Lefties: Liberals are simply better people than those evil conservatives! Science: Not so much:
According to recent studies, when it comes to how people are treated, conservatives are more likely to treat people equally.
You read that correctly.
According to a recent article on Psychology Today, “several recent studies over the past few years cast doubt on” the idea that liberals treat individuals and groups more equally than conservatives despite liberals’ “self-reported support for equality.”
On Twitter, “liberals were more likely to amplify the successes of female and Black athletes than male and White athletes, whereas conservatives treated the successes of groups more similarly,” one study found.
Other studies showed that “white liberals presented less self-competence to black than white interaction partners, whereas white conservatives treated black and white interaction partners more similarly. And in another set, liberals had stronger desires to censor passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.
If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.
Snip.
The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.
That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.
That encouragement is the unifying theme behind these policy disasters, one on the border, the other in our cities. The other unifying theme is their justification under the fashionable rubric of “social justice” and “equity.” What those feel-good arguments ignore is that our criminal laws are democratic efforts to preserve personal safety and community integrity. Failing in those responsibilities harms all law-abiding citizens.
Six weeks before yesterday was Tuesday, January 26. On that day, Texas reported 22,796 new cases of COVID-19 and 332 new deaths from the pandemic.
One month before yesterday was Tuesday, February 9. On that day, Texas reported 13,282 new cases of COVID-19 and 303 new deaths from the pandemic.
Two weeks before yesterday was Tuesday, February 23, Texas reported 10,090 new cases of COVID-19 and 258 new deaths from the virus.
Yesterday was Tuesday, March 9. The state of Texas reported 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and 168 new deaths from the virus.
It’s not quite a straight or smooth line, but you can see a steady decline in cases, followed by a similar decline in deaths. This doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. But it does suggest that the worst is over. Hospitals across the state now report a significant amount of unused capacity. “State health officials in Texas reported to the federal government that 75 percent of inpatient beds and 80 percent of ICU beds in hospitals across the state were still occupied as of March 6. Around 9 percent of beds statewide were filled by COVID-19 patients, they reported.” (Unused hospital beds are good for emergencies, but not good for the long-term financial health of the hospital.)
Texas ranks second in the country in the number of vaccine shots administered, with nearly 7.3 million, but it also ranks second in the number of shots received from manufacturers, because doses are allocated to states by population size. As of this morning, the state has used 75 percent of its delivered supply, which is not an impressive percentage. (It is worth keeping in mind that as more doses get delivered, every state’s percentage-used figure is declining a bit; North Dakota and Minnesota lead the country at 87 percent.) Fifteen percent of Texans have received one shot, and 8.2 percent are fully vaccinated. (We used to use the term “received both shots,” but now the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine is rolling out.) Obviously, getting hit with a terrible winter storm and experiencing widespread power outages does not help a state accelerate its vaccination program.
This week, another million doses have arrived or are scheduled to arrive in Texas. A week ago, Texas made all school and child-care workers eligible for the vaccine.
With the rise of gig economy jobs such as driving for Uber and other forms of independent work enabled by the digital era, more than 57 million Americans now work as freelancers in some capacity. But President Biden just endorsed a radical labor law that endangers their livelihood.
House Democrats recently reintroduced the PRO Act, which, among many sweeping reforms, would make many commonplace forms of independent contractor (freelance) arrangements illegal. It’s based on a California law that was so dysfunctional even voters in the very blue state voted to change it.
“He literally forgets the name of his Secretary of Defense, forgets the position, as well as the name of the Pentagon, calling him ‘the guy that runs that outfit over there.'”
Slow Joe is not big on news conferences. “Biden has gone longer without facing extended questions from reporters than any of his 15 predecessors over the past 100 years.”
Entire Nevada Democratic Party staff quits after Bernie Bros sweep every seat.
Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.
She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.
On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.
Democrats: We must destroy coal! Coal workers: Hey, we’re starting to take this personally. “Within two decades, your profession goes from being championed by the Democratic Party and labor officials to one that they want to destroy.”
Bad cop: “Dallas police officer allegedly hired hitmen to kill two people.” “Officer Bryan Riser, 36, was arrested Thursday in the unrelated slayings of Liza Saenz, 31, and Albert Douglas, 60, after one of the men charged in Saenz’s death told investigators he kidnapped and killed them at the officer’s direction.”
NYT‘s Maggie Halberstam just admits that Trump drove her crazy. Why does anyone think ordinary Americans will ever trust MSM outlets like New York Times ever again?
Matthew McConaughey teases a run for Texas Governor again. I don’t know enough about his politics to consider him a viable candidate (though he’s probably more viable than Beto O’Rourke on day 1), but the idea of him beating Greg Abbott isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it was a year ago, before Abbott maintained the coronavirus lockdown long after data said it was ineffective.
In a Wednesday evening Twitter video, with State Reps. Craig Goldman (R–Fort Worth) and Phil King (R–Weatherford) on either side of him, Abbott claimed Big Tech competitor Gab was “antisemitic” and that such companies “have no place in Texas and certainly do not represent Texas values.”
He offered no evidence to back up his claim against Gab. He also praised legislation from Goldman and King “that fights antisemitism in Texas.”
“I’m not on Gab a lot but I wouldn’t consider the platform as ‘anti Semitic’ …and I’m a Jew,” a citizen named Lisa replied to Abbott’s tweet. “Stop this nonsense.”
Gab recently skyrocketed in popularity, claiming more than 2 million new users in January after Twitter permanently banned then-President Trump and Amazon, Apple, and Google teamed up to shut down conservative social media app Parler.
