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President Trump first asked reporters to define the "alt-right," before saying members of the "alt-left" were also to blame for violence in Charlottesville, while taking questions from reporters on Aug. 15 at Trump Tower in New York. (The Washington Post)

In a chilling Tuesday news conference, President Trump named one of the many sides he has said are to blame for the weekends violence in Charlottesville: the alt-left. But as much as white supremacists rejoiced at his use of the term, they did not invent it. Liberals did.

The term alt-left has become a recent favorite of neo-Nazis, and Trumps embrace of the phrase is likely to propel it into his broader bases vocabulary. Yet its unlikely anyone wearing a Make America Great Again hat saw the term where it first caught attention in the news media: in the March edition of Vanity Fair magazine, atop an essay by James Wolcott titled Why the Alt-Left Is a Problem, Too. Or where it had already been springing up with surprising frequency: on the Facebook pages and Twitter feedsof movers and shakers closely associated with Clintonworld.

The 2016 Democratic primary exposed a long-brewing schism in the liberal order. Supporters of Bernie Sanders were fed up with the status quo and sought to tear it apart, while Hillary Clintons cohort preached a more pragmatic progressivism. The best hope of the Clintonites was to cast Sanders supporters as not just unreasonably radical but also a bit sexist and racist too hence the Bernie bro, their caricature of a childish white man who just cant bear the thought of a female president.

The Bernie bros were exactly the people center-left Democrats were describing when they first said alt-left. They didnt just mean the antifa, or anti-fascists. Thats an amorphous enough term already, encompassing both the black bloc and other groups devoted to denying neo-Nazis a public platform but less inclined to set limousines on fire. They didnt even just mean those who fit the technical definition of socialist, communist or anarchist. They meant anyone who wanted to push the political conversation beyond the boundaries of the 2016 Democratic Party platform: anyone who advocated for universal health care, free college or a $15 minimum wage.

Heather Heyer, according to that definition, belonged to the alt-left.

Its easy to see why alt-left was the perfect phrase for the job Clinton Democrats set out to accomplish. Because it sounded so much like alt-right, it made Sanders fans seem too extreme to stomach even violent. It also made them seem more sexist (that explains their lack of enthusiasm for Clinton, those using the term might say), or racist (now we know why theyre disillusioned with Barack Obama, or why they wont come around to Kamala Harris, theyd argue).

And its not as though the far left doesnt do the same sort of labeling of Clintonite Democrats calling them centrists as a veiled insult even when their views are measurably more progressive than the average Americans, or deeming them neoliberal to establish distance between them and what hardcore leftists see as the true liberal cause.

The alt-left label, as it turns out, is much more insidious. It creates a false equivalence at the extremes and plays into racists hands. White supremacists want the far left to look more sexist and racist the same way center-left Democrats want them to it gives them a foil. Of course they greeted Trumps Tuesday proclamation with glee: While alt-right is designed to make neo-Nazis look more mainstream, alt-left is designed to make their enemies look less so. White nationalists had already pulled off a remarkable trick by bringing a moniker that obscured their hateful worldview into the national lexicon. And theyve achieved another coup by snatching alt-left away from the Democrats and pushing it so hard that it eventually made its way out of the presidents mouth.

This is far from the first time a clever center-left coinage has flipped sides remember when fake news was a cry of liberal outrage against the glut of online conspiracy theories that culminated in a gunman traveling to a D.C. pizzeria to take out a nonexistent Clinton-connected child sex ring?

The left is eating itself alive. Fake news at least was designed to delegitimize a dangerous enemy. The center-lefts use of alt-left demonizes people who, when it comes down to it, should be their allies. Theres a real debate to had about health care, free college and the $15 minimum wage. Its happening now, and it will continue to happen through 2018 and beyond. But the right way to have that debate has never been by playing semantic tricks to score points. Its by being honest about the policies both we and those we disagree with stand for. Weve just learned how perilous the alternative can be.

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The alt-right didn't invent 'alt-left.' Liberals did. - Washington Post

Since the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, liberals have been trying to overturn it on the national, state, and local level. The latest effort to overturn Citizens United comes from Multnomah County, Oregon, the county in which Portland is located.

Since the Left completely misrepresents the holdings in Citizens United it is important to review what actually happened in the case. Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton and wanted to air and promote it in the months leading up to the 2008 election. But federal campaign finance law prohibited it, because Citizens United is a corporation and it wished to discuss a candidate. So, Citizens United sued.

