Major technology companies including Apple, Facebook and YouTube deleted years of content from conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars platforms over allegations of hate speech, a sudden clampdown that is fueling the growing debate over how big technology companies choose to censor.
The move was unusual for its sweep and speed, suggesting a new assertiveness by technology companies that in the past have worked to avoid alienating conservatives, who often assert that left-leaning Silicon Valley is biased against them. The removals appeared to be prompted by more users flagging Infowars content for policy violations.
Jones’ shows long have sparked complaints because of many elaborate and unsupported claims, including that mass shootings such as the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School may have been staged and that the government orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In July, YouTube banned one of his videos from June titled “How to Prevent Liberalism,” which depicts a man shoving a kid to the ground.
But in acting against Jones in recent days, the technology companies cited unspecified violations of their rules against hateful language. Facebook said in a statement Monday it was removing four of Jones’ pages “for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.”
Note that Jones wasn’t kicked off Facebook for “being a lunatic” or libel or slander, it was failing to show sufficient deference to the sacred shibboleths of the left. Jones was kicked off for having the wrong opinions. And now anyone who opposes jihad, thinks illegal aliens should be deported, or refuses to call Bruce Jenner a woman is eligible for the same deplatforming.
(1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all. (2) Aside from its free-speech* implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights). (3) This is proof that we need to break up these big tech companies, which exercise way too much power via their near-monopolies. That they coordinate in the abuse of those monopolies only makes it clearer.
Here’s Infowars own Paul Joseph Wilson’s take on the purge (at least until YouTube decides to deplatform him as well):
I don’t necessarily agree with the need for new laws. Existing antitrust law may be sufficient.
Some tweets:
Aside from the utterly obnoxious & disingenuous equating of censorship opposition with "defending Alex Jones," this faith that Mark Zuckerberg, Google execs & their friends will faithfully and benevolently decide what is "hate speech" is just laughable https://t.co/3KXEHvi2n5https://t.co/ODuuEpxuBE
Job interviews and book-related work have taken up the majority of my waking hours this week. Also, The Burning Time has fully arrived here in central Texas. It’s supposed to hit 108° on Monday…
There are plenty of risks with President Donald Trump’s trade strategy in China, but China faces risks of its own:
The smartest short-term decision Beijing can make is simply to absorb the next round of blows and hold its punches. For instance, if Washington moves ahead to impose 25% tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports, Beijing would withhold fire, in the hope of enticing Washington into a ceasefire, which in turn could create an opportunity to negotiate a face-saving way to avoid further and much more costly escalations.
The most compelling rationale behind this strategy of quick capitulation is to protect China’s centrality in the global manufacturing supply chain. About 43% of Chinese merchandise trade in 2017 (totaling $4.3 trillion) is, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “processing trade” (which involves importing intermediate goods and assembling the products in China). What China gains from processing trade is the utilization of its low-cost labor force, factories, and some technological spillover. Processing trade generates low value-added and profitability. For example, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones in China, had an operating margin of only 5.8% last year.
One of the greatest risks China faces in a prolonged trade war with the U.S. is the loss of its processing trade. Even a modest increase in American tariffs can make it uneconomical to base processing in China. Should the U.S.-China trade war escalate, many foreign companies manufacturing in China would be forced to relocate their supply chains. China could face the loss of millions of jobs, tens of thousands of shuttered factories, and a key driver of growth.
However, capitulating to a “trade bully,” as the Chinese media calls Trump, is hard for Xi, a strongman in his own right. Worse still, it is unclear what Trump wants or how China can appease him. The terms his negotiators presented to Beijing in early May were so harsh that it is inconceivable that Xi could accept them without being seen as selling out China.
Even if the trade war with the U.S. could be de-escalated with Chinese concessions, Beijing faces another painful decision. The trade war in general, and in particular the forced shutdown of the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE after Washington banned the company from using American-made parts have highlighted China’s strategic vulnerability from its economic interdependence with the U.S. Before the two countries became geopolitical adversaries, economic interdependence was a valuable asset for China. It could take advantage of this relationship to build up its strength while the mutual economic benefits cushioned their geopolitical conflict.
