Friday, July 17, 2020

A Black Portland Cop Says Rioters Are Racist. Leftists Immediately Confirm It.

 
 Portland Police Officer Jackhary Jackson. 

Article by Victoria Taft in "PJMedia":

 A black police officer says there are racist white people stage-managing the riots in Portland, Oregon and “they’re not even from here.”

 Officer Jackhary Jackson was featured in a video released by the Portland Police Bureau explaining what it’s like to be on the front lines after more than six weeks of rioting.


His observations are in line with what others are seeing in the riots since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters are being imported to Seattle and Portland. Minnesota officials initially were convinced that rioters who burned down the Third Precinct and other buildings, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, were from elsewhere, but the majority of arrested rioters were from the state. Some rioters who did travel to Minneapolis to riot, burn and loot were rolled up by the feds. The federal Department of Justice has begun to arrest and prosecute rioters who crossed state lines to commit riot, arson and other crimes.

It’s been obvious that the violent protests, allowed by a politically pliant Portland city hall, haven’t been about George Floyd for a very long time. The idea is to foment chaos and violence and to keep it going. The willingness of the elected officials to tolerate civil unrest, at the expense of other peoples’ security, is scandalous. The police officers’ union has accused the Leftist politicians in Oregon and specifically Portland of defending the violence.

Racist Rioters Get Support From City Hall

Officer Jackson finds it ironic that “if you’re at a Black Lives Matter protest you have more minorities on the police side than you do in a violent crowd.”



Brandon Farley • Portland Protest Reporter
@FarleyMedia
Portland Police Officer Jackson Speaks Out against Racist White "Protesters"
https://twitter.com/i/status/1281359664408522753 

 He says the rioters scream racist things at black officers and accuse him of “hurting my community” because he’s a cop.

And you have white people screaming at black officers ‘you have the biggest nose I’ve ever seen.’
You as a privileged white person telling someone as a person of color what to do with their life and you don’t even know what i’ve dealt with what these white officers that you’re screaming at. You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them.
I got to see folks that really want change like the rest of us that have been impacted by racism and then I got to see those people get faded out – by people who have no idea of what racism is all about. Never experienced racism.

It gets worse.

‘Frightening’ Rioters Who ‘Don’t Know History’

Officer Jackson said the rioters, most of whom are white, are “using are the same tactics that are used against my people. And they don’t even know the history. They don’t know what they’re saying. Coming from someone who graduated from PSU with a history degree, it’s actually frightening. You know they say if you don’t know your history you’ll repeat it and and watching people do that to other people.”

White protesters stage-manage the riots.

A lot of times someone of color – black, Hispanic, Asian, come to the fence and directly want to talk to me. ‘Hey, what do you think about George Floyd? What do you think about what happened about this? I go up to the fence, someone white comes up ‘F the police, don’t talk to him.’ That was the most bizarre thing because I could see it coming. I even had a young African American girl tell me ‘why is it you guys aren’t talking to us?’ Honestly, I think this was the 23rd day of doing it and every time I try to have a conversation with someone who looks like me someone white comes up – blocks them – and tells them not to talk to me. And right when I said that, this white girl pops up in front of us and said, ‘he said that was going to happen.’ And straight up, ‘I’ve been called the n-word. She’s been called the n-word, why are you talking to me this way? Why do you feel that she can’t speak for herself to me? Why is it that you feel you need to speak for her when we’re having a conversation?’
White Rioters Hit Black Cop With Racist Epithets and Rocks

Officer Jackson says in addition to being told his “you have the biggest nose I’ve ever seen” he’s been pelted with rocks, bottles of frozen water. He wonders why it was that a black-owned-business was the first one looted.

Then when you go to a gentrified community and one of the pictures I saw, one of the first places that was looted was a black-owned business, I mean, they, they’re not even from here. They don’t even know what they’re doing.
They say they are peacefully protesting, but it’s not peaceful. It’s violent. My cousin attended one of the marches and he left. He said ‘this has turned into something else. This is weird.

You know what’s weirder? The way Leftists trolling the police Twitter timeline immediately confirmed that they are racist.

Several called Officer Jackson a “token.”



