It’s not a “crackpot conspiracy theory” to believe Crist is a closet case, and that his marriages were merely camouflage. This kind of gossip has long been widespread in Florida political circles. But this wasn’t why Tea Party conservatives hated Crist in 2009, when the then-Republican governor of Florida dishonestly secured the endorsement of both the state party chairman and the National Republican Senatorial Committee 15 months ahead of the 2010 GOP Senate primary. With Tea Party backing, Marco Rubio surged ahead to beat Crist, who eventually became a Democrat. (And the exposure of corruption of the state GOP apparatus sent some people to prison.) When Joy Reid started gay-baiting Crist in 2007, however, Crist was seen as a “rising star” in the GOP, and smearing him as a closet homosexual was obviously an attempt by Reid — then as now a partisan Democrat — to sabotage the career of a Republican.
The issue is not whether Joy Reid is a “homophobe” any more than the issue is whether Crist is gay. Indeed, I have argued that much of what is condemned as “homophobia” is neither wrong nor harmful. The real issue is that Reid is dishonest — a Democrat Party hack, masquerading as a journalist — and that she is an unscrupulous hypocrite, willing to do whatever she can to hurt Republicans, even if it means acting in direct contradiction to her own party’s alleged “principles.”
(In fact, Democrats have no principle other than the pursuit of power.) Furthermore, Reid’s behavior illustrates Vox Day’s Three Laws of SJWs:
A reader writes about how convergence ruled his church:
The first time I corresponded with you was last year, in which I asked advice about a church which brought in a San Francisco 49er for one of their sermons. The entire point of the sermon was to lecture the congregation on how Colin Kaepernick was doing God’s work by kneeling for the anthem– not scriptural in the least. They followed a pattern of social justice convergence: firing pastors who were more scholarly in biblical works, hiring a woman to preach once a month, bringing in a more “diverse” congregation intentionally to replace the faithful. My wife and I walked out on the church and never returned. The advice you gave was to take charge of the spiritual matters of my family, as a man should, and on my end, as I’ve turned to Him, God has bestowed us with blessings beyond anything I could have imagined this year.
However, the converged church is not faring so well. They used to be one of the largest churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by all accounts they are failing hard. Attendance has dropped drastically. They’ve lost most of the actual “doers” on their staff to other churches. They’ve replaced most paid staff with volunteers who aren’t as competent. The church used to have its own coffee shop which it has now closed down because it no longer can sustain itself. In the space of one year since veering off into social justice, it has destroyed itself.
Social justice leads to complete ruin every time. Thought you might like an update.
I can’t say I’m surprised. The death knell is the female preachers. I don’t know why, exactly, but once a church reaches that point, you can rest assured that it isn’t coming back.
In the culture war engulfing America, there are many fronts. Some are apparent to everyone, such as the purging of right-wing figures from Facebook and Twitter. But a less well-known battle is being waged in science fiction publishing, where a steady convergence in the industry has all but eliminated straight white male authors from the catalogs of the major sci-fi publishers.
California is known as a bellwether state. Political, cultural, and demographic trends tend to appear in California first before metastasizing throughout the United States. It is not an accident that both no-fault divorce and Valley Girl uptalk both happened to have their roots in California.
In the same way, the comics industry can be considered something of a bellwether industry, at least when it comes to the culture war. Even before the university campuses descended into social justice lunacy, the two industry giants, Marvel and DC Comics, hired executives who promptly turned their companies into left-wing propaganda factories.
The extent of the convergence cannot be exaggerated; it is literally worse than you can likely imagine. From a transsexual Thor to a gay Hispanic Spider-man, from tedious lecturing and hectoring to homosexual marrying and villains celebrating girl power with heroes in lieu of fighting them, the culture warriors in comics have insulted their fans, rejected their roots, besmirched their heroes, and befouled and befattened the formerly beautiful.
Read the rest of my new monthly column on the culture war at Dangerous.
