SELF-DESTRUCTION, PART DEUX: “‘My job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt,’ [Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of Idaho’s Democratic Party] said.”

To paraphrase The Good Professor, in order to win, the Democrats simply have to not be crazy. They’re failing at not being crazy.

THE PENNY DROPS FOR MAUREEN DOWD? Ed Driscoll summarized earlier the NYT Op-Ed piece from Maureen Dowd, titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” I couldn’t help but notice this rather telling paragraph:

“The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.”

Conservatives and Libertarians and even a few still-sensible Democrats have been saying this for years, that substituting reason and logic with a self-appointed high moral ground is a form of “shut-upism” a way of avoiding solutions (other than your own) by demonizing (and subsequently deplatforming) the opposition.  A few, a very few, have begun to realize that Podesta and Hillary’s polarization game (“Deplorables!”) has contaminated — and possibly rendered toothless — Democratic politics for years to come. It was only a matter of time until they began to use this tactic on each other.

Maybe Maureen Dowd has looked around and asked what happened to the Mensheviks. And perhaps she’s inching closer to being red-pilled.

“FASTER, PLEASE”: “Johnson & Johnson is preparing to test an experimental HIV vaccine in the U.S. and Europe in a move toward developing the first immunization against the deadly disease after decades of frustration.”

As the Good Professor says: “Faster, please.”

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF HAVING IT BOTH WAYS: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, along with The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and others, have filed a brief in the Fourth Circuit asking the appellate court to affirm that Maryland’s Online Electioneering Transparency and Accountability Act is unconstitutional. (A federal district court held it unconstitutional in January, and the State of Maryland is taking an appeal to defend the law).

What’s that law about? You might remember certain newspapers (*ahem*) have been pounding the drums for two years now about dark and secretive influences online responsible for “hacking our democracy” and putting The Bad Orange Man in the White House. Thousands of column inches (not to mention hours of cable TV time) have been dedicated to demanding that government step in and make sure the “correct” political voices are heard and the “fake” ones be filtered out.

So what’s the problem here? Oh, buried in the RCFP’s press release is this telling nugget:

“The brief also notes the significant and adverse financial impact that the law will have on news organizations if they must comply with the disclosure requirements, noting that Google stopped accepting political advertisements in Maryland when the law went into effect. “The Act would be especially devastating to local and regional newspapers,” the brief states, emphasizing the financial burden smaller news outlets would incur in order to simply comply with the advertising reporting requirements.

Allocating staff time and financial resources to reporting advertisements could directly take away from the amount of journalism that the news organization can produce, Reporters Committee Staff Attorney Caitlin Vogus said. If news outlets were required to disclose publication-specific advertising information, it could also potentially compromise their competitive edge in the local news market.”

So the core of the matter is that our Gatekeepers of Democracy want accountability in political advertising, but are not willing to share the burden. They want the glorious ad revenue (and believe me, political season is Christmastime for publishers) but want someone else to carry the expenses associated with that revenue. As my ConLaw Professor Burt Neuborne once said: “The First Amendment is not a license to print money.”

BANNING THE “WRONG” VIEW: IT’S ALL THE RAGE! Is it possible that YouTube and Twitter “set the table” for banning or demonetizing any viewpoint but the “approved” one? It appears that banning statements of support for President Trump is forbidden now…on a bulletin board about knitting. Say those with newly-found power:

“We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

On the one hand, how people could drag politics into a knitting forum is just plain weird. But other forums are picking up the pace as well. RPG.Net, a forum for video gamers has also signaled their virtue thus:

“We are banning support of Donald Trump or his administration on the RPGnet forums. This is because his public comments, policies, and the makeup of his administration are so wholly incompatible with our values that formal political neutrality is not tenable. We can be welcoming to (for example) persons of every ethnicity who want to talk about games, or we can allow support for open white supremacy. Not both.”

[Insert joke about living in parents’ basement here].

Now, to be honest, there’s a part of me that says “yeah, I get it, I came here to participate in a [whatever hobby] forum.” But of course, it’s rather revealing because these moderators are almost certain to see everything in black-and-white. If you do not express utter contempt for the Administration at all times and in all ways, then You Are Evil.

You know, someone should write a book about this.

