“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 waiter scrawling, “We Hate Black People” on a check, going to the media and then collecting donations is a lot safer than faking an assault in a city with more security cameras than ethics.

Jussie broke the first rule of hate crime hoaxes. He filed a police report. At that point the stunt he might have been able to pass off as a social justice art project became a crime.

That’s what he was arrested for.

College hate crime hoaxers usually don’t file police reports. If they do, it’s to the campus cops who generally do the first part of their job and discover it’s a hoax, and then do the second part of their job and cover it up. Local cops in campus towns also often shrug and the perps walk away with no charges.

Had Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime hoax at the University of Iowa, where a student claimed that he was assaulted by three white men shouting racial slurs, he would have also gotten a pass.

Marcus Owens, the students, faced no charges so that the “community can begin to heal”. The University statement said, “We will continue to reach out to everyone involved, including Marcus, in order to provide support and assistance.”

Iowa City police Capt. Troy Kelsay suggested that he hoped that Marcus "learned a lesson from it."

The lesson is obvious. Stage fake hate crimes in Iowa City. If you don’t get caught, you win. If you do get caught, nothing will happen to you.

Iowa City is 82% white and 5% black.

Capt. Troy Kelsay and Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness are extremely white and servicing an area that Hillary Clinton won by 65%. They know that their job is to condescendingly pat minority hate crime hoaxers on the head and thank them for starting an important conversation about racism.

Chicago is 45% white and 33% black. It has an actual police force with a history and an ethos that isn’t just there to pat drunken students on the head and keep the gownies away from the townies.

Worse still, for Jussie, it’s headed by Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson.

The worst possible place to fake a hate crime is in an African-American city. Black cops don’t suffer from white guilt and have very little patience for fake racist hate crimes. Chicago’s top law enforcement officials are African-American. That’s one reason Smollett is getting the book thrown at him.

He might have checked with Fynn Ajani Arthur at Goucher College who came down from Maine and decided to fake racist graffiti in Baltimore County. Artie blamed bottled up anger. The police charged him with property destruction and a hate crime.

Hate crime hoaxes are most likely to lead to criminal charges in more diverse areas with more professional police forces. If Jussie Smollett had wanted to successfully fake a hate crime, he should have gone to a lily-white leftist suburb with a police force whose main job is social justice.

The best place in America to fake a hate crime is still a campus. That’s why hate crime hoaxes occur most frequently on college campuses where they’re usually treated as victimless crimes.

Trying the same stunt in Chicago, New York or Baltimore is a bad idea.

The NYPD or the Chicago cops might not bother following up if your phone was stolen or if you were mugged on the way to work. But media coverage of a hate crime puts pressure on the cops to break the case. And they have the equipment and the training to solve the crime. They also have access to the ten trillion cameras dotting every city. And they’ll find the time to actually do more with that footage than just send out an alert with some blurry footage and move on to the next crime they don’t have time for.

And there’s nothing those cops, many of them minorities, hated more than knowing that they’re ignoring violent assaults by the dozen to pore over some celebrity’s minor assault that’s really a hoax.

The cops investigating Smollett’s lie knew exactly how many bleeding mugging victims sitting all night in an ER they had to brush off to figure out if someone had threatened a pampered celebrity.

They had a good idea from the start that it was a hoax. They were working the case to protect their own reputations, always endangered in a lefty activist city, and to nail the bastard who put them in that bind.

And they got their man.

It’s not surprising that a celebrity would have executed a hate crime hoax. The primary motivation for hate crime hoaxes is political narcissism. The average hate crime hoaxer is a college student in his late teens or early twenties whose campus radicalism and sense of alienation collide in self-dramatization.

The hate crime hoaxer has absorbed a social justice narrative in which his or her emotional insecurities are explained by microaggressions and institutional racism, whose heroes are activists who show their emotional resilience by fighting bigotry, and dramatizes his or her emotional reality with a hate crime.

The fake hate crime is the outcome of an internal conflict given a false political context by campus radicalization. Radical ideologies and cults structure individual emotional turmoil in terms of their own larger struggles. Emotionally unstable students are brainwashed to perceive their own conflicts as expressions of identity politics struggles against ‘whiteness’ or ‘heteronormativity’.

Jussie is over a decade older than the usual hate crime hoaxer, but he shared the political narcissism and the erratic emotions of the younger students who usually perpetrate these crimes.

But there’s also the financial angle.

Millennial hate crime hoaxes usually pay off most directly in the attention that the hoaxers both crave and dread. But millennials are also expert at monetizing attention, whether with GoFundMe fundraisers or job offers. Jussie Smollett’s hate crime followed the familiar millennial hate crime hoax pattern of monetizing attention with a media blitz. And in his business, celebrity, attention is money.

Just ask Colin Kaepernick.

Smollett’s mistake was forgetting that ‘hate crime’ has a crime in it. And an extremely unnecessary one.

In a social justice age of microaggressions and facecrimes where a lefty activist can gain nationwide fame for accusing a teenage boy in a red cap of smirking at him, an actual assault was never necessary.

Smollett’s error was the classic mistake of all bad actors. He overplayed the part.

All Jussie really had to do was track down a Trump supporter somewhere and claim that he was smirked at. The same media that spent tubs of ink analyzing the skin movements around the mouth area of a teenage Catholic boy at a pro-life rally would have been happy to anoint Jussie a victim of facecrime.

And who needs fake crimes when you have facecrimes?

Microaggressions make it possible to fake hate crimes that exist only in the perpetrator’s head. External evidence of political incorrectness, such as a MAGA hat or racial differences, do all the rest.

The best way to fake a hate crime isn’t with bleach and a noose. It’s to claim that the experience of the hate crime is “your truth”. That it exists not in the realm of fact and evidence that any professional police department can take apart in a matter of days, but in the orifices of your traumatized psyche.

There is no claim of emotional racial trauma too farfetched for the modern political establishment.

Under Obama, the National Park Service had hired an outreach guy who claimed that black people weren’t visiting parks because they have ancestral memories of being lynched on trees.

It’s stupid, but there’s no way short of common sense to actually disprove something in your head.

Actors may live in their heads, but celebrities, as Jussie Smollett aspired to be, live in front of mirrors. It wasn’t enough for him to invent a hate crime. As a method actor, he had to physically live it out. And, maybe, like method actors, once he experienced it, he was actually able to believe that it was true.

Leftists believe in lots of things that don’t exist and aren’t true. Like universal health care and green trains to Hawaii. They believe in them, as all cult members do, because they feel like the right thing.

And there’s no harm in believing stupid and wrong things, as long as you don’t try to make them real.

Jussie Smollett’s mistake, like that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, another millennial political narcissist, was trying to realize the fantasies that made him feel important. As long as his “truths” were inside his head, they couldn’t be challenged, and he could rant against President Trump all he liked.

Leftist problems begin when they try to realize their fantasies.

That’s what California found out with high speed rail, Vermont found out with socialized medicine and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez found out when the Green New Deal actually had to exist on paper.

Leftism is a beautiful fantasy that becomes a nightmarish reality. What starts out with equality, ends with gulags, what begins with a green vision becomes a war on cows, and what commences with a passionate cry for social justice ends with two Nigerians pouring bleach on you in Chicago.

Like the commissars of the Soviet Union, Noam Chomsky in Cambodia and Steven Spielberg in Cuba, Jussie Smollett had finally found a truth he could believe in, even as everyone else learned it was a lie.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 York City Commission on Human Rights sent a cease and desist letter to Prada, in its own words, “demanding the company immediately stop displaying and selling the ‘Pradamalia’ goods.”

"The Commission is taking swift action to demand Prada immediately comply with the NYC Human Rights Law," Assistant Commissioner Sapna V. Raj warned.

The Commission's press release threatened that, "it has the authority to fine violators with civil penalties of up to $250,000 for willful and malicious violations of the Law."