Abbott’s attack on the free speech platform contradicts his words from last week when he defended free speech and berated Facebook and Twitter for their censorship.
“They are choosing which viewpoints are going to be allowed to be presented,” Abbott said at the time. “Texas is taking a stand against Big Tech political censorship: We’re not going to allow it in the Lone Star State.”
Mainstream media coverage of Gab has attacked its free-speech approach to moderation, labeling it a haven of “QAnon conspiracy theories, misinformation and anti-Semitic commentary […] .”
“Gab is not an ‘anti-semitic’ platform,” the company replied to Abbott’s tweet. “We protect the political speech of all Americans, regardless of viewpoint, because in this age of cancel culture nobody else will.”
“The enemies of freedom smear us with every name in the book because they hate America and they hate free speech,” Gab continued. “It’s a shame to see a GOP politician fall for this trap when conservative values are under sustained attack all over the country.”
Behind the Covid19 news, outside the 1619 wars, far more important than Dr Seuss, and much more far-reaching than dismantling the classics, a real line is being crossed in American education, and therefore American society as a whole. It’s the accelerating abandonment of standardized tests, the one objective measurement of students’ ability and potential in our society and culture: 77 percent of high school seniors sent in SAT scores in 2019-20; only 44 percent this year; and many schools want to keep it that way. What was initially a temporary suspension of tests because of Covid has become an opportunity to tear down the entire system.
The rationale for the SAT abolition movement is — surprise! — critical theory, which insists that any measurement that results in different outcomes among ethnic or racial groups is a priori racist. (Except for all cases when non-whites and non-Asians do better than whites or Asians, in which case, never mind.) In the words this week of Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York: “Standardized testing is a pillar of systemic racism.”
His argument is pure Kendi: the results are solely and exclusively what determines if a test is racist. Not the test itself; not evidence about its fairness or otherwise; not data about how it is constructed; not studies that examine its effects alongside every other way of measuring academic potential. Just the results.
There is no countering this argument because it is not an argument. It is a threat. All it tells us is that the power of the term “white supremacist” will be ruthlessly deployed to shut down anyone who dares to argue that the SAT is, in fact, the least culturally biased of all measurements, the one thing wealthy kids cannot buy, and the most helpful tool in discovering the potential of poor, first-generation immigrant, black and Hispanic children, and rescuing them from the restrictions of class as well as race.
Portland Antifa is at it again, trying to storm banks and break into the federal courthouse again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Milo Yiannopoulos now says he’s ex-gay. “I was never wholly at home in the gay lifestyle — Who is? Who could be? — and only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles.” Whatever. His agent provocateur pose has worn pretty thin over the years. But I suspect this is one “lifestyle choice” liberals won’t be celebrating.
Local man Craig Trudeau gave thanks to the good Lord above today that he’s an American so he doesn’t have to pretend to care about the royal family at all.
Trudeau said he is extremely humbled and grateful to have been born in the best country ever created by God, especially because it means he doesn’t have to care about Meghan Markle or Prince Harry.
“Lord, thank you that I was born in your chosen country of America, so that I don’t have to give a wooden nickel about whoever this prince and princess or king or duke or whoever they are,” he said Monday as he cleaned his AR-15 and shot off fireworks in front of his house, because he lives in America and so can do whatever he wants.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Democrats dance to China’s tune, the media suddenly discover that Hunter Biden is covered in a thick coat of industrial-grade sleaze, California continues to destroy its economy, and Elon Musk moves to Texas.
The most shocking thing about the recent news story that flatulent Russiagate hoaxer and American-nuking enthusiast Rep. Eric Swalwell was caught intertwined with a Chinese honey pot is…well, actually nothing about it is shocking. This is totally on-brand for the Dems and especially this particular clown. It’s not clear how far he got with this Democrat-diddling doxie, but the best case for Swalwell is that he was a fool who couldn’t see how unlikely it was for a DC 8 (and real world 5) to want anything to do with him other than as a mark. The worst case is that he eagerly betrayed his country for a roll in the rice with this Beijing bimbo.
Either way, he’s a disgrace.
But this singularly unaccomplished punch-line, this aspiring Beto without the hype or substance (Swalwell’s status as a furry is unknown, but I have my suspicions), is all too representative of his garbage party. The fact is that Red China is delighted by the opportunity to get back to business as usual with a Democrat administration – and in the case of a potential President Biden*, that’s literally business as usual. The garbage media didn’t think his crack-huffing, loser spawn being owned by Chinese intel –you think they don’t have tape of him living out his X-rated video of David Bowie’s 80s hit?– was significant enough to tell us about. But then, like the rest of the establishment, the media’s corporate owners are all wrapped up with the Chi-Coms. When’s the last time you saw Hollywood take a stand against the Chinese commies? That would be about the last time you saw Richard Gere on the big screen, since his career died when he did a movie pointing out their oppression of Tibet. Go look on Netflix or wherever – there’s plenty of stupid woke trash about how America sucks, but nobody talks about the big Red Panda in the room. The corporations know who their real boss is.
And, as Tucker pointed out in a great monologue, the Establishment is all-in on catering to the commies. It is bought and paid for, owned and happy, and dedicated to selling you out. And a President Biden*, in the event he is inaugurated, will happily continue the fire sale of American physical, intellectual, and moral assets to the reds.
“If Voters Had Known About 8 Stories Media Ignored, Trump Would Have Won.” Well, that’s why they ignored them…
Speaking of which, our media elites have suddenly discovered that the Hunter Biden corruption story was true. Of course they knew it was true all along, they just suppressed it until they could drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. (And if you somehow missed the Hunter Biden story, here’s the archive.)
