Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself You've got to love it when the left are eating their own

The old saying, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself,” has a somewhat obscure past. It has been attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, but direct quotes from 1805, alas! have rarely 🙂 been caught on tape.

Pamela Paul, photo from her website. Click to enlarge.

And so we come to Pamela Paul Stern, OpEd columnist for The New York Times, previously editor of The New York Times Book Review, overseeing all New York Times book coverage including the staff critics and publishing news. Graduated from Ivy League’s Brown University, she has carved out a prestigious career for herself. Married and soon divorced herself, she wrote The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, about couples who marry relatively young and divorce within five years, without having children:

The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony is a pioneering study of first marriages lasting five years or less and ending without children, and of the changing face of matrimony in America.

According to the brilliant trend analyst and journalist Pamela Paul, “It’s easy to conclude that the starter marriage trend bodes ill for the state of marriage. After all, we’re getting married, screwing it up, and divorcing—a practice that certainly isn’t strengthening our sense of trust, family, or commitment. But though starter marriages seem like a grim prospect, there is also an upside. For one thing, if people are going to divorce, better to do so after a brief marriage in which no children suffer the consequences.” But are there other consequences of starter marriages? And what causes these marriages to fail in the first place?

In today’s matrimania culture, weddings, marriage, and family are clearly goals to which most young Americans aspire. Why are today’s twenty- and thirtysomethings—the first children-of-divorce generation—so eager to get married, and so prone to failure? Are Americans today destined to jump in and out of marriage? At a time when marriage at age twenty-five can mean a sixty-year active commitment, could “serial marriages” be the wave of the future?

Drawing on more than sixty interviews with starter marriage veterans and on exhaustive re-search, Pamela Paul explores these questions, putting the issues into social and cultural perspective. She looks at the hopes and motivations of couples marrying today, and examines the conflict between our cultural conception of marriage and the society surrounding it. Most important, this lively and engaging narrative examines what the starter marriage trend means for the future of matrimony in this country—how and why we’ll continue to marry in the twenty-first century.

On August 15, 2004, she married again, this time with Michael Stern, a New York financial analyst. Then, in 2007, she published Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families:

“Strips porn of its culture-war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey Report for our time.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Porn in America is everywhere—not just in cybersex and Playboy but in popular video games, advice columns, and reality television shows, and on the bestseller lists. Even more striking, as porn has become affordable, accessible, and anonymous, it has become increasingly acceptable—and a big part of the personal lives of many men and women.

In this controversial and critically acclaimed book, Pamela Paul argues that as porn becomes more pervasive, it is destroying our marriages and families as well as distorting our children’s ideas of sex and sexuality. Based on more than one hundred interviews and a nationally representative poll, Pornified exposes how porn has infiltrated our lives, from the wife agonizing over the late-night hours her husband spends on porn Web sites to the parents stunned to learn their twelve-year-old son has seen a hardcore porn film.

Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and important investigation into the costs and consequences of pornography for our families and our culture.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Mrs Stern, even living in liberal New York City, would have at least something of a more traditionalist idea of sex, but the left are aghast! From The Los Angeles Times[1]If you cannot access the original due to a paywall, you can read it for free here.:

Pamela Paul criticized for anti-trans opinion about the word ‘woman’

by Dorothy Pineda | Thursday, July 7, 2022 | 12:21 PDT

The online literary community is slamming Pamela Paul, publishing kingmaker turned opinion columnist, after she wrote a piece in the New York Times criticizing language that is inclusive of transgender and nonbinary communities. And at least one critic is alleging that she used her longtime perch as the head of the paper’s books section to tone down transgender advocacy.

In an article published Sunday, headlined “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” Paul, who stepped down as books editor in March, posits that women in America are being stripped of their human rights not only by Republicans outlawing abortion but also by academics, progressives and transgender activists who reduce women to “a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.”

Earlier this week, author and journalist Patrick Ness called the article “a nasty bit of business” for “equating anti-abortion activists with trans rights believers” on his Instagram. He also alleged that Paul had asked him to change the opening in his review last year of Kyle Lukoff’s “Too Bright to See,” a story about a transgender boy.

“Ms Paul asked me to change my original opening — stating how transgender children are under attack — into something less political and ‘more focused on the book,’” he claimed before posting his original first paragraph, which began: “The culture wars have come for your transgender children.”

Perhaps it would be better to take less of what Mrs Stern’s views are from an obviously angered Los Angeles Times book columnist[2]Dorothy Pineda’s Los Angeles Times biography states that she “writes about books, publishing and the local literary scene for the Los Angeles Times. She served a brief stint in City News … Continue reading and quote her New York Times column directly. For ease of the reader knowing what quotations are from whom, Mrs Stern’s column is presented here in Times New Roman font, while Miss Pineda’s piece is shown in Ariel font.

The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count

by Pamela Paul | July 3, 2022

Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.

Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.

The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.

Can we state here that Mrs Stern, by virtue of her last quoted sentences, isn’t exactly an evil reich-wing conservative?

Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As we have reported here, “body parts” have several times offended real women! At least one member of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team has complained that Will Thomas, who claims to be a woman and calling himself “Lia,” is still a physically intact male and thinks little of parading around the locker room with his male genitalia exposed.

Kristina Wong of Breitbart has reported that:

An Army training slide obtained by Breitbart News instructs soldiers to shower with transgender members of the opposite sex even if they have not undergone a surgical transition.

Also see: William Teach: Army To Require Troops To Shower With Gender Confused

The training slide offers a “vignette” instructing soldiers on what to do if they encounter a female soldier who identifies as male according to the Department of Defense’s personnel tracking system known as Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), but has not surgically transitioned and still has “female genitalia.”

The slide, titled “Soldier/Unit Training Barracks, Bathrooms, and Showers,” reads:

Vignette: Following his transition from female to male (which did not include sex reassignment surgery) and gender marker change in DEERS, a transgender Soldier begins using male barracks, bathroom, and shower facilities. Because he did not undergo a surgical change, the Soldier still has female genitalia.

The slide instructs soldiers: “Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy. … Understand anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, or shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex despite having the same gender marker in DEERS.”

It also tells soldiers that they should be “respectful of the privacy and modesty concerns of others,” but that “transgender Soldiers are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers.”

Most soldiers are male, so perhaps putting it that way would be more practical, but by doing so, it ignores that which would most commonly be more objectionable: a “transgender female” who “did not undergo a surgical change” and still has male genitalia. As the father of a female staff sergeant and squad leader currently deployed to a desert area of the Middle East, I am aware that she shares quarters with another female soldier, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize that, with President Biden’s reversal of President Trump’s policy of banning the transgendered from military service, my daughter could be assigned a ‘transgender’ female who is still an intact male as a roommate.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”

It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

In a way, it’s odd. Most of the objections of us evil reich-wing conservatives have been along the lines of males claiming to be women, and taking athletic opportunities away from real women.[3]By “real women” I mean those who were born biologically female. Some people call them “cisgender women”, but in the typical phraseology of referring to “transgender … Continue reading But we appreciate Mrs Stern’s objection to the marginalization or real women from the other direction.

The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.

Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.

But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.

For a conservative like me, this is just glorious. Mrs Stern is clearly supportive of ‘transgendered’ people, but she has also, albeit grudgingly, conceded that the transgendered are simply different from the real members of the sex that they claim to be.

But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.

Well, of course it is unmentionable, because conservatives note what we have known scientifically for over a century, that, in humans, as in all mammals, XX chromosomes result in the females of the species, while XY chromosomes result in males. If the far left were to go along with the scientific fact that females have XX chromosomes, they have completely undermined the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves. .  .  .  .

The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.

Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.

At this point, Mrs Stern just doesn’t get it. By the left’s declaration that #TransWomenAreWomen, they have declared that ‘transgender women’ are identical to real women, that they just cannot be differentiated. To claim that there are things very specific to real women is to differentiate not just ‘trans males’ from real males, but ‘trans women from real women, and that wholly upsets the transgender ideology.

But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.

Can we tell the truth here? When it is asserted that “in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men,” it has to be noted — though most liberals will not do so — that such violence is almost entirely committed when men are taking up with a woman for sex, usually via prostitution, and then discover that the person they thought was a real woman was actually male.

If a person you believe to be female fellates you, and you then find out that he is actually male, you have been raped! Is it really that much of a surprise that a person who has been raped would respond violently?

It’s heartbreaking. And it’s counterproductive.

Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.

If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.

Well, of course: some people have called it ‘shutupery’, the argument that what you say cannot be said, so just sit down and shut the f(ornicate) up!

Me? I don’t want the transgender activists to shut up; I want them to shout their idiocy from the rooftops, because the greatest weapon against stupidity is to have its stupidity demonstrated for all to see and hear.

Back to Miss Pineda:

Paul, whose former position made her arguably the most influential person in print media books coverage, writes that the word “woman” once “had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and bodies with vaginas.’”

While she recognizes “the noble intent” of omitting the word “woman” when talking about reproductive health, Paul argues that “despite the spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.”

Others writers, critics and books journalists, who had generally been circumspect about Paul during her books tenure, now decried Paul for what they considered to be her anti-trans and trans-exclusionary views.

Maris Kreizman, host of LitHub’s literary podcast “The Maris Review,” wrote on Twitter Sunday: “Looking at the Opinion section and once again marveling over the fact that this terrible, hackneyed, boring writer was once the most important person in all of book publishing.”

I’ve got to admit it: seeing one liberal calling, via quotation, another liberal a “terrible, hackneyed, boring writer” as a way of dismissing her opinion can only warm the depths of my cold, right-wing heart. Mrs Stern and Miss Pineda ought to be allies on the liberal side, but Miss Pineda clearly hates Mrs Stern’s having taken a position different from her.

I’ve said it before: for the left, when it comes to sex, they feel almost required to take the most extremely left position, because to fail to do so is to legitimize us evil reich-wingers.

In her conclusion, Miss Pineda stated that Bette Midler, who was also concerned about the marginalization of the word “women”, cited Mrs Stern’s article to support her position. Mrs Stern’s writing will be cited by other people, hostile to the furthest left position, and that has the Los Angeles Times columnist very, very worried.

And so the extreme left are trying to destroy one of their allies on the not-quite-so-extreme left. With that, I am certainly pleased.

References

References
↑1 If you cannot access the original due to a paywall, you can read it for free here.
↑2 Dorothy Pineda’s Los Angeles Times biography states that she “writes about books, publishing and the local literary scene for the Los Angeles Times. She served a brief stint in City News Service’s police beat and was a general assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Wave newspaper. Pineda earned her bachelor’s in literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2012 and a journalism certificate from East Los Angeles College in 2017.”
↑3 By “real women” I mean those who were born biologically female. Some people call them “cisgender women”, but in the typical phraseology of referring to “transgender women” and “cisgender women” in the same article, such phraseology implies a form of equality between the two; I deny that, and will not use that wordage.
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Gun Control Laws and Our First and Second Amendment Rights Beware: if you are a faithful Roman Catholic, some states would deny your right to keep and bear arms

Robert Crimo III, via Twitter.


In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, several Republicans in the Senate got all wobbly-kneed and agreed to a Democratic ‘gun control’ bill. Among other things, it provides financial incentives for states without a so-called ‘red flag’ law to pass one.

Well, the solidly Democratic state of Illinois had a red flag law, and guess what? It didn’t stop alleged Highland Park shooter Robert Crimo III[1]Some people hold that publishing photos and the names of accused serial killers somehow encourages other potential serial killers. Personally, I cannot see how such an obviously incel-looking man … Continue reading from obtaining a firearm:

Highland Park suspect’s father sponsored gun permit application, police say

By Reis Thebault and Timothy Bella | Wednesday, July 6, 2022 | 10:18 AM EDT

The Illinois State Police confirmed on Tuesday that the father of the Highland Park parade shooting suspect sponsored his son’s application for a gun permit months after relatives reported that Robert E. Crimo III had threatened to “kill everyone,” and that authorities had “insufficient basis” to deny the application.

The revelation that Crimo, 21, had at least two previous encounters with law enforcement has raised new questions about how he was able to legally purchase his guns and whether more could have been done to prevent the massacre that killed seven people and injured more than 30.

In September 2019, a family member told Highland Park police that Crimo had threatened to “kill everyone,” said Christopher Covelli, a spokesman for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Officers visited Crimo’s home and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword, but made no arrest, Covelli said on Tuesday, because they lacked probable cause. However, they notified Illinois State Police, he said.

Months later, in December, Crimo applied for a firearm owner’s identification card, the document required to possess a gun in Illinois. Because Crimo was under 21 at the time, state law required him to have the consent of a parent or guardian before he could own a firearm or ammunition. According to state police, which issues the cards, Crimo’s father sponsored the permit application.

Also see: William Teach: Having Relatives Report Highland Park Shooter Threatened To Kill Everyone Is Apparently Not A Reason To Deny A Gun Permit

There’s more at the original, but it sounds like Robert Crimo, Jr, is being set up to be responsible, in some way, for his son’s (alleged) killings.

The Washington Post article continues to tell us that the state police had received a “clear and present danger” report on the younger Mr Crimo, but because there was no current request for a Firearms Owner’s Identification Card, there was no action the agency could take. Then, when he did apply for a FOID, the agency could not disapprove it because he had a sponsor.

“The subject was under 21 and the application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” Illinois State Police said in a statement. “Therefore, at the time of FOID application review in January of 2020, there was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger and deny the FOID application.”

So, what does this mean? It means that instates which are incentivized to establish ‘red flag’ laws, the pressure will be to make them more stringent, to suspend people’s Second Amendment rights for longer, possibly much longer.

I think back to the case of Nikolas Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter. Young Mr Cruz had many interactions with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, all for mostly petty crimes, but the deputies kept giving him free passes, kept letting him off with admonishments to be a good boy. After Mr Cruz committed an in-school assault, the Broward County schools, which had greatly reduced references to law enforcement, because they wanted to stop the “school to prison pipeline,” following a January, 2017, in-school assault. Had Mr Cruz been charged with that assault, he could not have legally purchased the weapons he used in the attack.

A FOID card is required under Illinois law to possess guns. The cards issued by the Illinois State Police require “any qualified applicant” to meet at least 15 requirements listed on the agency’s website.

At a news conference announcing the initial criminal charges against Crimo, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said Illinois’s red-flag law, which allows loved ones to ask a court to temporarily remove guns from those deemed violent or threatening, is “very powerful.” Yet the law is rarely used.

“We must vastly increase awareness and education about this red-flag law,” Rinehart said.

In the days following the shooting, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has vowed to strengthen state laws in an effort to prevent another tragedy like the one in Highland Park.

Translation: Illinois ‘red flag’ law did not work, so that Democrat-ruled state is going to make it stronger, restricting the rights of law-abiding Americans even further, because the state failed to act under the laws it had in place.

Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) said, “(I)n the state of New York, we’re now requiring social media networks to monitor and report hateful conduct on their platforms.” As Hannah Bleau noted on Breitbart:

It is a rather controversial move, given the varying interpretations of what constitutes “hate speech” in a world where far-left radicals consider “misgendering” someone an intrinsically “hateful” act.

In other words, because my site, The First Street Journal, states in the Stylebook,

Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

I would be denied a firearms permit in the state of New York because my sincerely-held belief that girls can’t be boys and boys can’t be girls. I have no criminal record, and have never even been accused of assaulting anyone. But because my beliefs closely adhere to Roman Catholic teachings on ‘transgenderism,’ the state of New York — where I do not live, but many Catholics do — would deny my Second Amendment rights over First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. Had I kept my beliefs entirely to myself, not exercised another of my First Amendment rights, freedom of speech and of the press, I guess I could get that permit.

There has been plenty of evidence that if law enforcement had acted on the laws already passed, some of these mass shootings could have been prevented, or at least made more difficult for the perpetrators; we could have prevented some of these cretins from obtaining firearms legally, but it seems that nothing can prevent a determined person from obtaining a firearm illegally. Instead, when existing laws have failed, due to bureaucratic mistakes and individual bungling, the response of the states is to further restrict the rights of people who have done nothing wrong. And now New York is attempting to remove people’s rights to keep and bear arms due to people’s religious and political beliefs.

References

References
↑1 Some people hold that publishing photos and the names of accused serial killers somehow encourages other potential serial killers. Personally, I cannot see how such an obviously incel-looking man male — surely no sighted heterosexual woman would ever consider actually copulating with him! — like Robert Crimo could ever inspire anyone to act like he did.
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Another begging letter from The Philadelphia Inquirer Remember when it used to be "An Independent Newspaper for All the People"?

This is not the first begging letter I have received from the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it is as amusing as all of the others.

I have frequently referred to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, in our nation’s sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area as The Philadelphia Enquirer ever since RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake. I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I have found it very apt. The Inky, despite Philly’s size, is only our nation’s 17th largest newspaper, by circulation. Why? I have suggested that part of it is because the Inquirer censors the news!

In attempting to meet publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper published its “Black City. White Paper” series, which, in effect, told white readers and potential readers that the Inky was really not for them.

Nor is it even true. Philadelphia isn’t a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

More, the Philadelphia metropolitan area is very much majority white. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Inquirer practically marketing itself as a newspaper for a “Black City” isn’t really something that’s going to help it to sell well in West Chester or Bucks County.

The Inquirer used to proclaim itself, on the newspaper’s masthead, that it was a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. That “Independent Newspaper” blurb was even proudly emblazoned on its old building, but the newspaper under Miss Hughes has been telling us that no, it is no longer a “Public Ledger,” and that it is no longer a “Newspaper for All the People.”

Why did Rebecca Forman, the Director of Advancement for the leftist Lenfest Institute, call me “a supporter of The Philadelphia Inquirer“? It’s simple: it’s because I am a subscriber for the digital newspaper.[1]As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area. And I am paying $21.96 every four weeks for my digital subscription, more than I pay for The Washington Post, $99 a year, and more than I pay for The New York Times, $17.00 every four weeks. Given that I used to live in the Keystone State, and Philadelphia is the city about which I am most concerned, and about which I most frequently write, I’ll continue to pay that subscription. I think I have contributed quite enough to the Inky, thank you very much.

But the Inquirer needs to get better; it needs to report all the news, not just what Miss Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar consider to be politically correct.

With the advent of digital publication, even though the dead trees edition has gotten physically smaller, newspapers in digital format are no longer constrained by word counts or assigned column inches. Newspapers have always had the ability to go more in depth than television news and their quick-fire show-and-tell stories, and now, with space constraints gone, really get into the heart of stories. The Inky can be better than it ever was.

Instead, it has gotten worse. Instead, the newspaper has gotten so thoroughly eaten up with ‘progressive’ ideology that the editors refuse to cover the news which might be politically incorrect, refuse to publish the news which might be outside Miss Hughes ideology. With Lenfest’s ownership, the Inquirer actually can call itself “An Independent Newspaper,” but they are failing in the “for All the People” part.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the newspaper and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the Inquirer really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt.

That is what journalists, real journalists, are supposed to do.

References

References
↑1 As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area.
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What is ‘gatekeeping’?

From The Gods Must Be Crazy, one of my all-time favorite movies. Click to enlarge.

We have previously mentioned the ‘gatekeeping’ function that the credentialed media used to enjoy. Now it seems as though “gatekeeper” and “gatekeeping” are internet insults. From Business Insider:

The internet really hates ‘gatekeeping,’ social media’s new go-to insult. The truth is you’re probably a gatekeeper, too.

by Sirena Bergman | Sunday, July 3, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT

Being a gatekeeper is just about the worst thing you can be accused of online.

Every few years, the internet cycles through a new buzzy clap-back phrase that’s instantly recognizable by its lifecycle, speeding from valid criticism to Twitter cliché until it hits the mainstream, finding its way into op-ed headlines and political discourse before being relegated exclusively to ironic use due to its cringe-inducing outdatedness.

