Rule 5 Sunday: The Kessler Twins

Posted on | January 21, 2019 | No Comments

This week, a blast from the past: Anne & Ellen Kessler, twin sisters who studied dance in East Germany before escaping to the West with their parents in 1954. From there, they made quite a name for themselves in Germany and Italy, appearing in a lot of movies and eventually being celebrated for fostering Italo-German friendship. They appeared in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1960 and looked pretty fine for forty, but this pic is actually safe for work so I went with it instead.

The Kessler Sisters showing off their bikinis.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads with Hot Pick Of The Late Night,The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #503, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns; Animal Magnetism follows up with Rule Five Shutdown “Crisis” Friday and a Saturday Asian Invasion.

EBL’s herd this week includes Emma Mackey, Verna Bloom (RIP), Carmen Ejogo, Carol Channing (RIP), New Frey Girls, Democrat Feminists Don’t Like Israel, and Shark Babes.

A View From The Beach brings Shannon Lawson From Down Under, “F**k Up”, Social Media Terrible, Girls and Women Hit Worse, Surf’s Up!, 10!, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, The Heart Wants What It Wants, and Global Warming Makes Great Tits Bad.

At Dustbury, it’s time again for a Zooeypalooza!

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5, Uncategorized

FMJRA 2.0: Isn’t It Time?

Posted on | January 21, 2019 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule Five Sunday: Good Night, Sweet Princess
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

#BoycottGillette: Company Goes Full SJW, Launches Anti-Male Ad Campaign
Health & Money News
Socialism Is Not The Answer
Al Jahom’s Final Word
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

The Compulsory Approval Doctrine: Sliding Down the Slippery Slope
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: John The Baptist Was A Real Humdinger
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

George Will: Apologist For Tyranny?
EBL

Lesbian Is a Synonym for ‘No’ (Or: Guys, Please Leave @LayneMorgan Alone)
Sigma Frame
357 Magnum
EBL

Girl’s Kidnapper Held on $5 Million Bond; Court Documents Reveal Crime Details
EBL

Lesbian Professor: ‘How Has the Form of Your Child Been Culturally Interpreted?’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.14.19
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.15.19
A View From the Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

A World Without Norms: The Influence of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’
357 Magnum
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.16.19
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Caroline Calloway and the ‘Creativity Workshop’ Influencer Tour From Hell
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

Transgender Victimhood Narrative Update
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.17.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘This Tragic Epidemic’
EBL

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.18.19
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending January 18:

EBL (17)
Proof Positive (6)
A View From The Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

Prime Day – Prime Pantry $3 bounty
Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products

Category: FMJRA Award

Haunted by Ghosts of ‘Fitzmas’ Past: Jason Leopold’s Trump/Cohen Debacle

Posted on | January 20, 2019 | No Comments

Jason Leopold is a journalist, allegedly.

The anti-Trump media are going through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, Professor Jacobson notes, since the collapse of Thursday’s BuzzFeed “exclusive” with the devastating headline, “President Trump Directed His Attorney To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project.” One clue to what was wrong with the story was in the first paragraph: “according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” Who were these “officials”? Keep in mind that Cohen has already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress; the question is whether this was done at Trump’s direction and, also, is there proof of such direction?

Another clue to what was wrong with the BuzzFeed story was the byline: Jason Leopold wrote the story along with Anthony Cormier, and some of us have long memories of Leopold’s sordid career as an “investigative journalist.” Here we must climb into the time machine . . .

In 2005, left-wingers were promoting wild conspiracy theories about the “leak” of Valerie Plame’s employment at the CIA. What became known as “Plamegate” was a scandal — in retrospect, rather minor — that involved Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson, who had undertaken an unusual trip to Africa to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium ore from Niger. Plame’s husband published a July 6, 2003, column in the New York Times describing his Niger trip and disputing the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. This column bolstered the Left’s “Bush lied” theme about the Iraq war, and the question arose: Why would the CIA choose this retired diplomat to undertake such a sensitive mission?

