“If a reporter and his newspaper know in advance — months in advance, as it turns out — that a man intended to undertake a stunt that could sow panic in the nation’s capital, are they obligated to alert law-enforcement authorities? And should they be faulted for not doing so until the last minute?,” Paul Farhi asks at the Washington Post regarding the Tampa Bay Times and proverbial “Florida Man” Doug Hughes.

Farhi writes that the Tampa Bay paper interviewed the professional mailman/amateur pilot last summer, who told them “he planned to breach restricted airspace and fly a small craft called a gyrocopter onto the lawn of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to the need for campaign finance reform.” Since that’s long been a lefty talking point, Hughes’ stunt is being treated as a happy funtime lightweight joke by the Post, the Tampa Bay Times, and other newspapers. Of course, if someone on the right had tried a similar reckless flight, the MSM’s outrage meters would universally be red-lined to Defcon One, and we’d be reminded of the potential for post-9/11 DC to go into lockdown mode and/or the risk of Hughes being shot out of the sky and/or killing someone if he crashed.

The Post’s Farhi writes:

Given the potential for chaos, however, the question is whether the paper should have done more, such as calling the Secret Service days in advance to alert officials that Hughes planned to enter restricted airspace with his one-man flying machine.

“We spent hours and hours talking about the ethics of this,” said Montgomery, who first encountered Hughes when the postal worker called him at work and told him his plans. “Ultimately, we felt comfortable that he was on the authorities’ radar and that he was not homicidal or suicidal. He had his plan down to a T. Is it our job to call attention to it?”

Actually, yes, say media ethicists.

“A news organization should be extremely knowledgeable of the potential harm” a stunt like this could cause, said Edward Wasserman, dean of the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “I really question their judgment. There is no end of the ways this could have gone wrong.”

* * * * * * *

Nevertheless, the Times made the wrong decision, said Fred Brown, a former longtime chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee. “I think the newspaper had a responsibility to alert authorities” well in advance of Hughes’s takeoff. “There are too many things [the paper] didn’t know. Was he carrying an incendiary device or a weapon? There are many ways to weaponize [the aircraft] or create a danger.”

Wasserman points out that the Times, a recipient of 10 Pulitzer Prizes over the years, benefited from its own inaction: It released its story just as Hughes was making news, ensuring that readers would flock to its Web site to learn more about him. “As a news organization, you can’t be complicit in this,” he said.

C’mon, the Tampa Bay Times was just following the advice of the Old Gods of their profession, such as Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace, who like to think that when it comes to alerting authorities in the effort to potentially save lives, “No, you don’t have higher duty — you’re a reporter:”

Oh, and as for campaign finance reform — you go first, Hillary.

Everything’s a Problem, the satirical blog written by Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon has some fun going into faux-outrage made over “Calling People ‘Guys,’” and quotes as his “problematic” example, David Gelernter’s March 2008 article in the Weekly Standard on “Feminism and the English Language,” in which Gelernter writes:

How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.

We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can’t wait much longer.

Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. (“Thou art the thing itself.” “A plague o’ both your houses.” “Can one desire too much of a good thing?”) The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English.” Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.

As I said, that was from early 2008. Flash-forward to six years of Hopenchange and the growing influence of the socialist justice warriors, as in this example, as spotted by Kathy Shaidle earlier this week, of a cri de coeur at Medium.com titled “Social Justice Bullies: The Authoritarianism of Millennial Social Justice,” written by someone who describes himself as possessing a “liberal heart,” and who “grew up in a liberal town, learned US history from a capital-S Socialist, and/or went to one of the most liberal universities in the country,” but like Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, apparently thought he’d be devoured last by the revolution:

[M]illennials are grown up now — and they’re angry. As children, they were told that they could be anything, do anything, and that they were special. As adults, they have formed a unique brand of Identity Politics wherein the groups with which one identifies is paramount. With such a strong narrative that focuses on which group one belongs to, there has been an increasing balkanization of identities. In an attempt to be open-minded toward other groups and to address social justice issues through a lens of intersectionality, clear and distinct lines have been drawn between people. One’s words and actions are inextricable from one’s identities. For example: this is not an article, but an article written by a straight, white, middle-class (etc.) male (and for this reason will be discounted by many on account of how my privilege blinds me — more on this later).

* * * * * * * *

The Newspeak of the millennial social justice advocate is an intricately and powerfully designed mechanism that seeks to eradicate and socially criminalize dissent.

Let’s talk about racism. The mantra of the movement is thus: It is impossible to be racist against white people because racism is the equivalent of prejudice and power. Since white people have social and economic institutional power and privilege (in America), those who are racially oppressed cannot be racist toward whites since those who are racially oppressed do not have power.

Why can’t I simply rebut this with a trip to the dictionary? Because this is laughed at by social justice types. The image of a white person walking to the dictionary to define racism is literally a trope at this point because the millennial social justice advocate finds it so entertaining that a dictionary, constructed by those in power for those who speak the language of power, can possibly give an accurate definition of a word. [It's a link to a Website called DiversityInc (sic) titled, "Ask the White Guy: Is the Oxford Dictionary Definition of Racism Too White for You?" -- Ed]

Do you see where I’m going with this? It is now possible to absolve yourself of guilt by working enough academic nuance into a word to fundamentally change it — in your favor.

You’re never going to change the mind of someone this far gone; I think Kurt Schlichter had the best response to this sort of madness at Townhall last year, when he said, “I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine:”

The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities. The privilege game is designed to circumvent arguments based on reason and facts and evidence, so the way to win it is to defeat it on its own terms.

Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

They won’t like it. It will make them angry. Good. Because tactics like “Check your privilege” are designed to make us angry, to put us off-balance, to baffle us and suck us down into a rabbit hole of leftist jargon and progressive stupidity.

Don’t follow them. Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!”

Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they are tell them.