But with the overall U.S.-China relationship turning adversarial, economic interdependence is not only hard to sustain (as shown by the trade war), but also is rapidly becoming a serious strategic liability. As the economically-weaker party, China is particularly affected. In the technological arena, China now finds itself at the mercy of Washington in terms of access to vital parts (such as semiconductors) and critical technologies (operating systems such as Android and Windows). Should the U.S. decide to cut off Chinese access for whatever reason, a wide swathe of Chinese economy could face disruption.
China’s somewhat vulnerable on semiconductors, but it’s severely vulnerable on semiconductor equipment.
Democratic U.S. House candidate and socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “We need to occupy every airport.” Yeah. I can’t possibly see that backfiring. Sayeth Powerline’s John Hindraker:
Yes, please! Please go straight to LaGuardia and shut it down. But don’t stop there! “Every airport” needs to be occupied and shut down by Democrats. Between now and the midterm elections, Democrats should do all they can to make air travel inconvenient, and preferably impossible.
This actually happened not too long ago, in the fall of 2001. Ocasio-Cortez may be too young to remember it clearly, but all of America’s airports were closed for a few days as a result of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Ocasio-Cortez is more ambitious, of course. She doesn’t just want to shut down “every airport” for a few days, she wants to make it long-term. Terrific, I say! Led by Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party could be as popular as al Qaeda by November.
Congress breaks record confirming trump picks. Also, check out this from Sen. Dianna Feinstein (D-CA): Oldham’s record “could not be more extreme and overtly political.” Really? Did he order kittens to be slaughtered in his chamber so he could bath in their blood while invoking Satan? No? In that case, I’d say he his a lot of headroom on the “more extreme” front… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The most difficult times I faced during my years with the LAPD were during the years Bernard Parks served as its chief. Parks, in an overreaction to the Rampart scandal (which, though a genuine scandal, was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station), had disbanded the LAPD’s gang units and instituted a disciplinary system that placed a penalty on proactive police work. It was under Chief Parks that I attended a supervisors’ meeting after a week in which my patrol division had seen four murders and a wave of lesser crimes. Despite these grim statistics, not a single word at this meeting touched on the subject of crime. What did we talk about? Citizen complaints. And even at that we didn’t discuss them in terms of the corrosive effect they were having on officer morale. Instead, we talked about the processing of the paperwork and the minutia of formatting the reports. Fighting crime, it seemed, had taken a back seat to dealing with citizen complaints, even the most frivolous of which required hours and hours of a supervisor’s time to investigate and complete the required reports.
As one might have expected, officers reacted to these disincentives by practicing “drive-and-wave” policing. Yes, they responded to radio calls as ever, but it became all but impossible to coax them out of their cars to investigate suspicious activity when they came upon it. As one might also have expected, the crime numbers reflected this change in police attitudes. Violent crime, which had been falling for seven years, began to increase and continued to increase until Bernard Parks was let go and replaced by William Bratton.
Which brings us back to Baltimore, where, USA Today informs us, 342 people were murdered in 2017, bringing its murder rate to an all-time high and making it the deadliest large city in America. (Baltimore’s population last year was about 611,000. In Los Angeles, by comparison, with a population of about 3.8 million, there were 293 murders last year.)
The Baltimore crime wave can be traced, almost to the very day in April 2015, that Freddie Gray, a small-time drug dealer and petty criminal, died in police custody. When Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the ill-considered decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death, she sent a clear message to the rest of the city’s police officers: concerns about crime and disorder will be subordinated to the quest for social justice.
As was the case in Los Angeles years ago, the result was entirely predictable. Officers disengaged from proactive police work, minimizing their risk of being the next cop to be seated in the defendant’s chair in some Marilyn Mosby show trial. The prevailing thought among Baltimore’s cops was something like this: They can make me come to work, they can make me handle my calls and take my reports, but they can’t make me chase the next hoodlum with a gun I come across, because if I chase him I might catch him, and if I catch him I might have to hit him or, heaven forbid, shoot him. And if that happens and Marilyn Mosby comes to the opinion that I transgressed in any way . . . well, forget it. Let the bodies fall where they may, and I’ll be happy to put up the crime-scene tape and wait for the detectives and the coroner to show up.
