Democrats claim U.S. Navy SEAL logo a form of “domestic terrorism”.
/By Sussex Watchdog
Every now and then a society goes batshit crazy and does something along the order of “The Purge”. It gets scary when the powerful and political get on board to use it for their own purposes.
The Salem witch hunt occurred in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. 30 were found guilty, 19 of whom were executed by hanging. One of the accused was pressed to death (rocks were piled on until the ribs pierced the lungs, causing death) after refusing to enter a plea. An unknown number died in jail. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America and is considered one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of public mass hysteria.
Those who spoke out against it, were attacked and imprisoned. The first to do so was a Quaker, Thomas Maule. In 1695, he wrote a book that criticized the handling of the trials by the Puritan leaders. It was Maule who wrote, “It were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch”. For publishing his book, Maule was imprisoned for 12 months.
The evidence used at the trials was all highly subjective. Innocent everyday occurrences were reinterpreted as “signs” and given infamous “meanings”. Based on these applied “meanings” people were deprived of property, freedom, and – eventually – their lives. All because somebody claimed that something meant what they wanted it to mean – regardless of whether it was meant that way or not. The legacy of those accusations left a permanent bloodstain on American history. It is a bloodstain that is being revisited today.
Today, politicians like Josh Gottheimer and Tom Malinowski appear to be lifting a page out of the Salem witch hunt. They openly support censoring alternative opinions, seizing assets and imprisoning people who disagree with them. As an excuse for such severe sanctions, they go through contortions in an effort to label the accused as "extremists" or "terrorists" of "anti-Semitism" or "racism" or "white supremacy". Given the outrageousness of it all, it is the duty of modern-day Thomas Maules to dissent.
Sussex County Democrats Damaris Lira and Camila DiResta (running as a team for County Commissioner) recently put out a video that attempted a witch hunt style smear on a blue-collar CWA union member, a working guy with a modest income, and a clean record. After bringing in a team of Murphy-backed professional dirt-diggers to review everything this CWA member ever posted on social media, they came up with a T-shirt with a logo they didn’t understand. In their fevered minds (modern-day Puritan mass hysteria?) it had to stand for “domestic terrorism” when, in fact, it was the logo used by Navy SEAL Chris Kyle.
Christopher Scott Kyle was a United States Navy SEAL sniper. He served four tours in the Iraq War and was awarded several commendations for acts of heroism and meritorious service in combat. He has over 150 confirmed kills and was awarded the Silver Star, four Bronze Star Medals with "V" devices for valor, a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with "V" device, as well as numerous other unit and personal awards. Kyle was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in 2009, and published his bestselling autobiography, American Sniper, in 2012. An eponymous film adaptation of Kyle's book, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring Bradley Cooper as Kyle, was released two years later. (Wikipedia)
The Sussex County Democrats tried this before. In 2017, Sparta’s own Kate Mateson led the charge attacking a GOP Assemblyman and his wife for attending a Country Western concert and having their photo snapped under the band’s banner. The band was thoroughly mainstream – Hank Williams Jr., as a matter of fact. But the Sussex Democrats claimed the flag was a Confederate Battle Flag – and went batshit over it and called for the Assemblyman to resign. The Sussex County Watchdog offered them $1,000 hard cash if they could produce a photograph of a Confederate army unit marching under a Hank Williams Jr. band banner (the Civil War was heavily photographed) but until this day, no Sussex County Democrat has ever come forward to collect.
That’s obviously all forgotten now, because Democrat Congressman Josh Gottheimer recently asked the GOP couple to attend one of the Congressman’s own telephone townhall events. The GOP Assemblyman’s wife, now an elected official herself, was asked by the Congressman to give the flag salute, while the GOP Assemblyman helped the Congressman with questions he didn’t understand about agriculture. From calls to resign to bi-partisan collaboration… it makes us wonder if the Dems didn’t know all that “Confederate flag” stuff was all bullshit in the first place.
We notice that whenever he gets caught in some hypocrisy or in an outright lie, Congressman Josh Gottheimer tries to deflect criticism by accusing those who disagree with him of something terrible. It’s a trick he is said to have picked-up from his former boss, Bill Clinton, who trashed the reputations of the women he forced himself upon.
Earlier this year, the New Jersey Globe reported on an instance when this routine badly backfired on Gottheimer:
Assembly Speaker Pro-Tempore Gordon Johnson has asked the Bergen County Prosecutor to investigate a September 2021 incident where a protestor allegedly screamed “Jew” at Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff) as a possible hate crime.
But even before the NJ Globe reported on it, Progressive journalists like Ryan Grim had dismantled Gottheimer’s allegations:
JOSH GOTTHEIMER’S WILD CLAIMS IN RUTGERS SPEECH ARE FALLING APART The New Jersey Democrat claimed that a protester screamed “Jew!” at him and that Jamal Khashoggi’s organization has links to Al Qaeda.
REP. JOSH GOTTHEIMER, a New Jersey Democrat, attacked the organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi on Monday as linked to Al Qaeda, echoing allegations that Saudi officials have leveled to muddy the waters around the state-sanctioned butchering of the Washington Post journalist.
In a speech at Rutgers University… Gottheimer said. “Hamas sympathizers, or others with ties to other terrorist organizations involved in 9/11, have no place on college campuses. Associates of Palestinian Islamic jihad have no place on this college campus. I know we all believe that hate has no home here. It’s time we all practice what we preach.”
Read Ryan Grim’s entire column here:
https://theintercept.com/2021/12/16/josh-gottheimer-antisemitism-khashoggi-al-qaeda-rutgers/
For a rational discussion on how the game of “linking” people to “terrorists” is played, watch this video from The Hill/ Rising…
Who is Ryan Grim?
Ryan W. Grim (born March 23, 1978) is an American author and journalist. Grim was Washington, D.C. bureau chief for HuffPost and is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept. He is also a political commentator for The Young Turks and appears frequently on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. His writings have appeared in several publications, including Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and Politico. He is the author of This Is Your Country on Drugs and We've Got People. He cofounded Strong Arm Press, an independent progressive publishing house. Grim and The Federalist editor Emily Jashinsky were the regular Friday hosts of Rising. They resigned in September 2022 and joined Breaking Points, where they host Counterpoints on Fridays.
Ryan Grim is certainly no right-winger.