Twitter’s war on conservative users continues apace.
First, they’ve kowtowed to the radical tranny brigade in declaring that you can’t refer to trannies by their birthnames (“deadnaming”) or sexes. So you’re not supposed to point out that:
It’s the crystal meth of social media — addictive and destructive, yet simultaneously unsatisfying. When I’m off it I’m happier than when I’m on it. That it’s also being run by crappy SJW types who break their promises, to users, shareholders, and the government, of free speech is just the final reason. Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
By why would they be mean to poor little her? Well, except for the tiny fact that she wants to primary fellow Democrat House incumbents who aren’t hard enough left for her:
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday threw her weight behind a new national campaign to mount primaries against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts.
The incoming star congresswoman from New York again put the Democratic establishment on notice that she and activist groups on the left aren’t content with a Democratic-controlled House: They are determined to move the party to the left.
“Long story short, I need you to run for office,” Ocasio-Cortez said Saturday on a video conference call hosted by Justice Democrats, as the group launched a campaign dubbed “#OurTime.” Justice Democrats supported Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign against powerful Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.).
“All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “That’s really what we need to do to save this country. That’s just what it is.”
The incoming congresswoman’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, was blunter.
“We need new leaders, period,” he said on the call. “We gotta primary folks.”
Gee, I can’t imagine why here fellow Democrats are not welcoming her with open arms!
The group said they want Democratic members of Congress to be representative of their diverse communities and support liberal policies like Medicare for all, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, implementing a “Green New Deal,” and rejecting corporate PAC donations. On the campaign trail, Ocasio-Cortez talked about forming a “corporate-free caucus” as a means to push for reform. That type of group, if it forms, could turn out to be the left’s counterpart to the Freedom Caucus, which pushed Republican leadership to the right.
Tiny problem there: The Freedom Caucus didn’t make its name by primarying ideological opponents within the party. That sounds more like what the Senate Conservative Fund or various Tea Party groups did, with limited success.
It also ignores the fact that Democrats accomplished their 2006 takeover of the House by running conservatives and moderates in red states and swing districts. Thanks to the hard left turn under Obama, almost all those Democrats have been defeated in subsequent Republican wave elections.
Maybe Congressional Democrats, faced with the keenness of Social justice Warrior demands to gore their own oxen, might do something about the victimhood identity politics cancer that has metastasized across their party. Unfortunately, I suspect they simply lack the balls to openly defy Miss Flavor-of-the-Month…
Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)
Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
A bit more analysis of the midterms:
Interestingly, the largest/highest profile misses were almost all in races where the Republican beat the polls:
– IN-Sen: polls D+2; actual R+8 – OH-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+4 – SD-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+3 – TN-Sen: polls R+5; actual R+11 – IA-Gov: polls D+2; actual R+3
Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:
William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, replaced on at least an interim basis by his chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker. Very early on in the Trump Administration, I decided that there were two things I wasn’t going to pay much attention to: 1. Reports of dysfunction or “chaos” among White House staffers, and 2. Trump tweets slamming various people. (See any of my previous posts on Trump persuasion techniques.) I have no particular insight into intra-White House squabbles, and reporting on this issue is so bad or overblown that there’s too much noise for me bother to extract signal from. So go elsewhere for how Sessions fits into the “Deep State vs. Trump” narrative. (Over at Powerline, they put up both anti-Sessions and pro-Sessions pieces.)
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer wants House Democrats to impeach Trump. I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on them…
Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town.
These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in corruption at the highest level,” said Paxton in a prepared statement.
“Each illegal vote silences the voice of a law-abiding registered voter,” added Paxton. “My office will continue to do everything in its power to uncover illegal voting schemes and bring to justice those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas.”
The nine Hidalgo County residents arrested were Guadalupe Sanchez Garza, Jerry Gonzalez, Jr., Araceli Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, Cynthia Tamez, and Ruby Tamez. Online jail records show bond was set at $20,000 for both Garza and Ruby Tamez. A $10,000 bond was set for Gonzalez, Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Cynthia Tamez. Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez’s bail was set at $1,000.
I already voted and the election is next week, so there is light at the end of the tunnel! And if political bloggers are already sick of this election season, just think how sick of it ordinary voters are. None of which will keep me from live-blogging/live-tweeting it election night…
Six weeks ago, Democrats were expecting a blue wave to rival the Republican victory of 2010, when the GOP picked up 63 House seats. Everything was in their favor. History—the party in power almost always loses seats. Money—Democrats continue to outraise Republicans by staggering amounts. The opposition—some 41 GOP House members retired, most from vulnerable districts where Donald Trump’s favorability is low. Democrats were even positioned to take over the Senate, despite defending 10 Trump-state seats.
