Category: Religion

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).




 

 

Can Nick Sandmann Win? Covington Student Sues the Washington Post

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The Covington Catholic student whose “menacing smirk” became famous last month is suing the Washington Post:

Attorneys for Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann filed a lawsuit against the Washington Post on Tuesday, seeking $250 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
“The Post wrongfully targeted and bullied Nicholas because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap on a school field trip to the January 18 March for Life in Washington, D.C. when he was unexpectedly and suddenly confronted by Nathan Phillips (‘Phillips’), a known Native American activist, who beat a drum and sang loudly within inches of his face (‘the January 18 incident’),” the lawsuit filed by lawyers Todd V. McMurtry and L. Lin Wood in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky reads.
The total sum sought by Sandmann is the same amount Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post for in 2013. The newspaper’s vice president for communications, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said in a statement to Reuters: “We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense.”
In a tweet Saturday, Wood announced via Twitter that he would begin filing defamation lawsuits against several news outlets this week. “Nick Sandmann is 16 years old has 2+ years to identify accusers sue them,” he said. “No member of mainstream social media mob who attacked him should take comfort from not being sued in initial round of lawsuits which will commence next week. Time is Nick’s friend, not his enemy.”
The development comes after investigators hired by a Kentucky diocese have found that Catholic school boys did not instigate a January 18th confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial that went viral on social media. Covington Bishop Roger Foys initially condemned the students’ behavior after a video showed a teenage boy face-to-face with a Native American man. Days later, Foys apologized for “making a statement prematurely.”

The lawsuit mentions a crucial fact:

The Post rushed to lead the mainstream media to assassinate Nicholas’ character and bully him, publishing their first article no later than 1:37 p.m. January 19. This story was not “hot” or “breaking news.” To the extent the Post performed any investigation at all into what occurred, its unreasonable investigation did not take long, and contrary information did not stop it from publishing its first story in its Sunday newspaper the next day. One of the reporters on the story first retweeted the video approximately four hours before receiving credit for the Post’s first article. In the intervening time, the Post apparently managed to track down and interview Phillips, write a story, and fan the flames of the social media mob into a mainstream media frenzy of false attacks and threats against Nicholas.

In other words, the Post did not merely report on an online controversy, but by retweeting the video, one of its reporters was actually part of the Twitter mob that incited the controversy. And the newspaper raced to publish an article before it had conducted sufficient reporting even to know the name of the student whose “menacing smirk” may cost the paper an enormous amount in attorneys’ fees to defend this lawsuit.

Normally, I would not think the Post could actually lose this lawsuit. Libel law in the United States favors freedom of the press to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for a libel plaintiff to win. At least nine times out of 10, lawyers will advise against filing such a lawsuit. Yet the facts in this case are unusual and, perhaps, unprecedented. Editors at the Post decided to turn an Internet flame-war into an actual print-edition news story, and they did so with astonishing haste, repeating in print Phillips’s claim that the Covington boys “suddenly swarmed around him” without bothering to interview any of the students. (Link is to the Sydney Morning Herald, which republished the Washington Post article, which is behind a paywall.) If the Post reporters had done “due diligence,” as lawyers say, they would have discovered what Robby Soave of Reason magazine was able to prove by Sunday afternoon:

The Media Wildly Mischaracterized
That Video of Covington Catholic Students
Confronting a Native American Veteran

To produce that article, Soave watched more than two hours of online videos that showed what happened was quite nearly the opposite of what Nathan Phillips claimed — he approached them, not the other way around. Furthermore, contrary to the anti-Trump media’s narrative, it was the Covington boys who were the targets of racism in this incident, as they were insulted by a group of so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites.”

The Washington Post‘s Jan. 20 article by Antonio Olivo and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. put a misleading political spin on the incident:

The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Donald Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the US Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas”.
In a statement, the Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organised the march, called the incident “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America”.

But once the facts emerged — facts that the Post was evidently in too much of a hurry to bother finding — it became apparent that “discourse in Trump’s America” had nothing to do with it, except insofar as that “discourse” involves bogus accusations of racism against white kids.

Do I think a Washington, D.C., jury will force the Post to pay $250 million to Nick Sandmann? No, I don’t, but I didn’t think a Florida jury would destroy Gawker with a $115 million verdict, either. People are getting fed up with the “fake news” media, and in a case like this, where one of the nation’s most influential newspapers rushed to join a Twitter mob in promoting a false narrative, even a D.C. jury might decide to punish them for their irresponsible journalism.

