The Anti-Breitbart Blacklist

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "The angry Left looks to punish conservative media for Trump’s victory":

Someone behind an anonymous Twitter account is trying to destroy the influential conservative Breitbart News website by smearing it as “racist” – and he’s already scared at least 47 advertisers away from Breitbart.

In the current atmosphere of left-wing hysteria over the surprise election of Donald Trump as president, this blacklisting project has already earned an impressive return on investment. Breitbart is a target of the wrath of social justice warriors because it reports the truth about the Left and it used to be run by Stephen Bannon, now slated to become chief strategist in the Trump White House. Hurting Breitbart hurts Trump and Republicans in general, the thinking goes.

The campaign takes screenshots of advertisements on Breitbart and then harasses the advertisers, demanding that they stop advertising there. It also encourages people who hate Breitbart or Trump to take screenshots of a target company’s ads placed beside content deemed objectionable and tweet the images at advertisers along with a threat to stop patronizing that company.

The cowardly crusader hiding behind this effort to frighten advertisers away from Breitbart by lying about and mischaracterizing the provocative news website’s content goes by the user name Sleeping Giants.

The user’s identity seems safe for the moment but if Breitbart files a defamation lawsuit, Twitter could be forced to disclose the user’s identity.

So far the identity of the individual or individuals behind Sleeping Giants is not known, except to Shareen Pathak, managing editor at the DigiDay blog.

Pathak reports, “The creator of the account said he would prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed by Trump supporters on the internet. He said he started the account because fake news and disinformation, are, in his opinion, two of the reasons why the election turned out in favor of Trump.”

The creator of Sleeping Giants reportedly told DigiDay, “The biggest way that this disinformation will continue is ad revenue, just like any news source. Beyond really wanting to stop this nonsense, this effort was really born out of the need to inform advertisers about the kind of material that they’re sponsoring. This isn’t supposed to be a boycotting effort as much as an information effort.”

The Sleeping Giants (Twitter handle: @slpng_giants) account was created last month. At time of writing the account had 3,144 tweets and 11,200 followers. Sleeping Giants says “We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars. Many companies don't even know it's happening. It's time to tell them.”

Of course Breitbart isn’t even remotely racist but left-wingers don’t let facts get in the way of an activist push. They know that smear jobs work, especially in the timid corporate world where companies routinely surrender to left-wing extortionists like Al Sharpton without much of a fight.

Food manufacturer Kellogg’s has withdrawn its ads from Breitbart, claiming the site is not “aligned with our values as a company.” The company offered no examples of how Breitbart’s values actually differ from its own.

The decision by Kellogg’s will have “virtually no revenue impact on Breitbart.com,” the news organization wrote. “It does, however, represent an escalation in the war by leftist companies like Target and Allstate against conservative customers whose values propelled Donald Trump into the White House.”

The decision “appears to be one more example of an out-of-touch corporation embracing false left-wing narratives used to cynically smear the hard working Americans that populate this nation’s heartland.”

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow is calling for a boycott of Kellogg’s and urging conservatives to sign the #DumpKelloggs petition. Marlow says the breakfast cereal maker’s “war” against the site demonstrates its “cowardice” and “bigotry.”

Breitbart News is the largest platform for pro-family content anywhere on the Internet. We are fearless advocates for traditional American values, perhaps most important among them is freedom of speech, or our motto ‘more voices, not less.’ For Kellogg’s, an American brand, to blacklist Breitbart News in order to placate left-wing totalitarians is a disgraceful act of cowardice. They insult our incredibly diverse staff and spit in the face of our 45,000,000 highly engaged, highly perceptive, highly loyal readers, many of whom are Kellogg’s customers. Boycotting Breitbart News for presenting mainstream American ideas is an act of discrimination and intense prejudice. If you serve Kellogg’s products to your family, you are serving up bigotry at your breakfast table.

Welch’s, a maker of juices and jams, is dropping Breitbart.

Facebook user Mary Dibbern wrote to the company: “Welch’s is advertising on the Breitbart site. I will boycott all Welch’s products, plus post a photo of the ads onto my FB and Twitter accounts if Welch’s does not stop giving Breitbart their advertising business.”

Welch’s promptly caved: “Mary, we assure you that we are taking the necessary steps to remove all Welch’s content from this site, and others like it. Thank you for reaching out.”

Other companies withdrawing advertising from Breitbart include pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, insurance provider Allstate, eyeglass maker Warby Parker, San Diego Zoo, 3M, AARP, Earthlink, L’Occitane, Paperless Post, Saddleback Bags, and U.S. Bank.

