The Other McCain

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

‘Their Precious Narrative’

Posted on | January 24, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Their Precious Narrative’

 

Years ago, Conor (With One “N”) Friedersdorf became a favorite punching bag around here because of his habit of making “conservative” arguments for the liberal agenda, not to mention his absolute lack of cynicism or humor. Friedersdorf craved recognition as a Serious Thinker in a way that struck me as eminently laughable — Mister Sincerity — circa 2009, when the Tea Party was first emerging and Andrew Breitbart was injecting a long-overdue dose of fun into the conservative movement. Well, Conor (With One “N”) is now ensconced at The Atlantic Monthly, where his commentary on the Covington Catholic imbroglio was headlined “This Is How the Left Destroys Itself.”

Writing at Instapundit, David Bernstein remarks:

Conor asks why so many on the left get caught up in politically counter-productive overreaction to the Covington kid. A lot of it is revenge fantasy against some obnoxious jerk from middle or high school. The “smirking” Covington kid (or Brett Kavanaugh before him) becomes a stand-in for the hated adolescent alpha, who probably was as bad as they remember. They couldn’t retaliate properly then, so they publicly join a twitter mob that fantasizes about committing violence, while engaging in doxxing designed to effectuate it. Of course, Nick Sandmann was not actually one’s high school tormentor, and getting caught up in this sort of psychological drama is a good way to alienate those who notice the gap between the vitriol and the evidence purportedly justifying it.

This is exactly right. Liberals perceive themselves as fighting on behalf of the underdog — the victim of oppression — and this gives them a sense of moral authority to inflict punishment on those they identify as villains in what Bernstein rightly calls a “psychological drama.”

So long as you never question the categorical classifications of victims and villains, it is very easy to subscribe to what Andrew Breitbart used to sneeringly call “their precious narrative.” I can still hear Andrew’s voice saying that phrase. The Democrat-Media Complex frames events to achieve its partisan objective, constantly reinforcing the belief that everything is about sexism, racism and homophobia, a televised morality play in which Republicans are cast in the role of Satan.

Because liberalism is so ubiquitous in academia, in Hollywood, and in the news media — all more than 90% Democrat, which is no accident, but the result of deliberate bias — it is possible for such people never to encounter any peer who contradicts their worldview. To them, conservatives are always Those Nasty People Over There, whose opinions (a) are entirely wrong, but (b) don’t really matter, because no Republican has any direct influence within their lives. To see the effect of living within such an ideological cocoon, just tune into CNN for a few hours and you’ll be astonished by the things these people seem to sincerely believe. Not only is there a remarkable absence of balance in their political reporting, but the same liberal bias distorts the way they cover (or don’t cover, as the case may be) everything else in the world. if all you know is what you see on CNN, you might believe that every illegal alien covered by DACA is an aspiring neuroscientist and that the only people who get shot by cops are honor students who were victims of racial profiling.

The transparent selectivity with which the liberal media reports (or doesn’t report) the news is about reinforcing a weltanschauung that serves a partisan purpose: “Vote Democrat, and end this oppression!”

Every day, the producers at CNN wake up and think of six ways to damage Donald Trump before they’ve had their second cup of coffee, and so when they saw the video of these MAGA-hat boys from Kentucky, it was like Santa had finally brought them a pony for Christmas: “This is the hateful face of white male entitlement we warned you about!”

Facts don’t matter to the Left, and all the truth that has emerged since Saturday that contradicts their precious narrative cannot reverse their commitment to their anti-Trump weltanschauung. Merely by existing as white males from Kentucky, these boys deserved to be hated, according to the deranged ideology of the Left, and when you add in the facts that they attend a Catholic school, were in D.C. for a pro-life march, and were wearing red MAGA hats, these kids were the living essence of evil, according to the belief system that prevails at CNN headquarters. Nothing said in defense of the Covington Catholic students can exonerate them in the eyes of the Left, whose implacable hatred of “privileged” white males — “the hated adolescent alpha,” as David Bernstein says — is the emotional root of their psycho-political drama.

They think they are Our Moral Superiors™ and it is therefore impossible for them ever to admit that they’re wrong, about anything. By contrast, I’m willing to admit that I’ve occasionally made a mistake. For example, that time in 1979 when I drank a quart of psilocybin mushroom tea and snorted an 8-ball of Bolivian flake cocaine? An obvious mistake.

Also, it’s possible I misjudged Conor (With One “N”), or maybe he’s just gained some wisdom in the past 10 years. We’ll see.




