I don’t know about you – but these days, when a accusation of a “hate crime” gets massive, immediate coverage, I’ve started to assume it’s a hoax until proven otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong – hate crimes exist. But the more publicity the unproven allegations get, and the more lurid the charges against someone in a MAGA cap, the more likely it seems the whole story turns out to have all the substance and integrity or a Ryan Winkler presentation on Black History Month.

Jussie Who?:Three weeks ago, I had not heard of Jussie Smollett. I’ve never had occasion to watch Empire, and I doubt I ever will.

But when I heard the story of the “Hate Crime” that reached out and, per his story, caught him a few weeks ago, nothing, even to my rather cursory listening, seemed to add up.

Kyle Smith – not a cop, but rather a writer at National Review – noticed the same things, and has 27 questions for the “journalists” who presumed Smollett’s story – of “MAGA”-screaming rednecks who attacked him without really attacking him – was unassailably true.

8 . How likely do you think it is that attackers would shout, “This is MAGA country” in Chicago, a place that no one thinks is MAGA country?

There are 26 more – the sort of thing “journalists”, ostensibly being the curious sort, should have asked.

13. Don’t you think it strange that his attackers fled without much harming Smollett or robbing him?

14. Related to (13), did it not occur to you that the whole alleged attack looked a bit like the criminal equivalent of a press release, meant to send a message rather than accomplish anything?

15. If you were beaten up, would you somehow remember to pick up your Subway purchase afterward?

Goalposts Moved: Over the weekend, as Smollett’s story began to collapse, the narrative changed; Smollett’s actions weren’t themselves a publicity “hate crime” against deplorables; they were “starting a conversation”:

Don’t let anyone say this latest hate crime hoax was okay because it “started a conversation.”

This episode SHOULD start a conversation – about the outright bigotry of the media and those who hate Trump and his supporters so much they will do things like this.

— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) February 17, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I think Jussie Smollett, and especially all the #Resitance media sycophants who parroted the story because, if you hate the MAGAs, it’s just too good to fact-check, just made life a lot harder for people who actually do wind up on the wrong side of bigotry.

Other than deplorables, obviously.

From Twitter yesterday:

“Conservatives pounce on failed attempt to smear conservatives” are the best conservatives pounce stories.

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) February 17, 2019

I’m not sure about you, but it’s almost gotten too easy.

In the latest Bar Association magazine, there’s an article calling on lawyers to provide more free legal work to help society, especially people who have been neglected or underrepresented or oppressed. 
In the same magazine, there’s an article telling lawyers: “Misgendering a person – such as referring to someone as “sir” or “she” when they are not – is an act of gender violence.
So I should volunteer to help someone who will be offended by my help?  Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if I did nothing? 

Big Left these days reminds me of a cop who gives out contradictory orders, to assure the person they’re yelling at does something they can arrest them for.

For when exploiting cheap labor, physical abuse of partners and subordinates, emotional sadism, sexual harassment from entitled juvenilia to entitled imposition, racism (old and not so old), rape, moving government into back rooms out of sight of the hoi polloi, and control of government by the highest bidder is always wrong, except when it’s Democrats, because shut up.

To: Andrew Zimmern, Celebrity Chef
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Appreciation!

Chef,

I caught this on Twitter over the past weekend:

Although the government shutdown is ending, at @lucky_cricket_west_end we are planning to continue to serve all those with a Fed Gov ID throughout next week, Monday-Friday, 2-5pm. We realize that furloughed workers will continue to need food since they h… https://t.co/h6qga7mPUP pic.twitter.com/67fbA92RaC

— Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) January 27, 2019

Glad to see you’ll be giving “Free” food to people who missed two checks…

…well, no. Wait. They had two checks delayed before getting it all paid back, amid a national welter of corporate virtue signaling of financial support – extremely low-interest loans, offers to skip payments, and, well, free food.

I and a few million private sector workers would have loved some of that ‘compassion” when we were struggling.