Democrats obliterated their own breaker in the space of two weeks with the ambush of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The left, its protesters and its media allies demonstrated some of the vilest political tactics ever seen in Washington, with no regard for who or what they damaged or destroyed along the way—Christine Blasey Ford, committee rules, civility, Justice Kavanaugh himself, the Constitution. An uncharacteristically disgusted Sen. Lindsey Graham railed: “Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it!”
A lot of voters suddenly agreed with that sentiment. The enormous enthusiasm gap closed almost overnight as conservative voters rallied to #JobsNotMobs. Even liberal prognosticators today forecast that Republicans will keep the Senate and Democrats will manage only a narrow majority in the House, if that. It’s always possible the polls are off, or that there is a last-minute bombshell. But it remains the case that the ascendant progressive movement blew an easy victory for Democrats.
Antisemetic hate crimes in New York are on the rise, yet “during the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Over 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including known gang membership. Those include a number of violent criminals – examples include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, sexual assault on a child, and assault on a female. Mexican officials have also publicly stated that criminal groups have infiltrated the caravan. We also continue to see individuals from over 20 countries in this flow from countries such as Somalia, India, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.
Giant Russian floating dry dock isn’t. It may or may not have damaged Amiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier (antiquated though it is) when it went down. Now the Russian Navy is in a world of hurt in the north because no other dry dock north of the Black Sea is capable of hosting either the Kuznetsov or many of Russia’s largest submarines. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
More reminders of just what sort of Administration Lightbringer McLegTingle ran:
CIA conducted "routine counterintelligence monitoring" of US Congressional communications, 2014. pic.twitter.com/gJm77JT3Ml
Aww, no one wants to campaign with Bill Clinton anymore. “‘Inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions’? Does the NYT use the phrase ‘sexual indiscretions’ when writing about other celebrities who’ve been accused of rape and sexual harassment?”
Workers walk out of Google in protest of their protecting sexual harassment among executives:
Perhaps no company deserves to be destroyed by feminists, but if any company does, none deserves it more than Google. Having built the world’s most powerful search engine, the company then developed or purchased a series of other innovations — Gmail, YouTube, etc. After obtaining a hegemonic position in the online world, however, Google then inexplicably sold its corporate soul to “social justice” ideologues.
The extent to which Google has been captured by left-wing totalitarians, and become an active agent of intellectual repression, became apparent last year after the company fired James Damore for writing an internal memo that criticized their “diversity” policies. Damore sued his former emoployer (“Google Lawsuit Exposes Stalinist Climate Protecting Anti-White, Anti-Male Bias,” Jan. 10) and Google was also subsequently sued by a former member of its “technology staffing management team” who said the company implemented illegal hiring quotas. Only female, black or Latino candidates were eligible for hiring at Google, the lawsuit by Arne Wilberg alleges, and recruiters were ordered to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees.”
Texts from the Nevada Democratic Party: “F—K Trump. Stupid Republican retard. Trump is the anti-christ. Trump loves misery and hates Mexicans. Trump wants you to die. Trump wants to murder Mexicans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.
But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump. Does Trump have a strategy that we can describe? Is Trump a return of Richard Nixon, of Ronald Reagan, or of something else entirely? After several months of watching the news without gaining any answers, I finally canceled my cable subscription and sought out other sources. I found some insights in unexpected places.
Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics.
Snip.
A third insight was from the unlikeliest place: the critically acclaimed animated show, “Rick and Morty.” During Trump’s campaign, his supporters frequently talked about how funny the candidate was. This humor was lost on most of my left-leaning peers. But “Rick and Morty” showed me what I have may been missing. Here is a popular TV show about a mad scientist Rick, an amoral, sociopathic man who considers himself the smartest man in the universe and tells dirty jokes in front of his grandson Morty. The slapstick, low-brow, and nihilistic insults and dirty humor of “Rick and Morty” — much like Trump — resemble some of the comedic greats from the decades prior to the 1990s: “The Honeymooners,” “Benny Hill,” “Abbott and Costello,” “The Three Stooges,” and “I Love Lucy.” These comedic devices can be traced back hundreds of years to Asian and European theater, which used slapstick, puns, insults, and innuendo.