Respectful argument should be reserved for those who respect the concept of argument. The sulky sophomores who babble about privilege do not. They only understand power. And we give them power when we give their nonsense the respect we would give a coherent argument.

They deserve only laughter. And to laugh at them, we simply need to refuse to be intimidated.

One of the reasons why the left have moved on to threatening to burn down midwestern pizza parlors over gay marriage doubleplus ungood crimethink is that they’ve exhausted the concept of racism. Starting in 2008, everyone, from Joe Biden to Hillary and Bill Clinton to Geraldine Ferraro to John McCain to Mitt Romney could be dubbed a racist in order to clear a path for Barack Obama. Racism used to mean something; being dubbed a racist meant the next stop was network Siberia for Howard Cosell and Jimmy the Greek in the 1980s. Today, anybody can be weaponized by the term — but if everyone is a racist, then no one is. Which is why the phrase “That’s racist!!!!” has become a gag line, much to the outrage-obsessed left’s chagrin, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2011:

No, racism hasn’t vanished. And the legacy of racism still has a long half-life.

But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby boomer parents.

It’s also a common joke among conservatives, precisely because we’re used to being called racists for the weirdest things. If I write on Twitter something about how I don’t like “Obamacare,” some fellow right-winger will immediately respond with some variant of “that’s racist!”

And that’s the joke. And the people who’ve spent the last few decades screaming, “That’s racist,” not as a punch line but as a heinously unfair accusation or in an attempt to bully people, don’t seem to get that the joke is on them.

I feel badly for the young Socialist Justice Warriors; their brains have to live within the hellish construct they’ve built for themselves. But I feel worse for the grownups — really, there are a few left — who have to work with them:

Related: Schlichter spots the end game for all of this madness.

And praises Common Core, Sean Davis writes at the Federalist:

During her first official campaign event in Iowa earlier this week, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton praised Common Core and referred to children’s education as a “non-family enterprise.” Clinton’s controversial statements about education, which were captured by C-SPAN, came in response to a question from a participant about how to offer a quality education throughout the U.S.

Just a reminder that Hillary’s “It Takes a Village” theme from the 1990s is her polite and folksy way of saying that in her socialist worldview, your children belong to the state, not to you.

In other Hillary news, as she likes to say, she’s exceedingly happy to “take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” And/or her own good. Does that include someone else’s handicapped parking spot?

(Perhaps though, owners of personal exoskeleton suits are granted exemptions under the ADA.)

“On Jackie Robinson Day, Let’s Remember When He Was Fired From the New York Post for Being Too Republican,” Matt Welch writes at Reason. As Kate McMillan likes to say at her Small Dead Animals blog, “I felt a great disturbance in the narrative:”

Today is the 68th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s notorious de facto ban against players having skin tone a shade or two darker than pure Castilian soap. As is the annual tradition, all MLB players today are wearing Robinson’s #42 in homage.

As I (and plenty of others) have long argued, Jackie’s awe-inspiring legend has, if anything, given short shrift to what a colossally competitive, accomplished, and complicated man he really was. He has as good a claim as anyone else at being the best all-around athlete of the 20th century (he was also a national champion long jumper, league champion collegiate basketball scorer, and All-American halfback at UCLA). He was a prolific if underappreciated author. A passionate and righteously angry civil rights activist. A banker/entrepreneur, active Rockefeller Republican, and the first black columnist for a major non-black newspaper, The New York Post. Which fired him for being too pro-Nixon.* [16 years before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and it was still left-leaning -- Ed]

Wait, what?

Read the whole thing.

* Oh sure. Next you’re going to tell me that Nixon campaigned for civil rights for all in 1960, reminding voters that “the whole world is watching us,” going on to earn “more of the black vote — 32% in his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy — than any GOP nominee of the past half-century,” and that once elected president eight years later, the first black guest to sleep in the White House was during his administration.

My, what big airbrushes the left has.

Exit quote, from Robinson himself:

No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner. I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed. There is a peculiar parallel between some of our great Northern “liberals” and some of our outstanding Southern liberals.

Some of the people in both classes share the deep-seated convictions that only their convictions can possibly be the right ones. They both inevitably say the same thing: “We know the Negro and what is best for him.”

Some things never change.

“Günter Grass Dies, Press Mourns Ex-SS Member,” Ben Shapiro writes at Big Journalism:

On Monday, German novelist, Nobel Prize winner, and former Waffen-SS Nazi, Günter Grass died in Lubeck, Germany, at the age of 87. The press mourned his passing.

The New York Times tried to make excuses for the fact that Grass hid his involvement with the Waffen-SS for some six decades before finally revealing that fact:

Mr. Grass was hardly the only member of his generation who obscured the facts of his wartime life. But because he was a pre-eminent public intellectual who had pushed Germans to confront the ugly aspects of their history, his confession that he had falsified his own biography shocked readers and led some to view his life’s work in a different light.

Actually, his confession only shocked those who considered him a moral authority in the first place—and they still didn’t find his confession shocking enough to stop seeing him as a moral authority. In 2012, Grass published a poem called “What Must Be Said,” which reads like a screed against the Jews who wanted to strike the Iranian nuclear program:

It’s a disgusting poem, in which Grass backhandedly argues for Iran to finish the job he and his cohorts started. As Shapiro notes:

Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999, with the Prize Committee explaining that he had fully fulfilled “the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.”

He waited another seven years to explain that he had been a full-fledged Nazi. After lecturing people for decades about how Nazism could only have been prevented by the death of capitalism and nationalism, it turns out that the great human rights activist had fought alongside the most brutal elements of the Nazi regime. But the Times writes:

Mr. Grass’s defenders argued that his social and political influence had forced Germany to face its Nazi past and atone for it. He might not have been able to play that role, they said, if he had been forthright about his background.

