Presidential Election

An Anti-Trump Protest In Portland, An Unbridgeable Divide On Immigration

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

–

Congratulations, American leftists. By deliberately and persistently conflating legal and illegal immigration in the public discourse, it is no longer possible to have any kind of rational dialogue on the subject

I’m not normally in the habit of sharing Infowars videos other than the few occasions when I have had a chuckle at Alex Jones, but I encourage you to watch this video.

This is footage of a calm and eminently reasonable man debating with two left-wing women on the subject of immigration at an anti-Donald Trump protest in Portland, Oregon.

Background: The man’s own parents were legal immigrants, and he is attempting to get the two protesters to acknowledge that there is a difference between legal and illegal immigration, and that the former should be welcomed but the latter not tolerated.

They totally refuse to give any ground, refusing to acknowledge any difference between legal and illegal immigration and becoming ever more nonsensical as the video progresses. It’s not so much that they are deliberately conflating the two types of immigration in the way that so many cynical politicians have done. In the case of these protesters – having no doubt percolated in an ideological echo chamber where everyone thinks and says the same liberal thoughts – they are genuinely unable to discern the difference.

Key moment in the dialogue:

Man: My parents came here from Cuba, they came through Ellis Island through the proper channels and they became citizens.

Woman: Sir, it’s not about it being legal, it’s about that America — is open to help people. You’re just being closed minded.

Man: I’m not against immigration or immigrants, never was. My parents were immigrants.

Woman: But saying you’re against illegal immigrants is the same thing.

Man: It is not! Legal and illegal immigration is not the same thing.

Woman: Why does it matter if someone’s not “legally”…

Man: Of course it matters.

Woman: Why?

The two women in this film genuinely cannot see why joining the queue, waiting, paying money and taking a citizenship test is more virtuous and honourable than sneaking across the border or overstaying a visa, and they become increasingly agitated the more the man persists in trying to explain the difference. While the man is able to debate and discuss, all that the protesters can do is shout accusations and repeat talking points, so when he quickly discredits their stock responses (illegal immigration is great, just like rainbows and puppies) they have no intellectual fallback position. This is why they become so evidently distressed a few minutes into the video.

It’s worth watching this to remind ourselves of what the Left has been trying to accomplish in the immigration debate. Conflating legal and illegal immigration has long been a core goal, because not only does it then become much easier to tar opponents of the latter with the stain of racism, it also produces brainwashed young activists and voters who mindlessly parrot the phrases they are given and accept these positions without question.

And when anything – like, say, a Donald Trump Rally – penetrates their hermetically sealed ideological echo chamber? Since they cannot debate, they have only one response:

Shut it down! Shut it down! Shut it down!

And since even taking a moderate position on illegal immigration (such as granting permanent residence but not citizenship to those who have already come) prompts exactly the same vicious reaction, is it any wonder that many American conservatives are now spurning compromise themselves and gravitating toward the presidential candidate who says “screw it, just build the wall”?

Congratulations, American liberals. This is what you have wrought on the American political discourse, all in the name of tolerance.

 

Donald Trump protest

–

Bottom Image: Press Herald

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Who Is To Blame For Nightmares Of Donald Trump?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Donald Trump - school

–

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Apparently American schoolchildren are being terrorised by the thought of Donald Trump winning the presidency.

Buzzfeed reports:

The presidential campaign is stoking fear and anxiety among children of color, according to a survey released Thursday of about 2,000 teachers.

The report, “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), puts much of the blame on Donald Trump’s comments about undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the U.S., and building a wall between the United States and Mexico.

Even though the survey questions didn’t identify any candidates, out of 5,000 total comments more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton were named less than 200 times.

“My students are terrified of Donald Trump,” said a middle school teacher with a large student body of African-American Muslims. “They think that if he’s elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa.”

More than two-thirds of the teachers reported that children of immigrants and Muslims expressed concerns about what might happen to them or their families after the election. More than one-third reported seeing an increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment.

“Students are hearing more hate language than I have ever heard at our school before,” said a high school teacher in Helena, Montana.

Another teacher who responded to the survey said a fifth-grader told a Muslim student “that he was supporting Donald Trump because he was going to kill all of the Muslims if he became president!”

But who is actually at fault here?

Is Donald Trump really to be blamed for the fact that American liberals, in their impotent anguish, have concocted all manner of exaggerated lies about Trump, and made any number of disjointed extrapolations between what Trump has actually said and what they think he would do in office?

Let’s be clear – Donald Trump has said some incredibly stupid and offensive things. But the closest he has come to announcing a plan to kill all American Muslims was his declared intention to halt all further Muslim immigration into the United States. Now, one can argue that this is a fear-based, prejudicial, unworkable and unconstitutional proposal (it is), but this still comes nowhere near suggesting that Trump plans to “kill all of the Muslims”.

