When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.
And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.
She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.
What Maddow never expected, of course, was that there would be a detailed official investigation of the Steele dossier’s role in manufacturing the “Russian collusion” hoax, and now that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has done that investigation, Maddow’s dishonesty is fully exposed. She has nowhere to hide — her deceptions are a matter of record, preserved on video — so that even the Washington Post cannot pretend she still has any credibility. Ed Morrissey:
The timeline Wemple provides — surely more of a highlights list than a comprehensive log — is damning. Maddow went neck-deep into the Steele dossier pool, only to claim later she never got wet at all. She denied in an interview with Michael Isikoff that she wasn’t “making the case for the accuracy of the Steele dossier,” when in fact she’d been making that case literally since Day 1.
Professor William Jacobson remarks: “Alex Jones is deplatformed, while Maddow still remains atop the MSNBC heap. Some conspiracy fear-mongers are more equal than others.” So it seems.
UPDATE: The Washington Post article is behind a paywall, but here is an archived version, because f**k a paywall, am I right?
Given the propensity of liberals to see Nazis and fascists everywhere, it’s easy to laugh at this paranoid tendency. On the other hand, there are actual Nazis, and they’re not funny at all. OK, maybe they’re a little funny because what could be more absurd than the Fourth Reich fantasies of a bunch of incel dimwits who think Jew-hating is cool?
As absurd as their beliefs are, however, these losers can actually be dangerous, as in the case of Jarrett William Smith. In September, Smith was arrested by the feds after an undercover FBI agent infiltrated an online chat of neo-Nazis and got Smith, a U.S. Army sergeant stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, to chat about his plans to assassinate Beto O’Rourke and bomb CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, among other things. The indictment of Smith also referenced “a communication describing a plan to attack a specific home” in Michigan, a message that “contained a threat to injure D.H. (whose identity is known to the Grand Jury) specifically by threatening to set fire to the home belonging to D.H.”
Dawn Shea and her family moved to Dexter in mid-August seeking a friendly, safe neighborhood.
She joked that it’s a town more known for its cider mill and doughnuts than anything else.
Within a month, unexpected visitors pierced through the family’s sense of security. An FBI agent and police officer knocked on the front door of their new home.
Two months from the birth of their second child, Dawn and her husband Rich Shea learned from the officers that their home address was being shared on a white supremacist message board. . . .
Later, a letter addressed to Daniel Harper, the former homeowner, was delivered to the home. After forwarding it, the family learned from Harper and his wife Ingrid that the letter contained intimidating statements from “neo-nazis.”
The threats escalated on Wednesday, Dec. 11. The Sheas returned home from the hospital after their second child was born, only to find two figures dressed in black taking flash photos of their home, Dawn Shea said.
“At that point, we knew exactly who and what it was,” Dawn Shea said.
The Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that a white supremacist group posted “non-threatening photographs and statements” on their website to intimidate a podcaster named Daniel E. Harper. Daniel E. Harper the podcaster has never lived at the same home where the Shea’s now reside, the sheriff’s office said. He is not related to the Daniel Harper who used to live there, police said.
Do you see what I mean? If you’re the “master race” intent on world domination, but you can’t even get the address of your enemies right, maybe you should reconsider your worldview. Just sayin’ . . .
There may be people who think Jon Schwarz is funny, but those people are mentally ill, and we’re not allow to laugh at mentally ill people. For example, you could get banned from Twitter for “misgendering” a lunatic like Anthony Halliday a/k/a “Stephanie Hayden.” If you say that a man is not a woman, that’s “hate,” which is not allowed on Twitter.
So in 2015, Jon Schwarz made a “joke” about killing Christians, but didn’t get banned because (a) almost nobody knows who Jon Schwartz is, and (b) all the people who do know who he is share his genocidal hatred of Christians. Schwarz is a liberal — he once worked for Michael Moore — and if there is anything that unites liberals, it’s their hatred of Christians.
And also, Fox News.
Christians, Fox News, and babies in the womb — these are the top three things liberals want to kill. But I digress . . .
Jon Schwarz’s anti-Christian “joke” on Twitter didn’t attract any attention until March of this year, when he used his Twitter account to accuse Fox News host Tucker Carlson of anti-Semitism, at which point some of Tucker’s fans dug up that 2015 tweet, and Schwarz’s account was suspended until he agreed to the deletion of the offending tweet.
For months, Schwarz refused to comply, but then in November finally agreed to their terms and his account was reinstated. End of story? No, because liberals always have to have the last word.
