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The Democratic Party is being forced into taking ridiculous positions by its insane base. Defund the police! Dishonor the flag! Throw Christopher Columbus in a lake!

What a wonderful gift! All Republicans have to do is take the other side. Make themselves the alternative to madness.

Instead, Trump and the Republicans have decided theyre going to be Democrats Lite.

Ill let others berate Republicans for doing nothing about the rioting, the arsons, the beatings, the corporate and social media canceling. This column will address the GOPs moronitude in response to attacks on the destruction of Confederate monuments. Works of art are being destroyed by Maoist vandals who have no idea what theyre doing.

Literally no idea.

Quick! Who was Fort Bragg named after? What did he do? Do you even know his first name? When you have to Google the guy on a statue to figure out who he is, maybe its not really the daily humiliation you claim it is.

At this point, the military bases are famous in their own right. No one hears Fort Hood and thinks of Gen. John Bell Hood.

Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, is many orders of magnitude more famous than Gen. Braxton Bragg. It would be like demanding President John F. Kennedy change his name because his namesake, John Fitzgerald, was a corrupt Boston mayor.

Most obviously, the Democratic Party is going to have to change its name. You want an institution that represents slavery? Confederate politicians were all Democrats, Democrats created Jim Crow, and the founder of the party was a slave holder. (The Republican Party was founded to end slavery.)

Speaking of repellant Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said on the Senate floor this week that the United States didnt inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.

This is the most ignorant statement ever made on the Senate floor. (And thats saying something!)

Every society has had slavery; it existed long before America did, including by American Indians (though they preferred torturing their captives to death, inasmuch as few of the natives farmed or built things).

From 1530 to 1780, at least a million Europeans were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced into slavery. The vast majority were starved or beaten to death.

In fact, unless were counting the Democrats wearing kente cloth last week, slavery is the only African institution ever adopted by this country. Portuguese not Americans brought the first slaves to Jamestown in 1619 (The New York Times favorite episode of American history!). We, are, however, the only country that fought a war to end slavery.

Isnt slavery bad enough? No, Kaine has to make it extra bad by calling slavery an American invention. A U.S. senator committed a blood libel against his own country.

Anything to say, Republicans? Even Obama would have corrected this boob.

The BLM fanboys complain that other countries dont honor the losing side in their civil wars. Yes, exactly thats why their wars never end. Myanmar has been in a civil war since 1948. Israels been fighting Palestinians since 1948. The Kurds and Turks have been fighting for half a century. At last count, there are two civil wars going on in the Philippines, and at least three in India.

America concluded its civil war by dominating and subjugating the losers, but also honoring their bravery.

Even before the war, the South was eons behind the North in industrial development. If the entire country had been the South, America never would have become the richest, most advanced nation on Earth. (And thats how slaves built America!) After the war, it was like a third world country.

On the other hand, Southerners could take justifiable pride in what everyone agrees was a better class of general and soldier.

At Appomattox, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant allowed Gen. Robert E. Lee to keep his sword. As Lee mounted his horse to leave, Grant saluted him. After announcing the Souths surrender at the White House, President Lincoln ordered the band to play Dixie.

It was an amazing way to end a civil war.

My ancestors were abolitionists who fought for the Union, but you dont have to be a Southerner to care about Confederate monuments. I cant help but notice that the people trying to obliterate our history are not part of that history.

Not that long ago, nearly all Americans had pre-Civil War ancestors. Not anymore! Recent immigrants, by which I mean people who arrived after 1865, think the country started with them. They find it hilarious to destroy anything that happened before they got here.

Talk about cultural imperialism!

What about the black Revolutionary heroes, like Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley? Nope, you can forget about foundational black Americans, too. The first two centuries of our nations history are canceled. Why would that interest someone from Pune, India, Mogadishu, Somalia, or Bangkok, Thailand? (That would be Kshama Sawant, socialist Seattle city council member, Democrat; Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat; U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat.)

Corporate plunderers, globalists, the wolf of Wall Street, 8 million diversity jobs (that go to Indians, not the descendants of American slaves, as intended) -- thats the America they revere.

The new arrivals are fine with Red Guards going into cemeteries, ripping up symbols of our heritage. Just dont dare lay a finger on their privately owned Rothkos!

What do the Republicans say? No problem! Senate Leader Mitch McConnell says hes OK with changing the names of military bases. Trump tweets narcissistic bluster.

How about a bill withholding all federal funds from Yale University until it changes its name? The schools namesake, Elihu Yale, was not only a slave owner, but a slave trader.