Portland Police

@PortlandPolice

Officer Jackson talks about being a black police officer working at the demonstrations in Portland, Oregon.
 https://twitter.com/i/status/1283498679265968128 
 queenbee

@gentleb333
No good cops in a racist system PPB. Interviewing a Black cop is tokenizing. I’d rather see defunding and abolition to create a truly just and equitable form of community care. Thanks for the #copaganda #acab
 Robert
@CronoMage
Never seen this guy before in my life. Is he a brand new hire? You should really get his voice out there more. Do you know what propaganda and tokenism are?
 LookDirectly

@seicho8
Tokenizing much? 

Here’s another way to call Officer Jackson a token: 

PupAngel
@Pup_AngelPDX
Trot out the black man. Great performance, a real well written publicity piece. 

Someone immediately did a back ground check on the officer in an attempt to intimidate him by doxxing him. Recently, antifa’s hackers doxxed the entire Portland Police Bureau officer’s roster.

Another claimed that Officer Jackson was a minstrel performer.

Oregon Politicos Defend Antifa and BLM Rioters

Politicians find it politically convenient to blame President Trump for riots that have been going on for weeks.

Portland’s mayor and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden have blamed President Trump for injuring an imported antifa protester from Texas who got hurt while attacking federal officers. The federal officers are ordered to protect the federal courthouse, which had been under attack for days.

Wyden called the rioter a “peaceful protester” and claimed that the officers deployed to protect the courthouse were President Trump’s “secret police.” Yes, Oregon politicians are that unhinged.

Ron Wyden

@RonWyden
A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police. Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.
 
 Wyden and Mayor Ted Wheeler, along with their fellow elected Leftists might want to heed Officer Jackson’s words before they line up behind racist antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.
 
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/07/17/a-black-portland-cop-says-rioters-are-racist-leftists-immediately-confirm-it-n654828 
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Statue of Jesus Beheaded, Follows Raft of Attacks and Incidents Involving Churches and Statues

 Image
Article by Nick Arama in "RedState":

A statue of Jesus Christ was decapitated and knocked off its pedestal at the Good Shepard Catholic Church in Miami on Wednesday morning.

Rev. Edivaldo da Silva believes it was a targeted attack and the Archdiocese of Miami expects it will be investigated as a hate crime.



From Washington Examiner: 

“Obviously not, that’s for sure,” da Silva said when asked if the statue fell over on its own. “They had some powerful hands to remove it. Seeing what is happening in our country, I presume so, but we don’t have 100% assurance.”
“The Archdiocese of Miami expects the police to investigate this desecration of the Jesus Christ statue as a hate crime. This crime reflects the increasing attacks on the Catholic church across the country,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

This is only the latest act of vandalism against Christian symbols.

A statue of the Virgin Mary was beheaded at St. Stephen’s Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, over last weekend.
In Boston, a statue of the Virgin Mary was set on fire outside St. Peter’s Church in Dorchester, lit plastic flowers in the statue’s hands on fire, charring the face of the statue, causing the statue’s face to become black. The statue had been erected to thank the Virgin Mary for the safe return of men from World War II.


A second statue of the Virgin Mary outride of Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary was vandalized in New York City when someone spray painted “idol” on it Friday night. Reports were that a masked woman did it and fled the scene. The rector, James Kuroly, called it an “act of hatred.”


Radical leftists have been toppling statues of St. Junipero Serra across California in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. Serra was a priest who came from Spain and set up missions in California. He was made a saint in the Catholic Church for his work with the poor.

Last Saturday, a church founded by Serra in 1771, the San Gabriel Mission was heavily damaged by fire, with most of the roof and a lot of the inside being destroyed. It’s not clear what started the fire, but there given the animosity directed toward Serra, unfortunately one has to ask the question. Several leftists were also cheering the destruction of the church after the news broke, attacking Serra and saying things on Twitter like “let it burn.”


At about the same time, a fire was also set in a church in Ocala, Florida where a man crashed a minivan into a church, then got out and set the church on fire. The fire was put out and no one was hurt.


It’s not hard to see a lot of this as part of the whole effort to tear down history and other cultural symbols in the wake of the radical leftists sowing chaos ripping down statues, especially after people like Shaun King said that anything depicting Jesus as a “white European” and his “white European mother” should come down. We’ll have to see to wait as the facts develop in each case. 

