The Other McCain

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

‘Gender,’ Envy and Self-Pity

Posted on | February 10, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Gender,’ Envy and Self-Pity

Ace of Spades summarizes a not-so-surprising discovery:

[F]emale-to-male transgenders are discovering that “Male Privilege” actually doesn’t exist, and that the actual privilege belongs to women. They’re saying that now as “men,” they are being accused of “mansplaining” for merely disagreeing or correcting errors, and are expected to defer to women in any social interaction.

The source is Carl Benjamin discussing a recent Washington Post story:

 

Incidentally, here’s something about me: I don’t watch YouTube videos. If you want to tell me something, write it. For any literate person, reading is far more efficient than listening to the spoken word. I am an extremely fast reader, and could fully comprehend the transcript of an entire 15-minute video in less than two minutes, and why should I waste that additional time? This is why I’m sometimes confounded by the fame, such as it is, of YouTube “celebrities.” There are people out there who have hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers and rate as “celebrities” within whatever niche of fandom they appeal to, and I’ve never heard of them, because I don’t watch YouTube videos. And when I see someone like Carl Benjamin (a/k/a, Sargon of Akkad) making a really good point in a YouTube video, I am tempted to yell at my computer: “WHERE’S THE F–KING TRANSCRIPT?” Like, you couldn’t even be bothered to write up your argument as a blog post? If you believe what you’re saying on your YouTube channel is important, wouldn’t it reach a wider audience and have more impact if you took time to publish a transcript, or at least a synopsis of your argument? But I digress . . .

The recent clash between feminism and transgenderism (see “The Rocky Horror Ideology Show,” American Spectator, Jan. 29) fascinates me because, as has been pointed out, feminists are to some extent being hoisted on their own petard. It was feminists who originated the claim that there are no meaningful differences between male and female, that all distinctions of social roles between men and women are a product of patriarchal oppression. If this is so — if “gender” is merely a socially constructed illusion — then why can’t men be women or vice-versa? But this wasn’t a consequence they considered back in the day when feminism’s utopian scheme of a gender-neutral world of “equality” was being theorized by radical nutjobs like Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, et al.

Today’s radical feminists insist (and rightly so) that transgenderism is threatening to erase everything that feminists fought to achieve, but isn’t it true that the theoretical basis of transgender ideology derives from feminist theory, in quite the same way that feminist ideology was derived from Marxist theory a half-century ago? And all of these left-wing ideologies are rooted in the worst of human emotions, envy.

Feminists in 1969 asserted that “male supremacy” was inherently unjust:

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”

Keep in mind that in the year that was published, more than 11,000 American men were killed by enemy action in Vietnam and I doubt the “psychological benefits from male supremacy” were adequate compensation for getting blown up by a Viet Cong mortar shell.

But oh, these women were oppressed, you see — denied the privilege of being shipped overseas to die in a sweltering jungle. Envy is the worst of human emotions, I say, rivaled only perhaps by self-pity, which is what feminist claims of “oppression” are really about, trying to get people to feel sorry for them, as if American women in 1969 weren’t among the most fortunate people in all of human history, living in a time and place of remarkable affluence and opportunity. And the success of the feminist movement (“success,” at least, in terms of obtaining political power) has been so extraordinary some men now envy the superior social status of women, coveting the political authority exercised by feminists, and so now we have transgender feminists, e.g., Charles “Charlotte” Clymer.

 

Some have used the acronym “LARP” — live-action role-playing — to describe the pursuit of fantasy fulfillment involved in such preposterous impostures. As I wrote, in the case of a young mentally ill woman who committed suicide 18 months after beginning testosterone injections: “What madness inspires these people? How much of a sense of failure as a woman do you need to believe you would be better off injecting synthetic hormones and undergoing surgery to become a fake ‘man’?”

Transgenderism is being promoted, on the one hand, as the ultimate in sexual fantasy and, on the other hand, as a magic cure-all for whatever dissatisfaction anyone might have with society’s expectations of what it means to be male or female. The fantasy aspect reflects an envy of the imagined pleasures to be obtained as a member of the opposite sex, while the magic cure-all reflects a self-pity about the abject misery of being “trapped” in one’s biological sex. But as Carl Benjamin points out, women who “succeed” in transition to the point of being able to pass as male find that the “male privilege” so often denounced by feminists isn’t what they’d imagined when they were gazing fondly at the greener grass on the other side of the fence. We know that gender dysphoria has high rates of “co-morbidity” with mental illness, so that their irrational and disordered thought processes prevent these people from being able to evaluate soberly the practical consequences of their decisions. In my American Spectator column about Gavin McInnes this week, I noted his 2014 defense of “transphobia”:

We’re all transphobic. We aren’t blind. We see there are no old trannies. They die of drug overdoses and suicide way before they’re 40 and nobody notices because nobody knows them. They are mentally ill gays who need help, and that help doesn’t include being maimed by physicians. These aren’t women trapped in a man’s body. They are nuts trapped in a crazy person’s body. . . .
By pretending this is all perfectly sane, you are enabling these poor bastards to mutilate themselves. This insane war on pronouns is about telling people what to do.

