The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Godless Men at Yale

Posted on | November 8, 2015 | 48 Comments

Every time I mention William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale here, it sells a few copies via the Amazon Associates link, a surprise that is both pleasant (because I need the money) and troubling, because it bugs me to realize that today, in 2015, there are conservatives who have not yet read that 1951 classic. Buckley’s book, published not long after he had graduated from Yale, immediately ignited a firestorm among the liberal elite. God and Man at Yale was published amid the Cold War tempest that history has called “McCarthyism,” and Buckley pointed out the ways in which “the superstition of academic freedom” was used to protect teaching that was clearly hostile to capitalism and Christianity.

More than that, Buckley documented how Yale had become confused about its own mission and, as a result, had betrayed the trust of the alumni whose contributions funded the university. God and Man at Yale, while focused on one particular Ivy League school, was in fact an indictment of American higher education generally, and especially of the academic elite whose embrace of New Deal-era liberalism had made it difficult for them to recognize the menace that Communism posed to our civilization. Though written at a particular time about a particular set of issues at a particular university, God and Man at Yale is nevertheless a work of timeless value and highly relevant to many of the controversies we encounter today, especially in higher education.

The recent absurd racial controversy at Yale, which resulted in an incident with an enraged student shouting obscenities at a dorm headmaster, calls our attention to why we cannot disregard (or treat as a joke) what is being taught at our nation’s universities. The cultural and political climate on campus today will shape the beliefs and attitudes of America’s future leaders, and incidents like this should give us cause for great concern. Yale is run by cowards:

In a closed-door meeting Thursday night, Yale University’s president apologized to a large group of minority students for the school’s failure to make them feel safe on campus.
“We failed you,” Peter Salovey, a psychologist, told more than 40 students gathered in the ornate room where the Yale Corporation meets, on the top floor of the president’s office.
“I think we have to be a better university. I think we have to do a better job,” he said, according to several students in the room who were taking notes.

You can read more at Reason magazine and at Hot Air, where Jazz Shaw points out the meaning of this abject surrender:

So it’s no longer good enough to admonish the actual practitioners of controversial speech . . . Now the faculty needs to go on the chopping block if they don’t proactively go out and squelch any offensive thoughts. This is the price we’re paying for generations of liberal thinkers encouraging the coddling of students and stamping out any competing ideas.

In other words, administrators now must vet their faculty, to make sure they never hire anyone who could harbor opinions that any student might find offensive, and sternly instruct professors to be sure that they do not tolerate any potentially offending expressions. This is the “better university” that President Salovey promised Yale’s students, and all because of Halloween costumes.

The laughably trivial nature of this controversy is, in fact, the point.

Go back to 1951. The Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons, the Rosenberg case had exposed the espionage by which this had happened, the Alger Hiss case and the Amerasia case had further exposed Soviet subversion, which was implicated in the Communist takeover of China, U.S. troops were fighting Red Chinese troops in Korea, and Joe McCarthy was investigating the lax security policies implicated in this national security crisis. Amid this cauldron of controversy, Yale student William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an erudite and thoughtful book about what all this meant for America’s institutions of higher education — he was not screaming dirty words while demanding that the campus be made a “safe space” to protect him from offensive Halloween costumes.

America’s cultural elite is decadent and depraved, and it has become so because our intellectual class failed to heed the warnings that Bill Buckley sounded in 1951. Yale University rejected Buckley’s criticism, and has proceeded in subsequent decades to do the exact opposite of what they should have done, had they taken Buckley’s criticism seriously. The true threat to “academic freedom” is not, as Yale’s defenders in 1951 imagined, from right-wingers like Buckley, but rather from the totalitarian impulses of the Left.

The truth about what is being taught at Yale, and at other colleges and universities, is of concern to every citizen, because it is abundantly evident that the pursuit of soi-disant “academic freedom” has now created a climate that excludes from campus the expression of any fact or opinion which the Left does not approve.

God has been banished from Yale, and the godless men who now exercise authority in academia — pusillanimous neurasthenic cowards like Yale President Peter Salovey — are evidently prepared to surrender to the puerile tantrums of young heathens whose “education” has rendered them incapable of even pretending to be civilized people.





