Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: The Broke Wokeness of Anita Sarkeesian

Posted on | June 23, 2019 | 2 Comments

Remember when the name “Anita Sarkeesian” was influential? When the feminist commissar was named to Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council”? The anti-male hatemonger rose to fame from 2012 to 2016 by demonizing men in the videogame industry and claiming to be a victim of sexist harassment. In 2014, the year of the #GamerGate controversy, Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency project raised more than $400,000 and, over a five-year-period, her organization raised nearly $1.6 million. Yet as Brad Glasgow explains in a remarkable YouTube video, Sarkeesian’s non-profit is now essentially bankrupt, having begun the year with a balance of barely $30,000 and laying off its employees:

John Sexton at Hot Air calls attention to a recent profile of Sarkeesian at the videogame blog Polygon, which is interesting in terms of confirming pretty much everything you’d expect about her, for example that she has always hated America. She was 15 when her immigrant family moved from Canada to Orange County, California, and instead of being happy — sunshine! beaches! palm trees! — Sarkeesian was miserable and angry:

“I went hard into counterculture. . . . I liked anything that was angry. I didn’t like anything that was normal.”

The teenage misfit never grew up, extending her adolescent tantrums into adulthood by protesting against the Iraq War in college:

“There were rooms where the Anarchists would meet across the hall from where the Marxists would meet and they didn’t get along,” she says. “I didn’t know any of the philosophy or politics behind any of this stuff, so I started reading a lot more political theory.”
“I learned about public speaking and audience analysis and understanding what gets people emotionally engaged,” she adds. “I ended up doing a lot of organizing; spending time in horribly ventilated back-rooms, having meetings and discussions.” . . .
Sarkeesian gained a bachelor’s degree in communications studies at California State. Her work was increasingly focused on economic theory and alternatives to modern capitalism.
She then moved to New York, where she once again joined forces with political action groups, while working various jobs.
“I got really interested in performance and guerrilla theater as a mode of activism,” she says. “I supported nonviolent direct actions. . . .
“We would figure out how to send out press releases, and how to get the media to cover this. He worked on crafting our message. I was interested in getting the message out there.”
Sarkeesian did not want the protestors’ actions to go unnoticed. “You can do a die-in in front of the [military] recruiter’s office, but it doesn’t matter if only three people see it. You need to get more people to see it.” . ..
Sarkeesian recalls attending workshops and group meetings and speeches by activists like Noam Chomsky. “I had already been politicized but I realized then that this is a life of work that people commit themselves to doing,” she says.
She began to focus more on feminist ideas. “I had done all this work on economic theory but I literally had no idea about identity politics. So I started learning about feminism.” She linked up with women who had been activists since the Vietnam era, who had experienced hostility and marginalization from male protest leaders. She listened to the stories of how women had to force their way into the conversation, sometimes storming the stage.
“The thing about the activist’s life is there are a lot of meetings,” she says. “You’re sitting on these conference calls with a hundred people. There’s all this sectarian politics and all this strife. It’s just the same bulls–t that is everywhere else. I was watching these young people reproduce the same systems as white, male-dominated spaces.”

So, she hates males, she hates white people, she hates the military, she hates capitalism — why would you give money to such a person? And of course, the money she raised was squandered to no good purpose, concluding with the same misfit attitude she began with:

But she knows that the job of educating game-makers about representation is far from over. “There is progress being made, but I struggle with how to talk about it. It’s like a pendulum swinging: This one thing is great, and then, oh, this other thing is shitty.
“When we talk about, oh, we solved the problem, we’re moving forward … no, we haven’t even begun to solve the problem. We’re just taking the next step to the greater vision. I’m always trying to remind people to look at the vision of what we’re fighting for. Understanding that helps influence how we work. It influences how we tell our stories and what stories we want to tell. It influences students coming out of school and the careers and jobs that they want.”
Part of the problem is that many of those who are willing to be persuaded have been persuaded. And those who are not will never come around. “They’re either not paying attention to the conversation or they are, and they’re on the other side of it. And I don’t like talking about it as a ‘sides’ thing. Because you either care about the humanity of people or you don’t. That’s the side you’re on.”

Despite wasting $1.6 million, Sarkeesian “hasn’t even begun to solve the problem,” and if you disagree with her, that’s because you don’t “care about the humanity of people.” Is anyone really surprised that sane people don’t want to support this fanatical ideologue?

