Conservatives welcome. Libs & RINOs go away. It's all of you destroying the society and conservatives must no longer appease you!
It just passed. Big loss to the far left. Via Daily Caller: Faced with immense pressure from members of her own party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will allow the Senate’s bipartisan border funding bill to be put on the floor for a vote. Instead of demanding more negotiations with the upper chamber of Congress and […]
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It doesn’t matter how “woke” you are, you may never be woke enough for some progressives — a lesson “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is apparently learning the hard way.
Rowling is, of course, a dedicated progressive. She regularly tweets about politics — and angrily at President Donald Trump — and has gone out of her way to re-adapt her masterpiece to more “woke” times, introducing LGBT characters and playing around with ethnicities and genders to satisfy an increasingly progressive “Harry Potter” fandom.
But Rowling isn’t perfect — at least not anymore. According to several progressive websites, including feminist nerd rag, The Mary Sue, Rowling’s recent wokeness is just a thin veneer for radical right-wing beliefs, and she’s just barely hiding her intolerance beneath the surface.
Social justice warriors were able to pull back the mask this week, though, after a Twitter account called “Trans Advocate” demonstrated that Rowling followed a number of “TERFs” on Twitter — or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”
TERFs are a thorn in the side of gender progressives in the U.K., largely because they contend that if traditional notions of gender are wiped away, the protections feminists — and especially lesbians — have worked toward for women have all been in vain.
The sentiment is a familiar one: plenty of female American athletes, especially, have complained about how male-to-female transgenders have upended women’s sports. TERFs see the problem writ large.
And J.K. Rowling is, apparently, one of them, according to Indy 100.
“A Twitter account called Trans Advocate, which also has a website dedicated to providing resources about transgender rights, uploaded a snapshot of people who Rowling follows, one of whom is Magdalen Berns, a self-professed ‘monotoned boring transphobe [sic],'” Indy reported.
Berns is credited with leading the TERF movement, Indy says, and has been vocal about the idea that “trans women are men.” She’s also a free speech advocate.
“Let’s stand up for ourselves and stop being weak because this nonsense is seeping into legislation and policy and you will lose your rights to even speak about yourself,” Berns wrote. “And you will lose your rights to be a lesbian and you will lose your rights to speak about an issue that predominately effect women [sic].”
That isn’t the only sin for Rowling, according to the Mary Sue. Rowling also “followed Fionne Orlander, a transwoman who also identifies as male and spouts and retweets a lot of transphobic awfulness. She also followed Julie Bindel, who has written extensively for years against transgender civil rights.”
Rowling only follows around 650 accounts, so whom she follows counts, the Mary Sue says. And she follows accounts that are hostile to transgender individuals.
Rowling has been in hot water for following TERFs before. Last year, she “accidentally” liked a Tweet from a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and her representatives made a ham-fisted excuse for Rowling’s temporary lack of wokeness, telling social justice warriors who complained that Rowling “had a clumsy and middle-aged moment” and that she liked the Tweet because she was “holding her phone incorrectly.”
SJWs were, at that point, willing to forgive. Now they aren’t. And Harry Potter and his friends may be the victims.
“[I]f this sort of behavior upsets you, you don’t have to alter your past, but it’s probably worth thinking about your present and future. Meaning, what and who we choose to give our money to makes a difference, and we have the ability to, as they say, vote with our wallets,” the Mary Sue wrote earlier this week.
“If we buy the new books, see the new movies, play the new games, or buy the new merch, we’re not just giving money to a TERF (although we aredoing that too). We’re giving money to someone with a gigantic platform who is serving to normalize transphobia for her audience, many of whom are young people,” they continued.
That’s tough news for Rowling who has more “Harry Potter” movies coming out next year.
