A recent Livescience.com article appearing in Yahoo! News highlighted a study by psychologist Gordon Hodson of Brock University in Ontario in which a nexus is supposedly found between being unintelligent and conservative and being racist. I presume then that, as conservatives and morons tend to be more racist, the dots between them are connected? The story not only provided an overview of the study but also links to other similar studies which appear to back up Hodson’s conclusions. Well then, there it is. We always knew that liberals are smarter and more tolerant. We just needed a study to prove it.
Gordon Hodson
At best, psychology is an inexact science, as the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, and to try to understand what makes it tick is daunting if not impossible. But layer on top of that the possibility that the researchers themselves may harbor a bias that leads them to subconsciously steer their studies towards reaching pre-determined conclusions, and you have the makings of a sham science project … with predictable results.
Hodson’s complete study is not available for free online, so I readily admit I only know what has been made public. Apparently the researchers offered a list of questions which would measure participants’ left or right leanings based upon the answers. For example, one measure in defining “conservative” is gauging one’s level of agreement with the statement “schools should teach children to obey authority.” Then they overlaid these results with responses to questions with overtly racial overtones such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people of other races.” I guess if you answer “yes” to authority and “no” to working with others not like you, you are a conservative racist. Conversely, if you replied “fight the power, maaan” and “I want my office to look like a rainbow, my brother,” then you are a tolerant and cognitively well-adjusted liberal. Oh, if only the world were so simple. (more…)
The Occupy losers are delighted; they finally got the footage they think will shift the focus off the almost unbelievable legacy of Occupier violence, sexual assaults and general degeneracy that has been so carefully documented by Big Government. They hope that the visual of the UC Davis police force using pepper spray to stop these mutants from disrupting the campus will re-mobilize the fainthearted liberals who have grown fed up with the Occupiers’ antics. We conservatives need to ensure that doesn’t happen.
And we can do it the same way that we disrupted their narrative during the first phase of the occupation – by providing the context and telling the truths that the Occupiers used to be able to count on the liberal mainstream media to conceal.
The Occupy movement is in a public relations freefall, and the outlines of the next phase in what is a classic Alinskyite propaganda operation are becoming clear. The problem for the Occupiers is that people are now seeing them for what they are, a movement composed entirely of weirdos, losers and mutations who worship at an altar of greed, laziness and bad hygiene – all served up with an utter lack of irony and self-awareness that drives away even those who might support aspects of the Occupiers’ inchoate ideology.
I knew the Occupiers had a problem when I partied in San Francisco last week with several very liberal friends – all of whom mocked the nearby Occupiers for being stupid, lazy and stinky as thoroughly as I did, and with the kind of searing contempt for these deadbeats that made me proud to be an American. My pals will never be tea partiers, but that’s not the point.
The point is that the puppeteers behind the scam now see that they have lost control of the narrative, and they are attempting to morph the Occupy movement in order to recapture it. The liberal media frenzy focusing on last week’s necessary actions by the police is the result.
The UC Davis pepper spray incident wasn’t an accident. The Occupiers wanted it. They needed it. They have been trying to make it happen. And they are counting on the notion that the aesthetic unpleasantness of video clips showing the reality of the use of force by the police – force made necessary solely by the actions of the Occupiers themselves – will shift the narrative from the Occupiers’ myriad personal and ideological failings and onto them as victims of state oppression.
Interestingly, the mainstream media is going into overdrive to depict the Occupiers as victims of a repressive police state when our head of state is the Occupiers’ Number One Fan. But again, neither irony nor self-awareness were ever liberal strong suits.
Remember that this community-organized movement is critical to the Left’s election strategy for next year; it mobilizes the radical base while providing a perfect target to triangulate against down the road. But now that plan is falling apart. The pepper spray imbroglio is part of a second phase designed to regain the initiative it has lost as a result of the very exposure it cultivated in the first place.
There’s just one problem for the Occupier’s puppet masters – this isn’t the same world in which Saul Alinsky operated, and that’s why this band of clowns is going to fail.