Lockdowns, shutdowns, mask mandates, curfews, and other governmental interventions are 1) evidence-free and 2) do not work, folks. https://t.co/G6tsROUH20
2/ Connecticut is the home of Yale and many intellectuals, so surely they followed the science.
Except now they have the highest per capita case count in the country. What about all those masks, lockdowns, and the all mighty #science? pic.twitter.com/BhrknAFShY
6/ Ok ok, but it would be so much worse if they didn't follow the #science, right?
Let's look at Florida, which effectively ended COVID restrictions on Sept 25th. Those crazies with their open schools, open business, and people who get to live their lives. Barbarians! pic.twitter.com/AhlB0bfHrC
8/ Governments call them lockdowns or whatever they want. But restricting freedom of movement, of worship, of a basic livelihood, all while using fear, fines, and intimidation to prevent families from seeing each other… that's not science.
Judge rules Los Angeles County acted arbitrarily with an outdoor dining ban. “By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the county acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end,” Superior Court Judge James Chalfant wrote in a tentative ruling.”
When Chirag Bhakta saw a headline recently that said tech workers were fleeing San Francisco, he had a quick reaction: “Good riddance.”
Bhakta, a San Francisco native and tenant organizer for affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing, is well-versed in the seismic impact that the growth of the tech industry has had on the city. As software companies expanded over the past decade, they drew thousands of well-off newcomers who bid up rents and remade the city’s economy and culture.
He said the sudden departure of many tech workers and executives — often to less expensive, rural areas where they can telecommute during the coronavirus pandemic — reveals that their relationship with San Francisco was “transactional” all along.
“They used their capital to radically shift the makeup of poor, working-class communities,” Bhakta said. “We’re left with ‘for sale’ signs and price points that are still out of reach for most people.”
Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry.
Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing costs, California’s relatively high income tax and the Bay Area’s general resistance to rapid growth and change.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has moved to Texas. “‘It’s worth noting that Tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in California,’ Musk said. ‘There used to be over a dozen car plants in California, and California used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing. My companies are the last two left.'”
“Immediately After Moving To Texas, Elon Musk Announces Tesla AR-15.
The new firearm will look similar to a standard AR-15 but will in fact be a battery-powered railgun capable of firing 3 million rounds per minute. It will also feature a fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth capability, heat-seeking ammunition, and a chainsaw bayonet, to name a few.
At 3 million rounds a minute, trips to the shooting range would get very expensive…
Virtually unheard of a decade ago, these Chinese players are moving vast sums quickly and quietly, authorities said. Their expertise: routing cartel drug profits from the United States to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders. The launderers pay small Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico to help them move the funds. Most contact with the banking system happens in China, a veritable black hole for U.S. and Mexican authorities.
Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson tries yet again to get Texas to legalize casino gambling. “Adelson’s noteworthy lobbyist crew includes current and former high-ranking government officials, including former chiefs of staff to disgraced Speakers of the Texas House Joe Straus and Dennis Bonnen.” Of course.
OhNoNotThisShitAgain.jpg:
BLM, antifa & other far-left extremists have established a new autonomous zone in north Portland after violently repelling law enforcement. They're trying to protect a squat that was earlier raided by police. Firearms were found on site. Read my report: https://t.co/FTavdjeaCB
Frederick Forsyth says that the reason the Brexit deal was scuttled at the last minute is that the EU was doing France’s bidding.
After years covering France in Paris for the Reuters agency, and bilingual in French, I have a pretty good idea how the French system works. Basically, whoever appears to rule on the basis of elections, it is the graduates of the ENA who are really in charge. So what is it, this ultra-college?
Founded under De Gaulle, it is a college designed to produce the true ruling class of the country, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or ENA and its graduates are the ENArques. More than all our public schools and Oxbridge put together, the ENA is accessible only by the brightest and the best to start with.
After three years there the graduates are the elite of the elite. They move seamlessly from industry to commerce to banking to civil service to politics, and always in the top slots. They do not oppose each other. President Macron and Michel Barnier are both ENArques.
As in all politics, election-winning is the key and in elections there are powerful voting blocs which must not be affronted. In France the biggest is the agricultural vote. Hence the EU’s incredibly expensive and burdensome Common Agricultural Policy, a money tree paid for by others, to subsidise France’s mediaeval and uncompetitive farming sector and its attendant sub-professions. Offend them and you lose the election.
Not far behind comes the fishing industry. Emmanuel Macron is facing an election. That is why last week at the very threshold of an agreement with the UK, Michel Barnier got new orders from Paris. No, you have conceded too much to the Anglo Saxons – we want all the fish and free access to all the waters.
It is easy to blame Barnier but he had his orders. That is why a German, Dane or Dutchman would have been better as the EU team leader. Germany, Denmark and Holland fish those waters but their politicians do not lose elections because of their fishing industries and they are not run by an ENA.
In other news, Frederick Forsyth is still alive. (Hat tip: @davidjacksmith.)
Speaking of which: “Facebook’s Fact-Checker ‘Lead Stories’ is Staffed by Exclusively Democrat Party Donors, CNN Staffers, And ‘Defeat Trump’ Activists.”
What could have bought Ed Buck so many layers of protection?
West Hollywood politics has a glimmering rainbow surface, but the authentic underlying powers are real estate interests. The City Council controls the fate of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development projects, a fact reflected in their campaign contributions. “Developers don’t drop tens of thousands of dollars in West Hollywood because they like the City’s position on gay marriage, says former West Hollywood Mayor Steve Martin.
