The Other McCain

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

News Media: Our Moral Superiors

Posted on | March 20, 2019 | Comments Off on News Media: Our Moral Superiors

 

David Sirota is a “journalist” in the same sense that George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are “journalists,” i.e., Democrat political operatives employed by the liberal media. Like all members of the media elite, journalists think of themselves as Our Moral Superiors. They’re better than us, and expect us to be grateful for their tutelage, as they condescend to share their enlightenment with us.

In his role as a columnist for The Guardian, Sirota played the grassroots populist, taking aim at “corporate-friendly Democrats” who “protect the status quo and serve corporate donors,” naming two potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidates — Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — among these villains. In December, Sirota twice wrote Guardian columns attacking Beto O’Rourke, first for having “frequently voted for Republican legislation” in Congress and then for being the favored candidate of “Washington elites.”

Remember, David Sirota is morally superior to you and me. He cares about the Little People. He’s got journalistic ethics:

Shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters, urging them to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents — talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.”
What he didn’t include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online.
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Sirota’s hiring as a senior adviser and speechwriter was announced by the Sanders campaign on Tuesday morning after The Atlantic contacted the campaign and inquired about the undisclosed role Sirota held while attacking other Democrats.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that Sirota had been in an advisory role prior to his hiring on March 11. “He was advising beforehand,” Shakir said, explaining that Sirota’s informal work for Sanders goes back months.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) In other words, Sirota has “informally” been a member of the Sanders campaign team since last fall and, while this doesn’t necessarily mean that Sanders was paying Sirota’s bills, it does mean that Sirota’s attacks on O’Rourke and other 2020 Democrat hopefuls were disingenuous and unethical, as his conflict of interest was undisclosed. Notice also that as soon as The Atlantic started asking questions, Sirota was “announced” as a campaign staffer. What this tells you is that Sirota’s services were considered sufficiently valuable to the Sanders campaign that they couldn’t afford to dump him, so they were forced to be honest about his role as a hired attack dog.

They are Our Moral Superiors.



 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election

In The Mailbox: 03.19.19

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.19.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Feast Of St. Joseph
Twitchy: Author Of Several Books On The Electoral College Not A Big Fan Of Mob Rule Or Stolen Elections
Louder With Crowder: Top Five Reasons We Need The Electoral College
Orange County Register: Chinese SF Writers Give Us A Glimpse Into Communist China’s Dystopian Present & Future (h/t The Political Hat)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Low Trust Societies
American Thinker: How Do We Know What We Know?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Policy Stunt News
Babalu Blog: Maduro Using Death Squads To Remain In Power, also, Cuba, Venezuela, & Nicaragua – The Caribbean’s New Devil’s Triangle
BattleSwarm: Betopalooza
Da Tech Guy: The Brains Of Your Children On Socialism, also, Mass Shootings – Journalists Are Accessories After The Fact
Don Surber: Google Learns The Power Of Suppress
Dustbury: The Undisputed King
First Street Journal: And Here We Go Again!
The Geller Report: Muslim Arrested In Second Toronto Bioweapon/Bomb Scare In As Many Days, also, President Restarts Effort To Defund Leftist Bastions NEA, NPR, PBS
Hogewash: Suing Twitter, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Yahoo Bullies Charlie Hunnam For Admiring Jordan Petersen
Joe For America: Did These Two Fox Hosts Conspire To Get Judge Pirro Suspended?
JustOneMinute: Monday Evening
Legal Insurrection: Pentagon Finds $12.8 Billion To Fund The Wall, also, Big SCOTUS Win For Trump On Detention Of Criminal Illegals.
The PanAm Post: FARC Dissident Groups Expand Criminal Empire From Venezuela
Power Line: The Uses Of Socialism, also, Kamala Harris Refused To Investigate Donor Herbalife
Shark Tank: President Trump Writes $100K Check To Homeland Security
Shot In The Dark: An Honest Browbeating
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Illinois Tax Persiflage
The Political Hat: The Ongoing Assault On The Second Amendment In Nevada
This Ain’t Hell: Vietnam Vet Wins 20-Year Fight Over Displaying Old Glory, also, American Taliban Fighter Scheduled For Release
Victory Girls: Is It Any Wonder Nobody Trusts The Media?
Volokh Conspiracy: MT Criminal Libel Statute Struck Down
Weasel Zippers: Polar Bear Population May Have Quadrupled Despite Al Gore’s Scaremongering, also, Murdoch Family To Launch New Fox, Hires Paul Ryan For Board
Megan McArdle: Mass Murderers Crave Publicity. Maybe Giving Them Less Would Be Helpful.
Mark Steyn: When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, also, Calling Out Around The World