 

Category: Education

FMJRA 2.0: After The Gun Show

Posted on | November 8, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Just What It Says On The Label
Animal Magnetism
Politically Incorrect Conservative
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny
Batshit Crazy News

Tancredo Rejects the GOoP
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Ride Across the River
The Pirate’s Cove
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

American Academia Is a Corrupt Racket
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

Hillary Is Lying, People Are Dying
The DaleyGator
Batshit Crazy News

Guys: Never Talk to a College Girl, Because All College Girls Hate You
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

She Is 23 and ‘So F–king Exhausted’
Inoperable Terran
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.02.15
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

On ‘Crackers’
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.03.15
Batshit Crazy News

Faisal Mohammad: Authorities Say Stabbings at UC-Merced Not Terrorism
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Is Ellie Clougherty a Liar?
Batshit Crazy News

Feminism: How a Privileged Elite Can Claim Permanent Victimhood
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.04.15
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

The @Salon Pedophile Click-Bait Magical Internet Outrage Marketing Machine
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.05.15
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Story
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.06.15
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (18)
  2.  (tied) A View from the Beach, Regular Right Guy (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


After the Gold Rush

Category: FMJRA Award

Our Moral Superiors™

Posted on | November 7, 2015 | 49 Comments

Tuition at Yale University is $47,600 and you would think, for that kind of money, they could provide decent mental health counseling for students, or maybe screen the applications to make sure they’re not admitting psychotics. Unfortunately, they seem to have an affirmative action quota for lunatics, including students so deluded they think they are “oppressed.” Some kind of absurd racial controversy erupted on the Yale campus, and a deranged student freaked out and started screaming obscenities at a dorm headmaster named Nicholas Christakis:

The conversation is at first tense but calm, but it escalates rapidly after a student accuses Christakis of creating an “unsafe space” at Yale.
“I did not-,” Christakis attempts to reply, but a student aggressively interjects.
“Be quiet!,” she screams. Then, voice quavering with emotion, she continues. “[In] your position as headmaster, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman.”
Christakis attempts to dissent, saying “No, I don’t agree with that,” unleashing a torrent of shrieks from the student.
“Then why the f–k did you accept the position? Who the f–k hired you?,” she cries, drowning out any attempt by Christakis to explain himself (Christakis never raises his voice, except to be heard by the crowd).
“You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!”

If your kids are maniacs, just send ’em to Yale. For $47,600 a year, it’s cheaper than putting them in a psychiatric ward.

 

Category: Education

Reasons to Home School Your Kids

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 42 Comments

Are you a homophobe? I mean, do you sit around all day seething in rage, waiting for nightfall, so you can go out and terrorize some homosexuals? Of course not. You are not a hater and you have no irrational “phobia.” You are a decent law-abiding citizen, and not a violent menace to your fellow citizens. If it weren’t for the incessant lectures from gay activists who insist you are a hateful homophobe, you’d probably never think about the subject. But if you aren’t a hater . . . why not?

Did you go through a special anti-homophobia training program in school when you were a kid? No, of course not. You were taught to be polite to everyone and respect others. You are not a bully. You’re a nice person.

So you are a civilized person, and not a violent ruffian, yet you never had any specific lessons about not being a homophobe. Why then do public school teachers seem to think such lessons are necessary? In Conway Springs, Kansas, a middle school teacher decided his eighth-grade history students needed to see a film “that depicts a fictional world in which heterosexual children are bullied by homosexual classmates”:

The movie he showed his eighth-grade students last month portrays a heterosexual girl being raised in a dystopian society where homosexuality is the norm.

(The Women’s Studies department at Bryn Mawr College?)

The girl is bullied by classmates — to the indifference of several teachers and other adults — until she commits suicide.

Question: What does this have to do with history?

Do this teacher actually teach any history? What do the kids in Conway Springs Middle School know about history? I mean, can they name all the presidents in order, by memory? Do they know anything about the Missouri Compromise or the Spanish-America War or the election of 1948? If I were to say “Cross of Gold” to these kids, would they automatically shout, “William Jennings Bryan”?

I’m gonna guess, no, because they’re too busy learning the only lesson that really matters anymore: Don’t Hate the Gays.

Look: There is this thing called “the Internet,” and if any parent thinks their child needs to see “a dystopian society where homosexuality is the norm,” you could download the YouTube video.