Of course, we can only wonder if liberals would be so overwrought about Citizens United if the case were about a liberal organization making a movie critical of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan.

The Supreme Court decided that individuals do not lose their First Amendment right of free speech when they join together into organizations, associations, corporations, and unions. Specifically, corporations and other organizations may spend unlimited amounts of money to speak, just as an individual may, as long as the political spending and speech is not coordinated with a candidate or political party.

Unlike what you hear frequently in the mainstream media, Citizens United did not allow corporations, foreign corporations, or foreign nationals to contribute to candidates or political parties. Such donations are still completely prohibited. It did not establish the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, which has existed for hundreds of years. It upheld disclosure requirements for political spending, though fear mongering about dark money still prevails in the media.

Importantly, Citizens United was a constitutional, not a statutory or regulatory, decision. Which means that the right of a corporation or other organization to speak independently on political issues cannot be overturned by federal, state, or local legislation.

Being a recognized First Amendment right of free speech has not stopped liberals from trying to overturn Citizens United since the decision was released in 2010. States have resisted updating their laws, regulations, and official policies to reflect the decisions holdings, and some states and localities have passed new laws attempting to restrict the speech right recognized in Citizens United. The Federal Election Commission itself did not update its regulations until 2014, four years after decision, because the Democrat commissioners objected to the speech right recognized in Citizens United and blocked every attempt to update the written regulations to reflect current law.

In 2016, Multnomah County, Oregon, passed, and voters approved, a measure which created contribution limits, expenditure limits, registration requirements, and disclosure requirements for spending related to county races. The expenditure limits provide that individuals and entities may only spend money if the money was collected subject to the contribution limits.

The new rules also limit aggregate independent expenditures per election cycle for individuals and political committees, impose no independent expenditure limits on small donor committees, and completely prohibit independent expenditures by all other entities, including corporations and non-profit organizations.

The primary problem with this misguided effort restricting constitutional rights of political speech is that it ignores not only Citizens United but also 40 years of settled campaign finance case law.

The only government purpose that allows regulation of campaign spendingconstitutionally protected political speechis the goal of preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, even before Citizens United, that this anti-corruption goal cannot be applied to restrict independent political spending by outside groups (which was protected in Citizens United).

Other justifications for such laws, such as reducing campaign costs, encouraging diversity among candidates, and equalizing the volume of speech from different groups, have been repeatedly rejected as unconstitutional. Likewise, attempting to enforce contribution limits (which are still constitutional) through expenditure limits is unconstitutional.

Putting aside federal constitutional law, Oregon Supreme Court decisions prohibit both expenditure and contribution limitations under the Constitution of Oregon because political contributions constitute expression. Because of these decisions, Oregon is one of the few states that does not impose contribution limits on either individuals or entities.

Multnomah County filed a petition for validation of the rule in Oregon state court in May. The Taxpayers Association of Oregon, represented by the Center for Competitive Politics, is seeking to intervene in the case and has masterfully outlined the legal problems with new rules and with the rules supporters arguments. The court held a lengthy hearing on Tuesday and a decision is expected soon.

The outcome of this case could have important repercussions for liberals efforts to resist Citizens United and the important political speech rights protected in it not only in Oregon but across the country.

If the court upholds the Multnomah County expenditure limits, the County will undoubtedly lose on appeal. But citizens should not have to file lawsuits and pursue costly appeals, often all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, simply to protect their recognized free speech rights.

The rule of law requires that state and lower federal courts follow established Supreme Court case law even when it is politically unpopular in the area the court is located. The rule of law and preservation of constitutional freedoms likewise require that states and localities not be permitted to repress free speech rights, particularly political speech rights, because of a foolish desire to equalize everyones speech. This is true whether the speech is about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or Jane Doe running for city utilities commissioner.

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Liberals' Latest Effort To Resist Citizens United - The Daily Caller

In the wake of the violence that took place in Charlottesville over last weekend, numerous activists and politicians have called for the destruction of more historical monuments,although asignificant majority of Americans (62 percent) think the monuments should stay put. Only 27 percent of Americans think these statues should be removed for fear of offending some people. As usual, public opinions not stopping liberals from pursuing an unpopular agenda.

Though by no means comprehensive, heres a list of the monuments that are facing calls for removal or have already been torn down.

In a PBS interview, Al Sharpton called for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC to be abandoned because the third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence was a slave owner.

Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Corey Booker (D-N.J.) have both called for statues commemorating Confederates to be removed from the U.S. Capitol.

The HuffPost got in on the action with this over-the-top headline.

