The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 12.12.19

Posted on | December 12, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.12.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: SFPD Cooks The Books On 911 Response Time
EBL: Horowitz Testimony
Twitchy: CNN’s Chris Cillizza Explains How Joe Biden Got His Groove Back & People Have Questions
Louder With Crowder: Dem Rep Rashida Tlaib Blames White Supremacy For Jersey City Killings

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: For The Sake Of Your Man Points, Get Off Social Media
American Conservative: Why Did Saudis Kill American Sailors While Three Others Filmed It?
American Greatness: Wray Doesn’t Seem To Care That The FBI Deceived The Court, also, Hell Yes There Was Bias
American Thinker: The Truth About The Horowitz Report
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Golden Rice News
Babalu Blog: Cuba Slides Further Back Into The Stone Age As Reliance On Horses, Oxen Increases
BattleSwarm: Blue Alert For A Cop Killer
Cafe Hayek: Marvelous Properties
Camp of the Saints: On The So-Called Silent Moderates
CDR Salamander: REFORGER Is Back
Da Tech Guy: Entertainment Under The Fedora, also, Quick Baseball Thoughts
Don Surber: Chris Wallace & The Thin-Skinned Press
First Street Journal: The Federal Reserve Finally Catches Up To The First Street Journal
The Geller Report: Twenty Muslims Arrested In Denmark – Jihadi Terror Plot Foiled, also, President’s Support Among Orthodox Jews Soars To 89%
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, UK Election Results
Hollywood In Toto: Jumanji – The Next Level Shrewdly Stays The Course
JustOneMinute: We Interrupt Comey’s Victory Lap
Legal Insurrection: Rashida Tlaib Deletes Tweet Blaming White Supremacy For Jersey City Murders, also, WaPo Punctures Elizabeth Warren Narrative
The PanAm Post: How Cuba Is Meddling With The OAS, also, Juan Guaido’s Political Suicide
Power Line: If This Is Exoneration…, also, Only A Pawn In Their Game
Shark Tank: Rep. Brian Mast Rips VA For “Limping From Scandal To Scandal”
Shot In The Dark: Mode$t Propo$al$
The Political Hat: Academic Excellence – Twerking, Racist Sandwiches, & Eating Bugs
This Ain’t Hell: Thursdays Are For Cooking, also, It’s Racist To Mention Illegal Alien Problems In Occasional Cortex’s District
Victory Girls: Harvey Weinstein’s $25 Million Settlement Deal Will Leave Accusers Empty-Handed
Volokh Conspiracy: Assessing Some Criticisms Of The Administration’s EO On Antisemitism
Weasel Zippers: Pelosi Admits The Democrats Have Been Planning Impeachment For Years, also, Louie Gohmert Drops The Whistleblower’s Name

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

‘A Familiar If Odd Accent to City Life’

Posted on | December 12, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘A Familiar If Odd Accent to City Life’

 

Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage Magazine:

The New York Times called them “sidewalk ministers” who practice “tough love.” The paper quoted Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center who described them as victims of racism and claimed that they were non-violent.
The Washington Post, in its own puff piece on the Black Hebrew Israelites, also falsely described them as non-violent, and concluded that, “Israelite street preaching in parts of D.C., Philadelphia and New York is commonplace, a familiar if odd accent to city life.”
The odd accent to city life in Jersey City came amid a hail of bullets as two members of the racist black nationalist hate group opened fire in the JC Supermarket. Despite initial claims by the media and the authorities that the Jewish market had not been targeted, David Anderson and Francine Graham ignored passerby on Martin Luther King Dr, to get to the store and kill as many Jewish people as they could.
When the shooting had ended, Moshe Hersh Deutsch, a yeshiva student who was known for helping distribute food packages to the needy, Mrs Leah Mindel Ferencz, a mother of 3 who helped her husband run the grocery store, and Miguel Jason Rodriguez, the father of an 11-year-old daughter and a parishioner at an Assemblies of God church, were all dead.
Anderson, who left behind anti-Semitic and anti-police writings, had also killed Detective Joseph Seals, a father of 5, and wounded Officer Ray Sanchez and Officer Ferenella Fernandez.
The black nationalist terrorist had hated cops and Jews. He managed to kill both.

