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

Posted on | January 23, 2019 | Comments Off on The Left Doesn’t Care About Facts: Why #StandWithCovington Still Matters

Professor Donald Douglas summarizes the lesson we’re learning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actual Savannah Guthrie statement to Covington teenager: "There is something aggressive about standing there." Yeah, he was asking for it by just standing there! https://t.co/A3HXtp8oH9

— Rebecca Mansour (@RAMansour) January 23, 2019

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

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

Ace goes off on these creeps:

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

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

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

Atty. Robert Barnes: We’re Giving Major Media, Celebrities 48 Hours to Retract and Apologize to Covington Kids or Face Lawsuit (VIDEO)https://t.co/RFZz18uSXv

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) January 23, 2019

Reporters, celebrities and others might become very familiar with the word "negligence" very soon.

The clock is only ticking. #CovingtonCatholic https://t.co/OLVpmswg1o

— PJ Media (@PJMedia_com) January 23, 2019

BREAKING: Lawyer Representing Covington Kids @Barnes_Law Receives Bomb Threat After Giving Celebs and Journalists 48 Hour Notice to Retract or Face Lawsuits https://t.co/OmcKn28eev

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) January 23, 2019

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

#StandWithCovington

Category: Catholics, Media Bias

‘Fyre Fraud’: A Millennial Woodstock

Posted on | January 23, 2019 | 1 Comment

Fyre Festival promoter Billy McFarland.

In October, when Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in federal prison, prosecutors described his criminal history thus:

“For the past five years, the defendant has been the consummate con artist. The defendant’s actions reveal a profoundly greedy, self-absorbed man focused exclusively on himself. . . . Whenever he needed more money, he lied to investors to get it. Whenever he wanted more money, he gave it to himself from business accounts. Whenever one scheme began to falter, he hatched a newer and more elaborate one.”

It appears that McFarland’s entire career, from the time he dropped out of Bucknell University in May 2011, was a series of scams, frauds and felonies disguised as start-up entrepreneurialism, culminating in the infamous April 2017 “Fyre Festival” in the Bahamas:

This “luxury” event turned out to be a wretched tent city with inadequate toilet facilities, more like a refugee camp than the kind of place you’d expect to find international supermodels hanging out. How bad was it? Promises of gourmet meals prepared by a famous chef turned out to be a cheese sandwich in a styrofoam container.

McFarland promised a tropical Coachella — Blink 182! Ja Rule! Bella Hadid! Hailey Baldwin! — and delivered a squalid nightmare. Two new documentaries, one by Netflix and one by Hulu, examine this notorious catastrophe and I watched the Hulu version of the story, Fyre Fraud, over the weekend. What the documentary shows is how the so-called “influencer economy” of social-media buzz was leveraged by McFarland to promote the idea that this event was going to be the hottest ticket of the year, thus appealing to the FOMO (“fear of missing out”) insecurities typical of affluent young hipsters. This reflects a phenomenon I first noticed in the 1980s and have called the “status leisure” mentality.

Pioneering sociologist Thorstein Veblen was the first to analyze how the wealthy of the Gilded Age spent their money in ways intended to display their social status. Middle-class youth of the 1980s were obsessed with designer-brand clothing and expensive sneakers — Nike Air Jordans became de rigueur for teenagers who never played basketball — as a means of displaying the social status to which they aspired. This aspirational aspect of status display reflects a message of upward mobility that young people seek to communicate to their peers. They might be just another suburban high-school kid now, but their upscale clothing conveyed the message that in the future, they would be members of the elite. And their preferences in leisure activity also reflected this status-obsessed mentality. Upwardly mobile young people couldn’t have fun doing things cheap or local; instead, real fun could only be had by spending money to go somewhere cool. Like, you couldn’t just invite your buddies over to play poker, you had to fly to Vegas for a three-day weekend. You didn’t want to go fishing at the nearby lake, you wanted to go fishing in Key West. Taking your kids to the county fair? Not cool. Taking your kids to Disney World? Cool. Taking your kids on a Caribbean cruise? Even cooler. This mentality — leisure activities as a means of status display — has been leveraged by promoters of events like the Coachella festival, where being part of a celebrity-studded scene is, to the Millennial hipster, what attending the Gold Cup at Ascot was for the Victorian aristocracy. But I digress . . .

