DEFUND HIGHER EDUCATION: How the ‘Defund Police’ movement started on college campuses. Pretty sure that most of the bad ideas, and very few of the good ones, in our society come from college campuses.
Archive for 2020
December 18, 2020
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: It’s time for the ‘Deplorables’ to become the Unconquerables.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: If Lockdowns Work Why Is California a Global COVID-19 Hotspot? “How in the hell is California a COVID nightmare when the state has been one of the most draconian with lockdowns and mask rules? I mean, haven’t they been doing all of the things that are supposed to keep the virus at bay over there?”
USA TODAY’S “FACT CHECK INTERN” CONTINUES TO KNOCK ‘EM OUT OF THE PARK: Fact check: Story about United Airlines, Black Lives Matter and a toddler is satirical.
Social justice remains a concern for some Americans. But a post on social media claims an airline may have taken its support for the cause too far.
An article in the Babylon Bee, headlined “United Airlines Kicks 2-Year-Old Off Flight For Refusing To Say ‘Black Lives Matter,'” claims the airline refused to let a young girl fly after she couldn’t pronounce the racial justice expression. The airline supposedly scolded the family of the child in a statement, too, citing its “strict ideological purity requirement” for all flights. Promotion for the article was posted to Instagram.
The satire article likely drew from other airlines’ support of the Black Lives Matter movement, too. Both American Airlines and Delta Air Lines created brand-specific “Black Lives Matter” pins for their employees to wear on the job.
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The Babylon Bee article is intended to be satire.
The website calls itself the “world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims,” and there’s no evidence United Airlines stopped a family from flying due to a child’s inability to say the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”
“Satirists often leverage the context of real events to create satirical stories,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon told USA TODAY. “We do this by modifying the scenario or exaggerating what happened to make a point. See this piece, for example. COVID relief bills have been in the news for some time. We aren’t conflating a real story with a fake one by making this joke; rather, we’re using real-world events as a basis and context for offering satirical criticism and commentary.”
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Our rating: Satire
We rate the claim that United Airlines kicked a child off a flight for refusing to say “Black Lives Matter” as SATIRE because it uses irony and exaggeration to criticize an actual event. The article appears to satirize a recent situation in which a family was kicked off a United Airlines flight because its 2-year-old would not wear a face mask.
I’m glad to know that a satirical article appearing on one of America’s most popular satirical Websites is indeed satire, as I was worried for a moment.
The USA Today author’s LinkedIn profile describes her as “Fact Check Intern at USA TODAY. I am a senior at DePaul University pursuing a degree in journalism with a minor in American politics. My work has been published in USA TODAY, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Suburban Life, WTTW, Northwest Herald, Highland Park Landmark, Lake Forest Leader, gb&d magazine, The DePaulia, Sixtysix magazine and The Daily Iowan.”
When Ben Rhodes famously said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing,” like most of the “reporters” he fed stories to, he didn’t know the half of it.
ALTERNATELY, GOVERNMENT COULD TRY TAKING ITS BOOT OFF THE ECONOMY’S THROAT: Former Goldman CFO Marty Chavez Calls For Universal Basic Income ‘To Stave Off Revolution.’
HAWLEY HAS A KNACK FOR CLARITY: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) succinctly explains why people who worry about voting fraud are not going to shut up any time soon.
PAUL BEDARD: Perdue and Loeffler edge into lead in Georgia, ‘should’ win both. Don’t get cocky.
Related, from Erick Erickson: Republicans in Georgia Are Turning Out.
I can’t speak for Georgia, but driving through Lower Alabama and the Florida Panhandle last week, the InstaWife and I saw Trump signs still defiantly flying a month after the election. We quit counting after a couple of hundred, but we only saw a single Biden/Harris sign. The refusal of the Deplorables to give in inspired my latest NY Post column.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Losing A Generation’: Fall College Enrollment Plummets For 1st-Year Students.
GOYA’S EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) selected over AOC for spot on Energy & Commerce panel.
As conservative radiologist/journalist Pradheep J. Shanker tweets, “Don’t ask me to take AOC seriously when her own party caucus doesn’t take her seriously. I mean, Rice was on Pelosi’s bad side last time, and got rejected for prime committees. And Pelosi STILL preferred Rice over AOC.”
