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gainesvilletimes.com
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
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The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Don’t claim to
be inclusive if
you hate Trump
supporters
BY JON HEALEY
Los Angeles Times
Our society is sharply polarized for a bunch
of reasons, but one that sticks out in my mind is
the prevailing sense of righteousness. You see it
all the time in online debates — the other side
isn’t just mistaken, it’s deficient, or venal, or
immoral, or even evil.
Exhibit A is the new policy announced this
week by Ravelry, which appears to be the top
site for craftsy people who like to make things
with yarn. Ravelry users upload patterns and
projects, then share them with other users.
On Sunday, Ravelry said it was banning all
content (projects, patterns and comments) that
supported President Donald Trump and his
administration. The statement included this
remarkable bit of pretzel logic: “We cannot
provide a space that is inclusive of all and also
allow support for open white supremacy. Sup
port of the Trump administration is undeniably
support for white supremacy.”
Honestly, I don’t know why people even
aspire to be “inclusive of all,” because “all”
means everyone, including folks no one wants
to run into at the punch bowl — serial kill
ers, necrophiliacs, telemarketers, your aunt’s
creepy ex-husband, the list goes on and on.
But I digress. Ravelry’s founders (who have
been publicly mum since Sunday) tried to dis
tinguish in their announcement between Trump
supporters and Trump support. The former
remains welcome, the latter does not, ostensi
bly because it makes the site feel like a hostile
environment to some users.
The statement that supporting Trump is
undeniably supporting white supremacy is
absurdly reductive. It’s akin to claiming that
support for the Obama administration was
undeniably support for illegal immigration,
or that support for the George W. Bush admin
istration was undeniably support for making
prescription drugs more affordable for senior
citizens.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not defending
Trump. What bothers me is the way Ravelry’s
founders imputed all of his sins on everyone
who might consider Trump a better choice next
year than, say, Bernie Sanders.
Trump’s signature issue may well be the real
and metaphorical border wall — his battle to
stop people from crossing the southern bor
der legally in search of asylum, or illegally in
search of a better life here. Critics certainly
see Trump’s xenophobia as a manifestation of
white supremacy. To his allies on that issue,
however, it’s not about race, it’s about an influx
of people who will be a drag on the economy,
public schools and the health care system.
Those supposedly dire consequences are
debatable; even some Republicans with a tra
ditional view of trade and economics see immi
gration as a net boon, not a burden. But those
same Republicans would rather have the coun
try led by an anti-migrant conservative who will
cut tax rates and regulations than a migrant-
friendly Democrat eager to bury the country in
taxes and red tape.
With two parties exerting a stranglehold on
elected offices, We the People don’t have the
luxury of supporting leaders who share every
one of our core beliefs. We all have to hold our
noses to some degree — and Republicans more
than Democrats these days. The president who
embraced trickle-down economics and gave
them two conservative Supreme Court justices
is also the guy detaining migrant children in
deplorable conditions, trying to speed global
warming and threatening the economy with a
trade war (which some Democrats are cheer
ing on).
That’s not to say every president is equally
flawed (ahem, Richard Nixon) or that some
Trump supporters aren’t white supremacists —
some clearly are. But again, one brush does not
paint them all.
Few people would have complained had the
founders of Ravelry banned all partisan flexing
during the protracted campaign season. But
instead, they decided to bar content that was
offensive to them, implicitly endorsing content
that’s offensive just to other people.
It’s their site, they can do as they wish. But
ham-handed moves like this only encourage
those who want Congress to require online plat
forms to be neutral in order to be shielded from
liability for their users’ posts. That would be a
big step backward for the internet, not just for
Ravelry and the knitters whose sensibilities it is
so eager to protect.
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Why wont US politicians talk
about Chinese authoritarianism?
Given the recent fight
over whether U.S. refugee
detention centers are in fact
“concentration camps,”
the Trump administration
might want to borrow a page
from the Chinese and simply
call them “vocational skills
education training centers.”
That way, no one would
really care at all.
That’s what the Chinese
call their gulag archipelago
of internment and re-education camps in
Xinjiang province, where an estimated
million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic
people are being held. The Uighurs are a
traditionally Muslim minority, and Bei
jing says they pose a major threat because
of Islamic terrorism. The reality is that
the Chinese fear separatist movements,
Islamic or otherwise, in a resource-rich
region three times the size of France.
As a result, the Chinese are pursuing
the largest attempt at cultural annihila
tion of the 21st century. Religion is heav
ily regulated throughout China, but it is
brutally policed in Xinjiang. According
to an analysis of satellite imagery by
Agence France-Presse, “30 religious
sites were completely demolished while
six had their domes and corner spires
removed.” Ancient cemeteries are being
erased, turned into parking lots. In the
southern city of Kashgar, once a jewel
of the Silk Road — and closer to Bagh
dad than to Beijing — morning calls to
prayer have been silenced.
The evil deeds in Xinjiang are merely
the most egregious examples of what
the Economist has called “apartheid
with Chinese characteristics” and what
I think of as a high-tech Asian version of
Jim Crow.
What is both intriguing and
infuriating to me is that Amer
ican politicians refuse to talk
about any of this. After all,
we are in the midst of a trade
war with China. Whatever
the merits of this economic
confrontation may or may
not be, you would think the
nature of the Chinese regime
itself would play a larger part
in debate. The nature of the
South African regime was the
entire reason for the sanctions and boy
cotts pushed by progressives and Demo
crats in the 1980s. The nature of the
Soviet Union was the rhetorical center-
piece of the economic warfare pushed
by Republicans during the Cold War.
Today, the repression of the mullahs and
the export of terrorism aren’t the main
driver of sanctions against Iran — that
would be the country’s nuclear program
— but they are a major part of the rheto
ric accompanying such policies.
