“Why did Jussie Smollett do it?” a thousand anxiously clueless progressives ask. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, because that’s where the money is. Just ask Khalil Cavil, a Texas waiter, who raised a thousand bucks off a fake note that he wrote himself, "We don't tip terrorist." "I want people to understand that this racism, and this hatred still exists," he claimed. There have been multiple cases in recent years of waiters and waitresses faking racist notes and then scoring thousands in online donations for their pain and suffering before the hoax gets exposed. A thousand bucks for a waiter equates to the millions that an actor hoped to make from a fake hate crime. The offense is the same, the social justice banks you’re robbing just get bigger for celebrities. But so do the stakes. Jussie Smollett’s mistake wasn’t faking a hate crime. It wasn’t even getting caught. (Most hate crime hoaxes are outed sooner or later.) It was being stupid. A wai
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Showing posts from February, 2019
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If There's a Hair in Your Soup, Thank New York's Commission on Human Rights
In December 2018, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a radical group supportive of terrorists, passed a display in the window of a Prada store in New York City. The display showed toy squids, aliens and monkeys that were part of the Pradamalia line, a name that combined Prada’ and ‘Animalia'. Alongside the $500 squids and aliens were two toy monkeys. One green and one red. The green monkey named Toto wasn't a problem. But the, now banished eighth creature, a red monkey named Otto, triggered Chinyere Ezie, the CCR lawyer, whose viral post declared, " I’m shaking with anger". According to Ezie, the red monkey was a clear case of blackface imagery. The rest of the story: outrage, hashtags (#StopBlackface #BoycottPrada #EndRacismNow) apologies, boycotts, a Prada diversity council, and a campaign accusing other luxury brands of racism is familiar. But something much more disturbing than a toy monkey in a Soho store happened in between. The New Yo
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The Media's Tribal War on Americans
Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago. These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal. Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn’t making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn’t making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This wasn’t an error due to prejudice, but an active effort to reinforce tribal prejudices. The Covington Catholic story in particular was not newsworthy by any rational definition of the term. The media insisted on making it news because it perfectly encapsulated the tribal prejudices of its base of urban and suburban lefties by pitting anti-abortion kids in MAGA hats against saintly minorities. There’s another example of tr
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America's Newest Muslim Martyr is a Monster
The road to the Supreme Court for the country’s newest Muslim martyr began with an Alabama tractor. It was a long way from County Road 62 in Alabama to One First Street, NE, in Washington, DC. And it all began in the summer of ’95 when a Selma mom gave her daughter $6 and never saw her again. While the frantic mother tried to find out what happened to her daughter, Domineque Hakim Marcelle Ray promised to help. He offered to put up fliers for the missing 15-year-old girl and put out a reward. Hakim kept on checking with Tiffany’s mother to learn if any clues had turned up in her disappearance. Hakim had a very good reason for his helpfulness. On the evening of July 15, as her mother was getting ready to head home, Hakim and one of his friends picked up Tiffany Harville. Hakim drove her out near Highway 41, and raped her while she pleaded, “God, God, help me. Please help me, God.” When Tiffany threatened to tell her mother what he had done, he slashed her throat. Hakim then
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The Political Blackface of Senator Kamala Harris
If Senator Elizabeth Warren wins in 2020, the millionaire class warrior will break the glass ceiling as the first fake American Indian to become the President of the United States. But Senator Kamala Harris is outdoing Warren as the first 2020 fake black candidate who actually is black. It’s easy to fake being a member of a minority group that your DNA test says you can lay 1/1,024th claim to, but what’s really challenging is being a fake member of a minority group you actually do belong to. But Kamala Harris is making being fake look easy. The other Senator from California decided to tout her racial cred by announcing her candidacy in Oakland on or around Martin Luther King Day. It all went according to plan except that photos showed a sea of white faces in the crowd. Behind her, you could see the sort of unwashed hipsters who haven’t figured out how to shave or cut their hair, but attend every Democrat event anywhere in America. Harris had been born in Oakland, but grew up in
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The ADL's #MeToo Moment
