RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/02/18/the-internet

Camila worked for Ristretto Roasters, my husband Din’s coffee roasting company in Portland, Oregon, for five years. She received regular promotions and by 2016 was earning a mid-five figure salary. In October of last year, Camila resigned. The end.

Or, the end until last month, when she sent an email to more than two dozen former and current Ristretto Roasters employees, alerting them to the YouTube series, #MeNeither Show, that fellow journalist Leah McSweeney and I launched in December 2018. In three half-hour episodes, we had discussed, among other topics, celebrities who have exploited the #MeToo movement, and the difference between sexual predators and those swept-up in the excesses of the current moment. The show’s “about” page reads, “#MeNeither is an almost-weekly conversation about the cultural issues of the day, and an attempt to create a space where people can find ways to think out loud through uncomfortable topics.”

In her email to Ristretto employees, Camila described our show as “vile, dangerous, and extremely misguided” and announced her intention to “take this information to [local newspapers] Willamette Week and The [Portland] Mercury.” She went on to explain that, “it could be really powerful to have a formal letter singed [sic] off by as many RR employees as possible so that the community at large knows that the people who actually keep RR running do not stand for this.”

The letter Camila circulated to the local press read in part:

We believe it is a business owner’s responsibility to create a safe and supportive working environment for their employees. Invalidating assault survivors throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace and has the potential to create a demoralizing and hostile environment for employees and customers alike. This cannot be tolerated.

The career-destroying potential of the internet mob immediately snapped into action. Articles appeared in at least four newspapers and on innumerable websites. People on social media hurried to declare that they would never again spend a penny at Ristretto and were rewarded with approval from like-minded peers. A college-age girl walked into one of the cafes screaming, variously, that the baristas were in danger, and that working for Ristretto somehow posed a threat to the community. Employees who had previously been secure in their jobs became jittery and quit. One of Din’s managers suggested that he sell the company and that I offer a public apology before it was too late.

This was within 48 hours of the first news reports appearing.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/19/15-recent-hate-crime-hoaxes-might-make-suspect-theres-trend/

……”

Cut to 2019, and an era in which the American left daily imbibes a different kind of fantasy porn to titillate the insatiable thirst for outrage. Enter Jussie Smollett, an actor who knows his audience. He is not the first actor to turn to a type of porn to revive his career. So he scripts two characters to help him act out a scene of outrage porn for the liberal media in which he pretends to be victimized by two Donald Trump supporters.

The script checks all the right victim boxes for a good outrage fantasy. Watch this montage of outrage as the mainstream media hilariously buy into it. Over and over, they ironically ask, “Who could believe that something like this could happen in 2019?” Who could believe it? So addicted are they to the narcotic of outrage, that the mere fantasy of the attack is all they need to believe it true.

You might remember a few other hoaxes over recent years. Smollett’s hoax reminds one of the failing talk show host, Morton Downey Jr. In the late 1980s, he attempted to revive public attention by falsely claiming to have been attacked by neo-Nazis.

Maybe you remember the Duke University lacrosse team being falsely accused of attacking an African-American exotic dancer. Or, more recently, you might remember a gay man falsely accusing Whole Foods of decorating his cake with the slur, “fag.”

We should also remember a recent video of a child being separated from his mother at the border that turned out to be a hoax. The Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle likewise had its share of hoaxes.

Such hoaxes are becoming common, even epidemic. There are hundreds of them, and several worthy authors (here, here, here, and here, for example) have done yeomen’s work compiling these lists from which I now draw. Here is a small sample of confirmed hoaxes in just the last few years.

https://www.city-journal.org/jussie-smollett-bigotry

The Jussie Smollett case, in which a young black, gay actor has apparently concocted a tale of being attacked by two white men wearing MAGA hats and shouting anti-gay slurs, is just the latest example of how desperately media elites want to confirm their favored narrative about America: that the country is endemically and lethally racist, sexist, and homophobic, and that the election of Donald Trump both proves and reinforces such bigotry.

The truth: as instances of actual racism get harder and harder to find, the search to find such bigotry becomes increasingly frenzied and unmoored from reality.

Smollett made a not-irrational wager that a patently preposterous narrative about an anti-black, anti-gay hate crime at 2 a.m. in subzero Chicago would be embraced by virtually the entirety of the mainstream media, leading Democratic politicians, Hollywood, and academia, with no one in these cohorts bothering to fact-check his narrative or entertain even armchair skepticism toward it. He also presumed, again with good reason, that to claim victim status would catapult him to the highest echelons of public admiration and accomplishment. And he was right. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker called it a “modern-day lynching.” Joe Biden warned that “we must no longer give this hate safe harbor,” his implication being that we need to stop winking at such racist attacks. If Beale Street Could Talk’s Barry Jenkins lamented, “This what all that hateful mongering has wrought. Are you PROUD???” Good Morning America interviewed Smollett without asking a single critical question about his story.

