The Other McCain

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

Virginia Democrat Governor Posed in KKK/Blackface Yearbook Photo

Posted on | February 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Virginia Democrat Governor Posed in KKK/Blackface Yearbook Photo

 

Well, this is certainly embarrassing:

A photo from Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook shows him and another person in racist costumes — one wearing blackface and one a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, though it was not clear which person was the future governor.
The photo, which The Virginian-Pilot obtained a copy of Friday from the Eastern Virginia Medical School library, comes from the 1984 yearbook, the year Northam graduated.
On the half-page set aside for Northam, there is a headshot of him in a jacket and tie, a photo of him in a cowboy hat and boots and a third of him sitting casually on the ground, leaning against a convertible.
The fourth photo on the half-page has two people, one wearing white Ku Klux Klan robes and a hood, the other with his face painted black. The person with the black face is also wearing a white hat, black jacket, white shirt with a bow tie and plaid pants. Both are holding canned drinks.
In a statement Friday evening, Northam, a Democrat, confirmed he appears in the photo “in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive,” but did not specify which person is him.
“I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now,” Northam said. “This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine and in public service. But I want to be clear, I understand how this decision shakes Virginians’ faith in that commitment. I recognize that it will take time and serious effort to heal the damage this conduct has caused. I am ready to do that important work. The first step is to offer my sincerest apology and to state my absolute commitment to living up to the expectations Virginians set for me when they elected me to be their governor.”

Ace has discovered that at VMI, Northam’s nickname was “Coonman.”

Credit for the original scoop goes to Patrick Howley at Big League Politics. Everybody’s piling on now.

 

Category: Democrats, Virginia

‘Persons of Interest’

Posted on | February 1, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Persons of Interest’

 

Obviously they must be Republicans:

The two persons of interest in the alleged attack on Empire star Jussie Smollett are only seen on the opposite side of the street in the surveillance footage reviewed by Chicago police, according to a local reporter.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Police Department released screenshots of two persons of interest in the alleged attack on Smollett. The Empire star told police he was returning from a fast food restaurant at around 2 a.m. when two men began hurling racial and homophobic slurs (Smollett is gay and black).
During the alleged attack, Smollett says a rope was put around his neck, bleach was poured on him, and one of his attackers yelled, “This is MAGA country,” referring to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

We’re all suspects now:

Are you a “far-right extremist”? There’s a simple test to find out. If you doubt that homophobic Trump supporters are prowling the streets of Chicago looking to beat up gay TV stars, you’re a “far-right extremist,” according to Alex Henderson of AlterNet. Henderson declared that “some extremists on the far right” — including syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin — are responsible for suspicions that actor Jussie Smollett was not attacked by Republicans in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Only an “extremist” could doubt Smollett’s story, according to Henderson, although Chicago police have so far been unable to verify it. As Patrick Poole of PJMedia observed Thursday, “the ongoing investigation into the alleged hate crime… has raised more questions than it has answered.” While the area near where Smollett claims to have been attacked is “heavily monitored,” Poole noted, police who “have reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance video” couldn’t find any that showed the alleged attack. But Patrick Poole is probably an “extremist” by Henderson’s standards, and maybe the Chicago cops are, too.
Getting labeled “far right” is astonishingly easy in the Trump era, when Democrats and their media allies would have us believe that the White House is occupied by the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and that the nearly 63 million Americans who elected him are “white nationalists” or “alt-right” or some other scary term. If you vote Republican, you don’t actually have to do anything to be accused of crypto-Nazi sentiments by the purveyors of progressive paranoia. Merely express support for the president’s agenda (or opposition to the Democrats’ agenda) and you’re a latter-day Eichmann. . . .

Read the rest of my latest American Spectator column.

