Field Day 8/24/17: Charlottesville and the Media

I’ll start with the fallout from the Charlottesville protest, counterprotest, and violence.  A couple nights ago, President Trump held a rally in Arizona where he spent around 20 minutes condemning the mass media for lying and misrepresenting him and the facts.  Most of it was warranted, some was him stretching the point.  (I heard various reports say it was 16 minutes of talking about the media, others that said 30.  I listened to it and it seemed longer – more like 25, but the consensus seems to be about 20 focused minutes.)

This is from the NYT yesterday, condemning Trump for going after the media.  The story itself isn’t much more than the usual media caterwauling we’ve come to expect in the last year, but it’s noteable for one thing buried in the middle of it that exemplifies the problem:

Its lead items on Wednesday were about attacks on journalists in Charlottesville from both white nationalists and counterprotesters aligned with the so-called antifa movement.

So-called?  (Screenshot in case it disappears.)  So-called?  No problem identifying the white national socialists, but the international socialists barely get mentioned and get the dismissive “so-called”, insinuating that they aren’t really a problem at all.

What seemed to particularly sting on Wednesday was the way that Mr. Trump had impugned journalists’ patriotism.

“Claim bias. Fine. Claim elitism. Fine,” Mr. VandeHei of Axios wrote on Twitter. “But to say reporters erase America’s heritage, don’t love America, turn off cameras to hide truth, are to blame for racial tension, is just plain wrong.”

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that the founders viewed an independent press as essential to democracy. Talk about heritage.

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that we don’t have a democracy.  We have a republic – if we can keep it.

Journalists aren’t patriotic.  They’ve been actively trying to get the president to fail since Trump was elected, and they want the country to suffer for it.  They actively believe that half the country are neo-Nazi reactionary racist hicks who are too stupid to be trusted to live and so they need to be beaten into submission, and they’ll do so with any story and any angle they can.

They just spent the last year ranting about how Russia (which Hillary did favors for in a cash for uranium deal, lest we forget how they were Democrat friends two years ago), right up until it was basically proven the story was nonsense.  Even hard-left Salon.com came to the realization that the subject was being changed because the “Russia collusion” story was BS and independent analysts have come to the conclusion it had to be an inside source – namely someone like the murdered Seth Rich.

Last week the respected left-liberal magazine The Nation published an explosive article that details in great depth the findings of a new report — authored in large part by former U.S. intelligence officers — which claims to present forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. Instead, the report alleges, the DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.

The Russia collusion story, despite being thrown on the front page of every leftist rag for the last year, turned out to be, as communist and CNN personality Van Jones called it – a “nothingburger”.  Meanwhile asking about Seth Rich’s unsolved murder is decried by the media as “right wing conspiracy”… that’s been debunked by… Snopes.  Y’know, two leftists, their cats, and a spam server to keep urban legends circulating to generate traffic.

At Charlottesville, the media went out of their way to ignore that there was violence on both sides, exactly as President Trump stated.  We have video of it.

The white racist identitarian national socialists – and yes, that socialism part puts them on the left, whether they like it or not – had a permit to march.  They were legally entitled to go make fools of themselves, but then Antifa decided to attack them, as Antifa does.

Antifa has the wonderful self-made justification that any violence they do, especially attacks they make, are completely righteous and absolutely correct, because they call themselves “Anti-Fascist”, and everyone knows fascists are bad, so ergo they can attack anyone they view as a fascist.  And anyone who opposes them must be a fascist, because they exist as a force solely to oppose fascism.  It’s a wonderful circular logic that completely ignores their roots as communist rioters that go back nearly a hundred years.

One thing both sides commented on was the lack of police presence.  Like we’ve seen in Berkeley over and over and over in the last year or so, the police are ordered to stand down by appointed police chiefs on leftist mayors’ orders.  In the case of Charlottesville, VA, the mayor is a leftist Democrat and pal of Obama and Podesta who works with the hard leftist Center for American Progress.  He’s horribly left.  His vice mayor, also a Democrat, is more entertainingly terrible, in that he’s a sexist racist homophobe.