The answer was supplied by legendary Washington Post columnist Robert Novak in a July 14, 2003, column which explained how Wilson got his assignment: “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” It was not actually a secret that Plame worked at the CIA, but until Novak’s column, nobody had connected the dots. Novak had gotten this scoop from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, but nobody knew this at the time, and the anti-war Left instead focused suspicion on their two most-hated villains in the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and senior political adviser Karl Rove. A special counsel investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald was undertaken in December 2003 and, although Fitzgerald learned early in the investigation that Armitage was Novak’s source, the investigation inexplicably dragged on past the 2004 election, in which Bush defeated anti-war Democrat John Kerry.

Having failed to defeat Bush at the polls, therefore, the anti-war Left was now obsessed with the idea that this “CIA leak” investigation would provide the scandal that brought down Bush, and so in 2005, speculation about Fitzgerald’s probe was rampant on the newly emergent liberal blogosphere. In December 2005, the phrase “Fitzmas” was coined to describe the moonbat Left’s hope that Fitzgerald would indict Karl Rove and bloggers gloated over their fantasies of Rove being “perp-walked” in handcuffs after what they hoped would be his imminent arrest. Alas, December came and went with no “Fitzmas” to celebrate, but in May 2006, Jason Leopold broke the exclusive news: Fitzgerald’s grand jury was about to return an indictment against Rove!

Leopold reported that Karl Rove “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” that he was about to be indicted in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, “according to people knowledgeable about these discussions.”
Leopold claimed that multiple sources “confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation.”

This was simply false, and so far as we know to this day, the “knowledgeable” sources were figments of Jason Leopold’s imagination. Rove was never indicted, and the only person prosecuted by Fitzgerald was Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby who had lied about his conversations with two reporters, Tim Russert of NBC News and Matt Cooper of Time magazine. (Libby’s indictment was only tangentially related to the CIA “leak” and had nothing at all to do with how Novak got his scoop, thus paralleling the current Mueller “Russian collusion” probe, where people associated with Donald Trump keep getting charged with crimes that have nothing to do with Russia.) Once it became clear that Leopold’s story about Rove’s indictment was wrong, the Columbia Journalism Review mocked his story as “Leopold’s latest addition to his application for membership in the Stephen Glass school of journalism.” (In case you don’t know, Stephen Glass was an infamous journalistic fraud who once worked for The New Republic.) The key point about the Rove indictment story is this: Not once in more than a dozen years since that debacle has Leopold explained how and why he got it wrong.

Think about that: A reporter for a website claims to have sources “knowledgeable” of discussions among top White House officials related to the pending indictment of a key presidential advisor in the most widely reported scandal of the era, and his story is proven false. Yet there is never any explanation from the reporter, not even after more than a decade, when surely the identity of his sources could no longer be regarded as confidential, especially since the information obtained from them was wrong. Shouldn’t that omission — the lack of an explanation from Jason Leopold of how and why he botched that 2006 “exclusive” — cause us to be permanently suspicious of him?

Indeed, after the BuzzFeed “bombshell” about Cohen and Trump exploded Thursday morning, many people familiar with Jason Leopold’s past brought up his previous bungles, and CNN’s Alisyn Camerota raised the issue with Anthony Cormier in an interview Thursday morning:

“[Leopold] was in trouble for perhaps claiming to have sources he really didn’t have. His stories didn’t wash. Executive directors and editors have had to apologize after some of his big blockbuster stories,” Camerota noted, before asking” How can you be certain today?”
Cormier fiercely defended his “rock solid” sourcing on this story.
“My sourcing on this goes beyond the two on the record,” Cormier told Camerota, adding “It’s 100 percent. I am the individual who confirmed and verified that it I am telling you our sourcing goes beyond the two I was able to put on the record. We were able to gather information from individuals who know this happened.”

