‘Be Not Conformed to This World’

Posted on | December 6, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Be Not Conformed to This World’

The words of the Apostle Paul came to mind this morning when I read John Nolte’s article, “Conformity Killed the Weekly Standard”:

The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? . . .
Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater. . . .

Read the whole thing. What’s the value-added of your journalistic product, as a conservative magazine, if your essential message is, “Liberals are right”? It is possible to dislike President Trump or to criticize his policies without joining Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry in the #NeverTrump chorus of sore losers whose basic argument is that the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were wrong to do so. According to the #NeverTrump chorus, because their favorite candidates did not win the GOP nomination, therefore Hillary Clinton should be president. They have devoted themselves to delegitimizing Trump’s presidency, and are we surprised that this message was so unpopular with conservatives that the Weekly Standard became a publication without a readership?

It is perhaps sacrilegious to invoke Romans 12:2 in such a secular context, but the conservative journalist, surrounded by liberals, is very much like the first-century Christian surrounded by pagans. We know that more than 90% of American journalists are Democrats, we know that dissenting from this hegemonic consensus will not make us popular with our peers, and we can expect only vilification from them.

For 20 years, the Weekly Standard had a “brand” represented by Bill Kristol’s frequent appearances on Fox News, which was no coincidence, because the magazine was originally funded by the same company that owns Fox News. The magazine was thus insulated from the market pressures of finding a readership. The Fox News audience was also the Weekly Standard‘s readership and, not coincidentally, a ready-made market for the lucrative Weekly Standard cruises.

As Kurt Schlichter says, “Ahoy.”

Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.

Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider. Sort of like Kirby Smart calling for a fake punt on fourth-and-11.

We cannot know what the future holds. President Trump’s election contradicted all the “expert” predictions, and so the prognostications of the political elite are now useless. By repeatedly doubling-down on its #NeverTrump stance, the Weekly Standard squandered its credibility, and everyone associated with that publication must be regarded by conservatives as permanently tainted by their failure. Let us hope that younger conservatives viewing the sorry end of that once promising publication will learn a valuable lesson. Selah.

Category: Intellectuals

Catch and Release: MS-13 Killer Avoided Deportation Because of Obama Judge

Posted on | December 5, 2018 | Comments Off on Catch and Release: MS-13 Killer Avoided Deportation Because of Obama Judge

Henri Salvador Gutierrez (left); Judge Mario Sturla (right).

In September 2016, a lawyer named Mario Sturla was appointed as a federal immigration judge by President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch. Sturla is himself an immigrant, a native of the Dominican Republic who graduated from Brown University in 2003 and got his law degree at Yeshiva University in 2006. In June, Judge Sturla heard the case of Henri Salvador Gutierrez, a 19-year-old Salvadoran entered the country illegally in 2014. Gutierrez, whose MS-13 nickname is “Perverso,” had been arrested three different times since his arrival in the U.S. and, by the time of his June 22 hearing in Boston, had been in federal detention for seven months. Homeland Security testified that Gutierrez had been determined “to be a risk to public safety as a verified and active member of the MS-13 gang in the Boston metro area.” Incredibly, Judge Sturla turned the foreign criminal loose on the streets:

“Lastly, the court finds that the respondent has made attempts to rehabilitate himself after multiple arrests for carrying knives and machetes,” Sturla wrote in his decision. “The respondent testified that he wants live a peaceful life.”

As might be expected, Gutierrez’s “peaceful life” didn’t last long. Within a matter of weeks after he was released, according to an affidavit, Gutierrez and five of his MS-13 accomplices stabbed to death 17-year-old Herson Rivas, who they believed was an informer:

“The nature and circumstances of the (charges) are troubling and horrific,”?a federal criminal affidavit reads.
That includes killing 17-year-old Herson Rivas on Aug. 2 with a large knife like they were “chopping wood.”
One of the accused, according to the affidavit, stabbed the defenseless teen “with such force his knife became warped during the attack.” . . .
“Four of the six defendants appear to have entered or remained in the United Status unlawfully. At least four of the six defendants have MS-13 tattoos indicating that they are MS-13 homeboys, suggesting that they committed a murder or other violent attack.
“At least two of the six defendants have felony records. At least two of the six defendants were previously in immigration custody but were released and went on to commit … murder,” prosecutors state.
One of the suspects was arrested yesterday and the rest are locked up on state charges or in immigration custody, and will appear in federal court soon.
“MS-13 is a ruthless, transnational gang operating in our backyard,” said U.S. Attorney in Boston Andrew E. Lelling. “This group routinely commits senseless acts of violence, including murder, to maintain control and instill fear.
He added: “Dismantling MS-13 in Massachusetts and elsewhere is a top priority of the Department of Justice. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will continue working together to investigate and hold MS-13 members responsible for these heinous crimes.”

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

Category: Crime, Immigration

In The Mailbox: 12.05.18

Posted on | December 5, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.05.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday; was under the weather.

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Is The Weekly Standard Doomed?
Twitchy: Daily Show Catches Heat For Using 41’s Funeral To Mock Trump
Louder With Crowder: How To Tweet Like Alexandria Occasional Cortex In Five Easy Steps, also, Senator Hirono Claims Democrats Have Trouble Connecting With People Because “We’re Too Smart”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Older Brother Podcast #30 – The Anime Girlfriend Pillow Episode
American Power: Heather MacDonald Interview, also, The Case For Spending More To Help Israel
American Thinker: Maxine Waters Wants Revenge
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Electoral Shenanigans News, also, Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Maureen Dowd Talks About Maureen Dowd (And A Little Bit About Bush The Elder), also, All The Feels
CDR Salamander: How An Officer Acts When Captured By The Enemy, also, Brave New China
Da Tech Guy: General Locusts, also, Five Quick Would-Be Tweets Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Mueller Inadvertently Exonerates Trump, also, Oh No! Joy Behar May Quit The View!
Dustbury: This Seems Stressful
The Geller Report: Muslim Defense Contractors Charged With Defrauding DoD Nearly $9 Billion, also, Canadian PM Trudeau Backs UN Migration Pact That Could Erase Canadian Identity
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, Get Woke, Go Broke, & Facebook Isn’t Your Friend, also, Poker v. Chess
Hollywood In Toto: Pop Culture Clobbered Conservatives In 2018
JustOneMinute: We’ll Always Have Paris, also, Out Like Flynn
Legal Insurrection: WI Republican Legislature Passes Bills Limiting Powers Of Incoming Democrat Gov, AG, also, Mueller Claims Flynn Gave Him “First-Hand” Details About Trump Transition Team’s Contacts With Russia – Which Aren’t Illegal
Michelle Malkin: Stop Partisan Corpse Abuse
The PanAm Post: Bolsonaro Rejects Slavery For Cuban Doctors, AMLO Approves It
Power Line: The Danes Have Had It With Illegal Alien Criminals, also, Analyze This
Shark Tank: Rubio Says Nation’s Future Is “American”, Contra Gillibrand’s Assertion That It’s “Intersectional”
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always – Nancy Nord Bence’s Unbroken Streak!
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday -The French Are Revolting
The Jawa Report: Abu al-Umarayn – He’s Dead, Jim
The Political Hat: The Neo-Luddites And The Populist Temptation, also, Drag Queen Openly Admits Grooming Children
This Ain’t Hell: Goodbye, Old Friend, also, U.S. Warship Sails In Sea Of Japan Waters Claimed By Russia
Victory Girls: Macron Blinks, Will Defer Global Warming Fuel Tax For Six Months
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Court Rules Against Administration In Sanctuary Cities Case
Weasel Zippers: Air Force Obliterates Taliban Training Camp In Helmand Province, Afghanistan, also, Jihadi Work Accident – 37 Taliban Losers Killed By Own Car Bomb
Megan McArdle: The Incredibly Unpopular Idea That Could Help Stem Opioid Deaths
Mark Steyn: Last Call, also, The Long Goodbye

Twelve Days Of Deals, Day 4: Personal Computers
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘The Title IX Reign of Terror’

Posted on | December 5, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘The Title IX Reign of Terror’

Professor Dennis Gouws (left); Dean Anne Herzog (right).

