The First Stone Throwers

 

The tech monopolies like Twitter make their money and increase their power by making people hate and attack each other.  That's their business model.  It's not a bug, it's a fundamental feature. 

Jack Dorsey who owns Twitter needs and wants you to hate each other.  It's not a game to him, it's the way he makes his money.  And that's the reason why appeals to "fairness" are so totally beside the point.  If things were fair and conversation polite, Twitter would fail as a business.

All it takes is for certain people with a low threshold for violence to start the process of creating a violent mob.  And there are always people who are willing to throw the first stone, and then the rest of the mob is empowered to throw the next,and the next and the next.

Because people are mimetic, meaning they imitate both the behaviors and desires they observe in others, they can be prompted most easily to perform an action by others doing so. As a result, Girard says, “the first stone is the most difficult to throw ... Because it is the only one without a model.” Contagious violence can be forestalled if the crowd lacks a model to follow. 

"Threshold models” developed by sociologists complement Girard’s “first stone” theory. For instance, Mark Granovetter concludes that for a riot to occur, there must be one or more individuals in a crowd with low “thresholds” for engaging in risky or antisocial behavior. Once they start the process, individuals with higher thresholds, who are less predisposed to such acts, will be more likely to join in. The mimetic chain goes from the lowest-threshold actors, who are least in need of a model, to the highest-threshold ones who will only join the riot once many others are already participating. Just a few individuals with low thresholds suffice.

Like their archaic counterparts, these modern priests grasp that “collective effervescence” is a powerful force that needs to be channeled and circumscribed. But the essential goal of today’s priests is not control, although that is an effect. Nor is it social cohesion and the greater good of the community. It is profit. The gamified mechanisms that precipitate us toward indignation against enemies also drive our continued use of the platforms. The more of us that are transfixed by spectacles of victimization, the greater the revenue the platform brings in. Like a bloodthirsty god, the platform business feeds off of sacrifice.

 

 Stifled debate may present an immediate political loss, but the far greater risk is the subjugation of all realms of human life to the sacrificial profit-driven logic dictated by the digital platform god and its priests. Many of those who defend participating in these cruel rites seem to regard them as a vehicle of progress. But sacrifice is cyclical, never progressive. It permits a temporary substitutive crisis resolution, in which individual victims stand in symbolically for vast, multifaceted problems. The punishment and expulsion of the victim occasions a cathartic transference of responsibility and an ephemeral relief of pressure. But the platform god and its priests will keep stoking the resentments that precipitated us toward this harsh resolution. That’s the game they need us to play.

Is This What Peaceful Protests Look Like? Here's the Portland Courthouse After Night 61

Yale’s dean of public health defends right to argue hydroxychloroquine could save lives

The dean of Yale’s public health department, Dr. Sten Vermund, has come out in defense of his colleague’s right to explore and promote hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment for coronavirus. Yale epidemiologist and public health professor Dr. Harvey Risch has come under heavy fire recently for arguing that hydroxychloroquine, if used to treat coronavirus, could save up to 100,000 lives.

Scott Adams on the logic of HCL, Zinc, & Azythromycin

I tell you why Trump is medically correct and CNN might be killing tens-of-thousands https://t.co/trfDfkx4TF

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 30, 2020

The Current State of World War III

Jim Jordan's full opening statement about the Russia Hoax and "Peaceful Protests"

Dems: The Antifa Party (This is not the first time Republican presidents have had to deal with terrorist-supporting Democrats. It probably won’t be the last.)

— “These soldiers are disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued the officers of Hitler’s storm troopers.”

— The president is substituting “military dictatorship for the Constitution of the United States.”

— “My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory.”

All this because, after 50 days of raging violence, President Trump has finally sent federal agents to restore order in Portland, Oregon.

No — wait. Different Democrats and different president.

Although all those quotes are indeed from Democrats about a Republican president, it wasn’t Trump. They were Democrats Richard Russell, George Wallace and Orval Faubus, denouncing President Dwight Eisenhower for sending troops to enforce desegregation at a schoolhouse in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Why Black Lives Matter is a Lie

Black Deaths 2019

Abortion: 380 000
Black on black violence: 7000
Police: 9

Guess which one the media has people marching, screaming & tearing down the country over.

It’s called mind control

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) July 27, 2020

The rioting and destruction are the point. George Floyd, at this point, is barely even an excuse.

Mark Steyn on Mike Adams - RIP

At the time of his death Mike Adams was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington - although not a very popular one with the administration. You will generally see him described in the media as "Controversial Professor Mike Adams", as if it's the subject he teaches: Mike Adams, Head of the Department of Controversy. It wasn't always so. A two-time "Faculty Member of the Year" winner at the turn of the century, Adams grew more "controversial" as the university got more "woke". He got a book deal with Regnery (publishers of America Alone), and was quoted favorably by Rush:

What American university wants a prof who's published by Regnery and getting raves on the Rush Limbaugh show? The Deputy Assistant Under-Deans of Diversity all frosted him out, and Adams spent seven years in a lawsuit with UNCW - which he won, but it's still seven years of your life you'll never get back.

