Bookworm Beat 5/7/19 — the Vanishing Conservatives on Social Media edition

There are reasons for you to be very afraid of the social media crackdown on conservatives (even fringe ones), plus other scary stuff in today’s world.

Bookworm Beat Benghazi Leftists Social MediaDemocrats prepare for 2020 by silencing conservatives.  If I had to identify the scariest news today, it would be Twitter’s purge of conservatives, which follows closely on the heels of Facebook’s purge of conservatives. These social media outlets, which hold power unimagined at any past time, are using that power to silence non-Progressive dissent.

When it came to Facebook’s most recent purge, I won’t argue that Alex Jones is an unpleasant, possibly slightly demented character. Others, though, are merely vocal not-Leftists, such as Paul Joseph Watson, whose platform is Alex Jones’s InfoWars, or provocateurs, such as Milo Yiannopoulos. As a sop to “equality,” Facebook also finally shutdown arch anti-Semite (and Democrat friend) Louis Farrakhan, whom two major Leftist media outlets promptly identified as “right wing.”

Other than Farrakhan, both Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have gone after Left wingers. Most conspicuously, they continued to ignore Left wing “news” sites that, for two years, promoted the biggest hoax in American political history or blue-checked Lefties who revel in fantasies of murdering Trump or slapping around conservatives, including the innocent Covington School boys, whose only crime was to wear MAGA hats. These same social media behemoths have also left alone Hamas sites that advocate for Israel’s destruction and the genocide of her people; and unhinged Leftists sites that screech hysterically about toxic whites, masculinity, straight people, etc., all in the most vile and violent terms.

Moreover, currently both Facebook and Twitter seem comfortable providing a platform for Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims, who proudly posted video of himself verbally harassing an old lady praying outside a Planned Parenthood clinic and then went on to promise to pay anyone who would dox three pro-life teenage girls.

When called on his behavior, the out-and-proud Sims doubled down on the hateful rhetoric, all of which seems to have escaped Twitter’s eagle eye for “hate speech”:

Speaking of Pennsylvania, do you recall Facebook closing down the social media account showing a school recital in which darling little American Muslim children joyously recited lines about becoming martyrs to take back the Al Aqsa mosque, all while beheading perfidious Jews in showers of blood? If you recall that, you recall more than I do. Of course, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly), the group that posted the video, did say that it erred in posting it, so I guess that was enough. Neither Facebook nor MAS Philly seemed troubled by the video’s genocidally anti-Semitic content, never mind the child abuse it displayed.

Given the prominence social media has in American communication, it’s fairly obvious that Twitter and Facebook both want to prevent a repeat of 2016. Their silencing of conservative voices, while doing nothing about the vile content emanating from those affiliated with the political Left, is their way of achieving that goal.

I’ve already harped on the fact that California’s open primary silences conservatives completely during November elections. This happens because California’s Leftist majority means that only Democrats show up on the ballot for state and federal offices. In other words, when voters are paying attention, the only voices they hear are Leftist ones.

My preference is for these social media outlets to be declared publishers. After all, they clearly exercise control over content. If these social media sites are identified as publishers, they can be sued over content. Then, sue them into oblivion or into even-handedness, one or the other. Failing that, the government is going to have to step in . . . and that’s never a good thing.

Why are gays and lesbians so stridently anti-choice? One of the things Brian Sims’s behavior highlights is that, when it comes to abortion, gays and lesbians are on the front lines. On my real-me Facebook page, the most vicious posts attacking pro-Life people are from gay men, with lesbians following at a close second. (I grew up and lived for decades in the Bay Area, so I have/had a lot of lesbian and gay friends and acquaintances.)

I find peculiar the fact that people whose preferred form of sexual congress cannot result in pregnancy are the ones loudest and most aggressive in their loyalty to abortion on demand up to and including the moment a baby is born.

Is it hostility to procreators?

Is it the fact that they live in essentially child free worlds and therefore have no empathy for babies?

Is it that, when gays and lesbians are politically Left, they hew to the extremes of that ideology?

