The Other McCain

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

Democrat ‘Rising Star’ Fading Fast

Posted on | February 9, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrat ‘Rising Star’ Fading Fast

 

Yeah, expect to see lots more shoes dropping in this case:

Days after Dr. Vanessa Tyson went public with her sexual-assault allegations against Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, another woman has accused him of rape.
In a statement from her lawyer, Meredith Watson claims she was raped by Fairfax, who is next in line to become governor, in 2000, when they were both students at Duke University. The letter characterizes the alleged attack as “premeditated and aggressive.”
“The two were friends but never dated or had any romantic relationship,” the statement said.
In a statement obtained by The Daily Beast, Fairfax denied the accusation and declared: “I will not resign.”
“I have never forced myself on anyone, ever. I demand a full investigation into these unsubstantiated and false allegations,” he said. “ It is obvious that a vicious and coordinated smear campaign is being orchestrated against me.”
While the letter provides little other information about the alleged rape, it says the details are “similar” to those outlined in Tyson’s public statement describing her attack. Tyson claims Fairfax sexually assaulted her at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, forcing her to perform oral sex in his hotel room. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
“Ms. Watson was upset to learn that Mr. Fairfax raped at least one other woman after he attacked her,” Watson’s lawyers said.

Nice phrase — “at least one other woman” — because there are already rumors of more women coming forward to accuse Fairfax.

Generally speaking, as we have seen since the #MeToo movement got rolling in fall 2017, someone with one complaint of sexual misconduct will usually show a persistent pattern of predatory behavior, as in the cases of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. So if Fairfax had assaulted one woman, chances are there were others out there with similar stories.

Now, a number of prominent Democrats — including 2020 presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — are calling for Fairfax’s resignation. And all the liberal journalists who called Fairfax a “rising star” are watching to see how soon he will fall.

 

Category: Democrats, Scandal, Virginia

Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

Posted on | February 8, 2019 | Comments Off on Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

 

What’s the first thing you notice about that photo? Yeah, there’s Gavin McInnes looking like a Kentucky colonel on Derby Day in his white suit, but there in the background is noted First Amendment lawyer Ron Coleman, looking like the third Blues Brother in his shades.

After it was announced Monday that McInnes was suing the SPLC, I arranged an interview with the plaintiff, and this is the result:

When he decided in 2016 to create a club for his supporters, Gavin McInnes says he had in mind something fun — like the “Loyal Order of Water Buffalo” lodge to which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble belonged in the old cartoon series. A humorist-turned-political commentator whose YouTube channel has nearly 270,000 subscribers, McInnes certainly didn’t intend the Proud Boys to be a “hate group,” but that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them, and a federal lawsuit McInnes filed this week accuses the Alabama-based SPLC of “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, defamation, and false light invasion of privacy.”
The 61-page complaint in the case details how the SPLC began targeting McInnes in 2017 and continued upping its characterization of him as an “extremist” and labeling the Proud Boys a dangerous “white nationalist” group until they succeeded in getting McInnes banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram last year. Citing numerous articles on the SPLC website as “false and defamatory,” the complaint accuses the tax-exempt left-wing group of using the “hate” label in a deliberate campaign to “destroy” its chosen ideological enemies. It seems the SPLC considers more or less anyone who supports President Trump to be a “far-right” extremist.
“I made it fun to love Trump, and I’m effective — that scares the Left,” McInnes said in a telephone interview this week, explaining his opinion of how a comedian ended up being branded with what he calls the “Scarlet Letter” of the SPLC’s hate label. Employing a metaphor made popular by the 1999 film The Matrix, McInnes says, “I’m red-pilling an entire generation.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

Category: Constitution

Rich Liberals (and Why We Hate Them)