 

Greenfield makes a point that my brother Kirby made yesterday. Kirby showed me the Google Map of the area, and anyone can see that, after they murdered Det. Seals at Bayview Cemetery, the killers had an easy and obvious escape route — Chapel Avenue to Garfield Avenue to Bayview Avenue and then onto Interstate 78, where they could have fled in either direction. That they did not seek to escape the area is important, and what did the suspects do instead? They drove their stolen U-Haul vehicle directly to JC Kosher Supermarket. We have video that shows the killers ignored every other establishment in that neighborhood, and charged directly into this Jewish-owned business, guns blazing.

 

There is no doubt that the killers deliberately targeted Jews, as this kosher market was described as part of “a small Orthodox Jewish community of nearly 100 families, most of whom moved from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn over the past few years”:

According to locals, the JC supermarket is the only kosher one of its kind in the area. It serves basic groceries, sandwiches and salads. Next door is Khal Adas Greenville, a building with a synagogue on a lower level and a yeshiva for children on the upper level.
“It’s a beautiful tight-knit community, very kind people, and it’s devastating that something like this happened,” said Rabbi Shmully Levitin, a Chabad rabbi who lives in this city across the Hudson River from New York.

Dismayed by the high cost of housing in Brooklyn, these Orthodox Jewish families seeking cheaper homes moved across the river to Jersey City, and their presence in this predominantly black community must have been apparent to the black racist David Anderson. Here’s an interesting report from (of all places) The New Yorker:

On Tuesday, each explanation for the shooting offered its own horrors, but, even after the scene was brought under control and the number of dead and injured known, some explanations were apparently more horrifying than others. In an Uber, on the way to the site of the shooting, my driver said, “They’re saying it’s not terrorism. Thank God.”
Except, as it turned out, there appeared to be a more insidious motive behind Tuesday’s violence. A few years ago, sixty-two Hasidic families moved into Greenville, refugees of high Brooklyn rents. . . .
Recently, old tensions had begun to simmer in the neighborhood. Some residents have complained about the insularity and new influence of the Hasidic community over the local real-estate market. The Hasidic community, meanwhile, has chafed at local politicians who told them their new shul was violating zoning laws. The shul sits next to the site of the shooting.

These Jews were not invisible; they did not blend into the community. This neighborhood, known as Greenville (ZIP code 07305), is about 45% black, 25% Hispanic and 17% Asian, so that the total white population is less than 15%, and these are ultra-Orthodox Jews, the men with beards, etc. They were highly visible targets, and this kosher market was next door to their synagogue. This was an act of terrorism, and we have extensive evidence of the terrorists’ motive:

David Anderson, the 47-year-old man accused in the Jersey City mass shooting attack, likely used the identity Dawada Maqabath and other alter egos on social media and online, NBC News is reporting. Heavy.com has reviewed multiple posts made by that identity on the Internet; Maqabath and another identity attributed to Anderson made numerous extremely anti-police comments on various obscure social media and online video pages, glorified Baton Rouge police shooter Gavin Long, unleashed anti-Semitic and anti-Christian vitriol, and called non-black Jewish people “imposters.” . . .
Heavy has unearthed many of those postings, including the Instagram page mentioned by NBC, and you can see screenshots later in this article. The most recent post reads, “Revelations 1:13-15. Jesus comes from the tribe of JUDAH!!!!!!!!!!!! Yall n*gguz better wake the f*ck up before its too late. America has NOTHING for us but DEATH …”
He wrote on another page, “Revelation 2:9 ‘Blacks ARE Jews, the ‘jewish’ are imposters. Our ethnic identity crisis is fueled by the synagogue of satan (amalek) and wicked Israelites who love darkness as a cover for their wickedness. This lying profane blasphemous bastard. Ata lo yahudi, lo, ata mumzer. Ata goyim.”