Quite a dilemma for the little snots who attend and teach there! It will be tremendously damaging to their brand.

After all, true sublimity for a Social Justice Warrior is virtue signaling and advertising their high SAT scores at the same time.

If you refuse to fight, Republicans, dont you at least want to have some fun?

Ann Coulter is a regular contributor to conservative news sites Human Events and Breitbart. She is a native of New Canaan, Conn.

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Ann Coulter: Yale University has to go! | Opinion | havasunews.com - Today's News-Herald

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Politics is inherently a debate. Ideally, it is a tango of perspective and position, with one side advancing an idea and the other retreating until the music shifts and someone else takes the lead. And as everyone knows, it takes two to tango.

College should be similar.

You cannot go to college to learn what you already know. Well, you could, but that seems like a real waste of four years and a lot of student loans. The idea is to train your brain to expand its perimeters by hearing ideas you havent heard before and applying them to things you thought you knew, things you are learning and things you want to discover.

No one ever said you need to believe every idea that filters through a college lecturer. The idea of a diversity of opinion is not to follow what someone else believes but to discover what you do.

And thus it is unfortunate that politics and the American college campus two places where a diversity of opinion are part of the building blocks cannot seem to coexist.

For years, there have been attacks on each other. Conservatives knock campuses for liberal lockstep. Colleges return the favor by shouting down right-wing voices.

It has happened everywhere. UC Berkeley and protests against Ann Coulter. Charlie Kirks Turning Point USA and its Professor Watch List. Penn State was sued by a Georgia man for denying a request for a speech from white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. That suit was later dismissed by a judge.

The most recent example is the response to Carnegie Mellon University bringing in Richard Grenell as a senior fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy.

An openly gay conservative, Grenell is no stranger to the idea of controversy and polar dissent. Adept in social media and a voice in campaigns or administrations for multiple Republican presidents or nominees, there is no arguing the ambassadors bona fides. For the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, he served as U.S. spokesman at the United Nations.

His positions, however, are something else. Allegations of sexism, misogyny and xenophobia have been made. As ambassador to Berlin, he was notably undiplomatic; in his short term this year as acting director of national intelligence, he was seen as primarily doing Trumps political bidding.

The university has had opposition to the appointment from faculty, staff and students, including an open letter signed by 200 individuals and a letter to the school administration from the Undergraduate Student Senate. The critics on Twitter included Gen. Michael Hayden, the Pittsburgh native who served as both CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush.

IPS director Kiron Skinner who has also worked in the Trump administration defended her hiring, saying she brought him on in the spirit of academic freedom. Opponents say she distorts the meaning.

Whether anyone agrees with Grenell or not does not mean there is nothing to learn from him, especially in the field of politics where half of the country doesnt agree with the other half. The IPSs mission is not just handing out degrees but to also build upon the universitys rich heritage of applying basic science to issues of public policy.

Science doesnt care about party or ideology. Science, like that tango, is a give and take of ideas and observations, and refusing to participate in a conversation because of someones politics is especially confusing in the arena of political science.

Without listening to those we dont agree with or even vehemently oppose we have no debate and we learn nothing. CMUs tuition is too high to not teach people to think for themselves by challenging ideas. Grenell, based on his experience to date, will be happy to engage in vigorous debate.

Categories:Editorials | Oakland | Opinion

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Editorial: CMU should be able to handle a Richard Grenell - TribLIVE

Mrs. America showrunner Dahvi Waller speaks with Awards Dailys Megan McLachlan about what Phyllis Schlafly represents about modern America, writing American history from a Canadian lens, and why shes interested in TV projects set in the past.

Ann Coulter. Tomi Lahren. Ivanka Trump. Modern-day conservative women have a particular look about themtheyre blonde, opinionated, and influence their base with manipulative rhetoric. Before these women, the mother of all conservative blondes was Phyllis Schlafly, who up until her death in 2016, was still throwing her support behind the GOP base, including publishing a book on Trump.

Mrs. America on FX on Hulu analyzes the rise of the conservative blonde by following Schlafly (Cate Blanchett) as she aims to dismantle the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. As showrunner Dahvi Waller points out in my interview with her below, on the conservative side of this debate, you have one woman who serves as the face of the movement, whereas on the other revolutionary side, you have many faces. However, today, there are many faces on both sides.

