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:

Charlottesville VA Riot & Violence Explained – Sargon’s TWIS 8/13/17

Sargon identifies the root problem with this as the racial-collectivist, racist identitarian politics of the progressive left (also frequently called the regressive left or illiberal left) now being adopted by defensive whites who may or may not have been racist before, but now they’re certainly on their way there.

There have been actively racist and racial-based movements for several years now from non-white groups directed at white (and treated-as-white Uncle Tom non-white) Americans, and now there’s a reactionary white-identitarian movement.

None of these groups whether white, anti-white, black, or anything else are representative of American virtues.  They are exactly as Sargon calls them out – racist identitarian collectivists, both the same thing with colors reversed.  Antifa, BlackLivesMatter and the anti-Western anti-white progressive-left racists of academia have perpetuated hatred against “white America” for so long, and so vehemently, that now there are white people who have been radicalized by that hatred.  Call them racists for so long and eventually they don’t care.

The same has probably been true in the past the other way at various times and to varying degrees of severity, with various ethnic groups demonized by a majority, but rather than simply stop at equality, for the last few decades (starting with racist policies like affirmative action), and the absurd notion of “pendulum swing”, we end up with this.  Rather than have equality and recognize individuals as being of value based on the content of their character and logic of their policies and ideas, skin color became a deciding factor.  The idiots who thought that injustice in the form of “pendulum swing” would make for “social justice” are getting the response from people who feel oppressed – and can point to ways they objectively are.  Tear down their monuments and erase their history and reject their racial identity while celebrating your own – and call for genocide of white people, and they’re eventually going to become the same kind of racial group you’re accusing them of because they’ll see there is “institutional power + privilege” being levied against them – the same thing the regressive racist left has imagined for years and used to attack white people (most notably in this last election by blaming the white working class for electing someone they hate).  The mass media and academia decry whites every day, and now those who’ve lost their cool are responding.

A few years back, when Greece was going through more strife than it is now, there was a neo-Nazi party concerned with Greeks called “Golden Dawn” that started gaining in popularity.  It was completely nazi in the National Socialist vein – interest in socialism for the nation, and only the ethnic nation (by far a bigger old-world problem).  It got to be a rather large movement, and for a while, there were people in the US comparing it to the Tea Party, a comparison which those who payed attention (including Greeks) rejected.  The Tea Party called for less government, fewer taxes, rejected bad health-care policy, demanded that if they were getting taxed that they get back what was taken from them, and were generally concerned with economic policy (started by this economics rant), and to a lesser degree social policy being mandated from DC.  Golden Dawn was concerned with ethnic Greeks being taken care of by the socialist Greek government, rather than taking care of foreigners landing on their soil.  There was no comparison other than that both had nationalist tendencies – the Tea Party loving America’s classic liberal/enlightenment heritage and conserving that philosophy and history and demanding a return to it, Golden Dawn loving the Greek people and their socialist government providing for the Greek people and noone else.  The alt “right” (who share more in common with the left than the actual right in the US) are basically America’s Golden Dawn.  Unlike the racist Golden Dawn that occured much more naturally in a nation that’s also an ethnic nation-state; these racists in the US had to be created – and they were brought together by persecution – from the racist American left.

Good job, leftists.  You’ve created a racist greivance group that has some racist greivances against you, and they’re going to use your tactics against you.

–

As a final note, Trump’s response to this, quoted in the video – is fantastically presidential – he calls out both sides for their violence and racism in a fair, even-handed, calm role as a national leader.  I used to be very critical of Trump, but during the election his interviews and word of mouth about how he talked with and listened to people brought me around – but now his even-handed response here condemning both racist sides of this violence as the responsible groups they are – this makes me proud of him as a president.

It would be good if more Republicans and Democrats would support him, but there seem to be Republicans too busy acting like Democrats to bother, and Democrats too busy being hard leftists to bother recognizing why this is going on.

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.

Kraut & Tea on The “Women’s March” and Islam

The recent “Women’s March” that was basically a test activation of the protesters we’ll be seeing for the next four years and who exist only to try to undermine the West had this as one of their prominent visuals:

It’s meant to be a powerful visual, but to anyone with a lick of sense, comes across only as powerfully offensive.  It takes a symbol of liberty – the US flag – and turns it into a symbol of oppression and subjugation – the hijab.