Andrew Cuomo fundraising tidbits. Cuomo has $31.1 million cash on hand and spent more on TV advertising ($1.5 million) than Cynthia Nixon has raised in total. Bonuses: Low-level shenanigans (one guy gave 69 donations totally $77) and Winklevoss twins!
Defeated Republican state representative Jason Villalba calls for President Trump’s impeachment. Thanks for reminding Republican primary voters, yet again, why they dumped you for Lisa Luby Ryan.
“Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested.” Bonus 1: She later bite a deputy’s thumb so hard she broke a bone. Bonus 2: She was elected to the Huron (population: 73) city council with a grand total of 2 votes.
Nancy Pelosi says she wants to be Speaker again. How nice of her to fire up the Republican base for midterms…
Democratic advantage on generic congressional ballots down to 1.2%. And that’s from Reuters, which is not known to be particularly Republican or Trump friendly…
I’m thinking that the Democrats who are making such a big deal out of these ads really don’t themselves believe in democracy. They have been going on and on for a year and a half about how Donald Trump shouldn’t be President. Personally, I want to believe in democracy, and what I saw back in November 2016 is that the American people voted Donald Trump into office. I accept that he is rightfully President because he won the election. It bothers me tremendously that so many people won’t do that. I think they do not believe in democracy. And I know they are leaning very hard into the argument that what happened wasn’t real democracy. Look at those stupid ads they’ve made such a big deal about!
AND: Please don’t tell me about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. What if Donald Trump had held rallies in upstate New York and various places in California, etc. etc.? He won the election that was held. She won an imaginary election that he wasn’t competing in.
Baghdad now has thriving night life and bars again. Plus men sport hairstyles that look like they’re auditioning to play the next alien race on Star Trek. Also this: “As the war against ISIS wound down, [Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-]Abadi began removing the drab, ugly concrete blast walls that once divided neighborhoods. The government is moving many of these barriers to the Syrian border, where it is creating a wall to keep out ISIS militants.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Bret Easton Ellis on Kayne West’s redpilling: “As someone who considers themselves a disillusioned Gen-X’er, I think there IS a backlash brewing against leftist hysteria…What I used to semi-align myself with has no answers for anything right now, just constant bitching and finding ways to delegitimize an election.” And if you can’t trust the author of American Psycho to offer unbiased political commentary, who can you trust?
“Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It’s a feature. It’s part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats.”
Uber software decided pedestrian was a false positive. Result: Dead pedestrian.
Since Dick’s Sporting Goods has decided to lobby for gun control (just how does that increase shareholder value for a sporting goods company?), Springfield Armory has cut ties with them.
Now some links from the “Old News Is So Exciting!” file:
Since I was distracted primary week by a dying dog, this bit of news slipped under the radar and I only recently realized I forgot to report it: Democratic State Rep. Dawnna Dukes went down in flames back in March, along with fellow Democratic state reps Roberto Alonzo of Dallas, Tomas Uresti (brother of convicted felon and former state senator Carlos Uresti) of San Antonio, and Diana Arevalo of San Antonio.
From 2015: “Police find 3,700 knives, satanic shrine in mobile home of Florida woman who tried stabbing an officer.” I think that’s taking your cosplay too far. Also, unless your ID card says “Sarah Kerrigan,” you don’t get to be the Queen of Blades…
This Penny Arcade post is actually from several years ago. I thought it was a swell piece of writing then, and since Tycho relinked to it recently, I read it again, and still think it’s a swell piece of writing. I commend it to your attention.
The attack on April 13th went up against a 21st-century Russian superweapon–the S-400 Triumf air-defense system, a mobile state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and missile network featuring four distinct missile types targeting aircraft in any performance envelope from treetop level to high altitude – including stealth aircraft (at a range of 150 miles, yet). For a decade we have been assured by military analysts that the S-400 is a game-changer – a system that could rend the heavens in twain and call into question the very concept of air power under battlefield conditions.