But safe to say, whole lot of evil happening right now. 

https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/07/17/statue-of-jesus-beheaded-follows-raft-of-attacks-and-incidents-involving-churches-and-statues/
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CNN, MSNBC largely ignore chaos in Portland despite DHS accusing local officials of enabling 'mob'

 Mayor Wheeler, city leaders address Portland riots | KATU
Article by Brian Flood in "Fox News". Adam Shaw and Joseph Wulfson contributed to the article:

Portland has gotten so violent that acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf accused local politicians Thursday of enabling the “mob” of protesters who have besieged the city for more than six weeks -- but anyone who relies on CNN or MSNBC for news probably wouldn’t have any idea about the situation.
Wolf posted a lengthy timeline of the damage caused by “violent anarchists” that was ignored by the liberal networks.

 CNN and MSNBC have only mentioned “Portland” during one segment apiece over the past week, according to a search of transcripts.

“The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city,” Wolf said in a statement. “Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”

But CNN’s only segment about Portland this week came on Monday when anchor Poppy Harlow interviewed Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., about a protester who was recently shot and concerns about area schools reopening in September. Merkley blamed the shooting on “federal forces” and wasn’t asked about the chaos inflicted by violent protestors.

Over on MSNBC, a search of transcripts shows that the city of Portland was only mentioned once this week, on Friday, when discussing federal agents using unmarked vans to go after protesters.

NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck feels that viewers would only need “a couple seconds from any video over the last few months, and even years, to see how Portland's become a hotbed for Antifa and other violent, far-left groups” but he isn’t surprised CNN and MSNBC have shied away.

“CNN and MSNBC have long expressed a repulsive affinity for Antifa, whether it be Chris Cuomo or Chuck Todd, to name two examples. Therefore, it's no surprise that they've shied away from any story or piece of tape exposing to the American people the true picture of what their dearly beloved agitators are actually like,” Houck told Fox News.

It’s possible that Portland was mentioned elsewhere and somehow missed by the network’s transcripts, but highly unlikely. Either way, CNN and MSNBC certainly didn’t devote significant time on an American city that has descended into chaos in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

While demonstrations took place in other cities and eventually fizzled out, in Portland they have gone on for more than six weeks, bringing violence and destruction of property.

Local businesses have reported $23 million in losses due to looting and rioting that have gripped its downtown area, and rioters were seen lighting mattresses on fire and setting off fireworks in the streets. Protesters have also set up tents in the park near the federal courthouse and have barricaded streets to create their own autonomous zone, likened to the since-disbanded Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle.

 On Thursday, Wolf also released a timeline showing the havoc caused by what DHS termed “violent anarchists.”

The timeline posted by Wolf shows how the personal information of officers has been released online. Meanwhile, rioters have assaulted law enforcement with hammers, lasers, slingshots and fireworks, while others have been armed with sledgehammers, tasers and “flaming debris.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-msnbc-ignore-portland-unrest-protests
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A Turning Point at State Dept

National Review

The State Department’s Human-Rights Report Marks a Turning Point in Foreign Policy



Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2020.(Andrew Harnik/Reuters)

A nation-centered foreign policy need not neglect unalienable rights.
Today’s State Department report on inalienable rights may mark a turning point in the long debate over whether the United States should emphasize power politics or human rights in world affairs. If only Nixon could go to China, could it be that only Donald Trump — mercilessly attacked for an amoral foreign policy — could reaffirm the U.S.’s commitment to promoting its values abroad without neglecting the national sovereignty upon which American power rests?

State Department releases of human-rights reports often amount to dull affairs, often little remembered except by a flock of human-rights organizations. The Trump administration, by contrast, invoked symbols meant to signal a fundamental change in understanding. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo introduced the report, not an assistant secretary of this or that. He did not deliver his remarks from a cozy Foggy Bottom office or the United Nations, but at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia — across the lawn from Independence Hall, the birthplace of America’s greatest contributions to individual rights: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Most tellingly, Pompeo introduced the report not from a body with a long name chock-a-block with words like “international”, “humanity,” “displaced,” or “fundamental,” but from the State Department’s Commission on Inalienable Rights — the very words of the Declaration of Independence.

