RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times published an op-ed Monday with the headline “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The piece was festooned with a celebratory exclamation mark, as though the mere declaration needed that something extra, like a Broadway production (“Mama Mia!”) or television game show (“Jeopardy!”).

The piece was written by Jason Barker, who is an associate professor of philosophy (!) at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. He’s also the author of the novel “Marx Returns,” so he writes fan fiction as well. In his article, Barker triumphantly declares Marx’s legacy to be a success because “countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.”

He then proceeds to describe the Marxist states which emerged primarily in the 20th century as “ironic,” based solely on the idea that Marx endorsed a concept in which there was no need for a state at all. How then does he explain the tenets of the “Communist Manifesto” in which industry, wealth, property, and even the lives of children should belong to the people as a whole? He doesn’t. This is philosophy where no explanation is needed. For someone who seems to be a fan of irony, he either overlooked or discarded the very definition of the term “state.”

But irony can be easy to miss. Indeed, as Barker’s article was being made ready for publication, a Marxist dictator was stepping across the 38th parallel into the very country where the professor teaches, in an historic event heralding yet another potential collapse of a communist regime.

As so many have done before him, Barker labors under the false assumption that communism has never truly been attempted in its purest form, and thus the term as well as the definition cannot be ascribed to failed states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

More irony: Marxist dictatorships labeled themselves “republics.”

Jason Zengerle publicly announced his profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine with the snarky tweet, “My latest for the @NYTmag on Devin Nunes, who’s been propagating, not to mention falling for, conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even in a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

It’s an accurate summation of the hit he attempted to place on Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The only problem is the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.

For example, Zengerle writes that a “suspicious” Nunes was wrong to believe that “Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended.” Zengerle says Nunes’ predecessor as chairman of the intel committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, agreed with Obama officials’ assessment and told Nunes the documents Defense Intelligence Agency officials were analyzing at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., showed nothing significant on that score.

“But Nunes wasn’t convinced. On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength—and an Obama administration cover-up,” Zengerle writes. “But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.”

No matter how you feel about Donald Trump or the Washington-based journalists who cover him, you should be angered by what was offered Saturday as entertainment at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Michelle Wolf, recently of Comedy Central and soon to have her own series on Netflix , was foul-mouthed about Mr. Trump and downright cruel about members of his administration, several of whom were in the room. Worse, though it proved to be beside the point, she wasn’t funny.

“Trump is so broke,” she quipped, that “Southwest used him as one of their engines.”

She called Vice President Mike Pence a “weirdo”: “He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you got to get that baby out of there.”

Ms. Wolf’s material—most of which was laced with too much profanity to print here—wasn’t about the First Amendment, as some suggested. Nor was it about the #MeToo movement, which she attempted at one point to hide behind. It was simply a Saturday Night Massacre of dignity and common sense.

It helped prove two unfortunate truths: First, the notion of having working journalists dress up for “nerd prom,” as they call it, and fawn over celebrity guests while listening to a hired comic roast the officials they cover each day was never a good idea. Now, in the freewheeling age of social media, it’s completely bankrupt.

Second, Mr. Trump was right to skip the event. No reasonable person, even among his harshest critics, would have expected him to sit through this. CONTINUE AT SITE

NBC executive Andrew Lack, reputedly the man who hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News, has cost shareholders of NBC-Universal millions of dollars. The three-year contract paying her a reported $23 million a year is the least of the costs the network must absorb. Had Kelly brought-in the eyeballs of early morning viewers for the Today Show, where she landed after dismal ratings for her Sunday prime-time “news magazine” entry, the money could be considered a wise investment of corporate resources.

But it turns out that, according to this report in the UK Daily Mail, Kelly is driving away viewers from her morning gig. Her:

…program that averages 2.4 million viewers an episode, which is 18 percent below what the hour was pulling in last season according to data from Nielsen.

Things get worse when it comes to the key demographic of adults aged 25 to 54, where the show is down 28 percent from last season.

That “key demo” is what advertisers seek, because brand preferences are not as firmly established as among older viewers, and this age cohort buys a lot of stuff, as they raise kids, buy houses and furnishings, and work hard to pay for all of what advertisers are selling.

And the damage extends to the program that follows:

Those numbers are now having a negative impact on the fourth hour of Today, which is also dropping in total viewers.

