Category: Media Matters

Once Great Newspaper Becomes Radicals’ Rag of Record

Of course, the Grey Lady has been slouching left for a long time now. Her Op-Ed pages have gone from being piss-poor to being positively feculent. David Brooks, who I once respected, is increasingly in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And he was one of the sane ones.

Sarah Jeong is a miserable twerp of no significance. Her hiring, however, is a major event signaling an institutional legitimation of deviant and destructive behavior. Things should prove interesting in the months and years to come. You are well-advised to keep your powder dry.

What we have here is  a struggle for the soul of America. Or is that too dramatic a way of putting it?

The New York Times has embraced the bigotry of identity politics. 

See also: Why Racism Begets More Racism

  Jeong

The Trouble with Tucker

The trouble with the Tucker Carlson show is that the host is insufficiently judicious as to the number and type of leftists he invites onto his program.  No doubt he is striving to be "fair and balanced," but what typically happens is that Carlson asks some reasonable question of the leftist guest, which the latter evades in order let loose with his reliably incoherent canned spiel, about,  say, all those thousands of people roaming around without photo ID who are 'disenfranchised' — sneer quotes! — by reasonable ID requirements at polling places. Tucker tries without success to bring the knucklehead back to the topic, voices are raised, they talk over each other, and I surf away to a Seinfeld re-run. 

These shouting matches are totally unproductive. Besides, they elevate my blood pressure. But when I return from Seinfeld to hear the brilliant and consummately witty analysis of Mark Steyn, or the less brilliant, but solid, contribution of my favorite gun-totin' lesbian, the charming Tammy Bruce, then it is all worthwhile and the old B.P. returns to 'within range.'

Of course, there are people who like to watch unproductive shouting matches. They like to see people fight. So it may well be that ratings would decline if my suggestion were followed. 

Tucker needs to realize that the age of productive dialog with political opponents is over in American politics.  Ours is the age of post-consensus politics. Destructive leftists don't need talk, they need defeat. Let's hope it can be achieved politically without resort to, God forbid, the 2A solution. But as every patriot knows, the 2A ain't about hunting. 

I now hand off to Bruce Thornton, Ridicule, not Reasoned Debate, is the Best Medicine for Political Cults.

‘Progressive’ Hate, ‘Progressive’ Projection

The Bad Hate the Good: The Southern Poverty Law Center vs. Prager University:

The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of "hater": "racist," "white supremacist," "extremist" and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.

[. . .]

Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world — an "extremist," as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an "anti-Muslim extremist."

This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a "fascist," the left (not liberals, to whom the left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no left.

Read it all.

A ‘Fake News’ Smear

Donald Trump baits the so-called journalists of the lamestream media with his largely, but not entirely, true accusations of 'fake news' and what do the 'journalists' do? They bite. They take the bait. 

In their TDS-driven rage they verify the accusations by violating their own professional standards. Well, keep it up knuckleheads! You are destroying what is left of your credibility.

By the way, when John McCain and others accuse Trump of attacking the Fourth Estate they are merely flailing about in frustration.  Trump is rendering a salutary service by punching back effectively at the patently biased and leftward-leaning mainstream/lamestream media.

Trump's genius is that he knows how so to needle them that they show their true colors. Or as Dan Bongino rather less delicately put it the other night, "He gets them to pull down their pants and show their asses."

Bongino then went on strangely to remark that he didn't mean the comment literally! No?

The only thing wrong with Trump's 'animal' comment is that it is not fair to animals. They don't have free will; MS-13 gangsters do.

It is clear proof that  leftists in high positions in the Fourth Estate are moral scum that they could with impunity slander a duly elected president in such a vicious and absurd way.

Animals

Zuck

Here:

So here’s what I know about Mark Zuckerberg. During those first few weeks of Facebook’s existence, while he was assuring his fellow college students that we could trust him with their identities, he had a private conversation on instant messenger with a friend. That conversation was subsequently leaked, and published by Silicon Valley Insider. It is as follows:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

In the intervening years, I’ve learned that Zuckerberg values his own privacy so much that he has security guards watching his trash, that he bought four houses surrounding his own house to avoid having neighbors, that he sued hundreds of Hawaiians to sever their claim to tiny plots of land within his massive Kauai estate, and that he secretly built tools to prevent further private messages from coming back to haunt him.

