Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is throwing his support behind a push to preserve a controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program in the wake of the Paris attacks.
The presidential candidate on Wednesday said he is backing legislation from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that allow the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone data to continue until 2017.
“The Paris terrorist attacks reminded me that crisis is opportunity to power up the police state and that no corner of the free world should be safe from our NSA savages, and it is our duty to defeat freedom by any means necessary,” Rubio said in a statement.
Rubio said the NSA reform legislation that passed earlier this year "left our intelligence community with fewer tools to surveil the American people and needlessly created more limitations on information gathering used to monitor innocent citizens at home and abroad."
Congress approved The USA Freedom Act after a heated legislative debate. The law requires the NSA to shutter its bulk collection of metadata by Nov. 29 and develop a system to obtain more targeted information about phone calls from private companies.
Neocon NWO nazis in the GOP and the intelligence community say the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday should prompt a reevaluation of the surveillance law.
In addition to continuing the bulk data collection, Cotton's legislation would lock in two other provisions in the Patriot Act, including the authority to target "innocent citizens" and to conduct roving surveillance of multiple unidentified devices used by the same target.
He criticized the Texas Republican earlier this month, saying that Cruz "voted to weaken U.S. intelligence programs."
Cruz suggested that Rubio was trying to serve his NWO police state masters.
She well knows that only a disarmed people can be completely controlled. In the debate Saturday night, Queen Bitch Hillary's gun lies stray far from the facts:
CLINTON: "Since we last debated in Las Vegas, nearly 3,000 people have been killed by guns. Two hundred children have been killed. This is an emergency." She said that in the same period there have been 21 mass shootings, "including one last weekend in Des Moines where three were murdered."
THE FACTS: The claim appears to be unsupported on all counts.
The Gun Violence Archive has recorded 11,485 gun deaths in the U.S. so far this year, an average of just under 1,000 per month, making Clinton's figure appear to be highly exaggerated. The archive had more detailed data for children and teenagers, showing 70 from those age groups killed by firearms since the Democratic candidates debated Oct. 13 - not 200 as she claimed.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, Clinton's campaign pointed to 2013 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 2010 figures from the Children's Defense Fund. But that's not the time period she said she was talking about.
The only mass shooting recently in Des Moines was Nov. 8, when four people were shot at a night club. One was killed, not three.
Her young protege Barry certainly learned well from this master of deceit.
Author and recording artist Sister Souljah on Thursday blasted Hillary Clinton’s public persona.
“She is the slave plantation white wife of the white ‘master,’ ” Souljah said, according to Time.
“She talks down to people [and] is condescending and pandering,” she said of the Democratic presidential front-runner.
“She even talked down to the commander in chief, President Barack Obama, while she was under his command,” Souljah added, referencing Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
“If you ask my view, even if it’s not your view, you have to handle that,” she said. "Don’t tell me I hurt your feelings. I’m not your kindergarten teacher.”
Souljah then argued that race relations are largely unimproved following the election of President Obama.
“[Obama] is fearful and powerless to stop his military and police force from executing innocent people based on race,” she said.
“One of the things I have tried to make clear is that racism is a system of power,” Souljah said. "That system did not go away.
When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow -- Old Native American Prophecy
Because I consider Islam to be especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, my views are often described as “racist” by my critics. It is said that I am suffering a terrible case of “Islamophobia.” Worse, I am spreading this disease to others and using a veneer of philosophical atheism and scientific skepticism to justify the political oppression, torture, and murder of innocent Muslims around the world. I am a “neo-con goon,” a “war monger,” and a friend to “fascists.” In other words, I have blood on my hands.
It is hard to know where to start untangling these pernicious memes, but let’s begin with the charge of racism. My criticism of the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas (e.g. martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, honor, etc.) impugns white converts to Islam—like Adam Gadahn—every bit as much as it does Arabs like Ayman al-Zawahiri. If anything, I tend to be more critical of converts, whatever the color of their skin, because they were not brainwashed into the faith from birth. I am also in the habit of making invidious comparisons between Islam and other religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Must I point out that most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are not white like me? One would hope there is no such need—but the work of several prominent writers suggests that the need is pressing.
Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. As I have pointed out before, whenThe Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. Yes, there are crazy people in every faith—and I often hear from them. But what is true of Mormonism is true of every other faith, with a single exception. At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame.
At moments like this, we inevitably hear—from people who don’t know what it’s like to believe in paradise—that religion is just a way of channeling popular unrest. The true source of the problem can be found in the history of Western aggression in the region. It is our policies, rather than our freedoms, that they hate. I believe that the future of liberalism—and much else—depends on our overcoming this ruinous self-deception. Religion only works as a pretext for political violence because many millions of people actually believe what they say they believe: that imaginary crimes like blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses.