Springfield College in Massachusetts is a small private liberal arts school with about 3,200 students. Perhaps best known as the place where James Naismith invented basketball, Springfield recently became the site of a feminist dean’s persecution of Professor Dennis Gouws.

This case illustrates what Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls the “Title IX Reign of Terror” unleashed by the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter. This was most obvious in what K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. have called The Campus Rape Frenzy. However, beyond the proliferation of sexual assault accusations, the Obama administration’s Title IX policy also made it possible for university officials “to discover ‘discrimination’ and ‘harassment’ pretty much wherever they want”:

A new campus regime emerged in which it became dramatically easier to threaten and to intimidate anyone who crossed the invisible and often imaginary lines.
The case of Professor Dennis Gouws at Springfield College in Massachusetts provides the best-documented instance of how this works. Gouws first came to national attention in spring 2016, when his department cancelled his popular undergraduate course, “Men in Literature,” which paralleled another offering in the English department, “Women in Literature.”
The course on men in literature had been offered for many years and wasn’t controversial, but all at once the dean of the college, Anne Herzog, decided Gouws’s interest in teaching about men was, as we now say, problematic. . . . Herzog seized on a complaint from one student in “Men in Literature” to demand that he revise the course. . . .

Read the whole thing. All it takes is one complaint for a feminist administrator to destroy a professor’s life and career.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

The Bankruptcy of #NeverTrump

Posted on | December 5, 2018 | Comments Off on The Bankruptcy of #NeverTrump

This morning, I noted the “Get Woke, Go Broke” factor in the failure of Mic-dot-com — which burned through $60 million in startup capital and was sold for $5 million — and a similar observation may be made about the woes of the Weekly Standard:

The Weekly Standard is not expected to survive going into 2019 and is preparing to shut down permanently, according to a current staff member and former member of the magazine’s parent company who spoke to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Rumors had been circulating throughout the media class Tuesday about the fate of The Weekly Standard in the wake of the magazine’s dwindling readership and circulation, despite a rebranding effort as the preeminent right-leaning periodical for conservatives opposed to President Donald Trump.
“I don’t expect it to exist after December 14, 2018,” one editor at the magazine told TheDCNF. “There is no budget for it AT ALL.”
News broke Tuesday afternoon from CNN that the magazine’s editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes addressed staff about the magazine’s troubles, but did not go into detail about what the future might hold. . . .
The Weekly Standard was founded in 1995 by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. Originally owned by NewsCorp, the magazine was eventually sold in 2009 to billionaire Philip Anschutz. Individuals close to the magazine told TheDCNF that Anschutz was growing frustrated with the direction of the magazine.
A former employee of The Washington Examiner, which is a member of the same parent company as The Weekly Standard, told TheDCNF the office had been hearing murmurings Monday about the magazine’s fate. That employee told TheDCNF there had been talk that some of The Weekly Standard would be folded into The Washington Examiner.
“They’re either closing or they’re folding into a page of the Washington Examiner,” said the former Examiner employee.
Yet a current editor at The Weekly Standard disputed that possibility.
“I don’t think ‘folded’ is the right word. It sounds more like get rid of us entirely,” the editor said.

So they were originally funded by Murdoch, and then got bought by Anschutz, but he’s “frustrated” about a magazine whose editors bet the ranch on #NeverTrump. This move was apparently undertaken without bothering to calculate whether there was a readership for an anti-Trump “conservative” magazine. Having decided to alienate a substantial segment of their existing readership, the Weekly Standard did not attract enough new readers to replace what they’d lost and even a billionaire can’t just keep pouring cash into a magazine nobody is reading.

