Archive for 2022

NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Say, where did all that Black Lives Matter money go, anyway?

Black Lives Matter’s leadership had hoped to keep the house’s existence a secret. Documents, emails, and other communications I’ve seen about the luxury property’s purchase and day-to-day operation suggest that it has been handled in ways that blur, or cross, boundaries between the charity and private companies owned by some of its leaders. It creates the impression that money donated to the cause of racial justice has been spent in ways that benefit the leaders of Black Lives Matter personally.

On March 30, I asked the organization questions about the house, which is known internally as “Campus.” Afterward, leaders circulated an internal strategy memo with possible responses, ranging from “Can we kill the story?” to “Our angle — needs to be to deflate ownership of the property.” The memo includes bullet points explaining that “Campus is part of cultural arm of the org — potentially as an ‘influencer house,’ where abolition+ based content is produced by artists & creatives.” Another bullet is headed “Accounting/990 modifications” and reads in part: “need to first make sure it’s legally okay to use as we plan to use it.” The memo also describes the property as a “safehouse” for leaders whose safety has been threatened. The two notions — that the house is simultaneously a confidential refuge and a place for broadcasting to the widest possible audience — are somewhat in tension. The memo notes: “Holes in security story: Use in public YT videos.”

Related: Black Lives Matter used donations to buy $6 million Southern California home: report. Plus: Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real estate buying binge.

BLM = Buy Large Mansions.

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter’s Chickens Come Home to Roost: The Great Elon Musk panic of 2022 is revealing a big fat boatload of blue-check hypocrites.

Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they’re terrified he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a less-censored world. . . .

In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Even that person would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.

Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted” content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.

Heh.

NARRATIVE MANAGEMENT: Why You Won’t Be Hearing Much More About (Alleged) Subway Shooter Frank R. James. “This is the wrong sort of lunatic for the mainstream media’s taste. He doesn’t help them politically. A guy who looks like that is supposed to be a victim, not an aggressor. So they’ll find a way to either excuse it or dismiss it, and then they’ll get back to maligning their preferred enemies. Remember when that maniac in an SUV plowed down a bunch of old ladies and children at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin last year? It might as well have been 100 years ago. The libs couldn’t blame it on Trump or his supporters, so they’ve all moved on. And they’ll move on from this attack as well.”

Related: Media downplays accused Brooklyn subway shooter Frank James’ hatred of whites. “Just as they did with Darrell Brooks, the man charged with driving through a Wisconsin Christmas parade, the press is eager to bury a black suspect’s anti-white statements and ignore them as a possible motivation.”

ECONOMICS CAN’T BE IGNORED:  We Told You So.

It can’t be gentled. It can’t be wished away. Contrary to what they taught yo in school, it’s a hard science. And the equations are always cold. Only fools and communists believe otherwise.

GAME CHANGER:  The Moskva.