Literal

Exasperated conservatives sometimes refer to the media as “the enemy”.

It’s understandable – the media at the editorial and national level is in general a PR firm for Big Left – and accurate in terms of long-term effect.

But not since Walter Duranty has it been quite this literally true.

Five Israeli families are suing the AP and Reuters for their “journalists” obvious collusion with Hamas on October 7:

The lawsuit filed by the victims’ parents last week alleges that five photojournalists, Hassan Abdel Fattah Eslaiah, Hatem Ali, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, Ashraf Amra, and Ali Mahmoud who filed photographs in real time of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hamas terrorists were in fact a component of the attacks themselves, and were not conducting legitimate journalistic work.

The journalists were either aware ahead of time that a mass invasion and terror attack was about to be staged by Hamas or, being present from the very outset of the attacks, were culpable for doing nothing to stop the assault, including failing to warn the Israeli authorities, the suit asserts.

While the free market is having its real final say with Big ProgressiveMedia, a little economic justice would be welcome. FIngers crossed.

The Real Victims

SCENE: Mitch BERG is leaving a guitar shop on Selby Avenue after dropping off an instrument for some repairs, when MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, steps out of a chi-chi coffee shop.

SILBERMAN: Merg.

BERG: Oh, hey, MyLyssa…

SILBERMAN: Terrible, what’s going on in Gaza.

BERG: Yep. 1,300 Israelis massacred, thousands of Gazan human shields dead, hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed…

SILBERMAN: Dozens of journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli forces. It’s terribly dangerous for journalists.

BERG: er, yeah. I suppose that’s a problem too. But, as in World War II, if you’re where the action is, there are dangers.

SILBERMAN: World War II killed dozens of journalists.

BERG: Right. And between 30 and 50 million other combatants and civilians.

SILBERMAN: And dozens of journalists.

BERG: And during the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which killed thousands, especially black and immigrant New Yorkers…

SILBERMAN: Rioters besieged the New York Times building and killed several journalists.

BERG: When the Titanic sank, it was a tragedy that…

SILBERMAN: …two journalists died.

BERG: But it’s not like they were singled out. I mean, they were on a ship…

SILBERMAN: Aren’t you listening? Journalists died.

BERG: Right. So – Rwanda…

SILBERMAN: Journalists were murdered!

BERG: Hmmm. And during the Minneapolis riots, the biggest outrage was…

SILBERMAN: Journalists getting pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets. And some government officials didn’t respond to our requests for interviews.

BERG: And the destruction of East Lake Street and University Avenue, the Third Precinct, and much of civil order…

SILBERMAN: (Yawns broadly). Sorry. I really have to get to the Society of Professional Journalists meeting

BERG: No doubt.

(And SCENE).

I Read Deena Winter In The “Minnesota Reformer” So You Don’t Have To

Earlier this week, the Minnesota Reformer – a news outlet financed by “progressive” plutocrats iwth deep pockets – did its review of AlphaNews’s “Minneapolis Has Fallen”.

The claims – well, I’ll let the tweet do the talking for the piece, entitled “I Watched Minneapolis Has Fallen So You Don’t Have To”.

Let’s go briefly through Winter’s claims.

Restraint

The biggest hit Winter has against Collin is that, according to her, the movie’s revelation that Chief Arredondo and his training officer lied about whether “Maximal Restraint Technique” was part of the MPD’s training and policy. Collin showed cops, and Chauvin’s mother, opening the manual to the exact section, and showed multiple current and former MPD officers saying they’d been trained in the technique. The movie also said the jurors were not allowed to see the body cam footage that showed that Chauvin did the technique correctly – with his knee on the shoulder blade, rather than on George Floyd’s neck.

Winter claims that yes, the jury saw both.

OK – so if that’s true, and the jurors saw the same training that the officers had, then could someone explain to me why Chief Arredondo still lied about it?

Neither reporter has clarified that for me, so someone else has to.

UPDATE: Danger Close

And as I wrote this in a hurry, I forgot this. But as “Bigman” noted in the comments – why the fact that Cahill failed to sequester the jury – who came to and from a courthouse that was being fortified like the Green Zone in Baghdad, and who were being told more or less directly that if they reached the “wrong verdict” that they were in huge trouble – not being discussed?

I’ll ask the question because Winter didn’t think she had to.

White Riot

Winter goes on to discuss the parts of the film dealing with the riot, most specifically the evacuation of the Third Precinct (on which. apropos nothing much, I scooped the entire Twin Cities media), I’m trying to figure out what Winter’s point is.

I’ll dispense with the fact that Winter…lacks a certain amount of empathy, or at least insight outside her own apparently narrow experience (emphasis added):

Collin also spends considerable time questioning why the MPD and local and state officials were slow to take action as protests devolved into riots and arson that destroyed hundreds of buildings across the metro.

Retired MPD officer Jason Reimer tells Collin what bothered him the most is “they let people throw rocks and bricks and firebombs and we’re supposed to just put on a helmet and take that.”

Well, helmets, but likely also bulletproof vests and eye-irritant spray, handcuffs, Tasers and semi-automatic pistols.

Bulletproof vests don’t keep you from burning to death. Spray and tasers are useful to get control one on one, not against a mob.

And I’ll let Deena Winter’s idea of shooting into a crowd of rioters hang out there, because I sure didn’t want to have to do it for her.

Winter cites some fairly wrenching scenes in the movie (that reflect what I reported in May of 2020), to which I’ll add some emphasis:

“We were in the middle of a war zone,” Herron said. “We were ordered not to do anything.”

She said the fire department wasn’t responding to calls, and officers were “wandering around aimlessly, waiting to be told what not to do next.”

They weren’t doing anything to control the riot,” she said. “They wouldn’t let us do our jobs.”

All true – but keep the emphasis in mind – the “they” that left them wandering around were the city and MPD leadership. We’ll come back to them.

Winter adds:

The city and state’s failed response and inability to quell the violence and arson are well documented, but it’s inaccurate to claim police were standing down. 

They went on joyrides, fired rubber bullets at protesters (see Jaleel Stallings); an officer, who went on to run an actual banana stand, was caught on video by a journalist macing protesters for no discernible reason; lots of cops in riot gear teargassed crowds

They shot protestors like Soren Stevenson with a rubber bullet and blinded him in one eye. They maced a journalist from Vice News in the face. They fired rubber bullets at journalists, including Reformer reporter Max Nesterak and Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix.

Side note: anyone but me notice how journalists only get really irate about injustice and official overreach when it’s other members of the Journo Club who are affected? Lake Street – and a fair chunk of the Midway, my neighborhood – got burned. The Minneapolis Police Department was, and remains, gutted. Crime soared, and is still double what it was as recently as 2018 – enh. But journalists got attacked ZOMG!

Not that Winter’s article tells you, but the main contention of the cops in the movie was that the city and the. MPD leadership – the “they” in the emphasized text in the first round of quotes, above:

  • Had no plan to deal with the riot
  • More specifically, abandoned the Third Precinct (apparently to “give the rioters ‘space to destroy'”), without having the foggiest idea about what the officers marooned there were supposed to do.

So when Winter snarks:

To the people on the other end of a rubber bullet or tear gas or mace, the police response sure didn’t feel like “standing down.” 

Stop me if I”m wrong, but everything she cites supports the cops contention. Some cops, operating in a complete vacuum, followed the normal human inclination to fucking hit back.

Either way, there was no plan. They were left danging in the breeze.

Winter doesn’t write about that, so I have to.

Who’s The Boss?

Winter goes on (and I’ll add emphasis):

[retired MPD cop Jason] Reimer says the weak response was all a deliberate attempt by politicians to use Floyd’s police killing to their advantage.

“The elections were coming up,” he said. “They were gonna use this incident for a political narrative, and they did.” 

Let’s hope Reimer was a better cop than he is a political analyst: The riots were a political disaster for the mayor, the governor and the entire DFL establishment. DFL political operatives blamed the riots and the defund/abolish police movement for key suburban losses that prevented a 2020 DFL trifecta. 

Although both Frey and Walz won reelection, they did so in part by hitching themselves to police during their reelection campaigns and would soon be accused by partisans on the left of being too cozy with cops.

I’m tempted to get cute and “hope that WInter is a better political analyst than Jason Reimer” – because it’d be more accurate to say the riots were a disaster for one city political establishment; the one where Jacob Frey and Andrea Jenkins and Lisa Bender were the “middle” and Alondra Cano was the loony left.

And for them, the riots were a disaster. For the new establishment, the one that gained huge ground in the ’22 elections and is poised to take the city over, the one led by the Democrat Socialists of America, against which Frey and Jenkins barely survived, and Bender and Cano retired lest they be seen as “too conservative” (literally the language the DSA droogs use to refer to Jacob F*cking Frey and Andrea Jenkins – the riots, and the aftermath (including the far far far left’s well-funded and well-organized response to whatever backlash there was in the ’20 elections) were a prime organizing opportunity.

But I won’t call Winter a myopic political analyst. Someone else will have to.

A Bonus I’ll Answer So You Don’t Need To

“Minneapolis Has Fallen” refers to quite a number of former MPD cops. Winter reminds us that a number of them are living on disability pensions and workmens comp settlements.

Someone needs to explain why that’s relevant (as opposed to, frankly, kinda pointlessly bitchy) since Winter will no doubt say she doesn’t have to.

Tea Leaves

Every DFL politician’s social media feed is raving about this puff piece from HuffPo which christens Tina Smith “the Velvet Hammer”.

The Velvet Hammer?

I can think of lots of adjectives to add to Smith’s hamfistedness. Velvet ain’t one of them.

And what usually happens after you see DFLers posting “attagirls” over inexplicable media. puff pieces?

Some dirt comes out on them. .

For example – during the session, the DFL noise machine broke out into a round of praise for Rep. Finke. It went from zero to 60 in three seconds, as if the Representative had just pulled someone from a burning building Clearly something had happened.

That something was Finke had charged across the House floor at another representative over retweeting a trans-skeptic account.

So am I too cynical in asking “what dirt is coming out about Smith?”

One Reason I Love Elon Musk

He called out America’s de facto Ministry of Information for what it is:

Big Media is rallying around their own – as they always do:

“Could undermine confidence”

NPR hosts actively pine for Marxism. They plot, in the open on the air, for ways to censor dissident media, not to mention using media to direct politics in their desired direction.