The Alinksyite strategy behind the Occupy movement operates on the premise that the liberal mainstream media will always present the movement in the most favorable light and will willingly airbrush out the… unpleasantness that always occurs whenever bands of leftists gather together.
This is an information operation, a propaganda campaign that depends on gaining legitimacy and sympathy from the good-hearted, soft-hearted mass of Middle America. The Occupiers cannot afford to be seen as they really are, a motley collection of tools ranging from greedy college students demanding normal people subsidize their Third World Womyns’ Studies graduate degrees, to drug-addled drummers living off the largesse of Uncle Sucker, to Jew-hating Palestinian suck-ups yearning for Holocaust Part II, to union-trained “up-twinkling” professional protesters, to straight-up Marxists looking to enslave the American people in the service of their dark collectivist god.
They need to be seen as “peaceful,” as “concerned,” as something approaching normal. The mainstream media is only too eager to comply, bypassing the masses of creepy mutations that make up the bulk of the Occupiers to find and interview on camera the rare Occupier who is unpierced, semi-coherent and looks like someone who might actually get a job some day. In this way, the mainstream media can help its left-wing allies promote the fiction that this is some sort of relatable, organic movement reflecting the real feelings of the majority of Americans.
I must respectfully disagree with my insightful colleague John Nolte about Jennifer Rubin, the resident conservative blogger at the Washington Post.
First, full disclosure: Rubin is a friend. I was privileged to get to know her during the 2010 elections after admiring her work throughout the dark days of 2008.
Jennifer Rubin speaking in Illinois, 2010
There’s a risk for any conservative when going “in-house” at a mainstream media outlet. In my view, Rubin’s held her own and maintained her independence.
[UPDATE: I am reminded, also, that the radical left and their mouthpieces, like Media Matters, hate the fact that Rubin is at the Post because they worry about her ability to use her blog to legitimize conservative views for the newspaper's liberal readership.]
I think it’s precisely her independence that fascinates–and frustrates–Ben Smith and other mainstream journalists. They wish she could be cast as a shill.
She’s been very aggressive in attacking Gov. Rick Perry–but then, she’s not the only conservative who has done so openly and stridently.
I don’t agree with fellow conservatives who have described her as “establishment,” either (if I had to characterize her views simplistically, I’d say they were “urbane”).
There are plenty of conservatives who are, like Rubin, critical of some of the social or foreign policy views that have emerged among the Republican presidential candidates.
I don’t think a single one of them wants to see Barack Obama re-elected. On the contrary, they want to see the best possible challenger emerge from the pack. (more…)
Yahoo’s Cutline as was astonished that a news outlet would feature more than one type of voice by hosting a GOP tea party debate. The shock is palatable.
How is it “strange bedfellows” that a news outlet — and news outlets are to be objective, yes? — would feature a GOP debate hosted with a conservative grassroots movement? CNN has held Democratic debates in the past; is it really beyond the level of acceptability for them to host a debate for the other party? Is media not a fair stage for all sides? Yahoo quotes this:
But tonight’s debate from Florida goes even farther down the ethical hole. A major cable network is teaming up with a political splinter group as an (apparent) equal partner in a televised event. CNN didn’t team up with political progressives, who helped shape the 2008 presidential campaign, during that election cycle. Yet here it is proudly teaming up with the Tea Partiers (who, they keep telling us, aren’t even an identifiable group, but a shared mindset). My guess is CNN is more interested in wresting viewers from Fox than in maintaining its own credibility.
It is through independence that journalists maintain our legitimacy, and our (fading) credibility. Not by sharing our outlets’ names on banners with the entities and people we are supposed to be covering. This is basic ethics: Don’t share the bed with the subjects of your journalism.
What awful logic. By this reasoning, no media organization should host any political debate, period, ever, because the purpose of media is to report on, and hold accountable, the people participating in these debates. By taking the line that CNN should not have partnered with a grassroots movement, Scott Martelle demonstrates his ignorance on the movement itself: it’s not a political party or government entity. It’s people. Average, American people, who have made more of a dent in politics these past 20 years than progressives. That’s notable.