Vice Newss Wilbert L. Cooper called for Mount Rushmore to be destroyed because the U.S. presidents whose visages are carved into the mountainside are problematic by todays standards.

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh had Civil War monuments removed from the city in the cover of night, without any public hearings or any public discussion process. Pugh told The New York Timesthat she used her emergency powers as mayor to take down statues ofRobert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from a public park surprising even some members of the city council.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan also called for a statue memorializing Roger B. Taney, a Supreme Court justice who penned the infamous Dred Scott decision, which determined that anyone descended from a slave could not be an American citizen, be removed from the pedestal where it had been erected since 1887.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for a frieze depicting Confederate soldiers to be removed from Stone Mountain in Georgia.

In Washington DC, a group of protestors gathered on Sunday to call for the statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, to be torn down.

A Chicago pastor has asked the mayor to remove the names of two former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson from city parks because both men owned slaves.

The Confederate Soldiers Monument was torn down by protesters from its spot in front of the old Durham County Courthouse on Monday.Four have been arrested in connection to this instance of vandalism. The Workers World Party released a statement claiming that it should be their right to tear the monuments down.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has called for additional monuments to be torn down and is asking the state legislature to repeal a 2015 law that prevents the destruction of Civil War monuments.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is asking state legislators and city officials to tear down monuments throughout the Old Dominion.

In Gainesville, Florida, a statue of a Confederate soldier was removed Monday from outside a county administrative building.

The City Council of Lexington, Kentucky voted unanimously on Tuesday to remove Confederate statues from the lawn in front of an old county courthouse. In response, a white nationalist group is reportedly planning a protest.

On Monday, protesters gathered in favor of removing a statue ofCivil War officer John B. Castleman from Louisville, Kentucky.

In Nashville, Tennessee, protestors gathered to call for the removal of a monument depicting Nathan Bedford Forrest, a lieutenant in the Confederate army, from the state capitol on Monday. People have also called for a memorial of Forrest, which sits on private property, to be hidden from view of the nearby highway.

A white flag was hung on the gun of the statue and its head and feet were spray painted, WECT reports. Officers were called back to the scene and found a rope tied to the statues neck. Upon examination, officers said they believe it was likely tied to a vehicle in an attempt to pull the statue over.

Another statue was marked with graffiti.

A statue that stood in the Confederate section of Hollywood Forever Cemetery for more than 90 years was toppled on Wednesday, Los Angeles Times reports. A plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis was also removed from a park this week.

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Here's A List Of All The Monuments Liberals Want To Tear Down So Far - The Federalist

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Posted: Aug 16, 2017 8:05 PM

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims fascists, they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a racist.

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans Nazis because some of them support the duly elected Republican president Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

Theyre all fascists! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are anti-fascists, or as they call themselves, antifa.

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally last weekend were Nazis, white supremacists or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they werent allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europes migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the Unite the Right crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding antifa beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

Thats when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled terrorism, but we still dont know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, well unravel Fields motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting Allahu Akbar! while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was upset about black people and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a White Power poster and liked three organizations deemed white separatist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.

Actually, none of that is true. The paragraph above describes, down to the letter, what was known about Micah Xavier Johnson, the black man who murdered five Dallas cops a year ago during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. My sole alteration to the facts is reversing the words black and white.

President Obama held a news conference the next day to say its very hard to untangle the motives. The New York Times editorialized agnostically that many possible motives will be ticked off for the killer. (One motive kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to me.)

In certain cases, the media are quite willing to jump to conclusions. In others, they seem to need an inordinate amount of time to detect motives.

The media think they already know all there is to know about James Fields, but they also thought they knew all about the Duke lacrosse players, gentle giant Michael Brown and those alleged gang-rapists at the University of Virginia.

Waiting for facts is now the Nazi position.

Liberals have Republicans over a barrel because they used the word racist. The word is kryptonite, capable of turning the entire GOP and 99 percent of the conservative media into a panicky mass of cowardice.

This week, Mitt Romney and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) among others instructed us that masked liberals hitting people with baseball bats are pure of heart provided they first label the likes of Charles Murray or some housewife in a MAGA hat fascists.

Luckily, the week before opening fire on Republicans, critically injuring House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Bernie Sanders-supporter James Hodgkinson had used the vital talisman, calling the GOP fascist. So you see, he wasnt trying to commit mass murder! He was just fighting Nazis. Rubio and Romney will be expert witnesses.