Anyone who sees the need for an impartial media that holds all government accountable should feel no confidence in NPR – Big Left’s PR shop.

That’d be a good start.

UPDATE : By the way – NPR’s “Fact check” of Twitter sniffs that the network only gets around 1% of its budget from government.

It’s technically true.

But the figure doesn’t count:

  • Subsidies and other grants from many other levels of government that are turned into program subscription fees that go…to NPR.
  • Perigovernmental and pseudogovernmental bodies – the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and various foundations, whose goals are in lock step with big government.

With that swag honestly counted, the total is by some counts well into the 30-40% range.

Qualifies as state media in my book.

All Things Dispensed With

I worked in radio long enough that I make a point of never revelling in the job misfortunes of others.

So yesterday’s news – 10% staff layoffs at National Public Radio – don’t provoke a happy jig. I wish em all luck, even the most useless mid-level bureaucrat among ’em.

But…has the organization learned the right lessons?

(Emphasis added):

When asked about his priorities, Lansing invoked what he has called the network’s “North Star” since his arrival in the fall of 2019: a push to ensure the network has a bigger and broader audience base, rooted in younger and more diverse listeners, readers and consumers. The emphasis, he says, must be on drawing in “the future audience to make NPR sustainable for the next 50 years.”

“Younger”? Well, over the past decade, the network has sure jammed down more than its share of breezy mediocrities (“It’s Been a Minute”, “The Moth Radio Hour”) – not sure if yesterday’s news is a verdict on that.

As to “more diverse” – they’ve tripled down on antagonizing half their audience. Even their “game shows” carry the message; the once excellent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, which used to include the late PJ O’Rourke as a regular panelist, has become as lively and politically unpredictable as “Late Night with Steven Colbert“.

But you remember above, when I said I didn’t take joy in others misfortunes?

Well, I’m going to ask forgiveness for this, since I’m going to make an exception. Emphasis added:

The layoffs are in keeping with an increasingly grim landscape for media companies over recent months. Vox Media cut jobs by 7%; Gannett and Spotify by 6%. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, eliminated its Sunday magazine and a handful of other jobs. After becoming part of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN cut hundreds of jobs and killed off its brand-new streaming service, CNN+.

Maybe it’s not “joy”. Maybe more “I told you so”.

Except Vox. That’s pure childlike joy.

Nothing To See Here

Hunter Biden paid $50K a month to rent a house he claimed he owned:

Hunter Biden claimed he paid $49,910 a month to live at President Joe Biden’s Delaware residence where classified documents were discovered, a document shows.

The file, labeled “background screening test,” shows Hunter Biden lived in the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence between March 2017 and February 2018. Hunter Biden also claimed to “own” the property, according to the document.

The document was originally discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, according to the Washington Examiner, and was reshared on Twitter by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.

Of course it’s money laundering. It won’t be confirmed until long after Biden has left office, but STFU. This is a payment to the Big Guy.

My only question: how will Big Leftymedia limber up for the logical and factual gymnastics they need to do to bury this?

Root Causes

“It’s Been a Minute” (henceforth IBaM) s one of the current plague of podcasts repackaged as radio shows that plagues both public and commercial broadcasting. As we discussed yesterday, some are better than others – some are OK radio, some are utterly dreadful as radio.

IBaM is pretty clearly trying to sell infotainment coverage smothered in public broadcasting convention, but to a black audience. It is, by public radio standards, breezy, sometimes to the point of sounding just a little contrived. But radio standards, it’s not the worst podcast on the air.

But this past weekend’s episode – about the wave of social media misogyny aimed at rapper “Megan Thee Stallion”, after she was shot in the foot by her…uh, paramour, rapper Tory Lanez. It features a “senior producer” from, guess what, another NPR podcast – Gabby Bulgarelli from a podcast called “Louder than a Riot”, and you’re on your own with that one.

Dog Bites Man. There’s an old newsroom bromide, passed down through Journalism 101 classes throughout the past 100-odd years. “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news”. If something is the norm, the expected, the utterly mundane? If you’re not the man being bit, it’s not realy news.

Anyway – I listened to this epi of IBaM, so you don’t have to. But if you’re curious – smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Here’s the part I wanted to focus on. It’s around 6:00 into the segment:

BRITNEY LEWIS (HOST): The coverage of this trial feels somewhat muted compared to the coverage of another trail that gained a lot of public attention this year, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Why do you think that this case feels so different?

BULGARELLI: One, nobody cares about black people. Two, it’s close to the holidays. Three, because it’s a closed court…in some ways they feel similar. A lot of the arguing (sic) against Megan feels similar to how people rallied against Amber in support of Johnny Depp…

LEWIS: Mmm Hmmm

BULGARELLI: …the way Megan has been made out to be a liar – I don’t think anyone believes Megan to be a victim, so they don’t care…

I can’t comment on the merits of Bulgarelli’s argument, presuming there are any.

But she’s ignoring two elephants in the room:

  • Rappers shooting rappers is, regrettably and tragically, dog bites man. No, seriously – the list is long, and spans genres, coasts, even nations. It’s been a generation, and we still haven’t a conclusive idea who killed Tupac and Biggie. Ms. Thee Stallion was shot in the foot during a domestic squabble. It’s senseless, and stupid – but Ms. Thee Stallion survived, and will no doubt see her profile increase as a result. Oh, yeah – violent misogyny in the world of hip-hop doesn’t even rise to the level of dog-bites-man; it’s more like “Dog Licks Dog” . It’s ugly, and awful, and it’s the norm, to the point that pushing back against it is, in fact, the news in the show-biz press.
  • On the other hand, what – besides skin color – distinguishes the Depp/Heard trial from the Lanez/Thee Stallion dust-up? A woman’s claims of victimhood have been torpedoed by overwhelming, sworn evidence that she was in fact an emotional and violent abuser – something mainstream narrative denies exists. Millions of men who’ve suffered, either in silence or in the face of open derision from cops, social service professionals and society at large saw at least some vindication, even if only vicarious. The dominant narrative – “the power differential means only men can commit abuse” – was stomped flat, opening the door for millions of men to perhaps, one day, be taken seriously.

The inconvenient truth for identity-thrashers like Bulgarelli is the Lanez/Thee Stallion is “Dog Bites Man”; Heard/Depp is “Man puts mayo and a slice of tomato on a dog and takes a big chomp”, trashing a different bit of identitarian dogma outside Bulgarelli’s career specialty.

Think anyone at NPR will cover that angle?

Just The News!

The “MN Reformer” is yet another effort to start a news organization by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – because after the Minnesota Monitor, the Minnesota Independent and MNPost, certainly the fourth time’s the charm.

They’ve actually done some decent reporting over the last year.

Emphasis on “in the last year” – when there wasn’t an election on the way.

But there is.

The Reformer ran an op-ed by Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn calling for the state medical authorities to revoke Dr. Scott Jensen’s medical license. Jensen is, by the way, the GOP candidate for Governor. He’s also been an out-front skeptic of our state’s hamfisted, tyrannical public health response.

Neither the op-ed, the Reformer’s bio-blurb about Dr. Lichtsinn, nor any of the Reformer’s social media traffic makes any mention of any political bent that she might have.

Anecdotally – and I’m the one with the anecdote, here – Dr. Lichtsinn has been pretty much the polar opposite of Jensen; on social media, she was a positively strident proponent of lockdowns, mandates of every kind, and draconian enforcement.

And the reason for that is, she’s every bit as much a Democrat activist with portfolio as she is a doctor:

It’d be fair to say that, when not playing nice and empirical in op-eds intended to be marketed to the unconvinced center, she’s a “groaningly strident” progressive

Apparently the Reformer didn’t think the reader needed to know that.

Which is why the Reformer – unlike the MN Monitor and the MN Independent before it – bothered with all that “decent reporting” last year; to put up a veneer of legitimacy around what was intended to be yet another DFL PR operation during the 2022 campaign season.

Dysfunctional

One of the more controversial stances I’ve taken on this blog is “MInnesota Public Radio News sucks less than most local news organizations”.

It’s not an unblemished statement, of course. With some of their staffers, their eliminationist leftism slips out (or comes gushing out in a tsunami of foul, scabrous rotting bile). And you don’t have to scratch the surface too hard to find MPR doing its best to uphold Big Left’s narrative.

So yes – they suck less. It’s a low bar, and they barely get over it, but there you have it.

But the product has been slipping in recent years. MPR’s newsroom has been shrinking – by a little over half in the past 5-6 years. Their on-air programming has gotten more and more perfunctory; ; less local production, (except for their local talk shows, which don’t take nearly as much overhead and effort as doing news – especially given how over-staffed as MPR historically has tended to be).

All is not well.

Jay Boller at Racket has a long, well-reported and, I need to add, utterly stereotype-affirming report on the recent decline of MPR News.

Long story short: As executive salaries soar, less and less of that taxpayer and donor money is going to news and programming.

But naturally, to those remaining, the problem is, notwithstanding the fact that the organization has unionized and pushed itself to the bleeding edge of the social justice fashion curve, MPR News just isn’t progressive enough:

The employee-led Transform group re-stated its lists of demands around anti-racism and gender equality last fall after Taylor assumed her role, concluding, “We remain tired, perhaps more tired than ever before. But we will not stop trying to force this company to change. It is simply too important.” 

This comes at a time when some – few, but some – in the “progressive” non-profit industrial complex are starting to ask some of the same questions about their business and political models (about which more, likely, next week), after noticing that all that money seems to be buying less results and more internal, woker-than-thou discord. The parallels are worth discussing.

I’d love to ask someone from MPR to come on the show to discuss this – but they’ve long since circled up their wagons and stopped talking with anyone outside the Circle of Trust.

Intellectual DNA Testing

I occasionally listen to public radio – not “in spite of” the fact that they have turned into the public relations arm, not just of “today’s left”, but of the “progressive” upper middle class. It reflects their angsts; I imagine a drinking game involving taking a shot whenever there’s a mention of Covid, January 6, climate change and white supremacy being very short and very chemically lethal.

