Category: Celebrities

NY Times Editor Claims Incompetence Led Him to Libel Sarah Palin

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Testifying at a hearing in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, suggested that it was an accident — rhetorical clumsiness — which led him to falsely blame Palin for “political incitement” in a 2011 mass murder:

“What I wasn’t trying to say was that there was a direct causal link between this map and the shooting,” Bennet said. “What I was concerned about was the overall climate of political incitement.”
He continued: “I didn’t mean to suggest that Loughner wasn’t responsible. … I did not think that Jared Loughner was acting because of this map.”
Bennet testified that he had not, in advance of publication, read specific pieces of reporting in the Times about a potential connection between the PAC ad and the shooting, and said he did not know at the time of publication whether Loughner had seen the map. He also said that he had not personally seen the map. “I was not reporting the editorial, your honor, I was editing it,” Bennet said.

Hot Air’s John Sexton quotes the editorial in question and, even if Bennet’s testimony can protect the Times from an “actual malice” finding, he’s more or less confessed to “reckless disregard for truth.” An editor is responsible for the changes he makes to copy and, if his changes result in the publication of a factual error, the distinction between reporting and editing is of no consequence in a libel case. The New York Times cannot claim that it was impossible for Bennet to know Jared Loughner’s motive, because this subject was extensively covered — by me, in a January 2011 article for American Spectator:

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Jared Loughner wasn’t motivated by anything Sarah Palin did. Nor, contrary to James Bennet’s testimony, was the gunman motivated by an “overall climate of political incitement.” He was motivated by his own psychosis and by an anti-Christian conspiracy theory video that had no connection at all to Sarah Palin.

While I spent dozens of hours researching Zeitgeist, and the weird cult the video spawned, apparently no one at the New York Times cared enough about the truth to bother discovering Loughner’s actual motives. They’re not journalists, they are Democrat Party propagandists, which was why they published the libelous claim that the “target” map in a political ad had some connection to Loughner’s crime, six years after this propaganda claim had been conclusively proven false.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Snitch Culture: @LenaDunham Auditions for PC Thought Police Commissar

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Progressivism (noun) — A political ideology typified by a desire to destroy other people’s lives and call the result “progress.”

If you’re a show-business multimillionaire, what do you do for fun? In the case of feminist TV performer Lena Dunham, you try to ruin the lives of people who have to actually work for a living:

Lena Dunham is calling out American Airlines after the actress claimed to have overheard two apparent employees engaged in “transphobic talk.”
The “Girls” creator said her flight on another airline was delayed for hours Wednesday at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Dunham, 31, wrote that the “worst part of this night” waiting at the airport came when she overheard two American Airlines’ “attendants having a transphobic talk.”
“At this moment in history we should be teaching our employees about love and inclusivity @AmericanAir,” she added in a subsequent tweet. “That was worst part of this night.”
Dunham then seemingly posted a screenshot of a direct message conversation she said she’d had with the airline.
n the message, the actress goes into further detail about what she claims to have overheard, writing that they were “talking about how trans kids are a trend they’d never accept a trans child and transness is gross.”
“I think it reflects badly on uniformed employees of your company to have that kind of dialogue going on,” Dunham continued. “What if a trans teen was walking behind them? Awareness starts at home but jobs can set standards of practice. Thanks for your consideration!”

Dunham claimed she overheard this conversation “in the arrivals hall coming from gate B30 to baggage … By the Hudson news across from the wine bar.” In other words, wherever she goes nowadays, Dunham is ready to snitch out anyone expressing an opinion she dislikes.

The social justice warrior (SJW) mentality is that of a third-grade tattletale, running to tell the teacher that the other kids aren’t playing nice. We all hated those spiteful brats when we were kids, and we don’t like them any better as grownups. Whatever happened to “mind your own business”? What sort of Stalinist impulse leads to this snitch culture, with self-appointed commissars acting as informers against those suspected of deviation from correct thought? Who does Lena Dunham think she’s “helping” by trying to get a couple of otherwise anonymous airline employees fired for the crime of having a private conversation near the Hudson News stand at JFK airport? But we know Lena Dunham is a liar, and perhaps she just made up this “transphobic” incident.

 

What Does ‘Homophobia’ Mean?

