Compare and contrast: loyalty to the candidates

The New Neo Posted on by

During the 2016 campaign Trump famously said, speaking of the loyalty of his voters, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible.”

He was excoriated for saying it. But it was hyperbole, meant not literally but to illustrate how devoted his most devoted followers were. And they were. And they still are.

Fast forward to now. I find it grimly amusing (meaning, not amusing at all) that in 2020 Joe Biden actually could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and he wouldn’t lose any media support. He doesn’t have “followers,” he has fixers who are determined to cover up whatever he does that might cause voters to turn away from him and lead to the re-election of Trump.

And unlike Trump in 2016 I am not being hyperbolic. No, Biden hasn’t shot anyone. But what I wrote about him shooting someone and the media covering it up – or calling it Russian disinformation even if there was a video proving it was true – is not an exaggeration. I now believe that it is literally true that the media (and the Democratic Party, but I repeat myself) would cover up any act of Biden’s no matter how despicable, in the effort to secure his victory over Trump.

When the press takes sides so openly and nakedly, and is joined by social media giants, we have reached a level of partisan information control I thought I’d never see in this country. But that’s where we are. And it’s in service of a candidate who has always been of mediocre intelligence at best and is now cognitively faded, who is almost certainly corrupt, who has been wrong on almost every important issue that exists, is a long-term liar and plagiarist, and will be putty in the hands of the most extreme leftists in his party who hate America and capitalism and want both destroyed.

“shipwreckedcrew” on Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor fired at Joe Biden’s behest

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“shipwreckedcrew” is a pseudonymous attorney who often writes at RedState on legal matters, and I’ve generally found his work to be quite good and very thorough. This recent piece by shipwreckedcrew is at a site with which I wasn’t previously familiar. It details some of the background of the Biden-ordered firing of Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Here’s a sample:

The story that has been told in the media is that Prosecutor General Shokin did not adequately cooperate with an investigation in the UK, and the result of his failures was that the UK Court was forced to release the funds. Joe Biden seized on the story that Shokin was corrupt and therefore was to blame for the failure to crack down on corrupt Ukraine oligarchs who had looted Ukraine natural resources under the Yanukovych government. The “proof” was Shokin’s failure to cooperate in the UK investigation of Burisma and its owner between April 2014 when the funds were frozen, and January 2015 when the UK court ordered the funds released due to insufficient documentary evidence provided by the Ukraine Prosecutor General. During his visit to Ukraine on December 6, 2015 – 11 months AFTER the funds were released by the UK Court, Biden demanded that Shokin to be fired, or the Poroshenko government would face the possible loss of $1 billion in US aid to Ukraine if that didn’t happen. Poroshenko obliged, and Shokin was fired.

The cover story is a lie. Shokin was fired because Burisma wanted him fired. Shokin’s replacement met with Burisma’s attorneys, and “resolved” all outstanding matters that Bursima and its owner Zlochevskyi from the time before the Poroshenko government took office.

The article says that the Burisma funds were released by the court in January 2015, but Shokin did not become the prosecutor until February of 2015, after his predecessor Yarema – who had been in charge of the case previously, when the funds were released – was fired by Poroshenko.

I tried to unravel some of the Shokin allegations in several previous posts. I call your attention to this one from September of 2019.

Joe Biden and Hunter: don’t ask, don’t tell

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I’ve been doing some research on the history of Hunter Biden, and one of the things that has struck me is that for many years Joe Biden has dealt with questions about Hunter’s work by saying he and Hunter never talked about it – as if that was a course of action that protected against corruption.

I would encounter variations of this theme over and over in articles and interviews. See this, for example, from September of 2019, when the Democrats were gearing up to impeach Trump [emphasis mine]:

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said. “Here’s what I know. Trump should be investigated.”…

Hunter Biden, however, told the New Yorker in an interview for an article published in July that he discussed Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas producer, with his father in December 2015. At the time, Hunter Biden sat on Burisma‘s board of directors.

Around the time of the conversation, Biden was preparing for a trip to the Ukraine and the Obama administration special envoy had raised the issue with the Vice President, according to the article. Hunter Biden told the New Yorker he and his father spoke about Burisma just once.