But why doesn’t the left take AOC seriously? We’ll never know, I guess.
BETTER STOCK UP THOSE WELCOME WAGONS: Everybody In California Is Moving to Texas.
TIME FOR SOME ACCOUNTABILITY: Dem Tapped to Run Interior Smeared Covington Students. We can’t have a bigoted racist in the Cabinet.
THEY’LL TURN US ALL INTO BEGGARS ‘CAUSE THEY’RE EASIER TO PLEASE: Coronavirus Lockdowns Throw Additional 8 Million Americans Into Poverty.
FBI SPIED ON FOX NEWS, RECORDED PHONE CALL BETWEEN FOX EXEC AND GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS, NEW TEXTS SHOW: “Although members of the corporate media repeatedly claimed that Trump’s criticism of journalists on Twitter constituted a violent attack on the First Amendment and the free press, no corporate media outlets have criticized the Obama administration for secretly recording phone calls with a cable news network executive without even bothering to seek a warrant.”
WAIT, I THOUGHT GERMANY’S BIG SUCCESS WAS PROOF OF #ORANGEMANBAD: Germany’s winning COVID strategy has stopped working. The other possibility is that the pandemic is doing what pandemics do, burning through a population until it can’t sustain transmission, and all the government actions are, at most, delaying things a bit.
DEAD LIKE A ZOMBIE OR A VAMPIRE: Trump’s peace deals mean the anti-Israel boycott movement is dead. “Last week, Morocco became the fourth Arab state — after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — to strike a peace deal with Israel. The US-brokered Abraham Accords will almost certainly be remembered as Team Trump’s greatest foreign achievement. Among the as-yet-unappreciated benefits: The accords will utterly delegitimize those in the West who seek to delegitimize Israel, not least the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction the Jewish state.”
MEDIA SAVES JOE BIDEN—JUST AS IT SAVED BARACK OBAMA: For NY Times, no news is fit to print about Rep. Swalwell and a spy.
If you’re a New York Times subscriber who also watches the broadcast network evening news and considers that your news diet, there’s a very good chance you haven’t heard about Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and his ties to an accused Chinese spy a few years ago.
To review why this is absolutely worthy of coverage, Swalwell’s interaction with the alleged spy known as Fang Fang included, according to Axios, Fang placing an intern in Swalwell’s office and helping to fundraise for his 2014 reelection campaign. In 2015, the FBI provided Swalwell a “defensive briefing” to warn him of the threat she appeared to pose.
So, the first obvious question is this: Given how easily Swalwell was duped, why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shortly thereafter place him on the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees the CIA and therefore has access to the highest level of sensitive, classified information?
The New York Times doesn’t seem to care about getting an answer to that question.
Of the biases we see in major media, the sin of omission is one that seems to occur only when the protagonist of a major story has a (D) next to his or her name. So, when the New York Times, which has a whopping 7 million subscribers and is considered the country’s most influential publication, doesn’t see the Swalwell story as a story at all, it tells you just as much about its moral compass as it does its editorial decisions.
Flashback:
Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase “God damn America.” Wright’s comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright’s quote in its news pages. Until today.
— Byron York, National Review Online, September 24th, 2008.
(Classical reference in headline.)
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Now a MEDICAL JOURNAL Wants to Get Rid of Sex on Birth Certificates.
NO. STUPID MAYORS AND GOVERNORS WHO TREAT THEIR CITIZENS LIKE CRIMINALS AND THE HOMELESS AND CRIMINALS LIKE OUR OVERLORDS MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT, THOUGH: The End of Big Cities? The Hill Blames Coronavirus for the Exodus.
The fun part about this? The cheating they did was to impose a regime that will not work in any way shape or form on a widely dispersed population.
I mean it never works, really, because close relative of communism. But it can’t even begin to be imposed on a widespread population.
They have no idea what they’ve done. I feel like I’m watching one of those silent films (look, I grew up in a very old fashioned place, okay) and one of those word-screens just popped up saying “They have no idea what is going to happen to them.”
SAVAGERY FROM AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: ‘We Must Follow The Science!’ Screams Actor Who Believes Xenu Dumped Frozen Aliens Into Volcanoes And Exploded Them With Bombs 75,000,000 Years Ago.