UPDATE: Whoa! Talk about sloppy journalism — I’m guilty. This lawsuit won’t be heard by a D.C. jury, because it was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. In which case, my advice to the Washington Post is, “Offer a generous settlement, because a jury full of angry Kentucky rednecks is not your friend.”




 

 

Democrat Ilhan Omar Sure Hates Jews — and the Media Sure Are Protecting Her

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Ace of Spades calls attention to the fact that CNN “reporter” Manu Raju is a Trump-hating partisan Democrat propagandist, and one of the examples of Raju and CNN’s dishonesty is how they’re making excuses for Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism:

Freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is defending her controversial views on Israel as they come under scrutiny in Washington, telling CNN that “it’s not surprising” her positions are generating attention and that she finds it “exciting” to be sparking debate.
“It’s not surprising. I think it is actually exciting because we are finally able to have conversations that we weren’t really willing to,” Omar told CNN on Tuesday. “It is really important for us to get a different lens about what peace in that region could look like and the kind of difficult conversations we need to have about allies.”
Omar along with Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, are indeed changing the conversation on Capitol Hill over the United States’ long-standing relationship with Israel by speaking out critically against the Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinians.

Yes, her “controversial views” are “changing the conversation,” so now Jew-hating conspiracy theories are OK, according to CNN.

Monday’s press release from the ADL:

The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) today called on the leadership of the House of Representatives to take action in response to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s statements yesterday suggesting that Jewish influence and money was the reason for strong bipartisan support for Israel.
On Sunday night, Rep. Omar tweeted, “it’s all about the Benjamins baby” in response to a tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald saying that “it’s stunning how much time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation,” referring to Israel (“Benjamins” is slang for 100-dollar bills). Later, when asked via Twitter by another journalist who she thought was paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, Rep. Omar responded, “AIPAC.”
“As Americans and Jews, we expect our politicians to condemn bigotry, not to fuel it. Words matter. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in the U.S. and abroad, Rep. Omar is promoting the ugly, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews have an outsized influence over politics. The notion that wealthy Jews are controlling the government is a longstanding anti-Semitic trope and one of the pillars of modern anti-Semitism, a retread of ideas spread by bigots from David Duke to Louis Farrakhan. As the people’s House, the House of Representatives must not tolerate any bigotry against any community in our nation. We call on the House leadership to take immediate action, so that the message is clear: anti-Semitism will not be tolerated,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of ADL.
“Unfortunately, making insensitive statements toward the Jewish community is not new for Rep. Omar. These tweets are part of a disturbing pattern of behavior that must end. The Congresswoman needs to understand that these comments promote dangerous stereotypes and are hurtful to her Jewish constituents and Jewish-Americans throughout the country,” Greenblatt continued.

Omar’s anti-Jewish attitudes were notorious before she was elected to Congress, so much so that when she served in the Minnesota state legislature, local Jews — including Democratic state Sen. Ron Latz — tried to have what they called an “intervention” with Omar:

“We wanted to reach out to her,” Latz recalled. “We were a bit troubled about several things she had said.”
Among their concerns was a 2012 tweet in which Omar wrote: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” The language evokes an anti-Semitic trope of Jews as practicers of some type of sorcery that allows them to control others. . . .
“Over the course of about two hours [Latz said], we shared with her our concerns for things, including language that has references and meanings beyond just the meanings of words. Tropes, dog whistles — call them what you will. We explained to her how hurtful, and factually inaccurate, they were.
“Most of us came out of that conversation very troubled by the answers we received. I was not convinced she was going to give a balanced approach to policy in the Middle East, and I was not convinced … where her heart is on these things.
“But we were glad she met with us, and we were hopeful she would be more careful about what she tweeted and she said if she got elected. Frankly, I was hopeful she’d grow in office a little, and understand the media platform she has. Instead, she keeps repeating her mistakes, if you can call them that.”

That’s just it, isn’t it? Her offensive statements aren’t “mistakes,” but expressions of her sincere hatred of Jews. Because she is a Democrat, and because media organizations like CNN are acting as partisan propagandists for Democrats, Omar receives sympathetic media treatment in a way that would not be extended to any Republican who repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric. It is one thing, as Latz said, to criticize Israel or to question U.S. policy in the Middle East, but Omar’s rhetoric goes far beyond that. And although Democrat leaders in Congress forced Omar to issue a half-hearted “apology,” she is still scheduled next month to address a $500-a-ticket “fundraiser for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a terror-tied organization that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist financing case in U.S. history.” Where is the accountability?



