The Other McCain

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

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | January 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

 

Say hello to Hannah Roemhild, an opera singer from Middletown, Connecticut, who is a Bernie Sanders supporter and also crazy:

Hannah Roemhild, a Connecticut opera singer who posted negative things about President Donald Trump on Facebook, was named by authorities as the woman accused of breaching security checkpoints at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
One post on her Facebook page contained a sign reading “not my president” in reference to Trump. In 2016, she indicated support for Bernie Sanders on social media. She’s a registered Democrat, according to Connecticut records.
Roemhild drove a black SUV through two security checkpoints at Mar-a-Lago, leading to shots being fired by authorities protecting Trump’s Palm Beach property, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department.
The incident location was given by authorities as “Mar-a-Lago main entrance.” In the media advisory, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department reported that the Florida Highway Patrol was “in pursuit of a black SUV” when it deviated to Mar-a-Lago. They now say that SUV was being driven by Hannah Roemhild. . . .
Ric Bradshaw, sheriff of Palm Beach County, said that at about 11:38 a.m. on January 31, 2020, a Florida Highway Patrol officer working a security job at the posh Breakers hotel in West Palm Beach was notified by security that they had a “white female who was acting erratically that was actually up on top of her car doing some kind of a dance.”
Roemhild then got inside the black SUV. The officer walked up to the window to get her attention, and she was “fooling around on the side by where the console was,” according to the sheriff. She tried to put the vehicle in reverse. He kept tapping the window. When she looked like she was putting the vehicle in drive, the officer smashed the window to grab the steering wheel, but it “didn’t work,” said the sheriff. She then drove off.
He caught up with her and then lost her in traffic. She drove toward Mar-a-Lago.
When a pursuit ignited, and she headed toward the president’s estate, authorities weren’t sure what they were dealing with at first, Bradshaw said.
“We didn’t know if it was someone with a car bomb or someone who was going to hit as many pedestrians as possible,” said Bradshaw in a news conference. At that point, authorities opened fire. It was a rental vehicle. She “crashed through” two checkpoints, according to Bradshaw. Guards moved out of the way just in time. . . .
Authorities say Roemhild fled Mar-a-Lago after the gunfire was directed at her vehicle.
The woman was ultimately confronted and arrested at a local motel. The FBI, sheriff’s department and Secret Service are all investigating, and they haven’t interviewed Roemhild yet. There were two females in the vehicle by that point. Roemhild picked up the second woman but that was after the Mar-a-Lago incident, Bradshaw said.

I’m not saying all Bernie Sanders supporters are dangerous, but . . .

Well, hang on, maybe I am saying that. Remember that James Hodgkinson, who opened fire on Republican congressmen in June 2017, was a Bernie bro, and undercover video by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas shows Bernie’s campaign staff is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, so it does seem as if there might be a pattern here.




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Crime, Florida

Violence Against Women Update

Posted on | January 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update

 

Instagram + Snapchat = rape:

A University of Utah football player was arrested Thursday after police say he kidnapped and raped a 17-year-old girl.
The alleged victim told police she met Terrell Perriman, a 20-year-old wide receiver for the team, on Instagram and they connected on Snapchat. The girl told police Perriman sent her sexually graphic videos and photos and requested the same from her.
The girl then went to Perriman’s apartment on Friday, where he took her into the bedroom and refused to let her leave unless she gave Perriman oral sex, according to the statement.
“The victim stated that she started crying because she wanted to leave and she was scared,” a statement of probable cause said. The girl tried to leave the room, and Perriman allegedly stood in front of the door blocking her exit.
Perriman also allegedly took the girl’s phone away and held it out of her reach so she couldn’t call for help.
The victim said Perriman then pulled down his pants and pulled down the girl’s shorts and raped her.
Perriman faces felony charges of kidnapping, rape and enticing a minor and a misdemeanor charge of dealing in material harmful to a minor.
Salt Lake City police Detective Greg Wilking said police have “some indication” there could be more victims and urged individuals to come forward, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
“Often in these kinds of cases, there’s not just one victim,” he added. “This is behavior that’s repeated.”
A three-star recruit out of Miami Central High School, Perriman was a 2018 redshirt who played 10 games in 2019.

Let me ask you ladies: If a guy sends you “sexually graphic videos and photos” and then you go over to his apartment, what do you think is going to happen once that door closes behind you?