A government agency issuing an order to stop displaying an artistic product (that is what Prada considered its Pradamalia collection) and threatening fines is a blatant First Amendment violation. Yet this abuse of power went largely unnoticed by the NYCLU, which these days seems to spend much of its time backing a Judeophobic campaign against Orthodox Jewish schools in the city. And while the stakes, a cartoon monkey that Prada swiftly disavowed, may seem silly, the case has ominous implications.

New York City's Human Rights Law is a sprawling and unwieldy mess, some of whose provisions would probably not survive a vigorous court challenge, and the Commission wields a disturbing amount of power, including the threat of prison for anyone who impedes its activities, but in this case it appeared to be defining speech as a discriminatory practice. And that is an attack on the First Amendment.

The Commission claims to fight for social justice, but its commitment to social justice appears to casually violate some of the most important civil rights protected by the United States Constitution.

The Prada case cast a brief gleam of light on how out of control a mostly obscure agency had become.

New York City had long ago rolled through the usual spectrum of legal protections for everyone from ex-cons to transgender men. And the Commission has been desperately concocting new legal protections. Its latest initiative declares that employers, including in the health care and food service industries, may not prevent employees, regardless of race, from wearing dreadlocks because that’s racial discrimination.

The Commission's new guidelines insist that employees have "the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.” Schools, public and private, are also forbidden from banning dreadlocks.

Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis boasted that “human rights warriors” had gone on Al Jazeera to discuss hair rights. Al Jazeera is Qatar’s Islamist propaganda network. Under Islamic law, women’s hair must be covered with anything ranging from a hijab to a burka. There are no “hair rights” in Islam.

And “human rights warriors” sounds like a government agency deploying official social justice warriors.

Hair rights may sound silly, but what it really means is that restaurants will have to choose between keeping hair out of the steaks and salads of their customers, or dealing with the Commission on cases that will last for years and potentially cost the victims tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When you find a hair in your soup in a New York restaurant, you can thank the Commission.

But the Prada crackdown and hair rights had become typical of a New York City government spinning out of control under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his even more radical New York City Council counterparts.

Amazon’s pullout and the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had focused national attention on the deranged radicalism and incompetence that had become the hallmarks of New York City politics.

What does the Commission actually do?

In 2014, a “small restaurant” in Brooklyn posted an ad on Craigslist seeking an “experienced waitress who can make cappuccino”. The Commission went after the unidentified 25-seat restaurant and its minority owner because he had used “waitress” instead of “wait-person” or “wait-thing.”

The owner told the representative of the Commission that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hung up the phone. He did not show up at any of the hearings and showed no interest in the kangaroo court.

In 2015, an administrative law judge held him liable for gender discrimination. Since Mr. Rosario didn’t show up, the Commission insisted he should be punished, "primarily because of the important public interest in ensuring cooperation with the Commission's administrative investigation and hearing processes."

The final order was signed by Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis three years after the original offense. Malalis has a B.A. in Women's Studies from Yale and a seemingly boundless hatred for restaurants.

A previous order had hit Crazy Asylum, a restaurant, accused of also putting up a Craigslist ad for “waitresses” who could wear heels, with a $10,000 fine after wasting four years on this case. “Respondents were not sufficiently deterred from posting another advertisement indicating a limitation on gender even after they had received the Bureau's Complaint,” the Malalis order fumed.

The inmates, with their degrees in Women’s Studies, were officially in charge of the asylum.

Also facing the Commission’s wrath was an Indian restaurant which had put out an ad for an Indian waiter or waitress back in 2013. The Commission conducted a sting operation by sending an email job application for “George Harris” and “using an email add-on that confirms when an email has been opened by the recipient, the tester confirmed that both emails were opened. However, the tester did not receive a response to either job application.” Would that hold up in court? Welcome to New York.

George, who didn’t exist, didn’t get the job. Neither did anyone else because the job no longer exists.

The Indian restaurant shut down, but the case kept going with a penalty finally issued four years later. Once again, Commissioner Malalis declared that, “Respondents' failure to cooperate with the Bureau investigation and to participate in the OATH hearing process necessitates the imposition of civil penalties.” The worst crime the Commission can think of isn’t racism: it’s ignoring the Commission.

However, all the managerial staff for the Indian restaurant that doesn’t exist were ordered to attend a Commission-led training that will teach them it’s wrong to hire Indians to work at Indian restaurants.

The Indian restaurant and the jobs of all its employees had to be destroyed for social justice.

Meanwhile two Muslim taxi drivers, Baqir Raza and Mohammed Dahbi, who discriminated against a black woman and a lesbian couple, got off with no fines. Instead, even though their alleged actions were actually discriminatory, in the interests of “restorative justice”, a euphemism that means giving minority offenders a pass, they were instead ordered to educate other drivers about the evils of discrimination.

The Commission had spoken.

Under Republican governance, New York City began a major turnaround. What made that turnaround possible was a crackdown on crime and quality of life issues, along with creating an environment that encouraged businesses to stay in New York, and attracted new companies to do business there.

All of these three factors were reversed under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Term limits, instead of reforming government, pushed out professional politicians and replaced them with motivated radicals. Policing was once again crippled and quality of life offenses became protected behavior on its streets.

New York City is steadily bleeding people. Beyond the established financial and cultural industries, few companies want to deal with a deranged regulatory environment run by incompetent radical activists.

Amazon couldn’t make it in New York. Smaller companies don’t even want to try.

The New York City Commission on Human Rights is both ridiculous and disturbing, a Kafkaesque monstrosity exercising dubious powers for radical ends, holding its own hearings, inventing its own laws and spitefully punishing small businesses who dare to ignore the radical agendas of its identity politics.

New Yorkers needs some human rights activists to save them from their Commission on Human Rights.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 tribal hatred masquerading as news in the news now.

Prime Time Sports, a small sports memorabilia store in a Colorado Springs mall, announced that it was going out of business. Malls are emptying out across the country and there was no reason why the closing of a mall shop selling Cubs t-shirts and Patriots mini-helmets should have ended up in hundreds of papers around the country. But the reason why its closing ended up in major papers and news networks, including CNN. says a great deal about the malicious nature of political tribalism on the Left.

"A Colorado store that boycotted Nike after its Kaepernick ad will close," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gloated about the misfortune of a mall store 1,400 miles away.

"He stopped selling Nike products because of Colin Kaepernick," the Washington Post breathlessly reported. "Now his store is closing."

The fate of a 2,000 square foot hole in the wall placeholder in a dying mall had somehow become of crucial interest to the opinion-shapers and policymakers of the nation’s capital. But when Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor suspected of hundreds of cases of infanticide, was on trial, the Post dismissed it as a “local crime” story. Those are the same tribal priorities that led the media to be outraged that Governor Northam wore blackface 34 years ago, but not that he now backed infanticide.

The headlines sum up why the national media found the closing of a mall shop so newsworthy. The owner had dared to buck the media’s tribal message that Colin Kaepernick was a civil rights hero. Going out of business was his punishment. It was a story of just deserts. A moral lesson for America.

Stand up to our social justice mega-corps and we will destroy you. And then dance on your grave.

Stories of ordinary people punished for their political views have slowly become a staple of the media. These often focus on some random person caught on video in what can be spun as a politically incorrect moment during a confrontation, and then being followed around by the cameras as their lives are destroyed. The Covington Catholic case is the most famous of these types of tribal humiliation stories.

Their existence says everything about where the media, its parent leftist movement and America are.

In a liberal society, people from different tribes can agree to disagree because they recognize their mutual humanity. In a tribal society, the ‘other’ is less than human. Tribal narratives are about the superiority of ‘our’ people to ‘their’ people. Outrage at selective incidents is used to dehumanize the ‘other’ tribe, to call for violence against them, and then to urge their utter destruction.

