The Other McCain

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

CPAC 2019: #FightOn Video

Posted on | February 28, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC 2019: #FightOn Video

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Today, after the national anthem opened CPAC proceedings in the Potomac Ballroom, they played a five-minute video that captures what it is that conservatives are fighting for, and what we are fighting against. The video was so popular that CPAC officials received requests to make it publicly available on YouTube.

 

Very nice. #FightOn indeed.

 

Category: CPAC

CPAC: Another Day, Another Deadline

Posted on | February 28, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC: Another Day, Another Deadline

 

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
After I hit my deadline about midnight, I strolled down Fleet Street to The Public House, where I was hailed by a guy who was talking to a group of college Republicans attending their first CPAC. “This is Stacy McCain — he’s been at 14 consecutive CPACs,” said the guy, whose name I had forgotten, but who knew me from back in the Tea Party days. The college kids were part of a Leadership Institute (LI) group, and I made a joke about getting punched in the face — which is what happened to LI organizer Hayden Williams at Berkeley. The ongoing campus culture war is a topic that will be addressed here at CPAC by none other than Hayden Williams himself, and I was happy to talk to a few of these kids gathered outside The Public House, telling them stories like how I first met Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in 2007. But I digress . . .

Part of my predicament at CPAC is that I’m supposed to be doing actual journalism here, and this interferes with just having fun, which is what I’d rather be doing. Wednesday night, while everybody was out partying, I was holed up in my room trying to make sense of the notes I’d scrawled during the day and turn this into 800 words of Final Wisdom. You’d think, after all these years, it would get easier by constant practice, but it never really does. At 10 o’clock, I was around the 250-word and getting from there to 800 in two hours . . . Well, do the math. Yet I think I managed to produce something worth the effort:

Jacob Wohl is a 21-year-old Trump supporter from California who laughs at how much he’s hated by liberals: “Of course they hate me. I’m destroying everything they love.” Wohl is a political prodigy. Having started his first business while still in high school, he was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission when he was only 18 years old, an investigation he believes was a “Deep State” reprisal for his outspoken support of Trump during the 2016 campaign.
When we met in the lobby bar of the Gaylord Hotel on the first day of the 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I had no idea how notorious Wohl is. Just the previous day, he’d been banned from Twitter, where he had more than 180,000 followers, after bragging to USA Today about his plans to use fake accounts to play havoc in the 2020 presidential campaign. Basically, Wohl intends to use social media to influence Democrat primary voters into supporting fringe candidates with no chance of beating President Trump. Such mischief-making by private citizens is not illegal. Liberals have spent the past two years fuming over conspiracy theories about “Russian collusion” in the 2016 campaign, but there’s no law against Americans trying to influence election outcomes, or else everybody at CNN might be in federal prison. . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Now I have to take a shower then go back, Jack, and do it again.

 

Category: CPAC

In The Mailbox: 02.27.19

Posted on | February 28, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.27.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny:  The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #543
EBL: Polar Bear Day
Twitchy: Ben Shapiro, Andy Ngo, & Sally Kohn Talk Smolett & Fake Hate Crimes On Dr. Phil
Louder With Crowder: Project Veritas – Facebook Engineers Regularly “Deboost” Conservative Pages, Including Steven Crowder

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Be Careful What You Wish For, also, George Pell & The Australian Assault On Christianity
American Thinker: The Resistance Is Everything They Accuse Trump Of Being
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Interesting Video On Recovery, also, Pakistan Reportedly Shoots Down Indian Fighter
CDR Salamander: Keeping An Eye On The Long Game, Part LXXXI
Da Tech Guy: Why Do Hoaxers Hoax? also, Jorge Ramps Discovers The Real Thing
Don Surber: Another Day, Another 6500 Manufacturing Jobs
Dustbury: Fetch Some Of That Jollity Over Here
The Geller Report: Pelosi Condemns Antisemitism, Then Poses With Ilhan Omar For Rolling Stone, also, Paypal Depends On $PLC Directions To Censor Those Who Oppose The Left
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, CPAC 2019
Hollywood In Toto: What Woke Critics Completely Miss About Green Book, also, Boots Riley Props Up Venezuelan Dictator On Twitter
Joe For America: Florida & Texas Thrive While California & New York Collapse
JustOneMinute: Big Day
Legal Insurrection: 81-Year-Old NJ Man Attacked Over MAGA Hat, also, CO Gov Signs Away State’s Electoral College Votes To National Popular Vote As Eric Holder Cheers
Michelle Malkin: I’ve Been Silicon Valley Sharia’d
The PanAm Post: Maduro Released Prisoners To massacre Pemon Indians, also, Colombian Leftist Petro Claims Lima Group “Has Been Disrupted”
Power Line: Knitting – A Hotbed Of Racism? also, Trump’s Nork Policy Win Praise From Experts
Shark Tank: Trump Clowns “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal
Shot In The Dark: When Government Barbie Deigns To Acknowledge The Peasant, The Peasant Shall Be Acknowledged
STUMP: Chicago Runoff – Preckwinkle & Lightfoot
The Jawa Report: Jaish-e-Mohamed Haven In Pakistan Bombed
The Political Hat: Amy Klobuchar’s Salad Days
This Ain’t Hell: How To Spot Stolen Valor Cases Like Nathan Phillips, also, Phone Scam Leads To Soldier Suicide
Victory Girls: SCOTUS To Hear Maryland Peace Cross Case
Volokh Conspiracy: Denaturalizing Natural-Born Citizens
Weasel Zippers: Occasional Cortex Furious At Photos Of Her & Staffer Destroying The Planet With Burgers, also, Michael Cohen Talked With Adam Schiff About Topics To Coem Up In Hearing
Megan McArdle: Harris & Warren Are Wrong – We Shouldn’t Pay Reparations For Slavery
Mark Steyn: Sousaphoning It In, also, Oscar Ennui


