RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2019/02/jussie-

Another day, another example of the national broadcaster’s monocular perspective. This time it involves an apparent ‘race hate’ hoax in Chicago and, tellingly, a blind refusal to publish any reports that might diminish the impression crosses are burning in the dark night of Trump’s America.

THERE is no accounting for taste, but it’s a fair surmise that few Quadrant Online visitors are devoted followers of the TV series Empire, which focuses on the intrigues and power plays of rap ‘music’ impresarios. Lately, however, the series might have registered more widely, as one of its stars, Jussie Smollett, was widely reported, not least by our very own ABC, to have been assaulted in the frigid wee hours of a snowy Chicago night by a pair of — yes, you guessed it — red-hatted white men who were said to have waylaid the young actor on his way home from a sandwich shop and battered him more than somewhat. The mystery biff artists were reported to have concluded the incident by dousing him in bleach, which they just happened to be carrying at 2am, while announcing gay black men aren’t welcome in “Trump country”, also hanging a noose about his neck for good measure.

A curious tale to begin with, it has grown more so as the Chicago Police Department’s efforts to establish the chain of the evening’s events have uncovered a wealth of discordant information. Despite the neighbourhood of the alleged assault being monitored top-to-tail by surveillance cameras, not an inch of footage capturing an attack has come to light.

What has been uncovered rather tends to support the theory that Mr Smollett staged the entire affair, perhaps in a bid to raise his public profile and avoid his character being being written out of Empire‘s plotline. More than a week after the purported attack, for example, investigators found a re-used hot-sauce bottle with traces of bleach still inside, a discovery which raised suspicions that it might well have been planted after the fact to bolster the original and daily more dubious complaint to police.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/06/atlantic-writer-tweets-trump-assassination-fantasy/

Jemelle Hill, staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote a mini fan fiction on Twitter during the State of the Union Tuesday night, about the assassination of President Trump with the help of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Hill tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez should yell, “GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET,” during the president’s State of the Union speech. The phrase “Get your hand outta my pocket!” was the same one yelled in the Manhattan Audubon Ballroom in 1965 as a distraction before the murder of Malcolm X. As the room tried to quell the commotion, another man rushed forward and shot Malcolm X in the chest.

The same assassination scene was depicted here:

The Atlantic’s motto since it was founded in 1857 has been “Of no party or clique.” The magazine insists it is a place for ideas across the political spectrum. Yet last year Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg hired then immediately fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson on the grounds that his views on abortion would make other Atlantic employees feel unsafe. Williamson thinks abortion is murder, a standard position for those who affirm that human life begins at conception.

It is hard to see how both of these things can be true: that the Atlantic is “of no party or clique” and that they don’t hire any individuals who make other employees feel unsafe. Hill’s fantasy about the president’s assassination would surely make any employee who supports President Trump feel unsafe — if The Atlantic indeed has any such employees.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/buzzfeed-death-spiral-the-millennial-readers-digest/

Which Pandering And Meretricious Yet Doomed Advertorial Dungbot Are You? Take The Quiz!

At its peak in the 1970s, Reader’s Digest pleased America like no other publication ever, selling 17 million copies a month while leaving no footprint whatsoever. It was invisible yet ubiquitous. Sure, it carried (often condensed) versions of real news stories written by fancy reporters for respected outlets, but that wasn’t why America adored it. Mainly it was defined by its periphery, its ephemera. Reader’s Digest was the mild, studiously inoffensive little nuggets of japery that readers sent in. The heartwarming stories about men in uniform, pets, kids. The “service journalism” — tips for soothing your aches or bringing harmony to your bank account. The patriotism, the Christmas miracles, the ironclad Frank Capra optimism. You’d see desiccated copies in your dentist’s waiting room or on Grandma’s coffee table. The product wasn’t quite junk food, merely the gentlest possible level of mental stimulation for the lowest common denominator. It was literary meatloaf.

Now picture the Reader’s Digest ethos reborn in 2006. What if you were willing to endure any amount of ridicule, contempt, dismissal, and eye-rolling in pursuit of the largest conceivable audience? What if your highest aspiration was the lowest common denominator? Keep in mind that the public had lost interest in paying for even moderately high-quality journalism, must less replacement-level journalism, much less the LCD variety. And all of the Gladyses were gone.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-times-roger-cohen-declares-himself-a-european-patriot/

In larger and larger numbers, Western Europeans are repudiating their subordination to Brussels. In Italy, this reaction has led to the installment of a government that is distinctly antagonistic to the European Union and, in particular, to its migrant-settlement directives. The United Kingdom, in accordance with the results of its 2016 plebiscite, is struggling to extricate itself from the EU. Elsewhere in Western Europe, politicians who reject the EU’s immigration tyranny are gaining support; in several nations of Eastern Europe, the heads of state, with strong public backing, are resisting EU demands that they take in armies of so-called migrants of the sort that are overrunning Western Europe. In May, elections for the European Parliament will take place across the continent. And at least some of the EU’s champions are unsettled.

I wrote the other day about one consequence of their concern: an open letter written by France’s most famous philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by a glittering roster of celebrity “intellectuals” who fretted that anti-EU forces will win big at the ballot box in May. “Europe as an idea,” warned Lévy, “is falling apart before our eyes.” Highbrows like himself, he maintained, are fighting “a new battle for civilization” — a concept that, in his mind, is more or less synonymous with the European Union.

As if by design, Lévy’s open letter — which was signed by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwen, and Milan Kundera, and was published prominently in several European newspapers — appeared on the very same day, January 25, as a piece by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen that made the same point. Entitled “Why I Am a European Patriot,” Cohen’s piece was more personal and passionate than usual. Here’s the key passage:

I am a European patriot because I have lived in Germany and seen how the idea of Europe provided salvation to postwar Germans; because I have lived in Italy and seen how the European Union anchored the country in the West when the communist temptation was strong; because I have lived in Belgium and seen what painstaking steps NATO and the European Union took to forge a Europe that is whole and free; because I have lived in France and seen how Europe gave the French a new avenue for expressing their universal message of human dignity; because I have lived in Britain and seen how Europe broadened the post-imperial British psyche and, more recently, to what impasse little-England insularity leads …

What to say about this? Well, it’s a perfect summary of elite opinion on the topic. But it’s sheer nonsense. CONTINUE AT SITE