Archive for 2019

AND AGAIN: Pro-Life Movie Unplanned Mysteriously Loses 99K Twitter Followers Despite Box Office Win.

While the Twitter account has jumped up to 86.9K followers, when users click on the number, they see the message “Unplanned Movie doesn’t have any followers yet.”

I just tried it, and while the number of followers listed on its homepage has more than doubled, the same message that Tyler O’Neil reports above is still displayed:

Earlier: Pro-Life Movie Unplanned Blocked on Twitter Hours After Release.

WELL, GOOD: Erdogan Appears to Suffer Major Defeats in Turkey’s Two Biggest Cities. “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party on Sunday was facing defeat in local elections in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and possibly even Istanbul, its largest city, a result that shook the nation as Mr. Erdogan suffered the first major electoral setback of his decade and a half in power. The municipal balloting around the country came nine months after national elections that extended Mr. Erdogan’s hold on power. It was closely watched as a barometer of his standing with voters after Turkey’s economy fell into recession and he assumed sweeping new executive powers.”

IT’S A SPOOF, but this Biden 2020 page has the ring of truth nonetheless.

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend in style.

BOREN WAS SO PC AS UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT. THAT PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TIPOFF: Oklahoma ex-senator David Boren accused of sexual misconduct. “A former University of Oklahoma student alleges he was touched and kissed inappropriately by former university President David Boren on several occasions almost a decade ago when the man worked as a teaching aide for the onetime governor and senator. The allegations by Jess Eddy, now 29, appear to be at the center of an investigation being conducted for the university by Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, into whether Boren sexually harassed male subordinates. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has also opened an investigation.”

To its credit, the story does report that Boren is a Democrat.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

—“Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again,” Ewan Morrison, Quillette, today.

THEY’RE HAPPY WITH FOREIGN PROPAGANDA, SO LONG AS IT ADVANCES THEIR PREFERRED NARRATIVE: The fake news epidemic includes state-run propaganda from al Jazeera recycled in American media.

In the wake of the terrible terror attack on two mosques that left nearly 50 dead in New Zealand, cable news outlets can’t seem to get enough of a certain very articulate man with a British accent who spits fire against Donald Trump and rails against Islamophobia and Israel.

Mehdi Hasan seems to be everywhere on TV these days. Reliably Trump-obsessed cable channels like CNN and MSNBC relish the opportunity to promote a foreign-born Muslim guest who, they believe, has the credibility to call the president and his supporters racists and white supremacists.

And Mr. Hasan, for his part, is relishing both the spotlight and the opportunity to make his case directly to an anti-Trump audience in the United States.

After spending the last several years claiming to be concerned about hostile countries interfering in American politics, though, it’s a bit jarring to see the employee of a state-run media outlet hostile to the United States appear so frequently on CNN and MSNBC.

By promoting Mr. Hasan, these cable news outlets are facilitating the insertion of foreign propaganda into the American political debate.

Mr. Hasan works for al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned media enterprise that advances the interests of the state and its royal family. When he speaks, he’s no less a government spokesman than Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Sanders.

That’s different because shut up.