With a huge war chest supporting them, a small handful of politicians reduced the government of West Hollywood to a game of musical chairs. John Duran, John D`Amico, John Heilman, Jeffrey Prang, and Abbe Land would bounce back and forth between the Mayor’s Office and City Council for decades, winning eighteen out of the last twenty-one mayoral elections between them.
Ed Buck played a variety of supporting roles in the political machinery, buoying the chosen few.
D’Amico’s political career was launched on the back of Buck’s support, winning a seat on City Council after marching through West Hollywood with Buck promoting his “Fur Free WeHo” campaign. Buck’s donations and connections to other major donors, including billionaire Gary Michelson, brought tens of thousands of dollars to Buck’s friends on City Council through multiple entities sharing the name ANIMAL PAC.
Buck’s money also bought him a position on the Steering Committee of the Stonewall Democratic Club, the kingmaker of West Hollywood politics. Buck used his position on the Steering Committee to influence Stonewall’s secretive endorsement process, one “designed to protect incumbents and well-financed, well-connected candidates,” says a former Steering Committee member. Stonewall rank and file must have wondered why the LGBTQ group was promoting candidates for County Tax Assessor and Board of Equalization. Buck was so useful, Abbe Land would open City Council meetings by calling him to recite the pledge of allegiance.
Officially retired since his early thirties, Buck would not have had the money to sustain his prolific spending habits relating to drugs, escorts, and politics. His biggest payday was in the 1980s when he flipped his friend’s business, Gopher Courier, to profit just over a million dollars, after which he lost money investing into pay-phones and a restaurant.
After moving to West Hollywood, Buck was suspiciously cash-rich and asset poor, driving a wreck of a car and living in a rent-controlled apartment. Journalists paint Buck as a wealthy social climber, but his finances and lifestyle suggest he was a dirty political operative.
Data from California’s political contribution records is highly truncated, but campaign finance rules create patterns that highlight alliances.
One can skirt contribution limits and obscure contribution origins by breaking up large donations into smaller payments and passing them through family members and political allies, so I looked for donors that matched Buck’s donations.
He donated varying amounts to plenty of politicians and causes, but there were consistent primary beneficiaries such as Jeffrey Prang, John Duran, Scott Svonkin, Honesty PAC, and of course, his ANIMAL PACs. The highly incestuous top donors who also supported Prang, Duran, Svonkin, and Buck’s PACs were real estate interests, chief among them being Excel Property Management Services managed by CEO Arman Gabay. Arman Gabay and his company funded Jeffrey Prang’s successful 2014 Los Angeles County Assessor bid with the help of Ed Buck, Ed Buck’s future attorney Seymour Amster, ANIMAL PAC, John Duran, West Hollywood activists, and various real estate interests. The same donors also funded periphery candidates who endorsed Prang and Svonkin.
As County Assessor, Jeffrey Prang controls property taxes on $1.7 trillion worth of property, explaining why his donors are real estate interests. The Tax Assessor is a notoriously corrupt office, both in Los Angeles and across the country. Jeffrey Prang’s predecessor was arrested by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office on bribery charges after selling tax breaks. Eighteen Tax Assessors in New York City were arrested on bribery charges after real estate developer Donald Trump realized he was paying more in taxes than his competitors.
This is where Scott Svonkin’s role comes in. Funded by Ed Buck, Buck’s attorney Seymour Amster, and a small handful of real estate interests after Gemmel Moore’s death in Buck’s apartment, Honesty PAC was created solely to fund Scott Svonkin’s 2018 for Board of Equalization, an oversight position overseeing the County Tax Assessor Jeffrey Prang. The kicker: Scott Svonkin was an aide to Jeffrey Prang while he served on West Hollywood City Council.
Scott Svonkin’s 2018 bid was unsuccessful, but the setback did not deter Jeffrey Prang. Whistleblowers filed suit against Prang for giving favorable tax treatment to West Hollywood real estate interests by intentionally losing legal cases, reversing property tax decisions, and reimbursing millions of dollars in back taxes for favored companies and individuals. Worse, Arman Gabay was arrested in May 2018 for allegedly soliciting preferable tax treatment from County Officials, soliciting public funds for his development projects, trading political donations in exchange for help on West Hollywood development projects, and other crimes involving political patronage. From a January 2020 prosecutor’s motion: “in another phone call agents intercepted on or about April 22, 2017, defendant made clear why he donates to public officials — he expects things in return.” When asked to contribute to reelect “Public Official 5,” he refused “because the last time he donated, defendant did not get anything from Public Official 5. Referring to Public Official 5, defendant said “f[*]ck him.”
If Arman Gabay had helpful public officials on his payroll, he and others likely had Ed Buck on it, too, which would explain Buck’s mysterious revenue stream. Buck’s choice of Christopher Darden as his defense attorney shows he still has plenty of cash to play with and that investigators aren’t chasing down where it comes from. Prosecutors seem to know Buck’s income is off the books; they requested an order from the court to ensure “no portion of the proffered bail was feloniously obtained.” Even from jail, Buck still has cards to play, especially if his corruption touches politicians or some in the district attorney’s office.
Based on 2019 data, Austin City Government gets an F grade for crime and D- for cost of living. Murders and violent crime are worse in 2020. Homelessness is worse. They ignore mayor's hypocrisy in violating their own covid restrictions. Alter and Flannigan deserve to be fired. pic.twitter.com/wQqL2t4tuN
Austin decommissions shitty art. Of the “artworks,” two are garbage, one is already gone, one is so badly decayed it has to be torn down, and one is literally a circle of rocks. It’s fine as rock circles go, but a yard guy could probably put one together for you for less than 20 bucks.