What has permitted this madness? Consider how the “self-esteem” cult has taken over the educational system and mental-health professions. Years ago, researchers noted a correlation between (a) success and (b) feeling good about yourself, and instead of making the obvious inference that success leads to high self-esteem, reversed the causation, to suppose instead that high self-esteem causes success:

For thousands of years, traditional Judeo-Christian values emphasized modesty and humility as the measures of a well-lived life. In these times, the self was down-played for the sake of pursuing a greater collective goal. But in the mid 20th century, a new philosophy took hold: that each and every person is special, regardless of how talented they are.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the seeds of the Cult of Self were sown with the humanistic psychology movement. The famed Abraham Maslow was one of its earliest supporters, which lead to his proposal that humans have a hierarchy of needs. The higher-order need to achieve our full potential (which he called self-actualization) could not be achieved until our lower-order needs (like food and water, physical safety, and relationships) were met. . . .
In the 1970s, the fire of self-esteem began to catch. The mega best-seller The Psychology of Self-Esteem wildly claimed that there wasn’t “a single psychological problem — from anxiety to depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation” that wasn’t the result of low self-esteem. 

This absurd theory has become the basis of the “everybody-gets-a-trophy” mentality which now prevails in schools. There can be no special reward for winners, nor any punishment for failure, because this might hurt the self-esteem of the precious little snowflakes. A similar idea underlies the “anti-bullying” interventions in schools, as well as the endless celebrations of “diversity” and “inclusion” as the highest moral ideals. These ideas derived from the Cult of Self-Esteem have influenced “social justice” ideology, which claims that any expression of thoughts that might hurt someone’s feelings are “hate” and “violence” which we are all expected to condemn. It is “hate” to speak critically of obesity or homosexuality, and this attitude of political correctness often takes the form of denouncing “stigma.” You must use slang terms when referring to the mentally ill, because phrases like “lunatic” and “nutjob” contribute to the stigma of mental illness. But doesn’t the stigma exist for a reason? Crazy People Are Dangerous, as I’ve often explained, and irrational behaviors are stigmatized because they are socially harmful.

 

 

When the herpes-infected feminist Ella Dawson launched the #ShoutYourStatus hashtag to fight the “stigma” of sexually transmitted disease, I warned about the consequences:

What we recognize is that feminism has become a quasi-religious faith, in which males are demonized as the satanic forces of patriarchy. . . .
What results from this Manichean dualism — feminism good, men bad — is that the current generation is coming of age in a cultural climate where young people are encouraged to disregard any adult who tries to warn them about the obvious dangers of trying to live out the “social justice” fantasies of feminist ideology.

I do not criticize feminism in order to defend “male privilege,” but rather because feminist ideology is demonstrably harmful to society, including young women who foolishly embrace it. By the same token, my criticism of the transgender cult isn’t about “hate,” but about rejecting a deceptive ideology that falsely promises happiness can be achieved by turning delusions into reality through synthetic hormones and surgery.

No one is “trapped in the wrong body.” This is a delusion. Someone’s unhappiness with the reality of their body as male or female may lead them to imagine life would be better if they could destroy this biological reality — their physical self — and replace it with a new self. Yet making this destructive suicidal impulse the basis of “therapy,” which is what the transgender cult has done, requires everyone else to play along with this bizarre delusion. In England, you can be investigated for “hate speech” if refuse to endorse the ideology of the transgender cult:

A 74-year-old retired journalist faced a grilling from police in England after she posted online comments such as, “Sex is real.” . . .
Margaret Nelson wrote in a post online: “Gender’s fashionable nonsense. Sex is real. I’ve no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth.”
Also, she reasoned that if a transgender person’s body was given a post-mortem examination, “his or her sex would also be obvious to a student or pathologist.”
“Not the sex that he or she chose to present as, but his or her natal sex; the sex that he or she was born with,” she wrote. . . .
Nelson said she soon heard from officers “policing” people’s opinions.
“The officer said she wanted to talk to me about some of the things that I’d written on Twitter and my blog,” she told James Kirkup of the Spectator. “She said that some of the things that I’d written could have upset or offended transgender people. So could I please stop writing things like that and perhaps I could remove those posts and tweets?
“I asked the officer if she agreed that free speech was important. She said it was. I said that in that case, she’d understand that I wouldn’t be removing the posts or stopping saying the things I think.”

The transgender movement embraces a victimhood ideology based in self-pity, and therefore accuses critics of “hate” merely for speaking truth.

UPDATE: Breaking news today:

Sane people don’t sic the police on people this way.

UPDATE II: Oh, I thought this person looked familiar:

Not a woman: Anthony Halliday (left) as ‘Stephanie Hayden’ (right).