Or, as New York Times columnist Sarah Jeong once tweeted, "#CancelWhitePeople".

Tribal superiority is reinforced through ritualistic acts of humiliation of the other side. Media stories like the one about a sports store in a failing mall going out of business ‘count coup’ on conservatives.

Once upon a time, America was a liberal society. And Americans were able to coexist together.

It’s easy to see what we have lost by what we now have. A tribal society is governed by mysteries and absolutes. Morality is relative and contradictory. The only real absolute truth is the superiority of the group. Divisions between tribes are therefore absolute. Unity is possible only against a common enemy.

And so we’ve lost science and replaced it with scientism. Science was a set of techniques for testing the accuracy of answers. Scientism is the conviction that anything a politically correct PhD says about the entire planet or the universe must be believed with a religious fervor because it makes you a more moral person.

Religious tolerance and tolerance for all different ideas have also become casualties.

In a tribal society, the other tribe is evil because of its ancestry and beliefs. These two are intermingled, as they were in Nazi Germany or among the leftist exponents of ‘white privilege’. Your tribe is superior because of its ancestry and beliefs. The enemy tribe is evil because of its race and its beliefs.

Racial tolerance has been replaced by racial tribalism. Coexistence is held to be a physical impossibility. The new racial theorems claim that ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ are in perpetual conflict, and that racial justice can only come by recognizing this conflict and doing everything possible to destroy ‘whiteness’.

There’s nothing progressive about this narrow-minded tribalism. Instead the ‘progressives’ have destroyed what was once a liberal society while declaring that their tribal hatreds and prejudices, their intolerance and refusal to listen to other points of view, are justified by tribal outrage and grievance.

All other forms of morality and justice have been supplanted by the tribal representation of ‘diversity’.

Tribal warfare begins with outrage, it escalates to raids and then to war. The media is already saturated with the tribal outrage of victimhood. The purpose of outrage is to declare something unacceptable. Media tribal outrage depicts almost any conservative views as unacceptable causes of tribal suffering. Every day, conservative views are responsible for the murder and oppression of minorities. Like Colin.

The next step in the tribal war is the raid. The raid is a brief skirmish that inflicts harm and humiliation on a tribal foe, demonstrating his weakness and the strength of the raiders. It raises the morale of the tribe, encouraging it to embark on a conflict, while weakening the morale of its targets to resist.

The media has been conducting these tribal raids for some time now. Over time the intentions behind them have become more explicit. Stories that reinforce the tribal conviction that conservatives are morally inferior give way to stories that seek to economically and even physically punish conservatives.

The journalists tweeting about Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic and his “punchable face” were demonstrating that the ultimate purpose of tribal narratives about the evil of the ‘other’ in his MAGA cap is to escalate that outrage, demonstrations of inferiority and ritual humiliations into violence.

The deluge of disgust, contempt and hatred is a tide that can only wash up on one bloody shore.

Different tribes can coexist in a liberal society, they can separate in a federation whose divisions are governed by strict rules, or, hatred and anger will funnel them into an escalating tribal war.

The media is the voice of the leftist tribes reinforcing their identities, policing their boundaries and stirring up hatred, outrage and violence against the rest of the country. It lets no incident pass it by that it can use to stir up more tribal enmity, whether it is a boy in a red cap in Washington D.C. or a mall store closing in Colorado Springs. It has become the greatest enemy of a tolerant and open society.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 made off with her purse and the $6 her mother gave her. Then, with her daughter’s blood on his hands, he showed up to tell her mother how much he cared and offered to put up fliers.

In August, a farmer was clearing land in a field in Dallas County and stumbled on Tiffany’s body. By then the teenager’s body was too badly decomposed to find out exactly how many times Hakim had stabbed her, but forensic examination showed that she had been stabbed a dozen times through the skull.

Three times, Hakim’s knife had entered Tiffany’s brain.

Defensive wounds showed that the 15-year-old girl had fought long and hard for her life. There wasn’t enough soft tissue left to show the marks on her flesh, but marks remained on her wrists and her bones.

Hakim had hacked her to death while she had fought desperately to survive.

It took two years to bring him to justice, but not before Hakim tried every trick in the book. Including accusing another man of the crime. In 1997, Hakim signed a statement, blaming another man and three other women for the attack. When his partner confessed, then eventually he did too.

A year before murdering Tiffany, Hakim had shot and killed Reinhard Mabins, a 13-year-old boy, and Ernest, his older brother. He was convicted of all three murders. The killing of the Mabins boys earned Hakim life in prison, while Tiffany’s rape and murder put the monster on Death Row.

As was typical, Hakim’s lawyers tried every trick to get him off the hook. His father hadn’t loved him, his mother was too busy to spend time with him and he hadn’t understood how serious the case was.

Finally, there was one last card to play. And Hakim’s lawyers took that card to the Supreme Court.

At the last minute, Hakim wanted his Imam with him in the death chamber. Yusef Maisonet, the imam of Masjid As Salaam, was not familiar with the safety protocols of the death penalty process, and was not allowed to be in the actual chamber.

The case went up to the courts, up to the Supreme Court, which turned Hakim down.

Instead Imam Maisonet met with Hakim before the monster was put down and taught him how to die like a good Muslim. Then he watched, along with the monster’s lawyers, from the viewing room as Hakim recited the Shahada, “la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah”, declaring the supremacy of Allah and Mohammed, before the monster joined his prophet in wherever hell murderers and rapists go to.

And with those words, Hakim became America’s next great Muslim martyr.

“He knew of the important fact to have Allah on your tongue and heart to recite the shahada over and he died with his right index finger extended bearing witness that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger,” Imam Maisonet posted on Facebook.

"Domineque Hakim Marcel Ray was executed by the State of Alabama & denied his request to have his imam present. His final request was to AT LEAST have a proper Muslim burial. We can help make that happen," Linda Sarsour tweeted.

Hakim had buried Tiffany in a field, with no word to her mother where she could visit her daughter. GoFundMe, which has frequently deplatformed conservatives, had no problem with helping Imam Maisonet raise money to keep Hakim from “buried in the prison cemetery with no ritual or care or love.”

“In grief for Domineque, in anger at our cruel system of ‘justice,’” the GoFundMe missive by Jen Marlowe, a “human rights activist” concluded. There was no mention of Tiffany or grief for her.

Shortly thereafter, Sarsour crowed that the funding goal had been met. “Thank u 4 reminding me of the goodness left in this world.”

Linda Sarsour had repeatedly praised her prophet, Mohammed. Hakim had raped a 15-year-old girl. Mohammed had raped a 7-year-old, among many other girls and women. Hakim had killed three people. Mohammed had massacred thousands. This is what “goodness” looks like in Islam.

CAIR had campaigned extensively for Hakim. “It was a Muslim whose rights were tragically violated,” CAIR’s Alabama board chair complained.

Latino Muslims of Texas urged its members, “please consider giving to this worthy cause. The brother's imam is our Latino Muslim brother, Imam Yusef Maisonet.”

The New York Times accused the Supreme Court of joining President Trump in sending a negative message to Muslims. The four leftist justices had, of course, dissented in favor of Hakim.

The pro-Hakim legal case rests heavily on the suitability of Imam Yusef Maisonet to operate within the security protocols of a death chamber. And few questions were asked about who he was.

Even though he runs a mosque in Alabama, Imam Maisonet’s Facebook page appears to list him as a resident of Cairo, Egypt. His Facebook page includes a call to free the Al Jazeera propogandists arrested in Egypt for their work in support of Muslim Brotherhood terror. Al Jazeera is the state propaganda network of Qatar and the Islamic terror state is a major backer of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Imam Maisonet also reposted a quote in support of Islamism by Necmettin Erkaban.