Know what I heard from one bill collector when I was out of work back in 2003? “Get a job”.

Hold that thought, Chef.

That is all.

NYTimes  reporter tweets:

I'm a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I'd like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.

— Dan Levin (@globaldan) January 24, 2019

Gosh – what do you suppose his angle is going to be?

Last week, I was listening to NPR.

I know, I know. Worth with me, here.

I can’t find it online – I didn’t try all that hard, but then I suspect it’s not the only piece like this. that’s going to turn up if you look hard enough.

An earnest-sounding SEIU leader – y’know, a non-biased, politically-objective source, solemnly intoned:

“We don’t want to politicize the border and immigration issue . We just want policy to reflect the changing patterns of migration”

In other words: we want “ignore the national boundary so that people can migrate north to join our power base” to become the new normal.

Oddly, the NPR host said nothing about this.

Politifact long ago gave up any claim to being non-partisan, at least among people who pay attention.   Fact-checking Politi”fact” is itself a target-rich environment for fact-checkers and “progressive” dogma-untanglers.

This year, they were kind of sly about it – the “winner” was “the “online smear machine” that attempted to “take down Parkland students.”

They’re referring mostly to Alex Jones’ reprehensible claims that the Parkland massacre was a setup and that the kids are “crisis actors”, and the small but vocal social media crowd that echoed the claim.

Of course, this brings up a logical problem, and a condundrum

First the logical problem, as David Harsanyi points out in Federalist:  –

Although I know of numerous Twitter accounts that have accused gun-rights advocates of being “terrorists,” many of them featuring blue checkmarks, I can’t recall a single conservative in Congress, anyone in the National Rifle Association, or any other mainstream right-wing group accusing the Parkland kids of being “crisis actors.” I do recall a single article on RedState questioning David Hogg’s actions the day of the mass shooting, which was quickly corrected and apologized for.

Yet PolitiFact spends much of its time detailing the Parkland kids’ cause by highlighting their political opponents who have nothing to do with the smear, implicitly linking them to the “Lie of the Year.” The piece is framed in a way that intimates that anyone contesting the Parkland kids’ political cause is now in league with the online mob – and Russian bots!

By the way, even if we allow that kids who experience this tragedy should dictate the contours of a policy debate, it is worth noting that there are “Parkland kids” who hold diverging opinions regarding the Second Amendment and arming teachers. They are largely ignored by the media.

It’s not the kids’ fault that they find themselves the focus of ugliness on social media. It’s the fault of those who attack them and the adults who exploit them for political causes. Young people should be given some leeway in their activism, even if they say ridiculous things—and David Hogg and other leaders of the March for Our Lives movement often say things that aren’t even in the proximity of the truth. There is no need for ad hominemattacks. But the “Parkland kids” were also given a massive stage on which to offer their uncontested emotionalism to drive the debate. Kids or not, Americans have every right to challenge their contentions.

And Politifact using Jones as the figurehead of this criticism is a strawman that tries to paint all criticism of Hogg and company as the same breed of crazy.   And yet Hogg and the rest of the kids that’ve been propped up with liberal plutocrat money deserve criticism; they are little petty tyrants in the making, and they are serial liars to boot.

Now the conundrum; without Politifact to tell people who Alex Jones was and what he was claiming, would anyone outside the alt-“right” fever swamp have ever heard of him?

The “online smear machine” is an amorphous and ugly entity that isn’t confined to any ideology and spares virtually no one in the public eye. But any way you look at it, imbuing it with an importance it doesn’t deserve isn’t doing public discourse any favors. Even if it makes conservatives look bad.

And finally – given that almost nobody in this country hears about Alex Jones except when the media expresses its high dudgeon over him, are his antics really “the biggest lie” of the year?  Or even the biggest lie about the Parkland massacre?

It’s debatable, in fact, that it was even the most significant lie disseminated about the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High. The sheriff of Broward County, after all, was featured at the widely covered CNN anti-gun rally where he misled the nation about the failures, cowardice, and incompetence that allowed the shooting to occur. And the sheriff of Broward County isn’t some random Twitter troll.