I don’t see how the University of Tennessee football program is likely to benefit from its decision to back out of hiring my fellow Bucknellian Greg Schiano because people were shrieking about it on social media:
As detailed by SI’s Bruce Feldman, the University of Tennessee on Sunday backed out of a deal to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano as its next head football coach. The two sides reportedly signed a “memorandum of understanding” or MOU. As explained below, an MOU for a college coach is a formal record of the understanding between the coach and the school as to the key terms and conditions under which the university would employ the coach. Could Schiano sue the university for breach of contract, fraud or other claims? If all of the necessary parties signed an MOU, the answer would be yes.
Tennessee’s football program is in disarray after a season in which the team finished 4–8 and winless in SEC play. Earlier this month, the school fired head coach Butch Jones. The firing was not a surprise, but that the school would target Schiano—best known as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Rutgers before his time in Columbus—to replace Jones was surprising.
Schiano has a controversial reputation, in part due to his time as Penn State’s defensive backs coach in the early ’90s under former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexually abusing young boys. In a 2015 deposition for a civil suit between the school and its insurance company concerning the payouts to Sandusky’s victims, another former Penn State assistant coach, Mike McQueary, testified he had heard through another coach that Schiano had recounted witnessing Sandusky molest a boy. In interviews with media, Schiano has denied the allegation, and he was never charged or otherwise implicated by any other party in the lengthy litigation of the Sandusky scandal.
I’m not a particular fan of Schiano, as I wasn’t impressed with his performance in Tampa Bay, but what high-caliber coach is going to want to go anywhere near Tennessee now? It’s been established that the authorities will bow promptly to the whims of the sufficiently vocal, so what coach smart enough to have options would want to go anywhere near that maelstrom of lunacy?
You may recall that last week, I posted an image of a GI Joe cover that many of you doubted could possibly be real. Well, it was. And here is an interview with the current writer of GI Joe, Aubrey Sitterson, with Bleeding Cool, which may prove to be more than a little informative. Note how this line was practically paraphrased from SJWAL’s description of the purpose of narrative propaganda: “It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?” BC: Some Joe fans take issue with a person of your political persuasions writing GI Joe. Tell us why that’s actually a good thing.
AS: I’m a socialist, and that’s been a tough pill for some folks to swallow. That’s in part because in this country, the military is almost universally seen as a right wing institution, but that’s actually far from a universal sentiment. There are too many countries to list where the military has fought off right-wing coups or fundamentalist takeovers, or even where the military has sided with socialist insurgencies. In South American history, it’s not even uncommon for socialist activists to become soldiers themselves! It’s a common Marxist refrain, but that’s because it’s true: The military has revolutionary potential.
There’s nothing inherently right wing about the military, it’s just how the military has generally been used in United States history. One of the big questions I posed to myself, especially writing this book in the midst of Trump taking office and the rise of the alt-right, was figuring out what a socialist GI Joe book would even look like. After a lot of thought, it came down to tweaking not only our general perception of the military’s goals, but also the methods by which it achieves them. A socialist military doesn’t exist to further enrich the monied classes or enforce property rights or promote imperialist agenda. Instead, it has a far simpler, far more noble goal: Protecting and empowering people.
The book is designed to be aspirational, so I tried to write Joe as an idealized military – what the military would be if I could wave a magic wand and make it so. That’s why GI Joe became an international organization, one more concerned with protecting the population of the planet than promoting any single country’s interests, and also a big part of why we switched all of the Joes over to using laser weapons. It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?
Using lasers also solved another big problem with doing a leftist take on GI Joe: Guns. I love gunporn action flicks as much as anyone, more than most, honestly, but what flies in John Wick or Commando simply ain’t appropriate in GI Joe, which is, at its core, and in my favorite incarnation, decidedly a kids’ property. I grew up watching all kinds of stuff that glorified gun violence and while I don’t think it broke me as a person or anything, that kind of material definitely contributes to the exaltation of firearms. And in 2017, with what feels like near-constant mass shootings, fetishizing guns in a children’s property isn’t just gross, it’s wrong.
That’s the behind-the-scenes reason on why the Joes use nonlethal lasers, but there’s also an excellent story reason as well: If the Joes are the best in their chosen fields, and they’re all working together…why would they even need to kill people? The Joes are strong and capable enough that they can afford to be nice, to give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts them at risk. And truthfully, that’s the very definition of a hero. BC: You’ve been the target of what we’ll call “backlash” for some of the changes you’ve made to GI Joe, but GI Joe as a property has been, in a lot of ways, progressive since the ’80s. In that respect, what parts of that legacy did you build on for your take on GI Joe?
