Category: Fox News

The Hypocrisy of the Rage Mob

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Virtue signalling SJWs:

Media Matters President Angelo Carusone is currently leading a boycott campaign against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a co-founder of The Daily Caller News Foundation, in an attempt to get him fired.
Carusone and Media Matters, which openly pine for the destruction of Fox News, have justified the left-wing boycott campaign by pointing to a number of statements that Carlson made on a radio shock jock show between 2006 and 2011.
But Carusone has his own track record of inflammatory statements. Carusone’s now-defunct blog included degrading references to “trannies,” “jewry” and Bangladeshis.
Carusone posted a lengthy diatribe in November 2005 about a Bangladeshi man who was robbed by “a gang of transvestites,” as Carusone described it. Carusone was offended that the gang was described as “attractive” in an article.
“Did you notice the word attractive? What the f–k is that doing in there? Is the write[r] a tranny lover too? Or, perhaps he’s trying to justify how these trannies tricked this Bangladeshi in the first place? Look man, we don’t need to know whether or not they were attractive. The f–king guy was Bangladeshi,” Carusone wrote. “And while we’re out, what the hell was he doing with $7,300 worth of stuff. The guy’s Banladeshi! [sic]”

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

It’s nothing but partisan politics:

An upcoming Media Matters protest against Tucker Carlson at Fox News headquarters in New York City received some help Tuesday from three Obama administration alums.
On the podcast “Pod Save America,” former Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor, as well as former Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett encouraged listeners to attend the protest.

What disgusting creeps they are.



 

Tucker Carlson: Still Not Sorry

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“One of the only places left in the United States where independent thoughts are allowed is right here, the opinion hours on this network, just a few hours in a sea of television programming. It’s not much, relatively speaking. For the left, it’s unacceptable. They demand total conformity. Since the day we went on the air, they’ve been working hard to kill this show.”
— Tucker Carlson

If you don’t understand what’s happening now, you perhaps didn’t notice this Legal Insurrection headline from 2011:

Media Matters Plans “Guerrilla Warfare
and Sabotage” on Fox News
And Conservative Websites

Eight years ago, David Brock openly described the “opposition research” Media Matters was doing as part of a “war” against Fox News, and their smear against Tucker Carlson is just the latest salvo. It is astonishing to think someone spent hours listening to recordings of old episodes of “Bubba the Love Sponge” for the sake of this “gotcha” effort. Like, can you imagine being Madeline Peltz (Oberlin College, Class of 2016) and your job every day for weeks is transcribing “unearthed audio”?

Evidently, Ms. Peltz is part of a team assigned to take down Carlson. It’s what she gets paid for, it’s her tax-exempt non-profit job to destroy him. Imagine writing a headline like this:

 

Advertisers on Carlson’s program, according to Ms. Peltz, are “sponsoring fascism” and Carlson is promoting “extremist ideology that . . . actually puts marginalized communities under direct threat of material harm.” Wbere is the evidence of this “material harm”? Carlson has the highest-rated program on the No. 1 cable news channel in America. About 3 million people tune in to watch Carlson nightly. If he is promoting fascist extremism against “marginalized communities,” shouldn’t someone be able to demonstrate this with, y’know, facts and evidence and stuff? But such defamatory assertions are an acceptable mode of discourse for the tax-exempt non-profit organization that pays people like Ms. Peltz to smear anyone on David Brock’s Enemies List.

As I noted Monday, Carlson seems to have read Vox Day’s advice against apologizing when you’re under attack by SJWs, and on Monday night, he just flat-out lit them up in his opening monologue:

 

Let’s see who survives this war, eh? Shock and awe, baby.



 

Tucker Carlson: Sorry, Not Sorry

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Tucker Carlson must have read Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie, because he is following Vox’s advice to those under SJW attack: Do not apologize!

