Category: CNN

The Media: Stupid or Dishonest?

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“I don’t think our media is really this dumb,” Hot Air’s John Sexton writes. “Rather, I think they’re being intentionally dishonest.” The subject was CNN’s coverage of the “migrant caravan”:

It started when CNN’s John Berman introduced the story this way: “U.S. border patrol agents deployed tear-gas on Central Americans seeking asylum, this does include women and children, during an incident near one of the world’s busiest border crossings.” CNN went on to frame the incident as a “peaceful march” that “devolved into chaos.” . . .
I don’t think our media is really this dumb. Rather, I think they’re being intentionally dishonest. The intent of this group was always to do exactly what it did, i.e. rush the border in numbers in hopes of overwhelming authorities.

Meanwhile, Ace points out that MSNBC appears to be shocked — shocked! — that the caravan isn’t a bunch of helpless women and children. Instead, as conservatives have been saying all along, this dangerous mob of foreigners is composed almost entirely of young men who hate America. In other words, this is a hostile invasion.

You know this. CNN knows this, too. They are on the side of the enemy. The people who run CNN hate America and are trying to destroy it.

MSNBC: Majority of Caravan Members Are Men,
Some Not Talking About Asylum



 

Obscure Cable-TV Personality Becomes Disorderly at White House Briefing

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CNN’s ratings are lower than the Hallmark Channel and Nickelodeon, which means more people watch Spongebob Squarepants than watch Jim Acosta, CNN’s prima donna “reporter” who threw a public temper tantrum during a presidential press conference today:

CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta was captured wrestling with an unidentified White House aide for possession of a microphone while he attempted to ask President Trump questions during Wednesday’s press conference.
Acosta and Trump got into a heated debate after the reporter asked him about the migrant caravan. Trump told Acosta to let him do his job.
“Honestly, I think you should let me run the country and you run CNN,” Trump told Acosta.
The reporter tried to ask him another question before a female White House aide walked over to him.
Trump then told him, “That’s enough!”
Acosta continued to try to talk as the aide was seen trying to take the microphone from his hand. She grabbed the microphone but Acosta wouldn’t give it up.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he told the aide as he continued his question. The aide then kneeled next to Acosta to wait for him to finish speaking.
Acosta then continued to ask Trump about the Russian investigation, which the president called “a hoax.”
Trump again told Acosta to put down the microphone. The aide was then able to take the microphone from Acosta and give it to NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander.
However, Trump wasn’t finished and called Acosta “a very rude person.”
“I’ll tell you what. CNN should be ashamed of themselves having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN,” Trump told Acosta.
“You’re a very rude person. The way you treat [White House press secretary] Sarah Huckabee [Sanders] is horrible. And the way you treat other people is horrible. You shouldn’t treat people that way,” Trump continued.

Acosta is a disgrace and his network is a laughingstock.



 

Category: CNN

‘Hate Speech,’ CNN and George Soros

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Republican campaign ad in Minnesota.

Yesterday, I switched my office TV to CNN, a psychological hazard I try to undertake at least once a week. Yes, it’s a mental-health risk to immerse myself into that bizarre alternative universe — a land where Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon are considered objective journalists — but if I don’t occasionally watch CNN, how can I know what’s going on in the deranged minds of Democrats? As much as we would like to ignore CNN, ignoring them is in some sense as dangerous as ignoring anti-Semitic kooks like Robert Bowers. The third-rated cable-news network is like a fringe extremist cult compound on the outskirts of town, and you never know when the cult leader might decide to start Armageddon.

Hey, has anyone mentioned that CNN has not one but two primetime anchors who are homosexual? Isn’t that odd? Like, you’ve got three hours of programming between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, and two of those hours are anchored by Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon? Whatever the percentage of the homosexual population, it’s certainly less than 67%, so why this unusual over-representation of gay men on CNN primetime?

We’re not supposed to mention such things — it’s homophobia, I guess — but the fact that we’re not allowed to talk about it doesn’t mean people don’t notice. CNN is gayer than the Castro Street Pride Fair, which may explain why the network’s ratings are lower than Nickelodeon and the Hallmark Channel. Given a choice between Don Lemon and reruns of Spongebob Squarepants, which would you watch? But I digress . . .