So where are these terrified schoolchildren getting their ideas, I wonder?

The answer is obvious. They are not being scared by Donald Trump himself, or by any of the things which the presidential candidate has said. They are being scared by the things which other people – typically Trump’s most vehement left-wing critics – are saying about him. These are people who hold their own political views in such high esteem (and the truth in such low regard) that they are comfortable telling children lies about the intentions of a presidential candidate as a means of whipping up public opposition.

A responsible adult would reassure these children that the president lacks any constitutional power to deport African Americans anywhere.

A responsible adult would point out to these children that Donald Trump has never once suggested that he wants to deport black people or kill all Muslims.

And a responsible organisation would be more concerned that young schoolchildren are being grossly misled and misinformed by their parents and other authority figures, and make that the focus of their report rather than Donald Trump.

Unforunately, we are now witnessing a (hopefully) small number of parents and teachers effectively terrorising their own children and students with an entirely false vision of Donald Trump, a caricature even more cartoon-like than the real thing. This is not a tremendously responsible way to raise children, and all the more surprising coming from the side of American politics which perpetually claims to be so concerned for the “mental safety” of students.

So before we even get to trigger warnings and safe spaces, perhaps the first rule for protecting the mental safety of children should be that grown adults – including parents, teachers and those in the media – refrain from telling scurrilous lies in pursuit of their anti-Trump political agenda.

There are enough genuine reasons for America to reject Donald Trump without the Left waging their own psychological war of terror against their own schoolchildren.

 

Donald Trump Hat - Make America Great Again

–

Top Image: slate.com

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Don’t Mock Bernie Sanders – David Cameron Is A Far Bigger Socialist

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Spot The Socialist - David Cameron vs Bernie Sanders - Semi Partisan Politics - Sam Hooper

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

SEMI PARTISAN SUMMARY

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

CULTURE

Slate magazine thinks that fastidious chefs are doing it wrong and that everyone needs to relax when it comes to worrying about the perfect oven temperature to cook their masterpieces – because the perfect oven temperature is a myth. Apparently some people pay people to “calibrate” their ovens every year, a waste of money given the fact that ovens heat above the set temperature and allow it to cool below before reheating, and the fact that different parts of the oven will maintain different temperatures to the area with the thermostat. This is a total vindication of my “make it up as you go along, don’t measure things and see what happens” philosophy of cooking.

Neil Armstrong is recovering well from heart surgery according to a report from NPR. Armstrong, the first man on the moon, now aged 82, recently had heart bypass surgery according to his wife. Neil Armstrong is an outspoken opponent of recent cutbacks to the NASA budget, recently telling Congress: “For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable”.

PoliticalOmnivore writes a smart review of David Frum’s first novel, “Patriots”, which I am currently also reading. Frum, a leading American and Canadian conservative intellectual, and former Bush administration official, has written an excellent novel which provides an insider’s glimpse into the seedy underside of Washington D.C., and the way that recent political trends (the Tea Party etc.) are influencing the behaviour of the thousands of political operatives working in D.C., serving the powers that be. I will be publishing my own review of “Patriots” on this blog in the coming days.

Another piece from Slate, scolding us for admiring the physiques of the female Olympic beach volleyball competitors, rather than their athletic skills. Justin Peters, the author, makes a fair point, though I think he goes a little too far in referring to Boris Johnson as an “asshole couch dweller”.

The astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station have a unique perspective on the London 2012 Olympic Games, writes astronaut Joe Acaba on his NASA blog. He writes: “I think watching the Olympics reminds us that we share one planet and that we can respect one another no matter what our differences, yet at the same time we can be proud of who we are and what we represent”.

A moving memorial from The Economist to recent failed missions to Mars, against the background of the recent success of NASA’s Curiosity rover in landing successfully on the surface of the red planet.

 

BRITISH POLITICS

The same left-wing blogs who so viscerally oppose the idea of unpaid internships, or the government’s welfare-to-work plans for unpaid work experience in exchange for benefits, are apparently posting recruitment advertisements for people to work as interns in a “voluntary” capacity. Blogger Guido Fawkes calls them out for their blatant hypocrisy.

<< Nothing else worthwhile to report on British politics. The Olympics eclipses everything… >>

 

AMERICAN POLITICS

A rare voice of sense in today’s Republican party, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md) has spoken out against the hysteria and apocalyptic language being used by some of his GOP colleagues as the budget “sequester” – the compulsory draconian spending cuts designed to kick into effect if the two parties could not agree a comprehensive spending deal – comes closer to becoming a reality. Appealing to the better nature of lawmakers, Bartlett says: “We need to stop with all the superlatives about the thing and be rational about it and involve the American people on it. It’s their country. It’s their kids that will have to fight the next war. They have a right to be involved, don’t they?” Hear, hear.