And lets recall the response of Hillary Clinton to the horrifying murder of five Dallas cops last year. The woman who ran against Trump displayed all the moral blindness currently being slanderously imputed to him.

In an interview on CNN about the slaughter that had taken place roughly 12 hours earlier, Hillary barely paused to acknowledge the five dead officers much less condemn the shooting before criticizing police for their implicit bias six times in about as many minutes.

What she really wanted to talk about were the two recent police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, refusing to contradict Minnesota Gov. Mark Daytons claim that the Minneapolis shooting was based on racism.

Officers in both cases were later found innocent of any wrongdoing. Either the left has had a really bad streak of luck on their police brutality cases, or bad cops are a lot rarer than they think.

Some people would not consider the mass murder of five white policemen by an anti-cop nut in the middle of a BLM protest a good jumping-off point for airing BLMs delusional complaints about the police. It would be like responding to John Hinckley Jr.s attempted murder of President Reagan by denouncing Jodie Foster for not dating him.

Or, to bring it back to Charlottesville, it would be as if Trump had responded by expounding on the kookiest positions of Unite the Right just as Hillarys response echoed the paranoid obsessions of the cop-killer. Trump would have quickly skipped over the dead girl and railed against black people, Jews and so on.

That is the precise analogy to what Hillary did as the bodies of five Dallas cops lay in the morgue.

Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman.

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When Liberals Club People, It's With Love In Their Hearts - Townhall

OTTAWA The Justice Department wants to know what Canadians think of changing some of the former Conservative government'scontroversial tough-on-crime sentencing legacy including mandatory minimum penalties before the Liberals bring in their promised reforms.

An online survey asks respondents to judge several scenarios involving mitigating circumstances surrounding a crime, such as a brain-damaged offender whose condition leads to poor decision-making skills, or an offender who acted out of character and has apologized to the victim in court.

Consider, for example, the fictional case of Sarah, a 36-year-old single mother struggling with addiction who was convicted of drug trafficking after she was caught selling some of her prescription opioid pills.

The survey says she had a knife in her backpack, which she claimed was for her own protection, and after she went to jail, her two children were placed with child welfare services because she had no family to take them in.

The survey, conducted by EKOS Research Associates, Inc., says everyone convicted of drug trafficking while carrying a weapon must be sentenced to at least one year behind bars, no matter the circumstances,and then asks respondents whether they believe the sentence is appropriate and fair.

The Liberals have promised legislative changes to mandatory minimum sentences, including at least some of the dozens the Conservatives imposed, or increased, over the decade they were in power.

Proponents of mandatory minimumpenalties argue they help ensureconsistency in sentencing, whilecritics have decried them for taking away the ability of judges to use their discretion in handing down a consequence that fits not only the crime, but also the person convicted of committing it.

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who said earlier this summer about half the charter challenges her officials are tracking involve mandatory minimum penalties, is expected to introduce legislation this fall.

Ottawa-based criminal defence lawyer Michael Spratt said he is concerned the surveysuggests the Liberal government is looking to public opinion, rather than evidence, when it comes to shaping its justice policy.

"Governing your justice policy based on the popular opinion is a dangerous game that potentially could undermine the rule of law and important constitutional protections," Spratt said.

Yvon Dandurand, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C., said he does not share that view because he knows the Liberal government is doing much more than polling when it comes to its review of the criminal justice system.

"They have done just about everything else to develop a good, rational policy on sentencing so to find out where public opinion lies is just part of that," Dandurand said.

Kathleen Davis, a spokeswoman for Wilson-Raybould, said the survey, which was not crafted by her office, is part of a broader effort by the department to engage the public on such issues, includingfocus groups and a more traditional public opinion survey using a randomized sample.

She said othertopics they will explore this fall include restorative justice, sexual assault, court delays, Indigenous issues and mental health.

Davis also said she has seenpreliminary results of the survey, which she would not release, and that she was surprised by the level of support for repealing mandatory minimum penalties.

"That goes against the narrative that's out there that the public would not be in favour of that," she said.

Carissima Mathen, a University of Ottawa law professor, said she would be concerned if the survey results were being used to determine policy, but said it could serve to educate people about "complexities in the criminal justice system," including how sentencing goes beyond the crime.

NDP justice criticAlistair MacGregor said he hopes the polling means the Liberals are getting closer to acting on their promise.

"I guess at the end of the day, you have to say better late than never," he said.

Follow @smithjoanna on Twitter

Joanna Smith, The Canadian Press

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Justice officials testing waters for sentencing reform promised by Liberals - rdnewsnow.com