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Wednesday, a group of reporters from various outlets were given a tour inside the Clint, Texas shelter which made news last week after attorneys claimed children insider were dirty and hungry and didn’t have soap or toothbrushes. The tour this week was organized by Customs and Border Protection both because reporters wanted to see inside and because CBP wanted to rebut some of the allegations made about the site. Last week there were over 300 kids in this shelter. After the negative press, all but about 30 were moved out but then nearly 100 were moved back in. At the time of the tour Wednesday, there were just over 100 kids inside.
As you might imagine, the tone of the stories covering the tour ranges quite a bit. In fact, that’s really the point I wanted to make. Depending on whose story you read, you get a slightly different take on what is happening.
NBC News’ story is headlined “Tour of Texas migrant shelter for children shows a system overwhelmed.” That’s really the angle the story takes:
It was only meant to hold 106 migrants.
At one point, it held almost 700 children…
Last week, lawyers who visited the station to ensure compliance with federal laws interviewed children and later spoke to the media about what they heard and witnessed. They told chilling stories of children who went without adequate food, showers or toothbrushes.
Border Patrol agents tell us those attorneys didn’t see the parts of the facility that we were shown. They only spoke with children in conference rooms. Before the start of the tour, one agent said, “We have to defend ourselves.”
At the very end of the story, NBC mentions the facility did have toothbrushes:
There is a two-stall portable shower facility. We’re told the children are usually allowed to shower every two days, depending on capacity. When there are less kids, they’re able to shower every day.
Finally, we’re shown a supply closet holding items such as paper towels and gauze pads.
One agent makes sure we notice the toothbrushes.
The El Paso Border Patrol Sector Chief, Aaron Hull, said the recent headlines accusing guards at the facility of being callous were upsetting because of the agents are risking their lives to enforce the law in a way that’s humane.
“It’s hurtful,” Hull told the group of reporters about the recent headlines. “Most of us are parents ourselves and we genuinely care about the welfare of these kids.”
He said agents are trying to do with right thing with “what we’ve got.” But he admits limited resources is making it difficult for them to do their job – so he’s imploring lawmakers to come up with a solution.
But Fox News’s story wasn’t a whitewash. In fact, it did not paint the facility in a particularly flattering light:
When Fox News toured the facility Wednesday night, there children sitting on cots and bunk beds. There were lots of flies buzzing around since the doors were constantly being swung open. There were seven port-potties outside and military-style showers.
There were pallets of food. Each day, the children eat Oatmeal for breakfast and ramen noodles for lunch. For dinner, they have a burrito.
ABC News’ version of the story is headlined, “Inside the Clint, Texas border facility that’s been accused of child neglect and ‘public health emergency.’” That’s pretty non-committal but the lede definitely went for the heartstrings:
The little face pressed against the glass window of the concrete cell belonged a toddler peering out at a group of journalists allowed access into a remote compound outside El Paso, Texas.
ABC’s actual description of the facility did provide a pretty good sense of what was going on inside. Here’s a sample:
During the tour, ABC News saw children who appeared to be toddlers, mingling with older female children in a crowded cell. The children appeared to be issued a thin foam mattress and thin cotton blanket…
For the girl inmates, those cramped cells are where they take their meals, sleep and use the bathroom. Televisions outside the cells play movies during the day. Some of the children seen by ABC News sat on cots, staring at the walls. One girl left a bank of phones sobbing, for reasons that were not clear.
Further on the ABC story also gave some space to the situation the CBP agents are facing:
Agents, many of them mothers and fathers, draw on experiences with their own families, he said. He claimed some agents have developed close relationships with the kids under their care, doing what they can to make them feel safe in a foreign place.
“We have to be constantly providing things that we typically wouldn’t for a normal adult in our custody,” he said.
Using resources normally spent on guarding the nation’s borders, he said officers have been tasked with changing diapers, helping the little ones brush their teeth and rounding up the kids for a regimented schedule of meals.
