RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/11/intellectual-dark-web-quillette-claire-lehmann-221917

One evening this fall at a house in West Hollywood, the Australian editor and writer Claire Lehmann had dinner with the neuroscientist Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, the managing director of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s investment firm. Joe Rogan, the podcast host, joined later on, when the group decamped to a comedy club.

You could think of the gathering as a board meeting of sorts for the “intellectual dark web,” or IDW, a loose cadre of academics, journalists and tech entrepreneurs who view themselves as standing up to the knee-jerk left-leaning politics of academia and the media. Over the past year, the IDW has arisen as a puzzling political force, made up of thinkers who support “Enlightenment values” and accuse the left of setting dangerously illiberal limits on acceptable thought. The IDW has defined itself mainly by diving into third-rail topics like the genetics of gender and racial difference—territory that seems even more fraught in the era of #MeToo and the Trump resistance. But part of the attraction of the IDW is the sense that many more people agree with its principles than can come forward publicly: The dinner host on this night, Lehmann says, was a famous person she would prefer not to name.

Over steaks, Lehmann recalls, the conversation revolved around a brewing academic scandal, a prank engineered by friends of hers. They had successfully placed seven nonsensical research papers in various academic journals devoted to what they characterized as “grievance studies.” One of the papers included a lengthy passage from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten to focus on feminism and intersectionality. Another was about rape culture in dog parks. Absurd as the papers were, they had been accepted by expert editors and published as serious research. For those in attendance, it was a ringing confirmation of just how politicized academia had become, and how blindly devoted to fashionable moralities.

It was also a big story for Quillette, the online magazine Lehmann runs and the unofficial digest of the IDW. Lehmann had known about the prank before the Wall Street Journal broke the news, and she had some time to formulate a response that would fan the flames. “I wanted the public to be aware that there are many people within the academy who are fed up with grievance studies scholarship,” says Lehmann, who went on to publish responses from five like-minded academics—one of whom called the incident “a Cultural Revolution in our own backyard.”

https://spectator.us/jim-acosta-don-quixote-fake-news/

Let’s face it, reality show star Jim Acosta could get a cover charge for his rendition of the Man of La Mancha. There he is, press conference after press conference, crooning his ‘unheard melodies’:

‘To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.’

Don Quixote tilted at windmills and was ridiculous but lovable.

Jim Acosta accosts his ‘unbeatable foe,’ Donald Trump and is ridiculous but disgusting.

Think back to his performance in August before the President’s Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. Acosta kept badgering her to assure the scribes in the White House press pool that the President did not think the were ‘enemies of the people.’ Sanders refused to let him fulfill that impossible dream, which sent the CNN reporter into one of his signature windmill-tilting frenzies. ‘For the sake of this room, the people that are in this room, this democracy, this country,’ he said with characteristic understatement and politesse, ‘the president of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people.’

Thanks for the lesson in civility, Jim. It was almost as pertinent as his invocation of ‘Nazis’ in response to the President’s observation that there were ‘some very fine people on both sides’ at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a couple of years ago.

Nazis, eh? Someone should tell Jim Acosta about Godwin’s law and the perils of reductio ad Hitleram.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/08/democrats

The world is divided into two classes of people: those who think that CNN’s Jim Acosta is “rude” and a “terrible person” and Jim Acosta.

Supporting the former opinion are episodes like Wednesday’s press conference at the White House at which Acosta once again played his version of charades, acting out the word “obnoxious.” He does it well, even if the routine has become tiresome through ceaseless repetition. It wasn’t all tedium, however, since Acosta this time earned himself a suspension of his White House press credentials by pushing away a female staffer who endeavored to take the microphone away from him after the president attempted to move on to another reporter. Your time was up, Jim. You should have sat down and behaved yourself.

I should explain that in the latter group, small but vocal, I include not just the excitable Jim Acosta himself but also that moist band of preening scribes who believe that by being rude and editorializing at press conferences they are somehow reporting the news. Let’s call that whole group “Jim Acosta” in scare quotes.

To be frank, I would have preferred that the Republicans had held the House on Tuesday. But the president was right: Tuesday was a great victory, not for Republicans, exactly, but for Donald Trump and his robust vision of a vibrant, free, and prosperous America. This election was a referendum on the “principled realism” that the president has articulated as the pivot of his approach to both foreign and domestic policy.

As the president observed, Tuesday’s vote, with a net gain in the Senate of three or four seats (as I write, the good people of Arizona are still doing their sums) was the largest Senate gain in a first midterm election since 1962. The losses in the House—currently 28—were, by historical standards, very modest, giving the Democrats only a slim majority of five. This is what that unhappy professional NeverTrumper Gabe Schoenfeld described as a “drubbing.” I am thinking of getting Gabe an English dictionary for his birthday.

Donald Trump famously likes making “deals.” In the world of diplomacy, the word “negotiation” is preferred, not least because it has five syllables rather than just one.