And yet, last Friday, the epoch-making Triumf failed to let out so much as a peep as 105 cruise missiles trashed Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plants. Not a single SAM left the rack while the attack was proceeding. (The Syrians did fire over 40 missiles at nothing, but only after the attack was completed. This is standard behavior among Arab armed forces – the Libyans and Iraqis did the same thing.) The Russians claim to have shot down over 70 of the attacking cruise missiles. How do we know this isn’t true? First, because the targets were utterly destroyed, and second, because the French were involved. If the Russians had shot down any U.S. missiles at all we would be hearing from Paris that American “missiles de croisière” are useless, and that’s why we had to turn to the French, who invented the cruise missile in 1689. (This is scarcely an exaggeration – Emmanuel Macron has gone on record to state that it was he, le président de la France, who persuaded Donald Trump to carry out the strike.)
Some might argue that the new AGM-158 JASSM stealth missile foxed the S-400, but half the missiles launched were actually thirty-year-old BGM-109 Tomahawks, the equivalent of Colt Peacemakers as far as the world of missile development is concerned. If the mighty S-400 can’t shoot down a thirty-year-old missile, what can it do?
Also this: “Russia today is what it always was – a Potemkin village hiding a nation in a state of suspended collapse.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit 51%.
Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.
Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.
McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.
The staffer also claims the campaign never paid him somewhere between 12-15 thousand dollars on top of a few thousand dollars in reimbursements. While he has since recovered, he expressed concern about former staffers with “families and children.”
I’ll never forget the first time I went to a steakhouse here. I thought I’d eaten steak before. I was expecting this small, flat circle of meat, maybe a couple of fries on the side. Fine. C’est bon.
So in Texas, steak is a different thing. I’m at this restaurant and they put this plate in front of me, and, well, there was barely any plate visible — all I saw was this was this big, big piece of meat. I look around, maybe I had been mistaken in what I ordered. Maybe this waiter was playing a prank on me. It looked like a whole farm animal in front of me. But everyone with me laughed and nodded and told me that in Texas, this is a steak.
Then I was introduced to these other foods I’d never seen before but were totally amazing. Mac and cheese, man. Guys, you are blessed for having mac and cheese here. It’s a work of art. Bravo, guys.
And that was the first time I thought, O.K. O.K., I think I can get used to this place.
But if he really wants to be “King of Books,” he should know that road runs through me…
Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.
We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it should become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.
Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.
If you run around saying “We should end border enforcement”, enough people to form a blocking coalition are going to hear that as “He wants the U.S. to sit on its hands as erosion of social trust degrades it into a shithole.” Of course most of them don’t have this intellectually analyzed – it’s a more a gut feeling. But no less powerful for that, especially since the problem is real.
Do you want more Trump? Because that is how you get more Trump – or possibly someone worse. I don’t think there is actually a large cohort of Americans willing to sign on to full-throated 19th-century-style nativism yet, and I’m glad of that. But that’s where the next turn of the screw takes us.
We can only save the positive benefits of immigration by controlling it. And by growing some freaking humility about our biases. It’s easy for elite whites like you and me to see only the upside of immigration (cool restaurants, interesting music, exotically pretty girls, lower price levels due to labor cost push on the things we buy, getting to feel virtuous about our inclusivity); immigration seldom has any obvious downside for us unless we roll snake-eyes and get killed by MS-13 or something.
We tend to miss the fact that if you’re a native-born unskilled laborer or minority or legal immigrant the cost-benefit ratio looks very different and not favorable at all. Loose labor markets are good to us, but sure as hell not to our poorer compatriots. A little more compassion and a little less class-blindness on our part would be an improvement.
Show of hands: Who thinks this stops, even slows down, once those mean old not-actually-assault weapons get banned? That liberals have taken a hard stand in favor of cowardice does not exactly fill one with confidence that once we give up our Second Amendment rights that we’ll be safer or freer.
I guess we both have blood on our hands for having this chat – the real heroes are Sheriff Israel and the Broward Cowards. Because of the children or something.
But at CPAC, the president was super clear – he is not wavering on the Second Amendment. Sure, gooey puff boys like Marco Rubio are eager to roll over and show belly, but a hard line on our rights is not going anywhere. Hey Little Marco, this is the Republican Party, not the Foam Party.