The superficiality of reality-TV culture in the Social Media Age lends itself to the delusion that any attractive young person can become a Kardashian-like celebrity — “famous for being famous,” as Malcolm Muggeridge said — by shrewd management of their online image. Developing a popular Instagram presence and turning that into a career (e.g., “Caroline Calloway and the ‘Creativity Workshop’ Influencer Tour From Hell”) seems to be an idée fixe for many Millennials, and the Fyre Festival disaster of April 2017 wasn’t Billy McFarland’s first attempt to get rich by exploiting this status-conscious mentality:

What’s the Magnises card? It’s the brainchild of Billy McFarland. You’ve never heard of this 22-year-old college dropout, but he’s cooler than you. (Just ask him.)
Founder Billy McFarland admits that Magnises is “Latin for absolutely nothing.” The Short Hills, NJ, native — the son of two real-estate developers — launched his first startup (a service that matched websites and designers) at 13, and skipped out on Bucknell University during his freshman year to launch a content-sharing site called Spling. From there, it was a short leap to starting his own credit-card company — and only letting in members whom he and his staff of 11 deem cool enough.
Magnises is “Latin for absolutely nothing,” admits McFarland, who launched the company in March. “The name is made up, but it sounds grand, doesn’t it?”
Forged in matte black stainless steel, the credit card is attempting to position itself as the hot new way to spend money among NYC’s young elite. Olympic hopefuls, scenester DJs, tech innovators and socialites like Nick Loeb (Sofia Vergara’s ex-fiancé) are among the 1,200 or so chosen ones who don’t leave home without it.

The appeal of the Magnises card — which was actually just a way to upgrade the user’s own debit card — was that it conveyed the prestige of being a member of this exclusive “young elite.” As the Hulu documentary shows, the Magnises scheme launched in 2014 was the platform of fraud upon which McFarland later built the Fyre Festival:

[I]n addition to acting as a “black card for 20-somethings,” the card was also meant to get members exclusive things like access to the Magnises townhouse in SoHo, private parties, and discounts on luxury and designer items. Membership, which cost $250 annually, was also supposed to include a car and driver and a 24/7 concierge to assist users in getting tickets to big events. . . . It was marketed as a status tool for wealthy millennials, but one former employee, Emily Boehm, says in the Hulu documentary that it was actually more for those wanting to join an “out of college frat.”
Fyre Fraud includes interviews with journalists who covered Magnises and the company’s former employees, and more than one person likened Magnises to madcap NBC sitcoms about ineffective workplaces. . . .
Events were often cancelled last minute and the number of actual members was unclear, despite McFarland’s numerous claims that membership was growing, according to a Bloomberg report on Magnises. With numerous customer complaints and conflicting membership stats, it was increasingly difficult to measure the company’s actual success.
McFarland used connections in Silicon Valley, investors, and marketing agencies with good pull and got celebrities to endorse Magnises . . .

One perk for Magnises members was invitations to parties at a private townhouse, but in 2015, McFarland was sued by his landlord who said the $13,750-a-month property, which he had leased “exclusively for residential purposes,” had been “maliciously vandalized” for more than $60,000 in damages as a result of McFarland’s “blowout parties.”