Far be it from me to defend Terrell Perriman — who, however, must be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law — but I’ve got a 17-year-old daughter, and I pray she would never be such a fool as to trust a guy who would even think of sending “sexually graphic videos and photos.” But this is just another case of violence against women that feminists won’t notice, for some reason . . .

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)




 

Category: Utah, Violence Against Women

Bernie Sanders: George Wallace Fan?

Posted on | January 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Bernie Sanders: George Wallace Fan?

 

Should we muster some “strange new respect” for Bernie?

Seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to George Wallace as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today,” a young Bernie Sanders praised the segregationist Alabama governor.
In an interview with the Brattleboro Reformer in 1972, Sanders, then 31, said Wallace “advocates some outrageous approaches to our problems, but at least he is sensitive to what people feel they need.”
Sanders, now a Vermont senator and 2020 Democrat, said, “What we need are more active politicians working for the people.”
The 1972 remarks surprised the interviewer at the time, who wrote that “even though [Sanders] has been labeled a ‘leftist radical’ by some persons, Sanders had some praise for [Wallace].”
On other occasions, Sanders was more critical of Wallace and warned about the allure of white identity politics.

To explain “strange new respect”:

The “Strange New Respect” Award is the invention of Tom Bethell, who noted decades ago how liberals would always start praising a conservative or Republican who showed signs of moderation, Bob Dole being a great example. “New respect” — a phrase you’d actually see in the media — was a euphemism for “moved to the left.”
It is a totem of insincere liberalism, a coy way of attacking present-day conservatives. My corollary is that for liberals, the only good conservative is a dead conservative. Back in the 1960s, William F. Buckley was attacked as a fascist or worse, and dismissed as a retrograde force. Today, of course, liberals call him a “national treasure,” and bemoan that today’s conservatism isn’t more like Buckley.

Can conservatives play the same game? If Bernie praised Wallace back in the day, maybe we are unfair to dismiss him as a simplistic lefty.

Speaking of fairness, it’s important to remember that Wallace actually began his career promising progressive reform, and lost the 1958 gubernatorial election to John Patterson, who ran as an all-out segregationist and implied that Wallace was “soft” on the issue. After that defeat, Wallace vowed (in blunt language I won’t quote here) that he would never lose on that issue again, and he was as good as his word.

Few of our readers are old enough to actually remember those days. I wasn’t born until 1959, and was 13 at the time of the 1972 election, so all of this was really before my time. My parents were both Democrats, and rather liberal by the standards of the Deep South at the time. It is probably a waste of time to try explaining what attitudes were like — what people were like — many decades ago, in an attempt to understand that society. Most people will simply condemn my ancestors as morally inferior, but that condemnation requires a belief that 21st-century America is superior to the America that fought and won World War II.

 

The way history is taught nowadays makes it easy to forget that the America which defeated Hitler did so with a segregated military, and that all the U.S. troops that fought and died on D-Day were white. Ask yourself: Why is the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia?

Thirty-four Virginia National Guard soldiers from the town of Bedford were part of D-Day. Nineteen of them were killed during the first day of the invasion, and four more died during the rest of the Normandy campaign. The town and the “Bedford Boys” had proportionately suffered the greatest losses of the campaign, thus inspiring the United States Congress to establish the D-Day memorial in Bedford.
The Bedford Boys included three sets of brothers: twins Roy and Ray Stevens, with Ray killed during the landing while Roy survived, Clyde and Jack Powers, with Jack killed and Clyde wounded but surviving, and Bedford and Raymond Hoback, both killed. The losses by the soldiers from Bedford were chronicled in the best-selling book The Bedford Boys by Alex Kershaw, and helped inspire the movie Saving Private Ryan.

This one small community in the Blue Ridge hills near Lynchburg suffered the loss of 19 of its sons on D-Day, and this is a very white part of Virginia. Even today, 93% of the population of Bedford County is white. In 2016, Bedford County voted more than 3-to-1 for Donald Trump (30,659 to 9,768 votes for Hillary Clinton). To put it bluntly, Bedford County is everything the Left hates about America, and this raises questions about the kind of America that George Wallace sought to preserve. Even if we are horrified by the history of Jim Crow, we must acknowledge that our ideas of “progress” tend to overlook those virtues that our allegedly less enlightened ancestors possessed, and that the loss of such virtues — including old-fashioned patriotic courage — is implicated in many of the social problems we suffer as a nation today.

