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BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- Spectators crowding around the viewing booth near the 15th green of the U.S. Women's Open often had their backs turned toward some of the best golfers in the world.

The booth's large windows offered fishbowl-style views of one of the most powerful men on the planet -- also the owner of the golf course itself -- as he attended to his affairs.

For hours each of the tournament's last three days people who had bought tickets to the championship found themselves with front-row seats to President Donald Trump's glad-handing, chit-chatting, sports watching and french-fry eating.

Usually Trump had his back to the green and the oglers, watching the competition on a TV screen when not greeting a stream of guests and visitors that included golfers and club managers plus his son, daughter-in-law and national security adviser.

With President Donald Trump in attendance, Sung Hyun Park shot her second straight 5-under 67 to win the U.S. Women's Open on Sunday for her first LPGA Tour victory.

Every so often, Trump acknowledged the crowd outside the booth, waving to them, pointing at those wearing Trump campaign merchandise, and offering a thumbs-up or a first bump. That prompted squeals from a group of schoolgirls on Friday and tears from a woman on Saturday. At one point on Sunday, the president drew cheers when he mimicked swinging a golf club.

It wasn't all smiles under the sun. Trump's presence drew demonstrators outside the course's gates to protest the U.S. Golf Association's decision to hold the event at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, located about 45 miles west of New York City.

On Sunday, four protesters from the women's rights group UltraViolet entered the club with event tickets and positioned themselves in front of Trump's viewing booth wearing purple shirts that read "USGA: DUMP SEXIST TRUMP."

"We're here to make sure we're represented," said activist Melissa Byrne of Philadelphia. "We wanted to be able to look him in the eye."

Security guards quickly surrounded the protesters. At times Trump supporters taunted the protesters and criticized reporters for giving them attention. Others welcomed the protesters' presence. "I'm so glad to see you. Thank you, thank you for being here," one woman said quietly as she walked by.

It was unclear whether Trump himself saw the protesters from his perch. He did not acknowledge their presence, but they seemed to preoccupy several guests in his booth. The protesters eventually left on their own accord.

Trump had tweeted about protesters on Sunday before leaving his residence on the golf course grounds.

Players competed for attention with the course's namesake. Again and again, club staff and volunteers asked the crowd gathered near Trump to hush so golfers such as Lexi Thompson and Stacy Lewis could focus on their game.

Chinese golfer Shanshan Feng told reporters Friday that she could hear crowds screaming for the president. Asked if she could tell which direction the crowds were looking, Thompson told reporters, "Not toward the golf."

The U.S. Golf Association released a statement Friday welcoming Trump to the open and noting that he is the first sitting president to attend.

"Our focus remains on conducting the championship and ensuring a great experience for the players and fans this week," it read.

Trump has spent nearly every weekend of his presidency visiting a Trump-owned property, golf course or hotel. Many critics and ethics experts have accused the president of using his position to enrich himself. His presence at the Open helped draw attention to the event, which he repeatedly promoted on Twitter.

While some at the course wondered aloud why the leader of the free world didn't have more important things to do, Anita DiBartolo of Whippany, New Jersey, said she completely understood the president's decision-making.

"Why," she asked, "would he be any other place than this paradise today?"

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President Trump's visit draws varied reaction at Women's Open - ESPN

CLAIM

A photograph shows Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump.

A photograph purportedly showing an image of Eric and Donald Trump, Jr., the two older sons of President Donald Trump, has been circulating on social media in various forms since at least June 2017:

The image, which provides an oddly grotesque look at President Trumps olders sons, has been re-purposed in various memes to mock the First Family. For instance, it has been turned into a movie poster for Dumb and Dumber, was shared in a meme comparing the two Trumps children into to the sloth character from the movie The Goonies, and was frequently shared with the captions They look like that hyucc sound Goofy be making or Donald Trump HATES this photo of his two sons. Please dont share it.

However, this picture (despite the Getty Images watermark) is not a genuine photograph of Donald Trumps sons, but a digitally altered version of one.