Anthony Halliday is an obese 45-year-old man who, in 2007, began “identifying” as a woman, calling himself “Stephanie Hayden.” Because so-called “self-identification” has obtained the protection of law in England, this has the effect of empowering deranged perverts like Halliday/“Hayden” to harass anyone who refuses to participate in their “gender” delusions. Earlier this year, Halliday/“Hayden” was granted a Gender Recognition Certificate, which means that anyone in England who doesn’t acknowledge his self-declared female identity is at risk of criminal punishment.

Giving mentally ill people a “right” to their delusions is a bad idea.



 

Category: The Transgender Cult

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved: Teaching Hatred at Yale University

Posted on | February 9, 2019 | 3 Comments

 

After the 2016 election, Isis Davis-Marks published a column in the Yale Daily News in which she declared: “I cannot even function right now. As a queer, black woman, I feel unsafe in this country.” Despite her fears, Ms. Davis-Marks has somehow managed to survive in New Haven more than two years, so that she was able to publish another Yale Daily News column this week in which she indulged a sadistic fantasy about destroying the careers of her white male classmates:

One day, I’ll turn on the television . . . and I’ll see him sitting down for his Senate confirmation hearing. Yes, he’ll be a bit older, with tiny wrinkles sprouting at the corners of his eyes and a couple of gray hairs jutting out of the top of his widow’s peak. But that smile, that characteristic saccharine smile, will remain the same.
When I’m watching the white boy — who is now a white man by this point — on CNN, I’ll remember a racist remark that he said, an unintentional utterance that he made when he had one drink too many at a frat party during sophomore year. I’ll recall a message that he accidentally left open on a computer when he forgot to log out of iMessage, where he likened a woman’s body to a particularly large animal. I’ll kick myself for forgetting to screenshot the evidence.
And, when I’m watching him smile that smile, I’ll think that I could have stopped it. . . .
I’m watching you, white boy.

(Hat-tip: Cassandra Fairbanks at Gateway Pundit.)

One might suppose that Ms. Davis-Marks’s anti-white, anti-male rage — her limitless hatred of her white male classmates at Yale, whose future lives she fantasizes about ruining by obtaining “evidence” of their racism — might be something she’d hesitate to publish as a student newspaper column her senior year at Yale ($69,430 a year, including room and board). Certainly, it cannot improve her prospects of future employment for Ms. Davis-Marks to declare openly her anti-white malice. Yet the curriculum at Yale nowadays evidently encourages such attitudes: Everybody at Yale hates white people, especially including white students and faculty, who have internalized the kind of self-hatred that prevents them from objecting to the hateful sentiments Ms. Davis-Marks espouses in the pages of the Yale Daily News. While those of us outside the rarefied environs of the Ivy League may imagine Ms. Davis-Marks would harm her reputation and hinder her chances of landing a good job after graduating, however, this just goes to show our own ignorance. If it is her hope to pursue a Ph.D. and become a professor herself, avowing her hatred of white males is actually quite helpful to Ms. Davis-Marks’s prospects. Or she might get hired at the New York Times, joining Sarah Jeong in that newspaper’s roster of anti-white hatemongers.

Monica Showalter at American Thinker explains how Yale produces such superstars of hate: “Davis-Marks has been steeped in the culture of political correctness and identity politics, and it doesn’t take long for political correctness policing to start turning into the tactics of the Stasi.” In case you don’t know, the Stasi were the secret police in the Communist regime of East Germany, and the totalitarian climate at Yale University now arguably merits such a comparison. As I have been warning for many months, The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved, and the hateful attitudes expressed by Ms. Davis-Marks are aligned with those of anti-white Professor Ali Michael at Penn, anti-heterosexual students like Becina Ganther at Harvard and Noa Wollstein at Princeton, and the “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity” program at Brown.

So many institutions in our society — Yale, the New York Times, CNN, the Democrat Party, etc. — are now dedicated to the anti-white/anti-male ideology espoused by Ms. Davis-Marks that her “I’m watching you, white boy” column will likely enhance her career opportunities. No doubt she’s being flooded with scholarship offers to enroll in postgraduate programs at Harvard, Georgetown and Duke. An internship with Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel is hers for the asking, and Ms. Davis-Marks could get a full-time paid position on the staff of any 2020 Democrat presidential candidate merely by sending them an email. As a queer black woman, Ms. Davis-Marks has a bright future ahead of her as one of America’s most promising young anti-white ideologues, and we can expect to hear much more of her in coming years, as she goes from one triumph to another — her book contracts, her TV appearances, her congressional campaign.

She’ll be watching you, white boy, and you should be watching her, too.



