School shootings have been front-page bait for nearly 30 years. It’s been nearly two decades since Columbine. Nearly ten since Virginia Tech.

And yet official America has learned nearly nothing, and contents itself with waving childrens’ bloody shirts to try to disarm people who didn’t, and never do, do the shooting in the first place.

The Orlando Sun Sentinel has an excellent interactive story showing the extent of the incompetence, breakdowns and bad planning that allowed Nick Cruz to slaughter 17 kids.

And of course, human frailty:

Cruz fires his first shots, killing freshmen Martin Duque, Luke Hoyer and Gina Montalto in the hallway of the first floor.

Taylor, the campus monitor, hears gunshots and races up to the second floor. He ducks into a janitor’s closet. Taylor has a radio but does not call a Code Red.

I’ll rarely second guess someone who exhibits what some might call “cowardice” to avoid getting shot. But the fact remains – Parkland’s security depended on a group of unarmed school monitors who failed to even order an alert that might have locked the school down, much less dealt with Cruz.

The story notes that there were heroes present that day…

Athletic director and campus monitor Chris Hixon is already at Building 12. He enters the double doors at the west end of the hall and runs toward Cruz.
Cruz shoots Hixon, who crawls to take cover in a nearby doorway. Cruz finds him about 30 seconds later and shoots him again.

—

[Social Studies teacher Ernie ]Rospierski flees with 10 students toward a stairwell as Cruz fires down the hall.
Two of the students, Jaime Guttenberg and Peter Wang, are hit. Wang dies in the hallway and Guttenberg in the stairwell, but others get away as Rospierski holds the door closed from inside the stairwell to keep Cruz from advancing.

…but a good plan, competently executed, is a whole lot better for everyone involved that heroes – especially dead ones.

The story is positively heartbreaking – a cascading tragicomedy of avoidable errors, frailty/cowardice, and official negligence.

Note that at any point, any armed response – any – would very likely have caused Cruz’ psychopathic reverie to break, sending him running away or off to a corner to shoot himself, even if it didn’t incapacitate him outright.

The performance of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office – both Scot Peterson and the other officers who responded – comes in for particular contempt. The department, led Sheriff Israel, who turned into an gun control leader to try to cover his own incompetence, covered itself in shame that day.

And yes, Sheriff Israel bears a disproportionate share of the blame. Although six deputies were on scene while the shooting was still going on, they were as useless as door-to-door salespeople – in large part due to policies pushed by Israel:

Since Columbine, officers are taught to rush toward gunshots and neutralize the killer. But the first Broward deputies don’t rush in.
Broward Sheriff Scott Israel later reveals that he personally changed department policy to say that deputies “may” instead of “shall” rush in.

And they lived down to their leadership – at least two BCSO officers went on the radio to urge their fellow officers to stay well clear of the school buildings.

Of course, not all the cops on the scene were useless simps:

Four Coral Springs officers enter through the west doors, where they see Chris Hixon shot. Two officers pull Hixon out of the building and onto a golf cart. He will not survive.

The Coral Springs officers later tell investigators their training was clear – run toward the gunfire.

Coral Springs Officer Raymond Kerner, the school resource officer at nearby J.P. Taravella High School, would tell investigators:
“Basically, what we’re trained to do is just get right to the threat as quick as possible and take out the threat because every time you hear a shot go off it could potentially be a kid getting killed or anybody getting killed for that matter.”

So there’s that.

Which, in its own way, evades the point; depending on law enforcement, even competent and courageous law enforcement, is not only a chimera, it’s an abdication of an adult’s responsibility.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Think about the increasing number of young Americans demanding socialism, even as the horrific collapse of Venezuela is in the news. Why do they want that to happen here?
It occurs to me that “hot” is a word which has no meaning to a child, until the child touches something hot. Until then, it’s just noise. What if “socialism” is the same? What if the only way to appreciate “capitalism” is to live under “socialism” for a while? Maybe, instead of class credit for protest marches, schools should require students to spend a month living in a place where the water isn’t safe to drink, the electricity isn’t reliable, there is no free wi-fi, food stores are empty, gasoline is only sold in back alleys, medical care is cash only and no antibiotics remain. A place where the police are not your friend, government officials demand bribes and the press reports what they’re told to report.
Would students learn a new appreciation of America? Or would they wave aside their experience saying: “But we’ll do it RIGHT this time.”
Joe Doakes

On the one hand, it’d lead to some of the “haves” among the students bleating “Yeah, but this isn’t socialism done right. “

On the other? It’d put some meat behind Churchill’s dictum “a man who’s not a liberal a 20 has no heart, and a man who isn’t a conservative at 40 has no brain”.