The problems with Magnises were one of the “red flags” about McFarland’s shady behavior that were ignored by those suckered into involvement in the Fyre Festival fiasco. One of the warning signs was the March 2016 indictment of Aubrey McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, who had been one of the biggest investors in Magnises. The day after the indictment, McClendon died in a single-car crash that many suspected was suicide, and McFarland needed to find some new source of cash to prop up his business (which looked a lot like a Ponzi scheme). Fashion executive Carola Jain, wife of wife of hedge fund manager Bobby Jain, was one of his new investors. Now, McFarland claimed to be developing an event booking app he called Fyre Media and this led to the idea of the Fyre Festival, conceived when McFarland and Ja Rule visited the Bahamas. McFarland managed to persuade a gaggle of big-name models to travel to the Bahamas to do a video promoting the event and, on December 12, 2016, all of them simultaneously posted the video and photos to their Instagram accounts. Marila Bobila of Fashionista described the effect:

Our feeds were flooded with images of a tropical vacation to a seemingly private island starring Alessandra Ambrosio, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski, Elsa Hosk, Paulina Vega, Lais Ribeiro, Rose Bertram, Gizele Oliveira and Hannah Ferguson.

The video promised “An Immersive Music Festival . . . On a Remote and Private Island in The Exumas . . . The Best in Food, Art, Music and Adventure . . . On the Boundaries of the Impossible.” And the online roll-out of the ad was impressive: “I mean, it was perfectly executed. It’s one of the greatest social-media campaigns I’ve ever seen. They got the most beautiful women in the world, with the largest social following. And then the photo shoot . . . It was just incredible.”

Keep in mind that this was barely a month after the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump had left a lot of people in the fashion/entertainment/media world feeling emotionally traumatized, and now . . . this awesome festival with tickets starting at $1,500? The young and hip were excited about it, but the ticket-buyers had no idea that, behind the scenes, people were already warning McFarland that he could never put together such an event on such short notice. McFarland was promising luxury accommodations, and even if he could come up with the money to provide what he promised — a big “if” — the logistics of transporting everything to this island site was problematic. Do the math: Suppose that a total of 5,000 people paid $1,500, that’s $7.5 million. Well, that ticket price included air travel from Miami to Exuma International Airport, which “services mainly light aircraft and regional jets,” in other words, not your big jumbo jets. American Eagle flies a 60-seater turboprop plane for its regular service from Miami to Exuma. So, to get 5,000 people to this festival would require about 80 flights. How are you gonna book 80 charter flights out of Miami?

Never mind that. The lowest-priced regular flight is $335 round-trip, so if you could somehow get charter companies to match that rate — another big “if” — you would have spent about $1.7 million just to deliver the air travel part of the package for your 5,000 ticket holders. That leaves you with $4.8 million for everything else and, even if you’ve got that much money (which McFarland didn’t), remember you not only have to pay off all the performers, the lights, the sound, etc., but you’ve promised luxury accommodations: “Guests will be staying in modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes.” Good luck building such housing for 5,000 people from scratch in just four months, and what about water, sewage, electricity, etc.? Also, you’ve promised these people gourmet meals, yoga classes, and a bunch of other luxurious experiences. What’s all that gonna cost to deliver on a remote island site in the Bahamas?

People tried to warn Billy McFarland that this was impossible to accomplish in four months, at any price, but . . . grifters gonna grift.

McFarland had claimed Fyre Media was worth $90 million, but as the April date for the festival approached, he was forced to pay exorbitant rates for an emergency loan in a desperate attempt to put together something even remotely resembling what he’d promised. Of course, he failed, and no concerts ever happened at Fyre Festival.

The first ticket-holders to arrive — riding from the airport on a school bus — found a bunch of tents set up with mattresses piled around the site, and very little else. Pretty soon, everybody was trying to escape and Twitter erupted in mockery at the hipster apocalypse.

What wasn’t funny, however, was that Fyre wasn’t merely a bungled festival, it was the culmination of more than three years of escalating frauds by which McFarland had bilked investors of millions.

Fyre Fraud features interview segments with McFarland, which often end with him sitting silently, unable to answer the questions. He is not capable of admitting the truth about what he did, and his excuses and rationionalizations can’t explain away the evidence. While I don’t doubt that McFarland believed, in December 2016, that he could actually make the Fyre Festival happen, despite all the warnings to the contrary, as the weeks went by and the evidence of an impending failure accumulated, he could have hit the brakes and postponed it. Why didn’t he?