Erkaban was a racist Turkish Islamist leader with links to the Muslim Brotherhood who had called for the Islamization of Turkey and then the entire planet. He was considered an inspiration by Islamist terrorist figures and was notorious for spewing rabid hatred toward Jews and other non-Muslims.

Imam Maisonet had also posted a statement by Sheikh Salih al Fawzan urging Muslims to take on government positions in non-Muslim countries in order to Islamize them. “If there is a country that needs change (correction/fixing), and a chance to guide the people (to Islam, to that which is correct etc) enter into working with the country’s government.”

The Sheikh is best known for endorsing the enslavement of non-Muslims. “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam."

And any Muslim who disagrees, “is an infidel.”

All of these should raise serious questions about Imam Maisonet. The pro-Hakim media has insisted that the question is purely a matter of religious freedom. But Alabama has argued that it’s a security issue.

And even a cursory glance at Imam Maisonet’s Islamic influences raise serious security issues.

Meanwhile, as money pours in for Hakim, Tiffany Harville and the Mabins boys have been forgotten. There are no impassioned tributes to the two African-American boys murdered by Hakim.

If you go out to Pineview Memory Gardens, you can find the grave of Reinhard Dwayne Mabins, a thirteen-year-old African-American boy, and his brother, Ernest Elijah Lee Jr.

The two boys share a single grave.

In his Selma Middle School yearbook photo, Reinhard is smiling shyly at the camera. In his Selma High School yearbook photo, Ernest is drawing a mountain. “Ernest Mabins… artist at work,” the title states.

While Muslims and leftists teamed up to send their Muslim killer off in style, it is unknown who paid for that one grave for two boys in Selma.

The media insists that Hakim had been deprived of his rights because he was a Muslim. The truth is that his victims were deprived of all their rights, while he was showered with privileges because he was a Muslim.

And Tiffany, who cried “God, God, help me. Please help me, God”, as Hakim was raping her, has had her prayer eclipsed in the media by her rapist’s chant of the supremacy of Allah and Mohammed.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 Berkeley and Montreal. And when the LA Times interviewed African-Americans in Oakland, it found few who thought of her as a native daughter.

At her rally, Harris waved, alongside her Jewish lawyer husband, Douglas Emhoff.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Kamala Devi Harris, who was raised by her Tamil Indian mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, and who spent her formative years in Canada, had attended a Hindu temple, and wore a flower garland around her neck at her wedding to represent Indian tradition (while the groom broke a glass), exemplifies diversity.

As did calling an aunt before an election, asking her, "Please pray for me, break coconuts at the temple."

But Kamala’s insistence on fake racial pandering, from her Wakanda Forever video to her claims of listening to Snoop before it was possible, makes Hillary’s hot sauce moment seem authentic.

Senator Harris began her series of racial gaffes by falsely claiming that "Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California."

Harris attended school in Berkeley, California, not Savannah, Georgia. Berkeley schools were not segregated by race. Her mother was an internationally famous cancer researcher and the daughter of P.V. Gopalan, a high-ranking Indian diplomat from the Brahmin caste. Her father was a professor of economics at Stanford who served as an adviser to multiple Jamaican prime ministers.

As a Los Angeles Times article described her, she was the “privileged child of foreign grad students”.

Kamala’s mother taught at universities in France, Italy and Canada. She smugly told Modern Luxury magazine “When Kamala was in first grade one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, “Oh, I’ve been there.”’ So I told her, ‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.”

Modern Luxury also quoted “one of Harris’s Nob Hill friends” as saying that “her Brahmin background accounts for her ease around wealthy, powerful people.”

Everyone in the Gopalan family was expected to earn an advanced degree and usually did. Both sides of her family were upper class political figures in their respective countries with money and power.

Kamala Harris graduated from "Montreal’s tony Westmount" (École Secondaire) high school. Her mother had moved her to Canada when she was twelve years old and lived a privileged childhood there.

Senator Harris’ pretense that she would never have become a lawyer if not for school busing to Thousand Oaks is transparently fake racial pandering that tries to paint a privileged upper-class woman, as the victim of racial discrimination in one of the most progressive cities in America.

It’s fake.

In her latest gaffe, Senator Harris tried to desperately overcompensate by claiming that she used to get high while listening to “Snoop” and “Tupac”. But as Nick Gillespie pointed out, Harris had graduated from school too early to be listening to either one while getting high or otherwise.

It was another unnecessary ‘Hillaryism’. An attempt to demonstrate her authenticity that only backfired.

And it wasn’t the first time that Harris had been caught awkwardly trying to fake music cred.

In an appearance on Colbert’s CBS Democrat late night fest, she debuted her “mood mix” and declared that the song that most reminded her of attending Howard University, an African-American college, was by Salt-N-Pepa, while pronouncing it, “Salt and Pepper”.

Senator Harris, who had previously opposed drug legalization, denied that she opposed marijuana legalization. “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me,” she retorted.

Her family is from Jamaica. But Senator Harris is cynically playing on stereotypes about drug use.

Donald Harris’ Stanford bio describes him as an “economic consultant to the Government of Jamaica and as economic adviser to successive Prime Ministers”. He had been a Fellow at Cambridge and a Fulbright Scholar in South America. He had even done consulting work for the UN and the World Bank.

The Harris family is descended from slave-owner Hamilton Brown. His grandfather, Joseph Alexander Harris, was a landowner. There are values in Harris’ account of his family worth teaching.

Unfortunately, Senator Kamala Harris chose to use her ancestry as a drug stereotype punchline.

Harris didn’t spend her college years getting high. Instead she got two degrees. Those are values that she picked up from both her parents. Instead of passing those values down, she’s condescendingly pandering to racial stereotypes in order to demonstrate her inauthentic authenticity.

Blackface controversies have torn apart Virginia. But Kamala Harris is running her own kind of blackface routine, performing stereotypes about black people for mostly white audiences, in order to get ahead. And the awkward head movements, the phony cultural references and attempts at victimhood, is its own kind of political minstrel show reeking of contempt for both black and white people.

Both Warren and Harris, successful professional women, appropriated the cultural identities of oppressed people to get a leg up because much of identity politics is really performative social climbing by upper-class professionals trying to obtain special privileges by identifying with minorities.

The new political blackface routines, like the old minstrel shows, depend on insulting condescending stereotypes, like Warren’s Pow Wow Chow and Harris’ imaginary Jamaican pot smoking family. Minstrel shows dehumanized their targets and their participants. Political blackface does the same thing.

Senator Kamala Harris could run as a career prosecutor from two upper class families, who grew up traveling the world with her parents, who spent her formative years in Montreal, who counted Nancy Pelosi as a friend back in her Nob Hill days, who married at a Jewish-Indian wedding, and whose tastes in music, very obviously, don’t include either Snoop Dogg or Salt-N-Pepa.

Instead she decided to run as a self-made blackface cartoon because her background is too diverse and too complicated. Identity politics claims to value diversity, but favors simple identities that appeal to chauvinistic racial and ethnic national movements. Kamala’s diversity cuts across those neat lines, outraging racial and religious sensibilities, and necessitating a simpler story complete with blackface.

It’s also much too upper class. In an election where everyone is trying to speak for the oppressed, her real background explains all too well how she tapped into elite political networks (not counting the affair with Willie Brown, the much older Mayor of San Francisco, who appointed her to positions she wasn’t qualified for and bought her a BMW) and how those networks exclude the actual marginalized minorities whom they claim to represent. That’s the explosive reality that Harris is smoothing over.

Identity politics can do a lot for someone like Senator Kamala Harris. Or even Senator Elizabeth Warren. It’s going to do much less for a poor family from Oakland. That’s the ugly truth about diversity.

And the ugly truth is being hidden with a whole lot of blackface.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 is an anti-Semitic movement," he declared. Like so many speakers who begin their sentences with, “let me be clear”, the former Obama official was actually disguising a hedge. Earlier that month, Greenblatt had written an essay arguing that the “vast majority of BDS supporters” were actually frustrated by the lack of peace.

