Sage Steele has broken her silence about what she says is “hypocrisy” at ESPN. Steele, now a former ESPN employee, was a guest on Megyn Kelly’s YouTube show Thursday, just days after leaving the network.
Steele provided the “life update” on X, formerly Twitter, saying her lawsuit against the company was settled, and she decided to leave so she can “exercise my first amendment rights more freely.
Before Steele spoke, Kelly showed a montage of ESPN broadcasters voicing political opinions on the air.
“All I ever wanted was consistency,” Steele told Kelly. “And if we are allowing my peers to go on social media, much less on our own airwaves, saying things that have nothing to do with sports, that are political … then I should be allowed on my personal time to give my opinion on my experiences personally, without telling others what to do or how to feel being biracial or being forced to take a vaccine.
“I think that’s just what breaks my heart. That there were different rules for me than everyone else.”
Steele reflected on the time she felt forced to apologize after another incident with ESPN brass.
ESPN’s Sage Steele also expressed support for Riley Gaines.(Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
“I did not want to apologize. I fought. I fought, and I begged and I screamed. And I was told that if I want to keep my job, I have to apologize. And I need my job,” she said. “And they knew that.”
However, Steele said, issues continued, and “there were events taken away as I’ve worked years to get.”
“It’s interesting. I think in anything in life, quite often, we say, ‘All right, one more time and it’s over, and I’m done …’ I knew that there was a line somewhere,” she explained.
That line was the Rose Bowl Parade. Steele had covered it previously but not this year.
“I knew that, mentally, I had checked out and was heartbroken again at the hypocrisy of the rules. A rule’s a rule for everybody or nobody. You can’t pick and choose, especially if it’s just one person. It’s just me.”
Sage Steele speaks onstage during The Players Tailgate Hosted By Bobby Flay for Super Bowl LVII Feb. 12, 2023, in Phoenix, Ariz.(Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Bullseye Event Group)
Steele’s lawsuit accused ESPN of selective enforcement of its policy that bars news employees from commenting on politics and social issues.
The suit alleged ESPN “violated Connecticut law and Steele’s rights to free speech based upon a faulty understanding of her comments and a nonexistent, unenforced workplace policy that serves as nothing more than pretext” and claimed the network relied on “inaccurate third-party accounts of Steele’s comments” and “did not immediately review the actual comments or the context in which they were made.”
She joined ESPN in 2007 after starting out at Comcast SportsNet. She became one of the mainstays on “SportsCenter” and made appearances on “NBA Countdown.”
The Georgia Indictment Was Triggered by Fake News.
The indictment against President Donald Trump and 18 lawyers, aides, and supporters has been widely criticized, but even many of the critics have missed the most important flaw: the fact that the entire grand jury investigation began with a bit of fake news.
The fake news was reporting that Trump had told Georgia officials, by telephone, to fabricate votes.
In early January 2020, for example, Trump was reported to have told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.
Actually, what Trump said was: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state” (emphasis added).
Trump was not giving an order. He was talking about his own feelings. And as Scott Adams noted this week, Trump was speaking in the context of believing he had already won the state. He believed the proof was out there; he didn’t need to make anything up.
As George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has noted: “While others have portrayed the statement as a raw call for fabricating the votes, it seems more likely that Trump was swatting back claims that there was no value to a statewide recount by pointing out that he wouldn’t have to find a statistically high number of votes to change the outcome of the election. It is telling that many politicians and pundits refuse to even acknowledge that obvious alternate meaning.”
The term “find” is also used colloquially, and often, in the context of counting votes. Political analysts on television routinely say that a candidate needs to “find” votes in one area or another, having already been cast, as results are reported by local precincts.
A week later, there was a mistaken report in the Washington Post on Jan. 9, 2021, that Trump had urged a Georgia election investigator, later named as Frances Watson, to “find the fraud.” The original headline was: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”
The Post later had to issue a correction: “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there.” But the inaccurate version of the Post‘s original story was repeated throughout the mainstream media before the correction was made.