The Economist ponders the difference between “buying a little social justice with your coffee and buying a little Christian traditionalism with your chicken”. Their conclusion: “… the best arena for moral disagreement is not the marketplace, but our intellectual and democratic institutions. We hash out our disagreements, as best we can, in public deliberation. The outcome of this deliberation becomes input to official policymaking, which in turn determines the rules of the game for business.”

Tim Stanley, writing in The Telegraph, cries a river for Mitt Romney over the recent harsh campaign ads that the Obama campaign has unleashed upon the Republican nominee-in-waiting. Pulling the partisan blinkers firmly into position over his eyes, he conveniently skips any mention of Republican “death panel” talk, or GOP intransigence on striking a bipartisan deal on the budget and deficit reduction. According to Dr. Stanley, “… we can also detect a strategy for winning that runs counter to liberal faith in his powerful personality. In short: hope and change are out; divide to win is in.”

Tax Breaks For Gold Medals

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Though neither of them have any intention of doing anything about it, in the run-up to the November elections both main political parties in America are at least making noises about the need to reform and simplify the massively complicated tax code in the United States. This is urgently needed – a thick, impenetrable layer of deductions and tax credits doled out by previous Congresses to the favoured special interests or wavering voting blocs of the day have led to an almost incomprehensible system, one which means higher marginal rates overall for everyone and one which benefits almost no one apart from the well-connected and their tax accountants.

So when “rising star” Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, proposed a tax break for US Olympic medal winners on the cash bonuses that they receive from the US Olympic Committee, you would think that the “first do no harm” rule might apply, and President Obama and others would shoot down the idea. Right?

No. President Obama actually supports this opportunistic piece of pandering, according to Matthew Yglesias, writing at Slate:

If they gave out awards for dumb new policy ideas, President Obama and Republican rising star Sen. Marco Rubio would both be medaling this week. Their achievements? Rubio’s completely pointless bill offering a tax break to recipients of Olympic medals and—even worse—the president’s decision to hop on the bandwagon rather than show the country he has a firmer grasp on the issues than his adversaries do. In the scheme of things, of course, winning Olympic prizes is not an important sector of economic activity, and the medals’ tax status doesn’t really matter. But the overall shape of the tax code does matter a great deal, and the speed with which a bipartisan consensus emerged around making it worse bodes quite poorly for efforts to make it better.

Yglesias goes on to provide some essential background that some early supporters of this harebrained scheme appear to have missed:

In this particular case, the issue is that the U.S. Olympic Committee—the nonprofit group that organizes Team USA for the games—rewards athletes with cash bounties for medals won. Gold medalists receive $25,000, silver medalists get $15,000, and bronze medalists receive $10,000. That’s income, so come spring of 2013 when medalists are filling out their tax forms, it’ll be reported and taxed like any other income. Their after-tax income will be higher if they do win a medal than if they don’t. There’s no “extra tax bill” waiting for anyone. There’s simply extra income, and the income would be taxed. (Some people have confused this with the idea that the medals themselves come with a hefty tax bill, but the real tax issue is about the cash prizes.)

Precisely. This is not about suddenly being landed with an unexpected tax bill just because you worked hard and won an Olympic medal. This is about the IRS treating the prize money that the winning athletes receive as an incentive from the US Olympic Committee as income, which it is, and taxing it at the appropriate marginal rate.

Of course, the number of London 2012 Olympic medal winners as a percentage of the US population is miniscule, so the policy, if enacted, would do no real harm to tax returns or anything else. But the blatant favouritism of rewarding Olympic athletes alone with this tax break, while making other “worthy” types pay normal rates of tax, would set yet another ridiculous and rather alarming precedent:

In terms of fairness, it seems like a strange slight to winners of other kinds of prizes. Are Olympic medalists worthier than winners of the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes? And of course exempting all prize income from income tax could merely encourage all kinds of people to restructure their income as prizes. The J.P. Morgan Memorial Prize for Achievement in Investment Banking, anyone?

And then the money quote:

The underlying issue is that taxes aren’t supposed to be a cosmic judgment on the underlying worthiness of people’s activities. The earnings of a great artist and a reality TV show producer are taxed the same. That can seem a bit perverse at times, but having Congress try to assess which professions are important and which are bad would be much worse.

Republicans always talk about how the government should stop trying to “pick winners”, accusing President Obama of doing this with his subsidies for various forms of green energy (and apparently turning a blind eye toward their own efforts to help their own favoured industries). Well, I would submit to Senator Rubio and President Obama that the successful US Olympic athletes have already picked themselves as winners through their achievements in London. They are to be congratulated and afforded all the respect due to a champion, but their accomplishments do not entitle them to a tax break, particularly at a time when the tax code is crying out for simplification.