Skeptics might say that all of this ceremony and symbolism only adds window dressing to a dismal record. The report’s concrete proposals probably repeat well-worn principles of U.S. foreign policy, such as “it is urgent to vigorously champion human rights in foreign policy” and “the power of example is enormous.” No president would openly say that the United States should simply disregard the way a government treats its own people. Even President Reagan, whose U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued for siding with authoritarians who opposed the Soviet Union, also gave the famous 1988 “Tear Down this Wall” speech in Berlin. Many Americans leaders, such as John F. Kennedy and Reagan, invoke John Winthrop’s 17th-century idea that American should be a “shining city on a hill” that acts as a beacon for the rest of the world.

Others have gone even further, claiming that Trump has caused great harm to human rights. That has been the mantra of former Obama administration officials such as Yale international law professor Harold Koh, who wrote a book on Trump’s threat to international law after only one year in office. Such critics claim that the Trump administration has sidled up to terrible dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, allowed China to herd its Muslim Uighur minority into concentration camps, stood silently by as Saudi Arabia murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and left the Kurds and other rebels to their fate by withdrawing troops from the Syrian civil war.

Despite these charges, the administration’s foreign policy does not follow a purely amoral, realist course. Punishing the Chinese Communist Party for its growing oppression of Hong Kong makes little sense from a purely cost-benefit approach — after all, the United States has little ability to stop Beijing from grabbing complete control over a small island adjacent to its mainland. A Cardinal Richelieu or Chancellor Bismarck might have counseled Trump to keep Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, make a deal with Venezuela, ally with Russia, and even demarcate spheres of influence with China. Instead, the White House has steadily increased sanctions on Beijing and Moscow, turned up the screws on Iran and Venezuela, and sought to protect the freedom of nations in the Pacific from China’s aggressions. Congress and the president have agreed that the U.S. should inflict further economic punishment on China for its Uighur concentration camps and its violations of Hong Kong’s freedoms.

Pompeo’s report makes clear that the Trump administration has sought to promote individual rights in a uniquely American way. Though Trump’s foreign policy has differed significantly from those of his near predecessors, it has sought to balance American values as well as interests. Trump is not, it turns out, so very different from the other post-war Presidents who have guided the nation in international affairs: belief in a moral dimension to foreign policy is in the American grain. As that putative arch-realist Henry Kissinger once said, “The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.”

But the moral premises from which Trump starts, though drawn from a long tradition of American political thought, are not those of Obama, Clinton or Carter, nor those of the Bushes and Reagan. Instead of “international human rights” that receive their blessing from agreement by the United Nations, his administration seeks to base rights in the Bible, the republicanism of the American Founding, and the evolution of freedom ever since. In explaining Trump foreign policy, the Commission openly recalls America’s founding truth: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Walter Russell Mead has argued that Trump belongs in the “Jacksonian” tradition of American foreign policy — a tradition Mead distinguishes from the more common “Wilsonian,” “Hamiltonian,” or “Jeffersonian” schools which, respectively, emphasize liberal international institutions, seek to erect a financial and security architecture to support world order, or advocate a reduced role for the U.S. Trump’s Jacksonianism, by contrast, stems from the belief that the American nation should not try to reshape a recalcitrant world into its image, but to influence the world with the power of its example as a free, prosperous society dedicated to serving the American people well.

Trump sounded these notes of his foreign policy in a September 25, 2019 address to the U.N. General Assembly. The cornerstone was his belief that the global order should remain structured as a world of nation-states — ideally, democratic ones — rather than be organized and governed by remote, bureaucratized international and supranational institutions. The global order, the speech argued, is best served by having a multitude of sovereign national governments, each representing the interests and values of its own people and answerable to them, that together seek to create value, resolve collective action problems and promote the common welfare through negotiation and cooperation with one another.

Consider Trump’s view of war. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Trump clearly prefers non-military, non-interventionist methods of resolving international disputes. That is not, of course, to say that he is unwilling to use American military power altogether, as the killing of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani showed. But such uses of force have been rare, episodic and small-scaled during the Trump administration, have typically been retaliatory, and were designed to head off the threat of more serious attacks on the U.S.