 

Category: Uncategorized

Contraception by Zoning

Posted on | February 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Contraception by Zoning

If you’ve got a large family, you know why my family prefers to live as far as possible from a major city. But if you need a further clue, consider this article about zoning policy:

At the end of last year, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission weighed a proposed zoning change that would effectively ban new day-care centers — along with tire stores and car repair shops — in a large chunk of northwest Philadelphia. The bill swiftly encountered fierce resistance, and it now appears dead. But the effort to block additional child-care facilities with a zoning overlay hints at a broader relationship between city planning and the cost of raising children. A growing body of research indicates that restrictive zoning — which often blocks the services and housing that families need—may help to explain why family sizes are shrinking in the United States.
The U.S. birth rate recently sunk to a 30-year low, a trend that’s been blamed on everything from economic anxieties and climate change to the rise of smartphones and the Millennial “sex recession.” Perhaps we should also lay some of the responsibility at the feet of city planning.
As bizarre as an anti-day-care bill may seem, the fear of more children coming into a community is a mainstay at new housing proposal hearings. Particularly in high-cost suburbs along the coasts, the mere inclusion of three-bedroom apartments — the kind of units young families need — can get a project in hot water with elected officials. While the justifications for blocking this kind of housing vary from preserving rural character to preventing (real or imagined) school overcrowding, the result is that more and more municipalities are adopting policies designed to keep out children and the families who care for them.
In the New York suburb of Garwood, New Jersey, city officials adopted a master plan earlier in 2018 that places a total prohibition on units with three or more bedrooms. In Nutley, New Jersey, another New York suburb, a July zoning fight came with assurances that three-bedroom units—and the children that come with them — weren’t part of the plan. In the Garden State more broadly, municipalities increasingly meet their state-mandated fair-share affordable housing requirements by building only senior housing. Affordable housing proposals that include three-bedroom units are rejected out of hand, leaving working families with few options.

You can read the rest. Let me say that I am against “affordable housing” mandates, which are another harmful utopian regulatory scheme. If New Jersey has enacted a state law that disrupts the normal mechanism of supply and demand in the housing market, that’s the root of their problem, but good luck getting the Democrats who run the state legislature to understand that. And let’s not overlook the issue of racism involved here: The kind of nice suburban liberal who supports restrictive zoning laws is a hypocrite who is all in favor of “inclusion” and “diversity,” so long as it doesn’t his neighborhood and guess what kind of family typically needs a three-bedroom apartment?

Yep — Mexicans, or some other “people of color” that the nice suburban liberal doesn’t want living in his neighborhood.

Families like mine — a white couple with six kids — are rare enough nowadays that most people think we’re non-existent, and certainly the people who support zoning restrictions that ban three-bedroom apartments don’t do this because they fear an influx of white Christian families. No, they don’t want Mexicans (or Puerto Ricans or Dominicans or whatever) moving into their communities, and zoning is the NIMBY (not in my back yard) method of preventing the liberal agenda they otherwise support from actually affecting them directly.

 

Category: Economics

In The Mailbox: 01.31.19

Posted on | February 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Can You Stay Alive For Five Minutes?
EBL: Thank You Prof. Jacobson & Rush – Trump Continues To Change The Courts
Twitchy: Here’s a Great Thread Staking Out The Middle Ground Between The #MAGA & #NeverTrump Camps
Louder With Crowder: Rabid Pro-Death Monica Klein Refuses To Condemn Gov. northam’s Infanticide Comments