 

How Anti-Christian Bias in #FakeNews Media Is Encouraging Anti-Semitism

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This is a topic I am reluctant to write about, but in the wake of the Covington Catholic school story, the elephant in the room is now so large that it is more dangerous to ignore it than to mention it:

It’s rare to see a major media outlet be so honest about its ideological bias. But yet there was New York Times reporter Dan Levin on Twitter the other day, openly soliciting negative stories about Christian schools. “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools,” Levin tweeted, “Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.” . . .
You probably won’t be surprised to learn . . . that the #exposechristianschools hashtag Levin used did not initially go viral because Twitter users were anxious to share their enriching experiences in Christian-based educational institutions. The tag was predominately used to dox and smear the Covington Catholic School kids. . . .
The New York Times’ long history of prejudicial coverage of religious Christians should cement your skepticism about its intentions. Even while the newspaper was rifling through Twitter looking for people who had been damaged by a traditional Christian education, it was running a fawning profile on the overtly racist and anti-Semitic “Black Hebrew Israelites.” The piece opens with the line: “They are sidewalk ministers who use confrontation as their gospel.”
Christian schools, of course, irritate the sensibilities of contemporary Democrats for a number of reasons. It’s not only that students who attend them are often saved from the leftist cultural and political indoctrination, but also that the very existence of parochial schools, private schools and home schooling undermines their institutional political monopoly.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit via Hogewash.)

Wow. That’s what they call a “bad look,” Dan Levin.

Or perhaps as some would say, it’s a shanda fur die goyim.

As David Harsanyi says, the anti-Christian bias of the New York Times has long been notorious, and this bias is transparently partisan: The Times has always been a propaganda organ of the Democrat Party and, ever since the 1980s, when the so-called “religious Right” was identified as a core constituency of the Reagan coalition, attacking Christianity has become a more or less regular “beat” in Times coverage.

Understanding this as a partisan bias is important. Whenever religion can be used as an issue in favor of Democrats, we find the liberal media singing from the same hymnal, so to speak. When John F. Kennedy’s Catholic faith became an issue in the 1960 campaign, the New York Times became more ardently Catholic than the Pope. When the Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter was the Democrat presidential candidate, the New York Times coverage was almost evangelical in its endorsement. Over and over, we can see it is the partisan political value of religion that dictates how the topic is covered in the New York Times — anything that helps Democrats is good, anything that helps Republicans is bad.

This partisan explanation of why the New York Times hates Christians is important to understand, because otherwise people might notice a name like Dan Levin and then point at the paper’s masthead — nudge, nudge, wink, wink — and you had better believe that this has been happening since the Covington Catholic fiasco. How is it, as David Harsanyi points out, that a New York Times reporter is seeking to “expose” Christian schools while at the same time his newspaper is giving softball coverage to a bizarre racialist cult like the Black Hebrew Israelites? Doesn’t such obvious bias lend credence to hateful stereotypes and conspiracy theories about Jewish influence? As a conservative Christian who is the exact opposite of an anti-Semite, I get tired of dealing with the anti-Semitic comments that crop up online whenever one of (((those names))) features prominently in a story about media bias.

Why Are Jews Liberals? the late Norman Podhoretz asked in a 2010 book that ought to be required reading in political science classes. Anyone can look at the exit poll numbers. In 2004, for example, Democrat John Kerry got 74% of the Jewish vote, which was more than his percentage of union members (61%) or Latino voters (53%).

That Jews voted 3-to-1 against Bush, who had invaded Iraq to crush the Jew-hating dictator Saddam Hussein, should have aroused critical scrutiny from the media, but for (((some reason))) it didn’t. Instead, the media were so blatant in their partisan loyalty to the Democrats that their negative coverage of the Bush administration lent credence to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “Zionist” neoconservatives.

Am I the only one who sees the feedback loop at work here?

  1. A majority of Jews are Democrats;
  2. Many Jews have prominent positions in the news media;
  3. The allegedly “objective” media are in fact dishonest partisans, consistently promoting pro-Democrat messages;
  4. Republican voters express resentment of the media’s dishonest propaganda;
    and
  5. The media then cite these complaints about bias as proof of Republican anti-Semitism.

Isn’t it obvious, in such a situation, that assigning (((Dan Levin))) to “expose” Christian schools was a very bad idea? And what I fear most is that this feedback-loop effect could create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The media uses accusations of anti-Semitism to justify their blind fanatical hatred of Trump, and this might actually (a) increase the partisan skew toward Democrats among Jewish voters while at the same time (b) encouraging avowed anti-Semites to support Trump, and then (c) lather, rinse, repeat with potentially dangerous consequences.