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Space Age Love Song

Posted on | June 23, 2019 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Space Age Love Song

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Tuesday: Halle Berry
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Hermione Granger At The Marco Polo Bridge
EBL

Marianne Williamson Will Share DNC Debate Stage With Biden and Bernie
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Welcome To The Club
A View From The Beach
EBL

Naming Names
EBL

LGBT Totalitarians Lose Again
Living In Anglo-America
357 Magnum
EBL

Horny Teacher Sentenced to Prison
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.17.19
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.18.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Trump Launches Re-Election Campaign With Monster Rally in Orlando
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

‘Parents Would Be Wise to Monitor the Activity of Their Children Online’
Dark Brightness
EBL

He Survived Two Tours of Afghanistan, But Then His Crazy Wife Killed Him
Dark Brightness
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.19.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Dear Democrats: Please Nominate the Notorious Gaffe Machine Joe Biden
EBL

‘All the Leaves Are Brown …’
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.20.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran
EBL

Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.21.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending June 21:

EBL (19)
A View From The Beach (9)
Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The Fake Ukrainian Ledger Angle: How the Media Colluded With the ‘Deep State’

Posted on | June 22, 2019 | Comments Off on The Fake Ukrainian Ledger Angle: How the Media Colluded With the ‘Deep State’

Look at the date on that New York Times story — how did it happen that, in August 2016, Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau” took an interest in Donald Trump’s campaign manager and these reporters had no trouble finding sources in Kiev telling them all about these “ledgers”? What that just a coincidence? Or does it seem to you more likely, as Ace of Spades suggests, that this story was about protecting the interests of the U.S. political establishment?

Remember, it was critical to Hillary Clinton that the FBI have active investigations opened into the Trump campaign, because she had a high profile investigation into her own actions, and she desperately needed to be able to play the They Do It Too Card.

Do you believe in coincidences like that? A powerful politician needs to smear her opponent and — oh, what a coincidence! — sources direct reporters for the New York Times to the Ukraine, where investigators cite a “secret ledger” that appears to prove wrongdoing by the opponent’s campaign manager. Well, guess what? Three years later, we discover that (a) the “ledger” was probably a forgery, and (b) the FBI was actively engaged in feeding this stuff to the media:

In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources. . . .
Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016. . . .
[T]he FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger — which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence — and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia == including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort — Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign,” the July 25, 2017, FBI agent’s affidavit stated.
Three months later, the FBI went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.
“The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger,’ ” an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit.
There are two glaring problems with that assertion.
First, the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.
An FBI record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine.
So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.
Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show.

So, Manafort was forced to resign from the campaign after someone fed this fake “secret ledger” story to the New York Times and then, in order to justify search warrants for Manafort’s bank records, the FBI leaks more “secret ledger” stories to the media, then cites those stories as “evidence” to claim probably cause on the warrant application. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me the people responsible for this need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of “Deep State” stuff — government bureaucrats acting improperly to exercise a corrupt political infleunce, and exploiting the news media in the process — is why every American should be glad Hillary lost. If she had won, we never would have learned what kind of shenanigans were going on at the FBI.

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias, MuellerGate, Ukraine

The Worst #MeToo Smear Yet

Posted on | June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

Imagine you’re a famous billionaire real estate developer. Now imagine you’ve got nothing better to do than to hang around department stores, raping magazine columnists in dressing rooms:

President Donald Trump strongly denounced an allegation of sexual assault from author E. Jean Carroll on Friday, saying that he never met the woman in his life.
“I’ve never met this person in my life,” Trump said in a statement sent to reporters. “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
Carroll published an excerpt of her story in New York Magazine claiming that Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995. Bergdorf Goodman confirmed that they had no surveillance video of the alleged incident.
Carroll is now 75, is an advice columnist for Elle, and wrote magazine features for Playboy and Esquire.
Trump noted that there was no pictures, no surveillance, no video, no reports, and no sales representatives who could prove the assault.
“It’s just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence,” Trump said. “Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news — it’s an epidemic.”
Trump also denounced false rape accusations for diminishing the seriousness of real assault cases.
“If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible,” Trump wrote. “The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.”