Shapiro sums up the opportunistic arc of Grass’s life:

When Nazism was popular, Grass was with it. When it lost, he transmuted that loss into a career lecturing people about the threats of Nazism, while fighting on behalf of anti-Western powers. Finally, he entered the realm of moral relativism, where he likened the Nazis to the Jews. Grass was no moral hero. He was merely a convenient object of worship for the post-Nazi left.

Grass plays a small role in Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay, “The Intelligent Coed’s Guide To America,” reprinted in his 1982 anthology The Purple Decades, available on the Kindle and an essential introduction to both Wolfe’s early nonfiction, and life in America in the crazed ’60s and ’70s, which today often reads stranger than fiction. Wolfe uses a statement from Grass as a springboard for the saying he helped enter into widespread distribution: “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” The two men shared the stage at a ruckus 1965 panel at Princeton University, dominated both on the panel and in the audience by paranoid lefties convinced that fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson was the new fascistic boogieman*, including Allen Ginsberg and Merry Prankster Paul Krassner, about whom Wolfe notes:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.

Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!”

That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon … Krakatoa, East of Java … I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds … Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy …

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

That quote from Grass takes on new meaning when you ponder that as a former SS man, literally or figuratively, he was one of those kicking down the doors long ago.

* Johnson’s strangely exotic accent and manners were likely all that was needed to throw these early pioneers of tolerance and multiculturalism into fits of cognitive dissonance.

Shot:

The cultural gap between those who vote in the Republican presidential primaries and those who cover the candidates in those primaries is now a chasm.

One by one, the media covering the Republican presidential candidates attach some quickly assembled defining flaw to each candidate: “Rand Paul has a temper problem with the media”; “Ted Cruz is an unelectable extremist”; “Scott Walker’s lack of a completed college degree is likely to be a major problem.”

All of these flaws are in the eye of the media beholder. Ordinary Americans don’t particularly care if Rand Paul is brusque with interviewers; they have a low opinion of journalists already. Ted Cruz’s ideas are much less “extreme” outside of newsrooms. And only about one-third of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, making Scott Walker closer to the “average American” than everyone else in the field.

A lot of members of the media who are covering the GOP presidential candidates have exceptionally little in common with the voters who will select the Republican nominee. Thus, when the Republican candidates make their pitch to grassroots conservatives, the hot-take instant analysis from the big media voices usually concludes that the pitch was a belly flop. But the GOP candidates aren’t trying to win votes in the New York and D.C. newsrooms, and in a spectacular failure of empathy and understanding, a lot of reporters simply can’t grasp the hopes, fears, and priorities of GOP-leaning voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina . . . and Tennessee. [Site of last week's NRA convention in Nashville, which Geraghty attended -- Ed]

—“The Skewed View of America Inside the Progressive Bubble,” Jim Geraghty, National Review Online, Monday.

Chaser:

I’ve been saying for years that people “should read the newspaper upside down” — that is, if they want to know the untold story, they should read the comments beneath online newspaper pieces.

The contrast between the elite liberal worldview of the paper, and that of the everyman reader below, is hilariously revealing. Occasionally, commenters provide both eye witness accounts, clarifications, contrary statistics — and a healthy dose of “ohferchrissakes” irritation at the latest pieties.

Now, do I think turning these comments into Important News Stories is lazy, agenda-driven and comical? Yes, but so is most of what “newspapers” do anyhow, and always have.

Those comments — and the tweets on “Black Twitter” and the crazy conversations over at World Star Hiphop or the smart ones at Reddit, mean _something_.

—Regular PJM contributor Kathy Shaidle, at her Five Feet of Fury blog, today.

Hangover: Last year, Michelle Fields interviewed young MSM-cocooned low-information Hillary supporters for PJTV. As the Internet cliche goes, “you won’t believe!!!” what one student says is Hillary’s biggest accomplishment:

Ambassador Chris Stevens could not be reached for comment.

Some timely music from Reason TV’s Remy. Sample lyrics:

And we’ll dance all night, it’s the best code ever
Some folks pay a lot, others they pay never
And you’ll get tax breaks if you’re really clever
It’ll take so long, it’s the best code ever
They’ll be like “oh, oh no”
We’ll be like “yeah, yeah, yeah.”
We’ll be like “awww.”

You may have heard that all your info
on our systems can be hacked with ease
But rest assured if they don’t get them
they’ll be in the care of folks like these
Yes historians will all agree
among the greatest works in history

Note to the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, which are doing their best this month to restore the IRS’s already sullen reputation (good luck with that), he means it ironically.

“Pitiful: Al Sharpton can’t even get a hunger strike right,” Noah Rothman writes at Hot Air:

It is perfectly appropriate that those who are cheapening the moral authority of the hunger strike by invoking it in order to force the Senate to move forward with Loretta Lynch’s stalled nomination are also failing to even commit fully to the practice.

MSNBC host, political agitator, and noted tax evader Rev. Al Sharpton is organizing a hunger strike, “along with female civil rights leaders,” to compel the U.S. Senate to confirm Lynch as the next attorney general. They’re calling it the “Confirm Loretta Lynch Fast.”

“[T]he new tactic is designed in the mold of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez, organizers said,” a Politico report read. And that’s true, with one tiny exception: Those civil rights leaders actually starved themselves in a display of civil disobedience. Fortunately for them, modern day civil rights activists are not held to such a rigorous and inconvenient standard. According to Politico, “fasters will alternate days abstaining from food until Lynch is confirmed to replace Eric Holder at the Justice Department.”

It’s the return of the rolling hunger strike! We’ve seen this goofy tactic before, haven’t we? On the Fourth of July in 2006, then-Democrat mascot Cindy Sheehan (remember her?) staged an anti-Bush protest involving a few equally preening Hollywood friends, as Agence France-Presse reported at the time:

Other supporters, including Penn, Sarandon, novelist Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover will join a ‘rolling” fast, a relay in which 2,700 activists pledge to refuse food for at least 24 hours, and then hand over to a comrade.