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) seem to believe that there is no downside to their divisive identity-politics game, so that even if there is some kind of backlash, they’ll be able to exploit this to their advantage, and never mind if innocent people actually get hurt. The media have recently tried to play victim — “Orange Man Bad!” — with CNN’s Jim Acosta actually getting a contract to write a book about how that evil bully Donald Trump is mean to famous millionaire TV reporters. So it can be expected that this media victimhood narrative will be merged with the “Republicans hate Jews” theme to create a new message: Criticism of liberal media bias is an anti-Semitic “dog whistle.”

Meanwhile, of course, Dan Levin will “expose” Christian schools and if you dare mention the hateful bias involved, you’re literally Hitler.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

The Left Doesn’t Care About Facts: Why #StandWithCovington Still Matters

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Professor Donald Douglas summarizes the lesson we’re learning:

Although these kind of lynch mob stories aren’t new, this whole thing for me has been extremely clarifying. Twitter is a radioactive dump of hatred and lies, and as the site’s run by leftists, it won’t get better. . . . If you’re a Trump supporter leftists want to destroy you. They literally want to kill you.

Honestly, when I wrote Monday about this incident — “Lessons From an Online Lynching (Why #StandWithCovington Is Going Viral)” — I expected it to be a one-day story. The gross misrepresentation of what happened to the Covington Catholic students was a combination of the social-media mob mentality and liberal media bias.

However, because I’ve been seeing this phenomenon every day for years, it didn’t seem to me that this was really anything new. You got smeared as a racist? Welcome to the club. No big deal. Happens every day.

But there was something different about this incident. First, there was abundant video evidence — hours of it — proving that the truth about what happened was the exact opposite of how the liberal media had tried to spin it. These kids from Kentucky hadn’t sought out a confrontation with the activist Nathan Phillips; instead, he had deliberately tried to provoke them, and didn’t get the reaction he expected.

The second point was that the chosen targets of this “racism” smear were Catholic teenagers, innocent kids who had done nothing to deserve the abusive treatment dished out by the online mob and their media enablers. The Daily Caller headline captures this:

Your Complete Guide to How the Media Tried
Ruining the Lives of Innocent Teenagers

Joe Simonson explains that the anti-Trump media were eager to pounce on the Covington Catholic boys because a BuzzFeed “exclusive” that inspired MSNBC and CNN to engage in a 24-hour cycle of impeachment fantasies had just collapsed in a heap of ruined credibility:

Just mere days after BuzzFeed News dropped its hotly disputed report accusing President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice, the media decided to pick a new target: a group of teenage Catholic high school boys. . . .
Media figures, still reeling from the wave of criticism following the BuzzFeed News fiasco, smelled blood. Sure, the initial video didn’t show the students assaulting anyone, but that didn’t stop reporters, commentators and Hollywood celebrities from focusing on the smirk of a student in the video, which somehow triggered painful memories of lonely prom nights and failed junior varsity sport tryouts.

The fact that these were white boys from Kentucky, and some of them were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, triggered the Left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome reaction — “WHITE SUPREMACY!”

If you’re white, Democrats hate you. If you’re male, Democrats hate you. If you’re from Kentucky, Democrats hate you. If you’re Catholic, Democrats hate you. So if you’re a white male Catholic from Kentucky, Democrats view you as everything wrong about America, because you are why Trump is president, instead of Hillary. (Covington Catholic is in Kenton County, which Trump won by a 26-point margin, 60%-34%.)

These boys didn’t actually have to do anything to make the liberal media hate them. Merely by existing, they deserved to be hated, according to the partisan ideology that prevails at CNN, MSNBC, etc. Yet this would be insufficient to explain why the Covington Catholic story, which started on Saturday, is still news on Wednesday if it were not for a third factor: The anti-Trump media have adopted the mentality of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) and, as Vox Day famously observed, SJWs Always Double Down:

CNN political commentator Symone Sanders doubled down on Tuesday after being criticized for mocking Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann’s television interview performance.
“When you’re trying to remember the lines the PR team gave you,” Sanders tweeted, posting a preview of the “Today” interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie scheduled to run on Wednesday. In it, the Covington Catholic junior insisted he had “every right” to stand where he stood during the incident.

 

Understand that Symone Sanders wouldn’t be insulting this kid if she thought she might lose her CNN contract because of it. No, this is the officially approved narrative, and everybody employed at CNN understands that it’s open season on these Kentucky boys. The same is true at NBC, where Today show host Savannah Guthrie used her interview with the student at the center of the controversy to attempt to rehabilitate the Left’s discredited narrative:

“There is something aggressive about standing there, standing your ground. You both stood your ground, and it was like a stare down. What do you think of that now, when you think about that moment?”