The media have called attention to photos showing Carroll in attendance at a 1995 event with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which would seem to refute his claim that he “never met this person,” but so what? Trump is a famous guy who meets lots of people, and he can’t remember all of them. Besides which, Carroll claims their encounter happened in midtown Manhattan, not Palm Beach, Florida. My hunch is that this story, which got saturation coverage on CNN and MSNBC yesterday, will have zero political impact. Only people who already hate Trump will believe it, and everybody else will see it as further evidence that the #MeToo movement has become a witch hunt. Even if you believe Jean Carroll is telling the truth, how convenient is it that she saves the story of this alleged felony for a book published nearly 25 years afterwards?

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 06.21.19

Posted on | June 22, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Knowledge Buffet: The Last Straw – The When Of Making Ourselves Ungovernable
EBL: Illegal Alien Gets Nine Months For Rape, Gets Released Without Notice To ICE Or Victim – And Rapes Her Again
Twitchy: Michael Moore Warns Left About Trump’s Base Ahead Of The 2020 Elections
Louder With Crowder: AOC & Democrats’ Five Insane Holocaust Comparisons, also, Condoleeza Rice Has No Time For NBC Reporter’s Race Baiting
According To Hoyt: “But For Wales, Richard?”
Monster Hunter Nation: My Russian Bot Review Of The Last Jedi
Vox Popoli: Mailvox – We Have An Answer

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: How SJWs Treat Their Own, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Get On With It Edition
American Greatness: We Need A Higher Education Reformation
American Power: David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars
American Thinker: Liberals’ National Popular Vote Scheme Is Unconstitutional & Dangerous
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Bigfoot Friday
Babalu Blog: Brazil’s Bolsonaro Investigating Questionable Loans To Cuba, Venezuela By National Bank
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For June 21, also, Texas Sends 1000 National Guardsmen To Border To Address Illegal Alien Surge
CDR Salamander: Cooling’s Last Stand, also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The Best Fight Is Living Your Life In The Real World
Don Surber: The Art Of The Iranian Deal, also, WSJ Pouts About The Donald
Dustbury: Dissociated Press
First Street Journal: Roy Moore Wants To Re-Elect Doug Jones
The Geller Report: Polish MP Challenges Occasional Cortex To Visit Hitler’s REAL Concentration Camps, also, Two Chicago Muslims Convicted Of Aiding & Abetting ISIS
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Bonus Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Riverdale Creator – How I Made Archie Matter Again
JustOneMinute: California Dreamin’ Comes East
Legal Insurrection: Portland, OR Using Boulders To Deter Homeless Camps, also, David Gibson Kept Fighting Oberlin So His Dad Wouldn’t Die “Being Labeled A Racist”
The PanAm Post: Bachelet’s Useless Visit To Venezuela Could Have Been Conducted Via Skype
Power Line: Thoughts From The Ammo Line, also, The Times Tips The FBI
Shark Tank: Another Sex Abuse Claim At Miami Migrant Center
Shot In The Dark: The Problem…
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Avant Garde
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, The Navy Needs To Return To Subic Bay
Victory Girls: Hope Hicks Testimony Makes The Democrats Look Foolish
Volokh Conspiracy: SCOTUS Overrules Catch-22 For Property Owners Trying To Bring Takings Cases
Weasel Zippers: Judge Appoints Special Prosecutor To Examine Handling Of Smollett Case, also, University Of Oregon Students Claim “Oppression” From Pioneer Statue, Demand Its Removal
Mark Steyn: A True North Stronger & Freer, also, Working It Out

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Category: Linkagery

Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion

Posted on | June 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion

The editors of Mosaic deserve tremendous credit for publishing “The Death of Morton Sobell and the End of the Rosenberg Affair,” by David Evanier, and two responses, “Few American Jews Were Communists, and Many Fewer Were Spies,” by Harvey Klehr, and “Why It’s Necessary to Bring Jewish Communism into Full View,” by Ruth Wisse.