What it boils down to is this: Donald Trump likes agreeing with all parties to an issue on arrangements that will benefit everyone. Hence his cheeriness about the fact that the Democrats narrowly took the House on Tuesday. (His pleasure depended on both elements, the victory and its narrowness.) There are a lot of issues that the country faces which require bipartisan participation to solve. Serious infrastructure problems, for example, as well as health care, immigration, and taxes.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/04/cnns-existential

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names
But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271853/democrat-activist-charged-vandalizing-new-york-lloyd-billingsley

On Friday, just days after 11 people were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue, New York City police arrested James Polite, a Democrat, for vandalizing a New York synagogue with anti-Semitic messages.

“Die Jew rats we are here,” read one message, along with “Jews better be ready,” and “Hitler.”

The next day, CNN failed to report that Polite, 26, was a Democrat activist who had worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. CNN described him as a “Brooklyn man” arrested and charged with a hate crime for the anti-Semitic messages and “criminal mischief and making graffiti.” Other reports found more background on the Democrat, who had been identified through surveillance footage.

The Daily Caller found that the New York Times had profiled Polite last year, noting that he had been the “adopted child” of Manhattan Democrat Christine Quinn, then speaker of the New York city council, and the entire city council staff. Polite worked on Quinn’s reelection campaign in 2009 and pitched in with Quinn’s mayoral bid in 2013. Polite’s Facebook profile was more revealing.

On November 1, a day before the synagogue vandalism, he posted a photo of a burning American flag captioned “Sometimes things take a lil heat to grow.” CBS reported that police believed Polite had “set fires outside seven shuls and yeshivas in Williamsburg overnight,” and also captured on security cameras. In other Facebook posts, the Daily Caller reported,

“Polite rails against Israel and posts about Palestinian causes.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/01/no-pence-not-invite-messianic-jew-pray-pittsburgh/
In this time of genuine coming together to mourn and stand in solidarity against hate, more hatred and division are simply unwelcome.

On Oct. 29, two days after the breathtakingly tragic terrorist attack against Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue, Vice President Mike Pence spoke at a campaign rally for several Republican candidates in Michigan. At the speech, a religious leader gave a prayer for the victims of the attack and prayed for the Republican candidates.

This gesture should have been taken as a kindness and show of respect. Outrage, however, centered around the fact that the religious leader, Rabbi Loren Jacobs of Shema Israel temple in Detroit, Michigan, is a Messianic Jew (a Jew who believes Jesus is the Messiah, so a Jew who is a Christian).

ThinkProgress quoted Daily Kos’ David Nir as saying, “Pence could not possibly have done something more offensive to Jews.” The article cited the progressive website Eclecta Blog, which, after incorrectly stating in its title that Pence had invited the rabbi, began its commentary by saying: “I don’t know how to describe this exactly. It may be the most insulting thing anyone in the Trump administration or campaign has done to Jewish Americans.”

Bend the Arc — a self-proclaimed progressive Jewish organization that stated in an open letter to President Trump he was unwelcome in Pittsburgh until he “denounced” white supremacy — responded by saying, “11 Jews were killed while praying, and this is how the Vice President responds??? Another attack on us from this administration.”

A local rabbi stated, “The only rabbi they could find to offer a prayer for the 11 Jewish victims in Pittsburgh at the Mike Pence rally was a local Jews for Jesus rabbi? … That’s pathetic!” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg tweeted, “Dear Pence, please give up the pretense of Jewish presence. You are a Christian supremacist. We know that, you know that. Also we will defeat you. But in the meantime, just stop pretending and appropriating my people.”

https://pjmedia.com/video/don-lemon-we-have-to-stop-demonizing-people-but-biggest-terror-threat-is-white-men-on-the-right/

On Tuesday night, CNN’s Don Lemon urged people to stop demonizing “any one group or any one ethnicity” and, in the very same breath, stigmatized “white men … radicalized to the right” as “the biggest terror threat in this country.” So, conservative white men are not “any one group or any one ethnicity”? Oh, right, according to “intersectionality,” we’re not people!

CNN’s Chris Cuomo was discussing the horrific shooting of two black people at a Kroger in Kentucky. The suspect reportedly targeted a black church first, but could not get in, thank God. Ironically, the same CNN commentators who would avoid rushing to judgment if a shooter were a different race or Muslim immediately rushed to stigmatize white men.

“I keep trying to point out to people not to demonize any one group or any one ethnicity, but we keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else, some people who are marching towards the border like it’s imminent,” Lemon said.

“So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right,” Lemon declared.

“And we have to start doing something about them,” he added. “There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban — they had the Muslim ban — there is no ‘white guy’ ban.”

What exactly is Don Lemon suggesting? Should government go after conservative white men?

Furthermore, forcing both of the most heinous terrorism attempts in recent weeks into this narrative proves quite a strain. The man who killed 11 people at the Pittsburgh synagogue hated Donald Trump — because Trump is a friend to Jews. The man who attempted to send bombs to Democrats was half-Filipino and self-identified as a Native American. If liberals want to stigmatize “whiteness,” they’re going to run into the same problem white supremacists do — defining “white” is far from easy.