IF YOUR HATRED FOR TRUMP EXCEEDS YOUR HATRED OF POINTLESS WARS: You have some serious problems. It’s about a week behind, but here’s a “must watch” clip of Tucker Carlson calmly, rationally, and factually praising Trump for not starting a war with Iran.

Look, I can’t bear the idea of an Islamic theocracy anymore than the next person (and a Jew at that) but this would not be like swooping in on Grenada. Anyone with a lick of military experience would tell you this would evolve into a debacle we’ve seen before, with horrific loss of blood and treasure.

Of course, the deepest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome egging us into war are never the ones who pay with their lives on the line. To them, our soldiers are (to paraphrase John Kerry) expendable idiots who are not smart enough to marry rich condiment heiresses.

THERE’S “WOKE” THEN THERE’S “FAKE WOKE.” The mark of the crybully is when a corporation’s CEO postures and preens, but it’s all a PR front. Take Apple, the “wokest” of the “woke”, whose CEO is the openly gay Tim Cook. Spent millions of shareholder money on LGBTQWTF marketing and virtue signalling this month, yet there are still plenty of Apple stores in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where this is a not uncommon occurrence:

Photo: Amnesty International

What I want to know is, where are the shareholder activists?

TWITTER AMPLIFIES ALL THE GARBAGE: Seattle Progressives explode when they heard conservatives on radio, TV.  An excellent lesson on how SJW’s abuse Twitter to “deplatform” voices with which they disagree:

“It’s such a frequent occurrence, you can script out exactly how it will unfold: 1. media outlet will feature a conservative voice; 2. one or two fringe Twitter activists will get mad and call out the media outlet; 3. their followers will retweet and send out similar messages, all within a short time span, making it seem like they’re louder in voice then they are. It’s exactly what they will do to me on Twitter today for writing this.

You know, some guy named Glenn Reynolds just published a book about this very same thing.

BUT HIS TWEETS!!! I’ve written before about the political pundit class and their absurd fear of the President’s 50 cal. Twitter gun, but sooner or later some of these dopes will realize we have it pretty f**king good here in the US. In countries where the press is under real attack, this is par for the course:

Judge Mohammad Moghiseh of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Branch 28 court found [journalist] Kazemi guilty on national security charges of spreading misinformation and insulting the supreme leader and other Iranian officials, and sentenced him to four and a half years in prison followed by a two-year ban from working as a journalist.

He’s lucky his head is still attached to his body.

ON THE MCCAIN FAUXMENT: The irony is amazing. The same John McCain who political media ass-raped in 2008. “He can’t lift his arms to use a computer!” they mocked. (His P.O.W. injuries were never mentioned in that story.) “He had an affair with Vicky Iseman!” they bellowed. (They later “clarified” the story claiming when they said he had an affair they “didn’t really mean to imply” an affair. (The Times has since vaporized the internet archive) When on the campaign trail a woman referred to nominee Barack Obama as “an Arab,” to which John McCain responded, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, a citizen.” This press slurred him “by suggesting that being Arab is at odds with being a “decent family man,” McCain made a comment that was patently Islamophobic.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting to see a huge Twitter war between Trump and David Duke, just so I can read The Times tell us what a great guy David Duke is.

HOW DUMB IS THIS WASHINGTON POST REPORTER? This dumb: She repeats the canard that Trump was the “motivation” behind the tragic murders at the Capital Gazette, yet the very article she cites says expressly:

“Ramos held a long-standing grudge against the The Capital. It began with an article in the newspaper in 2011 that detailed a criminal harassment charge that a woman filed against Ramos, a former high school classmate of hers.”

Of course, this video game is objectionable, but no more so than the wildly popular “Grand Theft Auto” series, which allows players to murder sex workers and homeless people.

LEFT WING FASCISM NEVER DISAPPOINTS: “Mass. teacher accused of planting live ammo at school, then calling police.” If the facts don’t fit your narrative, then invent the facts. Remember, it’s “for the children”:

“Southbridge police said high school biology teacher Alfred Purcell III, 57, of Woodstock, Connecticut, reported to staff that he had just found one live round of 9 mm ammunition in the rear stairwell. The school was placed on lock down. During the lockdown, police and Southbridge High School staff reviewed video footage and saw Purcell removing the live round of ammunition from his pocket, dropping it on the floor and quickly leaving the area, police said.