Contrast that to the missionary impulse to make other societies over in America’s image by using military force, as in Kosovo and Iraq. Trump’s efforts to end the “Forever Wars” by withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan have had their flaws, and encountered the persistent opposition of the military commanders and the national security bureaucracy. But unlike those of his predecessors, Trump’s foreign policy tends to rely on leveraging America’s unique economic strengths and its pivotal position in global trade to achieve American objectives, instead of deploying U.S. military force abroad.

Such a nation-centered foreign policy will never appeal to our liberal foreign policy elites, on whom a cosmopolitan and post-national vision of world order exerts an irresistible draw. But that in no way implies that free-floating international human rights occupy a higher moral plane. The cause of human liberty is better secured in a world dominated by democratic nations and peoples rather than in a world under the sway of international institutions and their bureaucrats. Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights suggests that this approach may have a lasting effect in rooting our rights in the more secure foundations of American sovereignty and national power.

Robert J. Delahunty is the Laurence and Jean LeJeune Distinguished Chair and Professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. John Yoo is Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of Defender-in-Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, to be published on July 28.

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What Police Reforms Do ...

Spectator.org

What Police Reforms Do Americans Actually Want?


by AVERY BOWER for The American Spectator


The push to cut police budgets or “defund the police” has dominated left-wing political agendas, social media trends, and mainstream headlines for weeks now. Many cities, such as New York and Seattle, have already begun introducing legislation that would severely reduce police budgets. 

Though defunding the police is an idealistic concept, Democratic leaders such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have aggressively pushed for the idea of a society without police. This amount of coverage and political support would lead one to assume that cutting or defunding the police is an idea supported by the majority of Americans. That assumption would be completely incorrect. 

A recent study released by the Pew Research Center shows that few Americans support any significant police budget cuts. 

An overwhelming majority of Americans do not want their police forces defunded.

Only 12 percent of Americans support any significant cuts to police budgets, according to the study, while 14 percent support small-scale police budget cuts. This means that only one quarter of Americans believe in cutting any spending on police.
A staggering 73 percent of those polled support maintaining or even increasing police budgets. Forty-two percent support maintaining current police spending levels, 20 percent support a slight increase to police budgets, and 11 percent support large budget increases for police. 

This data tells quite a different story than many mainstream media outlets, such as Vox’s June 26 article advocating police defunding, subtitled, “It’s not as radical as it sounds.” 

Op-eds by authors assuming that they speak for a majority of Americans have pushed the narrative that defunding the police is the only police reform worth pursuing. Unlike self-described “prison abolitionist” Mariame Kaba, Americans do not actually believe that “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

New York City, which was lauded by anti-police groups for defunding the NYPD by $1 billion and dismantling its plainclothes anti-crime cop program in June, now faces the reality of a defunded police force. It is not pretty.

The combined hostility towards police and budget cuts has made it increasingly difficult for police to do their job. The decreased police presence combined with rampant rioting has resulted in a bona fide crime wave.

In the first six months of 2020, reported homicides in the city were up 21 percent since last year. Even worse, shooting fatalities were up by 51 percent. Over the weekend, a 1-year-old was murdered at a barbeque shooting.


In response to this epidemic of gun violence, black community leaders have called for an increased police presence. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams pleaded for the return of the plainclothes program on Tuesday, citing the rising gun violence in the city. The anti-crime unit had focused on searching for illegal guns.

“The guns keep going off and now we have a 1-year-old and the blood is on the hands of the mayor and the state legislature,” community activist Tony Herbert said. To these leaders and their constituents, a defunded police force is not the answer.

The Pew study found that 54 percent of black adults support keeping police funding the same, including 22 percent who support increasing funding. Among Hispanics that number is even higher, with 39 percent supporting current funding and 37 percent supporting increases.

Polling and the reality of black communities flies in the face of mainstream media coverage. An overwhelming majority of Americans do not want their police forces defunded. When police forces have been shrunk in response to leftist demands, community leaders have spoken out against the ensuing violence.

Yet it is evident that our country is still reeling from instances of police and anti-police violence. Americans do want a solution to the issues exposed by the past few months, just not a defunded police force. The same Pew study suggests reforming qualified immunity has more popular support.

Qualified immunity is a judicial precedent that protects public officials from civil lawsuits if they have not clearly violated rights previously established in case law. In effect, it protects officers from being directly sued for misconduct. 
Sixty-six percent of those surveyed by Pew support ending qualified immunity. Among those ages 18 to 29, 78 percent support the measure. 