And maybe acclerate the timetable among those that can be saved.

So – if you’re out and about and need to warm up and work up a sweat tonight or tomorrow, stop on by the Eagle in Stillwater. My band Elephant in the Room will be playing from 8 ’til Midnight, Friday and Saturday.

It’s in the old Famous Dave’s, on Highway 36 at Greeley.

We’ve got some music for the holidays, too! [1]

Good food, not-too-expensive drinks, great location, pool tables just around the corner, fast service – and EITR. What a perfect way to decompress from the holidays?

(And don’t forget – we’ll be at the Outpost in Ramsey on Friday, January 11. Two weeks from tonight!)

[1] OK – to be accurate, it’s two songs. But hey, you’re not gonna get that from a dance club DJ, are you?

Dems and MSM (pardon the redundancy) alarmed that Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t seem to have changed the GOP’s support among Hispanics:

VoteCast data from the Associated Press showed that 32 percent of Latinos voted for Republicans at a time when many pundits and most Democrats hoped that the demographic group might lead an electoral revolt against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“Data from November’s elections show the GOP’s position among Latinos has not weakened during the Trump administration, despite the president’s rhetoric and policy,” read the tweet from MSNBC.

Of course, the media has spent a decade ignoring the fact that Hispanics poll even more hawkish on border security than anglos do; the GOP loses them on mass deportation. Even the most conservative Latinos frequenlty have someone in the family who came here illegally.

The city of Baltimore held a gun buy-back earlier this week.

They spent a bunch of money.

And the mayor thought she had something to crow about:

She did not.

Update: City of Baltimore paid $500 for this spent rocket launcher in its gun buyback. Military and ATF contacted for tracing pic.twitter.com/enlJcBUUHx

— Jayne Miller (@jemillerwbal) December 21, 2018

It’s a spent tube from a military “AT-4” anti-tank weapon. I emphasize – spent. It’s been fired – so all it really is now is a fiberglass tube with some miscellaneous parts and hardware. The only thing it’ll ever launch is flowers – but only if you tip it up on end and fill it with dirt and seeds.

And they can be had for about half what the city of Baltimore paid for it – $500.

Springsteen on Broadway – the Broadway hit just released on Netflix – is, as Kyle Smith describes it in National Review,

…a luminous performance, an unexpected new late-career peak. His persona may be fake but his artistry is sublime.

Let’s back up a moment and talk about that “fake persona” bit. It stems from the show’s big opening admission – in Bruce’s words:

“I made it all up,” he tells the audience in his new Netflix special Springsteen on Broadway. “Bruce Springsteen” the persona — all gritty working-class authenticity — is a creation. “I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life!” he says. “I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked 9 to 5. I’ve never worked five days a week. Until right now.”

To be fair, this surprises nobody who’s followed Bruuuuuce this past, um (counts quickly) 40 years or so – as Dave Marsh showed in his classic bio “Born to Run” back in the early ’80s, he pretty much eschewed everything but playing in bands and building a following.

News flash – to succeed at something, you gotta live it every day, as someone once said.

And that’s one of the lines about the whole evening that resonated with me the most – because there are times I feel like I “made it all up” too; I’ve never had any formal training for any of the careers I’ve had – or even for any of the things I do for fun. My UX career? Tech writing before it? Music? Blogging and talk radio (OK, I had some OJT when I was a kid, but beyond being a DJ, nothing)? I decided I was gonna do them, and started doing them. After 20 years as a UXer, I still feel like someone’s going to bust me as a fraud someday.

Anyway – it’s a great show, and I hope you get a chance to see it on Netflix.

(And for those whose response is “I won’t listen to Bruce, since he’s teh liberal” – well, yeah, but in his prime he was also America’s best *conservative* songwriter, which makes some peoples’ heads melt, but I’m right and they’re wrong)

I’ve got friends who still say, with a straight face, that the media does a good job of playing things down the middle. 

Here’s 18 cases where the media displayed naked bias, shimmying around the narrative poll, waiting for Big Left to stuff dollar bills in its G-String.  

