90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

The Real Government Corruption...

Facing Possible Criminal Investigation Ocasio-Cortez Starts Covering Her Tracks

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is running scared and working to cover her tracks now that the walls are closing in on her.

It started when journalist Luke Thompson discovered that the 29-year-old’s boyfriend had a campaign email address.

Ocasio-Cortez insisted that he only had the campaign email address for the purpose of checking her calendar and was not on her staff.

But then it was discovered that her boyfriend did have a job working for her chief of staff during the campaign.

And on Monday it was discovered that that same chief of staff appears to have moved $1 million from a PAC he and Ocasio-Cortez run to his private companies.

Not to mention the fact that a campaign is not supposed to have any ties to the PACs that support them.

Both Ocasio-Cortez and her campaign manager Saikat Chakrabarti could be facing some significant prison time if they are guilty.

And now in an effort to cover her tracks apparently, she has gotten rid of the original email address that started the investigating.

“Fun fact: his email address no longer exists. Guess he doesn’t need calendar access anymore, eh @AOC?” Thompson wrote.

Watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission.

The complaint alleges that Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti illegally funneled $1 million to companies he ran from a PAC he was in charge of, The Washington Examiner reported.

Chakrabarti’s campaigns raised $3.3 million and diverted more than $1 million to his...

On January 7 of this year, Robert Spencer published an article at PJ Media about Amazon removing doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive. In that article, I asked:

How long will it be before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others also be dropped by Amazon?

The answer turned out to be 51 days.
It’s the British government and the BBC, rather than CAIR, that are likely behind this, but Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin -- and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson. In the last two weeks, Robinson spectacularly embarrassed the BBC by exposing the bias and dishonesty of its reporter John Sweeney. The retaliation has been swift and severe: Robinson has been banned from YouTube and Facebook, and now his book has been withdrawn from sale.

Coauthor Peter McLoughlin states:

[T]his is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them. Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon? Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.

McLoughlin is correct that Amazon’s behavior has been wildly inconsistent. He adds that Amazon officials are steadfastly mum on why the book was banned:

[They] refuse to reinstate the book and refuse to explain why it has been banned. So they have banned the No.1 best-selling exegesis of the Koran. I can’t get my head round it. Every few weeks for the past 18 months they had emailed me asking to put it into special sales programmes, as it was selling so well. For 18 months they sought to profit even more from the sales.

“As dark as my vision is,” McLoughlin concludes, “I thought we were 10 to 20 years away from dissenting books from being banned.”

Indeed. Those who object to my labeling Leftist totalitarians “fascists” should take careful note of this story. What group is most famous for burning books? That’s right. And what group is doing it now? Right again. I predicted this, but like Peter McLoughlin, I didn’t think it would come so soon.

This is an extremely ominous development. Amazon and Barnes and Noble -- which is also not carrying this book -- have a virtual monopoly on book sales. When these two giants refuse to carry a book, that book effectively does not exist. If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere.

Some will applaud this as the ultimate and laudable demise of “Islamophobia,” but it is actually far more insidious. If the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists cannot be criticized or even discussed openly, jihad terrorists will have an absolutely free...