Links - 30th September 2021 (2) (Wikipedia bias)

Wikipedia’s diversity gap echoes around the internet. Here’s what local groups are doing to help | The Star - "Entries must reference secondary sources — books, articles and analysis by someone removed from the topic — as opposed to primary sources like interviews or the person themselves. So the less media we have about people from a diversity of backgrounds, the less there is on Wikipedia and the internet in general, Severson said. Amber Berson agreed and also said there’s a case for changing some of these requirements all together. Berson is an art historian and co-lead at Art + Feminism, a group that has worked to close the information gap around gender, art and the internet. She noted that relying on secondary sources doesn’t make the site accessible to cultures that rely on oral storytelling, like African, Asian and Indigenous cultures. Other things like little known magazines from around the world or collections can be challenged by existing editors. “Therefore, everything from those communities gets systematically excluded,” Berson said. “The ways in which Wikipedia has been set up, reflects a very Anglo-Saxon idea of what is proper.”"
Damn white men, spending so much of their time to increase the world's knowledge for free!
I'm sure when the standards are relaxed and Wikipedia becomes less reliable, liberals will be blaming "white supremacy" for that
It's interesting how often liberals don't want to create new institutions to address gaps they allege exist - they keep insisting on hijacking existing ones and ruining them

Wikipedia Is Badly Biased – Larry Sanger Blog - "Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.” The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science... The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major parties. But in fact, the only scandals that I could find in the Obama article were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash. You might find this to be objectively correct; but you cannot claim that this is a neutral treatment, considering that the other major U.S. party would treat the subject very differently. On such a topic, neutrality in any sense worth the name essentially requires that readers not be able to detect the editors’ political alignment. Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke"

Wikipedia bans editors support traditional marriage - "Wikipedia has decided to restrict its editors from expressing opposition to same-sex marriage on its platform ­— a decision that comes months after co-founder Larry Sanger said the site’s neutrality policy was “dead.”"

Facebook - "the Wikipedia entry on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence has been deleted... But this is far from the only evidence that Wikipedia has been taken over by left-wing extremists. Take for example the article on Cultural Marxism. The screenshots show what it looked like before and what it looks like now. Wikipedia is now just another left-wing propaganda outlet explicitly designed to protect and disseminate the woke religion."

The left-wing bias of Wikipedia - "A 2018 study by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu compared levels of political bias in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica by quantifying each encyclopaedia’s respective usage of phrases favoured by Democratic or Republican members of US congress. Their study found that Wikipedia articles are more politically biased than those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as being slanted towards Democratic (as opposed to Republican) points of view. The study also found that the amount of bias in Wikipedia articles tended to decrease the greater the number of people who had edited them... we build upon Greenstein and Zhu’s analysis by examining specific mechanisms that produce political bias in Wikipedia, with a focus on administrative decisions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard... Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats. Other politically biased sources have also been deprecated, but it is harder to position them on the left-right political axis, such as media companies controlled by the Russian or Chinese government. The deprecated right-leaning sources include both those that advance far-right conspiracy theories (Infowars and WorldNetDaily) and those that advance ordinary conservatism (the Daily Mail and the Sun), as well as many shades of grey between those two extremes. It could be argued that even the non-extreme sources that have been deprecated are not of a particularly high quality, so the prohibition against citing them is not a problem per se, but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos. According to Ad Fontes Media‘s widely-used media bias chart (which is commonly cited in discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard), CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos are all less reliable than the Daily Mail. This is significant because the Daily Mail, a deprecated right-leaning source, is often used as a benchmark for judging whether other right-leaning sources should be deprecated. All three of these left-wing sources are widely used at Wikipedia. An external links search shows around 2,580 Wikipedia pages linking to CounterPunch, around 2,400 linking to the Daily Kos, and around 1,640 linking to AlterNet... A proposal to deprecate AlterNet was made in April 2019, but the proposal received very little support. One user argued that AlterNet should be deprecated due to the site’s distribution of false medical information—that anthrax can be treated using homeopathy, for instance—meant that following its instructions can cause bodily harm. On the other hand, one of the users opposed to deprecation argued that AlterNet is “valuable for providing progressive viewpoints and reporting or interviews of progressive organizations.” The majority of the Wikipedia articles citing AlterNet are not medical articles, but in light of Wikipedia’s status as the most widely used source of medical information for doctors and patients, allowing citations to AlterNet poses a risk that does not exist for most of the deprecated right-leaning tabloid newspapers and political websites... Wikipedia calls itself “The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit,” but this is only true for uncontroversial articles. Many controversial topics have additional restrictions about who is allowed to edit them, such as only users who have registered an account and have accumulated a certain number of edits. More relevant to content or sourcing decisions is another type of restriction applied to some topics known as discretionary sanctions. These are a special set of powers given to administrators (admins) in some topic areas that allow them to place blocks or sanctions on any person editing the topic whom they believe to be acting disruptively. Discretionary sanctions can only be authorized by the Arbitration Committee (a.k.a. ArbCom), which is English Wikipedia’s highest ruling body, and usually are authorized at the conclusion of an arbitration case covering a topic. Discretionary sanctions are authorized in most of Wikipedia’s controversial topics, and cannot be lifted or modified unless there is a consensus among admins to do so. Because it is quite difficult for them to be lifted or modified, and because it is up to admins’ individual judgment what behaviour should be punished under this system, it would be quite easy for any administrator to use this system to suppress one side of a dispute. This could be done by blocking or topic banning most of the editors on one side (a topic ban prohibits a person from contributing to any articles or discussions related to a topic), or by making editors on one side feel unwelcome until they choose to leave. If this were to occur it would affect the balance of participants in discussions about sources or article content, and ultimately affect the outcome of those discussions. We have examined the history of reports at Wikipedia’s Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard with respect to four politically controversial topics in which discretionary sanctions are authorized, and how the viewpoints of editors involved in those reports relate to the reports’ outcomes... editors who support right-leaning views are over six times more likely to be sanctioned at Arbitration Enforcement than those who support left-leaning views. In the absence of any additional context, one possible interpretation of some of these results is that Wikipedia’s administrators are apolitical, and that right-leaning editors are sanctioned more often because their behaviour tends to violate Wikipedia’s policies more often. This argument has been made with respect to Trump-related AE reports: that because the coverage of President Trump in the mainstream media is predominantly negative, people whose edits take an anti-Trump viewpoint inevitably are supported by reliable sources, while those whose edits take a pro-Trump viewpoint are not. However, our results indicate that the tendency for right-leaning editors to be sanctioned more harshly is not limited to reports related to Trump. The same tendency also exists in areas such as gun control, where this alternative explanation presumably would not apply, at least not to the same degree. In addition, the argument that Wikipedia’s admins are apolitical ignores another important point: in many cases they do not claim to be apolitical. It is a widely expressed view among Wikipedia administrators, as well as by Wikipedia’s parent organization, that Wikipedia should show little tolerance for editors perceived as having right-wing points of view... The most recent major statement about the political views expected from Wikipedia editors has come from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. In June 2020, the organization published a statement endorsing the goals of Black Lives Matter, which reads in part: “On these issues, there is no neutral stance. To stay silent is to endorse the violence of history and power; yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is well past time for racial justice in America and beyond.” The statement “there is no neutral stance” is probably a reference to Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, which is still an official Wikipedia policy. This apparent rejection of a core Wikipedia policy by the site’s parent organization did not go unnoticed by members of the Wikipedia community, who subsequently debated the statement’s implications... As both the news media and academia become steadily more partisan, perhaps it was inevitable that Wikipedia would eventually follow a similar route. However, one difference between Wikipedia and most newspapers is that Wikipedia has core policies, such as NPOV and BLP policy, that still theoretically remain in effect. It remains to be seen how Wikipedia and its parent organization will handle the contradiction between these policies and their growing politicization. There are three possible outcomes, and one is for Wikipedia or the WMF to implement reforms protecting the viewpoint diversity necessary for its core policies to be upheld. A second option is for these policies to be officially overturned, although it is unlikely the Wikipedia community would agree to a change on that scale. The final possibility, and perhaps the most likely, is the one predicted by Larry Sanger: that these policies will remain on the books, with perhaps a few half-hearted attempts at reform, but that in the long term they will come to be understood as unenforceable."

Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever – Larry Sanger Blog - " I propose to look and see. Which issues in the last year or so have caused the most acrimonious dispute? We can look at the main battlefronts of the culture war: politics, science, and religion. I will spend most of my time on politics. In U.S. politics, four of the biggest political issues would include: Trump’s impeachments Biden’s scandals The Antifa and BLM riots Alleged election irregularities... In science, even more than global warming (or climate change), there has been significant controversy over Covid-19 and the official measures to combat it. You will not be surprised to learn that Wikipedia debunks everything the Establishment debunks, all conveniently collected into a single article on “COVID-19 misinformation.” Alongside silly things almost no one would take seriously, you can learn that it is “misinformation” to suggest a “Wuhan lab origin” of the virus. You will also be relieved to know that “masks do actually work.” Another article assures us, “Several researchers, from modelling and demonstrated examples, have concluded that lockdowns are effective at reducing the spread of, and deaths caused by, COVID-19.” Of course, there is no mention of any other research. What about the Covid-19 vaccines: are they effective? Safe? In the COVID-19 vaccine article, the introductory section mentions “demonstrated efficacy as high as 95%,” but nothing about side effects; further down in the article, a very short paragraph in a “Misinformation” section informs us that claims about such side effects are “overblown.” And that is it. You read that right: in an article about the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, the only thing Wikipedia has to say about their side-effects is that concern about them is overblown. Needless to say, you will not find anything in the way of information from the many skeptical physicians and medical researchers, who must not exist. Let us be clear on something here. You might support Wikipedia’s approach to Covid-19; but you cannot maintain that it is neutral. A neutral approach would acknowledge and fairly represent alternative views on the origin of the virus, the efficacy of masks, the effectiveness and defensibility of lockdowns, and the effectiveness and safety of the Covid-19 vaccines. You might maintain that the articles are better without such an approach; but then what you are saying is that you prefer the articles’ Establishment bias to a neutral approach that would let the reader decide... Basically, to hear Wikipedia tell it, Christianity is in decline, because mainline denominations are in decline, and the conservative denominations and churches are barely worth caring about. And I can just hear the response: “Well, yeah. Sounds about right.” But if you agree with the Wikipedia article’s approach, that does not mean it is neutral; the point is that it is clearly biased... These contentious issues are exactly where we should expect to see fair treatment of “alternative” views on Wikipedia. But we do not. This is hardly news, but it bears repeating. Wikipedia openly repudiates neutrality, and therefore it is shamelessly hypocritical in how it continues to pay lip service to its “neutral point of view” policy. Wikipedia’s editors embrace their biases sometimes so fervently that their articles emerge more as propaganda than as reference material... it’s also false that Wikipedia just represents the mainstream. Wikipedia does not just mirror the biases found in the mainstream news media, because some of it is conservative or contrarian. A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly “radical”; they are still mainstream. So, how on earth can such viewpoints ever be given an airing on Wikipedia? Answer: often, they cannot, not if there are no “reliable sources” available to report about them. In short, and with few exceptions, only globalist, progressive mainstream sources—and sources friendly to globalist progressivism—are permitted. It is true that Wikipedia permits a few sources, such as Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, and Weekly Standard, which are more often tolerant of conservative viewpoints, but these are (or have become) as often centrist as conservative, and they are generally careful never to leave the current Overton Window of progressive thought. They are the “loyal opposition” of the progressive media hegemony. Why has Wikipedia systematically purged conservative mainstream media sources? Is it because such sources have become intolerably irresponsible and partisan? That’s what Wikipedians will tell you. As they put it, it is because they do not want what they dismiss as “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” etc., to get any hearing. In saying so, they (and similarly biased institutions) are plainly claiming exclusive control over what is thinkable. They want to set the boundaries of the debate, and they want to tell you how to think about it. A good illustration of just how radical Wikipedia’s source-banning policies have become can be seen in their treatment of Newsweek magazine, which is now marked as “no consensus” (i.e., avoid and use with caution), because ownership passed in 2013 to IBT Media, the publisher of the centrist, sometimes conservative-leaning, International Business Times, which is itself deemed “unreliable.” For these reasons, it is not too far to say that Wikipedia, like many other deeply biased institutions of our brave new digital world, has made itself into a kind of thought police that has de facto shackled conservative viewpoints with which they disagree. Democracy cannot thrive under such conditions: I maintain that Wikipedia has become an opponent of vigorous democracy. Democracy requires that voters be given the full range of views on controversial issues, so that they can make up their minds for themselves. If society’s main information sources march in ideological lockstep, they make a mockery of democracy. Then the wealthy and powerful need only gain control of the few approved organs of acceptable thought; then they will be able to manipulate and ultimately control all important political dialogue."

One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia | WIRED - "Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one’s name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski’s stories weren’t subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: “They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out—much unlike allied war crimes.” To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army—to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did. When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn’t be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they’re gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles... In the spring of 2016, Coffman goes through hundreds of articles about the winners of various Nazi medals, including one called the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. She removes biased sources and any information based on those sources. When she is done, typically, there is nothing left to the article—nothing to say about the person—other than the fact that he won an award. She then insists that an award isn’t reason enough for a stand-alone Wikipedia article. Without a reliable source telling your life story, you can’t be notable. Poof. Another Nazi legend bites the dust."
They try to put a positive spin on it, but this is a good example of liberal bias on Wikipedia. Declare a source "dubious" as a way of getting around NPOV

Japan and the west

Japan and the west - HistoryExtra

"‘There isn't a feeling that Christianity is unacceptable in philosophical terms, or unacceptable theologically. Japan isn’t anti-christian in that sense. It's much more a law and order issue, and a politics issue... Hideyoshi Toyotomi… when he starts to try and bring the country together… he gets down to Kyussu. And he finds that a huge number of people have converted to Christianity. They're, including really influential feudal lords, when people convert, he finds them smashing up Buddhist temples, smashing up Shinto shrines, and some of these feudal lords, their loyalties, it isn't quite clear where they lie. Do they lie with the Portuguese? Do they lie with the pope? Is there some higher authority basically, than Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And he's a famously vain man, I don't think he could stand the idea that there might be. And so famously, he crucifies 26 Christians in Nagasaki... he has a very interesting worry about Christianity, in terms of what it says about European culture. He says, in Japan, someone who has a remarkable life would change remarkable things, may end up after death, becoming a God...

In the late 1860s, and 1870s, there's a real wide open embrace in Japan, of what the West might be able to offer. This is an era where slogans are really important. And there are two or three, which I think really get to the heart of what Japan's new leaders are thinking about in 1868. The first one is *something*, which is enrich the country, strengthen the military. Basically, if Japan is not going to go down the road that China has gone down in the Opium Wars, then they need to be wealthy enough to trade, build up their weapons, build up their military, and keep the West at bay otherwise, they are essentially next on colonialism’s to do list in Asia. That's the slogan on which more or less everyone can agree. 

Second slogan is civilization, and enlightenment. So one of their thinkers very famously, he's on one of the banknotes in Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi, he says that he's been to the United States, and he's been to Europe, travelled there in the 1860s. He comes back to Japan and he says, you know what, as Japanese, we have nothing to be proud of, except for our scenery. In more or less every other way, the West has somehow ended up ahead of us. And amongst people like him, there is a kind of a blame game that gets going. He says how is it that Westerners have ended up so far ahead of us that their technology appears to us to be magical, that they've got steamships and telegraphs and gas lighting, they have these incredible ships, they dominate global trade, they dominate the globe militarily, they are picking out colonies here, there and everywhere in these years. 

One of the things he says is that it's the old Confucianists, who he talks about as being rice consumed dictionaries, they don't really have that kind of go getter, exploratory spirit that we need to have. Other people think that it's Buddhism, because they've been peddling cosmological lies about the world, we need to get rid of the Buddhists and there's lots of violence against Buddhism as well in the 1870s. But what Fukuzawa Yukichi says is that what we want is civilization. And what Japan really struggles to do in the 1870s and 1880s, is to make a differentiation between civilization in some general universal way, and simply turning itself into a version of a western country. 

And so in the 1870s, it kind of goes all out towards embracing the West in every way that you can imagine. So you have people saying that we should ditch the Japanese language, we should all speak English in Japan. Or if we keep the Japanese language, we should do away with kanji, our writing system, and we should write it using the Roman alphabet instead. Some people think the secret of Western success must be eating meat and eating beef, especially. And so loads of people start to eat beef, first in the military, and later, in Japan. If you go to Japan now you can have beef cooked in, in miso, and all these wonderful flavors. This will start in the 1870s, possibly as a way of building up stronger Japanese bodies. 

Even the first Japanese ambassador to the United States in, I think 1872, talks to Japanese students who've gone to New York, on a kind of study trip to learn about how America does business. He said to them, you know what, when you finish studying, go out and meet some American women, meet them, bring them back to Japan, marry them and have a family. And we can get American blood into the Japanese system, again, as part of our buildup of a modern country. Because they think it's not enough just to have western style weapons and technology and a banking system and our financial infrastructure. There's something deeper about the West that we try, if we can try to get hold of ourselves, then we can basically fast track our progress in the modern world. 

And this goes on across... the 1870s, even to the point where people don't want to do Japanese poetry anymore. So Japanese poetry in the past was wonderful. But now it's bred sort of effeminate people. And so we should do away with poetry. And we should have, we should have kind of narrative texts that are a little bit more martial and purposeful, and basically a little bit more like the West. And one of the turning points for this idea of how to deal with the West, I think, is the building that you see here. This is a building called the Rocker Meikan [sp?], which is built in the early 1880s, where the Japanese elite could basically dress up in European style finery, and dance the night away with the elites of Europe, and the United States.

And this becomes a turning point, because in the Japanese press, critics start to say, you know, what, if you went to a soiree like this, and you saw Japanese, basically, dressing up like Europeans, smoking like Europeans, drinking white Europeans trying to dance like Europeans to speak like Europeans, it's basically embarrassing. You know, this is the country with hundreds and hundreds of years of history, people in Japan know their history really well, we shouldn't be doing this, you know, we are turning ourselves basically into a facsimile of the West. And it's a national embarrassment. And there's a huge outcry in Japan saying, actually, we need to change course, we need to try to do something different. 

And so instead, in the 1880s, the Japanese start to take a very different approach to dealing with the West, they start to say, Actually, you know what, when we have our Constitution, we'll do things differently. When we have our civil code, we'll do things differently. And so the Japanese, instead, they have their own mix, in the end, of Japanese history, and Western history. This is the constitution being promulgated in 1889. And it's a mixture of the two in the end. They say one of the things we don't need from the west is British or French style, democracy. Instead, we can have political power in Japan, that comes from the Emperor, who's a figure in Japan, going back into mythological time, as far as Japanese of this period are concerned, he will hold all the power himself. And people's role is basically to try to strive in whatever job they have, in their professional lives, in their family lives, to build up the nation, for the sake of the Emperor.

And there's a loose parallel I think you can make between Japan, the settlement that they achieve in their dealings with the West in the 1880s, and what has happened in China over the last few decades, which is that when you're trying to borrow and adapt, especially from the West, it's possible to do it in a way that brings in technology, that brings in Western trading ideas, commerce, finance, without necessarily taking on Western ideas about individualism and liberalism and democracy. The Japanese in this era quite successfully turned their back on most of that, at least the leadership of Japan did, and they managed to flourish without some of those things that advocates in Japan really wanted to have. They wanted to have a British style Parliament, British style democracy etc, Japan managed to do actually quite well without it...

They achieve a military victory over China, which for the Japanese is psychologically enormous, because China for centuries has been the country Japan looked up to culturally and politically, and so to actually defeat China in war, would have been unthinkable just a few decades before…

In 1945, once the second world war is over, and the Americans come in, they had to do this fascinating thing of working out what it is about the 1868 moment that went wrong… their version of it ends up being that Japan's modernization, Japan's contact with the West was in the end the wrong mix. So you ended up with a country that had Western levels of wealth, Western levels of technological achievement, Western weaponry, that almost on the outside, looked like a western country, and as far as the Americans were concerned, looked like a civilized country. 

But on the inside Japan hadn’t really bought in. So what you ended up with was a people as the Americans in 1945, sorry, people who on the outside looked, in their words civilized, on the inside, who were still quite feudal. Part of the reason they took that view was because of what the Imperial Japanese Army was doing on the battlefield, that to them looked barbaric, to use that word, again. But it also looked like there was a mismatch between the inside of Japan and what Japan looked, looked like from the outside. And so America's role as they saw it, was to kind of revisit the 1868 moment and build Japan up along new lines. And one of the ways that Japanese think about their history since 1945, is that it was a chance to begin, again. To go back to 1868 and do things slightly differently. 

It wasn't an entirely American view of 1868. Because there were plenty of Japanese intellectuals who said, why didn't anyone in the late 30s and the early 1940s, why didn't anyone in government stand up and say, what we're doing is wrong? Going into Manchuria, going into China, going into Southeast Asia, starting a war that, surely we knew we couldn't win against the West? Why did no one stand up or not enough people stand up and say that was not a good idea. And so one of the great political scientists after the war says, it's because that element, we didn't manage to take, not necessarily from the west, we didn't manage to realize it in ourselves of what they called individual responsibility, that that was the kind of Japanese failing. And so after the war, this is something that Japanese intellectuals try to get, right, tried to build Japan up in a different way with a different sort of mentality…

Japanese critics of Japanese culture and politics now would say that that 1945 moment of revisiting 1868 in the end was squandered. It didn't go the way we wanted... the length of time that the Americans stayed around, and they're still there. Now famously, military presence in parts of Japan, Japan hasn't really had an independent foreign policy in the world because of its close relationship with America. In order to become an economic superpower, which Japan did, by the middle of the 1960s, sacrifices have been made in terms of people's freedom, in terms of enjoyment that young people might have at school, because they're thinking of the next thing, the exams and the career track and all the rest of it, the sorts of pressures that people end up being under to build the country after 1945. 

In many ways, the extreme Japanese critics would say, resembles what happened after 1868. To quite a large degree Japan’s politics is much freer. Women get the vote after the Second World War. It's a fully democratic country, but the power of Japan's media, the mainstream media, to create a consensus in Japan, to still persuade people that there are right and wrong ways of thinking right and wrong attitudes to take to the country. 

There is still that sense of Japan being a consensus culture, which some in Japan would regard as being not what 1945 should have been about, I suppose from the other side of it very briefly, there are those in Japan who would say that some of the Western institutions that get launched after 1945, from United Nations and all the others, that portray themselves as being global, portrayed themselves as being International, in fact enshrine Western values, they enshrined the values of the people who won the war. 

And so Japanese will constantly say we feel like whether it's, whether it's whaling, or whether it's the way that we remember or don't remember the Second World War, we constantly feel as though we are being told by the West what to do, as though we're seen as a catch up country still, even though we're wealthy. We're an economic superpower, a cultural superpower in the 1990s, you know, manga, anime, Haruki Murakami, all the rest of it, there is still this patronizing edge to Westerners when they're in Japan, but really has been there, since the middle of the 1500s, was really big in Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s.'"

Links - 30th September 2021 (1)

This Is Why Warren Buffett Really Eats So Much Fast Food - "Warren Buffett eats in a way few would consider healthy. "I am one quarter Coca-Cola," he joked at the Berkshire Annual General Meeting in 2016. Out of the 2,700 calories he consumes per day, 700 come from the fizzy drink... All this despite a high-sugar, high-sodium diet that includes ice cream, potato chips, peanut brittle, and copious amounts of fast food. The billionaire's company, Berkshire Hathaway, is Coca Cola's largest shareholder. He's also invested in See's Candies, McDonald's, and Dairy Queen... Warren Buffett's close friend, billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, says Buffett mostly subsists on a diet of hamburgers, ice cream, and Coke. Celebrating 25 years of their friendship in 2016, Gates wrote in his blog, Gates Notes, "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old." ... He downs three cans of Coke before leaving for work. For breakfast, he may have a bowl of ice cream, or Utz potato chips. Buffett's logic? "I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among 6-year-olds, so I decided to eat like a 6-year-old. It's the safest course I can take"... Once a month, Buffett takes his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to the fast food restaurant and soft-serve ice cream chain Dairy Queen... "Warren tells this story that, when he was young, he took a young lady to Dairy Queen. She had a great experience, and he said that if he ever had the opportunity, he would buy the business. So he did"... he has a McDonald's card that allows him to eat for free at any of the fast food chain's Omaha restaurants. There's no expiration date on the gold card — not that it matters. Buffett's company has enough money to buy McDonald's outright (via Business Insider). But the very modest billionaire told CNBC that the card is the reason "why the Buffett family has Christmas dinner at McDonald's."...  The market's highs and lows even affect what he eats. In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, Buffett explained how he decides which of three breakfast options to order at McDonald's. "When I'm not feeling quite so prosperous, I might go with the $2.61, which is two sausage patties, and then I put them together and pour myself a Coke," he revealed (via CNBC) . He continued, saying, "$3.17 is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit, but the market's down this morning, so I'll pass up the $3.17 and go with the $2.95... Cauliflower makes Warren Buffett sick and rhubarb makes him retch. He doesn't like sweet potatoes, but he will reluctantly nosh on some carrots. Buffett is vocal about his disdain for vegetables... "I don't see smiles on the faces of people at Whole Foods"... No matter which part of the world he travels to, Warren Buffett sticks with the meals he knows, usually a hamburger or a hotdog. In Buffett's biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, he is quoted as saying, "I like eating the same thing over and over and over again. I could eat a ham sandwich every day for fifty days in a row for breakfast.""
Weird this isn't that known, given the media obsession over Trump's diet

Warren Buffett says he eats McDonald's three times a week because he 'isn't bothered by death' - "Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has admitted eating McDonald's chicken nuggets for lunch at least three times a week - because he is 'not bothered by the thought of my death'... He is partial to both the regular and cherry coke varieties, which give him the necessary energy boosts as he doesn't drink coffee... Despite his high-sugar, high-salt diet, Mr Buffett has never touched alcohol.   This is reminiscent of the U.S President, Donald Trump, who despite his junk food habit and disinclination to exercise, doesn't smoke and is a noted teetotaler... Mr Buffett also handed a big endorsement to Britain ahead of Brexit by dismissing fears about its impact on the economy."

Too Much Tech Could Be Causing Nearsightedness…But Not in the Way You Might Think - "Myopia, the blurry vision we know as nearsightedness, is reaching epidemic proportions—it could overtake a third of the world’s population by decade’s end. But is the condition caused by the rise of computers and mobile devices that strain the world’s eyes? It turns out that tech can cause nearsightedness...but not in the way you might think. Scientists are increasingly linking myopia with time spent indoors, reports Ellie Dolgin for Nature. She notes that scientists have long been on the hunt for the cause of myopia, which has been linked to higher education levels, genetics and book work over the years. But though researchers have been unable to find a link between specific computing or reading behaviors and myopia, says Dolpin, they did find a connection between eyesight and the amount of time spent indoors"

Dvořák's "American" Quintet - "Composers and publishers don’t always see eye to eye. Simrock, the German publisher of Dvorak’s music, irritated the patriotic Czech composer by issuing his scores with his first name printed in its Germanic form “Anton” rather than its Czech form “Antonin.” They finally came up with a compromise: Simrock ABBREVIATED Dvorak’s first name, printing it as “A-N-T-period” on the music’s title page: Germans could read that as “Anton” and Czechs as “Antonin.” Everyone was happy."

Ravel plays "guess who" in Paris - "On today's date in 1911, the Independent Music Society of Paris sponsored "An Anonymous Concert" at which the audience was invited to guess the composers of a number of pieces presented without attribution.  In the audience was the French composer Maurice Ravel, who had agreed to let a suite of his new piano pieces be performed as part of the experiment. Some professional music critics were also in attendance, although they prudently refused to reveal their guesses, fearing their professional reputations might suffer as a result.  "The title Valses nobles et sentimentales is a sufficient indication that my intention was to compose a chain of waltzes following the example of Schubert," Ravel wrote. "They were performed for the first time, amidst protests and booing, at this concert."  Even more droll, recalled Ravel, were the reactions of some his most ardent admirers, who attended the concert with him, but didn't know any of his own music would be played. They jeered at his waltzes, calling them "ridiculous pages," and ventured the guess the composer must be either Erik Satie or Zoltan Kodaly. Ravel accepted their comments in stoic silence."

Bernard Herrmann gets a pink slip from Hitch - "When Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd feature film, a cold war spy thriller entitled "Torn Curtain," opened in New York Theaters on today's date in 1966, audiences did NOT hear this music over the title credits.  It was the swinging 60s, and Hitchcock had asked his long-time collaborator, composer Bernard Hermann, for a pop score that would be "with it." For the main title, Hitch wanted a pop song that might be successful as a hit radio single. What Hitch did NOT want was, as he put it, "more Richard Strauss." Hermann assured Hitch he knew exactly what was required—and then ignored him completely.  Herrmann thought "Torn Curtain" was a dangerously weak film, and one that needed a strong orchestral score to make it effective. Herrmann's huge symphonic score featured an eerie choir of massed flutes and ominous, oppressive brass. When Hitch heard a Hollywood studio orchestra rehearsing Herrmann's main title music, he fired the composer on the spot and called in someone else to score the film.  Herrmann was crushed. He had thought his score would rescue a weak film, and that Hitch should have been grateful. "You call in the doctor to make you healthy," he later quipped—"Not to make you rich!"  Hermann may well have right. "Torn Curtain" is regarded as one of Hitchcock's lamest efforts, while Herrmann's rejected score has gone on to be recorded and admired on its own."

Ennio Morricone - "He also offered a bit of wise advice when asked about scores that were NOT successes: “A long time ago I really loved a film that I was working on and I became too involved. That was kind of unbalanced. It made me realize that you can’t love things too much if you want them to work.”"

Liszt gets political - "Liszt delivered an equally impassioned speech calling for Hungarian cultural and political independence. The patriotic audience went berserk with joy and began a torchlight procession of some 5000 people through the city, with Liszt at the front.  It’s one of those nice, ironic touches of history, however, that Liszt, the standard bearer for Hungarian national music, didn’t really speak Hungarian very well, and, for the record, delivered HIS patriotic address in French."

The morning after for Sergei Rachmaninoff - "“If there were conservatory in Hell, and if one of its students were instructed to write a symphony based on the seven plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff's, he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and delighted the inmates of Hell.”  Ouch!  What must have really hurt was that the review was written by a fellow composer, Cesare Cui, and the premiere was conducted–poorly, it seems–by another composer colleague, Alexander Glazunov.  The whole affair was so painful that Rachmaninoff needed therapy before he could compose again, and when he left Russia for good in 1917, he left the symphony’s manuscript behind, and in the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution it was lost. The original orchestral parts for the 1897 premiere, survived, however, and they were rediscovered in 1945, two years after Rachmaninoff’s death, and a belated, and this time successful, SECOND performance took place that same year."

Morton Gould rewrites history - "de Mille and Gould had met at the Russian Tea Room to discuss their ballet, a retelling of the true story of Lizzie Borden, acquitted for the gruesome ax murders of her father and step-mother.  Both de Mille and Gould thought Borden must have been guilty as charged. “Well, what shall we do about that,” asked de Mille. “Hang her!” said Gould, adding that it any case it would be easier for him to write hanging music than acquittal music. So, with that large dollop of poetic license, de Mille and Gould came up with the scenario for a ballet that opens with Lizzie standing before the gallows."

Full text of "The Fall Of Constantinople 1453" - "The West remained unmoved when it came to deeds. Aeneas  Sylvius might grieve sincerely; and there were a few historically  minded romantics such as Oliver de la Marche, to whom the  Emperor that fell at Constantinople had been the one authentic  emperor, the true heir of Augustus and of Constantine, unlike  the upstart in Germany.  But there was nothing that they could  do. The Papacy itself was largely to blame for this apathy. For  more than two centuries the popes had denounced the Greeks as  being wilful schismatics, and of recent years they had complained  loudly that Byzantine adherence to the Union of the Churches  was insincere. Western peoples to whom the Turks were a very  distant threat might well wonder why they should be asked to  give their money and their lives to rescue those recalcitrants. They  were conscious, too, of the angry ghost of Virgil, who ranked in  the West as an honorary Christian and a Messianic prophet. He  had told of the horrors of the Greek sack of Troy. The sack of  Constantinople Was its retribution. Literary-minded authors with  a taste for Classical phraseology, such as Cardinal Isidore himself,  were apt to call the Turks the Teucri. Were they not therefore  the heirs of the Trojans, if not actual Trojans themselves ? A  letter supposed to have been written by Mehmet II to Pope  Nicholas was circulating in France a few decades later; and in it  the Sultan was made to express his surprise that the Italians should  show him enmity, since they were descended from the same  Trojan stock as the Turks. Laonicus Chalcocondylas complained  bitterly that at Rome it was generally believed that the Greeks  were being punished for their atrocities at Troy; and Pope  Pius II, whose name of Aeneas should have given him spedal  authority, was at pains to point out that the Teucri and the Turcac  were not identical."

Women fighters of the Jewish resistance - HistoryExtra - "‘When you say that the, the Jewish women found it easier to masquerade as Christian Poles than the men. Why was that? I mean, in the book, you talk about the fact that obviously they wouldn't be circumcised. And that's something that would always distinguish a Jewish man. Was that the only reason or were there other things that enabled women to conceal themselves more?’
‘Yeah, there were, there were other things. So first of all, in the 1930s, in Poland, education was mandatory for boys and girls. But often Jewish families sent their sons to private Jewish schools, and daughters were sent to Polish public school. And in these public schools, these girls who ended up becoming the operatives in Resistance that I write about. They, they were surrounded by Christian friends, they were more acculturated. They were aware of Christian traditions and habits, and even gesticulations. And most important, they, and they write about this constantly in their memoirs, they were taught to speak Polish, like a Pole, and not with as they often say, the creaky Yiddish accent...
I think that there's been a misconception that I too, subconsciously felt or participated in for many years, that that that of Jewish passivity. But now, what, I mean to me right now that the Holocaust is a story of constant resilience, constant resistance, constant defiance. Just most people were still killed, because they couldn't, you know, battle a massive army. But, but I think that's important’"

Robert Walpole: Who Was Britain's First Prime Minister? - HistoryExtra - "‘The key thing about him was he helped to ground a parliamentary monarchy and parliamentary state. I mean, if you look back at the 17th century, Britain was the failed state of Europe. It had had terrible Civil War, not just in England, which we tend to think about, but also obviously, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, culminating in the creation of a republic. That then had fallen in 1660. There’d then be in fresh chaos at the end of the 1670s, the Popish plot, the exclusion crisis, culminating in 1688, with James the Second, James, the Seventh of Scotland being kicked out in the so called Glorious Revolution. There had then been chaos again in the mid 17 teens, the Jacobite rising of 1715 to 16. And at that point, Britain really seemed a bit of a political basket case. And, you know, at the very end of the 17 teens, you have a political split within the governing Whig Party, and you then have the financial chaos and crisis of the South Sea bubble. So somebody who could come along, stabilize the situation and give the country over 20 years of stability was really crucial. We tend to underrate that because we're not used to civil war. But actually, if you've got a background of civil war, there's somebody who can stabilize the situation is really important. Somebody like Charles de Gaulle in France, for example.’"