 

 

Category: Intellectuals, Media Bias

Violence Against Women Update: MS-13 Members Beat Teenage Prostitute

Posted on | January 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update: MS-13 Members Beat Teenage Prostitute

 

Last week, a Maryland man was sentenced to prison:

A Silver Spring, Maryland, man has been sentenced to serve 15 years in prison in a case that highlights MS-13 brutality and human trafficking.
Felix Zuniga, 52, was found guilty [Jan. 16] on charges of third-degree sex offense, solicitation of sex with a minor and prostitution for having sex with a 14-year-old girl.
According to charging documents, the girl worked at Lilly’s Restaurant, in Wheaton, where Zuniga was regular customer, and she was also forced into prostitution by members of an MS-13 clique who at least once beat her with a baseball bat in the backyard of a Kensington home as punishment when she tried to leave.
The girl had been reported as a runaway missing juvenile more than five times.
She said she was forced to work for the MS-13 clique between July and November of 2017.

More details from D.C. Fox affiliate WTTG-TV:

According to court documents, Feliz Silva Zuniga, 52, met the teenager at Umberto’s restaurant in Wheaton, and then videotaped the sexual encounter with her.
He also reportedly told the girl that she must continue having sex with him or he would show the video to her employers at Lilly’s restaurant.
Eventually, he did show the video to people at the restaurant, including her boyfriend, a high-ranking member of MS-13, according to the affidavit. The teen quit working at Lilly’s restaurant out of fear of retaliation, officials stated.
The investigation into the incident revealed the inner workings of MS-13 in Montgomery County, and its use of teenage girls for prostitution.
Court documents obtained by FOX 5 paint a horrifying picture in which a 14-year-old girl who worked at Lilly’s restaurant in Wheaton was forced by the gang to help sell drugs and serve alcohol to customers.
When the teen told the gang she wanted to quit her job, authorities said the MS-13 members took her to a house on Valley View Avenue in Kensington and beat her with a baseball bat.
An affidavit filed in the case quotes a source who said they saw the girl after she was beaten and she had discolored arms and legs. According to the affidavit, the girl was then pimped by the gang to men willing to pay $100 to have sex with her.

Ivan Pena-Rodriguez, 20, Yervin Romero-Rivera, 21, and Miguel Ayala-Rivera, 24.

Three suspects were arrested in February 2018:

A female human trafficking victim too young to legally drive a car or buy a lottery ticket was savagely beaten with a bat by a pack of incensed MS-13 members, Montgomery County Police said.
Late last month, Ivan Alexis Pena-Rodriguez, 20, Yervin Josue Romero-Rivera, 21, and Miguel Angel Ayala-Rivera, 24, were all formally charged with first-degree assault, plus other assorted criminal counts.
According to court documents obtained by WJLA, Montgomery County authorities served a search and seizure warrant at a suspected MS-13 hangout house along the 11200 block of Valley View Avenue in Kensington, near Albert Einstein High School. As a result of that warrant, an unnamed source told detectives about an incident that left a 15-year-old girl “severely” wounded and bloody.
The source explained Ayala-Rivera, a high-ranking local MS-13 leader who goes by the nickname “Noctorno,” pimps out a number of underage girls from a number of states. On Aug. 1, 2017, the source said Pena-Rodriguez, Romero-Rivera, Ayala-Rivera, plus two other men, used a solid bat to beat the girl behind the single-family home along Valley View Avenue. The men reportedly took turns whacking the 15-year-old girl’s flailing body — 28 swings in total. Her injuries included an “indented” buttocks, discolored arms and legs, and visible bleeding from the neck down.
A second unnamed source would later tell cops that Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) ordered the backyard clubbing because he felt the victim was “not doing a good job as an MS-13 prostitute.” The same source revealed Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) raked in a lot of money by trafficking teenage girls to men of all ages. . . .
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Romero-Rivera is in the United States illegally. ICE has submitted an immigration detainer with Montgomery County authorities for him. An official document obtained from Montgomery County’s Department of Correction and Rehabilitation explains Ayala-Rivera also has a pending ICE detainer. As for Pena-Rodriguez, court paperwork indicates he was born in El Salvador, but ICE explains it cannot publicly share information about the 20-year-old.
Romero-Rivera and Ayala-Rivera were already in jail awaiting trial for their alleged roles in a string of armed robberies at check cashing businesses across the area. The streak of high-stakes heists ended in November with a police chase along Interstate 495 in College Park that netted five suspects, plus a stockpile of guns and cash.

So at least one of these MS-13 pimps is an illegal alien, and two of them — including the boss pimp “Nocturno” — were among the MS-13 crew accused of committing multiple armed robberies. But don’t expect feminists to mention these thugs, because feminists only notice violence against women when the perpetrators are “privileged” white males, and these criminals don’t look like potential Trump voters, do they?




