Saturday Morning Brunch For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables, if I have one piece of advice after Friday’s riots it is to stock up on guns and ammo instead of toilet paper.

LBJ’S Democratic Plantation

By Dinesh D’Souza

Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. —Lyndon Johnson to Sen. John Stennis, 1957

The transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of racism and segregation to the party of civil rights is, according to historian Eric Rauchway, the central political arc of the 20th century. Rauchway is a left-wing historian, and what he means is that it is the central theme of progressive history about the twentieth century. Yet progressive history has become conventional wisdom, and it is that conventional wisdom I challenge in this article, excerpted from my new book Death of a Nation.

The progressive narrative begins by crediting President Lyndon Johnson almost single-handedly for passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This focus on LBJ is critical because progressives don’t want to admit that proportionately, more Republicans in Congress voted for those laws than Democrats. The main opposition to the civil rights movement didn’t come from the Republican Party; it came from the Democratic Party. These inconvenient truths are skipped through a singular focus on LBJ.

Progressives know that LBJ, in his early career, was a bigot and a segregationist. He was part of the most racist wing of the Democratic Party. Yet progressives like Rauchway and his sidekick Kevin Kruse have turned LBJ into one of their great icons. In some respects, this is understandable. The Left, in recent decades, has distanced itself from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, who respectively were the founder of the Democratic Party and the first progressive Democratic president. The progressives need LBJ, just as they need FDR, if they are to have any heroes at all.

And, boy, has LBJ become a progressive cult hero! Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists wouldn’t dream of yanking down LBJ statues. That’s because the progressive narrative for LBJ is even more positive than it is for FDR, at least as far as race is concerned. LBJ was the “flawed giant,” in the title of a biography by historian Robert Dallek. Marshall Frady in the New York Review of Books affectionately calls him “the big guy” and revels in his “brawling, uncontainable aliveness,” his “galumphing conviviality.”

The story that Rauchway, Kruse, Dallek and other progressives tell about LBJ is a triumphant account of how a redneck white country boy underwent a moral transformation. To paraphrase Obama, the arc of his life bent toward justice. When he got the power, he used it for good.

According to the left-wing journalist Bill Moyers, LBJ once told him that as a consequence of supporting civil rights laws, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” This seems so altruistic on the part of a famously cynical man as to almost inspire wonder. And as progressives tell it, the political transformation of the Democratic Party was no less altruistic and wondrous.

That’s because in miniature the progressive narrative about LBJ mirrors the progressive narrative of the Democratic Party. As the narrative goes, civil rights was no less of a political risk for a party previously wedded to white supremacy than it was for LBJ. Yet the Democrats were up to the challenge, and came out better for it. For LBJ as for the Democrats, a faulty start led to a happy ending. The party of bad guys became the party of good guys.

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LBJ was a pervert in every sense of the word; if I can pursue the excremental theme, he was into this shit. As LBJ himself put it, he wanted the type of person working for him “who will kiss my ass in the Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’” Surely many Democratic plantation bosses of the 19th century could have said pretty much the same thing.

These traits do not describe the “old” LBJ, prior to some moral transformation. This is who LBJ was the whole time. And the same is true of LBJ’s racism. We can see this in LBJ’s use of the term “nigger” or “uppity nigger.” LBJ didn’t just use these terms in the early days, when under the tutelage of his segregationist mentor Richard Russell he upheld segregation, upheld the poll tax, and fought to undermine anti-lynching laws. No, LBJ showed a special fondness for them when he was Senate leader, vice president and president—in other words, the very time when, supposedly, he was undergoing his moral transformation.

In the mid-1960s, LBJ nominated African-American lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When an aide suggested to LBJ that there were other qualified black jurists he could have chosen, suggesting as an alternative possibility Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, LBJ responded, “The only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

This was in 1965, one year after LBJ helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The man he called a “nigger” was the nation’s most prominent African-American attorney who had argued the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. Yet progressive historian Robert Dallek, who recounts this episode, interprets it in a way to minimize LBJ’s culpability. “Johnson’s pejorative language was partly his way of intimidating a new staff member or of showing how tough and demanding he was.”

Yet for LBJ this kind of talk was a consistent pattern. The same year, LBJ told his aide Joseph Califano that the black riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles showed how blacks could not control their emotions. Pretty soon, Johnson warned, “Negroes will end up pissing in the aisles of the Senate and making fools of themselves, the way . . . they had after the Civil War and during Reconstruction.” The very fact that LBJ continued to embrace this view of Reconstruction—once promoted by the progressive racists of the Dunning School and popularized by Thomas Dixon in The Clansman and Birth of a Nation—suggests that contrary to progressive rumor, LBJ’s racism was never rehabilitated.