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Category: Linkagery

CPAC 2019: Wednesday Scenes — Don’t Hate Me, I’m Only the Media

Posted on | February 27, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC 2019: Wednesday Scenes — Don’t Hate Me, I’m Only the Media

The National Affairs Desk for the next four days.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Just after 2:30 p.m. today my son dropped me off in front of the hotel and I checked into my room, unloaded my luggage and immediately went over to pick up my media credentials for CPAC. Even though the sign said check-in wouldn’t begin until 4 p.m., they were already issuing credentials and the line was forming up. Fortunately, I’d brought the email confirmation with a bar-code, so all I had to do was scan that in, show my ID and — zoom! — I was off, an official member of the media.

 

Which isn’t really an honor. Americans hate the media, and I don’t really blame them. American journalism is a disgrace, and its practitioners deserve all the opprobrium heaped upon our collective head.

With the legendary Phil Kent.

Immediately upon leaving the media check-in, I ran into my old friend Phil Kent, who used to be Strom Thurmond’s press secretary back in the day, became a regular at the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and on the popular statewide politics show The Georgia Gang. He runs Inside Advantage and, like all great Americans, is hate-listed by the SPLC.

 

The line for CPAC registration was out the door.

Is CPAC attendance up or down this year? I have no idea, and don’t actually care. Whatever the trend may be, there are thousands of people in attendance, and it’s the biggest gathering of conservatives in the country. And there are lots of cool people here besides me and Phil.

Say hello to Rick Harrison of ‘Pawn Stars.’

After I’d completed my media sign-in, I headed outside to have a smoke, turned the corner and there in the smoking area was History Channel star Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars fame. He’s a big Trump supporter and will speak Thursday here at CPAC. Rick was talking to a couple of “Angel Parents” whose kids were killed by illegal aliens. One of them was Steve Ronnebeck, whose son Grant was a convenience store clerk murdered over a pack of cigarettes in 2015 by Apolinar Altamirano, a criminal who was facing deportation but had been released from federal custody.

The handsome and charming Jacob Wohl.

Old guy interviewing Jacob Wohl.

I met up with friends, including podcast partner John Hoge, for dinner and found myself talking to Jacob Wohl, a 21-year-old Trump supporter who just got banned from Twitter yesterday. I had no idea how notorious Jacob was until I came back to the National Affairs Desk and started Googling him. He was banned from Twitter after giving an interview to USA Today in which he described his plans to troll the 2020 election.

Student activists gather around Turning Point USA leaders.

After dinner, I headed downstairs where there was a reception, but quite by accident stumbled upon an interesting scene, where about 150 college students were gathered around for a pep talk from leaders of Turning Point USA. So if you want to get punched in the face . . .

Well, I’m credentialed as a correspondent for The American Spectator, and that midnight deadline isn’t going to meet itself, so I’ll have to get cracking on that part of the job now. Ciao.



 

Category: CPAC, Shoe Leather Fund

CPAC 2019: Great Minds Think Alike

Posted on | February 27, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC 2019: Great Minds Think Alike

 

Tuesday night, while I was working on my latest American Spectator column, I kept getting distracted because my office TV was tuned to the A&E Network’s documentary The Trump Dynasty. On the one hand, this was entertaining and informative. I did not realize, for example, that Trump’s grandfather was a German immigrant who made his fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush. And there was also the information, from a 2014 interview with Trump, that he understands his own success to be significantly influenced by heredity. Seeing life as a Darwinian struggle, Trump believes himself to benefit from genetic superiority. And why shouldn’t he? He is 6-foot-3, which puts him in the 97th percentile of U.S. males, and he is phenomenally healthy. At age 72, he’s never had any heart problems, and if you watch the A & E documentary, you’ll see footage of Trump as a young man in the 1970s to remind you what a remarkable physical specimen he was in his prime, with the fine white teeth of a carnivore and the calm blue eyes of a natural-born killer.

