Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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CNN correspondent in trouble for telling the truth Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men's room.

My good blogging friend Robert Stacy McCain likes to note how the once-renowned Cable News Network, CNN, has fallen in the ratings, not just third behind Fox News Channel and MSNBC, but gets fewer viewers than Nickelodeon’s kiddie cartoon Paw Patrol.

Fox News is unapologetically conservative, and MSNBC makes no bones about being leftist. CNN is leftist as well, though the network tries to deny it, and recently fired CEO Chris Licht, who was at least trying to get the network to report less bias and more news.

Well, in today’s more amusing news, a CNN correspondent, Ryan Young, is being criticized for doing something really radical, telling the truth!

CNN under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney: ‘Unbelievably bad’

By Lee Brown | Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 9:21 AM EDT | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

CNN is under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney as “he” and “him” in a segment about the “culture war” being waged over the transgender influencer’s partnership with Bud Light.

Correspondent Ryan Young failed to use the 26-year-old influencer’s preferred pronouns in a short segment about the backlash against the beer giant that has led to plummeting sales.

Young also mispronounced Mulvaney’s first name as “Dylvan” while describing the social media star to “CNN News Central” viewers Tuesday.

“He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with, with Bud Light,” Young said, using “he” instead of Mulvaney’s preferred “she.”

“But [trans activists] didn’t like how Bud Light didn’t stand by him after all this,” Young said, again failing to use the influencer’s preferred “they.”

Well, that’s a mistake: is Mr Mulvaney’s preferred pronoun “she,” the feminine singular, of “they,” the genderless plural?

Media Matters critic Ari Drennen shared footage of the less-than-2-minute clip, ripping it as an “unbelievably bad CNN segment.”

That Media Matters would see using the correct pronouns to refer to Mr Mulvaney as “unbelievably bad” is unsurprising. Naturally, CNN apologized for having a correspondent tell the truth:

CNN eventually apologized at the end of Wednesday’s episode of “News Central.”

Referring to Mulvaney, Bolduan said: “She was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronoun, and CNN aims to honor individuals’ ways of identifying themselves and we apologize for that error.”

When Mr McCain noted that CNN was coming in behind Nickelodeon’s Paw Patrol, he neglected to mention that Paw Patrol, and really all of the children’s network’s programming, is more accurate and truthful than CNN. Mr McCain has said that he watches CNN so that his readers don’t have to, which is a fair amount of self-sacrifice. Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men’s room.

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Killadelphia: What the Philly media won’t tell us

With the Kingsessing mass shooting being a Philadelphia story, it’s unsurprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer would have several follow-up stories on it.

As soon as the name of Kimbrady Carriker was released, his social media were investigated, and photos of Mr Carriker in female dress led to immediate speculation that he was, like Audrey Hale in Nashville, yet another transgender killer. Well, that led to Philly officials quickly denying it:

While he acknowledged the social media images that appear to show Carriker wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, Asa Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, condemned the “violent” language coming from the “conservative press” about Carriker’s gender identity and shared what the district attorney’s office knows firsthand about Carriker’s gender identity.

“Appear to show”? No, there’s no “appear to show” here, but actually show. Why would Mr Khalif, who supports the homosexual and transgender community, and must surely not be offended by, or see anything wrong, with cross-dressing, want to mealy-mouth things?

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

I saw a video of Mr Khalif’s statement, and while he stated that Mr Carriker had not identified as transgender or anything other than male, I also noticed that he went out of his way to use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the suspect. Did Mr Carriker express a preference for such to be used? If so, it hasn’t made the credentialed press, but speaking with the District Attorney at his side, he might have been clued in to something the DA’s office knew but hasn’t been made public.

Khalif condemned those who label trans people as “killers.”

“They are the most vulnerable to violence,” he said. “They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner expressed similar sentiments.