Then came the Covid. He Tweeted energetically through the lockdown, including at his governor:

Massa Cooper, let my people go!

And on the education lockdown in particular:

Don't shut down the universities. Shut down the non-essential majors. Like Women's studies.

The left isn’t fighting against fascism. Instead, they are fighting FOR authoritarianism.

The left isn’t fighting against fascism. Instead, they are fighting FOR authoritarianism.

They claim that their political message transcends the law; that it allows them to control cities; that it allows them to destroy property; that it justifies their designs on canceling heretics; that it permits them to block roads, create no-go zones for non-rioters, prosecute those who stand against them while themselves avoiding persecution.

Leftist-run cities have shown what happens when police and federal law enforcement are demonized and unsupported by elected leaders; when local leadership can seize “emergency powers” — then pick and choose who to punish: rioters are exempt from lockdowns; you can sing in the streets but not in churches; masks are required, but not for them.

They can tell you what counts as a substantive meal, essentially holding businesses hostage to their arbitrary and incoherent edicts: pot dispensaries and large warehouse stores can open; gyms and restaurants cannot.

They decide what hate is; what racism is; who is unclean; who is deserving of both punishment and reverence. They presume to control and police every narrative, and in that way, control and police every person.

They reduce you to your skin color, your “gender” — but mostly, to your politics: individualism, respect for rule of law, constitutional order and the color-blind equanimity that comes with it — all of these things are reduced to the cancer of “whiteness.” “Systemic racism” is their empty catechism; it creates a Kafka trap in which you are defined by your original sin of birth, but you can neither receive absolution or forgiveness.

In short, you are defined by your birth, your color, your sex — and there is no escape: either you are born an oppressor who must be fought, or you are born a victim entitled to perpetual grievance, regardless of how much power you actually enjoy.

This is the very structure of authoritarianism run through populist fascism.

It is where the left always takes you. The left has brought back segregation as “racial separatism”; they’ve stoked racial and class division; they’ve sought to control speech, which controls thought which ultimately, is meant to constrain you.

While the left riots in the streets, pulls down statues, demands the sacrificial death of pancake salespeople & rice peddlers; calls for UNEQUAL treatment under the law, with special dispensation for favored identity groups they bellow the self-righteous claim that it is THEY who are fighting fascism.

But know this: fascism is what they ARE. And they prefer that system because they have presumed to be its leadership class, its enforcement mechanism, and its performative philosophers.  Either “moderates” or those who aren’t especially political wake up to these truisms, or our country as founded will fall.

Resist the conformists. The corporate enablers.

Remember this: in the fight against fascism, YOU are the outlaws, the true guerrilla warriors.

So fight

Liberty and individualism are our birthrights.

Refuse — ever — to surrender either.

WSJ Reporters Follow NYT, Tell Publisher To Crack Down On ‘Misinformation’ In Opinion Section

A group of more than 280 WSJ reporters, editors, and other staff sent a letter to Latour on Tuesday calling for more separation between the paper’s news and opinion sections online. The letter also asked for more freedom for reporters to critique opinion articles online and said the opinion staff should be more restrictive in what it chooses to publish, according to WSJ which reported on the letter.

The letter also pointed to a June 2 op-ed by The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald titled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.” Mac Donald argued that the “charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. … A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.”

While the article has not been updated with a correction, the letter accuses Mac Donald of cherry-picking data and drawing an “erroneous conclusion.”

“Employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain this Opinion piece caused them during company-held discussions surrounding diversity initiatives,” the letter continues, adding if the “company is serious about better supporting its employees of color, at a bare minimum it should raise Opinion’s standards so that misinformation about racism isn’t published.”

Fire them.

Time For Trump To Start Kicking Aspiration

PROSPERITY:

1. Using the same pro-growth policies that gave us America’s best economy ever, we will be back to 5% unemployment by April 2021. A year from now, we will be back where we were when the pandemic hit, 3.5%, and we will again have the lowest minority unemployment rates ever. Then we’ll do even better.

2. We’re going to make China and other countries trade with us fairly or not at all. We see China as an opponent, and we will compete instead of capitulate. No more outsourcing American jobs!

3. And no more insourcing foreigners to take American jobs – not only will we tighten the H1B visa process to ensure no American can do the job before we import someone, but we will give any employee the right to sue his employer for punitive damages if his job is taken by a foreigner on a work visa. No more American workers training their replacements!

4. Sleepy Joe tried to co-opt “Buy American,” but he’s faking it. We will double down on revitalizing American industry, with tariffs as necessary and emplace tough rules relocating critical industries (medicine, masks, electronics) to the US of A. No more relying on the Red Chinese to decide if your kids can have penicillin.