“‘Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,” and I said, ‘I do,’ ” the younger Biden is quoted as saying in the article.

For a moment, and for the sake of argument, let’s forget the Hunter laptop and the emails. Let’s forget the evidence of corruption on Hunter’s part and the suggestions in the emails that Joe was on the take as well. Let’s just look at what’s being said there, which is that Joe Biden was heavily involved on behalf of the Obama administration in Ukrainian policy, and his son was on the board of a large Ukrainian energy company. Even the Obama administration (if you can believe the New Yorker) recognized the possible impropriety or at least the strong appearance of impropriety.

And yet, when Joe finally came round to talking to Hunter, all he said was (according to Hunter, that is), “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and Hunter said, “I do.”

Chew on that for a moment. What it’s saying is that, in a very sketchy and suspect situation rife with opportunities for conflicts of interest and corruption or the appearance thereof, Biden père decides to trust Biden fils. And the MSM seems to have no trouble with that scenario.

Let’s go to that New Yorker article on Hunter. Maybe this is just ex post facto ass-covering, but it seems that a number of people connected with Obama thought Hunter’s role wasn’t a good idea. And it also seems that the “Obama administration special envoy” who “raised the issue” with Biden – as quoted above – was actually the special envoy for energy. Here’s a fuller quote from the magazine:

Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”

In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden, but did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board. As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’ ”

So Obama didn’t insist, Joe trusted Hunter, and the situation did not change.

We can speculate that this was because Joe was on the take and/or knew Hunter was. And that is probably the case. But even without that, this shows remarkably poor judgment on Joe Biden’s part, in two ways. And it should have been roundly and publicly criticized at the time.

The first way in which it shows poor judgment is that obvious one: the appearance of impropriety and the opportunities for corruption are strong. The second way, however, is that Joe should never have trusted someone with a history like Hunter’s. Never, about anything – except to trust him to inevitably eff up.

As that New Yorker article and many others make clear, Hunter Biden was a mess and had been a mess for most of his adult life. And by “a mess” I don’t just mean a run-of-the-mill bout of addiction or alcoholism. I mean a person heavily addicted to both drugs (primarily cocaine, at least as far as we know) and alcohol, so addicted that countless (and I mean I lost count) rehab programs were tried and all ultimately failed. His addictions included strippers and prostitutes, and spending tons of money on them. His father was aware of much of this, especially the multiple rehabs. And by the time of that supposed “I do” on Joe’s part in 2015, Hunter had recently lost a Naval job because just a short while after obtaining it he tested positive for cocaine in a urinalysis.

Not only that, but take a look at Hunter’s excuse for that positive test:

On May 7, 2013, [Hunter] was assigned to a Reserve unit at Naval Station Norfolk. He had hoped to work in naval intelligence, but was given a job in a public-affairs unit. In a small, private ceremony at the White House, Hunter was sworn in by his father. Later that month, the night before Hunter’s first weekend of Reserve duty, he stopped at a bar a few blocks from the White House. Outside, Hunter said, he bummed a cigarette from two men who told him that they were from South Africa. He felt “amped up” as he was driving down to Norfolk, and then “incredibly exhausted.” He told me that he called Beau and said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” Beau drove from Delaware to meet Hunter at a hotel near the naval station. “He got me shipshape and drove me into the base,” he said. On his first day, Hunter had a urine sample taken for testing.

A few months later, Hunter received a letter saying that his urinalysis had detected cocaine in his system. Under Navy rules, a positive drug test typically triggers a discharge. Hunter wrote a letter to the Navy Reserve, saying that he didn’t know how the drug had got into his system and suggesting that the cigarettes he’d smoked outside the bar might have been laced with cocaine. Hunter called Beau, who contacted Tom Gallagher, a former Navy lawyer who had worked with Beau at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Philadelphia. Gallagher agreed to represent Hunter pro bono, but it became clear that, given Hunter’s history with drugs, an appeals panel was unlikely to believe the story that he had ingested cocaine involuntarily, and that appealing the decision would require closed-door hearings and the testimony of witnesses, increasing the likelihood of leaks to the press. Hunter decided not to appeal. Navy records show that Hunter’s discharge took effect on February 18, 2014.