As I wrote in response, I was so moved by their efforts, “I’m going on my own personal thrice-daily rolling hunger strike. That’s right: rather than just one random hunger strike once a year, I’ll eschew all solid foods from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM. And from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM. And then just to really stick it to the war-mongering imperialists, I’ll fast from 6:00 PM until 8:00 AM the following day.”

And I’m prepared to do the same every day once again, no matter what happens to the would-be attorney general. Fight the power, err, in this case, for the power, man!

Update: “I would be remiss, by the way, if I did not note that there’s a simple way to get Lynch’s nomination to go forward,” Moe Lane writes in response to Sharpton’s “hunger” “strike:”

Democrats can stop filibustering that anti-human trafficking bill that they’ve been blocking. Once that happens, business can continue. Of course, doing that may mean that fewer minority babies end up being aborted, but the Democratic party leadership can’t have everything that they want.

Meanwhile, Twitchy looks for synergy: “Imagine the weight loss if these hunger strikers would join forces with Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ campaign!”

Perhaps Weight Watchers and/or Gwyneth Paltrow should also get onboard. Or maybe Jamba Juice.

Today on MSNBC-DNC, “President Barack Obama’s top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, went around the table and kissed reporters before an interview this morning on MNSBC’s Morning Joe. The moment was briefly captured on live television before the network cut away to a commercial break,” Daniel Halper writes at the Weekly Standard:

Jarrett’s first step is toward the BBC’s Katty Kay. “Hi, there,” Jarrett’s heard whispering as she leans in for a hug and kiss. Kay is “Anchor for BBC World News America in Washington.”

Then the senior White House adviser just as warmly greets Cokie Roberts, a National Public Radio contirbutor.

As the segment heads toward a commercial break, host Joe Scarborough can be heard saying, “Valerie, come give me a hug.”

As the Obama administration enters into its twilight phase (and yes, it feels so good to type those words), it’s nice to see their relationship with their close-circuit talking points distribution system ending the same way it began. Recall that during the administration’s first year when Morning Joe — which holds itself out as being co-hosted by MSNBC’s token Republican — read a memo on air “correcting” a segment immediately after it had been emailed to the show by the Obama White House. Who knows — perhaps by Valerie herself?

Back in 2009, Fox News’ revelations led to disgraced Obama “Green” “Czar” Van Jose given his walking papers by the White House for harboring, as Brit Hume said at the time, “views that were out there where the buses don’t run.” Hume responded to the administration’s boilerplate attacks on Fox by asking, “One wonders how our colleagues at CNN and elsewhere like being patted on the head and given the seal of approval by the White House.”

Forward! We’ve progressed in the last six years from head pats to pecks on the cheek. But it’s not like we weren’t warned in 2008 that Democrats with and without bylines shared a mutual lovefest:

And the love goes on as we’ve seen, with DNC stenographers lapping up Hillary’s prefabricated “Scooby Do” tour of mid-priced Mexican-themed chain restaurants in the American midwest:

So Hillary deletes 30k emails after 2012 Congressional inquiry. And the top story of the day is BURRITO. Democrats sure got it good…

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) April 15, 2015

They could kiss themselves over how good.

“A Project to Turn Corpses Into Compost,” the New York Times reports in chillingly straitlaced fashion:

The body of the tiny 78-year-old woman, gray hair falling over stiffened shoulders, was brought to a hillside at Western Carolina University still clad in a blue hospital gown and chartreuse socks.

She was laid on a bed of wood chips, and then more were heaped atop her. If all goes as hoped, the body will turn into compost.

It is a startling next step in the natural burial movement. Even as more people opt for interment in simple shrouds or biodegradable caskets, urban cemeteries continue to fill up. For the environmentally conscious, cremation is a problematic option, as the process releases greenhouse gases.

Armed with a prestigious environmental fellowship, Katrina Spade, a 37-year-old Seattle resident with a degree in architecture, has proposed an alternative: a facility for human composting.

The idea is attracting interest from environmental advocates and scientists. The woman laid to rest in wood chips is a first step in testing how it would work.

The article was written by someone at the Times named Catrin Einhorn. I assume she’s absolutely no relation to “Earth Day” co-founder Ira Einhorn, and the bad luck of the New York Times strikes the snake-bitten paper once again. This is after all, the publication that praised Bill Ayers the morning of September 11th, before the Islamofascist terrorist attacks took place. Once again, a macabre bit of synchronicity strikes the Gray Lady, when the journalist reporting on a story about human composting shares a last name with Ira Einhorn, who name equated radical environmentalism with the disposal of dead bodies decades ago, as Michelle Malkin wrote in 2001:

The facts are sickeningly familiar to Philly residents, but not to the rest of the nation. In the ’70s, Einhorn made a name for himself as a radical environmentalist and “counter-cultural” peacenik. He grew a ratty beard, stopped bathing, dubbed himself a “planetary enzyme,” spouted Marxism, and hogged the spotlight during the nation’s first Earth Day. Poets, scientists, hippies, New Agers, billionaire benefactors, and young women caught up in the haze of free love and free-flowing drugs all flocked to Einhorn.

One of those women, former Texas cheerleader and artist Holly Maddux, lived with Einhorn in the City of Brotherly Love. In the fall of 1978, she disappeared. Einhorn said she walked out and never came back. Few dared challenge the Flower Power guru who hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, lectured at Harvard, and traveled the world.

It took a year before cops opened a missing persons file on Maddux. Her family pressured law enforcement to investigate Einhorn. His neighbors complained of a foul stench and brown ooze seeping from his residence. Eighteen months after she went missing, detectives discovered her body stuffed and mummified inside a black steamer trunk hidden in Einhorn’s closet.