The Suez Crisis: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra - "‘They sort of immediately issued this ultimatum on 30th of October for both Israel and Egypt to stop fighting and withdraw 10 miles from the canal... Now, this was a big problem... This is being written a long way ahead of time because in fact, what was happening at that point on the 30th of October was that the front between Israel and Egypt was actually around 125 miles east of the canal in Sinai. So what they were actually asking was for Egypt to withdraw 135 miles into its own territory, and for Israel, the aggressor to advance 115 miles into Egyptian territory. So immediately became apparent to everyone that this was actually a kind of conspiracy or plan that was going on... The operation was really very badly planned. Part of the reason for that is that the invasion, Operation Musketeer, as it was called, you know, this had been planned as an invasion. And then very quickly, when this conspiracy was made with Israel, it had to be kind of turned into something that would look like a peacekeeping operation. Now of course, those are two completely different things. So a lot of the prep was extremely bad. And the troops found themselves having to kind of, you know, participate in basically this pantomime. But also, it was so badly planned that sometimes the troops just didn't really know what was going on. Before Suez people used to speak about the three superpowers, and they would talk about the US, the USSR and Britain, because still, you had a British Empire. So Britain was spoken of as a superpower. After Suez that stops. People no longer, they speak of two superpowers’"

Jonathan Dimbleby On Barbarossa | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It was assumed that the Soviet Union would collapse in weeks. And this was assumed around the world, incidentally, everyone thought the Soviet Union would collapse. And the Allies said, let's keep them going as long as we can, support them as much as possible because the longer they fight against the Germans, the weaker the German army will be in facing and threatening the United Kingdom. So the weather was bad, but it was predictably bad. The weather is always bad at that time of year, General Mud is always on the march. And, and the Red Army had to face the same conditions, but was equipped better to do it. Their weapons didn't freeze up to the same degree that the, the Army's weapons, you know, artillery wouldn't fire, tanks wouldn't start, they lit fires under the tanks to get them going. Meanwhile, they were running out of supplies and fuel. People were getting starved of food, they were getting starved of equipment. And the the, the attack was faltering. They were also losing large numbers of lives. You know, in that first six months of the war, the Germans lost almost as many lives through death, imprisonment, wounding as the Allies did in the whole of the war, the Western Allies did in the whole of the war. You know, these were huge losses, they were, they were dwarfed by the scale of losses that the Soviet lost. Nonetheless, this was attrition that they couldn't withstand’"

How Constitutions Changed The World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'To ensure it continues to be successful, I think you'd need regular provisions for amendment. Otherwise, these documents become out of date. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said that he thought that a constitution shouldn't be left untouched for more than, say, 17, 18 years. And I think that's one of the problems with the US Constitution now. The states’ constitutions in the United States are regularly amended, but the Founding Fathers, because they were, they were worried about possible instability, made it very hard to amend the Federal Constitution... The right to bear arms… was designed for a world where guns took about three minutes to load. They are not suitable to the kind of armaments that some Americans have at their disposal now, and this is an extreme example of one of the challenges of written constitution. So those who oppose them, including some in Britain, said that this was the problem, that they were too rigid...
The British have a rather, one could call it even hypocritical response to constitution since they offered to write them for their colonies. And they keep doing that right up to the 1960s. But you know, it's this idea, well, you people need a written constitution. But of course, we are above that. I'm, I'm being a little sarcastic'"
Liberals are so intent on changing the US Constitution, but keep crowing about how according to the Constitution the census doesn't need to ask about citizenship
If we've learnt something about nation building and democracy in the third world, it's that institutions take time to build, which is why the UK can do without a written constitution

Stanley Baldwin | Episode 2: Britain's Greatest Prime Minister Podcast Series - HistoryExtra - "My view is, appeasement was not necessarily a failure, because basically, you had to give Hitler enough rope to hang himself. In other words, you had to, people had been so traumatized and brutalized by the First World War, that they didn't want another war, there was a colossal peace movement in the 1930s. And the only way that Britain would go into the war united, is if you showed beyond the slightest possible doubt, that the Nazis were villains and couldn't be trusted. And in that sense, I actually think Baldwin’s strategy was successful. And he started rearming, he started building up the RAF during his time in office, it's not true that they did nothing. But he felt hamstrung by the opposition in the country, in fact the Labour Party was basically a pacifist party, there was a very strong disarmament movement. He just thought he could go as far as, as he could, and no further. But the benefit of all that was that when Britain did go to war in 1939, nobody said, well, the British should just, you know, hideous war mongers and they've been itching for this war. And actually, we should have given Hitler a chance and the Germans had legitimate grievances. Maybe, you know, you know, we didn't launch a sort of Iraq style preemptive campaign. If we had and even if we'd won, people would still be arguing about it now, they'd probably, there’d still be a lot of books, people saying that we should never have attacked the Germans in 1936, how cruel and wicked we were, Hitler was actually a splendid fellow who was just a bit misguided. Whereas as it was, we were able to go in completely united and, and sort of solid aristic [sp?]'"
Why am I not surprised that the Labour Party supported appeasement?

Choppy/laggy video on HDMI out - "A few months ago I had raised the display resolution being projected over the HDMI cable to 1920x1280 so the desktop would display completely on my TV, without being cropped. This had caused video to play jittery, so when I rolled back the resolution to 1280×720, video became smooth again."
"If your graphics card is integrated, it will cause severe lag unless, as you do, it carries extra GRAM. As it is, you need a discrete or dedicated card (or two, optimally) to output into a large, second screen."
Addendum: Same with the audio - lower fidelity helps

Petition after ice cream and custard dropped from school menu - "Primary children have started a petition after custard and ice cream was dropped from their school dinner menu on health grounds.  Pupils at Aberdeenshire's Rhynie PS said they were taking the action to reinstate their favourite puddings, described as the "best in the world"."

Medieval Ethiopia's Diplomatic Missions | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - [On why they needed to send out embassies to get relics] "The Ethiopians didn't dismember their saints. So, you know, like, I think, especially in English, English sources, you do find sometimes descriptions of the rather vigorous dismemberment of the saint’s body, and then the head goes somewhere and the hands go somewhere else and the fingers and what have you. And that is not a practice that Ethiopian Christianity subscribes to. Now, what that leads to, of course, is a bit of a scarcity. Because if you're preserving a saint’s body whole, that means you only have one locality that can have that body or that relic"

Robert Harris On V2, Historical Fiction & WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "After a while, people around Hitler, the SS began to cotton on to the fact that the V2, although the most sophisticated piece of engineering in the world, revolutionary, it would fly, it could fly nearly 100 miles into space. It wasn't a weapon, it wasn't a very successful weapon, it was hugely expensive. The Germans spent almost as much developing V weapons as the or indeed, slightly more actually, than the Americans spent developing the atomic bomb. They wasted the money because a V2 only carried a one ton warhead, and a Lancaster bomber could carry six tons."

Ancient Babylon: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘When people think of the heyday of Babylon, they think of two particular moments in time that stand out. One would be in the 18th century BC, which is the, during the reign of the king Hammurabi and the king Hammurabi is a, best known for the monument that we call the law code of Hammurabi, which is from about 1760 BC, and many schoolchildren learn about that in school as the world's earliest law code. We now know that there were in fact, even earlier law, monuments of law before this and, and texts that write down laws before this, but somehow this has stayed in people's minds as the earliest law code, and he was a very influential and powerful King politically as well, but he's mostly associated with this law code. The other period in time is the time of the King Nebuchadnezzar. So we're moving much forward in time to a period between 604 and 562 BC, the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, which is the time when the city underwent a great deal of reconstruction and the building of major monuments, major architectural structures, and we have descriptions, ancient descriptions of what the city looked like at that time’"

Links - 29th September 2021 (2) (AOC)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tells Sean Spicer What Capitalism Is - "Spicer took to Twitter to suggest the lawmaker—a self-described democratic socialist—selling merchandise was somehow hypocritical. Ocasio-Cortez responded to Spicer's tweet, stating that "transactions aren't capitalism." "Not sure if you know this Sean, but transactions aren't capitalism. Capitalism is a system that prioritizes profit at any & all human/enviro cost," she wrote in a tweet that amassed more than 40,000 likes in about nine hours. "But [for what it's worth] our shop is unionized, doesn't operate for profit, & funds projects like free tutoring, food programs, & local organizing." Webster's dictionary defines capitalism as: "An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market."... Other Twitter users responded to Spicer's tweet to tell him that he appeared to not understand what capitalism means. "The right continues to prove it doesn't even understand the one sacrosanct term in its lexicon," one person wrote."
Words mean whatever liberals want them to mean

Biden Is Illegally Keeping Migrant Kids in Detention for 38% Longer Than Last Week. - "The Biden regime is holding unaccompanied minors entering the U.S. illegally for an average of 107 hours – nearly one and a half days longer than the legally allowed limit.
While the numbers, reported first by CNN, would have caused outrage under the Trump administration, Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have stayed silent on the matter."