Robert Caro describes an incident involving Robert Parker, LBJ’s chauffeur. Parker recalled the occasion when Senator Johnson asked him whether he would prefer to be called “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” Parker asked to be called by his name. Johnson erupted, “As long as you’re black, and you’re going to be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Bill Gates’ Web of Dark Money and Influence – Part 1: Philanthropic Narrative Shaping

Via The Last American Vagabond

In the first few months of 2020, business tycoon and billionaire Bill Gates saw his popularity soar through the roof. According to YouGov, 58 percent of Americans polled about Gates had a positive opinion of him, he is equally liked by men and women, and both Boomers and Millennials adore him. Gates’ popularity might have increased due to a viral Netflix documentary about his life being released in late 2019. Combine that positive press with a wave of media interviews seeking the guidance of the man who “predicted” the next major pandemic, and voila – Bill Gates is a superhero here to save the planet from impending doom.

Of course, this rather cartoonish view ignores several incontrovertible facts, and a few strong theories regarding Gates’ true intentions. First, the facts. Bill Gates has used his immense wealth to garner influence and media time, spreading his message of fixing global health issues while he continues to make billions. Using the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to dole out grants and donations, Gates has created a web of organizations who owe their budget to the foundation or answer directly to Gates. By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his foundation by two degrees or less. This gives Bill Gates and his foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic. Equally worrisome is Gates’ call for global lock down until the entire world has been vaccinated and given a digital certificate to prove immunity.

Now, the theories: when taking a careful listen to several speeches and statements made by Gates, it becomes clear that he has a penchant for discussing reducing population growth. Despite “fact checkers” claiming Gates’ words have been taken out of context, his words speak for themselves. He believes the population should be reduced or prevented from growing, and he believes this can be done with vaccines and healthcare.

As we attempt to peel back the layers of PR stunts and puff pieces fawning over Bill Gates, we hope to illustrate that the man being propped up on the global stage and sold to the people as their savior, is anything but. Despite the apparent growth in support for Bill Gates, there is also evidence on social media that people are beginning to question him and challenge the savior narrative. This is the first step in unraveling Bill Gates’ Web of Dark Money and Manipulation.

In 1994, the story goes, Bill Gates asked his father, William Gates Sr., to help him “improve reproductive and child health” by founding and leading the William H. Gates Foundation. Gates Sr. agreed and by 2000, the Foundation was merged with the Gates Learning Foundation to become the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the Foundation, Bill Gates has donated $36 billion of his personal wealth to the foundation. The Foundation is estimated to be valued at $46.8 billion.

For the last two decades the Foundation has invested in a range of controversial companies and projects while pursuing their goal of improving global health and access to vaccines and reproductive care. This has all been done as part of Gates’ plan to reshape his public image as that of a friendly and kind billionaire whose only aim is to help the world. The reality is much more suspect.

Read the entire article HERE.

A Fatal Failing of Establishment Elites

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God.

A miffed Biden signed off, saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Biden was saying that no self-respecting black American would vote for Trump over him this November. Indeed, any such individual would have been labeled in the 1960s with the slur Uncle Tom.

As Biden put it, if you’re for Trump, “you ain’t black.”
Recognizing the damage he may have done with his own and his party’s most loyal constituency, which might object to being taken for granted as knee-jerk Democratic voters, Biden’s staff put in a hasty call to a gathering of the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce.

There, Biden burbled full apologies: “I would never take the African American community for granted. … I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy. … No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background.” He had just been kidding.

Now, as a gaffe, this was not of the magnitude of James G. Blaine’s failure to object when a friendly Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Sam Burchard, rose to disparage the New York Irish Blaine had been courting as being “the Party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

In 1884, that slur soured Catholics on Blaine, helping to cost him New York’s state’s electoral votes and the White House. Thanks to Burchard, Grover Cleveland would become the only Democrat to win the presidency in the half-century between 1860 and 1912.
Biden’s gaffe and Burchard’s slur have this in common: Both manifest a measure of condescension toward a large bloc of voters.

Hillary Clinton did something similar in 2016.

At a closed-door gathering of contributors, she volunteered, to their amusement, that half of all Trump’s voters belong in a “basket of deplorables” for being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Their pathologies are part of their character, Clinton was saying. And while many were “irredeemable,” fortunately, they are “not America.”

During the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was guilty of the same elitist condescension when he told a San Francisco gathering of gay right advocates why he was not doing well in the Keystone State:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Hard times have curdled the character of these folks, Obama was saying, turning them into bigots and Bible-and-gun nuts.

The people of whom he was speaking would deliver Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and the nation to Donald Trump in 2016.

As for Biden’s remark, “No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background,” it is surely true.

But while not mandatory to support someone of the same race, ethnicity gender or faith, it is naive to deny that identity and tribalism are realities in the politics of this nation.

Read the entire article HERE.

Democrats Admit Their 2020 Strategy: Lock Us Up and Starve Us Till We Join Them

Via The Stream

In a piece I wrote with Jason Jones a few weeks ago, we pointed up the looming threat of famine around the world, thanks to America’s open-ended, moving-goalposts lockdown. Millions who rely on U.S. food exports and aid will now go hungry. This amidst a historic plague of locusts that has spread from the Horn of Africa to India, devastating farmers.

We asked if “Woke” liberals care about the fate of all those brown people. So far, none seem to. The fate of these millions of mostly non-white, non-Christian poor people means little to Nancy Pelosi, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo. They want to continue the lockdown until … when, exactly? They never say. But I think I have the answer.