For example, liberals love to talk about inequality:

The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.
More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military. . . .
That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer. . . .
In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people.

What does this mean? It means that American military power — the muscle of our foreign policy — rests disproportionately upon the shoulders of Southerners, particularly the children of military veterans. And this inequality in terms of military service has consequences for our national politics, because people who have “skin in the game” (my son is a paratrooper who has served in Afghanistan) are likely to have a much different view of foreign policy than the decadent elite who send their sons to Harvard instead of Fort Benning or Parris Island. The elite have more influence over foreign policy, but their sons are not the ones dodging bullets and mortars to enforce foreign policy, and this is a kind of inequality that liberals don’t seem to care much about.

Well, I don’t know how much that long digression has to do with Bernie Sanders, except that some people seem to think that the best way to beat Bernie is to smear him as a racist. Not in a million years would I ever vote for Bernie, but there are still 5 A’s in “RAAAAACIST!”




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, History, Racism

Collins Announces ‘Yes,’ Alexander ‘No’ on Calling Impeachment Witnesses: TIE?

Posted on | January 31, 2020 | Comments Off on Collins Announces ‘Yes,’ Alexander ‘No’ on Calling Impeachment Witnesses: TIE?

 

Last night, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine announced that she would vote to open the impeachment trial to more witnesses and documents, while Sen Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said he would vote against more witnesses. Mitt Romney, worthless backstabber that he is, says he wants John Bolton to testify. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is probably a “yes.” If the known whip count stays the same — that is, if there are no surprise “yes” votes — then the result would be a 50-50 tie, and the motion for new witnesses would fail, unless Chief Justice John Roberts intervened to cast a “yes” vote, which would be controversial.

This is Alexander’s explanation for his “no” vote:

“I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense. …The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.
“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.”

Alexander cedes two points: First that the House Democrats have proven their case, and second that Trump’s conduct was “inappropriate,” while at the same time asserting that what has been proven falls short of the “high bar for an impeachable offense.” This is shrewd, and probably reflects what a lot of independent voters think about the case, that the attempt to influence Ukraine was “inappropriate” (i.e., it doesn’t look good), but the Democrats went too far with their rush to impeachment.

In other words, you can disapprove of what Trump did without believing that he needs to be immediately removed from office for it. With the election barely nine months away, let the people decide. The fact that the Democrats rushed to impeach was essentially a vote of “no confidence” in their field of presidential candidates. Meanwhile . . .

Trump’s approval ratings have gone up since the impeachment began, and this despite (or perhaps because of) liberal media bias:

Jake Tapper doesn’t want you to know the name of the so-called “whistleblower” who caused the impeachment drama. Of course, the identity of Eric Ciaramella was never much of a secret — lots of people in D.C. knew that the former National Security Council staffer was the reputed source for California Rep. Adam Schiff’s investigation of President Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ciaramella’s name has been in many news stories in recent months: “Report: Anti-Trump Complainant Eric Ciaramella Worked With Brennan, Biden, and DNC Operative Chalupa” (American Greatness, Oct. 30, 2019) and “Open Society Emails Show Anti-Trump CIA ‘Whistleblower’ Eric Ciaramella Was Updated on George Soros’s Personal Ukraine Activities” (Gateway Pundit, Nov. 17, 2019), to cite just a couple. But CNN viewers have never heard Ciaramella identified, and Jake Tapper evidently wants to prevent anyone else from reporting this fact, either.
Wednesday afternoon, Tapper tweeted, “A Trump campaign official just RTed a tweet containing the name of the alleged whistleblower.” Tapper’s third-grade tattletale behavior was in response to Trump campaign deputy communications director Matt Wolking retweeting investigative journalist Paul Sperry, with a photo showing Ciaramella meeting with Ukrainian officials in 2015.
Why doesn’t Tapper want anyone to see that photo? . . .