5. The greedy tech titans are too powerful, so we’ll regulate them to ensure the internet remains free to all and that no one can be silenced.

6. We will have a massive infrastructure re-build where the money goes not to bike lanes, railroads to nowhere, and other nonsense, but to actual freeways and airports and high-speed internet that will make our lives better.

7. We will finish building the wall and keep deporting illegals – we need our jobs to be for our people and to keep drugs and crime out.

8. We’ll need money for this, so we’ll tax those with over $10 million in earnings. Most of the super-rich are now Democrats, so too bad.

SECURITY:

9. Crime, particularly in Democrat cities is out of control. We’ll crack down on violent criminals. Law and order!

10. Fund the police! We back the blue. Law and order is non-negotiable.

11. People fear cancellation – so we’ll outlaw it. There will be no more firing someone over his political views. California and other states have such laws, but we can expand them to ensure that families don’t have to worry that some misconstrued word will let a bunch of bad-haired and dumb-tatted little SJW brats ruin them.

12. Also, we will make it a federal crime to block an interstate, and harshly prosecute those who riot, loot, and destroy.

13. We will support law enforcement by making it a federal hate crime to attack police officers for being cops.

14. We will enforce federal hate crime laws against anyone of any race who attacks anyone of any race equally, and within the federal government people will be treated with absolute colorblindness. We won’t tolerate discrimination against anyone on account of their race!

15. We will also make it a federal crime to prosecute someone for defending himself and his family from a mob. Yeah, there may be some federalism challenges in court. So what?

16. We will protect the future of young people by rethinking higher education, which is too expensive, too pointless, and too unresponsive to the needs of American families, largely by draining the current cesspool and reimagining it. There are plenty of ideas here, including taxing endowments, outlawing political persecution and kangaroo courts that harass our kids, and making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy (the schools can guarantee them!).

17. We will aggressively prosecute and jail rioters and deny federal funds to cities and states whose Democrat dictators won’t.

18. We will reform the CDC bureaucracy to ensure that it focuses on epidemics and not politics and so that next time it’s ready to protect us.

19. We will reform the immigration systems to focus on merit and on the potential to contribute to our country so that the best and brightest can come to America and become Americans.

20. We will end the Middle East wars and have our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq by the end of 2021. If those countries can’t fight their own battles after 20 years, then we cannot help them anymore. Also, we’ll pull our troops out of Europe if the Euroweenies don’t open their wallets and pay their fair shares.

21. Finally, we will continue to protect your rights and freedoms with judges who follow the Constitution and are not affected by whatever hallucinogen they put in the Hawaiian drinking water.

There, an affirmative, positive vision for a second term…backed up with the supporting effort of ruthlessly gutting Hoover Biden’s Daddy and whatever hack he picks as Real President. Time to aspire to victory!

This weeks funnies

Shock Poll Shows Trump on Track to Win Reelection

News you won't see in the MSM

A new poll conducted by the Washington based Democracy Institute for the Sunday Express shows President Trump tied with his rival Joe Biden at 47 percent, but surpassing him in the electoral college 309 to 229.

These positive results for Trump come amid a constant drumbeat of negative media coverage in recent weeks that paints his electoral chances in November as virtually nil.

According to the shock poll, Trump is “on course to win the crucial swing states including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where he outpolls Vice President Biden by 48 percent to 44 percent.”

According to David Maddox, the political editor of the Sunday Express, the poll indicates that the Black Lives Matter riots have created a backlash that is helping Trump.

It's all about November 3

Roger Kimball:

The unremitting, monolithic wall of noise that has been crashing against Donald Trump since election day 2016 has gotten louder and louder, more cacophonous, more furious, more irrational. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. But the one thing that takes precedence over everything now is defeating Trump, which means defeating not only Trump himself but what he stands for—those 63 million voters who put him in office, for starters.

...

And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

Why are pro sports such hellholes of bigotry and hate?

Mitch Albom: Anti-Semitic posts — and tepid reactions — should enrage us

But they don't because Black trump Jew. The pampered multimillionaire pets of the NFL and NBA can do anything, say anything and get away with anything because White Liberals are sick, self-loathing bastards.

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian movement dressed up in bumper sticker Social Justice finery.

Twitter roll of truth by Protein Wisdom.

Mulder’s Rugged and Impenetrable White Fragility

As a .@Broncos fan, it is beyond disturbing to me that anti-Semitic / Farrakhan-fluffing language has been defended and repeated by .@ShannonSharpe and Malik Jackson.

When everyone in the Denver sports media was falling all over themselves to bow at the altar of BLM ...
I Tweeted many of them and warned that they were tethering themselves to a Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian movement dressed up in bumper sticker Social Justice finery.

One of these people wrote back telling me I was a racist; another huffed, “we have Jews on staff!
The fact is, many of those — if not most — who run sites covering teams, are all either fairly recent graduates of our academic indoctrination mills, or else are terribly afraid of clapping back at empty platitudes and would rather just mouth the SJW liturgy...
...than potentially risk their livelihoods.