Rubio, displaying the political savvy that convinced him to don a studded leather collar and be led around on a leash by Chuck Schumer, talked Congressman Brian Mast into rolling too. Suckers. The New York Times was delighted that Mast agreed to commit career suicide by sticking his constituents in the back when he tried to leverage his being a vet into somehow qualifying him to tell everyone else what their rights are. Amazing, but those of us vets who don’t dance to the libs’ tune never seem to get a Golden Ticket to the NYT op-ed page.
These gullible outliers don’t change the fact that the rest of the GOP is solid. That’s why the left is changing the rules and trashing our norms to do what they can’t do politically through intimidation. They have cultural power and we don’t, and they now seek to use businesses to destroy our rights and silence our voices. Understand that they don’t want an argument or a conversation – they want to use their non-governmental cultural power to deny us access to a platform so that we are unable to make our views heard. We need to recognize this dangerous trend and counterattack ruthlessly with our political power.
Schlichter also reminds conservatives that liberals don’t hate the NRA, they hate you:
Just give them a listen. Those carefully selected moppet puppets are out there on TV telling Normals “We are going to outlive you.” When leftists tell you that you are going to die first, you should believe they mean it. They have a track record of making that happen.
And then there is the new meme, that the NRA is a “terrorist” organization. This means you are a “terrorist” simply by advocating for your political views. Think about that. Labeling your political opponents as “terrorists” – gee, that can’t end badly. Violence against and suppression of terrorists is okay, isn’t it? And when this ploy works with guns, it will happen with the next right the left wants to take from us.
How’s that blood on your hands? Sure, you were thousands of miles away, and your AR-15 – like the 14,999,999 other AR-15s out there – never shot up a school, but just believing in the Second Amendment makes you a non-human. Those of us who know something about history know that the people leftists regard as non-human always tend to end up non-living.
Q: Why are Senate Democrats torpedoing their own gun bill? A: Because it might pass:
When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) first proposed the Fix-NICS act last November, he had four members of each party as sponsors, calling it “the most important piece of bipartisan guns legislation since Manchin-Toomey.” The bill would plug the gaps in reporting by federal agencies to the background-check system, failings that contributed to the fatal church shooting that month in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Now, though, Democrats have spent their first days back from recess rejecting Fix-NICS, and even Murphy doesn’t want a stand-alone vote for his “most important” bill.
Because it fixes problems with the existing NICS system rather than disarming law-abiding Americans. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
In late November, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo flew to Buffalo for a fund-raising trip, a quick two-stop jaunt that brought in more than $200,000 in donations for his re-election campaign.
The events, one at an Embassy Suites hotel and the other a more intimate gathering at a private residence, were hosted by two men familiar to Mr. Cuomo — and to state government.
One host, Steven J. Weiss, had been appointed by Mr. Cuomo to the New York State Housing Finance Agency in 2011 and the state board of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in 2016. Government records show that Mr. Weiss has donated $53,000 to the governor’s campaign since being picked for the housing agency.
The other, Kenneth A. Manning, had been named by lawmakers to the same cancer research institute board, and had been appointed by Mr. Cuomo to a state judicial screening committee in 2011. Records show that Mr. Manning has donated $50,500 since his 2011 appointment.
That type of arrangement — appointments go out, campaign cash comes back in — has vexed government reformers in Albany for generations. Things were supposed to change in 2007, when Eliot L. Spitzer, then the newly elected governor, issued an executive order barring most appointees from donating to or soliciting donations for the governor who made the appointment. Mr. Cuomo renewed the order on his first day in office.
But a New York Times investigation found that the Cuomo administration has quietly reinterpreted the directive, enabling him to collect about $890,000 from two dozen of his appointees. Some gave within days of being appointed.
The governor also has accepted $1.3 million from the spouses, children and businesses of appointees, state records show.
Even the liberals talk like Ukip, while those on the Right talk of mass deportations. Every conversation involves the phrase: ‘I’m not racist but . . .’
Last weekend, thousands of Left-wing demonstrators descended on the town for an anti-fascist demonstration following the attack on the migrants. The locals, however, did not take part.
All tell me that the situation had been getting out of hand long before recent atrocities, with a marked rise in begging, petty theft and increased inter-racial tension.