Finally, NPR did a brief story on the tour for All Things Considered with the headline “Border Patrol Officials Allow Reporters To See Inside Clint, Texas, Facility.” This actually had one of the most positive descriptions of the facility itself:
We were not able to speak to the kids that we saw, but we did see that they were being monitored by Border Patrol agents and that they appeared clean. A group of girls in one of the cells even laughed when a group of reporters walked by. It was not the scene of despair that you might have expected. The lawyers who were here last week interviewing kids who were held here said that they noted there was little adult supervision, that they found older kids caring for babies. They said the children complained about not having enough to eat, never showering, never washing their clothes. And some were quarantined with the flu. Today, it was really not at all like what those lawyers who visited the place quite recently described…
[Border Patrol] said that the lawyers who were here did not see what they showed us, the reporters, on a tour today. The lawyers were only able to interview kids in a room, not inside the holding facilities themselves. The Border Patrol said that the lawyers did not get to see what they showed us – the supply closet with toothbrushes and soap. And the lawyers didn’t get to see the pantry where the Border Patrol keeps the burritos and the instant cup of soup and the snacks for the kids. And the Border Patrol chief in the sector said he was hurt by the allegations, and he says that the agents do the best with the resources they have. They try to take good care of the kids and give the kids snacks whenever they ask.
I think Media Matters would have exploded in a fireball if a Fox News reporter had offered such a positive assessment of the facility.
In any case, I thought it was interesting how different these stories were despite the fact that they were all about the same facility based on a tour that happened on the same day. In fact, I’m pretty sure all of these reporters were taking the tour at the same time because two of the outlets (NBC and ABC) mentioned the same girl crying after leaving a bank of phones. The point is obvious: Different reporters emphasized different things and depending on which ones you read, you could come away with a very different impression of the conditions inside this facility.
If there is a common thread here it’s that things appear under control now but this facility was never designed to have 700 children inside it or even 300. When CBP says they are overwhelmed, they aren’t making idle chatter. Bottom line: This really is a crisis that needs to be dealt with.
Finally, for those not familiar with Rashomon (in the headline), it’s a great and justifiably famous Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa which looks at a single incident from multiple perspectives.
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Priorities. Via Free Beacon: All seven Democrats in the Senate running for president were absent Wednesday for a vote to send $4.6 billion in emergency humanitarian relief to the southern border to help thousands of migrant families and unaccompanied children. Less than 24 hours after House Democrats passed a measure Tuesday night, the Republican-controlled Senate […]
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Facebook, a country with a population of 2.38 billion, is building a “Supreme Court” to oversee them. The social media platform released a report in a June 27 blog post that detailed the results of its workshops and roundtables to construct an Oversight Board.
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CBP officials announced on June 27 the award of a contract in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to build approximately four miles of new border barrier segments, according to information obtained from CBP officials on Thursday.
The plan, according to the released statement, is to build four segments of border barrier totaling approximately four miles in length. The new construction project will be located south of Rio Grande City and La Grulla, Texas. These border towns are located in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. This sector is historically the busiest of the nine southwest Border Patrol sectors.
Southwest Valley Constructors won the awarded contract valued at approximately $33,048,700. The company is authorized to begin construction of the new border barriers in November 2019.
Officials report the construction will be 18-30 foot tall bollards. The contract also calls for new road construction to give Border Patrol agents ready access to the wall. The contract also calls for the installation of new detection and lighting technology.
CBP officials specified the funds for this contract come from its regular FY 2019 budget. The funds are not pursuant to President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration. The funds are also not being diverted from any other source of funding, including the Department of Defense or Treasury.
“RGV is the busiest Sector in the nation and accounts for more than 40% of the illegal alien apprehensions, more than 43% of the seized marijuana in the southwest border for the fiscal year to date, and is second in seized cocaine,” CBP officials stated. “RGV accounts for a large percentage of the southwest border illegal alien apprehensions and narcotic seizures and the majority of its activity is occurring in areas where RGV has limited infrastructure, access and mobility, and technology.”
CBP officials also emphasized that the new construction will not be located on any of the communities that require additional consultation with Starr County elected officials as specified in the FY 2019 appropriations bill.