At its core, he was suggesting, BDS might be anti-Semitic, but most of its supporters were good people.

Greenblatt’s ambiguity, condemning BDS while defending the “vast majority of BDS supporters”, was typical of the organization’s erratic course under his leadership. BDS supporters had appeared at ADL events and the formerly pro-Israel group had endorsed pro-BDS movements such as Black Lives Matter. The ADL had lobbied against anti-BDS legislation and condemned Jewish groups, like the Zionist Organization of America and Canary Mission, that fought unapologetically against BDS supporters.

The ADL’s double game had infuriated many in the Jewish community. And Greenblatt, a former Obama official with no experience running a Jewish organization, was equally angry. His vision of the ADL as an all-purpose social justice organization, that would act as a bridge, harnessing funds from Jewish donors for social justice causes while communicating Jewish concerns to the intersectional left, had failed.

Greenblatt couldn’t lash out at the leftist groups that had snubbed the ADL, so he directed his fury at the pro-Israel groups who saw his pandering to anti-Semites as a betrayal of the Jewish community.

And that fury allegedly reached its climax behind the scenes at the United Nations. What followed was a confrontation that has divided Jewish organizations and a scandal that took two years to reach its climax while exposing malfeasance in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization.

Ambassadors Against BDS had brought out an array of Jewish organizations and activists. The ADL was there, but so were its vocal critics at the Zionist Organization of America. The two groups didn’t just occupy different sides of the alphabet, but different sides of the political spectrum. And in the Trump era, the ZOA was every bit as relevant and pro-Israel, as the ADL had grown irrelevant and anti-Israel.

And Greenblatt allegedly decided to vent his rage on Liz Berney, the ZOA’s Director of Special Projects.

“He came up to my right side, put his arm around my back, grabbed me with his left hand on my left shoulder. He starts pushing me with the force of his arm down the hall. I was trying to get away from him, and he was restraining me,” Liz Berney related. “He’s continuing to hold my shoulder really tight, not letting me out of his grip, and basically dragging me down the hall.”

Women involved in pro-Israel activism have learned to expect not only harsh words, but physical force, from leftist advocates of peace and tolerance. But prior to Greenblatt’s alleged assault on Liz Berney, the most notorious incident had been the assault by UCLA Hillel Director Chaim Seidler-Feller on pro-Israel journalist Rachel Neuwirth and Allyson Rowen Taylor, a former vice president of StandWithUs.

“I saw my rabbi take swings to Neuwirth’s face and kicks to her legs," one eyewitness described.

"He came after me and lunged at me and started screaming and (a student) literally put his arms around him and pulled him off of me," Taylor related.

Chaim Seidler-Feller, an anti-Israel activist and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now, had attacked the two pro-Israel women at an event for Alan Dershowitz’s book, “The Case for Israel.”

Seidler-Feller later wrote a letter of apology, claiming to be, "deeply sorry that I hit, kicked and scratched you.” Despite this admission Seidler-Feller remained a respected Hillel figure. And many in the Jewish organizational world sided with him and came to his defense, rather than that of his victim.

Today, Seidler-Feller, remains affiliated with the UCLA Hillel, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Wexner Heritage Foundation and many other Jewish groups. His name frequently appears on anti-Israel letters.

The same year that Greenblatt allegedly assaulted Liz Berney, the Jewish Journal celebrated Seidler-Feller’s “40 year legacy” at UCLA. There was a lesson here and it was a deeply troubling one.

If Liz Berney and the ZOA were to hold Greenblatt accountable, they would be swimming upstream. The celebration of Seidler-Feller and J Street’s more recent complicity in Ari Shavit’s sexual harassment showed how little accountability there was for leftist Jewish men who assaulted and harassed women.

The ADL’s #MeToo moment had arrived and the organization responded by denying everything.

“When ZOA leveled these charges privately to the ADL two years ago, we — despite their provenance — took them seriously, looked into the matter, and determined that no inappropriate conduct took place,” the ADL’s spokesman contended.

But, according to Morton Klein, the head of the ZOA, no one from the ADL had even spoken to the victim.

“ZOA has a long history of making outrageous claims against Jewish organizations they disagree with, including for many years, the ADL,” the ADL insisted. “That is why the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is currently conducting a disciplinary hearing about ZOA’s behavior."

Instead of sanctioning the ADL, the Conference of Presidents chose to go after the ZOA.

When asked for an apology for his alleged assault at a Conference meeting that July, Greenblatt allegedly shouted, “I’m never going to apologize to her.”

Nor did the Conference put any pressure on him to do so. Instead it claimed that it had no jurisdiction over an assault by a leader of one of its members, while instead focusing complaints by leftist Conference members collaborating with anti-Israel hate groups that they had been criticized by the ZOA.

The ADL, and more explicit allies of the anti-Israel left, HIAS and NCJW, often appeared more comfortable in the anti-Israel camp. The National Jewish Coalition of Women was particularly notorious for its backing of the anti-Semitic Women’s March. CEO Nancy Kaufman had earlier made it clear that her group would continue collaborating with anti-Israel activists. And yet the NCJW went unsanctioned.

“The ZOA cannot say that ADL helps anti-Semites join the anti-Israel lobby,” Jonathan Greenblatt had insisted. But, in a double standard, the ADL was allowed to accuse the ZOA of Islamophobia.

Meanwhile Greenblatt allegedly refused to show up and be questioned at the hearings. The ADL complained that the ZOA had violated confidentiality and attacked Liz Berney for going public with her story, claiming that it prevented resolution of the dispute. These tactics are typical of a cover-up.

The Conference of Presidents sided with the ADL and the anti-Israel left, allegedly violating its own due process rules by imposing sanctions on the pro-Israel group without hearing from the ZOA. Even though the ZOA had been attacked by some of these organizations, it was condemned by the Conference for the subjective metric of “the manner and tone of otherwise permissible or legitimate criticisms”.

The “manner and tone” of Greenblatt’s physical assault were left off the table.

The ZOA was accused in the Conference ruling of being “unnecessarily shrill”. It was a troublingly sexist choice of words when sanctioning the female victim of an alleged assault.

But the entire process had been troubling from beginning to end. In the #MeToo era, the Conference silenced a woman who claimed to have been assaulted while empowering an alleged abuser. It ignored the most damning issue at hand and instead engaged in tone policing in defense of the ZOA.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations had come face to face with the ADL’s #MeToo moment and had behaved as badly as the establishment had after the Seidler-Feller assault. Instead of using the incident as a teachable moment, it had enabled not only an alleged abuser, but the larger betrayal of the Jewish community by organizations collaborating with the anti-Israel Left.

And the two are inseparably interrelated.

When the umbrella group of major Jewish organizations won’t take the side of Israel against the Left, why expect it to take the side of a pro-Israel woman against the leftist leader accused of assaulting her?






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 or 140 employees back in August. Tronc, another publishing giant, has already been making major cuts at newspapers like the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times.

Reuters expects to cut 3,200 jobs or 12% of its global workforce, closing 55 offices by 2020. BuzzFeed fired 15% of its staff or 220 employees, wiping out its national security desk, most of its national news desk, LGBT team and entertainment team.

Verizon, which through a series of bad business decisions had inherited the Huffington Post, cut 7% or 800 jobs in its media division. HuffPo dumped its health and opinion section, along with various reporters. Vice Media is laying off 10% or 250 employees from its global staff. Mic’s staff was mostly let go back in November. And the bloodletting isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

Why is the media failing while the rest of the economy is thriving?

It used to be said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. But what’s good for the media is bad for America. And what’s bad for the media appears to be remarkably good for America.