This is a 180-degree reversal of the situation, which anyone can see if they’ll watch the video. Nick Sandmann did nothing “aggressive.” The activist Nathan Phillips was clearly the aggressor, wading into this group of teenagers while chanting and beating his drum. What would you expect a teenage boy to do, if some idiot protester got up in his face like that? Rather than being falsely accused as “aggressive,” Nick Sandmann deserves to be praised for his restraint under the circumstances.

Having gotten the story completely wrong, the #FakeNews media now insist they’re the victims because we’re tired of their lies.

 

Ace goes off on these creeps:

If the media succeeds in its mission of getting these kids attacked, should we throw the media a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes in Wall Street?
Do they want to be affirmatively praised for putting innocent children’s lives in danger?
What do they get if they succeed in getting a kid killed? A Pulitzer?

This is what people have to understand: In becoming partisan Democrat cheerleaders, the media have become utterly irresponsible. They tell lies, and when they get caught, they pretend to be the victims. They believe that as long as they are anti-Trump, they can do no wrong. This attitude not only convinces them that they are justified in lying about Trump (e.g., the “not accurate” BuzzFeed story), but also justified in lying about Trump supporters like these MAGA hat-wearing Kentucky boys.

Facts don’t matter to the media, because they are engaged in a war to destroy the 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump. They will keep doubling down on their lies until they are held accountable.

The media have been warned they have 48 hours to recant and apologize.

#StandWithCovington




 

 

 

The Happiness Industrial Complex

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Young people (and by “young,” I mean under 40) generally know nothing about the 1960s, except what they’ve seen in movies or on TV, and therefore some are falling prey to the same scams and hustles that typified the so-called “Age of Aquarius.” For the benefit of these young fools, therefore, I must explain that during the 1960s, a lot of alienated youth in the West got heavily into Eastern mysticism — yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. — which became a sort of racket, and sometimes turned into weird cults. Shady characters were able to pass themselves off as gurus and “enlightened masters” possessed of esoteric knowledge, and attracted followings of naïve spiritual seekers. Many thousands of American kids from middle-class suburbia devoted their lives to a perpetual adolescent rebellion against their parents, and this phony Eastern “enlightenment” gold rush that began circa 1967 was one aspect of that rebellion. Rejecting Judeo-Christian religious tradition (with all those “Thou shalt not” moral restrictions), the spiritual seekers of the 1960s also rejected the tradition of Greco-Roman philosophical rationalism. To explain why these young fools abandoned every tradition of their own culture, in order to pursue an ill-informed attempt to emulate the beliefs and practices of Oriental paganism, would require a more thorough explanation than I could provide in a blog post. The relevant point is that this trend gave rise to an entire industry of “spiritual” hustlers, who cashed in by selling themselves as teachers of Ancient Wisdom, which was usually mixed in with a lot of self-help pop psychology and pleasant sounding slogans about peace and love.

Remember Julia Baugher, a/k/a Julia Allison, the used-up “fame whore” whose wasted life became a sad parable of Internet celebrity life?

Julia Baugher at the Burning Man festival.

As part of her effort to “re-invent” herself (i.e., to find some way to get paid without having to work an actual job), Ms. Baugher convinced a publisher to give her an advance for a book grandiosely entitled Experiments in Happiness: How I Learned to Live a Life Filled With Love, Creativity, Meaning…and a Little Bit of Magic. She was unable to deliver the manuscript she’d promised, the publisher attempted to get her to return the advance payment, and there may have been threats of legal action involved, but that’s irrelevant to my point, namely that Ms. Baugher’s pursuit of happiness led her to some strange places. She became a fixture on the “alternative” music festival circuit, running around with her DJ boyfriend “Rain Phutureprimitive” (a/k/a Chad McNally) until he decided he was into “polyamory” (a/k/a, screwing around, threesomes, orgies, etc.). She went to the annual “Burning Man” festival in the California desert where in 2014, she married herself in an “exuberant celebration & sacred ritual of self-love.” Along the way, Ms. Baugher spent years “studying and developing a deep faith and integrating ‘New Age’ ideas like yoga, acupuncture, meditation, ashrams, and holistic medicine into my life.” In other words, this young woman born during the Reagan era, who had attended an eminent Catholic university, went traipsing down the same path of Eastern mysticism previously trodden by all those idiot hippies of the 1960s.

Now a self-proclaimed “Change Activist” and “Social Alchemist,” Ms. Baugher is all about devotion to her spiritual “sisters,” including trips to Bali with her “best girlfriend” Myka McLaughlin. Whatever . . .

The ‘Change Activist’ and her girlfriend in Bali.