Posted on | February 7, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

You probably never heard of Anand Giridharadas — I hadn’t, until yesterday — but let’s begin our introduction with this: He attended Sidwell Friends School, the same ultra-elite private school in D.C. to which Bill and Hillary Clinton sent their daughter Chelsea. His father Mohan Giridharadas spent 18 years at the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. before founding “the leading predictive analytics company in Silicon Valley.” Anand Giridharadas attended the University of Michigan and then went to India as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. before deciding to embark on a career as a journalist, publishing columns for the New York Times and authoring a book, India Calling (2011) that was widely praised for its insights on the economic and cultural transformation of his ancestral homeland. Giridharadas followed that with a second book, The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014) that examined the case of Mark Stroman, a petty criminal who was executed in Texas for murdering a convenience store clerk, Vasudev Patel, one of three people he shot in a week-long spree of violence in late 2001 which Stroman stupidly thought of as revenge for 9/11.

In 2011, Anand Giridharadas was chosen to be an Aspen Fellow, an honor bestowed by the prestigious Aspen Institute, but his experience there convinced him that the rich liberals who fund such organizations are misguided in their belief that they are “making a difference.” This disillusionment inspired Giridharadas’s most recent book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World:

An insider’s groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can — except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward “thought leaders” who redefine “change” in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

In sum, Giridharadas is somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders. He is a radical socialist who wants to destroy the market-based economy. However, as a right-winger, I can at least admire him for seeing through the phony do-gooder make-a-difference nonsense embraced by the kind of rich liberals who hang around the Aspen Institute.

All of that is preamble to what happened Tuesday night, when he was invited as a dinner speaker at the famed Players Club in Manhattan. This was a gathering of New York’s socially-conscious liberal elite, and Giridharadas was apparently invited as a substitute for another author who had been caught in some kind of #MeToo scandal. What ensued was a scene somewhat reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, with Giridharadas offending his bien-pensant liberal hosts by dissing David Koch, and refusing to let them off the hook for their hypocrisy. His Twitter thread about the event went viral, and here are a few excerpts:

This is splendid fun, even as much as I despise Giridharadas’s anti-capitalist politics, for the same reason that Radical Chic was fun, despite my abhorrence of the Black Panthers’ racial radicalism. As always, guilt-stricken rich white people who want to think of themselves as “progressives” are shown to be fools. My own Jacksonian populist sentiments are rooted in an old-fashioned contempt for the decadence of the elite. Wealth itself is not wrong; the problem is that affluence begets arrogance, including a we-know-what’s-best attitude where these overprivileged people act as if they’re missionaries and the rest of us are ignorant savages in need of their “enlightened” supervision.

This kind of preachy liberalism — folks who imagine themselves to be neo-Platonic archons because their Daddy could afford to send them to Harvard — offends me as an expression of snobbery. My Daddy was a farmboy who attended the University of Alabama on the GI Bill, and he instilled in his children a sufficient sense of their own self-worth that we don’t need a bunch of Harvard snobs to do our thinking for us.

And what of Giridharadas’s economic radicalism? Socialism has never worked anywhere, it produced mass slaughter in the 20th century, and it’s still producing disaster (e.g., Venezuela) today. Giridharadas’s basic problem is that he’s close enough to the top of the socioeconomic heap — the son of a successful businessman — that he can’t see how important a free economy is to those of us much nearer the bottom. Contrary to what Giridharadas seems to believe, our capitalist system still offers hope to smart young people who are willing to do three simple things:

  1. Work hard;
  2. Live cheap;
    and
  3. Save their money.

No matter how near the bottom of the economic pile a young person may begin in life, there are real opportunities in a free economy, and Giridharadas doesn’t seem to notice that his own lofty position — a published author and journalist, invited to speak to the Manhattan elite — is testimony to the miraculous power of capitalism. He is the beneficiary of his father’s success, which must in turn reflect the good values inculcated by his grandparents in India, and why should young Giridharadas wish to destroy the system that has made possible such an ascending trajectory? His existential despair — his belief that the system is somehow rigged, and that the poor are hopeless victims of oppression — is symptomatic of the kind of elite degeneracy that I should hope my own children and grandchildren will avoid. However rich you might become, so long as you’ve earned your money in an honest way, you should not be ashamed of what you’ve got, and you should never mistake the politics of liberalism for charity. Real charity requires that we voluntarily give what is ours to help others; liberalism is about using government to take other people’s money and hire a bunch of bureaucrats to do whatever some politician might consider helpful. Ronald Reagan said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He wasn’t wrong.