AS: “Backlash” is a nice word for it, right? Though they’ve thankfully calmed down now, I was getting death threats for more than a month. One of the most perplexing things about that whole situation (outside of how someone could get so upset over a comic book that they’d threaten someone’s life) was that GI Joe has been progressive since the very first issue of Real American Hero. War was never something to be celebrated in that book — it was a sad necessity, albeit one where heroes could be elevated through valor. And that progressive trend was continued in the Sunbow series a few years later, with a level of gender, ethnic and racial representation that was simply unheard of at the time. And while the Joes were a diverse group of friends, the Cobra villains were, by-and-large, homogenous white males. That’s shockingly progressive for smack dab in the middle of Reagan’s America.
GI Joe is, at its core, a progressive concept, so I didn’t have to go in and do any heavy lifting. Instead, it was all about figuring out ways to continue that trend, but in a way that’s appropriate for 2017. Our new Salvo is a great example of that, albeit one for which I continue to catch a lot of heat from a certain vocal minority of Joe fans. Making Salvo a Samoan woman served a couple purposes. First, it gave us another international Joe for our newly international team. Changing the character’s race and gender not only gave us some Polynesian representation, but also helped us dodge some problematic visual associations, as Salvo’s original look (bald, heavily muscled white guy with giant guns and a shirt that says “THE RIGHT OF MIGHT”) reads as… a little too alt-right. It also presented an opportunity to introduce a different body type into the group, which I thought was important.
So, the SJW definition of a hero is “someone who is strong enough to be nice and give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts himself at risk.” That explains the SJW position on immigration, does it not? Okay, so that’s the shot. Now here is the chaser, a news item posted later that same day by the same comics news site, Bleeding Cool.
There’s still more than a week before the December 5th final order cutoff for retailers to order Scarlett’s Strike Force, the new GI Joe series launching out of IDW’s First Strike super-mega-crossover event. But before all the orders are in for the first issue, set to hit stores on December 20th, the book has already been canceled by IDW.
“Unfortunately, IDW told me early this month that Scarlett’s Strike Force was being canceled after issue #3,” writer Aubrey Sitterson told Bleeding Cool in an exclusive interview. “And with up through issue #4 already written, that means ending on a pretty outrageous cliffhanger.”
Since the first issue is more than a month away from hitting stores, with time yet left for retailers and fans to order it, it might seem premature for the book to already be canceled, but Sitterson relayed the reason he was given by his publisher, as unlikely as it sounds: “IDW told me they made the decision due to low sales.”
Good riddance! IDW appears to be figuring out that SJWs are a cancer a little faster than either Marvel or DC is. Of course, IDW has considerably less margin for error, since they aren’t being propped up by their movie-licensing revenue. UPDATE: No, my assumption was incorrect. Apparently IDW has learned nothing from this incident and the decision was imposed upon them from above. “IDW stood by Sitterson (he did keep his job as the writer after all). Their initial support statement was only retracted after Hasbro allegedly got involved.” Snicker-snack….
A longtime DC Comics fan explains why he recently canceled his subscription.
Like many kids, I enjoyed comics, but as I got older I gave them up so it had been decades since I’d bought one. In 2016 DC, realizing that their sales were slumping and the effect of SJWs on their comic franchises, launched Rebirth, which was a supposed return to the roots of the characters. I’ve always liked Batman and Superman and decided to give them a shot. My focus here is with the political and moral implications of the various comics, not specific plots, unless they were especially good or bad. The art ranged from really good at times to mediocre but that’s outside the scope of this too. I’m not looking for political perfection in my comics and I expect them to be as far left as the average TV program–which is at minimum center left.
However, I was finally forced to conclude that Rebirth is an SJW bait-and-switch aimed at traditional fans, and that all of the reborn comics will eventually be as converged as they were before. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that Marvel’s big SJW, Brian Bendis, is now coming to DC to do to Superman what he did to the various Marvel lines.
Detective Comics: Read #934-956
The main arc is that Batman assembles a team to help in Gotham which includes Batwoman and even Clayface. The Clayface plot was actually pretty good of why he was a villain and him trying his best to reform his life. A positive highlight was the Victim Squad. They were a group of people who through Batman’s actions in the past were “collateral damage”. They had physical ailments, suffered loss, etc. They collectively decided that since something bad happened to them it justified whatever they wanted to do to the world and of course wanted revenge. I think this was a direct swipe at the victim culture. Another interesting plot is that Batwoman’s father is a military man who is running a black op to take out sleeper agents in Gotham. Batman stops him and moralizes at him, then throws him in jail. All well and good except Batman is dead wrong, the military guy is right, and there are sleeper agents in Gotham. I stopped reading it at Robin’s (Tim Drake) death because it was such a stupid plot device, and the it was obvious they were going to bring him back quickly making his death meaningless. The series has a few lesbians as as friends of the team and mentions that Batwoman was forced to leave the US Military Academy due to her being in a lesbian relationship. I’d say overall it’s center left, but not full SJW.
Titans: Read #1-10
Not much to say here. It’s pretty boring, but the art was nice. I didn’t really care about the characters and I don’t remember a lot of heavy politics by the time I gave it up.
Superman: Read #1-#35
This is the best of what I read. Superman is heroic, always tries to do what is right, including being a good father and husband to Lois. The art is good, the plots are classic, with an interesting twist that Lex Luthor is now a good guy (maybe). The best part of this series is the interaction between Superman and his son. I don’t even think I could nitpick this series if I wanted to as Krypto “Superdog” is even in it and defends Superboy and Superman. This is what comics should be like.
I read the preview and it is 100{75555d9e07a24e4b9ce698107dbbd309d5544f8e8057bab8f219509a7e001883} converged. “Undeplorables”, Russia is the enemy, and William F. Buckley Jr. is a villain. This is the future of DC now, as this event will impact the continuity going forward. Action Comics: #957-987
This is the series which made me give up on DC. It starts out reasonably well and retells Superman’s origins, death at the hands of Doomsday, and explains how this Superman got here as apparently he died again before this series of illness and this Superman is from New Earth, not Earth Prime on which things happen now. (Confused yet? Welcome to the silliness of comic continuity.) The plot dragged down as Doomsday showed back up but there was no tension because they weren’t going to kill Superman again with Doomsday since started with Superman #1. They high point is where Lois and Jon (Superboy) pray for their father during the fight.
From there it goes downhill plot-wise and the SJWs show back up. First after raising their son in an idyllic countryside about an hour from Metropolis Lois decides that she isn’t fulfilled and a whole lot of horrible rationalizing begins by Lois and Superman of why she needs to go back to work at the Daily Planet, live in an apartment, and Superman of course goes along with all of it. Even though they both admit it’s not necessary monetarily, and Jon loves his friends and where he lives. He complains but they don’t give a shit and move him to a skyscraper because it makes them happy. (Are Babyboomers writing this?)
Then an SJW writer takes over and “the worst evil humans can commit” is brought about by some guy named Dr. Oz which includes a white hunter teaching his son in Africa to poach rhino horns, white rebels in Africa stealing medicine, white sweatshop owners, and a white guy who lost his job to Hispanics – expressly illegal immigrants – tries to gun them down while wearing an American flag bandanna on his head. I stopped reading right then, and got my money refunded on my Kindle. In fact I had purchased a few others I had not read yet and got my money refunded on all of them too.
With the recent Bendis hire, I can only imagine where things are headed. I’m sure Superman will be fully converged soon. I’m a casual fan, so any corrections in the above with regards to plot or characters is appreciated and I’m sure that the serious fans will have a lot of good insights to add which I missed. I’m also curious to know about some of the other series like Green Arrow or Wonder Woman are like, and what state they are in since Rebirth.
Those are not ratings declines, those are cliff dives. Especially when all three games were featuring elite franchises in the playoff hunt. It’s already being estimated that NFL advertisers have lost over $500 million due to the ratings decline, and that is when they were in the 20 percent year-on-year range.