“There are some people for whom hate is a full-time job,” Krasner said. “And if they can stay away from the facts and talk about nonsense, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Mr Khalif, who tweeted on the Fourth of July, “So when i say Fuck The Police..don’t tell me that’s disrespectful..the violence against black people is beyond disrespectful!”, keeps telling us, through multiple tweets, and retweets that the alleged shooter isn’t transgender. The Philadelphia Inquirer also jumped on that bandwagon:

Conservative media outlets claimed Carriker was transgender based on Facebook photos of him dressed in feminine clothing. However, Carriker is identified as male on public records and district attorney officials said Wednesday that he identifies as male.

I actually avoided making such a claim, writing on Independence Day:

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

But, you know what I also haven’t seen in the Philly media? You know what Mr Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for District Attorney Larry Krasner, hasn’t yet told us? Mr Carriker’s grandmother said that he was homosexual:

Ms Carriker said her grandson was gay and would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, but had not undergone gender transition surgery or treatment.

She said she made it clear to Carriker that she disapproved of him wearing women’s clothes due to her Christian beliefs.

“I saw him one time in female clothes, and from the expression on my face, from that point on, he never came in female clothes around me because he knew how I felt about it,” she told The Independent.

“He was trying to find himself. He didn’t know where he belonged. I used to talk to him about it, but he didn’t like to converse with me about things like that.”

The Philadelphia media, so quick to tell us some of Mr Carriker’s political views, his support for the Second Amendment, admiration of Tucker Carlson, and hating of President Biden, but soft-peddling his support of #BlackLivesMatter and the riots in many cities in the wake of the unfortunate death during the arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, and telling us that he wasn’t transgendered, never mentioned, at least as far as I could find, that he is homosexual. It took a report from a newspaper in London, England, for us to get that news.

It is not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to the Philly media that they would keep such under wraps.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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Today’s left really, really, really hate Freedom of Speech, and normality

There has been all sorts of leftist angst and hollering and combitching about laws, passed in several states, which ban hormone and surgical ‘treatments’ for minors who believe themselves to have been born the wrong sex. It’s discriminatory, it’s wrong, it will hurt people, and lead to suicides, we are told.

Yet, oddly enough, I never read one thing about this, in a single sentence from Newsweek:

Last week, Michigan banned conversion therapy, the controversial practice trying to “cure” LGBTQ+ people of their sexual orientation and gender identity, for minors in the state.

Yet:

Research shows that lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) teens are at increased risk of suicide and mental health issues like depression and anxiety. One of the most startling statistics: LGBTQ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about twice the national rate for all adolescents.

So, if the left are arguing that not allowing minors who believe themselves to be the opposite ‘gender’ from the sex they were born to receive ‘gender-affirming’ care increases suicide risk, why would they concomitantly want to ban homosexual minors from treatment for their homosexuality if being homosexual increases their risk of suicide?

The homosexual lobby contend that conversion therapy is both harmful and ineffective, and whether it is ineffective medically, those claims have certainly been effective politically. But the real issue is one of reproduction: since homosexuals cannot naturally reproduce without stepping into heterosexuality, ‘losing’ homosexuals to normal sex is an attack on all of them. They hate being called “groomers”, but what else is it when they try their hardest to keep every kid growing up sexually confused, and to reduce the societal stigma attached to homosexuality, what else can we call it?

And now we have this:

Michigan Pronouns Law Declared an ‘Abomination’ by Former Judge

by Giulia Carbonaro | Monday, July 3, 2023 | 9:00 AM EDT

Michigan’s recent bill making it a felony for people to harass or intimidate someone by misgendering them and using the wrong pronouns has sparked controversy in the state, with former judge and television personality Joe Brown calling the measure an “abomination.”

The new measure, House Bill 4474, is part of a package of legislation that would replace Michigan’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and would make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words.

It expands the existing law to cover sex, sexual orientation, age, gender identity or expression, and physical or mental disability. Religion, ethnicity and race were already included in the previous legislation and will still be covered under the new law.

Michigan has recently been pushing reforms and new measures that would expand the protection of LGBTQ+ rights in the state, going against a nationwide trend that has seen other states moving to limit rights for transgender youth.