 

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Category: Immigration, Violence Against Women

Violence Against Women Update: Woman Raped on Video in Atlanta Nightclub

Posted on | January 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update: Woman Raped on Video in Atlanta Nightclub

 

We can expect feminists to ignore this crime:

The Atlanta woman who said she was drugged and raped at Opera nightclub in Atlanta on January 19 while she was streaming to Facebook Live spoke out before deleting her social media accounts.
The alleged victim, who was identified as Jasmine Eiland, posted a video on Monday confirming that she is alright. She also addressed some rumors circulating about her accusations.
“I’m not going to address any negativity any opinions, none of that,” Jasmine said in the video, adding “thanks for every text, every message, I haven’t responded to all of them.”
She then went on to say that the man in a photo she posted earlier in the day was not the assailant, and she revealed she did not delete the video because police told her it would slow down the investigation. . . .
After Jasmine’s video went viral, Opera Atlanta released a statement saying, “The disturbing matter that occurred last night has been brought to our attention, and we are working as diligently as possible in full cooperation with law enforcement.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

The victim of an alleged sexual assault at Opera nightclub has hired a prominent Atlanta attorney to conduct an independent investigation into the incident.
Attorney Chris Stewart will represent the woman who was allegedly raped inside the Crescent Avenue club in Midtown on Saturday. The woman, who was already streaming her birthday celebration on Facebook Live, captured the attack as it happened and continued to stream the video. Her screams and pleas for help could be heard on the video. . . .
Stewart said there is additional footage of that night that shows the suspect picking the victim up and carrying her into a back room.
“You hear the music die off and her screaming some more,” he said.
Atlanta police received several phone calls Sunday morning reporting the attack, but by the time they arrived at the club the woman was gone. . . .
According to Channel 2 Action News, the woman, who is originally from St. Louis, told police someone put drugs in her drink and then sexually assaulted her on the dance floor.
On Monday, police identified and contacted the man seen in the video, but have not released his name.
The investigation is continuing, but Atlanta police did not have an update on the case Tuesday. Stewart said they are awaiting results from a rape kit and a blood sample completed at a St. Louis hospital.

The reason I expect feminists to ignore this crime is because my hunch is that the perpetrator is not a Trump voter, IYKWIMAITYD.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

Category: Violence Against Women

Fat Black Lesbian Sentenced to Federal Prison for $5.4 Million Swindle

Posted on | January 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Fat Black Lesbian Sentenced to Federal Prison for $5.4 Million Swindle

Living large: Keisha Williams on a 2018 trip to Disney World.

Look, the facts aren’t “hate,” and the headline is strictly factual. Keisha Williams is black, she could probably stand to lose a few pounds and, of the millions of dollars federal prosecutors say she swindled from investors, nearly half a million of it went to support her girlfriend:

After two days of jury trial, an Ashburn [Virginia] woman pleaded guilty [Oct. 18] to wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to impersonate a federal agent to demand money, and obtaining confidential phone records.
According to court documents and the evidence at trial, Keisha L. Williams, 43, solicited over $5.4 million from more than 50 victims by telling them that she had paid a lot of money for a certain healthcare-related software overseas in Austria; that the software was being held in “escrow” because she still owed taxes, attorney’s fees, and other debt associated with the purchase; and that if they would just give her a short-term loan to get this software out of escrow and bring it to the United States, the software would be a huge success and everyone would be quickly repaid, with interest.
In truth, Williams spent over 95 percent of the victims’ money on creating a lifestyle of luxury for herself, including millions on international travel, retail purchases at stores like Chanel and Gucci, and close to half a million on maintaining her girlfriend. Williams also recruited others to pose as federal law enforcement agents in order to demand money from several individuals to whom she sent proceeds of the software fraud. Williams recruited still other individuals to purchase private telephone records of one of the extortion victims from T-Mobile retail stores.
Four other individuals entered guilty pleas in connection with this case before trial.

