Email to @betsyscribeindc

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on Email to @betsyscribeindc

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
— Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind

Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2017 6:09PM ET
From: Robert McCain
To: Betsy Rothstein
BCC: Bert the Samoan Lawyer

Dear Miss Rothstein:
As the old show-biz saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so I am in your debt for the Aug. 30 Daily Caller article headlined, “Journo Welcomes Female Wrath Into His Life.” When you emailed me in reply to the press release for next Saturday’s event in Worcester, I was a little too busy to reply immediately, but did ask you to phone me the next day, and later sent you replies to your initial questions. Well, that didn’t make it into your story, but I was rather amused to see you included this:

The Mirror also sought comment from Washington journalists who are familiar with his work.
“I think the guy is bad news,” said a Washington journalist. “Seems like a parody of the racist, sexist Neanderthal that the opponents want to portray all Republicans as being.”
“He’s gross,” said a female Washington writer when asked for comment. “You can disagree with feminism without being derisive about women.”
When McCain worked The Washington Times, The Mirror has learned that some female coworkers found him “funny” and others thought he was “offensive.”

Whether some anonymous writer thinks of me as a Neanderthal is of no consequence, but I fully agree with your second source: Disagreeing with feminism doesn’t mean being “derisive about women,” and I am not.

This is a point I made myself in reply to one of your email questions. You asked how I viewed women “generally,” and in my answer I said, “There obviously is no correct answer to such a question, because no one views women ‘generally.’ Rather, every intelligent person views people as individuals, and we tend to be offended by generalizations about groups.” Elsewhere in my reply, I remarked on the unfortunate tendency to think that any man who criticizes feminism is somehow “anti-woman.” This is some like saying a critic of Marxism is “anti-worker,” and is self-evidently false. Radical ideologues who insist that all opponents of their identity-politics movement are motivated by bad faith (mala fides) are engaged in a dishonest rhetorical game, and become offended when their tactics are exposed. During the Cold War, Communists always engaged in character assassination against their enemies, because Communism was (and still is) indefensible on its merits.

Elsewhere in your article, you seem interested in reviving the ancient fable that I am some kind of “white supremacist,” which falls into the category of fake news, as President Trump might say. As I told the pathetic bungler Max Blumenthal a dozen years ago, I’m too lazy to be evil. You might also want to consult my November 2009 blog post, “How to Reply to the Southern Poverty Law Center (If You Must).”

All of this is “asked and answered,” and there are many friends who could testify to my innocence in this regard, but why bother? In the Trump Age, liberals expect us to believe that all 65 million Americans who voted Republican last fall are crypto-Nazis, so I suppose I was just a few years early in being smeared as a “hater.” Now that you’re working for a notorious bastion of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I suppose I should welcome you to the club with the secret handshake, etc.

Considering how the Left’s character assassins are always slinging mud at their enemies, no sane man with a regard for his own reputation would become a conservative, but no one’s ever accused me of being sane. This email is BCC’d to my friend Bert the Samoan Lawyer, who can attest that I’ve been notoriously crazy as long as he’s known me, going back to my career as the music columnist “Doctor Rock” at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University. Of course, I was a Democrat back then, and there weren’t any left-wing media clairvoyants probing my subconscious mind for evidence of Thought Crime, so maybe I was a dangerous “alt-right” extremist the whole time, without even realizing it. But I digress . . .

A basic problem with Washington, D.C., is that it is a town full of utterly selfish people intent on climbing the Ziggurat of Ambition. Everybody’s concerned about their “image” and enhancing their “connections” by sucking up to those they perceive as influential. In their constant scramble for advantage, these status-conscious people often develop the habit of disparaging others behind their backs, and organizing clandestine attacks on those they deem enemies or rivals. A few months ago, I found myself at a CPAC party being yelled at by a certain GOP operative because of an old quarrel between two acquaintances. This was a quarrel that I had attempted to prevent, but my friends had disregarded my advice and so, inadvertently, this led someone to make me out to be the Bad Guy, and this GOP operative felt the need to get up in my face.