I loved getting the opportunity to chat with Waller about her captivating series, why she chose to center the action on Schlafly, the freedom of writing Sarah Paulsons composite character, and what Gloria Steinems (Rose Byrne) late-night fridge notes say about being a woman.

Awards Daily: The show spends a lot of time with Cate Blanchetts Phyllis Schlafly. How did you decide how much time should be spent with each character? And why the focus on her, whos essentially the antagonist of the story?

Dahvi Waller: I was excited about centering the series on Phyllis Schlafly for a couple of reasons. One, I was really interested in telling the story of how our country took a sharp turn to the right in the 70s, that really set the stage for understanding where we arrive at today. And thats really a story that can only be told through Phyllis Schlafly. I think one of her greatest achievements was ironically to build up a grassroots army of politically right-wing women who became the soldiers in the Reagan revolution. That was the larger story of the series beyond the Equal Rights Amendment battle. It felt that to tell that story, we really needed to spend quite a bit of time with Phyllis Schlafly. But also, I think you keyed in to an asymmetry about these two worlds. In one world, you have one woman who was the one singular leader of the counter revolution, and on the other side of the revolutionaries, you have so many leaders. So we had to figure out how to structure the series so that were not making it seem like it was a Phyllis Schlafly versus Gloria Steinem. It wasnt at all. The two never met. But really finding a way to structure the series so that we do give many of the women who are leaders in the womens movement in the 70s their due, while still contrasting these two worlds.

AD: Theres really so much care with that, too. While I was watching, I appreciated how you balanced all aspects of the movement. You include black rights, gay rights, and really run the spectrum. Was that something you gave extra attention to?

DW: Absolutely. In telling the stories about the Equal Rights Amendment battle, I was really, really interested in telling the story not only of the birth of intersectional feminism, which really began in the 1970s, but really the struggle for the leaders of the womens movement to understand how important it is to embrace gay rights and issues of racism within the Womens Rights Movement. (Laughs) I was really shocked to discover that the womens movement had not embraced intersectional feminism from the get-go from the late 60s, but still in the early 70s, they considered womens rights something different from gay rights, which was so shocking to me. I really wanted the series and all the writers on the staff to really focus on that struggle and not shy away from it.

AD: Sarah Paulsons character is one of the few thats not based on an actual person, and she gets her own episode in Houston. What was it like to write that character who wasnt restricted to a specific history?

DW: (Laughs) In many ways, it was so liberating! It didnt involve research, like 200 pages of research documents! We really wanted to represent the homemakers. Phyllis Schlafly was not a homemaker. She was a working woman who ran a massive organization, but there were homemakers who formed her grassroots group, and we really wanted them represented and dramatized, what it was like to be a homemaker at this time fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment with real characters. That was the genesis for Alice Macray and Pamela Whalen (Kayli Carter). But because there werent that many public figures who came out of Phyllis Schlaflys movement, we created composite characters based on real women who we either had spoken to, or read an oral history, or read a newspaper article. Alice Macray is a loose composition of some members I talked to as well as a neighbor of Phylliss I came across in a newspaper article from the 70s. But because she is a composite character, we had the luxury of having her change over the course of the series. With Alice, we were able to show a character move through this decade and have an actual change in her worldview and that was really exciting. I think she also represented the every woman. We had all of these larger-than-life historical figures who were so iconic, but we wanted an every woman whos very relatable, who could be the audiences way in to this historical time period.

AD: Youre Canadian, and while this story is a part of womens history, its also a part of American history. Did being Canadian allow you to see it from a different lens, and if so, where does that come through?

DW: That is such a great question. Most people are like, Who are you to write about American history? But you phrased it in a really interesting way. I do have some street cred. My parents are American expats who emigrated to Canada. Although I was born and raised in Canada, I do hold dual citizenship. But I really didnt learn any American history until I went away to college. Since my dad is a political scientist, who focuses on American government, I did grow up in a home watching political conventions on TV, and election nights were like the World Series in my house. I really did grow up learning about American political history from my father, thats probably a great influence. You can definitely see his influences in the show. And he was my unofficial political consultant who I would call whenever I needed, to find out information about the Democratic Convention in 72 and the 76 convention. He would give free consultation, which was very sweet of him.

But I do wonder if, because you asked this and no one has asked me before, I do wonder because I was born and raised in Canada, and in a way even though I have American citizenship, I always have felt like a bit of an outsider in this country, maybe it did allow me to see events that I didnt live through here in the states with a different lens, view Phyllis Schlafly without the same kind of loaded way because its not part of my own history. Growing up in Canada, we didnt have Phyllis Schlaflys! (Laughs) And Cate Blanchett is Australian, and I think she also has this outsider perspective. We can view things maybe in a different way than if we had grown up with these stories.