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Sunday refused to apologize for a series of past comments about women and issues like statutory rape that surfaced in a YouTube compilation by Media Matters for America (MMFA).
During call-in segments on “Bubba the Love Sponge Show” between 2006 and 2011, the future Fox News host said that women enjoy being told to “be quiet and kind of do what you’re told” suggested that statutory rape isn’t like “pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting” them and described Martha Stewart’s daughter, radio and TV personality Alexis Stewart, as “c–ty.”
In a statement on Sunday night, Carlson said, “Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago.” (He sidestepped the fact that some of the highlighted comments occurred as recently as 2011.)
“Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour,” Carlson continued. “If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

If you don’t know who “Bubba the Love Sponge” is, he’s a working-class guy from Indiana who became a successful morning radio host in Tampa, Florida, with a “shock jock” style similar to Howard Stern. He was repeatedly fined by the FCC for his crude humor. There is something absurd in Media Matters pretending that guests on Bubba’s show are expected to offer serious public-policy insights. As for the comments themselves, what did Tucker say that was actually wrong? It is true that statutory rape is not the same as a violent sexual attack, and everybody knows it; the purpose of statutory rape laws is to protect young people from those who may take advantage of their, uh, youthful enthusiasm. To go back to the 2013 Kaitlyn Hunt case, for example, no one alleged that the 18-year-old used physical force to compel her 14-year-old girlfriend into lesbian activity. It was a crime, but not a crime of violence.

Anyway, Tucker went on this “morning zoo” type of show — a radio frat-house, basically — and said the sort of things one might say on such a program, and you’ve got to be amazed at the desperation of the Left in assigning someone to wade through hours of decades-old audio archives in order to catch Tucker saying “offensive” things.

To repeat Vox Day’s advice: Do not apologize.



 

Good-Bye, @MegynKelly

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Did you make the smart move? That’s the question that occurs to most Fox News viewers who have watched your meteoric ascent, as they consider your switch to NBC. Surely the network that hired you would not have done so if they thought you were a conservative. NBC News is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party. It is the network of Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow. NBC is anti-Christian and pro-Islam, anti-family and pro-abortion, anti-cop and pro-“Black Lives Matter.” The partisan and ideological biases at NBC News are so blatantly obvious that it is impossible to imagine that you, Ms. Kelly, could be permitted to broadcast anything there that would deviate from the network’s Democrat/“progressive” agenda. But anyway . . .

 

“Bill hated her” — I laughed when I read that quote from an unnamed Fox News host in Gabriel Sherman’s article. Yes, and we hate Bill O’Reilly, a guy who’s been the “face” of Fox News for way too long. Why did Roger Ailes invest so heavily in making O’Reilly the tentpole of the network, the signature of the Fox News brand? It never made sense to me. Veteran news guys like Brit Hume and Brett Baier are the best thing on the network, and in terms of opinionated conservatism, Sean Hannity is more watchable. Yet year after year, O’Reilly has remained entrenched in his 8 p.m. time slot as the centerpiece of the Fox News identity, and I could seldom stand to watch more than a few minutes of The O’Reilly Factor.

“Personnel is policy,” as the Reaganites said, and the Ailes-era staffing decisions at Fox News seemed to reflect a commitment to a particular style of Republican political messaging, namely the old Al D’Amato Long Island GOP machine and its Art Finklestein-engineered attack strategy. Attracting a large viewership in the outer suburbs of New York City made sense, as a business strategy for Fox News, and the demographics of that audience meant that having an Irish Catholic guy from Long Island as the 8 p.m. anchor also made sense. But once the network had established its national influence, didn’t Fox News limit its audience by having this snide and smarmy egotist as its most famous face?

 

Well, The Kelly Files was a counter-balance to that problem, but the gigantic ego  of Bill O’Reilly — and the network’s investment in his ego — could not be effectively counter-balanced, and so, good-bye, Megyn:

For Kelly, the jump from a primetime perch at Fox to a multifaceted role at NBC carries a high degree of risk. She’ll be giving up the most loyal audience in cable news for new set of platforms that she’ll have to largely build herself. At NBC, Kelly will anchor an Oprah-like daytime show, launch a new Sunday night news magazine, and contribute to the network’s political coverage. The track record for talented anchors launching daytime programs hasn’t been good (see: Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira, Anderson Cooper), and no Fox News star has successfully crossed over to the mainstream before.