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The question raised by the #FireColbert controversy goes to the very heart of our 21st-century Culture War over “sexuality”:

If I wanted to insult Stephen Colbert, I might have called him a lot of things, but “cock holster” probably wouldn’t have come to mind. By the standards of Stephen Colbert, however, there are no standards, so I can call him any slang synonym for homosexual and still hope to get a network TV contract.
Alas, my phone isn’t blowing up with return calls from CBS executives, which probably means you won’t see “The Stacy McCain Gay Joke Show” on their fall schedule. And I had so much material ready . . .
Being almost as notoriously heterosexual as President Trump, I wouldn’t be much offended at being targeted by an anti-gay slur. It’s an odd thing about what are commonly called “homophobic” insults: Who’s insulted?
If you’re not actually gay, why would someone call you a faggot? Is he trying to start a fight? Aren’t anti-gay insults, when aimed at a target who is not even suspected of homosexuality, just a way of saying, “I don’t like you”?
OK, you don’t like me, so you call me a faggot. And then what?
How am I expected to react to this non sequitur? Call the Civility Police and report you for violating the law against homophobia?
Oh — wait a minute! Homophobia is not actually against the law. It’s a free country, and you have a right to your own opinion. . . .

Read the whole thing at The Patriarch Tree.

That article was funded by readers who contributed in support of what I promised would be a 2,000-word “sledgehammer blow” against liberal orthodoxy, to be delivered by noon today. Actually, when I hit the “publish” button on the article, it was 2,097 words at 12:04 p.m. ET, so I was four minutes late and nearly 100 words beyond my proposed length. There were a couple of ideas I had in mind when I began writing that I didn’t get around to addressing specifically — e.g., isn’t “homophobia” more or less a prerequisite to heteroseuxality? — but we can hash out some of those points later. Please go read the entire article and let me know (either in responses there, or in the comments here) what you think of my work. Did I deliver on my promise? Did I focus attention on the proper response to the #FireColbert controversy? Did I raise the right questions and suggest the right answers?

Thanks to those who hit the tip jar: Leslie W., Jeffrey H., Steven J., Steve W., Cheryl B., Jennifer N., Louis M., Randall S., Whitney G., Philip M., David G., Peter S., Jonathan D., Stephen S., Laurel L., and Jason B. One reason I’m late in posting this acknowledgement is that the cable company decided today would be a good time to call my attention to my past-due bill by suspending my Internet service. So I called the service number to remedy this neglect and, checking my balance after I’d gotten the service restored, I was happy to discover that the Pay Pal contributions received in the preceding 12 hours were about $50 more than what I owed on the cable bill. Your donations were like answered prayer to a need I didn’t even know I had. God moves in mysterious ways, and all I can hope to do in gratitude is to try to give readers their money’s worth.



 

New Jersey Computer Whiz Kid Discovers That Real Life Isn’t Like Web Design

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Billy McFarland, allegedly a genius.

You’re young. You’re smart. You do computer code. You attended a private university where the tuition is $51,960 a year, but dropped out your freshman year to start your own web company.

You like rap music and made friends with a popular rapper, so you get this genius idea: Let’s have a giant music festival in the Bahamas!

Total disaster ensues, because you don’t know the first damned thing about how to organize a music festival, especially when you promised to provide luxury amenities for people on a tropical island:

A luxury festival on a private beach on Great Exuma, the Bahamas, has descended into chaos with reports of festival goers trying to leave the site being locked in the airport.
The three-day Fyre Festival, co-organised by Ja Rule and tech entrepreneur Billy McFarland’s Fyre Media company, was promoted via Instagram by a host of supermodels, including Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid. . . .
Tickets to the luxury event included a return flight from Miami on a custom, VIP-configured Boeing 737 and guests were to stay in eco-friendly geodesic domes.
Planned activities include morning yoga and meditation on the beach, as well as fitness classes. Pusha T, Tyga, Major Lazer, Disclosure (DJ set), and Blink 182 were all booked to headline at the event.
But Fyre Festival, which was due to start on Friday, has been deemed a “disaster” and a “scam” via social media, with images from the site not matching the luxury that customers were promised. . . .

This “luxury” event turned out to be a wretched tent city with inadequate toilet facilities, more like a refugee camp than the kind of place you’d expect to find international supermodels hanging out. How bad was it? Promises of gourmet meals prepared by a famous chef turned out to be a cheese sandwich in a styrofoam container.