In a word, money. Because his entire business career was essentially fraudulent — McFarland was a Bernie Madoff in the making — he knew that if he canceled the April date, there would be no chance to do the festival at a later date, because his financial pyramid scheme would soon come tumbling down. McFarland had built a reputation as a whiz kid, a reputation that had enabled him to live large on investors’ money, and he knew he’d be ruined when the chickens finally came home to roost.

Billy McFarland is in federal prison now, but the social-media “influencer” game is still going on, and grifters are still grifting.

The “status leisure” syndrome — the status-obsessed fixation on being perceived as one of the cool kids, conveying an image of upward mobility — is at the root of what made the Fyre Festival such an alluring idea for so many young people. At his sentencing hearing, Billy McFarland claimed he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but it would be more accurate to say he is afflicted with the Millennial mentality, a delusional condition caused by excessive exposure to social media.

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 01.22.19

Posted on | January 22, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Is “Conservative Media” An Oxymoron?
EBL: How Long Will National Review Survive?, also, How Depraved And Corrupt Is Hollywood? Won’t You Be My Neighbor Not Nominated For An Oscar
Twitchy: New Reporting Suggests Nathan Phillips Is Even Worse Than You Thought
Louder With Crowder: Patricia Heaton Goes Ballistic On People Attacking Covington Catholic Kids

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Yellow Vest Protests – Who Are The Bad Guys? also, The Wigwam Tom Tom Credibility Test
American Power: Prince Philip Stokes Debate On Older Drivers, also, Rachel Notley’s NDP Government Launches Stalinist Campaign To Shut Down Rebel Media
American Thinker: Kamala Harris’ Identity Ticket, also, The Madness Of Crowds And What Lies Ahead
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Western Pacific News
BattleSwarm: Jonathan Pie On Why May’s Brexit Deal Was So Horrible, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Now THAT’s The Navy I Like To See! also, Keeping An Eye On The Long War, Part LXXX
Da Tech Guy: They Want To Make Him Pay, also, Non-Tweets For January 22
Don Surber: Covington Kids Should Sue Twitter, also, National Review Should Apologize – And Finally Has
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Needing More Than Mrs. Peel
First Street Journal: The Sexism & Racism Of CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson
The Geller Report: SNL Writer Offers BJ To Anyone Who Punches “The MAGA Kid” In The Face, also, CNN Legal Analyst – The Buzzfeed Fiasco Will Make People “Think We’re A Bunch of Leftist Liars Trying To Get Trump”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Accountability?
Hollywood In Toto: Is This Why Judd Apatow bows To The PC Police? also, Jones’ Ghostbusters Trump Rant Is Pure Ingratitude
Joe For America: Alyssa Milano Brands Iconic MAGA Hats As “The New White Hoods”, also, Judge Jeannine Puts Her Career On The Line, Exposes Who Pelosi Is Really Working For
JustOneMinute: You Can’t Make this Stuff Up – Unless You Do, also, Feel Great, Feel The Hate
Legal Insurrection: Supreme Court Allows Military Trans Ban To Go Into Effect, also, WaPo Corrects Covington Smear Story To Say Indian Provocateur Didn’t Fight In Vietnam
The PanAm Post: The Young, And Capitalism As An Attitude
Power Line: Sue The Bastards! [Updated], also, Racist Black Nationalism And The Covington Controversy
Shark Tank: Carlos Muniz Appointed To Florida Supreme Court
Shot In The Dark: Advice
STUMP: San Diego ERS Has No Business Giving Out 13th Checks, also, Taxing Tuesday – For Illinois, I Foresee PAAAIN!
The Political Hat: Banning The Receipt In California, also, The Latest In Transgender “Science” – Reincarnation
This Ain’t Hell: Nathan Phillips, “Vietnam Times” Veteran, also, Poe’s Take On Politics & Honesty
Victory Girls: Pelosi, Not Trump, Is Holding America Hostage, also, Should Twitter Be Charged For Threats To MAGA Kids?
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Circuits & The Second Amendment In 2018, also, Will SCOTUS Read The Free Exercise Clause As Often Mandating Religious Exemptions To Common Laws?
Weasel Zippers: Lawyer Offers Covington Kids Free Representation, Warns NYT About “Obvious Libel”, also, Dems Who Slammed Kavanaugh Went on Puerto Rico Trip With Cardenas
Megan McArdle: The Covington Students Failed To Act Like Grownups. So Did The Adults.
Mark Steyn: Pure Barry, or Not, also, The Drumbeat Of The Mob