Throughout his tenure, there have been several facets in which President Obama has been demonstrably weak on leadership, with the debt debate coming to the forefront in recent months. Now however, lost in that news cycle has been another failure of leadership for the President – his own request to tone down violent rhetoric in this country. For it was mere months ago that Obama stood in front of a crowd in Tucson that had anxiously sought leadership amidst the chaos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; a teachable moment that had The Guardiangushing about how the President had delivered “calm amid the toxic rhetoric.”
That moment of calm has long since dissipated. Where once the President had denounced discourse that places “the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” we hear Republicans blamed for holding the American people hostage to their economic policies. Where once we were urged to talk “with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” we now hear tea party members being denounced as terrorists.
Make no mistake, this ratcheting up of terrorism and hostage-taking discourse directly coincides with recent events in Norway. The instant that Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, was labeled as a ‘right-wing Christian,’ liberals finally had their moment to seize upon – not just a chance to mislabel conservatives as extreme ideologues but a chance to label them as violent ideologues. This message has been a coordinated and vicious attack amongst the media, the Democrats, and most assuredly, the President.
Prior to the Norwegian massacre, references to the tea party as extreme were prevalent, but making the leap in logic to terrorism had been scant. After the Norwegian massacre however, liberals defining the tea party as hostage-taking terrorists have become far more frequent. In the last few days it has become practically commonplace.
This past Friday Politico ran an op-ed titled, “The Tea Party’s Terrorist Tactics,” which featured an illustration of an individual with a dollar sign-shaped bomb strapped to their chest, and argued that the party had progressed from hostage-taking to “the intentional infliction of harm on innocent Americans to achieve a political objective – terrorism.”
Joe Klein penned a piece for Time in which he accused Republicans of being beholden to ‘tea party robots,’ and worse, that their perceived unwillingness to compromise is something that would have made Osama bin Laden proud. The exact quote being that were he alive, bin Laden “could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.”
Noted ‘conservanerd‘ David Brooks has abandoned all pretense of conservatism in his latest New York Times column titled “The Mother of All No-Brainers.” It’s pretty clear that he believes that his readers are the brainless ones – rarely have so many shaky premises, false assertions and heapin’ helpings of pure nonsense been gathered into one NYT opinion column. That’s saying something.
Brooks is Obama and Axelrod’s favorite pseudo-conservative for a reason: his creepily slavish devotion to the idea that we mere drones need to be guided, led and – sadly yes, controlled – by a coterie of Ivy League-indoctrinated betters who will lead us out of the darkness of our sad little lives. These wise leaders may be identified by the crease in their slacks – Obama’s sharp press famously demonstrated to Brooks that The One would be The One. It’s that kind of profound insight that has made David Brooks the most popular conservative pundit among those who hate and despise everything conservatives stand for.
Let’s take a quick look at the cheesy rhetoric and flabby thinking that this servant of the failed status quo put out on the Fourth of July. It’s a wonderful illustration of how liberals argue – and provides a lesson in countering the nonsense.
The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda … Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators.
First, he sucks up to the conservatives. This is to try and make us think he is one of us, that he speaks as a friend instead of the house servant of his lefty overlords. Feel your defenses crumbling? Then:
[The Democrats] have agreed not to raise tax rates.
Wait, what? Since when have the Democrats agreed not to raise tax rates? Isn’t the President still talking about raising the rates next year, or is that one of those inconvenient truths?
[The Democrats] have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.
Hold on … weren’t they agreeing not to raise rates just a sentence ago? Or are these “revenue increases” – don’t you love euphemisms? – all going to come from wiping out the scourge of corporate jets? Whatever.
And wait a second – exactly who has agreed to this 3-to-1 ratio? It best not be someone on the GOP side unless she or she wants a well-funded primary opponent next year.
