LinkSwarm for January 25, 2019

How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

  • True tales from border enforcement. “I also had multiple cases where convicted child molesters were arrested illegally reentering the United States.” (Hat tip: Director Blue. )
  • Over at American Thinker, E.M. Cadwaladr is not a fan of recent immigration policy:

    The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.

    While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.

    Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.

    This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.

    Snip.

    They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.

  • Human smugglers: extortion and death threats. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abboyy’s Twitter feed.)
  • Are Democrats wavering on a border wall?
  • Luke Rosiak’s book on the Awan case, Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats, is out next week. I intend to pick up a copy.
  • How National Review stepped in it in the rush to denounce the Covington kids:

    It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.

    “They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.

    On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

    That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

    Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.

    But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”

    Snip.

    When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.

    Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)

    To be fair, French did address the issue in this piece. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady via The Other McCain.)

  • It turns out that openly wishing for the deaths of children who hold different political views than you do is a career-limiting decision. Who knew?
  • MSM lies about Trump supporters again. Clip and save this sentence for reuse…
  • Let the lawsuits begin! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Press That Sicced Mob On Teenagers Based On 10-Second Video Clip Unsure Why Some People Call Them ‘Fake News.'”
  • Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
  • Ace of Spades had some pungent observations on journalists and Twitter:

    As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.

    You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.

    The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.

    What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.

    Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.

    Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.

    Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!

  • The six axioms of Social Justice Warrioring. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott on Instapundit.)
  • “Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration.” Naturally Nancy Pelosi has given her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks to Intersectionality, Democrats are exploring bold new frontiers in graft! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “What if the FBI Had Probed Obama for Collusion with Iran?”
  • The Supreme Court has agreed to review New York City’s draconian gun laws.
  • David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • In China, it’s not enough for Communist Big Brother to know you’re in debt, he has to let everyone around you know you’re in debt as well.
  • Germany catches an Iranian spy.
  • This just in: Shelia Jackson Lee is still a scumbag. And no longer leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
  • Cahnman is a big fan of Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s committee assignments.
  • Powerline has a nice meme roundup of last week’s news. I’ll swipe a couple:

  • Could Alzheimer’s be caused by…gum disease? (Hat tip: David Shirpley on Twitter.)
  • Facebook is building an orbital death ray. Because they just weren’t evil enough before…
  • The fraudster behind the Fyre Festival.
  • Feel good story: A Puppy Saved From A Fire Becomes A Firefighter. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
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