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




 

Category: Donald Trump, Senate, Ukraine

In The Mailbox: 01.30.20

Posted on | January 30, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.30.20

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Eric Ciaramella & John Roberts – Call Me By Your Name
Twitchy: Rep. Hakeem Jeffries Says The Steele Dossier Wouldn’t Be Impeachable Foreign Evidence Because It Was Purchased
Louder With Crowder: Court Declares Child Molester Not A Threat Because He’s Transgender Now

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Woke Women Are Female Incels
American Conservative: Modern Feminism’s Hated Enemy – Womanhood
American Greatness: Chief Justice Roberts Blocks Question From Sen. Paul About Ciaramella, Allows Question About Schiff Staffer
American Power: Senator Kelly Loeffler Takes Office Amid Impeachment & Foreign Policy Crises
American Thinker: Democrats Don’t Care About American Lives
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Backfiring News
Babalu Blog: Despite Living In A “Socialist Paradise”, Cubans Continue To Flee The Island
BattleSwarm: Contempt News Network
Cafe Hayek: Unseen Law
CDR Salamander: The Lessons From Germany’s Hollow Force
Da Tech Guy: Do You Really Expect Me To Be Worried By The Bolton Sucker Play? also, President Trump Sets Life & Prosperity Before The Palestinians
Don Surber: Liberals Notice Drudge Flipped
First Street Journal: Media Bias – When The Headline Causes A False Impression
The Geller Report: Turkish Government Mulling Letting Child Rapists Go Free If They Marry Their Victims, also, Indonesia Forms All-Women Whipping Force To Enforce Sharia
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Copyright Trolling
Hollywood In Toto: Fallon Sells His Comedy Soul To Billionaire Bloomberg, also, Sick Of Woke Shows? Binge These Korean TV Dramas Instead
Joe For America: No Wonder Nancy Is Nervous – Her Son’s Oil Company Employed Russians To Influence Politicians
JustOneMinute: Going Gentle Into That Good Night
Legal Insurrection: Roberts Rejects Rand Paul’s Question Again Because It supposedly Names The “Whistleblower”, also, Ex-Trump Aide Carter Page Sues DNC, Perkins Cole Law Firm Over Steele Dossier
The PanAm Post: Why Deporting Criminals From Argentina Isn’t Xenophobia, also, When The Nile Doesn’t Flood, Kill The Pharaoh
Power Line: Time To Pull The Plug On This Impeachment Farce, also, Ezra Levant Tells Them To Stuff It
Shark Tank: Mucarsel-Powell Claims Trump Is Failing Venezuelans
Shot In The Dark: I’ll Be Darned – A-Klo Must Have Mattered After All
STUMP: Pandemic – How Worried Should You Be About Coronavirus?
The Political Hat: Woke Academic Study – Secret Pedagogues, Social Justice Mathematics, & Cultural Humility Training
This Ain’t Hell: Thursday FGS, also, Thursdays Are for Cooking
Victory Girls: Warren Turns The Trans Pandering Up To 11, also, Cringeworthy – Mike Bloomberg’s Big Gay Ice Cream
Volokh Conspiracy: Trump Supporters Score Higher On Verbal Ability Tests
Weasel Zippers: Warren Says Her Education Secretary Must Meet Trans Child’s Approval, also, Pelosi Blathers If The Senate Votes To Acquit Trump, He “Will Not Be Acquitted”
Mark Steyn: Ain’t No Challah Back Girl, also, Coronavirus! Bolton Fever!! Tory Torpor!!

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Category: Linkagery

Eric Ciaramella’s Name Is Not a Secret, and #TeamTrump Only Hires Winners

Posted on | January 30, 2020 | 3 Comments

NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK, Martinsburg, W.Va.
Working from a McDonald’s here this morning because my brother Kirby has an all-day doctor’s appointment at the VA Medical Center, and contributions to the tip jar would be sincerely appreciated. Meanwhile, in the Historic Impeachment™ drama, Jake Tapper is a whiny bitch:

Trump campaign deputy director of communications Matt Wolking retweeted this tweet by Paul Sperry, which features the name of the alleged whistleblower:

And CNN’s Jake Tapper is on it:

Does Wolking’s retweet constitute a “formal threat” or nah?

Honestly, it’s kind of strange for Tapper to be hyperventilating about this. For better or for worse, Eric Ciaramella’s name has been out there for a while now.

This entire Historic Impeachment™ drama — which has done no real harm to Trump, but turned into a debacle for Democrats — was begun when Ciaramella decided, on the basis of hearsay, to play tattletale. He is not an actual “whistleblower,” since he had been kicked out of the White House for suspicion of leaking to the media and thus had no direct knowledge of the Ukraine phone call that was allegedly the “high crime” for which Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi decided that Trump needed to be impeached. The fact that someone as untrustworthy as Ciaramella continues to be employed at the CIA is the real scandal.