What’s interesting is how Bill Kristol, whose frequent appearances on Fox News made him the “face” of the Weekly Standard, left the magazine in late 2016, after Trump was elected. Did he see the handwriting on the wall? Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, and maybe Kristol perceived what that meant for his anti-Trump magazine.

As Kurt Schlichter would say, ahoy. So much ahoy.

UPDATE: Remember when the Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last published “The Case for Banning Alex Jones”? How ironic is it that Jonathan V. Last is now threatened with the loss of his job?

There’s just so much ahoy here.

Category: Media Bias

Digital Fire Sale: ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ Wiping Out SJW Online Media

Posted on | December 5, 2018 | Comments Off on Digital Fire Sale: ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ Wiping Out SJW Online Media

Making “social justice” part of your business model is never a good idea, and some startling numbers are starting to come out:

It was around this time last year that things were starting to look a little dicey for the media industry’s once breathlessly-hyped digital unicorns. Both BuzzFeed and Vice made news for substantially missing their revenue targets. Mashable was sold at a dramatic price reduction. Vox Media was forced to terminate 5 percent of its workforce. . . .
A year later, the challenges have hardly abated. Mic canned the majority of its staff last week as part of a last-resort sale to Bustle for about $5 million — $95 million less than its previous valuation. Vice, under turnaround C.E.O. Nancy Dubuc, is in the process of trimming its 3,000-person global headcount by 15 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported Vice’s losses at more than $50 million in 2018. At Refinery29, 10 percent of the workforce received pink slips this fall. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti recently floated in the pages of The New York Times the quixotic notion of a multi-company merger between BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media, Group Nine Media, and Refinery29, as a means to rival the Facebook-Google ad duopoly.

Whoa — Vice is losing $1 million a week? That’s insane. And did you know (I didn’t) that Mic had raised $60 million in investment capital? But the founders Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz “couldn’t find a business model” to pay the bills for their “millennial-focused news company,” so they sold for just $5 million. Just three years ago, they had a vodka company sponsoring their private party at a swanky Chelsea nightclub, but then Facebook changed its algorithm and the clickbait traffic evaporated, so no more hoverboards in the office, eh?

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Media Bias

Buzzword Alert: ‘Neoliberalism’

Posted on | December 4, 2018 | Comments Off on Buzzword Alert: ‘Neoliberalism’

Over the weekend, transgender activists sent out a hoax email falsely claiming that radical feminist Meghan Murphy had cancelled her scheduled Jan. 10 talk at the Vancouver Public Library. Some Canadian outlets were deceived by that email, didn’t bother checking with either Murphy or the library, and ran with the false story.

While I was at Ms. Murphy’s Feminist Current website checking that story, I noticed they had published an article by British academic Heather Brunskell-Evans entitled “A neoliberal concept of freedom has allowed gender identity ideology to take hold,” which begins thus:

Neoliberalism is the political philosophy (of the left and the right) that was developed in the West during the 1980s as populist “common-sense.” It has several problems:

1) It regards the individual as an autonomous agent, primarily motivated by self-interest;
2) It tells us the unregulated free-market economy alleviates social inequalities;
3) It describes personal freedom in terms of the individual’s ability to “choose” in a market place of choices.

What is wrong with this neoliberal, economistic view of the human being? It is reductive. As well as being individual agents, human beings are also located in psychological, social, and political contexts that render our autonomy and inter-relationship with others more complex than such an ideology allows.

Permit me to register my protest against this word, which was coined in the past 15 or 20 years by the progressive Left (the kind of people who take Noam Chomsky seriously) as analogous to “neoconservative.” The purpose of the word “neoliberal” is to discredit anyone on the Left who would compromise with the Right. People who use this word mean to say that if you are not an outright socialist, you are a “neoliberal.”

Professor Brunskell-Evans is British, as I say, and so her perspective on political ideology reflects British realities, which are structurally different than the American situation. Their Tories are not the same as our Republicans, nor is Labour the same as our Democrats, and Britain does not have America’s profusion of independent organizations (e.g., Heritage, AEI, Cato) influencing their political debate.