It reflects their conceits; the traditional “NPR Voice”, the ofay upper-middle-class accent of the Oberlin poli-sci graduate, is being supplanted by very audibly African-American and, how shall we say this, accents of males with alternate lifestyles – the sort of stuff things that upper-middle-class white progressives demand from their entertainment.

And it reflects their ignorance, over and over, in so many ways.

One that I caught yesterday while driving across the Northern Plains, on the syndicated “New Yorker Radio Hour” – an episode which has not yet gotten onto the website – involved a woman, a reporter if memory serves, saying with what sounded like a straight face:

China has changed so much in recent years – economically, and socially.

And yet, the political system just doesn’t seem to change

Huh.

You’re saying a communist kleptocracy, which knows fiull well that the only alternative to being in power in a Communist dictatorship is a bullet in the back of the head, a system that is more similar to the Mafia than anything else we know of, doesn’t “change with the times?”

I often – very, very often – say that Democrats can say pretty much anything they want to their audience, since they – whether they dropped out of high school, or have a PhD in Women’s Studies – are so universally gullible and ignorant.

Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking too broadly.

Then, I hear things like this, and I get back on track.

Just Remember…

The real danger to our society is “right wing terror”.

As the gone-but-not-forgotten, perma-blocked Dog Gone used to say, the danger is a wave or conservative violence that will “dwarf 9/11”.

While we wait,and wait, and wait, we saw this from a “journalist” for “Rewire News Group” re the firebombing in Madison we talked about earlier this week:

Image

I’ve heard people on both sides of this issue say that abortion would be the spark for the next hot civil war in this country.

I disagree. The left’s response to being forced to share power, via shared powers, checks and balances and due process, with those they hate is going to be what the civil war is about.

Abortion will be one of the issues that will exercise the shared powers, checks, balances and process against which Big Left will revolt.

Kangaroos Everywhere

SCENE: The studio at the National Public Radio Twin Cities bureau. Mitch BERG is sitting, in headphones, in front of a microphone. Around the corner of the table is Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, she is the office manager at a small phrenology practice. Through the glass, an engineer, an assistant engineer, an editor, an editorial assistant, two associate producers, a producer, a digital producer and an executive producer sit, listening intently. Across the table from SCAT and BERG sits MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER 1: “Aaand we’re rolling”.

SILBERMAN: (Reading from a script). Thanks, Kathy. That dress is adorable, by the way. Now, we look at America’s large and growing political divide. With us today are Cat Scat, Executive Fact-Checker at the journalism site “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”, a source of journalism and news for Minnesotans since 2008.

SCAT: Hello. Is this thing on?

SILBERMAN: And Mitch Berg, blogger and talk radio host.

BERG: Uh…yeah, hi.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation…

BERG: Er, MylLyssa? That’s not true – on either side. People on the left were concerned about a rise in populism in Europe in the early 20`0s, when, rightly or wrongly, they fretted about the rise of the Volkspartei in Germany, and Victor Orban’s Fideš party in Hungary, as well as some pretty potent Polish nationalism. In the meantime, conservatives in the US have been concerned about the politicization of the state bureaucracy, with Barack Obama weaponizing some of the tools of excessive power that George W Bush instituted during his administration’s control over the War on Terror…

(BERG stops, noticing that SILBERMAN and SCAT are glaring at him).

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Take two?

SILBERMAN: Yep

LEAD ENGINEER: Rolling.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation. As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting boog bang… (stops). we’ll cut that in the edit. (deep breath) book bans, restrictions on saying “gay”, bans on reproductive rights, and a rise in hate from the right…

PRODUCER: (breaking in on the talkback): MyLyssa – read that as “skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans.

EDITOR: …and “women and their children”.

PRODUCER: Love it. Got that, MyLyssa?

SILBERMAN: (scribbline on script) Got it.

ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Take it from “As right wing…” (SILBERMAN nods)

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Three, two, one…

SILBERMAN: As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting book bans, restridctions on saying “gay”, and skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and women and their children, we want to get the views of our guests – Cat Scat, progressive journalist and activist, and Mitch Berg, right wing hatemonger.

BERG: Uhhhhh

SILBERMAN: Ms. Scat, what’s your take?

SCAT: The problem entirely started in 2016, when hatemongers took over the White House, ushering in an era of hatred for people of color, for LGBTQ+, for women’s reproductive choice, for transgender and queer folk, for demoracy itself, and replacing it with a paranoid neo-nazi ammosexual delusions of a bunch of red-state trailer-park dwelling cousin-f**king high school dropouts, which studies show the majority of red America are…

BERG: I’m gonna break in, here. Your statement is the kind of lie that gets legs of its own if you let it fester. It’s a preposterous slander of tens of millions of millions of Americans; we almost invariably are motivated not by hate, but by concern over the trashing of the parts of Western Civilization that have made us not only the free-est and most prosperous society in history – one where for the firs time ever, obesity is a bigger problem than starving to death – but more humane, especially for gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about, and don’t support authoritarians, ever, in any way.

PRODUCER: What can we do with that last bit.

ENGINEER: Wait one…

(freantic computer editing)

ENGINEER: OK, here’s what we got:

(BERG’s voice, edited, in the playback): “I’m gonna break…Your…legs …we… hate… the trash…of Western Civilization…obesi…gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about and…support authoritarians…in any way.