Keisha Williams was sentenced last week to 15½ years in federal prison, and her “lifestyle of luxury” is now a matter of public record. She conned 70-year-old Christian D’Andrade out of $1.4 million:

“The way in which you spent this money … is appalling,” Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told her before imposing the sentence Friday in federal court in Alexandria. “It was one of the worst (cases) I’ve seen.” . . .
D’Andrade, 70, lost his business, his two houses, car and all his savings, according to court papers, along with the savings of his girlfriend, ex-wife and a business mentee. . . .
She faked bank documents to claim she would soon get a $58 million loan from “John,” described by prosecutors in a court filing as “a fictional cancer-ridden Texas billionaire.”
When she pretended to be at a Dallas hospital negotiating with John, the court records show Williams was actually at Disney World and then on a $75,000 trip to Jamaica for her girlfriend’s birthday.
Repeatedly, when telling D’Andrade she was broke and struggling to deal with both financial and medical emergencies, Williams was on trips with her girlfriend all over the world.
“It’s so much pain!” she texted him in December 2017. “I have a massive headache can’t even open my eyes barely and still trying to find remaining money to get this done today.”
She was, in reality, on vacation in the Bahamas, where in text messages she crowed that the hotel had given her four butlers but complained about her cabana’s lack of a balcony. . . .
A month before Williams’ arrest in February 2018, D’Andrade sent her his Social Security check.
“I normally use that to [pay] my phone and utility bills which is over due,” he wrote. “I will see if [I] can get a few days extension on them.”
Williams was on a trip to Italy at the time, staying at five-star hotels in Florence, Rome and Venice. Estimating she spent about $200,000 on the trip, she told a friend, “It’s worth every penny, the memories and the beauty and culture of other places is priceless.”

How many of you earn less in a year than the $75,000 Keisha Williams spent for her girlfriend’s birthday trip to Jamaica? We are all endlessly lectured about the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia and, according to the “intersectional” social justice calculus of identity politics, Keisha Williams was a victim of oppression. Also, she’s fat.

Maybe that’s why her cabana in the Bahamas didn’t have a balcony, eh?




 

 

 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 01.23.19

Posted on | January 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #509
EBL: President Trump Recognizes Juan Guaido As Interim President Of Venezuela
Twitchy: Grauniad Writer Claims Conservative Media Created “Parallel Reality” About Covington Students
Louder With Crowder: NY State Senate Cheers After Passing law Allowing Abortion Until Moment Of Birth

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Moment A Boy Becomes A Man, also, It’s A Cuck^6 World
American Thinker: The Ultimate Irony of The “Native American Elder” And The MAGA Hat Kids
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm:  How Texas Oilmen Made LBJ, also, “Nicolas Maduro Must Go”
CDR Salamander: The Future Is Never Wrong
Da Tech Guy: For The Children, If They Survive The Womb, also, Non-Tweets For January 23
Don Surber: The Press Failed The Covington Catholic Kids. The Internet Saved Them.
Dustbury: The Internet Of Crap
Fausta: You Need To Unfriend Me
First Street Journal: This Is What TDS Gets You – Known Liars Telling Lies Have Their Lies Believed
The Geller Report: Sweden’s Bombing Crisis – Four Explosions In 24 Hours, also, Germans Build “Line Of Horror” Monument To Migrant Crimes, Murders, & Rapes In front Of Chancellery
Hogewash: The Vietnam Service Medal, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: The Crazy True Story Behind The New “Tarzan” Movie
Joe For America: Covington Bishop Refuses To Apologize, Still Speaks Of “Corrective Action” For #MAGAKids
JustOneMinute: Clickbait Journalism
Legal Insurrection: Pelosi Tells Trump No SOTU In The House During Shutdown, also, Behar Admits People Smeared The Covington Catholic Kids Because Trump
Michelle Malkin: The Covington Rorschach Test – What Do YOU See?
Power Line: Isn’t It Rich? also, A Pattern Emerges
Shark Tank: We Don’t Want Or Need A $15 Minimum Wage In Florida
Shot In The Dark: As The Ramp On The Higgins Boat Slams Down
STUMP: A Year of Dickens – Literature For The Masses
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler Job Opening(s) – Hamas Watch Tower Operations Technician(s)
The Political Hat: The Netherlands And Repressive Tolerance
This Ain’t Hell: Nathan Phillips, a/k/a Nathan Stanard – Valor Vulture, also, Antidisestablishmentarianism Is Relevant Again
Victory Girls: What Will Pelosi Do Now?
Volokh Conspiracy: An Attempt To Get Google To Disappear My Article About A Forged Court Order
Weasel Zippers: Poll Says 74% Of Democrats Would Consider Occasional Cortex For President, also, Attorney Robert Barnes Warns Ilhan Omar, Media – You Have 48 Hours To Retract
Mark Steyn: Coffee & Cigarettes, also, The Respectable Right & The Revolutionary Left


Category: Linkagery

Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee Forced Out of Leadership Posts by Intern Sex Scandal

Posted on | January 23, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee Forced Out of Leadership Posts by Intern Sex Scandal

 

 

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) made a habit of demanding President Trump’s resignation, so this is certainly interesting news:

Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is reportedly resigning as chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and as chair of a congressional subcommittee amid allegations she retaliated against a former staffer who claimed she was raped by a foundation supervisor.
Both BuzzFeed and The New York Times report Jackson Lee will leave as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a non-profit group closely aligned with the Congressional Black Caucus.
She will also leave her position temporarily as chair of a House Judiciary subcommittee.
The Democrat came under pressure last week to resign her posts after she was accused in a Jan. 11 lawsuit of retaliating against a former staffer who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Damien Jones, a former intern supervisor at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
The woman, who goes by Jane Doe in the court filings, claims she was raped by Jones in October 2015, when she was an intern at the foundation. . . .
The woman began working in November 2017 as a staffer for Jackson Lee. According to her lawsuit, she asked Jackson Lee’s chief of staff in March 2018 to meet with the lawmaker to discuss her alleged rape. The meeting never occurred, and the woman was fired soon after from Jackson Lee’s office.

Shouldn’t the “believe women” narrative Democrats used against Brett Kavanaugh apply to Jane Doe, who was allegedly raped by a Democrat, and fired when she reported it to the Democrat congresswoman?

 

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Scandal

The Left Doesn’t Care About Facts: Why #StandWithCovington Still Matters

Posted on | January 23, 2019 | Comments Off on The Left Doesn’t Care About Facts: Why #StandWithCovington Still Matters

 

Professor Donald Douglas summarizes the lesson we’re learning:

Although these kind of lynch mob stories aren’t new, this whole thing for me has been extremely clarifying. Twitter is a radioactive dump of hatred and lies, and as the site’s run by leftists, it won’t get better. . . . If you’re a Trump supporter leftists want to destroy you. They literally want to kill you.

Honestly, when I wrote Monday about this incident — “Lessons From an Online Lynching (Why #StandWithCovington Is Going Viral)” — I expected it to be a one-day story. The gross misrepresentation of what happened to the Covington Catholic students was a combination of the social-media mob mentality and liberal media bias.

However, because I’ve been seeing this phenomenon every day for years, it didn’t seem to me that this was really anything new. You got smeared as a racist? Welcome to the club. No big deal. Happens every day.

But there was something different about this incident. First, there was abundant video evidence — hours of it — proving that the truth about what happened was the exact opposite of how the liberal media had tried to spin it. These kids from Kentucky hadn’t sought out a confrontation with the activist Nathan Phillips; instead, he had deliberately tried to provoke them, and didn’t get the reaction he expected.

The second point was that the chosen targets of this “racism” smear were Catholic teenagers, innocent kids who had done nothing to deserve the abusive treatment dished out by the online mob and their media enablers. The Daily Caller headline captures this:

Your Complete Guide to How the Media Tried
Ruining the Lives of Innocent Teenagers

Joe Simonson explains that the anti-Trump media were eager to pounce on the Covington Catholic boys because a BuzzFeed “exclusive” that inspired MSNBC and CNN to engage in a 24-hour cycle of impeachment fantasies had just collapsed in a heap of ruined credibility:

Just mere days after BuzzFeed News dropped its hotly disputed report accusing President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice, the media decided to pick a new target: a group of teenage Catholic high school boys. . . .
Media figures, still reeling from the wave of criticism following the BuzzFeed News fiasco, smelled blood. Sure, the initial video didn’t show the students assaulting anyone, but that didn’t stop reporters, commentators and Hollywood celebrities from focusing on the smirk of a student in the video, which somehow triggered painful memories of lonely prom nights and failed junior varsity sport tryouts.

The fact that these were white boys from Kentucky, and some of them were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, triggered the Left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome reaction — “WHITE SUPREMACY!”

If you’re white, Democrats hate you. If you’re male, Democrats hate you. If you’re from Kentucky, Democrats hate you. If you’re Catholic, Democrats hate you. So if you’re a white male Catholic from Kentucky, Democrats view you as everything wrong about America, because you are why Trump is president, instead of Hillary. (Covington Catholic is in Kenton County, which Trump won by a 26-point margin, 60%-34%.)

These boys didn’t actually have to do anything to make the liberal media hate them. Merely by existing, they deserved to be hated, according to the partisan ideology that prevails at CNN, MSNBC, etc. Yet this would be insufficient to explain why the Covington Catholic story, which started on Saturday, is still news on Wednesday if it were not for a third factor: The anti-Trump media have adopted the mentality of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) and, as Vox Day famously observed, SJWs Always Double Down:

CNN political commentator Symone Sanders doubled down on Tuesday after being criticized for mocking Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann’s television interview performance.
“When you’re trying to remember the lines the PR team gave you,” Sanders tweeted, posting a preview of the “Today” interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie scheduled to run on Wednesday. In it, the Covington Catholic junior insisted he had “every right” to stand where he stood during the incident.

