COVID-19 has been politicized so effectively that it spreads like wildfire at Trump rallies, but does not spread when leftist hooligans pack the streets to riot. This is because violent mobs are more conscientious than conservatives. Sounds preposterous, I know — but the Most Trusted Name in News confirms it:

If Leana Wen strikes you as more of a left-wing hack than a medical professional, you won’t be surprised to learn that she used to be president of Planned Parenthood.

On a tip from Rapinhoe.

Get woke, go broke. Even at a time of in-your-face corporate moonbattery, the principle still applies — at least to Matt Drudge, who appears to have jettisoned his libertarian principles to ideologically align himself with the liberal establishment. As a result, his traffic is in a tailspin.

Paul Joseph Watson tries to make sense of it:

On the positive side, the decline of the Drudge Report has created an opportunity for worthy alternatives like Whatfinger, Liberty Daily, Government Slaves, and Canon212.

On tips from KirklesWorth and Lyle.

When liberal elitists like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo denounce poor and working-class whites for having “white privilege” …

… they reinforce something that actually exists, namely nonwhite privilege.

Nonwhite privilege manifests itself mainly as an imperious attitude that comes from being designated by the ruling class as “oppressed” and therefore more equal than the other animals on the farm. Its application in daily life looks something like this:

A more effective means of stoking racial animosity than promoting nonwhite privilege would be hard to imagine. The media and education establishments do this so methodically that it must be part of a conscious political strategy.

On tips from Adam, Rapinhoe, KirklesWorth, R F, and Lyle.

The USSR was infamous for doctoring photographs so as to erase those who had been canceled by Stalin during his ruthless purges. If Democrats succeed in fundamentally transforming America into the USSA, CNN will fit right in:

CNN appears to have altered a widely-seen photograph of Joe Biden with his young son to remove the logo of the Washington Redskins.

Bullies forced the Redskins to drop their name in order to genuflect before political correctness. They are now known only as the “Washington Football Team.”

With some help from CNN et al, soon the Washington Redskins will never have existed, just like erased NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov.

On a tip from Adam.

Coercively subsidized NPR gives us more than liberal spin for our tax dollar. It provides validation for the farthest extremes of the lunatic left. Cities throughout the country have been engulfed in riots for months. Meanwhile, NPR effectively validates looting:

Writer Vicky Osterweil’s book, In Defense of Looting, came out on Tuesday. When she finished it, back in April, she wrote (rather presciently) that “a new energy of resistance is building across the country.” Now, as protests and riots continue to grip cities, she argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of “law and order,” and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.

Reportedly, Vicky Osterweil is actually a man, formerly known as Willie Osterweil. Be forewarned that the following excerpts from NPR’s interview with Osterweil offer a disturbing glimpse into an abyss of malign lunacy.

Osterweil starts by defining the word “looting”:

“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending.”

Unsurprisingly, even to call looting “looting” is racist:

“Looting is a highly racialized word from its very inception in the English language.”

Here’s why looting is good:

“It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building—taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free.”

In utopia, we will gather the fancy sneakers and jumbo televisions that grow freely in the fields, and share them benevolently amongst each other.

COVID-19 comes in handy for leftists once again:

“[Looting] gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage—which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk.”

In contrast, meeting your basic needs by taking part in a violent mob as it loots high-end stores on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is risk-free.

“[Looting] also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

Working for a living is oppression. Having to pay for your purchases is unjust. Without police oppression, everyone could have everything they want for free, and no one would have to work.

Who would manufacture products and provide services in world where no one has to work? Why would stores restock shelves knowing that the goods would be stolen? Being a left-wing intellectual means never having to think things through that far.

Another reason Osterweil likes the ongoing mayhem is that it is being inflicted by or in the name of blacks. In the “antiracist” scheme, everything boils down to blacks good whites bad:

“Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”

America, white people, property rights — they are all the same thing, which should be rejected in favor of the liberatory joy that can be experienced by stealing or destroying what belongs to someone else.

Some liberals still understand that looting is wrong. That’s because they are racists who hate the poor. Osterweil explains:

“[T]here’s also another factor, which is anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life, which looting immediately provides. … It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

Actually, in addition to the many lives ruined by the Black Lives Matter riots, a rising number of people have been killed.

How wiping out local businesses makes for a better life beyond the immediate gratification of the stolen goods is left unexplained.

Regarding the small businesses that are destroyed, many of them owned by the minorities who are supposedly being championed by the rioters,

“It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.”

To comply with Osterweil’s ideology, which must be correct or it would not be showcased by NPR, you have to believe that small business owners must not be respected, they do not create jobs, and they are not part of the community.

Osterweil then denounces businesses that cannot recover after being looted and/or burned down, as if failing to reopen could only be interpreted as an act of malice.

The interview reaches a climax with this open endorsement of political violence:

“Ultimately, what nonviolence ends up meaning is that the activist doesn’t do anything that makes them feel violent. And I think getting free is messier than that. We have to be willing to do things that scare us and that we wouldn’t do in normal, ‘peaceful’ times, because we need to get free.”

In the olden days, people who are conspicuously malevolent and insane were locked up in rubber rooms. Now they are provided a megaphone at taxpayer expense so that they can incite other maniacs to riot.

On tips from Varla, Dragon’s Lair, and Lyle.

Tony Heller is right. When a city burned down by terrorists is reported as “fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” and law-abiding citizens objecting to COVID-19 tyranny are described as extremists, we are living in George Orwell’s 1984, with the gaslighting liberal media establishment serving as the Ministry of Truth:

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Remember when MSNBC’s Ali Velshi stood in front of burning buildings while reporting that Black Lives Matter rioters were mostly peaceful, even if some fires had somehow started?

“I wanna be clear on how I characterize this,” said Velshi, reporting live from Minneapolis. “This is mostly a protest, it is not, it is not, generally speaking, unruly.”

Not according to the narrative, anyway. Velshi did admit that he could see four fires.

CNN learned nothing from the ridicule that ensued. Ensconced inside the liberal bubble, CNN apparatchiks probably never heard the laughter; they may not hear it even now:

The news chyron read, “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting,” as a CNN reporter stood in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in front of a conflagration set off by the rioting over the police shooting of a black man. …

CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez noted that earlier in the day the protests were “largely peaceful” but that they “became a little more contentious” after night fell.

World War II was similarly largely peaceful, but became a little more contentious at certain points. It’s not as if Pearl Harbor was bombed every day for years on end.

Jimenez then reminded us whose side the media is on by blaming the police for the rioting.

By the time 2020 is finally over, at least no serious person will regard the “mainstream” media as anything more than cartoonish left-wing propaganda.

On a tip from Rapinhoe.

Usually, the liberal establishment has no problem crushing the little people on behalf of its contrived and corrosive narrative. But sometimes this backfires, as in the case of Kentucky teenager Nick Sandmann. After being featured by Big Media for the Two Minutes Hate, Sandmann forced massive settlements from CNN and the Washington Post for defaming him.

This admirable young man went on to speak at the Republican National Convention last night. CNN propagandist and former Clinton apparatchik Joe Lockhart refused to even listen, confirming that CNN is still not interested in hearing the countermoonbat side of the story:

It is not hyperbole to describe the liberal media establishment as an enemy of the American people.

On tips from KirklesWorth and Mr. Freemarket.

If you were to judge by coverage in the New York Times, you might think that this year’s wildfires in California are a cataclysmic event, unprecedented and irreversible. The fires must have been caused by anthropogenic global warming, so the only rational response is to allow the federal government to radically reduce our standard of living in the hope that even if this would probably have no measurable effect on the climate, at least Mother Nature might appreciate the gesture.

Tony Heller has discovered that one way to debunk the agenda-driven mendacious hysteria that characterizes the New York Times is with earlier material from the same paper, dating back to when it was a more credible source of information:

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Liz Wheeler sums up what people should have heard from the mainstream media during the week but probably didn’t:

• A Texas judge has ruled James Younger will be transformed into a girl named Luna despite his father’s objections.

• Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleads guilty to altering evidence for the Russia hoax.

• Neil Ferguson, prominent advocate of maintaining lockdowns for COVID-19, has a financial conflict of interest.

• The usually left-wing Ninth Circuit admitted that California’s ban on “high-capacity” magazines violates the Second Amendment.

• It appears that a large proportion of the population has preexisting immunity to COVID-19.

Here is more relevant information in under 5 minutes than you can get in 5 days of watching the alphabet networks:

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Some things are almost too massive to quantitate, like the extent of media bias against Trump’s reelection. But NewsBusters gives it a try:

From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden. …

The extra airtime devoted to Trump consisted almost entirely of anchors and reporters criticizing the President. During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95 percent of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five percent (34) that were positive.

Of the few evaluative statements that were made about Biden, 67% were positive, proving that you can’t accuse network producers of not having any imagination.

NewsBusters concludes that there were 150 times more negative comments about Trump than about Biden.

This is consistent with Democratic strategy. Biden’s handlers know better than to ask people to vote for the cognitively declining husk of a corrupt swamp veteran, or for the unhinged radicals who most likely will be calling the shots for him. So they keep Biden in the basement like some freak in a horror movie and ask us to vote against Trump, whom they demonize at every opportunity.

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Liz Wheeler notes a few of the lies by omission that characterized the “mainstream” media’s coverage last week:

• The shocking murder of Cannon Hinnant was covered up, presumably for purposes of not undermining the narrative.