The bizarre beliefs expressed by Anderson are directly derived from those propagated by the Black Hebrew Israelites cult, who claim that Africans are the authentic “chosen people” and that modern Jews have somehow stolen the identity of ancient Israelites. Whenever you encounter such a belief, you know that it is rooted in profound ignorance, but it is difficult to discern how dangerous this ignorance is in any individual case. There are actually lots of black people on the Internet ranting against cops, against white people, against Jews, so how can you tell which of these hateful people is a serious threat of violence? If you want to understand the size of this problem, consider the local black people in this Jersey City neighborhood caught on video blaming the Jews for this attack.

This is astonishing, and we ought to be deeply concerned about it. However, Democrats and the media have their own agenda:

When gunfire erupted Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, cable news networks provided live coverage as police engaged in a standoff with the armed suspects. Liberals on Twitter began emitting their predictable rhetoric in such circumstances, blaming the National Rifle Association and smearing Republicans as somehow culpable for the shooting. At that time, little or nothing was known about the perpetrators, and there was no reason to believe the suspects were NRA members or Trump supporters, but the Left’s explanation for armed violence is a prefabricated narrative in which their political enemies are always the villains. Whenever the facts don’t fit this narrative, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) immediately change the subject, and thus we can predict the Jersey City shootout will be quickly forgotten by CNN and other left-wing outlets.
It turns out that Tuesday’s deadly attack was perpetrated by two black people, David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 51, who were reportedly connected to the so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites” cult. . . .

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



 

Category: American Spectator, New Jersey, Racism, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 12.11.19

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: NYPD Near Miss With Ransomware
EBL: Welcome To Jersey City
Twitchy: Senator Ted Cruz Shares Three Of The Most Glaring Abuses Of Power From The IG Report Hearing
Louder With Crowder: The YouTube Purge Is Coming

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Holy Sydney Smoke
American Conservative: Can We Impeach The FBI Now?
American Greatness: CNN, MSNBC Both Refuse To Air Senator Graham’s Full Opening Statement
American Power: No One Is Above The Law
American Thinker: Horowitz Goes Full Comey
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Bolivia Files Charges At The Hague Against Ousted Prez Evo Morales For Crimes Against Humanity
BattleSwarm: Handicapping The 2020 Texas Senate Race
Cafe Hayek: Taking Leave of Economic Reality
Da Tech Guy: Report From Louisiana, also, Do “Experts” Have Any Value?
Don Surber: Rolling Stone – It Was Fake News, also, The 9th Circus Show Is About To Fold
First Street Journal: House Democrats Just Gave Every Republican Reason To Vote Against Impeachment
The Geller Report: Jersey City Bloodbath, also, Antisemitic J Street Condemns Trump’s EO Protecting Jewish Students On Campus
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, When Even Rolling Stone Calls It Fake News
Hollywood In Toto: Eastwood’s Richard Jewell Snubbed In Early Awards Voting, also, Conservatives Face A Moment Of Truth In The Culture Wars
Legal Insurrection: NAS Pensacola Pilot Tells Bosses “Our Message Is Simple. Arm Us.”, also, AG Barr Blasts FBI & Media Over Russian Probe, “Largely Bogus Narrative”
Michelle Malkin: Open Borders Boston Has Blood On Its Hands
The PanAm Post: Are Russian Troops Occupying Venezuela’s Mining Arc? also, Maduro Merges Militia With Armed Forces In Violation of Constitution
Power Line: The Press Piled On Nunes – Will They Now Apologize? also, Barr Is On The Case (2)
Shark Tank: FL Ag Commissioner Nikki Fried Engaged To Medical Marijuana Company Founder
Shot In The Dark: “The Simple Fact”
The Political Hat: Old Communist China Same As New Communist China – Evil Incarnate, also, Housing Justice
This Ain’t Hell: What Was Missed? also, Things I Learned From The OIG Report
Victory Girls: Lisa Page Wants A Payout For Her Affair
Volokh Conspiracy: The NYT Misreported Trump’s Executive Order On Antisemitism
Weasel Zippers: Horowitz – No One Who Touched This Was Vindicated, also, Dem Rep Karen Bass Says House Would Impeach Trump Again If He Won In 2020
Mark Steyn: Jews, Jihad, & Joe, also, Demography & Democracy

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Report: ‘Black Hebrew Israelite’ Cult Connection to Jersey City Attack

