Great Lakes state residents and lawmakers are reacting angrily to an undercover video shot by citizen journalists affiliated with the Center for Medical Progress. The 8-minute videotape features Dr. Deborah Nucatola seeming to affirm that Planned Parenthood (Nucatola’s employer), the reproductive rights organization, participates in the illegal trafficking of aborted fetal body parts and tissue for scientific research.
Paul Chatfield, the brother of state representative Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, took to the streets of Petoskey, Michigan in protest this past weekend. About sixty people joined his demonstation, which was held outside the offices of Planned Parenthood of Northern Michigan. Most protestors bore signs, like “Life – the first Inalienable Right.”
Chatfield, who describes himself as a college student with a conscience, said that his initial response to news about the shocking disclosures on the videotape was a flip one.
“I thought it was a joke. We’re not that bad,” he said.
But when Chatfield heard the comments made by Nucatola – who quotes a price of $30-$100 per part to a pair of actors pretending to be representatives of a human biologics company – he realized it wasn’t the stuff of science fiction.
“We’re that bad!” exclaimed Chatfield.
“[The comments on the video] go against everything America stands for,” complained George Horniman of the Emmet County Right to Life organization.
The non-profit, which was the branchild of Margaret Sanger and is controversial for its abortion counseling services, has received federal dollars since 1970. Planned Parenthood’s Annual Report for 2012-2013 reports that the group was awarded over $540 million in government grants for FY 2013.
“It is sad that the government keeps funding Planned Parenthood,” noted Rachel Evans a 22-year-old woman who is pregnant with her first child (whose mother is pregnant with her 11th child), who heard about Chatfield’s protest via local talk radio.
Mitten state lawmakers have also weighed in on the videotape controversy without mincing words. State Senator Phil Pavlov, R-St.Clair issued a press release: “I am calling on the Michigan departments of Health and Human Services and Licensing and Regulatory Affairs to launch formal investigations into Planned Parenthood affiliates across Michigan to determine whether or not any Michigan-based facilities have participated in the horrifying sale of babies’ body parts.”
“We must make sure this is not happening in Michigan, and that if it has, those responsible are brought to justice,” added Pavlov.
Congressman Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, chair of the U.S. House panel on Energy and Commerce, has promised to investigate the claims made by Planned Parenthood’s Nucatola, describing the video as “abhorrent.”
Paul Chatfield injected a spiritual perspective into an already heated debate.
“Government should reflect God’s laws; this is in direct defiance of the Bible,” he said.
Friday, July 17th, marked the 19th anniversary of the deaths of 230 people on TWA Flight 800. There remain unaddressed questions about how this jet mysteriously exploded off the coast of Long Island. But the mainstream media aren’t interested in providing the public with much needed answers, pursuing this scandal, or even, really, marking the anniversary of the victims. Instead, recent coverage of this anniversary has been confined to some local news reports. I’m sure there will be much more coverage next year, for the 20th anniversary.
But the media continue to do a disservice to America and the memories of those lost, by ignoring this enduring scandal and its many victims. They are not interested in re-litigating the facts because the facts overwhelmingly point to an administration cover-up, and to expose this scandal would implicate the Clintons in yet another scandal.
Andrew Danziger, a 28-year airline veteran, spoke out this past April about the transparent government cover-up that took place nearly two decades ago.
“This investigation smelled like bull all those years back, and time has done nothing to soften that stench,” wrote Danziger for the New York Daily News. “I don’t believe the findings, and neither do hundreds of other pilots that I know.”
That might be because the FBI, he says, took the “lead” in the investigation, an “unprecedented” step. In particular, Danziger wrote, one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots at the time told him that “the mechanics and their representatives were denied access, in the early going, to the hangar where all of the recovered material was stored and being re-assembled.”
His colleague also told him that “During the investigation, the FBI periodically required everyone to leave the hangar due to ‘national security issues.’”
“Only after they ‘sterilized the area’ were folks allowed back in to continue where they left off (that is, if what they were examining was still there),” writes Danziger. In addition, eyewitnesses were not allowed to testify, and their words were only summarized in FBI reports which they could not personally review.
“Lots can go wrong with an airplane,” he wrote. “But jets do not explode in midair.”
“…Hank Hughes, an [National Transportation Safety Board] NTSB investigator who headed up the reassembly of the wreckage in a hangar in Calverton, New York, had been telling what he knew since early in the investigation,” I recalled for Accuracy in Media two years ago. “He told a Senate committee in 1997 that he witnessed evidence being tampered with, and some being destroyed.”