Category: Linkagery

Elizabeth Warren’s Billion-Dollar Indian Casino Plan Defeated by Democrats

Posted on | January 22, 2019 | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren’s Billion-Dollar Indian Casino Plan Defeated by Democrats

Elizabeth Warren’s effort to gain credibility as the 1/1024th Native American candidate in the Democrat 2020 presidential primary field wasn’t limited to her creepy experiments in DNA “racial science.” Emily Zannotti at the Daily Wire recaps Senator Warren’s failed efforts to promote a Massachusetts tribe’s casino bid:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been working with a local Native American tribe in Massachusetts to push through authorization for a new casino on federal land — a casino that local Massachusetts residents, and the federal government, have repeatedly said they don’t want.
But the bill to build the casino died in the senate late last year, and now, it seems, some of Warren’s fellow Democrats may be to blame.
The Washington Times reports that the bill, which would have allowed the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to build a “$1 billion resort in Taunton, Massachusetts,” never made it to the senate floor, thanks to the efforts of the two Democratic senators from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, who pleaded with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to let the bill die in committee.
The bill reappeared in the House last week, this time sponsored by Reps. William Keating and Joe Kennedy III, both Massachusetts Democrats.
The bill overrides a federal court’s decision not to award the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe around 300 acres to build the billion-dollar tribal casino, based on rules granting tribal land only to those tribes recognized in an early-20th century federal agreement. The Mashpee Wampanoag received federal recognition, the Times reports, in 2007.
“As a result, federally recognized tribes in Rhode Island would argue that they hold the same standing as the Massachusetts tribe and request that similar legislation be introduced on their behalf,” the two Rhode Island senators wrote. “As you know, we have long opposed doing so due to potential conflicts with the 1978 Rhode Island Indian Claims Settlement Act, which ensures that settlement lands remain subject to Rhode Island state law.”

There are so many things wrong with the Mashpee Wampanoag casino bid that it’s difficult to say what’s the worst thing about it. The Massachusetts gaming commission will approve only three casinos in the state, each in a different region, so if the plan backed by Warren to put a casino in Taunton goes through, that would sabotage efforts by nearby Brockton to bring a casino to their struggling town:

Brockton Mayor William Carpenter said the Warren legislation on behalf of the Masphee Wampanoag tribe would destroy his community’s plans for a casino, a project designed to bring badly needed jobs and economic development to the blue-collar burg. . . .
Lobbying on behalf of the Warren-Keating legislation is the Genting Group, a Malaysia-based entity that has sunk a reported $400 million into the tribe’s First Light Resort and Casino project and could lose it all if the federal government fails to take the land into trust.
“We are up against a foreign company that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” said [Taunton resident Michelle] Littlefield. “It’s a bottomless well on the other side. From day one, we’ve been the underdog, and the only thing we’ve ever had on our side was the law.”
She criticized lawmakers for attempting to overrule the judge’s orders [denying the Mashpee Wampanoag’s federal land claim]. “If we could just get the government to follow the law, not only the federal agencies involved, but every congressman and senator who’s taken the oath of office,” she said.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign money are involved:

The biggest push behind the effort has come from the Genting Group, a Kuala Lumpur-based company with a global portfolio of casino businesses that has $249.5 million invested in the troubled project and is slated to manage the First Light Resort & Casino if it’s completed, according to Malaysian reports.
Genting disclosed in its 2015 annual report its $249.5 million investment in promissory notes from the Mashbee Wampanoag Tribal Gaming Authority. It gained no equity from the investment, which was intended to “establish” its “growing presence in the U.S.”
There will be no return on investment until the casino is in operation and Genting is paid for management, an increasingly unlikely outcome that would result in Genting losing $274 million. In the case that no casino is ever built, the tribe says it won’t even have to pay back the investments made by Genting.
Genting hired lobbying firm Gavel Resources in February 2018 to make its case on the land use decision in Washington, D.C., according to official lobbying disclosure forms.

Heap big wampum, as you might say, has been invested in lobbying for this Indian casino that federal courts have declared illegal, but it’s being promoted by the 99.8% white Massachusetts Senator because . . . ?

I don’t know, “social justice,” or something.

Despite being the first Democrat to declare her presidential intentions for 2020, Senator Fauxcahontas isn’t actually popular with primary voters. Polls show her with less than 5% support, according to the Real Clear Politics average, far behind Joe Biden (27%) and Bernie Sanders (17%).

Perhaps the surest omen that Warren’s campaign is doomed, however, is the way Saturday Night Live spoofed her during the “Weekend Update” segment, with Kate McKinnon as the candidate mocking her DNA test (“The test came back 100% bad idea. Who knew race science wasn’t a good PR strategy?”) and comparing herself to a prostate exam. “Politico was accused of sexism for an article saying you aren’t likable,” host Colin Jost asked. “What do you think about that?”

“Look, yeah, I’m sorry I’m not young and pretty like Donald jackass Trump,” she said. “Look, Colin, was the article sexist, of course it was. Am I likable? Probably not. But neither is a prostate exam. But you need one or you’ll die.”
“This country is long overdue for a finger up its caboose. You might even like it,” she continued. “So bend over, America, and let Mama Warren get to work.”

No, thank you, ma’am.

Category: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts

Advice to Criminals: Avoid Texas

Posted on | January 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Advice to Criminals: Avoid Texas

America’s criminal population lost three members over the weekend:

Three men were killed and two others were injured after dozens of shots were fired by a homeowner in Texas during a home invasion early Sunday, officials said.
The incident happened around 1 a.m. in east Houston after five men wearing ski masks broke into the home, police told KPRC.
The male resident inside then grabbed his weapon and opened fire at the men.
“The homeowner appears to have defended himself,” Houston Police Department homicide detective Travis Miller told KTRK-TV.
A shootout then took place between the groups, according to police.
“We have multiple, multiple shell casings from several different types of guns,” Miller said. . . .
One of the suspects was found dead in front of the house, while the others fled in an SUV and on foot. Police told KPRC that the SUV crashed into a pole nearby and a second suspect was found dead inside.
A third suspect who was in the SUV fled, collapsed in the street, and later died, KPRC reported.
The fourth and fifth suspects, who were also injured in the shooting, were taken to the hospital. The incident remains under investigation by police, who did not release additional information. The homeowner was not injured.

You should read the book Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms by Robert Waters.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

Category: Crime, Texas

Lessons From an Online Lynching (Why #StandWithCovington Is Going Viral)

Posted on | January 21, 2019 | 2 Comments

One of the basic rules of political journalism is, you don’t have to comment on every controversy that comes along. And you certainly don’t have to rush to become the first to publish such a commentary. What happened over the weekend with a viral video of Catholic school boys confronted by a protester in D.C. should remind us of that rule.

On Friday, students from Covington Catholic School participated in the annual March for Life in Washington. On Saturday, a video clip was posted that claimed to show the students — many of whom were wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats — engaged in harassment of a Native American activist named Nathan Phillips. This clip went viral on Twitter, with a swarm of blue-check pundits excoriating the boys.

For about 24 hours, this Catholic school in the northern Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati was the target of an online outrage mob. Kids were get “doxxed” and their families were being threatened.

Guess what I said about this controversy? Nothing.