Yet.

Further evidence that the mainstream media needs to be distrusted but verified – and then, especially on hot-button topics like this, almost invariably distrusted some more.

I’ve observed in the past that there’s nothing Big Left hates more than one of “their” constituents – women, minorities (other than Asians), gays and the like – leaving the proverbial Progressive Plantation. 

It’s not uncommon;  religious fundamentalists frequently hate apostates worse than infidels (see also – the danger involved in being a “Moderate” Muslim).  

Of course, some of the apostates are noticing it, too.

There’s a reason for those, of course; it’s absolutely true. 

Many years ago, I went out on a date with a woman who was a pretty “out” DFLer.  Public employee union member, second generation DFL activist (at least), and predictably emotion-driven in her approach to all things political.

We went out 3-4 times – “dates” that almost always involved being out with quite a number of her friends, and an amazing paucity of one on one conversation.

Nonetheless, when “fish or cut bait” time came along, she said “I’m just not sure I can trust you to be kind”.

Bear in mind, nothing about me or my senses and practice of kindness, charity or anything of the sort had ever come up.  But my conservatism had.  Literally, the only thing she knew about me was the stereotypes she had of conservatives.

It was, if unwittingly, one of the nastiest things anyone’s ever said to me.

I thought about that when reading this New York Magazine piece about women who are abandoning relationships and marriages in a flurry of “Lifetime Network”-caliber pique and huff…

…Because Trump.

David Thompson fisks one of the interview subjects to a fine sheen – go and read it – but that was by no means all:

[the writer] goes on to share other tales of bedlamite sorrow. A woman named Samantha complains that her husband of 25 years, a fellow lefty, has “much less rage” than she does, specifically about “white privileged men,” and doesn’t wish to spend every evening equally infuriated by the existence of people whose politics differ somewhat. “Anger,” says Samantha, is her “de facto mode.” Though she’s trying to “get rid of it through therapy.”

A Brooklynite named Betsy boasts that “cultural change is like a steamroller. It flattens distinctions, and some people will get hurt,” by which she means men falsely and maliciously accused of rape, before adding, “and I’m okay with that.” Betsy and her husband are currently in counselling.

Another lady named Sarah tells us that her marriage became unsustainable “after the 2016 election, when I ramped up my political activism.” Sarah’s husband is described as “completely aligned” politically, a feminist, even, albeit one who doesn’t care to spend every waking hour raging about politics. “Talking about the Trump election,” says Sarah, “makes me more emotional than the end of my marriage.” And presumably, more emotional than the thought of her children losing the stability and reassurance of a family structure. But hey, priorities.

It’s not a new, original observation to say that progressivism is to the left what faith is to the cultural right.  Far from it.

But some parts of “progressivism” are becoming downright cult-like.

SIDE NOTE to Minnesota Republicans fussing about “Sharia Law”:   Progressivism will destroy this nation long, long before anything else will.

British “socialist dominatrix” claims to turn “white, right wing” men into socialists.

For many of her clientele, who are almost exclusively white right-wing men because she finds herself unable “to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man,”

Of course they are, and of course she does.

that fetish is serving a powerful woman. Maybury derives her pleasure comes from forcing those men to see the contradiction between their love of powerful women and their support for political parties that actively work to limit women’s rights and empowerment. In her book, Dining with Humpty Dumpty, she detailed conversations with a man she said exhibited the “disgusting contradiction” of claiming to be both “a ‘female supremacist’ and a Tory.’”

A cursory Google search of Ms. Maybury shows no indication that she’s actually successfully “converted” anyone, but that she is the sort of D-list pseudo-academic (but increasingly, academic) “celebrity” that does pop up on NPR “arts and culture” programming often enough to get talked about…

…and this post would indicate it worked.

Some of my “progressive” friends over the weekend were chortling over this one, naturally, the way they usually do over this sort of pseudo-story.