In 2009, as the economy was tanking, journalism school applications increased sharply. As the economy began to recover, J-School enrollment began to fall. Call it the Vulture Effect. Carrion eaters are attracted to death. When the death rate drops, they have to either learn to kill things or face extinction.

Consider the media’s destructive behavior of the last few years a classic example of CNN carrion eaters trying to trick the predators into fighting each other and making more carrion for them to feast on.

By 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was projecting a 10% decline in employment for reporters and correspondents. After this winter, the BLS may need to sharply revise its estimates upward. Major media organizations are dumping 10% of their staff as a routine response to business model reverses.

The media does best when things are bad. It’s the same reason why Democrats have their strongest footholds in cities with massive poverty, gun violence and infant mortality. Or why starving children dig through the trash in Communist countries while the red billboards overhead tout Socialism.

Lefties claim that they want to make things better, but they only gain power by making things worse.

The media is terrible at trying to make good news happen. Its shrill insistence that the economy had recovered 5 minutes after Obama took the oath of office on a reflection in the mirror convinced no one. After 5 years, it had become a running joke with the flavor of late Soviet propaganda about wheat harvest percentages. But it can be quite effective at spreading bad news and convincing people it’s true.

Just look at how the media has managed to convince people that the global warming sky is falling, that Facebook trolls are a national security threat and that President Trump gets all his orders from Moscow.

If the media is going to make any money and gain any power, it’s got to go negative. But negativity is a tougher sell when times are good for most people. Except for the brooding vultures of the media.

A winter of Trumpian economic growth has been very bad for those birds.

The January media layoffs actually involve two different tracks of the industry. There’s the dead tree media track of the newspaper giants who have been steadily bleeding jobs ever since their customers realized that they didn’t need to pay twelve bucks a week and get ink smears on their hands just to read the local rewritten versions of the same lefty talking points from New York and Washington D.C.

And then there are the digital media operations fueled by venture capital cash that were going to be the Great New Hope of the mainstream media with slick snarky stories, their own in-house ad shops and lots of millennials writing about social justice outrages trending on social media for other millennials.

That’s the new media catastrophe. And the one that has occasioned the real wailing and tooth-gnashing.

"The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency," Farhad Manjoo shrieked in the New York Times. Farhad meant the other kind of “democratic”, but his headline was unintentionally correct. The media is a massive force multiplier for the Democrats. If it didn’t exist, national politics would look very different.

Imagine an America in which Democrats eavesdropping on Republicans, supporting cop killers, ISIS, Iran and infanticide weren’t met with immediate walls of media spin, lies, fake explainers and even more fake fact checks. Then imagine an America with a border wall, voter ID and a real War on Terror.

That’s a “Democratic emergency”. No question about it.

If the media falls, it will be the greatest moment for democracy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that the Evil Empire was really a bunch of boring bureaucrats who, through the magic of ideology and mass murder had acquired the ability to terrorize millions of people.

The unraveling of the media will reveal that the echo chamber that told us what to do and think, that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, that stole generations of progress and prosperity from a great nation, was really a bunch of otherwise unemployable Marxist grad students.

The media has blamed Google and Facebook for not giving it enough traffic. It’s redoubled its efforts to demand that the dot com giants give them even more money (Google and Facebook have already pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the media), more privilege for their traffic and more power to censor conservative media under the guise of ‘fact checkers’ fighting a ‘fake news’ emergency.

Hatred has also been hurled at Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune, BuzzFeed, Bustle and Vice management which are pursuing merger and consolidation plans that will cost even more media jobs. They point to the profitability of some of these companies as proof that the layoffs are really capitalist greed.

Sure.

The digital media empires with their fake news, explainers and snarky social justice commentary were built by convincing investors that they could be as profitable as actual tech companies. BuzzFeed and the rest of the gang could have just shrugged and announced that failing to meet expectations would be the new reality. And that if their investors don’t like it, they can go and invest in tech startups.

Then in a year or two, it wouldn’t be a few hundred jobs being cut, but a few thousand.

Digital media is full of millennial socialists with an Ocasio-Cortez level grasp of economics who spend six figures on a useless degree in journalism from Columbia and are convinced that destroying Facebook will save them. Even though Facebook is the only reason that clickbait parasites like BuzzFeed even exist.

Finally, many in the media blame President Trump. In an ocean of economic prosperity, the media has become a desert island full of cannibalistic savages, devouring each other, while praying to Mueller.

But that’s not because of anything Trump did to the media. It’s about what he isn’t doing.

Obama’s divisive policies created social, cultural and economic insecurity across the spectrum. Trump’s politics have brought prosperity and economic security. And the media has refocused on stirring up insecurity among Democrats and Never Trumpers because they are its only remaining demographics.

The good times are here. And the media’s only customer base consists of people who don’t believe it.

A growing media indicates a loss of confidence by Americans. It shows that the divisive leftist tactics of the media are paying huge dividends in fear, uncertainty and doubt among ordinary people. A shrinking media however indicates that we are once again becoming an optimistic and confident nation.

The media’s loss of jobs is a very good thing. It’s a statement of confidence by Americans in America.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 restaurant.

“Phoenix restaurant says this is a photo of coal miners. But I see offensive blackface,” Thomas complained. “My concern that the photograph of men in blackface was a threat to me and my face and voice were ignored. A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, ‘Whites Only.’ It says people like me are not welcome.”

The photo is actually of Welsh coal miners from a century ago. And its political context is a million miles away from the case of Governor Ralph Northam in Virginia and mockery of African-Americans.

It does have a political context, but one that has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with class. The inability of Thomas and Arizona Republic editors to immediately grasp this encapsulates how detached they are from the working class.

Old lefties would have recognized and understood the political meaning of the photo. It was taken during the great coal strike of 1910 and 1911. The early twentieth saw massive strikes by coal miners both in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Tonypandy riots, which is the context for the coal miner photo, was one of the larger and more explosive confrontations which spiraled into a larger strike and culminated in Churchill, then Home Secretary, sending in the British Army as backup.

The strike would grow until one in six miners in South Wales were part of it.

The photo depicts coal miners in Cwmbach, Wales, discussing the upcoming strike. The coal boom had transformed Cwmbach, but working in the coal mines was risky with mine collapses that killed dozens. Cwmbach became part of the strike fairly early which actually started when the mines stopped allowing miners to take waste timber for their own homes. The men in the photo are relaxing in the pub, knowing that they won’t be going down into the mines again, but also that they won’t have any work.

They’re having a drink while knowing that it may be a while before they will be able to afford one again.

The significance of this is lost on the Arizona Republic’s Buddhist poet who writes, “The photograph shows coal miners’ faces covered in soot. The context of the photograph is not the issue.”

But the context is an issue. It’s just an issue that his fellow lefties once embraced, before abandoning.

The strike is still commemorated in the UK, where the romanticizing of a working class that actually worked with its hands still lingers a little, but strikes in the US invariably involve municipal workers.

Driving through Los Angeles in the rain a few weeks ago, you couldn’t escape men and women in red bellowing through megaphones outside schools to demand that their 6% raise be a 6.5% raise. And the usual teachers’ union obsession with destroying charter schools, testing and student education.

That’s what a strike looks like in 2019. And it’s very different than the dirty men in that pub.

“If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them,” Obama had boasted.

“We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business," Hillary Clinton told West Virginians.

She didn’t. But coal miners helped put her out of work and put Trump in the White House. American coal miners aren’t threatened by cartels, but by environmentalists. They’re not oppressed by billionaires who own mines, but by billionaire lefties like Michael Bloomberg who don’t own mines, and don’t want any to exist. And hardly a day goes by without another proposal to replace coal mines with lavender farms, in a recent Bloomberg magazine, or a proposal to teach coal miners how to code.

