The Other McCain lays bare the lies.

One of the basic tricks of Lying With Statistics is to use certain characteristics — age, race, sex, etc. — to define a group, and then report some data about the group as an average.

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I am not making this up.

Students involved in fraternities and sororities at the University of California Merced have been notified that use of the terms “Greek,” “Greek Life,” “Pledge” or “Rush” is now considered to be both “cultural appropriation” and “non-inclusive.”

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Don’t go to college in Canada.

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A broken clock is right twice a day and former President Bill Clinton was certainly right Monday when he criticized ObamaCare for hurting working people. “…The people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” he remarked at a campaign rally for his wife. The shocking admission by the liberal president went unreported by ABC Tuesday, while CBS and NBC aided in playing it down that evening.

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Monday’s coverage of Donald Trump’s speech to veterans is a prime illustration of a trend noticed in September by Salena Zito over at The Atlantic: Some reporters and headline writers are taking Trump’s comments very literally rather than attempting to address the substance or trying to plumb what he’s really getting at. Trump’s supporters are the exact opposite—they’re interpreting what he actually means from his rather inarticulate way of saying what he has to say. The gulf between the two cultures has inflamed the anger of Trump supporters over how the media behaves.

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After giving a substantial amount of attention to the case of Keith Lamont Scott being shot and killed by Charlotte police, with his wife disputing police accounts that he was holding a gun when he was shot, CNN this week has barely touched the important revelations that Scott not only was a convicted felon who had a history of gun violence, but that his wife even filed a protective order last year accusing him of threatening her and her son with a gun.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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They don’t even bother to pretend any more.

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Anybody who traumatizes Cher can’t be all bad.

(What’s Cher doing at a ‘World Youth Summit’? I know millennials are ignorant but surely they realize that she’s old enough to be one of their grandmothers.)

Mollie Hemmingway digs the dirt.

One of the interesting things about the public relations blitz to make Sandra Fluke a household name in order to advance a key Democratic campaign theme was how everyone complying with the public relations blitz pretended it was organic. Very few journalists admitted they were running a story pre-packaged by the country’s most Democrat-aligned public relations firm, the firm that was also behind Planned Parenthood’s wildly successful destruction campaign against the Komen Foundation (as described here). Instead, they all pretended that a fresh-faced little law student just happened to find herself in the middle of a media maelstrom. The media’s talking points matched those of the Obama administration-staffed public relations firm down from start to finish.

An innocent, random young woman was victimized by mean old Republican men. Sound familiar? It should.

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But it has gotten me thinking about The Easiest Job In the World — being the Liberal Black Point of View Columnist. (The brilliant conservative, Dr. Thomas Sowell and other black conservatives being refreshing exceptions, of course.) With leftists, every single thing that happens looks like a “nail” because your only weapon is the sledgehammer of crying “Racism.” At everything. No matter how the story plays out, the ending is always the same! No black Oscar nominees one year? What could it possibly be but raaacism?

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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On September 14, The Washington Post published what can only be described as a public display of child abuse. In an article entitled “My teen boys are blind to rape culture,” feminist writer Jody Allard chastises her sons for questioning the propaganda she feeds them.

“They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now, and they roll their eyes and argue when talk to them about sexism and misogyny.”

That Allard’s boys won’t take up their mother’s fight makes them “part of the problem,” writes Allard. They’ve “dipped their toes into toxic masculinity,” she adds. Toxic masculinity is a favorite feminist term. It means the more masculine a man is, the more vile he is. Nice, huh?

Fortunately for Allard’s sons, their mother’s efforts to indoctrinate them has failed. Unfortunately, her response was to publicly shame them.

The careful reader will notice no mention of a ‘father’ in this cesspit. There’s a reason for that.

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But apparently it was a Noble Lie that advanced the Narrative, so it was a good thing.

They’re not even bothering to pretend any more.

All hail the Ministry of Truth!

Steve Sailer looks at the news.

The NYT Editorialists take time out from warning us of the constant threat of Mass Shootings by Dylann Roof types to urge everybody not to react to the bombs in its circulation zone.

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Tucker Carlson the other day said that modern journalists, and by that he meant political reporters, are just stupid rich kids. The parents have done well so they send their smart kid off to law school, while the dull one is sent off to journalism school. The result is modern journalism is a culture dominated by Ron Burgundy, nitwits too dumb to realize they are stupid.

These are the people who would raise their hands at a college graduation if you asked for a show of hands of all those who wanted to Change The World and Make A Difference.

The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The “Minnesota man” in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It’s where the “suspect wearing a red shirt” is identified as a black guy named T’Q’ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics of him holding a handgun and a bong. The comment sections have become a leak in the system.

This is why newspaper reports of crimes and other socially dysfunctional behavior run pictures of the perps only when they can’t avoid it — it shows that women and minorities are not only hardest hit but also more often than not hardest hitters, and that is contrary to the Narrative and certainly ‘phobe’ic.

When you live in the snow globe of opinion journalism, the outside world is horrifying. That’s why you went into the snow globe in the first place, to get away from the cold, pitiless world of reality. The Spectator is a collegial place where peers josh with one another, engage in witty repartee, but always respect their “shared dignity.” Those angry Dirt People in the comments with their facts and reason just don’t get it. Many of them don’t even have a PhD. They are ruining it for everyone!

We bloggers love it when we can make special snowflakes cry. Think of it as evolution in action.

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I am not making this up.

John Hinderaker at Powerline blog does the fisking.

So it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, or a spontaneous flight of fancy. It was part of Hillary’s repertoire of lies.

I am not a psychiatrist, and am not qualified to say what causes Hillary Clinton to lie constantly, with almost every breath she takes. My amateur guess is that she suffers from a deep-seated insecurity that comes from having been overrated through almost all of her life. She apparently feels a need to make up stories that put her in a heroic light–named after the world’s most famous mountain climber! almost shot down over Bosnia! turned down by the sexist Marines! left the White House dead broke and lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps! a pioneer feminist beset by baying male chauvinist hounds!

Far from these flights of fancy, the real Hillary is a small, unoriginal, not very talented woman who was fortunate enough (in some respects) to marry Bill Clinton. Pretty much everything else is a lie.

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It’s no surprise that inequality in the U.S. is on the rise. But what you might not know is that math is partly to blame.
In a new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” Cathy O’Neil details all the ways that math is essentially being used for evil (my word, not hers).

From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, O’Neil looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.

I am not making this up. I wish I were. (I wonder what the weather is like on their planet?)

Apparently, for Voices of the Crust, when reality disagrees with ideology, reality gets two to the head.

Read it. And watch the video.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign allegedly fed former Senate Committee on Foreign Relations chairman Bob Menendez questions for Hillary Clinton to debunk ahead of the committee’s January 2013 hearing on the Benghazi terror attack, reports Fox News’ Catherine Herridge.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

No link because the article itself isn’t really worth reading, but I found the headline illustrative of our degenerate modern age.

Whenever you see the words ‘Naked Selfie Twitter Feud’ you know that the End Times are here.

Jim Goad isn’t buying what the MSM are selling.

According to the professional pundits who are paid to dictate reality to us, Donald Trump is clearly an evil Satanic Nazi demon who will eat your babies and summon a nuclear holocaust.

Oh, and he’s also a fear-monger.

…

I’m starting to notice a pattern here—Trump’s legions of naysayers always manage to sound far more bombastic and insane than Trump ever does. For all their claims about his “fear mongering,” it’s readily apparent who’s hysterically and desperately flailing in their attempts to stir a giant boiling rancid vat of fear here. Listen to the fear. Observe the hyperbole. Everything Trump’s critics say is far more unhinged and fearful than anything he says.

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So with all this attention to Trump on David Duke, surely you read the news about John Bachtell, right? He endorsed Hillary and the headlines were everywhere. Oh, wait, sorry. Mr. Bachtell’s Hillary endorsement was apparently not newsy enough to make the mainstream media headlines.  Curious, yes? If the endorsement of Trump by the ex-head of the Ku Klux Klan is big news, one would expect a Hillary endorsement by the head of the Communist Party USA would be a big deal as well.

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Of course not. That would be Noticing.

But if Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes did something like that, hoo boy….

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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Add this to the immensely long list of things that annoy Obama when he’s making a speech.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

He doesn’t even need to make any comment. Just posting the drivel from the Times is enough.

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Yeah, well, she said that about Reagan, too. She’s such a tease.

Gavin McInnes explains what the Drive By Media got wrong (as usual).

Remember last week when Trump tanked his campaign by flip-flopping on immigration? Few do. It was almost seven days ago and this campaign is about turning every glitch the GOP faces into a nuclear war, then quickly moving on to the next one. Nobody questions the press because by the time the truth comes out, they’re already onto something else. Well, just for fun, I’d like to single out this non-debacle as an example of the kind of fake controversies the media consistently tries to frame Donald Trump with.

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Media outlets just love to tell people how to think.

How can over 90% of Native Americans be wrong? Well, according to USA Today, it’s when they say that the word Redskin is not a slur. Badly needing a comeback to the Washington Post poll in May, where American Indians resoundingly rejected the idea of the term ‘Redskin’ as a slur, USA Today decided to seek out an expert to tell American Indians just how silly and wrong they are.