Are some rich people also bad people? Yes, but the politics of liberalism — or the more radical socialism advocated by Giridharadas — won’t eradicate human sinfulness. There is an excellent book by Joshua Muravchik, Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, that exposes the futility of this persistent utopian delusion. Anand Giridharadas is still a young man, not yet 40, and perhaps he will yet gain enough wisdom to realize the lesson that Heaven on Earth teaches.




 


Category: Economics, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 02.05.19

Posted on | February 6, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Reporter Doesn’t Understand Why .Gov Shouldn’t Take Care Of Every Problem
EBL: Put Down That Bong!
Twitchy: Democrat Women Wearing White Again Tonight – No, Not For That Reason
Louder With Crowder: Bernie Sanders Fakes A Phone Call To Dodge Questions About Justin Fairfax’s Accuser

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #101 – The Didact Interview, also, The Steps To Become A Man
American Power: Leftists Don’t Share The Same Goals, also, Leo Strauss, Natural Right And History
American Thinker: Democrats, The Party Of Destruction
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Mad Max News
BattleSwarm: Houston ISD School Board  – “A Step Below Hell”
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Your Motivational Picture Of The Month
Da Tech Guy: Democrats, A Union. And Corruption, also, Antidote To Trump Anxiety
Don Surber: Brad Pitt Trumpenfreude
Dustbury: This’ll Kill You
First Street Journal: True Confession – I Made Hangman’s Nooses!
The Geller Report: Pope Hugs & Kisses Sheikh Who Calls For Murder Of Those Leaving Islam, also, NYC – It’s The NYPD Lookalike Muslim Community Patrol
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Child Abuse?
Hollywood In Toto: DVD Autopsy – Speed Kills, also, HiT Episode #104 – Jon Levine
Joe For America: SOTU – Pelosi Frowns As Trump Lists America’s Great Achievements
JustOneMinute: Those Scary, Annoying Russians
Legal Insurrection: Trump’s SOTU – “Tonight, We Renew Our Resolve That America Will Never Be A Socialist Country”, also, Uh Oh – Fauxcahontas Registered With Texas Bar Association As American Indian
The PanAm Post: El Salvador’s New President Could Be More Dangerous Than FMLN Communists
Power Line: DNA Testing & College Admissions, also, The Epic Fraud Of Elizabeth Warren
Shark Tank: FL Republicans Ask Commerce Dept. To End Agreement With Mexican Tomato Growers
Shot In The Dark: It’s Technically Only Satire If It’s Not 100% True
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – We’re Number One!
The Political Hat: Volonte Generale – The Dawn Of The Hive Mind?
This Ain’t Hell: NOT MY PRESIDENT, also, Family Of Slain Navy Linguist Fights Reg That Forced Her Deployment To Syria
Victory Girls: Nancy Pelosi Needs Polident, STAT!
Volokh Conspiracy: Why The Demand For Fake News Is A More Serious Problem Than The Supply
Weasel Zippers: Democrat Senator Blocks Bill Banning Infanticide For Babies Surviving Abortion, also, Video – Northam Refuses To Shake Black Opponent’s Hand
Megan McArdle: In Attacking Neomi Rao, Democrats Are Arguing Against Progress In More Ways Than One
Mark Steyn: Aquarius, also, Getting There From Here


Amazon Warehouse – Post-Holiday Sale

Category: Linkagery

The Fetid Left-Wing Origins of @chick_in_kiev (Talia Lavin)

Posted on | February 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Fetid Left-Wing Origins of @chick_in_kiev (Talia Lavin)

 

