File this story under “coincidences in the news:”
Earlier in January, far-left hack-haven website Buzzfeed was proven laughably wrong on yet another anti-Trump story, so much so that even Bob Mueller felt compelled to issue a statement saying that their latest story was full of Schumer. This is not at all unusual for Buzzfeed, as you could guess if you went to their headquarters, and noticed that the big sign in their lobby that says, “Consecutive Days Without Getting a Story Wrong” has been stuck at “0” since 2012.
Anyway, on Friday, January 25th they announced massive layoffs.
I know what you’re thinking: HA HA HA HA HA!
Also: WHOO! Stop! My ribs are killing me! Let me catch my breath!
And finally: HA HA HA HA HA!
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive deeper into the details of the story and tease out some nuance:
Far left website full of hateful “journalists” blows story after story, spends like drunken congressmen but can’t make a dime of profit, and is now careening toward insolvency like Hillary tumbling down some temple stairs after throwing a horseshoe. The end.
That’s called “brevity,” people. And it’s the soul of wit.
Actually, there are a few details worth savoring. For example, the layoffs hit 43 of the 250 “journalists” working there. Yet oddly, none of the zero conservative journalists who have ever worked there were affected.
Also, the hardest hit groups were the national desk, the entertainment team, and – I quote – “the LBGT desk.”
I know that I’m old and out of it, but what exactly is a “LBGT desk?” A desk that thinks it’s an ottoman? One that identifies as an armoire? One that has some drawers that you pull out in the regular way, but others that must be pushed in?
And if you push in the pull drawers or pull out the push ones, it screams at you for being a cis-gendered bigot?
I’m so confused.
In other news, you might think that after the MSM humiliated themselves by jumping on the Buzzfeed story bandwagon and then having to retreat when it proved to be as phony as Lizzie Warren’s Cherokee birth certificate (#wemustneverstopmockingher), they might be a little gun shy about chasing the next “too good to be checked” political fairy tale.
But you’d be wrong. Because at the first whisper of, “What’s that old Indian dude doing over there with those white kids in the red hats?” they stampeded across the national mall like Michael Moore when he hears someone drop a glazed donut a block away.
And within minutes, they were hand-fed a heavily-edited, minute-long video depicting a leathery-skinned old guy standing next to a young white kid in a MAGA hat. So they raced off to immediately post their first, restrained accounts, with subtle titles like, “Sacred Native Elder nearly lynched by racist mob of Trump-supporting Stepford Children,” and “Bad Orange Man blows dog whistle, Sends bloodthirsty white-privilege junkies to dismember and consume saintly Minority Speaker of Truth to Power.”
Ten minutes later, when our leading leftist journalists had entered what is technically known as their “refractory period,” some sane citizens watched the entire video of the encounter, and Googled Nathan Phillips, and the MSM accounts turned out to be what AOC would call “morally right.” (Which is to say, not even factually close to the truth.)
Read these accounts, and see if you can spot the subtle differences:
MSM version: Nathan Phillips is a super-respected Native-American elder and Medal of Honor Winner who served many years in Vietnam. He was surrounded and threatened by obnoxious, age-ist and racist white kids who chanted, “Build the Wall,” and who blocked his attempts to get away from them.
Factual version: As a young man, Mr. Phillips had a history of assault and alcohol-related crimes. He did spend two years in the Marines – and God bless him for that – but he spent his service time in El Toro. (For those of you who didn’t get your Master’s in Vietnamese Geography, “El Toro” is not just outside of Da Nang. It is, in fact, in “California.”) (Which, if I’m not mistaken, is a Spanish word which means “very, very far from Vietnam.”)
Although he didn’t win a Medal of Honor or a Purple Heart, he was a three-time winner of the prestigious “AWOL” award. His service designation was not “mortar-man” or “tank commander” or “specialist-in-swimming-with-a-serrated-knife-clenched-in-his teeth.”
His job was actually listed as “util RefrigMan,” which my crack research team tells me is a refrigeration mechanic.
I’m not making that up. He basically spent the war years as a Maytag repairman in California.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not one to talk. I’ve never served, and I couldn’t repair a fridge to save my life. On the other hand, I’ve never claimed to be an amalgam of Crazy Horse, Rambo and Gandhi, either.
But boy, did Phillips get a lot of support from empty-headed celebrities. Fright-wigged decapitation-fantasizer Kathy Griffin called for the innocent high school kids to be harassed and publicly shamed. Several dozen talking heads on the various CNN and CNN-adjacent networks aroused themselves with fantasies of what punishments should be inflicted on these evil white kids.
Leftist pols got in on the act, too. A typical tweet came from Rep. Deb Haaland, New Mexico Democrat and a Native American, who accused the students of “blatant hate,” and praised the way Phillips “put his life on the line for our country.”