AppNexus Inc., a digital ad firm, has banned Breitbart from using its ad service, Bloomberg reports. The firm “decided the publication had breached a policy against content that incites violence.” AppNexus is reportedly second only to Google in the ad serving market for publishers.

AppNexus mouthpiece Joshua Zeitz said, “We did a human audit of Breitbart and determined there were enough articles and headlines that cross that line, either using coded or overt language.”

Zeitz claimed preposterously that Breitbart isn’t being targeted for its conservative inclinations. “This blacklist was solely about hate speech violation,” he said.

The Sleeping Giants effort is the same kind of malicious campaign waged by George Soros-funded groups against conservative organizations.

Led by ColorOfChange, a far-left race-baiting group whose views are largely indistinguishable from those held by Van Jones (a co-founder) and Al Sharpton, activists attacked the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for its policy stands. Soros-funded ColorOfChange smeared corporations that donated to ALEC as racist because the group supported voter ID laws. The campaign against ALEC also led to the group disbanding the task force that had been responsible for drafting model voter ID laws to be used by state lawmakers, along with “Stand Your Ground” laws.

Soros-funded Media Matters for America (MMfA) claims to have cost “The Rush Limbaugh Show” “[h]undreds of millions of dollars in losses attributable to advertisers refusing to subsidize” the show after Limbaugh’s controversial comments about leftist birth control poster girl Sandra Fluke.

MMfA has also waged war against Breitbart News, Fox News Channel, Ann Coulter, and talk show hosts like Glenn Beck, though generally with little success.

This new attack on Breitbart is happening because left-wingers are still in deep denial over President-elect Donald Trump’s come-from-behind victory over Democrat war horse Hillary Clinton and they’re desperately searching for scapegoats.

They’re blaming purveyors of so-called fake news – which includes Breitbart since it doesn’t toe the leftist line.

For example, useful idiot Craig Timberg recently churned out an outrageous left-wing propaganda piece in the Washington Post, a newspaper that lied over and over again about Trump during the campaign.

Timberg claims a vast Russian conspiracy planted fake news before American eyeballs and that’s the real reason Trump won.

“Russian-backed phony news” was behind “[s]ome of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York,” he wrote, adding there had been “a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health.”

She did in fact fall ill at the 9/11 event, a fact that would never have been reported by the mainstream media if an onlooker hadn’t captured Clinton collapsing as she was entering a vehicle and being held up by two security men. She suffered at least temporary brain damage in recent years when she sustained a nasty concussion. She also experienced coughing fits on the podium.

Russia’s “propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-Trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign.”

Well, the evidence is fairly convincing that the Clinton campaign did in fact pay anti-Trump protesters to participate in demonstrations and foment violence at Trump campaign rallies. Democrat uber-thug Robert Creamer has admitted that Hillary personally knew about the false flag operation which was euphemistically referred to as “conflict engagement.”

Timberg adds, “The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said.”

This is all very interesting except that in the modern era all presidential elections are filled with allegations of electoral irregularities. It’s normal and it happens with or without fanciful conspiracy theories or Kremlin involvement.

But the Left soldiers on, inventing villains and vilifying good people.

These people can’t win on the facts or by offering rational arguments.

All they can do it attack, attack, attack.

And Breitbart won’t be their last target.

Jackie Johnson's Cooler Cloudy Forecast

More weather blogging with the lovely Ms. Jackie.

President-Elect Donald Trump is TIME's Person of the Year for 2016

At TIME, via Memeorandum, "The Last, Greatest Deal."

Donald Trump is TIME's Person of the Year 2016 #TIMEPOY https://t.co/5pTGOksevE pic.twitter.com/N8BtqTu9Nl

— TIME (@TIME) December 7, 2016

Stella Maxwell LOVE Advent 2016 (VIDEO)

These videos are the best, heh.

75th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack

Seems so weird. The years are flying by.

At WSJ, "Pearl Harbor Survivor Prepares for 75th Anniversary Reunion."

And, "Pearl Harbor Survivor Makes a 5,000-Mile Trek."

Robert Coles, a 92-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor from Maine, is making his first visit since 1941 https://t.co/c1GUPZzbkc

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 7, 2016

Plus, photos, "Pearl Harbor’s 75th Anniversary: A Look Back at the Attack."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "At Pearl Harbor's 75th anniversary, a reminder of how America proved its greatness — and why it is still great."

Senator Sessions Isn’t a Racist, His Left-Wing Accusers Are

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "They’re coming for Sessions":

They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.

The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.

A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.

But it gets worse.

There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.

I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”

The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.

You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”

Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama's first black tax assessor, who said, "The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law."

Then under "Association with White Nationalist and Hate Groups," the letter, which seems to thrive on parading its own stupidity around, proves that Sessions must be a bigot because he had received awards from the "David Horowitz Freedom Center and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."