You may not remember the name Talia Lavin, but her anti-American prejudices were revealed in June 2018 when she falsely accused an ICE agent of having a neo-Nazi tattoo. It turned out that, in fact, the ICE agent was a Marine veteran who lost both his legs to a Muslim terrorist’s bomb in Afghanistan and that the tattoo Lavin mistook for a Nazi symbol was, in fact, the insignia of his Marine platoon. As a result of her idiotic blunder, Lavin was forced to resign from her job as a “fact-checker” for The New Yorker (while claiming victimhood, of course). Probably no one will be surprised to learn that Ms. Lavin is a Harvard alumna and a militant feminist who in 2014 wrote a Huffington Post column about being the victim of a “sexual assault” during her sophomore year. This wasn’t exactly a horrific trauma — she and some friends “drank heavily,” and she was “stumble-drunk and giggly” when a classmate, who was also drunk (and “totally into me,” she says) attempted to kiss her. That’s pretty much it. The guy was so drunk that the next day, he didn’t even remember what happened, but #MeToo or something. Whatever.

 

What kind of guy would be “totally into” Talia Lavin? A drunk Harvard guy, allegedly, but I’d rather not think about such pathetic desperation, which is a distraction from Ms. Lavin’s journalism career. After she resigned from the New Yorker, Ms. Lavin was hired by “Media Matters, a left-wing organization funded by socialist billionaire George Soros . . . to cover ‘far-right extremism.’” And it is from her “far-right extremism” beat that she produced her latest paranoid screed for the New Republic:

 

The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins
of “Learn to Code”
How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.
By TALIA LAVIN
February 1, 2019
Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section — where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months — had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.
Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”
I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.” . . .

Now, before we go wading into the, uh, fetid swamps of left-wing conspiracy theory where Ms. Lavin is leading us, permit me to remind readers that I wrote a lengthy post (“‘Learn to Code’ and the Collapse of the Millennial SJW Clickbait Bubble,” Jan. 25) about this meme. As has been pointed out, critics of the media began using this phrase to mock laid-off journalists because the media themselves used “learn to code” as advice to coal miners and other working-class people who lost their jobs as a result of Obama’s economic policies. All of which is make the point that the conspiracy theory Talia Lavin is about to lay on you is both (a) false and (b) an irrelevant distraction from the really important question: Why is the media so hated that everybody celebrates when journalists get laid off? But please, continue, Ms. Lavin:

But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility — and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.
What’s a brigade attack, you may ask? It’s a rather dramatic name for coordinated harassment, usually migrating from one social media site to another. Often hatched in the internet’s right-wing cesspools, these campaigns unleash a mass of harassment on unsuspecting targets. 4chan’s /pol/ board — a gathering-place for people who want to say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence — has an oversize role in organizing brigade attacks, in part due to the fact that all its users are anonymous.
While it’s difficult to trace the origins of brigading — like most of internet history, its beginnings are ephemeral — the term, and its tactics, came to new prominence during the loosely organized and militantly misogynist harassment campaign known now as GamerGate, which unfolded over the course of 2014 and 2015. . . .

Oh, dear God, #GamerGate! In case you’ve forgotten, that drama began with Zoe Quinn, a tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, who was accused of trading sex to journalists for favorable coverage of her wretched game “Depression Quest.” What the participants in #GamerGate sought to do was to expose how feminists and other so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs) were trying to gain control of the billion-dollar videogame industry by shady manipulative methods. Predictably, SJWs were able to recruit dishonest journalists to attack #GamerGate by portraying it as a “misogynistic harassment campaign,” of which Zoe Quinn and other no-talent losers claimed to be victims. The truth, however, was quite different:

Zoe Quinn is not an innocent victim of “harassment.” She deserves everything bad anyone might ever say about her. . . .
As Ethan Ralph says, Zoe Quinn is a fraud, who couldn’t program her way out of a wet paper sack, and whose status as a “game developer” is as fictional as the “blame-the-patriarchy” narrative she has created to depict herself as a saintly martyr for the feminist cause.

As for “brigading” as a tactic, it is more or less exclusive to Twitter, which did not exist before 2006 and did not become widely used until 2008. It was not until 2014, when the Left began complaining of “harassment” on Twitter, that I ever heard this swarming effect of hostile replies called “brigading,” although I myself had been targeted for orchestrated harassment on Twitter in 2012 after I started reporting on the Brett Kimberlin saga. Of course, nobody in the media notices harassment when the Left is attacking conservatives, so it’s as if that never happened, so far as liberals like Talia Lavin are concerned. (I was the intended target of a SWATting, and the guy responsible was sentenced to federal prison.)

Liberals consider it “hate” if you disagree with them, and it’s “harassment” if you criticize them, and yet Talia Lavin doesn’t seem to understand that the media’s blatant attempt to silence their critics might have something to do with why everybody hates journalists:

GamerGate was essentially a public test of weapons online trolls would use to inflict hell on anyone who they perceived as enemies, with a central focus on journalists. Its tactics have only grown in sophistication in the intervening years. . . .
When I smelled the putrid odor of a brigade attack, I decided to do a little research into the origins of this sudden, and plainly coordinated, bombardment of “learn to code” tweets. (There were also death threats and a flood of anti-Semitic Instagram comments.) It was a fairly simple operation: I clicked over to 4chan’s /pol/ board and searched for the phrase.
In a thread entitled “HAPPENING – Huffpo / Buzzfeed / other MSM garbage (((journalists))) FIRED,” which discussed the extant and impending layoffs, there were dozens of responses laying out the “learn to code” plan. . . .
Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s most openly white-supremacist host and a frequent amplifier of far-right meme warfare, ran a segment about the trolling campaign for his roughly three million viewers. . . .
For me, the open hostility of “learn to code” was, from the first moment, compounded by escalating misogyny and anti-Semitism . . . .
The experience of the “learn to code” campaign was being bombarded with harassment that others stridently claimed wasn’t harassment; being told death threats were a joke; having my name broadcast mockingly on Fox News — all for the temerity of tweeting about losing a column. It was an experience of being mugged by gaslight.

Here’s a suggestion for Ms. Lavin that I’m sure she will ignore: Maybe consider the possibility that the reason people hate you is . . . you.

YOU SMEARED A WAR HERO AS A NAZI! THE GUY YOU FALSELY SMEARED WAS WORKING TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL PREDATORS! YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, TALIA LAVIN!

And this applies more or less equally to everyone who got laid off at BuzzFeed and HuffPo, especially including Chloe Angyal, who boasted of imposing quotas to discriminate against white males at HuffPo. While she was busy preventing white men from publishing opinions at HuffPo, what sort of columns did Chloe Angyal pay for?

If Democrats Want To Win, They Need
To Embrace The Power Of Rage
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 1

I Want A Woman President.
I’m Not Afraid to Say So Anymore.
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 6

Tax The Rich, Then Tax Them Some More
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 12

If You Think Trans Rights Are A Distraction, You’re Part Of The Problem
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 22

Real thought-provoking stuff, eh? Ms. Lavin’s dumbed-down partisan drivel served no useful purpose, and nobody will miss her weekly columns at HuffPo, which was only published to inflate the numbers for Chloe Angyal’s “diversity” quotas. Now she’s peddling paranoia at The New Republic, trying to convince her fellow dimwits that a bunch of guys on 4chan who “say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence” are a menace to democracy or something.

And look at what results Ms. Lavin produces:

 

Yes, Ben Popken of NBC News is encouraging journalists to report any account that tweets “learn to code” at them. Stephen Green quips:

You know, this little snitch is probably patting himself on the back and thinking, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

They are trying to ban Republicans from using the Internet at all — that’s the real bottom line of all this. Journalists are now partisan operatives for the Democrat Party, and consider it part of their job to smear anyone who disagrees with them as a right-wing “white supremacist.”

And they wonder why we hate them . . .




 


Category: Media Bias

Left-Wing Journalist Hacks Email of Republican Billionaire Joe Ricketts

Posted on | February 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Left-Wing Journalist Hacks Email of Republican Billionaire Joe Ricketts

GOP billionaire Joe Ricketts (left); left-wing journalist Molly Osberg (right).

John Joseph “Joe” Ricketts got rich from the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, and retired from the business in 2011 to concentrate on philanthropy. Ricketts is a staunch conservative, a Nebraska native and Catholic father of four, and his family bought the Chicago Cubs in 2009. Ricketts is also interested in journalism, and in 2009 created DNAinfo-dot-com, a site devoted to local news in New York and Chicago. He shut down the site in 2017, one week after employees voted to unionize. Ricketts hates unions, considering them a divisive force, destructive of the esprit de corp necessary to business success. God bless him.

In December 2018, a left-wing journalist named Molly Osberg, who writes for the Gizmodo-owned website Splinter News, began publishing a series called “The Billionaire’s Inbox,” with emails apparently obtained from hacking Joe Ricketts’ personal account. The legality of the methods by which Ms. Osberg obtained these emails is a matter on which I would be hesitant to offer an opinion. The hacking of John Podesta’s emails is currently being investigated by a federal special prosecutor, but hacking a private citizen’s email? That’s what is now considered “investigative journalism,” I guess. At any rate, Molly Osberg keeps publishing batches of Ricketts’ private correspondence, e.g., “The Ricketts On Capitalism and Electoral Politics” (Dec. 17), and “How to Get Filthy Rich in America Without Anyone Knowing Your Name” (Jan. 31), and one would suppose Ricketts might hire a squad of top lawyers to stop this embarrassing drip-drip-drip disclosure, but for some reason it continues.

Monday, Osberg published the latest batch of Ricketts emails (“Here Are The Racist Conspiracy Emails Rotting Right-Wing Billionaire Joe Ricketts’ Brain“), which include some Obama “birther” stuff and other offensive materials, and these revelations finally caused a public reaction:

A series of emails obtained and published by Splinter News on Monday appears to show Joe Ricketts, the patriarch of the family that owns the Cubs, sharing and endorsing racist jokes and conspiracy theories.
Ricketts, 77, and his son and team Chairman Tom Ricketts, issued separate statements regarding the emails after they were posted.
“I deeply regret and apologize for some of the exchanges I had in my emails,” Joe Ricketts said in a statement. “Sometimes I received emails that I should have condemned. Other times I’ve said things that don’t reflect my value system. I strongly believe that bigoted ideas are wrong.” . . .
Tom Ricketts emphasized that his father isn’t involved in the operations of the Cubs, although Joe Ricketts sold 34 million shares of the TD Ameritrade company he founded for about $403 million to cover the equity needed to purchase the Cubs in 2009.
“We are aware of the racially insensitive emails in my father’s account that were published by an online media outlet,” Tom Ricketts wrote in his statement. “Let me be clear: the language and views expressed in those emails have no place in our society.
“My father is not involved with the operation of the Chicago Cubs in any way. I am trusted with representing this organization and our fans with a respect for people from all backgrounds. These emails do not reflect the culture we’ve worked so hard to build at the Chicago Cubs since 2009.”

Well, why and how is this happening?

That’s the real question. Let us stipulate that almost anyone has stuff in their email account which, if made public, could be embarrassing, and furthermore stipulate that any 77-year-old Republican’s frank opinions about such subjects as Islam and immigration might be a public-relations disaster for any institution with which he was associated, if a left-wing journalist somehow hacked his private communications.

But I don’t think Molly Osberg has super-hacker skills, nor do I think Joe Ricketts’ account got hacked by some shadowy crew of hostile online antagonists. No, my hunch is this is an inside job.