Maddux’s skull had multiple fractures and she had shrunk to less than 40 pounds. Experts say she was alive when she was forced into the trunk. Author Steven Levy wrote that when horrified cops informed Einhorn, who was waiting in his kitchen during the search, that the corpse looked like Maddux’s body, Einhorn coolly replied: “You found what you found.”

The peaceniks rushed to Einhorn’s side and insisted he was incapable of violence — let alone the monstrous evil that befell Maddux. A parade of liberal aristocrats lavished praise on the accused murderer at his bail hearing. And Einhorn had the best legal representative in town – former district attorney and soon-to-be-U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, who won an obscenely reduced bail for Einhorn of $40,000. Wealthy socialite Barbara Bronfman of the Seagram’s liquor empire put up the measly $4,000 bond needed to spring Einhorn out of jail in 1981 before trial.

Einhorn fled. While Maddux’s family grieved, he traipsed around Europe for 20 years (partly subsidized by Bronfman). Meanwhile, two former girlfriends came forward and testified that Einhorn had nearly killed them in separate, savage attacks. A Pennsylvania jury convicted Einhorn in abstentia for Maddux’s murder in 1993.

And of course, the notion of composting bodies instantly brings to mind the first radical environmentalists as well.

By the way, to return to our headline, isn’t everything so, so, problematic these days?

“Man featured in Hillary Clinton’s launch ad wants Democratic candidates to challenge Clinton in the primary,” Daniel Halper writes at the Weekly Standard:

REPORTER: “Attorney Sean Bagniewski was in the video along with his wife and his dog.”

…

REPORTER: “He says it was filmed a month and a half ago. And is he still eating the trash?”

BAGNIEWSKI: “He still is.”

REPORTER: “Bagniewski has been a Clinton fan since fifth grade. but he still hopes other Democrats get in the race, including former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and former Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Do you want more Democratic candidates in the field?”

BAGNIEWSKI: “Yes. I think it’s better for the candidates, it’s better for the voters to get the whole array of opinions and I think it’s better for Iowa.”

Hillary sure can pick ‘em — we’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we?

Casey Knowles, a High School Senior in Washington state, recently discovered she was one of the sleeping children in Clinton’s controversial “Children” ad appearing prior to the Texas primaries.

Knowles, a supporter of Barack Obama was shocked that she had contributed to the national security message of a candidate that she passionately opposes.

When asked by The New Argument, this is what Knowles had to say about her appearance in Clinton’s ad:

“While I love Hillary, I would much rather hear Barack Obama’s voice at the other end of the phone at 3am.

In case you had forgotten. Speaking of memory loss, while the London Independent, the paper that would prefer you forget their infamous “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past” headline from 2000 isn’t known for their (intentional) humor or trolling, this is a pretty masterful job of front page design:

THE INDEPENDENT FRONT PAGE: Alzheimer’s breakthrough gives new hope to millions. #skypapers pic.twitter.com/pjxfSmVUT8

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 14, 2015

And certainly a far more subtle piece of trolling than Ezra’s Klein’s casually racist “typo:”

You stay classy, young juicevoxers.

“Of course there has been a ‘libertarian country’ before,” Robert Tracinski writes at the Federalist.

“We’re it. Or at least we were, for roughly the first 150 years of our existence—which, far from being some sort of fairy tale or collective delusion, was probably the most successful period ever in the history of any nation.”

As Tracinski notes:

I’ve recently been seeing the revival of an odd line of argument I hear from the left now and again. In response to the launch of Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, for example, I heard it said that Paul’s vision for a much smaller government, for eliminating so many agencies and regulations, was a fantasy of a “libertarian country” that has never existed. The implication is that radically smaller government is a new idea that has never been tried.

Similarly, in response to my suggestion that maybe we should stop basing our government on massive, omnipresent coercion of the citizenry, the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent replied:

@Tracinski @chrisrlloyd @ryanlcooper It is an utter fantasy to imagine a return to pre-industrial state role of govt. A fairy tale.

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 9, 2015

Yeah, unstopped growth of socialist government usually ends, rather painfully for all concerned:

You can never have enough Government. pic.twitter.com/162Ysp9LwF — State Control™ (@State_Control) April 14, 2015

But I’m sure it will work this time.

Entirely unrelated tweets:

Big Blue is Killing Upstate New York http://t.co/P7HJrrVTBe via @aminterest

— Ed Driscoll (@EdDriscoll) April 15, 2015

Criticize her while you can MT @DouglasLevene HRC says she’d back const amdt to cut back 1st Am prot for polit speech http://t.co/4Dk73LV0yt

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) April 14, 2015

A year ago, in a post titled “Why Democrats Call Americans Racist,” we speculated:

As in the 2010 midterms, expect the madness from the left to ramp up exponentially between now and November. They’re just getting started.

(And then presumably some time between mid-November and the start of the new year, the left will begin declaring half of America sexist. Unexpectedly.)

We apologize for getting the timing wrong; ABC’s Cokie Roberts waited until yesterday to declare half of her network’s viewers to be sexist:

According to ABC’s Cokie Roberts, hints that Hillary Clinton may be unlikable can be traced back to sexism. The veteran journalist appeared on Good Morning America, Tuesday, to promote her new book, but the conversation veered into a discussion of 2016. Citing an unnamed poll, Roberts referenced “research that shows that a woman who is strong and powerful is seen as not friendly and empathetic.”

The journalist added, “Here we are in 2015…and we still have to deal with that.” She lamented, “[Clinton] is running against herself.” Roberts marveled, “She’s trying to figure out how to show people how she’s a warm and friendly person.”

Astonishingly, even NBC’s Andrea Mitchell can see what’s going on with with the media and Hillary, when asked by Luke Russert, who only has his NBC gig due to his father’s last name why the MSM is fawning over a woman who is only running for the presidency because she has her husband’s last name:

“What do you make of this rollout, the Scooby-Doo van going from New York to Iowa, just stopping at it seems random gas stations along the way?”