The Navy was “unlikely to believe the story.” And actually, any sentient being who knows anything about drug addiction should be “unlikely to believe the story” as well. And yet we are to accept that Joe found Hunter trustworthy enough to “know what you’re doing” in his Ukraine company.

On the face of it – even without the actual corruption of which we now have evidence – this indicates that Joe is either a knave or a fool or both.

It’s interesting that both Hunter and Joe Biden thought this story was good enough to tell the press, and had little to no fear that they would be criticized except in the tiny portion of the press that’s on the right. Just as Joe enabled Hunter, the press enables Joe. And now it’s reached epic proportions with the laptop coverup.

The lasting appeal of extreme leftism

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “DNW” quotes me, and then asks some questions:

[neo]:“I think that one of the basic reasons that socialism and Communism are such difficult ideas to kill is that they appeal to something universally idealistic in regular people”

[DNW]: What is that something, that ideal , which socialism offers which universally appeals to regular people?

And does ” regular” mean psychologically normal people, or something along the lines of “yer average Joe around the world”?

I’ve written a number of posts on that very subject, so the rest of this post will just be a recycling of this, which appeared in January of 2019 and was entitled, “The enduring appeal of extreme leftism.”

Communism/Socialism is an idea whose time has always come, ever-fresh and ever-new. It keeps rearing its ugly head wearing a new mask, like some vampire returning in a new guise. But can’t we finally drive a stake through its wretched heart?

In 2014 (but still quite relevant today, if not more so), Robert Stacy McCain wrote an essay describing the latest renaissance of the idea that persists in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary, and which was correctly critiqued by the economist Ludwig von Mises not long after the Soviets came to power:

In his classic work Socialism, Mises explained that the attempt to replace the market system with central economic planning could not succeed, because the planners could not possibly have the information necessary to make all the decisions which, in a market economy, are made by individuals whose needs and desires are reflected in prices: “The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism.”

“Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years,” Mises wrote in 1922, “in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable. …. Socialist writers may continue to publish books about the decay of Capitalism and the coming of the socialist millennium; they may paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours and contrast with them an enticing picture of the blessings of a socialist society; their writings may continue to impress the thoughtless — but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea.”

The rest of the McCain article is worth reading. My response is that this persistence of the idea of socialism/Communism despite evidence of its awfulness when put into practice in the real world should not be at all surprising. And I don’t think we’ll ever find the proper stake to drive into its still-beating heart, because the nature of this beast is that it represents an idea with strong appeal to a vast number of human beings. No amount of empirical or historical evidence can permanently teach enough people otherwise.

The rhetoric of Socialism/Communism has intrinsic appeal to certain groups of people and some members of each group are always likely to fall under its spell: the guilt-ridden wealthy and/or their even-more-guilt-ridden spawn, the poor who feel they’ve been screwed by society, the politically and economically naive intelligentsia who feel they know better than others, the religious and/or idealistic who want everyone to be loving and good and selfless, and those who just like the idea of power and control over others and plan to be the ones in charge.

Combine all that natural appeal with the undeniable propagandist skill of the left—including their willingness to lie in the most brazen manner—and you have an even greater effect. And then combine all of that with ignorance of history and economics, our culture’s reluctance to teach the young our good points and its eagerness to harp on our bad ones, and the fact that people only tend to really learn something through bitter and personal experience.

The wonder is that more people don’t believe that socialism/Commmunism is the answer to the world’s prayers, not that so many succumb to it in the first place. Never imagine that the fight, especially in the intellectual and educational and propaganda spheres, can be over. It would be too bad if each generation had to learn the lesson through personal suffering rather than in the realm of ideas.

Did the Nazis think they were “doing good”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” raises an interesting issue:

Clearly someone like Obama, an intelligent, trained, leftist activist, is aware his actions aren’t pouring oil on troubled waters but quite the opposite. However, I tend to believe, lacking the ability to look into Obama’s soul, that Obama is aiming at a leftist utopia and transforming the US thusly is the paramount priority for that utopia.