My first reaction:  it says more about the nature of socialist men than about “right wing white” guys; they make Pajama Boy look like Chuck Norris.

The second?   This is such a complement to Berg’s Seventh Law that I am inaugurating a new one:  The Maybury Corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.  To wit:  When a “progressive” makes a mocking or defamatory pronoucement about the deviance, depravity, deceit, dissipation or lack of a conservative’s sexuality, it is invariably a combination of their own insecurities and what they desperately want to believe about those who believe differently than them.

Progs want to believe that all it takes to convert a conservative male into a socialist…er, being is a little highly-stylized pseudo-sex from a modern pseudo-academic phrenologist.

And perception is reality, among the “evidence-based” set.

But it’s called Berg’s Law for a reason.

Booming foreign-born populations, highly dependent on big government, lead to electoral sweeps.

The biggest problem with the huge numbers of Somali immigrants isn’t that they’re Muslim, or the possibility that less than a percent of Minnesota’s population might “impose Sharia law”.  ‘

It’s that they support “progressivism” today.  And “progressivism” is the one ideology that can destroy America.

“Anti”-Fa thugs terrorize Tucker Carlson’s family.

And then journalistic Dash OK, “journalistic” Dash thugs justify it:

The reason Big Left talks so much about the “wave of right ing terror” that’s sure to be coming any day now for the past twenty years is that they desperately need something to actually fit their narrative; raw projection alone only carries you so far outside the Democrat base…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Fox News reports that the ‘caravan’ migrants are boarding busses chartered by the local government in Mexico.  They don’t want the migrants in their area so they’re paying for busses to ship the migrants North, passing the buck to America.

Can’t blame them.  Can we hire busses to ship them to Canada?

Nice idea – but the Canadians actually enforce their borders and immigration rules.

A friend of the blog writes:

Looking at the video footage of the “Caravan” I was reminded of the Carter tenure when the Mariel Boatlift happened. Then as now a compliant MSM was thrilled at the prospect of capturing all the touching, even heart-wrenching, human interest stories of photogenic brown-skinned people being pulled from the drink while the likes of Dan Rather or David Brinkley uttered cliched platitudes in the voiceover.It was campaign gold for the Democrats who could burnish their bona fides with the non-white voting block they wished to keep on the plantation.

The Marielitos were the solution to a few problems for Castro too. In the process Castro dumped 127,000 of his citizens;  all his mentally ill, incorrigible criminals, homosexuals, anti-socialists, and political disidents onto the US. He was also able to smuggle, according to one congressional hearing source nearly 7,000 intelligence agents and drug running logistics experts into the US for long term intelligence gathering, while locking up and exploiting the burgeoning drug market.  At least 300 of the spies were rolled up in the 1st couple years which lead to “The Year of the Spy”. The NYT addresses the Marielito spies in this article(paywall):

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/us/cuban-ties-boatlift-to-drug-trade.html
here’s a pull quote:
“The Cuban Government used the 1980 Mariel boatlift to send as many as 7,000 spies to the United States, some of whom were ordered to help drug smugglers ”flood” this country with illegal narcotics, one such spy said today.
The Cuban agent, Mario Estevez Gonzalez, testifying at a United States Senate hearing here, said some of the spies travel freely in small boats between their Communist homeland and the United States. Mr. Estevez, who has been convicted of drug smuggling, said some agents were in this country for propaganda purposes and others were to create ”chaos” in the event of war.”
The Miami Herald from the same date had this story;
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/drugs/testimony.htm
this pull quote underscores the issue
“The U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Thomas Boyatt, was more blunt.
“I’m telling you that it happened,” he insisted during an interview before his testimony. “The Cuban government, as a matter of policy, for a long period of time, until exposed, was involved in drug smuggling.
“It was a [Cuban intelligence] operation with the blessing of Fidel,” he said. “

Leftists suffer from severely retarded imaginations (just look at Hollywood’s output for the last 10 years) but when they hit on something that seems to work they do it over and over. The Mariel Boatlift worked and would have been even more successful had Jimmy Carter not lost his re-election bid. Reagan wasn’t having any.