The hosts of last season’s pre-Kelly show, Al Roker and Tamron Hall, together reportedly were paid less than half of what Kelly is being paid. Evidently, they were more congenial guests in viewers’ homes. Ratings for daily morning television shows like Today are believed to be driven by viewers’ comfort with and attachment to the personalities of the hosts, who guide them through an overview of what’s happening in the world, along with fluff-like celebrity interviews, cooking, and quasi-stunt segments that revolve around the hosts being put in amusing or interesting situations and settings. The Q Score, which purports to measure the appeal of a celebrity or brand, and the comfort of consumers with it, is vital to success in building a weekday morning viewing habit.

Editor-in-Chief of Frontpage Magazine, Jamie Glazov, was recently threatened with violence by a Muslim on Facebook, and the only one who paid a price for that threat was Jamie, after he posted about it. Facebook ended up suspending him for a week. That’s the basis of my accompanying cartoon. This unfair, unwarranted punishment of those on the Right is happening more and more these days by a platform that pretends to be neutral, but is dominated by hardcore leftist Islamophiles.

I’ve had my own trouble with Facebook. Right after the Garland attack, where Jihadists planned to murder over two hundred of us at the Mohammad Art Exhibit event, Facebook removed me from their platform. It was only after a healthy online protest against my removal that I was reinstated. I’ve enjoyed social media, it’s helped me connect with like-minded individuals around the world, and it’s helped me get my work out there in a way I haven’t before. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that, despite their protestations, they have a secret policy of limiting the reach of those who criticize the Left and Islam.

If Facebook and Twitter were transparent from the outset that they would censor non-leftists and Islam critics, they wouldn’t be as big as they are. But now that they’re massive, the purge is here. But instead of outright removing accounts they find troublesome from their leftist perspective, they secretly limit their reach. Facebook has crippled the accounts of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, limiting their reach to a fraction of what it used to be. Facebook and Twitter are private companies who can do what they want, and who can alienate whoever they want, but they’re underhanded about it and they belie their terms of service, which is supposedly against discrimination. That’s a big reason why their reputations are eroding.

Every mass delusion has a beginning.

One day in the Middle Ages, a French nun began meowing. Other nuns soon joined in. Soon, all the nuns in the convent were meowing together several hours a day. They stopped after neighbors complained, and some soldiers threatened to beat up the nuns.

Like the chorus of meowing nuns, the Russia Truther movement began at a particular time and place: a press conference that Donald Trump conducted on July 27, 2016, in Doral, Florida.

Some background:

In March 2015, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, while in office, she diverted some 66,000 emails to a server in the basement of her house. As the Associated Press would determine, the server was “vulnerable to hackers” and the setup was “the subject of U.S. government and industry warnings at the time over attacks from even low-skilled intruders.”

After the diversion was discovered, Clinton returned roughly half of the stolen emails. The other half, she claimed, related to private matters and were deleted. Some, it turned out, were destroyed while under subpoena.

Despite the deletions, there was a chance that the stolen emails might be found because Russia and other adversaries probably had their own copies.

In 2015, Mike Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (who would be a Trump adviser), said the odds were “very high—likely,” that Russia and other countries had broken into the system. Mike Morrell, former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said, “I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses.”

The press corps gave a collective cheer this week when federal Judge Kimba Wood forced the public disclosure that Sean Hannity is a client of Michael Cohen, or at least considered to be a client by Mr. Cohen’s attorneys. When they’re done celebrating, perhaps a few media folk will reflect on how they would feel about such treatment for anyone not named Hannity.

Among journalists, the Fox News television host and radio broadcaster is about as popular as the President. And journalists have raised reasonable questions about what obligations Mr. Hannity has to inform his viewers when discussing documents seized by the government that may possibly include information about him. But journalists as well as non-journalists may also reasonably ask why a criminal investigation of an attorney requires publicizing the names of others, regardless of whether they have any connection to the allegations at hand.

Mr. Cohen has primarily served as an attorney for Donald Trump and is now being investigated by the FBI and federal prosecutors. As for Mr. Hannity, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy at National Review writes, “Forget about evidence of wrongdoing. There is not even a suggestion that Hannity is involved in any crimes.” There’s no indication he knows anything about the issues being investigated and furthermore, says Mr. McCarthy, “grand-jury proceedings are secret by law . . . In short, the public does not have the right to know the names of people—whether or not suspected of wrongdoing—who pop up in a criminal investigation.”