Starved into Submission

In that column Jason and I cited an infamous kidnapping case from the 1970s. I think it applies so precisely to the Democrats’ electoral strategy it deserves a column all its own. We wrote:

What are the goalposts now? Do they stand at “till we have a reliable vaccine and have forced everyone in America to take it”? That’s a safe one, since five years will likely pass, with no guarantees on that score.

We think we know the real goalposts: Till the limping, battered economy drives enough blue-collar workers to deaths of despair, closes enough small businesses, and makes sufficient Americans 100% dependent on government money to induce a national Stockholm Syndrome. Then like a traumatized, battered Patty Hearst, Americans will numbly reach out and vote for their captors, the Democrats. The very next day, the media sirens will sound the “All-Clear!”

For those of you too young to remember Patty Hearst, she was an heiress kidnapped by a crackpot cult. The Symbionese Liberation Army beat, starved, and raped her over months. At last, her psyche cracked and she agreed to join their gang, even took part in their bank robberies, and read a manifesto they’d written for her.

From the State of the Union to Our State of Siege

Now we have proof that the Democrats’ plan for America is analogous. They really are directly prolonging Americans’ economic pain, and worsening global hunger, for crass political gain. Remember the State of the Union address? President Trump delivered it in that tiny political window between the end of the fake impeachment effort based on the Russian collusion hoax, and the moment when Democrats decided the virus was real … and really useful.

During that halcyon time, when Nancy Pelosi was inviting folks to Chinatown, and Andrew Cuomo was boasting that New York got more viruses because it was more “welcoming” to illegal immigrants, things were different. Our economy was roaring. This thanks to Donald Trump’s policies, and much of his powerhouse address highlighted that. Democrats openly worried that low unemployment, rising tides in poor, non-white neighborhoods, and a national sense of hope might re-elect Trump.

So Democrats turned on a dime from saying “Don’t talk about the Virus, that’s racist! Keep flights coming in from China!” to peddling abject terror. Now, it’s true that lockdown policies swept across Europe too. And they seem to have done at least as much harm as good. See Jeffrey Tucker on all the deaths by other causes (from suicide to canceled medical tests) the lockdown caused.

That’s because politicians dragged on far, far past the point of “flattening the curve” in hospitals. Now it’s flattening whole economies, with the poorest suffering most. And in many European countries, as in American blue states, the most vulnerable people in nursing homes got no protection at all. Euthanasia via virus has devastated the elderly in Sweden, which the BBC reports is denying older patients the simplest medical care: oxygen.

The Democrats Hope for a Depression and a Green New Deal

But I don’t see countries in Europe calling for lockdowns to last till a vaccine emerges, if it ever does. That’s confined to U.S. Democrats, who count on a real depression handing them a 1932-style landslide. And they’re terrified at the prospect that lives getting better for Americans could cheat them of their victory.

Read the entire article HERE.

This Is CNN Fake News: Violent Riots Happening Now Are Somehow Just Like The Boston Tea Party

Via Newsbusters

This afternoon on CNN Newsroom, sports journalist LZ Granderson seemed to justify the rioting, looting, and arsons happening in Minneapolis and all over the country Friday as akin to the American Revolution. Speaking to host Brooke Baldwin, Granderson compared the violence to the Boston Tea Party and claimed that was a “riot” as well.

He went on to claim that the past two days of rioting was productive instead of destructive, saying this was America’s way of getting things “done”:

And there is one other thing I would like to share. There is a lot of people that I’ve read over social media who say they understand why people are upset but don’t agree to taking to the streets and don’t agree with the protests. The Boston Tea Party, despite its name, was not a party. It was a protest. It was a riot. What I’m saying is the very foundation of this nation is based upon what is happening right now. Which is when there is an injustice and those who are in authority do not hear the people’s cries, the cries are emulated in other fashions and sometimes they are violent. And I’m not advocating violence, I’m just reminding people, particularly white people who may want to characterize this as just angry black people, this is actually the way things have gotten done in this country, since its beginning.

Earlier that morning on CNN after one of the network’s reporters was arrested and later released, CNN commentator Bakari Sellers also seemed to justify the violence on display.

“This is America in 2020. I hate to be cheesy, but the revolution literally is being televised!” he declared.

Granderson’s analogy was shared by New York Times’ Charles Blow who tweeted:

Read the entire article HERE.

CNN Draws Largest Crowd In Years

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

ATLANTA, GA—CNN executives were baffled by a large crowd outside their offices and in their lobby Friday, not having seen an audience that size in many years.

Execs quickly added the hundreds of people outside their offices to their audience numbers, more than doubling their ratings for the day.

“Woohoo! It’s happening!” said the station’s founder, Bob CNN. “Brian! Anderson! Come quick! We’re finally drawing crowds! Years of hard work finally paying off!”

Peering out the window, Brian Stelter muttered, “No social distancing or masks though. But we’ll take what we can get at this point.”

Mr. CNN then walked through the lobby handing out fliers inviting the protesters back to watch CNN’s failing weekend shows Saturday and Sunday. “This is where it all turns around for us.”

Check out all of the Bee’s great takes on politics and culture HERE.

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