Or, at the very least, keeping Democrats in power which allows that possibility which would be prevented by Republicans in power. So almost anything goes.

Of course, one can extend that argument to include Hitler who believed he was acting for a better world — once the millions of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, useless eaters etc. were eliminated.

Modern-day tyrants usually give altruistic reasons for doing what they do. Is that to fool the masses, or because they believe what they are saying? Do they actually intend to do evil, or do they fool themselves and think that they really will get that tasty omelet after breaking all those eggs?

I can’t say; I don’t read minds. But I think that one of the basic reasons that socialism and Communism are such difficult ideas to kill is that they appeal to something universally idealistic in regular people (not necessarily the leaders and masterminds), but invariably turn out horrific in execution because such approaches contain a built-in contradiction with human nature. This contradiction virtually guarantees that the idyllic imagined future never comes to pass, and the effort to create it leads (often very quickly) to a dystopia instead. This dystopia is sometimes labeled a temporary transition period. But the longed-for goal never arrives.

In contrast, Nazism does not appeal to anything so universally idealistic. That’s not to say it didn’t appeal to a lot of people in its day (and even a few in this day). But it is mean-spirited and exclusionary on its face. I suppose that someone could say that Nazism was striving for a “better world” as defined by purely German interests, in that the Germans would be the ones wearing the boots stamping forever on the human face. The temporary dystopia envisioned by Communist rhetoric was the endpoint ideal of the Nazis for everyone in the world except the Germans, who would be ruthless and vicious but on top of the heap.

I also don’t think that the Nazi leaders themselves probably thought in terms of “good” and “bad” as we ordinarily mean them. They thought in terms of gain and loss, and strong and weak, and they were determined to be the strong winners. Fortunately, they were not.

[NOTE: Although I’ve read a lot of history, I don’t pretend to be an expert on this. These thoughts are meant to be a springing-off place for thought and discussion.]

Hunter Biden’s laptop, Andrew McCarthy, and the commenters at The Hill

The New Neo Posted on by

The Hill is far from the most leftist of news outlets in the MSM. Andrew C. McCarthy has an article there on Hunter Biden’s laptap, and in his usual measured way he concludes that the laptop is authentic and the information on it very likely to be authentic too.

And yet, when I read the first group of comments there (there are over six thousand total as of now), it was nearly all “Russia, Russia, Russia.” The leftist operatives are out in force, and they are doing what they do best.

The irony of it would be funny if it weren’t so sad – the left is now in the business of pretending to see a Russian (of all things) under every bush (or Trump), and they are in the pay of big business and the mega-rich.

2020: some of the things that astound me

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They astound me, and yet they shouldn’t. Cognitively, I believe I know why and how these things are happening. Yet emotionally, I find them difficult to believe and astonishing to accept as occurring on such a scale in America.

The first is the speed of the Democrats’ capitulation to the leftists among them, and the completeness of it.

The second is the seamless voluntary morphing of the MSM into Pravda.

The third is the joining in – not just of the dot.coms, whose censorship activities are really no surprise at all – of the bulk of corporate America, including previously “all-American” sports.

The fourth is the vulnerability of so many Americans to the propaganda. It works so well because so many cultural, educational, business, and press organs agree on the message, and the voices on the right have been increasingly marginalized and demonized.

Just a few short years ago I would have thought that something like the Hunter Biden laptop revelations would sink any major party candidate. But I would have thought wrong. The left yells “Russian disinformation” (which is almost humorous, given what the left is and what it’s done with Russian disinformation) or fails to cover the story, Joe sits in his bunker, and many voters shrug and go about their business.

I think there is no limit to how far the left will go to suppress liberty and the right if given power in this country, or how corrupt they will become. And plenty of seemingly (or previously) reasonable and well-meaning people will give them the keys to it, thinking that by doing so they are doing good.

[ADDENDUM: See also this by Victor Davis Hanson.]

Hatred of Trump leads to liberal confusion about what to do: Bari Weiss gets it, and she also doesn’t

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I think Bari Weiss’ new Tablet piece is an illustration of the kind of confusion a great many liberal Democrats feel these days.