The “Andrew Gillum,” “Busted” and “Meth” parts of that headline are all spelled out on the police report, whereas the “gay orgy” part is only suspected.
Candace Owens, the conservative activist and founder of #Blexit, a campaign that encourages black voters to leave the Democratic Party, dropped a bombshell Friday on social media.
According to Owens, who included screenshots of what appears to be a Miami Beach Police Department report, Florida’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum “was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident.”
An incident that allegedly took place in a Miami hotel, where Owens said an orgy was “suspected, but unconfirmed.”
“Removing one page of report that had @AndrewGillum’s personal address listed which was wasn’t my intent— but YES— BREAKING: Democrat Andrew Gillum was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident last night in a Miami hotel. Orgy suspected, but unconfirmed,” she tweeted.
Let’s repeat that the “gay orgy” part is only suspected, while the “busted for crystal meth” part is confirmed. It’s entirely possibly that three men just showed up the same hotel room at the same time merely to smoke crystal meth, and not to have a gay sex orgy.
Gillum, of course, denies everything. Drunk at a wedding, went to assist a friend, yadda yadda. The usual “veneer of plausibility” story no one believes.
Personally, I feel that a juicy Democratic politician gay meth orgy scandal is exactly what America needs to distract it from all the Wuhan Coronavirus gloom.
And now some tweets:
when they told Andrew Gillum to rock the vote they should have been clearer
Rarely, in the history of politics, is a choice so clearly validated as the correct one as the choice of DeSantis over Gillum in Florida given today’s events.
“Hey, it’s three days before Christmas! How about some light, uplifting content?
Sorry, this is what I have instead: Shoe0nHead dissecting the “MAPS community,” AKA “pedophiles who hang out on Tumblr” (and increasingly Twitter).
However, pace Shoe, the gay community has a long history of tolerating pedophiles among its ranks. NAMBLA was a member of the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994, when ties were severed due to political pressure. (And this bullshit isn’t helping her case either.)
In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.
The warning proved prescient.
One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.
After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.
Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”
Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.
Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.
Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.
China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.
Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.
If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.
If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.
Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.
Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?
Snip.
“In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”
That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.
When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.
In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”
If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.
The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.
Snip.
Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.
Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.
One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.
Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”
This sign was on the door of a restaurant in Kansas. Me and my clients went in and enjoyed a very nice steak dinner. No one was harassed, asked to leave, or in fear for their lives. And I expect 80% of us were carrying. It’s become a regular stop because it is a safe space pic.twitter.com/3bRtPGQvxn
After having gay leather bar owner Jeffrey Payne and perennial candidate Grady Yarborough as their ostensible gubernatorial frontrunners, Democrats finally seem to have lured someone who’s won at the county level to the race in the form of Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez. Valdez was elected to her current post four times, so she has as much electoral experience as Wendy Davis had in 2014. However, she lacks Davis’ celebrity status outside the state, so she’s unlikely to draw anywhere near Davis’ fundraising dollars, surefire donations from Emily’s and Annie’s Lists notwithstanding. Valdez is also a lesbian, so she might split the gay vote (small as it is) with Payne.
Also, Mark White’s son Andrew has thrown his hat into the ring as well. His myriad political experience includes…being Mark White’s son. That’s it. He’s also making all sorts of bipartisan noises, but when you read his positions, they’re thinly disguised Democratic Party boilerplate, such as supporting the DREAM Act and boosting “sanctuary cities.” He also trots out the “personally pro-life” and “safe, legal and rare” canards, which always amount to “bring on the partial birth abortions!”
The Texas Tribune has a modestly irksome roundup of the race up. I couldn’t help noticing that one candidate the Texas Tribune omitted a picture for was the only candidate who had previously made it to a statewide ballot in November: Grady Yarborough, who in his 2016 Railroad Commissioner run did not do any worse (38.3% of the vote) than most statewide Democrats did in 2014. And he, like fellow gubernatorial candidate Cedrick Davis Sr., former Mayor of Balch Springs (in Dallas County south of Mesquite), who’s photo is also omitted, is black, while they included the picture of another longshot, distinctly pale former congressional candidate Tom Wakely. Another longshot mentioned in the piece, Dallas investment adviser Adrian Ocegueda (who I’m fairly sure is the only candidate whose webpage talks about contracts in virtual reality), also had his picture omitted.
Other 2018 Texas Democratic Gubernatorial candidates not even mentioned:
Garry Brown, an assistant for Williamson County commissioner Terry Cook (and formerly for Rep. Lloyd Doggett)
The press seems to want to this to come down to a White/Valdez race. My guess is they’re half right. I’m betting White does get into the runoff due to the electorate’s lamentable but demonstrated tendency to support political dynasties. However, right now I’d guess that, despite hostile press gatekeepers to the contrary, Grady Yarborough is more likely to make the runoff than Valdez…
Having contributed to a few Republican candidates over the years, I’m on all sorts of email solicitation lists. Including Governor Greg Abbott’s reelection campaign.
Most election campaigns, I received 1-2 pieces of email a week. The Abbott campaign, by contrast, seems to send out at least 1-2 piece of email a day. By my count I’ve received some 90 email solicitations from the Abbott campaign this year, and the pace picked up notably in June.
That doesn’t mean no Democrats have stepped forward to challenge Abbott. Meet the de facto 2018 Texas Democratic Gubernatorial front-runner Jeffrey Payne of Dallas, the owner of The Dallas Eagle, a gay leather bar.
There are political races where being owner of a gay leather bar would not be a huge obstacle; say, a Mayoral race in San Francisco.
A Texas Gubernatorial race is not one of them.