“This is their attempt to show her as the average person, relating to average everyday people as did her video, trying to show she can cross the country,” Mitchell responded, referring to Clinton’s 2016 announcement video.

“It’s a deliberate, very well-orchestrated attempt,” she continued. “Everybody in the media are being used in this regard.”

C’mon, for once, tell the truth DNC-MSM: Sure it feels dirty — but it’s that good, sexy warm kind of dirty, isn’t it, MSM?

Oh, and speaking of sexism — I don’t recall the MSM losing too much sleep over this in 2008:

YOU GUYS! DON’T BE MEAN TO HILLARY – It’s sexist to be mean to female politicians. #Hillary2016 #OhHillNo #tcot pic.twitter.com/xf4tJQZqzu

— #MakeDCListen™ (@RickCanton) April 13, 2015

Fidel Castro inspired CNN International, disgraced former CNN chief executive Eason Jordan told an apparently approving Harvard audience in 1999:

A longtime admirer of Fidel Castro, [Ted] Turner has called the former Cuban president “one hell of a guy.” In 2001 Turner told a class at Harvard Law School, “You’d like him [Castro]. He has been the leader of Cuba for 40 years. He’s the most senior leader in the world, and most of the people that are still in Cuba like him.”

Castro, in turn, holds Turner in high regard, so much so that the dictator was the inspiration behind the creation of CNN International. As CNN News Chief Executive Eason Jordan told his audience during a 1999 lecture at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism:

“… Let me also thank Fidel Castro. In the earliest days of CNN, when CNN was meant to be seen only in the United States, the enterprising Fidel Castro was pirating and watching CNN in Cuba. Fidel was intrigued by CNN. He wanted to meet the person responsible. So Ted Turner, who at that point had never traveled to a Communist country or knowingly met a Communist, [went to Havana]. It was big deal for Ted and during the discussions Castro suggested that CNN be made available to the entire world. In fact it was that seed, that idea that grew into CNN International.”

Turner generally has been loath to condemn totalitarian tyrants such as Castro, a stark contrast to his frequent and passionate denunciations of President George W. Bush. When asked in 2000 whether he thought Saddam Hussein could accurately be described as evil, Turner said: “I’m not sure that I know enough to be able to answer that question.”

Which brings us to CNNi today:

As Iowahawk tweets, “Parody Is Dead”; one of his Twitter followers adds, “That thinking is a wonder of the age. They think Cubans are like animals in a zoo exhibit.”

Exactly. In 2004, Cuban-American blogger Val Prieto coined the phrase “Omnipotent Tourism Syndrome:”

What is O.T.S.?

The Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome? is a disease common among Americans that is caused by arrogance, egotism and non-chalance. Carriers show a penchant for obliviously overlooking the obvious while delighting themselves at the cost of others. Delerious OTS sufferers refuse to acknowledge their malady and will argue that it is their God given right as an American to travel freely about the world with little or no conscience or consequence. OTS people fequently hide behind their Bill of Rights and Constitution. Unfortunately, there is no cure for OTS nor is there any way to ease it’s symptoms. It is a disease which, no matter how much hard data and facts are introduced into the OTS sufferer, will not ease unless said sufferer finds a compass of morality and humanity.

And it was also in 2004 that Fox’s Roger Ailes gave the very best definition of CNNi to CSpan’s Brian Lamb — and today’s Tweet is a reminder that like Castro’s closed socialist regime nothing has changed at the network:

(And don’t even get CNN started on the glories of North Korea.)

Related: “Why Cuba Was, and Must Remain, on State Terror List,” from my PJM colleague David Steinberg.

“Video: The dumbest news segment ever,” as spotted by Ed Morrissey:

Someone is wrong on the internet – and the CBS affiliate in Dallas spent two minutes of air time on their 6 pm news broadcast covering it. A woman in Dallas wrote a Facebook post saying that a woman should not be President, and it got quite a few responses. So naturally, a TV news crew interviewed her, her client, and showed a shaky-cam shot of the post itself. Steve Pickett even managed to stand outside on the street — for what reason, no one knows — to recap some of the responses to the Facebook post.

Aaaaaaaaaand … that’s the story. No, really:

Click over if you want to see the Dallas CBS affiliate in their effort to become the next Mencken meets Bill Bradlee meets Woodward & Bernstein meets Tom Wolfe level of earth shattering, world-changing journalism. As Ed writes:

There are two explanations for this segment being broadcast, which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. One: There was absolutely nothing of interest happening in Dallas-Fort Worth yesterday. (Possible, but unlikely.) Two: Someone in CBS Dallas wants to paint all opposition to Hillary Clinton as kooky, bigoted, and possibly evidence that religion makes people both of those.

My hunch is that Option Two looks pretty likely here. And my further hunch is that we’ll see more of this ludicrous media focus on even the smallest nuggets of anti-Hillary kookiness to exploit as a way to marginalize her opposition over the next several months.

Bingo! But since it’s a CBS affiliate, and presumably can pool resources with the staff of any of its fellow affiliates across the country, I know the perfect CBS employee for the station to hire to investigate this story to the nth-degree:

.@donnabrazile Nobody’s heard from Alix Bryan of CBS6 have they?

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) April 14, 2015

And if they can’t find Alix, I’m sure the new host of Face the Nation would be happy to help.

Update: Bryan would be perfect for this gig, actually. The left have discovered yet another small business that must be destroyed:

The whole reason this story exists is because the news outlet is trying to get this woman’s business shuttered. http://t.co/YfCYQjQGUK

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) April 14, 2015

(Cartoon by XKCD.)

Remember when the DNC-MSM was bored back in February immediately before Brian Williams blew himself up, and tried to make this a rightwing issue?