Let me put this bluntly: showing “solidarity” with BLM Inc is the EASIEST FUCKING THING IN AMERICA TO DO RIGHT NOW.

It buys you the cheapest of grace, and serves as a kind of verbal lambs blood smeared on a door jamb...
...with expectation that the Angel of Cancel Culture will skip your house.

I have heard weak condemnation of the anti-Semitic rants of those in the National Farrakhan League from a few of these erstwhile woke Uber-prog scolds; others have been largely silent.
As Mitch Albom points out in a column today, this very conspicuous variance in responses is not only troubling, it’s terrifying.

What it says to Jews is this: “stop whining. We progressives are trying to help black folk!”

It is paternalistic, but hardly surprising....


The subtext is that Jews, who have been the most scapegoated people in history (and who aren’t even a race, outside Hitler and Farrakhan’s desires to proclaim it such), have done well-enough that hatred turned on them, when even acknowledged, “distracts” from the REAL hatred....
...supposedly still aimed at blacks.

This is rank nonsense: hate crimes against Jews are very real — and are now rolling into the rhetoric of BLM marches.

Meanwhile, hate crimes against blacks — coming out of 2 terms with a black president — are so rare...
...that hoaxes seem to exceed real cases.

Bakke opened up affirmative action programs for certain minorities but not others; Jews and Asians don’t really count.

We’ve had a Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, criminal justice reform, opportunity zones...
— and yet here we are, at a time when — pre-Covid — blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., all enjoyed historical low rates of unemployment. Wages were rising for lower-income groups more than they were for higher income brackets. And so the great irony of BLM...
...and the pasty-white woke progs who are it’s most rabid — yet self-neutered — foot soldiers, is that they were called to war *to fight real and demonstrable progress*, mostly through a siren call of wealthy, relatively young, black athletes whose understanding of history...
...seems to come largely from critical race theory, Howard Zinn, Louis Farrakhan, and the Tweets of Colin Kaepernick and Lebron James — each of whom makes bank off of communist China or child labor or some other human rights abuse that is hidden safely from daily view.
Meanwhile, Hasidic Jews are beaten in Brooklyn; synagogues are routinely defaced in LA and other major cities; BLM protesters chant against “Jewish aggression”; and a bunch of risk-averse, talking-head eunuch sports babblers routinely glom on to the latest approved woke trend.
We see the double standard. We recognize the profound cowardice. We despise the diminishment of what they see but pretend not to see — save for a few perfunctory words about all hate being bad.

It’s puerile relativism masquerading as social justice.

It’s anything but.
So, @CodyRoarkNFL, @ChadNJensen @NickKendellMHH @NickiJhabvala @dmac1043 @NickFerguson_25 @JoRo_NFL @redwardsradio @AllbrightNFL @markschlereth @MaseDenver @RyanKoenigsberg @byesline @ZacStevensDNVR — how about some greater consideration to how WE feel when you celebrate...
...and lionize those whose path to adopting the racial supremacist tropes of Hitler and Farrakhan and Stalin and Angela Davis happen to fall within the bailiwick of your coverage?
How about you stop slobbering over AOC and other hard leftists who promote Hamas, Hezbollah, BDS, and the delegitimization of Israel?

How about instead of gaslighting listeners with the BS narrative that Kaepernick’s kneeling was “never about the flag,” you read his own words.
— or is it best just to interpret for him — or Desean Jackson, or Shannon Sharpe, or Malik Jackson, or Malcolm Jenkins — and let us know what they * really meant* from your perches, where you are a necessary translator for people who maybe you believe ....
...just aren’t very articulate.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a special pleader for hatred aimed at Jews.

But it’s real. And a lot of it is coming from a movement you RUSHED to stand with.

9 unarmed black men were killed last year. In only a handful of cases...
...were the shootings deemed unjustified. Charges were brought against those officers.

Blacks and Hispanics make up a significant percentage of police forces — which are now being cut or defunded on a lie, with literal peer-reviewed studies being *retracted*...
...for reaching the “wrong” conclusions based on actual, empirical data.

You want to stan for anti-bigotry? Do some research into where that bigotry truly becomes manifest — not in Kafka-trap junk theories about “systemic racism” or “white fragility,” but in looting...
...& vandalism & arson & unprovoked beatings & stabbings & shootings.

Or don’t.

But I needed you all to know that, while you may think the culture is on your side, a big core of it isn’t.

You won’t be eaten last by the crocodile; but I’m sure it’s a pleasing fiction.

When Black Lives Matter throws a block party

It seems that the Hilldale Shopping Center in Madison Wisconsin offered itself up to BLM for a block party.

It did not meet the organizer's expectations.

Organizers in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in Madison and Milwaukee said they came together at the shopping center in an effort to educate patrons on the plight faced by Black people in America. But the normally bustling shopping center was void of customers as businesses shut their doors at about 2:30 p.m., prior to the kickoff of the event....

