¡No Pasarán!

Thursday, June 11, 2020

"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…Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked"

Isn't there someone that Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds you of? Think about it: the attitude, the self-righteousness, the wild hair, the (seeming) constant urge to giggle.

Give up?

Michelle Wolf.

And Nikole is just as fair and pertinent and objective and neutral as the comedienne is with her comments.

(I am not even sure that you can say that NHJ looks like MW, but she does remind one of her… In any case, should anyone ever need to portray Hannah-Jones in a film, we know who to go to…)

Regarding the 1619 Project, David Rutz writes over at the Washington Free Beacon that the Founder of Error-Ridden ‘1619 Project’ Slams Lack of Fact Checking in Cotton Op-Ed:

Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her initiative examining the legacy of slavery in American history, but the "1619 Project" has come under fire for multiple inaccuracies.

Despite the objections of historians, Hannah-Jones has stood by her assertion that American revolutionaries were motivated primarily by a desire to defend the institution of slavery, a claim that was ultimately subject to a lengthy clarification. One historian who helped fact-check the "1619 Project" said the Times ignored her objections about it.

In the seven months between the article’s publication and the Times’s clarification, five prominent historians demanded that the paper retract "all the errors and distortions" it contained, a move the Times has resisted.

Hannah-Jones was one of dozens of Times staffers who expressed fury last week over the publication of Cotton's essay, writing in a tweet that she was "deeply ashamed" of her employer.

And now, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend Stephen Green your ears, and listen to what the Instapundit blogger has to say with regards to the 1619 "Agitprop" Project's instigator — hilariously — stating that Nobody Should "Have the Right to Run [Their] Opinions in the New York Times Unedited and Unchecked" And that "We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked" ("we" meaning that Nikole Hannah-Jones is, or at least, feels part of the New York Times family)…

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the deeply flawed 1619 Project for the New York Times, went on CNN’s Reliable Sources this weekend to accuse Senator Tom Cotton of spreading “misinformation.”

The word you’re looking for is “chutzpah.”

Before we get to that, let’s back up a moment.

On Sunday, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was forced out of his job following a snowflake-induced uproar over an op-ed he published on Friday by Sen. Cotton.

In a piece headlined “Send In the Troops,” Cotton argued that “these rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives.” Since local authorities in many cities have proven unable — or more likely, unwilling — to quell the violence, Cotton wrote that “it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority.”

… This was too much for the SJW crowd, who immediately accused Cotton of calling for the military to slaughter innocent civilians, and demanded the Times fire pretty much everybody who had ever even hear[d] of Tom Cotton.

Instead, Bennet was offered up as the sacrificial lamb to appease the progressive gods, who are as insatiable as they are jealous.

Enter Nikole Hannah-Jones and her dubious-at-best 1619 Project for the NYT. The premise of 1619 was to claim that the United States was “born” the day the first black slaves arrived on our shores in 1619. As PJMedia’s own Rick Moran wrote about it last August:

A project that seeks to condemn capitalism and view the remarkable achievements of an entire nation through the prism of slavery and race is ignorant. These views represent a complete (deliberate?) misunderstanding of 400 years of American history.
Other reviewers were even less kind.

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin called 1619 outright “agitprop,” and bemoaned the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Times for publishing it:

Journalism and academia are supposed to honor, as their highest value, the fearless pursuit of truth. If you tried to parody the sad decline of prestige awards in those fields into an ideologically blinkered self-congratulatory echo chamber for progressive agitprop, it would be difficult to find a more on-the-nose example than the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times for commentary.
Marc A. Scaringi noted for American Thinker that “the major premise of the Project is based upon a lie.” Several lies, actually, as Hannah-Jones conflated, obscured, or just “somehow” got wrong nearly everything about the history of slavery in North America and in Africa.

Scaringi notes that pushing a radical racialist and anti-capitalist agenda has proven quite lucrative for Hannah-Jones, who “holds a 2017 fellowship with the MacArthur Foundation, which was founded and endowed by a white man, in which she received a $625,000 no-strings-attached grant.”