In particular, it’s worth noting, the British had nothing comparable to our Religious Right, which exercised such a powerful influence on the conservative movement from the 1970s onward. One might observe that Christian conservative influence in our political life has waned in the past decade, but you cannot disregard this as a source of difference between America and Britain politics. Our conservatives are more religious than their conservatives, and this matters in ways large and small. Now, let’s quote some of Professor Brunskell-Evans’s article:

The 1990s saw a fierce backlash against the radical feminist critique of patriarchy. Society, we were told, had reached a stage of “post feminism,” and we could all rest easy because the feminist movement’s demands had now been met. The Spice Girls became the epitome of young women’s newfound, individualized sexual empowerment. Feminism became a dirty word, conjuring up a spectre of miserable, sexually starved, repressed women who hated men. My students at Goldsmiths College (one of the first universities unequivocally committed to understanding sex and gender through the lens of Queer Theory, and now the proud UK hotbed of the latter), revealed an actual revulsion towards the “F word.” Any suggestion that the equality laws and the sexual freedoms from which they benefited were brought about by feminist activism and our refusal to be bound by sexist gender roles was met with disavowal. They confidently derided any suggestion that second wave feminists were sexual freedom fighters.
Transgender ideology is an outcome of the meteoric rise of Queer Theory which, contrary to the claims of trans activists, does not reject biological essentialism, but reifies it by simply reversing the order: It asserts that binary sex — being female or male — is socially “assigned,” not a biological fact; in contrast gender — an individual’s feeling of “femininity” or “masculinity” — is said to be pre-social, emerging from the inner being. This ideology has no human scientific basis and overrides simple facts.

Well, yes, ma’am, we agree that transgender ideology is nonsense, but your account of what happened to feminism reflects a view from inside academia, rather than what was happening in the real world, where feminism never possessed the sort of institutional authority it wields on university campuses. It is wrong to say there was “backlash” against feminism in the 1990s because, in the world outside academia, no one with any common sense ever doubted that feminists actually were (and still are) miserable repressed women who hate men. The form that feminism took during the 1990s, the marketing coup of “sex-positive feminism” as a message of “empowerment,” was best represented by Nina Burleigh’s comment on the Lewinsky scandal:

“I’d be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

Nina Burleigh was not the only feminist who believed that the Clinton presidency, and the Democrat Party more generally, was the only thing preventing “the theocracy” from outlawing abortion. Feminism’s alignment with the Democrats was rooted in the idea that abortion is women’s most important right — the holy sacrament of the Church of Liberalism, as Ann Coulter remarked in her book Godless. And this fanatical delusion never could have taken hold were it not for the way the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision circumnavigated the political process to impose legalized abortion on the nation.

Let’s be clear about this: If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

There is no way one can endorse infanticide and then claim the authority to lecture others about moral rights and wrongs — and this has been the fundamental error of feminism. Whether or not abortion is legal, it is always wrong, and while the law may compel us to tolerate this evil, a free people can never be forced to endorse abortion or forbidden to criticize it.

Feminists have sought to stigmatize and silence their critics and now that the shoe is on the other foot, with transgender activists seeking to stigmatize and silence feminist, who has the moral authority to referee this internecine dispute among progressives?

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”
— Genesis 1:27-28 (KJV)

Feminists will not be able to defeat the transgender cult without the aid of Christians who believe that the categories male and female are the work of the Creator, who had a purpose in mind for His creation. Unless we have respect for the purpose of sexual differences (i.e., the “be fruitful and multiply” part of that formula), how are we to claim any moral high ground in such matters? If there is no God, and thus no purpose to our existence — if human life has no moral meaning or value, so that abortion is a “right” — who are we to deny transgender activists the authority to impose their own meanings, and to silence their critics?

Feminists now confront an existential crisis. If “Hailey Heartless” is a woman and “Zinnia Jones” is a woman, why can’t they assert their authority to define feminism in their own terms? If the definition of “woman” is now to be altered by political compulsion, then it becomes nearly impossible to speak of “women’s rights” in any meaningful way.