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Clementine Ford Goes Off The Deep End
American Power: Extreme Cold Kills Several As Polar Vortex Spreads Into Midwest
American Thinker: The Ruling Class & An Undeclared Civil War
Animal Magnetism: Mom (1928-2019)
BattleSwarm: No Deal Brexit?
CDR Salamander: Bad Ideas Never Go Away
Da Tech Guy: Five Patriots Super Bowl Worries, also, Democrats Are Trying To Take Control Of The Electoral System
Don Surber: Chicago Chases Fake Case While Ignoring 400 Murders
Dustbury: Forward To February
First Street Journal: The Perfect Democrat Spokesman
The Geller Report: Devout Indian Muslim Sets Little Neighbor Girl On Fire For Refusing Sex, also, The New Nazi Party  – House Dems Defend Omar, Tlaib Amid Anti-Semitic Accusations
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, On Economies Of Scale
Hollywood In Toto: Here’s What’s Missing In Dystopian Stories
Joe For America: Pelosi Claims Democrats Do “God’s Work” While Republicans “Dishonor God”
JustOneMinute: SCOTUS Takes A 2A Case
Legal Insurrection: Networks, Liberal Cable News Ignore Gov. Northan’s Infanticide Endorsement, also, FL Gov DeSantis Order Common Core Removed From Schools
Michelle Malkin: Conservatives, Don’t Fall All Over Yourselves Defending Howard Schultz
The PanAm Post: Spain’s Failure To Recognize Guiado Could Cost 41 Million Euros
Power Line: Why “Green” Energy Is Futile, In One Lesson, also, Ilhan Omar – Why I Hate Israel, Continued
Shark Tank: DeSantis Ends Common Core In FL, Renews Efforts In Civics Education
Shot In The Dark: Buzzkill
STUMP: NJ – Battle Over Public Finance Between Democrats
The Political Hat: Purging The Pledge Of Allegiance: In NYC, In San Francisco, & In College
This Ain’t Hell: Thousands Answer The Call To Attend “Unaccompanied” Air Force Vet’s Funeral, also, Leftist Loon Rieckhoff Stepping Down From IAVA
Victory Girls: Democracy Of Israel Almost Gets A Chuckle From Ilhan Omar
Volokh Conspiracy: Second & Fourth Amendments
Weasel Zippers: VA Delegate Tran (D-Fairfax) Submits Bill To Save Caterpillars On Same Day As Late-Stage Abortion Bill, also, Bill Nye Predicts Climate Change Will Force US To Grow Food In Canada
Megan McArdle: Could Howard Schultz Be The Common Ground We Need?
Mark Steyn: Macedonians & Macchiato


Amazon Warehouse Post-Holiday Event

Category: Linkagery

My Kind of People: Junior Johnson and the End of the American Way of Life

Posted on | January 31, 2019 | Comments Off on My Kind of People: Junior Johnson and the End of the American Way of Life

NASCAR legend Junior Johnson and his 1940 Ford.

My wife has recently re-arranged my office and, in the process, moved some books that I hadn’t read in a while, so the other day I picked up Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and began re-reading it. The best journalism — and Tom Wolfe, who died last year at age 88, was certainly the best — has an enduring value, and a lot of the stories collected in Streamline Baby were innovative works of cultural anthropology. The titular essay, first published by Esquire in 1963, examined the rise of hot-rod and custom-car culture in Southern California after World War II. Drag racing on L.A.’s Sepulveda Boulevard in the 1940s, a scene that centered around the Picadilly drive-in — that’s where the hot-rod culture originated, and Wolfe got the story directly from George Barris, king of the custom designs. It was this California trip that truly launched Wolfe’s career as an essayist. A writer for the old New York Herald-Tribune, Wolfe had gone out West to explore the custom-car craze, but couldn’t figure out how to write the story until finally, with deadline looming, his editor said, just send us your notes and we’ll have somebody else write it up. Wolfe sat down at his typewriter and cranked out a 49-page memo in about 10 hours and Esquire published the whole zany, wonderful mess.

Streamline Baby also includes brilliant little word-portraits of celebrities from early-1960s teen culture — “The Fifth Beatle” (DJ Murray “The K” Kaufman), “The Girl of the Year” (model Baby Jane Holzer), “The First Tycoon of Teen” (record producer Phil Spector) — but the real masterpiece is an article Wolfe wrote for the March 1965 issue of Esquire, “The Last American Hero,” about NASCAR legend Junior Johnson.

Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a native of Wilkes County, N.C., got his start hauling moonshine through the hills of Appalachia, where his innovative methods of out-running federal revenue agents included a move that became known as “the bootleg turn,” a 180-degree reversal that set him running back through and past his hapless pursuers. Johnson’s father was a moonshiner who spent a total of 20 years in prison, and Junior was one of three sons who specialized in delivering the merchandise via souped-up cars. One day someone asked him to drive in a race at a local dirt track, where he was the first driver to develop the “power slide” technique in turns, and by 1955, he won five races on the NASCAR circuit. In 1960, he won the Daytona 500, where he invented the technique of “drafting” behind a faster car.

 

As should be obvious, Junior Johnson was highly intelligent, not in a bookish or abstract way, but in a hands-on practical way. He became a successful businessman, and as a NASCAR team owner helped develop such champions as Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip. Now 87, Johnson is a living legend, his life made famous in the 1973 film The Last American Hero starring Jeff Bridges, and in 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave him a pardon for his 1956 federal moonshining conviction.

Tom Wolfe’s 1965 article is a sort of sociology text, and includes such spendidly written and insightful passages as this:

To millions of good old boys, and girls, the automobile represented not only liberation from what was still pretty much a land-bound form of social organization but also a great leap forward into twentieth-century glamour, an idea that was being dinned in on the South like everywhere else. . . . It got so that on Sundays there wouldn’t be a safe straight stretch of road in the county, because so many wild country boys would be out racing or just raising hell on the roads. A lot of other kids, who weren’t basically wild, would be driving like hell every morning and every night, driving to jobs perhaps thirty or forty miles away, jobs that were available only because of automobiles. . . . After the war there was a great deal of stout-burgher talk about people who lived in hovels and bought big-yacht cars to park out front. This was one of the symbols of a new, spendthrift age. But there was a great deal of unconscious resentment buried in the talk. It was resentment against (a) the fact that the good old boy had his money at all and (b) the fact that the car symbolized freedom, a slightly wild, careening emancipation from the old social order. Stock-car racing got started about this time, right after the war, and it was immediately regarded as some kind of manifestation of the animal irresponsibility of the lower orders. It had a truly terrible reputation. It was — well, it looked rowdy or something.

Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.

If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”

The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.

 

What struck Tom Wolfe as so heroic in Junior Johnson was the man’s reckless daredevil courage. Johnson set speed records in qualifying simply because he was willing to take curves at tire-smoking speeds that even his fellow NASCAR drivers considered insanely risky. Going all-out on a straightaway is one thing, but it was Johnson’s absolute fearlessness in those high-banked curves that made him legendary. Wolfe captures perfectly the milieu of Appalachia that bred such courage:

The people there were already isolated, geographically, by the mountains and had strong clan ties because they were all from the same stock, Scotch-Irish. Moonshining isolated them even more. They always had to be careful who came up there. There are plenty of hollows to this day where if you drive in and ask some good old boy where so-and-so is, he’ll tell you he never heard of the fellow. Then the next minute, if you identify yourself and give some idea of why you want to see him, and he believes you, he’ll suddenly say, “Aw, you’re talking about so-and-so. I thought you said—” With all this isolation, the mountain people began to take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong sense of family, clan and honor. People would cut and shoot each other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like Turks that way.
In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.

What were the odds, eh? Wolfe’s point is that the same conditions that produced such an extraordinary concentration of military heroes in the small towns of Appalachia also explained the kind of daredevil courage required to run 140 mph neck-and-neck with a man who might give you a bump and send you spinning into a concrete retaining wall.

Naw, Esquire would never publish an article like “The Last American Hero” in the 21st century. It doesn’t fit their narrative, which is all about Diversity and Inclusion and Progress. Esquire editor Jay Fielden’s hand-wringing over the #MeToo revelations and his virtue-signalling over “gun culture” signify his contempt for the sort of manly men who admire Medal of Honor winners or NASCAR drivers. The suspicion that these men vote Republican — 68% of white males in North Carolina voted for Trump, who carried Wilkes County with 77% of the vote — is enough to render them “deplorables” in the eyes of Esquire editors, all of whom voted for Hillary and are probably lined up to back Kamala Harris in 2020. Everything in journalism is politics now, and it’s not the kind of politics that celebrates moonshine runners or dirt-track racers or any other kind of authentic all-American masculinity. Esquire used to be a men’s magazine, but what is it now? I don’t know, and I don’t reckon Jay Fielden could explain it, either. It’s a ghost of its former self, another once-great institution the liberals have ruined in their decades-long crusade to destroy the American Way of Life. Selah.



