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Ruth King

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Jussie Smollett Hoax and the Media’s Tribal War on America The real reason the media fell so swiftly for the Smollett hoax – right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 19th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272912/jussie-smollett-hoax-and-medias-tribal-war-america-daniel-greenfield

Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago.

These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal.

Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn’t making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn’t making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This wasn’t an error due to prejudice, but an active effort to reinforce tribal prejudices.

The Covington Catholic story in particular was not newsworthy by any rational definition of the term. The media insisted on making it news because it perfectly encapsulated the tribal prejudices of its base of urban and suburban lefties by pitting anti-abortion kids in MAGA hats against saintly minorities.

There’s another example of tribal hatred masquerading as news in the news now.

Prime Time Sports, a small sports memorabilia store in a Colorado Springs mall, announced that it was going out of business. Malls are emptying out across the country and there was no reason why the closing of a mall shop selling Cubs t-shirts and Patriots mini-helmets should have ended up in hundreds of papers around the country. But the reason why its closing ended up in major papers and news networks, including CNN. says a great deal about the malicious nature of political tribalism on the Left.

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EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Three Amigas by Gerald A. Honigman

By on February 19th, 2019

You know, the duplicitous, taqiyya (deliberate lying for the cause)-spouting rock stars, Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, Farakhan’s good gal pal, Rashida Tlaib, and members of their dhimmi cheer leading squad–like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As a preliminary, you might want to first check out that “d-word” above http://dhimmitude.org/.

Years ago, there was a good comedy, The Three Amigos, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase. Unlike the film, however, there’s no humor in what follows…

It’s become common, even popular–especially with younger generations having little historical perspective—for people to accept the one-sided vilification of Israel and Zionism (among other things, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people) often presented to them.

Truth turned on its head…

David is transformed into Goliath, Jews become the new Nazis, Hamas’ Gaza is the Jews’ Warsaw Ghetto, and Arabs (with almosttwo dozen states carved out of mostly non-Arab peoples’ lands) are now the allegedly new, “stateless” Jews.

Much of this can be traced to the higher indoctrination, not education, served on numerous “Progressive” campuses these days. Now, add to this many millions of dollars donated to support courses related to the Middle East (and even other seemingly non-related areas) by Arab oil potentates and international petro-connected businesses (ARAMCO, Bechtel Corporation, etc.) to fund scholars, programs, scholarships, travel, and so forth, and you can better understand why some subjects are not discussed and don’t appear on course reading lists, while others never seem to leave center stage.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Infantile disorder on the left By James Lewis

By on February 19th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/infantile_disorder_on_the_left.html

There are many ways to measure cultural decline, but the most important one might be emotional regression to infancy. This idea is old, but it has been studied carefully since Sigmund Freud saw it in Vienna. Freud himself came home one day and saw his house surrounded by Hitler thugs. He went at them with his heavy walking stick, and they scattered.

Freud was already in his sixties, but the family realized that Vienna was no longer safe. Freud and his daughter Anna moved to England, a land he had always loved. The Freud Museum today is not in Vienna, where he lived, but in London.

Since that time, social scientists have taken a serious look at emotional “regression,” as it’s called, because it shows grownups falling back into infantile rage and “splitting.” Mature coping includes problem-solving in the real world, and also rationalizing one’s emotions and working out personal issues through the arts and work. Nobody was ever killed by rationalization, or by the arts and music.

But regressive people live in a kind of nightmare, like infants in the Terrible Twos, switching between fits of rage and demanding love and worship. Normal parents start to wonder what they did wrong, but it’s not they; it’s the kid going through a phase.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Exposing Socialism By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on February 19th, 2019

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.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Coups Cover-ups and Context by Linda Goudsmit

By on February 18th, 2019

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.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Democrat Socialist Party of Dhimmis By Victor Sharpe

By on February 18th, 2019

Let me first explain what a dhimmi is. It is an Arabic noun referring to a non-Muslim who becomes subject to Islamic servitude. Dhimmitude is the condition that dhimmis endure under such Islamic power and influence.

Back in 2006 I first wrote an article titled, Dhimmitude for Dummies, which was published in a conservative website. In it I attempted to warn about the terrible danger posed from stealth Islamic jihad infiltrating the Western world, threatening Judeo-Christian civilization and, in particular, menacing our very own United States of America.

Several years earlier, on that terrible day we know as 9/11, Islamic fanatics in the name of Allah destroyed the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon using hi-jacked passenger planes as aerial bombs. They failed in their attempt to destroy the White House using yet another hi-jacked plane. All three aircraft were filled with doomed men, women and children.

This atrocity was a violent and vengeful act that was celebrated by millions of Muslims around the world. Who can forget the TV pictures of Palestinian Arabs handing out candies as they rejoiced while watching the iconic twin towers falling and thousands dying in agony.

