Mad Magazine Fact-Checked by Snopes, Denounced by the New York Times, Censored by Amazon, Banned by Facebook, and Slammed by SJWs

Mad Magazine was fact-checked by Snopes in the wake of a (rare) article making fun of Joe Biden, or his memory problems, coming to light on its website.

It was rated Mostly False by spokesperson Bobby Snopes Jr, who explained that "Every one in America cannot be expected to know that Mad Magazine is, or was, a satirical publication."

The issue was brought to the attention of mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, who decided to let fact-checkers rummage through the history of the monthly.

This only worsened the scandal, as one of their number uncovered the publication of a series of problematic articles in the 1970s called "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions."

Appalled by the negativity, the scorn, and the hatred displayed by one Al Jaffee, The Times decided to show the articles to a select group of college students at Columbia University.

The responses turned out to be almost universally negative, if not devastating: Mr. Jaffee makes us feel unsafe, said one female student who preferred to remain anonymous. It is judgmental, testified another who is majoring in gender studies, it is unsafe and triggering, said a third, while a fourth asked, "Where is the room for dialog? Don't you understand? This is precisely the reason why we need safe spaces."

Asked why anyone would write hurtful comedy like that, Mr. Jaffee, who turned 100 last March, said that that was a question that it was probably safer for him not to provide an answer to.

Amazon chimes in

Threatening to limit the distribution of, and demonetize, the periodical founded by Bill Gaines and its website, an Amazon spokeswoman requested the censure of 290 articles or so while demanding "an apology from Mr. William Gaines, from his heirs, or from whoever is in charge of the website today."

One example given of a problematic story was a 1980s James Bond 007 spoof because "in today's #metoo environment, a number of people might be triggered by Mort Drucker's hot chicks or be offended by the title, 'For Your Thighs Only'."

One e-bay fact-checker who has been going back and looking through old Mad magazines for the past two months was asked if he at least enjoyed reading the compilations as well as the vintage issues.

"Honestly, it was more of a task — a noble one at that — so I haven't really had time to laugh, although I did chuckle a bit when I read spoofs of both Bushes, [Ronald] Reagan, and [Richard] Nixon…" (Like most humor outlets then as today, at least 70 to 80% of Mad's most acerbic comedy was directed at the right and at conservatives.)

Facebook and Twitter join the crowd

At this point, Facebook joined the fray, saying it would deplatform Mad Magazine because the descriptive of the periodical's group of artists is, or was, "the usual gang of idiots", which is a synonym of "retards," which in turn is poking fun at cerebrally-challenged individuals, as seems to be the face of the periodical's tooth-missing mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.

Besides, added a Twitter spokesman, Norman Potrzebie, who brought up the subject of compassion, "doesn't this Alfred fellow turn out in reality to be an icky conservative spewing Republican propaganda?!" 

When it was bemusedly pointed out that Alfred E. Neuman rarely says more than three rather uninspiring words, Mr. Potrzebie exclaimed:

Precisely! What is that motto of his, 'What, me worry?' That is it! A talking point! A GOP talking point! If he had any brains, he would know that there are many many, many things to worry about if we want to save humanity and the planet: the coronavirus, sexism, homophobia, transgenderism, #metoo, the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism, systemic racism, the deplorables, global warmi — I mean, climate change — the possibility of a Republican in the White House, Pépé Le Pew, and, worst of all, the fact that in 1619, a solitary white male in a tiny Virginia hamlet 150 years prior to the foundation of the United States decided to buy 20 slaves who had been bound for Brazil.

What may be worse, actually, added Twitter's Mr. Potrzebie, is that "the very word [i.e., Mad] means insane but it also means Angry, and what kind of people get angry?"

The Haters, he snarled, answering his own question, also known as the heinous members of the Republican Party; the Haters! he reiterated as he grew visibly distraught over people he barely considered members of the human race, but monstrous beings with no brotherly love for their fellow humans. The HATERS! Mr. Potrzebie repeated once more, as his eyes started bulging and his mouth began frothing. 

The whole issue turned somewhat moot when it appeared that the magazine was no longer published
and that Bill Gaines had been dead for close to 30 years.

Was Mad Magazine's Publisher a Racist?

As we went to press, a group of Social Justice Warriors had jumped into the fray, convening a meeting on Madison Avenue, in which complaints were voiced that the "usual gang of REDACTED" at Mad Magazine (a prime example, they pointed out, being the aforementioned Mr. Jaffee) were all white artists, and that there was not a black face among them.

"Did Don Martin ever showcase an LGBTQ person?!" asked one of the participants, Fester Bestertester, pointedly. "In a respectful way, I mean."

The issue was dropped when it was discovered that two of the artists were of Latino heritage.