The original photograph was taken on 12 November 2005, during Donald Trump, Jr.s wedding reception at his fathers Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida:

Donald Trump, Jr. pose with his brother Eric Trump after the wedding ceremony at the Mar-a-Lago Club on November 12, 2005 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by C. Allegri/Getty Images)

Several subtle changes were made to the original image in order to uglify the Trump brothers. For instance, Donald Trump, Jr.s upper lip was enlarged, his bottom teeth were hidden, his right eye was moved off-center, and his left ear was lowered. Eric Trumps eyes were also widened, and some extra fat was added to his neck.

Heres a comparison of the fake image (left) and the real image (right):

Got a tip or a rumor? Contact us here.

Fact Checker: Dan Evon

Published: Jul 16th, 2017

Continued here:
Is This a Real Photograph of Donald Trump's Older Sons? - snopes.com

Its anyones guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, this drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving President Donald Trump and the East, including the eruption of controversy over Trumps remarks in Warsaw earlier this month, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trumps liberal critics were revealing and dangerous.

The speech a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog, tweeted The Atlantics Peter Beinart. Trumps speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto, read a Vox headline. According the New Republics Jeet Heer, Trumps alt-right speech redefined the West in nativist terms.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term alt-right that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trumps speech: For example, that he shouldnt have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaws recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served Americas interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of liberalism and the West. Liberalism is an ideology defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

So to appeal to the West in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the Wests wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of the West to liberalisms enemies on the alt-right that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of immigration skeptic, or social conservative, but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the Wests greatest achievements.

As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed todays conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.

As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the West. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist they fashion themselves defenders of the West, but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the Wests principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.

To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trumps speech was his remark that the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism and, presumably, the PC liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the Wests survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.

The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the West into a slur, Trumps critics are disarming. Perhaps the presidents dire warning wasnt so exaggerated, after all.

Jason Willick is a staff writer at The American Interest. This was first published in The Washington Post.

Originally posted here:
Defending the West from the alt-right - Santa Fe New Mexican

Laura Loomer

Laura Loomer put a burqa on the Fearless Girl statue in New Yorks Financial District during the March Against Sharia on June 10th.

Far right media activist Laura Loomer this morning, she has been the target of vicious anti-Semitic posts on social media since Forward published a profile of her Friday morning.

Synagogue of Satan. You are fake Jews, wrote @BrydensFunny.

Go back to Israel you filthy kike, wrote Leah Goldstein. (Twitter handle: @JewessGoyim.)

Goldstein? You sound like a member of the tribe to me! Mashugana! Loomer tweeted in response.

Though she tries to maintain a sense of humor about it online, Loomer acknowledges that dealing with the flood of anti-Semitic comments and imagery on Twitter is really hard to deal with.

Its insane, Loomer wrote in a text Friday.

Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.

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Alt-Right Trolls Lash Out At Laura Loomer After Profile - Forward

Getty Images

BY: Micah Meadowcroft July 16, 2017 5:00 am

In Kill All Normies Angela Nagle has done us all a service at what one must imagine is great psychological cost, surveying the dampest and most deranged corners of the internet. It seems self abuse surpassed in scale only by the onanism of her subjects.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a much needed book, though for lack of editing not a particularly good book as such. Nagle is an insightful analyst, and the Irish writer has documented the internet's final breaking of the anglophonic world's brain, beginning with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. From that "leaderless digital counter-revolution," Nagle traces a meandering history up to the appalling present of life online, the latest theater in a long culture war.

Two of Nagle's topics stand out, the origins of a self-conscious internet right in "Gamergate" and the sterile politics of performative transgression. Both of these, and really all of the intersecting subjects of this book, Nagle demonstrates, are rooted in responses to the sexual revolution.

"Gamergate" describes the Japan-inspired, porn-fueled, anonymous message board 4chan's first major foray into the public consciousness. With a rallying cry calling for "ethics in gaming journalism" young men putrefying in their own filth harassedin a manner too obscene to detail herewomen who had the gall to not only write about video games but to express concerns about misogyny in that community. The threat of feminist influence on gaming and game culture was treated as existential, and was responded to with promises of sexual violence.

"Gamergate brought gamers, rightist chan culture, anti-feminism, and the online far right closer to mainstream discussion and it also politicized a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organized tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the political left," Nagle writes.

