’s opponents in accordance with the talking points provided by Obama administration officials—they were helping the president prevent another senseless war. That’s for history to decide. What everyone saw at the time was that the press had put itself in the service of executive power. This was no longer simply tilting left, rather, it was turning an American political institution against the American public.

Now with Trump in the White House, commentators on the right are critical of those angry with the press for calling out Trump on the same stuff that Obama got away with. Let’s be above it, they argue. Just because Obama did it doesn’t make it OK for Trump to do it. Fine, obviously, call out Trump—but this isn’t about playing gotcha. It’s about a self-aggrandizing press corps gaslighting the electorate. The public is astonished and appalled that the media has now returned after an eight-year absence to arrogate to itself the role of conscience of the nation.

It’s not working out very well...

Muslim organisation announces reward for beheading Tarek Fatah

A bounty amounting to slightly over the equivalent of $15,000 is being offered for the beheading of my friend Tarek Fatah by an extremist Muslim group.  Can someone point me to the religious Christian or Jewish groups that are paying for hits on people whose viewpoints they don't like in 2017.

So much for the "all religions produce extremists"  moral equivalency argument.

A Bareilly-based Muslim organisation has announced a “reward” of Rs 10 lakh to behead Islamic scholar Tarek Fatah for allegedly promoting “un-Islamic” views through his TV programme.

The All-India Faisan-e-Madina Council also demanded an immediate ban on ‘Fateh ka Fatwa’, a television programme hosted by Fatah on a private news channel.

“Tarek Fatah is conspiring to disrupt harmony between Hindus and Muslims. He is as an agent of our enemies. He must be stopped at any cost and our organisation will pay Rs 10,00,786 to any person who will decapitate him,” said Moeen Siddique, head of the council.

“He and his programme are being funded by foreign enemies of our country and the government must initiate an inquiry against him,” Siddique said.

Fateh, a Canadian national of Pakistani origin, is known for his secular views against Islamic fundamentalism...

What the Canadian media ignores about Canada’s ‘new’ refugee crisis

...For decades, Somalis have been flooding out of their country, a place so plagued by violence the Canadian government’s official tourism advice is simply “avoid all travel.” When seeking exile, many in the diaspora have favored Canada over the United States for reasons that range from family ties —  Toronto is home to a Somali community even larger than Minnesota’s — to the fact that Canada’s immigration bureaucracy is seen as more forgiving (although both countries are generally hesitant to deport anyone back to the war-torn nation).

Yet a Somali wanting to enter Canada can’t simply jump on a direct flight from Mogadishu. For many, the journey involves a long slog through multiple other countries before arriving in the United States and hopping the Canadian border in what has been described as a modern “underground railroad” of human smuggling.

Some in Canada have taken to blaming this state of affairs on the Safe Third Country Agreement negotiated by Canada and the United States in the early 2000s in an attempt to prevent “asylum shopping” — the practice of refugees traipsing around the First World for the best possible deal. Since 2004, anyone who attempts to leave the United States at an official Canadian border crossing for the purpose of making a refugee claim is told to work within the U.S. system.

This obviously offers small comfort to refugees lacking faith in that system. Yet while Canadians may sympathize in the context of a capricious president, appeals to Canadian superiority can also offer convenient cover for migrants unwanted by the United States for perfectly justified reasons — including terrorist ties and serious criminal records...

Lawrence Solomon: Americans still trust Trump more than the media—and they’re right to

...Trump’s reference to refugees in Sweden at a Florida rally Saturday illustrates why the press is so distrusted. “Trump Alludes to Terror ‘Last Night in Sweden’ That Never Happened,” ran the Vanity Fair headline. “’Last Night in Sweden’? Trump’s Remark Baffles a Nation,” said a bemused New York Times. “Trump’s invention of a Swedish terrorist attack was funny. But it likely comes from a dark place,” decided VOX. “Baffled Sweden asks Trump to explain terror remarks,” ran the Los Angeles Times.

