Welcome to Redstate’s Water Cooler where every Tuesday we inform the readers of the best and brightest the culture wars have to offer.  Being an open thread, one is free to comment on these or any topic of interest.

Celebrity Fool of the Week

Riots in Gaza and the President calling animalistic humans “animals” dominated the headlines.  The move of the US embassy to Jerusalem brought this response from noted Mideast expert and future Secretary of State, Bette Midler:

“Fifty-two people die in protest over moving American Embassy to Jerusalem. Thanks, asshole! Your uninformed and demented actions have consequences! Don’t you get it? Those people had families too.”

Lost in translation: most of those killed were Hamas terrorists, but since when do facts matter when there is a narrative to be made?

Smackdown Live: BLM vs. ADL

As everyone is painfully aware, Starbucks will be shutting down one day so that their employees will receive racial sensitivity awareness training.  Starbucks has partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to conduct these sessions, but this did not sit well with Tamika Mallory, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter.  Her objection is that the ADL is biased in their support of Israel (an “apartheid state”) and others have claimed the ADL is anti-black.

This is the same Tamika Mallory who was dragged through the coals for attending speeches by noted anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan.  As for the ADL being “anti-black,” the only blacks they have openly criticized are noted anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

Berkeley Decides: The Cause of Campus Riots Was…

Not the perpetrators of the violence- that is, antifa Leftist thugs- but the conservative speakers invited to speak on campus.  Instead, these conservative speakers were actually out to incite violence and therefore make the university and others look bad.  Apparently, a cabal of conservative speakers got together one day, decided to make universities look bad by having themselves invited to speak so that thugs would then engage in violence.  This is to be expected from the likes of Berkeley- after all, the violent protesters were simply exercising their Constitutional rights by denying the Constitutional rights of others. That, my friends, is the definition of “twisted logic.”

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Montgomery county in Maryland recently debated whether to allocate almost $375,000 to fund an organization who will help low income illegal immigrants fight deportation.  If the special budget resolution passes, they will join other jurisdictions in funding legal aid for for people who violated the law.

Anti-Gun Hysteria 

Jepsen Magnet School in New Haven, Connecticut is a pre-K-8 magnet school that recently made some news when it was announced that police were called in to investigate the menace of a gun in the school…made of Legos.  The age and identity of the Lego-gun-toting perpetrator was not released, but being pre-K through 8th grade, one hopes it was in a lower grade.  If 8th graders were playing with Legos, there’s something wrong at that school…

Who Needs Washington and Lincoln When You Have Karl Marx?

The California Assembly recently debated a bill that would eliminate the celebration of either Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday and replace the tossed holiday with another one- International Socialist Workers Day, or May 1st.  It’s not that California doesn’t have more pressing problems, but actions like this merely confirm in the minds of many that California maybe going the way of Venezuela or Cuba.

The Strange Case of a Transgender and a Bikini Wax, or How to Shake Down a Business

Jason Carruthers is the owner of a waxing spa in Windsor, Canada.  A local transgender person, who identifies as a woman but has male plumbing, filed a complaint against the spa for allegedly refusing services since there was no male staff on duty that day to perform the requested bikini wax.  In fact, only a Muslim woman was working that day which would have opened another can of worms. The transgender “woman” with the male body parts is claiming they were denied services because of their gender identity even though Carruthers explained the reasons to him/her.  The anonymous transgender is seeking a $50,000 settlement for “immense harm to my dignity.” They also have launched a public relations attack on the spa through Facebook postings.

This whole issue will hopefully be resolved before the Orwellian-sounding Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.  If a mediator cannot resolve the problem, then Carruthers will be dragged before the Tribunal for final resolution of this heinous transgression.

That’s it for this week.  Be sure to check back next week for another edition of the Water Cooler’s presentation of THE CULTURE WARS!!!