 

Understand that Symone Sanders wouldn’t be insulting this kid if she thought she might lose her CNN contract because of it. No, this is the officially approved narrative, and everybody employed at CNN understands that it’s open season on these Kentucky boys. The same is true at NBC, where Today show host Savannah Guthrie used her interview with the student at the center of the controversy to attempt to rehabilitate the Left’s discredited narrative:

“There is something aggressive about standing there, standing your ground. You both stood your ground, and it was like a stare down. What do you think of that now, when you think about that moment?”

This is a 180-degree reversal of the situation, which anyone can see if they’ll watch the video. Nick Sandmann did nothing “aggressive.” The activist Nathan Phillips was clearly the aggressor, wading into this group of teenagers while chanting and beating his drum. What would you expect a teenage boy to do, if some idiot protester got up in his face like that? Rather than being falsely accused as “aggressive,” Nick Sandmann deserves to be praised for his restraint under the circumstances.

Having gotten the story completely wrong, the #FakeNews media now insist they’re the victims because we’re tired of their lies.

 

Ace goes off on these creeps:

If the media succeeds in its mission of getting these kids attacked, should we throw the media a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes in Wall Street?
Do they want to be affirmatively praised for putting innocent children’s lives in danger?
What do they get if they succeed in getting a kid killed? A Pulitzer?

This is what people have to understand: In becoming partisan Democrat cheerleaders, the media have become utterly irresponsible. They tell lies, and when they get caught, they pretend to be the victims. They believe that as long as they are anti-Trump, they can do no wrong. This attitude not only convinces them that they are justified in lying about Trump (e.g., the “not accurate” BuzzFeed story), but also justified in lying about Trump supporters like these MAGA hat-wearing Kentucky boys.

Facts don’t matter to the media, because they are engaged in a war to destroy the 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump. They will keep doubling down on their lies until they are held accountable.

The media have been warned they have 48 hours to recant and apologize.

#StandWithCovington




 

 

 

Category: Catholics, Media Bias

‘Fyre Fraud’: A Millennial Woodstock

Posted on | January 23, 2019 | 1 Comment

Fyre Festival promoter Billy McFarland.

In October, when Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in federal prison, prosecutors described his criminal history thus:

“For the past five years, the defendant has been the consummate con artist. The defendant’s actions reveal a profoundly greedy, self-absorbed man focused exclusively on himself. . . . Whenever he needed more money, he lied to investors to get it. Whenever he wanted more money, he gave it to himself from business accounts. Whenever one scheme began to falter, he hatched a newer and more elaborate one.”

It appears that McFarland’s entire career, from the time he dropped out of Bucknell University in May 2011, was a series of scams, frauds and felonies disguised as start-up entrepreneurialism, culminating in the infamous April 2017 “Fyre Festival” in the Bahamas:

This “luxury” event turned out to be a wretched tent city with inadequate toilet facilities, more like a refugee camp than the kind of place you’d expect to find international supermodels hanging out. How bad was it? Promises of gourmet meals prepared by a famous chef turned out to be a cheese sandwich in a styrofoam container.

 

McFarland promised a tropical Coachella — Blink 182! Ja Rule! Bella Hadid! Hailey Baldwin! — and delivered a squalid nightmare. Two new documentaries, one by Netflix and one by Hulu, examine this notorious catastrophe and I watched the Hulu version of the story, Fyre Fraud, over the weekend. What the documentary shows is how the so-called “influencer economy” of social-media buzz was leveraged by McFarland to promote the idea that this event was going to be the hottest ticket of the year, thus appealing to the FOMO (“fear of missing out”) insecurities typical of affluent young hipsters. This reflects a phenomenon I first noticed in the 1980s and have called the “status leisure” mentality.

Pioneering sociologist Thorstein Veblen was the first to analyze how the wealthy of the Gilded Age spent their money in ways intended to display their social status. Middle-class youth of the 1980s were obsessed with designer-brand clothing and expensive sneakers — Nike Air Jordans became de rigueur for teenagers who never played basketball — as a means of displaying the social status to which they aspired. This aspirational aspect of status display reflects a message of upward mobility that young people seek to communicate to their peers. They might be just another suburban high-school kid now, but their upscale clothing conveyed the message that in the future, they would be members of the elite. And their preferences in leisure activity also reflected this status-obsessed mentality. Upwardly mobile young people couldn’t have fun doing things cheap or local; instead, real fun could only be had by spending money to go somewhere cool. Like, you couldn’t just invite your buddies over to play poker, you had to fly to Vegas for a three-day weekend. You didn’t want to go fishing at the nearby lake, you wanted to go fishing in Key West. Taking your kids to the county fair? Not cool. Taking your kids to Disney World? Cool. Taking your kids on a Caribbean cruise? Even cooler. This mentality — leisure activities as a means of status display — has been leveraged by promoters of events like the Coachella festival, where being part of a celebrity-studded scene is, to the Millennial hipster, what attending the Gold Cup at Ascot was for the Victorian aristocracy. But I digress . . .

