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Democrats find the secret sauce: No more ‘pandering to white people’ By Colin Flaherty

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/democrats_find_the_secret_sauce_no_more_pandering_to_white_people.html

Chris Hayes never saw it coming: the MSNBC host was banished from the Democratic Party just because he is white. He even said that was OK.

News of his permanent suspension was delivered by Danielle Moodie-Mills, host of a blog called “Woke AF.” The AF does not stand for Air Force.

White people have to step aside, said Moodie-Mills, to ensure the future of the Democratic Party. She did not specifically say the dour Mr. Hayes had to commit media hara-kiri. She did not have to.

“What Democrats need to stop doing is pandering to the white working class,” said Moodie-Mills, to an increasingly and plainly uncomfortable Chris Hayes. Chris has to know that if there is no place for working-class white Democrats, then there is certainly no place for working-class heroes, like him.

And for anyone keeping score in this never-ending, ever deepening game of identity politics, that also means Chris is taking a job that rightfully should be filled by a black person. A black woman would be better. A gay black woman, like Moodie-Mills, better still.

Moodie-Mills rejects the conventional wisdom that Democrats played the race card too much, too often in 2016. And that is why Trump won.

Turns out, sayeth Moodie-Mills, Democrats lost 2016 because did not play the race card enough, and they have to double down between now and the 2020 elections if they want to win:

What lost us the elections is constantly pandering to a class that isn’t on your side. That isn’t the future of this country. That isn’t the future of the party. What black Americans have shown time and time again is that they are the backbone of the Democratic party, yet receive none of the investment from it.

By “investment” she means more free stuff. Or a high-paying gig on MSNBC.

Let us stop pretending that white women and white men are going to save us from ourselves. They are not going to. They are always going to vote with their whiteness. That’s reality.

Please stop playing with my Holocaust, Geraldo/Cortez Ignorance? Anti-Semitism? There is no comparison between today’s militant migrants and Holocaust survivors and no excuse for the spurious comparison. Jack Engelhard

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23072

It appears that throughout this entire great country, we have but one proper news channel, Fox News, and even over there we can use a day without Juan Williams.

Or Geraldo Rivera.

There he was, saying that it is wrong to use the Holocaust to score political points, as Rep-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) just did – which would have been a good place for him to stop.

For those who haven’t heard, Ocasio-Cortez, neither our best nor our brightest, compared the migrants crashing our borders to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

There is only one Holocaust, sweetheart. You might learn that when you grow up.

“At the same time,” Geraldo continued, these “poor people” have no choice but to come as they can because they have no legal system upon which to rely.

Plus…here it comes… Geraldo (as reported) went on to say, they have no friends, no rabbis, no fixers.

As if we did – the Jews. We had friends, rabbis and fixers. So where were they, you dumb klutz, for the Six Million who perished?

Personally, I was carried in a rucksack across the Pyrenees…and coming to America, through Canada, read this, there were no friends, rabbis or fixers.

CNN Refuses To Condemn CNN Pundit’s Anti-Semitism By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/cnn-refuses-to-condemn-cnn-pundits-anti-semitism/

A few years ago, I was admonished by a prominent CNN anchor upset that The Federalist had published an article he claimed was anti-Semitic. The column in question, written by an Orthodox Jew, warned that his co-religionists had become fixated on the largely powerless alt-right while allowing left-wing anti-Semitism to go unchecked in American institutions.

It didn’t hit me at the time to mention that a perfect example of this trend could be found on CNN. Marc Lamont Hill, allegedly “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country,” according to the network, already boasted a long history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only defending terrorists abroad but praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan here at home.

On Wednesday, Hill gave speech in front of the United Nations, advocating for violence against the Jewish State and dropping the well-known eliminationist phrase, “from the river to the sea,” a favorite of Hamas and other Islamic terror groups, to the applause of representatives from theocrats and tyrannies around the world.

No one uses this phrase accidentally — certainly not in this context. Certainly not someone smart enough to be considered one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. As Hill pointed out in his ham-fisted attempts to walk back these statements, “from the river to the sea” predates Hamas by 50 years. It also predates the idea of “occupied territories.” The expression, which has existed in various forms since the inception of Israel, was adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1964, before the West Bank came under Israel’s control after repelling an attempt to destroy it.