 

Category: Culture, History, Journalism, Media Bias

You Haters! Stop Questioning Gay Actor’s Claim of ‘MAGA’ Hate Crime in Chicago

Posted on | January 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

 

When it was reported Tuesday that a gay black actor had been the target of an alleged hate crime in Chicago (“‘Empire’ Star Jussie Smollett Tells Cops His Attackers Shouted ‘MAGA Country’,” TMZ, Jan. 29), there were obvious reasons for skepticism, as Michelle Malkin explained:

Question: How many racist, homophobic menaces wander around the upscale Streeterville neighborhood of liberal Chicago at 2 a.m. carrying rope and bleach, yelling about “MAGA country?”
Question: How many racist, homophobic menaces have ever heard of “Empire,” could recognize Jussie Smollett, or know or care anything about his sexuality?

This is not the same as calling Jussie Smollett a liar, but it is difficult to believe that MAGA-hat wearing rednecks were roaming the streets of Chicago to ambush an actor almost nobody had heard of. And so far, to almost no one’s surprise, Chicago cops have been unable to verify Smollett’s tale or apprehend his (perhaps imaginary) redneck attackers.

What? You’re claiming to be the victim of a hate crime that occurred while you were on the phone with your manager, but you refuse to let police examine your phone? Gosh, nothing suspicious about that. But if you’re skeptical, you must be a “far-right extremist.”

Far-right extremists are trying
to convince people that the brutal attack
on Jussie Smollett is a hoax
— Alex Henderson, AlterNet

Look, buddy, I can’t speak for any other “far-right extremists,” but as for me, I’m not “trying to convince” anyone of anything (except maybe that they should hit the tip jar because the electric company seems very serious about my $400 past-due power bill). All I’m saying — and what such of my fellow “far-right extremists” like Michelle Malkin and Steven Crowder are also saying — is that we’ve seen a few amateurish “hate” hoaxes over the years, and Jussie Smollett’s tale seems quite familiar.

 

Did I mention that my electric bill is past-due? As I said in an email to regular tip-jar hitters, it’s embarrassing to have to do these emergency tip-jar rattles, but thanks to a couple of sympathetic readers I was able to stave off disconnection this morning, and that’s all that matters. There is no obvious correlation between productivity and revenue in the blog racket. I was feeling pretty good about my output — more than 90 posts this month, compared to 70 in January 2018, thus a 28% increase — but then the power company guy showed up with the cut-off warning and I was like, “Well, that’s not so good.” It’s been a hard month. The temperature this morning was 3°F and thank God my wife ordered the heating oil last week, but that was another $400, and did I mention that BuzzFeed is laying off staff despite collecting nearly half a billion dollars in capital investment? Oh, that’s a “democratic emergency,” according to the New York Times. whereas a lone blogger’s problems? Nobody cares. Certainly nobody at the New York Times.

But if any of my fellow “far-right extremists” could make some small contribution — $5, $10, $20, whatever — I would be most grateful. The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Uncategorized

A ‘Right’ to Laser Hair Removal?

Posted on | January 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

‘Jessica’ is demanding taxpayer-funded treatment.

If health care becomes a “human right,” guess what becomes health care?