You see that “happiness” is marketed as a commodity by clever hustlers who understand that in an affluent society there are millions of people like Julia Baugher, born into middle-class comfort, who are desperately in search of some deeper meaning to their empty lives. There are corporate executives and other successful people who believe their career achievements and wealth entitle them to a greater share of happiness than is enjoyed by the common rabble. These would-be consumers of “happiness” represent the demand side of a market equation from which spiritual hustlers hope to get rich by providing the supply. Like the hippies of yore, however, the 21st-century seeker of spiritual enlightenment doesn’t want anything to do with the Bible or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Insofar as any belief system is part of the Western cultural tradition, this is sufficient to render it obsolete, invalid and worthless in the eyes of the spiritual seeker, who either craves “ancient wisdom” from some non-Western culture, or else will prefer a trendy new belief (e.g., “climate change”) as the basis of his enlightened worldview. After all, if happiness and “enlightenment” can be found by any hillbilly yokel attending a Baptist church in Kentucky, there isn’t much social status to be gained by this pursuit. No, the upwardly-mobile middle-class college-educated spiritual seeker prefers to believe in something exotic, and this requires innovation by the hustlers of the Happiness Industrial Complex.

 

Say hello to Sah D’Simone, a homosexual immigrant from Brazil who, at age 23, became co-founder of a now-defunct fashion magazine, Bullett. After he was ousted from his position as creative director of Bullett in 2012, D’Simone embarked on “an intense journey of self-discovery, one that led him to silent retreats with monks in Nepal”:

A 30-day meditation retreat turned into a life-changing sojourn that completely turned his life upside down. Being so in his head for so long healed him, but it also forced him to confront his pain, those who hurt him, and his traumatic past.
“The experience allowed me to rewrite my past,” he says. It was letting go of his past, of his enemies, of those who hurt him that Sah says allowed him to grow. “Forgiveness came with finding a space within myself to let go. “It isn’t that suddenly unpleasant triggers and memories disappear. You realize that holding a grudge is so damaging to you. It ages your body and brain and boost cortisol. You’re drinking poison thinking about the other person while they’re living their life.”
Actively letting go, Sah says, is what’s allowed him to take power back into his own hands.

Since 2016, D’Simone has been self-employed as a “Holistic Health & Happiness Coach, Raw Vegan Chef, Meditation & Yoga Instructor, Humanitarian” whose specialty is “helping people move forward through obstacles and change into living evolved, elevated and expanded lives.” He recently published his first book, 5-Minute Daily Meditations: Instant Wisdom, Clarity, and Calm, which is in the top 20 of Amazon’s bestsellers in the category of Taoism. Interestingly enough, his ex-fashion model sister has also re-invented herself as a hustler of happiness:

I dropped out of college and moved to NY when I was 21 and soon after got into Bravo TV’s “Make Me A Supermodel”. It was a very interesting experience. They wanted a blank canvas, but more and more I began to notice how much I had to say, and how much I actually wanted to create and be free.
There were fun moments, of course, especially when I lived in Paris and London, but when I came back to NYC, my brother Sah D’Simone was starting Bullett Magazine, and asked me to be the photo director.
I was completely disassociated with my body from binge eating, to not eating, to drugs and alcohol, all to hide and suppress my feelings. . . .
In the spring of 2014, Sah came back from his first pilgrimage to India and stayed with me. His stories led me to question my whole existence in a new way I had never really done before. That summer I broke up with my boyfriend of 7 years, saved enough money and bought myself a one-way ticket to India. . . .
Bodh Gaya was my first stop, the place where Buddha became enlightened. I met my first teacher, the incredibly witty and profound Ven. Sarah Thresher, an English Buddhist Nun, during my first 10-day silent retreat.

 

So there you have it — the gay former fashion magazine editor and his ex-model sister are now prepared to sell you the Secret of Happiness™ at their week-long spiritual oceanside retreat in Mexico:

When was the last time you felt completely free? When was the last time you dedicated yourself to the things that bring you true joy? This special retreat was designed for you to come play, heal, and create deeper connections to yourself and nature in the hidden paradise of Mazunte, Mexico.
These seven days are carefully curated to allow you to take charge of your personal growth while being held in the supportive healing container. In addition to daily meditation, yoga, and breathwork practices and wisdom talks, you will be given ample opportunities to explore the town and go on adventures. The adventures include hiking, swimming, sea turtle and whale watching, rest by the ocean, massages, local culture.