Honestly, I don’t know. What do you think?

Jews, Israel, and the Democrat presidential candidates Here are two stories, that are definitely related. The first is that 42% of American Jews, when polled, complained that Trump is too pro-Israel:

Roughly four-in-ten (42%) say they think Trump is favoring the Israelis too much, while a similar share (47%) say he is striking the right balance between the Israelis and Palestinians. The rest either say he is favoring the Palestinians too much (6%) or they don’t know (4%).

Daniel Greenfield, who brought this poll to my attention, sees a bright side:

On the bright side, this means that about 53% of American Jews are pro-Israel.

He makes another, even more important, point about those anti-Israel Jews (all of whom, I guarantee you, are products of American institutions of higher indoctrination and anti-Semitism):

Many don’t like the Jewish State and their idea of being Jewish is watching Woody Allen movies or, for millennials, Broad City.

In other words, these are Jews in name only (“My last name is Goldberg, I vote Democrat, I fast on Yom Kippur, I hate Trump, and Israel is a Nazi nation.”).

The other, related, story is that, after Hamas in Gaza (territory without any Israeli control or oversight) rained over 600 rockets down on Israel, killing four Israelis, not a single Democrat party presidential candidate spoke up. [UPDATE: As of the last time I checked, four candidates have now weighed in, with Booker being the most prominent and — good for him — pro-Israel. Gravel, the whack job even by Dem standards, wants to dismantle Israel.]

Indeed, the only Dems who seemed willing to mention the issue were Representative Ilhan Omar (D. Somalia) and Representative Rashida Tlaib (D. Palestine). Ilhan Omar bemoaned that “cycle of violence” as if the facts weren’t that Israel did nothing until she’d been hit by hundreds of missiles. Tlaib, meanwhile, who is ostensibly an American politician, mourned what was happening to “our Palestinian people.” Not “the Palestinian people” or “our allies {as if!) in Palestine,” but “our Palestinian people.” I honestly can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that these two women are in Congress. On the one hand, they’re way too close to the levers of power. On the other hand, ordinary Americans can finally see what conservatives have been worrying about for years.

One of my Democrat Facebook friends, who is deeply concerned about Israel’s well-being and about rising anti-Semitism around the world, noted the Democrat primary candidates’ silence. He urged people following his Facebook feed to contact these candidates to complain. Because I don’t believe people can be harangued into agreeing with you, I confined myself to pointing out that, even if pressure caused these Dem pols to issue a belated pro-Israel statement, it was worth remembering that their initial instinct was to remain silent. I hope that thought fell on fertile soil.

I think we will see some Jewish migration to Republicans and even more Jewish migration away from Democrats. (That is, the latter group won’t be able to bring itself to conservativism, but will no longer be able to tolerate both open and covert anti-Semitism in the Democrat party.) The numbers will be small, but every vote — or lack of a vote — counts.

I’m personally ambivalent about Jews joining the Republican party. If their only reason for being there is to support Israel, but they remain Leftist in all their other values, they will do to the GOP what Leftists did to red states when they fled high tax states for low tax states — they turned those states blue and promptly imposed in those states the same policies that had them fleeing their states of origin in the first place. Rush describes those people as locusts, and he’s right to do so.

My real preference is for disaffected Jewish Democrats just to sit out the 2020 election — or, even better, to cast a single protest vote for Trump and then do nothing.

Trump may have China’s number. To my great surprise, the New York Times published an opinion piece that says, not that Trump is an idiot in his dealings with China, but that Xi Jinping may have been the one who let the glory days of the Obama years go to his head. Yi-Zheng Lian argues that, while former Chinese premiers made nice with American presidents, Xi Jinping got increasingly aggressive in his policies, whether in trade, intellectual property theft, or attempts to expand China’s military and economic reach.

Lian says that Xi’s overreach happened because he became president in 2012 when China was still enjoying a great “economic miracle,” as compared to America’s ongoing recession. What Lian tactfully ignores is that Xi became Chinese’s president when Obama was America’s president — and the latter was always willing to back down and sell out.

Now, not only are China’s economic chickens coming home to roost because of its over-extension, Xi is facing a president who rightly views China as an economic and military threat. Additionally, rather than backing down, Trump is slowly but surely pushing China into a corner.

No wonder then that Steve Bannon, who may be unpleasant but is nobody’s fool, thinks that yesterday (Monday) was the most important day in Trump’s presidency:

“I happen to think that today [Monday] was the most important day of Donald Trump’s presidency,” Bannon told Dobbs. “He’s president of the United States because of the rejection of working-class people and middle-class people, about the managed decline of our country at the hands of people like Hillary Clinton. The Clinton global initiative, the whole Clinton apparatus. These globalists and elitists were very comfortable with the managed decline, particularly vis-a-vis the rise of China. And Donald Trump confronted that, particularly in the upper Midwest. This is the reason he won states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. People understand […] the factories went to China, the jobs went to China, and the opioids came in. So I think that Trump understands that tariffs are more than taxes. They’re more about self-empowerment of the working class.”

Not only does Trump understand this, Bannon said, but he also explained it very well. “Today he said that […] ‘I’m not going to do this, you’re not gonna come back and retrade us. I’m going to hit you with the tariffs.’ And I think this is a very big week in American economic history,” he added.

In this regard, Bannon explained, it’s important to keep in mind that the pressure on Trump to be soft on China has been enormous. “The IR department of the Chinese Communist Party, the Investors Relations department, is Wall Street, the lobbyists of corporate America. The pressure on President Trump has been relentless, and it’s all the Fear Project.”

If you like seeing Leftists viciously attacked in the media, then you must read Kyle Smith’s preemptive strike against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is apparently planning to run for president:

Like an insecure college student trying on various personalities in an effort to capture the attention of the cutest girl in Postcolonial Gender Politics — now a preppy tennis player, now a tortured Goth guitarist, now an angry male feminist — de Blasio keeps trying to repackage himself, unable to perceive that it is the contents that people don’t like.

[snip]

De Blasio is not just a snoozy, groundhog-murdering buffoon who causes the city embarrassment on a par with the New York Knicks or JFK Airport. He’s also a skeezy money grubber who borrows tricks from his former boss Hillary Clinton (for whom he served as campaign manager in 2000). He has a tendency to set up noble-sounding activist groups that by miraculous coincidence attract dollars from entities wishing to grease the wheels with City Hall.

[snip]

What’s most salient about de Blasio is the sheer scale of his incompetence: Without even an “Oops,” he just shuttered his disastrous “Renewal” program, which torched three-quarters of a billion dollars on failed educators who were happy to cash the checks and delivered approximately zero results. De Blasio’s New York City Housing Authority — the outfit that runs all those charming housing projects — is so unspeakable (mold, rats, lead paint, unsafe elevators, leaky pipes, etc.) that the city was forced to accept oversight from a monitor appointed by Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s right: The mayor bungled one of his central duties so badly that it’s now under the control of the administration of . . . Donald J. Trump.

What should really shake up the few sane people still loyal to a Democrat party is that de Blasio, with all his faults and failures, fits perfectly into the current Democrat party presidential candidate line-up.

Not all children’s deaths are equal. I sometimes get the sense the Progressives’ “compassion” is circumscribed by political need. For example, think of Democrats on the border issue: They’re all about “the children, the children, the children,” except that they don’t seem to care at all that, with the flood of people crossing our southern border, children are being rented out to create temporary families for asylum claims. These children are merchandise and, I suspect, get handed over to sex traffickers when their utility is over.

Moreover, many of the complaints about “the children, the children, the children,” don’t seem to be rooted in fact. For example, Sheriff David Clarke (ret.) wrote an article pointing out that three “cause célèbre” dead children all died from illnesses unrelated to the U.S. border. Each death was a tragedy, but none had political weight, so the media and their pro-immigrant fellow travelers had to lie about or obscure the reasons these poor children died.