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Report: ‘Black Hebrew Israelite’ Cult Connection to Jersey City Attack

 

Early this morning I reported (“Jersey City Shooting ‘Targeted’ Jews, ‘Being Investigated as a Hate Crime’”) about suggestions of anti-Semitic motives in Tuesday’s shootout, and now we discover evidence that clearly indicates this was an act of terrorism:

David Anderson was named as one of the two active shooters who kept police at bay for hours in a dramatic and dangerous Jersey City standoff, murdering veteran detective Joseph Seals in a cemetery, and three civilians inside a kosher bodega. The mayor now says the Jewish grocery was targeted. The other suspect has been named as Francine Graham. Anderson, 47, and Graham, 50, were first named in a report from NBC New York.
According to NBC News, Anderson had made anti-Semitic and anti-police statements on social media prior to the shooting. Details of those posts were not immediately available. Jersey City officials have said the motive is under investigation, but according to NBC, investigators believe the views shared by Anderson were behind the attack. According to The New York Times, police found guns, ammunition and a live pipe bomb in a stolen U-Haul truck Anderson and Graham were driving at the time of the shootings. Investigators also found a “brief and rambling” manifesto-style note in the van, but it did not include a clear motive. . . .
NBC New York reported, through sources, that surveillance video shows the two suspects “shoot a Hasidic man on the street and then run into the store, where they began firing at the victims inside.” The suspects “had…bomb-making materials inside the truck,” the station reported.
The Jewish media named two of the victims as Leah Ferencz, 33, who co-owned the grocery with her husband, and Moshe Deutsch, 24, her cousin. They were both members of the local Orthodox community. The third victim has been identified by NorthJersey.com as Miguel Jason Rodriguez, an immigrant from Ecuador who had been working at the Jewish grocery store for the past three years. . . .
NBC New York reports that the 47-year-old David Anderson was once associated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. The station says that an online presence associated with Anderson contained anti-semitic and anti-police sentiments. A note with religious writings was found inside of the U-Haul. The New York Times said that a law enforcement source referred to those writings as “rambling.”
The Times also confirmed with an official that Anderson had ties to the Black Hebrew Isrealite movement, writing, “The extent of Mr. Anderson’s involvement in that group remains unclear, the official said. The Black Hebrew Israelites have no connection with mainstream Judaism.” . . .
The headquarters were raided by the FBI and IRS agents in November 2016. Jermaine Grant, the group’s leader, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to defraud the United States in April 2019, reports the New York Daily News.
The Black Hebrew Israelites gained national attention in January 2019 when members of the group who were protesting in Washington D.C. confronted students from Covington Catholic High School. . . .
A former neighbor of 47-year-old Francine Graham’s told NBC New York that after she met Anderson, the shooting suspect became a “dark person.” The neighbor said Graham had been a home health aide in Manhattan but quit after becoming injured in work.
The neighbor went on to say that Graham had become involved in a religion that he could not identify. That religion involved chanting and reading from the New Testament. The neighbor said Graham moved out after she stopped paying her rent.
Public records show Anderson had a criminal record, with arrests in New Jersey in 2004, 2007 and 2011, all on weapons charges, NBC New York reports. He spent some time in jail. Anderson was also arrested in Ohio in 2009 on a criminal mischief charge. . . .
NBC New York reported that, according to law enforcement sources, it’s believed that “Seals saw a U-Haul truck possibly linked to a murder from over the weekend in Bayonne. As he approached the truck, one of the suspects got out of the car and shot him.”
The television station added: “It was not immediately known why or how the U-Haul truck that Det. Seals approached was linked to the death of livery driver Michael Rumberger.”

We can expect to learn more — including the details of that “rambling” manifesto and whether Rumberger’s death was indeed connected to this incident — in the next few days. For now, we have clear evidence that these killers were motivated by hatred of Jews.