These essays help provide a factual understanding of a complex phenomenon that most historians and journalists have tried to avoid, with the result that silence and ignorance have given rise to paranoia. You cannot suppress anti-Semitism by avoiding unfortunate facts, and the fact is that Communists used false accusations of anti-Semitism as part of their propaganda efforts against the United States during the Cold War. Yes, there were a disproportionate number of Jews involved in the CPUSA, and many Jewish Communists (including Morton Sobell and the Rosenbergs) were also among those engaged in Soviet espionage. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the crimes of Hitler still a very fresh memory, the Soviets and their CPUSA henchmen cleverly exploited this to their advantage, accusing American anti-Communists of being Jew-hating “fascists” while proclaiming the innocence of the Rosenbergs and other Soviet spies. As Wisse points out, this Big Lie isn’t just some remote historical controversy, but it has consequences down to this very day, persuading many Jewish Americans that they must always identify with those allegedly “oppressed” by American society. Furthermore, because our universities and media institutions have been unwilling to address this topic directly, they have unwittingly given aid and comfort to anti-Semites, who love to depict Jews as inherently subversive, while claiming that powerful Jews use their influence to conceal the extent of this subversion.

To depict all Jews, collectively, as responsible for the bad actions of a minority within their community, is the kind of guilt-by-association smear that ought never to be tolerated. The truth is the only possible antidote to such smears, and this means we have to be able to acknowledge unpleasant truths that we might prefer to sweep under the rug. It’s a simple fact that the Communist Party included a lot of Jews, as Harvey Klehr makes clear:

Although Jews made up a disproportionate share of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) — perhaps as much as 40 percent in 1939 — the party itself never held more than 100,000 members. So, in an American Jewish population of several million, a tiny percentage were Communists. . . .
In 1945, three of the six people arrested in the Amerasia case, the first espionage case of the cold war, were Jewish. (None was ever successfully prosecuted for spying.) In 1947, six of the Hollywood Ten who on First Amendment grounds refused to answer questions when subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) were Jewish. In 1949, five of the eleven top leaders of the CPUSA convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the American government were Jewish. In the 1948 presidential election, Henry Wallace, formerly FDR’s vice-president now running on the Progressive ticket with Communist backing, drew only a little more than a million votes altogether; but, by one estimate, about a third of American Jewish voters, a much larger percentage than the number of Jews in the CPUSA, cast their ballots for him.

In other words, if you were concerned about Communism circa 1947-49, a certain level of suspicion toward Jews was justified, even though the vast majority of Jews were not Communists. And to look at the obverse of the case, it might be that an ordinary Jew-hater would engage in anti-Communist rhetoric as a way to promote his pet prejudice, but this certainly doesn’t mean that every anti-Communist was a Jew-hater.

You cannot protect the innocent by denying the guilt of the guilty. You cannot solve a social problem by pretending it doesn’t exist, by minimizing it, justifying it or rationalizing it. Communism was a grave threat to constitutional liberty in America, and to U.S. national security, and the role of Jews in supporting Communism needs to be confronted soberly by historians, especially by Jewish historians. One thing I like to point out, whenever anti-Semitism rears its ugly head in discussions of the Cold War, is that while the Rosenbergs were Jews, the federal judge who sentenced them to death, Judge Irving Kaufman, was also Jewish.

Part of the problem is that Cold War history is either ignored in our schools, or taught from a pro-Communist perspective, recycling Soviet propaganda claims about the irrational “paranoia” of the 1950s, with “McCarthyism” made to seem a greater menace than Stalinism. Young people generally know nothing about the Bolshevik Revolution or the atrocities committed by Communist regimes. Sympathetic portrayals of accused Communists as being victims of a right-wing “witch hunt” in the 1950s are part of a liberal mythology that Jeanne Kirkpatrick once summarized succinctly: “They always blame America first.”

To augment that mythology by falsely accusing anti-Communists of anti-Semitism is dangerous for several reasons, particularly because Jew-haters are likely to exploit this for their own purposes, and the editors of Mosaic deserve credit for taking direct aim at this myth.

Category: History

Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

Posted on | June 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

If true, this is good news:

Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been the president’s third military action against targets in the Middle East. Mr. Trump had struck twice at targets in Syria, in 2017 and 2018.
It was not clear whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials. No government officials asked The New York Times to withhold the article.
The retaliation plan was intended as a response to the shooting down of the unmanned, $130 million surveillance drone, which was struck Thursday morning by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the military planning and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.
The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians.
But military officials received word a short time later that the strike was off, at least temporarily.

My hunch is that this report is true, and that the reason a “senior administration official” would share this information with the media is because President Trump wants Iran to know how close they were to getting hammered. The president approved the strike and then decided against it — we were this close to war, and Iran really doesn’t want that.