“Robert Kennedy Jr apologizes for comparing vaccinated children to victims of a ‘holocaust’” the London Daily Mail reports. Though of course they, and he mean The Holocaust:

● Nephew of JFK, and son for former Attorney General, opposes vaccines
● He believes a chemical called thimerosal causes autism in children
● Promoting protest film, he likened vaccinated kids to holocaust victims
● On Monday, he apologized for the comment after widespread criticism

Besides, doesn’t RFK Jr. know that Al Gore has claimed the lock on that particular Godwin’s Law violation for radical environmentalism since 1989 before cashing in his chips at the start of 2013 to Big Oil?

Of course, given the state of American education, it won’t be long before most impressionable young lefties scratch their head and ask, “what is a Holocaust, anyhow?”

That’s a map. MT @DanaBashCNN: New @marcorubio 2016 logo. Note American flag over the “I” pic.twitter.com/WZeKkj0yx2

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 13, 2015

Besides not knowing the difference between flags and maps, I wonder how many young journalists (read: DNC operatives with bylines, such as this cub reporter on the make) working at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO and the recently spun-off Time magazine (a) absolutely loathe Rubio’s slogan and (b) have absolutely no idea that it’s based on the most memorable article the founder of their namesake companies ever wrote?

My work in the Time-Life Book Division was not exactly onerous, since the manuscript was in good shape and whenever one of the researchers asked me, “What is your authority for this statement,” I would look at her firmly and reply, “I am.” So while Man and Space progressed fairly smoothly thirty-two floors above the Avenue of the Americas, I had ample energy for moonlighting with Stanley Kubrick.

—Arthur C. Clarke on his visit to New York in 1964, which led to his co-writing a little super-8 home movie four years later called 2001: A Space Odyssey, as described in Clarke’s 1972 book, Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations.

But unless you actually invented the communications satellite and co-wrote a epoch-shattering movie with Stanley Kubrick, citing yourself as your own source of authority can lead to trouble if you hold yourself out as an objective journalist. At the Federalist today, Matthew Schmitz describes what can go wrong “When [the] Critics A Reporter Cites Are The Reporter:”

When it comes to reporting on contentious issues, perhaps no journalistic shortcut is more prone to misuse than the phrase “critics say.” Used well, it usually precedes a quotation from one of those critics that allows the reader to judge them in their own words. Used poorly, it becomes an opportunity for the writer to put words in the mouths of people he doesn’t like in order to discredit their position or insert his own view into the story. All of a sudden, “critics say” just what the reporter happens to think.

Usually, reporters are careful enough there’s no way to prove this has happened. Occasionally, they’re sloppy enough that we can see the editorializing at play

When the Critic Is the Reporter

Take a recent story written for Religion News Service by David Gibson on a donation from the Koch brothers to the Catholic University of America. Gibson gives ample space to the view of certain “critics”:

Critics of the CUA gift say it is ironic that the school would seek such massive support from a social liberal when Catholic charities are not allowed to take any money from any person or group that supports abortion rights or gay rights.

Curiously, he does not name any critics or offer any examples of that kind of argument. Why not? If critics said something, there should be critics to name and statements to quote. Did Gibson just make them up?

Well, no, as it happens. There is a critic who has made this exact point about CUA and Gibson has heard him do so. The week before he published his story on the Koch gift, Gibson participated in a debate where one critic had this to say:

For years, conservative Catholics have been arguing the very same thing: that CCHD, Catholic Charities, and Catholic social groups cannot take a dime from somebody who has even the remotest connection to the gay rights agenda or Planned Parenthood. This is like Planned Parenthood funding a Catholic bioethics center.

This is exactly the criticism that Gibson was referring to. It came in a public forum on a radio show that aired the day before his story was published. So why not quote the statement and name the critic?

Perhaps it is because the criticism was offered by Gibson himself. The unnamed and unquoted people in the story weren’t made up—they were the reporter himself. He is the critic who had something to say.

Some say this is a bad journalistic practice. And regarding the similar “some say” tic, a decade ago, Elizabeth Scalia dubbed it the journalistic cliche of the year:

My personal choice: “some say…” Used continually by Katie Couric, David Gregory and oh, basically anyone in the press who wanted to advance their own personal opinion or the general concensus of the fourth estate: “Some say President Bush is trying to undermine our civil liberties,” “Some say Iraq is a quagmire,” “Some say America is a world-bully,” “Some say if only the Kyoto treaty had been recognised…”

Just once, I would like to hear a politician come back with, “WHO says? WHO exactly SAYS, Katie, David, Tim, etc”

They’d never spill the true answer, though, “why, WE say, WE in the press!”

There’s a great clip of Margaret Thatcher pushing back against the “some say” cliche in 1980. I’d like to see more conservative politicians employ this when faced with a critique from a strawman named Mr. Somesay:

Related: “News media’s sloppy week,” Glenn Reynolds on their spectacular cluster-fark last week, though the headline could be recycled 52 times a year. It’s a Scooby Do Mystery Machine-size quandary as to why this keeps happening to the DNC-MSM!

Shot:

.@gwenifill Good question! Apparently @chucktodd did for some reason. “Spontaneous” was his word, not mine. https://t.co/Tt5lYsk47q

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 13, 2015

Chaser:

How “spontaneous” is Hillary’s van ride? She did the exact same thing (w/ the same name!) in 2000. (h/t @seanspicer) pic.twitter.com/sI3TTLw7pc — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 13, 2015

Hangover/Exit Question:

Quick question to journos who’ve been covering U.S. politics since Clinton admin.: How’d you forget this? https://t.co/2zxGloJdAl — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 13, 2015

Incidentally, there’s little doubt that Chuck Todd and NBC are more than ready for Hillary. Alternate headline: Thin-skinned NBC anchor/Democrat operative blocks editor of conservative Website from reading his tweets:

Yep. pic.twitter.com/fgTiOHlivS

— jon gabriel (@exjon) April 13, 2015

Update: Rut-roh, Chuck!