The atrocious Islamic ‘success’ on 9/11 became a rallying war cry for untold millions of Muslims who saw in their fevered minds – and still do – an Islamic victory over a vanquished United States of America. For them it was a 21st century revenge by resurgent Islam over the so-called ‘infidels’ whose ancestors centuries earlier had beaten back the many previous Islamic invasions by Muslim hordes.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

High Theory and Low Seriousness written by Gustav Jönsson

By on February 18th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/02/15/high-theory-and-

Sixty years ago today, just as Henderson the Rain King was going to print, Saul Bellow penned an article for the New York Times in which he warned against the perils of deep reading. Paying too close attention to hidden meanings and obscure symbols takes all the fun from reading, he wrote. The serious reader spends an inordinate amount of energy trying to find profound representations in the most trivial of details. “A travel folder signifies Death. Coal holes represent the Underworld. Soda crackers are the Host. Three bottles of beer are—it’s obvious.”

Moreover, deep reading is such an imprecise game that numerous dull and contradictory interpretations arise from the same passage. “Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville’s Pequod in Moby Dick can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous.” One man, Bellow wrote, had volunteered an explanation of Moby Dick as Ahab’s mad quest to overcome his Oedipus complex by slaying the whale—the metaphorical mother of the story.

Instead of this tedious attitude to literature, Bellow urged that people take after E. M. Forster’s lightness of heart. Forster had once remarked that he felt worried by the prospect of visiting Harvard since he had heard that there were many deep and serious readers of his books there. The prospect of their close analysis made him uneasy. In short, for Bellow and Forster, the average academic critic tried to understand literature and thus ruined the enjoyment of it.

The low seriousness that Bellow lamented has only increased since his complaint. Today, literary scholarship is home to some of the most impenetrable gobbledygook ever put on paper. The main culprit is easily identifiable: literary theory. Literary theory, a school of criticism with little hold outside the universities, has captured whole colleges and threatens to extinguish students’ love of reading. Imagine the dejection a student about to begin university, eager to read the best that has ever been written, feels when they are told to examine some heavy tome of unreadable theory. It drains all the fun from reading.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Amy Klobuchar shoots herself in the foot with comments on the Aurora shooting By Thomas Lifson

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/amy_klobuchar_shoots_herself_in_the_foot_with_comments_on_the_aurora_shooting.html

Only a week after launching her presidential campaign decrying global warming during a snowstorm in Minneapolis, the woman who wants to claim the mantle of a “moderate” Democrat has beclowned herself with a nonsensical statement. Even worse, as a veteran prosecutor — county attorney (D.A.) in the most populous county in Minnesota, responsible for all criminal prosecution — she missed a point squarely within her area of purported professional competence.

Screen grab from Twitter.

The Hill posted a video to Twitter of her campaigning in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (friendly territory not too far from the Minnesota border), claiming that the mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois shows that “It is time to put sensible gun control legislation in place.”

One problem: the shooter in Aurora was already prohibited by existing laws from having a firearm. The problem was that existing laws weren’t enforced. Via The Daily Wire:

During a Saturday press conference, Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman said that the suspect had previously been arrested on six separate occasions by the Aurora Police Department, “including arrests for traffic and domestic battery-related issues.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar’s Big Lie By Rich Lowry

By on February 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/ilhan-omars-big-lie/The Left distorts what happened in El Salvador in the 1980s.

In a viral exchange at a congressional hearing last week, the new congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who is quickly establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the House Democratic freshman class despite stiff competition, launched into Elliott Abrams. She accused the former Reagan official and Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela of being complicit in war crimes.

“Yes or no,” she demanded, “would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving U.S. interest, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

Omar was cribbing from the Left’s notes on U.S. Latin American policy, and doing it badly. She made much of the 1981 El Motoze massacre in El Salvador. The idea that Abrams is somehow directly implicated in this bloodcurdlingly awful event is completely absurd. He was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Reagan administration, then became assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs on December 10, 1981. The massacre occurred the next day. Unless we are to believe the El Salvadoran military unit took his change of jobs as a green light to indiscriminately kill villagers (which unfortunately was not a new practice), Abrams obviously had nothing to do with the massacre.

Nonetheless, the Omar attack is an opportunity to examine the premises of the Left’s narrative on Reagan’s policy in El Salvador, which supports the persistent attacks on Abrams as a “war criminal.” To paraphrase the famous Mary McCarthy line about Lillian Hellman, every word in this narrative is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

In what follows, I rely throughout on Russell Crandall’s book The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992, a fair-minded, factual account that’s a marked contrast to the tendentiously left-wing material that dominates online.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

McCabe and 60 Minutes Avoid Discussing Why Russia Factored in Comey’s Firing By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 18th, 2019

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.

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