During the Oslo negotiations, when he finally dropped the idea, Arafat openly admitted that the phrase connoted complete Arab control of the lands between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It has nothing to do, as Hill laughably contends, with the emergence of a multi-ethnic liberal democratic state. Rather, it is about pushing Jews into the sea.

You’d think this kind of bigoted rhetoric would be highly upsetting to CNN’s sensitive journalists, who are able to ferret out anti-Semitic dog whistles, sometimes real and often imagined, all over the place.

The Ugly Departure of Max Boot By Jonah Goldberg

Since Max Boot was reborn in the age of Trump, he’s decided that conservatism — pretty much all of it — was corrupt from the start.

Max Boot and I agree on quite a few things with regard to Donald Trump and even a couple of things about today’s GOP. So I understand — and empathize with — his account of how the rise of Trump could cause him to take a rigorous personal inventory and prompt him to embark on his “ideological journey.” But I find the spectacle of it quite ugly.

I have many problems with Max’s approach, but I will focus on two. First, he essentially admits — in his book and in interviews — that he didn’t do much firsthand analysis of conservatism and many conservative positions. The election of Donald Trump caused him to question the conservative movement he’d aligned himself with since he was a teenager, and:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

On most public controversies, he outsourced his convictions to those on the right he trusted or to conservative conventional wisdom and merely focused on his core issues. His adherence to a conservative party line was “a process of indoctrination — largely self-indoctrination, I should add — that took decades and that I am only now escaping.”

On one level, I don’t have a huge problem with Boot’s reliance on others. Every columnist, on both the right and the left, relies on experts, authorities, and colleagues they trust to do some of the heavy lifting for them. Whenever I write about guns, I always try to talk to someone like Charlie Cooke. When I write about North Korea, I make sure to talk to or read Nick Eberstadt. I don’t see this as “indoctrination” but education — and argumentation — because I will try to listen to the other side as well.

No Aid for Censors: The Case for Quitting Twitter By Boris Zelkin

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/28/no-aid-for-censors-

Last night I suspended Twitter indefinitely.

This had been building for some time for two primary reasons. First, Twitter, like Facebook (which I had given up a few months ago), is a hate machine. Second, Twitter’s ever-changing terms of service and curiously selective enforcement of said terms via shadow and outright bans made it increasingly obvious that Twitter is less interested in real conversation than it is in kabuki theater conversation—censored one-sided shadow-boxing—replacing freedom of speech with speech at the pleasure of one’s betters.

As such, Twitter has became a platform I can no longer support with my participation.

From my perspective, participation on a platform that actively censors political speech, even when that participation consists of criticism the platform, is a tacit approval. Remember how you felt when you saw those “Occupy Wall Street” folks using iPhones to bemoan capitalism? That’s how I began seeing giving Twitter my voice, a voice that they could choose to either allow or silence if it became pesky or popular enough.

Having your letter critical of state policies published in Pravda is not the same as speaking freely. You are still at the mercy of the state. Worse still, you are being used by the state to feign even handedness.

When you “join the conversation” on Twitter, you’re speaking at the discretion of Twitter’s censors, be they human or algorithms. Like Jonathan Edwards’ spider, you exist on Twitter at their pleasure. And per Jonathan Edwards, the Twitter gods “Abhor you and are dreadfully provoked.” With each new term of service added (the newest being the prohibition on “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) everyone is a potential violator. They’ve covered the floor with eggshells and then tell you that you’re free to jump around. A Twitter executive in 2012 quoted CEO Jack Dorsey proclaiming Twitter as “the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party”. Hardly. Not Even Jack believes that bullshit anymore.

Being a conservative, free speech supporter, libertarian, or even the wrong kind of liberal on Twitter is engaging in speech that one hopes will pass muster with the company. It is speech reliant on approval from a system whose purposely opaque and broad rules shift with the winds. It is the acquiescing and providing power, reach and currency to the system one is criticising.

Any time I used Twitter to inveigh against Twitter unfairness, I felt as though I became another propaganda statistic that Twitter’s defenders can point to as demonstrable proof of how truly magnanimous Twitter is. “But we allow @FreeSpeechGuy557 to speak.” So there—shut up or we’ll ban you. The Soviets did, after all, hold public trials to show the world and convince themselves just how fair they could be.

Conservatives, Don’t Quit Twitter By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/26/conservatives

If you are someone on the political Right who might quit Twitter because it just banned Jesse Kelly, here’s my plea: Don’t.