Organizers said they were told by shopping center management that the stores were closed to accommodate the block party, but organizers were skeptical. They said shopping center security tried to block them from setting up a sound system and grill outside the Apple Store.

Oh! They felt unwelcome. And the customers of the stores didn't work as a captive audience for this proffered "education." They all went home! There was even free food... but who would eat protester-prepared food in the time of social-distancing?!

Nothing says fun like a shopping trip involving a suspect food, is a confrontation, perhaps violent, and a Conversation on the Black Experience in America brought to you by people who probably want you to pay them for something you didn’t do and they didn’t experience.

When Did You First Notice The Left’s ‘Epistemic Breach’?

When did you first realize that reality - and the way reality was distorted by the leftist press - were not even close?  That funhouse mirrors were more real?

The Travon Martin story?

Hands up don't shoot?

The Covington kids?

The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax?

 The Bubba Wallace "racist" noose?

 And the endless examples of racism, sexism, and bigotry that turns out to have been manufactured by the "victims" themselves?

Author Jesse Singal made a statement last night about the moment he first noticed what he calls an “epistemic breach” on the left. In context, he means the moment when it became obvious that people on the left could maintain opinions that were verifiably false by simply opening their eyes. For Singal, the moment he noticed it was the Covington kids

Read the whole thing.

HOW BAD ARE AMERICA’S COLLEGES? THIS BAD

If you spend $70,000 a year sending your children to Macalaster College you are committing child abuse.

Some conservatives tend to say, “Sure the colleges and universities are bad, but…” There is no but. With rare exceptions, they are worse than you can imagine. Unless they are studying to be an engineer or a doctor, most people would be better off to avoid college altogether, learn a trade, and read books on their own. Which is the way it used to be.

For a window into the zoo that is “higher” education in the 21st century, check out this article by Kathy Kersten on Minnesota’s Macalester College in the upcoming issue of Thinking Minnesota. Kathy is a Senior Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment, and is by far Minnesota’s best columnist and investigative reporter.

Click on the link to the entire article.

Warrant Served On St. Louis Couple Who Defended Private Property, Rifle Confiscated, Report Says

Mark McCloskey, who guarded his private property with an AR-15, told a local news station following the incident, “We were threatened with our lives, threatened with the house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog’s life being threatened. It was about as bad as you can get. You know, I really thought it was the storming of Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a huge and frightening crowd and they broke in the gate and they were coming at us.”

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, claimed that the McCloskey’s defending their private property was a “violent assault” and that authorities “will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable.”

Albert Watkins, the McCloskeys’ attorney, told Fox News that “If Kimberly Gardner wants to press charges against two attorneys who are protecting their home and their family and themselves on their own property, I will tell you that it will be nothing short of the proverbial cluster f***.”

“Gardner, one of four Democrats running for St. Louis circuit attorney in the Aug. 2 primary, is taking heat for a new political ad paid for with money from a national super PAC that is at least partly funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.”

Former Fairfax police officer murdered in Wisconsin in alleged hate crime, police say

Daniel Navarro, 27, is accused of intentionally ramming his truck in Phillip Thiessen's motorcycle. Police say Navarro believed that all Harley riders are "white racists." (Image: Fond du Lac County, WI Sheriff's Office)

Phillip A. Thiessen, 55, was riding his motorcycle in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin when investigators say a man intentionally swerved his truck into the motorcycle because he believed all Harley riders to be “white racists.”

Daniel Navarro, 27, is held on a $1 million bond and is facing charges of first-degree intentional homicide – hate crime, use of a dangerous weapon, and first-degree recklessly endangering safety – hate crime.

Thiessen was a former Marine and served as a police officer in the City of Fairfax from 1990 until his retirement in 2016, and later worked for the Wisconsin Department of Justice Internet Crimes Against Children unit.

It’s unsurprising that so much loud hate from the left leads to crimes of violence against the innocent.

'A Letter on Justice and Open Debate' is Bullshit!

From Ace of Spades:

Just as every Nazi meeting had to begin and end with Heil Hitler, and every communication from Islamic terrorists has to have 'Death to America' or 'Death to Israel' in it, so, too, does every article written by a liberal have to contain a ritualistic condemnation and renouncing of Donald Trump and all of his works.

Which is why A Letter begins:

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

So the signers of this letter want us to believe that the SJW howling mobs that are getting (mostly conservative voices) silenced and deplatformed from social media, and in some cases causing them to lose their employment are being led or inspired by Donald Trump.

But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

So, in other words, the real problem with cancel culture is that conservatives are pouncing on it. And who are these "right-wing demagogues" who are "exploiting" the situation, which I guess means making the left look bad by pointing out their crimes? The open letter doesn't say.