If you didn’t read Scaringi’s entire piece when he published it back in August, I highly recommend it.

But it wasn’t just right-leaning columnists who found fault with Hannah-Jones’ effort. Rich Lowry noted in January that historians “roasted” the 1619 Project:

It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”
More:

Given that the Times can’t necessarily be trusted to give a straight account in its news pages of Mitch McConnell’s latest tactical maneuver, it wouldn’t seem a natural source for objective truth on sensitive historical matters, and sure enough, the 1619 Project is shot through with an ideological radicalism that leads to rank distortions and laughable overreach.
When as a reviewer you’re forced to tell readers that something is bad even for the New York Times, that says all too much about the condition of the once-respected Gray Lady, and the writers it chooses to promote.

But how bad was Hannah-Jones’ work, really? Hannah-Jones herself was forced to make “a very significant change” to her “core 1619 claim” after being called to account by the NYT fact-checker.

… Nevertheless, the NYT has yet to issue a formal correction, much less a retraction of the Project, which is now used to teach our schoolchildren lies instead of history.

Talk about spreading misinformation, right?

CNN’s “media watchdog,” Brian Stelter, invited Hannah-Jones on his comically-named Reliable Sources to spread even more manure.

And here’s the relevant quote from Hannah-Jones, if you can’t bear to sit through the whole thing:

What was the main issue was that you have a U.S. senator in the party of power saying that he wants to use the military to repress dissent, not going into the normal fact-checking process that anyone making such claims should go through and making, you know, assertions that our own reporters had discredited through their reporting. And that was the main concern.
None of that is true. None of it.

Cotton called for the military to assist in cases where state and local authorities are overwhelmed by rioters, not protestors. Unlike Hannah-Jones and her 1619 hit job on American history, Cotton referenced actual events anyone can look up, and that millions of Americans can still remember.

Bennet edited and fact-checked Sen. Cotton’s op-ed before publication, and lost his job for having printed factually correct wrongthink. Meanwhile, historical smear-peddler Hannah-Jones has not had her work denounced by the Times, no one has lost their job over its publication, and she remains a regular guest on a show called Reliable Sources.

But that ain't all: Over at mrcNewsbusters, Nicholas Fondacaro provides its audience with the entire transcript, in addition to having these words to offer:

Journalism is dead. That fact was made abundantly clear by New York Times staff writer and founder of the factually-inaccurate 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones in an appearance on the CNN’s so-called “Reliable Sources” Sunday, where she argued that the media couldn’t legitimately treat the Republican Party fairly because they were a “rogue” organization and being fair would be “picking sides.”

… National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote an extensive report on how The Times had a big role in helping to shape the scope and edit Cotton’s piece. “There were at least three drafts back and forth. The Times would send along edits for approval, and the Cotton team would sign off, and then there would be another round,” he wrote. “The first two rounds focused on clarity and style, and the last round on factual accuracy.”

Hannah-Jones went on to suggest the Cotton controversy was the latest example of the media getting in trouble because they were trying to be fair to Republicans. “But I think so what happened is a larger symptom that we're seeing in news organizations across the country, which is they are really struggling to cover in a way that appears to be nonpartisan a political landscape where one political party has, in many ways, gone rogue and is not following the rules.” She said.

Adding: “But there’s a sense that if you're cover that straight down the line, you look like you are picking sides. So, this adherence to even-handedness, both side-ism, the view from nowhere doesn't actually work in the political circumstances that we're in.”

In reality, the opposite was true: The New York Times is fine with the lies and revisionist history Hannah-Jones published via the 1619 Project despite the warnings of scholarly fact-checkers, because it fits their narrative.

“On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America,” wrote Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris for Politico back in March.

Hannah-Jones also boasted about the internal outrage against Cotton’s op-ed. “So, let me just say that The New York Times journalists who oppose this column love the institution of The New York Times intensely and also care deeply about journalism.”