Trump’s Embrace of Racial Bigotry Has
Shifted What Is Acceptable in America

That’s the headline on a Slate column by Jamelle Bouie, and what does it mean? Trump’s rhetorical style is abrasive, yes, but he isn’t anti-black. In fact, both polling data and anecdotal information indicate that black people like Trump’s blunt tell-it-like-it-mode of communication more than they like the controlled, scripted GOP talking-points style of most Republican politicians. Trump is a wealthy businessman and guess what? A lot of black people admire wealth and success. Why shouldn’t they?

Trump is a white guy who doesn’t feel guilty about being white, and that’s most of what the “racial bigotry” narrative is about. Liberals believe it’s wrong to be white, that white people should be embarrassed by their whiteness, and Trump refuses to play along with that game.

The other thing is, of course, immigration.

 

Let’s not mince words here: Democrats want to import Third World immigrants because they believe this will enable Democrats to take over the federal government, the same way they have done in California. Remember that 25 years ago, California was a GOP-controlled state, but as the Hispanic population rapidly grew, Democrats took over. California is now 39% non-Hispanic white, 39% Hispanic, 15% Asian and 7% black, and the white minority is shrinking rapidly. Every year, about 140,000 more people leave California than move there from elsewhere in the U.S., and if you think the exodus of white people from California is good for the people (of whatever ethnic background) left behind there, you’re a fool. The only people really benefiting from California’s demographic transition are the Democrats gaining more and more political power.

California is in effect a one-party state, where Democrats control every statewide office, both houses of the legislature, and the vast majority of elected county and municipal offices. This has consequences.

Have you noticed that Democrats keep reminding us Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016? Why do you think that is? California. What happens if you subtract California’s numbers from the total?

U.S. Popular Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton ……. 65,853,514
Donald Trump ……. 62,984,828

California Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton …….. 8,753,788
Donald Trump …….. 4,483,810

U.S. Minus California, 2016

Donald Trump …….. 58,501,018
Hillary Clinton …….. 57,099,726

In other words, the Democrat takeover of California — which is entirely due to the demographic shifts produced by immigration — accounts for all of Clinton’s popular-vote advantage in 2016.

So when you see liberals denouncing Trump for “racial bigotry” because of his outspoken opposition to the Democrats’ open-borders agenda, you understand that this is because cracking down on illegal immigration is a threat to the Democrats’ political power. Democrats want to do to America what they’re doing to California — turn it into a Third World hellhole — and Trump is trying to stop them. That is “racial bigotry.”

 

Maybe the average Trump voter hasn’t crunched the numbers and done the kind of analysis I’ve shown here, but they have an instinctive sense that the Democrats’ immigration agenda is harmful to their interests. Liberals will call this “racial bigotry,” too, I suppose — “How dare those working-class people in Iowa vote to defend their self-interest?”

For many years, the partisan lines in the debate over immigration policy were obscured by prominent open-borders Republicans like John McCain, and by such so-called “conservative” intellectuals as the pro-amnesty editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. One reason Trump was able to win over working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan was because he didn’t follow that script. Like every other Republican who’s won a presidential election since 1968, Trump is demonized by liberals as Hitler, and anyone who voted for Hitler is obviously a Nazi, so the hate that liberals direct against Trump is actually aimed at you, the Republican voter. And anyone who points this out is, of course, engaging in “hate speech”:

Americans are no longer a free people, if debate on major public-policy issues is effectively criminalized, which is what the Democrats and their allies are attempting to do with regard to our immigration policy. We are now being told in effect that it is “hate speech” to express opposition to the open-borders agenda of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and such of their billionaire donors as George Soros. Democrats and their media allies have recently taken to declaring that it is a “dog whistle” of racism and anti-Semitism for any Republican even to mention the name of Soros in connection with the immigration issue. If you don’t think the United States should throw open its borders to welcome the caravan of Honduran migrants now headed north through Mexico, and if you call attention to how Democrats are cheering on this horde of would-be foreign invaders, well, you must be some kind of Nazi who wants to kill Jews. Or at least that’s the general drift of liberal rhetoric in the final week of the midterm election campaign.
CNN has spent the past few days insinuating that the gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue was incited to this act by President Trump. Republicans are not allowed to object to CNN’s one-sided coverage, however, because Florida madman Cesar Sayoc also hated CNN, and therefore anyone who criticizes the network is deemed a potential threat to public safety. Between the Pittsburgh shooter and the Florida bomber, basically anything said in favor of Republicans (or against Democrats) is now considered “hate speech” in the eyes of liberals. This is especially the case when it comes to immigration. Ever since the migrant caravan set off from Honduras, announcing their intention to march all the way to the United States, Democrats have been accusing the GOP of “exploiting” the issue. What are Republicans supposed to do? Pretend they don’t notice the lawless intentions of these so-called “refugees”? . . .

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



 

 

What Happened to Oliver Darcy?

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Oliver Darcy as a young conservative in 2013.

The purge of Alex Jones and his Infowars site from social media is the work of one man, CNN’s Oliver Darcy, who in recent months has been on a sort of jihad again Jones. While I have never been an admirer of Jones (a 9/11 “Truther” who led an enraged mob against Michelle Malkin at the 2008 DNC in Denver), his site InfoWars has published some good reporting about various issues, and it is wrong to suppose that any “right-wing” voice is safe from the tactics used against Jones. If conservatives are afraid to fight against efforts to silence “controversial” figures on the Right, this will produce a steady retreat, as various figures are targeted for destruction the way Oliver Darcy targeted Alex Jones.

What I can’t understand is why Oliver Darcy would volunteer for this destructive mission. I remember Darcy when he was at Campus Reform, the college-beat site run by the Leadership Institute. From there, he went to Glenn Beck’s site, The Blaze, becoming deputy managing editor. In mid-2016, however, Darcy left The Blaze, joining Business Insider as politics editor, before signing on with CNN in spring 2017.

So why did Oliver Darcy — who called himself a “conservative-leaning libertarian” in 2013 — become a Torquemada leading an online Inquisition against right-wingers? While I have no inside information to account for this transformation, and I’m not sure if Darcy has ever explained his anti-free-speech crusade, my hunch is that his experience working at The Blaze for three years might have been pivotal.

Glenn Beck’s operation once generated $90 million a year in revenue, but since 2014 the company has become increasingly troubled, and when there were mass layoffs in 2017, the story included this:

Meanwhile, as Beck himself has acknowledged, his staunch opposition to Donald Trump has cost him dearly in alienated former fans, and even his most reliable source of income, his daily Premiere Radio Networks syndicated talk show, has not been immune from the consequences of his Never Trumpism. An industry observer noted that Beck’s radio audience is also taking a hit.

The rise of Trump was also the decline of Beck, and we may imagine that there would be some bitterness in Darcy’s heart about that.

But why go after Alex Jones? Well, there was never any love lost between Beck and Jones. Beck called Jones a “fascist” and Jones called Beck a “global operative,” so here, too, it may be said that Darcy is doing Beck’s work in attacking a hostile rival. And let’s face it, ratings at CNN are so low that Alex Jones probably reaches a larger audience than the “Clinton News Network.” The primetime audience for the week of Aug. 27 was 2.3 million at Fox, 1.9 million at MSNBC and 1.1 million at CNN. In attacking Jones, Darcy was depriving a CNN competitor of social-media access. And who will be next on Darcy’s hit list? Once a purge gets rolling, it’s difficult to predict who will be targeted next.



 

CNN’s Favorite ‘Republican Strategist’

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“I think the pictures of the cruelty of this administration are a very deliberate part of this. . . . They’re only talking to their core supporters. And their core supporters want anybody who’s darker than a latte deported. They’re not happy about immigration of any kind.”
— Rick Wilson, CNN, July 11, 2018

Running political campaigns is not the kind of work that fills a person with idealism, and the longer people stay in that line of work, the more cynical they become. It’s just the nature of the job. The “hired guns” of politics get paid whether a candidate wins or loses, and it’s difficult for the ordinary conservative to understand how that affects the mindset inside the consultant class. A fool and his money are soon parted, and if the fool wants to run for Congress (or Senate or Governor) as a Republican, consultants will get their share of his money.

Rick Wilson calls himself a “Republican strategist.” He got his start in the Bush 41 campaign and is associated with the liberal open-borders wing of the GOP. His current job is Trump-Hater-at-Large, the kind of Republican who shows up on CNN telling people how much he hates his fellow Republicans. You know — the ones who win elections?

Six weeks before Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, Wilson went on MSNBC and denounced the Republican candidate as “a guy backed in large measure by a group of white supremacists and neo-nazis and frog meme idiots.” Congratulations, “frog meme idiots” — you not only beat Hillary, you beat Rick Wilson.

Who paid Rick Wilson to say this kind of stuff about Trump? One thing you know about political operatives is, they don’t work for free. So there must be some client who hired this “Republican strategist” to trash Trump on TV. At least that’s the logical deduction, but while campaigns are required by law to disclose their expenditures, a political operative has no such obligation. Unless his name shows up in an FEC disclosure, you’ve got no idea who’s paying Rick Wilson and, for all we know, he could be on the payroll of Tom Steyer or George Soros.

The alternative theory is that Rick Wilson is constantly ranting against Trump for emotional reasons — he’s butthurt because his candidate didn’t win the GOP nomination, or maybe he’s just suffering from a testosterone deficiency that makes him moody and irritable.

Honestly, does Rick Wilson believe that “frog meme idiots” accounted for Trump winning Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states no Republican presidential candidate had won in 28 years? If the “Republican strategist” is such a genius, how does he explain this? Does he think the GOP would have carried those states had they nominated his preferred candidate?

Donald Trump is the “reset” button for the Republican Party. It has been evident for many years that the GOP “brand” was in trouble. To continue running the kind of campaigns “Republican strategists” run would have continued to produce the same results: Defeat.

Even if Trump is not your ideal of a Republican leader, it cannot be denied that he won against overwhelming opposition, including the opposition of “Never Trump” types like Rick Wilson. But it would not be in the interests of people like Rick Wilson to admit they were wrong, to confess they don’t know nothin’ ’bout winnin’ no elections.

This is why we now find Rick Wilson spewing melodramatic nonsense:

I’m still a registered Republican, even if I feel like a stranger in a strange party. There are days I stick around just out of spite, a human middle finger stubbornly reminding members of the Trump GOP that their souls are in hock to a con man, and some of us are going be here to pick up the pieces.
By numbers, Never Trump might look like a failure, but it has succeeded in one of its most important missions. As oppressive governments learn over and over, a leaderless resistance on the right side of history is hard to kill. No matter how badly beaten and battered we were by the Russia-and-Fox-powered Trump juggernaut, we are committed to preserving the memory of the conservative movement, some remnant of the faith in the Constitution, limited government, free markets, free trade and individual liberty. Like medieval Irish monks hunched over parchment by the light of a candle flame, we are illuminating the scrolls of conservatism while the storm rages and the tide of ignorance rises. We will be here when it ebbs.

To describe yourself as a “medieval Irish monk” while sitting at your computer in Tallahassee, hustling your next CNN appearance, requires more imagination than most people can muster, and this “leaderless resistance” looks suspiciously like an epidemic of butthurt.



 

Darren Beattie: Guilty of Intellectualism

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Sunday, I wrote about Darren Beattie, the former Trump speech-writer who got hounded out of his job by CNN because he spoke at a 2016 conference attended by “white nationalists.” Beattie has now published the text of his speech, “The Intelligentsia and the Right,” and as anyone can now see for themselves, he said nothing — absolutely nothing — about race in this speech. Beattie’s argument is that “movement conservatism” (i.e., the ideology made famous by Buckley and made policy by Reagan) lost whatever intellectual coherence it had with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Now, this assertion might itself provoke controversy. Contra Beattie, I would argue that conservatives have simply failed to adapt to the post-Cold War era, and that the primary obstacle to such an adaptation is the Republican establishment, particularly the senior leadership of the Senate, and the GOP consultant class. Furthermore, I would argue, conservatism does not require intellectual coherence, by which I mean that conservatism is not an ideology in the sense that Marxism is an ideology; rather, conservatism is an opposition to all such ideologies. In America, conservatism emerged as a force in the 20th century in the wake of the New Deal, and the post-World War II confrontation with Communism. The uniting force of this movement was perhaps best expressed by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, which argued that the West was headed in the wrong direction, moving steadily toward totalitarianism, by the expansion of the liberal Welfare State.

What has led “movement conservatism” into the wilderness since the 1990s is a lack of visionary and charismatic leadership. It was our singular misfortune that, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the White House was occupied by George H.W. Bush, a decent and honorable fellow who was not, alas, visionary or charismatic. Thus, liberalism was able to rebound, putting Bill Clinton in the White House for eight years, and we’ve been trying to recover from that ever since.

Success in politics requires a good bit of cynicism and, as a rule, intellectuals don’t much care for the kind of practical considerations necessary to turn ideas into electoral victories, thus to enable the winners to implement policies that will accomplish . . . whatever.

Democrats are generally more cynical in this regard, and Republicans often suffer from a childish naïvete, imagining they can win by being nicer than Democrats. This kind of Nice Guy conservatism is what I call Bushism, and Trump has won by discarding it. He plays hardball with the Democrats, and if he keeps winning, maybe some other Republicans will finally figure out how to play hardball, too. But I digress . . .

However much I might disagree with Darren Beattie (and it’s hard to tell, because his speech is so highbrow, I’m not sure I understand it completely), there is not a word in it that can be called “white nationalism,” and CNN’s witch-hunt against Beattie is evidence of how desperate these Democrats with bylines have become.

Now they’re going after Larry Kudlow for having Peter Brimelow as a guest at his 71st birthday party. Republicans can’t even have a birthday party without the Left’s permission now, I guess.

 

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Goes Full Antifa

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Never go full antifa:

CNN’s Chris Cuomo argued Monday night Antifa protesters are wrong to hit people, police, and reporters, “but fighting hate is right” and in a clash between hate and those who oppose it, “those who oppose it are on the side of right.”
Cuomo said “all punches are not equal morally” when it comes to bigots. However, he acknowledged that two punches are actually equal “in the eyes of the law.”
“People who show up to fight against bigots are not to be judged the same as the bigots, even if they do resort to the same petty violence,” Cuomo said.
“Fighting against hate matters,” he added.
“I argue to you tonight, all punches are not equal morally,” he said. “In the eyes of the law, yes. But in the eyes of good and evil, here’s the argument: if you’re a punk that comes to start trouble in a mask and hurt people, you’re not about any virtuous cause. You’re just somebody who’s going to be held to the standard of doing something wrong.”
“But when someone comes to call out bigots and it gets hot, even physical, are they equally wrong as the bigot they are fighting? I argue, no. Fighting against hate matters,” Cuomo concluded.

On the remote chance that Chris Cuomo might actually be reading this blog, I must ask: Who gets to define “hate,” Chris? Who is in charge of deciding who the “bigots” are? Because while it may seem obvious to you in this particular case, it is by no means always obvious.

Perhaps, Mr. Cuomo, you are not familiar with the history of fascism, and how the Communists circa 1930, having determined that bourgeois liberals and democratic socialists were their real enemies, pursued a strategy that enabled the Nazis to gain power in Germany. All during the so-called “Popular Front” era, of course, Communists made “anti-fascism” their slogan, up until August 1939, when Stalin and Hitler reached an agreement for the partition of Poland (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which precipitated World War II.

Endorsing mob violence in the name of “fighting against hate,” Mr. Cuomo, not only raises the question of what constitutes “hate,” but amounts to an endorsement of a might-makes-right ideology, where political decision-making becomes a matter of numerical superiority and the willingness to employ violence to obtain power.

Where does this lead? Cambodia under Pol Pot. Genocide in Rwanda.

No borders! No wall!
No USA at all!

That’s what your antifa buddies were chanting Sunday, Chris. Do only “bigots” disagree with them? Is it “hate” to love America? Are patriotic Americans expected to surrender our country to an anarchist mob?

Nobody here — not me, nor any of the conservatives I know — is endorsing Nazis. We may sometimes joke about helicopter rides for Commies, but we hope this Pinochet-style solution will be unnecessary. We hope that it will be possible to preserve constitutional liberty despite the mob mentality you endorse, Mr. Cuomo, and despite CNN’s dishonest partisan propaganda that portrays all 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump as “bigots” who deserve to be attacked by antifa thugs.

We should thank you, Mr. Cuomo, for taking off the mask, exposing yourself as a dangerous totalitarian who endorses lawless violence, so long as the criminal perpetrators are on your side — i.e., on the side of CNN and the Democrat Party. As law-abiding citizens who are not on your side, we hope that America will not descend into the chaos of mob violence that you and your antifa allies advocate, but if worse comes to worse, we have the means to defend ourselves and our families.



 

 

Category: CNN

How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent

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Headline at Ace of Spades HQ:

Journalists or Activists? CNN,
Which Admitted They Were Responsible
for Getting Alex Jones Deplatformed from
YouTube, Apple, and FaceBook, Now Admits
It’s Also Pressuring Twitter to Deplatform Him

This is shameful. When I was working for The Washington Times, we did not seek to prevent the distribution of The Washington Post, nor during my years as a correspondent for The American Spectator have we ever sought to silence any competing publication. Yet CNN and other so-called “mainstream” media operations are now actively engaged in a smear campaign intended to “de-platform” alternative voices online.