Even at absolute best the hijab is a symbol of voluntary submission to a rigid totalitarian theocratic patriarchy (oh, the irony!).  But to an objective observer looking at how the hijab exists as a garment forced on women in much of the world, that image above is wrong on a lot of levels.

Kraut and Tea covers it in harsh detail, breaking it down (also be advised there are graphic images as the video goes along – images of actual abuse of women that was not being protested during the women’s march):

The instances of Islamic murder of women as “honor killings” he discusses in the video are only in his native Germany.

But this happens everywhere in the world.  Amina and Sarah Said were murdered in the US by their own father in 2008.

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.

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.

 

Democrat Joe Manchin – Let’s Get Rid Of Due Process Of Law

Via WeeklyStandard and HotAir:

The problem we have—and really, the firewall we have right now, is due process. It’s all due process. So we can all say, ‘yeah, we want the same thing,’ but how do we get there. If a person is on a terrorist watch list like the gentleman—the shooter—in Orlando, he was, twice by the FBI, we were briefed yesterday about what happened. But that man was brought in twice. They did everything they could. The FBI did everything they were supposed to do. But there was no way for them to keep him on the nix list or keep him off the gun buy list. There was no way to do that. So can’t we say that if a person is under suspicion, there should be a five year period of time that we have to see if good behavior, if this person continues the same traits? Maybe we can come to that type of an agreement. But due process is what’s killing us right now.

Haven’t committed a crime but the government wants to restrict your rights because you’re on a secret list somewhere?  No problem!  Just do away with due process.

How to get rid of the 2nd Amendment?  Easy – just get rid of the 5th Amendment first!

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

5 years of rights restriction based on being put on a watch list?  A watch list that Ted Kennedy had to fight to get off of?

How about… no.

Don Burnstick and the Washington Redskins “Offensive Name” Poll

In the last couple years or so, leftists who felt they needed yet another front in the culture war attacked the Washington Redskins football team for having a name that white elitist liberal leftist progressives thought was offensive to American Indians (or Amerinds, or Native Americans, or First Nations people, etc.).

A poll conducted last week confirmed what a poll years ago said – only about 1 in 10 are offended.  The vast 90% majority don’t care.

If you know who Don Burnstick is, you would already know this.  White elitist liberal leftist progressives obviously do not.

Don Burnstick is hilarious.  Native friends who’ve seen him live (on a res, no less) said he’s a riot in person.  He started parodying Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” jokes and took the jokes one step further into their own thing.

Today from Washington Post (via HotAir), there are white elitist liberal leftist progressives who are mad because:

WaPo: Those dumb Indians don’t even know when they’re being insulted

Just days after the Washington Post revealed that 90% of Native Americans don’t find the term “Redskins” to be offensive, the paper’s own editorial board has proclaimed that they know better about racial slurs than the alleged target of said slur.

In a move that illustrates the height of liberal elite arrogance, the Post proclaimed in their Sunday editorial that “A slur, is a slur,” and despite the findings of the poll, they’re still demanding the name of Washington’s NFL team be changed because, in their enlightened understanding of the world, Redskins is racial slur:

    Where does that leave us? We’ve always made clear that we think fans who embrace the name do so without racist feeling or intent. But we also are clear that the term originates in an era when Indians were considered less than human and were often treated accordingly. References to scalping, war whoops and tomahawk chops hark back to that era and perpetuate stereotypes that can be hurtful, especially to Native American children.

Did you get that subtle insinuation that those polled were just too uninformed to know that they’re being insulted?  “(M)ore than half of respondents had heard little or nothing about this controversy,” the Post says, knowingly. They left out the implied, “those dumb Indians,” but we all get the picture.

In the grand scope of things, there are better things to be pissed off about if you’re an American Indian.  You could be pissed off at how tribal governments are run by corrupt cabals, pissed off at how the feds come in and tell you how to run things, pissed off at all the do-gooders who don’t actually help anything but their own sense of smugness, pissed off at the cycles of alcoholism and drug use that plague reservation communities, pissed off at the economic opportunities lost because of layers of government in the way, or just generally pissed off.

Or you could be pissed off about the name of a football team a thousand miles away because some white elitist liberal leftist progressives told you you should be pissed off about it.

–

Or you could still be pissed off at white elitists from DC knowing what was best for you and forcing you to be disarmed in a massacre over 125 years ago.