Now the would-be festival promoter has issued a lame press release full of self-justifying excuses, promising how huge and awesome the event is going to be “next year.” Except I’ve got a sneaky suspicion there isn’t going to be a “next year,” because boy genius Billy McFarland is likely to be bankrupt and maybe on his way to jail by then.

Don’t expect Bella Hadid to visit you in jail, Billy.

 

Remember, @SarahKSilverman Speaks Officially for the Democrat Party

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“Hillary is our Democratic nominee, and I will proudly vote for her. It’s so inspiring.”
— Sarah Silverman, July 25, 2016

Sarah Silverman is a Democrat. She spoke from the main stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and may therefore be regarded as an official spokeswoman for the Democrat Party. It is important to keep this in mind when we consider what Ms. Silverman says:

Sarah Silverman joined in the anti-Donald Trump “Tax March” protest in New York City Saturday, where she demanded the president release his tax returns in a fiery speech.
“Show us your f*cking taxes, you emotional child,” the 46-year-old comedian and liberal addressed the president in comments delivered to the protesters.
“You like being a superficial bully? Here’s one for you: you are a three at best,” Silverman added, apparently referring to Trump’s appearance.

Yes, the President of the United States is an “emotional child” and a “superficial bully,” according to official Democrat Party spokeswoman Sarah Silverman, who has never held any job that involves adult responsibility. She has made a show-business career out of her own self-indulgent brand of “humor,” and has an estimated net worth of $3.5 million. This qualifies her to denounce Donald Trump, who made his own fortune in the demanding and competitive world of real-estate development. Maybe you don’t like Donald Trump. Perhaps you consider making wisecracks on TV to be a more socially valuable enterprise than building skyscrapers, but are Hollywood entertainers really the people best qualified to lecture us about superficiality and emotional maturity? Can you cite any particular personal achievement that would make Sarah Silverman a moral authority in such matters?

 

Yes, that’s official Democrat Party spokeswoman Sarah Silverman at Saturday’s protest, brandishing a sign which proclaims that the President of the United States “eats farts 4 dinner.” These are the utterances of someone who calls the President an “emotional child.” And you may recall some of Ms. Silverman’s previous official policy statements.

 

Yes, in February, Sarah Silverman demanded that the U.S. military “join the resistance” to “overthrow” our democratically elected government.

Why is it that elected Democrats are never asked to comment on what their official spokeswoman Sarah Silverman says? Contrast how the Democrats get a free pass with how reporters demand that Republicans respond every time Rush Limbaugh says something “controversial.” This is another example of the media’s partisan double-standard.

(Via Memeorandum.)



 

Dear @EmmaWatson: You Are the ‘Goodwill Ambassador’ for a Rape Culture

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Hello, Ms. Watson. Remember when you went to the United Nations and gave that speech about how everybody should be a feminist? April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Ms. Watson,. and the organization for which you are a spokeswoman . . . Well, let’s talk about “awareness”:

A Wednesday report by the Associated Press sheds further light on the extensive child rape problem that exists within the United Nations peacekeeping forces.
The expose focuses on U.N. peacekeepers operating in Haiti, where nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse have occurred since 2004, with more than 300 cases involving children. A large number of the victims included boys and girls as young as 12 years old, many of whom were raped by peacekeepers on a regular basis.
“I did not even have breasts,” one girl, known as V01, or Victim No.1, told the AP. She said she was consistently raped by as many as 50 U.N. peacekeepers from ages 12 to 15.

Some very ugly stuff here:

The UN report eventually concludes the number of sexual assaults is too numerous to describe in detail and involved 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers. . . .
The AP found 2,000 complaints of sexual abuse over the past 12 years, with over 300 of those involving children. In very few cases are the soldiers involved ever punished. . . .
A woman who was raped by a peacekeeper tells the AP, “As far as the U.N. goes, they came here to protect us, but all they’ve brought is destruction.”

So the organization for which you are “goodwill ambassador,” Ms. Watson, has been responsible for thousands of rapes, including more than 300 children raped by United Nations “peacekeepers.” The U.N. is clearly not an organization in a position to talk about “women’s rights,” Ms. Watson, and the question is, what are you going to do about it?

Let me guess: Nothing.

 

You are a big phony, Emma Watson. You’re just a rich girl who postures as “feminist” because you want to be admired and praised. You are never going to spend a cent of your own money to do anything to help real people with real problems. Children raped by U.N. peacekeepers? No, we can’t expect Emma Watson to notice such trivial events. You’re far too important to be bothered about such things, you lying hypocrite.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Lesbian Fitness Guru Faces Felony Charges After Driving Incident

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Ten years ago, Jackie Warner was an L.A. celebrity, the star of Workout, a reality show on the Bravo cable TV network. For three seasons, the show featured Warner and her clients at her Sky Sport and Spa in Beverly Hills. A self-made millionaire, Warner is the author of the books This Is Why You’re Fat (And How to Get Thin Forever) and 10 Pounds in 10 Days: The Secret Celebrity Program for Losing Weight Fast.

Being a reality TV star, however, didn’t quite suit Warner’s temperament. The producers made Warner’s lesbian relationships a focus of the show, and she had three different girlfriends — Mimi Saraiva, Rebecca Cardon and Brianna Stockton — during the course of three seasons. And then there was the incident when Warner was caught on camera making negative comments about a client’s breast implants. As it turned out, the client was a “well-known fitness model and breast cancer survivor.” Warner says she “didn’t like doing the type of TV that I was doing which made me uncomfortable and uneasy,” so she left the Workout series and eventually sold her gym. She went into a downward spiral:

“To be honest, I felt a bit lost and started partying a lot. It felt like I was taking a few steps backward in life and I started making bad decisions.” . . .
Jackie realized she needed to accept responsibility for her actions and devise a plan to pull herself out of her misery. “I quit drinking for a year and I quit dating for a year,” she continues, adding that she prayed for guidance every morning and night and cut “almost everyone” out of her life including friends, business partners, managers, lawyers.

Two years ago, Warner was planning a comeback with a new book, but evidently that didn’t work out so well, and now there’s this news:

The former Bravo fitness star crashed her car into a pole in West Hollywood, CA Feb. 24, after allegedly “sleep driving.” She nearly ran over an LA County Sheriff’s Deputy when she allegedly threw her car in reverse and tried to leave the scene. . . .
The former star of Work Out went to lunch earlier in the day, drank one martini and took an Uber home, sources close to Jackie told TMZ. She then claims to have taken the sleep aid Ambien and says that the next thing she knew, she woke up in the hospital with no memory of the accident. According to TMZ, she wasn’t wearing pants — just underwear — when she was arrested around 5:45 pm. The former owner of Sky Sport and Spa in Beverly Hills was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon for nearly mowing down the deputy. Her blood alcohol level was measured at .08, exactly the CA legal limit, so she hasn’t been hit with DUI charges just yet.

 

You were driving without pants, with a .08 blood-alcohol content in the middle of the afternoon, you nearly killed a deputy and were taken into custody at gunpoint? Could be trouble, but don’t worry, the “Ambien defense” will save you. You’re a former reality-TV star and a lesbian. There’s no way a California court is going to convict you of a felony.



 

Comic Genius @AceOfSpadesHQ: Funnier Than @AmySchumer (and Not as Fat)

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You probably forgot that Vogue put Amy Schumer on its cover in July 2016, which was one of those many signs that the entire media establishment — fashion magazines included — had gone all-in on the Hillary Clinton presidential bandwagon. This massive propaganda blitz on behalf of the Feminist™ brand began cranking up in early 2014. By the summer of 2016 the fever was raging like Ella Dawson’s herpes infection. Striving to create a sense of historic destiny on behalf of the First Woman President, it became the habit of journalists interviewing female celebrities to solicit their opinions on feminism. “Are you a feminism? What does feminism mean to you?” Well, why did it matter?

Someone should go back and scrutinize how many sitcom starlets and pop singer barely out of their teens were solicited for their opinions on feminism between, say, June 2014 and November 2016. It was like the HUAC hearings from 1951 or something: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the feminist movement?” All of this hype for the Feminist™ brand was transparently a media effort to help Hillary overcome the negative perceptions of her as the ultimate example of what everybody hates about feminists — angry, vindictive, selfish, etc.

 

The editors at Vogue made Amy Schumer their cover girl in July 2016 not because she was glamorous or widely admired, but because she is deliberately and defiantly obnoxious. This is how you fight the patriarchy, see? Be rude, crude and chubby because . . . empowerment!

Likability has become something of a dirty word for modern-day feminists, as if a woman’s daily routine should include being eternally vigilant about whether she presents as pleasant and appealing. Amy Schumer is not the least bit concerned with being likable, which, oddly enough, has made millions love her — although she does have more than her fair share of haters and trolls, she says, mostly men who “don’t like my disgusting feminism. The feedback that reaches me is so equal in appreciation and outrage that it doesn’t feel overwhelming in either direction.” . . .
In her act, she jokes about how if you’re a woman in Hollywood who weighs more than 140 pounds, it, “like, hurts people’s eyes.” Women’s being judged on how they present themselves alone is one of those issues that have endeared her to Hillary Clinton. Schumer is with her: an unequivocal supporter. (“She does all this f–king work,” she says, “and she’s just trying to do good, and people are like, Pearls? To that event?”) Indeed, Schumer seems to have fully embraced the idea that she can be an activist and still be funny. . . .

Remember, this is in Vogue magazine, a publication that earns revenue by selling advertising to vendors of cosmetics, clothing, jewelry and other female-specific products. When did partisan politics and radical ideology become fodder for fashion magazines? But I digress . . .

Ace of Spades has got jokes like Ella Dawson has herpes lesions, and insofar as I have a blogging hero, Ace is it. Ten years ago, when I was trapped in a desk job at The Washington Times, I’d read AOSHQ and say to myself, “That’s the life!” Perhaps a diligent researcher at the SPLC could dig around in Ace’s comments circa 2007 and find me commenting as “Chuck Norris’s Left Testicle” or something like that. Ace and his merry band of morons were having fun, while I was stuck editing wire-service reports and arguing with our Capitol Hill reporters over the wording of articles about long-since-forgotten congressional controversies. When I finally got my chance to eject from print journalism in early 2008, I swiftly made the transition to blogger and discovered . . . uh, well, it is genuinely fun at times, but ain’t nobody getting rich at it, or else Glenn Reynolds would have quit his day job as a university professor by now. However, I have no cause to complain, and thus have many reasons to be grateful to Ace of Spades for his inspiration. Not to get too meta here, but Ace has an idiosyncratic style — it’s his personality that is the selling-point. Everybody’s got an opinion on politics, and so it is a mistake to think that the secret of success in political blogging is to have The Correct Opinion, to imagine yourself to be a sort of official arbiter of political righteousness, and to expect people to sit still while you tutor them.

What Ace does . . . well, I’m already past the 700-word mark now, so I won’t bore you with trying to explain what he does, except to say that he’s extraordinarily good at doing it, which is why he’s been doing it successfully for nearly 15 years now. And at least half my blog shtick was stolen from Ace, including the idea that you can get away with writing really long blog posts. All the so-called “experts” tell you that there is an ideal length of a blog post — 300 or 400 words — and that it’s bad business to write long stuff, but some of the best stuff Ace has done over the years has been extended riffs, and why not? If you’re really cranking, if the good stuff is just pouring out effortlessly, just keep going until the thing reaches its own natural stopping point. Speaking of which .. . .

Amy Schumer blames “alt-right trolls” for the bad reviews of her latest comedy special on Netflix. Never mind that critics at such mainstream publications as Newsday and the Los Angeles Times also panned Schumer’s show — no, it’s those dastardly Trump-loving “trolls” who are to blame for her flop! Ace points out that Schumer has also been accused of stealing other comics’ material. Ace kind of goes easy on Schumer, admitting that he himself may have accidentally “stolen” a joke from an old David Spade SNL routine: “I didn’t write this joke. I just remembered it, without realizing it was a memory rather than an invention.”

Happens to the best of us, I guess, but Ace’s best is still awesome, like this brutal takedown of Evan McMullin’s latest venture, which is even funnier if you know the people it’s aimed at. But what Ace is most proud of these days is his GAINZ. He’s gotten into some kind of diet/exercise health kick that he blogs about regularly. When I was at CPAC, I ran into Ace’s girlfriend and asked, “Is Ace here?” She said he wasn’t — Ace was never much for big crowd scenes — and I said I was disappointed.

“I wanted to see him now that he’s made all these GAINZ, but I’m afraid I might not recognize him, all pumped up like Hans and Franz.”

She assured me that Ace won’t be competing for the Mr. Olympia title, but she is very proud that he’s getting healthy, rather than turning into a bloated blimp of a washed-up joke-thief like Amy Schumer.

Gotta keep Ace healthy, so he can live long enough to write the obituary when Amy Schumer chokes to death on a slice of pizza.