The examples are as numerous as the retractions will be minimal.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/19/the_bleeding_wounds_of_our_constitutional_order_139505.html

America’s constitutional order faces mounting threats and too few principled defenders. The threats come from vitriolic partisanship, compounded by declining trust in government and the steady erosion of vital institutions, from churches and media to law enforcement. The warning signs are painfully clear.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, with the power of the purse – just as it is lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are tasked with ratifying or rejecting treaties, and offering “advice and consent” on federal judges and high-level administration appointees. President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency (“which I don’t have to do”) as a pretext to fund his border wall is an affront to our constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.

It is only the latest example. The issue here is not whether the wall is a good idea. It is whether a president can bypass constitutional norms to build it—with the acquiescence of his political party. The same dynamic was at work when President Obama unilaterally decided to change the status of immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. For years, he said he had no constitutional authority to do that. Then, he did it anyway. Obama also used constitutionally evasive tactics to pass the most important U.S. foreign policy pact in decades: the nuclear deal with Iran. In every substantive sense, this was a treaty. It should have been treated like one. Obama refused to acknowledge that because he knew the Senate would never ratify it (since that required a super-majority, and since he never bothered to consult senators as he negotiated the terms). So, he simply called it an agreement, not a treaty, and supine elected officials in the nation’s top legislative body let it pass. They have behaved that way for decades, passing off hard decisions to the White House or telling mid-level bureaucrats to make the rules themselves.

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-farrakhan-wicked-jews-use-me-to-destroy-womens-march/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1550564090&pushcrew_powered=1

Notorious Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, at his movement’s Saviours’ Day conference on Sunday in Chicago, accused the “wicked Jews” of using him to break up the women’s movement. His statement received a standing ovation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/farrakhan-praises-omars-anti-semitic-remarks-shake-up-that-corrupt-house/

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday praised Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D., Minn.) recent endorsement of an anti-Semitic trope and urged the freshman lawmaker not to bow to pressure from critics.

“Ms. Omar from Somalia – she started talking about ‘the Benjamins’ and they are trying to make her apologize. Sweetheart, don’t do that. Pardon me for calling you sweetheart, but you do have a sweet heart. You sure are using it to shake the government up, but you have nothing to apologize for,” Farrakhan said during his annual Saviour’s Day address in Chicago, in comments first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

“Israel and AIPAC pays off senators and congressmen to do their bidding, so you’re not lying. So if you’re not lying, stop laying down. You were sent there by the people to shake up that corrupt House,” he added.

Farrakhan, who has long engaged in anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering, went on to mock Omar’s Democratic allies, who have defended her remarks as the result of inexperience and lack of knowledge regarding the historic plight of the Jewish people.

“‘Oh she’s just young. She just got here. Don’t be so hard on her,’” he said, mocking Omar’s defenders. “My beautiful sisters, you were sent there to shake that House up. Your people voted you in, but God is the overseer.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/18/adam

He helped conceive a hoax so outlandish that only the most gullible, craven, or witless person could believe it.

The attack, as he called it, allegedly was executed by mysterious and politically motivated thugs with the intent to inflict harm. It exploited the political climate of the moment given that the chief goal of the ruse—and of the perpetrator himself—was to sow division in an already-fractured American populace for his own gratification. Nonstop news coverage and social media chatter ensued. The heretofore obscure perpetrator gained instant fame.

Lawmakers, journalists, and celebrities acted as accomplices, allowing themselves to be duped and conferring immediate legitimacy to the event. Public resources were diverted away from more serious matters. Whenever fair-minded observers voiced skepticism about the questionable nature of the circumstances and evidence at hand, they were riddled with insults.

As authorities began to expose the hoax, the mastermind lashed out, blasting his detractors and making incendiary accusations.

The public mostly went along with it because it sounded right or, at least, familiar like the narrative that Donald Trump and his people ultimately are at the center of everything wrong with our country today. And astoundingly, even as his story fell apart and his early supporters tried to distance themselves from the ruse, the hoaxster remained entrenched, beclowning himself and those who aided the scam.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/exposing_socialism.html

Sixty-two years ago, author and ex-communist Howard Fast wrote that he had “only one important task in front of [him] to define this thing, to explain it, to picture this unholy god in his own frightful nakedness; so that if there is another generation in [his] land that must face the agony of [his] generation, they will never see this avenue as a road to any future that man should face without loathing.” His 1957 book titled The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party was Fast’s coming “to grips with the “hollow, rigid, ‘political’ incantations of the movement’s cultural high priests.” It is a book that “explains, in terms of specific instances, the whys and wherefores of total commitment to a false ideal.”