For example, Weiss puts her finger squarely on the fact that leftist Democrats such as AOC are either anti-Semitic themselves or fully at the service of other anti-Semitic leftists. But after discussing that for a while, she reverts to reflexive Trump-hate [my emphasis]:

…[M]any smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

There is also the X factor of Donald Trump, which is impossible to overstate. Understandable hostility toward him has prevented many Jews from seeing the problem on the other side. To even look away from the obscenity in the White House for a moment strikes many, as they have told me, as irresponsible or beside the point.

I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society. That truth doesn’t detract from another: There is another danger, this one from the left.

This way of thinking isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of Weiss’. It is typical of someone in the throes of a strong cognitive dissonance that he or she cannot easily resolve. She hates Trump, but hates the danger on the left as well. What to do?

In the second and third paragraphs of that excerpt, Weiss exhibits her Trump hatred. As is typical of the writing of Democrats, including others who think of themselves as old-style liberals, Weiss doesn’t seem to feel the need to give a single specific example of how Trump has demonstrated these terrible qualities she’s writing about. We are to take them on faith. Surely, we already know – the science, as they say, is settled. It’s a tautology that: (a) Trump is an “obscenity” (b) he is worthy of disgust (c) he has “normalized” bigotry and cruelty; and (d) that said normalization has “crippled” American society.

I think part of the reason Weiss says all of this is that she’s writing mostly for other Democrats who happen to be Jewish, although they’re not the only people who read Tablet. It’s telling that she says “I share” their supposed disgust for Trump; so she is saying “Hear me out, I’m one of you, not one of those dread Trump supporters.”

And it’s especially interesting to me that she says all of this despite the fact that the rest of her article is a lucid warning about the dangers of the far left and Critical Race Theory – which happens to actually be a huge and influential purveyor of “bigotry and cruelty” today, and to also be the force that has in fact “normalized” these things and is currently “crippling American society.”

Weiss follows up her warning about the danger of the left with this, which makes it clear she thinks the left is more dangerous than Trump, and that Biden would not be able to stop them:

And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America’s elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance.

So the only logical conclusion is to vote for Trump, right? After all, if the left is the bigger danger, and Biden won’t counter that danger, isn’t voting for Trump an obvious solution? But of course she can’t say that or even think it; she is focused on being able to fight “wokeness” from within the Democratic Party, and with Biden as president.

Good luck with that, Bari. You’ll need it.

Weiss follows that up with a recitation of liberal ideals. This is also interesting, because that list clearly tracks to the ideals of the right these days – only Weiss probably doesn’t know it.

She also (even after being booted off the NY Times because her type of liberalism no longer exists there) doesn’t seem to understand that she’s reciting ancient history, as far as the Democrats are concerned. It’s been a game of pretend for a long time, as the ostracism of Joe Lieberman many years ago should have made crystal clear:

[The ideals of America as a whole used to be] liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy…

…[T]his liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

She adds:

American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

I hate to tell Weiss, but adhering to that sort of “American liberalism” today makes her what’s known as “a conservative.” And I regret to inform her that the “new ideology” isn’t “vying to replace” that sort of liberalism among the Democrats. It did replace it quite some time ago. And the left has taken over nearly every cultural institution, including the press (as she obviously experienced at the Times).

So it’s late and getting later.

If Weiss and other old-fashioned liberal Democrats could take over that party, I would applaud them. But I don’t think there’s any chance of it happening, unless they are trounced in this election – and I’d give it only a very slim chance even if that were to happen.

The rest of Weiss’ rather long piece is quite good. It mostly describes things with which readers of this blog are very familiar, and which I’ll just summarize by saying that she discusses the philosophy and goals of the anti-racism movement and Critical Race Thoery, and how that plays out in society and also within the non-Orthodox Jewish community.

It’s pretty apparent that Weiss wrote the piece to appeal to those Jewish Democrats who can hear her and who might not know what’s been going on with the left and what it signifies. And that’s fine. But by demonizing Trump (which perhaps she must do, not only because she believes what she says but also because she thinks the readers to whom she’s appealing believe it, too), she is cutting off the only avenue to buy time for any kind of reversal of the dangerous and alarming trends on the left that she sees and describes so well.