“This project will improve the RGV Sector’s ability to impede and deny illegal border crossings and the drug and human smuggling activities of transnational criminal organizations,” CBP officials concluded.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Face
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While 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates line up to decriminalize illegal immigration and provide amnesty for millions of illegal aliens in the U.S., a study from the AFL-CIO finds that the country’s white working class swing voters are on President Trump’s side to end illegal immigration and mass deport illegal aliens to reduce foreign competition against American workers.
The AFL-CIO study, analyzed by the New York Times‘ Thomas Edsall, reveals that the vast majority of white working class swing voters across the country support building a wall along the southern border to stop illegal immigration and mass deporting the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living freely in the U.S.
When asked if they disagreed with building a wall at the southern border, less than 30 percent of white working class swing voters said they disagreed with such a policy. Likewise, only three percent of Republican white working class voters said they disagreed with building a border wall.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
Similarly, when asked if they disagree with deporting illegal aliens to their native countries, less than 15 percent of white working class swing voters said they disagreed with the mass deportation policy. Also, only one percent of Republican white working class voters disagreed with deporting illegal aliens.
Democrat presidential primary candidates like Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have proposed ending enforcement of central Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policies that detain and deport illegal aliens.
The AFL-CIO study found that white working class swing voters by a 56-point margin opppose abolishing ICE and its role in enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the country.
Like the issue of immigration, white working class swing voters tend to support economic nationalist positions rather the Republican donors’ preferred economic libertarian policies of cutting entitlement benefits for Americans and tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans.
For example, nearly 60 percent of white working class swing voters support increased taxes for Americans earning $100 million or more a year. About 56 percent of white working class swing voters said they supported a plan to have “the government produce generic versions of lifesaving drugs, even if it required revoking patents held by pharmaceutical companies.”
White working class swing voters are increasingly holding populist worldviews. Roughly 50 percent said they agreed with the state that “social and economic problems in this country are largely due to a handful of wealthy and powerful people rigging the rules to their advantage.”
Another 50 percent of white working class swing voters said they agree that “social and economic problems in this country are largely due to a handful of wealthy and powerful people dividing us against each other so they can take more for themselves.”
At the same time, about 52 percent of white working class voters said they agreed that one of the main issues facing the country is residents “across races and origins refusing to work and expecting handouts” and 54 percent said they agreed that economic problems are additionally spurred by “certain groups failing to work hard and play by the rules.”
The study is just the latest case in which surveys and polls have found that American voters see a divide between their needs and the agenda of the country’s ruling class and their well-connected economic elite friends.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference on Thursday in Washington, DC. (Penny Starr/Breitbart News)
“This is a time of consequence,” Cruz said. “This is a time when the fate of the nation is being debated.”
“Defend freedom,” Cruz said, and that includes fighting for economic freedom, religious liberty, and freedom of speech.
Under Trump, Cruz said, tax cuts, deregulation, creating jobs, and lowering unemployment has shown what economic freedom can accomplish.
“It’s for a very simple reason — freedom works,” Cruz said.
“We need to defend not just economic freedom, we need to defend religious liberty — something each and every one of us cares deeply about,” Cruz said. “Every one of our rights in the Bill of Rights – we depend on the judiciary to safeguard those rights.”
“And I’ll tell you when it comes to religious liberty, we are seeing threats and abuses proliferating,” Cruz said.
He cited the Alliance Defending Freedom’s case against Yale University where pressure from LGBT activists led the school to ban financial aid to students who would take jobs at ADF because of its support for traditional marriage and sexual values.
“Well, I tell you when I saw that — I chair the Constitutional Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee — when I saw that I launched an investigation of Yale’s discrimination against religious faith,” Cruz said.
“Yale receives every year hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars and under exciting federal civil rights law it is illegal for them to discriminate based on religious faith,” Cruz said.
“And we are going to hold them to account,” Cruz said.