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Category: Linkagery

The $100 Trillion Woman

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on The $100 Trillion Woman

 

Elizabeth Warren wants to spend, spend, spend:

Sen. Warren believes she knows the way into Americans’ hearts: Lots of government spending.
In her CNN townhall Monday night, Sen. Warren responded to almost every question with a proposed new government program.
Over the course of the 80 minute forum, Sen. Warren endorsed Medicare-for-All, slavery reparations, universal childcare, universal pre-K, “universal pre-pre-K,” the creation of 3 million new federal housing units, increasing infrastructure spending several times, forgiveness of student loan debt, and the Green New Deal.
Add it all up, and it’s more than $100 trillion.
Estimates range on Warren’s proposed spending plans, but the Green New Deal has alone been projected to cost at least $93 trillion; slavery reparations have previously been pegged at upward of $14 trillion; and Warren says her universal child care, universal pre-K, and universal pre-pre-K programs can be done for $3 trillion.

That bitch is crazy.

 

Category: Election, Elizabeth Warren

Reading Samizdat

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Reading Samizdat

This morning, I answered an email from a reader disappointed that I had linked the pickup artist (PUA) site Chateau Heartiste in my post about feminist Sophie Vershbow. The content of the post at Chateau Heartiste is anti-Semitic, and the comments on the post are even worse, and I replied to the reader’s email explaining that of course I do not endorse such sentiments. That post was linked on a “credit-where-credit-is-due” basis, because that’s where I’d learned of Ms. Vershbow’s existence, after searching for a certain PUA slang term. As I explained in my email: “The thing about Internet discourse is, if you don’t ban anti-Semitism in any particular forum, you’ll find the anti-Semites take over and hound everybody else out. We have never tolerated it in our comments, and I’m sorry that you were offended by the Chateau Heartiste link, but I also occasionally link CNN and the NY Times, you know.”

A link is not an endorsement, nor is a quote an endorsement. I’ve linked and quoted dozens of feminists here in the course of criticizing feminism; you cannot criticize ideas second-hand, but must wrangle with them directly, and I trust that my readers are sufficiently intelligent to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I said, anti-Semitism is banned in the comments here because the alternative is to have every post hijacked by anti-Semites, but this rule doesn’t prevent me (or anyone else) from reading outside the limits of permitted discourse.

Here’s an example of why that matters: Professor Kevin MacDonald has been accused of anti-Semitism, and is considered untouchable by mainstream journalists. Yesterday, however, Professor MacDonald published “The Role of Empathy in Moral Communities: Altruism and Pathological Altruism,” which is worth reading. What caught my attention in this was a quote from a 2015 article by British liberal journalist David Goodhart:

There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. … [The political class] failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens.

What this quote by Goodhart shows is that the intellectual elite in England (and in America, too) have adopted a cosmopolitan worldview — citoyens du monde — that leads them to deny any patriotic obligation to their own country and their own people, instead devoting themselves to “global welfare,” i.e., advancing the interests of foreigners. This attitude, Professor MacDonald argues, is symptomatic of pathological altruism.

Why is it that, to find such arguments, one must read beyond the range of what is considered acceptable mainstream discourse? Isn’t it because Cultural Marxism has advanced so far that the only people able to think freely are Thought Criminals? While I don’t want to get tangled up in the arguments about Professor MacDonald’s alleged anti-Semitism, I’m willing to read forbidden authors — like dissidents in the Soviet Union reading samizdat — if they write something that will help me understand our current political predicament. It should be obvious that we cannot solve our problems if we allow the Thought Police to decide for us what we are allowed to read or if, adopting the guilt-by-association tactics of the SPLC, we make it impossible for people to think freely, because so many people have been labeled proponents of “hate.”