What can anyone do, in such a situation? Once upon a time, an insult might result in an invitation to the old Bladensburg dueling grounds, but nowadays it’s mainly just people badmouthing each other behind their backs, and trying to get people fired from their jobs by giving anonymous quotes to reporters. That’s at least 90% of the explanation for why, more than a decade ago, malcontent employees and disgruntled ex-employees of The Washington Times decided to make me the scapegoat for their grievances with the newspaper’s senior editors. As for the other 10%, I long ago said as much in my own defense as was necessary, and there’s no need to repeat all that today. Anyway, I need to wrap this up because Alabama’s playing Florida State tonight, and I wouldn’t want to miss the kickoff. Thanks again for the publicity, ma’am. Roll Tide!

— RSM

Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Transgender Victimhood Narrative Sustains Further Embarrassment

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | 3 Comments

Nothing is more important to the self-esteem of Democrats than the belief that they are fighting on behalf of Victims of Oppression. The Democrat Party is organized as an identity-politics coalition and promotes the idea that victims exist categorically and oppression is systemic: All women are victims of sexism, all black people are victims of racism, all gay people are victims of homophobia, etc. Democrats and their media allies wage continual propaganda campaigns to sell these identity group victimhood narratives. This is how, for example, the shooting death of a robbery suspect in Ferguson, Missouri, got turned into a nationwide crisis, because the Democrats who run CNN decided this particular incident should be the subject of 24/7 coverage in order to promote the victimhood narrative of “Black Lives Matter.”

Commercial conglomerates are eager to play along with this propaganda, as a matter of corporate public relations, because they don’t want to be perceived as guilty of “hate,” which is the implicit accusation against anyone who disputes the social-justice victimhood narrative. This explains why so much ballyhoo accompanied L’Oreal’s announcement last month that a British DJ named Munroe Burgdorf would become the makeup company’s first transgender “brand ambassador.”

Munroe Bergdorf makes history as the first openly
trans woman to land her own L’Oréal UK campaign
— Mic, Aug. 28

Munroe Bergdorf Opens Up About Being
a Trans Woman in a Beauty Campaign
— W, Aug. 30

Munroe Bergdorf Is The First Transgender
Model To Star In A L’Oréal Campaign
— Nylon, Aug. 31

This was P.R. hype, not journalism, and because fashion magazines are publicity agents for their advertisers, Munroe Bergdorf even got a byline in Vogue for an article entitled, “What Makeup Means to Me”:

To be the first trans woman in a L’Oréal Paris UK campaign feels amazing, and also kind of crazy. When I got the email about it I was just sat with my mum and I couldn’t believe it. But I think it’s great – I mean, as women we’re all so varied and L’Oréal are allowing more women to see themselves represented. It can be alienating, to see the same images all of the time and for none of them to relate to you. . . .

Yes, “representation” — which is to say, tokenism and quotas — is all the rage in media nowadays, as if being able to see our own images reflected back to us by TV, movies and advertisements is an inalienable right. This rhetoric fosters a sense of narcissistic entitlement on the part of those who claim that their identities are “marginalized” because they are “underrepresented” in media: “This TV show is oppressing me!”

Hiring a mixed-race transgender “ambassador” like Munroe Bergdorf was the ultimate diversity gesture for L’Oreal, a company that made about $3.7 billion profit from about $150 billion revenue in 2016. How did this cynical “social justice” pandering work out? Not very well:

With a dizzying fanfare, she was brought in as the ‘face of modern diversity’.
But days after she was announced as L’Oreal’s first transgender model, Munroe Bergdorf launched an extraordinary rant declaring all white people racist.
And [Thursday] L’Oreal confirmed the 29-year-old British star, who appeared in its recent ‘#allworthit’ campaign with Cheryl Cole and Katie Piper, has been dropped from her lucrative new role.
In a lengthy Facebook rant, she wrote: ‘Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
‘Because most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***.
‘Come see me when you realise that racism isn’t learned, it’s inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.
‘Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth… then we can talk.
‘Until then stay acting shocked about how the world continues to stay f***** at the hands of your ancestors and your heads that remain buried in the sand with hands over your ears.’