Democrats overwhelmingly support the measure, with 85 percent of respondents agreeing. Republicans supported this measure more than other policy changes proposed, but still only 45 percent agreed. With young Republicans, however, this number jumps up to 61 percent.

For this measure in particular, there is bipartisan support in reforming qualified immunity. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor have both criticized current qualified immunity statutes as too broad. In Congress, Republican Sens. Mike Braun, Lisa Murkowski, David Perdue, and Lindsey Graham have all signaled support for debate on reform. 

If activists and proponents of police reform are looking for a realistic change to push for, qualified immunity is it. There is an appetite for change in America and how we interact with our police force — it just needs to be seized upon with a solution Americans can support.

Both anecdotal and statistical evidence currently suggest that Americans are not in favor of defunding the police and all the deleterious consequences that go along with it. 
Now is the time for anti-police activists to show whether they are exploiting a very real crisis for their own political benefit or they are committed to achieving change that Americans support. If we continue to see calls for defunding the police and the subsequent increases in lawlessness, we will know the answer is the former.
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Adam Schiff dreads criminal investigation led by federal prosecutor



How Attorney General William Barr may yet unleash the power of the Justice Department has House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff unnerved.

The California Democrat invoked U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal inquiry of the federal Russia investigation, as he discussed his dread that "more serious abuse" of federal law enforcement will happen in the coming days.

"One of the concerns I have with Bill Barr is that the worst is yet to come. I mean, he's got a terrible, destructive track record as it is, and it may get worse in the coming days," Schiff said in a recent episode of the Talking Feds podcast. "But what we have seen largely is Barr's intervention to protect the president."

As examples, Schiff mentioned Barr's rollout of special counsel Robert Mueller's report and "intervention" in cases spun off from the Russia investigation to "help Trump cronies" such as Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

"What we have not yet had full visibility on is not Barr's use of the shield to protect corruption writ large of his boss, Donald Trump, but the sword," Schiff continued. "How he may be using the power of the Justice Department through Durham or others to go after the president's enemies. And in many respects, that is a far greater, more serious abuse of the power of the Justice Department than his use of the shield."

It's a well-worn line of criticism for Schiff, who has complained since last year that the Justice Department has kept the Democratic-led House in the dark about its inquiries into whether there was inappropriate "spying" on Trump's 2016 campaign and other misconduct.

But more recently, that anxiety has deepened as Trump accused former President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, of committing crimes as part of the "Obamagate" scandal.

"And so I continue to be concerned with the president, who is tweeting about how Obama and Biden should go to prison, that Bill Barr may be preparing the use of the sword in a politicized and dangerous and desperate way," Schiff said.

Barr has repeatedly said he does not expect Obama or Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to be targets of Durham's investigation. He also has dismissed the inquiry as being a partisan hit job, even as some critics fear an "October surprise."

"This cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower our standards to achieve a particular result," the attorney general said in May. Barr told Fox News last month that he anticipates "developments" in Durham's criminal investigation by the end of the summer.

Whereas Schiff is spooked by being kept in the dark about Durham's work, his Republican counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee views that as a "good sign."

"The one good thing so far that we've learned about this Durham investigation is that Durham isn’t talking. People on his team aren’t talking," California Rep. Devin Nunes said during a Fox News interview last month. "I think that’s a good sign that this is a real, legitimate investigation that’s occurring."

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AG Barr Slams the ChiComs

The Federalist

AG Barr Slams 
Hollywood, Big Tech For ‘Kowtowing’ To The Chinese Communist Party

The U.S. Attorney General called out the CCP's attempt to infiltrate and influence the American film industry "a massive propaganda coup."


AG Barr Slams Hollywood, Big Tech For ‘Kowtowing’ To The Chinese Communist Party
The U.S. Attorney General called out the CCP's attempt to infiltrate and influence the American film industry "a massive propaganda coup."
U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr slammed Hollywood and Big Tech companies for pandering to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in a press conference at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum on Thursday.

“If American corporations continue to bow to Beijing, they risk undermining both their own future competitiveness and prosperity, as well as the classical liberal order that has allowed them to thrive,” Barr warned. “American companies must understand the stakes. The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report.”