One example here:

After the Avenatti carnival turned the Kavanaugh confirmation upside down, NBC attempted to report the bizarre claims his client was leveling. NBC spoke with a supposed corroborating witness Avenatti produced, but that woman instead debunked most of the client’s claims. When confronted, Avenatti told NBC the woman debunking his client’s claims was in fact his corroborating witness, but after being told she didn’t corroborate anything, he shot back: “How about this, on background, it’s not the same woman [as the corroborating witness]. What are you going to do with that?” There was more back and forth and the “corroborating witness” ultimately said Avenatti was lying about everything, yet despite all of this happening before Kavanuagh’s confirmation vote, NBC didn’t actually publish the story until weeks later. The Daily Wire published a helpful overview. 

Seventeen to go.  Get reading. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Trump plans to withdraw the 2,000 US military members from Syria.  Neo-Cons are upset.  Defense Secretary Mattis is resigning.  The establishment consensus is Trump is making a horrible mistake.  Is he?
George Washington warned against entangling alliances.  That’s pretty good historical precedent for Trump to bring our troops home.  Yes, the neo-cons reply, but the world has changed since Washington’s time. We need to police the world.  Failing to do so is isolationist.  Failing to fight every battle means people will die, nations will fall.
So?  The world, to Americans, means Christendom.  True, that world has changed.  Rome ruled for 500 hundred years before it fell.  A thousand years later, England, France and Spain were the great powers; then the Axis Powers for a decade; then the nuclear nations calling themselves the Security Council; power constantly changing.
But England is no longer a great power (despite having nuclear weapons).  It contributes a few hundred people to each global conflict, not enough to tip the scale.  As a power, they’re a has-been.  So are France, Spain, Rome.
We’re headed their direction.  The economic and military domination we enjoyed after WW II is gone.  We should stop pretending, stop over-extending.  We should pull back to our own shores, fortify against the coming global crash, hope to ride out the long night while the rest of the world burns.
Socialism is a disease and we’re facing an epidemic.  The treatment for an epidemic is quarantine: save the ones you can, let the rest die.  Isolation is not a bad thing for a nation, it’s the responsible thing.  Put America First.
Joe Doakes

I’m starting to think we’ll need that internally.

Build a wall around California, Illinois, and the mid-Atlantic states. And make them pay…

…well, no, let’s not get fancy . Just build it.

Vermont teen busted planning to carry out a school lmassacre.

That’s the good news.

The bad news? Then, they went and confiscated the firearms belonging to a relative that had nothing to do with the case:

According to the news report and the law as written, the actions taken by law enforcement were illegal and should have been prevented by the presiding judge.
This case raises serious questions about judicial review in gun violence restraining order cases. Many who push for “red flag” laws claim that the courts will weigh the evidence at hand and the law equally without violating individual rights. The Vermont law clearly states that it is only applicable when “prohibiting a person from purchasing, possessing, or receiving a dangerous weapon or having a dangerous weapon within the person’s custody or control.”
But in this case, the firearms in question were owned by a relative and kept in another home. Having potential access to them by criminal means like theft doesn’t qualify under the law.

Further proof that there is no such thing as a “good faith compromise” with gun control advcoates. Every single one is either:

• Actively seeking gun oonfiscation by means covert or wanton, or
• A useful idiot doing the work of those who are.

I’ve been involved in the issue a long time, and I have yet to meet an exception.

The short answer: whille the GOP on the national level capitulates on spending and allow all sorts of government scope creep the chips are down, the Democrats take the gas pedal of power and jam it to the firewall:

Democrats are increasingly lining up to support a “Green New Deal,” which, while vague on details, could end up being the largest expansion of government in decades.
As it stands, the “Green New Deal” is more aspirational than actual policy. Indeed, it takes its name from the New Deal of the 1930s, and its main backer, incoming Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, compared it to the Great Society of the 1960s.
More than 40 Democratic lawmakers support the “Green New Deal” as part of a broad plan to fight global warming and bring about what they see as “economic, social and racial justice.” A poll found most Americans supported the deal, but knew little about it.
But the big question is when Americans find out what’s in the “Green New Deal,” will they be willing to pay for it?

After a few months or years of media alarmism and emotional logrolling from an in-the-bag media?

Is that even a serious question?

Hope you all have a happy and blessed one.