Compare that oeuvre to the 1990s-2000s, during which comedy was more satirical, knowing, self-referential, meta, and smug. This idea is far from perfect, but examples of satire that use slapstick as well include “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Team America: World Police”, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodies. American society today seems to be witnessing a return of what columnist Noah Smith calls “goofy” humor and a decline of “knowingly sarcastic” humor. Even The New Yorker complained that the 2018 Emmys were too smug and later described Trump’s rallies unfavorably as a “vaudeville routine.” Perhaps our shift toward a reversion in history also means we are seeing a cultural reversion as well. Smugness has become politically tone deaf.
Snip.
The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insulting friendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette. Trump keeps his enemies even closer than his friends, while previous presidents did the opposite. Niccolo Machiavelli might have been familiar with these tactics.
Trump’s diplomatic method can be reduced to the four “B’s”: bullying, bargaining, burden-sharing, and bragging. He starts an interaction by bullying the subject — usually on Twitter, seeks a chance to sit down with the target to bargain as hard as possible toward what Trump may see as a more reciprocal relationship of burden-sharing, and then finally brags about whatever the results are. Trump treats all relationships as transactional, deploying tit-for-tat tactics toward achieving his goal of “reciprocity.” His message is that he wants to make America great again but does not spend much time lecturing or moralizing to foreigners. Finally, his use of insults, jokes, and slapstick, physical humor creates an image of honesty and authenticity with his supporters. Overall, these techniques and worldviews are becoming increasingly common around the world, including with the leaders of countries as diverse as Turkey, the Philippines, Russia, Israel, Mexico — and potentially Brazil.
Trump described his realpolitik-with-no-sacred-cows approach during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September: “America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again. This is true not only in matters of peace, but in matters of prosperity.”
Overall, Trump’s approach represents a reversion to a style of statecraft that flips previous approaches. Technocracy, meritocracy, and bureaucratic approaches are giving way to establishing top-level personal rapport, trust, and loyalty. Free trade ideology is giving way to trade as a means to enrichment. Building institutions gives way to questioning the utility of each institution. Moral diplomacy gives way to talking to anyone who will bargain. Careful speeches give way to saying anything that gets results. Saving sacred cows gives way to killing them or threatening to do so. Open markets give way to using U.S. markets, military, and migration as bargaining chips. Every relationship is subject to maximum leverage of what is possible.
West is nothing if not independent. He doesn’t need the approval of the Democratic establishment or the usual suspects among the liberal Hollywood elite. He is untethered from the traditional liberal gatekeepers in the same way Trump was untethered from the Republican establishment as a presidential candidate. There is a reason that the Democrats and their allies in the media insult, marginalize, ridicule and try to “Uncle Tom” West. It is obvious they are afraid of him and the discussion he might start.
“Beto O’Rourke Raised Record Breaking $38 Million in 3Q.” And he’s still losing. Just imagine if Democrats had used that money to protect endangered incumbent senators instead…
O’Rourke’s “extraordinary political success” is illusionary. His national popularity is contingent on aesthetics and mass of coverage. It is merely that Beto looks and acts like the type of guy producers at most cable news networks and talk shows think—or more precisely, wish—a senator would look and act like. Unlike, say, Cruz (nearly two years older than Beto), who is always blathering about the Constitution or whatnot.
It’s not as if O’Rourke is a special talent by any measure. His speeches and talking points are just as vacuous and predictable as those of any other middling politician. His positions on guns and abortion—and a multitude of other issues—are in lockstep with his party, not the state. O’Rourke has never offered any substantively impressive policy ideas. He’s not led on any notable issues in the House. He’s remarkably unremarkable.
The son of a onetime Republican county judge and a longtime furniture store owner, the Democratic congressman from El Paso married into the family of one of his hometown’s most prominent developers and has assembled real estate investments worth millions.
Congress is rife with rich people, but O’Rourke had a 2015 net worth of about $9 million, ranking 51st out of 435 House members, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than double the $3.8 million worth of his Republican opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, who ranked 41st of 100 senators.
Think Progress alum thinly disguised as a journalist does 50 Shades of Beto. Ick.
The hits keep coming:
The lies flow easily from 'Beto':
Beto O'Rourke's Mother, Who He Says Is A 'Lifelong Republican,' Donated To Obama, Voted In 15 Of 17 Democratic Primaries https://t.co/I5QC9SEjlF
The Russian government kills journalists, among others. I do not recall the Washington Post protesting on this basis the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Putin’s government or Obama’s promise to be more “flexible” with Russia after his reelection. Nor, as far as I remember, did the Post cite Russia’s murderous ways as a reason not to farm out to Putin enforcement of the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Cuba’s treatment of journalists and others has been atrocious. Yet, the mainstream media supported the Obama administration when it radically reset U.S. relations with Cuba without insisting on any change in the regime’s treatment of dissidents.