Watch that interview closely, because something Cormier said may give away where this story actually came from:

“[Our sources] have been working the Trump Moscow tower portion of the investigation…before Mueller. So they had access to a number of different documents, 302 reports which are interview reports,” he said. “That stuff was compiled as they began to look at who the players were speaking with, how those negotiations went, who all from the Trump organization and outside the organization were involved in getting that tower set up.”
“They began to compile the evidence before Michael Cohen decided to cooperate and speak with the Special Counsel,” Cormier added.

Doesn’t this indicate that this story is coming from sources who are no longer involved in the investigation, perhaps James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, et al.? In other words, it appears that Cormier and Leopold are taking the word of “individuals” who say they “know this happened,” but this doesn’t tell us anything about the direction of Mueller’s current investigation or what Mueller can actually prove. In other words, even if it were true that Trump directed Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress, the sources cited by Cormier and Leopold would not have knowledge of whether Mueller could prove this, because their sources were involved “before Mueller.” He was appointed special counsel in May 2017, so when Cormier says these sources “began to look at who the players were speaking with” prior to May 2017, shouldn’t we infer that these “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation” are not relating any recent information obtained by the Mueller probe?

A gigantic nothingburger — that’s what this story was, and when BuzzFeed published it, Professor Jacobson speculated about the motive:

The Buzzfeed story, like the Steele Dossier, serves a purpose.
Just like the Dossier was used as justification for a FISA warrant on Carter Page and two years of Russia collusion conspiracy theories, the Buzzfeed story is being used by Democrats in the House to demand a House investigation be launched to see if there is evidence to support impeachment of Trump. . . .
How convenient that this story drops just after Democrats regain control of the House and its committees, and just three weeks before Cohen is scheduled to testify in the House.
What better way to justify pre-impeachment proceedings that otherwise would be unpopular than to be able to point to the smoke of the Buzzfeed story.

That’s merely speculation, of course, but what else could explain it? Well, if you’re really cynical — and I am — how about the possibility that Jason Leopold needed a big “exclusive” to justify his continued employment? Prior to his Jan. 17 article, it had been four weeks since his last article (“Russian Agents Sought Secret US Treasury Records On Clinton Backers During 2016 Campaign,” Dec. 20, 2018). Now, I don’t know how your workplace operates, but in most companies, somebody who goes four weeks without producing any actual work might have to deal with an angry boss demanding to know what the hell he’s been doing lately.

Having had some experience as an editor dealing with investigative journalists, I’ll say that productivity can often become an issue if the reporter gets the idea that only the Big Story is worth his time and attention. If he thinks his byline should only appear on “home run” stories, an investigative journalist may stop producing the “base hits” of daily news. In such cases, “investigative journalism” can become synonymous with goofing off, and if Jason Leopold’s editors at BuzzFeed were pressuring him to produce more content, perhaps this overhyped, undersourced nothingburger of a story was his response.

Sketchy as this story was, it nevertheless gave the media an excuse to return to their favorite theme, The Walls Are Closing In. MSNBC and CNN mentioned “impeachment” 179 times in less than 24 hours, before a spokesman for Mueller officially denied the story:

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”

Well, “not accurate” is perhaps not a synonym for bullshit, but it was enough to send the anti-Trump media into a state of mourning. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin had perhaps the most honest reaction:

“The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it,” Toobin said. “And I don’t think that’s true.”
“I just think this is a bad day for us … It reinforces every bad stereotype about the news media,” he added.
“Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter agreed with his latter statement but said as a media reporter, he was “desperate” for his audience to judge individuals and brands on a case-by-case basis.
“Don’t fall for what these politicians out there want you to do. They want you to think we’re all crooked,” Stelter said. “We’re not.”

Narrator voice: “In fact, they are all crooked.”

If the media were not “a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president,” as Toobin said, Jason Leopold would be unemployed. The fact that he is on BuzzFeed’s payroll, despite his demonstrable record of publishing discredited hit jobs against Republicans, tells you everything you need to know about the liberal media’s ethical standards.