  • Cultivate self-compassion and self-acceptance
  • Become present and emotionally intelligent
  • Learn how to feel at home in your body
  • Nourish your mind and body with group practices, wisdom talks, and local healing foods
  • Fall in love with yourself and life all over again

The brother and sister team of Sah D’Simone and Moun D’Simone created this one of a kind retreat out of love to help you reconnect with your bliss and your heart’s desire. You will return home, rejuvenated and ready to live a more joyful, fulfilling, and creative life.

The cost of this “personal growth” experience is $1,200 per person, with a shared room, or $1,700 for a private room. Add in the round-trip airfare which, JFK to HUX, would be about $300, and this weeklong vacation — no, wait, I meant to say, spiritual retreat — will cost you around $2,000.

There’ll be no Baptist hillbillies from Kentucky down there watching the whales and listening to “wisdom talks” in Mazunte, I’ll bet.

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

That’s from a book of ancient wisdom, and anyone — whether a Kentucky hillbilly or a Brazilian homosexual — could benefit from studying it. But you see it’s impossible to get rich by urging people to read the Bible and pray, to follow the familiar and humble paths of Christianity, in an age where young fools want to believe they need to take a pilgrimage to India or a spiritual retreat to the Oaxaca coast in order “to live a more joyful, fulfilling, and creative life.” Folks who can afford to spend $2,000 on a Mexican vacation don’t want to read the King James Bible or listen to any sermons about sin and salvation. No, they want 5-Minute Daily Meditations, Buddhism, “Holistic Health” and “wisdom talks.”

Well, I’ve never been to Mazunte or studied with Buddhists in Bodh Gaya, but I do know a thing or two about what’s called street smart, and I know what a scam looks like when I see one. Why are so many people who think of themselves as “elite” such easy marks for an obvious hustle?

There is such a thing as an honest hustle, but paying a gay fashion magazine editor to teach you all that secondhand Buddhist hippie “peace and love” crap? That makes as much sense as paying a washed-up fame whore like Julia Baugher to give you relationship advice.

Of course, I have no esoteric insights to share, and I’m not fool enough to imagine anyone would pay me $1,200 to teach them how to “cultivate self-compassion and self-acceptance” or whatever. All I know is that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

National Review’s ‘Pro-Family’ Writer @xan_desanctis Insults Dennis Prager

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Alexandra DeSanctis’s parents sent her to an ultra-Catholic all-girls school — Opus Dei! — in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and thence to the University of Notre Dame, where she graduated two years ago and joined the staff of National Review. Somewhere along the way, Ms. DeSanctis acquired an unfortunate insolence, so that her reaction to an excellent column by Dennis Prager was to declare: “I’m as pro-marriage and pro-family as anyone, but I’m really ready for the ‘women need to avoid working so they can find a Nice Man to support them and make them happy’ genre of conservatism to fall out of fashion.”

 

This is a deliberate distortion of what the column was actually about — I’ll get to that momentarily — but perhaps more importantly, it is a 25-year-old presuming to stand in judgment of Dennis Prager, a conservative warrior who has suffered many wounds on behalf of the cause. The faculty at Oakcrest evidently failed to teach young Ms. DeSanctis to respect her elders and, were I her father, I would be outraged to find my daughter publicly disporting herself in a manner unbecoming a proper young Christian. This shocking insult was called to my attention by Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi, who read Ms. DeSanctis’s remark as an omen of future misfortune, referring to a genre of “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” (i.e., unmarried traditional conservative women) who lament, “where have all the good men gone?”

 

This is a real phenomenon. There is an entire category of self-help books by Christian women whose devotion to “traditional family values” somehow never resulted in them walking down the aisle, and so they write about the “godly single” life and offer relationship advice (which would seem to be the blind leading the blind, so to speak). As Rollo says, the “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” often blame men for their failure, complaining that men need to “man up.” The more likely explanation, of course, is that these women actually had matrimonial opportunities in their youth, but just didn’t play their cards right and, rather than confess their errors — “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa” — instead rationalize their failure by scapegoating men.

Rollo Tomassi went on to accuse Ms. DeSanctis of “advocating for the Sandbergian plan,” a reference to Facebook executive Cheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Tomassi added: “The Sisterhood Über Alles recognizes no politics or ideology.”

 

In other words, even many self-declared “conservative” women now embrace a careerist worldview in which women must join an anti-male alliance — “Sisterhood Über Alles” — to defeat men in a ruthless competition for educational and employment opportunities. Believing that career achievement is the only measure of success, such women distrust males as implacable enemies both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Not only must the Sandbergian woman destroy any male coworker who might be her rival for advancement, but she must also eschew any serious heterosexual romantic involvement, because marriage and motherhood might impede her professional ambition.