But among both Democrats and
Republicans, Chinese authoritarianism
often goes unmentioned, save perhaps
as an afterthought. Countless conserva
tives, particularly of the new nationalist
bent, want to take a hard line with China
because they make widgets at a lower
price than us or because they rip off
Hollywood. The fact that the Chinese
government has put a million Muslims
in re-education camps and persecuted
Christians, too, is rarely part of the
conversation.
Rhetorically, President Trump has
been far harsher on Canada and Mexico
than he has been on China. He refused to
offer even pro-forma support for the pro
testers in Hong Kong beyond saying the
protests were having a “big impact.”
One needn’t be blindly moralistic
about all of this. China is big, powerful
and dangerous. But so was the Soviet
Union, and we still managed to tell the
truth about it. China is also more inte
grated into the global economy than the
USSR ever was, and that brings impor
tant considerations as well.
The ongoing confrontation with China
highlights the moral blind spot of eco
nomic nationalism — on the right and
the left. The new fad of nationalism on
the right has brought many conserva
tives into agreement with the left on non
interventionism and realism. The Trump
administration as well as Democratic
supporters of a tough trade policy with
China (such as Sen. Chuck Schumer)
have made it clear that all we expect of
Beijing is more cooperation on trade,
intellectual property and currency poli
cies. Fix that stuff, our messaging sig
nals, and everything you do to your own
people is your business.
President Trump’s speech in Nor
mandy earlier this month was rightly
hailed as one of his best. It was particu
larly popular among the nationalists
because World War II understandably
looms large in the romance about Ameri
can moral and military might. Trump
hailed the veterans of D-Day who “threw
open the gates of Nazi concentration
camps to liberate Jews.” Meanwhile,
today’s nationalists are happy to demon
ize a China that bootlegs Mickey Mouse
but are silent about the very same China
that rounds up internal enemies and puts
them in concentration camps.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of
National Review Online and a visiting
fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute.
JONAH GOLDBERG
goldbergcolumn@
gmail.com
LISA BENSON I Washington Post Writers Group
Ilhan Omars ideological
attacks on two Christian pastors
Congressional hearings
are a fixture in Washington
and are supposedly a tool for
investigation by the nation’s
lawmaking body.
Unfortunately, too often
when Democrats are in
charge, it’s not the case.
Rather than hearings being a
means for seeking facts and
information, they become
just a platform for politick
ing by members of the
majority party and a forum for attacking
those whose views they don’t like.
This distortion of process was in full
view at recent House Budget Committee
hearings on Poverty in America: Eco
nomic Realities of Struggling Families.
Of eight witnesses, six were from the
same left-wing organization — the Poor
People’s Campaign.
The other two were members of the
national clergy network of my organiza
tion CURE, Center for Urban Renewal
and Education: Latasha Fields, pastor
and founder of Christian Home Educa
tors’ Support System, and David Mahan,
pastor and founder of Frontline Youth
Communications.
Ilhan Omar, Democrat congress-
woman, member of the committee
and one of three Muslims in Congress,
showed up at the hearing not looking for
facts but with her already established,
prefabricated view of the world. Rather
than asking questions, she used all her
time to pontificate and ridicule CURE’S
two Christian pastors.
The remarkable stories that these two
pastors shared about growing up poor
in broken communities and
beating the odds through
struggle and faith were of
zero interest to Omar. They
didn’t say what she wanted
to hear.
Mahan summed up his
formula for what worked,
saying, “Personal responsi
bility, strong marriages and
families, and an active faith
in Jesus Christ.... Govern
ment programs will only
prove successful to the degree that they
supplement these key factors, without
supplanting them.”
Fields talked about her determination
as a young woman to not become part of
the drugs, crime and despair in the com
munity that surrounded her where she
grew up in Baton Rouge.
She shared the devastation she expe
rienced after becoming pregnant at age
17 and withstanding the pressure from
those around her who told her to abort
the child.
“I had a big decision to make,” she
said. “Do I get rid of my baby and pro
ceed as normal as though nothing hap
pened ...? Or do I live the rest of my life
knowing I had killed my baby?”
Mahan and Fields conveyed how they
rejected abortion, how they married,
struggled, home-schooled their children
and are now proud parents of children
with university degrees.
Rather than holding up Fields’ story of
faith and courage as a shining example
of what works, Omar mocked her.
“(We) hear someone say, ‘It was a
choice made — up to me, to have my
children and not be like other black peo
ple... We don’t get to have those kinds of
conversations,” Omar said.
What kind of conversations do we get
to have, according to her? “The kind of
systematic barriers that exist in prosper
ity — that’s the conversation we should
be having,” she said.
The great hymn “Amazing Grace,”
composed by repentant slave trader
John Newton, ends with “I was blind but
now I see.”
Omar is blinded by hate for the nation
to which she had the privilege of immi
grating. She is blinded by the distortions
of the statist ideology that, despite years
of experience and tens of trillions in gov
ernment expenditures to the contrary,
she chooses to believe will improve
impoverished lives.
Two courageous Christian pastors
presented themselves before the House
Budget Committee as living examples
that the faith and freedom that made
America great is still the formula that
works — even in the most difficult and
challenging circumstances.
We’re now entering election season.
Democrats are betting they can still
drown out the truth and continue to sell
the same failed big-government lies to
blacks.
My bet is stories like those of pastors
Fields and Mahan are too powerful, even
for the screaming and ranting of Ilhan
Omar. Even those who were once blind
are coming to see the truth.
Star Parker is an author and president
of the Center for Urban Renewal and
Education and a columnist for Creators.
(The (Ctmcs
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Shannon Casas