So, what did it say about Times reporters that they didn’t have the same outcry against a 2014 op-ed that wanted to destigmatize pedophilia?

RELATED: 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

• 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)

• 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

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

• 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

• 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

• "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

• 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

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Propagandistic sob stories about “protests”: Whereas normal people see rioting, looting, and mayhem, our abjectly useless journalists see dispossessed people protesting peacefully

There is no such thing as “violent protests.” Violent protests are not a subset of a larger phenomenon called “protests.” They are an entirely separate phenomenon called “riots.” Say it with me now: riots.

Thus writes Benny Huang at Liberty Unyielding.

As America presses through its second week of smoldering rage, the media continue to prove their abject uselessness. Round-the-clock coverage of our national mayhem has illuminated nothing and hidden quite a bit beneath hours of pointless chatter.

Journalists have gotten the story wrong since the moment a police officer killed George Floyd because journalists don’t understand it any better than we commoners — and perhaps worse than we commoners. Their Pavlovian conditioning simply won’t allow them to process what’s happening before their own eyes. Whereas normal people see rioting, looting, and mayhem, journalists see dispossessed people protesting peacefully. If the American Psychiatric Association hasn’t yet documented this inability to engage with reality in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it should really get on that posthaste.

CNN’s Brian Stelter, for example, at first refused to believe that the rioters had set Washington’s historic St. John’s Church ablaze. … When the Daily Caller’s Katrina Haydon tweeted about the arson, Stelter insinuated that she was propagating fake news — his network’s specialty.

… At this point we should really be asking ourselves why Stelter would resist believing that the mob in front of the White House was behaving as all mobs do. My answer is that he was suffering from a case of confirmation bias so severe that it brought on visual hallucinations. His imaginary “live video” showed a church unscathed because, like most journalists covering this story, he has a soft spot in his heart for terrorists.

Stelter sees their cause as just and wants to believe that they are basically good people.

He therefore chafes at the suggestion that they might be engaged in wanton destruction and violence. He cannot part with his romanticized image of “civil rights” trailblazers singing “We Shall Overcome” as they register black voters and desegregate bus stations. Stelter must therefore reflexively disbelieve stories that reveal the mob to be anything less than saintly until incontrovertible evidence is presented. Even then he’ll pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist if it’s presented by the wrong outlet because, after all, CNN would be all over the story if it were really happening, right?

There’s only one word for Stelter’s condition and it’s called bias. Like all biases, Stelter doesn’t see his own or, more likely, doesn’t think that there’s anything wrong with it. Stelter’s bias is systemic to nearly all of our news media. That’s why the news media can’t seem to report on the rioting, looting, and casual capitulation to mob rule. They don’t understand it and they will remain incapable of understanding it as long as they persist in calling the mayhem “protests.”

… For my part, I have taken to writing to local TV newsrooms to complain about their use of this infernal word: protests. Here are two I found on a CBS affiliate website:
“Police have arrested nearly 1,400 people in 17 U.S. cities since Thursday as protests continue over the death of George Floyd.”

Wait, what? People are getting arrested for protesting? But protesting is every American’s First Amendment right — apparently even in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, unlike your right to free exercise of religion which has been indefinitely suspended. Any red-blooded American who reads that headline ought to be outraged. But in fact, no one is being arrested for protesting. People are being arrested for tossing firebombs and bricks, beating an unarmed woman with a 2-by-4, burning down a police precinct, and looting small businesses. And in many cases they’re not being arrested for these offenses because some police chiefs, mayors, and governors are too timid to stand up to the mob.

Here’s another one: “Violent protests rock Atlanta as mayor says ‘You are disgracing our city.’”

There is no such thing as “violent protests.” Violent protests are not a subset of a larger phenomenon called “protests.” They are an entirely separate phenomenon called “riots.” Say it with me now: riots.

And there are many more similar headlines where those came from. This isn’t journalism, it’s a Jedi mind trick used to convince us that we aren’t seeing what we’re actually seeing. Fortunately, like all Jedi mind tricks, it works only on the weak-minded.