In recent years, the media was full of proposals to teach coal miners to code. “Hillbillies who code,” was one of the ridiculously condescending media headlines. But when digital media ventures recently began laying off hundreds of journalists, the media insisted that telling them to “learn to code” was a hate crime. It’s one thing to suggest that coal mining is obsolete, but another to suggest that journalism is.

But the Arizona Republic and the New York Times make a compelling case for journalism’s obsolesce.

Unhappy with all the attention that the Arizona Republic was getting for conflating coal with blackface, the New York Times decided to run an op-ed accusing Mary Poppins, specifically Bert, of blackface.

“'Mary Poppins,' and a Nanny's Shameful Flirting With Blackface,” the old gray lady huffs and puffs.

The rant by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, who had amassed a PhD in English from Harvard, contends that, “Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition”.

“When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker,” he writes. “Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.”

"One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up," claims Pollack-Pelzner, who has a chair in Shakespeare but can't tell race from class.

The scene that Harvard’s best and brightest is referring to has Bert singing about the life of a chimney sweep, “Tween pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world/Where there's 'ardly no day and 'ardly no night”, while taking middle class children out of their sheltered home and into the mysterious grime of a working class world.

A world that is both magical and dirty. And one that romanticizes the coal dust of hard work.

What was once a politically subversive scene has, much like the coal miner photo, become magically reactionary with the passage of time and the distancing of the Left from the working class.

Does Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a member of the faculty at the University of California Dickens Project, really not understand the role of the chimney sweep in British life? Or British class structure? Did he somehow manage to get a PhD in English at Harvard without ever once encountering Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper “a little black thing among the snow”? Did he think Blake was referring to blackface?

He probably isn’t that ignorant or incompetent. But he’s playing to an audience that is.

An essay on British working class life wouldn’t get you into the New York Times or Arizona Republic op-ed sections, but discovering racism lurking in Mary Poppins or a restaurant photo will.

The chimney sweep and the coal miner were powerful symbols of the working class. But the transgressive images of Mary Poppins and middle class children smeared in coal dust or coal miners enjoying a pint in a pub before the big strike are no longer politically useful.

And what isn’t politically useful swiftly becomes reactionary. Every progressive will live long enough to become his own villain as yesterday’s revolutions of social progress become tomorrow’s hate crimes.

In what some are calling, “facecrime”, media essays read hateful volumes into the quirk of a teenage boy’s lips at a pro-life rally or the coal dust on men’s faces. These exercises in theoretical physiognomy don’t reveal new truths, they are just the Rorschach inkblots that justify the bigotry of the observers.

And their ignorance.

The new obsession with racism demands ignoring the terrible damage that the Democrats have done to African-American communities with their policies through an endless search for shiny new racisms. Reading racism into movies and photos does nothing to help African-Americans in the working class, but fuels a boom in the work of academics and essayists of all races whose work is geared to the upper class.

The coal miner photo and the dancing chimney sweeps date back to an era when the Left was interested in class. Now it’s refocused all its attention on race while leaving the working class behind in the coal dust. And to the Buddhist poets and Harvard academics, coal dust doesn’t represent class, but racism.

When you don’t work for a living, then the people who do, real or fictional, are incomprehensible. Like their upper class predecessors, the Left sees the working class as ‘other’ and their dirt as moral decay.

The cultural signifiers and attitudes haven’t changed. Only the exact definition of immorality has.

The upper class of a century past thought that dirty working people were crude, indolent and savage. Our leftist upper class thinks that they’re racist.

They could benefit from joining Bert in a trip up the chimney.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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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 Skid Row, but has spread to Long Beach and Pasadena. And while the homeless encampments act as incubators for the disease, it’s not the only social justice policy spreading disease across America.

Or at least in California and Texas.

“It’s never been considered a very common disease,” Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, noted, “but we seem to see it more frequently. And it seems to be extending across from Southern California all along the Mexican border into southeastern Texas and then into the Gulf Coast in Florida.”

America never had much of a history of typhus, but Mexico did. And our brief episodes of typhus invariably involved immigrants and migrants carrying the disease from Europe or Mexico.

The first outbreak of the disease in this hemisphere occurred in Mexico back in the 17th century and there have been 22 major outbreaks since then, caused in part by refugees and crowded conditions. Typhus was so associated with Mexico that it was even known as Tabardillo or Mexican typhus fever. There was extensive debate as to whether Mexican typhus was different than European typhus.

The first case of typhus in southern California was linked to Mexican refugees.

Dr. L.M. Powers, a Los Angeles physician, was the first to spot it. "The first recognized and recorded cases of typhus fever in southern California occurred in the summer of 1916, when many Mexicans came to this section during a civil war in their own country," he wrote in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The first victim of typhus had visited El Paso. Dr. Powers linked many other typhus cases in Los Angeles to Mexico. Historical records show that these cases involved migrants and Mexican railway workers.

In saner times, American authorities understood the problem and took common sense measures to fight the spread of the disease. The rise of typhus cases in California a century ago led to a campaign that included the delousing of anyone coming into the United States from certain parts of Mexico. Leftists have revisited this history in recent years to make obscene analogies to Holocaust gas chambers.

But despite the insistence that disinfection stations were motivated by racism, rather than real fear of the disease, the 67 typhus cases in El Paso make it very clear that there was a real problem.

El Paso’s efforts to keep out typhus were touched off by the death of Dr. W. C. Kluttz, who spotted the disease in the Mexican refugees that he was treating, before becoming infected and dying of it.

Dr. Kluttz was far from the only medical professional who lost his life to the disease. Dr. Howard Taylor Ricketts, the brilliant pathologist after whom Rickettsia, the genome that causes typhus is named, died while trying to isolate typhus in Mexico City at the request of the Mexican government.

At Dr. Kluttz's funeral, El Paso's Mayor Lea called for "a strong federally enforced quarantine here that would effectively stop the entrance into this country of disease-bearing persons from south of the Rio Grande."

The ambitious 2,000 mile quarantine ultimately proved to be a success, preventing Mexico’s typhus outbreaks from spreading into the United States. But it also claimed a toll with at least one inspector, David M. White, conducting disinfection procedures, contracting typhus and dying of the disease.

Illegal migrants seeking to bypass the quarantine however spread the disease in unlikely places.

A 1921 outbreak of typhus on a Navajo reservation was attributed to it being on a “pathway for itinerant laborers.” That particular outbreak appears to have killed 27 Navajo Indians.

The quarantine is history and typhus cases continue to rise in border states.

Texas saw a surge of typhus cases between 2008 and 2016. And the cases have been heavily concentrated in counties with high illegal populations. But officials insist on blaming ‘global warming’.

The number of typhus cases rose from 30 in 2003 to 519 in 2017. Hidalgo County had the highest incidence with 99 cases. Hidalgo County contains 6% of the state’s illegal alien population. Harris County has the second highest rate with 71 typhus cases and contains 24% of the state’s illegal alien population. Hidalgo has some of the youngest and newest illegal alien arrivals which may account for its high typhus infection rates.

Bexar County, with 59 typhus cases, the fourth highest rate of infections, hosts 4% of Texas illegals.

Typhus had fallen off the radar in the United States. It had been delisted by the CDC in 1994. And then it made a comeback in the middle nineties. Los Angeles saw a rise in the number of typhus cases in 1996 around the same time as futile efforts were being launched to fight the plague of illegal migration.

Now the situation has worsened. And it will only keep getting worse.

Like superstitious dark age types, leftists insist on blaming the typhus outbreaks on global warming, caused by an angry ‘Mother Earth’ rather than on the very real spread of disease by people. Instead of preventing the spread of disease, they insist that we must repent for our crimes against the environment, and recycle more, and then the earth will cool and the typhus outbreak will stop.

This denial of basic scientific facts is at the root of the typhus outbreak. Raising taxes in a bizarre scheme to change the weather is a bizarre folly that will do absolutely nothing to stop the spread of typhus.

The legalization of illegal migration and homelessness, is leading to a new wave of disease outbreaks.

Epidemiology shows us that typhus flares up in border counties and areas with large illegal alien populations. From there, it takes root in poor areas with bad hygiene. Fleas carried by rats, possums and cats can then pass on the disease to people who would have never expected to come down with it.

We know how to stop typhus. It begins with ending public vagrancy and illegal migration.

The Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney called typhus a “medieval disease”. Senator Kamala Harris of California ridiculed President Trump’s proposal for a border wall as “medieval”. California Rep. Harley Rouda urged Trump to “give up on the outdated notion of building a wall from medieval times.”

Rouda represents parts of Orange County. The O.C. had 15 typhus cases last year.

If you want to stop a medieval disease, you might want to start with a medieval wall.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

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 charitable cause, not a profitable venture.

Journalism is deader than disco. The shambling monster still squealing about the First Amendment while pressuring social media companies to censor its conservative opposition under the guise of a Russian conspiracy theory has as much to do with journalism as Nabisco’s ad agency or Biden’s spokesman do.

The media doesn’t report the news. It reposts tweets, recycles news stories from a handful of wire services and largely relies on outside interests to do its actual reporting for it. Sometimes that means outside hit pieces covertly embedded, like Fusion GPS’ Russian Trump conspiracy theory, other times it’s more openly financed, like NPR getting $100K from a pro-Iran deal group to report on the Iran deal.

Media once stood for the multiple mediums, print, radio and television, which required expensive infrastructure and allowed major corporations to reach a national audience with its mass media.

The internet 1.0 crushed the infrastructure advantage of the media and then internet 2.0 made the media dependent on a handful of social, search and commerce platforms for its traffic.

Staring death in the red digital eye, the media tossed journalism out the window as it went after two targets, President Trump and the social media giants that were starving it of ad revenue. The Russia conspiracy theory evolved to incorporate the entanglement between Facebook, Russia and Trump.

Soon, media outlets, desperately loathing and desiring Facebook, were filled with conspiracy theories explaining how Russian Facebook trolls had managed to swing the 2016 election. The conspiracy theories were nonsense. Actual analysis showed that the Russians had mostly targeted African-Americans on Facebook. But the media had dumped truth and the facts a thousand miles back.

The Trump-Russia conspiracy theories hatched by the Clinton campaign and distributed by the media were popular with the more hysterical breed of Democrat prone to marching around with pink hats and memorizing long Slavic names and their appearances at Trump hotels. They helped make the eyeball traffic of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN great again, albeit very temporarily.

But, for the media, the real target of the conspiracy theories was Silicon Valley.

Internet 1.0 had humbled the media. Internet 2.0 had crushed its business model. But where internet 1.0 had been a cheerful thriving anarchy, the web of the college campus, the wild realm in which anything was possible, internet 2.0 was a gated community owned by a handful of giant monopolies.

A fortune in capital had been flowing into Amazon, Google, Facebook and its ilk. Media outlets could only greedily lick their lips and report on the latest viral surfing gorilla video accident trending on some app whose value had gone from nothing to billions overnight.

The media’s growing thrust leftward wasn’t just ideological. It was also practical.

The old business model of serving consumers, while injecting bias into the stories and broadcasts, wasn’t working anymore. Why bother watching the news when you can scroll through your Facebook feed? The new media model would be loud advocacy. And it would be treated as a public service and financed by the very people making a fortune off viral surfing gorilla videos.

They just had to be talked into it.

Amazon had shown the way when its megalomaniacal boss, Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post. Soon, the formerly respected establishment paper, took on the tone and professionalism of a social justice blog, combined with blatant opposition research, hit pieces and election interference.

Silicon Valley had eaten the media’s business model. Now the goal was turning Big Data corps into the patrons of a media acting in the public interest. And public interest, meant the interests of the Left.

Like many welfare recipients, the media has made its case with a combination of truculence and victimhood. Its papers and magazines never go out of business because the public isn’t interested. They’re always “murdered” or “sacrificed” to corporate greed. If the media suffers a downturn, it’s a conspiracy. And social media giants must do the “right thing” and keep the media in business.

Or else.

The media is staying alive through the patronage of lefties convinced it will bring down Trump. But what happens when Trump is gone and there’s no Mueller or Russia conspiracy to pump for traffic?

The media is leveraging Trump conspiracy theories to win Silicon Valley patronage. But that’s just hooking one bad business model on another. When Facebook begins its deep dive, suddenly the hundreds of millions that it once casually threw about the way that Gilded Age tycoons lit cigars with hundred dollar bills will no longer be there for its media remoras. The media bet its future on Trump and FAANG stocks. It doesn’t have a Plan C. And that means that its future looks a lot like Myspace.

The media is becoming another Silicon Valley acquisition that will soon outlive its utility.

It’s out of touch with 99% of the country. But it’s in touch with the special interests, politicians and leaders who run the country. And so it can turn a silly conspiracy theory into the national agenda.

Content providers are snapping up content creators all around. But unlike cable providers buying their own studios, Facebook and Google don’t actually need the media. They make their money from user submitted content. The media’s business model has failed. It needs Silicon Valley sugar daddies. And in exchange the Silicon Valley sugar daddies buy into the national messaging arm of the Left.

Facebook and Google don’t need the media to reach ordinary people. Their own reach is as far beyond the paltry airport users glued to CNN or the EPA resistance members paging through the Washington Post on their iPhone X as the sun is to the moon. But what the media has and Silicon Valley needs is political access. The media’s eyeball range is laughable. But it’s a gateway to the political insiders.

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post because it sets the agenda in Washington D.C.

Facebook is pumping money into the media because when it doesn’t, the media runs Facebook hit pieces. It’s cheaper for Facebook to toss $300 million at the media than to fight each negative media hit piece. $300 million sounds like a lot, but Facebook’s summer stock market beating amounted to a $100 billion loss for the company and a nearly $16 billion loss for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Silicon Valley isn’t trying to buy the media. Even the people who pour hundreds of millions into any social app used by at least a single millennial know that’s a terrible idea. They’re buying influence.

The media, as we used to know it, no longer exists. Journalism is a joke. Local news coverage occasionally functions, but the national news means millennials fresh out of J-school writing up trending topics that exist only to be shared on social media and forgotten 5 seconds later, or older reporters writing up hit pieces on behalf of shadowy special interests operating behind the scenes.

Real journalists don’t work for the media. They’re employed in the shadowy netherworld where information warfare is cooked up by organizations like Fusion GPS, which hatched the Russia conspiracy theory that has hijacked our entire political discourse. The media is where the informational bombs are detonated by reporters who are too dumb and lazy to be any more than cutouts for the real players.

The media circa 2018 is just the messaging arm for the Left. And occasionally anyone influential enough.

This isn’t a business model. It’s the death throes of a dying industry making a compelling case why it can’t and won’t function as a business, and has no alternative except existing as a corrupt charity case trading political influence for cash from the monopolies destroying the last vestiges of freedom.

The continuing power of the media reveals how little say Americans have in running their own country.

The media is monetizing its political access to Silicon Valley. The media will spew lefty talking points and Big Data will subsidize its efforts to take out President Trump and anyone else it doesn’t like. Social and search will give the media a financial lifeline and an illegal competitive advantage by censoring conservative media on its platforms under the guise of fighting ‘fake news’.

That will mean that the big internet monopolies will have even more of a monopoly over the public marketplace than ever.

And that makes the very idea of free speech into the punch line of a tragic joke with its own IP address.

The internet monopolies were a huge threat to freedom before they became entangled with the media. Now they may be the biggest threat to our political freedoms in the entire history of the United States.

Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other internet monopolies are financing the media and censoring opposition media. That provides them with an unprecedented stranglehold on the marketplace of ideas.

If the elected officials don’t meet this unprecedented threat, elections will cease to mean anything.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.