It was the faceoff that launched a thousand digital ships, including the career of Milo Yiannopoulos. Nagle, who is a remarkably sympathetic and intellectually charitable observer, writes of Gamergate's participants:

"Ultimately, the gamergaters were correct in their perception that a revived feminist movement was trying to change the culture and this was the front, their beloved games, that they chose to fight back on. The battle has since moved on to different issues with increasingly higher stakes, but this was the galvanizing issue that drew up the battle lines of the culture wars for a younger online generation."

While Nagle does not attempt further explanation of Gamergate's causes, contenting herself with accounting for its consequences, the question why young men might indulge in such inhuman extremes is worth a brief examination.

Books such as Putnam's Bowling Alone and Nisbet's The Quest for Community have detailed the advancing loss of the vital intermediary institutions between a citizen and state. Paired with declining male employment and the age of computers, is it any wonder that the decline of these predominantly male social spacesfraternal organizations, clubs, unions, and even bowling leaguesshould lead to men seeking to make spaces for themselves online?

In the uncivilized chaos of contemporary society, video games and online subcultureswhich all have esoteric and enforced bywords and bylawsprovide a sense of order and belonging not found elsewhere. The crisis of masculinity is a civilizational one; many young men cannot fit into the civilization in which they find themselves, and they have retreated to the internet to build a virtual one. In a world where little seems controllable and people feel caught in the current and eddies of economic and social forces, video games and life online are a simulacrum of self-determination and individual responsibility.

Briefly surveying the 60s counterculture and America's culture war as waged by Pat Buchanan, Nagle argues convincingly that the liberal left has ceded Gramscian and critical theory's tactics to the alt-righta term she uses as a bigger tent than Richard Spencer would like it to betrading Marxianism for Judith Butler. She contends, further, that the alt-right's oft-feuding coalition has abandoned conservatism's traditional foundations for the writings of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade:

"The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from an egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right."

Sex and power are inseparable for both this online left and online right in a strange codependency. For the male-dominated rightist subculturesespecially and explicitly in what is called the "manosphere"the idea of, desire for, and act of sex becomes the primary currency of power and status.

Meanwhile, as Nagle explains, in feminized spaces like Tumblr and the contemporary education system an economy of victimization has been created through intersectional theory. Here, limitless self-defined gender identities (e.g. "Omnigay Genderfluid, with one's attraction to other genders changing with one's gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender) allow bourgeois white kids, who would not normally have currency to spend in such a market, to compete with minorities and the poor through marginalized sexuality.

Nagle observes that contemporary reactionaries are driven to using the trolling tactics of online life by Tumblr-liberalism's victim fetish. For those of this alt-right who claim a modicum of conservatism, trolling is a paradoxical attempt to protect the interior of the Overton Window by smashing its frame. And for all trolls it is a gleeful display of the "if you are going to cry I will give you something to cry about" mindset. Comparative disadvantage, safespaces, trolls, harassment, antifa, and the rest work together to create a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nagle, who describes herself as a "French revolution hipster" on Twitter, and would prefer the left focused on economic and material systems, has no patience for this cycle. Writing of Yiannopoulos's much-disrupted college tour:

"When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn't, but also that they couldn't. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon."

As a religious conservative, I appreciate Nagle's observations of the alt-right's abandonment of conservatism's priors. And as just illustrated, she has much to say, and critically, about the left in Kill All Normies, as well as in her essays and interviews. I've enjoyed reading and listening to Nagle since last year, when she began writing for the Baffler and other American leftist publications. Her project is worth paying attention to. It is unfortunate then, that Kill All Normies suffers from whatto be charitable to its authorwe shall call a truly calamitous and utterly woeful lack of editing, which has left it messy, often disjointed, and riddled with typos and formatting errors, and the reader disappointed, often perplexed, and bewildered by how variable the writing is.

Kill All Normies is a short book, howeveronly 120 pagesand with an attentive editor and expansion in light of ongoing developments a fruitful second edition could be produced. This investigation, considering the abuse anonymous wretches are surely subjecting Nagle to, was a courageous one, and I hope it continues.

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After Conservatism, Sadists and Lost Boys - Washington Free Beacon