The superficiality of reality-TV culture in the Social Media Age lends itself to the delusion that any attractive young person can become a Kardashian-like celebrity — “famous for being famous,” as Malcolm Muggeridge said — by shrewd management of their online image. Developing a popular Instagram presence and turning that into a career (e.g., “Caroline Calloway and the ‘Creativity Workshop’ Influencer Tour From Hell”) seems to be an idée fixe for many Millennials, and the Fyre Festival disaster of April 2017 wasn’t Billy McFarland’s first attempt to get rich by exploiting this status-conscious mentality:

What’s the Magnises card? It’s the brainchild of Billy McFarland. You’ve never heard of this 22-year-old college dropout, but he’s cooler than you. (Just ask him.)
Founder Billy McFarland admits that Magnises is “Latin for absolutely nothing.” The Short Hills, NJ, native — the son of two real-estate developers — launched his first startup (a service that matched websites and designers) at 13, and skipped out on Bucknell University during his freshman year to launch a content-sharing site called Spling. From there, it was a short leap to starting his own credit-card company — and only letting in members whom he and his staff of 11 deem cool enough.
Magnises is “Latin for absolutely nothing,” admits McFarland, who launched the company in March. “The name is made up, but it sounds grand, doesn’t it?”
Forged in matte black stainless steel, the credit card is attempting to position itself as the hot new way to spend money among NYC’s young elite. Olympic hopefuls, scenester DJs, tech innovators and socialites like Nick Loeb (Sofia Vergara’s ex-fiancé) are among the 1,200 or so chosen ones who don’t leave home without it.

 

The appeal of the Magnises card — which was actually just a way to upgrade the user’s own debit card — was that it conveyed the prestige of being a member of this exclusive “young elite.” As the Hulu documentary shows, the Magnises scheme launched in 2014 was the platform of fraud upon which McFarland later built the Fyre Festival:

[I]n addition to acting as a “black card for 20-somethings,” the card was also meant to get members exclusive things like access to the Magnises townhouse in SoHo, private parties, and discounts on luxury and designer items. Membership, which cost $250 annually, was also supposed to include a car and driver and a 24/7 concierge to assist users in getting tickets to big events. . . . It was marketed as a status tool for wealthy millennials, but one former employee, Emily Boehm, says in the Hulu documentary that it was actually more for those wanting to join an “out of college frat.”
Fyre Fraud includes interviews with journalists who covered Magnises and the company’s former employees, and more than one person likened Magnises to madcap NBC sitcoms about ineffective workplaces. . . .
Events were often cancelled last minute and the number of actual members was unclear, despite McFarland’s numerous claims that membership was growing, according to a Bloomberg report on Magnises. With numerous customer complaints and conflicting membership stats, it was increasingly difficult to measure the company’s actual success.
McFarland used connections in Silicon Valley, investors, and marketing agencies with good pull and got celebrities to endorse Magnises . . .

One perk for Magnises members was invitations to parties at a private townhouse, but in 2015, McFarland was sued by his landlord who said the $13,750-a-month property, which he had leased “exclusively for residential purposes,” had been “maliciously vandalized” for more than $60,000 in damages as a result of McFarland’s “blowout parties.”

The problems with Magnises were one of the “red flags” about McFarland’s shady behavior that were ignored by those suckered into involvement in the Fyre Festival fiasco. One of the warning signs was the March 2016 indictment of Aubrey McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, who had been one of the biggest investors in Magnises. The day after the indictment, McClendon died in a single-car crash that many suspected was suicide, and McFarland needed to find some new source of cash to prop up his business (which looked a lot like a Ponzi scheme). Fashion executive Carola Jain, wife of wife of hedge fund manager Bobby Jain, was one of his new investors. Now, McFarland claimed to be developing an event booking app he called Fyre Media and this led to the idea of the Fyre Festival, conceived when McFarland and Ja Rule visited the Bahamas. McFarland managed to persuade a gaggle of big-name models to travel to the Bahamas to do a video promoting the event and, on December 12, 2016, all of them simultaneously posted the video and photos to their Instagram accounts. Marila Bobila of Fashionista described the effect:

Our feeds were flooded with images of a tropical vacation to a seemingly private island starring Alessandra Ambrosio, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski, Elsa Hosk, Paulina Vega, Lais Ribeiro, Rose Bertram, Gizele Oliveira and Hannah Ferguson.