Yes. Because those fridges are very heavy, and if you are super-drunk when you work on one, it can fall and squish you. That’s probably why he kept going AWOL, because he was tormented by ice-maker-related flashbacks.
Back to our story: the full video shows that Phillips was the aggressor, walking into the middle of the Catholic kids, banging his drum in their faces and trying to provoke them into a response. In an act of restraint that’s hard for me to imagine young males are capable of, they did not smash his drum over his head, or respond in any way. They did not chant, “Build the Wall,” as Cochise Frigidaire claimed, but sang their school song.
Other than that, the MSM got the story absolutely right.
The low point in this story for me was when I heard that Reza Aslan posted a pic of one of the Catholic kids, asking, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”
First, I was heartbroken to hear that a magnificent Christ-figure lion was dissing the kids. But then I realized that the “Aslan” here was the tiny-brained leftist who was fired by CNN two years ago for some anti-Trump tweets that were too obscene and vile even for CNN.
And if that description – too malicious to be a CNN host – seems like it’s almost metaphysically impossible, I agree. It’s like the other members of the Grateful Dead staging an intervention, in which they tell you that they are worried about your drug use.
But more importantly, I don’t like that TB (tiny-brain) Aslan may have violated my trademark by pointing out the innocent kid’s face-punchability rating.
Those of you who have followed my work for CO over the last several years probably remember all the R&D money that I put into developing the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI)™ in 2017.
If so, you’ll also remember that Harry Reid has been designated the proud holder of the highest SFPI of all time. But there are tons of people with higher SFPI ratings than the innocent Catholic kid, including Hillary, Barack, Trump, Lizzie Warren, Jim Acosta, Scowling Wookie, Spartacus, Ted Cruz (sadly), and a cast of thousands more.
In fact, the Catholic kid couldn’t even compete in the Minors Division of the SFPI™ tournament, because the undisputed champion there is David “Kewpie Hitler” Hogg, of potty-mouth Parkland gun-grabbing fame.
Anyway, nice job, MSM. Once again you’ve proven that no one should ever trust you about anything, ever again.
Finally, I thought I’d let everyone in on yet another New Year’s Resolution that I’ve made. (At this pace, I should be making my last New Year’s resolution of 2019 right around the beginning of July. Spoiler alert: I resolve to put on my biggest fireworks show yet!)
As a mature male with the ability to grow the 5 o’clock shadow/beard of a mature male who identifies as a male, I’ve been a user of shaving equipment since I turned 13. (Did I skip right past the sad, weak little mustache stage of many adolescent males, and go straight to an impressive full beard that allowed me to begin dating college girls before I could legally drive, you ask? Yes, thanks for asking.) (Also, how did you get access to my 9th grade yearbook photo?)
When I saw the Gillette ad lecturing me about the dangers of toxic masculinity, I immediately had two thoughts:
1.Would any women’s fashion or haircare or makeup company EVER dare to insult their core audience this way? “Hey ladies, you know how you are always making the men around you utterly miserable, with your constant nagging and terrible taste in movies and ridiculous voting choices and lack of driving ability and incomprehensible lack of appreciation for football and carpentry and logical argument and the music of Johnny Cash? And the way that men die earlier, largely because your soul-sucking complaints eventually rob us of the will to live? And don’t get us started on your unconscionable use of sex as a weapon. Anyway, please buy all of our products, you awful, awful harpies.”
No. You will never see that ad.
(*Also, please note that the preceding paragraph was written for humorous purposes only, and obviously has no relation to any female, living or dead, and especially not to anyone to whom I might be married, for example.)
2.Where is my Gillette razor, so that I can put it in the vice and then smash it with a framing hammer in “The Testosterone Zone” (which is what I have just now decided to call my workshop, where I keep a variety of power- and hand-tools which I use to build and maintain what we amateur anthropologists call “civilization”)?
Ugh. Hey Gillette, thanks for the timely warning about the terrible dangers of “toxic masculinity.”
Here’s hoping that the men of America will soon teach you a little lesson about the horrors of “toxic profitability.”
Also, just in case you were hoping that whatever you lost by insulting your male customers might be made up for by increased sales to female customers – who, after all, need razors to use on their legs and underarms? Well, think again.
Because the kind of women who get their gender-non-binary underwear in a bunch because of their outrage about toxic masculinity also happen to be the kind of women who do NOT shave either their legs or their armpits.
Enjoy bankruptcy, you condescending jerks!
On a related note, if any of the good people at the Schick razor company are looking for a sarcastic blogger with a firm jawline and no aversion to lucrative sponsorships – coincidentally, someone who was also a finalist for People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, as far as I know — please contact me through CO at the Cautious Optimism page.
Martin Simpson 