There is some evidence that the media’s reluctance to use the “r” word — riot — has come down from senior levels. This isn’t something that rank-and-file reporters have decided to do, though it isn’t something that they’re pushing back against either. Last week, NBC broadcaster Craig Melvin spilled the beans about corporate guidance when he tweeted:

“This will guide our reporting in [Minnesota]. ‘While the situation on the ground in Minneapolis is fluid, and there has been violence, it is most accurate at this time to describe what is happening there as ‘protests’ — not riots.”
In some kind of perverse inversion of Abraham Lincoln’s famous adage, lying is in fact the best policy over at NBC News. Anything else is forbidden. Good to know.

In Melvin’s defense, his tweet came on Thursday, May 28. The degree of lawlessness and violence at that point was already unacceptable though much lower than what we would see over the weekend. Still, at the time of my writing, NBC News’s headlines are still propagandistic sob stories about “protests.”

Here’s a silly NBC headline: “Protests show no sign of fading more than a week after the death of George Floyd.” Slightly more ridiculous: “Atlanta residents struggle to heal amid pain and power of protests.” And in the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me department: “Protesters in Minneapolis bringing peace met with police force.” (That headline was later changed).

This is where Poe’s Law comes into play. It’s impossible to parody NBC News any more than they parody themselves on a daily basis. It’s a clown show over there.

… It really is that simple. If it were white guys flying Gadsden flags from their pickup trucks, they’d all be labeled terrorists if even only a few of them used force to defend themselves. And if the “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd didn’t use force at all, the media would focus on their menacing appearance, their “rhetoric,” or just their lack of “diversity.” Just think about how the Tea Party was covered in the media, or the recent anti-lockdown protests in Lansing, or the pro-Second Amendment rally in Richmond this January.
That’s the way this game is played. …

Tuesday, June 09, 2020

Following Riots 5 Years Ago, One U.S. City Defunded Its Police Force in 2015; How Did That Turn Out?

From Germany, David's Medienkritik — which along with No Pasarán was always during the Bush years among the three runners-up for Best Conservative Blog in Europe — ist zurück (is back).

The Tragedy of Baltimore, Alec MacGillis calls his article. Guess in which news outlet?

As reported by the arch-conservative New York Times Magazine:

"In 2016, the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division concurred, releasing a report accusing the city’s Police Department of racial discrimination and excessive force. The city agreed to a “consent decree” with the federal government, a set of policing reforms that would be enforced by a federal judge. When an independent monitoring team was selected to oversee the decree, [Shantay Guy] was hired as its community liaison. This was where she wanted to be: at the forefront of the effort to make her city a better place.

But in the years that followed, Baltimore, by most standards, became a worse place. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times as populous. Other elected officials, from the governor to the mayor to the state’s attorney, struggled to respond to the rise in disorder, leaving residents with the unsettling feeling that there was no one in charge. With every passing year, it was getting harder to see what gains, exactly, were delivered by the uprising. (...)

On the left, in contrast, Baltimore’s recent woes have been largely overlooked, partly because they present a challenge to those who start from the assumption that policing is inherently suspect. The national progressive story of Baltimore during this era of criminal-justice reform has been the story of the police excesses that led to Gray’s death and the uprising, not the surge of violence that has overtaken the city ever since. As a result, Baltimore has been left mostly on its own to contend with what has been happening, which has amounted to nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years."
Simply put: The "Defund the Police" approach has already been tried — and ended up turning police into a largely reactive force — devastating minority neighborhoods in Baltimore following the 2015 riots (pre-Trump) — and doing enormous harm to those it was intended to benefit. And, of course, members of the Left who pushed for the so-called "reforms" that led to the massive crime spike simply put Baltimore out-of-sight and out-of-mind when reality caught up to their false narrative.

As they say: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it...Minneapolis appears to be on the same course...