The video promised “An Immersive Music Festival . . . On a Remote and Private Island in The Exumas . . . The Best in Food, Art, Music and Adventure . . . On the Boundaries of the Impossible.” And the online roll-out of the ad was impressive: “I mean, it was perfectly executed. It’s one of the greatest social-media campaigns I’ve ever seen. They got the most beautiful women in the world, with the largest social following. And then the photo shoot . . . It was just incredible.”

Keep in mind that this was barely a month after the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump had left a lot of people in the fashion/entertainment/media world feeling emotionally traumatized, and now . . . this awesome festival with tickets starting at $1,500? The young and hip were excited about it, but the ticket-buyers had no idea that, behind the scenes, people were already warning McFarland that he could never put together such an event on such short notice. McFarland was promising luxury accommodations, and even if he could come up with the money to provide what he promised — a big “if” — the logistics of transporting everything to this island site was problematic. Do the math: Suppose that a total of 5,000 people paid $1,500, that’s $7.5 million. Well, that ticket price included air travel from Miami to Exuma International Airport, which “services mainly light aircraft and regional jets,” in other words, not your big jumbo jets. American Eagle flies a 60-seater turboprop plane for its regular service from Miami to Exuma. So, to get 5,000 people to this festival would require about 80 flights. How are you gonna book 80 charter flights out of Miami?

Never mind that. The lowest-priced regular flight is $335 round-trip, so if you could somehow get charter companies to match that rate — another big “if” — you would have spent about $1.7 million just to deliver the air travel part of the package for your 5,000 ticket holders. That leaves you with $4.8 million for everything else and, even if you’ve got that much money (which McFarland didn’t), remember you not only have to pay off all the performers, the lights, the sound, etc., but you’ve promised luxury accommodations: “Guests will be staying in modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes.” Good luck building such housing for 5,000 people from scratch in just four months, and what about water, sewage, electricity, etc.? Also, you’ve promised these people gourmet meals, yoga classes, and a bunch of other luxurious experiences. What’s all that gonna cost to deliver on a remote island site in the Bahamas?

People tried to warn Billy McFarland that this was impossible to accomplish in four months, at any price, but . . . grifters gonna grift.

McFarland had claimed Fyre Media was worth $90 million, but as the April date for the festival approached, he was forced to pay exorbitant rates for an emergency loan in a desperate attempt to put together something even remotely resembling what he’d promised. Of course, he failed, and no concerts ever happened at Fyre Festival.

The first ticket-holders to arrive — riding from the airport on a school bus — found a bunch of tents set up with mattresses piled around the site, and very little else. Pretty soon, everybody was trying to escape and Twitter erupted in mockery at the hipster apocalypse.

What wasn’t funny, however, was that Fyre wasn’t merely a bungled festival, it was the culmination of more than three years of escalating frauds by which McFarland had bilked investors of millions.

 

Fyre Fraud features interview segments with McFarland, which often end with him sitting silently, unable to answer the questions. He is not capable of admitting the truth about what he did, and his excuses and rationionalizations can’t explain away the evidence. While I don’t doubt that McFarland believed, in December 2016, that he could actually make the Fyre Festival happen, despite all the warnings to the contrary, as the weeks went by and the evidence of an impending failure accumulated, he could have hit the brakes and postponed it. Why didn’t he?

In a word, money. Because his entire business career was essentially fraudulent — McFarland was a Bernie Madoff in the making — he knew that if he canceled the April date, there would be no chance to do the festival at a later date, because his financial pyramid scheme would soon come tumbling down. McFarland had built a reputation as a whiz kid, a reputation that had enabled him to live large on investors’ money, and he knew he’d be ruined when the chickens finally came home to roost.

Billy McFarland is in federal prison now, but the social-media “influencer” game is still going on, and grifters are still grifting.

The “status leisure” syndrome — the status-obsessed fixation on being perceived as one of the cool kids, conveying an image of upward mobility — is at the root of what made the Fyre Festival such an alluring idea for so many young people. At his sentencing hearing, Billy McFarland claimed he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but it would be more accurate to say he is afflicted with the Millennial mentality, a delusional condition caused by excessive exposure to social media.




 

 

 

Category: Crime
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