After the shocking news spread Sunday night that Twitter had deplatormed the conservative influencer for unknown reasons, some conservatives are threatening to leave the social media site. Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. Instapundit, a law professor and writer who runs a news aggregate site, deactivated his Twitter account hours after Kelly (no relation) was banned. Other critical voices on the Right, including Salena Zito and Mollie Hemingway, said they might follow suit.

I understand why Salena and Mollie would consider leaving Twitter. They’ve both been subjected to bullying and harassment on the platform—even by people who purport to be on the same political side as they are. Anonymous troll accounts quickly can spread vile and hurtful comments about you and your family. Twitter is not a place for the faint of heart.

There’s no doubt that taking a break from Twitter is good for the soul and disposition: Anyone who uses it regularly is aware of how much it can influence your mood. And one ill-advised tweet can not only ruin your day, but your career.

Post-2016 Twitter is a far more hostile place than it was before Donald Trump was elected. Republican lawmakers have been shadowbanned on Twitter, and the company even indulged a petition drive to banish President Trump from the site. Founder Jack Dorsey faced harsh questioning from congressional Republicans earlier this year about his company’s anti-conservative bias.

But, despite its flaws,the reality is that Twitter is ground zero in our ongoing political war. Having utterly failed to infiltrate the country’s one-sided media behemoth, or hold news organizations responsible in any way for their egregious political bias and dishonesty, the Right has no choice but to fight back on Twitter. And for now, there is no other serious alternative or legitimate replacement in the offing.

It is the only public forum where you can instantly call out a journalist for lousy news coverage or condemn a politician for bad behavior. In just the past week, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) had to walk back his tweet threatening to use nuclear weapons against disobedient gun owners, and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) had to delete a tweet that suggested the use of tear gas at the southern border violated international laws on chemical weapons. Without Twitter, those ridiculous comments would have gone unanswered.

Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC wins the prize for the stupidest comment on the border assault By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/andrea_mitchell_of_msnbc_wins_the_prize_for_the_stupidest_comment_on_the_border_assault.html

There is a lot of competition, but one Trump-hater stands out for utter, implausible, easily refuted inanity in attempting to demonize opposition to the organized attempt to force our southern border open to anyone who wants to come here and sign up for the rich subsidies and benefits offered to poor people.

Congratulations to Andrea Mitchell: You have now earned your place in broadcast history with the claim that calling the mob intent on violating our border a “caravan” demonizes them. If you don’t believe me, watch this video excerpt from her MSNBC show. She makes the idiotic claim at 1:00 minute into the segment.

Google, Facebook, and the ‘Creepy Line’ By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/documentary-review-the-creepy-line-google-facebook-disturbing/
A new documentary reveals how much deeply personal information Google has on all of us.
O n Google, I just typed in “top races Republican,” and the word “races” got a squiggly underline suggesting I had misspelled the word. Beneath it ran Google’s helpful correction: “top racist Republican.” With “top races Democrat,” no such veering into the gutter. No squiggly line. The word “racist” did not insinuate itself into my field of vision. Oh, and before I completed the phrase, with just “top races Democra,” two lines below ran the following little hint: “best Democratic races to donate to.” Huh? Who said anything about donating? I’ve never donated to a political candidate in my life, and if I did, I wouldn’t donate to Democrats. Again, no parallel on the Republican side. No steering me to fundraisers.

The documentary The Creepy Line takes its name from a shockingly unguarded remark by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is smiling and relaxed in a conference as he explains that Google has (had?) a nickname for excessive invasiveness. “Google policy on a lot of these things,” Schmidt says, “is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.

The film delves into some of the troubling habits of our two Internet masters, Facebook and especially Google. An early segment of the film, produced and partly narrated by the journalist Peter Schweizer, illustrates how your search history gives Google an enormous, permanent cache of information about you, everything from what things you like to buy to what you like in bed. Naturally Google uses the data mainly to fine-tune ad sales. But what else might they do with it? Who knows?

‘The Enemy of the People’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/trump-media-criticism-enemy-of-the-people-charge/

Criticism of the media by a president is not necessarily a bad thing

Depending on your perspective, one of President Trump’s real talents, or one of his most baleful traits, is his knack for the zinger label, pinned on a political or institutional foe. “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted,” “The Swamp” — the labels often stick . . . and sting.