A transgender woman [in England] said she is regularly reduced to tears because the NHS [Britain’s National Health Service] is keeping her waiting for laser hair removal surgery.
Jessica Samson, 39, has to shave twice a day while she continues her more than six month wait for the permanent procedure.
She was approved for the treatment in July as the final stage of her gender reassignment but progress is slow, she said.
The NHS needs to ‘realise they are mucking around with people’s lives’, according to the frustrated IT customer service worker.
After a complaint in December, Miss Sampson has now been offered a consultation appointment but worries her case is the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
The NHS has faced criticism in the past for the range of service it offers transgender people, and recent growth in demand has piled pressure on clinics.
Miss Sampson claims she has had to endure months of frustration as she has emailed various NHS departments to try and get the process moving.
‘As it stands, something that should’ve taken two months is currently taking six,’ she said. ‘And there is absolutely no sign of it making any further progress.
‘It is difficult to explain why this is a big issue to anyone who hasn’t had trans-thoughts, but I’ve been on hormones long enough for my body to start changing.
‘But I still grow a beard every day and I have to shave twice a day to maintain some sort of normal lifestyle.’

(What do you consider a “normal lifestyle”? Never mind . . .)

Formerly a man, Miss Sampson, from Salisbury, is trying to get the surgery in her home city through a commissioning team in Bristol.
She said her letters went unanswered for months and, after five months of waiting without an update, she filed a formal complaint against the health service.
‘I’ve had my head in my hands crying so many times about this,’ she said. . . .
In the NHS’s own guidance it says facial hair removal is an ‘essential part of gender reassignment’ and should be one of the first stages of the process. . . .
Dr James Palmer said the NHS may provide facial hair removal, breast reduction, and even reverse gender reassignment surgeries.
There has been an ‘explosion’ in the number of children seeking a sex swap, Dr Palmer said, which may accelerate if plans to expand publicly funded operations go ahead.
Dr Palmer told the Westminster Social Policy Forum that referrals for gender dysphoria have increased by around 240 per cent over the last five year period.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.) If health care is a “human right” — which is a central claim of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign — and sex-change treatment is health care, how long before American taxpayers are required to foot the bill for laser hair removal?



 

Category: The Transgender Cult

BuzzFeed Is Democracy, or Something

Posted on | January 31, 2019 | Comments Off on BuzzFeed Is Democracy, or Something

 

It’s hard to take seriously Farhad Manjoo’s claim that layoffs at BuzzFeed represent “a story of impending slow-motion doom — and a democratic emergency in the making, with no end in sight.” (Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

As I explained Wednesday (“Who Keeps Paying BuzzFeed’s Bills?”), the company has devoured nearly $500 million in investment capital since its founding in 2006 and in recent years has been burning through cash to the tune of $75 million a year, with no prospect of profit.

What are investors getting for that money? Just days before BuzzFeed announced staff layoffs, the publication was embarrassed by a bungled “exclusive” about the Mueller investigation (“Haunted by Ghosts of ‘Fitzmas’ Past: Jason Leopold’s Trump/Cohen Debacle,” Jan. 20). Evidently, reporting “fake news” is so vital to democracy that if BuzzFeed can’t afford to keep doing it, that’s an “emergency.”

Liberal journalists do not want to admit that their political bias may be a major reason for their industry’s decline, but when the money crunch hits, they insist that their work is valuable to “democracy.” But what did BuzzFeed do to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital? Quite simply, they figured out how to game the Facebook algorithm for cheap hits with clickbait, which might have been good for BuzzFeed’s traffic numbers but didn’t do anything in terms of creating an informed citizenry. And here’s a Daily Caller headline from 2017:

BuzzFeed’s Infamous Trump Dossier Is Facebook’s Most Read News Story In Past Year

Oh, that’s right — BuzzFeed was the first to publish the phony Steele dossier, a pile of anti-Trump propaganda commissioned by Fusion GPS under contract to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Is it an “emergency” that BuzzFeed had to lay off some staffers? Or is it just liberals upset that liberals are losing their jobs? It never occurs to them to reconsider their biases (“‘Learn to Code’ and the Collapse of the Millennial SJW Clickbait Bubble,” Jan. 25), so we can expect further layoffs and further declarations that “democracy” is in peril.



 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias
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