There’s more at the original.

Apparently the great state of Michigan, in which Governor Gretchen Whitless Whitmer, a Democrat of course, imposed illegal and draconian executive orders to fight the COVID-19 panicdemic, believes that the Freedom of Speech guaranteed to all of us under the Constitution of the United States can, should, and must be regulated to spare the precious feelings of the ‘transgendered.’ I wonder: while I do not live in Michigan, and have never set foot in that state, could I be punished because my website is available there?

Under the bill — which makes it a hate crime for a person to threaten another by deliberately using the wrong pronouns with an intimidating purpose — offenders would be guilty “of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000.”

This is what today’s left do: they elevate ‘group rights’ over those of the individual, to support the goals of the State — at least, as long as they control the State — above the individual rights protected by our Constitution. If the law passes, which has not yet happened, it will take someone actually charged and convicted of this ‘crime’, appealing the conviction through multiple layers of courts, to get it reversed, even though simply referring to Bruce Jenner as Bruce Jenner doesn’t hurt anyone. Such a person could wind up serving a sentence in prison before it could ever be reversed.

If someone wants to refer to Bradley Manning as ‘Chelsea,’ that’s perfectly up to them, and no skin of my nose, even if I see it as both silly and stupid; that’s within their free speech rights. But the lower house of the Michigan state legislature would make it a crime to refer to Mr Manning as Bradley, or as Mr Manning.

Bill Blankschaen and Erick Erickson coined the phrase, “You will be made to care“. An issue about which most sensible people would not care — it’s none of my business if Harry wants to become Sally — is becoming one in which the homosexual/transgender lobby are trying to use the power of the State to force people to go along with their kinks and delusions; that makes it other people’s business.

We have pointed it out previously: the left are smart enough to know that if they can control the language used, they can subtly, and perhaps not-so-subtly, direct your thinking. If you can get acclimated to calling someone like Richard Levine “Rachel,” and referring to him with the feminine pronouns, the job of the left is half-way done. That some of us stubbornly insist on calling the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names — if we can find them; sometimes I cannot — and using the pronouns and honorifics appropriate to their actual sex not only fights back against the left, but angers them so much that at least some of them want to make it illegal shows just how important they believe it to be.

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The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud.

At the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Those words were fished out after President Barack Hussein Obama nominated her to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. What can those words mean other than, as a jurist, Hudge Sotomayor would take her decisions, at least in part, based not on the law, but on her race, sex, and ethnicity.

She backed away from that statement in her confirmation hearings, “declaring it ‘a rhetorical flourish that fell flat’ and stating that ‘I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,'” and she was ultimately confirmed, 68 to 31.

Well, today Associate Justice told us, once again, that it isn’t what is written in the law, or the Constitution, that is important, but people’s feelings! In her dissent in 303 Creative v Elenis, she wrote:

The meaning of our Constitution is not found in any law volume, but in the spirit of the people who live under it.[1]303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.

This is rather remarkable. The Justice, utterly horrified by the decision that a Colorado web designer could not be compelled to create a website for a same-sex ‘wedding,’ cited precedent after precedent telling us that the government could, and has, gotten away with both restricting and compelling various forms of commercial speech, along with dozens of citations of laws and court cases concerning equal access to commerce and commercial enterprises. Yet, after all of that long dissent, she broke down and told us that what was written in the law just flat didn’t matter. What mattered, according to our ‘wise Latina,’ is how the people who live in the United States feel about things.

This is a hugely dangerous position, but one which is hardly unexpected. Justice Sotomayor voted against religious freedom in the cases of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, but railed against the decision, this time supporting the freedom of religion and assembly in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo. The cases were all about the same thing: the states forcing churches to close, due to the COVID-19 penicdemic, and Justice Sotomayor believed that the virus trumped the Constitution of the United States.