It’s a little astonishing that no one has ever hired me as an SJW consultant for their business, when it is readily apparent that SJW-convergence is one of the most immediate and pressing threats that ANY business can face.
Diamond is down 20.27 percent year-on-year because SJW. Marvel is down 9 percent year-on-year because SJW – a little surprised it is that low, to be honest. DC is down 10.5 percent because SJW.
I’m a graduate of UC Berkeley with a major in Gender and Women’s Studies. I had a 3.94 GPA and a 750 on the GMAT. My WE isn’t that good, I’ve been a “Youth Outreach Coordinator” for Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach. I make like 30k a year.
To be honest, I was overly idealistic and extremely naive. I was extremely liberal/socialist, and that got worse at Berkeley, where I thought good intentions and a pedigreed university would empower me to change the world. I was deluding myself of the employability of my Gender Studies degree. It’s actually been a con to some corporate employers. I’m disillusioned.
Social justice work isn’t for me, and I want out. The fact that I’ve learned, is that some marginalized groups are definitely victims of their circumstances, but others are there for genuinely poor decisions, and not all are deserving of unvarnished empathy. I can’t take this anymore. But I haven’t been able to get non-retail or non-low-level sales jobs in the business sector.
My dad was a management consultant at Bain, and I miss my family’s lifestyle and standard of living. I want to go into management consulting now. I’m fine with tier 2/big4/boutiques, doesn’t have to be MBB. What are my options?
Her best option is to get a retail job, get married, have children, then quit the job. A university education is worse than wasted on most intelligent women, being an observably dysgenic and societally destructive accomplishment.
The chief consequence of encouraging women to pursue college degrees is lowering the average national IQ. This is not merely a negative consequence, it is a catastrophic one that future historians will be sure to note played a role in the collapse of various Western societies.
Remember, there is nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, the SJWs consider too sacrosanct to soil. In fact, the more sacred you hold it, the more eager they are to destroy it.
A much loved children’s story book has had a revamp to make it more politically correct, including placing a male bunny in the kitchen helping his wife. ‘The Best Word Book Ever’ by US author Richard Scarry was first published in 1963, but over the years the illustrations have been gradually tweaked to bring the book up to speed with modern times.
The colourful illustrations of rosy cheeked pigs in police uniforms and rabbits getting the children ready for school are very much the same, but ‘policeman’, ‘fireman’ and ‘handsome pilot’ have been changed to unisex titles such as ‘firefighter’.
Male characters are also pictured looking after children and cooking, whilst female characters have been given careers such as farming and labouring.
I wonder what was the purpose of this atrocity against history? Ah yes, that old standby, inclusivity!
ESPN will lay off more than 100 staffers after the Thanksgiving holidays, multiple sources tell Sports Illustrated. The layoffs, which were described by a person briefed on the plans, will hit positions across ESPN including front-facing talent on the television side, producers, executives, and digital and technology staffers. The SportsCenter franchise is expected to be hit hard—including on-air people—given the frequency of the show has lessened considerably on main network ESPN.
The network declined comment to SI on Thursday afternoon…. ESPN continues to be impacted by the changing habits of consumers including cord-cutting and cord-nevers (those who have never purchased a cable subscription) as well as the rising costs of sports rights. The network has dropped in households from 100.13 million in 2011 to an estimated 87.5 million households today.
Notice that all these SJW-infested companies are in double-digit decline. I was told this evening that Marvel is going to try to turn things around, but the problem is, they are either going to have to clean house almost completely or their new editor-in-chief is going to find himself at war with nearly 100 percent of his current writers and artists. And I find it impossible to believe that Disney, of all companies, is going to engage in full-scale deconvergence operations.
Regardless, I will bet that within 24 months, either Marvel or DC will be asking me to work with them in some capacity. Because we even do SJW better than they do, as you will see later this week.
In the meantime, ESPN has new policies designed to try to prevent their more outspoken SJWs from attacking their viewers: “Communication with producers and editors must take place prior to commentary on any political or social issues to manage volume and ensure a fair and effective presentation.” It’s far too late for that. They’re not fooling anyone.