The Third Reich built the autobahn and the Volkswagen; does that make you a neo-Nazi when you drive your VW on the freeway?

UPDATE: Dear God . . .

Criminalizing opinions?



 

Category: Intellectuals

Totalitarian Twitter Tactics

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Totalitarian Twitter Tactics

 

Rep. Devin Nunes has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter, and it’s time to have a conversation about the silencing of dissent:

Does anyone remember “GamerGate”? In October 2014, a friend named Beth Haper urged me to pay more attention to the controversy that erupted over accusations of unethical favoritism by journalists covering the videogame industry. “Stacy, you need to talk to Adam Baldwin about this,” Beth told me, and I immediately called the actor, whom I’d met a few years earlier in California while visiting his friend Andrew Breitbart. Over the phone, Baldwin explained that “GamerGate” had awakened videogame enthusiasts to the menace that feminists and other “social justice warriors” (SJWs) posed to their pastime. Because I was then working on a book about radical feminism, this was of interest to me and I began paying closer attention to “GamerGate” with the eventual result that in February 2016 my popular @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter. Although no one at Twitter would ever explain exactly why I was banned (a company spokesman told Debra Saunders that “privacy” concerns prevented such an explanation), many observers noted that I was banned shortly after feminist ideologue Anita Sarkeesian, a key figure in the “GameGate” controversy, was announced as a member of Twitter’s “Trust & Safety Council.”
No less an authority than feminist author Amanda Marcotte has claimed that understanding “GamerGate” is crucial to explaining how Donald Trump was elected president and, while my views are diametrically opposed to Marcotte’s, I cannot deny the possibility she is correct about this, although perhaps not in the way she intends. What happened in “GamerGate,” from my perspective, is that the Left exploited the political prejudices of liberal journalists in order to redefine disagreement as “hate,” and to prohibit criticism as “harassment.” In the three years since I was banned from Twitter, the use of these tactics to silence conservative voices online — to “de-platform” and “de-monetize” the Left’s opponents — has escalated to the point that some have suggested anti-trust regulation be invoked against companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google. Beyond the First Amendment issues concerning online free speech, however, the Left’s increasingly common tactic of smearing their enemies with the “hate” label has important ramifications for every sphere of public-policy debate. . . .

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



 

Category: Media Bias

Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke

Posted on | March 18, 2019 | Comments Off on Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke

 

Shane Ryan is the kind of Democrat who feels that Barack Obama was insufficiently progressive, and he won’t get fooled again:

What, exactly, is Beto O’Rourke’s appeal?
It’s not policy-oriented, and it’s not identity-based. He’s independently rich, and despite his grab at exoticism by transforming “Robert” into “Beto,” he’s white. As the Vanity Fair piece noted, he won his first House race by “drawing a large number of white Republican voters to his cause, which deepened suspicion from left-leaning Chicano activists.” Representing a safe Democratic district, he nevertheless voted with Republicans 167 times in six years. . . .
Let’s state it plainly: If you like Beto O’Rourke, you like him because he seems cool, and you think the fact that he seems cool means he’s going to bring everyone together under the banner of good feelings and become the next Obama. . . .
His appeal is the appeal of the surface, of the pathetic yearning to feel good without fixing anything.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

O’Rourke raised more than $6 million right out of the gate and he’s in the top five in recent polls, which means that he’s likely to be in the race a while. Between O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, that means three of the leading candidates for the Democrat nomination are white males. So the identity-politics crowd, who insist that white males are the root of all evil, are increasingly unlikely to be excited by the result.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”



 

Category: Democrats, Election

In The Mailbox: 03.18.19

Posted on | March 18, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Chicago & Corrupt Politicians
EBL: Nebraska Flooding, also, Dick Dale RIP
Twitchy: @redsteeze Torches Tom Nichols For Embracing Democrats To “Purify Conservatism”
Louder With Crowder: New Poll Shows Half Of Americans Think Trump Is Victim Of Mueller Probe Witch Hunt

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The War On Protein
American Power: Punk Cracks Egg On Head of Aussie Senator, Gets Smacked
American Thinker: Is America Headed For A Wave Of Political Violence?
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Castro’s Regime Used Cuban Doctors To Intimidate Venezuelans Into Supporting Maduro, also, Colombia Captures Cuban Spying On Military Base, Deports Him
BattleSwarm: The Unbearable Whiteness Of Beto, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Germany Won’t Lead Anything, also, Build A Few Unmanned Surface Vehicles, Test A Little, Learn A Lot
Da Tech Guy: Tales From The Illinois Exodus, Part 1, also, Something To Look Forward To
Don Surber: The Perfect Democrat Nominee, also, A Government Out Of Control
Dustbury: The Usual Wailing, also, Strange Search Engine Queries
First Street Journal: The WaPo Tries To Use The NZ Shootings To Overturn American Immigration Policy
The Geller Report: Another Ten Christians Killed As Jihadi Carnage Continues In Nigeria, also, Jihadi Who Opened Fire On Dutch Train Fought In Chechnya, Had Links To ISIS
Hogewash: Democrats & New Deal Principles, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: How Cultural Appropriation Crushes Hollywood
Joe For America: Occasional Cortex Flips Out After New Polls Show Most People Don’t Like Her, also, Obama Family Linked To College Bribery Scandal?
JustOneMinute: The Red Guard Gets Results!
Legal Insurrection: Sanders -I’ll Do A Better Job Of Explaining What We Mean By Socialism, Democratic Socialism, also, Pelosi – “I Myself Have Always been For Lowering The Voting Age To 16”
The PanAm Post: Ecuador Withdraws From Unasur In Stinging Rebuke To Socialism, also, The Raging Media War Ignores Starving Venezuelans
Power Line: President Trump Saves Thousands Of Lives, also, Epstein-Acosta Deal Was Even Sweeter Than We Thought
Shark Tank: Scott “Disappointed” With Everglades Restoration Budget
Shot In The Dark: If Justice Exists
The Political Hat: Lights Out In Venezuela
This Ain’t Hell: 1st Ranger Battalion Kills, Captures 1900 Terrorists In Latest Deployment, also, Another Disturbance In The Farce
Victory Girls: Congress Wants A Pay Raise, also, America, Don’t Become Seattle
Volokh Conspiracy: Does The Constitution Require Unanimous Jury Verdicts In Criminal Cases?
Weasel Zippers: Bill Introduced To Establish Firearms Registry In Pennsylvania, also, Homeland Security Releases Almost 85,000 Illegal Aliens Into US Over Two Months
Megan McArdle: The College Admissions Scam Reveals A Truth About Our Self-Perpetuating Elites
Mark Steyn: Beto Goes Bovine, also, Batman At Eighty


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Category: Linkagery

Dutch Police Seek Turkish Suspect in Utrecht Shooting That Killed Three

Posted on | March 18, 2019 | Comments Off on Dutch Police Seek Turkish Suspect in Utrecht Shooting That Killed Three

 

The latest story:

Police have named the suspect in a shooting attack on a tram in the central Dutch city of Utrecht which has left three people dead and nine injured.
Officers identified Turkish-born Gokmen Tanis, 37, in connection with the incident. The public have been urged not to approach him.
Authorities immediately raised the terror alert for the area to the maximum level and said they are considering the possibility of a “terrorist motive” in the attack.
Utrecht mayor Jan van Zanen confirmed the number of people killed and injured in the incident, saying the authorities were likely to “assume a terror motive”.
The suspect reportedly opened fire at passengers on a tram in the area of 24 Oktoberplein.

It is not yet clear whether this actually is a terrorist attack, but let’s engage in unsubstantiated speculation anyway:

If Trump inspired the New Zealand shooter, as the media alleges, did the media inspire this guy? How about Ilhan Omar? Or is Trump the only person on earth with the charisma to inspire people?

Personally, I blame Beto O’Rourke because why not?

UPDATE: The suspect has reportedly been arrested after an eight-hour manhunt. He had a previous criminal record, and the tram shooting may have resulted from a personal quarrel, rather than terrorism. Still, I blame Beto O’Rourke.

 

Category: Netherlands, Terrorism
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