The good Justice also saw nothing wrong with restricting our Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and McDonald v City of Chicago, or upholding equal protection under the law in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The plain words of the Constitution meant nothing to Justice Sotomayor, or the other liberals on the Court, as they went through all sorts of contortions to say that somehow, some way, the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution just didn’t matter when it came to liberal policies.

The liberals on the Court are hardly the only ones who want to massage the words of the Constitution to mean something other than what they say. The Editorial Board of The New York Times opined:

In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.

The Editorial Board spend many words telling us why Affirmative Action is so desperately needed, yet never manage to give us a reason as to how it fits under the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.

Left unaddressed was one of the Chief Justice’s points, that, in the context of university admissions, which are a zero-sum game, helping black applicants has another effect, hurting white and Asian applicants.

There is so much more that could be said, but, in the end, it boils down to this: the left have programs in mind which elevate the programs of the government over the rights of individuals, and today’s left are fine with that. And that is why sensible people must fight the left, fight for our rights, because the left won’t help us.

References

References
↑1 303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.
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Special Snowflake™ melts down.

Unfortunately, I have to make a trip to Ashland today, but I felt the need to screen capture a few things before Erica Marsh decides to block me or protect or delete her tweets.

Miss Marsh described herself as a “Proud Democrat: Former Field Organizer to elect President Biden. Volunteer for the Obama Foundation.” And then she included her ‘pronouns,’ as though anyone looking at her photo couldn’t tell that she’s female.

On June 10th, she tweeted:

My name is Erica (She/Her), I’m a Proud Democrat, fully vaccinated and boosted, still wear 2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine 🇺🇦. I will never stop advocating for progressive candidates and causes fighting against the fascist ULTRA MAGA. RT IF YOU ARE WITH ME

Naturally, there was a Ukrainian flag in the tweet, but, significantly enough, no American flag. I think that says something. That she “still wears two masks” says something else

Well, on Thursday, she said something pretty stupid:

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

Apparently Miss Marsh believes that black Americans are just plain inferior. What other way is there to read what she tweeted?

Of course, after people pointed it out to her, she quickly realized what she had said, and had to issue a clarification:

Allow me to clarify this tweet, which is being manipulated for propaganda and misinformation by ULTRA MAGA.

The intention of my tweet is to highlight that prior to affirmative action, there existed a supposedly merit-based system for Black individuals to gain admission to colleges. However, these institutions employed racial profiling to prevent Black individuals from attending under the guise of this “merit” system.

I want to emphasize that my statement in no way suggests that Black individuals are less intelligent than people of other races.

Perhaps she didn’t realize what she wrote, but it was in the past tense, “prior to affirmative action.” If she had actually read the ruling, or Grutter v Bollinger, she’d have realized that the Supreme Court had previously required an end date for Affirmative Action programs, June 23, 2028 under Grutter, but as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the ruling at hand, neither Harvard University nor the University of North Carolina, the two colleges part of the case, had specified how they were going to taper off their race-based preference systems by that date, had made any progress to doing so, nor could give any projected date for its end.

A lot of people criticized Miss Marsh’s tweets, but hey, when you speak in public criticism is something you can get.

Finally, she went all Special Snowflake™, because she apparently got her precious little feelings hurted.

If anyone is a defamation lawyer who works on contingency, please (direct message) me. Thanks.

President Harry Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” That’s pretty good advice for Miss Marsh. But I checked just before posting this, and at least she hasn’t blocked her critics — at least not me, anyway — or ‘protected’ her account.

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Today’s #woke left sure do hate Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and democracy . . . when those things go against leftist values

I will admit it up front: when I saw the article on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page, and cited below, I expected one dripping with liberal bias, but it was actually mostly balanced reporting.

Why Moms for Liberty was designated an ‘extremist’ group by the Southern Poverty Law Center

Born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools, Moms of Liberty pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools.

by Maddie Hanna | Wednesday, June 28, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Moms for Liberty calls itself a parent empowerment group. But as the polarizing organization arrives in Philadelphia this week for its annual summit, it’s being identified as something else: an “antigovernment extremist group.”

That’s according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the veteran civil rights organization that tracks domestic extremism. This year, the group added a number of “parental rights” groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to them as “anti-student-inclusion” — to its tally of hate and antigovernment extremist groups.

Robert Stacy McCain has done a lot of reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, and pointed out, in an article asking “What counts as hate?“, writing:

by continually expanding the definition of “hate” and “extremism,” and by encouraging censorship and suppression of anyone who dissents from their liberal agenda, the SPLC compels people with more or less mainstream beliefs to engage in the kind of activism practiced by Moms for Liberty. Furthermore  (and, again, I think SPLC staff are too stupid to grasp this), by denoting mainstream groups as proponents of “hate,” the SPLC undermines its own credibility and causes people who are not remotely “extremist” to question the whole rationale of this type of “hate”-hunting enterprise. Like, why should we even care if someone is prejudiced against gay people or black people or Jews or whatever? So long as they are not engaged in any actual criminal behavior, or advocating violence against others, people are free to form their own opinions. This whole business of “exposing” people as holding allegedly dangerous beliefs — which is to say, acting as Thought Police — is antithetical to liberty. And I think more Americans are beginning to reject the type of Thought Police agenda that SPLC pursues.

Of course, in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, where so many seem to despise freedom of speech for the people they oppose, the staff at the American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia, a revolution against the British government spread by freedom of speech and of the press, don’t support allowing the Moms being allowed to speak.

Back to the Inquirer:

Moms for Liberty has accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of espousing “hate” toward its members. Here’s why the organization says Moms for Liberty warrants the designation:

What makes Moms for Liberty an antigovernment group?

Founded in Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty was born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools and now claims 285 chapters across 45 states. It pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools, as part of a broader conservative movement that has accused schools of indoctrinating students around race, gender, and sexuality.

Heaven forfend! Some parents are opposed to the public schools, which have, due to the compulsory education laws in every state, what is, in effect, a captive audience, been teaching, been indoctrinating, beliefs which are opposed to some people’s religious beliefs, and opposed to simple, common sense. It wasn’t so very long ago that girls who like rough-and-tumble, who would go out and get dirty and sweaty playing ball with the boys were called, sometimes admiringly and sometimes not, tomboys, but everyone knew that they were still girls. There was a time in which boys who liked to play with dolls or do somewhat ‘girly’ things were called, never admiringly, sissies, but everyone knew that they were still boys. Now? Now, they’re not what they were born, but one of 1 × 10n new ‘genders,’ you’ve got to call them that, and it’s time to reach for the puberty blockers and surgical scalpel. No one would ever say that public school libraries should have materials showing girls fellating boys, but today’s left — which includes a lot of public school teachers and administrators — are aghast that some people are opposed to having materials in public school libraries which depict boys fellating boys. Many concerned parents do not want this kind of stuff normalized, but if you are a parent who doesn’t want that, the SPLC says that you are a hater and an anti-government extremist.

That messaging is what landed Moms for Liberty on the SPLC’s list, said Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

“It’s really looking at their overall narrative: that public educators and public schools are attempting to indoctrinate and sexualize children through this radical Marxist agenda,” Carey said.

The SPLC notes statements from Moms for Liberty leaders, including the group’s slogan that “we do not co-parent with the government,” comments referring to “government schools,” support for abolishing the federal Department of Education, and accusations that teachers unions are responsible for indoctrination.

In one example flagged by the SPLC, Moms for Liberty said last year that “the K-12 cartel — also known as the national teachers union (NEA) — met and drafted a proposal to replace the word ‘mother’ with ‘birthing person.’” Describing the proposal as “insane,” Moms for Liberty said that “as the teachers union pushes an agenda focused on everything but educating our children, American parents are rising up, taking back our school districts and putting the focus back on educating our children.”