These are the kind of people who tell the police to stand down because they identify with Antifa.

CNN did an accidentally honest piece on Antifa that they had to go back and edit.  This is the unedited version, still around on the Wayback Machine:

And this is the edited version, to delete the whole “they start violence everywhere they go” part:

The video story actually shows that the reporter doesn’t unmask Antifa at all.  In fact, the Antifa terrorists (because they use violence for political ends and are thus the very definition of terrorists) keep their masks, hoods, and glasses on while talking about how they have to be able to commit crimes with impunity in the name of “social justice”.

Or, y’know, so they can stab people for having the wrong haircut.

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

“I threw my hands up and once the knife kind of hit, I dived back into my car and shut the door and watched him run off west, behind my car.”

Witt, who is in no way a neo-Nazi, joked that he believes it was indeed his haircut that confused the anti-fascist, and said he’s considering changing his style. He has no other marks that would make his attacker mistake him for a white nationalist, he said.

But it’s not really a surprise that a bunch of violent socialist revolutionaries would begin attacking people who look like their racial and political enemies.

For those who haven’t seen what Antifa actually stands for (hint: mostly communist Anti-American violence and racism against anyone who’s not in lockstep with them), here’s some examples of their propaganda and events:

Did I mention Antifa was racist?

Antifa really seems to like hitting black people who disagree with them.  Seeing as how Antifa are collectivist identitarian racists, that makes sense, because someone who disagrees with them and is of a different skin-color is the kind of person who is a visual affront to their violence and stupidity just by existing.

Basically, Antifa is this:

Appabend’s “Why You Don’t Hire Ideologues”

I’ve been following a lot of youtubers recently, many of whom cover things on the topics of culture/SJW progressivism in society from angles and in ways more detailed than mainstream media ever could.

Appabend is the handle of a young (late teens-20s) Indonesian youtuber who mostly focuses on comic books, video games, manga/anime, and other aspects of pop/nerd culture.

He’s part of that group of people who were otherwise just enjoying their hobbies and diversions and minding their own business and then got mugged by games journalists during Gamergate.

He also provides a different non-Western perspective on Western pop-culture – and here he covers a little side-story of an Islamic ideologue (I’ll be kind and stick with his term for the guy) who got a job with Marvel comics, then went out and inserted subtle phrases and codes that aren’t so subtle if you’re aware of them… all because the Islamic bigot ideologue hated the mayor of Jakarta.

He frequently makes the point that SJWs ruin everything – and specifically they ruin comics by forcing SJW demands in that people don’t want.  The example is frequently that a beloved character who’s decades and decades old is warped into some SJW lunacy for the sake of SJW lunacy… when a new character could be introduced with no offense to the fans.  When the SJWs complain about people hating the new characters, they blame the audience rather than acknowledge they screwed up the characters.

As an anecdotal example, I used to buy a few different comics frequently.  I followed Batman during the late 90s-early 2000s when they did the Batman No-Man’s-Land arc, I followed Top 10, Powers, a bit of the Transformers/GI Joe reboots, and to probably no one’s surprise still reading this, Punisher (after the 2000 or so Marvel Knights/MAX reboot that grounded the character again).  I dropped most of them by the early 2000s, but followed Punisher for several years, then stopped around the late 2000s when the decision was made to have the Punisher put on a Confederate flag t-shirt and go to the desert southwest to fight “Hatemonger” as a propaganda lesson from the publishers in “anyone who wants secure borders is a giant white racist”.  And just like that, a comic alienated a core reader.

This was well before the current wave of SJW influence in comics, this was more the “NY/NYC/big-city leftist who knows nothing of the outside world and simply stereotypes the rest of the nation as racist hicks in flyover country”… much like we see with the demonization of Trump voters today and of Bush voters 16 & 12 years ago.  It was an earlier generation of SJW-ing, but that was enough that Marvel alienated a reader – and I doubt I’m the only one.

The Horrors of Deportation To Mexico

Delightful sarcasm from Sargon.

Quite entertaining to see someone from across the pond objectively fisk some Al Jazeera leftist propaganda about deportation.