UPDATE: Ben Shapiro nails it here:

In other words, the liberal media have made anti-Semitism a partisan weapon used to attack Republicans. If a white person, in any way aligned with the “right,” engages in anti-Semitic activities, you can expect 24/7 coverage on CNN, and lots of lectures about the “conversation” America needs to be having about a “climate of hate” for which (it is at least implied, if not directly stated) Republicans are somehow to blame. However, when anyone aligned with the Left (and/or with radical Islam) engages in anti-Semitic activities, this is ignored, dismissed or explained away. For example, the fact that there has been a series of anti-Semitic attacks in New York City perpetrated by black “youths” is swept under the rug by the media, as is the escalating anti-Semitic climate on university campuses incited by the left-wing BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction) movement against Israel. Filtered through the rampant Trump Derangement Syndrome that now prevails in the media, this attack on the Jewish community by black cult kooks simply does not fit the narrative, and therefore will be brushed aside and forgotten.



 

Category: Crime, New Jersey, Racism, Terrorism

Impeachment Circus Update

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Readers will excuse my paucity of commentary about this week’s “historic” impeachment news — CNN keeps repeating the word “historic,” as if we were watching the crash of the Hindenburg in real time — but I was busy destroying the feminist blogosphere. You’re welcome.

Anyway, on Monday the Democrats held a hearing in which their chief witness was a lawyer who, after he finished testifying, got up on the other side to serve as the interrogator of the Republicans’ chief witness.

It was like the Moscow Show Trials re-done as a Monty Python skit.

When Democrats are making a mockery of due process this way, can you blame me if I fail to provide running commentary? What can I do except point and laugh? Everybody with two eyes and a brain understands that this isn’t about President Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it’s about ORANGE MAN BAD! We’re witnessing the symptoms of terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome, not an actual impeachment, and it’s very difficult for me to treat this ludicrous charade seriously.

What I didn’t realize Monday morning, however, was that the Democrats had scheduled that hearing on short notice as a means to try to hijack the news cycle on the day that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his devastating report on the FBI’s malfeasance in its surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign. So this impeachment business is actually a cover-up — Adam Schiff and his cronies are using this process to smear Trump and distract Americans from evidence of wrongdoing that occurred in Obama’s administration.

The so-called “mainstream” media is tangled up in all this, as Molly Hemingway explained Tuesday on Fox News Special Report:

I’m one of the few people who has actually read the 430-page report. It outlines such tremendous amounts of spying. Electronic surveillance, the use of confidential human informants that were replaced people on the campaign.
Two years ago you had competing memos come out. You had Devin Nunes say that there were problems with the FISA process, that that was abuse. You had the response memo from Adam Schiff who is now leading the impeachment effort. Never Trump media and liberal media completely disparage the Nunes memo and completely supported the Schiff memo and they were utterly humiliated by what come out in this report yesterday. Every single thing in the Nunes memo reported to be true. If anything, it underreported the problems with the FISA process.
Meanwhile, things that were claimed by Schiff that people took seriously, the people accepted uncritically, were shown to be false. They said there were no material omissions in the FISA warrants. . . .
There were so many errors. And, again, all in the same direction. The dossier was completely disputed. Remember that Adam Schiff read the dossier into the Congressional record. He hijacked a separate hearing in order to do so. There should be consequences for this. And there should be consequences for media that got it wrong as well.

Do you see why it seems to me futile to comment on every new development here? When all is said and done, the daily events of this circus will be just so many details that no one really cares about, because the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) as so obviously in the wrong that nothing I say about it could possibly matter.

Here’s the thing though: If Nancy Pelosi understands nothing else, she certainly knows how to conduct a whip count. In other words, she has enough Democrat members demanding impeachment in order to get the 218 votes necessary, and if she tried to stop it, the demented Trump-haters in her caucus would destroy her. Pelosi has no choice now but to pretend that this is legitimate, regardless of what the polls might say, and the polls aren’t very encouraging for Democrats. They have lashed themselves to the mast, and will go down with the ship.