Most suspect the authorities are not telling them the whole story about Pamela Mastropietro’s death.
So remember how Russian “mercenaries” got their ass kicked by American forces in Syria? Evidently there’s audio from the survivors talking about just how bad that ass-kicking was. Evidently (assuming the audio is legit, for which I make no claim one way or another), “our guys didn’t have anything besides the assault rifles…nothing at all, not even mentioning shoulder-fired SAMs or anything like that.” If true, this posits a tremendous failure of either leadership or situational awareness akin to attempting a bayonet charge uphill against an entrenched machine gun nest in World War I. You don’t attack a well-defended enemy’s position across a river using only small arms. But it also makes it harder to draw any conclusions about the relative quality of American and Russian troops; an American unit attempting such a monumentally stupid attack against similarly defended Russian forces would likely suffer the same devastating defeat.
Police arrest Daniel Frisiello, the guy who allegedly sent an envelope of white powder to Donald Trump, Jr. Judging from his targets, the things Frisiello allegedly hates are: A.) Trump, B.) Jews, and C.) People who hate pedophiles.
Also: Guess which party he belonged to?
BREAKING: Daniel Frisiello, just charged by DOJ w/sending hoax white powder letter to @DonaldJTrumpJr's family is a Massachusetts Democratic activist who donated to Act Blue in the same cycle they donated to MA's @SenWarren.
A 43-case dossier handed to the party leader in the document entitled LabourToo contains shocking complaints from women describing themselves as MPs, candidates, staff and activists.
MPs are due today to debate proposals for a new parliamentary complaints and grievance system drawn up by Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, in the wake of a rash of complaints of inappropriate behaviour.
One woman told LabourToo she was raped at the annual conference, but “no-one cared” when she told her regional party and an MP.
Another said an individual facing rape accusations was allowed to resign quietly and others told of lewd comments and leg-stroking.
After Rotherham, is anyone really surprised?
A tweet:
This notion that women should vote for female candidates insulting and wrong. I call that "vote your vagina." I wouldn't vote for somebody because they have earlobes; why should I vote for somebody because they have a vagina?
From a co-worker who was evidently not fired: “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.”
“An employee who sexually identifies as ‘a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin’ and ‘an expansive ornate building’ presented a talk entitled ‘Living as a Plural Being’ at an internal company event.”
Numerous examples of Google officially proscribing conservative thought and pushing SJW victimhood identity politics.
No wonder Google’s “fact checking” only targets conservative sites. They want America at large to reflect Google’s far-left ideological monoculture.
Via Prager University comes ex-Google engineer James Damore explaining how when he used science and logic in an internal memo to explain that not all differences in hiring patterns between men and women was the result of sexism. When the internal memo was leaked, Google fired him for his heresy.
To summarize, the indictment is an exercise in omission. No mention of the Awan group’s theft of information from Congress. Not a hint about the astronomical sums the family was paid, much of it for no-show “work.” Not a word about Wasserman Schultz’s keeping Awan on the payroll for six months during which (a) he was known to be under investigation, (b) his wife was known to have fled to Pakistan, and (c) he was not credentialed to do the IT work for which he had been hired. Nothing about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged, prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what should be their best evidence.
The Democratic National Committee just posted its worst July fundraising numbers in a decade, raising questions about why the party machine cannot capitalize on President Trump’s low approval ratings and whether new Chairman Tom Perez is up to the task.
The DNC raised $3.8 million last month, compared to $10.2 million for the Republican National Committee. The tally fit a pattern for the Democrats, who have posted a string of depressed fundraising numbers month after month this year, even after new party boss Perez took charge in February.
Why, it’s almost like Russian conspiracy theories, LARP Nazis and the the imminent threat of Confederate statues doesn’t motivate Democratic donors to open their wallets. Or that Bernie Sanders supporters realize that the DNC is still the the hands of the same corrupt Clinton cronies who rigged the 2016 primaries…
“Ask yourself a few questions: Does the typical ‘swing’ voter who made the difference for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin consider monuments to Robert E. Lee a major social problem?”
