Tag Archives: Extremism

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Department of Defense training manual labels Founding Fathers as “extremists”

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The Daily Caller reports. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

A Department of Defense teaching guide meant to fight extremism advises students that rather than “dressing in sheets” modern-day radicals “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” and describes 18th-century American patriots seeking freedom from the British as belonging to “extremist ideologies.”

The guide comes from documents obtained by Judicial Watch and is authored by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a DoD-funded diversity training center.

Under a section titled “extremist ideologies,” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

Besides a brief reference to 9/11 and another to the Sudanese civil war, the guide makes no mention of Islamic extremism.

The guide also repeatedly tells readers to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource in identifying hate groups. The SPLC has previously come under fire for its leftist bias and tendency to identify conservative organizations such as the American Family Association as hate groups.

In August 2012, an attempted terrorist attack occurred at the Family Research Council, another conservative organization the SPLC has branded a hate group. FRC president Tony Perkins said the SPLC’s designation prompted the attack, stating the gunman “was given a license to shoot … by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

In a statement, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton slammed the Department of Defense documents for what he described as their bias against conservatives.

“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism. And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military,” said Fitton. ”And it is striking that some the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.”

The Elusive Wapiti lists some of the factors in the document which are linked to extremists like the Founding Fathers, and then comments:

I suppose it’s a marker of my supposed extremism that the Left exhibits most or all of these so-called “extremist traits”. For isn’t it the very operative definition of a Liberalist as one who engages in Alinskyite fix-it-freeze-it-polarize-it ad hominem attacks against his/her opponents, who makes sweeping generalizations of their ideological adversaries, who makes repeated assertions unsupported by facts, sometimes long after their assertions have been debunked, who view their adversaries as evil rather than merely misinformed, who’d readily resort to intimidation and sloganeering rather than rational discourse, who assume they’re morally superior to all those unevolved knuckle-draggers in flyover territory, and who themselves are in thrall to Malthusian apocalyptic dogma (overpopulation, environmentalism, anthropogenic global warming)?

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this training manual joins other documents shown to DoD personnel, characteristic of a consistent, maybe even extremist, anti-Right worldview, as little more than a cynical attempt at projection…to deflect criticism away from one’s behaviors by accusing your opponents of doing exactly what you yourself do.

Todd Starnes, who follows the persecution of Christians in the military, commented on this story over at Fox News.

Excerpt:

It’s not the first time the military has been caught using training materials that depict conservatives and Christians as extremists.

In April Fox News obtained an email sent by a lieutenant colonel at Fort Campbell to three dozen subordinates warning them to be on the lookout for any soldiers who might be members of “domestic hate groups” like the FRC and the American Family Association.

“When we see behaviors that are inconsistent with Army Values – don’t just walk by – do the right thing and address the concern before it becomes a problem,” the email advised.

At the time the Army denied there was any attack on Christians or those who hold religious beliefs.

“The notion that the Army is taking an anti-religion or anti-Christian stance is contrary to any of our policies, doctrines and regulations,” an Army spokesman told Fox News at the time.

However, in a separate incident, an Army training instructor listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism – along with Al Qaeda and Hamas.

The same Army spokesman said the training session was an “isolated incident not condoned by the Department of the Army.”

Fitton told Fox News the military seems to be having a lot of isolated incidents and it appears the Pentagon is sending a message to Christians.

“They are putting out the not-welcome sign to conservative Christians,” Fitton said. “They are trying to make the military an unwelcome place for conservative Christians.”

So the person who wrote this is citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was a source of information for the homosexual activist Floyd Lee Corkins II who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council think tank. Isn’t it ironic that the author of an anti-conservative document is citing the same source that supplied the information used by a convicted domestic terrorist who attacked a conservative organization with guns? I find that ironic. I also find it ironic that the military is so politically correct that it is trying to label what a real domestic terrorist like Nidal Hasan did as “workplace violence”. I find that ironic. Ironic and perplexing. So, Congressman Paul Ryan advocates for small government, and he’s an extremist domestic terrorist, but Floyd Corkins and Nidal Hasan don’t even get a mention in a DOD training manual.

Do you think this person has ever read a book by someone like Thomas Sowell or a Robert George or a Mark Levin? I think that they probably went through their entire education without ever reading a single thing written by an intelligent conservative. They probably can’t even name an intelligent conservative. But they still got a job in the government, working at taxpayers’ expense. I think that we should really reform the government-run public school system that produces people like this DOD writer, so that we can get students graduating with a higher degree of open-mindedness, tolerance and critical thinking. It probably wouldn’t hurt if we steered more students toward math and science instead of the liberal arts areas, which are more vulnerable to this sort of fact-free demonization of conservatives.

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What do PETA and animal rights activist Meredith Lowell have in common?

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Here’s Meredith Lowell, the main character in a very weird story.

Excerpt:

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show.

[…]Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.

The affidavit says an FBI employee posing as a possible hit man later began email correspondence with Lowell, and she offered him $730 in jewelry or cash for the killing of a victim of at least 12 years but “preferably 14 years old or older” outside a library near a playground in her hometown.

“You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes,” says an email reprinted in the affidavit.

She told the undercover employee she wanted to be on site when the slaying took place so she could distribute “papers” afterward, the affidavit says.