Oh, that word — “killer” — was a compliment in the vocabulary of Trump’s father Fred, a remarkably successful real-estate developer. Fred was one tough taskmaster of a dad, and young Donald was sent to military school because of his unruly behavior. The son learned to appreciate his father’s qualities and, after becoming president of the family business, famously sought to make a name for himself in Manhattan, acquiring a valued mentor, Roy Cohn.

This is where the flaws in A&E’s telling of the Trump tale became apparent to me. In recounting Cohn’s early years as an attorney on the staff of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the producers repeat the liberal myth that McCarthy wrongly accused people and invented Communist conspiracies “from whole cloth.” Anyone who has read M. Stanton Evans’s excellent 2007 book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, knows that this is a smear. McCarthy had his flaws, and he made some mistakes, but there really was a national-security problem with Communists and their sympathizers employed in sensitive government jobs, and McCarthy’s investigations unearthed real evidence of this problem.

If they get the McCarthy thing wrong, how many other things did the A&E producers get wrong? As I say, there was a lot in the show that fascinated me — and distracted me from my work — but this glaring error of their smear against McCarthy undermined their credibility.

This morning, Instapundit linked a column by Donald Trump Jr. in which he discussed the media’s demonization of his father’s supporters:

When there’s violence against Trump supporters because of their political beliefs, the media will ignore it until they can’t, and then they’ll downplay it. If that fails, they’ll just proclaim that the Trump supporters had it coming to them because of the “climate of hate” that their political views create.

Yes, and weirdly enough, that’s exactly the point I was laboring to get across in the column I was working on last night:

President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have both been announced as speakers at this week’s 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but I don’t expect to be inside the Gaylord Hotel’s Potomac Ballroom for those speeches. Presidential security is heavy duty, with lines to get through the metal detectors and lots of muscular guys with ear-pieces and holster bulges standing around looking very serious. Instead of dealing with security hassles and ballroom crowds, I’ll be out in front of the Gaylord watching the left-wing protest mobs that predictably show up wherever the president goes. The fact that CPAC is in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside D.C., makes it a short trip for Washington-based protesters, but Joseph Alcoff probably won’t be there.
Alcoff was a reputed leader of Smash Racism DC, an “Antifa” contingent blamed for mobbing the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson last November and running Texas Sen. Ted Cruz out of a restaurant in September. Last month, however, authorities in Philadelphia filed 17 charges against Alcoff for his alleged role in an attack on two Marines. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

Now I’ve got to get packed up for my trip. Yesterday, I sent emails to two dozen tip-jar hitters, thanking them for their contributions and explaining that my wife’s going to hit the roof when she sees my hotel bill for CPAC. The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 


 

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump

Cohen to Testify Before Congress

Posted on | February 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Cohen to Testify Before Congress

Here’s the headline stack on top of the Drudge Report:

Cohen to Testify That Trump Engaged in Criminal Conduct While in Office... 
Plans to Provide Evidence... 
Will describe president's 'lies, racism and cheating as private businessman'... 
New details? 
Echoes of Watergate...
Congressman 'threatens' Cohen over 'girlfriends'...
RNC: Have fun in prison!
Curtain rises on 3 days of drama...
VIEWING GUIDE... 
CONGRESS CALLS WITNESS CONVICTED OF LYING TO CONGRESS... 

Also these two banners:

RATFEST ON CAP HILL

COHEN READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP

Well, I don’t what Cohen will say or what impact it will have.

My expectation is a big media noise, with little result.

 

Category: Congress, Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 02.26.19