The issue was resurrected when it was pointed out that Antonio Prohías seems to have been a Cuban who left the tropical island as the valiant Fidel Castro and the mesmerizing Che Guevara were fundamentally transforming their nation and were gloriously bringing a bright new future to the Cuban people — so didn't that mean that the artist of Spy Vs. Spy (which in any case is far too violent) was some kind of icky (alt) right-winger from Little Havana?

The matter was dropped again when it emerged that the artist had been dead for over two decades.

The matter was resurrected once more when it was pointed out that Prohias had been replaced by a white artist.

The matter was dropped again when it turned out that, besides drawing Spy Vs. Spy, Peter Kuper is a valiant left-winger doubling as a rabid anti-Trumpist behind many Orange-Man Bad drawings for The New Yorker.

We will bring you updates to this article as they arise… 

•••••••

(And here it is! An update! Welcome, readers of Instapundit, Maggie's Farm, Uavcall, and Investment Watch!)

Another Update! Is the Mad Magazine Cancellation News Report True or Is It Satire?

The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

As the Biden-Harris administration's Department of Education goes ahead with plans and grants for implementing critical race theory and the 1619 Project inside school rooms, it is time to summarize said 1619 Project in one single (albeit longish) sentence.

Here it is:

It is nothing short of preposterous to claim that an obscure (if admittedly heinous) one-day commercial transaction — involving two or three white males in a tiny Virginia hamlet a century and a half before (!) the founding of a nation — is more reflective of said nation and of an entire people than the 15-to-20-year era of strife and quarrels including a continent-wide war (the American Revolution along with its attendant historical documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), which concerned every single one of its (then) two and a half million inhabitants, as well as the power structure of the entire Western world.  

Indeed, the ludicrousness of the entire idea being some kind of deep revelation of some kind of a dark cryptic secret is evidence more of superstition than even of pseudohistory. 

It is also reflective of the Left being more akin to a more or less brainwashed cult than to anything else, leading Erick Erickson to complain that the 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination; Allen C Guelzo to state that the 1619 Project is not history but conspiracy theory; and Tyler O'Neil to declare that it takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive. (Update: welcome, Instapundit readers.)

As Paul Johnson writes, 

the total gestation period of the United States Constitution should be seen as occupying nearly thirty years, 1763-1791.

Again: How can 28 years of struggle, with brawn and brainpower, involving everything from political resistance en masse to open warfare, and involving thousands upon thousands of Americans from all parts of society leaving homes, farms, and families to pick up the musket and risk their lives, compare to a couple of nameless unknowns making an obscure business deal in a Virginia hamlet over a period of at most 28 hours?

Beyond that, what is galling is how all other nations, nationalities, and races are left out of the guilt trip and of the equation itself.

As it happens, it was by a fluke that a ship carrying 20-something slaves landed in the future United States in 1619. The vessel which was seized by pirates, the San Juan Bautista (no, not really an Anglo-Saxon or a Protestant name) was but a tiny part of a Portuguese fleet of 36+ (!) ships filled with thousands upon thousands of Ndongo slaves headed for Latin America. The slaves had been sold to the Portuguese by their Imbangala allies in Africa, a continent where, according to Scottish explorer Mungo Park, some three quarters of the inhabitants were effectively slaves (although slaves to masters of the same skin color).

As the (left-leaning) National Geographic observes (in a pro-1619 article),

In just two years, 1618 and 1619, the Portuguese-Imbangala alliance resulted in the capture and enslavement of thousands of Ndongo people, filling at least 36 ships with human cargo. These captives would be sent to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America to work as laborers. It was through this arrangement that slavery would spread to British North America in 1619, when chaos intervened and the destiny of those “20 and odd” Africans was redirected to a place called the Colony of Virginia on the Atlantic coast.

Again: The obvious question is, if the United States is to be castigated for this type of sin, why on Earth is it the only, or the main, nation to be so described (and demonized)?  How about the Spanish, Portuguese, and British kingdoms?  How about the Kongo, Dahomey, Yoruba, Benin, Imbangala, and Asante empires? How about the Arabs? And the Muslims? The Arabs and the Muslims? Why are they left out?

Ask George Avery, who goes even further outside the box:

Relatively speaking, the United States was a minor player in the African Slave Trade — only about 5% of the Africans imported to the New World came to the United States. Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the ocean voyage, a mere 388,000 were shipped directly to North America. The largest recipients of imported African slaves were Brazil, Cuba. Jamaica, and the other Caribbean colonies. The lifespan of those brought into what is now the United States vastly exceeded those of the other 95%, and the United States was the only purchaser of African slaves where the population grew naturally in slavery – the death rate among the rest was higher than the birth rate. …

The World Slave Trade

The Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean African slave trade, which began by Arabs as early as the 8th Century AD, dwarfed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued up to the 20th Century. Between the start of the Atlantic Slave Trade and 1900, it is estimated that the eastern-bound Arab slave traders sold over 17 million Africans into slavery in the Middle East and India, compared to about 12 million to the new world – and the Eastern-bound slave trade had been ongoing for at least 600 years at the START of that period.