In other words, this ridiculously didactic Don’t Hate the Gays propaganda film is just one click away for anybody who wants to see it, including your eighth-grader. So why do you think the public schools (paid for with your tax dollars) need to force kids to watch this stuff in class? Does it now occur to anyone, besides me, that public schools have stopped teaching facts — William Jennings Bryan, and all that — and instead are teaching attitudes? And don’t you see that the attitudes being taught in public schools are liberal attitudes, because all the teachers are liberals who vote for Democrats and they want to train your children to be liberals who vote Democrat, too.

The American public school system is corrupt. Public schools are a political indoctrination program operated by Democrat activists who pay dues to a teachers union that is one of the major funders of the Democrat Party. Why would any Republican parent let their children go anywhere near these kind of wicked and dishonest people?

By the way, William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat, and his “Cross of Gold” speech was an irresponsible and demagogic appeal to envy and economic ignorance. But those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, which probably explains why Barack Obama is president. And if your daughter decides to go to Bryn Mawr and major in Women’s Studies, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

Category: Education

PowerLine Laid Out On Fainting Couch Over Ben Carson USMA Story And Small Arachnid, But Mostly Ben Carson

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

As a service academy graduate, this story makes one go “Hmmm…”

I like Ben Carson, though in the race for the GOP nomination he’s far down my preference list. Thus, I was happy to defend him from what struck me as an unfair attack by CNN on his “personal story” (having to do with manifestations of anger as a teenager).

But now, the Carson campaign has admitted that the candidate’s story about applying [note, Carson never claimed to have applied] and being admitted to West Point is untrue. Politico uncovered the falsehood:

According to a story told in Carson’s book, “Gifted Hands,” the then-17 year old was introduced in 1969 to Gen. William Westmoreland, who had just ended his command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the two dined together. That meeting, according to Carson’s telling, was followed by a “full scholarship” to the military academy.

West Point, however, has no record of Carson applying, much less being extended admission. . . .

There are no ‘scholarships’ to any of the three academies. There are appointments. One is appointed Congressionally, or via the Executive Branch. I qualified for a Presidential nomination, as the son of a veteran, but attended on a Secretary of the Navy nomination, as a service member myself.

How nutty is this entire scandaletto? Nearly this nutty:


You can have high personal regard for the Doctor, and you can call this a sloppy non-troversy (it certainly doesn’t pass muster at a glance), but don’t call him a liar until he throws in some sniper fire, or claims that the West Point conversation occurred while cruising over Macho Grande.

TWEET. OF. THE. YEAR:

UPDATE. I stand corrected:

> There are no ‘scholarships’ to any of the three academies.
There are four service academies. USMA, USNA, USCGA, & USAFA.
There’s also a small factual error here:
> There are appointments. One is appointed Congressionally, or via the Executive Branch.
Appointment to USCGA is strictly merit-based; there are no nominations of any kind in its application process.

via OhioCoastie

Category: Republicans

In The Mailbox: 11.06.15

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.06.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Dorothy Bland, Dean Of Journalism And Liar
Da Tech Guy: How Obama And The Left View Jews And Israel, In One Paragraph
The Political Hat: Green Energy Scam, Death Ray Victory
Doug Powers: Obama Says There’s Been A Lot of “Misinformation” Spread About Obamacare
Twitchy: Houston Mayor Not Eager To Hear From People She Called “Transphobes”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Californians Less Safe After Proposition 47 Passes
American Thinker: Culture Matters
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Host By Robin Cook
Conservatives4Palin: Christie, Huckabee Exit Main Debate Stage
Don Surber: Obama To Environment – Drop Dead
Jammie Wearing Fools: Hitler, So Fashionable In Gaza
Joe For America: Ted Cruz Introduces Bill To List Muslim Brotherhood As Terrorist Organization
JustOneMinute: Exxon Lied, People Died. Or Overheated. Or Something.
Pamela Geller: UC Merced Jihadi’s Manifesto PRAISED ALLAH, But Cops Say Motive Wasn’t Terrorism
Protein Wisdom: Star Wars – International Trailer
Shot In The Dark: Just Another Day In The Life Of Every Saint Paul Conservative
STUMP: Public Pension Watch – Won’t Anybody Think Of The Poor Corrupt Officials?
The Gateway Pundit: Camille Paglia Calls Out “Transgender Mania” – Parents Who Indulge Kids Commit Child Abuse
The Jawa Report: Al-Qaeda, The Kinder, Gentler Islamic Terrorists?
The Lonely Conservative: Rush, The Big Voice On The Right
This Ain’t Hell: Hasan’s Victims Struggle For Benefits
Weasel Zippers: Former CIA Director Woolsey – Unvetted Foreigners Being Hired For TSA And Baggage Handling Positions
Megan McArdle: What’s The Mortality Rate For Unicorns?
Mark Steyn: Stabbers For Allah


Shop Amazon – Countdown to Black Friday in Toys

Category: Linkagery

Is Ellie Clougherty a Liar?