So, naturally, they went and sought out someone connected to the federal government.

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USA Today’s sports editor, David Meeks, and reporter Taylor Barnes actually went to the gas station, looked for damage, talked to witnesses and reviewed surveillance videos. What they discovered by simply asking questions, something journalists used to do, was what Lochte and the others told officials actually happened.

They found no damage to the bathroom – the mirror and soap dispensers were still intact or had been replaced not by new equipment but filthy, old equipment complete with crusty old soap. The door was old and undamaged, not kicked in.

Through actual journalism, the USA Today team saw all the surveillance videos, and even though the bathroom door was in frame, there is no footage of the swimmers entering, exiting or kicking it. Unable to gain entry to the bathroom, they’d relieved themselves behind the building, then went back to their cab. That’s when it gets interesting.

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Documents exposing billionaire George Soros’ agenda have been public for more than a week, but that ranked lower than a cute seal, according to ABC’s Good Morning America.

Can’t blame them — the seal is a lot cuter than George Soros. Come to think of it, a tree stump is a lot cuter than George Soros.

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Bill McKibben wants the world to wage war against Climate Change, by giving governments full wartime powers to seize private property and coerce businesses into supporting the effort, and with strict government control of the economy.

Sky falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

If I had written a post anywhere near as outrageous as McKibben’s jingoistic demand for a war on climate, his demand for wholesale surrender of liberty and property rights to government, I would be called a fascist. But because McKibben is a green, he gets a free pass from mainstream media to demand the unthinkable.

Yeah, a lot of that going around.

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Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section is at it again. Saturday morning the site ran a headline in the section declaring, “Colin Powell: Former Secretary of State Confirms He Recommended Using Personal Email to Hillary Clinton.” The only problem is Powell made no such declaration and he denied Clinton’s claim.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Hey. Priorities.

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Well, everybody at the New Yorker knows he loves it, whether he actually said it or not.

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On CNN New Day Wednesday morning, Chris Cuomo brought up the video of Sylville Smith’s sister, calling for violence in the suburbs getting widespread attention, though the initial part of her message calling for nonviolence in their community, was. “That part of the bite was not widely used,” Cuomo said, conveniently leaving out that CNN was the one who left out the rest of the soundbite, initially.

Well, we’ll just gloss over that part.

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Martin Reynolds, the fellowship director, spoke to this me over the phone Wednesday afternoon. When asked whether white journalists should bother applying to the program, Reynolds pointed to the fact the grant is for journalists of color. Asked what “colors” specifically, Reynolds said racial and ethnic minorities.

I pointed out that I am Argentine and asked whether this would allow me to qualify for this opportunity. Reynolds then asked if I was a “white male” and I responded in the affirmative, but pointed out that I’m still an ethnic minority. Reynolds then said that people “understand” if they operate within a “community of color.” The fellowship director said that he doesn’t require a photo of the applicant to check their color because he trusts their “integrity.”

When asked if the program is discriminatory, Reynolds said “no.” He viewed the program as necessary to cover a disparity in journalism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in employment.

Just in case you were wondering why ‘journalism’ is so defective.

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In the land of NeverTrump, it turns out one American is more reviled than Donald Trump. This would be the Donald Trump voter.

Lincoln famously described government as of, by, and for the people. Even so, the people are now getting a hard lesson about what happens when they reject the advice of their betters and go with a nominee of their own choosing. What happens is an outpouring of condescension and contempt.

This contempt is most naked on the left. No surprise here, for two reasons. First, since at least Woodrow Wilson progressives have always preferred rule by a technocratic elite over democracy. Second, today’s Democratic Party routinely portrays its Republican Party rivals as an assortment of nasty ists (racists, sexists, nativists, etc.) making war on minorities, women, foreigners and innocent goatherds who somehow end up in Guantanamo.

Thus Mr. Trump confirms to many on the left what they have always told themselves about the GOP. A New York Times writer put it this way: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Still, the contempt for the great Republican unwashed does not emanate exclusively from liberals or Democrats. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s run for office, it is now ascendant in conservative and Republican quarters as well.

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Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit. Voice of the Crust … you can fill in the rest.

The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and “machine learning” systems.

Note the immediate ‘progressive’ cannonball into the Aggretation Fallacy: Somehow this is a problem ‘facing the United States’. Uh, no it isn’t — except in the minds of those who see every problem as a problem ‘for all of us’ (i.e. for government to solve).

Note the immediate ‘progressive’ assumption that ‘meaningful work and good wages’ are something that need to be ‘provided’ (i.e by government, because who else could do it?).