Because I know absolutely zero about Ms. DeSanctis’s personal life, it would be foolish for me to presume she is so unpopular as to have never had a serious boyfriend, but we might infer from her vehement reaction to Prager’s column that she is quite sensitive about this subject. One can imagine that her Catholic parents are probably beginning to express concern about why their daughter hasn’t found a husband yet. So, what was it about Dennis Prager’s column that offended Ms. DeSanctis? He shared the comments of a woman who called in to his radio show:

I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.
I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this. . . .
It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. . . .
You sit home alone and you do nothing. I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.
Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.” . . .
I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

Very good advice and, in truth, young men should be similarly advised. The carefree young bachelor who becomes accustomed to playing the field is apt to become “set in his ways,” as folks say down home, so that he finds it harder to accommodate himself to the compromises necessary to making a relationship work. Trust me on this, guys — I didn’t marry until I was 29, and the adjustment was more difficult than I expected, but the tale of how and why I didn’t marry earlier is a story for another time. My point now is that Ms. DeSanctis’s insolent attitude is unfortunately common among young people, who think old-fashioned common sense is obsolete, so that they can scoff at the advice of their elders.

While my devout Catholic friend Pete Da Tech Guy might wish to include Ms. DeSanctis in his prayers, I suspect she’s already a lost cause. Why? Well, in high school, she played varsity softball.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.



 

Catholic ‘Gay Mafia’ in Action

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Fr. Sean Sheridan of Franciscan University.

My colleague at The American Spectator, George Neumayr, is author of The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives. He has written extensively on the latest scandals of clerical pedophilia, including “The Fall of the Gay Mafia’s Don,” about disgraced Archbishop Donald Wuerl. Neumayr’s latest column is about “diversity and inclusion” (IYKWIMAITYD) at a nominally Catholic university:

Secularized American Catholic universities fail every test of honest advertisement: they are neither Catholic nor American, insofar as they peddle heresies and anti-American ideologies, and they don’t even resemble universities. They are more like glorified PC high schools or left-wing adult learning annexes. They are worse than a waste of time and money; they corrode souls and deform minds. A few of them are academically strong in this or that department, but in general they are ghastly messes — sorry products of the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Statement, a baldly heretical declaration cobbled together by Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh, and incidentally signed and promoted by the pedo-rapist Theodore McCarrick, which called on all Catholic colleges and universities to secularize.
Sadly, Franciscan University of Steubenville, which many Catholics assume is safe from that secularist contagion, is succumbing to it. Both the president of Steubenville University and his COO (who functions as a de facto executive vice president) are “pushing the school to embrace the LGBT agenda,” says an angry parent. Concerned Catholics, including several shocked parents and students, contacted me several months ago about the secularizing mischief of Fr. Sean Sheridan, Steubenville University’s president, and his hand-picked COO William Gorman. They have set up a “Diversity and Inclusion Committee,” which they are using to “undermine the Church’s teachings on human sexuality,” says a concerned Catholic who has witnessed the school’s slide toward secularism over many years. “Sheridan and Gorman want to drive conservatives off campus and bring gay-rights propagandists like Jesuit James Martin on to it.” . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator. Because I’m a Protestant and don’t ordinarily pay much attention to news about the Catholic Church, I was rather shocked by how far the shadow of suspicion reaches. Knowing nothing about Fr. Sheridan myself, I at first hesitated to put his photo under a “Gay Mafia” headline, but then thought: “Whose fault is it that he has become an object of suspicion?” As Neumayr says, Franciscan University previously had a reputation as a rather conservative school, until Sheridan started this “diversity and inclusion” charade. Everybody now recognizes this as code-speak for “Gayer Than the San Francisco Pride Parade” and, when coupled with the revelations of priestly pedophilia, clerical advocates of this agenda are necessarily suspected of being complicit in the molestation of boys. That’s not my fault, and while I recognize the basic unfairness of guilt-by-association, the current scandals affecting the Catholic clergy are notorious enough that any priest who does not wish to become a suspect would be well advised to keep his distance from “diversity and inclusion.”

The Catholic Church is currently demonstrating O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” George Neumayr is correct, by the way, about how awful Catholic universities have become, e.g., “Queer Feminism at Marquette University” (Oct. 26, 2016) and “Gender-Neutral at Notre Dame?” (April 5, 2016). The latter post includes this warning:

What we are witnessing in the 21st century is the revival of an ancient heresy, a postmodern version of Gnosticism. The theologian Peter Jones first described this weird phenomenon in his 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age. Jones further explored the neo-Gnostic trend in his 1997 book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America. This steady drift toward syncretism suggests that many Christian “leaders” and institutions are now “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (I Timothy 4:1-3 KJV).

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.