Weiss does not see her own blind spot. Voting for Trump is a bridge too far and she cannot get there – although some people (such as Dave Rubin, for example) have. But I submit that, for now, it’s the sole option open to her and to other “liberal” Democrats.

And time’s a-wasting.

CLARIFICATION AND ADDENDUM:

I want to be very clear: the phenomenon that Weiss describes is neither specific to Jews nor limited to them. It is rife among virtually all liberal Democrats today. Weiss is primarily addressing Jews in her article, but Jews share her sentiments only insofar as they are liberals. American Jews trend liberal, particularly secular and Reform Jews, but Orthodox Jews vote majority Republican, and the more extreme Orthodox groups are more likely to vote Republican. The recent voting behavior of Jews in presidential elections has been at a ratio of a bit more than 2:1, Democrat/Republican.

Professor Bruce Gilley is a very brave man

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Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State University, is a profile in courage:

“I attribute the ease and suddenness of my latest [book publishing] cancellation to this year’s Black Lives Matter moral panic. It has taken cultural totalitarianism to new levels, challenging the U.S. ethic of freedom,” Gilley wrote…

In 2017, his scholarly article “The Case for Colonialism,” published in the peer-reviewed Third World Quarterly, led to petitions denouncing Gilley and his piece that drew upwards of 16,000 signatures, as well as demands for his firing.

The article was taken down after the journal’s editor received credible death threats. The piece was also likely the impetus for an administrative probe Gilley faced right after the controversy (he has since been cleared).

Gilley forged ahead with his scholarship, offering a class called “Conservative Political Thought” at Portland State. That, too, was cancelled by his peers in 2019…

In an essay for First Things earlier this year, he suggested five ways to take back power in the academy: enforce existing laws that protect free speech and equal opportunity employment; abolish university offices of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’; stop letting professors be the only ones in charge of hiring; abolish grievance studies; and unite the resistance.

“That kind of moral courage is what we need today if we are to release the academy from the death grip of the left and make it useful to society again,” Gilley wrote.

“The corruption of the universities has come about through the use of political power, above all in university hiring committees and diversity offices. The deliverance of the universities will be achieved in the same way.”

Much more at the link. Please read the whole thing. And see also this.

Roger Simon on the Orwellian developments on Twitter, et al.

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger L. Simon writes:

…[W]hen Twitter announces—via Vijaya Gadde, its “Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead”—their two new principles in the wake of the Hunter/Joe Bidenemail censorship scandal, caveat emptor.

The first, about hacked content, is so much eyewash. The second is extremely dangerous and, yes, Orwellian:

“2. We will label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter”

I see. They will “provide context.”

This is actually more sinister than their previous approach—censorship. At least that was obvious.

This is, in essence, thought control.

You, the great unwashed, are not capable of analyzing for yourself. You need guidance—the same guidance they provided when publishing ad infinitum obvious disinformation about non-existent Trump-Russia collusion or propaganda from Javad Zarif, foreign minister of a country whose citizens are not allowed access to the internet but just happens to have 1.5 million Twitter followers.

I wrote “publishing” above because that’s what Twitter does, despite their denials and insistence that they only link to other publishers, supposedly giving Twitter itself a firewall against lawsuits.

This appears all the more ludicrous given their new rule two, which indicates that not only are they curating, they are editorializing (i.e., publishing… Congress take note).

They are our betters, and will tell us what to think. Got it.

But actually, this has been going on in the regular press for a long long time. And I don’t just mean on the editorial page; it’s expected there. Or the opinion pieces. I mean in the news.

For many years I have noticed that I could fisk almost every article written, even those that are supposedly straight news, and point out the multiple and repeated elements of such guidance. It starts with the decision as to what news to cover and what to ignore. It goes on to the headlines (“Republicans Pounce,” anyone?) and involves the placement of each fact, the emphasis it’s given, adjectives and verb and noun choice (“undocumented”), phrases such as “with no evidence” used for assertions by the right and not the left, the often-bogus “fact-checking” page, and so much more.

It is all the more effective for being subtle, at least to the people who are under its spell. Once noticed, though, it can’t be unnoticed. But the subtlety makes it more difficult to notice.