From the headlines — literally hundreds were like these — you’d never know that Trump didn’t invent a terror attack. The press invented it by jumping to an erroneous conclusion. Trump was referring to a TV interview he had seen the previous night on Fox News that described the refugee-related crime wave that hit Sweden. The transcript of his Swedish rally-reference mentions “problems,” not terror attacks: “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

Why wouldn’t the press have investigated precisely what Trump meant by his reference to Sweden? Partly because journalists are mean-spirited towards Trump. They’re more interested in discrediting him than in understanding his statements. Partly because they’re lazy and subject to groupthink, lacking curiosity and parroting their collective sentiments. And partly because the press was clueless as to the mayhem caused by refugees in Sweden in recent years, because the press doesn’t report news that doesn’t comport with its narratives. Coincidentally, while the press was still mocking Trump for holding up Sweden as an example of refugee-related chaos, a riot broke out in a Muslim suburb of Stockholm when police tried to arrest a drug dealer. The press — true to form — all but ignored the riot...

Kids pay the price of transgender politics

...Debra Soh was a gender dysphoric child. She liked trucks, not dolls. She hated being a girl. In the 1980s, the idea that a kid might transition to another sex was completely unknown. “My parents allowed me to wear boys’ clothing and shave my head, to live as a girl who otherwise looked and behaved like a boy,” she wrote in The Wall Street Journal. By her late teens, she outgrew her dysphoria. Her parents’ support, she says, “helped me work things out.”

Today, a child like Debra might be treated at a gender clinic (where the waiting lists are very long). Canada was renowned for having one of the best in the world – the child and youth clinic at CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The clinic’s former head, Ken Zucker, is world-renowned for his path-breaking research. Hundreds of parents – and former clients – testify to the care and guidance they received there.

But last month, the clinic was abruptly shut down, and Dr. Zucker was dismissed. CAMH, after releasing an external review of the clinic by a pair of independent psychiatrists, issued a bafflegab statement saying that not all the clinic’s practices were “in step with the latest thinking.”

In fact, Dr. Zucker was the latest victim of the raging battles in gender-identity politics. Critics say CAMH’s decision has sacrificed science to ideology, and put children on the front line. They think it’s a disaster for science, and for kids.

Dr. Zucker’s approach was to encourage children to explore different ways of gender expression. He believes that a child’s gender identity isn’t necessarily fixed in stone, and that helping him feel comfortable in his birth sex is a reasonable approach. He has never tried to steer the ultimate outcome. The research shows that most kids with gender dysphoria will grow up to become bisexual, gay, lesbian or straight adults. For some, transitioning is best, and when that’s the case, he helps them.

But that approach is now politically taboo. The activists argue that children with doubts about their gender should be automatically “affirmed” in their new gender by adults. In a society that’s squeamish about chemicals in foods, the activists want to give them drugs that will postpone puberty, start them on a lifetime of hormones and rush them into irrevocable surgery...

Mainstream media complaint: What does Trump think he's doing, communication with the public?! It's "our job" to control what people think

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski:

How bad is Islamophobia? Someone finally asked Canadian Muslims

...Last week in the House of Commons, for instance, Iqra Khalid made several impassioned entreaties to her fellow MPs, invoking the spectre of “more than one million Canadians who suffer because of Islamophobia, who are victimized on a daily basis.” But this isn’t quite the horrible state of affairs described by Muslim Canadians when someone actually bothers to ask them.

Last April, a CBC-Environics poll revealed that Muslims in Canada are annoyed less by discrimination in this country than by all the damn snow. About a third of the Muslim respondents said the really lousy thing about Canada was the weather. Only nine per cent said it was discrimination. One of five respondents said they couldn’t identify anything about Canada they didn’t like. Eight in ten said Muslims are treated better in Canada than any other Western country.

Still, 30 per cent of Muslim respondents said that in the preceding five years they had experienced discrimination that was based on their religion, ethnicity or culture. This is not something Canadians can be proud of, and it would be well worth the time of Khalid’s proposed standing committee study to look into this closely. But it’s well shy of a million Muslim Canadians being victimized by “Islamophobia” on a daily basis...