My present to all of you:

California Democrats have gone way too far with the taxation and regulation, says Ted Nugent.

Just kidding. It’s…

…Jerry Brown.

The leader of the most populous state has kept Democratic lawmakers in check by limiting spending on social programs in favor of saving it to protect against a future economic downtown. He sometimes butted heads with legislative leaders, warning spending too much now could hurt taxpayers or require budget cuts later…
“I’d say we’re in for contentious times and for too many rules, too many constricting mandates and probably too much spending,” Brown told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday.

And it’s not even like Brown – a died-in-the-wool prog – has been especially restrained in his own approach to taxing, regulating and squashing enterprise.

German “journalist” Claas Relotius spent many years on the European and world journalistic fast track, until it was realized he’d spent years falsifying stories.

One of those stories was about the xenophobic misanthropic fascist racists in…

…Fergus Falls, MN.

And he didn’t just make up the little stuff. Two local residents combed through the story:

There are so many lies here, that my friend Jake and I had to narrow them down to top 11 most absurd lies (we couldn’t do just 10) for the purpose of this article. We’ve been working on it since the article came out in spring of 2017, but had to set it aside to attend to our lives (raising a family, managing a nonprofit organization, etc.) before coming back to it this fall, and finally wrapped things up a few weeks ago, just in time to hear today that Relotius was fired when he was exposed for fabricating many of his articles.

The following was neither the dumbest nor the most extravagant of Relotius’ lies:

6. The view from the Viking Cafe
“You can see the power plant where he works when you look out the window of the Diner, six tall, gray towers, from which rise white steam clouds.”
The Viking Cafe is Fergus Falls’ most treasured downtown establishment — over 60 years old. One of the reasons we Minnesotans all like it so much is that it has a cozy, underground feeling. Why? Because there are literally NO WINDOWS in the interior of this restaurant. Sure, you can see a little bit out the small front windows, but nothing beyond the shops across the street. The power plant Relotius refers to is almost 2 miles away on the northeast edge of town, blocked from view by a neighborhood on a large hill, and sports a single smokestack. Relotius’ imaginings are dramatic for the movie version of Trump’s America someday, but is it accurate and true? Not in the least.

Further proof that if you read it in the mainstream media, and it’s even a little bit political, distrust first. Then verify.

Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

Ken Martin’s “investigation” into the domestic violence allegations against Keith Ellison is almost done.

Is the suspense killing you, too?

Starbucks’ decision to virtue-signal and open their rest rooms to the homeless is working out exactly as well as any rational person – which seems to exclude their PC-addled, apparently drug-garnished Seattle-based management – could have predicted.

Too much failure to even try to pick a single pullquote.  Just read it.

State “bump stock” bans are going over like Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes at an NPR fundraiser.  Vermont’s gun grab netted almost nothing:

State police told local media this week that a total of two reciprocating stocks were turned in prior to the Oct. 1 deadline. Two! That’s it! For the entire state!

The ATF estimates that there are up to a half million bump stocks in circulation in the U.S. While it’s not clear how many are in The Green Mountain State, it’s almost certainly more than two! [Going purely proportional share of the population, the number could be right around 1,000 – Ed.]

It’s not like they couldn’t have predicted this:

Authorities in Vermont should not be shocked by the poor turnout. Compliance in the other eight states that have prohibited them has also been virtually nonexistent.

Only three stocks had been surrendered by the February deadline in Massachusetts, and as of earlier this year, none (0) have been turned in since Denver and New Jersey banned the devices, as GunsAmerica previously reported.

Henceforth, any citizen caught possessing a bump stock faces up to a year in jail, a fine of $1,000 or both, Vermont State Police Capt. Tim Clouatre told NBC5.

Kinda makes you wonder how it’ll work when they start going for the guns themselves…

Well, the Trump administration is making moves to ban “bump stocks” – mechanical devices that speed up semi-automatic firing.

That’ll have an effect on firearm homicides – right?

What do you think?

And it’s not limited to ARs. Other firearms, down through handguns, can be jury rigged to “bump fire”. Not that you’d want to – it’s a great way to burn up money and hit nothing you’re shooting at.

Well, the good news is that they have no intention of stopping with this utterly meaningless result.

Wait…

Kevin Williamson on – ahem – “Why Alexandria Ocasio Cortez drives Republicans Crazy”, and I’m gonna stop right there.

She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”.  She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually is as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and much more extreme.