What are the differences between Russia/Cuba and Saudi Arabia? I see two. First, Russia and Cuba are adversaries of America. Saudi Arabia is an ally.
For the sane, this difference would, if anything, cut in favor of the Saudis. For the left, it cuts against them.
Second, the Trump administration has very visibly allied itself with Saudi Arabia as a means of countering Iran and achieving other American objectives in the Middle East. Thus, the Khashoggi slaying provides the mainstream media with the opportunity to do what it does best — hammer President Trump.
In my view, the Khashoggi slaying should not cause America substantially to alter its foreign policy. Our relatively close relationship with Saudi Arabia is predicated, as it should be, on mutual interests and mutual adversaries. Either the geo-political predicate justifies the relationship or it doesn’t.
1. Vilification (Alt-right, racist…) 2. Guilt by association ("Did the *Koch brothers* fund this?") 3. Misrepresentation ("So basically, you think trans ppl should just *die*…") 4. Reduction to privilege anxiety ("White fragility!") https://t.co/tOPJGl0zWp
Florida man does it again. Not only is he a registered sex offender who hired a federal informant for a mad-bombing spree aimed at target stores, he did it all for…making money off shorting the stock?
Remember back all the way to last month, when the the Kavanaugh hearings went from senators questioning a nominee over his philosophy to ideological nuclear war over what one woman may have remembered about something that may have happened at a nameless party at an unknown person’s house at an unremembered location sometime in the early 1980s?
Just as that was sucking up every last bit of America’s political oxygen, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas had the misfortune to start dropping hidden camera videos of deep state bureaucrats bragging how they worked for “democratic socialism”/”social justice”/etc. on the taxpayer’s dime. If you’re like me, you may have been aware of the videos, but were too busy focusing on Kavanaugh stuff to actually watch them. As a public service, I thought it would be good to post all those videos in one place now that people might actually have time to view them all.
Bonus! Here’s a Prager University video of O’Keefe talking about his various earlier media bias videos.
The leadership of Google is very, very upset that you commoners keep making political choices of which they disapprove, so they’ve crafted a document to justify why they have to censor your views. They favor a “European” regime to emphasize “safety” from your non-liberal views over that pesky and outdated “free speech.”
The fact that they actually label the document “The Good Censor” sort of gives the game away, doesn’t it?
An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.
Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products.
But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.
Examples cited in the document include the 2016 election and the rise of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.
Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the document should be considered internal research, and not an official company position.
The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a “utopian narrative” that has been “undermined” by recent global events as well as “bad behavior” on the part of users. It can be read in full below.
It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers. “This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations,” says the document.
You can tell the document has came out a while ago (the date on it is March 2018), since the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy still plays a prominent role.
PP26-34 – The briefing explains how “users behaving badly” undermines free speech on the internet and allows “crummy politicians to expand their influence.” The briefing bemoans that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” are allowed a voice alongside “revolutionaries, whistleblowers, and campaigners.”
“Social Justice Warriors: Good! Republicans: Bad!” How dare the proles be allowed to express approval for politicians of which we disapprove? And always remember that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” is SJW-speak for anyone who refuses to toe the party line.
P45 – After warning about the rise of online hate speech, the briefing approvingly cites Sarah Jeong, infamous for her hate speech against white males (Google is currently facing a lawsuit alleging it discriminates against white males, among other categories).
P45 – The briefing bemoans the fact that the internet has until recently been a level playing field, warning that “rational debate is damaged when authoritative voices and ‘have a go’ commentators receive equal weighting.”
“Stop embarrassing our experts! Only experts with approved political opinions should be allowed to hold the conch!”
Page 70 indicates the shift to censorship is in response to “user demand,” which is false in the aggregate. Users aren’t clamoring for censorship, only the SJW hard left is doing that. Ordinary users want freedom of information, not what Google thinks we should be reading because the left keeps losing elections.
It ends with lots of fig-leafs about “transparency,” but the real purpose of the doc is to talk about the “problems” of free speech.
Google’s assertions to the contrary, this is not an internal document to decide what to do, this is an internal document to justify what they were already doing.
I don’t want my Internet search engine to be a “good” censor, or indeed any kind of censor. I don’t want my search results filtered for the “correct” opinions Google’s far left leadership wants me to hold. Between this, James Damore’s firing, and their decision to build a better censorship engine for China, Google already made the decision to embrace their inner censor before this document was ever commissioned.