Hollywood’s and the Left’s Fascination with Freaks

The denizens of HollyWeird love the freakish, the 'transgressive,' the grotesque, and the unnatural. And being leftists, they celebrate losers and screw-ups, from the legendary La La Land 'motorist' Rodney King to the shotgun murderer Tookie Williams. A characteristic of libs and lefties is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they take the side of losers, criminals, screw-ups and underdogs regardless of what they did to bring on their underdog status. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in equal justice under the law. And I believe in helping those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. I practice what I preach. But the attitude of leftists whereby they celebrate transgressives and miscreants is perverse, which is why these destructivos deserve our steadfast opposition and unremitting contempt.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you what I really think. For now, I pass the baton to Gilbert T. Sewall:

Hollywood’s A-list is almost all in for transformative social justice, which mixes calculated groupthink and “can I grab the spotlight?” As a result, America’s favorite Hollywood evening has mutated into hours of glossy political hectoring, this year in behalf of female empowerment, support for immigrants, and opposition to the National Rifle Association.

“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Harvey Weinstein declared in 2009. “We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” With telethons and global hugs, who needs nature or God?

[. . .]

Hollywood likes freakish [freakishness], and so do its devotees. Criticizing tattoos, hookups, rap music, or trannies — saying the wrong thing on Facebook — might get you into trouble at work or school. Heaven forbid you should offend those who would consider your disapproval “hatred,” which entitles them to destroy your career or good name. Or maybe blow you away.

We’re getting used to that as well. First-person shooter video and computer games allow people to enact murder, not only watch it. That’s part of Hollywood’s multimedia platform too, a franchise worth billions.

Media accountants and publicists raise the specter of censorship and the thought police on their way to the bank. In fact, entertainment capitalists have no illusions what they are stirring up and the thrills they provide. New York- and Los Angeles-based wizards know how to stimulate appetites and points of view, and for a price they can do their magic in Washington, D.C. Privately, they exalt [exult] in their power.

Meanwhile, Hollywood doubles down on identity politics. It insists that depravity and imaginary violence do not lead to sociopathic behavior. It professes the product is mere fiction, that it has no real world effect. If you don’t like it, look the other way. You don’t have to buy it.

 

The Contribution of Hollywood Cultural Polluters to Violence

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of  defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.

HollyWeird Cultiral Polluters

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Fake News: 18 School Shootings Since January 1, 2018. The Importance of Definition

The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.' 

What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in  a pond on a school's grounds?  The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?

Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.

Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.  

Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.

That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18. 

Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.

Now go read the Politifact article.

The Erasure of Garrison Keillor

His work and legacy, not the man. The Stalinism of the Left at work eating its own. Of a piece with the leftist erasure of history via the destruction of monuments and statues. Leftists share this nasty tendency with Muslims with whom they work in cahoots, consciously or not. Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts.

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno!

Details and documentation here.

The Bret Weinstein-Heather Heying Caper at Evergreen State

Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from this Chronicle of Higher Education piece:

Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.

It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.

"He was horrified, I was horrified," Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. "Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes."

Weinstein teaches biology and he wastes class time on political commentary and mockery of talk show hosts?

One thing I do like about lefties, though, is that they eat their own with a hunger and ferocity unlike anything on the Right. The 'progressive' Weinstein, who is now a 'racist,' is learning this the hard way. May he come to his senses. May he come to appreciate that conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists. 

I have written a number of articles critical of NPR and PBS. Here is an excerpt from National Public Radio and the Tit of the State:

"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)

One answer is that the booboisie  of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming.  The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamored of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.

Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer.  The problem for me is twofold.  NPR is run by lefties for lefties.  That in itself is not a problem.  But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer.  But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem.  Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government.  Planned Parenthood and abortion.  NEA and "Piss Christ."  Get it?

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