 

 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

Democrat ‘Rising Star’ Fading Fast

Posted on | February 9, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrat ‘Rising Star’ Fading Fast

 

Yeah, expect to see lots more shoes dropping in this case:

Days after Dr. Vanessa Tyson went public with her sexual-assault allegations against Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, another woman has accused him of rape.
In a statement from her lawyer, Meredith Watson claims she was raped by Fairfax, who is next in line to become governor, in 2000, when they were both students at Duke University. The letter characterizes the alleged attack as “premeditated and aggressive.”
“The two were friends but never dated or had any romantic relationship,” the statement said.
In a statement obtained by The Daily Beast, Fairfax denied the accusation and declared: “I will not resign.”
“I have never forced myself on anyone, ever. I demand a full investigation into these unsubstantiated and false allegations,” he said. “ It is obvious that a vicious and coordinated smear campaign is being orchestrated against me.”
While the letter provides little other information about the alleged rape, it says the details are “similar” to those outlined in Tyson’s public statement describing her attack. Tyson claims Fairfax sexually assaulted her at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, forcing her to perform oral sex in his hotel room. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
“Ms. Watson was upset to learn that Mr. Fairfax raped at least one other woman after he attacked her,” Watson’s lawyers said.

Nice phrase — “at least one other woman” — because there are already rumors of more women coming forward to accuse Fairfax.

Generally speaking, as we have seen since the #MeToo movement got rolling in fall 2017, someone with one complaint of sexual misconduct will usually show a persistent pattern of predatory behavior, as in the cases of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. So if Fairfax had assaulted one woman, chances are there were others out there with similar stories.

Now, a number of prominent Democrats — including 2020 presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — are calling for Fairfax’s resignation. And all the liberal journalists who called Fairfax a “rising star” are watching to see how soon he will fall.

 

Category: Democrats, Scandal, Virginia

Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

Posted on | February 8, 2019 | Comments Off on Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

 

What’s the first thing you notice about that photo? Yeah, there’s Gavin McInnes looking like a Kentucky colonel on Derby Day in his white suit, but there in the background is noted First Amendment lawyer Ron Coleman, looking like the third Blues Brother in his shades.

After it was announced Monday that McInnes was suing the SPLC, I arranged an interview with the plaintiff, and this is the result:

When he decided in 2016 to create a club for his supporters, Gavin McInnes says he had in mind something fun — like the “Loyal Order of Water Buffalo” lodge to which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble belonged in the old cartoon series. A humorist-turned-political commentator whose YouTube channel has nearly 270,000 subscribers, McInnes certainly didn’t intend the Proud Boys to be a “hate group,” but that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them, and a federal lawsuit McInnes filed this week accuses the Alabama-based SPLC of “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, defamation, and false light invasion of privacy.”
The 61-page complaint in the case details how the SPLC began targeting McInnes in 2017 and continued upping its characterization of him as an “extremist” and labeling the Proud Boys a dangerous “white nationalist” group until they succeeded in getting McInnes banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram last year. Citing numerous articles on the SPLC website as “false and defamatory,” the complaint accuses the tax-exempt left-wing group of using the “hate” label in a deliberate campaign to “destroy” its chosen ideological enemies. It seems the SPLC considers more or less anyone who supports President Trump to be a “far-right” extremist.
“I made it fun to love Trump, and I’m effective — that scares the Left,” McInnes said in a telephone interview this week, explaining his opinion of how a comedian ended up being branded with what he calls the “Scarlet Letter” of the SPLC’s hate label. Employing a metaphor made popular by the 1999 film The Matrix, McInnes says, “I’m red-pilling an entire generation.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

Category: Constitution

Rich Liberals (and Why We Hate Them)

Posted on | February 7, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

You probably never heard of Anand Giridharadas — I hadn’t, until yesterday — but let’s begin our introduction with this: He attended Sidwell Friends School, the same ultra-elite private school in D.C. to which Bill and Hillary Clinton sent their daughter Chelsea. His father Mohan Giridharadas spent 18 years at the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. before founding “the leading predictive analytics company in Silicon Valley.” Anand Giridharadas attended the University of Michigan and then went to India as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. before deciding to embark on a career as a journalist, publishing columns for the New York Times and authoring a book, India Calling (2011) that was widely praised for its insights on the economic and cultural transformation of his ancestral homeland. Giridharadas followed that with a second book, The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014) that examined the case of Mark Stroman, a petty criminal who was executed in Texas for murdering a convenience store clerk, Vasudev Patel, one of three people he shot in a week-long spree of violence in late 2001 which Stroman stupidly thought of as revenge for 9/11.

In 2011, Anand Giridharadas was chosen to be an Aspen Fellow, an honor bestowed by the prestigious Aspen Institute, but his experience there convinced him that the rich liberals who fund such organizations are misguided in their belief that they are “making a difference.” This disillusionment inspired Giridharadas’s most recent book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World:

An insider’s groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can — except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward “thought leaders” who redefine “change” in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

In sum, Giridharadas is somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders. He is a radical socialist who wants to destroy the market-based economy. However, as a right-winger, I can at least admire him for seeing through the phony do-gooder make-a-difference nonsense embraced by the kind of rich liberals who hang around the Aspen Institute.

All of that is preamble to what happened Tuesday night, when he was invited as a dinner speaker at the famed Players Club in Manhattan. This was a gathering of New York’s socially-conscious liberal elite, and Giridharadas was apparently invited as a substitute for another author who had been caught in some kind of #MeToo scandal. What ensued was a scene somewhat reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, with Giridharadas offending his bien-pensant liberal hosts by dissing David Koch, and refusing to let them off the hook for their hypocrisy. His Twitter thread about the event went viral, and here are a few excerpts:

This is splendid fun, even as much as I despise Giridharadas’s anti-capitalist politics, for the same reason that Radical Chic was fun, despite my abhorrence of the Black Panthers’ racial radicalism. As always, guilt-stricken rich white people who want to think of themselves as “progressives” are shown to be fools. My own Jacksonian populist sentiments are rooted in an old-fashioned contempt for the decadence of the elite. Wealth itself is not wrong; the problem is that affluence begets arrogance, including a we-know-what’s-best attitude where these overprivileged people act as if they’re missionaries and the rest of us are ignorant savages in need of their “enlightened” supervision.

This kind of preachy liberalism — folks who imagine themselves to be neo-Platonic archons because their Daddy could afford to send them to Harvard — offends me as an expression of snobbery. My Daddy was a farmboy who attended the University of Alabama on the GI Bill, and he instilled in his children a sufficient sense of their own self-worth that we don’t need a bunch of Harvard snobs to do our thinking for us.

And what of Giridharadas’s economic radicalism? Socialism has never worked anywhere, it produced mass slaughter in the 20th century, and it’s still producing disaster (e.g., Venezuela) today. Giridharadas’s basic problem is that he’s close enough to the top of the socioeconomic heap — the son of a successful businessman — that he can’t see how important a free economy is to those of us much nearer the bottom. Contrary to what Giridharadas seems to believe, our capitalist system still offers hope to smart young people who are willing to do three simple things:

  1. Work hard;
  2. Live cheap;
    and
  3. Save their money.

No matter how near the bottom of the economic pile a young person may begin in life, there are real opportunities in a free economy, and Giridharadas doesn’t seem to notice that his own lofty position — a published author and journalist, invited to speak to the Manhattan elite — is testimony to the miraculous power of capitalism. He is the beneficiary of his father’s success, which must in turn reflect the good values inculcated by his grandparents in India, and why should young Giridharadas wish to destroy the system that has made possible such an ascending trajectory? His existential despair — his belief that the system is somehow rigged, and that the poor are hopeless victims of oppression — is symptomatic of the kind of elite degeneracy that I should hope my own children and grandchildren will avoid. However rich you might become, so long as you’ve earned your money in an honest way, you should not be ashamed of what you’ve got, and you should never mistake the politics of liberalism for charity. Real charity requires that we voluntarily give what is ours to help others; liberalism is about using government to take other people’s money and hire a bunch of bureaucrats to do whatever some politician might consider helpful. Ronald Reagan said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He wasn’t wrong.

Are some rich people also bad people? Yes, but the politics of liberalism — or the more radical socialism advocated by Giridharadas — won’t eradicate human sinfulness. There is an excellent book by Joshua Muravchik, Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, that exposes the futility of this persistent utopian delusion. Anand Giridharadas is still a young man, not yet 40, and perhaps he will yet gain enough wisdom to realize the lesson that Heaven on Earth teaches.




 


Category: Economics, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 02.05.19

Posted on | February 6, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Reporter Doesn’t Understand Why .Gov Shouldn’t Take Care Of Every Problem
EBL: Put Down That Bong!
Twitchy: Democrat Women Wearing White Again Tonight – No, Not For That Reason
Louder With Crowder: Bernie Sanders Fakes A Phone Call To Dodge Questions About Justin Fairfax’s Accuser

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #101 – The Didact Interview, also, The Steps To Become A Man
American Power: Leftists Don’t Share The Same Goals, also, Leo Strauss, Natural Right And History
American Thinker: Democrats, The Party Of Destruction
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Mad Max News
BattleSwarm: Houston ISD School Board  – “A Step Below Hell”
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Your Motivational Picture Of The Month
Da Tech Guy: Democrats, A Union. And Corruption, also, Antidote To Trump Anxiety
Don Surber: Brad Pitt Trumpenfreude
Dustbury: This’ll Kill You
First Street Journal: True Confession – I Made Hangman’s Nooses!
The Geller Report: Pope Hugs & Kisses Sheikh Who Calls For Murder Of Those Leaving Islam, also, NYC – It’s The NYPD Lookalike Muslim Community Patrol
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Child Abuse?
Hollywood In Toto: DVD Autopsy – Speed Kills, also, HiT Episode #104 – Jon Levine
Joe For America: SOTU – Pelosi Frowns As Trump Lists America’s Great Achievements
JustOneMinute: Those Scary, Annoying Russians
Legal Insurrection: Trump’s SOTU – “Tonight, We Renew Our Resolve That America Will Never Be A Socialist Country”, also, Uh Oh – Fauxcahontas Registered With Texas Bar Association As American Indian
The PanAm Post: El Salvador’s New President Could Be More Dangerous Than FMLN Communists
Power Line: DNA Testing & College Admissions, also, The Epic Fraud Of Elizabeth Warren
Shark Tank: FL Republicans Ask Commerce Dept. To End Agreement With Mexican Tomato Growers
Shot In The Dark: It’s Technically Only Satire If It’s Not 100% True
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – We’re Number One!
The Political Hat: Volonte Generale – The Dawn Of The Hive Mind?
This Ain’t Hell: NOT MY PRESIDENT, also, Family Of Slain Navy Linguist Fights Reg That Forced Her Deployment To Syria
Victory Girls: Nancy Pelosi Needs Polident, STAT!
Volokh Conspiracy: Why The Demand For Fake News Is A More Serious Problem Than The Supply
Weasel Zippers: Democrat Senator Blocks Bill Banning Infanticide For Babies Surviving Abortion, also, Video – Northam Refuses To Shake Black Opponent’s Hand
Megan McArdle: In Attacking Neomi Rao, Democrats Are Arguing Against Progress In More Ways Than One
Mark Steyn: Aquarius, also, Getting There From Here


Amazon Warehouse – Post-Holiday Sale

Category: Linkagery

The Fetid Left-Wing Origins of @chick_in_kiev (Talia Lavin)

Posted on | February 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Fetid Left-Wing Origins of @chick_in_kiev (Talia Lavin)

 

You may not remember the name Talia Lavin, but her anti-American prejudices were revealed in June 2018 when she falsely accused an ICE agent of having a neo-Nazi tattoo. It turned out that, in fact, the ICE agent was a Marine veteran who lost both his legs to a Muslim terrorist’s bomb in Afghanistan and that the tattoo Lavin mistook for a Nazi symbol was, in fact, the insignia of his Marine platoon. As a result of her idiotic blunder, Lavin was forced to resign from her job as a “fact-checker” for The New Yorker (while claiming victimhood, of course). Probably no one will be surprised to learn that Ms. Lavin is a Harvard alumna and a militant feminist who in 2014 wrote a Huffington Post column about being the victim of a “sexual assault” during her sophomore year. This wasn’t exactly a horrific trauma — she and some friends “drank heavily,” and she was “stumble-drunk and giggly” when a classmate, who was also drunk (and “totally into me,” she says) attempted to kiss her. That’s pretty much it. The guy was so drunk that the next day, he didn’t even remember what happened, but #MeToo or something. Whatever.

 

What kind of guy would be “totally into” Talia Lavin? A drunk Harvard guy, allegedly, but I’d rather not think about such pathetic desperation, which is a distraction from Ms. Lavin’s journalism career. After she resigned from the New Yorker, Ms. Lavin was hired by “Media Matters, a left-wing organization funded by socialist billionaire George Soros . . . to cover ‘far-right extremism.’” And it is from her “far-right extremism” beat that she produced her latest paranoid screed for the New Republic:

 

The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins
of “Learn to Code”
How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.
By TALIA LAVIN
February 1, 2019
Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section — where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months — had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.
Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”
I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.” . . .

Now, before we go wading into the, uh, fetid swamps of left-wing conspiracy theory where Ms. Lavin is leading us, permit me to remind readers that I wrote a lengthy post (“‘Learn to Code’ and the Collapse of the Millennial SJW Clickbait Bubble,” Jan. 25) about this meme. As has been pointed out, critics of the media began using this phrase to mock laid-off journalists because the media themselves used “learn to code” as advice to coal miners and other working-class people who lost their jobs as a result of Obama’s economic policies. All of which is make the point that the conspiracy theory Talia Lavin is about to lay on you is both (a) false and (b) an irrelevant distraction from the really important question: Why is the media so hated that everybody celebrates when journalists get laid off? But please, continue, Ms. Lavin:

But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility — and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.
What’s a brigade attack, you may ask? It’s a rather dramatic name for coordinated harassment, usually migrating from one social media site to another. Often hatched in the internet’s right-wing cesspools, these campaigns unleash a mass of harassment on unsuspecting targets. 4chan’s /pol/ board — a gathering-place for people who want to say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence — has an oversize role in organizing brigade attacks, in part due to the fact that all its users are anonymous.
While it’s difficult to trace the origins of brigading — like most of internet history, its beginnings are ephemeral — the term, and its tactics, came to new prominence during the loosely organized and militantly misogynist harassment campaign known now as GamerGate, which unfolded over the course of 2014 and 2015. . . .

Oh, dear God, #GamerGate! In case you’ve forgotten, that drama began with Zoe Quinn, a tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, who was accused of trading sex to journalists for favorable coverage of her wretched game “Depression Quest.” What the participants in #GamerGate sought to do was to expose how feminists and other so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs) were trying to gain control of the billion-dollar videogame industry by shady manipulative methods. Predictably, SJWs were able to recruit dishonest journalists to attack #GamerGate by portraying it as a “misogynistic harassment campaign,” of which Zoe Quinn and other no-talent losers claimed to be victims. The truth, however, was quite different:

Zoe Quinn is not an innocent victim of “harassment.” She deserves everything bad anyone might ever say about her. . . .
As Ethan Ralph says, Zoe Quinn is a fraud, who couldn’t program her way out of a wet paper sack, and whose status as a “game developer” is as fictional as the “blame-the-patriarchy” narrative she has created to depict herself as a saintly martyr for the feminist cause.

As for “brigading” as a tactic, it is more or less exclusive to Twitter, which did not exist before 2006 and did not become widely used until 2008. It was not until 2014, when the Left began complaining of “harassment” on Twitter, that I ever heard this swarming effect of hostile replies called “brigading,” although I myself had been targeted for orchestrated harassment on Twitter in 2012 after I started reporting on the Brett Kimberlin saga. Of course, nobody in the media notices harassment when the Left is attacking conservatives, so it’s as if that never happened, so far as liberals like Talia Lavin are concerned. (I was the intended target of a SWATting, and the guy responsible was sentenced to federal prison.)

Liberals consider it “hate” if you disagree with them, and it’s “harassment” if you criticize them, and yet Talia Lavin doesn’t seem to understand that the media’s blatant attempt to silence their critics might have something to do with why everybody hates journalists:

GamerGate was essentially a public test of weapons online trolls would use to inflict hell on anyone who they perceived as enemies, with a central focus on journalists. Its tactics have only grown in sophistication in the intervening years. . . .
When I smelled the putrid odor of a brigade attack, I decided to do a little research into the origins of this sudden, and plainly coordinated, bombardment of “learn to code” tweets. (There were also death threats and a flood of anti-Semitic Instagram comments.) It was a fairly simple operation: I clicked over to 4chan’s /pol/ board and searched for the phrase.
In a thread entitled “HAPPENING – Huffpo / Buzzfeed / other MSM garbage (((journalists))) FIRED,” which discussed the extant and impending layoffs, there were dozens of responses laying out the “learn to code” plan. . . .
Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s most openly white-supremacist host and a frequent amplifier of far-right meme warfare, ran a segment about the trolling campaign for his roughly three million viewers. . . .
For me, the open hostility of “learn to code” was, from the first moment, compounded by escalating misogyny and anti-Semitism . . . .
The experience of the “learn to code” campaign was being bombarded with harassment that others stridently claimed wasn’t harassment; being told death threats were a joke; having my name broadcast mockingly on Fox News — all for the temerity of tweeting about losing a column. It was an experience of being mugged by gaslight.

Here’s a suggestion for Ms. Lavin that I’m sure she will ignore: Maybe consider the possibility that the reason people hate you is . . . you.

YOU SMEARED A WAR HERO AS A NAZI! THE GUY YOU FALSELY SMEARED WAS WORKING TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL PREDATORS! YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, TALIA LAVIN!

And this applies more or less equally to everyone who got laid off at BuzzFeed and HuffPo, especially including Chloe Angyal, who boasted of imposing quotas to discriminate against white males at HuffPo. While she was busy preventing white men from publishing opinions at HuffPo, what sort of columns did Chloe Angyal pay for?

If Democrats Want To Win, They Need
To Embrace The Power Of Rage
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 1

I Want A Woman President.
I’m Not Afraid to Say So Anymore.
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 6

Tax The Rich, Then Tax Them Some More
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 12

If You Think Trans Rights Are A Distraction, You’re Part Of The Problem
— Talia Lavin, Jan. 22

Real thought-provoking stuff, eh? Ms. Lavin’s dumbed-down partisan drivel served no useful purpose, and nobody will miss her weekly columns at HuffPo, which was only published to inflate the numbers for Chloe Angyal’s “diversity” quotas. Now she’s peddling paranoia at The New Republic, trying to convince her fellow dimwits that a bunch of guys on 4chan who “say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence” are a menace to democracy or something.

And look at what results Ms. Lavin produces:

 

Yes, Ben Popken of NBC News is encouraging journalists to report any account that tweets “learn to code” at them. Stephen Green quips:

You know, this little snitch is probably patting himself on the back and thinking, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

They are trying to ban Republicans from using the Internet at all — that’s the real bottom line of all this. Journalists are now partisan operatives for the Democrat Party, and consider it part of their job to smear anyone who disagrees with them as a right-wing “white supremacist.”

And they wonder why we hate them . . .




 


Category: Media Bias

Left-Wing Journalist Hacks Email of Republican Billionaire Joe Ricketts

Posted on | February 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Left-Wing Journalist Hacks Email of Republican Billionaire Joe Ricketts

GOP billionaire Joe Ricketts (left); left-wing journalist Molly Osberg (right).

John Joseph “Joe” Ricketts got rich from the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, and retired from the business in 2011 to concentrate on philanthropy. Ricketts is a staunch conservative, a Nebraska native and Catholic father of four, and his family bought the Chicago Cubs in 2009. Ricketts is also interested in journalism, and in 2009 created DNAinfo-dot-com, a site devoted to local news in New York and Chicago. He shut down the site in 2017, one week after employees voted to unionize. Ricketts hates unions, considering them a divisive force, destructive of the esprit de corp necessary to business success. God bless him.

In December 2018, a left-wing journalist named Molly Osberg, who writes for the Gizmodo-owned website Splinter News, began publishing a series called “The Billionaire’s Inbox,” with emails apparently obtained from hacking Joe Ricketts’ personal account. The legality of the methods by which Ms. Osberg obtained these emails is a matter on which I would be hesitant to offer an opinion. The hacking of John Podesta’s emails is currently being investigated by a federal special prosecutor, but hacking a private citizen’s email? That’s what is now considered “investigative journalism,” I guess. At any rate, Molly Osberg keeps publishing batches of Ricketts’ private correspondence, e.g., “The Ricketts On Capitalism and Electoral Politics” (Dec. 17), and “How to Get Filthy Rich in America Without Anyone Knowing Your Name” (Jan. 31), and one would suppose Ricketts might hire a squad of top lawyers to stop this embarrassing drip-drip-drip disclosure, but for some reason it continues.

Monday, Osberg published the latest batch of Ricketts emails (“Here Are The Racist Conspiracy Emails Rotting Right-Wing Billionaire Joe Ricketts’ Brain“), which include some Obama “birther” stuff and other offensive materials, and these revelations finally caused a public reaction:

A series of emails obtained and published by Splinter News on Monday appears to show Joe Ricketts, the patriarch of the family that owns the Cubs, sharing and endorsing racist jokes and conspiracy theories.
Ricketts, 77, and his son and team Chairman Tom Ricketts, issued separate statements regarding the emails after they were posted.
“I deeply regret and apologize for some of the exchanges I had in my emails,” Joe Ricketts said in a statement. “Sometimes I received emails that I should have condemned. Other times I’ve said things that don’t reflect my value system. I strongly believe that bigoted ideas are wrong.” . . .
Tom Ricketts emphasized that his father isn’t involved in the operations of the Cubs, although Joe Ricketts sold 34 million shares of the TD Ameritrade company he founded for about $403 million to cover the equity needed to purchase the Cubs in 2009.
“We are aware of the racially insensitive emails in my father’s account that were published by an online media outlet,” Tom Ricketts wrote in his statement. “Let me be clear: the language and views expressed in those emails have no place in our society.
“My father is not involved with the operation of the Chicago Cubs in any way. I am trusted with representing this organization and our fans with a respect for people from all backgrounds. These emails do not reflect the culture we’ve worked so hard to build at the Chicago Cubs since 2009.”

Well, why and how is this happening?

That’s the real question. Let us stipulate that almost anyone has stuff in their email account which, if made public, could be embarrassing, and furthermore stipulate that any 77-year-old Republican’s frank opinions about such subjects as Islam and immigration might be a public-relations disaster for any institution with which he was associated, if a left-wing journalist somehow hacked his private communications.

But I don’t think Molly Osberg has super-hacker skills, nor do I think Joe Ricketts’ account got hacked by some shadowy crew of hostile online antagonists. No, my hunch is this is an inside job.

Let’s go through some background: During the 2016 GOP primaries, Joe Ricketts poured his money and effort into stopping Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination. He bankrolled something called “Our Principles PAC,” led by Katie Packer, a former aide to the Romney and Jeb Bush campaigns, which ran ads attacking Trump as a misogynist. After Trump secured the nomination, however, Ricketts had a change of heart and began spending millions to support Trump. “The Ricketts decided they could not sit back and watch Hillary Clinton become the next president of the United States,” Ricketts adviser Brian Baker told the Wall Street Journal in September 2016. Todd Ricketts was recently named finance chair of the Trump 2020 campaign.

If the leak of Ricketts’ private emails were an inside job — which is the most obvious explanation of how Molly Osberg got this scoop — doesn’t it make sense that the culprit might be some “Never Trump” type within the billionaire’s inner circle? Suppose that there was someone working for Ricketts who grudgingly went along with that 2016 switch from anti-Trump to pro-Trump, but secretly disagreed with the decision and, instead of quitting his or her job for the Ricketts political operation, became a sort of mole engaged in espionage and sabotage.

While I know nothing about who has worked for Ricketts, if I were betting money, I’d put $20 on such an explanation for how and why Molly Osberg got hold of those emails — never trust a Never Trumper.

On the other hand, maybe one of Joe Ricketts’ children decided to throw Dad under the bus because they don’t like being under the old man’s thumb. The prime suspect in that scenario would be his daughter, Laura Ricketts, a lesbian Democrat who is chairwoman of LPAC, a lesbian Super PAC that launched the “Lesbians for Hillary” website in 2015. So if Laura Ricketts ever had access to her father’s account, this could explain how his personal emails got dumped in Molly Osberg’s lap.

My hunch is that Joe Ricketts already knows who leaked his emails, and I wonder why this information hasn’t already become public. But speculation is mere speculation, and I suppose that if we’re patient, the truth about this sasbotage operation will eventually become known.

On a completely unrelated note, the fundraiser to support Gavin McInnes’s lawsuit against the SPLC has now raised nearly $30,0000 — more than double what it was Monday evening when I gave $10.

 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias
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