My hunch, Ms. Kelly, is that you will simply disappear. The partisan Democrats who run NBC News have no interest in your success. What they have done is to hire you away from Fox News in order to damage their rival, and to neutralize whatever personal influence you may have had in terms of undermining liberalism’s hegemonic control of the news media. You are now another highly-paid puppet whose strings are controlled by the executives at 30 Rock, and if you fail at NBC — if your daytime show is a ratings flop — those executives will have no problem paying out your contract while limiting your airtime to occasional appearances as a Meet the Press panelist.

 

Of course, I’ve been wrong before. A month before Election Day, I declared that the devastation of Trump’s accumulating scandals meant he couldn’t possibly win and, if I was wrong about that, maybe I’m also wrong about your career prospects at NBC News. How could you succeed?

  1. Be pro-life — The pro-abortion bias is arguably the most toxic aspect of the media’s liberal agenda. Obviously, NBC News isn’t going to let you use their airtime to promote the pro-life perspective in any blatant way, but there will be times when your decisions could have a subtle yet important influence. “Therefore choose life.”
  2. Be anti-Hollywood — My old friend Andrew Breitbart and I used to argue about which was more wicked, Hollywood or D.C. Having spent so long dealing with the two-faced backstabbing scoundrels in Washington, I was certain that D.C. was the most evil place on the planet, but Andrew was unconvinced. “No, trust me, Hollywood is worse,” he’d say, before regaling me with tales about the selfish coke-addicted perverts who run the entertainment industry. If you, Ms. Kelly, were to use your NBC daytime show to expose some of the shocking decadence of Hollywood, this would be a tremendous public service and, I suspect, would make you unique among major network news personalities.
  3. Be patriotic — What was the secret of Trump’s victory, really? First, “build a wall,” and second, “Make America great again.” This simple old-fashioned patriotism proved so popular that 63 million American voters were willing to overlook every negative aspect of Trump’s personality and politics. Maybe your NBC audience would find it refreshing to encounter a daytime show where the U.S. military and our nation’s law-enforcement officers are recognized for their heroic service to our country. Flag-waving Mom-and-apple-pie patriotism is a “brand” whose value has been unappreciated by the liberal media establishment, and you might enjoy surprising success at NBC if you make this a core theme of your new show.

Network TV stars don’t ask for my advice, and I offer it unsolicited only because it seems to me there is too much an echo-chamber mentality in the major media. People inside the news industry can never be objective about the industry and its problems. Unable to step outside the echo chamber, and unwilling to listen to anyone who isn’t part of the industry — what do they know, those stupid people who merely watch TV? — the media’s hive-mind generates a sort of impenetrable force-field that prevents insiders from seeing their industry’s problems objectively.

Maybe you, Ms. Kelly, can be an exception to that rule.

 

(Via Memeorandum.)



 

 

The @GretchenCarlson Lawsuit and the Problem of the ‘Boys Club’ Atmosphere

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As everyone should understand, filing employment discrimination lawsuits is not something I support. If you don’t like your job, quit. It’s a free country. Nobody can force you to work for a company that treats you unfairly. You have skills, your skills have value and, if your employer does not properly appreciate the value of your work, give your notice and leave. Unless you are willing to quit on the spot — “Take this job and shove it!” — you will always be vulnerable to unfair treatment. What happens, too often, is that people become so economically dependent on their employer that they essentially forfeit this trump card. If your boss thinks you can’t afford to quit, and that you can’t find similar opportunity elsewhere, you may be treated badly because of the assumption that you have no choice but to tolerate bad treatment.

Gretchen Carlson has filed a lawsuit against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and the specifics of these allegations are quite shocking. Her lawsuit conveys a sense of what goes on behind the scenes at FNC, and adds to an existing perception of a “boys club” atmosphere at the network. You can go back and research what happened when FNC’s Geraldo Rivera said he wanted to spit on FNC contributor Michelle Malkin. The network’s executives did not do the right thing in that case — Rivera should have been fired — and eventually, Malkin ended her association with Fox, to the network’s detriment. And this was certainly not the only previous case where women complained about the FNC “boys club” problem.