Sessions was honored by the Center for Security Policy at the Smithsonian Postal Museum with its Keeper of the Flame award, which recognizes “those individuals who devote their public careers to the propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world.”

Past recipients have included Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Garry Kasparov and Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps the Conference could specify which white nationalist hate group Lieberman and Kasparov belonged to.

Senator Sessions received the Annie Taylor Award from the Freedom Center in 2014. The next year’s recipient would go on to be African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

It’s unknown which white nationalist hate group Clarke belongs to. Perhaps the Conference could ask the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose inept smear of Sessions it appears to have relied on, to tell them.

The Annie Taylor Award has gone to Iranian dissident Amir Fakhravar, journalist Oriana Fallaci, Baroness Caroline Cox and Democratic Senator Zell Miller. But perhaps the most notorious white supremacist to receive the award was Ward Connerly, the African-American chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.

As smear campaigns go, the Conference’s letter is laughably terrible.

“Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity,” it claims. That’s quite a claim and it isn’t backed up.  If Sessions had spent the last 30 years going around shouting racial slurs, you would think that there would be more evidence of that to present in the left’s poison pen letters.

The Conference insists that the Attorney General has to be approved of by “every member of the public”. If that were the case, we couldn’t get a single Attorney General approved.

It states that Sessions supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder raises questions about his fitness. Is the Conference really demanding an Attorney General who won’t uphold Supreme Court decisions?

The Conference’s letter is short on facts and heavy on innuendo. It’s clueless about its own charges. And mostly it opposes Sessions because he doesn’t agree with its radical policy agenda. The letter accuses him of opposing illegal alien amnesty and being skeptical about Global Warming which, according to the letter, “disproportionately affect low-income families and communities of color.”

World ends. Minorities hardest hit.

Further evidence of Sessions’ unfitness is found in that he voted to defund Planned Parenthood, opposed a push for Green Energy and Obama’s pardons for drug dealers. In short, he’s guilty of being a conservative Republican, not a radical leftist.

That’s really why the Leadership Conference opposes him, but it can’t come out and say so. The failed effort to smear Sessions as a racist isn’t about his record; it’s about blocking anyone on the right while cynically abusing a serious accusation for partisan political gain. No one who knows Sessions, including one of the accusers who serves as the basis for many of these smears, believes that he is a racist.

Furthermore the accusations are coming from actual racists like La Raza and the ADC. The ADC honored Helen Thomas after she called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. It was where Ralph Nader insisted that, “Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” The Leadership Conference shows no signs of having a problem with any of this.

Senator Sessions isn’t a racist. His accusers are.

Kendall Jenner LOVE Advent 2016 (VIDEO)

Via Theo Spark.

I do love this young woman Kendall.

I don't know why. I'm supposed to viscerally dislike her, as she's part of the Kardashian klan and all, heh.

Jackie Johnson's Mild Midweek Forecast

Here's the lovely Ms. Jackie.

It's been a bit nippy in the early hours, but otherwise actually quite pleasant.

Via CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

University Student: We Shouldn't Take Finals Because Trump's Election Has Been Stressful

Heh.

Trump's triggering the college trigglypuffs, lol.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University Student Demands We Shouldn’t Take Finals Because Trump’s Election Has Been Stressful":

Trump? You kids don’t know what real worry is like – when I was in school, our final exams were taken in the shadow of atomic war, nuclear winter, disco, and Fred Silverman’s NBC programming. Not to mention what was on the other channels...

Click through for the video.

Donald Trump's Conservative Cabinet (VIDEO)

Things are looking pretty good.

At LAT, "Step by step, Trump is assembling an administration far more conservative than his campaign":

Donald Trump expressed fondness during the presidential campaign for some of the big federal programs that serve the country’s most vulnerable, but whatever warmth he may feel does not seem to be shared by the people he is choosing to run them.

Monday’s selection of Ben Carson, the former pediatric neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development was the latest move to fit the pattern of stocking the Cabinet with social conservatives deeply skeptical of the government agencies they will be asked to oversee.

Trump chose Carson despite the physician’s protest last month that he lacked the credentials needed to run a federal agency. As a child, Carson lived in what he has described as a housing project in Detroit. Since becoming a doctor, however, he has had little other direct experience with urban policy or housing issues.

He would assume a post overseeing an agency that was elevated to the Cabinet level as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society effort to combat poverty — something that Carson has declared an epic failure.

The job would test Carson’s management ability. The department, with an annual budget of $48 billion, oversees big development contracts and the distribution of lucrative grants to communities, and it has been historically susceptible to corruption in times of weak oversight.