Facebook - "So AOC skipped a memorial event for the Israeli leader who gave his life at the hands of a right-wing Israeli assassin for desperately trying to make peace with the Palestinians and give them a state - to stream video games instead? If the most ardent advocate for Israeli-Palestinian peace isn't worthy of recognition, is any other premiere worthy? And if not - well, is it time to admit that some other reason is at work?"

Pelosi trashes AOC, Squad in 'child-like' voice: book - "Veteran journalist Susan Page of USA Today profiled Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her upcoming biography “Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power.”... Pelosi “offers the Squad this blunt advice: ‘You’re not a one-person show. This is the Congress of the United States,'” according to the report. Democrats have a seven-seat edge in the House, giving the band of relatively young leftists power to influence legislation."

AOC says she's effectively 'served in war' after Capitol riot - "She claimed that congresspersons have now effectively "served in war" and that she is "doing therapy" because of her experience on January 6... After the riot, Ocasio-Cortez was heavily chastised for misrepresenting her whereabouts on January 6. Ocasio-Cortez had previously claimed that rioters had made it to her office door yelling, "where is she?" She further claimed that she thought she was going to die during the riot... it was revealed that Ocasio-Cortez was in a different building entirely, as revealed by Congresswoman Nancy Moore, whose office is two doors down from Ocasio Cortez's. As many criticized Ocasio-Cortez's recounting of events as hyperbolic, the Congresswoman discussed her previous trauma from an alleged sexual assault and argued that those who dismissed her were "using the same tactics as abusers.""

AOC’s Capitol story is crumbling - "‘Squad’ leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made great political hay out of last month’s storming of the Capitol. She has talked it up as an attempted terror attack. ‘We came close to half of the House nearly dying’, she said in the days after the event. She insists she was in imminent danger of being ‘murdered’. She has used her ‘trauma’ at the Capitol to bolster her calls for a war on domestic terror and for tearing up the First Amendment... The discrepancies in her story led #AlexandriaOcasio-Smollett to trend on Twitter, with many comparing AOC to disgraced actor Jussie Smollett, who organised a fake hate crime a gainst himself... She has even tried to present herself as the main victim. The real victims, of course, were the six people killed in the chaos. And the main target of the rioters’ anger was not AOC, but Republicans like vice-president Mike Pence who refused to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf. AOC has responded to those calling her out by accusing them of spreading disinformation. Her office has encouraged her supporters to combat questions about her whereabouts during the Capitol riots."

AOC compares herself to war veterans after her Capitol riot exaggerations backfire - "Ocasio-Cortez has since claimed that it was Trump supporters who planted the two pipe bombs that surrounded the Republican and Democratic National Committees headquarters on Jan. 5. The perpetrator has yet to be identified and apprehended by federal authorities—let alone the culprit's political affiliation."

AOC wasn't in the Capitol Building at the time of the Jan. 6 riot—she was in another building entirely - "Ocasio-Cortez later said that she believed her colleagues in the GOP were white supremacists who she feared would allow others do to harm to her. Ocasio-Cortez falsely accused Senator Ted Cruz of "trying to get [her] killed," that she wouldn't attend President Joe Biden's inauguration because she didn't "feel safe" around Republicans, and has demanded the removal of Republicans in the House and Senate."

Mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's trauma is really about covering for Trump's violent coup - "Assuming a right to define the impact of another person's trauma is a tired shtick that is often trotted out by right-wing pundits who attempt to deflect negative attention like after a school shooting or publicized event of police violence... The anti-democratic nature of the right-wing movement in America is deeper than even the anti-democracy moves made by Republicans in the establishment. The anti-democratic nature of the right-wing media actively works against the full participation of every member of our society. They work hard to discredit "lived experiences" because the world of credentialism has thus far blocked competition for them. Trauma is mocked because they have no understanding of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of any of these things so they think "rapist" and "racist" are just insults that you call somebody you don't like"
You're not allowed to disagree with (liberal) "minorities"
Of course, liberals mock the "trauma" of people they disagree with (e.g. claiming that cancel culture isn't real)

Is AOC the most dangerous politician in America? - "This is Authoritarianism 101: depict certain forms of political speech as violent, as akin to attempted acts of murder. It is a demand, implicitly, for censorship, for the punishment of those who dare to hold views that AOC finds unpalatable. Indeed, it is striking that shortly after the Capitol riot AOC openly proposed that Congress should think about how to ‘rein in’ the media... This is where authoritarian hysteria ends up: calling for restraints on political speech and controls on the press. AOC has previously given a green light to the virtual blacklisting of public figures who backed Trump. Late last year she suggested that someone make a record of all ‘Trump sycophants’ in case they try to ‘downplay or deny their complicity in the future’. This inspired the establishment of the Trump Accountability Project, which seems committed to preventing Trump staffers from gaining certain forms of employment in the future – those who ‘took a paycheck from the Trump administration should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart’. In the words of the New York Post, it smacks of being a ‘blacklist’ of ‘allies and staffers of President Trump’. AOC is continuing her over-the-top recollections of what happened at the Capitol on 6 January. Yesterday, in an Instagram live chat that predicably went viral, she described the terror she felt when someone stormed into her office, while she was locked in the bathroom, and started yelling, ‘WHERE IS SHE?’. It is only later in the chat that we discover this person was a police officer, coming to ensure she was safe. For heaven’s sake. We’ve gone from the claim that half of representatives were at risk of being murdered to the reality of a cop checking on AOC’s wellbeing... Right now, AOC might just be the most authoritarian politician in the US. Her hyperbole about the Capitol riot, her fearmongering about the threat of ‘domestic terrorism’, her animosity towards the free press, and her demonisation of her critics as being pro-murder or similar to sexual abusers, in the full knowledge that her army of devoted online followers will amplify these shrill, censorious accusations – this all points to how determined AOC is to crush anything that she considers too right-wing or too offensive."
Plus she claimed she was terrified that the police officer was going to harm her

'I've Been Shot!' Screams AOC As Ted Cruz Greets Her With Set Of Friendly Finger Guns | The Babylon Bee - "At publishing time, Mitch McConnell had held the door open for Ocasio-Cortez, prompting her to scream that she was being sexually assaulted."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez storms Nancy Pelosi's office for climate change protest - "A group of activists have staged a sit-in protest at Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office, joined by an unexpected guest: New York Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez."
It's only bad when the "right" do it

Lucas Lynch - AOC: "Not only must Native voices not be ignored, they should be *centered* in a climate agenda.Indigenous wisdom, principles, & organizing have been proven right on climate over and over." "This is a total crock. "Indigenous peoples" were responsible for the first wave of mass extinctions the earth saw since the time of the dinosaurs.There used to be woolly mammoths and now there aren't. Ever ponder why that is? It's because our ancestors were no more wise or moral than ourselves, they just had inferior technology in their barbarity. The book "sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari illustrates very well how the introduction of people in every corner of the globe was always accompanied by waves of mass extinctions of large mammals. The savage was never noble - the savage was, of course, human. The plight of "indigenous peoples" most certainly was an atrocity, but it was only the result of technological imbalance, not moral imbalance."Indigenous wisdom" is just religious superstition. Only in very recent years post enlightenment did we begin to understand why restraining ourselves from consuming the earths resources was both moral and a matter of our survival."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter - "We stand with our Asian American & Pacific Islander community against the rising tide of racism and hate crimes that have been stoked to a fever pitch, much of amplified by the actions of our last president. It’s on all of us to speak up against bigotry & protect our neighbors."
Replies: "Have you watched any of these videos and seen who the offenders are?"
"The fact that the media isn’t reporting on these stories is really fucked up. Do we not matter? When is the hate and violence going to end?"
"It is funny how when it’s not a white person committing the crimes she doesn’t mention the race of the attackers but if it’s a white person she won’t miss the chance. I’d just like some consistency on her part."
"I'm sure Trump was really inspiring the Black and brown community in Oakland to commit assaults on elderly Asians."
"Welcome to the 2021 season of #FakeLeft Political Theater w/ your host, @AOC!Platitudes...Virtue Signaling...Distraction mongering by clickbait consensus...It’ll be a heartfelt action-packed year of veiled warmongering & austerities on behalf of Corporate America.Enjoy!"
"When I see these videos of the perpetrators of attacks on Asian Americans the first thing I think is “I bet he’s a white supremacist” bravo congresswoman you’ve nailed it again!"
"As an Asian American / Pacific Islander I have never felt discrimination. AOC is a complete tool."
"To anyone seeing this, please note AOC’s silence on discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions, or the horrible attacks on Asian Americans by BLM rioters over the last year. AOC was given the signal that it’s time to care about this. Who gave the signal?"