The reason that Jake Tapper and others want to pretend that Eric Ciaramella’s name is a secret — and, as I’ve noted, Facebook will ban you for saying the name of the “whistleblower” — is because knowledge of what actually happened contradicts the Democrats’ narrative.

Report: Anti-Trump Complainant
Eric Ciaramella Worked With Brennan,
Biden, and DNC Operative Chalupa
— American Greatness, Oct. 30, 2019

Open Society Emails Show Anti-Trump
CIA “Whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella
Was Updated on George Soros’s
Personal Ukraine Activities
— Gateway Pundit, Nov. 17, 2019

Whistleblower Was Overheard
in ’17 Discussing With Ally
How to Remove Trump
— Real Clear Politics, Jan. 22

Those are just three headlines that Jake Tapper and the rest of the “fake news” media don’t want Americans to know about, because they show that the origins of the Historic Impeachment™ drama are connected to the origins of the “Russian collusion” hoax which, as everyone now knows, was a phony “scandal” ginned up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign using the Steele dossier as a pretext for surveillance of the Trump campaign. So now Jake Tapper is trying to play tattletale on Matt Wolking, as if the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director doesn’t know what he’s doing? Oh, baby, was Jake ever wrong about that!

This is the “Streisand Effect” in action — by pretending that we have to treat Eric Ciaramella’s name like it’s top-secret classified information, Tapper and other Democrat operatives in the media have inadvertently made everyone curious to know the identity of the “whistleblower.”

Matt Wolking is a guy I’ve known about 10 years, and I’ve known his wife longer than that. She was working the registration desk at a Young America’s Foundation conference I covered in 2007, and she was so cute that I never forgot her name. Alisa was among the guests (along with Andrew Breitbart, Ace of Spades and Mary Katherine Ham) at the notorious CPAC party that Matt Vadum and I threw in 2008, where the hotel security showed up to shut us down just about the time Rep. Bob Barr arrived. Then, when I was covering the giant Tea Party rally in Washington in September 2009, Alisa spotted me in the crowd and talked me into getting her backstage where she chatted up an Indiana congressman named Mike Pence. Anyway, she and Matt have two kids now, and Matt’s working for the Trump campaign, getting paid to make a fool out of Jake Tapper. Life is good. Winning is good.

 

So here I am at the National Affairs Desk, where breakfast cost me $6.55, and Kirby just called from the VA Medical Center to say they’ll give him a lunch break at noon and he wants me to bring him a Quarter Pounder With Cheese ($4.59) for lunch, so I’ll once more remind our readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks in advance. We’re winning, but we still gotta eat.





 

Category: CNN, Donald Trump, Ukraine

Report: Impeachment Could End Friday

Posted on | January 30, 2020 | Comments Off on Report: Impeachment Could End Friday

 

The long, sad circus is coming to its inevitable conclusion:

A Democratic push to force Republicans to accept witnesses at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate appeared to be flagging on Wednesday, raising the possibility the president could be acquitted as early as Friday.
As senators spent the day posing questions to both the Trump legal team and the Democratic managers of the trial, the White House objected to the planned publication of a book by former national security adviser John Bolton in which he is said to have depicted Trump as playing a central role in pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden.
U.S. Senator John Barrasso, the No. 3 Republican in seniority, said it was possible the trial could end on Friday without Democrats achieving their goal of having witnesses called to testify.
“The momentum is clearly in the direction of moving to final judgment on Friday. That vote will be Friday. We still have a couple members who said they want to listen to the answers to questions, but that’s where the momentum is,” Barrasso said.
Asked when on Friday the vote might take place to settle the debate over witnesses and move to either acquit or convict Trump, Barrasso said probably Friday afternoon or late that day.
Other Republican senators were predicting a similar outcome in conversations with reporters during breaks in the trial on Wednesday.

Last week, Democrats endlessly repeated what we had already heard in House hearings last year. The president’s defense team took over this week, and utterly destroyed the Democrats’ case. If this were a court trial, the judge would order a directed verdict of acquittal. As it is, Republican senators have no incentive to defect, and it’s likely that some Democrats will join the vote for acquittal, whenever that may actually occur.