The Weapons of Culture Warriors – The Targeting of Milo & PewDiePie

Sargon of Akkad gives a good backstory on what’s happened in the last week here, with a fairly complete breakdown & summary:

He points out rather adeptly that the SJWs simply use whatever Alinskyite tactics they can against people they view as cultural enemies, regardless of truth, fact, or internal consistency.  Hold the enemy to their own rules, etc.

For further backstory on PewDiePie (especially for those unfamiliar with him), another video here:

And Kraut & Tea’s take on it here:

Not only are these guys immersed in internet culture and can act as guides for those who are less l33t and can’t triforce, but they also go into greater detail and in a more effective way than a long blog post full of links.

A lot of this rejection of the MSM is still the long-term effects of Gamergate, where video games “journalist” SJWs targeted the audience they’re supposed to cater to by colluding secretly and publicly telling gamers that they were dead as an identity, and then slandering them all as racist sexist homophobe white males in their mother’s basements, yadda yadda, same SJW leftist bullshit, different day.  The effect was that legions of politically apathetic video gamers who would otherwise frequently have been David Mamet-style “brain dead liberals” got mugged and found themselves at least understanding some conservative/classic liberal perspectives – and most importantly rejecting the SJW totalitarian left.

These two particular youtubers also trace some lineage to the “rational/atheist” groups that take pride in reasoned thought, which also leads them intellectually more towards classic Enlightenment liberalism and thus also priding themselves on trying to understand different perpectives.  That degree of intellectual honesty also allows them to see what’s happened with the media and the progressive (regressive) leftist SJWs.

Both are very sharp guys, and the places that they politically diverge from an American/classic liberal/libertarian/American conservative viewpoint (which are fairly frequent) are nonetheless places where due to that rigorous intellectual honesty, they’re the kind of people you could discuss such things with.  For example, Sargon’s been on Stephen Crowder’s show, and though there are political differences, it becomes reasoned discussion with differences based on experience and viewpoints.  There’s certainly never any “SHUT UP!” of the SJW left.

This Year In Stupid 2016

There’s been so much going on in the last year that rather than do a massive field day story dump with a few comments, here’s a lot of them covered rather quickly by Brit youtuber Sargon of Akkad:

While I disagree with him on some things, this covers a lot of the cultural and international cultural stuff that has happened in the last year.  He also covers so much ground here there would be a massive stack of categories & tags, so some are omitted because it’s a long vid.

Fallout From the Victory of the Deplorables

I’ve been following Sargon of Akkad for a while, and his takedown of the state of the media after We the People elected Trump is good stuff and covers a lot of ground, and covers some of the media/progressive/leftist politician collusion as well:

He’s wrong on a couple things at the end (mainly a rosy view of Snowden and Manning that they don’t deserve), but one of the reasons I like the videos he produces is that I don’t always agree with him, and he tends to show his work on arguments so even if there’s disagreement, it’s reasoned disagreement.

Stephen Crowder’s rant tearing into The Young Turks for being arrogant swaggering media leftist jackasses is wonderful as well:

There are some on the right, however, who want to apologize for upsetting their Hillary-supporting friends.  Sadly, thus:

Sad only that it doesn’t go on longer.

CNN Tells Voters What To Say During 2nd Presidential Debate

As they cut to the CNN rep talking to the audience, she’s setting them up with lines.

Sheriff David Clarke Shuts Down Don Lemon & The Leftist #BLM Lie

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke makes clear the law enforcement perspective… and one shared by most of the nation regardless of color.  The best exchange is above.

The later part, after cutting to commercial to protect Don Lemon from further looking like a biased chump and useful idiot, is what CNN posted.  It’s 30 seconds of Don Lemon saying, in effect – if you want to have a conversation, you need to shut up and agree with me, then Lemon running interference for racist Black Lives Matter while saying “that’s a different conversation” every time the Sheriff brings up a point.

Sheriff Clarke is elected by the people of the county to provide law enforcement for them.  He is as direct a representation of what a community wants in law enforcement as is possible in a representative democratic republic.  And based on that first exchange, it sounds like he’s got the community’s interests at heart – both the citizen community and law enforcement community, as they are one and the same (7).