Watch out, because these harmless “revenue increases” are “to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures.” The “tax expenditures” language is priceless – as if the government “spends” money by not taking it. And the “loopholes” are the same kind of deductions that every business takes – deductions merely being a recognition of costs since what is taxed is profits. David, if you want to get on board with a low corporate tax rate and wipe out most all deductions, we conservatives might be on board. But you don’t. You want to raise rates without raising marginal rates; the sneaky way to do that is make more income taxable by eliminating deductions. And you think your readers are too stupid to see that.
According to a University of Miami study, those historical rankings of American presidents that pop up every year or so are significantly weighted in favor of Democrats, thanks to the liberal leanings of academia.
Political science professor Joseph E. Uscinski, one of the study’s authors, said the new analysis shows that the overwhelmingly liberal academic community consistently ranks Republican presidents about 10 spots lower than the public would.
“I don’t think anyone is surprised,” Mr. Uscinski told The Washington Times. “Among the political scientists and historians that I work with, Democrats outnumber Republicans 8 to 1.”
What was eye-opening, he said, was the stark difference between the historians’ assessments of Republicans and the grades given by the public.
“On average, all the Republicans get the short end of the stick,” he said. “But the one it impacts the most is [Ronald] Reagan. It’s often difficult for people to fathom why he’s ranked as low as he is.”
I’ve discussed this topic a lot all across the country, the wave of women, of mothers in political activism.
Why have so many mothers become so active?
Because motherhood is political.
I have two sons. One day they may hear the call of duty and enlist to fight for our liberty. One day they may be called upon to defend America’s shores. They may decide to enter business or take up a trade. They may decide to have families of their own someday. I want them to have every opportunity available to them and I will stand against that which impedes on their rights. It’s instinctual: my job as a mother is to raise up, nurture, and protect my children, to protect their interests, to protect the interests of my family. In a society where my first line of defense, my husband, has been compromised by the self-victimization of the female sex, I’ve volunteered to go to the front lines of this ideological battle and I do it for my children. I’m not the only one.
It’s unconscionable to me that I would protect my children from running out into a busy street but not protect their right to be free. A month after my oldest was born my husband and I spent an entire morning baby-proofing our house: placing plastic covers on all empty wall sockets, installing cabinet latches, covering all the sharp edges of the tables with adhesive cushions. Why wouldn’t I also rise to install barriers against that which harms my children’s future? We armed our children with the knowledge against “stranger danger,” we taught them how to dial 911 in emergencies, we’ve taught them how to properly handle and not handle firearms. Why wouldn’t I teach my children about their fundamental rights as an American? Their right to free speech, to assemble, the freedom of the press, the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the freedom of religion? Their right to pursue happiness but not the expectation that they are owed happiness from their fellow man?
There is a misconception that the mainstream media hates all conservatives. That’s just not true. The MSM loves some conservatives – the ones who combine a willingness to stick their conservative brothers and sisters in the back with a stereotypical, tweedy doofusism that ensures absolutely no one would ever want to be one of them. Their poster children are David Brooks and David Frum. Call them the Conservanerds.
Conservanerds aren’t hard to identify. You can tell one by listening to him for about 15 seconds, by which time you will be overcome by a desire to either slap him or take his lunch money. You can find them dwelling at the fringes of liberal culture – they are allowed to attend the cocktail parties as the token conservative, tolerated by their masters in return for passive obedience and the occasional swipe at Sarah Palin and her intolerable uppityness.
If they were simply annoying, that would be one thing, but the problem is that the MSM loves to present them as the true face of conservatism, a face that is reasonable and harmless and that always – always – loses out to the liberals. Conservanerds play up to the awful stereotype of the bookish, passive-aggressive “traditional” conservative with a disdain for popular culture and, critically, for the other 95% of modern conservatives out there today.
Tea Party folks? Heaven forbid – those simply are not our kind of people. Those vulgar Tea Partyiers enjoy NASCAR and beer and guns and some actually believe in God. Many of them work with their hands, and most of them didn’t even go to Harvard!
Sure, there’s class at play – it goes without saying the Conservanerds feel more at home with an Ivy League Hillary Clinton than a Middle-American Sarah Palin – but it’s also MSM wish fulfillment. Liberals love the idea of conservatives who pose no threat at all, who are happy to take the scraps from the MSM’s table just as long as they get invited to the dinner party.