There is no reason to believe that the current Caravan is not another form of the Mariel Boatlift, already another Caravan has formed in El Salvador,  soon there will be another. The Socialists(Communists)and Castro proteges, Maduro, Castro and Ortega, all recognize that the Mariel Boatlift was a hugely successful intelligence operation and they profited enormously from the spy networks established in the 80s by Castro that survived Reagan’s spy hunt.

This Caravan solves a problem that the Tyrannical Troika has been struggling with; how to get identities and access to the US for their agents. The Caravan made up seemingly of compasinos with little or no documentation show up “seeking asylum” and the first thing the US govt does is generate identity paperwork for them, those who survive the asylum vetting process are embraced without further suspicion and best of all in 5 or 7 years when they become active they’ll have USA passports and identities. That’ll all work out well.

Now am I just a cynical bastard for thinking that 300-400 of these Caravanistas are actually intelligence agents from Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador? Time will tell.

Don Lemon pulls off a rhetorical triple Salchow:

It took me a couple of reads to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

I’ve become convinced that the greatest ever in rotation of Berg’s 7th law has been this past two decades’ drum beat of promises that there is “an avalanche of right wing terrorism” just around the corner.

Any day now.

Honest.

Actor James Cromwell predicts – I would say it’s more like “calls for” – “revolution” if the Republicans win the midterms:

Speaking to Variety at the event, he warned of the turn that he sees America taking and cautioned there will be “blood in the streets” if Republicans remain in control.

“This is nascent fascism. We always had a turnkey, totalitarian state — all we needed was an excuse, and all the institutions were in place to turn this into pure fascism,” Cromwell said. “If we don’t stop [President Trump] now, then we will have a revolution for real. Then there will be blood in the streets.”

The star, who previously played George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s “W,” echoed these sentiments during his acceptance speech, where he warned that he believes the country is headed toward the possibility of a violent revolution.

“We’re living in very curious times, and something is coming up which is desperately important to this country and to this planet, and that is an election, in which hopefully in some measure we are going to take back our democracy,” he said. “We will have a government that represents us and not the donor class. We will cut through the corruption, [and] we won’t have to do what comes next, which is either a non-violent revolution or a violent one, because this has got to end.”

I don’t think members of the “elite” Realize how many Americans are ready to take him up on that. I don’t think it’s going to go nearly as well as they – Cromwell – think it will.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting in a cafe, doing his taxes on his laptop.   Avery LIBRELLE walks in, and notices BERG before he can look away. 

LIBRELLE:   Merg!

BERG:   Oh…hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE.   Words have meanings! Less stable followers will take those words and use them to justify violence!

BERG: So you people call yourself “the Resistance” – appropriating the name of a movement that violently assassinated members of an occupying military, blew up their trains and trucks, sank their ships, gunned them down and hand-grenaded them in cafes and on public transit, set bombs in their offices and factories, threw molotov cocktails into their trucks, and murdered those they saw as “collaborators” to ensure nobody would collaborate.

LIBRELLE: No, no no, Merg. YOUR side’s words have meanings. OURS don’t.

And SCENE

Followers of the party that has undercut Israel for 40 years, many of whom cuddle up to Louis Farrakhan, and where Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar are leading emergent figures…

…says Donald Trump’s rhetoric promoted an anti-semitic attack.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You know the pipe bombs are fake when celebrities and politicians start MeToo-ing them.

Obama, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros – sure, they are Conservative hobgoblins.  It’s believable some Conservative might send them bombs.  But Robert DeNiro?  He gets a bomb?  And now New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants in on the action (NYPD denies he got one).

Receiving a fake pipe bomb is the latest status symbol.  How come I didn’t get a bomb?  Did you get a bomb?