Meanwhile, the idea that having John Bolton as a witness would be valuable took a big hit Wednesday, when video surfaced of House impeachment manager Adam Schiff twice — on MSNBC in 2018 and on CNN in 2005 — casting aspersions on Bolton’s integrity and honesty:

 

 

Fox News has identified clips of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., now the lead House impeachment manager, in which he says Bolton had a distinct “lack of credibility” and was prone to “conspiracy theories.” This week, Schiff said Bolton needed to testify in the impeachment trial as an important and believable witness.
“This is someone who’s likely to exaggerate the dangerous impulses of the president toward belligerence, his proclivity to act without thinking, and his love of conspiracy theories,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 22, 2018, when Trump named Bolton national security adviser.
“And I’ll, you know, just add one data point to what you were talking about earlier, John Bolton once suggested on Fox News that the Russian hack of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] was a false flag operation that had been conducted by the Obama administration,” he said. “So, you add that kind of thinking to [former U.S. attorney] Joe diGenova and you have another big dose of unreality in the White House.”
Schiff made similar arguments back in May 2005, saying in an interview with CNN’s “Crossfire” that Bolton was “more focused on the next job than doing well at the last job” when he was up for nomination as ambassador to the United Nations under then-President George W. Bush.
“And particularly given the history, where we’ve had the politicizing of intelligence over WMD [weapons of mass destruction], why we would pick someone who the very same issue has been raised repeatedly, and that is John Bolton’s politicization of the intelligence he got on Cuba and other issues, why we would want someone with that lack of credibility, I can’t understand,” Schiff had said.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)


 

Category: Democrats, Donald Trump, Senate, Ukraine

Can We Ever Forget the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg?

Posted on | January 29, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

Alas, we can never forget. #GamerGate is newsworthy again. Over the weekend, without warning, I noticed a surge of traffic to one of my posts about “Zoe Quinn,” whom I’ve described thus:

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct. . . .
Quinn was accused of gaining favorable coverage of her work — which is allegedly useless and awful — by providing Grayson and others access to her nasty poontang. And when these allegations of quid pro quo were published by one of Quinn’s embittered ex-lovers, Quinn’s defenders accused her critics of misogyny.
There were all kinds of background factors involved, but liberals decided that the narrative was about “misogyny” within the male-dominated videogame industry, and also about women being “harassed” online.

When that controversy erupted in late August 2014, I paid intermittent attention to it — I haven’t played a videogame since the Pac Man era — until, in October 2014, a friend urged me to give it more coverage. I placed a call to Adam Baldwin, the man who named #GamerGate, and he explained to me that this was an important battle in the Culture War, and that it transcended the usual right/left divide. Many of those who supported #GamerGate were sincere liberals who simply had gotten fed up with the sanctimony of so-called “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) who were trying to take over the multi-billion-dollar videogame industry.

 

It was arguably as a result of #GamerGate that Twitter in 2016 created its infamous “Trust and Safety Council,” including arch-SJW Anita Sarkeesian, whose first action was to ban my @rsmccain account. The wave of banishments that subsequently swept across social media platforms — not just Twitter, but also Facebook and YouTube, not to mention the James Damore incident at Google — exposed the extent to which SJWs have consolidated their power in Big Tech. According to the SJW narrative, anyone who complains about this kind of censorship is defending “hate speech” and “harassment.” The larger issue, however, is that social media, once viewed as an alternative to the establishment media, has been taken over by people with the same biases and control-freak conformity that made establishment media so untrustworthy. And the controversy over #GamerGate highlighted how leftist ideologues operate to obtain and exercise their control. Differences of opinion are turned into moral crusades against “hate,” and the result is that there is an ever-growing list of Things You Can’t Say, Even If They’re True.

So, why has #GamerGate become newsworthy again? Well, last week, Aja Romano wrote an article at Vox-dot-com with the headline, “What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate,” asserting that the rebellion against SJWs in videogames “ultimately coalesced into the larger alt-right movement that helped fuel the election of President Trump.”