Never mind that, in condemning white people as “the most violent and oppressive force on nature on Earth,” Bergdorf was denouncing his/“her” own mother (a white woman from a working-class background in northern England) and also the 87% white majority of British people. Also, never mind the white people (whose “entire existence is drenched in racism”) that run L’Oreal and paid Bergdorf as their “ambassador.” Objective facts are irrelevant to the victimhood narratives that sustain the identity politics ideology of 21st-century progressivism.

Munroe Bergdorf’s self-inflicted career destruction might be evidence of mental illness, but at least he/“she” isn’t an axe-wielding maniac:

The triumph of postmodern Third Wave feminist theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize the key points of Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble — has unleashed a tsunami of weirdness, a tidal wave of confusion and conflict.
Consider, for example, the case of Karl Amati, a brilliant young student from Australia who decided as a teenager that he should become a “she,” and traveled to Thailand in 2015 to undergo sex-change surgery.
Ms. Amati, now 24, recently made headlines in Australia, when police say she went on a violent rampage and attacked three people with an axe at a convenience store . . .

Read the whole thing at The Patriarch Tree.

Pardon me for suggesting that the Obergefell ruling was the pivotal event that spawned our current epidemic of social/political insanity. pic.twitter.com/72vB2BlxYo

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) September 1, 2017

* * * * *

Readers can come hear me speak, and get a copy of my book Sex Trouble, next Saturday, Sept. 9, in Leominster, Massachusetts, at an event hosted by Da Tech Guy blog, the Worcester Tea Party and Granite Grok.

Tickets for this buffet luncheon event are available online, and I hope all my friends in the New England area will attend.

If you can’t make it to next week’s luncheon, however, you might want to chip in to the Shoe Leather Fund, because I’ll be spending five days up there and hope to visit Harvard University and other institutes of higher learning in the region, just to see what kind of lunacy the Gender Studies crowd is promulgating on campus this fall. Please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Gays, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

#Evergreen New York Times Ditty

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on #Evergreen New York Times Ditty

by Smitty

If you want to win a bet,
Go against truth in the NYeT:
Pravda-on-the-Hudson likes it wrong. (1/2)

— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017

Facts always seem to hide,
From their lyin' Commie pride,
Like talent from a wretched hip-hop song. (2/2)

— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017

Retweet these to Stick It To The Man.

Category: humor, Journalism, New York Times

In The Mailbox: 09.01.17

Posted on | September 1, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Lack of Zoning Didn’t Flood Houston
Twitchy: Texas High School Removes Pic Of Soldiers Sleeping In Hallway After Shameful Criticism
Louder With Crowder: LWC #223 – The Shapiro & Crowder Origins Story!, also, Sorry Slackers! Trump Reinstates Work Requirements For Welfare
According To Hoyt: Fear
Monster Hunter Nation: The International Lord Of Hate’s DragonCon Schedule
Vox Popoli: Mailvox – So Just Give Up And Die?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #54 – The Crowdfunding Episode, also, Friday Links And Resident Hawtness
American Power: Identity Politics Are Destroying America, also, Green Tyranny
American Thinker: Saving The Country From Its Own Government
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Windy Day Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For September 1
Da Tech Guy: Damned If You Do…
Don Surber: Why The Cabinet Disagrees With Trump
Dustbury: We Said to Shut Up
The Geller Report: SPLC Transfers Millions In Cash To Offshore Entities
Hogewash: Programming Announcement, also, Tubman On The Twenty?
Jammie Wearing Fools: Trevor Noah Finally Says Something Funny
Joe For America: LA Democrats Silent On Gay Black Rentboy’s Death At Hands Of Huge Hilary Donor
JustOneMinute: Who Will Fact Check The Fact-Checkers? also, Going After The SPLC
Power Line: Was It A Hack Or A Leak? also, Justice Scalia On “The Very Human Realities” In Arpaio’s Arizona
Shark Tank: (POLL) Senator Rubio’s Job Performance
Shot In The Dark: Have You Noticed Something Missing From The DFL Chanting Points Lately?
The Jawa Report: Right Wing Zionists Vow To Endeavour To Persevere, also, Sandcrawler PSA – The Sleestaks Are Taking Over!
The Political Hat: Kamala Harris Talks To Her Intellectual Superior
This Ain’t Hell: Socialism, History – And “An Inconvenient Truth”, also, Yeah, I Think We Can Handle This
Weasel Zippers: Woman Resembling Danny DeVito Is Criticizing Melania Trump’s Fashion, also, Comey Gave Clinton Aides Immunity After He’d Already Decided To Exonerate Hillary
Mark Steyn: Insufficient Emoting, also, The Coming Terror

Tomorrow is FMJRA day, and Sunday we have Rule 5 Sunday’s Labor Day OUTRAGE!
Send me your links if you want to be part of the hot bloggy action!

Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals – Bargain Bin! Everything At Least 50% Off!
Amazon Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘Less Than Fake News’

Posted on | August 31, 2017 | Comments Off on ‘Less Than Fake News’

OK, so Laura Ingraham has a web site called LifeZette, the chief executive of which is a guy named Peter Anthony, who allegedly is a “creep.”

Anyway, Betsy Woodruff and Lachlan Markay — two young conservative journalists I happen to know personally — wrote a story for The Daily Beast detailing various creepy things Peter Anthony has allegedly done, e.g., making sexual comments about female employees of LifeZette and urging employees to drink shots at staff Happy Hour parties.

The basic problem with this story is that (a) all these allegations are made by anonymous sources and (b) nobody’s filed a lawsuit or anything. Also (c) who cares about D.C. newsroom gossip, anyway?

While I don’t want to take lightly the accusation of sexual harassment, I wouldn’t push the “publish” button on that kind of story without some kind of documentation — preferably a verified court filing, but maybe an internal company memo or an email. You’ve got to have something more than just “anonymous sources said” before you run a story like that, because otherwise you’re setting yourself up for a libel suit.

These are journalistic considerations that have nothing to with whether Peter Anthony is or is not a creep, or whether working conditions for women in the LifeZette offices are ideal. You can say, “Well, the story quotes multiple people saying this guy’s a sexist pig,” but none of those people have filed a lawsuit, nor are they otherwise willing to go public with these accusations under their own names, and this is problematic.

If you don’t like your job or you don’t like your boss, quit — a simple solution, and if you want to badmouth your ex-boss, OK. But where else except in D.C. do people have this perceived need to “expose” the ex-boss they don’t like by giving anonymous quotes to the media?

Joe Curl used to work at LifeZette, and before that he worked for Drudge, and before that he worked at The Washington Times, and I’ve known Joe for almost 20 years now. Seeking to verify their story about LifeZette, the Daily Beast reporters emailed Joe some questions:

In response to an email from The Daily Beast, Curl replied by writing, “So, Houston is under water, North Korea’s firing missiles over Japan, the cost of health care has tripled under Obamacare, and you’re writing about — LifeZette happy hours? No wonder so many Americans despise the media. Your ‘story’ is less than fake news — it’s utter bullshit.”

Ouch.

Really, it’s D.C. media reporting about the D.C. media, and unless it involves a lawsuit or an arrest, it’s difficult to justify such a story.

Does Peter Anthony have a “habit” of making “crude observations” about female employees’ appearance? I don’t know. But I also don’t know if anyone outside the world of D.C. journalism cares. The LifeZette office could be Animal House, and so what? “Double-secret probation”?

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg — isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!”

God bless America!

Category: Journalism, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 08.31.17