Let’s go through some background: During the 2016 GOP primaries, Joe Ricketts poured his money and effort into stopping Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination. He bankrolled something called “Our Principles PAC,” led by Katie Packer, a former aide to the Romney and Jeb Bush campaigns, which ran ads attacking Trump as a misogynist. After Trump secured the nomination, however, Ricketts had a change of heart and began spending millions to support Trump. “The Ricketts decided they could not sit back and watch Hillary Clinton become the next president of the United States,” Ricketts adviser Brian Baker told the Wall Street Journal in September 2016. Todd Ricketts was recently named finance chair of the Trump 2020 campaign.

If the leak of Ricketts’ private emails were an inside job — which is the most obvious explanation of how Molly Osberg got this scoop — doesn’t it make sense that the culprit might be some “Never Trump” type within the billionaire’s inner circle? Suppose that there was someone working for Ricketts who grudgingly went along with that 2016 switch from anti-Trump to pro-Trump, but secretly disagreed with the decision and, instead of quitting his or her job for the Ricketts political operation, became a sort of mole engaged in espionage and sabotage.

While I know nothing about who has worked for Ricketts, if I were betting money, I’d put $20 on such an explanation for how and why Molly Osberg got hold of those emails — never trust a Never Trumper.

On the other hand, maybe one of Joe Ricketts’ children decided to throw Dad under the bus because they don’t like being under the old man’s thumb. The prime suspect in that scenario would be his daughter, Laura Ricketts, a lesbian Democrat who is chairwoman of LPAC, a lesbian Super PAC that launched the “Lesbians for Hillary” website in 2015. So if Laura Ricketts ever had access to her father’s account, this could explain how his personal emails got dumped in Molly Osberg’s lap.

My hunch is that Joe Ricketts already knows who leaked his emails, and I wonder why this information hasn’t already become public. But speculation is mere speculation, and I suppose that if we’re patient, the truth about this sasbotage operation will eventually become known.

On a completely unrelated note, the fundraiser to support Gavin McInnes’s lawsuit against the SPLC has now raised nearly $30,0000 — more than double what it was Monday evening when I gave $10.

 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 02.04.19

Posted on | February 5, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: No MAGA Hats In Streeterville
EBL: Happy Chinese New Year!
Twitchy: Guess What Justin Fairfax Was Up To At The Time Of The Alleged Physical Assault
Louder With Crowder: USA Powerlifting Bans Transgender Women From Female Competition

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Telstra Is An Anti-Australian Company, also, Clementine Ford Rescued By White Male Taxpayers
American Power: Life Without The “Big 5” Tech Giants, also, Justice Democrats To Wage War On Their Own Party
American Thinker: Infanticide Abortion May Be Only The Beginning, also, Homo RICO – The Feds Need To Bust Big Gay
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
BattleSwarm: Europe’s Dysfunctional Defense Dilemma, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: The Stalingrad Schoolhouse
Da Tech Guy: A Deeper Look At Northam, also, Five Super Bowl LIII Thoughts
Don Surber: The Video The Media Should Fear, also, Ram Trumpenfreude
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Teardrops On Your Router
First Street Journal: The Democrats & The Politics Of Division, also, A Pusillanimous Cardinal
The Geller Report: Dem Rep Tlaib Lied About Residency To Run For Office, Registered To Vote At False Address, also, VT Democrats Elect Nation’s First Muslim Party Chair; Has Deep Terror Ties To Al-Qaeda
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Manufacturing Outrage
Hollywood In Toto: Here’s Why The Superbowl Halftime Show Bombed
Joe For America: Mary Poppins Branded Racist By Professor Over Soot On Face
JustOneMinute: Meanwhile, Back In West Texas
Legal Insurrection: Typhus Crisis In Los Angeles Worsens, also, Study Reveals Extensive Links Between BDS, Terrorist Organizations
The PanAm Post: With Bolsonaro, Brazil Is Wall Street’s New Favorite, also, Guaido Tells Mexiso & Uruguay – No Talks With Human Rights Violators
Power Line: A Sandmann Lawsuit Preview, also, Democrats Near Meltdown In Virginia
Shot In The Dark: Echoes Over The Desert
STUMP: The Undeniable Corruption of Chicago & Illinois, Part III
The Jawa Report: Breaking! Elmer Doesn’t See Shadow!
The Political Hat: Who Runs Venezuela?
This Ain’t Hell: CBS Rejects Pro-Flag, Anti-Kaepernick “Just Stand” Super Bowl Ad, also, War Crimes Prosecution Against Navy SEALS Takes Double Hit
Victory Girls: The Fall Of Northam – It’s About Time We Started Fighting Back
Volokh Conspiracy: The Northam & Kavanaugh Controversies, And Long-Past Misbehavior
Weasel Zippers: Shocker! Gov Who Endorsed Infanticide Got $2 Million From Planned Parenthood, also, Gladys Knight Schools Don Lemon After He Questions Her Singing national Anthem At Super Bowl
Mark Steyn: The Johnnie Cochrane Of The Great White North? also, The Day After Tomorrow