SILBERMAN: So you hate people of weight as well as POC, LGBTQ+ and Latinx people…

SCAT: You’ve been fact-cjhecked!

BERG: I did in fact record the original unedited exchange on my phone and this digital recorder.

SILBERMAN: Unfair!

PRODUCER: Chilling effect on journalism!

EDITOR: Why do you hate the free press?

And SCENE

Based, loosely but not nearly loosely enough, on an MPR piece I caught last week.

I Wanna Make Some History

Last week’s kerfuffle between Spotify (and their contract employee, Joe Rogan) and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Barry Manilow and (reportedly) Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters, may not mark the point where the iconoclasm and “rebellion” of popular music fromthe 1950s through the 2000s finally died.

But it’s certainly a waypoint on populist conservatism’s path to being the real iconoclasts.

Kid Rock wraps himself, crudely and profanely, in the Constitution in a new song aimed at the President, “woke” culture and the cancelers.

Armond White reviews it:

The strongest lyric on Kid Rock’s new single “We the People” is 235 years old: “In order to form a more perfect union / Do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”…On the day Kid Rock released his song, rock-music veteran Neil Young publicly threatened Spotify with an ultimatum: Either remove its broadcast of the political commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, or he’d remove his music from its streaming service. It’s enough to make a true rock and roller revolt…In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.

As with most things Kid Rock has done in the past three decades (but by no means all), light leaving “safe for work” right now won’t reach us for centuries. A radio edit bleeping out the profanity would sound like Morse Code.

You’ve been warned. Here goes.

Very NSFW. Probably not for family consumption, either.

Inhuman

Remember in the 1980s, when some “conservative” fundies rejoiced at the deaths of AIDS patients.

It was a pretty depraved stance. Everyone knows that.

Someone tell the fairly irredeemable LA Times drone Michael Hiltzik – who has reprised that particular bit of human depravity by declaring “Mocking some anti-vaxxers’ deaths is necessary“.

Helpfully, he adds “My exception applies to those who have actively undermined public health for the sake of an ideology and a culture war”.

I’m not going to extensively pull-quote the column – which is full of the sort of “two weeks to stop the virus” cheerleading that seems to have come from a CDC press release in April 2020, or from someone who thinks Gavin Newsom is on the right track.

That’s not especially remarkable.

Remarkable? Humanity is secondary to progs like Hiltzik:

It may be ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.

But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled…There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.

Actually, there is another way: : stop politicizing public health. Stop spreading distrust of “the Trump Vaccine” during the elections, and then turn around and claim credit for it. Stop making “sowing controllable panic” the default setting for public health messaging. Stop being whores for the Democrats, if you’re the media.

Of course, this is more about them than – and their needs to find a scapegoat for their frustrations – than the unvaccinated.

But let’s not pretend this – mocking and giggling about opponents, on whatever issue, that die unfortunate deaths – is anything but the default setting for ghouls like Hiltzik. After watching people like him giggle and guffaw over the deaths of Tony Snow, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh, and hoot and holler for the death of Steve Scaliise, it’s a stretch to assume they have any other setting.

Sort of like guffawing about dead AIDS patents, only apparently acceptable.

The Usual Suspects

Trump supporters on the Mall

“Trump Supporters” who stormed the Capitol.

We’ve seen the horned-hat guy before:

Wasn’t there a famous incident a centuray ago, a fire blamed on innocent people which gave a certain politician the excuse to seize power?
Are we absolutely certain the troublmakers were ordinary Trump supporters, same as the rest of the crowd outside, and not infiltrators hoping to cause a backlash against President Trump and his supporters protesting the stolen election

Joe Doakes

Whether the riot was launched by provocateurs or not, plenty of Trump supporters did participate with great glee. There’s a dilemma, of course – if there’s one thing we learned during the Tea Party, at gun rights and pro life and tax-protest rallies, it’s that conservatives need to behave impeccably, because the media and the Dems oppo research staff (pardon the redundancy) will pick over every utterance, visual and thought for wrongthink).

(If there’s another thing we learned it’s that the left’s slander machine and control of the administrative state makes perfect behavior irrelevant. Lefty social media today is awash in claims that the Tea Party was racist, violent, and a tool of the Koch Brothers, who (we’re told) bought all of American politics for a few years).

But whoever turned the demonstration into a riot, and whatever the reasons, the left is responding to last week’s events with a technique they’ve mastered; not wasting a crisis. Whoever did what, it will be spun relentlessly to their advantage.

Ricardo Lopez: Middle School Reporter

Ricardo Lopez writes for “MN Reformer”, which is a website in the tradition of the old “MN Monitor” – basically a propaganda site funded by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets,

Further proof that not only the Democratic party, but its pet media (and the Reformer is nothing but a paid PR lapdog for Ken Marti) can assume that their audience isn’t an especially critical bunch of thinkers.

Because, say what you will about Miller’s letter, logically or epidemiologically, but other than choosing the word “Exchange” over the more apposite “Exposure”, he got the mechanics of how we currently know Covid is spread pretty right.

It took Lopez’s apparently eighth-grade sense of discernment to read “sexual transmission” into a choice of words that, otherwise, got things basically correct.