This is not a new phenomenon. Starting with Goldwater and up through the Reagan years, a bunch of new folks flooded into the Conservative movement, folks that were less William F. Buckley and more John Wayne – or even Johnny Rotten. The old line conservatives, the tweed-wearing country club types, found it quite a culture shock. During college in the 80’s, half the staff assembling the California Review, UCSD’s right-wing paper, would be trying to appreciate to some Respighi concerto while the rest of us would be cranking the Ramones and swilling Coors.
The real conservative today is aggressive, outspoken and (worst of all for the Conservanerds) cares nothing for the approval of the elite. That makes us anathema. No wonder they are so eager to pounce – we’ve committed the sin of not caring what they think. Whether you’re a tee-totaling Georgia Evangelical, a concerned mama grizzly from Kansas or a beer-swilling LA cavalryman with a four letter vocabulary and the Sex Pistols on his CD player, we’re the new face of conservatism. And it’s driving the Conservanerds bonkers.
As the protests in Egypt have raged on now for more than a week, President Obama and members of his administration continue to practice restraint in their communications and careful selection of the words that are spoken. Hillary Clinton has cautioned against anything that could increase chaos. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told television networks that the “complex, very difficult situation in Egypt requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the protesters.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed the sentiments that while Egypt needs to change, it’s not the place of the United States to publicly support or oppose the removal of Mubarak. Likewise, most Republicans are also on the same page as the Obama administration, speaking out in support of democratic reforms in Egypt, yet taking great care not to back or oppose Mubarak either way – at least not publicly. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I don’t have any criticism of President [Barack] Obama or Secretary [Hillary] Clinton at this point. It’s important for U.S. officials “to speak as one voice during this crisis.” As many have noted, Egypt is perhaps one of the only issues that’s rendered an overwhelmingly bi-partisan response.
But one man in particular is not exactly in agreement with that bi-partisan response: George Soros. And he’s warning us to toe the line – his line, that is.
The leftist billionaire who made his fortune on the back of US capitalism is taking aim at all the “rigid and ideological supporters of Israel” and “the religious right” for standing in the way of democracy for Egypt.
Berlin Wall at sunset, Reagan Library, Simi Valley. Photo by Dana Loesch
I was in elementary school when the Berlin wall fell but the imagery which comprises my mind’s history of it are photos of youths tearing chunks from it and crying when it fell.
I had a conversation with a friend last night about the fast growth of conservatism in new media. Having been schooled in old media and learning a new industry on an old PHP group blog right as new media exploded over a decade ago, I’ve watched with interest the tug-of-war between the left and right in terms on Internet influence. The left dominate during Dean and Obama’s campaigns but something happened in ‘08 and now conservatives are out-organizing the left on the web. More conservative blogs are created each day.
While praying for the recovery of the Safeway victims all last week, we also documented the media’s attempts to defame the tea party by tying the actions of Jared Loughner to the conservative movement — all of this done while lecturing America on civility and rhetoric:
The result? Death threats against Sarah Palin are at an all-time high, I myself have received threats as has Andrew Breitbart (who made the first call for civility last Saturday), Big Journalism contributor Liberty Chick, talk radio host Jon Justice, and more hardworking conservatives and tea party activists than I can expediently include, including many who do not wish for their circumstances to be known as they are fearful for their families. Yesterday during a taping for a national broadcast, Tucson Tea Party organizer Trent Humphries had his life threatened on camera by Eric Fuller, a victim of the Safeway shootings.
Despite zero evidence to connect Loughner to any conservative, despite the President’s words that discourse “did not cause this tragedy. It did not,” none of the insinuations, suggestions, or coverage presented above from certain media and leftist blogs has been corrected, retracted, or remedied by way of apology.
The Huffington Post regularly receives criticism on this site for offenses ranging from bias to outright absurdity, but every now and we’re surprised.