AD: How much research did you do about these real people? I love Gloria Steinems little dances she does. Was that something she actually does? How did you throw things like that in?

DW: We did a ton of research. I had a researcher working with me as far back as development. Once I got the writing staff, all of us were doing research. We must have read as a group between 25 to 30 books. I think I clipped a thousand articles in newspapers. Magazines. We read oral histories. We watched footage. We went pretty deep. And one of the reasons I wanted to go deep is to get at that specificity in character that you just alluded to. Gloria Steinem tap dancing is a great example. We were reading and watching a documentary about her on HBO that she took tap dancing lessons as a girl, and that she thought she would dance her way out of Toledo. Thats how she was going to make it out of her working-class background. And for a feminist icon to also be great at tap dancing and also that be a part of her childhood and be performative when she really didnt like the limelight and to get joy from dancing even as an adult, it was such a great character detail that I wanted to bring in to the Gloria episode.

Another small character detail which came out of the research, we read a lot about oral histories of Ms. Magazine and Glorias memoirs about running the magazine. In one of her biographies or articles about her mentioned that late at night when she was the only one at the office, she would sneak food from her co-workers. What really struck me that was so enchanting is that she would leave them little notes. I thought, one, thats so relatable. Two, theres something so enchanting about that. It made me love her, so I put it into the script. The specificity of that really says a lot about her, that she would leave a note behind.

AD: Yeah, a dude boss would just take food.

DW: Hes not gonna leave a note!

AD: Women would leave notes to each other.

DW: It really spoke to what a female-centric work environment it was. Same with the Tot Lot. When I learned that there was a Tot Lot in the corner of the office, where women would just leave their children there. We dont even have that today. We had an amazing art department that built the entire Tot Lot where Margaret Sloan brings her daughter Kathleen the first day. Another detail, one of my favorites, was that it was such a startup and everything was being thrown together so fast, that some of them were working on dishwashing machine boxes instead of desks. So we actually had that in Episode 2, and by Episode 4, they had desks. Those little details, the art department was as great at research as the writing staff was. They would bring those little details into production design.

AD: Phyllis Schlaflys daughter believes your characterization of her mother villainizes her. But I think Phyllis comes off pretty good. We all manage to care for Phyllis in some capacity. What were your thoughts on that?

DW: (Laughs) What I find most interesting about a show like this, especially when you have so many versions of women all across the spectrum, from saintly and angelic to villainness, all of those types of women are represented in the show. I think its an interesting Rorschach test for our own beliefs about ourselves as women and about women in power and about our political history. Its natural to project your own belief systems onto whatever youre watching. You cared about her, [but] some women watching have seen the show and said, Shes the anti-Christ. I hate her. And then other women are like, You really villainize her! Weve heard the whole gamut. For me, its rewarding that a show can have such extreme emotional responses from viewers. To me as a writer, its quite rewarding. How you view her says as much about you as it does about how shes portrayed.

AD: Youve worked on a string of period shows, starting with Mad Men, then Halt and Catch Fire, and now Mrs. America. Is there something that intrigues you about shows set in the past?

DW: Another great question that no ones asked me. I think that sometimes its easier for us to understand or to reflect where we are today by looking at a period of time in history where we have a little bit of distance and were able to see things more clearly, than if we were to write about relevant issues in a contemporary way. In the same way that Mad Men shone a light on gender dynamics in the workplace, even today, even though it was set in the 60s. [With Mrs. America], I wanted to look at it from a post-2016 lens. I think thats one of the appeals, getting to explore this world that way. Thats fun for me as a writer.

Mrs. America is streaming on Hulu.

Read more here:
'Mrs. America' Showrunner Dahvi Waller On Viewing American History as a Canadian, Showing the Birth of Intersectional Feminism - Awards Daily

OPINION: In case you hadnt noticed, theres yet another election looming and the honeyed words of persuasion are beginning to flood forth from all points of the political compass.

Were set to be bombarded with pre-cooked talking points, what the focus groups and super-secret internal polls are saying we should be told, what the advisers are advising, and who knows, maybe a decent, fact-based opinion or two, truly held, if were lucky.

Shame this isnt Finland its population similar to New Zealands. Are you kidding? Too cold, too close to Russia and too many strange habits, like doing weird things to each other with birch twigs, they say. And they dont speak English.

