Archive for 2021

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Attempted breach of Ohio county election network draws FBI and state scrutiny. Something about this sentence doesn’t quite work: “Data obtained in both instances were distributed at an August ‘cyber symposium’ on election fraud hosted by MyPillow executive Mike Lindell, an ally of former president Donald Trump who has spent millions of dollars promoting false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.”

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: The London Independent Falsely Stated Rittenhouse Shot Three Black Men.

“The police shooting of Jacob Blake sparked the 2020 Kenosha riots. The current version of the Independent article mentioned that Blake was black, but did not acknowledge that the men Rittenhouse shot were white. Rittenhouse’s trial polarized Americans along political lines, with numerous politicians and celebrities calling his acquittal racist. Journalist Glenn Greenwald said that the same error had occurred in numerous Brazilian newspapers as well as in a Dutch publication Friday.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

TIME’S UP FOR TIME’S UP: Staff Fumes, Ashley Judd Weeps as Time’s Up Pink-Slips Almost Everyone.

The vast majority of Time’s Up’s remaining staffers were laid off Friday in what they described as a debacle that began with leaders revealing they gave the news to the Washington Post first and ended with board member Ashley Judd breaking down in tears.

The embattled organization, limping since its CEO and entire board resigned this summer, announced Friday that it would lay off the vast majority of its remaining staff. Leadership informed staff of the decision in a virtual meeting that started 15 minutes before the Post article made the pink slips national news.

“They said on the call, ‘The Washington Post is releasing a piece right now,’” said Stacey Ferguson, Time’s Up’s digital director. “Some staff members were like, ‘Oh my god, my mom is going to read about it before I can tell her.’”

“To paraphrase what a colleague shared on the call: For an organization that’s supposed to be advocating for fair and dignified workplaces, this feels like the opposite of that,” Ferguson added.

In a statement, the board called the layoffs a “major reset” needed to right the ship after the events of the last year. Multiple outlets reported over the summer that the leaders of Time’s Up—which was created in response to the #MeToo movement—had counseled then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on how to respond to sexual harassment allegations against him and had disparaged his accuser in text messages.

Flashback: “This week Anthony Weiner got a lengthy profile in the NYT. Today Jeffrey Toobin got his old job back at CNN. And of course, Bill Clinton is welcome anywhere at any time. Is there a sex pest the libs won’t welcome back for telling them what they want to hear?” Jim Treacher asks.

See also, Bad Touch Biden:

Last year, voters evidently decided that voting out #OrangeManBad was more important than #metoo:

THE JUSTICE SYSTEM AT WORK: How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways… “To put it succinctly, Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus left a skid mark on the robes of justice. They put a Kraus-sized turd on Lady Justice’s scale. And they almost put an 18-year-old in prison because he fought for his life and took out three of their ‘heroes,’ as Binger called them.”

Plus:

You can blame Leftist propagandists or your laziness if you believed that Rittenhouse’s assailants were black, or that his gun was illegal, or that he brought it “across state lines,” or that he was a “chaos tourist” and a “vigilante.”

But there’s a special Mike Nifong-sized ring of hell for prosecutors who introduce these slanders into a courtroom, knowing that their subterfuge might put a kid away for the rest of his life.

Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus did this in many ways, by invoking lies — that they knew were lies — into pre-trial bail hearings, motions, and then ultimately into the courtroom itself in the trial. All of these lies were dutifully transcribed by friendly journalists. Indeed, as I reported at PJ Media, prosecutors never went back to revise or revisit the plethora of charges brought against Rittenhouse to test against the truth. If the mob believed ’em, they stayed in the charging documents.

Well, Binger and Kraus, you two are to blame for nearly black-pilling the rest of America who still had hope in the justice system after the FBI and the DOJ scandals.

You had a chance to do a clean trial.

You chose poorly.

Awful people who should be reminded of their awfulness for the rest of their lives. I hope they’ll face ethics complaints.

Plus: “District Attorney Michael Gravely chose to bring a case against someone with a clear-cut case of self-defense. Voters should do something about that guy in the next election.”

OUT ON A LIMB: The TSA’s 20th Birthday Should Be Its Last.

As President Reagan said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”

HATE SPEECH RULES ARE ONLY SUPPOSED TO APPLY TO CONSERVATIVE WHITE MALES: Students behind viral ASU video face Code of Conduct charges. Faculty say that is racist. “Faculty members are pushing back against Arizona State University for charging Code of Conduct violations against the female students who attempted to kick out two White men from the school’s Multicultural Community of Excellence Center earlier this year.”

BIAS BY OMISSION: A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial:

Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.

When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.

Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.

Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.

There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.

Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”

If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.

Like 1968, 2020 was a dreadful inflection point in America’s history that will be studied endlessly to understand the left’s moral panic.

Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering.

At one level, the gap is surprising: The “oppressed” seem less enthusiastic about riots than those who worry about their oppression. At another level, it’s not surprising: The people whose neighborhoods are being destroyed are less sanguine about the destruction than are those who observe it from the comfortable environs of our nation’s capital. . . .

But this is mostly a class divide. The women interviewed in DC share the up-talk and vocal fry that characterize well-off, college-educated young women today. They aren’t people who run or depend on small businesses that can be ruined by one night of destruction; they aren’t people whose wages might suffer from business closures following mass violence. They speak in the most abstract of tones.

By “college educated,” we could also say “poorly educated,” these days. Plus:

The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent.

That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.

And they are.

A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: University fires administrator for discriminating against police chief who voted for Trump. “The University of North Dakota recently fired its Vice President for Student Affairs & Diversity, Cara Halgren, after an investigation determined she has discriminated against the campus police chief due to his political beliefs. UND Police Chief Eric Plummer had filed a complaint alleging his working relationship with Halgren deteriorated after she learned he voted for Donald Trump, and a subsequent investigation affirmed that position.”

THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE FACTS, THEY HAVE A NARRATIVE.

Plus:

Or she’s just lying because she doesn’t care about the truth, which is my bet. Plus:

The narrative is set:

But no matter what airhead celebrities want, Kaepernick is not a hero, and Rittenhouse is not a terrorist. But to be honest, they don’t say that they want that. They’re saying how they want people to think about the facts, which is typical for the left.

THERE IS REASON FOR DOUBT, BUT IN THIS ERA OF INSTITUTIONAL CORRUPTION WHO COULD TRUST THE TEST? Voters want Biden to take cognitive test. “With a majority of likely voters believing President Joe Biden is ‘incompetent,’ a sizable majority want him to undergo a cognitive test and release the results to the public. In a new McLaughlin & Associates survey shared with Secrets, 59% said they want the president to take the test and release the results. Just 33% said no.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Joe Biden and His Handlers Immediately Walk Back the President’s Kyle Rittenhouse Comments.

“Honestly, this presidency is the most predictable in history. Any time Biden manages to say something halfway not insane, his far-left handlers immediately rush to reshape his position. It’s so obvious he is completely beholden to the radicals, and it’s a terrible thing for a nation that desires some semblance of normalcy.”

Why, it’s as if social media is running John Gill’s White House.