11 years ago, I wrote an article titled “Hollywood Stasists vs. Valley Dynamists” for Tech Central Station, on the cold technological war between northern and southern California. But rather than using the dynamists and stasists terminology from Virginia Postrel’s 1999 book The Future and Its Enemies, perhaps I should have referred to both sides as the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, as all of the battles were being led by various factions of the left.

The left-leaning (sometimes very left-leaning and occasionally more than a little racialist) National Journal spots Marlon Perkins-style, “The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley.” Longtime readers of PJM should find this passage quite familiar:

Rather than ruffle feathers—or worse—Republicans who work there often just keep quiet. Rich Tafel, who coaches tech companies in politics and policy, understands the dynamic. The founder of the gay group Log Cabin Republicans, he’s had many Republicans in Silicon Valley confide to him their true political views.

“You just learn how to operate, if you will, in the closet as a Republican,” Tafel told National Journal. “You keep your viewpoints to yourself.”

One startup CEO who has worked in Silicon Valley for more than a decade says that while it’s popular to talk politics in the workplace, the underlying assumption is that everyone has similar views.

The CEO, who generally votes Republican and donates to GOP candidates—he spoke on background to conceal his right-leaning views—said that in 2012, “you wouldn’t want to say you’re voting for Romney in the election.” At the same time, openly expressing one’s support for Obama was “incredibly common.”

His opposition to raising the minimum wage is just one area where he diverges with most of his colleagues. “If you say something like, ‘We need a higher minimum wage,’ you don’t get critiqued,” he said. But he would never reveal his more conservative outlook on the matter.

“They can’t fathom that somebody disagrees with them,” he said. “And I disagree with them. So I’m not going to open up that box.”

Which our own Roger L. Simon described in the original title of his 2009 autobiography as “Blacklisting Myself:”

You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor’s office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the executive keeping you waiting. They are definitely not in surgery. The intention is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I have personal knowledge of an instance when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours—I assume he didn’t realize they’d come to pitch him Prizzi’s Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy or vengeance.)

Once inside the executive’s office, the pecking order of talent and management thus confirmed, it’s instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water—originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what’s important. It usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (depending on the year), and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. (What will they do without him?) Fucking Bush did this or that … Did you hear the stupid thing Chimpy the Idiot said? You didn’t even have to hear Bush referred to specifically— the word “idiot” sufficed. You knew. The subtext was that we were all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don’t.

If you didn’t agree with this particular Weltanschauung, if you dissented from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you had but three choices: One, you could argue, in which case you would be almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger, or a right-wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have had little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you could shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you felt like a coward and experienced (as I have) a dose of nausea straight out of Sartre. Three, you could stop going to the meetings altogether—you could, in effect, blacklist yourself.

I don’t know the size of that self-selected blacklist, but I suspect it’s substantial, though certainly not as large as the number of those in the closet. People have to make a living, after all, as in the days of the old blacklist. Only there are no “fronts,” as in the Woody Allen movie of the same name.

This happens with actors as well; Morgan Brittany, one of the former stars of Dallas who’s openly Republican, tells this story of appearing onstage with Ed Asner, who’s openly Stalinist:

Brittany told of building a friendship with actor Ed Asner, a sometimes activist for progressive causes, when the two starred in a stage-play together during the infamous Florida recount that put Republican George W. Bush in the White House over Democrat Al Gore. And she told how she lost Asner’s friendship due to politics.

“Every night he just loved me and came in and gave me a big hug,” she said. “Then one night he was going crazy about Gore and Bush and stealing the election. I’m backstage and I said, ‘Ed, chill, not everybody thinks the way you do’.”

“Well, where do I begin?” I swear. It was like a light switch,” she said. “He turned to me and said, ‘you’re not a Republican?’ I said, ‘yep.’ And he said, ‘I can’t even look at you. I can’t even talk to you’.”

“From that moment on, he never spoke to me again, except on stage,” she said. “This is what we’re dealing with. The intolerance of the left.”

Goodbye to all of that, says science fiction/fantasy novelist and frequent PJM contributor Sarah Hoyt in response to the socialist justice warriors overrunning that industry’s Hugo Awards, which we mentioned last week, creating what she calls, quite accurately, “The Architecture of Fear:”

Do consider how it would feel to come out of the closet and kick the mouse up and down main street, making him eat his Stalinist “guilt by association” cries.

I’m not going to force you.  I’m not going to out you.

But this Stalinist “I know everything you do and it’s all analyzed for deviationism” always leads to purges.  In SF/F those purges might mean not publishing traditional.  Or they might mean not winning awards.  Or getting kicked out of an organization.

But this type of mind-set is a cancer in the culture and sooner or later leads to gulags and graves.

I can’t push you and I won’t.  If you want to keep your opinions — left, right, moderate, libertarian, anarchist — hidden, it’s your job.  I am not the keeper of your soul.

However, I want you to think of the dark and dank place that fear and that suspicion and the constant spying lead.

And then I want you to think of how good it would feel to get off your knees, stand on two, look your tormentors in the face and say “No more.  I’m free. My thoughts and my opinions, my beliefs, my tastes, my friends are my own.  You have no power over me.  Not now, and not ever again.”

That’s all.  I just want you to think.

Now that the left are threatening to burn down Midwestern pizza parlors, and getting Silicon Valley CEOs fired for doubleplus ungood oldthink, you don’t see many commercials from them these days like this 1981 Amnesty International ad toasting freedom and celebrating speaking your conscience, huh?

Related: “How free speech became right wing:”

Essentially, the left needs to rediscover and reclaim its liberalism. Otherwise, the basic liberties of free thought and free expression will become the exclusive purview of the right.

But at least in America, the left declaring itself “liberal” was simultaneously a stolen base and a rebranding tactic in the early 1920s, after the Wilson administration demonstrated — the hard way — that free speech and “Progressivism” were mutually incompatible terms.

God only knows what they have against pizza, though — it’s Mussolini-approved!