But in a world where Samantha Bee is among the left’s top journalists, it doesn’t not make sense that someone like Lopez would do…well, this.

My Checklist

My “Black Friday” checklist:Wednesday before Thanksgiving:

  1. Make sure I’ve got groceries and essentials sufficient to get through ’til Monday. Check.
  2. Anticipate the places I need to go for the next three days, and map out routes avoiding major malls, Targets, Walmarts and commercial districts. Check.
  3. Switch on NPR and start counting all the “celebrities” and “newscasters” referring to this next four weeks as the most miserable, dysfunctional time of the year, full of family one hates because of their politics and the onerous nature of having to engage in forced civility while celebrating gratitude and humility while apparently feeling neither. Make sure I have a fresh set of legal pads, since it gets worse every year. Check.
  4. Silently ponder, for yet another year, converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity, at least in part to put Christmas off til January 6 and get some awesome savings on presents in the week between Christmas and New Years. Check.

OK. I’m good to go.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving, everyone!

Male Like Me

President Trump is so strong, so virile, so . . . hyper-masculine, just like a Vladimir Putin or  some Confederate general. 

MPR really misses Pajama Boy.

Joe Doakes

I’ve got friends…well, semi-professional acquaintances that haven’t gone completely mad with partisan rage, anyway – at MPR, so I’ll not comment on the locals.

But it seems to have been decreed from on high that male voices that aren’t audibly African-American must sound like most of America thinks Pajama Boy sounded.

Where Have You Gone, Learned Foot…

…the nation turns its lonely, topical limerick and haiku writing eyes to you. And Ryan Rhodes.

But since Foot is retired and Ryan is MIA, we’ll have to fill in ourselves.


There once was a fellow named Toobin
(Don’t confuse him with Jennifer Rubin).
His career met its doom,
when he dropped trou on Zoom
Now there’s a different part getting the lube-in.


Toobin takes “lid” off,
Two weeks’ frenzy erupts, as
Biden’s lid stays on.


So Toobin had fun of the kind,
the nuns said would make you go blind.
But there’s no point in moping,
it’s just Jeff’s way of hoping
for less trouble than the conjugal kind.


Carry on.

Blue Fragility: Open Letter To Jonathan Chait

To: Johnathan “Chaitful” Chait
From: Mitch Berg – Red State Sleeper Agent
Re: This Little “Eliminationist Hatred” Problem You Have

Mr. Chait

We go way back, of course – and not in a good way. You have a bit of a history of being a horrible excuse for a human being. But you are a gift that keeps giving, for people like me, so for that I thank you, even if backhandedly.

This past week, you wrote an article in “New York Magazine” claiming that the Republican response to Covid is, in your terms, a “Death Cult”.

I won’t pullquote anything – the article is long, and never really improves over the title.

But I have two questions.

First, some background – here’s the listed Covid fatalities/million as of last Friday:

  • NY (D): 1,684
  • NJ (D): 1,790
  • US average: 474
  • FL (R): 319
  • MN (DFL): 291
  • TX (R): 241
  • ND (R): 135

So I’ve got two questions for you, Mr. Chait:

  1. Did you ever refer to Cuomo (or the governors of NJ/CT/MA) as running a “death cult?” I’ll confess, I’m an infrequent reader of yours. I only read you (or John Fugelsang) when you step on your d**k spectacularly – but I’d hate to be unfair.
  2. I wager you a shiny new quarter that as of November 3, 2020, TX and FL will be below half NY’s fatalities per million. Any action on that bet?

Thanks.

By the way – at the risk of sounding uncharitable, there are times that I think you are God’s karmic gift to me for never teasing the short-bus kids in elementary school. For this, I thank Him, and urge you to keep up the, uh, work, karmically speaking.

That is all.

Side Note: I’m making this the The George W. Bush Corollary To Berg’s Seventh Law – All of a Republican’s sins, imaginary or (for sake of argument) real, will be forgotten once the Republican can no longer hold office. 

There Are Millions Of Reasons…

… why I will never donate a single penny to Minnesota Public radio, even though I listen to them (primarily news and classical music) constantly.

Two of them, for starters, are:

  • Keri Miller
  • WNYC’s “On The Media”.

But a few more million of them are right here; as Minnesota Public radio lays off much of what used to be a pretty good news room, their executive staff still keep getting paid, well, like this:

To add insult to injury, MPR’s national production group, “American Public Media”, is canceling “Live from Here with Chris Thile” – the excellent show that grew from the ruins of “Prairie Home Companion”, and one of the few original production non-news shows worth listening to.

MPR hastens to point out that their C-suite is taking a 30% pay cut. Which sounds like a big deal, until you realize that a whole lot of private sector CEOs are cutting their pay to $1 for the duration.

Democracy Dies In Conspiracy

Conservatives, especially conservatives who are “out” critics of the mainstream media, get routinely accused of “hating” journalism. The late Nick Coleman was particularly, er, “acerbic” in his criticism of those who had the gall to criticize the news/industrial complex, claiming in one bout of hysteria that bloggers “wanted to kill the Strib”.

While we correctly savaged the Strib, and especially Coleman, on issue after issue, it was still baked wind. Self-government, small-“D” democracy, needs a functional, and above all trustworthy, media (among many other institutions) to survive.