You may remember the “check your privilege” phrase, circa 2012, which was counterbalanced by calling those using it “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.” Then came the age of calling out “virtue signalers,” who were swiftly put in their place with a well-timed “this you.”

Now, the 2020s have ushered in their own social-media-specific takedown. So abhorred is the concept of “gatekeeping” that it’s been lumped in with “girlbossing” and “gaslighting” to spawn a meme.

I will admit it: I am so uncool that I had to look up “girlbossing” and “this you.”

In its simplest form, “gatekeeping” is having access, opportunity, or knowledge — and then keeping it all to yourself. Gatekeepers, at least according to the internet, pull the ladder up behind them and exclude those with fewer opportunities from their space.

A great deal follows, including defining gatekeeping as simple privacy, such as ‘celebrities’ not sharing every little thing about themselves, though as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the former Mrs Depp, learned the hard way, sharing everything might not be a particularly good idea.

But it can also be less specific, referring to people who maybe aren’t hiding something tangible but are telling others they’re not entitled to an opinion or behavior (whether warranted or not).

The most obvious example of that, today, are the pro-prenatal infanticide forces telling men that they cannot have an opinion on the subject — unless it is pro-abortion, of course! — because males cannot get pregnant. But it has been used in countless other ways, such as blacks saying that non-black Americans cannot have an opinion on anything happening in primarily black neighborhoods.

Calling out gatekeepers is a core tenet of extremely-online Gen-Z culture which, spurred by the pandemic and the evolution of social media, has come to uphold the democratization of, well, everything, as the ideal.

This part is just silly, because it’s “Generation Z” who have been behind much of the censorship of social media: clamping down on ‘unapproved’ information about COVID-19, and Twitter’s banning of ‘deadnaming‘ and ‘misgendering‘. I have had to be careful in my article titles about Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who claims to be a woman named “Lia,” to keep from being banned; my good friend William Teach has been suspended from Twitter a couple of times, and had one account completely killed, because Twitter doesn’t like people doing something really radical like tell the truth.

Of course, the notion of “generation Z” and all of the other named generations is entirely a #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Western notion, and I hesitate to use it at all, but, alas!, it has become part of culture, and when the article I reference uses that kind of shorthand, it’s difficult to ignore it.

On social media, people have been accused of gatekeeping marginalized identities, science, mental health, zines, “the truth,” Kate Bush, and on, and on.

Accusing someone of gatekeeping online is so common that it’s now a trope in and of itself, one that is often mocked and subverted in irony.

So, what gatekeeping do I do? This site uses a spam blocker, which is almost always successful; I have attempted to close the gate against unrestricted advertising. We have a Comments and Conduct Policy, plainly accessible from both the website main page and subsequent article pages, although I’ve almost never had to actually enforce it. Maybe if more people actually read The First Street Journal, . . . .

As minor as this site is, we are, in effect, a publisher, and publishers can choose what to publish. We almost never actually censor anything, as I believe that what people say says more about the individual saying things than the writer may realize.

Is that ‘gatekeeping’? Yes, it pretty much is. But unlike the credentialed media of old, my refusal to publish something here does not prevent someone from saying what he pleases, because not only are there millions of websites out there, but starting your own site is simple, easy, and inexpensive. Some sites, like blogger.com, are so inexpensive that they are free.

I will accept the internet dismissal of OK Boomer for what it is, a reference to the fact that we boomers built the greatest economy and freest nation in the world, which the Special Snowflakes™ are trying to destroy! 🙂

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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For print newspapers, tempus is fugiting The solution to being 18th century technology is not becoming 19th century one-party newspapers!

Mickey East, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky during the 1970s, when I was a student there, used a bastardized phrase to encourage his students to get their work done, “Tempus is fugiting.”

According to Wikipedia, the expression “Tempus fugit” comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil‘s Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time”.

Well, time flies for newspapers, which I have previously called 18th century technology, because people are abandoning printed materials.

U.S. newspapers continuing to die at rate of 2 each week

Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

by David Bauder, Associated Press | Friday, July 1, 2022 | 10:26 AM EDT

NEW YORK — Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

“A growing recognition of the problem,” huh? The problem is that time has flown by, and technology has overtaken the print medium. Yes, I subscribe to newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, for my use as source material for my poor site. As I have previously mentioned, my hearing is seriously compromised, and I can read the news far more easily than I can watch and hear the news on television. More, when reading the news, if there’s something which was poorly worded or unclear, or that I somehow missed, I can go back to reread that portion, to lock it down correctly. To me, especially as a (poor) writer, trying to ascertain that I am getting things correctly, that’s important.

But, let’s face it: my subscriptions to those newspapers, and all the рублей I am spending — The Wall Street Journal in particular is not cheap, and though this site has changed, I had originally planned to concentrate more on economics — are all digital; I not only don’t get the print editions, but out in the rural area in which I live, I cannot get home delivery of the dead trees edition. Heck, I can’t even get the United States Post Office to deliver the mail to me, so I have to rent a post office box!