About 10 minutes later, the video shows Purcell standing over the ammunition and taking a picture of it with a cellphone, police said.”

Like Stalin said: “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.”

Or as one of his current admirers put it: “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? “Brazil to allow crime reporters to carry guns for protection” reports the UK Press Gazette. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Second Amendment says what it says and though I haven’t owned a weapon in decades, the people who want to stop you from owning one are for the most part wrong. That said, step back and think about journalists carrying sidearms. I know literally hundreds of journalists, and can count less than 10 of them who know anything about firearms. The idea of an armed Jim Acosta ought to scare anyone. And remember this guy?

The point is that I’m not really sure that arming people who think ear plugs are some sort of riot round, or that “an AR-15 “shotgun” was used in the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting is a really great idea.

To be sure, journalists in places like Mexico and Brazil are truly at risk, and if open carry makes them safer, I’m all for it. I just hope that the periodistas are more informed than their American counterparts. I’ve written about this at The Daily Caller.

INSTANT TROLLING: It’s true that every now and then I have fun pulling my left-leaning friends’ chains by posting something on social media guaranteed to make them foam at the mouth and wet their pants. I know, it’s a bit cruel, like taunting a puppy, but there you have it.
Soooo, I saw this graphic from The Hill today:

And I just couldn’t help asking:

“Does this mean Democrats are naturally bigoted? The two African-American and one Latino candidate are at the bottom of the polls of likely Democratic registered voters.”

Try it yourself and watch the fun.

I CAN JUST HEAR PALLYWOOD NOW: “Hey, they fought back! No fair!”

THE IRONY IS DELICIOUS (BUT SCARY): Stephen Green highlighted this earlier, but I just had to add that faux-liberals have been screaming “Russia! Russia!” since Trump’s election. “He’s doing Putin’s bidding!” Yet these very same people are all-in on shutting down websites and blogs that *they* deem “dangerous.”

Democrats doing Russia’s bidding? “The word of the day is “projection,” boys and girls. Can you say Projection”?
#OffToTheGulagMrJournalist

AN UPDATE: The Poynter Institute has (for now anyway) taken down the webpage that listed conservative-leaning websites like The Daily Signal as “fake” because they were, well, “conservative.” Backstory here.

There’s a helluva difference in writing news of interest to conservatives and writing news with a “conservative slant.” (Bumped, by Glenn).
**Update: Here’s Poynter’s statement.

CONFUSING “CONSERVATIVE” WITH FAKE: The once revered Poynter Foundation, which stood as a pillar of journalistic integrity has fallen hard, after they issued today a list of untrustworthy or “fake” news sites and included The Daily Signal, which writes straight and factual news of interest to conservatives. (Disclosure: I serve as their outside Media Law adviser).

The Daily Signal is not taking this lying down, and their editor-in-chief Katrina Trinko penned a brilliant Op/Ed in response:

“We’re sharing the story of a Border Patrol agent whose own dad came here illegally and yet still believes it’s important to keep the border secure. We’re reporting on abortion survivors, whose amazing tales belie the left’s lies that babies don’t need guaranteed medical treatment after they survive. We’re telling the incredible tale of a man who went from transgender to nonbinary to identifying as a man again—a story whose conclusion the mainstream media wouldn’t touch, despite covering his earlier transitions […] If you don’t like The Daily Signal because you don’t believe in free speech or you think conservatives should be silent or you just don’t want certain stories told or it makes you upset that we call unborn babies “babies” instead of “fetuses,” fine. It’s a free country. But to smear us as engaging in dishonest journalism is well … dishonest journalism.”

There’s a helluva difference in writing news of interest to conservatives and writing news with a “conservative slant.” The Daily Signal does the former, not the latter. I implore you to write to Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Foundation at  and ask him to fix this atrocious error.

SOMETHING FOR THE ARMCHAIR WARRIORS: “The Army of the Living’s Battle Plan Wasn’t So Bad“: Robert Farley, a visiting professor at the United States Army War College reviews the Battle of Winterfell, and says in Slate that the defenders “needed to induce a fight in order to avoid the threat of a prolonged siege.”