“Getting a bomb” is the new “once dated Taylor Swift”.

Andrew McCarthy  on the media’s treatment of the “pipe bomb” story:

There is plenty of media commentary at the moment about incivility, in the form of incendiary rhetoric and actions. This is entirely appropriate. But I’m at a loss to understand how the climate is improved by spicing up reports with thinly veiled suggestions that President Trump may have triggered a series of potentially murderous attacks on political opponents. When Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson opened fire on the Republicans he targeted and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise, I don’t recall much Times speculation about whether he could have been set him off by Democrats urging their supporters to get aggressive — “get in their face”; “if they bring a knife, we bring a gun” — when dealing with political adversaries.

Every one of these episodes is like a mini Reichstag fire, a Gliwice incident;  every Democrat from Maxine Waters to Kathy Griffin to the New York Times can openly fantasize about killing the President and attacking Republicans – but let Trump talk smack about reporters and suddenly we’re on civility patrol.

As we often observe after terrorist attacks, everyone needs to take a deep breath until facts begin to emerge. The investigators are doing their jobs. Chances are we will know soon enough who is actually responsible for the pipe bombs. Then we probably won’t need speculation about motive and incitement . . . though there will be no shortage of it, anyway.

As Andrew McCarthy points out, there  is no evidence yet as to who did it – which doesn’t excuse the media’s double standard in covering the story.  At any rate, my speculation is of no more (or less) value than what you’re seeing on the news right now.

So I’ll speculate:

• – The bombs were amateur productions: https://twitchy.com/…/former-bomb-disposal-officer-weighs-…/
• – They targeted obvious Democrat figures – the Clintons, CNN, Obama, and George Soros – but only in a way that was practically guaranteed to get discovered long before they reached their ostensible targets (at least some were apparently packed in padded envelopes).
• – They came out two weeks before the election.

Seeing that, what would YOU think?

An Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren bio for, apparently, kids:

The lesson?  That any girl born into immense wealth, prestige and class privilege can still find a way to grow up to be an identity pimp.

… that thousands of people are theatrically attempting to bum rush the borders to get here to the country he’s, er, destroying.

Perhaps they thought they were marching to Venezuela?

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema – who’s running against Martha McSally to replace Jeff Flake – had this to say about women who choose to stay at home with the kids:

“These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life,” she told Scottsdale nightlife magazine 944. “That’s bullshit. I mean, what the f*** are we really talking about here?”

She later claimed she was joking.

Which makes me wonder – given last week’s claim by “suspended” MNDFL staffer William Davis that his call for Republicans to be “guillotined” after the election was “an inside joke” – what is with that Democrat sense of humor?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I don’t keep up on new memes – not even certain how to pronounce the word – and my experience with role-playing games dates back to Gary Gygax and graph paper.  So I was surprised to learn the New York Times says it’s totally unfair that somebody on the Right stole the phrase Non-Player Character (NPC) to describe Liberals who mindlessly follow The Narrative.  Apparently, that’s dehumanizing and mean and Twitter was correct to engage in viewpoint discrimination by restricting the free speech of people who use that meme.

Also, the situation is completely different from when Liberals describe people on the Right as “Deplorable,” or “bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles,” or “literally Hitler,” or going back to the early days of Rush Limbaugh, as “mind-numbed robots.” Those descriptions were acceptable because they were accurate.  NPC is not acceptable because it’s intentionally misleading election-related content.  Not all Liberals are alike.  Every Liberal is as unique as a snowflake, individually expressing the exact same sentiments at the exact same time using the exact same words as every other unique individual snowflake who all vote exactly the same way and you should, too.

The funniest part of the article is Twitter claiming negative advertising hyperbole affects the election so they must ban those accounts to protect the integrity of the electoral process.  If that were so, every ad on television should be banned, they’re all variations on the same theme of “So-and-so will do bad things if elected” and frankly, Liberals are the worst offenders.

Joe Doakes

I’m taking way too much pleasure in this.