And by “”trustworthy”, we mean “can be trusted to report the news, truthfully, regardless of its own institutional and individual political opinions.

In Europe, the media are pretty honest about their political points of view, on an editorial level; the Times of London and the Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right; Guardian and Die Zeit and Le Monde are all various degrees of left. You know the slant before you pick up the paper. You can account for it.

American media has built a myth of objectivity, or at least of being a so-called “neutral voice”, around itself; Minnesota Public Radio news even made “No Rant, No Slant” their motto for a while, and it’s not much different than the mythology American media built for itself over the past hundred years or so. In my freshman year journalism class,

And it’s never really been true. Some journos do in fact do their best to separate their personal views, of course – I’ve got nothing but respect for the best of them.

Many journalists also do their best, but inevitably reflect the fact that their entire frame of reference is left-of-center. Their education, their workplace, their social circle, are an ecosystem where some variety of The Left is the old, current and future Normal. When they confront a different point of view, they can seem a little like Jane Goodall venturing out among the gorillas.

And when things are chugging along like normal, who cares, right?

The New Abnormal . But then something pops up that threatens the order, and not in a good way. What then?

The media has been rightly seen as slanted to the left for close to fifty years. With the rise of talk radio and alternative news 30 years ago, you could sense that the “elite” media were starting to give up on the pretense of balance and detachment. The notion of the “neutral voice” has been

But with the election of President Trump, the floodgates got dynamited.

The “neutral voice”, isn’t.

“Oh, Mitch – you and your hyperbole”.

No. Not at all.

The Gatekeepers Speak: “On the Media” is a production of WNYC Radio in New York. It’s a public station, one of the flagship station in the National Public Radio chain. Like a lot of NPR productions, sometimes it’s excellent. Sometimes the smug rolls off it like fog off a loch.

And sometimes, it accomplishes its mission – which in the case of “On the Media”, is to serve as the exposed id of the “elite” media in this country.

With that in mind: this show was broadcast on December 1, 2016 – probably as fast as could be put together on NPR timelines. It had four segments:

  1. The first gazed navel-ly about “how the media should cover President Trump“. Because conveying the facts and letting the audience make up their own mind was presumably not good enough anymore.
  2. How talking about Trump “Normalizes” him – unless the media changes the rules when discussing him. This featured reprentatives, not from The Nation and Slate.com or Buzzfeed or Samantha Bee. No, they were from the NYTimes and Washington Post. That led to another segment…
  3. How the language itself needs to be understood, and harnessed.
  4. And, lest the foregoing was too oblique for the casual listener, a segment linking the (as yet unstarted) Trump administration to Putin’s variety of autocracy, and laying out the imperative for the media to use it’s power to prevent “Normalizing” the president-elect.

And the media’s behavior in the three and a half years since has mapped to that template, as the media has grasped at every possible straw to try to “take down” the President.

We didn’t even need to get this leaked to us, like ‘Journo-list’ – although I suspect I may have been the only conservative listening to that groaningly pompous program, and I suspect that’s WNYC’s assumption as well.

TL:dr – At least some of the people at the apex of the “layers and layers of gatekeepers” have abolished the old rules of journalism, publicly but yet internally, as re Donald Trump.

The “elite” media’s entire coverage of Trump over the past four years, on every issue, has followed the template that’s suggested, sub rosa, in the four On the Media pieces above.

Will the rules change back when Trump leaves office? Of course not – the media had the same general attitude toward Republicans, conservatives and the issues of the right for a generation before 2016.

But the institutional imperative to use the media’s power toward political and social ends? That’s not going to end.

Distrust, but verify. And then, almost inevitably, if some smidgeon of partisan politics is involved, distrust some more.

Young Jerks

If there’s a figure anywhere in the liberal media that makes the likes of the late Ed Schultz, or Chris Matthews, or most of the host of “the view””, seem intelligent, rational and human, it’s Cenk Uygur, impresario of the “Young Turks” – sort of a “MinnesotaReformer” for loud, entitled people.

They are, naturally, progressive to a geometric fault.

Including, it seem, in terms of rank hypocrisy. Uygur, It was a knee-jerk supporter of public sector unions and the national $15 an hour minimum wage for mere public sector employees…

… has a different point of view when it comes to his own organization:

Earlier that day, a Twitter handle claiming to represent TYT employees had announced on the social media platform their intention to form a union. In the staff meeting, the network’s co-founder and influential host, Cenk Uygur, urged employees not to do so, arguing that a union does not belong at a small, independent outlet like TYT, according to two workers who were present. He said if there had been a union at the network it would not have grown the way it has.

Huh. You don’t say?

His talk ― at times emotional, the staffers said, with Uygur throwing his papers to the ground at one point, and chastising an employee ― seemed to contradict the progressive, worker-first ethos that TYT broadcasts to its millions of lefty followers. Jack Gerard, who is acting as the company’s chief operating officer as Uygur runs for Congress in California, told the staff they were not discouraging unionization. 

But the message from Uygur was clear ― and, to at least some staffers, discouraging.

Not nearly as discouraging as…oh, I dunno, realizing your’re out of collect, paying of $200K in student debt, and still working for Cenk Uygur

But still discouraging.