He also notes that although many are criticizing the choice to sacrifice the Dothraki cavalry, it made military sense because among other things:

“Team Alive knew enough about Team Dead to guess that the Dothraki faced a kind of infantry that they had never encountered before; one without fear and thus invulnerable to shock and flanking. Moreover, in the dark, the Dothraki probably could not even identify the enemy flank.”

To be honest, in the dark, I could barely recognize anyone.

IS PREPAREDNESS A PRESIDENTIAL QUALITY? So Biden appears on the inevitably fawning gabfest The View, and is tossed a softball question about the touchy stuff. To be honest, I’d like to think he’s sincere. Being 60+ years old, I’ve been called to HR for addressing a 19-year-old intern as “sweetheart” in passing — a function of my age and generational upbringing. But listen to this interview and it’s amazing to me that he was not prepared and can’t seem to string together a single coherent sentence. If he can’t see *this* coming from a group willing to love him, how would he deal with Putin?

AMERICAN GREATNESS: PERSONIFIED

REFRESHING HONESTY…FROM ROLLING STONE? I’d imagine Matt Taibbi isn’t being invited to the “right” parties anymore after his second story about The Hoax That Was Russiagate. A remarkably clear-headed read, he calls out the clueless who are actually convinced they did a good job:

[I]t’s shocking to see national media voices after the release of Robert Mueller’s report patting each other on the back, congratulating themselves for a three-year faceplant they must know will haunt the whole business for a long time.

Then Taibbi goes on to deflate the “conventional wisdom” the MSM is selling each other in terms of what the Mueller Report actually says:

You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.

He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”

As the Good Professor says, “Read The Whole Thing.”™️

IT DEPENDS WHO YOU ARE EXPOSING: The pro-life activists who filmed a Planned Parenthood staffer negotiating the price of fetal body parts in a crowded restaurant will soon find out if they have to face trial:

First Amendment attorney Matthew Strugar predicted a liberal San Francisco jury will convict Daleiden and Merritt even if the evidence comes out in their favor – greenlighting judges to chip away at the investigative tools available to journalists. “CMP to me are despicable actors who seem to be grossly misstating what happened,” Strugar, who is not affiliated with the case, said by phone from Los Angeles. But he said the group’s undercover methods “are tried-and-true investigative techniques” long used by journalists in the United States to gather evidence of misconduct, from animal abuse on farms to auto mechanics ripping off customers.

The sad part is that the mainstream media and their lawyers — who have a lot to lose here — are avoiding fighting for the right to do this kind of undercover filming because of their liberal pro-Planned Parenthood agenda. If you’re looking for honesty and commitment to principles, the media bar ain’t what it used to be. But secret film of Mitt Romney talking about the 47% who won’t vote for him? No problem.

#NotAllMedia: “WHAT THE PRESIDENT GETS WRONG ABOUT THE PRESS.” My latest column in The Daily Caller…

“Enemy” is a strong word, and when it comes from the bully pulpit of the White House, I suspect it’s taken a little too far in these polarized times. Nonetheless, the damage to public trust in journalism — which is its lifeblood — should be laid at the feet of the political pundit class.”

Guest appearance by Andrew Klavan, who makes unsurprisingly sharp and accurate points.

WORD OF THE WEEK IS “NIMBY”: Forget the Categorical Imperative for a second. If I save a drowning person in hopes of getting a big reward, is she no less saved? It seems to me that the hubbub about Trump’s sanctuary plan is simply “we don’t like his motives.” This is the worst NIMBY I’ve seen since Ted Kennedy blocked wind energy farms off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s more than a masterstroke of trolling by Trump, it’s actually a lesson in “be careful what you ask for.” But NIMBY is old chapeau for the faux-liberals. There is no more solidly Democrat neighborhood than the People’s Republic of the Upper West Side. Yet, when the beloved “diversity” (virtuous!) was proposed for THEIR schools, these Hillarybots went markedly Galt: Said one parent: “You’re talking about telling an 11-year-old, ‘You worked your butt off and you didn’t get that, what you needed and wanted.”

I simply cannot help but be reminded of this Christopher Guest classic: