Step by Step: Liberals and the Trump Election

Is Disrespecting the President OK? Hypocrisy Run Amok

From Reason magazine, an essay on the question: Is It Cool To Call the President a Bastard Again?

For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was “rank disrespect,” as Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism, Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. “Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president, while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism … It is called treason,” insisted one particularly moronic meme by Occupy Democrats.

But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.

But with Trump:

And, where once Hollywood celebrities issued a thoroughly creepy “pledge to serve Barack Obama” when he took office as president, eight additional years of seeing the duties of that office exercised led us to singer Madonna saying she’s thought a lot about “blowing up the White House.”

Madonna made her comments at a massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration during which hundreds of thousands of regular Americans promised to resist the new chief executive before he’s even had a chance to start rivaling the damage inflicted by his predecessor.

It’s all such a welcome change.

For the libertarians at Reason, it is a welcome change, since the notion that a strong, righteous president will set everything right in the country is a huge threat to liberty. When all your hopes are invested in the president, then you’ll condone illegitimate exercises of power. Remember Obama and his pen and phone.

And the “blow up the White House” comment by the ageing slut Madonna is, in fact, no real threat to the Republic. But then, neither was the stupid “birther” notion that Obama was born in Kenya. But please, let’s just have an end to the hypocrisy.

Now We Are Going to Get Tough?

Russia invades Crimea: oh well
Russia shoots down airliner: mistakes happen
John Podesta falls for phishing scam: RESTART THE COLD WAR

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 29, 2016

Escaped!

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Change the Rules After the Election?

Yes, Hillary supporters are demanding that electors in the Electoral College pledged to Trump change their votes, and vote for Hillary. If enough do that, Hillary could be president. A commenter named “Bud” on newsgroup alt.assassination.jfk asks:

Let’s say there was a basketball game and one team won the game by shooting a lot of three pointers. But the fans of the losing team noticed that their team would have won had the three pointers only counted as two points each, and petitioned to change the rules of the game after the fact to give their team the win. What would anyone think of that behavior?

Of course, Hillary supporters say that electors are free to vote as they wish. But it would be grossly dishonest to allow oneself to serve as a Trump elector, and get the votes of people who want Trump for president, and then vote for Hillary. Further, in many states the electors are bound by state law to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. But the petition says:

24 states bind electors. If electors vote against their party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most states.

In short, the people who sign the petition are urging the electors to break the law. But who cares about that when you really, really hate the winner of the election.

Reverse Course

The Fake Attack on “Fake News”

From Frontpage Mag:

Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”

By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.

The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.

Why Facebook?

Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.

But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.

Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.

The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.

The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.

Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic, has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.

Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.

But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.

USA Today and the Los Angeles Times promoted a list of “fake news” sites that included a variety of mainstream conservative sites including RedState, IJR and the Blaze. BuzzFeed targeted RightWingNews.

Fake news, like fact checking, has very obviously become a euphemism for attacking the politics that the left disagrees with by dressing up partisan agendas in fake concerns about journalism and civic virtue.

This goes far beyond namecalling. The goal is to ban conservative sites from social media. Or at least to penalize them in ways that will make it difficult for them to compete with the mainstream media.

There are obvious ideological and financial motives behind this war on “fake news.” The financial motives are grossly blatant. The loudest media voices in this war, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and Vox, depend heavily on social media traffic for their own hyperpartisan factually challenged clickbait.

Read the entire article.

The Washington Examiner gave some examples of what the Buzzfeed “study” considered the top “real news” stories:

Here’s the top “Real News” stories: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn’t report enough on Trump’s scandals.

No. 2 is “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.” This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman.

The No. 3 “Real News” story is “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos From Racy Shoot Revealed,” published at the New York Post.

To be clear, the journalists gnashing their teeth about “Fake Election News” winning would have been less concerned if “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos” had received more clicks.

If this study shows something it’s that the biggest fake news stories get a ton of Facebook engagement — maybe more than the biggest real election stories. (I say “maybe,” because maybe there were stories with more engagement at places like AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, Yahoo News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Houston Chronicle, or any of the thousand other news sources not included in the BuzzFeed study.)

Three conclusions can be drawn from all this. First, liberals are seeking a rationalization for why their candidate lost. They cannot admit that Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate. They cannot admit that their snobbish elitism was recognized, and rejected, by voters. If this evil fake news could have been controlled, the obviously correct candidate would have won, they believe.

Second, the Mainstream Media, and liberals generally, long for the bygone days when a few gatekeepers decided what was news, and what was true, and how events should be understood. They hate having to complete with alternative conservative sources over these issues, and hate that ordinary citizens on social media can entirely undermine the mainstream narrative.

Finally, this is an example of the ugly authoritarianism of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it is significant that liberals will not call themselves “liberals,” since they have abandoned, in huge numbers, the central doctrine of classical liberalism. As propounded by Jefferson: “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Liberals increasing insist they need not tolerate error.  And they believe themselves authorized to decide what is in error.

Wrong Direction

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Media Arrogance and the Trump Victory

From, of all places, CBS News, a biting critique of the elitist liberal attitudes of the media.

The writer notes that a lot of Americans, and Trump voters, hate the media. He then asks:

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong. [emphasis in original]

The media (and liberals generally) have been going through the motions of taking stock and rethinking and reassessing some of their attitudes and practices.

But the toxic cultural prejudices that afflict the media (and liberals generally) are deeply ingrained, and part of a very insular and parochial culture. The odds favor only the most superficial self-examination, after which they will go back to their smug elitism.

University of Rochester Professor Offends Anti-Trump Protestors, Issues Groveling Apology, Loses Position

Source: screen capture

From station WHEC

A University of Rochester professor stepped down from his director position after posting a controversial statement on Facebook regarding the Presidential election.

Ted Pawlicki resigned as the undergraduate Program Director for the Department of Computer Science on Friday. The story was first reported by student paper the Campus Times.

The comment, which has since been deleted, read: “A bus ticket from Rochester to Canada is $16. If this is not your America, then I will pay for your ticket if you promise never to come back.”

Students posted screenshots of the post as well as comments. Pawlicki wrote in a department-wide email that “These remarks were ill-considered, and I deeply regret any and all hurt they occasioned.”

On Monday, News10NBC Investigative Reporter, Jennifer Lewke sat down with Pawlicki to discuss his comments and why he chose to step down.

Pawliki says he didn’t like that students were planning a “Not My America” protest on a day that is reserved for honoring those who defend America, “to say ‘not my America’ on veterans day was very offensive,” he says and that’s why he decided to comment on the Facebook page.

“The ‘move to Canada’ joke has been around since the Reagan administration; celebrities always threaten to move to Canada if their candidate doesn’t win. It was in the context of what I consider legitimate political humor,” he adds.

Pawliki tells News10NBC he didn’t think much of the comments initially. “I went to teach and I got back about an hour and a half later and I think there were 120 posts, at that point, I realized perhaps I touched a nerve, I should explain. I believe entirely in the complete equality of all people,” and he says, he tried to say so but was shocked when students didn’t seem to want to listen.

“I believe its part of my job to teach students to engage in robust discussion and to challenge them on their positions and to have my positions challenged by them and to train them to question authority and stand up to authority in a forthright and respectable manor,” he says.

But instead, at least one complaint was filed against him with the university and he agreed to step down from his leadership role. He just hopes this incident doesn’t scare off other students and faculty from sharing opinions.

Pawliki: “The discussion of safe spaces and coddling and students being fearful of challenge is a debate that is being discussed across all campuses.” Jennifer Lewke: “Because you spoke your mind, you’ve lost this program coordinator position and that’s got to be tough to deal with knowing that you’ve had this position for 18 years and this one comment seems to have taken that away.”

Pawliki: “It’s a little tough, but as I said, it happened on Veterans Day and a minor disturbance in my life is nothing compared to the sacrifice our service people have provided.”

While Pawlicki will no longer be director, he is still teaching.

In a statement, the University of Rochester says, “The decision to step down from his position as undergraduate program director in computer science was Ted Pawlicki’s, based on his own determination of whether he could continue to be effective in that role after his public comments, which he acknowledged were ill-considered and for which he apologized. He remains a member of the University of Rochester computer science teaching faculty.”

Pawlicki, who made a perfectly sensible jibe about the self-righteous protestors, should never have apologized, and never have voluntarily stepped down.

In essence, what he did was similar to a woman who has been raped but fails to report the rape to authorities, since that embroils her in a legal hassle. The fact that so many women do not report rape gives potential rapists the (unfortunately correct) idea that they might well get away with it.

Likewise Pawlicki’s apology, and his willingness to step down, gives the campus fascists the idea (also unfortunately correct) that they can exact retribution on anybody on campus who expresses any politically incorrect idea.

It is true that tenure does not give Pawlicki any right to an administrative position, only the right to continue to teach as a faculty member. But if he was told he must resign by the Rochester administration, he should not have made it easy for them. He should have refused, and forced them to fire him from his administrative position.

In his defense, standing up to the campus bullies is not easy, especially when university administrations are usually on the side of the bullies. But saving any semblance of free expression on campus requires that some people do it.

Your Democracy, or Your Life

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

The Bottom Line on “Tolerance” and “Civility” in 2016

Remember when conservatives rioted, attacked people in the streets & smashed up shops when Obama won in 2008 & 2012?

Me neither. #TrumpRiot

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 11, 2016

Oops!

Fleeing

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Anti-Trump People Go Bonkers

Supposedly, you can judge a man by the enemies he makes, and if we applied that principle to Donald Trump, he would be a very good person indeed.

A photo gallery on the CNN website tells the story.

Trump is, in fact, not nearly good enough to deserve enemies like these. But they fully deserve Trump.

Wasn’t it the case that Donald Trump was an evil person because he said he would not necessarily “accept” the outcome of the election?

Seems these folks don’t “accept” the outcome of the election.

Of course, if all they do is speak out publicly, they are perfectly within their rights.

But the same would have been true of Donald Trump, had he lost.

Quandary

Post Election Stress Disorder

The Real Horror is Not Over

The Case for Trump

Finger in the Dike

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.