AOC on NYC Crime Wave: People "Need To Feed Their Child," Maybe Have To "Shoplift Some Bread"
Clearly, if you can't feed your family you go out and murder someone

CBS News on Twitter - ""Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral" -@nhannahjones"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter - "And to be 💯% honest, it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote. Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone,that’s violence"
Leftist logic: words are violence, but violence isn't violence

Ryan Knight ☭ on Twitter - "AOC: “Biden has exceeded our expectations!”
Reality:
Bombed Syria
Kids still in cages
No medicare for all
No $15 minimum wage
Lied about $2K checks
Privatizing war in Afghanistan
No student debt cancellation
@AOC is a sheep-dog for the right-wing capitalist “Democratic” party."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Refused To Campaign More For Bernie Sanders - "Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent decision to avoid stumping for Sanders stands out precisely because of her intense work on his behalf in the fall and early winter."
You can't blame her for being a shrewd operator

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounces socialists and praises Biden administration, Democratic Party - World Socialist Web Site

Hypocritical, hilarious AOC says calling border crisis a 'surge' invokes white supremacy - "“This is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents, and we are not being invaded. Which, by the way, is a white supremacist philosophy. The idea that if another is coming in the population, that this is an invasion of who we are." That's Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) latest WTF moment on Instagram, which is breathtaking even for the same person who once said during the Trump years that unemployment was low only "because everybody is working two jobs," which isn't how unemployment numbers are calculated. So let's unpack this latest verbal masterpiece by quoting the most popular member of Congress (from a social media perspective) in 2019, when a surge decidedly smaller than this one was happening at the border under the previous administration. "The child detention camps are here. I confronted the border officers myself. Using their names, I told them exactly what they are responsible for. One of them made eye contact with me. I spoke directly to him. I saw his sense of guilt. We can dismantle this," Ocasio-Cortez declared in 2018 while calling migrant facilities "concentration camps." She also used the opportunity to visit the border for this infamous photo-op. Fast forward to 2021, and with Democrats completely in control, suddenly the congresswoman can't seem to find the time to visit the border to take more self-promotional photos. She also can't bring herself – much like the Biden administration – to call this border crisis a border crisis, instead arguing that it’s "an imperialism crisis, it’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis. And also, it’s a carceral crisis.” AOC doesn’t have a monopoly on immigration hypocrisy, though. "I will also immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum," Kamala Harris – then a presidential candidate – declared in 2019 during a primary debate. "I will release children from cages. I will get rid of the private detention centers," she added. In a related story, candidate Biden urged migrants to "surge the border" during the same debate... this task will be exceedingly difficult for Harris, who once compared ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to the Ku Klux Klan while arguing that illegal border crossings should be legal."

AOC flashes white supremacy sign during Instagram session!

Anthony Brian Logan (ABL) 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "So does this mean @AOC is a white supremacist? *AOC flashing OK sign*"
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Not as much as her views on the inability of black people to succeed in America without lots and lots of help from her side of the government, being exempt from the law, and lowered achievement standards in just about every other domain, but maybe."

Bulgarian Singles USA - Posts | Facebook - "Leftist women love denigrating white men, but have you noticed that 'Kamala Harris married a white man, Susan Rice married a white man, Ilhan Omar married a white man and AOC dating a white man. For such vocal haters of white men, these CLODS sure do love to indulge.' What gives?"

Hot Takes Nobody Asked For - Posts | Facebook - AOC: "I wonder if Republicans understand how much they advertise their disrespect of women in debates when they consistently call women members of Congress by nicknames or first names while using titles & last names when referring to men of = stature. Women notice. It conveys a lot."
"Numerous Republicans called President Obama "Barry" for 8 years. Plenty of Democrats call President Trump "45" in a pejorative manner. There are countless other examples."

Facebook - "As you’ve heard, AOC’s abuela is living in a dilapidated home that was ravaged by Hurricane Maria. AOC is unable to help her own grandma for whatever reason, so I have set up this Go Fund Me campaign to save her home. Please give if you can. #HelpAbuela"

AOC's aunt says Trump is NOT to blame for lack of aid to the struggling island - "'This is her home. Hurricane Maria help hasn't arrived. Trump blocked relief $ for PR…. The relative, who refused to give her name, added: 'We are private people, we don't talk about our family.' Ironically for AOC, she also refused to blame former President Donald Trump for thousands of Hurricane Maria victims being unable to get money to repair shattered homes... 'It's a problem here in Puerto Rico with the administration and the distribution of help. It is not a problem with Washington. We had the assistance and it didn't get to the people.'... Walsh had written: 'One cannot be certain of the cost to repair grandma's house, but surely most of the work could be completed for the price of AOC's shiny Tesla Model 3. 'Sadly, virtue signaling isn't going to fix abuela's roof. So we are. Let's all kick in to help save AOC's abuela's ancestral home.'... planning director Leslie Orama... denied AOC's statement that relief 'hasn't arrived', adding 'that's not the case'. Yet she admitted problems, saying: 'It is just that it has been limited in the amount that can be handed to the people that were affected, because of the process itself... The city official also cited past corruption – but said it was in the claims, not the distribution. She added: 'I know that the federal government has been making sure that the money goes to the right places. It is not that I support the way they are acting or working, but I understand that they might be ensuring that all the support is handled correctly. 'Sometimes the claims are not real. Or people even damage their own stuff in order to get money. Some people do the right thing, some people don't.'"

Matt Walsh Raises $100K For Ocasio-Cortez’s Grandmother; GoFundMe Shuts Down Account - "The message from GoFundMe appears to suggest that it may not have been Ocasio-Cortez’s grandmother who directly refused the funds, but someone else in the family. The Daily Wire has reached out to the platform, asking if it is standard practice to allow one member of a family to deny funds to another family member in need. The platform did not respond... More than 5,800 people pledged to help Ocasio-Cortez’s grandmother, raising just over $100,000 in 10 hours before the fundraiser was shut down. All this in response to the congresswoman suggesting that rather than taking direct action to help her grandmother, the most important role she played in the situation was to decry “systematic injustice.”... “Tragically this charitable effort has been sabotaged by forces outside of our control. Still I’m grateful for the outpouring of support for abuela, even if AOC isn’t. But questions remain: Why didn’t AOC help her own abuela? Why was our help turned down? We are left to speculate,” Walsh added. “In the end, our campaign raised 100 thousand dollars and could have solved a problem in ten hours that AOC couldn’t solve in four years. We can all be proud of that. As for abuela, all we can do now is pray.”... Walsh questioned why Ocasio-Cortez, who earns more than $170,000 annually and drives a Tesla, has not offered aid to her own grandmother... Walsh said he would donate $499 – the monthly lease payment for a Tesla – to start the fundraiser"

Lol Dan Crenshaw demolishes AOC, says she embodies "the worst stereotypes of the millennial generation." - "Crenshaw went on Megan Kelly's podcast yesterday and put AOC on blast, noting that there are many, many Republicans who have faced MUCH harder situations than getting someone's order wrong at a restaurant. War, being one example...
The best bit was when Crenshaw took AOC to task for always painting herself as a victim. He said,
"And that playing the victim thing, she really embodies sort of the worst stereotypes of the millennial generation. And it gives us a bad name, and I wish she'd stop.""

WATCH: AOC explains how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis: 'It's not the how to get to that what' | The Post Millennial - "Ocasio-Cortez attempts to explain the means in which Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved by focusing on the "how." She states, "It's not the how to get to that what" as a response to the question of addressing the conflict. This event was a week ago and Ocasio-Cortez has yet to clarify what exactly she is saying during this livestream event."