However, it’s more than that. Before I retired, I used to pick up a copy of the Inquirer from the Turkey Hill in Jim Thorpe, to take to the plant. The guys combitched[1]The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated. that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because that was closer to local news, but it was, and is, a junk paper. Now that it’s been bought out by the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, I’m pleased that I didn’t spend much money at all on the Morning Call.

Amusingly enough, for an owner of dead trees newspapers, Alden’s website opens up to an image of trees!

One of the issues with buying the Inquirer for the plant was that there were frequently sports stories which noted that ‘this game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.’ In the 21st century, we can always get our news up-to-date, by checking that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. And that illustrates the major problem for print newspapers: they are always several hours behind, in a world in which the news is reported minute-by-minute. I have no idea whether the Associated Press story referenced above will appear in the print edition of the Inquirer, from which I sourced it, but time stamped at 10:26 AM as it was, it cannot appear earlier than Saturday’s dead trees edition!

Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.

The country had 6,377 newspapers at the end of May, down from 8,891 in 2005, the report said. While the pandemic didn’t quite cause the reckoning that some in the industry feared, 360 newspapers have shut down since the end of 2019, all but 24 of them weeklies serving small communities.

Actually, even out in the sticks, we have not one but two local weekly newspapers, the Citizen’s Voice & Times and the Estill County Tribune, but who can know how long they’ll both survive?

An estimated 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers in 2006, and now that’s down to 31,000, Northwestern said. Annual newspaper revenue slipped from $50 billion to $21 billion in the same period.

Even though philanthropists and politicians have been paying more attention to the issue, the factors that drove the collapse of the industry’s advertising model haven’t changed. Encouraging growth in the digital-only news sector in recent years hasn’t been enough to compensate for the overall trends, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the report’s principal author.

As I have previously reported, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and 17th largest newspaper as measured by circulation, still thinks that the taxpayers should be taxed to support journalists, to the tune of a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors.

In other words, the publishers of the Inquirer believe that the taxpayers ought to pay up to $25,000 of the salary of reporters and editors! Does ABC News or CNN have to beg for the taxpayers to subsidize their journolists'[2]This was not a typographical error. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure … Continue reading salaries?

True “daily” newspapers that are printed and distributed seven days a week are also dwindling; The report said 40 of the largest 100 newspapers in the country publish only-digital versions at least once a week. Inflation is likely to hasten a switch away from printed editions, said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative.

One of the newspapers to which I subscribe, the Lexington Herald-Leader, does not publish a Saturday edition, and what I see online on Saturdays makes it look like the reporters and editors are pretty much off on Saturdays.

But there’s more to it. When I look at the digital editions of the Herald-Leader and the Inquirer, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization it has become obvious: if those were your only sources of news, you’d not be blamed for thinking that six Supreme Court Justices are the only people in America who don’t support an unlimited abortion license. These newspapers have been wholly one-sided in their reporting on the subject.

What my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal just published a fairly long story on the disappearance of Democratic voters in eastern Kentucky. You’d have to be a Kentuckian to really understand it, but it points out the problem for the newspaper: a paper which used to circulate widely throughout the counties east of Lexington — and I delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, two counties away from Lexington, when I was in junior high and high schools — has few subscribers now, because there is little or no local delivery, but also because the newspaper has become so thoroughly urbanized to the city that it really has nothing for the more conservative counties to the east. As we have previously reported, the newspaper has consistently endorsed the candidates, all Democrats, strongly rejected by the voters in every county of their (former?) service area other than Fayette. If you don’t give something for the readers in the outlying counties, can you really expect to have many subscribers there?

In Pennsylvania, the Inquirer is steadfastly liberal and Democratic in orientation, publishing all sorts of OpEds and barely-disguised opinion pieces camouflages as regular news articles slamming Republicans and conservatives, yet, while Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes in 2020, that was only due to his 471,050 vote margin in Philadelphia; absent Philadelphia County, President Trump had a margin of 389,495 votes. Much of Pennsylvania was strongly “red” and even Philly’s collar counties were only slightly “blue.” But the Inky gives those more conservative voters no reason to be actual readers of the newspaper.

Newspapers have more than a single problem. Yes, print newspapers, despite fancy colored printing and photographs, are simply updated 18th century technology, and the reduction in print subscribers has meant a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue. But they also have a 19th century problem: in becoming so highly slanted, they have reverted to the one-party newspaper style of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In the 19th century, there were competing newspapers in every city of any size, and if readers of one particular political stripe did not like the slant of one newspaper, they could turn to another.

Today, few cities have more than one newspaper, but newspapers do have competition, from television news. If MSNBC and CNN are slanted to the left, Fox News and the One America News Network are slanted to the right, and consumers can do something really radical like choose the sources they prefer. That newspapers face serious competition from television news and the internet is obvious; when they respond by pissing off half of their potential readership, they compound their problems.

References

References
↑1 The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated.
↑2 This was not a typographical error. 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typo in the title: 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

As we have mentioned, The Philadelphia Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes for its reporting. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are all significantly younger than the Inky. With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does the Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

Another pro-life clinic attacked, this one in Philadelphia

by Joe Bukaras | Wednesday, June 15, 2022 | 3:41 AM EDT

A pro-life pregnancy center in Philadelphia was vandalized last weekend with smashed windows and graffiti.