That does not mean Trump’s conduct was praiseworthy. But there was nothing in his conversations — properly reported, at least — to suggest that he had done anything illegal, especially given that he knew lawyers and skeptical officials were listening to him.
Nevertheless, these reports were partly what prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch her investigation, starting with a “special grand jury” and leading to the current indictment.
CNN recently reported that the conversation with Brad Raffensperger were what “kicked off the local district attorney’s investigation.” That conversation, and others, were reported — and misquoted — in a highly partisan context, when Democrats were looking for any way to punish Trump and his supporters.
In Trump’s second impeachment trial, for example, which centered on the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the Democrats’ House impeachment managers presented the fake “find the fraud” quote as if it were real, effectively falsifying evidence in the Senate.
It was not the first time fake news had factored into an impeachment.
Trump’s first impeachment was prompted by misleading, second-hand, anonymous media reports about his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The transcript, which Trump declassified and released, showed that there had been no “quid pro quo” for an investigation into (accurate, it turns out) suspicions of Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine. But Democrats stuck with the fake news, even making up a fake transcript.
The pattern in both cases was the same: incriminating media reports, based on leaks that likely came from anti-Trump sources, triggered an investigation that had too much political momentum to be stopped once the contrary, first-hand evidence emerged.
Another fake news story that helped launch an investigation was the claim that Trump asked Russia to hack into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump joked about Russia finding Clinton’s emails during a press conference in July 2017. His critics claimed that his rather obvious attempt at humor was, in fact, an invitation to a geopolitical rival to commit espionage.
That prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to start a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. That investigation fed the “Russia collusion” hoax, which became an attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election. No major figure — not Clinton, nor her lawyers, nor the officials responsible for pushing the lie — was indicted, though Special Counsel John H. Durham convicted an FBI lawyer of falsifying an email (and lost two other cases, likely, in part, because of jury nullification).
It is unclear whether the “special grand jury” in Georgia heard about the calls to Raffensperger and Watson, though it reportedly heard recordings of another call, with Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston.
All three calls are referred to in the indictment approved by a formal, subsequent grand jury on Monday. But the indictment does not cite the falsely reported quotes from those calls, or even an accurate version of Trump’s statement to Raffensperger, which launched Willis’s investigation.
That is because the actual quotes from those calls are, arguably, exculpatory, just like the Ukraine transcript. But it is too late.
Once again, the partisan media, amplifying the political prejudices of anti-Trump officials, has brought the country to the brink.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court. The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.
In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.
Shrimp and grits are the uptown incarnation of staples from the Carolina Lowcountry, where the Gullah Geechee people, who live on the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, would catch small creek shrimp in their bare hands to eat themselves or sell on the streets of the cities and towns. Grits, from ground dried corn, have a more troublesome history: they were distributed by slaveholders as part of slaves’ food allowances. Historical records show Carolina slave children would get one pint of grits a day for most of the year, with salt.
Clarence Thomas’s mother tongue was not English, but Gullah — a lilting language that sounds like music, a mysterious linguistic cocktail of English, Creole and West African. (Experts disagree on its exact origin.) Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, the second child of Leola Williams. His father abandoned them when he was two. When he was six, his younger brother accidentally burned down the shack they lived in, and they were both sent to be raised by his grandfather in Savannah.
This is the origin story of today’s most hated Supreme Court justice, if you poll the Slate audience. It is also the main focus for a well-funded, well-organized Democratic campaign to put the Supreme Court under siege — not just in the press, but in the public too. And many on the left seem to like it that way. If you can’t transform the judiciary through the process of government, transform it by making it a job people are afraid to take.
In March 2020 Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood surrounded by protesters and pointed at the Supreme Court Building, bellowing: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Since then, the last of the three branches of government with respect for norms has indeed been at the center of a whirlwind — even as Democrats repeatedly claim to be the stalwart defenders of democracy, norms, the Constitution and the rule of law.
When the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the most significant culture-war decision in a generation — was leaked, the justices’ families and children were mapped and targeted, and their homes picketed illegally without any reaction from Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. A twenty-six-year-old man even traveled across the country intending to murder Brett Kavanaugh and his family. He showed up on the justice’s suburban street with a Glock-17 and a plethora of tools — zip ties, duct tape, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a crowbar and padded boots for stealth. With last-minute misgivings, he called 911 and told the operator he had traveled from California “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice.” His online messages showed he had wanted to kill as many as three; he had conducted internet searches for “most effective place to stab someone,” “assassin skills,” “assassin equipment” and “assassinations.” He was arrested and indicted — he pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. (Authorities still claim to have no idea who leaked the opinion.)
In the opening episode of a podcast series focused on Clarence Thomas, Slate host Joel Anderson begins with his own peaceful version of a home confrontation. In “America’s Blackest Child,” he knocks on the screened-porch door of a modest single-story white house on a Savannah street. The ninety-four-year-old Leola Williams, happy to oblige a visitor, welcomes Anderson inside, where he discovers the shocking scene you would expect from any proud Southern mother: pictures of her family, including her son Clarence, covering the walls.
Anderson sounds awkward in the podcast audio from Mrs. Williams’s home, as if he knows he’s crossed a line. But he showed no such qualms when he appeared on television with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan to promote the episode, instead expressing surprise there was no security to stop him outside the house. “If they had had a chance to tell me to not come, they probably would have, but when you show up it’s hard to turn someone away from your front door,” he said. The MSNBC segment is mostly devoted to accusing Thomas of being a hypocrite for his anticipated ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard. (Thomas joined the 6-3 majority in the decision announced on June 29.) Speculating on his likely vote, Hasan described it as an example of a minority “pulling up the drawbridge after themselves.” Asked why Thomas would choose to become a member of the “radical right,” Anderson had the answer: “He wanted to make money.”
Money is central to the story the left wants to tell about Thomas and the Supreme Court more generally. As is this little white house in Savannah. A ProPublica investigation revealed this spring that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow bought the property from Thomas and his family several years ago.
The relationship between Thomas and Crow, a major Republican donor the justice and his wife Virginia say is a close friend they’ve known for years, has been the primary focus of ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series, which seeks to pin all manner of ethical lapses and alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior on conservative justices.
ProPublica’s work has been the centerpiece of a flood of reporting across multiple media outlets focusing on what is being framed as a Supreme Court irrevocably compromised by relationships with well-heeled benefactors. The original series is a slog of filings and reports interspersed with vacation photos dug up from corners of the internet and quotes from various ethics experts — who also are of the left — denouncing the dire nature of a corrupt court.
At first glance, many of these stories look pretty bad. They paint a picture of lifetime-appointed justices palling around with powerful billionaires who shepherd them on fishing trips and to hunting lodges, take them on vacations to exotic locales and contribute indirectly or directly to supporting their legacies. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet even slightly closer inspection reveals that there are enormous reasons to take the breathless reporting with a pinch of salt.
The best example yet of the absurdly disproportionate reporting came in an over-the-top piece by Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian. The article revealed that seven Washington attorneys had used Venmo to send Christmas party money to a top aide of Thomas’s. Noticeably absent from the hair-on-fire “conflict of interest!” piece were the amounts in question, which turned out, according to one of the payers, to be $20 for an annual “lunch buffet consisting of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken tenders” held for Thomas’s former clerks. Scandalous!
Then there’s the travel. The Judicial Conference, the administrative body which sets the rules for things such as travel disclosures, requires justices to report where they go, when they went and the nature of expenses, but not total costs. They are not required to disclose “any food, lodging or entertainment received as ‘personal hospitality of any individual.’” The rules further define the scope of hospitality: “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization… on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”
The argument that the loophole should be smaller might be valid, but the rules are what they are. Demanding justices retroactively report something they weren’t required to report at the time is absurd — ex post facto rulemaking, if you will — and implying they were doing something untoward by following the rules as written is disingenuous. And it’s clear enough that justices of many stripes have long proceeded by the ethics rules as they stand.