It also helps the cause greatly that the left controls all these levers of communication, except for just a few outlets. That makes for a unified message, which has extra power.

YouTube is an interesting case. It censors and demonetizes some sources on the right, but remains one of the main conduits for the message of certain people on the right, in particular many black conservatives or semi-conservatives. How long will that last?

Earlier today, commenter “physicsguy” wrote this:

The laptop is real. All the corruption to the highest levels is real. NOTHING will come of this. This morning after reading through all the above insightful comments and discussion I went and looked at the websites of ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR news. Here’s what I found:

ABC: in a sidebar with links to minor stories in small print 5 lines down was a link about “FBI probing emails”

NBC: nothing

CBS: Over half way down the page with 12 other stories ahead of it, was a story about Guiliani being a source of Russian disinformation.

NPR: second story from top was ” ‘Questionable NYPost “scoop” driven by ex-Hannity producer Guiliani”

I didn’t bother to check CNN et al. Combine that with Twitter and FB levee building. And for 3 days carefully watching the liberal/leftist acquaintances I follow on FB, who follow politics rabidly where nothing has been even mentioned,…I now assume they really have no knowledge of this at all. It’s only on Fox and the right internet media that is carrying this story. It’s going nowhere, and even if it does eventually make it out to the general public it will be too late, and then nothing more will happen. They’ve won by controlling the information stream. Hillary’s server, the Durham facade, and now this….none of it matters and nothing will happen.

That is my fear as well.

The information from the right is stifled by the gatekeepers. But even if it happens to get through to someone not on the right, that news has already been labeled as bogus and therefore not worth the time to study for oneself. So if I happen to mention any number of such events to any Democrat friend of mine, the usual response is either that the person has no idea what I’m talking about, or that it’s a lie because the source is only on the right.

Back when the blogosphere began, it seemed to be a possible way to counter that. But after a short heyday, blogs have been enormously eclipsed by social media and then quite quickly by leftist control of social media. The regular MSM, the entertainment field, education, and the press had already been lost by the time blogs (including this one) came on the scene. And they are even more lost now.

If the Democrats with this election, any investigation into any of these problems – the Bidens, Twitter’s status as a possible monopoly and publisher – is gone. Probably forever, or at least for a long long time, because the screws are tightening.

Suggestions in the comments here for what to do at this point would be appreciated. All I can think of is to talk to some of my more open-minded liberal friends about this, and discuss some of the events about which they might not be aware – although given past experience, our talks won’t be very productive.

Biden’s repeated abysmal ignorance about policing and firearms

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and yet he arrogantly opines as though he does know, which is the worst kind of ignorance. Or perhaps he knows, and is merely trading on what he assumes is the ignorance of his audience.

Apparently Biden thinks that this is a really good suggestion for police. He made it in last night’s Town Hall:

…”you have to teach [the police] how to de-escalate circumstances,” said Biden. “So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.”

That’s not just a demonstration of ignorance about how difficult it is to shoot someone in the leg (it’s easy to miss the leg, and then the person keeps “coming at you”) and how dangerous it can be to shoot someone in the leg (there’s an important artery there and a person can bleed to death from such a wound), but it’s also a demonstration of extreme ignorance about how police are presently trained.

Is Biden actually so ignorant that he thinks that police are not already “taught to de-escalate circumstances”? Does he not know that the “first thing” police do is not “shooting to kill”? Ever heard of a taser, Mr. Biden? And among other things, when police do shoot in a self-defense situation, they shoot to stop people from harming the police, not to kill – and since shooting in the leg is almost impossible for most police with a moving target “coming at you,” they are purposely taught to aim for the bulkiest place that’s easiest to hit and most likely to incapacitate the other person, which is the torso.

You can read article after article patiently explaining, to people who know zero about policing or firearms or self-defense, that if someone is trying to attack you, aiming to shoot in the leg is a bad idea.

And the story gets worse – because this isn’t the first time Biden’s said this. He had already stated his brilliant and innovative policing idea back in June, and the way in which he stated it then was even more stupid and ignorant, if such a thing be possible:

An “unarmed” person coming at you with a knife.