We have previously reported how The Washington Post kowtowed to the #woke by headlining an article with “pregnant people” in both the title and body, and a site search of the Inquirer’s website returned 2,905 references to “pregnant people,” 1,062 references to “pregnant person,” 1,643 references to “birthing person,” and 4,669 references to “birthing people.” Is that what the Inky’s stylebook now requires? Is it surprising that sensible people would note these assaults on language and attempts to normalize transgenderism and the notion that men can get pregnant and have babies?

Well, perhaps the SPLC were not surprised at that, but Maya Henson Carey said that the SPLC cited such objections as part of the reason Moms for Liberty was declared to be an “anti-government extremist” group.

After several paragraphs in which Dr Carey claimed that the Moms must be raaaaacist, comparing their objections to critical race theory, the education of which has a strong political component, she went on:

Moms for Liberty has also opposed policies accommodating transgender students and has referred to gender dysphoria as being “normalized by predators.” And while Moms for Liberty has said it’s focused on removing inappropriate sexual content, efforts to ban books from libraries have disproportionately targeted stories about LGBTQ people or people of color, Carey said.

It’s certainly true that the Moms are fighting the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the public schools, but that’s what they should be doing. It’s an obvious question: why on earth would the public schools be pushing normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the first place? Why would the public schools be pushing something which is opposed by many religions, why would they be pushing something that is directly contrary to the religious faiths of many parents?

Is not the state pushing a particular issue which violates a lot of people’s religious faith in itself a state establishment of religion?

Carey said the education groups represent a trend of “a shift to public spaces” by extremist groups, that “comes with them showing up for school board meetings and running for public office. A lot of these antigovernment and hate groups are really infiltrating the lives of everyday Americans.”

And there you have it: an SPLC spokeswoman is complaining that conservatives are exercising their freedom of speech, and, in what must surely be a horrific attack on democracy, are doing something really radical like running for office in democratic elections!

 

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If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang! The professional media don't usually tell us outright lies, but their editorial and stylistic decisions sure do shade the truth!

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.

A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.

“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.

by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.

Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.

Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.

The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.

I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.

Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.

Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:

Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.

by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021

Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.

On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.

There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”

We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.

Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.

If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!

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The pot calling the kettle black: Jenice Armstrong tells us that cable news networks are biased The Philadelphia Inquirer laughably tells us that they "delineate between opinion and straight news."

I have said it many times before: I prefer to read the news rather than listen to it on radio or watch it on television. Part of that is because I have very degraded hearing, and part of it is because newspapers have the capability, especially now that digital newspapers have taken some advantage of being able to ignore the printed space limitations of the dead trees editions. Reading the news enables me to go back and reread a section if I found it confusing or contradictory. There’s also the personal point that I delivered newspapers from the sixth through eleventh grades.

But I had to laugh, and I mean a loud, trying-not-to-spill-my-Rice-Chex guffaw, at Jenice Armstrong’s OpEd column in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t watch cable news much anymore. Here’s why.

Recently, I hosted a screening of “Trustworthy,” a new documentary that asked Americans what they think about the state of media in the U.S. No surprise: It isn’t good.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

When I decided to pursue a career in journalism, it wasn’t that long after the glory days of the uncovering of the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon. Back then, Americans viewed us as heroes, champions of the people.

I worked at newspapers all over because I admired reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I sacrificed time I could have spent with my family — or even starting one of my own — because I wanted to do this work. I’ve watched my colleagues do the same, only to end up working for a shrinking industry that Americans rank not far above used car salespeople.

Today, Americans trust journalism less than ever. A recent poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup discovered that only 34% of Americans trust the news media to be accurate and fair; more — 38% — said they have “no trust at all” in the media.

Recently, I hosted a screening of Trustworthy, a new documentary on the subject of media distrust, at the Fitler Club, which was followed by a panel discussion. Executive producer Stephany Zamora, a Silicon Valley tech executive, created it after watching Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She woke up the following morning determined to explore the media and democracy and whether it’s possible to find common ground.

Despite having zero filmmaking experience, Zamora set off on a 5,300-mile bus journey across the country interviewing academics, journalism experts (including Inquirer editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar), and ordinary Americans about what they think about the state of media in the U.S.

