La Marseillaise below the fold. Continue reading
Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press
Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign communications director tells us she “shares the goals” of the outside rabble
It was buried far down, as in the 15th paragraph of the article, before Michael Tyler, the campaign communications director for Kamala Harris Emhoff told us a truth he might regret. In an article in The Hill by Alex Gangitano entitled “How Harris wants to handle Gaza at the Democratic convention“, the author told readers that the Democratic National Convention isn’t spending much time on the Israel/Hamas war, because other issues are of greater importance to American voters, but far down, she gave us this:
When asked about the war protesters in Chicago this week, Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler argued that Harris is “somebody who understands the goals of the people who are showing up to demonstrate here and frankly who shares the goals.”
As the campaign’s communications director, one would assume that Mr Tyler understands the importance of words and choosing his words carefully, so when he tells everybody that Mrs Emhoff “shares the goals” of the pro-Hamas demonstrators, I believe him.
NBC News reported:
Tuesday night’s protest was organized by Behind Enemy Lines, a leftist group with militant leanings. Another group behind the protest was Samidoun, which Germany and Israel have banned over allegations that it has ties to terrorist groups. (The U.S. has not declared Samidoun a terrorist group.)
The hyperlinks in the quoted paragraph were not in the original, but added by me. These organizations seek to disrupt civilization itself in their advocacy of fighting for the ‘Palestinians’ and freeing ‘Palestinian’ terrorists in Israeli jails. As we have previously noted, one of the infamous prisoner exchanges, 1,027 ‘Palestinian’ prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli hostage, Corporal Gilad Shalit, was Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7th massacre. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reported that the demonstrations were smaller than anticipated, but he heard “clarion calls for the destruction of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever.”
Most of the credentialed media failed to publish images of the Hamas flags being waved, but at least Fox News managed to do it.
So, if Mrs Emhoff “shares the goals” of the outside demonstrators, it has to be asked: which of their goals does she share? Most called for the ‘liberation’ of Palestine, but as Mr Milbank noted, there were also chants supporting the elimination of Israel; that’s what “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means! Those waving the Hamas flag are telling us that they support the kidnapping, rapes and murders that Hamas committed last October 7th; when the Democratic presidential nominee “shares the goals” of the protesters, does she support that as well?
Karma comes to Taylor Lorenz!
Our regular readers, both of them, will remember Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Miss Lorenz most significant claim to fame was her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, the owner of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. The left hated LoTT, because Miss Raichik’s schtick was to find the idiocy that the left were posting to TikTok — and there was a lot of it — and expose it far more widely, to the ridicule of the libs. At the time, Miss Raichik was working as a real estate agent, and the exposure was designed to cost Miss Raichik her job.
In the end, it simply made Miss Raichik more popular and wealthy, but it also made Miss Lorenz more of a public figure as well, invited to some of the hoitiest and toitiest of Hollywood soirees.
Of course, despite her insistence that everybody wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — though she subsequently deleted it, she informed readers that she was at least somewhat immunocompromised — as late as August of 2023, she didn’t wear one herself.
Well, in a true sauce for the goose moment, it seems that Miss Lorenz has been outed for something. From NPR, not exactly an evil reich-wing site:
‘Washington Post’ reviews star columnist Taylor Lorenz’s ‘war criminal’ jab at Biden
by David Folkenflik | Thursday, August 15, 2024 | 7:55 PM EDT
Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.
The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.
After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”
I am thoroughly amused.
A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.
NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.
Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.
“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.
The Post has already been cutting staff, due to the newspaper losing a lot of money. If Miss Lorenz loses her job over this — something which is certainly not guaranteed — would it not be a delicious bit of karma for trying to cost Miss Raichik her real estate position?
Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.
If that is true, then yes, Miss Lorenz has admitted posting it on Instagram. Perhaps she thought it was a joke, but as a social media savvy reporter, she should have realized just what a stink this would cause, as well as understanding that once something goes out into the internet, it can be seen by the wrong people, and used against her. Using utter stupidity as an excuse isn’t a good look.
Perhaps Miss Lorenz is now learning about sauce for the goose!
Apparently your Freedom of Speech is dependent upon which side you support
Many on the left decried efforts to curtail anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas demonstrations, and backed the not-so-peaceful demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and Antifa during the 2020 Summer of Hate, shouting about freedom of speech. But now we have the amusing spectacle of The New York Times fretting about how cities can fight “hateful speech” when it comes from the right.
What Can a City Do When Neo-Nazis Start Marching Down Its Streets?
The brazen appearance of white supremacist groups in Nashville left the city grappling with how to confront hateful speech without violating First Amendment protections.
by Emily Cochrane | Thursday, August 1, 2024
They first arrived at the beginning of July: dozens of masked white supremacists, shuffling out of U-Hauls, to march through Nashville carrying upside-down American flags.
