RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/

Eleven years ago, back in 2008, the blog Creeping Sharia was launched on the WordPress platform, the same publishing system used by Quadrant Online. On Sunday, May 12, an item was published that went entirely unreported by the Australian press and received only fleeting attention from mainstream US media: FBI agents had raided and made arrests at a compound in backwoods Alabama allegedly being used as a training centre by an Islamist cell said to have been planning to use small children as human bombs.

It would be the last item ever published on that site, as the following day its operators were informed by WordPress that permission to continue publishing on the blogging platform had been withdrawn for ever. Creeping Sharia had earlier been alerted by both Twitter and WordPress that its recent reproduction of the Charlie Hebdo cartoon below “violated Pakistan’s laws”. Yes, the laws of Pakistan, where a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, spent ten years with a death sentence hanging over her head after her Muslim neighbours accused her of “insulting the Prophet”. Now safe in Canada, the Toronto Sun reports an imam has vowed to track her down and deliver the Prophet’s brand of summary justice.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/nyu-journalism-teacher-the-gop-is-a-terrorist-organization/

She seems nice.

No stranger to controversy, the 28-year-old Fordham grad and author of How to Start a Revolution tweeted last year on the death of evangelist Billy Graham, “The big news today is that Billy Graham was still alive this whole time. Anyway, have fun in hell, bi*ch.”

Controversy, vindictiveness masquerading as commentary, potato, poTAHto.

Me, I’m with Twitter user “VillainsMatter” who replied, “You know this whole acting like a complete asylum inmate bit, people look at it and vote trump 2020 because of it.”

This summer, Duca will teach a class at NYU called “The Feminist Journalist.” According to Wikipedia, the class will “focus on intersections of feminist ideology and the practice of journalism.” If Duca’s work is any indication, feminism and journalism — at least as journalism was once practiced — make up a Venn Diagram of two circles with zero overlap. That NYU finds someone so viciously partisan worthy of training tomorrow’s journalists tells you everything you need to know about the actual worth of an NYU journalism degree.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-13-frances-fox-piven-icon-of-the-left

In the New York Times, they have a section that goes by the name “New York” on weekdays and “Metropolitan” on Sundays. This section contains next to no useful information about what is going on in New York and/or the surrounding area. Even local news staples like murders and fires rarely get covered. And if you want to learn about the latest corruption in City government, or important new laws coming out of the state legislature, you mostly have to look elsewhere.

But they have to fill the space with something. A fair characterization of the large part of it would be “support for our team.” To illustrate, yesterday’s “Metropolitan” section was totally dominated by a single article that contained nothing about relevant local news. Instead, it was, to put it mildly, a fawning profile of a woman named Frances Fox Piven. The headline was “This 86-Year-Old Radical May Save (or Sink) the Democrats.”

Have you heard of Frances Fox Piven? She first came to my attention way back in the 1960s, when she had become one of the early enlistees in the “War on Poverty,” and went around leading loud welfare “rights” demonstrations. She’s been doing variations of the same ever since. But I can’t say that I have closely followed her career. This Times profile fills in many details, and in the process makes clear that Ms. Piven is a true archetype of the species sometimes known as the Upper West Side progressive radical. I thought that readers here might like an introduction.

Here is how the Times chooses to introduce its piece:

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/14/seth-meyers-useful-idiot/

After listening to Seth Meyers run interference for Rep. Ilhan Omar last week, an exasperated Meghan McCain asked him: “Are you her publicist? Are you her press person?” Perhaps the more pertinent question is, who else do you represent?

Because on the same day Rep. Rashida Tlaib was complaining (via her 500,000-follower Twitter account) that powerful forces were “trying to silence” her, the freshman representative also appeared on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Tlaib’s presence on “Late Night” is unsurprising, whether it was booked earlier or not, as the show has become something of a safe haven for unaccomplished freshman reps with very specific opinions about a certain ethnicity. The fact that Meyers, like most of his colleagues, shills for Democrats isn’t particularly noteworthy. It’s more pertinent, however, when an alleged comedian not only provides someone like Tlaib a giant platform to spread a despicable historical lie, but helps her do it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/progressive-plans-change-senate-response-jamelle-bouie/

I n a provocative Sunday opinion piece for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie takes aim at the United States Senate. It is “is highly undemocratic and strikingly unrepresentative” institution, dominated by a “Republican coalition of rural whites, exurban whites and anti-tax suburbanites.” This needs to be changed — because everybody knows it is un-American to oppose higher taxes!