Still, some blame was attached to B'more's situation, wasn't there? Oh, that's right, that was directed at the usual suspect(s) — i.e., at Republicans like, in this case, Donald Trump — for calling "Charm City" (better known as "Mobtown") a "mess" (indeed, a "rodent-infested mess." whose residents, notably the "African-American" population, are "living in hell").

Update: Thanks to Stephen Green for the Instalink

Sunday, June 07, 2020

When Trump Launches a Raid to Take Down a Terrorist Killer, Le Monde's Top Cartoonist Knows Who the True Villain Is

Flashback: Back in October, around Halloween, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. special operations raid launched in Syria, Le Monde's Plantu penned a typical leftist cartoon showing the death of the (formerly elusive) leader of the Islamic State only leading to more terrorism, begetting witches with skulls.

Meanwhile the truly fiendish monster turns out to be — to no one's surprise — the American president who does not understand such obvious truths, i.e, Donald Trump with his head turned into a devilish Halloween pumpkin.

Saturday, June 06, 2020

Many Men to Victory

The story
of D-Day.

Their lives mattered
— Arnaud C. Enée

Friday, June 05, 2020

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

Tom Cotton: Publishing the opinions of the Taliban was not a bridge too far for NYTimes staff;
but a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is

On Fox News, always mocked and demonized by the rest of the mainstream media as faux news, Howard Kurtz notes that

We are getting a great insight into the culture of the New York Times.

The paper struck a blow for honest journalism--and that greatly upset many of its staffers.

At stake is whether the op-ed pages of a newspaper should be a forum for debate, or just a vehicle for reinforcing what its top editors and a majority of its readers already believe. To choose the latter course is to reduce that precious real estate to predictable propaganda, which is not just one-sided but boring.

The Times did the right thing--well, until it didn’t. The paper’s editors chose to publish a piece by Tom Cotton, a Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, titled “Send In The Military.” Cotton argues that it’s perfectly appropriate for President Trump to use the military to restore order in cities wracked by violent protests after the brutal killing of George Floyd.

Well, there was an open revolt at the paper, led by black journalists who were offended.

Nikole Hannah-Jones of the Times Magazine, who worked on the paper’s Pulitzer-winning “1619” slavery project, said: “As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”

… To their credit, the editors [decided to stick] to their guns. … The Arkansas senator praised the editors … telling Fox: “They’ve stood up to the ‘woke progressive mob’ in their own newsroom. So, I commend them for that.”

But he spoke too soon. About two hours after I checked in with the Times PR office, the paper caved.

…The paper said it would make changes, expand its fact-checking operation and publish fewer op-ed pieces.

Fewer op-eds? No explanation of supposed factual shortcomings? The internal pressure must have been overwhelming.

In a Victor Garcia story, the Senator strikes back:

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., responded Thursday to The New York Times apology for running his opinion piece by blasting the paper, accusing them of retreating in the face of a "woke mob" in their newsroom.

"I can tell you my op-ed doesn't meet The New York Times standards," Cotton told "The Story". "It far exceeds their standards, which are normally full of left-wing sophomoric drivel. And I find it amazing that in the last 24 hours, the editor of The New York Times and the publisher of The New York Times have both defended their decision to publish this op-ed, but in the face of the 'woke' mob, of 'woke' kids that are in their newsroom, they tucked tail and they ran.

"They confessed and said they're going to go into reeducation camp. They were going to cut the number of op-eds they write," Cotton continued. "And for that ... I will say to the world, you're welcome for getting The New York Times to run less of the garbage that you normally see in their pages."

… Cotton cited a Morning Consult poll saying 58 percent of Americans are in favor of using the U.S. military to bolster local law enforcment against rioters before turning his wrath back on the so-called "paper of record."

"A child mob truly is in charge at The New York Times tonight," Cotton said.

In Commentary's THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE VANGUARD OF THE INCOGNIZANT, Noah Rothman has this to say:

“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.