Now, anyone who’s been alive during the past 1,000 years knows this is a fair assessment. Given that Christian nations have mercilessly oppressed both Jews and Muslims, it’s peculiar that Christians and Jews are currently teaming up to kill Muslims. You’d think Muslims and Jews would be natural allies. (Indeed, while it’s completely forgotten now, there were tentative attempts by the Zionist movement during the 1920s to find common ground with the Arab world on this basis.) What makes this tweet a joke is that in 2019 it is completely preposterous to imagine, say, Iran and Israel joining forces to bomb America.
Preposterous? Maybe, but if they did, Jon Schwarz would be happy.
White liberals must step up right now in the right way.
If there’s going to be any political force that can resist Trump and build a livable future, it will be led by African Americans, Latinos, and young people from all backgrounds.
The role for older, richer white liberals will be important but painfully different from what they’re used to. They’ll have to support other people’s priorities, put up money for things they don’t control, and use all of their social power to protect Muslims, immigrants, and every threatened minority.
What white progressives can and must pursue is outreach to Trump’s white base. One of the killer robot’s main fuels is white supremacy. But human beings are complex and inscrutable and sometimes change. If just 20 percent of the white supremacy could be neutralized, the robot might be much less powerful.
White liberals will be more effective doing this if they first spend time considering how they may be as equally complicit in white supremacy as Trump voters.
There are a few things I enjoy more than “terrified” white liberals, but most of those things involve orgasm or Alabama touchdowns.
The world’s craziest feminist, Amanda Marcotte, was upset about the controversy surrounding a commercial that showed two lesbians kissing, which drew complaints when it aired on the Hallmark Channel. Having long since grown accustomed to Marcotte’s craziness, even I was surprised by where she took it:
Running down this year’s schedule of Christmas movie offerings [on the Hallmark Channel] is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It’s like watching “The Stepford Wives,” but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.
None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.
That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl’s films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of “normality.”
There’s plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview.
Amanda is Patient Zero in the Trump Derangement Syndrome epidemic.
Breitbart News Network’s Facebook page has captured more engagement than several of the largest corporate news outlets combined amid the ongoing impeachment battle, a VICE News report revealed Monday. VICE News reports:
With just 4 million followers, Breitbart’s page racked up more likes, comments, and shares since Sept. 1 (57.8 million) than The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today combined (42.6 million). It outpaced each of the broadcast news networks, MSNBC, and CNN. CNN Spokesman Matt Dornic rejected the comparison in a statement to VICE News.
Despite Dornic’s objection to the report, engagement data via analytics firm CrowdTangle are undeniable. CrowdTangle found Breitbart News has received more likes, comments, and shares than CNN’s primary Facebook page over the last three months.
“We’ve been dominating in our neck of the woods,” Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow told VICE News.
In addition to engaging news stories, Marlow credited Breitbart News’ success on Facebook to its use of content that fosters community interaction, with each post garnering thousands of likes, comments, and shares.
“It’s a bigger win if they’re going straight to the website,” he explained. “But we do look at it as a more holistic approach for developing the brand.”
The obvious explanation is this: Liberal bias saturates “mainstream” news organizations and thus stamps a certain boring conformity on most journalism. Anyone looking for something different — something exciting, not molded to fit the contours of political correctness — will find that Breitbart News offers what they seek. By consistently delivering the desired commodity, Breitbart builds “brand loyalty” in its readers.
So while liberals bemoan the “2019 Media Apocalypse,” readers continue flocking to alternative (i.e., not liberal) news sources.
Wendy “Wednesday” Martin is the second wife of New York lawyer Joel Moser, and the author of several popular books. In 2015, she published Primates of Park Avenue, a memoir described as “a well-heeled combination of the Real Housewives and Sex and the City.” Martin, who has a Ph.D. from Yale, did a sort of anthropological study of women like herself — the wives of wealthy men on the ultra-affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan. While any rational observer would view such women as the most fortunate humans on the planet, Martin argues that “these seemingly privileged women are fundamentally powerless” because their lifestyles are “dependent on a husband’s earnings.” Martin contends that this explains, among other things, why these women are obsessed with fitness and fashion, because maintaining their beauty is necessary to prevent their wealthy husbands from dumping them.
Considering that she was herself a replacement for the first Mrs. Moser (a tale told in her 2009 book Stepmonster), Martin seems to have internalized the message of her own status as a replaceable commodity, but rather than questioning the atheistic culture in which marriage vows mean nothing, instead she takes this for granted. She inhabits a world in which there is no god but money, and no meaning to life except the pursuit of pleasure, and evidently cannot imagine any other world. Martin criticizes her peers as afflicted with false consciousness:
These are women who have disempowered themselves relative to their husbands not only by family-prioritizing choice but as a form and marker of achievement. . . .