Latrice Booker, director of Hope Pregnancy Center in Philadelphia, told CNA that when she drove by her clinic Saturday, June 11, she found four windows smashed, with one written on with graffiti. It is unclear what the graffiti says.

Three glass doors were smashed as well, she said. She estimated the damages to be around $15,000. As of Tuesday afternoon, the windows were boarded up and the clinic is in the process of repairs. They are still open for business, she said.

Booker said that the clinic offers all its services to help women and families in need at no cost. She said that the clinic is not dissuaded in its mission by the vandalism and called on people of faith to “stand tall” despite the vitriol against pro-lifers.

There’s more at the original. Naturally, I searched the Inky’s website, to see if I could find this story, and to my very much not surprised self, I found nothing, nada, zilch, zippo, ничего. You can see the top of the search results if you click on the image to the right.

I did, however, find hundreds of articles on abortion, in a site search for pro life clinic, virtually all of them supporting the pro-abortion position in one way or another. The ‘pro-choice’ crowd do not like the term ‘pro-abortion,’ but it is economically accurate: to support having the choice to have an abortion, you must concomitantly want enough abortions to occur to keep the abortuaries open. President Clinton’s formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” falls on its own weight, because if abortion is rare, abortion providers can’t stay in business.

From Politico:

Garland returns to Oklahoma City to warn that domestic terrorism is ‘still with us’

The attorney general has vowed to crackdown on a resurgence of violence linked to white supremacist and right-wing militia groups.

by Josh Gerstein | April 19, 2021 | 12:14 PM EDT

Attorney General Merrick Garland returned Monday to Oklahoma City — the site of the nation’s most deadly act of domestic terrorism and of his formative experiences as a young prosecutor — to deliver a warning that the threat of domestic extremism is again on the rise.

Delivering his first major speech as attorney general, Garland told a memorial service that the nation must remain vigilant against such dangers.

There were plenty of other stories, such as “Top law enforcement officials say the biggest domestic terror threat comes from white supremacists.” in The New York Times, while National Public Radio reported:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI’s National Security Branch, told lawmakers that the threat posed by domestic violent extremists is “persistent and evolving.” The “most lethal threat” from domestic violent extremists, she said, is posed by white supremacists and anti-government militias.

So, I’m wondering: was the vandalism at a pro-life pregnancy center or one at a similar clinic in Washington DC the work of evil reich-wing extremists or white supremacists?

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared itself to be a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. Now it should have a blurb similar to the one that ought to be on The New York Times, “All the News That’s Politically Correct.” The Inky just doesn’t want you to tell its readers the truth, and that’s why the only real newspaper in our nation’s seventh largest metropolitan area is just 17th in circulation.

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The pro-abortionists really, really don’t like it when someone uses plain and concise language If abortion is such a good and noble thing, why must the left mealy-mouth their words about it?

We have previously noted how the credentialed media use control of language to try to influence the debate toward their favored positions, which always seem to be toward the left.

Twitter did so by prohibiting “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Simply put, if someone wanted to tweet something about William Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and is on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team using the name “Lia,” that person would have to concede to Mr Thomas’ claim that he is a woman by using the feminine pronouns and his assumed name, not his real one. The New York Times laughably gave major OpEd space to Chad Malloy, a man male who claims to be a woman going by the name “Parker” to claim that Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.

Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnaming’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their birth names — and ‘misgendering’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their natural, biological sex — tramples on the speech of normal people, people who do not believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. The argument is that, in effect, we can’t hurt their precious little feelings, and so we must concede their major point to engage in debate. Here’s hoping that Elon Musk changes that!

Now comes Jeffrey Barg, also known as the Angry Grammarian, getting upset that Associate Justice Samuel Alito used plain language, did something radical like tell the truth, in his leaked draft majority opinion on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Continue reading →

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Why does a newspaper censor the news? The Philadelphia Inquirer kept from its readers information already available to the public.

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

Grandson charged with murdering his grandfather and another man stemming from a dispute over bedroom conditions

The circumstances leading to the arrest of Czar McMichael, 22, of North Philly, began on Thursday when Benjamin E. McMichael, 67, conducted “a routine inspection” of his grandson’s bedroom.

by Diane Mastrull | Sunday, May 1, 2022 | 4:27 PM EDT

Czar McMichael, via Fox 29 News

A Philadelphia man has been charged with murder in two shootings over two days that left his grandfather and another man dead in a double homicide that emanated from a complaint over the condition of the grandson’s bedroom, police said Sunday.The circumstances leading to the arrest of Czar McMichael, 22, of the Logan section of North Philly, began on Thursday when, police said, Benjamin E. McMichael, 67, conducted “a routine inspection” of his grandson Czar’s third-floor bedroom in their home on the 4600 block of North Broad Street and was upset with the condition of the room.

Police said the elder McMichael grabbed his grandson’s arm and Czar McMichael spun around and shot his grandfather.