When the Gillette ad condemning “toxic masculinity” aired, the ADL was quick to jump on board. The former Jewish civil rights group, whose priorities had sharply drifted away from Jewish issues, even put out a lesson plan for 8-year-old boys warning about “The trap of masculinity” and “aggressive” behavior. It was an odd choice for a group whose CEO was under fire for an alleged physical assault on a woman. In 2016, Ambassadors Against BDS brought together two ambassadors to the United Nations, America’s Nikki Haley and Israel’s Danny Danon, and many major Jewish groups for the first anti-BDS summit at the UN. It was an impressive accomplishment that used an anti-Israel forum for a pro-Israel event. But behind the scenes a confrontation unfolded that would pit those organizations against each other. Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s new left-wing CEO, was there and followed the lead of the pro-Israel speakers with a sharp denunciation of BDS. "Let me be clear: at its core BDS i
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What's Bad for the Media is Good for America
The winter freeze might have shut down entire cities, but it couldn’t slow down job growth as the economy roared through the cold and shattered projections with 304,000 non-farm jobs in January. There were job gains everywhere from transportation (27,000) to health care (42,000) to hospitality (74,000). Under Trump, construction gained 338,000 jobs in 12 months while manufacturing picked up 261,000 jobs in that same period. There was good news for many industries, but bad news for one. The media is freezing colder than the polar vortex with thousands of lost jobs in January and February. Gannett, the giant behind USA Today and many local lefty papers such as the Arizona Republic, the Detroit Free Press and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, fired 400 employees. McClatchy, another newspaper giant, which publishes the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star and the Charlotte Observer, among many others, announced voluntary buyouts for 10% of its employees after having fired 3.5% of its staff
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"Coalface" and the Left's Betrayal of the Working Class
When I was growing up, the man who delivered coal to our school jokingly warned me that if I didn’t study hard and get good grades, I would also end up delivering coal. It was a joke. But it also wasn’t. Working with coal was hard and dirty. Even if all you had to do was deliver it. And, there, far removed culturally and geographically from America and its old minstrel shows, coal dust meant hard work. Once upon a time, the Left romanticized coal dust and the coal miner as symbols of the oppressed working class. Then it degenerated into a movement of university bred urbanites with contempt for hard work and a calculated ignorance of the “brown energy” that makes their lives possible. The disdain and ignorance reached a fever pitch with two media articles conflating coal dust with blackface. The Arizona Republic, ran an editorial by Rashaad Thomas, a self-described poet, essayist and Buddhist thinker, who was offended by a photo of Welsh coal miners hanging in a restauran
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Stop Medieval Diseases With a Medieval Wall
The media recently reported that Los Angeles County’s ongoing typhus epidemic had infected Deputy City Attorney Liz Greenwood. "Who gets typhus? It's a medieval disease that's caused by trash,” she wondered. Greenwood is partially correct. The typhus outbreak, like the hepatitis outbreak, was directly caused by social justice policies that legalized public vagrancy, and leaving trash and human waste on sidewalks. The piles of trash, human waste and people combine to create horrifying diseased conditions. Before Greenwood, many Los Angeles patients who had been diagnosed with typhus were indeed homeless. "There are rats in City Hall and City Hall East," she complained. "There are enormous rats and their tails are as long as their bodies." The rats are a problem, but the fleas that carry the disease that Greenwood has can live on a variety of animals, including stray cats and possums. That’s why the typhus outbreak isn’t just happening in Ski
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Big Data's Subsidization of Big Media
The media is dying. Read about it in the media. Facebook is pumping $300 million into the media. And that’s after the Google News Initiative shoved $300 million into fighting “fake news” and helping struggling media outlets like the New York Times. These aren’t investments. They’re charitable donations by Big Data to Big Brother. Take Jeff Bezos taking $250 million, a little more than the $215 million he makes a day, and using it to buy the Washington Post, not because it’s a good business opportunity, but a good political one. The media isn’t worth investing in. TV and cable news are the weakest holdings of the entertainment giants. That’s why AT&T is none too fond of the CNN white elephant it’s stuck with. John Stankey, Time Warner’s new boss (and therefore also CNN’s new overlord) told CNN that the news network has a “special social responsibility”. That’s the same rhetoric about public service that has the emerging giant monopolies subsidizing media companies as a
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