Bouie offers an outside-the-box idea. Rather than change the Senate via constitutional amendment, progressives should look to increase the number of Democrats in the Senate by giving representation in the Senate to non-state units—“Washington, D.C., the Atlantic territories, the Pacific territories and the Native tribes.”

Normally, I do not write columns responding to other columns. But Bouie’s piece is typical of the progressive Left’s frustration with the Senate, as well as of an inability to reckon with its role in our constitutional regime. For these reasons, it merits a thorough examination.

For starters, full disclosure: I get it. The Senate is not democratic, and in a republic, that is problematic. All else being equal, I would agree with Bouie. But all else is not equal. This is in fact a very old debate, whose context demands some thoughtful appreciation before slashing changes are made. Why do you think the Constitutional Convention dragged on through the entire summer of 1787? James Madison, James Wilson, and other federalists from the large states insisted on a fully majoritarian system. But the small-state representatives, including John Dickinson and Roger Sherman, said, No dice — you want our assent to this Constitution, we need guarantees.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/12/the-media-wounded/

There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality” and diversity. To the degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its founding.

At the recent third president-less White House Correspondents’ Dinner, passive-aggressive journalists whined that they were victims, standing on the barricades against the all-powerful, all-evil—and all absent—Donald Trump. If the attempt was to return professionalism to the evening and eschew the pathological celebrity obsessions of the past, the result was only more confirmation of the self-referential and narcissistic culture of the Washington press corps.

Why should we believe reporters suddenly worried about ethics, and free inquiry and speech?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/wapo_jumps_to_gazas_defense_on_missile_attack_story.html

The Washington Post article “Gaza’s homemade rockets still test Israel’s sophisticated defense system,” published May 7, 2019, uses biased phrasing in the title to downplay the threat Gaza imposes against Israel, stating that Gaza’s “homemade” rockets merely “tested” Israel’s defense system.

The authors open the article highlighting the tight border controls Israel enforces on Gaza but disregard Egypt’s border controls on Gaza. More importantly, the authors neglect to mention why border controls exist! The reader is primed to feel that Israel is singularly acting unjustly against impoverished Gaza. Why is Gaza impoverished when Hamas receives billions in humanitarian aid? Largely because Hamas exploits aid funds to stockpile weapons and build terroristic infrastructure instead of helping its people.

While the authors admit to Gaza’s large stockpile of rockets in the article’s beginning, their biased frame continues by stating that a tiny fraction was fired toward Israel. The nearly 700 rockets were not just fired “toward” Israel. The rockets fired by Hamas and Islamic Jihad targeted and devastated civilian, not military, areas across southern Israel, resulting in the tragic deaths of four Israeli civilians (briefly mentioned later) in addition to injuring hundreds of Israeli civilians, including children (who are never acknowledged).

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/deplatforming-the-platformers-why-antitrust-legislation-is-the-way-to-go/

Having failed to impeach President Trump on grounds of collusion with the Russians, the Democratic left and its allies have turned to other weapons in their arsenal to obstruct his re-election. Their instruments can be very potent: a media blitzkrieg, the raising of the dead (the cemetery vote), multiple vote counting, newly franchised illegal voters, massive vote harvesting, and social media censorship—all of which constitute a campaign of monstrous voter fraud.

Evicting dissident voices from social media platforms may be the most effective device of the left. How can such high-tech despotism be challenged or negated? Citizen journalists, who can be seen as liberal democracy’s samizdat warriors, are to be applauded and supported for trying to counter a significant bias, but far more is required to thwart what amounts to an organized campaign to commit doxa violence—a modus operandi perhaps even more effective than the practice of totalitarian terror.

There are many ways to eliminate opposing voices, from police oppression to mass slaughter to the stifling of the means to acquire salient information. The coercive method eventually engenders resentment, revolt and ultimately political collapse. Data suppression works better, not only muzzling people from expressing their views and convictions but preventing many common folk from even knowing they have been erased from the public conversation. Big Tech, in collaboration with the Democratic left, may well be President Trump’s most powerful enemy—and, indeed, the gravest threat to freedom and the life of a viable democracy.