Posted on | February 26, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.26.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Left Thinks We Should Feel Sorry For Smollett
EBL: Remember Iwo Jima, also, Desperately Seeking QAnon
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex Just Noticed Se. Cornyn’s Mussolini Quote
Louder With Crowder: Watch Citizens Eating Out Of Garbage Truck In Socialist Paradise Of Venezuela, also, ABC Disney Pulls Louder With Crowder’s Oscars Live Stream – Now It’s War!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – No Country For White Men Edition, also, Greasy Pole Podcast #11 – The Binary Breast Diabled Toilet Episode
American Power: Air Force Is Buying New F-15s, also, The Green New Mess
American Thinker: Boys Will Be Boys, Except When They Are Girls
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Conscription News
BattleSwarm: Indian Airstrikes Hit Pakistan, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Afghanistan & The Long War With Bill Roggio, also, No ENS For LCS
Da Tech Guy: Non-Tweets Under The Fedora For 2/25, also, The Reparations Insanity At Its Core
Don Surber: Why They Hate Green Book, also, Now We Know Why The MAGA Hat Upset Her
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, News From Uncanny Valley
The Geller Report: “Palestinians” Uproot Trees Planted In Memory Of Jewish Girl Raped & Killed By Jihadi, also, Argentina’s Chief Rabbi In Serious Condition After Being brutally Beaten In His Own Home
Hogewash: Dead Naming, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Office Space At 20  – Why It’s As Relevant As Ever
Joe For America: Five House Democrats Took A $60,000 Trip To See Beyonce In South Africa, Paid For By Non-Profit Lobbyists
JustOneMinute: Brexit Fog
Legal Insurrection: Woman Who Attacked MAGA Hat Wearer Turns Out To be An Illegal, Now In ICE Custody, also, Police Believe LGBT Activist Burned Own House Down, Killed Pets For Attention
The PanAm Post: Police Loyal To Maduro Burn Trucks Bearing Humanitarian Aid, also, Sanders Sides With Maduro, Not Venezuelan People
Power Line: In Venezuela, The End Game Approaches, also, Neomi Rao & The Abortion Issue
Shark Tank: FL Congressmen Tapped To Lead RLCC
Shot In The Dark: Conundrum
STUMP:  Presidential Mortality, also, Taxing Tuesday
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile On Tatooine
The Political Hat: NV Poised To Allow Hospitals To Tell You To FOAD, also, Does Time Grow Short For Maduro?
This Ain’t Hell: Retirees Can Be Court-Martialed For Crimes Committed After Service, also, Funeral For Former Vietnam MIA Lt. Richard Lannom
Victory Girls: CNN Soils Its Frilly Panties At An Acting SECDEF Actually Shooting Something, also, Four Lessons Hollywood Still Hasn’t Learned, And Won’t
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Court Rules Male-Only Draft Registration Is Unconstitutional
Weasel Zippers: Biological Male Is Top-Ranked NCAA Women’s Track Star, also, WI Governor Orders Guard Troops Back From Mexican Border
Mark Steyn: The Tinge Of Fake Hate, also, The Continental


Category: Linkagery

SJWs Ruin Everything: Knitting Bloggers in Meltdown Mode Over ‘Social Justice’

Posted on | February 26, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

What does knitting have to do with politics? Nothing that I can think of, except that everything is political to “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who constantly patrol the Internet in search of something to be angry about.

Kathrine Jebsen Moore at Quillette tells the amazing story of how Karen Templer, a popular figure among online knitting enthusiasts, became a target of SJW rage after she wrote a blog post expressing her excitement about a planned trip to India. This drew a comment from a guy named Alex Klein, who accused Templer of expressing “a colonial/imperialist mindset.” You’ve got to have your “social justice” radar tuned to an astonishingly high frequency to find offense in a middle-aged woman’s writing on a knitting blog, but Klein’s comment seems to have started an avalanche of SJW snowflakes. When another online knitting enthusiast, Maria Tusken, criticized the Internet mob attack on Templer, the mob then turned its rage against Tusken. This is how what’s known as “call-out culture” turns into something like the Red Guards in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Anyone who objects to the ritual of public denunciation becomes a suspect, accused of “wrong” beliefs, and targeted in the ongoing purge. Kate Heppell, editor of a British knitting magazine, denounced Tusken for questioning the “call-out” of Templer:

 

The word for this is insanity. Karen Templer never wrote anything “racist” on her blog, and Maria Tusken did not use “hate speech” in defending Templer against false accusations of racism. The entire controversy originated with Templer talking about her trip to India, a country she had dreamed of visiting since childhood. Once the SJW mob got riled up, however, this led to a competition to make the most emphatic denunciation of the “colonial/imperialist mindset” Templer was accused of exhibiting, and anyone who criticized this mob became a target suspected of sympathizing with Templer’s allegedly wrong beliefs.

Kathrine Jebsen Moore says:

In an age in which freedom of speech seems to be under attack in many different spheres of society, heretics to the progressive creed find themselves persecuted ad nauseam by a choir of the self-righteous. This kind of vindictive activism has been described by Jordan Peterson as a hunt for people who dare to disagree. “What’s happening on the radical end of the political spectrum is not good. But the conservatives are too afraid. They’re afraid they will be targeted as individuals, mobbed by the social justice warriors, and taken out,” he said in an interview with the Epoch Times. The writer and activist James Lindsay, meanwhile, told me that campaigns like these are simply “a power grab thinly clothed as a civil rights movement.” . . .
People’s livelihoods are being credibly threatened by this kind of behaviour. “You can be bullied and destroyed,” Tusken told me.

You can’t even be a knitting blogger anymore unless you endorse and promote this kind of insane “social justice” activism.



 

Category: Racism
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