In commentary about the media that is sometimes withering and sometimes unhinged, the president uses the term “the enemy of the people.” The epithet has gotten under the skin of many journalists. Some of them worry aloud about being targeted for retribution, a concern that is overwrought as applied to Trump partisans generally, but that cannot be dismissed out of hand — Cesar Sayoc’s attempted pipe-bomb rampage against Trump critics, like James Hodgkinson’s gunfire spree against Republican congressmen, reminds us that no one has the market cornered on evil and dementia.

But who exactly is “the enemy of the people”? Trump maintains that he is not referring to the entire press, only to “fake news” coverage by mainstream-media outlets. Is such line-drawing appropriate? Even if the public at large may validly make such distinctions, should they be drawn by a president of the United States, or does that specter imperil constitutional free-press protections?

The Pretense of Objectivity
Before Trump zapped our politics with his lightning rod, it was a commonplace in conservative circles to complain about that most pernicious practice of the political press: the pretense of objectivity. No, we did not begrudge the New York Times and Washington Post their editorial pages, nor resent opinion pieces and programs clearly advertised as such. Our objection was to patently biased news coverage that was presented as if it were dispassionate, just-the-facts-ma’am reporting. The bias is seen and unseen, but pervasive. It is found in the reporting itself. It is intimated in the description of sources (e.g., conservatives always described as “conservative”; left-wing sources — the ACLU, SPLC, CAIR, etc. — described as civil-rights groups with no partisan agenda). Most important, it is concealed in editorial decisions about what gets covered and what does not, camouflaged by the thread that gets emphasis and the “lede” that gets buried.

To people who follow the news closely, it is patently obvious that the mainstream media — specifically, the news divisions of the broadcast networks and many major national newspapers, magazines, and websites — tote water for the Democratic party and progressive causes in general. Again, they are perfectly within their rights to do this. The problem is: They pretend they are not doing it. And it is a profound problem. By reporting this way, the media inculcate in the public the assumption that there is no other side of the story. The Left’s Weltanschauung is not presented merely as a worldview; it is portrayed as objective, inarguable fact, and any other way of looking at things is subversive, cynical, or psychotic.

Because this situation is so corruptive, conservatives and other fair-minded commentators have complained about it for decades. It is why National Review has been “standing athwart history” since 1955.

Glamour magazine turns itself into left-wing rag, finds itself out of the print business By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/glamour_magazine_turns_itself_into_leftwing_rag_finds_itself_out_of_the_print_business.html

Glamour magazine has decided to end its print version, heading to a web-only format, according to its parent company, Conde Nast.

In a story from Variety:

After nearly 80 years, the monthly print edition of Condé Nast’s Glamour women’s magazine is ending.

Glamour’s last regularly published print edition, the January 2019 issue, is scheduled to hit newsstands next week, the company announced Tuesday.

It’s another move by Condé Nast away from declining print businesses to pivot to a mostly digital future, a trend that has cut across the entire publishing biz. Glamour has a print circulation of about 2 million, but the brand reaches an audience of around 20 million online, according to the company.

Which is kind of the story of a lot of print media, with all its good and bad reasons. The magazine can’t be doing well, deny it as they try to suggest in their statement to Variety.

But the lack of wellness of the magazine is hardly confined to the tech revolution’s advances, or the preferences of the Millennials – have you taken a look at what Glamour is like these days?

It’s actually pretty hideous. I did with the last issue, viewing it in the doctor’s office, and boy did I put that one back on the stack instead of sneak it out in my purse. In the past, the magazine, formerly known as ‘Glamour of Hollywood’ was a great go-to place for stories about models, makeup, fashion, boyfriends and good girly stuff. One of my mother’s favorite photos of me at age 7 was of how I used to lap up her copy of Glamour magazine, seated like a kid with my feet on the couch reading it like a kid reads a storybook.

Today, it’s decided that Hollywood for Ugly People is better than actual glamour.

Seriously, it seems to be focused now on female politicians of the strictly Democratic stripe, the kind who wear pantsuits and congratulate themselves with awards. They’re the Democrat-left establishment. They’re the Planned Parenthood-approved sisterhood. The actresses the magazine focuses on are there solely based on their leftwing activism – Alyssa Milano and the #MeToo types, not people who’ve actually done something interesting in the acting trade. There was just one clothing spread and boy was it boring. In short, the magazine has degenerated into Democratic establishment politics, which is a stupid thing given that it advertises itself as about fashion and presumably, the cutting edge.