Fox News has been innovative in developing female on-camera talent, but at the same time, the network has too often tolerated off-camera behavior that should not have been tolerated. You don’t have to fire people or issue formal reprimands in order to prevent the perception that female employees are being treated unfairly. Keep in mind that I do not believe in the concept of “worker’s rights.” Your right to quit should suffice, as far as I’m concerned, to safeguard your own interests in any fee-for-service arrangement. Sometimes, greasing the squeaky wheel is the best approach to handling complaints of unfairness, but on the other hand, sometimes complainers are just complainers. Effective managers must learn to tell the difference on a case-by-case basis.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to witness at close range the ways in which claims of “discrimination” arise. In too many cases, these complaints are just a shakedown: “Pay me what I want, or I’ll sue.”

It doesn’t matter what you think of Gretchen Carlson or Roger Ailes or Fox News, this lawsuit is evidence of a managerial failure. Good managers spot personnel problems long before they reach this stage, and intervene to prevent the kind of escalation to leads to litigation. The wise employee, however, should beware of the danger of becoming so dependent on an employer that your right to quit is effectively void.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum. More at Hot Air, Red State and MediaGazer.)





 

Fox News Is Corrupt and Unethical

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It was never a good idea for conservatives to put all their media eggs in Rupert Murdoch’s basket, and this story about Marco Rubio’s role in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” deal explains why:

A few weeks after Senator Marco Rubio joined a bipartisan push for an immigration overhaul in 2013, he arrived alongside Senator Chuck Schumer at the executive dining room of News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters for dinner.
Their mission was to persuade Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the media empire, and Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of its Fox News division, to keep the network’s on-air personalities from savaging the legislation and give it a fighting chance at survival.
Mr. Murdoch, an advocate of immigration reform, and Mr. Ailes, his top lieutenant and the most powerful man in conservative television, agreed at the Jan. 17, 2013, meeting to give the senators some breathing room.
But the media executives, highly attuned to the intensifying anger in the Republican grass roots, warned that the senators also needed to make their case to Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio, who held enormous sway with the party’s largely anti-immigrant base. . . .

Read the whole thing. (Hat-tip: Mark Krikorian on Twitter.)

 

‘Carly Cut His Balls Off’?

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Certainly, many Fox News viewers must have been shocked Wednesday night by Rich Lowry’s comments to Megyn Kelly:

“Look Trump attacks everyone but she’s become a much bigger target. And I think part of what’s going on here is that last debate. Let’s be honest, Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon.”

Fox is becoming the anti-Trump network, as Trump himself has noticed and, whatever its effect on Trump’s campaign, I’m not sure that is a wise marketing strategy for Fox. The populist anti-Washington “mad as hell” voters who like Trump are a huge part of Fox’s viewership. Nor are the Trump voters a negligible component of the electorate:

Americans are “fed up” with politics, suspect the wealthy are getting an unfair edge, and think the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll that lays bare the depth and breadth of the discontents propelling outsider candidates in the Republican presidential field.
The survey shows that 72 percent of Americans think their country isn’t as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign. More than a third prefer a presidential candidate without experience in public office.
Three of the four candidates leading the Republican field fit that description: Trump, the first choice of 21 percent of registered Republicans and voters who say they lean that way, followed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson with 16 percent, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush with 13 percent, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina with 11 percent.

My suggestion last night on Twitter:

People need to calm down about this primary campaign. We are still four months away from the Iowa caucuses. If Trump is your favorite candidate, OK. If you hate Trump, that’s OK, too. But there’s no point in conservatives denouncing their own friends and amping up the all-or-nothing rhetoric as if nothing else mattered.

Six months from now, in late March, a lot of people are going to disappointed that their favorite didn’t get the nomination, but so what? As long as the eventual Republican nominee wins in November 2016, conservatives generally will be happy, while liberals generally will be freaking out in paroxysms of rage and despair.

Imagine the disconsolate tears of liberals when Hillary loses. Be happy.




 

War on Human Nature: The Celebrity Fantasy Dress-Up With ‘Caitlyn’ Game

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We now live in a world in which we are required to believe lies, where telling the truth is condemned as “hate,” and where strangers feel qualified to diagnose you as suffering from an irrational “phobia” if you refuse to cooperate with their political agenda. As I remarked a couple of months ago, “Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement.”

Of course, one of the strange things I encountered when I started the research that became the “Sex Trouble” research project is that radical lesbian feminists were being labeled as “transphobic” because they refused to play along with dishonest “gender” games. Today, I woke up and turned on Fox News and was disturbed to see “Fox and Friends” playing along with Bruce Jenner’s ridiculous farce, and why? Because yesterday, when Neal Cavuto snarked at the new Vanity Fair “cover girl,” the Left went into attack mode and, we may presume, Rupert Murdoch’s executives issued a memo commanding everyone on the network to join in the “Caitlyn” charade. The Culture of Lies has become so powerful that we must forfeit respectability if we dare speak truth to perverse power.

Let’s flashback to what I wrote in January 2014:

By the time a feminist reaches the radical point at which normal sexual intercourse is regarded as inherently oppressive, she has already marched a good distance down the Crazyville Road. Sane, normal people become the Enemy and, in order to maintain her delusions, the feminist seeks out the company of her fellow radicals, who share and confirm these extreme beliefs. The maladjusted thereby exile themselves to a sort of voluntary asylum, where they only encounter lunatics like themselves.
So, RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym.
How crazy did that conflict become? At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.”

This is what you find as you travel down the Crazyville Road: “Diversity” forbids radical feminists to have a women-only conference, because “equality” means that men have a right to be women, too.

Not only are the lunatics running the asylum, but now sane people are diagnosed as crazy for not participating in delusions.

Feminism is now undergoing a sort of nuclear meltdown because the liberal (“pro-sex”) feminists have encouraged men to accept the idea that promiscuity, pornography and prostitution are “empowering” to women. Buying into that liberal lie has a way of transforming men into depraved monsters who crave wicked and perverse thrills. Women who are brutalized by such beastly men — and girls coming of age, horrified by the prospect of being required to conform to the pornified “ideal” of womanhood in this twisted liberal culture — experience psychological trauma. As sex becomes increasingly dehumanized, the minds of both men and women are warped. Human dignity is abandoned. Reason gives way to savage ferocity. Selfishness is celebrated as wisdom and mercy is condemned as weakness. People abandon the ancient faith, and embrace radical ideology with the fanatical certainty of religious zeal.

“In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology. . . .
“Heterosexual hegemony insures that people think it natural that male and female form a life-long sexual/reproductive unit with the female belonging to the male. . . .
“Male supremacy is what is attacked in lesbian ideology. What we are doing in revolutionary struggle is to make our consciousnesses different. When enough people’s consciousnesses are different, then we make a revolution.”
— Margaret Small, “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Bunch and Nancy Myron (1975)

“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination, in particular through the way it channels women into marriage and motherhood.”
— Diane Richardson, “Theorizing Heterosexuality,” in Rethinking Sexuality (2000)

“Western culture is founded upon . . . the idea that there is an essential difference between men and women. . . .
“The idea of biological sexual difference stands as the major obstacle to the recognition that men and women actually stand in relation to one another in positions of dominance and subordination. . . .
“The category of sex into which humans are placed is the basis of compulsory heterosexuality . . .”
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2015)

The devil knows his time is short, you see.

Bob Belvedere at The Camp of the Saints had a very interesting post about the way revolutions impact mental health. The madness now erupting from our culture like a volcano of insanity is a result of the Obama Revolution: ISIS is the Hope and “Caitlyn” Jenner is the Change.




Are we Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption? Almost certainly so. People need to be praying. Only a miracle can save us now.