Finally, as I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution.
If you’re Social Justice Warrior, you’re a liar. You actively spread absurd falsehoods about the nature of men, women, sex, and culture that can’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny. You change history and conceal facts to fit preferred narratives, even when it costs human lives. You claim the best of intentions yet achieve the worst of outcomes. And through it all, you hate the very nation and political system that have granted you the liberties you so grotesquely abuse.
If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, you’re intolerant. Because your lies can’t withstand scrutiny, you wall yourself off in comfortable enclaves and then ruthlessly suppress dissent within your chosen communities. From that secure ground, you then strike out, seeking to expand your territory by walling off the arts, the academy, pop culture, and even athletics, silencing because you can’t persuade and punishing those you can’t silence.
If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, however, you’re also ultimately impotent. While you’ve intimidated many institutions, you actually control few. Only in the most cloistered of communities, including in your academic strongholds, do you represent a majority. You gain power by causing trouble, by making it easier to comply with your demands than to defy your tantrums. And that works until it doesn’t — until your demands become so absurd thatyou become the joke, until you’ve been proven so toothless that defiance becomes a path to power and popularity.
If history is any guide, then mendacious and intolerant ideological movements tend to have relatively short cultural half-lives, especially when they don’t actually attain total control over law enforcement or the means of mass communication. The modern wave of political correctness is doomed. In fact, it has already peaked — it has nowhere to go but down.
While it’s always dangerous to predict when any particular cultural trend peaks, I’m pegging October 31, 2015, as peak PC. Whenuniversities actually post flow charts to keep your Halloweenparty from being offensive, humorlessness is redefined. When students are so fragile that the very thought of ethnic-themed Halloween costumes leads to much-mocked YouTube “guides,” then political correctness is losing its punch:
If you disagree — if you think that political correctness is gaining momentum — then consider a few facts. First, the top two candidates in the Republican race for president of the United States attained their front-runner status by willfully, gleefully defying political correctness at every turn. Ben Carson shot to the top of the polls when he did the unthinkable — told the truth about guns, about Islam, about resistance to mass shooters, and about abortion — without flinching. It’s old news by now that Donald Trump’s supporters love him for his anti-PC stands. (Though sadly, he’ll use feigned PC outragewhen it suits his purposes.)
In fact, virtually every great moment in the first three GOP presidential debates has occurred when candidates defied the cultural Left and spoke truth to power. Think of Carly Fiorina’s passionate argument against Planned Parenthood, or Ted Cruz blasting the media in primetime last Wednesday.
If there is one thing that’s predictable in this otherwise unpredictable GOP cycle, it’s that defying the PC police is the path to prominence. “Sensitivity” is the path to oblivion and ridicule.
Social Justice Warriors simply have no influence on large swaths of the American electorate.
Social Justice Warriors simply have no influence on large swaths of the American electorate. How many conservatives believe that Bruce Jenner is a woman? How many Evangelical denominations are reconsidering the traditional definition of marriage or the “fluidity” of gender? Evangelical congregations grow while liberal congregations shrink.
Even many of the Left’s “victories” are proving Pyrrhic. Yes, they’ve fined bakers and florists who refuse to participate in gay weddings, but rather than marginalizing and shaming these brave Americans, that persecution has encouraged millions to rally around their cause — and now the public, according to polls, is showing signs of respecting freedom of conscience. Then there are the scalps that the Left hasn’t taken — Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby,American Sniper, Duck Dynasty.
Increasingly, Social Justice Warriors seem to win only on the turf they already control. And so they’ve begun to turn to the behavior best calculated to end their cultural dominance, behavior that makes even their fellow liberals miserable. Liberal comedians won’t perform on college campuses, liberals disrupt liberal campaign events, liberals insult movies by liberal directors for failing to comply with impossible-to-meet liberal gender standards, and liberal professors now live in fear of their liberal students.
I’m no Pollyanna. I know the cultural climate is toxic toward Christianity, the social-justice Left is relentless, and Christians and conservatives in liberal enclaves tend to face real threats to their liberty and livelihoods. I also know that even if the PC wave is cresting, it has a long way to fall before it becomes culturally irrelevant. In fact, it’s likely to never lose all its power. There will be more casualties of the culture war yet.
But the PC Left is reaching its limit. Intolerance is ugly, self-righteousness is unappealing to everyone but the already-converted, and lies eventually lose to reality.
— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.