Normally I’d say it’s a safe bet Sheriff Clarke won’t be invited back… but then again, if it generates ratings, views, and hits, CNN may recognize they should have someone on besides their party loyalist mouthpieces.

Where Did The Orlando Terrorist’s Co-conspirator Wife Go?

While there’s a big story going on in Dallas now (which is going to require more info before there’s much else to say about it), isn’t it odd that the Orlando terrorist’s wife disappeared?  After the jihadi attack in Orlando with 49 people murdered, she was involved, and then suddenly she disappeared, and nobody knew where she was anymore, and nobody knew anything about her. From LittleMissRightie:

Where is Noor Salman? More importantly, where is the media on her overnight disappearance in the wake of her husband’s terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub?

Three week ago today, the nation woke up to the news about the worst terrorist attack to hit U.S. soil since 9/11. The one woman who may hold answers (and who may also share responsibility for the attacks) is “missing” according to government officials and no one in the media is asking about her whereabouts. It was obvious given the facts of the case the media was going to bury this story as quickly as possible. But there is a woman missing who may be a co-conspirator and not one inquiring journalist asks about her whereabouts? What a sad state of affairs for that dying profession.

The last update on Noor Salman, second wife to Omar Mateen, was that a grand jury convened to deliberate 49 counts of being an accessory to murder, 53 counts of attempted murder, failure to notify law enforcement of a pending terrorist attack, and lying to investigators. A Google search on the update on these proceedings yields no results since June 15th. The Google search results are all the same: “Sources: Grand Jury to Investigate Noor Salman, Orlando Shooter’s Wife”. That information too is fuzzy. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for the Southern District of Florida won’t comment on the proceedings or where they are taking place, however, that is not uncommon. Grand jury proceedings, especially at the federal level and for high-profile cases are sealed. At least the contents are sealed. It’s also not uncommon for the location and dates of said proceedings to be sealed. Those caveats aside, it has been three weeks since it was announced a grand jury was convened, therefore, isn’t it peculiar no one in the media thought to ask about the outcome of the grand jury proceedings?

Around the same time, the last update from federal authorities on Salman’s whereabouts was June 20th when Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated, when asked if Salman was still in the state of Florida, “I believe she was going to travel but I do not exactly know her location now”.

Pardon? Federal authorities have “lost” the wife who texted “I love you” to her husband as he was carrying out Jihad at the Pulse Nightclub. This is also the same woman who admitted she bought ammunition with him and drove him to the club to scope out the location and other details as he planned his attack. And authorities have lost track of her? Is anyone buying what they’re selling here?

Yes they have lost track.  And no one is buying it.

LMR suggests that she may be in federal protection somewhere, but that’s a best-case scenario that still relies on trusting that “top men” are on the case.

It would be nice to know WTF happened to a terrorist co-conspirator from the deadliest mass shooting terrorist attack in US history.

Field Day 6/20/16 – Another Gun Grabber Roundup

May as well start with the dumbest first.  HuffPo is calling for complete disarmament of the US citizenry.

One may say that the Supreme Court, after 250 years in which the Second Amendment was read as allowing only a well-regulated militia to have guns, recently reinterpreted it to mean that there is an individualized right to own guns. This suggests that we may have to get to domestic disarmament through the back door.

Make the gun manufacturers liable for harm done with their products. Ban the sale of ammunition. And vote for a president that will add to the Supreme Court those who will read the Second Amendment as written.

Above all, domestic disarmament is a true, compelling vision which cannot be said about the small gun control measures that are currently promoted by some of the most enlightened people among us.

That’s a whole new level of smugness right there.  Also, the Second Amendment as written would guarantee access to arms by American citizens, especially weapons used in a military capacity.  It’s very clear what it says, as are the numerous state Constitutions that mirror it.

–

And the next stupidest, via HotAir, from Democrat Senator Chris Murphy:

Today’s gun vote wouldn’t stop recent mass shootings, admits leading proponent

Asked by guest host Jonathan Karl whether the so-called “gun show loophole” would have done anything to stop Orlando, Murphy stammered and finally responded as though he was Miss Teen Connecticut answering a pretty tough question about what his favorite color is.

MURPHY: So, it may have in the sense that if you partner together with the bill that stops terrorists from getting guns…

KARL: But wait a minute. He didn’t buy those guns at a gun show. And he would have passed the background—he did pass a background check.

MURPHY: He did pass a background check, but if the Feinstein bill was in effect, the FBI could have put him on the list of those who are prohibited from getting guns. And what if he went into the gun store and was denied? He could have just gone online or to a gun show and bought another one. *

KARL:  OK. But what I’m trying to get at is that every time there’s one of these terrible tragedies, there’s these proposals. Your proposal would have done nothing in the case of Orlando. It would have done nothing to stop the killing in San Bernardino, and in fact, was unrelated to the killing in Newtown. So why are we focusing on things that have nothing to do with the massacres that we are responding?

MURPHY: First of all, we can’t get into that trap.  I disagree. I think if this proposal had been into effect, it may have stopped this shooting. But we can’t get into the trap in which we are forced to defend the proposals simply because it didn’t stop the last tragedy. We should be making our gun laws less full of Swiss cheese holes so that future killings don’t happen.**

Couple important takeaways here.

1st, let your lefty, gun-grabbing brother-in-law see this so he can stop telling you that you are an accomplice in the murder of innocent people just because you exercise the right to self protection. And repeat it on your social media as many times as it takes: These laws will not stop bad people from doing bad things with guns. Full stop.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

We already know that the Orlando terrorist beat his ex-wife.  He could’ve been denied based on that, but apparently his ex-wife never bothered to call the police.  He wouldn’t have had a security job, nor been able to buy a gun legally.  Wouldn’t have happened.

Speaking of wife-beaters not allowed to own guns, from ThisAin’tHell.  Short version is a reporter went into a gun store to try to buy an evil toddler-killing black rifle and was denied.  He claimed it was because he was a reporter.  Really, it was because he slapped around his wife.

The folks at Maxon Shooter Supplies and Indoor Range, who claim to be TAH fans, send us a link to the story about them in the Chicago Sun Times, wherein the Times sent Neil Steinberg, one of their reporters, to write about his experience buying and firing an evil black, scary gun (known in journalistic circles as an assault rifle). Steinberg does the handwringing thing about guns and journalistic integrity thing during his drive to Des Plaines, Illinois to the Maxon “lemonade stand” as the owner described it to me.

Driving to Maxon Shooter’s Supplies in Des Plaines on Wednesday to purchase my first assault rifle, I admit, I was nervous. I’d never owned a gun before. And with the horror of Sunday’s Orlando massacre still echoing, even the pleasant summer day — the lush green trees, fluffy white clouds, blue sky — took on a grim aspect, the sweetness of fragile life flashing by as I headed into the Valley of Death.

Earlier, in my editor’s office, I had ticked off the reasons for me not to buy a gun: this was a journalistic stunt; done repeatedly; supporting an industry I despise. But as I tell people, I just work here, I don’t own the place. And my qualms melted as I dug into the issue.

At 5:13 Sarah from Maxon called. They were canceling my sale and refunding my money. No gun for you. I called back. Why? “I don’t have to tell you,” she said. …

A few hours later, Maxon sent the newspaper a lengthy statement, the key part being: “it was uncovered that Mr. Steinberg has an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife.”

Well, didn’t see that coming.

This would be on the 4473:

From the Maxon Facebook page;

Mr. Steinberg was very aggressive on the phone with Sarah, insisting he was going to write that we denied him because he is a journalist. “Journalist” is not a protected class, BTW. We contacted his editor and said that, while we don’t normally provide a reason for a denial, in this case to correct the record before you publish, here’s why; we pasted a couple links of press accounts of his past behavior and his admission of same. He’s free to believe or disbelieve that’s why he was denied, but that *is* why he was denied. There was no “We’ll see you in court!!!!” type of language from us – we simply want to set the record straight. That it undermined his thesis and rendered the column incoherent isn’t really our problem, is it? Thanks for your support.