If you’re a wealthy woman, you feel virtually compelled to stay home with your children. You may think you’re making a choice, but it’s a false choice.
Question: If any mother had the option to stay home with her children — whether because of her husband’s high earnings or any other economic subsidy — why wouldn’t she do so? She might not be able to afford to live like Wednesday Martin, in the poshest Manhattan neighborhood (with a weekend place in the Hamptons), but if a woman could so arrange her life as to avoid the necessity of working outside her home to pay the bills, wouldn’t she prefer this to any other arrangement?
Certainly, my wife would be happier if my career were more lucrative, so that she could count on all the bills being paid without her having to worry about a job, and when our children were younger, we arranged our lives so that this was (almost) possible. There was never a time when my wife didn’t do something to help with the finances — selling baked goods or babysitting other people’s children — and eventually what had begun as a part-time job became a full-time food service career, but if I’d been making really big bucks, I wouldn’t have expected her to do anything more than the (very demanding) job of being a mom.
This devaluing of motherhood, sneering at the woman who is “just a mom,” is what has always offended me most about feminism. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this because (a) I so deeply appreciate my wife’s maternal excellence, and (b) my own mother died when I was 16. Unless you have lost your mother, you can’t really understand what a valuable resource a mother’s love is, and being forced to deal with the finality of death has a way of making you appreciate the value of life. One of the benefits of middle-class life in a modern industrial democracy is the tremendous sense of security that makes death a distant thing, something that usually only happens to old people in nursing homes. Prior to the development of such medical advances as antibiotics, death was a much nearer danger, and the proximity of the Grim Reaper instilled in young people a greater sense of gratitude for such small blessings as they had. But I digress . . .
Wednesday Martin’s portrayal of the wealthy wives of Manhattan as “disempowered” — hey, ladies, would you feel “disempowered” if your husband was a multimillionaire? — became a New York Times bestseller, and what did her husband think of this? We don’t know. The men who marry feminists are expected to remain silent, and if Joel Moser ever expressed an opinion about his wife’s feminist ideology, I couldn’t find it. Whatever the royalties on Martin’s books may be, however, they aren’t enough to pay for a $3.7 million co-op apartment, a place in the Hamptons and private schools for their children. In other words, Moser’s wealth is subsidizing his wife’s career as a feminist author, even while she proclaims her enthusiasm for “Smashing the Patriarchy.”
One of the things wealth can buy is the kind of arrogance necessary to think you’re invincible, and Joel Moser might imagine that he can never suffer any real harm from his wife’s anti-male ideology. How else to explain why he keeps paying the bills while she writes stuff like this?
“You should have an affair if you want,” my husband of 17 years said with a yawn, as we were getting ready for bed one night, “for your research.”
He was referring to the work I’d been doing for my book about female infidelity. . . .
I’ve come to believe that all couples should talk more openly about their craving for sex outside the relationship. Why? Well, for starters, despite the fact that the accepted cultural norm is monogamy, our society has a sky-high rate of undisclosed infidelity. . . . If monogamy is so damn hard, why do we keep trying to pull it off?
Thus did Joel Moser’s wife admit she has a “craving for sex outside the relationship” and, in a remarkable feat of psychological projection, asserts that this is a problem of the inclusive “we,” affecting “all couples” in “our society,” contrary to “the accepted cultural norm.” In other words, if you say you’re happy in your marriage and have no interest in cheating, Wednesday Martin is calling you a liar and a hypocrite.
At risk of unnecessarily elongating a post that’s already more than 1,000 words, let me briefly reiterate a point I’ve made before: There is reason some things are called “fantasies,” because if you tried to do them in real life, bad things would happen. Yes, a man might fondly imagine having his own private island populated by nubile sex slaves willing to satisfy his carnal cravings, but even if he had the money to make that fantasy come true, he would be prosecuted on federal sex-trafficking charges and, it should not be necessary to add, Epstein did not kill himself.
Every time I read headlines about some polygamist cult leader — David Koresh, Keith Raniere, various “fundamentalist Mormon” types — I think to myself, yeah, that might be cool, except for such downsides as having to arm yourself with AK-47s and dying in a fire at your cult compound. Besides which, cult leaders are always described as “charismatic,” and I’ve always suffered from a charisma deficiency. Even while acknowledging the appeal of polygamy as a fantasy, you see, objective analysis leads me to consider it impractical in real life, even if I cared nothing about the moral considerations involved.