Regarding the 1619 Project, Ed Driscoll (who I thank for being behind many of the hyperlinks in this post) takes the opportunity to step back and make a broader remark about the "newspaper of record" and, beyond, about its and the rest of the mainstream media's fairy tales:

As a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, 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. Or as Tiana Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”

As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”

… Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.

The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.

Which brings Ed Driscoll to allow William F. Buckley to have the final word:

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

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

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

Thursday, June 04, 2020

Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks — The 1619 Project exists solely to convince the young generation that America was founded on evil principles

It is quite clear that the entire 1619 project is not an attempt to write accurate history but to re-write it

writes Miranda Dawson for an organization called Seeking Educational Excellence (SEE), regarding "the debunked essay" introducing the 1619 Project.

Rutgers University Professor Bruce Baker … and leftists alike know that in order to change the entire American system is to convince the young generation it was founded solely on evil principles.

Seeking educational excellence disagrees with this kind of thinking. We at SEE believe in American exceptionalism and think every child deserves to learn about our nation’s founding from a basic nonpartisan approach.

In that perspective, Dennis Prager writes that The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks:

If the left cared about blacks, leftists would work to raise blacks to universal academic standards, not lower and abolish standards as they have done for decades, most recently in abolishing the SAT exam at the University of California.

If the left cared about blacks, leftists would work to elevate all people, including blacks, not only to universal academic standards but also to universal personal/moral standards. Perhaps the most obvious of these is that women should marry before having children, and men should stay in the lives of children they conceived — ideally as the husband of their mothers, but at least as a father, mentor and breadwinner.

… If the left cared about blacks, leftists would increase — not lobby and demonstrate to decrease — police presence in black neighborhoods, where blacks are murdered, raped and beaten in the thousands each year by other blacks — almost never by whites, whether policemen or anyone else. In 2016, the last year for which I could find FBI data, 2,870 blacks were murdered. Of those, 2,570 of their murderers were black; 243 were white.

A typical left-wing reaction to all this was written in June 2019 by journalist Michael Coard in the Philadelphia Tribune: "Today's black so-called thugs/monsters are created by the evil American system that miseducates them, unemploys them, underemploys them, over-polices them, and over-incarcerates them. America is Dr. Victor Frankenstein." Note "over-polices."

Coard is correct about one thing: Today's blacks are often miseducated, which leads to their unemployment, underemployment and other terrible consequences. Who has been running America's schools for decades now? (Hint: Not the right.) But that doesn't cause violence. Black murderers and rapists are the only people in America told that no matter what they did, they are not responsible for it. America is. And the people telling them that are all on the left.

Why does the left do this?

First, because, as opposed to liberals, the left — everywhere in the world — hates America. And why does the left hate America? Because it is a living refutation of left-wing ideology. America is the most successful country while also being the most capitalist, most religious and most nationality-affirming of all the industrialized democracies.

The left-wing mantra of "America is racist" has little to do with caring for blacks; rather, it is indispensable to bringing America down.

Second, without a lopsided black vote for the left-wing party, the Democrats, no Democrat could get elected to national office. It is therefore imperative to repeat as often and as vociferously as possible how anti-black America is. The angrier a black person is at America, the more likely he or she is to vote Democrat.

… To the left, blacks are not real people as much as they are an electoral bloc.

… Further proof that the left doesn't care about blacks is that the left doesn't care about any group in whose name it speaks. The left uses groups to attain power and to give themselves moral legitimacy.

The communists never gave a damn about workers, but they preached incessantly on workers' behalf.

Left-wing feminists don't give a damn about women.

… And whereas liberal Jews constituted a bedrock of support for Jews and the Jewish state, left-wing Jews, like George Soros, don't give a damn about Jews or Israel. Likewise, their support for Palestinians has nothing to do with care for Palestinians; it is all about hatred for Israel and America.

Tears for George Floyd are universal and justified. Anger at what happened to him is universal and justified. But for leftists, that poor soul is little more than a weapon to be used in their ongoing rage against America, the police and white people. And to further enrage blacks against them.

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

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s