And, of course: government by ‘progressives’ — because (a) they’re smart enough to see the problem, as you are not, and (b) they’re smart enough to figure out a solution, as you are not (or at least their intentions are good, and that’s all that really counts).

The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families — through a universal basic income, or a greatly expanded earned-income tax credit, or a 1930s-style plan for public-works employment. Ranting about bad trade deals won’t begin to address the problem.

Another thing that the ‘political debate’ needs to ‘engage’ is who is going to pay for all this. ‘Progressives’ seem to assume that the money is just out there somewhere and will show up when it’s required.

They actually pay people to write this crap.

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Having watched Michelle walk up stairs, this doesn’t surprise me. She’s the last person I’d go to for nutrition advice.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

According to Buzzfeed News, citing a company insider, then-CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered Twitter employees to filter out abusive replies to the president during his May 2015 #AskPOTUS digital town hall. The company did so both by creating an algorithm to automatically filter out abuse and by manually removing certain tweets that slipped through.

Buzzfeed’s report is based on multiple inside sources, one of whom said that many senior employees were kept in the dark about the censorship in fear they would strongly object.

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Tucker Carlson, the 47-year-old editor in chief of The Daily Caller, is not gun-shy about expressing his opinion of today’s journalists: “They’re cowards, utterly conventional, trite and stupid,” he seethed to the Observer by phone earlier this month, adding “They go to Twitter to figure out what they’re supposed to believe.”

The pundit, who made his name as the conservative co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, also backs up his belief in his company’s recruiting practices. “I’ve never hired anyone who went to journalism school, and I never would. They’re boring rich kids with an overabundance of parental money,” said Carlson, whose father Richard, a veteran of print and television news, also served as ambassador to the Seychelles under President George H.W. Bush.

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Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

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Of course they did. After all, Trump is such an unusually bad person that they are justified in any trick they can think of, including flat lies.

When the Washington Post’s notoriously inconsistent fact checker Glenn Kessler feels he has to defend Donald Trump against a false claim, you know it must be a whopper. That was the case with the meme which arose last week that Trump, in words found at the New York Daily News, “booted a fussy baby from a rally Tuesday because the tot was wailing over the businessman’s speech.”

However, instead of giving several media outlets and the Hillary Clinton campaign the formal Four-Pinocchio “whopper” evaluation, Kessler merely gave Trump a “Geppetto checkmark” for telling the truth, and gave those who reported it and Team Hillary an unwarranted pass: “We can see why some reporters ran with this tale, based only on the videotape.”

Jim Rutenberg, proud Voice of the Crust, takes the mask off.

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

In other words, so-called journalistic objectivity is just a Clever Plastic Disguise that applies only when the ‘news’ doesn’t get too far beyond the Narrative.

It’s much dodgier for conventional news reporters to treat this year’s political debate as one between “normal” and “abnormal,” as the Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein put it recently.

In a sense, that’s just what reporters are doing. And it’s unavoidable. Because Mr. Trump is conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen.

In other words, it’s All Trump’s Fault for being such an outlier that it forces, forces ‘journalists’ to dump impartiality and support the Narrative. Yup. All Trump’s Fault.

For a proper fisking, go here.

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Which is very white of them.

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Actually, there are only two:

1. The sky is falling.
2. Give us money, lots of money, to fix it.

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Appearing on Tuesday’s New Day, liberal Daily Beast contributor and recurring CNN guest Dean Obeidallah went ballistic after a fellow guest and Donald Trump supporter recalled that Khizr Khan has a history of ties to the Clintons as the immigration expert was an employee of the law firm Hogan Lovells LLP, which not only has represented the Clinton Foundation but also worked on immigration cases involving the controversial EB-5 visa program.

After former South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer recalled Khan’s connections to the Clintons, the two got into a heated debate as Obeidallah incredulously accused the Trump supporter of “smearing” Khan by merely introducing his links to the Clintons into the political conversation.

Well, I can see where asserting a connection to the Clintons might be thought of as a ‘smear’ … if not true.

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So it’s not really about Lives, it’s about Money.

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My local newspaper, the Sonoma County Press-Democrat, is so clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton that I no longer take pleasure in my morning read. Trump’s acceptance speech, for example, was covered on the front page with two stories: on the left a straight, albeit somewhat judgmental, account of the speech, and on the right a “fact check” that disputed every point made by the GOP nominee. Clinton’s speech was covered with three front page stories, with headlines describing her nomination as “historic,” “inspiring” and “trailblazing.” A relatively mild fact-checking piece was relegated to the back pages.

This transparent bias is a national phenomenon, infecting both print and television media to such an extent that it has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they’ve lost the ability to assess events rationally.

And this is in the L.A. Times, a usually-reliable Voice of the Crust.

They’re not even pretending any more.