What AOC Just Got Wrong About the Supreme Court and Separation of Powers - "Like every new member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pledged to uphold the Constitution when she was sworn into office. But the socialist congresswoman’s latest criticism of the Supreme Court reveals that she lacks even the most basic understanding of the document she promised to protect... the congresswoman misunderstands or rejects the very role the Supreme Court plays in safeguarding our constitutional liberties. She decries the fact that the judiciary can overrule elected policymakers, but that’s exactly the point. The reason we have a First Amendment, for example, is because our right to freedom of speech is supposed to be off-limits — yes, even for “laws that hundreds and thousands of legislators, advocates, and policymakers drew consensus on.”... Ocasio-Cortez’s comments suggest that she thinks majoritarian support alone should be the criteria for a public policy’s legality"

AOC demands MORE justice despite Chauvin guilty verdict | The Post Millennial

AOC named 'employee of the month' at Goya - "Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was named “employee of the month” at Goya Foods after sales spiked following her calls to boycott the company’s products, its CEO said"

GOP senator offers to pay for AOC to come campaign for his opponent in Georgia - "Incumbent Georgia Sen. David Perdue is hoping to win reelection in January by pursuing the Democrat Party’s most radical members to pave his path to success... What Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand is that while she boasts a positive favorability rating in her far-left district, she boasts a horrible one everywhere else. Polling data from 2019 showed that neither she nor her peers in the radical “Squad” boasted a “Very favorable” rating higher than 17 percent."
Maybe if she had agreed he would have won

‘Racial reckoning’: AOC injects BLM rhetoric into demand for sweeping US migration policy changes | The Post Millennial - "the Biden administration hired a deputy director with a history of anti-ICE activism... what we’re left with in the meantime is a letter that seeks to combine the Biden border crisis with the Black Lives Matter style of rhetoric. Quite literally. In the closing it says: “We are in a moment of racial reckoning in this country, with communities across the country calling for an end to mass incarceration and racist policing. It is time to end the carceral approach to immigration, which relies on these same flawed systems.” Ironically it’s being addressed to an administration whose President is in large part responsible for the creation of the 1994 crime bill... Since the Biden administration is willing to prioritize transgender migrants coming across the US border? AOC’s wishlist has a fair chance of being heard by White House officials."

Balloonhead AOC says Republican states are "suppressed states" and "the only way our country will heal is through the actual liberation of Southern states" - "The socialist wing of the Democrat Party (which grows by the day) sees conservatives and Republicans as literal oppressors from whom liberals need to be liberated. Not fellow Americans with whom they can disagree and debate, even vigorously. No, they see us as an evil force that needs to be utterly defeated."

As a Democrat whose family escaped socialism, Ocasio-Cortez worries me - "Cuba’s socialist revolution was supposed to work for workers — like my grandparents who lived in Miami during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. In January 1959, just two weeks after Fidel Castro seized power, they returned to the island to care for my grandmother’s ailing mother. For the next 20 years, they remained prisoners in their own country... To understand my grandparents’ desperation to flee socialism, imagine leaving everything behind and starting anew at almost 60 years old... On the night of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in New York, I thought her use of the term was a misnomer. Then I began studying the views of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the rapidly growing national organization she belongs to, and was disturbed by what I learned. Like those of yesteryear, today’s socialists believe the government should nationalize major industries, propose eliminating private ownership of companies, and reject profits. In other words, democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business. When I confronted some progressive friends about this, they initially dismissed my concerns. After sharing some articles with them, the conversation shifted to "they just want us to be more like the Nordic countries" and "they’re not like real socialists!" Both are reductionist, self-delusions to avoid confronting difficult truths. The latter is a particularly absurd fallacy because it requires one to believe that adults who willfully join socialist organizations, sound like socialists and call themselves socialists are not what they claim to be. Claims of "Nordic socialism" are also largely exaggerated. As Jostein Skaar, of Oslo Economics, told me, "I would stress that the Norwegian economic system is capitalistic, heavily influenced by the U.S. and U.K." This is probably why DSA argues that the Nordic model is not good enough. The ideological counterparts of America's democratic socialists are likelier to be found to our south than in northern Europe. For instance, Cuba — where the state controls three-fourths of the economy, limits private-sector activity, and employs the majority of workers — is clearly more representative of DSA's economic vision than Denmark, where 89 percent of the wealth is privately owned and seven out of 10 Danes work in the private sector... it’s foolish to believe that democratic socialists — who promise to end capitalism — would be satisfied with Medicare for all, if given the reins of power. This must never happen. The descendants of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should have no place in the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Given its horrific record of human suffering, it would be a moral disgrace for Democrats to embrace socialism just to win elections, as some suggest. Those who use the blitheful ignorance of many for the political gain of a few deserve to lose. Indeed, if socialism represents the future of the Democratic Party, that’s a dystopia no American should want to be a part of."
Liberals still try to gaslight everyone by claiming the far left / extreme left in the US just wants universal healthcare

Ocasio-Cortez Mocks People Who Get ‘Cancelled,’ Suggests That They Are Entitled And Unliked - "Ocasio-Cortez provided no evidence backing up her claim that the term “cancel culture” comes “from entitlement” and that it involves people who have “a large, captive audience.” While the targets of cancel culture have included famous names, many people who get “canceled” are ordinary people whose employers face calls for boycotts if they keep them as an employee. Ocasio-Cortez appeared to hold herself to a different standard in her tweets as she claimed that people who were “cancelled” were really “just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.” Ocasio-Cortez then claimed that Fox News, which she did not name directly, was “dedicated to stoking hatred of” her. Like other media outlets, Fox News does frequently report on Ocasio-Cortez, but is often just challenging her ideas, holding her accountable, or reporting that she’s unliked."

Ted Cruz on Twitter - "aoc wearing the words tax the rich on her dress? simply iconic #MetGala"
"Cost per Ticket: $30,000. Virtue signaling to your base while partying—without a mask—with the people you claim to hate: Priceless."

The Smirk Order - Posts | Facebook - "All of these socialist influencers are frauds. They get rich using capitalism by preaching the socialist gospel on social media. AOC, Hasan Parker, that pedophile Vaush, are all successful because of capitalism and they all turn out to be hypocrites in the end."

AOC's 'Tax the Rich' dress designer Aurora James owes heavy debt - "Designer Aurora James called her “Tax the Rich” dress for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “powerful message” — but it’s not one she has taken to heart. The 37-year-old fashionista who made waves at the Met Gala with Democratic-Socialist AOC last week is a notorious tax deadbeat with unpaid debts dogging her in multiple states, records show... Between April 2018 and April 2019, the Internal Revenue Service placed six federal liens on Cultural Brokerage Agency totaling $103,220. The liens specifically cite the company’s failure to remit employee payroll taxes... While James apparently has no problem stiffing the Taxman, she isn’t shy about taking money from taxpayers — her company received in $41,666 in pandemic relief aid. Over the years Cultural Brokerage Agency has also faced multiple legal challenges as a result of habitual nonpayment of worker benefits... Ex-staffers blasted the operation as a sweatshop that relied on legions of unpaid interns working full-time jobs. “I experienced a lot of harassment when I worked for her,” one former contract employee told The Post. “Aurora would ask me to do things that were not in anyone’s job description, like scheduling her gynecological appointments. The work environment was so hostile that I was afraid to ask for my check.” The employee was ultimately terminated... James is also an alleged rent deadbeat, records show... Though AOC was comped tickets to the annual ball for boldfacers, entry to the famously exclusive Met Gala runs $35,000 a head. James attended the bash with Benjamin Bronfman, a rumored boyfriend she’s frequently spotted with. Bronfman, 39, is a scion of the powerful Bronfman family and its distilling empire. He is worth an estimated $100 million... James’ unpaid bills belie her champagne tastes. She frequently jets off to exclusive locations, her Instagram richly decorated with photos from Jamaica, Morocco, France, Indonesia, Mexico, Italy, the United Kingdom and The Hamptons. She also found money to make a $2,700 donation to Hillary Clinton in 2016. “It’s the height of hypocrisy when socialists attend a $30,000 per ticket gala with a message of ‘tax the rich’ while wearing an overpriced dress by a luxury designer who doesn’t pay taxes,” Republican Staten Island Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis told The Post. “What happened to everyone paying their fair share?”... James pushed progressive causes long before making headlines for dressing America’s most famous socialist. After the death of George Floyd in May 2020, she created the 15 percent pledge, demanding that major companies commit to buying 15% of their products from black-owned businesses. The idea took off with major companies like Bloomingdale’s, Vogue, Sephora, and Crate & Barrel, according to a 15 percent pledge website. “This is the least you can do for us. We represent 15% of the population and we need to represent 15% of your shelf space,” James said in an Instagram post announcing the idea. Ocasio-Cortez, who has made a career out of demanding better worker wages and benefits, and taxing the rich to pay for her budget-busting federal programs, did not respond to multiple requests for comment."

Of course AOC went to the Met Gala - "AOC’s seamless entry into the Met Gala set reminds us that what passes for ‘left-wing’ politics has perhaps never been more palatable to the powerful. They tweet ‘defund the police’ while walking around with armed bodyguards. Identity politics allows even the most wealthy among them to occasionally pose as oppressed. They mouth anti-capitalist slogans apparently safe in the knowledge that there is no worker’s revolt on the horizon that might actually take something away from them – just AOC’s Instagram following stanning in her mentions. If she is what passes for the left in America today, it really is no threat to the elites. I’m sure she fit right in."

Maskless Met Gala Scene, With Face-Covered Servers Waiting On “Liberal Swells”, Mocked As Double Standard By Bill Maher: “Do The Germs Know Who The Good People Are?!”