A week later, members of a separate neo-Nazi group, waving giant black flags with red swastikas, paraded along the city’s famed strip of honky-tonks and celebrity-owned bars. The neo-Nazis poured into the historic Metro courthouse to disrupt a City Council meeting, harassed descendants of Holocaust survivors and yelled racist slurs at young Black children performing on a downtown street.
The appearance of white nationalists on the streets of a major American city laid bare the growing brazenness of the two groups, the Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. Their provocations enraged and alarmed civic leaders and residents in Nashville, causing the city to grapple with how to confront the groups without violating free speech protections.
“I can’t imagine having a mimosa on Fifth and Broadway, and 400 Patriot Front members walk out of a U-Haul — it has to be one of the most jarring experiences as an American and as a tourist in the city,” said State Representative Aftyn Behn, who represents the city’s downtown. “Nashville is a microcosm of the greater country, and we are at a moment where we have to decide who we are.”
I’m not sure how 400 Patriot Front members would fit in “a U-Haul,” but whatever. But it seems to me that the best response to groups advocating things you hate is to ignore them, at least as long as they aren’t setting buildings on fire or physically assaulting people. These groups usually demonstrate with well-disciplined and orderly marches, then get back in their vehicles, and return to their homes.
Both of the groups that visited Nashville this summer have become more visible since the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va, and are now among the top sources of white supremacist propaganda. At the same time, the leadership of the other far-right groups like the Proud Boys has been disrupted by prosecutions over their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
White supremacists have appeared in Nashville before and have increasingly promoted racist and antisemitic messages across the country. Those include plotting to riot at a Pride event in Idaho, disrupting city council meetings in New England and protesting at the opening New York performances of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in the South.
Did you catch that? They were “plotting to riot,” not that they actually started a riot. According to the embedded Times story, police “received a tip that a group of people had jumped into a U-Haul van near a Pride event.”
Many of the men also had shields and wore shinguards, and the police recovered one smoke grenade, they said. They did not mention other weapons.
So, other than a “smoke grenade,” something which could be used to have a group of marchers emerge from a cloud of smoke, the 31 arrested men were unarmed. That Times story concluded with this gem:
The action in Coeur d’Alene was not the only threat that involved a far-right group and an L.G.B.T.Q. event on Saturday. In San Lorenzo, Calif., members of the Proud Boys disrupted the “Drag Queen Story Hour,” a reading event at the San Lorenzo Library that was attended by children, parents and other community members, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook.
The men shouted homophobic and transphobic slurs at the event organizer and were described as having a violent demeanor, authorities said. Deputies arrived and de-escalated the situation, but a hate crime investigation is underway, the sheriff’s office said.
So, the men in that protest “shouted” mean things at the organizers of the event, and “were described as having a violent demeanor,” but the story does not say that they actually committed any violent acts.
Back to the article originally cited:
(Nashville) City officials said they were reviewing ordinances related to face coverings, littering and permit requirements for parades, as well as consulting a First Amendment expert to ensure that any crackdown would withstand a legal challenge.
The white supremacist groups, city officials said, strategically navigate city regulations to avoid arrest or police interference. Often, they are penalized with littering citations for distributing antisemitic pamphlets; in one instance, a leader of the Goyim Defense League spent a few weeks last fall in a Florida jail.
If you follow the last link, which is behind a paywall, you’ll see that the man listed as having spent a few weeks in jail was sentenced to thirty days for littering. From what little I could see before the paywall blocked everything, there were no charges against him of any violent crimes.
Today’s left in America very much support protests and rallies by the far left, cheering on the Black Lives Matter and Antifa demonstrations which caused multiple millions in damage in break-ins and arson, and they still call Kyle Rittenhouse a murderer for having defended himself against three previously convicted criminals assaulting him during that famous “Fiery but mostly peaceful protest” in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But when a group of men, in “which members generally wear masks and ‘khaki pants and a blue or white polo shirt,’ and sometimes employ smoke bombs,” for dramatic effect, and even have an operational plan consisting of marching in an orderly column until they reach barriers are encountered, and disengage and march back to a pre-arranged spot “once an appropriate amount of confrontational dynamic has been established.”
They might be confrontational, and they might be unpleasant, but they proceed without weapons to exercise their freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. Liberal urban governments really hate that, but let’s tell the truth here, American liberals really do hate the freedom of speech when it isn’t speech they like.
When he says we must listen to students, it needs to be all that the students say!
The Great Valley Middle School case in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has mostly faded from the news. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, some students created 22 faked TikTok accounts, “some depicting racist, homophobic, or sexually inappropriate content” that were attributed to teachers.