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 39 Comments

Joe Lonsdale and Ellie Clougherty in 2012.

It seemed like a perfect romance — a young high-tech entrepreneur and the former fashion model who met through a mentorship program at elite Stanford University. But after they broke up, the stunning beauty claimed she had been raped and abused by Joe Lonsdale. He was banned from the Stanford campus and sued by his ex-girlfriend Ellie Clougherty. What went wrong? What really happened? The truth in such matters is always difficult to know, but in the midst of the “rape culture” hysteria that feminists have incited on college campuses, this love-gone-wrong tale in California’s Silicon Valley took on a political significance:

After sightseeing in Rome [in March 2012], Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. Stanford investigated whether he broke the university’s rule against “consensual sexual and romantic relationships” between students and their mentors and, later, whether he raped her. The findings from the investigations have sparked a war of allegations and interpretations, culminating last month with dueling lawsuits, filled with damaging accusations. This case, which has been picked up by the media, does not fit neatly into the narratives that have fueled an ongoing national conversation about sexual assault of students on campus. But it exposes the risks of Stanford’s open door to Silicon Valley and the pressure that universities are under to do more for students who say they’ve been raped. . . .
In December 2012, Lonsdale wrote Clougherty a long email. “We are dealing with serious relationship dysfunction,” he began, and laid out a list of examples in bullet points. The first read: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”
Lonsdale spent Christmas with Clougherty at her family’s home. They fought about a number of things, including the fact that he didn’t bring her a Christmas present. When he got home, Lonsdale broke up with her over email. . . .

You can read the rest of that story, which Emily Bazelon wrote for the New York Times magazine in February. Permit me to remark what should be obvious: A girl who is (a) a professional fashion model, (b) smart enough to go to Stanford University, (c) devoutly Catholic and (d) still a virgin at age 21, is not Just Your Typical College Girl.

Joe Lonsdale, a millionaire who is eight years older than Miss Clougherty, certainly recognized her to be a special young lady, but the way he seduced her — and I think the word “seduced” is not unfair in this situation — created a predictable problem. Having persuaded her to forsake her religious ideals, Lonsdale should have expected the “serious relationship dysfunction” of which he later complained.

He “broke up with her over email”? Dear God!

This simply will not do, sir.

However princely your standing among your Silicon Valley peers, you can’t just seduce and abandon a girl like Ellie Clougherty and expect no reprisal. You sure as hell don’t break up with her via email. The sequel of this story — involving a Harvard “gender violence” conference and a decision to use federal Title IX law to require that Stanford punish Joe Lonsdale — is what made it part of the “rape culture” conversation. And that is why this story came to the attention of Emily Bazelon.

Because of the thoroughness of Bazelon’s reporting, especially her quotations of email correspondence between the couple, Stanford reversed its ruling against Joe Lonsdale, and Ellie Clougherty’s lawsuit against him has been settled. Bazelon makes an important point about how these stories are covered:

On Tuesday, the university reversed its finding of sexual misconduct and harassment, lifting the campus ban it had imposed on Lonsdale. Lonsdale agreed not to challenge the separate determination that he broke the rule against consensual relationships between mentors and students. That’s hardly in the same category as sexual misconduct and harassment. . . .
Last December, when Rolling Stone’s account of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia began to unravel, some commentators argued that we should nevertheless take claims of sexual assault at face value, on the grounds that statistically, they are very likely true. “I choose to believe Jackie,” Jessica Valenti wrote in The Guardian. “I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong.” In The Washington Post, Zerlina Maxwell argued: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”
As Margaret Talbot pointed out in The New Yorker at the time: “That’s a position that makes moral and emotional sense for advocates and friends of the victim, whose primary role is to comfort and support. But it’s not a position that makes sense for journalists, whose job is to find out what actually happened.” It’s true that women don’t make a lot of false rape accusations to the police. That’s rare. But rare is not the same as never. . . .