The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

"All sides." Because the recent spate of rioting and vandalizing/destruction of statues was a bipartisan effort. Definitely. You ever notice that when the left wants to call out the right for doing something bad, they say 'the right is doing something bad', but when the left is caught doing something obviously bad, they claim it's 'all sides' who are doing it? Even when it's manifestly untrue? In fact, you can take this to the bank: when the left says that 'both sides' or 'all sides' are to blame for something, that's a tacit admission that they've screwed up, they know they've screwed up, and they're trying to hide the fact that they've screwed up.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

So cancel culture is "expected" from the "radical right", only the open letter provides no examples nor even bother telling their readers who on the "radical right" is actually doing it. Only that it is "spreading widely in our culture."

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

And this would've have been the perfect time to admit, "yeah, you know, cancel culture is pretty much a left-wing phenomenon and we need to knock that sh*t off", but they don't. They just make a sudden shift into the passive voice ("mistakes were made") to describe what has been happening. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces." Why? Who fired them, and why were their pieces 'controversial'? They don't say. "Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity". Who decided to withdraw the books and what does 'inauthentic' mean and why were the books considered as such? Again, they don't say. They also didn't say that the publishing world is close to being a 100% left-wing operation as you can get, so if anybody got fired or had their books withdrawn or forbidden to write on certain topics, the person who did the firing and withdrawing and forbidding was undoubtedly a lefty. Not a conservative. Not a "right-wing demagogue." And certainly not Donald Trump.

In this open letter, the left never gets mentioned as doing anything worthy of condemnation at all. Not once.

It's like the signers are a bunch of cowards who are afraid to call out their own BFFs.

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Aren't you guys a bit late with this? I mean, seriously, conservatives have been blackballed, black-listed, censored, and cancelled from mainstream brick-and-mortar publishing houses for decades and not a peep from any of you. And no, it wasn't from Donald Trump or "the radical right", it was you guys who either participated in the cancelling or silently cheered from the sidelines. And please don't tell us you didn't know. Conservatives have been complaining about this for years, but you turned your back and ignored them. The *only reason* you signed this letter is that cancel culture is now eating you. The rough beast you've birthed and nursed and fed in your bosom is now turning around and devouring you. And to this I say: Fan-f*cking-tastic. No-one deserves it more than you sorry collection of sanctimonious hacks. Margaret Atwood? Screw you. David Brooks? EABOD. Noam Chomsky? Up yours. David Frum? Eat poo. Todd Gitlin, Steven Pinker, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Matthew Yglesias and the rest of you who signed this craven plea to be eaten last? You can all just eff right off.

On being white and male

A comment thread on REASON involved someone making the case that white men have had a history of dominating "the narrative" which I think means that most of the books and essays have been written by white men.  (Of course, that assumes that all non-white cultures never existed).

If you read much from writers writing from certain feminist or critical race or similar perspectives (as opposed to reading what their critics have to say about them), a theme or point often made is that white straight men have dominated narratives for so long that it’s hard for them to ‘get’ the experiences and attitudes/opinions of others, and the latter is what needs much more focus. That doesn’t mean white straight males have nothing to say on the issue, it just means they’ve been dominating the conversations for ages now and there should be a priority on listening to other voices.

Here's a response that refutes it totally.

Being white or male does not mean your voice was used in the name if whiteness or maleness. It is actually very possible, and likely, that a large number of voices that happened to come from whites and males, were used on the behalf of universalist ideas such as equal rights, equal standing before the law, etc. An example would be any white male speaking for free speech rights.

To impose meaning onto the message because of the genetics of the speakers says volumes about your commitment to judging people on character and merit rather than race or gender.

And simply because a white man 100 years ago spoke does not invalidate my right to speak or the validity of my arguments.

That people are even talking about intersectionality or whatever progressive claptrap is the topic of the day proves that there IS a voice for the historically ignored. Fredrick Douglass lived as a slave, the lowest station a black man has held in American society. And during that era… he was able to eventually have a voice that went directly to the ear of the President. Some 200 years later a black man was president himself. MLK is taught to every school child. Both of them have had a voice on the topic far outweighing mine.

Do I get to claim a spot at the table and special pleading to be heard? Or, perhaps, we buy into freedom of speech and NO ONE gets special pleading.

Minorities are heard more today than they ever have been. In fact, they are heard from in respectable circles (universities, news rooms, refined public conversations, etc.) than young white men who feel disaffected by the pendulum swinging from white supremacy to an inverse rather than a neutralization.

I was told as a kid that we are all equal. I took that to heart. And now that I am older I am treated with disdain because of my race… that I already had my say (even if no one spoke my message… I am white therefore any white man 200 years already used up my clock).

I am befuddled. I feel cheated… I spent my life not judging people by their race. I listened to them, laughed with them, fought with them, loved with them. But now those who are the self-proclaimed champions of equality and anti-racism do not treat me in kind.

I was either lied to and treating people based on skin tone is right… or these people who do it today are wrong. Both positions can’t be right at the same time. At least one position is morally bankrupt. From studying history I am quite confident I know which one.