I still believe that “the evidence remains overwhelming that the plane was brought down by a missile or missiles.”
AIM conducted a detailed investigation of the downing of Flight TWA 800 to attempt to expose the truth. We examined the evidence supporting each of the three leading theories of what caused the plane to explode, and then crash into the Atlantic, 19 years ago this week. Our award-winning documentary, “TWA 800: The Search for the Truth,” can be viewed here.
In a Sunday column in The Washington Post, “Stop laughing at Donald Trump,” a liberal analyst from the Brookings Institution tries to warn the Washington, D.C. beltway elites that they should take the businessman seriously because he has figured out how to win a national election—by taking the white vote. This is the “silent majority.”
While it is true that minorities and other groups helped elect President Obama twice, “the white portion of the electorate, which votes strongly Republican, underperformed in support of John McCain in 2008, and white turnout was down in 2012,” when Mitt Romney was the Republican presidential nominee, notes William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan.
In other words, if McCain and Romney had only come across in a more conservative and assertive manner, and had appealed to more white voters, they probably would have won.
Frey comments that Trump “appeals to a vein of the U.S. electorate that will remain a significant voting bloc for several election cycles to come: older whites.”
Yet, GOP politicians and Fox News commentators such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer have been attacking Trump and his policy positions. McCain went further, smearing Trump supporters as “crazies,” before Trump fired back, in comments on McCain’s war record. Veteran reporter Sharyl Attkisson said Trump’s comments were taken out of context and distorted by The Washington Post.
It appears that the “crazies” include a lot of ordinary Americans who are sick and tired of politics as usual. Trump, in contrast to McCain and Romney, has figured out a way to fire them up and tap their anger and frustration.
A 2014 study by Professor Marisa Abrajano on the coming backlash to immigration policy not only explains the Donald Trump phenomenon, but also why the liberal media are so determined to destroy him. The media know that Trump’s appeal threatens the ability of the Democratic Party to continue to fool white voters into embracing liberal policies that destroy their own communities.
Her academic paper, published by the Brookings Institution, was clearly designed to warn liberals about how a “broad backlash” to immigration could damage the Democratic Party. She said a backlash could not only “shift the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans” but benefit “rightward leaning candidates throughout the country” who want to do something about it.
“Immigrants may be arriving in historically high numbers,” she noted, “but they account for only a relatively small fraction of the nation’s population. Native-born whites still represent 63 percent of the population and, perhaps more importantly, some 75 percent of its voters.”
Hence, the key to Democratic Party success lies in manipulating the minority groups and immigrants into voting for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, as they currently do, while also conning a significant number of whites into voting Democrat. This is a con because the Democratic Party has no interest in protecting the interests of white people as a political or special interest group.
The Abrajano report has some interesting comments about media coverage of the issue that may help explain the reaction to Donald Trump. It says, “At the aggregate level, we find that when media coverage of immigration uses the Latino threat narrative, the likelihood of whites identifying with the Democratic Party decreases, and the probability of favoring Republicans increases.”
Of course, the liberal media never use the “Latino threat narrative,” and the phrase is meant to suggest that concerns about immigration are somehow racist or improper. Our media have done their best to play down the problem, through such maneuvers as banning the term “illegal alien” and substituting “undocumented worker.”
What Trump has done is bring the issue to the fore, making it out to be the threat that it is. The Trump surge, plus the murder of a young American in San Francisco by a Mexican illegal alien and the prison escape in Mexico of a drug cartel leader, have put the dangers on the front pages of our newspapers in a manner that has garnered the attention of the nation. Our media have been forced to cover the issue in a way that captures the peril our nation currently faces. As a result, the Democrats and their liberal media allies fear that white voters have now been dramatically educated about the political stakes and may vote accordingly in favor of their own interests.
The media have no problem with blacks and Hispanics voting for Democrats in large numbers and affirming and protecting their own racial identities. But when whites do it, it suddenly becomes racism. That charge has carried a lot of sting in the past, but with illegals streaming across the border and Middle Eastern Muslims creating enclaves in places like Tennessee, it looks more and more like members of the “silent majority” are deciding to be silent no more. They are realizing that the lives of their family members and the cultural identity of their nation are at risk.