 

Category: Donald Trump

Jersey City Shooting ‘Targeted’ Jews, ‘Being Investigated as a Hate Crime’

Posted on | December 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Jersey City Shooting ‘Targeted’ Jews, ‘Being Investigated as a Hate Crime’

 

After police engaged in a gun battle Tuesday with two gunmen in Jersey City, liberals on Twitter spewed out their predictable rhetoric blaming the NRA, President Trump, and Republicans generally. Never mind that New Jersey has some of the most stringent anti-gun laws in America, and never mind that at the time, nothing was known about the suspects or their motive. If it turns out that these perps were NRA members or Trump supporters, I’ll be rather surprised. Until police release the identity of the gunmen, it would be irresponsible to speculate about the motive here, but Jersey City’s mayor said the shooters “targeted” the kosher grocery store where three Hasidic Jews were killed, and said it is being “investigated as a hate crime.” Meanwhile, in New York:

New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch said the NYPD was boosting its presence at “high-profile sites, including synagogues.” New York authorities were working with Jersey City police and New Jersey State Police, the councilman said.
“The Mayor of Jersey City has asserted that today’s incident was a deliberate attack targeting the Jewish community,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter.
“This tragically confirms that a growing pattern of violent anti-Semitism has now turned into a crisis for our nation. And now this threat has reached the doorstep of New York City,” de Blasio’s post said.

De Blasio said he had “directed the NYPD to assume a state of high alert.” Despite suggestions of an attack motivated by anti-Semitism, we don’t actually know this for sure, and must await further reporting.



 

Category: Crime, New Jersey

In The Mailbox: 12.10.19

Posted on | December 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who hit the tip jar to save my car. Also, Shark Tank is back; whatever security cert issues were plaguing it previously seem to have been fixed.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: Here’s An Idea – Do Your F**king Job
357 Magnum: Neighbors Were Shocked
EBL: Brexit, Actually
Twitchy: Byron York Tears FBI, Media A New One In Vicious Thread On Steele Dossier
Louder With Crowder: British Mom Shamed For Saying “Father Christmas”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #128 – The Rootlessness Episode
American Conservative: Five Infuriating Takeaways From The Afghanistan Papers
American Greatness: IG Report Shows Comey Briefed Obama On Trump Campaign investigation
American Thinker: Socialism’s Unbroken Trail Of Failure
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Bigfoot News
Babalu Blog: Photos Of The Day – Havana Before & After Socialism
Baldilocks: November 2019 Post Digest At Da Tech Guy Blog
BattleSwarm: Terrorist Cartels & The War On Drugs, also, Inflation Slayer Paul Volcker, RIP
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
Camp of the Saints: The Left’s Abject Hatred
CDR Salamander: Shaping The Blame In Afghanistan
Da Tech Guy: Remember, Canonization Doesn’t Make A Saint…, also, It’s Almost Showtime
Don Surber: Red China’s Exports To US Down 23%, also, Why Trump Succeeded Where WFB Failed
First Street Journal: President Trump Has Kept Another Promise, And The Globalists Don’t Like It
Fred On Everything: On Rogues & Rogue States
The Geller Report: Muslim Migrant Plotted To Behead People With Chainsaw, Had Huge Weapons Stash, also, Navy Suspends Flight Training for 300+ Saudi Students In Wake Of Pensacola Shooting
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Double Plus Untrue
Hollywood In Toto: Tears, Rage, & Results – Season One of Red Pilled America, also, Star Wars Mocks Conservatives At Worst Possible Time
Legal Insurrection: Schiff Confirms Trump Impeachment All About 2020, also, Democrats Announce Articles Of Impeachment
Power Line: Hollywood? Inaccurate? You Don’t Say! also, What Besides Political Bias Can Explain The FBI’s Egregious Misconduct?
Shark Tank: FL Rep “Christmas Carlos” Smith Debuts In Gay Christmas Play
Shot In The Dark: Cultural Cleansing
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Taxes For Old, Taxes For New?
The Political Hat: You Will Be Made To F**k
This Ain’t Hell: Jeffrey Epstein – Not A Navy SEAL, also, No Bias In Anti-Trump FISA Request?
Victory Girls: Under-Rehearsed Democrats Give Pitiful Performance
Volokh Conspiracy: Seattle Public Library Considering Whether To Cancel Meeting Of Trans-Skeptical Feminist Group
Weasel Zippers: Dem Rep Spanberger (VA-7) Confronted By Constituents On Impeachment – “Incredible Bullshit”, “Crap”, also, CIA Alumnus Responds To Brennan’s Tweet – “I Will Attend Your Trial And Sentencing”
Megan McArdle: Why McKinsey Became A Problem For Pete Buttigieg
Mark Steyn: The Accelerating Madness, also, A Bicycle Built For #MeToo

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Who Killed All the Feminist Blogs?