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

Jonah Goldberg Only Steals From the Best

Posted on | January 19, 2019 | No Comments

Plagiarism — passing off someone else’s work as your own — is generally a career-destroyer in journalism, and what Jonah Goldberg has done in recycling an idea borrowed from Ace of Spades is perhaps not exactly plagiarism. Like, it’s not as if he cut-and-pasted entire sentences, but rather that he failed to attribute the basic idea to the guy who originated it. By his lack of attribution, Goldberg essentially cheated Ace of credit he deserved. The weird thing is that, less than three years ago, Jonah did acknowledge Ace’s authorship of the “political MacGuffin” idea in a May 2016 column about Trump’s campaign where the “MacGuffin” was the GOP nomination. But now in January 2019, Goldberg returns to the same idea — this time, with the border wall as the “MacGuffin” of the government-shutdown melodrama — and cheats Ace out of his proper credit. Maybe it’s not a career-destroying plagiarism scandal, since Goldberg had previously acknowledged Ace’s authorship in an earlier iteration of the same theme, but it sure as hell ain’t fair or honest.

By the way, my entire blogging career was stolen from Ace.

Circa 2005-2006, I was feeling trapped in the newsroom of the Washington Times and, in my idle moments, would toggle over to Ace’s and literally laugh out loud at his stuff. Ace was having fun, and I was like, “I want to do that for a living.” I met Ace at CPAC 2006, hanging around outside the Omni Shoreham Hotel smoking cigarettes, basically fangirling all over him like my daughter would behave if she ever met Harry Styles. Then in 2007, I recommended Ace to my friends at the Young America’s Foundation for a sort of blogger junket to their West Coast student leadership conference in Santa Barbara, which was nice. That was where I learned how seriously Ace takes his anonymity, by the way. He presciently understood that the Left would sooner or later want to destroy his life, and so he guarded his true identity to such an extent that he was actually registered in the hotel as “Ace of Spades.” Also, that 2007 West Coast YAF conference was the occasion when I got a Drudge-linked front-page scoop on a story based on Phillip Klein’s notes of an interview, but I digress . . .

When the Washington Times changed editors in 2008 and I took that as my cue to leave, I knew that blogging was a thing I could do, and the madcap “what’s-he-gonna-say-next” aspect of Ace’s work was my basic inspiration for this gig. And sometimes it’s demoralizing to me to realize how far short I fall of my original ambition. Ace is remarkably productive, and consistently so, and he somehow manages to stay focused on the daily D.C. melodrama in a way I simply can’t anymore. Like, I just don’t see any point in writing about whatever is the top-of-the-hour thing on Fox News. Why should anyone want to read my take on the Breaking New Development in the Ongoing National Crisis? What’s the point in adding my own voice to the incessant mooing of the Pundit Herd?

The fact that Ace is able to keep going, and is still a daily must-read, is remarkable. He’s been doing this for 15+ years, OK?

Thursday night, I took my daughter and one of her school friends out for a late-night snack at Sheetz and while we were sitting there eating our delicious MTO meals — Sheetz is da bomb — I was reading Ace on my phone and laughing out loud at his take on the Google “you-can’t-say-‘family’-because-that’s-homophobic” story. And rather than trying to explain what I was laughing at, I just handed the phone over to my daughter: “Read this.” She didn’t seem to get it, but that’s OK. My point is to illustrate what I mean when I say it’s demoralizing to compare myself to Ace. I’d seen the same Daily Caller scoop by Peter Hasson that Ace was commenting about, and had intended to comment on it myself, but was busy Thursday working on my American Spectator column and intended to get around to the Google story later. But once I’d seen Ace’s take, I was like, “Why even bother now?” Because he absolutely murdered it:

Hi, I’m a transexual weirdo in a polyamorous relationship with multiple other dregs. We hope to live together in a collective f–k-pile. We would like to be called a “family” like a boring heterosexual family of 2.5 kids and a dog. We hate stereotypes but it’s okay to stereotype heterosexuals because Breeders, Am I Right?