[…]Reprinted emails also say Lowell wrote that she sees nothing wrong with “liberating” animals from fur factory farms and laboratories since “soldiers liberated people from Nazi camps in World War 2.”

She also criticized a new aquarium in Cleveland – saying “it is wrong for animals to be taken against their will and put into their (equivalent) of a bathtub” – and research by the Cleveland Clinic, where she said animals should be “liberated and put somewhere where they are not tortured.”

And here’s what PETA believes:

The graphic campaign and exhibit “Holocaust on Your Plate,” devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.

The exhibit opens Friday in San Diego, California, and went up Thursday at the University of California at Los Angeles. It also is posted on a PETA Web site, http://www.masskilling.com, which calls for support for the campaign from the Jewish community.

The comparisons prompted an angry statement from Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League national director and a Holocaust survivor.

“The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent,” the statement said. “PETA’s effort to seek approval for their ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.”

Lisa Lange, PETA’s vice president of communications, told CNN’s “American Morning With Paula Zahn” on Friday that the idea for the public relations effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, she said, wrote: “In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka” — a death camp in Poland.

Lange said the campaign is appropriate because “Nazi concentration camps were modeled after slaughterhouses.”

One more thing about PETA. PETA is not a pro-life organization. Every single animal rights person I have ever spoken to is pro-abortion. I find it so weird that an organization that worries so much about animals has nothing at all to say about protecting humans.

News

Berkeley College Republicans hold affirmative action bake sale

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Berkeley College Republicans affirmative action bake sale
Berkeley College Republicans affirmative action bake sale

From the NY Daily News.

Excerpt:

A controversy over cupcakes is heating up at UC Berkeley in California, where campus Republicans are planning to hold an affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday.

At the sale, white men will be charged $2 for a baked good, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos $1, African-Americans 75 cents and 25 cents for Native Americans, KGO-TV reported.

Women will get a 25 cent discount.

“The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset,” Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told the TV station. “But it’s really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”

The Campus Democrats immediately slammed the sale, which Lewis said is meant to take a stand against an affirmative action-like bill for the University of California system that is awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

On Friday, the student newspaper reported that the student government could vote to defund the Republican group over the bake sale. A hearing is scheduled for Sunday on the fiery issue.

So the response of the left is to censor the people who offend their feelings. But that’s not all.

Look at the emotional language from the opposition in this CNN article.

Excerpt:

ASUC President Vishalli Loomba said many students who attended a community meeting Monday night expressed disgust that the bake sale would take place.

“As a woman of color, when I first saw the event, I was appalled someone would post something like this on the Internet — not only a different pay structure, but also to rank the races,” she said. “It trivializes the struggles that people have been through and their histories.”

Now, for anyone who wants the research on affirmative action, and why it hurts minorities, I recommend two books by my favorite economist Thomas Sowell. (I also have to mention that he’s black, because otherwise the secular leftist commenters will cry racism, which is all they learn to do in four years of college). The first book is “Inside American Education” and the second book is “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study“, published by Yale University Press. I only recommend the best to my readers. The first book is better for beginners, the second is more academic. Sowell’s conclusion? Affirmative action certainly doesn’t help minorities, and in many cases it actually hurts minorities. You can read a summary of Sowell’s findings here.

So on the one hand, you have the whiny secular left woman expressing real racism and sexism (“woman of color”), whining, blaming, and being disgusted and appalled. And on the other hand, you have Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell and the Yale University Press.

How Vanderbilt persecutes Christian groups on campus

But there’s more! I notice that the secular left is becoming increasingly bold about censoring Christians as well. (H/T Wes from Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

Is Vanderbilt University flirting with the suppression of religion? Yes, according to Carol Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Law School.

Specifically, Swain is referring to four Christian student groups being placed on “provisional status” after a university review found them to be in non-compliance with the school’s nondiscrimination policy.

Vanderbilt says the student organizations cannot require that leaders share the group’s beliefs, goals and values. Carried to its full extent, it means an atheist could lead a Christian group, a man a woman’s group, a Jew a Muslim group or vice versa.

If they remain in non-compliance, the student organizations risk being shut down.

So what’s behind this? Flashback to last fall. An openly gay undergrad at Vanderbilt complained he was kicked out of a Christian fraternity. The university wouldn’t identify the fraternity, but campus newspaper the “Hustler” reported it was Beta Upsilon Chi. As a result, the school took a look at the constitutions of some 300 student groups and found about a dozen, including five religious groups to be in non-compliance with Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy. All were placed on provisional status.

Among the groups threatened with shut down is the Christian Legal Society. It ran afoul with this language from its constitution. “Each officer is expected to lead Bible studies, prayer and worship at chapter meetings.” CLS President Justin Gunter told me, “We come together to do things that Christians do together. Pray, and have Bible studies.”

[…]Vanderbilt officials refused to be interviewed, and instead released a statement saying in part “We are committed to making our campus a welcoming environment for all of our students.” In regard to the offending student organizations, officials said they “continue to work with them to achieve compliance.”

Some people who are Christians give money to Vanderbilt, and other universities. But they shouldn’t do that. The only two colleges worth giving money to are Hillsdale College and Grove City College.