Posted on | December 10, 2019 | 3 Comments

 

Let’s throw a victory party to celebrate this good news:

Soon after Anna Holmes took on the job of building the website Jezebel, in 2007, she set it apart from established publications like Vogue and Elle with a post offering $10,000 to anyone who would send in the best unretouched version of a women’s magazine cover photo. And with that, Jezebel had marked its territory: feminist cultural criticism, with an edge. . . .
Within three years, Jezebel had surpassed its sibling publication, Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, in monthly page views. . . .
In the aughts and the earlier part of this decade, other online feminist publications sprang to life — Feministing, The Hairpin, The Toast and many others — covering everything from paid leave to the Kardashians in a conversational voice that was sometimes rude, sometimes funny and never didactic.
Now many of those sites are dead or dying, and Jezebel is under new management, part of a stable of publications run by the hedge fund-controlled ownership group, G/O Media, that recently set off a staff exodus at the sports site Deadspin. Feminist media has been especially hard hit by the financial turbulence in the news industry.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Feministing and now the executive editor of Teen Vogue, said she missed the years when those publications were connecting with readers, calling it “the heyday” of independent feminist media. . . .
The gradual collapse has continued into this year. Feministing, an independent blog founded in 2004, plans to shut down in the weeks to come. At its peak, the site had 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, with most revenue coming from ads and reader donations. The co-executive editors, Lori Adelman and Maya Dusenbery, said Feministing helped popularize the term “slut shaming,” ran early interviews with chart-toppers like Lizzo and pushed for coverage of Gamergate, a cybermob that targeted women.
“It was unclear how we could have such a ferocious audience and not be onto something,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said. “Many of us involved in the feminist blogosphere are now in mainstream media, and that’s exciting. That said, we need independent media because they’re an important check.”
The Establishment, an independent blog focused on gender and race, stopped publishing in April with a farewell post bemoaning the “Sisyphean” difficulty of making money with a site focused on “intersectional feminist media.” In May, Vice Media’s women’s site, Broadly, was folded into the larger Vice brand.
The Hairpin, with recurring features like “Ask a Queer Chick” and “Interview With a Virgin,” shut down last year, as did Lenny Letter, the newsletter and website started by Lena Dunham and her producing partner, Jenni Konner. Rookie Magazine, the diarylike site started by the fashion-blogger-turned-actress Tavi Gevinson when she was 15, also ended its run. XoJane, known for first-person essays like “My Rapist Friended Me On Facebook (And All I Got Was This Lousy Article),” signed off in 2016.

Now, as much as I’d like to claim credit for destroying all these feminist blogs, the truth is that none of them were ever really successful enough to be self-sustaining. I mean, Feministing’s editors want to brag about 1.2 million uniques a month? That number sounds more impressive than it actually is, and it certainly could not have justified a full-time staff based on potential advertising revenue. No, those blogs were always a money-draining vortex, which chiefly owed their existence to (a) contributions from tax-exempt liberal non-profits like Planned Parenthood, and (b) the willingness of Gender Studies majors to write for free (or for minimal fees). And, it must be said, after Hillary lost the 2016 election, several of the Left’s moneybags evidently re-thought the wisdom of their investment in feminist Internet propaganda mills. For some reason, this New York Times feature ignores the demise of the very worst of the lot, Everyday Feminism, which now exists in zombie form — they don’t seem to have posted any new articles since 2016, although the site is still online. I never could figure out who was paying the bills at Everyday Feminism, but was under the impression that they must have some kind of deep-pockets sugar daddy willing to shell out a six-figure annual subsidy for all that “queer” intersectional insanity they published.

Whatever the case, the decline and fall of the feminist empire is good news — glad tidings! joy to the world! hosanna in the highest!

You don’t have to give me credit. All I ask is that you remember that the Five Most Important Worlds in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Feminism
« go back — keep looking »