It’s like the Texas Democratic Party went “We can’t possible do worse than Wendy Davis did in 2014!” and Fate said “Hold my beer!”
Payne is the front-runner for having filed and for his willingness to loan $2.5 million of his own money to his campaign. But look for the Texas Democratic Party to desperately coax an old warhorse out of retirement, ala Paul Sadler in 2012, to avoid a complete down-ballot wipeout.
The year is half over! Donald Trump has been the 45th President of the United States of America for over five months, and liberals still haven’t stopped freaking out about it.
“It’s Obamacare that’s killing people, and just two classes of states are showing any immunity. Deaths from opiate overdoses are on the rise across the country, except in states that either legalized marijuana or declined Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”
President Trump this morning: Repeal ObamaCare now, replace it later. Which is pretty much what Republicans have been campaigning on for the last six years…
Lying with numbers: CBO estimates 18 million people will be covered by ObamaCare in 2017. Actual number enrolled at the end of 2016: 9.1 million. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Multiple members of Congress hired as their information technology (IT) administrator an individual whose most recent job experience was being fired from McDonald’s, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.
Spokesmen for the members won’t say what their bosses knew at the time, but the hiring decisions highlight the role — witting or unwitting — the representatives played in what turned out to be an alleged multi-million-dollar IT scam in Congress with serious implications for national security.
Soon after Imran Awan joined the staff of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina, and his brother’s wife Natalia all appeared on other members’ payrolls, supposedly as IT administrators. His best friend Rao Abbas landed on the payroll too. Most of them made salaries ordinarily only chiefs of staff earn, but they were rarely seen or heard from in Hill IT circles.
The crew is now the target of a U.S. Capitol Police criminal information security probe with assistance from other law enforcement agencies as needed. Politico reported the “House staffers are accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.”
By my count, the unqualified members of Imran Awan’s circle (who frequently failed to even show up for work) could read the emails of the 31 different House Democrats…
Postscript on the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election: Jon Ossoff actually got fewer votes than the ghost candidate that ran in 2016:
One good reason why Tom Price beat his last opponent by 23 points was that his last opponent was functionally indistinguishable from a corpse or a bag of lettuce. [Democratic candidate Rodney] Stooksbury spent precisely $0 on his campaign and has never been seen in public. Jon Ossoff had the entire national Democratic Party pulling out the stops for him, and flooded Atlanta television with ten million dollars in advertising. Drastically improving on the Stooksbury numbers should be no dazzling feat. (Although, somewhat hilariously, Stooksbury actually got more total votes than Ossoff, 124,917 to Ossoff’s 124,893. Granted, special elections have lower turnout, but good grief.)
Ghost workers in the House, ghost candidates on the ballot. Your modern Democratic Party, ladies and gentlemen… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Speaking of the modern Democratic Party: Members of the all-Democratic City Council in White Plains, New York selected party chairwoman Elizabeth Shollenberger for a plum six-figure judicial seat. Tiny problem: She’s too morbidly obese to perform her duties. If ever there was a metaphor for Democratic-run government…
Democrat Seth Williams, former Philadelphia District Attorney, has resigned as part of a bribery plea deal. “In addition to accepting that he could face a maximum five-year term when he is sentenced, Williams agreed to forfeit $64,878.22.” Part of the plea deal was pleading guilty to one count of bribery so he could skate on the other 28…
Democrats and the national media sure put the Scalise shooting behind them quickly so they could get back to saying Republicans want to kill you:
Less than 48 hours after a multiple assassination attempt on members of Congress, there were no media vans or cameras at the Alexandria baseball field where it occurred. Just for perspective, when Republican staffer Elizabeth Lauten committed the offense of writing something critical of President Obama’s daughters on her private Facebook page, news cameras were camped on her parents’ lawn staking her out for the better part of a week.
Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that Iraqi forces on Thursday cut a wedge in the middle of the area held by Islamic State, seizing the Nouri mosque and cornering the few hundred remaining fighters in half of Mosul’s Old City on one side, and an area around a hospital that has been a stronghold for the group on the other side.
Col. Dillon predicted that the fighting would be over in a matter of days and that it would then take time to fully clear the areas the Islamic State holdouts.
House passes two border control bills. “One is known as Kate’s Law that increases penalties for illegal immigrants who keep trying to re-enter the United States, especially those who have criminal records. The second denies federal grants to sanctuary cities.”
Three gay Jews asked leave the “2017 Dyke March Chicago” because their Jewish pride flag bore the Star of David. “If the Star of David makes you feel unsafe, there’s a word for that …”
Intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.
By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.
Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.
One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, an Iranian Jew named Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”
She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.
President Trump nominates former Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison as the next NATO ambassador. Not my favorite Texas Republican Senator by a long shot, but I fail to see how she would be unqualified for this role.
Lawyer who committed $600 million in Social Security fraud has evidently skipped the country, claims to be broke. Sure, sport…
Label drops Austin band Dream Machine for WrongThink. Including a legal immigrant who was critical of illegal aliens:
Doris Melton, who came to the United States from Bosnia told the website she was “glad they’re finally starting to work on deporting criminal illegal aliens too. It took ages for me to get my green card here legally and because there’s so many illegals coming in they make it hard for the people who do want to become part of American society the right way. They’re handing out free money to people who come here illegally, but when you want to work hard to become an American citizen to start a family they make it so hard on you, and expensive!”
Later in the interview, Doris Melton was asked to name something that bothers her about the music industry. She responded by saying “girls have mostly become lazy jellyfish and are starting these horrible feminist bands just to try and ‘show men what they got’.”