On Saturday Anthony Ham, 45, of Philadelphia, along with an acquaintance stopped by the McMichael home to check on Benjamin because they hadn’t heard from him in a couple days. Ham got into the home by climbing through a window and unlocked the door for the person with him, whom police did not identify.

There’s more at the original.

What did I predict? That the newspaper would decline to print the suspect’s mugshot and would do what it could to conceal the suspect’s race. And in fact the Inquirer did not include the suspect’s mugshot, though it was easily available and had been published on Fox 29 News. Steve Keeley of Fox 29 tweeted his mugshot at 1:47 PM EDT, 2 hours and 40 minutes before the Inquirer’s article was published.

Mr Keeley also published the Philadelphia Police Department’s press release on the matter, which noted that the victims were a (45/B/M) and a (67/B/M), but of course the very “anti-racist” and #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer were not about to publish that!

Yet the newspaper published the mugshot of Kathleen Kane, a Scranton woman who has been out of public office for six years, who has been disbarred and thus no longer practices law, and who has, as nearly as I can discover, simply been living on the spousal support from the wealthy businessman she divorced since she got out of jail.

Black murder suspect in the newspaper’s hometown? Conceal that information! Attractive white woman accused, but not convicted of, a DUI? Splash her photo all over the newspaper’s website, and Twitter!

This is what passes for journalism in the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper: conceal the facts which are inconvenient and do not go along with publisher Lisa Hughes’ ideas and goals.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” — Benjamin Franklin

While Abteilung für Vaterländische Sicherheit is a more literal translation of Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, perhaps Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Main Security Office, would be a more accurate one. And Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, frequently shortened to Propagandaministerium, was at least more honest than the ‘official’ name for Herr Biden’s Ministry of Truth, the ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’ As we hear about the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security and its new Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board, now we get this story, from The Wall Street Journal:

FBI Conducted Potentially Millions of Searches of Americans’ Data Last Year, Report Says

Searches in national-security investigations came without warrants, could stoke privacy concerns in Congress

by Dustin Volz | Friday, April 29, 2022 | 6:22 PM EDT

Also see: William Teach: FBI Conducted Almost 3.4 Million Warrantless “Wiretaps” In 2021, Media Mostly Silent

WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.

An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency.

Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.

The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.

Well, no, but then again, it wouldn’t.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Various Supreme Court decisions, including Mapp v Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108 (1964), and Ker v. California, 374 U.S. 23 (1963), have ‘incorporated,’ or applied the Fourth Amendment to state action as well. We take our constitutional rights seriously, but in its ever-expanding attempts to protect the United States, federal law has been gradually chipping away at those rights. And while the disclosure noted by the Journal occurred entirely under the Biden Administration, it has to be admitted that it has happened under Republican presidents as well. Remember: the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security was created under the younger President Bush following the September 11 attacks.

It was when the creation of that cabinet department was proposed that a very liberal friend of mine was calling it the Department of Fatherland Security. I gave it some credence, despite the fact he was pretty much a nutcase when it came to blaming the Bush family for everything bad under the sun.[1]The first World Trade Center bombing, she said, was aimed at the elder President Bush, even though he had already been defeated for re-election and left office, while the second was aimed at the … Continue reading

The disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known as Section 702, is due to expire next year.

While the ODNI report doesn’t suggest systemic problems with the searches, judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with privacy rules. Officials said the FBI’s searches were vital to its mission to protect the U.S. from national-security threats. The frequency of other forms of national-security surveillance detailed in the annual report generally fell year over year, in some cases continuing a multiyear trend.

The 3.4 million figure “is certainly a large number,” a senior FBI official said in a press briefing Friday on the report. “I am not going to pretend that it isn’t.” .  .  .  .

Congress last renewed Section 702 in 2018, and then-President Donald Trump signed the renewal into law after openly questioning the measure over unsubstantiated concerns that it was used to spy on his presidential campaign. It is set to expire again at the end of next year, and current and former intelligence officials have said they anticipate a bruising political battle.

At some point, a point I think has not only been reached, but passed, we need to start realizing that yes, there could be increased danger to our national security, but that the endangerment of our constitutional rights is a far, far, far greater threat to Americans than attacks from foreign governments or terrorist organizations. President Clinton was overly concerned about going after Osama bin Laden might somehow violate international law without the proper gathering of evidence first, to the point at which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright insisted that Pakistan, the government of which was rife with Taliban sympathizers, had to be notified about a cruise missile overflight in the attempt to destroy Mr bin Laden and his associated in a campground in Afghanistan. The attack went ahead, but the al Qaeda leaders had left the scene hours before.

Yet since that time, we’ve created federal bureaucracies which trample upon our constitutional rights in attempts to protect our nation against outsiders. Is it really worth it to protect America if we have to cease being America to do so?

Section 702 should not be renewed, and we have to find some other way, even if it risks being less efficient, to protect the United States. Mr Biden’s Ministry of Truth should not be allowed, or funded.

References

References
↑1 The first World Trade Center bombing, she said, was aimed at the elder President Bush, even though he had already been defeated for re-election and left office, while the second was aimed at the younger President Bush, even though the planning and preparation for it had begun while Bill Clinton was President, and Al Gore was favored to win the 2000 election.