You can read the rest of that article, which came to my attention because of Jessica Valenti’s (ill-advised) Twitter pushback against Bazelon’s criticism. A reporter like Bazelon has an obligation to pay attention to facts that don’t fit the preconceived prejudices of anti-male crusaders like Jessica Valenti and Zerlina Maxwell. A feminist is always prepared to believe the very worst about any man (as long as the man is not an elected Democrat), and is also obligated to pretend that women never lie (unless they are Republican women). Beyond her blatant partisan motives, Jessica Valenti has a direct financial incentive to advance the “campus rape epidemic” narrative, since this helps Valenti sell books and get lucrative speaking engagements. You cannot trust her, period.

Back in the day, a fellow who did what Joe Lonsdale did might have had to reckon with the vengeance of her father or brothers, or her new boyfriend might show up with some of his buddies, looking to even the score. The possibility of being confronted by a crew of angry rednecks was something a fellow down home could not take lightly, but the old-fashioned way of dealing with these things probably doesn’t happen very often at Stanford. However, turning these love-gone-wrong tales into Title IX cases and civil lawsuits is arguably a poor substitute for the ancient and simple customs of down-home Hillbilly Justice.

Well, what of Ellie Clougherty? She was a fool, even if she was also obviously in some sense a victim. Her fateful trip to Rome with Joe Lonsdale was her own decision, and once she had compromised her standards, what consequences did she expect would follow? A hitherto faithful Catholic, she made the all-too-common mistake of trusting “love” to guide her, and this was a tragic error.

Perhaps even worse than that folly, however, Ellie Clougherty’s decision to force Stanford into a Title IX proceeding against Joe Lonsdale — and subsequently to go public with her accusations against him — exposed her personal life to an examination that no wise person would ever deliberately invite. The confessional mode of so much feminist discourse, where women reveal the most intimate details of their lives in order to dramatize how they have been victimized by the oppressive patriarchy, has always bothered me. Many times I have thought about stories I could tell — which may or may not involve redneck girls and their angry boyfriends — to illustrate a point, but then decided that the Fifth Amendment is as valuable as the First Amendment. Some stories just aren’t worth telling, when you consider all the possible costs.

Is Ellie Clougherty a liar?

This is not a question I can answer, but it is a question that many will ask, because she told a story she could not prove true.

You know and I know, woman,
I ain’t the one.
I never hurt you, sweetheart.
I never pulled my gun.
Got bells in your mind, mama,
And it’s easy to see.
I think it’s time for me to move along,
I do believe.





 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Faisal Mohammad: Authorities Say Stabbings at UC-Merced Not Terrorism

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 78 Comments

The knife-wielding student who stabbed four people Wednesday before being shot by police at the University of California-Merced was not acting on a political motive, officials say. Faisal Mohammad, 18, was pursuing a personal vendetta against fellow students who had excluded him from a study group, according to authorities:

The California student who went on a stabbing rampage before being shot dead by police had planned to kill a police officer, steal a gun and shoot the classmates who had kicked him out of a study group.
Faisal Mohammad, 18, a freshman who majored in computer science and engineering at the University of California, Merced, stabbed four people on Wednesday.
But the teenager, of Santa Clara, California, ‘had far greater intentions to do damage’, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said.
According to a two-page manifesto found stuffed in his pocket during an autopsy on Thursday, Mohammad had a detailed plan of revenge for the students who had expelled him from their group.
Mohammad had been carrying two plastic baggies of highly flammable petroleum jelly, ziptie handcuffs, night vision goggles, duct tape and a hammer in his backpack when he was shot in the back by officers.
He had planned to hold students hostage by using the plastic ties to bind their hands to their desks during class on Wednesday morning.
hen, he planned to call police with a fake distress call, ambush the responding officers and take their guns.
He intended to squirt the petroleum jelly on the floor to create a slippery surface for anyone entering the classroom.
But his attack on the class was foiled almost immediately and the four people he stabbed with a hunting knife — two students, a staff member and a building contractor — are all expected to recover.
Sheriff Warnke said the document written by Mohammad discussed his expulsion from the study group and listed the students he sought to harm as well as other violent musings.
Warnke added that although Mohammad made several references to ‘Allah’, he does not believe the attack was connected to religion or terrorism.
Earlier on Thursday, UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland said the attacks were motivated by ‘personal animosities’ and a ‘vendetta’, not a political agenda. . . .
The student, described as ‘anti-social’ by his roommate, was ‘having fun’, one victim said, as he slashed the first student in the throat inside a classroom.
When construction worker Byron Price, 31, heard the commotion and intervened, he was stabbed in his left side by Mohammad as he tried to stop the attack.
‘He had a smile on his face, he was having fun — which is more what bothers me,’ Price told CBSFresno.
Sheriff Vern Warnke said that Price’s entrance into the classroom likely prevented the death of the first victim who was attacked.