She went on to say, “The safe space mentality has made them weak. They don’t even know how to play their instruments! They’ll make songs about being ‘sexually assaulted’ or about how ’empowering’ abortions are or some (expletive) and it’s (expletive) retarded, they’re embarrassing themselves. If men did that they would be crucified! You see the longing for a gender supremacy under the guise of ‘equal rights.’ What happened to the incredible female singers from back in the day with real talent, singing about finding true love and wanting to be a good woman?”
New York Times staffers rebel against cutbacks. Hey, when you alienate half of your potential audience, a Mexican billionaire’s largess only goes so far…
I don’t recall getting into a Twitter tiff with John Cusack, and I’ve liked most of the Cusack films I’ve seen (Being John Malkovich, Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity). I even had mostly kind things to say about him in 1408. I assume he must be using one of those autoblockbot things to avoid running into #WrongThink…
Methhead with nine prior felony convictions given life for evidence tampering. Previous convictions include manslaughter of an Arizona State Trooper and engaging in a “deviant sex act involving a squash.” And then there’s the creepy stuff…
I wanted to avoid the whole “Milo Yiannopoulos Defends Pedophilia Controversy” because there’s too much squick factor and more heat than light surrounding the issue.
MY: In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.
(Unnamed interviewer): It sounds like molestation to me. It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.
MY: But you know what? I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.
That…does not sound good. Especially given the gay community’s notorious tolerance for what they euphemistically call “eubophilia” (i.e., an attraction to post-pubescent teens still under the age of consent). Indeed, science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany has explicitly endorsed such relationships in a way Yiannopoulos didn’t.
The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most-
And this was evidently edited out as well:
You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty… That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.
Still not great, but far from the “defense of pedophilia” Yiannopoulos’ critics have made it.
For his comments, Yiannopoulos has been disinvited from speaking at CPAC (an event that was already controversial due to CPAC board members not being informed of his invitation in the first place) and his book deal has been been cancelled. (The way these things are usually handled, Yiannopoulos will get to keep his advance money and is free to sell the book elsewhere. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him go the route of a successful Kickstater.)
I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers. I’ve outed three of them, in fact — three more than most of my critics. And I’ve repeatedly expressed disgust at pedophilia in my feature and opinion writing. My professional record is very clear.
But I do understand that these videos, even though some of them are edited deceptively, paint a different picture.
I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, “advocacy.” I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.
As to some of the specific claims being made, sometimes things tumble out of your mouth on these long, late-night live-streams, when everyone is spit-balling, that are incompletely expressed or not what you intended. Nonetheless, I’ve reviewed the tapes that appeared last night in their proper full context and I don’t believe they say what is being reported.
I do not advocate for illegal behavior. I explicitly say on the tapes that I think the current age of consent is “about right.”
I do not believe sex with 13-year-olds is okay. When I mentioned the number 13, I was talking about the age I lost my own virginity.
I shouldn’t have used the word “boy” — which gay men often do to describe young men of consenting age — instead of “young man.” That was an error.
I am certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret.
Anyone who suggests I turn a blind eye to illegal activity or to the abuse of minors is unequivocally wrong. I am implacably opposed to the normalization of pedophilia and I will continue to report and speak accordingly.
Rating: Plausible. The bit about Father Michael and giving head did indeed sound to me like black humor rather than advocacy. As for the rest, it should be no surprise that a professional troll and shit-talker managed to go too far. Yiannopoulos did not confess to being a child molester, he confessed to not minding being molested; disturbing enough in its own way, but not remotely the same order of magnitude of disturbing.
In any event, Yiannopoulos screwed up, paid the price, and apologized. But the furor with which he has been attacked by many in the “professional conservative” ranks (i.e., those insider and establishment types that were #NeverTrump even when the only other option was a Hillary Clinton presidency). It seems that President Trump’s success has so unhinged them (I’m looking at you, Bill Kristol) that they wanted to take Yiannopoulos’ scalp because they couldn’t take Trump’s. They’d still rather lose politely with Romney than win a bare-knuckles brawl with Trump due to their own status anxiety over being Important.
What I do know is that Milo Yiannopoulos has always stood up for freedom of speech and against Social Justice Warriors trying to silence any who oppose them. It’s perfectly acceptable to me that conservatives would ask Yiannopoulos be disinvited as speaker over his comments. What wouldn’t be acceptable is if “conservatives” launched a violent riot to prevent him from speaking, but leftists actually did launch a riot to keep him from speaking. And that would have been unacceptable even if he had been there to launch a enthusiastic intellectual defense of pedophilia. (Which, of course, he wasn’t.)
No wonder I didn’t want to write this piece, as it will probably please exactly no one (even me).
Ace of Spades also has some thoughts on Yiannopoulos and outrage culture. “Who knows — maybe this very post you’re reading right now will be cited as the reason Ace Must Now Be Purged to Maintain the Purity of the Body of the Church of Twitter.”
Hope all of you had a happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm before you go off to engage in mortal combat to save $5 on an improved deframbulator.
“If Americans outside the big blue cities don’t care about the social obsessions of aging hippies, indoctrinated millennials, and frigid feminists, then they’re wrong. You can probably fix everything by redoubling your efforts to show them how horrible they are.”
“Why pretend to respect their opinions when you don’t respect their opinions. They like guns and America and Jesus, and frankly those things are, at best, embarrassing if not downright horrible. I mean, #Science, right?”
“Why bother assembling and analyzing the facts when you know what the answer will be, what it must be: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and whatever other faux-phobias that come slinking out of academia to give you an excuse to hector and nag normal people.”