Indeed, as horrific as crossing the ocean (the Atlantic) in chains in the hold of a ship was, crossing a scorching desert (the Sahara) on foot led to far greater death rates.

As it turns out, therefore, the only true descriptive of the situation is that The United States Was a Footnote in Slavery’s History.

So, remember: what the Left hates is not slavery (or, indeed, racism); what the Left hates is America. 

As Dennis Prager writes (in Whites Aren't Hated for Slavery but for Making America and the West),

the left … hates America, which it regards as the paragon of capitalism. By becoming the most successful country in history, America, the quintessential capitalist country, remains a living rebuke to everything the left stands for. If America can be brought down, every left-wing egalitarian dream can be realized. … What the left does very much seek is to destroy America as we have known it -- the capitalist and Judeo-Christian enclave of personal freedom.

A much longer and much more detailed version of the present post was published here:

• 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the New York Times

Check out the Twitter thread:

The #1619Project Summarized
in One Single Sentence https://t.co/D8tJiIjB9d
It is nothing short of preposterous to claim
that an obscure (if heinous) commercial
transaction in a tiny #Virginia hamlet
involving at most 25-30 people …
1/5@nytimes@nhannahjones@nytmag pic.twitter.com/Qs0z9ERBK6

— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) April 20, 2021

RELATED: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence 

• 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word (!) user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one pundit

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!), An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be" 

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• The 1775 proclamation of slave owner Lord Dunmore was a reaction to—not a cause of—a revolution already in full swing

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833 

• Militiamen Mere "Slave Catchers"? Blatantly Overlooking the Important Role Played by America's Militias in the French & Indian War as well as the American Revolution, Both of Which Predated the Constitution and Its Second Amendment

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• Can the Élites' Contempt for the Voters' Desires in the 2020s Be Traced All the Way Back to the Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies? In a sense, Lincoln chose the events of Thanksgiving 1620 as our true founding in order to repudiate the events of 1619

• 2,000% better off — Economic history is unequivocal: Jefferson’s slavery wasn’t the basis of America’s prosperity; Jefferson’s liberalism was

• If slavery was the basis of capitalism, asks Rich Lowry, why did the capitalist North wage a war to destroy the seedbed of its own prosperity?

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Secular humanistic indoctrination dumbs down children, drives wedges between them and their parents, and has grown increasingly hostile to patriotism and parental authority

• 1619 is a "reframing" of the American story in mockery of our political origins, in defiance of actual history, with the expressed purpose of sabotaging our sense of national identity

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• Hulu's 1619 Project Docu-Series Is Not Designed to Teach Us—and Our Kids—About (or to Hate) Slavery or Racism; It Is Designed to Teach Us to Loathe America

• In 1640, more than 5,000 English citizens were being held as slaves in North Africa: Slavery’s long, cosmopolitan history is ignored by the architects of the 1619 Project

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• A Prager U Video and a Book, "1620," Take on the 1619 Project

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Sunday Special: GoFundMe Page for Hilary in Far-Away Port Huron

The sister of an NP reader (and friend) was in a car accident "in faraway Port Huron" a month or two ago which totaled the van she uses for her charity work. (I donated $100 bucks.) The GoFundMe page set up by her friends has more details:

miss hilary was t-bone[d] by a car [in late February], as [the other driver] ran a red light and smashed right into her sending her to the hospital. thankfully the lord was watching over her and allowed her another day with us. She's going to be unable to work during this time and is going to need help not only with medical and bills but also with buying a new van for herself. 

She needs a new van to be able to continue her journey with helping the other families she helps on a daily basis. Hilary runs a good pantry for her church and spends most of her own money to supply the food and material that's donated to many families in need, just last Monday she supplied 17 families with the help they needed to feed their family during this hard time as we know many are not working and every penny counts for those bills. 

She is always and I mean Always putting the needs of others above her own and now it's our turn to show her the live and support she deserves, whether it's donating, sharing or praying it all adds up in our eyes, so please join us and help us get her back on her feet when she's able to do so and help her replace her van as its done for and she needs it in order to shop, provide for families and Continuing to do what she lives the most in life!! thank you everyone for standing behind her and showing your love and support while she heals, i know she appreciates each and every one of you.