Press Now Plumbs Its Own Depths Of Depravity

There has never been a presidential campaign in the United States where the administration was so massively opposed by the principal press outlets as in this election. Nor, in at least a century, have the national political media so widely and thoroughly discarded the traditional criterion for journalistic professionalism: the clear division between comment and reporting.

Many aspects of the Trump presidency are unprecedented; he is the first president never to have sought or held a public office, elected or unelected, or a high military command; and this is the first presidency, at least in living memory, in which almost the entire national political press have completely and constantly misreported the president’s public remarks and policies.

The former newspaper of record, the New York Times, has been commendably forthright in declaring that it was opposing rather than just reporting on the Trump administration. Mr. Trump delivered the greatest speech of his career on Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, devoted altogether to celebrating the idealism of the American Revolution, the suppression of the Confederate insurrection in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and the enactment — albeit tardily — of the Jeffersonian promise, renewed by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, that all men are created equal. The Washington Post editorial board declared that he had reached “new depths of depravity.” This is an outrage worthy only of the press of a totalitarian country describing an opposition figure.

With few exceptions, the United States is now served by a national political media that is incapable of reporting about the president accurately, that baits him at press briefings with disgusting insolence, and that is extraordinarily negligent in ignoring or downplaying anything that reflects poorly on the president’s other enemies, the media’s allies in the war against the president.

The hideous permutation of the legitimate protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 — protests the president endorsed — into widespread arson, pillage, vandalism, and assault resulting in more than 20 deaths in many cities across the country was largely ignored or deemphasized by the media.

Fascinating Bio of Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's Father

Robert Barnes' recap of the career of Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad) is amazing.

Maxwell supposedly died of a heart attack while on his yacht. There is wide speculation that he was actually abducted, tortured for information, and then returned to the yacht dead.

He was connected to every western intelligence agency -- and every communist one too.

Parts of LeCarre's Russia House were lifted right from his bio.

And isn't it odd that Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been in the same business?

Trump's Secretary of Labor, Acosta, said that he was told to go easy on Epstein by the intelligence community.

Statue of Frederick Douglass — Former Slave and Abolitionist — Torn Down and Damaged in New York

You didn't think this was about statues of Confederates, did you?

Chicago Mayor Says Fourth Of July Weekend Was 'Mostly Peaceful' (Babylon Bee)

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called this past Fourth of July weekend where 79 were shot in the city a "mostly peaceful" weekend at a press conference today.

"It was mostly peaceful, very calm, lots of people enjoying themselves, very fun," she said. "Yes, there were a few run-of-the-mill murders and shootings, but hey. We just call that a Saturday here."

"Other than the people getting shot on basically every block, it was largely calm and peaceful."

Lightfoot also pointed out that most people who committed murders were practicing social distancing and wearing masks. "Encouraging" surveillance footage showed that Chicago's murderers are using hand sanitizer and wiping their weapons down after each murder. "So, by that metric, I think it was definitely a success. We're making a lot of progress on that front."

She further stated that she suspects the murderers are actually paid Trump supporters trying to make her city look bad.

Trump’s Rushmore speech was monumentally splendid

Despite so much media drivel about President Trump giving a “dystopian” or “dark and divisive” or out-and-out racist speech at Mount Rushmore, his Friday speech, as written, was the single finest of Trump’s presidency.

It featured realistic, entirely justified pushback against civilization’s despoilers. And it married that with an appropriate, much-needed celebration of the essential goodness of the United States and its history, along with plenty of unifying thoughts and proposals.

My colleague Byron York already did a well-merited takedown of establishment-media distortions of Trump’s remarks. What remains is to parse out and then amplify what made the speech itself (as written, without regard to Trump’s style of delivery) not just appropriate but magnificent.

First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”

Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.

Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

Since when is a rejection of such destruction, married to concrete achievements and aspirational themes, somehow “dystopian?” Only an establishment media and corporate culture that are morally twisted, themselves committed to the destruction, could somehow treat a defense of decency as if it were an affront.

Even so, Trump spent less than one-fourth of his speech defending the U.S. honor against the “web of lies” wherein “our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains, [while] all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured … and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”

The other 75% of Trump’s speech was a stirring asseveration of civic virtue.

“We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed,” said the president. “Every child, of every color — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of God. We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture. We embrace tolerance, not prejudice.”

And: “We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King when he said that the founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation. Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals.”

Trump paid homage to Frederick Douglass, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Jesse Owens, and Louis Armstrong. And: “We gave the world the poetry of Walt Whitman, the stories of Mark Twain, the songs of Irving Berlin, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald, the style of Frank Sinatra, the comedy of Bob Hope, the power of the Saturn V rocket, the toughness of the Ford F-150, and the awesome might of the American aircraft carriers.”