The essence of her argument in this book is that women are naturally lustful seekers of sexual adventure, and that marriage is a patriarchal prison, created by men seeking to deprive women of their right to fulfill their their needs. This is just a reiteration of every “pro-sex” feminist argument, dressed up with “New Science” claims. Ever since the 1960s, feminists have been denouncing marriage as a sexist institution that benefits men and oppresses women, and you might think that decades of such argumentation would separate women into two categories:
Women who want husbands and children;
and
Feminists, who believe all babies should be aborted.
Alas, there are some women who don’t understand why feminist ideology can never be reconciled with marriage and motherhood, and some men who can’t understand why they should avoid feminists.
Christmas is a time for tradition — bringing a tree into the house, midnight mass, giving gifts… and being repeatedly encouraged to cheat on your husband by a respected, small-c conservative national newspaper.
This is a tradition in the sense that 2019 is the second festive season in a row where British broadsheet newspaper the Daily Telegraph — which enjoys a strong legacy reputation as being the standard-bearer for the intelligent, conservative right in the United Kingdom — has bombarded its male social media followers with messages to encourage their wives to cheat on them as a Christmas present.
The December 2018 article Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas was ridiculed on social media when it was first published over a year ago as being so apparently totally out of character with the newspaper. Essentially an extended advertisement for a book whose author’s quotes on freeing women from their husbands makes up the majority of the copy, the article also cites societal decline as proof of the central thesis of the work. . . .
Perhaps the most mystifying thing about Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas is the Telegraph’s loyal and dogged promotion of it, apparently out of all proportion for a humble book-plug and of all times, especially around Christmas. Having originally fired this ode to polyamory into the Twittersphere on December 7th 2018, the experiment was repeated again on December 11th of that year.
Apparently not satisfied that London Christmas cocktail parties last year hadn’t descended into unending orgies of other people’s wives, whoever runs the Telegraph social media accounts gave it another swing this year, with Tweets promoting the story with a variety of pro-infidelity messages cropping up on November 2nd 2019, November 7th, November 16th, and finally December 16th.
The article being promoted is an enthusiastic feature interview with Wednesday Martin about her pro-adultery book and the Telegraph was actually paying Twitter for this promotion. Why?
Immoral people always encourage immorality. Perverts are never satisfied with merely having liberty to pursue their perversion. Instead, they seek to normalize their sexual abnormality, which is why Wednesday Martin would have us believe “we” are all complicit in her adulterous desires. The problem is not her, but “our society.” It is wrong, according to Martin, to expect people to keep their marriage vows, because she experiences “craving for sex outside the relationship.” It should be acceptable for her to seek fulfillment for her craving — no one should condemn her adulterous lust — and, therefore, we must make it normal for married people to cheat on their spouses. Everybody should become “swingers,” in order to make Wednesday Martin feel OK.
Are we to believe that Joel Moser is not embarrassed by the obvious implication of his wife’s argument? It would be fair for any intelligent reader to assume that Moser is not exactly Mister Excitement in the bedroom. How else to explain his wife’s sexual dissatisfaction? Contrary to what Wednesday Martin argues at length, any observant person will perceive that, in general, male demand for sex exceeds the female supply. After all, any reasonably attractive young woman can earn hundreds of dollars a day as a prostitute, whereas male prostitution is rare, and the clientele are gay men. If women have such a “craving” for sex, why aren’t they willing to pay for it? What is true in the macroeconomic sense is usually replicated at the level of individual relationships, i.e., husbands generally want sex more often than do their wives, and one entirely predictable challenges of married life is finding some way to reconcile this typical imbalance of desire. Personally, I would suspect a man must have some kind of problem if his wife were complaining she’s not getting enough sex. So what are we to assume about the Moser-Martin marriage?
Does Joel Moser not understand the damage his feminist wife’s writing inflicts on his reputation? Or does he simply not care? It is difficult for me to imagine why any man would endure such insulting treatment, much less pay for it, but kinky is as kinky does, I suppose.
Not going to lie, I’m ambivalent about taking tomorrow off. On the one hand, I don’t want to hang around the barracks all day waiting for Christmas dinner, but on the other hand, just about everything’s going to be closed, so I’ll have to schlep to the other side of the Strip if I want to do any posting. On the gripping hand, hanging out at McDonald’s by the Outlet Mall banging on the keyboard is going to take gas and some pocket change. So bribe me. If I get $20 in the tip jar tomorrow, I’ll get rolling and post links. If not, well, one must obey the will of the commentariat, up to a point. While I’m at it, thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links this month. It has clearly been a good month for buying stuff!
