Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Bluesky has suspended the account of Libs of TikTok.

Chaya Raichik, the doxed by Taylor Lorenz creator of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok began with the amusing tactic of searching TikTok for leftists saying or doing utterly stupid things, and publicizing them more widely. She recently deployed again to the oh-so-polite company of Bluesky, but it seems that the leftists over there just can’t stand having their own words repeated back to them.

Miss Lorenz, who blocks people on her Twitter account, because she can’t stand criticism, hasn’t blocked me, at least, on Bluesky.  She is personally “severely, severely immunocompromised,”  and is “in and out of the hospital constantly bc I have the immune system of someone going through chemo”, so she chronically complains about people not taking COVID precautions, skeeting we “dumbfucks are out raw dogging the air and spewing ur disease laden breath all over ur elderly neighbors.” According to the Urban Dictionary, “rawdogging” originally meant copulating without a condom.

Translation: Miss Lorenz is complaining about people breathing! Robert Stacy McCain was amused. Continue reading →

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Oh, those poor babies! White House press corps are crying that they'll have to work harder under President Trump

My career, before retirement, consisted of arising at 4:15 AM, going to work, and working until the job was done. It meant, as I began, pouring and finishing concrete, in the heat of the August sun or the cold of January. It meant, after I moved from pouring concrete to producing concrete, being at work at 6:00 AM, and sometimes significantly earlier, and staying until the last customer was finished. It meant, though some work was inside, shoveling out under conveyor belts, climbing silos, stripping and resetting 2’x2’x6′ waste concrete blocks, greasing plants, running front-end loaders, fixing machinery, in all kinds of weather, and workdays that were almost never only eight hours long.

I was hardly the only working-class person that had to do stuff like that. Millions upon millions of us had to do the same things, five and six days a week, and when the restrictions that came with the panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; that is exactly how I define it! — that had some people assigned to work from home, many working class people laughed at the notion that what they did for a living could be done from home.

So, when I saw this, I will confess that I was not moved by the plight of these poor babies!

White House reporters already ‘exhausted’ by second Trump administration

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! The legacy media rarely lie outright, but their biases can be seen in their editorial choices of what to cover, and what to ignore

One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading →

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Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and hate!

It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.

I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading →

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough!

Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for José Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.

Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance

For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST

Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and “peeping Tom.”

Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

Continue reading →

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Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press

Let’s get this part out of the way early: I have little respect for Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s intelligence. But even he ought to have seen the silliness in his Tuesday morning newsletter.

Mr Bunch began with his very great concern that our “45th and soon-to-be 47th POTUS” would be cracking down on free speech and dissent:

Mother Jones also notes in a new piece that the anti-Gaza-protest playbook will likely inspire a Trump regime in other ways, including following through on his campaign threats to deport campus protesters. Cornell University grad student Momodou Taal — a protester whose student visa was revoked but has dodged deportation, for now — told the magazine that last spring’s crackdown set an awful precedent, saying: “I think what [President Joe] Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

Indeed, Cornell’s moves to suspend Taal and other pro-Palestinian students who disrupted a job fair in September is just one part of a campus crusade against dissent and, arguably, free speech that seems to have succeeded in sharply reducing protests against the killing of civilians in Gaza — or against anything else for that matter.

Uhhh, even Mr Bunch (unwittingly?) admitted that Mr Taal “disrupted a job fair,” which means that this was beyond freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, but was infringing upon the freedom of speech and peaceable assembly of other people.

Mr Bunch then advocated the new social media site Bluesky, the anti-Twitter refuge of those who can’t stand actual freedom of speech: Continue reading →

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The Philadelphia Inquirer keeps up with the hate of Donald Trump even after the election

Wouldn’t the answer be, to children who might ask why former and future President Donald Trump beat current Vice President and future private citizen Kamala Harris Emhoff in the election, that the United States held a free and fair election, and as in every election, one serious candidate won, and one serious candidate lost? But no, the American left, having gone off the rails in their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, think something else is required.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How do we explain this election to our children?

Children need us to accept their gift of hope, even if we aren’t feeling it, and they need us to use it to fight for them.

by Gwen Snyder, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

The past two months have been a whirlwind of autumnal novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. There was Sesame Place, then her 3rd birthday, then her first day of school. Just as things began to settle, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, fast on their heels came the election.

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The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of President Nixon and Watergate, bringing down a Republican president, chose to protect a Democrat.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, huh?

The Washington Post added that tagline to its masthead in February of 2017, claiming that it wasn’t an attack on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, deciding “to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee,” though nobody in particular believed that. I question the timing, as Robert Stacy McCain would say.

The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.

I am glad that my favorite reporter, Heather Long, stepped back from the newspaper’s Editorial Board a couple of months ago, so that she can’t be blamed for this drivel.

Trying to protect Biden, Democrats sacrificed their credibility

Democrats’ coverup of the president’s decline hurt their claim of being the party of truth.

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Yet another liberal blames Democrats’ loss on Freedom of Speech

I saw Michael Tomasky’s whining article in The New Republic on Friday, and mused about commenting on it, but Robert Stacy McCain beat me to it. It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Mr Tomasky blames Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post — which lost over 250,000 subscribers when owner Jeff Bezos cancelled the upcoming endorsement of Mrs Emhoff — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have included the much more conservative New York Post!

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on. Continue reading →