Finally, from pride in the past to future, common aspirations: “Uplifted by the titans of Mount Rushmore, we will find unity that no one expected; we will make strides that no one thought possible. This country will be everything that our citizens have hoped for, for so many years, and that our enemies fear — because we will never forget that American freedom exists for American greatness. And that’s what we have: American greatness. Centuries from now, our legacy will be the cities we built, the champions we forged, the good we did, and the monuments we created to inspire us all.”

That’s not dystopian, it’s quintessentially American. And, lest the media misunderstand, to be quintessentially American is the ultimate compliment.

MSNBC’s Sharpton Condemns Mount Rushmore as ‘Love Letter to White Supremacy’

This is on the ballot this November. Never forget.

The vile Al Sharpton described President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore as a “love letter to white supremacy.” In Saturday night’s PoliticsNation, Sharpton smeared our Founding Fathers, as white supremacists, rather than courageous heroes that founded this great nation.

Dems and Media to Blame for Countless COVID-19 Deaths After Anti-Hydroxychloroquine Hysteria

The media hate President Trump so much they caused people to die because he recommended a treatment that cut the death rate in half.

Last week, a new peer-reviewed study of hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness at treating the coronavirus was published, and it found that the drug significantly reduced mortality rates.

And by significantly, I mean it literally cut the mortality rate by more than half.

The study also determined that despite previous reports, there were no adverse effects on the heart....

How many lives were lost because the Democrats and the media claimed that taking hydroxychloroquine would kill you? In May, Dr. John Giles of Columbia University told NPR that fears about hydroxychloroquine made it difficult to recruit volunteers for clinical studies. “Pretty much everybody said, ‘well, that’s the drug that is dangerous to your heart,’ or ‘I talked to friends and they said don’t take it,’ or ‘I saw it on TV that it was dangerous,'” Giles explained. “It became almost impossible to get anyone interested.”

But Giles knew these fears were unfounded. “It’s a very, very safe drug. It’s been used for over 75 years,” he said.

Despite the drug being safe, Giles eventually gave up on doing his study.

He wasn’t alone. Dr. Christine Johnston at the University of Washington told NPR that volunteers felt “that the study and the drugs feel too political, and they just don’t want to participate at all.”

And all this time, hydroxychloroquine has been shown to cut the death rate of the coronavirus in half.

WHO Quietly Changes COVID Timeline following Republican Questioning

  If you continue to read you will discover that the Chinese government never actually told WHO about the Wuhan virus.  Not on December 31, or earlier ... or later.  The WHO got their information just like Barack Obama claimed he go this information, they read about it in the paper.

The lack of clarity led multiple outlets — including Axios, the Washington Post, and the BBC — to report that Chinese authorities told the WHO’s China office about the outbreak on December 31. But an interim report released last month by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee scrutinized that claim, and argued the CCP never actually told the WHO about the outbreak.

“I’m glad to see the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party have both read my interim report on the origins of the pandemic and are finally admitting to the world the truth — the CCP never reported the virus outbreak to the WHO in violation of WHO regulations,” HFAC Lead Republican and China Task Force Chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) told National Review. “The question now is whether the CCP will continue their false propaganda campaign that continues to claim they warned the world, or whether they will come clean and begin to work with the world health community to get to the bottom of this deadly pandemic.”

Six Weeks, Six Cities, 600 Murders

The single most important issue, affecting some of the largest swaths of populations in America, is the scandal the media ignores even as it explodes in our faces.

In only six weeks, city after city operated by entrenched Democrats have seen a massive expansion in lawlessness, violence, and murder. Stunningly, many news outlets seem gobsmacked and mystified at how or why such an explosion of lawlessness has occurred.

NOTE: the cops are not the ones doing the killing. Yet, "defund the police" is favored by Democrats in all these cities.

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot: 'We're Making Progress' After 13 Bodies Lie Dead in the Street

20 People Killed in the ["Mostly Peaceful"] George Floyd Riots

Black man runs down white BLM women blocking Seattle freeway

Liberals spent an entire day blaming Trump and his "racist" supporters for two (white) BLM protesters being hit by a car on a Seattle freeway.

....Then they found out the driver was a young black man - now they're feverishly deleting tweetshttps://t.co/uzeZzJGYPK

— ✭ Wayne Dupree ✭ (@WayneDupreeShow) July 5, 2020

Seth Abramsoon (Newsweek) thinks Trump lied about these statues being torn down

I replied to each of your points. Here is a compilation of just a few of the statues to which Trump was referring.
Washington, Jefferson, Heg (abolitionist) all toppled, and also, the Lincoln emancipation statue (funded by freed slaves) the protestors demanded by removed. pic.twitter.com/mtVffYDKYR

— GivenToThink 🇺🇸 (@GivenToThink) July 4, 2020

Patriot

Wow!

This is so powerful. And yes the choice of song did not go unnoticed. https://t.co/9G0cObcSmA

— The Kate Awakening (@kate_awakening) July 2, 2020