On Monday morning, Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman, pondered how to maintain freedom of speech for students and still avoid the ‘disruption’ student speech can sometimes cause. We need to listen to the students, he told readers, but missed an important point. Continue reading
Journolism: How can we call the credentialed media actually credentialed these days? They deliberately concealed Joe Biden's descent into dementia because they hate Donald Trump so much
No, that’s not a typo in the headline! The spelling ‘journolism’ or ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.
Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19th, she wrote:
President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.
Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops!
Trump has done Biden a favor over the past few months by painting the president as an infirm, doddering old man. If Biden appears even remotely sane, alert and engaged at the debates, he will have defied expectations. Moreover, Biden already accomplished an important component of a successful debate. In getting out in front to reach quick agreements with CNN and ABC, the president might have snagged, for the CNN-hosted June 27 debate in Atlanta, two of the most competent moderators available. Continue reading
MSNBC worried that their talking heads’ #TrumpDerangementSyndrome will be exposed even more
MSNBC was widely mocked after they sidestepped their AM show, Morning Joe, on Monday, due to fears that one or more of hosts Joe Scarborough’s and Mika Brzezinski Scarborough’s guests, or perhaps the couple themselves, might say something just boneheadedly crazy following the assassination attempt aimed at former President Donald Trump. That fear was hardly unreasonable, given that Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok has shown us dozens of statements the haters have posted on social media lamenting that the would-be assassin failed. Miss Raichik succeeded in many regards, as some of these #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-addled people have now found themselves unemployed. The bosses at MSNBC knew that Mr and Mrs Scarborough were deeply affected and infected with that disease, as many of their guests are as well. Continue reading
Killadelphia: The Inquirer isn’t fooling anyone by censoring the news
We have previously reported about how the rest of the credentialed media in Philadelphia despise Fox 29 News reporter Steve Keeley. They just don’t like the fact that Fox 29 reports on crime in the City of Brotherly Love, and they publish mugshots, which are public records.
My reaction upon seeing Mr Keeley’s tweet about the story? What a great mugshot! He has an expression on his face that very clearly says, “Oh, what did I do?” Or perhaps, “I am so f(ornicated).” If he’s guilty, Title 18 §2505(b), second-degree murder, Title 18 §1102(b), life in prison.
Too bad Graterford was closed!
Arrest made after Philadelphia store clerk shot, killed during robbery
By FOX 29 Staff | Wednesday, July 17, 2024 | 9:20 AM EDT
PHILADELPHIA – A man is charged with murder after a robbery at Philadelphia convenience store took a deadly turn last week.
Kharee Simmons, 37, is accused of shooting Kenneth Kennedy-McLeod to death inside Frankford Convenience Store on Pratt Street.
The 37-year-old victim was found gunned down behind the counter with several shell casings surrounding his body.
He was pronounced dead minutes later with multiple gunshot wounds to his shoulders.
An open register and several loose bills led police to believe the shooting stemmed from a robbery.
Simmons was arrested Tuesday and charged with Murder, Criminal Conspiracy, Robbery, Theft-Unlawful Taking, and Theft-Receiving Stolen Property.
That’s all there was, six short paragraphs on the robbery and murder.
Though there was a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the robbery and murder, published last Friday, the newspaper doesn’t have anything on the arrest of Mr Simmons. If there is a story published later, you can bet euros against eclairs — my version of dollars against doughnuts 🙂 — that Mr Simmons’ mugshot will not be included. [Update: Story published at 2:34 PM EDT. And, no, there was no mugshot published.]
My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.
Inquirer publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes decided, a couple of years ago, that the the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization,” and the paper ceased noting the race of suspects and victims, or publishing the mugshots of accused criminals, because mugshots somehow leave the impression that some minority groups are more closely identified with crime, but let’s tell the truth here: simply publishing Kharee Simmons’ name tells the reader that he is black. And the location of the murder, Pratt Street near Frankford Avenue and SEPTA’s Frankford elevated train depot, tells anyone familiar with the city that the suspects would probably be black.
Why, then, should people be paying $285.48 a year for a newspaper that doesn’t report all of the news? It’s not as though the Inky is actually fooling people. I would argue that, by trying — and failing; it’s not as though the Inquirer is the only news source in town — to conceal the news, the newspaper is actually pushing an impression that all criminals are black.
Immigrant and naturalized American Elon Musk protects the Freedom of Speech Native-born American citizen Mark Zuckerberg does not
You know how our good friends on the left always talk about “common sense gun control,” as they attempt to weaken our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms? “Oh, people don’t need an AR-15 to go hunting,” and that it was never meant to protect an individual’s right to own a firearm for self-defense.
Well, today’s left don’t think much our First Amendment rights, either. From Pirate Wires:
Musk: EU Wanted “Illegal Secret Deal” to “Quietly Censor Speech”