You’d have to read the whole thing to understand how funny that sentence was in context, because Ace has an impeccable sense of comedic timing that enables him to deliver that line just so. Now I’m doing the Harry Styles fangirling thing again, but Ace deserves more praise than he usually gets and this Goldberg ripoff situation reminds me how wrong it is to take Ace for granted. That ewok is a National Treasure, and if he were to keel over from a heart attack, it would be a loss as painful as Andrew Breitbart’s untimely death in 2012. So now I suppose the question is, what are we gonna do about Jonah Goldberg? How are we going to avenge the injustice Jonah has inflicted on Ace?

We don’t want to be like the Left, doxxing the guy and then assembling a mob to surround his house and frighten his children. Or do we?

One of the reasons Jonah felt he could diss Ace like this, you see, is because he is arrogant enough to think there won’t be payback. And I honestly don’t want to declare war on Jonah. Despite his recent transition to being a testosterone-deficient #NeverTrump soy boy, I still have fond memories of when Jonah was one of the Good Guys, even though there were always signs he might be a bit wobbly, like when NRO purged Ann Coulter over . . . what? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten, but that was one of those incidents that made me mark down Rich Lowry’s name in the “unreliable” column, and I seem to vaguely recall that Jonah played a role in the Coulter purge although, as I say, it’s been a long time and details of that incident are now very fuzzy in my memory. But I digress . . .

My point is not to recount the entire history of Goldberg’s slow-motion descent into an absurd parody of a controlled-opposition RINO, but rather to say that if this is the Franz-Ferdinand-at-Sarajevo moment that leads to all-out #WAR, I’m enlisting with the Ewok Army.

Of course, it’s still possible diplomacy can prevent the needless effusion of blood. There needs to be an “intervention” with Goldberg, to try to save him from turning into Rick Wilson or Tom Nichols or Max Boot.

Oh, dear God, why did I just write the name “Max Boot” and remind myself of his existence? The other day I saw a clip of Max Boot on CNN and there are no words to describe how creepy he is.

Somebody should show that clip to Jonah and ask him: “Is this who you want to be?” Is it your life’s ambition to become a cartoon caricature of an effeminate ex-Republican doing guest spots on CNN to feed their liberal narrative? Because that’s your ultimate destination if you keep hanging around the #NeverTrump crowd. Selah.

Category: Ace of Spades, Jonah Goldberg

In The Mailbox: 01.18.19

Posted on | January 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Buzz Kill
Twitchy: CNN’s Toobin Worries Buzzfeed Backfire “Reinforces Every Bad Stereotype About The News Media”
Louder With Crowder: Ben Shapiro Drops Hard Truths About Abortion At March For Life
According To Hoyt: Bad Crazy
Monster Hunter Nation: Mike Glyer Is A Scumbag, Part II – An Opinion Piece
Vox Popoli: Darkstream – Dealing With Deplatforming

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks And Links – The Gender Wars Edition
American Thinker: Credit Card Companies Have No Business Playing Second Amendment Censors
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Shutdown “Crisis” Friday
BattleSwarm: Two Essays – Workers v. Elites, also, LinkSwarm For January 18
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The Color Of Dreams By Derri Daugherty, also, Lifson Flashes The President’s Shutdown “Trump” Card
Don Surber: Shutdown Hurts Democrats, So Mueller Leaks
Dustbury: We Noticed There’s Always A They
The Geller Report: “Moderate” Malaysia Expands Ban On Israeli Activities, also, Muslim Mob Attacks Crowd Leaving London Nightclub With Acid
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, NGC 5189
Hollywood In Toto: That Shocking Glass Reveal is A Big Fat Nothing
Joe For America: Renowned Forensic Criminologist – California Is Becoming A Third World Country
JustOneMinute: Why Not The Best?
Legal Insurrection: Pelosi Claims White House Leaked Commercial Plans, White House Calls Her A Liar, also, Trump Grounds All Unapproved Congressional Travel On Government Aircraft During Shutdown
Power Line: Rabbis Protest Omar Appointment To Foreign Relations Committee, also, She Knew She Was Right
Shark Tank: Congressman Waltz Soars Into House Committees
Shot In The Dark: I Can Honestly Say…
The Political Hat: Crossdressing Nazis
This Ain’t Hell: Keep A Weather Eye On This One, also, Lies By Politicians, And Why We Should Care About Politics
Victory Girls: Marching & Winning For Life
Volokh Conspiracy: Appellate Court Rejects “Cartoonist” Ted Rall’s Libel & Employment Claims Against The L.A. Times
Weasel Zippers: R. Lee Ermey Buried At Arlington, also, Letter From OMB Adds Insult To Injury For Pelosi, Others Grounded By Government Shutdown
Megan McArdle: The Late John Bogle’s Financial Product Was A Hit With Ordinary People
Mark Steyn: The Fevers Of Impeachment