This unholy god was communism, and it is with great alarm and fear that we must, yet again, teach Americans of the evil inherent in socialism which is always the first step to communism. With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hypnotizing impressionable and miseducated millennials we are headed toward a tattered future.

Howard Fast was devoted to communism but eventually realized that it needed to be exposed so that its tenets would wither and die. He wrote that “an idea must be bent over the anvil of truth to see if it can survive some strong blows.” As an important literary figure in the Communist Party, Howard Fast’s defection was a shock. He had spent thirteen years as a devotee to Communism until Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret report” finally revealed the “terror, the fear, the hollow pretenses, the bestiality, [and] the inhumanity that characterized the leadership.”

Khrushchev “exposed the mechanism of terror and the system of arbitrary rule that had dominated the country for thirty years. He deployed dozens of documents and a wealth of detail to reveal the brutal character of the terror. The document catalogued the assassinations, the lawless mass deportations of non-Russian peoples, and the methodical falsification of history written by Stalin himself.” Khrushchev revealed that “Stalin was a bloodthirsty criminal responsible for systematic physical and psychological terror.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22366/coups-cover-ups-and-context
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

After much media hype and online snippets the prime time CBS News interview of Andrew McCabe finally aired last night 2.17.19. It was a well-choreographed editorial hit-piece masquerading as journalism worthy of study by any legitimate journalism school if any still exist.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed McCabe for the show. Pelley handled McCabe with the deference, tenderness, and soulfulness of a dance partner, completely inappropriate for interviewing the disgraced former acting head of the FBI involved in an unprecedented coup attempt against President Donald J. Trump. CBS entertained America with their well-rehearsed dance sequence.

The stage is set for two. Pelley’s gentle voice leads McCabe as they tango around the political dance floor justifying motivations for removing the president. A dip here, a dramatic pause there.

McCabe, dressed in his best red white and blue dance costume takes the lead and reveals that he ordered an investigation into whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI director James Comey. Dancing McCabe’s Tango Walks naturally curve to the left as he claims he initiated the probe to safeguard and document the ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election so they could “not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

Pelley turns and moves his partner in a different direction. McCabe follows for a Reverse Slip Pivot and in a staggering admission that has gone viral on the Internet but being virtually ignored by the mainstream media, McCabe describes how the Justice Department considered enacting the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office.

Britain’s online newspaper The Independent reported on the admission in its stunning 2.15.19 article titled, “Trump 25th amendment: Justice Department considered attempt to remove president after Comey firing, former FBI chief reveals.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-60-minutes-avoid-discussing-why-russia-factored-in-james-comeys-firing/

Trump wanted Comey to state publicly what he had insinuated to the president privately: that Trump was not a suspect.

Andrew McCabe is a good witness and he made a favorable impression, at least on me, in his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley. Pelley and his editors did a great job highlighting McCabe’s down-to-earth likability. Unlike Jim Comey, a career prosecutor and corporate lawyer before he became FBI director, former deputy director McCabe is a career agent; his relation of events smacks of the Bureau’s “just the facts, ma’am” ethos. And McCabe’s account of Trump telling him to ask his wife what it was like to be a “loser” (after she lost a Virginia state senate race) is devastating, precisely because it sounds just like something Trump would say.

That aside, there are problems with McCabe’s story.

First, Pelley failed to ask him the screamingly obvious questions: What about Russia did Trump want included in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo supporting Comey’s dismissal? McCabe obliquely said Trump wanted Rosenstein “to put Russia in” the memo about Comey (I’m quoting from memory). But Pelley never asked what in particular about Russia Trump wanted included. What about Russia was Trump referring to when he spoke — in conversations with NBC News and Russian diplomats — of Russia’s part in Comey’s firing? Pelley highlighted the word “Russia,” but he sidestepped what Trump was concerned about regarding Russia.

The viewer was thus left to conclude, from McCabe’s other comments, that Trump must have fired the FBI director because he was fearful of the Bureau’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the election; because he was concerned that the FBI would find that Russia intended to benefit Trump and would therefore deduce that Trump was complicit.

But that is misleading. We know that what Trump wanted made public was something very specific about Russia, namely, that Comey repeatedly told the president he was not a suspect in the Russia investigation. Trump was frustrated — over time, ballistic — over the fact that Comey was privately telling him that he was not under investigation, yet making statements that would lead the public to believe Trump was suspected of conspiring in Russia’s hacking operations. Trump wanted Comey to state publicly that he was not a suspect; Comey’s refusal to do so made no sense to the president, especially after Comey gratuitously implied, in his stunning March 2017 House testimony, that Trump was a suspect.