Category: American Spectator

Google Is Lying, Again

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Gosh, it’s almost as if they’re being evil, or something:

The American Spectator is on a list of sites “blacklisted” in Google search results, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller.
Google created an “XPA news blacklist” to suppress “fake news, hate speech [and] conspiracy theories” in its search results, the Daily Caller’s J. Arthur Bloom reported in an exclusive Tuesday. This practice, approved by Google’s Trust & Safety team, contradicts congressional testimony by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who denied that the company manipulates its search results. Bloom quotes the internal Google document as saying the blacklist would be used to “filter problematic sites that violate the good neighbor and misrepresentation policies.” According to the document:

The beginning of the workflow starts when a website is placed on a watchlist which is used for monitoring of sites to determine if they violate the Good Neighbor Policy. This watchlist is maintained and stored by Ares with access restricted to policy & enforcement specialists working on the Good Neighbor Policy. … The investigation of the watchlist is done in the tool Athena, the Ares manual review tool, and intakes signals from Search, Webspan, and Ares in order to complete reviews. … Once a domain is determined to be violating the misrepresentation policy or the Good Neighbor Policy, such patterns are then added to deceptive_news_blacklist_domains.txt by the Trust & Safety team.

Sites targeted by the Google blacklist include not only The American Spectator, but also Jim Hoft’s popular Gateway Pundit site and the Conservative Tribune. Google made no explanation of how it was determined that these sites were determined to be “deceptive” or engaged in “misrepresentation,” as compared to, say, CNN, which has spent the past two years promoting a false “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory.

Just for the record, The American Spectator is more than 50 years old, and it has never promoted “fake news,” hate, or conspiracy theories.



 

Is the Bible ‘Hate Speech’?

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Trigger warning: Homophobia and slut-shaming.

“There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.”
— Deuteronomy 23:17 (KJV)

What would happen if a student started quoting the King James Bible in an American university classroom nowadays? It’s frightening to imagine the riots that would probably ensue, with masked Antifa smashing windows and purple-hair fat girls marching around with protest signs.

We are living in an age of decadence and depravity, and Christianity is now so counter-cultural that any teenage rebel looking to cause trouble just needs to keep his Bible handy. It’s easy to joke about the insanity of the Left, but we must remember that Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Floyd Lee Corkins had a pistol and planned to kill everybody at the Family Research Center in 2012. He might have done it, had it not been for the heroic courage of Leo Johnson. That event was foremost in my mind Wednesday when the Southern Poverty Law Center issued its latest “Hate Map.” Make no mistake — if you disagree with the SPLC’s left-wing agenda, they want you dead. The whole point of their annual “Hate Map” is to dehumanize the people listed, to make them targets of reprisals (see “The Terrifying Rise of Financial Blacklisting,” by Allum Bokhari). If you become a dot on the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” it could cost you your life.

 

Years ago, I started my journalism career at the Cobb News Chronicle, a weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, that has since gone out of business. Our circulation was in the South Cobb area — Austell, Mableton and Powder Springs — and I got paid $4.50 an hour, including my Wednesday duties driving a van to deliver the paper on a route that took me up past the mill in Clarkdale to Powder Springs. In those days, McEachern High School in Powder Springs was a phenomenal force in football, having installed the “Chinese Bandits” offense of the Delaware wing-T, and so I knew that community very well. Growing up in nearby Lithia Springs — in eastern Douglas County, just across the county line from Austell — that whole area was my old stomping grounds. Well, imagine my surprise this week when I clicked on the SPLC map for “Anti-LGBT Hate Groups” . . .

 

That dot on the map is American Vision, a Christian conservative group I’d never heard of, but my curiosity was aroused, and I began researching. Research is a habit of mine, you know. Unlike a lot of journalists, I’m not content to regurgitate whatever propaganda is manufactured by the machinery of media hype — that wasn’t the way my editors taught me back in the day. So I started digging into everything I could find about American Vision and realized they are a very familiar sort of latter-day Calvinists — Rushdoony, “theonomy,” “dominion,” etc. — with a strong libertarian streak. If you know who Joe Morecraft is (he preached the sermon at Larry McDonald‘s funeral), you recognize this kind of hard-core Presbyterianism, which is not remotely as scary as the SPLC might have you think. The current president of American Vision has a Ph.D. in theology and has written several books, and it occurred to me — as it apparently never occurred to any other reporter in America this week — to give Dr. Joel McDurmon a call at his office:

Citizens of Powder Springs, Georgia, probably have no idea they are a dot on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual “Hate Map,” which was published this week and achieved its purpose, i.e., generating scary headlines: “Hate group count hits 20-year high amid rise in white supremacy, report says” (USA Today), “U.S. Hate Groups Rose 30 Percent In Recent Years, Watchdog Group Reports” (NPR), and “Trump ‘fear-mongering’ fuels rise of U.S. hate groups to record: watchdog” (Reuters). The journalists who supply the SPLC with this kind of free publicity seldom if ever bother to dig down into the details of these annual reports, so it’s unlikely that USA Today readers or NPR listeners in Powder Springs are aware that one of these “hate groups” has made their town a dot on the map.
Located in the prosperous Cobb County suburbs of Atlanta, Powder Springs has more than tripled its population in the 30-odd years since I worked there as a young newspaper reporter. However, I had no idea there was a “hate group” in Powder Springs until I clicked on the SPLC’s latest map and found that the town of 14,000 people is home to American Vision, a small 501(c)3 “Biblical Worldview Ministry” currently led by Dr. Joel McDurmon, author of such books as God Versus Socialism: A Biblical Critique of the New Social Gospel (2009) and Restoring America: One County at a Time (2012). A theologian by training, McDurmon’s views can perhaps be most easily summarized as Calvinist and libertarian, and the question is: Why is this Christian non-profit organization with an office in Powder Springs labeled an “Anti-LGBT Hate Group” by the SPLC?
“Merely because we have always stood by the Bible’s position on homosexuality,” McDurmon told me in a phone interview the day the latest “Hate Map” was published. . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator (which got linked today by Professor Reynolds at Instapundit — thanks).




 

 

Lynching America: Jussie Smollett and the Prejudice of Anti-Trump Hatred

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“The media have summoned into existence a Hate-Hoax Industrial Complex that keeps manufacturing fake ‘incidents’ …”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 28

Americans nowadays consider “racist” the worst thing you could call someone, but I’m old enough to remember a time and place where quite the opposite was true. There is an 11-letter hyphenated compound that, in the South in the old days, was perhaps the foulest insult imaginable. The French phrase Amis des Noirs might be the most acceptable euphemistic substitute to describe white people who exhibited unusual sympathy toward African-Americans, an attitude considered philanthropic in 18th-century France, but less so in the Deep South circa 1964.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m from Georgia, and that when I was in second grade, Lester Maddox was elected our governor? So whenever I hear some allegedly clever liberal speak of “racism” or “white supremacy” in America now, it offends me because it insults my intelligence.

Buddy, I know what real racism looks like, and this ain’t it, OK?

Pete Da Tech Guy actually uses that 11-letter hyphenated compound while invoking To Kill a Mockingbird as an analogy for the liberal prejudices we’ve seen in the Jussie Smollett case. Tom Robinson was wrongly convicted “not only because the accusations fit [the jury’s] existing prejudices but they understand that to suggest in public that they believe a black man instead of a white woman might mark them as outside of their community beliefs and norms.” To say the least.

The profound racial prejudice once typical of the Deep South is quite nearly unknown in America today, but has been replaced among liberals by a partisan political prejudice, the belief that “racism” (or some other species of “hate”) is the only reason anyone votes Republican. The relevant “community” in this case are the Democrats and their media allies, whose “beliefs and norms” are offended whenever a Republican wins an election. Consider this news item:

Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker told reporters Sunday that he would withhold judgment on the alleged attack on “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett after calling the incident “an attempted modern-day lynching” when it was first reported last month.
“I’m gonna withhold until all the information actually comes out from on-the-record sources,” the senator from New Jersey said after meeting with voters in Rochester, N.H. “We know in America that bigoted and biased attacks are on the rise in a serious way, and we actually even know in this country that since 9/11, the majority of the terrorist attacks on our soil have been right-wing terrorist attacks — the majority of them white supremacist attacks.”
Booker cited the deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue this past October as well as the June 2015 shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C.

According to the FBI, more hate crimes have been reported in recent years, however (a) this does not mean “bigoted and biased attacks” have actually increased, nor is it correct to conclude that (b) attacks by “right-wing terrorists” or “white supremacists” are a majority of such crimes. Many incidents that might not have been reported as “hate crimes” in previous years are now being reported because of heightened attention to such crimes, and the category “hate crime” includes a lot of different offenses committed by different people for different reasons.

Go look at the actual FBI statistics for 2017, the most recent year available, and you’ll find that 21% of reported hate crimes (1,359) were committed by black people, and 9% (454) were committed by Hispanics. Whatever sort of “hate” motivated these offenders, I doubt their crimes can be described as “right-wing terrorist attacks.” In terms of motive, of the 7,175 hate-crime incidents reported by the FBI for 2017, more than 10% (741) were classified as “anti-white,” 13% (938) were “anti-Jewish.” There were 1,130 hate-crime incidents (16%) motivated by “sexual orientation” (including 32 “anti-heterosexual” hate crimes) and another 165 incidents (2.3%) motivated by gender or “gender identity,” including 22 “anti-male” hate crimes. My point is that not everything counted as a “hate crime” reflects what Senator Booker intends to suggest, i.e., that such crimes are “on the rise” because of President Trump.

What appears to have happened in the Jussie Smollett case is an effort to inflame and exploit prejudice against Trump voters — a vicious and deliberate slander against 62.9 million Americans:

Four below zero — that’s how cold it was at 2 a.m. in Chicago on Jan. 29, when actor Jussie Smollett claims he was the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two white Trump supporters. There were many reasons to be skeptical of Smollett’s story, but the fact that Chicago was experiencing a “polar vortex” of arctic cold was high on the list of doubts. Even if you could believe that two right-wingers would be stalking a not-very-famous actor in downtown Chicago, waiting for a chance to attack him on his way back from a wee-hours trip to a sandwich shop, why would they be doing this in -4°F weather?
Smollett’s story never made sense, and it came completely unraveled last week after Chicago police apprehended two of the Empire actor’s friends when they flew into O’Hare Airport, returning from a trip to Nigeria. According to reports by Chicago’s WBBM-TV and other outlets, brothers Abimbola “Abel” Osundairo and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo were paid $3,500 by Smollett to stage the fake hate crime. Police have not yet filed any charges or given an official explanation of exactly what happened, and Smollett’s attorneys issued a statement Saturday asserting his innocence, but there is now every reason to believe that the whole thing was a complete hoax. If this proves to be the case, will any of the liberals who rushed to exploit Smollett’s tale face any consequences for smearing Trump supporters? . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.




 

 

Prejudice and Error

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If the basis of your investigation is a belief that witchcraft is the source of social problems, you’ll probably find some witches soon:

Mistaken identity is always a risk when a witch-hunt hysteria takes hold, and the hunt for “hate” in the Trump era has produced a mob mentality that rivals 17th-century Salem. Just ask Michelle Grissom, a Colorado middle-school teacher who may lose her job because she mistakenly identified the wrong Covington Catholic School student in a viral video — and called him a “Hitler Youth”!
Ms. Grissom has been placed on leave from her position as a social studies teacher at Mountain Ridge Middle School in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch after deleting her Twitter account and apologizing for her error. The Kentucky student she meant to defame as a Nazi — Nick Sandmann — is now arguably the most famous Catholic in America, thanks to video of his Jan. 18 confrontation with activist Nathan Phillips in D.C., but Ms. Grissom instead “doxed” Covington Catholic junior Jay Jackson. Unfortunately for her, Jackson did not accompany his classmates on the trip to Washington for the annual March for Life. Instead, he was 500 miles from the nation’s capital, playing basketball in a tournament in Middletown, Ohio. Adding to Ms. Grissom’s misfortunes was the fact that Jay’s father is a successful obstetrician who, to say the least, did not take kindly to having his son labeled a Hitler Youth. After the gravity of her error became apparent, Ms. Grissom issued an abject apology and also resigned her post as local teachers union official.
To paraphrase Britney Spears: Oops, they did it again. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

‘This Tragic Epidemic’

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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.




 

 

 

‘The Truth About Who Kills Women’

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It is probably unwise for a feminist to employ the word “truth,” which may provoke someone familiar with the relevant facts:

Jessica Valenti is a feminist and a liar, but I repeat myself. A couple of weeks ago, Valenti invited scrutiny of her truthfulness by responding to the murder of a young woman in Iowa. On Aug. 22, the White House issued this statement on Twitter: “For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found. The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone.” That message included a brief video of parents whose children were also killed by illegal aliens.
Ms. Valenti, a columnist for the Guardian and author of several feminist books, responded with an obscenity, calling the White House message “f—king disgraceful,” and then added this remarkable statement: “The deadliest demographic for American women isn’t immigrants — it’s husbands & boyfriends. But the truth about who kills women in this country isn’t politically useful for the White House.”
Well, since Ms. Valenti has invited an examination of the demographics of murder, let us ask: Who is killing whom in America?
It so happens that I’ve previously researched this question, and can say with certainty that Ms. Valenti’s insinuation — that the typical American woman is in danger of being murdered by her boyfriend or husband — is absolutely false. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

 

Victims of ‘Cissexist Heteropatriarchy’

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Let me state clearly what should be obvious to longtime readers: I don’t like it when kids at elite colleges claim to be victims of oppression.

Self-pity as a basis for political activism is a very bad idea and should be discouraged. Generally speaking, young people are ignorant and foolish. Being highly intelligent is not a substitute for experience, and youthful enthusiasm should never be confused with actual knowledge. Do not tell me you are a victim of oppression if your Daddy is rich enough to send you to a school where tuition is $50,586 a year:

There are too many white musicians in the Oberlin College jazz band. This was among the numerous complaints — “concrete and unmalleable demands” — in a 14-page manifesto issued last week by the Black Students Union (BSU) at the elite private liberal arts college in Ohio. The second item on their list of demands was “a concerted effort to increase the percentage of Black students and specifically Black female identifying instrumentalists in the Jazz department. We would like to reiterate the demand for a 4% annual increase in the enrollment of Black students in the Jazz Department starting in 2016 to accumulate to 40% increase by the year 2022.”
Underrepresentation of “Black female identifying instrumentalists in the Jazz department” might seem a rather odd choice of student grievances to those of us old enough to remember when campus radicals focused their attention on serious issues like the Vietnam War. The seemingly trivial nature of the Oberlin BSU complaints contrasts starkly with the group’s dramatic denunciation of the college as an institution that “functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” . . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

The Standards of Liberal Journalism Are Every Bit as Real as ‘Haven Monahan’

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How about we start speaking some blunt truths?

Rolling Stone magazine perpetrated a hoax against the University of Virginia, doing “journalism” about an alleged gang rape that evidently never happened. The source of the dramatic tale Rolling Stone published last November, “A Rape on Campus,” was a UVA student named Jackie who has been proven to be a liar. Her freshman year at UVA, Jackie invented a make-believe boyfriend she called “Haven Monahan” as part of an unsuccessful attempt to inspire the jealousy of her friend Ryan Duffin, on whom she had a romantic crush. This deceptive scheme apparently led to Jackie’s subsequent claim that she was gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house during a date with this non-existent boyfriend on the night of Sept. 28, 2012.
We didn’t learn the truth behind Jackie’s lies, however, until after Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s sensational article in Rolling Stone described in lurid detail how Jackie was allegedly raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi house her freshman year. One of the first journalists to raise questions about the article, Richard Bradley wrote, “Something about this story doesn’t feel right,” and cited the obvious problems that any veteran editor would have noticed about the story. To believe the Rolling Stone story, Bradley argued, “requires a lot of leaps of faith. It requires you to indulge your pre-existing biases.” Yet these biases — a willingness to believe the worst about fraternity members, and about men in general — were precisely what led Erdely and her editors to publish the 9,000-word article that, they believed, would expose once and for all the reality of what feminists have claimed is a “rape epidemic” on college campuses.
Rolling Stone’s story was a lie and there is no such “epidemic.”
A lengthy examination of Erdely’s article by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has exposed the inexcusable lapses in editorial judgment that resulted in Rolling Stone’s gross libel of UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter. It is a near-certainty that the fraternity will sue for defamation, and it is difficult to imagine how Rolling Stone could successfully defend itself against such a suit. The magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, told the New York Times that his staff was taken in by ”a really expert fabulist storyteller.” Yet as the Columbia review makes clear, Erdely and her editors did not take the most basic steps needed to verify (or debunk) Jackie’s tale.
Rolling Stone was grossly negligent, but this has been true of the entire profession of mainstream journalism in dealing with the claims made by feminists about the “rape epidemic” on America’s college and university campuses. These claims are as fictional as Jackie’s imaginary boyfriend “Haven Monahan.”. . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.