Take for instance blogger Lee Stranahan’s analysis of conservatives’ treatment and the fradulent claims in Pigford and how the media just hasn’t gotten around to actually talking about it – as seen most recently in the Rep.King vs. John Boyd battle on AC360 last week.
If you’re a progressive and you think the right tosses out the term ’socialist’ like an odd form of Ayn Rand Tourette’s Syndrome, just take a look at the comments section of your favorite left wing blog (including HuffPost, to be fair) and see how often the word ‘racist’ gets used as pretty much the sole argument against someone.
[...]
King is making a factual claim. Why not follow that line of inquiry? Why go down the racist rabbit hole? Show me the box and the dude. If you can’t show them to me, explain why you can’t. The box is either real or not and it either proves that there were more than three (3!) fraudulent claims or it doesn’t.
And even a few fraudulent claims add up. Let’s do some simple math.
For reasons that go back more than a century, all the way to the First Great Migration from the South, Illinois has led the nation in black political empowerment. We’ve elected more black statewide officials than anyone else. We produced the first black president. And it was a matter of pride among many Illinoisans that we kept the Senate integrated. In 2004, we picked such a great black senator that he went on to integrate the presidency.
This is no slur against Kirk. It’s not a slur against Illinois, either. It shouldn’t be our responsibility to provide a black senator. It’s a slur against the other 49 states, who refuse to elect a black politician to the U.S. Senate.
I’d like to introduce Mr. McClelland to Cedra Crenshaw. She was a black contender for Illinois state senate but the Chicago machine employed every dirty trick against her and even unsuccessfully ran her off the ballot.
Because she was a Republican.
Yet after 4 p.m. today, African-Americans will make up 0 percent of the nation’s most prestigious elective body. That’s disgraceful.
Yes, Mr. McClelland, it’s disgraceful how you ignore candidates of color when they don’t serve the plantation politics of progressivism. So when the Chicago machine was forcing out a mother-politician off the ballot because she threatened the progressive narrative that people of color can’t be conservative, that wasn’t, as McClelland so aptly writes, “segregation?”
I should explain again as I do every week to the viewers as a kind of a viewer’s guide that this is the weekly Sarah Palin segment in which the impression is given that the whole of conservatism in America is encapsulated in this one glorious woman?
[...]
I think in the liberal imagination she is and will always be the only representative of conservatism of any importance.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the “It gets better” campaign circulating in Hollywood wherein celebrities tape PSAs with an anti-bullying message and the videos are released on Youtube.
Personally, my anti-bullying message would be to knock a bully on his ass, because pacifism doesn’t deter knuckle-draggers who like to beat up on anyone they feel to be vulnerable. Pacifism doesn’t work in every situation and the encouraging words of a celebrity, no matter how well-meant, only carry so far.
Regardless, media and Hollywood like propagating one thing and doing another.
Someone doesn’t have a problem with self confidence.
Actually, I did not take part in it. I led it. OK?
This entire discussion presupposes that Palin is dead politically and that Parker is a conservative. Considering that Palin has a better record than our President at turning endorsed candidates into winning candidates says the complete opposite. I don’t know that I would be claiming credit for something that hasn’t actually happened because it reinforces the idea that your influence is null.
The American Public has come to know firebrand Reverend Al Sharpton as the #1Black Leader in the media.
Sharpton has billed himself as the voice of fairness, balance and authority, when it comes to the issues racial injustice in the Black Community, while boasting he is unafraid to debate anyone about the merits, yet unknown to many Al Sharpton is actually afraid to debate one man and that man happens to be Project21’s Chairman Mychal Massie.
Massie has put out several calls and letters to debate Sharpton on the issues of race relations, big activist government and the tea party movement, yet Sharpton and a whole host of other self-appointed Black Leaders are either unwilling or unable to debate the issues, yet they are willing to hide behind members of the press, who will allow them to filibuster and control as well as edit the segments in their favor.
I believe like many in the media Sharpton is simply afraid he would be unable to think on his feet and present his arguments logically against an Intelligent Conservative of Color, thus he would rather pretend that Massie does not exist.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
Gordon Hodson
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