“Immigration and other factors appear increasingly to be pitting the declining white majority against the growing non-white minority,” she wrote. That majority may have found its voice in Trump, a man unafraid of the liberal media and the GOP establishment, which wants to continue the losing strategy of pandering to the minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Abrajano also wrote, “The conventional view of pundits and prognosticators and maybe even most social scientists is that the dramatic growth of the minority population and its strong ties to the Democratic Party portend the demise of the Republican Party.” She adds, “That may be true in the long term. But that prediction ignores the white population and the possibility of a widespread white backlash in the short term.”
It appears that “short term” has now arrived. His name is Donald Trump.
Abrajano’s co-author, Hajnal, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, recently wrote that Republicans’ “opposition to immigration reform actually represents a winning strategy, not a losing one.”
Of course, the term “immigration reform” is code for amnesty for illegals.
That aside, he acknowledges that “Republicans win or lose largely depending on white voters. Whites still make up the vast majority of voters—some 75 percent in 2014—and whites tend to favor the Republican Party by large margins. Republican congressional candidates garnered 60 percent of the white vote in 2014. All told, 89 percent of all Republican votes in 2014 came from white voters. Put simply, the Republican Party doesn’t really need the minority vote.”
Since the Republicans have a winning strategy, what holds them back from using it? It’s called political correctness, which holds that appealing to people based on their fears of immigration destroying their country is racist and wrong. Trump didn’t care what the media thought and decided to address the issue anyway. The response speaks for itself.
It’s not surprising that GOP presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio would go after Trump. For whatever reason, perhaps because they want to appear “inclusive,” they are desperate to appeal to Hispanics, a voting bloc that is essentially owned by the Democrats.
This is not to say that some Hispanics do not agree with Trump.
Maria Espinoza launched the group America First Latinos, in order to “prove, once and for all, that the majority of Latino citizens are solidly behind the U.S. Constitution and a secured national border.” Espinoza also launched the Stolen Lives Quilt project, whose members appeared with Trump at his July 10 news conference. The group remembers the victims of illegal alien crimes in the U.S. and is coming to Washington, D.C. this week to press their case against criminal aliens coming across America’s open borders.
This is a horrific idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hunting down and dispatching terrorists and bad guys on our turf. But internment camps? Let’s just stop for a minute and wonder why Wesley Clark has done an about face so suddenly. Anything they can use in the name of national defense like internment camps can also be used against everyday Americans at their discretion. The internment camps in WWII were shameful and wrong. The same would be true here. If you have to deport people or prosecute them, that is one thing. But to round up everyone you deem ‘radicalized’ is quite another. What does that even mean to Clark? Color me highly suspicious of this and shocked that it is being floated out there.
Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”
He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”
The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”
In a memoir written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Earlier this year I spoke with Clark at the annual Lewis and Clark University Symposium on International Affairs in Portland, Oregon. The subject of our discussion was how to deal with the potential threat of foreign fighters returning from armed conflicts abroad. At the time, Clark spoke out strongly against “the politics of fear” and eroding democratic institutions and norms, while reiterating his criticism of the excesses committed by Bush-era neoconservatives under the banner of fighting terrorism.
But on Friday, he was advocating the revival of a policy widely considered to be among the most shameful chapters in American history: World War II domestic internment camps. Aside from the inherent problems in criminalizing people for their beliefs, Clark’s proposal (which his MSNBC interlocutor did not challenge him on) also appears to be based on the concept of targeting people for government scrutiny who are not even “radicalized,” but who the government decides may be subject to radicalization in the future. That radicalization itself is a highly amorphous and politically malleable concept only makes this proposal more troubling.
“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said. “I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists.” And he added that “not only the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”
Despite an outcry about his comments on social media, Clark has not responded publicly. As of Monday morning, his latest tweet was from Friday, encouraging his followers to watch his interview.
Wesley Clark is a political hack. His suggestion here should chill every American right to the bone. He’s not just suggesting it for America either… he’s suggesting it be done globally. Listen to the video closely. He’s suggesting people who are likely to be radicalized should be imprisoned. This is unconstitutional and barbaric. He’s suggesting here that we suspend the Constitution (even more than they already have) and build and populate gulags. I can’t believe what I’m hearing and seeing. Things are hurtling out of control in America. Americans better stand up and stop this or we are going to see a fascist tyranny take hold here and fast. Internment camps? What scares me the most is that people on both sides of the political sphere are cheering this on. Unfreaking believable.