Cruz said that freedom of speech also has to be defended, and that’s why he held a recent hearing on whether or not big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are censoring conservative viewpoints.
“I am going to continue shining a light to defend our free speech and we are not going to let big tech silence the men and women in this room,” Cruz said.
Cruz concluded his remarks warning the crowd that they had to be vigilant ahead of the 2020 election.
“You know how to pray and you know how to stand and speak, and in 2020 our country is going to face an assault — we are going to see the biggest turnout on the far left this country’s ever seen,” Cruz said. “That means we need to awaken the church.”
“That means we need to awaken young people,” Cruz said. “That means we need to awaken every single lover of liberty in America, because if we do not stand up and defend freedom, it will be taken from us, and I am convinced together, standing up for this country, that’s not going to happen.”
“We are going to defend freedom in the United States of America,” Cruz said.
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I’m sure @Twitter will apply this fairly across the board & won’t use it to target conservatives. ??? Big Tech is so determined to stop @realDonaldTrump’s reelection that they’re willing to kill what made their platforms popular in the first place (free speech!) to stop him. https://t.co/MiKFN8wak9 — Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) June 27, 2019 And […]
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As Allahpundit noted earlier, Pelosi’s arm was twisted today by a group of moderates who threatened to shut down her revised border bill and basically forced her to accept the Senate bill (or have nothing). Now Politico reports on the ugly fights that broke out between House progressives and moderates:
Some lawmakers even resorted to public name-calling, with progressive leader Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) accusing moderate Democrats of favoring child abuse — an exchange on Twitter that prompted a pair of freshmen centrists to confront him directly on the floor, with other lawmakers looking on in shock…
Reps. Max Rose (D-N.Y.), and Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), both members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, confronted Pocan on the House floor over his tweet. According to sources familiar with the conversation, Rose used expletives, and Pocan said he did not apologize.
“I said, how come you can’t stay 24 hours to do your job?” Pocan said of his retort to Rose on the floor. “He said, ‘My mother thinks I’m a child abuser.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell your mother you’re not a child abuser.’”…
“Mark’s tweet just speaks to why everyone hates this place. He’s just trying to get retweets. That’s all he cares about,” Rose told POLITICO.
Here’s the tweet:
Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus? Wouldn’t they want to at least fight against contractors who run deplorable facilities? Kids are the only ones who could lose today.
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) June 27, 2019
The argument continued on Twitter as well as on the floor of the House:
Maybe the REAL problem is someone who thinks this is about retweets and not about bad contractors, awful conditions and kids
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) June 27, 2019
And on it went:
7) Progressive Caucus Co-Chairman Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) blasted moderate Democrats after a meeting with Pelosi. Pocan decried “people who think the are players in the Problem Solvers Caucus.” That’s a swipe at moderate Democrats who try to work with Republicans
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 27, 2019
The Intercept’s Ryan Grim reported that someone (Pocan again?) told him the leader of the Problem Solvers might be primaried:
Source is Problem Solver-skeptic @MarkPocan
Also hearing @RepJoshG increasingly likely to get a primary
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 27, 2019
AOC’s Chief of Staff also lashed out at moderates in a tweet which he quickly deleted comparing them to racist Southern Democrats of the 1940s:
Whoa. @AOC’s chief just deleted this. pic.twitter.com/xRJphPAkwb
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) June 27, 2019
So you definitely get the impression the progressives are spitting mad about this and lashing out at their moderate colleagues. Finally, here’s CNN’s Manu Raju basically making the same case for 3 minutes, i.e. this is open warfare within the Democratic Party. All I can add is ‘Oh what a day, what a lovely day!’
Democratic infighting breaks out after House easily approves Senate bill to spend $4.6B on border funding — with 95 Democrats voting against it. On the floor, Mark Pocan, co-chair of Progressive Caucus, was seen in a heated argument with Max Rose, a moderate freshman, on floor pic.twitter.com/5LYs0EBqdQ
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 27, 2019
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