That article is more than 4,500 words long, and I don’t know that anyone here will click the link and read the whole thing. Romano, who evidently considers any non-“woke” opinion to be white supremacy or some other species of “hate,” operates from the premise that there was never any legitimate basis for #GamerGate, so that her story is about how hate and harassment became a problem, and what needs to be done to stop it:

Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities . . . described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.
Again and again, throughout 2014 and afterward — and, really, well before that, as women in online subcultures withstood years of targeted harassment — many failed to understand and assess what Gamergate was. The media, tech platforms, the niche internet communities these reactionaries came from (places with marginally obscure names like 4chan, 8chan, and Voat, for instance), the corporations they easily manipulated, and the general public, who seemed to take it in as nebulous online noise; no one properly identified Gamergate as a major turning point for the internet. The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Wait — “more violent”? How many people did #GamerGate kill? The only death I’m aware of is when “Zoe Quinn” accused an ex-boyfriend of sexual abuse, thus driving him to suicide, but that’s obviously not what Aja Romano has in mind. No, what she has done is to assert (rather than prove) that #GamerGate was and is connected to every incident of “right-wing extremist” violence since 2014.  You would have to read the whole thing (and again, I doubt that many of you will do so) to see how she makes this connect-the-dots narrative seem plausible, but this is standard-issue media smear tactics: Ever since Trump was elected, online “hate speech” (i.e., disagreeing with liberals) is automatically implicated whenever a frustrated “incel” goes on a murder rampage.

Notice the clever prestidigitation Aja Romano achieves here:

Gamergate ultimately made us all much more aware of the potential real-world impact of online extremism. Yet, years after Gamergate, despite increasing evidence suggesting a connection between online violence against women and real-world violence — including mass shootings — many corporations and social media platforms still struggle to identify and eradicate extreme forms of violence against women from online spaces.
Despite all of its algorithmic tweaking, Twitter is still abysmal at identifying and taking action against rape and death threats on its website. The 2019 murder of 17-year-old Bianca Devins, a well-known Instagram user, carried a disturbing online component that involved her killer posting graphic online photos of her death. The photos rapidly went viral, including on Instagram and Twitter, which were both largely ineffective at curbing their spread. . . .
This failure to act has serious consequences, because many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first. In 2018, the International Center for Research on Women identified online gender-based violence as “an emerging public health and human rights concern” and linked it to a growing number of mass shootings, noting, “Failing to detect and deter technology-facilitated GBV is a missed opportunity to prevent deadly consequences offline.” Other research has found that more than half of the US’s mass shootings involve the targeting of an intimate partner or ex-partner, and many of the most recent mass attacks involve a perpetrator who displayed or threatened violent behavior toward one woman or multiple women, either online or off. In the past year alone, multiple mass shootings have had an element of misogynistic or domestic violence targeted at women.

It goes without saying that I disapprove of murder (“Teenage Girl Nearly Decapitated by Jealous Loser She Met on Internet,” July 15, 2019), but exactly how is #GamerGate to blame for what happened to Bianca Devins? (Answer: Not at all.) But if you create a category as large as “online extremism” and then assert that this is connected to a category as large as “gender-based violence,” you are free to pick and choose the most egregious examples to illustrate your argument that (a) mass murder is caused by (b) people saying mean things on the Internet, and therefore (c) #GamerGate is like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zionism, the all-purpose conspiracy theory that explains everything.

Repetition is a basic tactic of propaganda. If the Big Lie is to triumph over truth, it must be repeated until people internalize the false belief with which you wish to indoctrinate them. And so the liberal narrative — about “gender-based violence” and everything else — must be consistently reinforced by retelling the same biased version of events, and also opposing viewpoints must be silenced. It is especially important to totalitarian ideologues (which is what SJWs actually are) that their authority as truth-tellers never be subjected to criticism. This is why the media hate Trump so much — every time he mocks them as purveyors of “fake news,” the President demonstrates that we do not have to passively accept whatever narrative the people on CNN are telling us.

OK, so why did Aja Romano and her Vox-dot-com editors decide that January 2020 was a good time to revisit #GamerGate to the tune of 4,500 words? We may suppose that that they fear liberals might forget the narrative about the menace of online “hate,” so as to lower their guard against it. But the question is: Why now? It’s not about the off chance that some extremist kook is going to go berserk with an AR-15 next week or next month. It’s really about politics, as Aja Romano herself emphasized in concluding her article last week:

The public’s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right’s misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump. . . .
As described by Vox’s Ezra Klein, Trump’s willingness to engage in incendiary racist rhetoric is similar to the tactics that have led many journalists to dismiss his followers as trolls: “He chooses his enemies based on who he thinks will rile up his base. He uses outrageous, offensive insults to get the media to take notice. And then he feeds off the energy unleashed by the confrontation.” In other words, he and his followers — many of whom, again, are members of the extreme online right-wing that got its momentum from Gamergate — are using the strategy Gamergate codified: deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.