Barr lambasted Hollywood for “kowtowing” to the CCP’s regime in pursuit of economic profits. He cited reports that in the movie “World War Z,” Paramount Pictures changed a scene that suggested the virus at the center of the film may have originated from China, in an attempt to receive a distribution deal in China. He also referenced the Marvel movie “Dr. Strange,” in which a character’s nationality was switched from Tibetan to Celtic because acknowledging the existence of Tibet might anger the Chinese government.

“Chinese government censors don’t need to say a word, because Hollywood is doing their work for them,” he said. “This is a massive propaganda coup for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Barr also noted the quotas and pressures to enter joint ventures that the CCP has placed on Hollywood, in an attempt to learn from American technology and to increase China’s own film industry. “In the long run, as with other American industries, the People’s Republic of China may be less interested in cooperating with Hollywood than co-opting Hollywood—and eventually replacing it with its own homegrown productions,” Barr said.

He criticized the CEO of Disney for apologizing about a 1997 film that showed “the PRC’s oppression of the Dalai Lama” because it angered the CCP, and noted that 300 employees at Disney’s Shanghai theme park are members of the Communist Party.

Barr also slammed American tech companies for their cooperation with the Chinese government. “American companies such as Cisco helped the Communist Party build the Great Firewall of China—the world’s most sophisticated system for Internet surveillance and censorship,” he said. “Corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate with the CCP.”

Apple, Barr noted, has removed “pro-democracy songs” from its music store for Chinese audiences, and recently took down a news app from Chinese markets because the CCP disapproved of its Hong Kong coverage. The tech giant is also beginning a move to store some of its iCloud data in China “despite concerns that the move would give the CCP easier access to e-mails, text messages, and other user information stored in the cloud.”

The CCP, Barr added, has been actively reaching out to the heads of American companies and leveraging the company’s business interests in China to pressure them to lobby for the CCP’s interests to the U.S. government.

The Chinese government “also seeks to infiltrate, censor, or co-opt American academic and research institutions,” Barr continued, citing CCP-funded “Confucius Institutes” at American universities. These Confucius Institutes “have been accused of pressuring host universities to silence discussion or cancel events on topics considered controversial by Beijing.”

In addition to warning against acquiescence to China by Hollywood, Big Tech, and academia, Barr warned of the CCP’s attempt to dominate markets for artificial intelligence, rare earth materials, trade routes, and digital infrastructure. The American response to the CCP’s ambitions, he predicted, “may prove to be the most important issue for our nation and the world in the 21st century.”

“How the United States responds to this challenge will have historic implications, and will determine whether the U.S. and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny, or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will control the future,” Barr said. “I hope my speech will encourage the American people to reevaluate their relationship with China, so long as it continues to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Barr had a specific warning for American business leaders. “Appeasing the PRC may bring short-term rewards, but in the end, the PRC’s goal is to replace you,” he said. “A world marching to the beat of Communist China’s drums will not be a hospitable one for institutions that depend on free markets, free trade, or the free exchange of ideas.”

He ended his speech with a call to action for Americans to resist the ploys of the Chinese government.
“The CCP has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them. To secure a world of freedom and prosperity for our children and grandchildren, the free world will need its own version of the whole-of-society approach, in which the public and private sectors maintain their essential separation but work together collaboratively to resist domination and to win the contest for the commanding heights of the global economy. America has done that before. If we rekindle our love and devotion for our country and each other, I am confident that we—the American people, American government, and American business together—can do it again. Our freedom depends on it. “

“The hypocrisy that exists in Hollywood that was subject to [demands from China] is breathtaking,” Pompeo said. “If the United States demanded that they did something in the movie or didn’t do something in the movie it would not only be rejected but it would be inappropriate. And yet when the Chinese Communist Party has hollered at them, they have jumped.”

Pompeo noted that Hollywood’s cooperation with the Chinese government is directly tied to financial greed. “There was money to be made,” he said. “I hope they’ll take seriously, that it may not be worth a little bit more money…to put at risk all the things that I know they valued so much, of the freedom that people in Hollywood have benefited from.”




Here is a link to read a transcript of his speech:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/read-attorney-general-barrs-speech-blasting-hollywood-big-tech-on-risks-of-corporate-collaboration-with-china/


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