• The “pragmatic moderate” Kamala Harris cosponsored a bill to destroy women’s sports by forcing schools to allow boys to compete as girls as a civil right.

• Evidence continues to pour in that COVID-19 does not warrant keeping schools closed, regarding the safety of either students or teachers.

• The pretext for the riots that ripped apart Chicago was an outrageously distorted story that the media for the most part let stand.

• The Obama/Biden/Comey FBI misled the Senate regarding the credibility of the Steele dossier.

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Leftists must be terrified of North Carolina congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn. They have beclowned themselves in a desperate attempt to portray the 25-year-old as a Nazi sympathizer for posting a picture of himself visiting the Eagle’s Nest, which is a popular tourist destination. The Instagram caption refers to Hitler as “a supreme evil,” yet we are asked to regard this as evidence that Cawthorn is a Nazi sympathizer:

HuffPost takes the handoff from Jezebel, only to fumble:

“The vacation house of the Führer,” Cawthorn wrote in a caption for the post, addressing Hitler using the reverential term Nazis associated with their leader.

Make note of the new rule. If you refer to anyone by their title, you are being “reverential.”

Actually, Hitler’s official title was “Führer und Reichskanzler.” HuffPost should have spun this as Cawthorn revealing an unsavory degree of familiarity by calling him “Führer” for short.

Cawthorn told HuffPost that the Allied victory “was the history I had in mind” when visiting the Eagle’s Nest. “It was a surreal experience to be remembering their joy in a place where the Nazi regime had plotted unspeakable acts of evil,” he said.

According to Jezebel, however, the candidate has named his real estate company SPQR ― a term popular among white nationalist groups ― and has allegedly displayed Betsy Ross’ version of the American flag, which the Anti-Defamation League says has been appropriated by far-right militias “among other Revolutionary War-era symbols.”

SPQR stands for Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (Roman Senate and People), in reference to the Roman Republic that preceded the Roman Empire. Among sarcastic Italians, it can also stand for “Sono Pazzi Questi Romani” (These Romans are crazy). The Betsy Ross flag stands for American patriotism, which is why Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like it. When leftists started going after our history and heritage, they were never likely to stop with tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee.

The ADL confirms that SPQR and the Betsy Ross flag are not hate symbols. Via Breitbart:

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said the Betsy Ross flag, the SPQR abbreviation and Spartan helmet are not included in the league’s database of hate symbols. Pitcavage said while there are examples of their use by white supremacists … they are used “just as much or more often by nonextremists than extremists.”

Cawthorn responded to the attack by pointing out the obvious:

The Blaze has some background on Cawthorn:

Cawthorn stunned the political world in June when he won the Republican nomination for the election for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in a landslide victory. The motivational speaker trounced the GOP candidate who was backed by President Donald Trump, but he also ran in support of the president and his policies.

If he wins in the heavily Republican district, he would become the youngest member of Congress.

Cawthorn was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2014 car accident that nearly took his life.

A guy who might have been euthanized by the Nazis probably isn’t a big fan of them.

Looks like Cawthorn is making the most of the second chance he was given. Good luck to him in fending off future attacks from left-wing propagandists.

On a tip from Bluto.

Remember Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, the New York City lawyers who were arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail into an NYPD vehicle? Turns out there were mitigating circumstances. They were “young and idealistic”:

If your ideals motivate you to firebomb police cars, being idealistic is not a good thing. All terrorists are idealistic.

The link in the tweet is to a New York Magazine piece glorifying the not so peaceful protesters as champions of the marginalized. It asserts that prosecuting them “is far more extreme than the crime itself; that it amounts to a criminalization of dissent and reflects a broader right-wing crusade against people of color and the progressive left — and, as such, demonstrates precisely the horror of the system they were out in the streets that night to protest.” That they were prosecuted for firebombing the police vehicle proves that they were right to do it. The two sociopaths are lauded as “civil-rights heroes.”

The crime is characterized as a momentary “lapse in judgment.” This is untrue. Rahman is an avowed terrorist. She gave an interview prior to the firebombing in which she barked, “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down” and “the only way they hear us is through violence.”

Also prior to the attack, Mattis and Rahman were seen passing out extra Molotov cocktails to other rioters. The New York Magazine piece didn’t get around to mentioning this.

The never-ending riots are not happening in a vacuum. They were initially triggered when a COVID-infected career criminal who had overindulged in fentanyl and methamphetamine died in police custody. But that’s not what has caused them to spread and continue.

A society that tolerates rioting will have rioting. It will continue to escalate until society stops tolerating it. By glorifying the rioters and their cause, the liberal media has done far more to cause the mayhem than Derek Chauvin. George Floyd was never more than a pretext.

On a tip from Blackjack. Hat tip: Hot Air.