No matter!

Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise — her far-left politics — wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She’s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word “socialist” means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans’ noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he’s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont — a useful cat’s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.

As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they’d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans — no strangers to callow dilettantism — still have a chance after all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Headed toward another government shutdown because Democrats won’t defend the border.

I’d be more concerned about a government shutdown – women and children hardest hit – except everybody is already dead from the end of net neutrality, or soon to be dead from global climate change, so at this point, what difference does it make?

Small bit of comedy in the article: “The House and Senate used to pass annual appropriation bills, and the president signed them into law.”  Yeah, that was when we had a thing called “budgets.”  Democrats did away with them: too confining, too oppressive, and they never liked math anyway.

True.

But since most government spending is on autopilot, really, what difference does it make at this point?

On NPR the other morning, I heard a story about Hungarian protests against a new overtime  law.

The protesters complained to NPR’s reporter on the scene that the main broadcaster in Hungary – which is governed by a conservative, putatively “Trumpist” popular government led by Viktor Orban – is controlled by the state, and that all major private media is controlled by allies of the government.

And I thought “Hmmmmm”, as I listened to NPR on the local Minnesota Public Radio station, and looked at the copy of the Star/Tribune in the passenger seat of my car.

But I continued listening.

One of the protesters complained that the media didn’t accurately report the numbers of people at their demonstrations, when they bothered to report about the demonstrations at all.

And I pondered for a moment, remembering when the media reported “hundreds” of attendees at Tea Party rallies at the Capitol in 2009-2010  that drew closer to 7,000.

And I thought “Huh.  So there are examples of media bias that the mainstream American media will report on”.

The punch lines practically write themselves;  Keith Richards gives up drinking.

Aaaaaand rock and roll is, if not dead, navigating with a walker.

Some Venezuelans are realizing something that we Real Americans have been tryihg to explain to Califorians, New Yorkers, New Jersey-ites and Connecti…cutters (?); that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with hunting, and is only coincidentally about self-defense against criminals.

They’re figuring it out…

“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”

Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all – except government entities.

Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntary gun surrenders, while the majority of seizures – more than 12,500 – were by force.

…just a tad too late.

Liberals scoff when Real Americans talk about guns being a bulwark against tyranny.

Perhaps because they’re OK with tyranny.

To:   The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  Think.  Think Really Really Hard

Rev.  Nord Bence,

Over the weekend, you posted this on “Protect” MN’s Facebook page:

Over the years, I’ve pointed out – with absolute accuracy – that you have never made a single statement about guns, gun owners, gun history, gun laws, the 2nd Amendment or gun crime that was simultaneously substantial, original and true.  

Here’s the good news:   your claims above are substantial, and, er, “original”.  But they are howlers. 

Run Awaaaaaaay:   First – you say “police in Minnesota can already use the Stand Your Ground defense”. 

Well, yeah.  That’s right.  The police don’t have a “duty to retreat” when doing their jobs.   Unlike civilians, they are supposed to run toward trouble.   

They don’t have “Stand your Ground”.   They have “Qualified Immunity” – not only no obligation to try to retreat, but a mulligan for mistakes made in generally good faith in the line of duty. 

Question for you, “Reverend” Nord Bence:  Would you prefer that police also be required to run away from criminals?  

Just curious. 

Shoot Off Your Unqualified Mouth First, As Questions Later:  Next comes the notion that self-defense reform would give citizens “the same right to shoot first and ask questions later” that cops “have”. 

Nope.  It merely means that citizens don’t have to convince a county attorney that they tried hard enough to run away from a threat (that was otherwise a reasonable threat of death or grave injury), provided you were anyplace you had a legal reason to be. 

That’s it.  

It’s not a license to kill. 

And I suspect you know that – and are lying anyway, to logroll the gullible dolts who take you seriously.   

Either that or you are a deeply, deeply stupid person.  

My money says “both”. 

That is all.  

Writer Tim Willard with a brilliant Twitter thread on why he hates communism so completely.

It starts here – but I urge you to read the whole thing:

I get asked why I loathe Communism so fervently. It’s damn near a religion with me.

How about a little background. I’m from the wrong side of the tracks. My siblings would have stolen railroad tracks and sold them for scrap. When we left the farm, we went to the trailer park.

— Tim Willard (@TWillardAuthor) December 16, 2018

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.