Now would be a good time to switch your default search engine to DuckDuckGo, if you haven’t already…
Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the United States Supreme Court, but the Democrats’ last-minute Hail Mary smear attack has inflicted lasting damage…on themselves:
There is a dangerous and irresponsible strain of opinion telling the Democratic Party today that when they lose, it’s because they aren’t fighting hard enough…The thesis goes something like this: the left has total dominance of the culture, and total dominance of the popular vote, so the answer to why they lose not infrequently is that the system is rigged against them, and they must fight all the harder and “take the gloves off” or something like that to achieve their ends.
The gloves have been off for a very long time in American politics. How quickly we forget the attempted murder of multiple Republican politicians including Steve Scalise, who may never walk normally again. Just this past week we saw a Democratic staffer who doxxed multiple Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee indicted, facing nearly 50 years in federal prison for his crimes. We saw Cory Gardner revealing his wife had received graphic texts of a beheading after his vote for Kavanaugh, along with their home address. And in Washington, we saw whatever all this is.
And this is not new, of course – it stretches back a long time. The gloves were off for the American Left in the late 1960s, when campus and activist violence became normalized. They were off in the 1970s when the outgrowth of that spirit of protest led to the sequence of Weathermen bombings that crisscrossed the nation.
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What this whole “we’re the wet rag party” talk really translates too is: we, the abidingly secular Americans who were repeatedly promised we were the ethnically and sexually diverse and dominant coalition during the Obama years, now feel frustrated by being merely ascendant and feel instead entitled to absolute and immediate victory. And that justifies the “we’re coming for you” attitude today. Because any roadblocks or speedbumps for that agenda are now viewed as the vestiges of dead old white men protecting the interests of modern old white men.
This was a surprisingly dominant viewpoint as recently as a few years ago, accepted even among intelligent people on the right. Then a surprising group of people came along willing to say: No. And that has made all the difference.
Even the gimpiest of conservagimps can’t pretend that the attack on Kavanaugh isn’t an attack on us. The last few weeks has made it impossible for them to live in denial any longer. Hell, when Bret Stephens wakes the hell up you know the alarm is going off. At this rate, next we will see anti-Trump sex symbol George Will announce that the Democrats have been “unsporting.”
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But the rest of us are woke, and getting woker . We are red-pilled, and getting red-pillier. We are getting, you might say, militant.
See, we Normals get that if they can do this to Brett Kavanaugh, they can do this to anyone. If they win, they can destroy anyone Normal, or Normal-friendly, by a mere accusation (Notice how none of this applies to the elite – since they really don’t care about sexual abuse, their own gross collection of woman beaters, abusers, and pervs get a pass). This is the left’s dream tool. They don’t have to prove anything. They simply have to point, screech “Witch!” and their enemy disappears like in that bizarro universe Star Trek episode where Spock had a beard.
But it has become clear that we are not accepting this, because to accept this is to accept our own submission to these goofs in perpetuity. At first, the response was anecdotal. Hugh Hewitt had a bunch of women callers dial in, all of them irate, in what he described to me as an unprecedented “avalanche.” I personally got emails from center right folks, Normals, who do not like politics. In fact, they hate politics. But now they are paying attention. And they are mad. Every man knows he has a bull’s-eye on his back. Every woman knows her husband, brother, or son could be next. These people aren’t afraid of men being held accountable for things they did, but of false accusations that liberals would strip them of their ability to defend themselves against.
he attempted human sacrifice of Brett Kavanaugh on the altar of unrestricted abortion is too much for them. And now the polls are making it clear that that they are angry, ticked off, and ready to low crawl over jagged glass shards to vote against the Democrats who instigated this atrocity.
Sure, anecdotes are tricky. But the polls are less so. Heidi Heitkamp is gone. She’s toast. Claire McCaskill, toast. That goofy guy in Indiana, looking bad. Manchin? He knows what time it is, so he might weasel through.
We are not going to forget what happened here. And this is going to have a lasting impact, but not one the Democrats are going to like.
Several public polls have shown a fading “enthusiasm gap” between Democratic and Republican voters since the Kavanaugh fight escalated. The campaign arm for House Republicans reported an explosion in small-dollar donations. “[W]hat the Kavanaugh experience has done is gotten Republicans excited,” Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, chairman of the NRCC, told Fox News.
Other polls showed Republicans pulling away in red-state Senate races. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., both broke 50 percent in the CBS/YouGov polls. Blackburn is running to replace Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who voted against Kavanaugh, is down by nearly 9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. The Cook Political Report has shifted the Montana Senate race in the GOP’s favor.
Poorly written editorial blames white women for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, voting Republican. “After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.” Yes, there’s nothing like spicing up your turgid, far-left Social Justice Warrior feminist prose by breaking out the purple pulp writing cliches of the 1930s!