If you want to see politics based on emotionalism over reason and a borderline-religious devotion to an iconic figure, forget the Trump Army; look instead to the Cult of Clinton.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election, all eyes, and wringing hands, have been on the white blob who voted for him. These “loud, illiterate and credulous people,” as a sap at Salon brands them, think on an “emotional level.” Bill Moyers warned that ours is a “dark age of unreason,” in which “low information” folks are lining up behind “The Trump Emotion Machine.” Andrew Sullivan said Trump supporters relate to him as a “cult leader fused with the idea of the nation.”
What’s funny about this is not simply that it’s the biggest chattering-class hissy fit of the 21st century so far — and chattering-class hissy fits are always funny. It’s that whatever you think of Trump (I’m not a fan) or his supporters (I think they’re mostly normal, good people), the fact is they’ve got nothing on the Clinton cult when it comes to creepy, pious worship of a politician.
By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine—the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I’ve come across.
Trump supporters view their man as a leader “fused with the idea of the nation”? Perhaps some do, but at least they don’t see him as “light itself.” That’s how Clinton was described in the subhead of a piece for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter. “Maybe [Clinton] is more than a president,” gushed writer Virginia Heffernan. “Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself,” Nothing this nutty has been said by any of Trump’s media fanboys.
“Hillary is Athena,” Heffernan continued, adding that “Hillary did everything right in this campaign…She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second.”
That’s a key cry of the Cult of Hillary (as it is among followers of L. Ron Hubbard or devotees of Christ): our gal is beyond criticism, beyond the sober and technical analysis of mere humans.
Snip.
As with all saints and prophets, all human manifestations of light itself, the problem is never with them, but with us. We mortals are not worthy of Hillary. “Hillary didn’t fail us, we failed her,” asserted a writer for the Guardian. The press, and by extension the rest of us, “crucified her,” claimed someone at Bustle. We always do that to messiahs, assholes that we are.
And of course the light of Hillary had to be guarded against blasphemy. Truly did the Cult of Hillary seek to put her beyond “analysis for even one more second.” All that stuff about her emails and Libya was pseudo-scandal, inventions of her aspiring slayers, they told us again and again and again.
As Thomas Frank says, the insistence that Hillary was scandal-free had a blasphemy-deflecting feel to it. The message was that “Hillary was virtually without flaws… a peerless leader clad in saintly white… a caring benefactor of women and children.” Mother Teresa in a pantsuit, basically. As a result, wrote Frank, “the act of opening a newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.”
Then there was the reaction to Clinton’s loss. It just wasn’t normal chattering-class behavior. Of course we expect weeping, wailing videos from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton about how Clinton had been robbed of her moment of glory; that’s what celebs do these days. But in the media, too, there was hysteria.
“‘I feel hated,’ I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt, holding my bare neck,” said a feminist in the Guardian. Crying was a major theme. A British feminist recalled all the “Clinton-related crying” she had done: “I’ve cried at the pantsuit flashmob, your Saturday Night Live appearance, and sometimes just while watching the debates.” (Wonder if she cried over the women killed as a result of Hillary’s machinations in Libya? Probably not. In the mind of the Hillary cultists, that didn’t happen—it is utterly spurious, a blasphemy.)
Then there was Lena Dunham, who came out in hives—actual hives—when she heard Clinton had lost. Her party dress “felt tight and itchy.” She “ached in the places that make me a woman.” I understand being upset and angry at your candidate’s loss, but this is something different; this is what happens, not when a politician does badly, but when your savior, your Athena, “light itself,” is extinguished. The grief is understandable only in the context of the apocalyptic faith they had put in Hillary. Not since Princess Diana kicked the bucket can I remember such a strange, misplaced belief in one woman, and such a weird, post-modern response to someone’s demise (and Clinton isn’t even dead! She just lost!).
It’s all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn’t even realize it’s doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one second, in Heffernan’s words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.
A word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week-and-a-half, and it’s revolting to watch.
For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again.
What kind of president will Trump be? It’s a tad too early to say, isn’t it? The media are supposed to tell us what happened, not speculate on the future. But its incessant scaremongering, the utter lack of proportionality and the shameless use of double standards are an embarrassment, one that is demeaning the value of the institution. The press’ frantic need to keep the outrage meter dialed up to 11 at all times creates the risk that a desensitized populace will simply shrug off any genuine White House scandals that may lie in the future (or may not).
Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter, the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.
“One by One, ISIS Social Media Experts Are Killed as Result of F.B.I. Program.” My reaction: 😊 (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More of those “mostly peaceful” protestors we keep hearing about, this time in North Dakota (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The reason the micro-group of neo-Nazis got attention is the media. It’s not the Right. This is an active attempt by CNN and others to paint all conservatives as anti-Semites. It’s disgusting.” Or why Richard Spencer is the new Westboro Baptist Church: A tiny, unimportant thing constantly hyped by the mainstream media as a way to paint Republicans as evil. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Mickey Kaus wonders if Democrats are finally willing to flip to an enforcement-first approach, giving up on amnesty to take the issue off the table and win back working class white voters. That idea makes a lot of sense, which is why I’m sure Democrats will never go for it…
Palestinians are shootinge each other, since the border wall makes it difficult to shoot Israelis. “The violence, much of it directed at a Fatah leadership seen as corrupt and out of touch.” Has there ever been a single moment in the history of “Palestine” when their leadership wasn’t “corrupt” and “out of touch”?
More Trump dividends: France cancels umpteenth Israel-Palestine summit because nobody gives a rat’s ass.
Twitter suspends the account of their own founder. That’s some mighty fine vetting process you’ve got going on there, Jack… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