Reading Sheriff Clarke’s article made me realize that I’ve seen almost nothing in the American media about Anders Holch Povlsen’s children. If you’re saying “Anders Holch who? And why his children?” you’ve made my point for me.

Asos is a huge British online fashion and beauty retailer. Its founder, however, is a Danish billionaire, Anders Holch Povlsen. He and his family — Povlsen, his wife, and his four young children — were in Sri Lanka for a vacation a little while ago. They stayed at a very nice hotel. Well, it was a very nice hotel until Muslim terrorists blew it up, along with several churches on an ill-fated Easter Sunday.

That explosion killed three out of the four Povlsen children: Alfred, Alma, and Agnes. Only little Astrid remains. You can see the surviving Povlsens’ overwhelming grief in this photo essay about the funeral, where they had to watch three of their children get carried away in little, white, flower-covered coffins.

Normally, you’d think the media would be all over a story about the deaths of three out of four children in a billionaire’s family. Imagine if they had died in a car accident or while marching in a pink pussy hat parade. We would have seen non-stop coverage, along with hand-wringing, about unsafe cars (a green world without cars would be better) or about the incredible evil of alt-right people.

But that’s not how these children died. Instead, they died quite politically incorrectly at the hands of Muslim terrorists. Their deaths, not being politically useful, have been ignored as much as possible.

Remember, if it doesn’t fit the narrative, it doesn’t exist.

If the only thing Trump did was change the federal judicial bench, he will have been the most important, consequential president in our lifetimes.

I say this because an Obama appointee just couldn’t bear to imprison for an extended period a young man who, at age 18, decided he wanted to blow up a whole bunch of people in the name of Allah. Fortunately, Adel Daoud confided, in between happy giggles, his plan to an undercover FBI agent, rather than a real terrorist. That’s why, when Daoud pushed the detonator on a car bomb outside a crowded Chicago bar, nothing happened.

But for Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, an Obama appointee, Daoud’s utterly evil intent didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was a poor, lost little boy:

Coleman said Daoud was uniquely immature at the time, when he was 18, noting how Daoud is heard giggling almost constantly as he brainstorms attacks to avenge what he saw as the West’s war on Muslims.

At an impressionable age, the judge said the “awkward young man with few friends” was immediately drawn to the 38-year-old FBI agent who first met with Daoud. Daoud promptly began tossing out ideas to impress the agent posing as a terrorist, once suggesting they mount an attack with “flying cars” packed with explosives.

“He continued to do what teenage boys do … talk big,” Coleman said.

Somehow that “big talk” translated into big action, because Daoud actually pushing what he thought was a detonator button. Coleman, though, was moved most by his giggles. Seeking to make things better for this poor little baby, Coleman gave Daoud the lightest sentence possible.

Thomas Lifson, who wrote about this story, explains:

All of that happened on 2012, and after years of incarceration while the case was prosecuted and he was tried, yesterday Daoud was sentenced to 16 years in federal prison, not the 40 years the prosecution asked for, with the six-plus years he has spent in jail credited against the sentence. In addition, he will concurrently serve (in other words, no extra prison time) for two other crimes: hiring an assassin to kill the informant who turned him in and the attempted murder of an inmate who he thought had insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

Next time you look at Trump in despair because he tweeted something that offended your sensibilities, think of Judge Coleman and ask yourself if you want more of her or fewer of her on the federal court. If you think her judicial sensibilities are too Progressive, just be grateful for Trump. Imagine what the federal bench, all the way up to the Supreme Court, would have looked like with four years of Hillary.

(Speaking of the Supreme Court, who believes that Justice Ginsburg is effectively fulfilling her responsibilities on that body? I’m not arguing that she’s dead; I just wonder if she’s functional.)

Helping out a friend. I just learned that Garry Hamilton, husband of master blogger Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, is being treated for cancer. And as is the case with cancer treatments, the experience is awful and expensive. Our thoughts and prayers can help the personal awfulness of it all and your donation to their GoFundMe campaign can help the expense. So, if you’ve got any spare change lying around, please send it their way.


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