Despite official statements that Mohammad’s attack was motivated by personal grievances, several commentators — including Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer — noted the resemblance between the UC-Merced violence and a recent series of knife attacks by Palestinian terrorists against Jews in Israel:

The Twitter account on which the attack was praised appears to be one of thousands that regularly reference ISIS, according to Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC), which translated the message. Veryan Khan, of TRAC, which monitors ISIS and other groups on social media, said ISIS mounted a call for stabbings on Oct. 18, with the release 19 videos, but could not say what motivated Wednesday’s attack.
“Over the past three days, the Islamic State has released nineteen videos encouraging Palestinians stabbing attacks on Israel,” Khan said. “The media campaign coincides with a wave of renewed violence between Israel and Palestine, after a wave of seemingly lone wolf attacks by Palestinians targeting Israelis.”

Determining the motive of a “lone wolf” terrorist could be difficult. Even if Mohammad himself declared his actions to be a matter of personal revenge, it may be that his antisocial attitude — the moody loner fantasizing about violent reprisals against those he felt had wronged him — could reflect the cultural alienation of a young Muslim man unable to adapt to secular Western society. Speculation about such factors, which liberals would condemn as “Islamophobia” when regarding Muslim criminals, is commonplace when violence is committed by persons whose background and choice of targets could be interpreted as suggesting a “right-wing” political motivation. If the UC-Merced attack had been perpetrated by a white Christian male who praised God in his “manifesto,” liberals would be quick to claim that this was right-wing violence inspired by talk radio, Fox News or Republican politicians.

The difference between (a) legitimately trying to understand the motives of attackers, and (b) trying to score political points for partisan advantage, is one we should always keep in mind when we see how the liberal media pick and choose which violent incidents to give saturation coverage, and how that coverage presents the “moral of the story.”

Too many journalists view the news as a series of opportunities to indulge in didacticism, intended to teach the news consumer liberal political lessons. This attitude means that events which don’t fit the liberal narrative are treated as “local news” of no national significance, whereas events that lend themselves to a liberal interpretation are highlighted, given in-depth coverage and made a focus of commentary by “experts” and pundits. Conservative criticism of media bias should be aimed at exposing to public scrutiny the falsehoods and distortions created by the political prejudices that prevail in the news industry.

People must have access to every fact in order to be able to form accurate judgments, and media bias tends to deprive people of facts that would lead people to question the liberal worldview. Once people realize that the media are attempting to deceive them, and that this attempted deception has political motives — e.g., to enhance the electoral success of the Democrat Party — then they begin to view media skeptically, to question the accuracy of what is reported, to seek out facts that are overlooked by the liberal media. There is a difference between skepticism and paranoia, of course, but once we realize that the partisan tilt in America’s newsrooms favors Democrat over Republicans by a factor of at least 4-to-1, there is never thereafter a moment when we can entirely trust the media to tell us the whole truth.

Rush Limbaugh: The Conservative-Media
Revolution Has Forced the Liberal Media
to Abandon Any Pretense of Objectivity

Limbaugh’s point is that in the past 30 years, under pressure from conservative critics, allegedly “objective” journalists have been unable to maintain their pretense of neutrality. The biased reporters, editors and producers at major news organizations like NBC, ABC, the Associated Press and the New York Times are no longer able to imagine that they are doing anything else than performing as cheerleaders for the Democrat Party. They cannot pretend to be anything other than partisan propagandists and, knowing that their readers and viewers are aware of their dishonesty, these journalists must either drop the mask of “objectivity” or else lose whatever self-respect they ever had.





 

Category: Education, Islam, Media Bias, Terrorism
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