During Ronald Reagan’s tenure, HUD money was regularly misappropriated to contractors with political ties, leading to multiple felony convictions. The agency’s standing in that administration seemed to be crystallized by Reagan’s failure to recognize his HUD secretary, Samuel Pierce, during an encounter at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1981. Reagan addressed Pierce as “Mr. Mayor.”

Carson’s first test at managing a complex, multi-state operation came in the presidential campaign. He proved gifted at raising money, building a small-donor network that was surpassed only by that of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But Carson’s campaign and the network of allied super PACs that supported him also stood out for how little money they spent on campaigning and how much was plowed back into payments to contractors.

His lack of experience drew attacks from many prominent Democrats.

“I have serious concerns about Dr. Carson’s lack of expertise,” said incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York. “Someone who is as anti-government as him is a strange fit for Housing secretary, to say the least.”

Schumer vowed Carson would be pushed during confirmation proceedings to prove he “is well versed in housing policy and has a vision for federal housing programs that meets the needs of Americans across the country.”

In Los Angeles, which works closely with the federal housing agency as it carries out a $23-million anti-homelessness initiative, one of the country’s largest such programs, Mayor Eric Garcetti was more cautious.

"Los Angeles stands at the forefront of the very challenges that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was created to tackle,” Garcetti said in an email. “I am hopeful that as a physician, Mr. Carson will create the much-needed connection between public health and community development in neighborhoods everywhere.”

In 2014, the last year for which full figures are available, 492,000 Californians received HUD-funded vouchers to help with rent. The city of Los Angeles received $52 million in community development grants from HUD that year.

In the Cabinet, Carson would join a list of social conservatives that includes Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Georgia Rep.Tom Price, and Betsy DeVos, who has been tapped to head the Education Department.

Price is a budget hawk and crusader for cutting Medicaid and Medicare, the latter of which Trump, in the campaign, said he opposed cutting. DeVos, the wealthy former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, is a strong backer of voucher programs, which provide tax money to families to spend on private schools...

Still more.

Shelby Steele, Shame

I bought this book when it came out, but I'm now engrossed in it.

Steele offers perhaps the best explanation yet of our current (crushing) era of political polarization; it's an  merciless indictment of radical left-wing identity politics.

Not to be missed, at Amazon, Shelby Steele, Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country.

Victor Davis Hanson on 'Uncommon Knowledge' (VIDEO)

I listened to this entire interview, over 40 minutes long, and it was worth every minute.

VDH is a national treasure.

His most recent book is The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq.

With Peter Robinson, for the Hoover Institution's "Uncommon Knowledge":

The New York Times Snubs Hillbilly Elegy

Big mistake.

I noticed that Hillbilly Elegy was at the top of the non-fiction bestsellers at the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, and I felt a hint of pride in having read it.

But turns out the New York Times refused to cite the J.D. Vance autobiography in its list of top books of 2016.

Pathetic.

See David Forsmark, at FrontPage Magazine, "One of the most talked-about memoirs of 2016 doesn't make the cut for 'notable' books."

Buy the book at Amazon.

Vietnam Veteran Dies With Maggots in His Wounds (VIDEO)

I can hardly believe this story, at the Tulsa World, "Physician assistant who resigned in wake of veteran's death rehired at another Oklahoma VA center."

And video, at Fox News, "4 quit VA facility after veteran with maggots in wound dies: Employees resign after investigation was conducted in Oklahoma; veteran Pete Hegseth reacts on 'America's Newsroom'."

Shop Amazon Home

Here, Home Gift Guide.

I love the Keurig Coffee Makers.

And don't forget your Cuisinart fine products.

BONUS: Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America--The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675.

Evelyn Taft's Slightly Cooler Forecast

Here's the weather with the lovely Ms. Evelyn, of whom I haven't blogged in a while.

Via CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

The Social Justice Left vs. the Identitarian Alt-Right

From Ben Sixsmith, who's just a kid, by the looks of his Twitter profile.

But he's good:

Both social justice warriors & Alt-Right shift to more extreme positions to gain social status (& clicks, media etc) https://t.co/YTMQc0SayI

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) December 3, 2016

Shop Best Selling Products [BUMPED]

At Amazon, Shop Toys and Games, Electronics, Camera and Photo, and More!

BONUS: Adrian Goldsworthy, Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World.

The Radicals Have Taken Over Canadian Universities

Heh.

They've taken over the American universities, too!

But see Margaret Wente, at Toronto's Globe and Mail, "Academic Extremism Comes to Canada."

BONUS: At the Other McCain, "Amid Dow Boom, Liberal Media Gloom."

Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Tonight!

It's at 10:00pm, on CBS.