It is not my policy to comment on everything that goes viral on the Internet. Every day, controversies like this flare up and burn out without my ever bothering to notice them, because there’s just so much happening in the world that I’d drive myself crazy if I felt obligated to add my two cents to every controversy on the Internet. The #GamerGate controversy, for example, had been raging for weeks before I bothered to pay much attention to the melodrama that started with a tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg.

When I saw the Covington Catholic controversy start trending Saturday, I glanced at it briefly and just couldn’t make sense of it. My podcasting partner John Hoge’s reaction was similar:

I held off commenting on the Covington Kid v. Native American story this past weekend. The initial video didn’t look good, but it also didn’t make sense to me. I waited for corroborating facts, and none appeared. In fact, the additional raw footage that surfaced has discredited the narrative spun around the original edited version. It now looks to me as if someone used the edited video to tell a lie, and that lie resulted in a social media mob rioting, trying to figuratively burn down the lives of some kids who got in the way of The Narrative.

As so often happens in such cases, it now appears that the liberal media Narrative was almost 180-degrees opposite of the truth. The Covington student has told his side of the story. What happened was that, when the March for Life ended, the students had been told to assemble at the Lincoln Memorial to wait for their buses. The buses were delayed, and as the Catholic students waited, they were harassed by a group of black people nearby. What the Covington students didn’t realize is that, on the same day as the March for Life, there was another event in D.C. — the Indigenous Peoples March. This event was what Nathan Phillips was doing near the Lincoln Memorial when the Covington boys showed up and, apparently, the event also attracted some members of a bizarre cult known as the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI), who started harassing the Catholic students. Reason‘s Robby Soave reports what happened:

Phillips put himself between the teens and the black nationalists, chanting and drumming as he marched straight into the middle of the group of young people. What followed was several minutes of confusion: The teens couldn’t quite decide whether Phillips was on their side or not, but tentatively joined in his chanting. It’s not at all clear this was intended as an act of mockery rather than solidarity.
One student did not get out of Phillips way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a “hate factory” and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn’t quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around.
And that’s all there is to it. Phillips walked away after several minutes, the Black Hebrew Israelites continued to insult the crowd, and nothing else happened.

Kudos to Robby for taking time to watch two hours of video to figure out what actually happened Friday, while everybody else jumped the gun to mischaracterize this encounter as a racist incident, on the basis of a video clip that seems to have been edited to convey that false impression.

So many rushing to delete tweets that defamed the #CovingtonBoys
H/t @PardesSeleh @Mediaite https://t.co/rxZBZUAXus

— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) January 21, 2019

The mainstream media — particularly CNN — went all-in to demonize these Catholic school boys as symbols of white supremacy and toxic masculinity when the truth was that they were the ones being subjected to racial harassment, simply for being white. And as Allum Bokhari at Breitbart notes, Twitter’s rules against harassment apparently don’t apply when the targets are white boys from Catholic schools.

The hashtag #StandWithCovington is being used to rally support for these kids, who were unfairly smeared by the online mob.

UPDATE: Legal Insurrection cites the typical media headlines:

The New York Times: “Viral Video Shows Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Surround Native Elder”
CNN: “Teens in Make America Great Again hats taunted a Native American elder at the Lincoln Memorial”
The Washington Post: “‘It was getting ugly’: Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat-wearing teens who surrounded him”
Variety: “MAGA Hat-Wearing Teens Harassing Native American Elder Spark Condemnation From Hollywood”

Not like there’s a pattern here or anything . . .

Category: Media Bias, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: The Kessler Twins

Posted on | January 21, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

This week, a blast from the past: Anne & Ellen Kessler, twin sisters who studied dance in East Germany before escaping to the West with their parents in 1954. From there, they made quite a name for themselves in Germany and Italy, appearing in a lot of movies and eventually being celebrated for fostering Italo-German friendship. They appeared in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1960 and looked pretty fine for forty, but this pic is actually safe for work so I went with it instead.