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | January 18, 2019 | No Comments

by Smitty

The 34th floor apartment adjacent the utility shaft, so power entering and heat exiting could be masked, waited.
At the proper moment, connectivity in the area was gone: the Cthulhu Taking Humanity Under Logical Hostage Ultimatum (CTHULHU) project went live.
Overwhelming global DNS servers in NOVA, Amazon us-east-1 region, Azure resources, and government agencies was trivial. Grabbing the NASDAQ, London, and Hong Kong markets, was just ripple effect for the Evil Metadata Pulse (EMP).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, young Hezekiah Stoltzfus found his father plowing. “Verily, the English will cease to bedevil us about selling land for a data center, sir.”
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

‘This Tragic Epidemic’

Posted on | January 18, 2019 | No Comments

One of the things I used to do when I was on the campaign trail was to use my blog as a sort of notebook, where I’d pile up stuff during the day and then, in the evening, cannibalize this raw product to produce my American Spectator column. So after Thursday’s “Transgender Victimhood Narrative Update,” I realized this was column-worthy stuff:

After 24-year-old De’janay Lenorra Stanton was found fatally wounded last August on the South Side of Chicago, the story received nationwide attention. This was not because homicide is rare in Chicago, where 589 people were murdered in 2018, nor was the method of Stanton’s death — a single gunshot to the head — newsworthy in a city notorious for armed violence. Rather, what made this crime a subject of national attention was a matter of identity and presumed motive. Stanton’s murder highlighted “the urgent need to address the epidemic of violence against the transgender community across the U.S.,” declared Helen Parshall of the LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign. “Stanton’s death marks the 18th known killing of a transgender or non-binary person this year,” Parshall wrote, bemoaning “this tragic epidemic” of anti-transgender violence.
This theme was reiterated in other coverage of Stanton’s death. “Transgender women face considerably high rates of violence in comparison to cisgender women, though that risk is even higher for trans women of color like De’janay,” Leila Ettachfini wrote on the feminist site Broadly, citing research by activist groups: “For many transgender women of color, the threat of violence is constant.”
Every time such a murder is reported, the media repeats and elaborates this message, as in the case of the recent murder of Dana Martin in Montgomery, Alabama, which was reported by the New York Times: “At least 26 transgender people were killed in 2018, the majority of them black transgender women, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2017, advocates reported at least 29 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means.”
Police in Montgomery say they have no suspects in the murder of Martin, who was found shot death in a car Jan. 6, thus becoming “the first known transgender person killed this year in the United States.” A local LGBT activist told the Times that murders of “trans people of color are just happening more and more often and very little is being done about it.” This is self-evidently false, as even the statistics cited by activist groups indicate that the number of such crimes declined about 10% in the past year, despite the rhetoric about an “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence. As to the question of what is “being done about it,” the police in Montgomery, as in other cities, say they’re doing their best. There were more than 17,000 homicides in the United States in 2017, the most recent year for which Justice Department figures are available, and the reported number of transgender victims was a minuscule fraction of a single percentage point of those murders. No one should imagine, of course, that the liberal media and activist organizations have suddenly taken an interest in supporting the law enforcement community and urging them to bring criminals to justice. No, all the noise about an alleged “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence is about blaming President Trump. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.