“Arrest warrants are out for three men who skipped their arraignments yesterday after being cuffed following the ‘Free Speech Rally’ on the Boston Common Saturday and massive counterdemonstration.” So if you spot Antifa dumbasses Adan Daroba, Roberto Bonilla or Chad Cruger, contact the police… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Update: Joshua Stuart Cobin, AKA “tear gas in the nads guy” has been arrested for assault, evidently for kicking the tear gas canister back toward police. There are a lot of real crimes numerous Antifa protestors should be arrested for, but this one seems a very dubious charge if that’s all it’s for.
Oh yeah, we’ll repeal Obamacare. Oh yeah, we’ll defend the border. Oh yeah, we’ll defund the baby-butchering cartel. Oh yeah, blah blah blah blah blah. All lies, but they didn’t care. They had their power and prestige and the promise of a fat paycheck down the road when they moved from Congress to K Street. Actual conservative ideology? Well, that was for the rubes. And we were the rubes. We in the base, who are suffering from the establishment’s incompetent mismanagement of the society it had been foolish to try to micromanage in the first place, tried to warn them. But the Fredocons wouldn’t listen, because they’re smart, not like everyone says, like dumb…
That warning was called ‘the Tea Party,” and the GOP establishment didn’t like it either. Remember how all those activated Republican voters helped recapture Congress, yet most of the establishment types looked at them like they were something nasty that was smeared on their shoes? See, the base isn’t supposed to be activated. It’s supposed to be obedient. It’s supposed to turn out on election day to do volunteer work and write checks. It’s not supposed to try to have input. That’s for our betters, not for us.
But the thing is, now we’re woke, and we’ve realized that our establishment sucks, and that we’re tired of being the suckees. They didn’t listen to us when we gave them the Tea Party, so now we gave them Trump. And they’re very, very upset with us. That’s a key reason they want to undercut Trump. Some people are just always going to want to trash the guy getting the attention and wielding the influence they think rightfully belongs to them. That’s true whether they are some donkey–looking senator from Arizona or Nebraska pimping a book about his agonizing moral struggles, or some tiresome op-ed scribbler serving as the domesticated house conservative on a failing liberal rag, or the invasion-happy beneficiary of his parents’ success who finds he can’t fill the cabins on his brochure’s cruises anymore.
“Chief Obamacare Architect Fired, Forced To Settle Fraudulent Billing Investigation In Vermont.” I know we were all hoping he’d be pushed off the Nakatomi Tower…
You say that White Nationalists believe that everyone who goes to college is an “academic elite.” You then say that Republicans promote “anti-intellectualism.” You offer no proof to support either claim, but it really doesn’t matter – your statements successfully connect two radically different organizations by alleging a shared belief. Thus, White Nationalists and The Republican Party suddenly have something in common – a contempt for higher education. Then, you make it personal. You say that Republicans “love” me because they believe that my initiative and “their” initiative are one and the same. But of course, “their” initiative is now the same initiative as White Nationalists.
Very clever. Without offering a shred of evidence, you’ve implied that Republicans who support mikeroweWORKS do so because they believe I share their disdain for all things “intellectual.” And poof – just like that, Republicans, White Nationalists, and mikeroweWORKS are suddenly conflated, and the next thing you know, I’m off on a press tour to disavow rumors of my troubling association with the Nazis!
Far-fetched? Far from it. That’s how logical fallacies work. A flaw in reasoning or a mistaken belief undermines the logic of a conclusion, often leading to real-world consequences. And right now, logical fallacies are not limited to the warped beliefs of morons with tiki torches, and other morons calling for “more dead cops.” Logical fallacies are everywhere.
“One Statistics Professor Was Just Banned By Google.” Statistics professor Salil Mehta, adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science, was banned by Google last Friday. “On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.” His blog isn’t political and his Twitter account follows several prominent Democrats. (Update: restored.)
“For many Republicans, what matters most about Donald Trump is that he’s demonstrated resolve against the enemy — not the Islamic State or the Taliban, but the media.”
The Village Voice to end print publication. “Under its current ownership, the paper eliminated sex advertising.” Given that’s the only way “alternative” weeklies make money, I bet that was the final nail in the coffin. (Hat tip: Dwight.)