Posted on | August 31, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.31.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box – Episode #1 (Won’t be up until 0300 Friday. Sorry.)
EBL: It’s Here – Burning Man 2017
Twitchy: Kamala Harris Gets A Brutal Lesson On What Is And What Isn’t A Right
Louder With Crowder: Watch Elderly Couple Rescued From Flood Waters – By Chick-Fil-A?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Cheating
American Power: America’s Mass Hysteria, also, Peter McPhee, Liberty Or Death
American Thinker: Trump Goes It Alone And Leaves ‘Em In The Dust
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Tax Reform News
BLACKFIVE: Andrew Gross, The One Man and The Saboteur
Bring The HEAT: African Americans In The Navy In World War II
Da Tech Guy: Letting DACA Lapse Would Be The President’s Best Move So Far, also, How To Get Undrafted By The NFL In One Easy Step
Don Surber: Why Trump Isn’t Filling Positions, also, Harvey Shows Trump As CEO
Dustbury: Leaving It All Behind
Fred On Everything: Thoughts From Below The Rio Bravo – A Preliminary To Going Into Hiding
The Geller Report: Trump-Type Populism Hits Germany’s Polls As Alt-Right Poised For Historic Parliamentary Wins
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obama’s Mideast Legacy – Iran’s Puppets Surround Israel With War On The Way
Joe For America:
JustOneMinute: Reality As A Social Construct
Power Line: Expecting Defeat In Supreme Court, Public Sector Unions Try To Slow Members’ Exodus, also, (DHS) Magical Mystery Tour – Doing The Work The Strib Won’t Do (Part 4)
Shark Tank: Rep. Deutch Denounces Antifa, But Claims Its Members Aren’t All Anarchists
Shot In The Dark: Let The Great Retraction Begin
STUMP: Soda Tax Gone Global – Is It Sweeps Week Yet?
The Jawa Report: White Man Kills Five Black Men In Racist Murder Spree
The Political Hat: Social Justice Education, Social Justice Math, Social Studies Engineering, Social Justice Everything!
This Ain’t Hell: Mark E. Wisner – Guilty At The VA, also, SPLC Wants Army Bases “Taken Down”
Weasel Zippers: UN Human Rights Chief Whines Trump May Be Inciting Violence Against Media By Calling Them “Fake News”, also, Comey Drafted Statement Clearing Hillary Before Interviewing Key Witnesses
Mark Steyn: A Hell of A Steal, also, Acts of God And Man

Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals – Up To 25% Off School Supplies
Amazon Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

Dry-Humping the Patriarchy, Because @LaurenJauregui Is a Feminist Like That

Posted on | August 31, 2017 | 2 Comments

SHOT:

CHASER:

Some readers may recall the name Lauren Jauregui, not because you’ve ever heard any songs by her girl group Fifth Harmony, but because she decided to make a feminist statement after the 2016 election:

Anti-American left-wing teachers at an all-girls Catholic school in Miami taught bisexual pop singer Lauren Jauregui the radical feminist beliefs that inspired her outspoken opposition to President Trump.
A member of the group Fifth Harmony, the 20-year-old Jauregui denounced Republican voters as “racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, a–holes” in a November rant in which she compared Trump to Hitler and declared her pride in being “a bisexual Cuban-American woman.” In that Nov. 18 message, Jauregui specifically cited her attendance at an all-girls Catholic school in condemning Republicans as “narrow-minded” and “selfish.” Saturday [Jan. 22], Jauregui attended the pro-abortion “Women’s March on Washington,” obscenely condemning “patriarchy.” . . .
In an interview with the feminist web site Nylon . . . Jauregui defended federal funding for Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider, and credited her feminist politics to attending Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami . . .

Read the whole thing, in case you’ve forgotten (or never cared) who Lauren Jauregui is or what she said about Republican voters.

“F**K THE SYSTEM AND THE PATRIARCHY.”
— Lauren Jauregui, Jan. 21, 2017

She vowed a “revolutionary fight for justice” in January, but even an America-hating anti-capitalist pro-abortion feminist has to pay the bills, so Lauren is shaking her money-maker for heteronormative cash:

Fifth Harmony bumped and grinded while surrounded by shirtless male dancers for He Like That, the second music video off their third studio album released Friday.
Lauren Jauregui practically bared her entire rear-end in a corseted mini-skirt for the raunchy reggaeton-tinged track, which has already amassed 500K views on YouTube.
‘Pumps in the bump, pumps in the bump / He like the girls with the pumps in the bump,’ the girl group sang.

Yeah, that “revolutionary fight for justice” is a tough job. Lauren Jauregui is fighting “patriarchy” under a management contract to Simon Cowell (male) making profit for a record label headed by L.A. Reid (male) which is owned by the multi-trillion-dollar conglomerate Sony.

Lauren’s Daddy paid $30,000 a year to send her to a Catholic girls school, where the radical teachers taught her a lot about “social justice,” but she apparently never learned the definition of irony.

The patriarchy is laughing all the way to the bank, sweetheart.