#GamerGate is still relevant because Trump is still president. And in fact, Aja Romano has previously made #GamerGate the explanation of why Trump was elected. In December 2016, she published “How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy” at Vox:

In the wake of the election, perhaps no topic has been more widely discussed and debated than the self-described “alt-right” — the racist, sexist, meme-happy, mostly internet-based movement associated with radical white supremacy that has unexpectedly taken center stage in US politics after the election of Donald Trump. The recent disruptive violence of incels — a shortened form of “involuntary celibates” that refers to an online enclave of extreme misogynists — may seem like a lone outlier with little connection to the racialized politics of white supremacists. But in fact incel culture, the “men’s rights” movement, and their focus on what they perceive as belittled masculinity have more in common with the broader alt-right than you might think. . . .
In the wake of Trump’s victory, many have pointed to Gamergate’s sexist assault on feminism as a harbinger of things to come. Far more than the “fringe” components of the alt-right, the Gamergate movement drew mainstream attention from its beginnings in August 2014 and gained extensive coverage from popular geek media outlets as well as international news organizations as it grew. . . .
The ease with which the alt-right channels male insecurity around women’s rights into an ideology of white supremacy ultimately illustrates that the paths by which men wander into the alt-right movement are deceptive. While many of the movement’s male-centered online communities may seem to offer something of value to the men who join them, the alt-right movement has never been about helping men cope with low self-esteem, relationship problems, or their personal pain and insecurity. In fact, it’s never particularly concerned itself with building up men as individuals at all. Instead, it’s about maintaining a sense of power at all costs over an ever-expanding list of designated targets.
And with Trump’s victory, the movement now has more power than ever.

Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that both #GamerGate in 2014 and Trump’s election in 2016 reflected some larger Zeitgeist, including forces of sexism and racism, this still does not mean that the cause-and-effect relationship is what Aja Romano says it is. Does anyone believe that American voters were more racist and sexist in 2016 than they had been eight years earlier when they elected Obama president? Is identity politics the only possible explanation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat? Could it not be that voters — including those crucial working-class white voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who swung into the GOP column in 2016 — had other reasons to prefer Trump over Hillary?

If a hammer is the only tool you’ve got, every problem looks like a nail, and if “intersectionality” is the only tool you’ve got, every problem looks like misogyny, white supremacy and homophobia. By ruling out every explanation of the 2016 election that is not identity politics, Aja Romano is able to conclude it must be identity politics. This is similar to the sophistry by which an anti-Semite blames everything on Jews.

Still, why now? Why resurrect #GamerGate in January 2020? Consider what has happened in the Democratic presidential primary campaign: All of the non-white candidates except Andrew Yang (at single digits in the polls) have now dropped out, so that the choice is which white candidate Democrats like best. And look at the numbers in Iowa: Bernie Sanders leads the field with 24.2% in the Real Clear Politics average of Iowa polls, with Joe Biden at 21%, Pete Buttigieg at 16.8% and Elizabeth Warren at 14.7%. If the most formidable female Democratic candidate can do no better than a fourth-place finish in Iowa, with three white guys leading the field, how can progressives explain this except as the result of racism and sexism? And this is why #GamerGate is suddenly newsworthy again: The Left must hype up the threat of right-wing extremism — angry Trump-supporting “incel” terrorists — in order to distract from the unbearable whiteness of their own candidates.

Also (and you have to pay close attention to the intra-party squabbling among Democrats to notice this), the feminists supporting Elizabeth Warren are all still angry about how “Bernie bros” fought against Hillary’s nomination in 2016. Lots of the guys who back Bernie have glaring misogyny issues of their own, according to the women who support Warren, and thus reviving #GamerGate becomes a way of trashing Sanders supporters and making a preemptive excuse for Warren’s ultimate defeat. So we must endure this #GamerGate revival for a few more weeks, until Liz finally quits or perhaps until some demented “incel” goes on a shooting rampage, which would give Aja Romano her see-I-told-you-so moment. Meanwhile, back in the real world, establishment Democrats are panicking over the possibility that Bernie Sanders could actually win the nomination.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .


 

Category: Sex Trouble
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