It is now considered de rigueur to stipulate, before protesting against such social-media bans, that one does not like the banned person or agree with everything he says or does. People did this when Twitter suspended my @rsmccain account, which annoyed me to no end, because Twitter never even bothered to specify what had precipitated this banishment. I’d been on Twitter for seven years and had tens of thousands of followers, none of whom saw anything in my TL that would justify this suspension. Yet when I got banned, several journalists who wrote about this incident felt the need to describe me as “controversial” or whatever in the process of lamenting this evidence that commissars of the Thought Police had obtained hegemonic authority at Twitter.

Why? Isn’t it obvious that these journalists wanted to convey the idea that I must be a special case, “controversial” in some way that made me different from other accounts which had not been banned?

The fact of the matter was (a) that I was simply more effective than some others in calling attention to obstreperous leftists on Twitter, and (b) that I had made influential enemies as a result of this.

Keep in mind that I was hate-listed by the SPLC long before it became routine for them to traffic in such dangerous libel. Circa 1999, the SPLC decided that “neo-Confederates” were a menace and, because I had then just recently been hired by The Washington Times, my name got mentioned in their account due to my previous association with the League of South. Now, it is a mistake to get down in tall grass discussing all the so-called “evidence” involved in the kind of smear campaigns the Left pursues against its chosen enemies. However, after more than a decade of being an independent blogger, don’t you think that if I were a “white supremacist” (as the SPLC has called me), that I would have published something that would suffice as proof of this?

Nothing of the kind ever happened, however, and when Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs tried to revive this “white supremacist” nonsense in September 2009, he made himself an object of ridicule and has long since departed into irrelevant obscurity: “Charles Who?”

Vindicating myself in l’affaire de LGF had the effect of making me a target for the Left during the Tea Party era leading up to the 2010 election, in large measure because leftists are incapable of admitting when they’re wrong. If the SPLC has called me a “white supremacist,” the leftist believes, I must be a very bad person, and this belief becomes the premise for further “investigation” of my allegedly hateful opinions.

So I was continually monitored by the Left all during the many ensuing years, as I ping-ponged around the country doing campaign-trail coverage and occasionally engaging in conflicts with personalities like Neal Rauhauser, Brett Kimberlin and Barrett Brown. Some readers may recall, for example, how the Kate Hunt case in 2013 involved covering the swarm of #FreeKate lunatics who thought there ought to be a lesbian loophole in Florida’s age-of-consent laws, so that she could get a free pass for diddling a 14-year-old. When you cover stories like that in Gonzo mode, you may acquire particularly obnoxious and persistent enemies.

 

All of this is by way of offering the most likely explanation of why, in February 2016, my @rsmccain Twitter account was permanently suspended for “participating in targeted abuse,” even though no one could say (a) who was “targeted”; (b) what kind of “abuse” they had suffered; or (c) how I was “participating” in this harmful activity.

Having accumulated many enemies, who on prior occasions had called on others to “block and report” my account, there was probably quite a large file of complaints about me at Twitter by the time someone — Anita Sarkeesian, perhaps — reported one of my tweets as “abuse.”

When my banishment made headlines in February 2016, various writers (including conservative journalists I consider friends) felt obligated to describe me as “controversial” or to otherwise indicate that, somehow, in some sense, I might have done something to deserve my fate. And this is why I deplore the habit of people who, in opposing the suppression of someone like Alex Jones, feel an obligation to characterize him in a negative way, as if he is a special case in some way substantially different from those who are not (yet) de-platformed.

Is Alex Jones more “racist” than, say, Jordan Peterson or Charles Murray? Is Alex Jones a “conspiracy theorist” in a way that, say, Jim Hoft or Pamela Geller are not? Is Alex Jones more “controversial” than, say, Glenn Reynolds or Rush Limbaugh? Do you see my point here?

There are many reasons I should include disclaimers to “distance” myself, as they say, from Alex Jones. He was a 9/11 “Truther” back in the day, and personally I have a hard time forgiving him for siccing a mob of his supporters on Michelle Malkin at the 2008 DNC in Denver. Yet this is not why Alex Jones is being de-platformed now. Rather, CNN and others on the Left are seeking to silence Alex Jones because he has been effective in calling attention to various facts that the Left desperately seeks to conceal from the general public. Please go read the entirely of the Ace of Spades post about this and ask yourself: “Who’s next?”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

P.S.: Click here to buy that “Fake News: Enemies of the People” T-shirt.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please remember that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!