But heres the thing, apparently Finland tops the annual European index that measures resistance to fake news across 35 countries on that continent.

READ MORE:* Alison Mau: An election year to make George Orwell spin in his grave* Migrant kids are 'child actors', claims Ann Coulter, telling Donald Trump not to be fooled* When politicians hijack the pro-truth 'fact check'

Warwick Smith/Stuff

Keeping a close eye on what is said during an election campaign can be a bedazzling experience among the volume of pre-cooked sound bites and occasional strongly held views.

Fake news, before Donald Trump was invented, used to be known as plain old propaganda, false or misleading information or just liesbut where Washington goes, the rest of us follow, so fake news it is now, for the moment.

We know that when Trump moans about fake news, what he is really objecting to is something he disagrees with. If only people do what he does and get the facts from Fox News then there wouldnt be a problem, right?

Fox News is an experience all right, but its relationship with the real world is way too obscure for this news junkie.

Besides, there are, thankfully, alternatives that house a smorgasbord of offerings when it comes to trying to figure out whats going on around the planet.

Meanwhile, Finland, where the government, it is said, became fed up with being targeted by fake news stories out of neighbours Russia, decided the world had moved in to something called the post-fact age.

What to do?

Teach a counter-narrative, starting in the primary schools, thats what.

Begin with why fairytales work so well and take it from there, right through the years so you end up with a generation of young adults who can critically think for themselves.

OK, here our school curriculum is crowded and about to become more so when all our schools start teaching New Zealand history, assuming they get the resources and teachers from somewhere. As another aside, how many of our schools dont already teach NZ history? A few, some, lots?

Anyway, back in Finland, the clever things have incorporated aspects of critical thinking into various subjects across the curriculum. So, its not in a silo, Critical Thinking 101, or some such, as you might see at university.

Thus in maths, for example, students learn how easy it is to lie with statistics see any politician of your choice for a working example.

In art, they learn how an image is manipulated. A picture used to be said to be worth 1000 words. Now its not so simple.

In history, among other things, they get to dissect propaganda campaigns, again a useful skill to have come election time. And in language, theres a lot of fun to be had looking at how words can be used to deceive people and how they might mislead.

It would be a good idea to wheel in George Orwell at this point, because he penned the primer on English language and politics in an essay, while his novel 1984 also contains some pretty useful pointers when it comes to seeing what can be done with words. Democratic Peoples republics are still around even now. You know, the sort of place where leaders get a 99 per cent yes vote in elections. And the misguided 1 per cent are sent off to the countryside for a spot of re-education.

All this feeds into journalism, of course, and how it is ideally practised in places such as New Zealand, where facts are sacred but comment is free is the basic credo.

To get at the facts you need verifiable information though. In journalism, there are providing sources who are traditionally rated as reliable, such as the police, for instance. But of course, we live in an age where were drowning in social media and everyones facts are as good as the next persons. And science is horribly devalued. Perhaps well hurtle back in time to when religion and magic were deemed to explain the world.

But places such as Palmerston North are a bastion of education, so it is here, and in centres like us, where the struggle is being fought out.

Some of the signs are encouraging, especially when you look at the dire state of other parts, except Finland, it seems, and see what is occurring.

Alister Browne is an experienced Stuff scribe and former Press Gallery reporter who will write a weekly politics column

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Beware politicians and their election-year tall tales - Stuff.co.nz

By Gulf Breeze News | on June 18, 2020

Recent actions by some state and city governments make me wonder if Ann Coulter was right when she stated Liberals Are Insane. For a government (city, county, state) to exist there must be order. In a free society, basic rules of decorum and respect for human rights are required.

All citizens in the USA have the right of assembly if that assembly is orderly and respectful of others. Recent protest marred by violence does not qualify for this right. Police hate blacks; therefore, the violence against them is justified! The facts show that 700 police have been hurt and 20 people have died during these so called peaceful demonstrations. Where is the concern and compassion for the police? One might note most of the violence occurred in cities run by liberal democrats. Violence and the destruction of private property negate any rational reason the demonstrators may have had. Mobs are useful tools for extremist. Vladimir Lenin called them useful idiots. Are you one?

Restoration of law and order is required if we are to survive as a free people. For the liberals that will flee these out of control cities, please do not bring you insane liberal philosophy to our fair city and state.

LARRY SESSIONSGulf Breeze

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Where is compassion for the police? - Gulf Breeze News