Amazon Warehouse – Post-Holiday Deals

Category: Linkagery

Gavin McInnes Sues SPLC

Posted on | February 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Gavin McInnes Sues SPLC

 

This is a very important development:

Conservative commentator and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes is reportedly suing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for “defaming” him, publishing “false, damaging and defamatory statements,” and attempting to “deplatform” him.
McInnes’ lawyer, Ron Coleman, published the full complaint online, Monday. McInnes is raising money for the legal fight at defendgavin.com.
“Mr. McInnes, his associates and his family have been successfully targeted for personal and professional destruction by a self-appointed enforcer of such orthodoxy, defendant SPLC, to achieve SPLC’s own ideological, political and financial (i.e., fundraising) ends, as alleged further below,” the complaint alleged. “As also detailed below, the primary method SPLC uses to achieve its goals and those of its donors is by identifying activists, political figures and groups as targets or enemies of society and designating its enemies ‘extremists,’ ‘white supremacists,’ ‘hate groups’ and the like… Although the SPLC Hate Designations are not empirical statements of fact, and are frequently entirely counter-factual, the SPLC Hate Designations are nonetheless intended by SPLC and treated by the mainstream press, law enforcement, courts and social media organizations not as SPLC’s opinion but rather as objective, empirical factual determinations.” . . .
Last year, it was revealed that at least 60 groups were considering legal action against the SPLC following anti-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz’s successful lawsuit against the organization.
The SPLC paid Nawaz a $3.3 million settlement and made a public apology after the organization included him in a list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” despite Nawaz being Muslim himself.
In June, a Washington Post columnist claimed the SPLC had lost “all integrity and credibility.”
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter all reportedly work with the SPLC, and the organization even works with YouTube to police the platform.
The SPLC has received millions of dollars in donations from Apple CEO Tim Cook and Hollywood actor George Clooney.

You should read the entire complaint online, as McGinnes’s legal team go point-by-point in explaining how the SPLC’s “hate” label is being used to silence conservative voices. When McGinnes started Proud Boys, it was basically a social thing — meet-ups for fans of his podcasts — but then the media started paying attention, Trump got elected, and “Antifa” started harassing the Proud Boys. Last year, SPLC evidently decided to target McInnes for destruction, and this lawsuit is about his refusal to be destroyed. Keep in mind, SPLC is also being sued by Baltimore attorney Glen Keith Allen, and many other organizations are said to be contemplating their own lawsuits. Whatever the ultimate outcome of these suits, they are valuable in that (a) the SPLC is forced onto the defensive, and (b) if the lawsuits get to the discovery phase, we could learn a lot about the internal workings of their billion-dollar smear machine. The fact that SPLC was willing to pay $3.3 million to Nawaz shows how much they fear what might be revealed in discovery.

You can click here to donate to DefendGavin.com — as of 8 p.m. ET, they’d raised about $12,000, including $10 from me.

 

Category: Racism
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