The blurb to the right is a screen capture from Miss Armstrong’s column, and it’s certainly true. But the columnist is about to miss the entire point.

All it takes to discredit news media are two words, Escobar notes in the documentary: “Fake news. When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Mr Escobar said that as though the “work that journalists do” is somehow beyond criticism, beyond question. But I am old enough to remember ‘Rathergate‘, in which CBS News used forged documents to try to sabotage the younger President George Bush’s re-election bid. More, I watched CBS News coverage on election night that year, as Dan Rather kept asking reported Ed Bradley, who was doing the numbers that night, for another scenario in which Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) could somehow pull out a win, despite the numbers going against him as the returns rolled in, and the hang-dog expressions on all of their faces as they realized that President Bush was going to be re-elected.

Miss Armstrong wrote that she blamed the problems that journalism is facing on “cable news,” at which point she commented on the failures of CNN to revitalize itself after the firing of Jeff Zucker and hiring of Chris Licht, an effort which failed, and Mr Licht was let go himself earlier this month, after barely a year on the job. Amusingly, the Associated Press reported:

A lengthy profile of Licht in Atlantic magazine that came out on Friday, (June 2, 2023), titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,”[1]Internal link added by me; not in cited article. proved embarrassing and likely sealed his fate. Author Tim Alberta discussed how Licht’s effort to reach viewers turned off by CNN’s hostility to Trump had failed and damaged his standing with CNN journalists.

Another belly laugh here. According to the report, CNN’s journalists were complaining that, in effect, Mr Licht was trying to go for less strident anti-Trump stuff and trying to engage in less unfair more unbiased reporting.

Naturally, there was the Inquirer’s standard denigration of Fox News as slanted — which it is — but I was amused when Miss Armstrong told us that she used to keep cable news on as a “backdrop,” and “fall asleep listening to MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.” If you listen to Miss Maddow’s show, you’ll never run out of biased news, as she is as hard left, on an admittedly leftist network, as you can find.

Miss Armstrong concluded:

In the meantime, I have another solution: Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news. Also, turn off 24-hour cable news, which too often blurs the line between fact and opinion and hypes events to boost ratings.

That’s what I do. I’m way less triggered that way. I sleep better, too.

“Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news”? How many times have I noted the journolism — the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity — of the Inquirer? There are 68 stories on this website alone in which a site search for Inquirer journalism returned. We have noted how the Inky deliberately censors the police reports they use, refused to publish a story on a pro-life clinic, in Philadelphia, being vandalized, and we have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

Many of those stories were supposedly straight news stories, not specified opinion pieces.

But it’s hardly unexpected, because the Inquirer itself told us that, to meet publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ requirement that it become an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper would censor the news, saying that the newspaper would be:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.

In a city which has averaged over 500 murders a year for the past three years, and could be headed that way again in 2023, I’m not sure how the newspaper could possibly ‘overemphasize crime.’

  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.

So, the newspaper has publicly committed to an “antiracism” mission, and that, rather than simply presenting the facts, will guide how it publishes the news.

  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Put plainly, Miss Hughes told us that the Inky would bend its coverage on “crime and criminal justice” with an organization which specifically labels itself activist, which wants reparations from media organizations, and which, despite Miss Hughes’ efforts, wants the newspaper to go even further to the left. The newspaper’s publisher wasn’t telling us about the Inky’s editorial and OpEd pages, she wasn’t “delineat(ing) between opinion and straight news,” but about everything that they publish!

Yes, Miss Armstrong is right: the cable news networks have biases, biases strong and obvious enough that News Nation has seen an opening for straight news programming, though I cannot comment on how successful they’ve been in avoiding bias.

But The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bias, too, and not just on the editorial and OpEd pages; they have already admitted it. It’s understandable that, as a newspaper employee and writer, she’d want people to get their news from newspapers, but to claim that newspapers, especially her own, “delineate between opinion and straight news,” is just laughably false.

References

References
↑1 Internal link added by me; not in cited article.