The New York Times acknowledged in their editorial on the issue that “Justice Stephen Breyer took at least 225 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, including trips to Europe, Japan, India and Hawaii… Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a private tour of Israel in 2018 that was paid for by an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, who has had business before the court.” And OpenSecrets reported that the top two trip-getters in 2021 and 2022 were tied, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan both at eight. So yes, both sides do it.
In fact, the single most overlooked story in recent years may relate to the Notorious RBG. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a $1 million prize given to her by the left-leaning globalist Berggruen Institute raised eyebrows (the Judicial Conference limits honoraria to $2,000), but RBG said she would instead donate the amount to a variety of charities. Only later did it become clear that she had wanted the list of recipients to remain hidden, and Berggruen complied on its requisite Form 990 — preventing the public from knowing if any of the recipients had business before the court.
Republican senator Mike Lee raised the issue in a July Judiciary Committee hearing on a court-targeting bill backed by Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin. “This might have some very significant ramifications if she was still serving on the court,” Lee said. “We don’t yet know exactly what was done with that, whether she carried out the apparent intention of the stated purpose of intent at the outset to donate it to charity.”
As for that house in Georgia: Crow’s spokesman has said he ultimately wants to turn Thomas’s childhood home into a museum, “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.” Thomas’s share of the sale was a third of $133,000, and it’s still not entirely clear if he even reported it incorrectly, though he reportedly intends to amend it as necessary.
The longer this spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds. The Washington Post devoted a 3,300-word hit piece on the effort spearheaded by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to honor Thomas on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment. The public relations campaign was designed to push back against a fictionalized HBO glorification of Anita Hill, who testified against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, and included the promotion of a documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.
The Post paints this entirely typical PR campaign in dark, secretive terms, even drilling down to investigate a “Justice Thomas Fan Account” which posted clips and quotes from the justice. “The account’s posts about the justice generated nearly 21,000 impressions,” the Post reports — a laughably small amount, no offense to the earnest creator.
The Post has yet to conduct a similar deep dive into the promotional campaign around the 2018 documentary RBG, which was acquired and distributed by Participant Media, a production company with an explicitly leftist activist mission founded by Canadian billionaire and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, who has given millions to leftist causes. Nor have they shown any interest in investigating the promotion and creation of the 2018 dramatic film, On the Basis of Sex, based on a script by Ginsburg’s nephew, and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer (though the Post’s Style section did publish a meet-cute piece titled “That time Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked out Armie Hammer,” doing their part to promote the film’s Washington premiere). Participant Media also produced this laudatory fictionalized biopic for roughly $20 million, though it’s unclear if that amount also paid for the movie’s promotional pop rap “Here Comes the Change” performed by Ke$ha, with official artwork by Shepard Fairey, or the Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video, which as of this writing has 818,000 views on YouTube — tragically, the fewest of any Ke$ha music video.
Stepping back from all of this, what we see is a series of breathless reports designed to inflate perceptions of bias without the facts necessary to establish anything of the sort. At most, justices may have to refile forms or clarify their reporting to the ethics body. Due to a change in policy by the Judicial Conference this spring, they’ll also have to report when they fly on a private jet — something they didn’t have to do before. But if that’s all you think it takes to buy a Supreme Court justice, imagine what Hunter Biden could get you for $5 million.
“All these breathless ‘investigations’ amount to nothingburger concern-trolling of justices whose opinions progressive activists don’t like,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. “The left simply can’t stand that a majority of the Supreme Court is finally, after decades of hand-waving, interpreting the Constitution based on what it says instead of nebulous conceptions of social justice.”
At the Slate podcast taping, Anderson’s first guest of the night was Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of course — his Democratic colleague, Illinois senator Dick Durbin, was supposed to be there too, but he came down with Covid. Anderson’s first question jumped right to the point: given all the horrible things now established about Clarence Thomas, he asked: “So Senator Whitehouse, do you think he should resign?”
“In all decency, he should,” Whitehouse said, to applause. “But there’s just no world in which that happens that I can foresee. He’s just that determined to stay there and make his points and exercise his resentments.”
“I told my caucus, the Senate caucus, that we have a problem with the Supreme Court: it’s now a political organization, we have to treat it as such. And I basically got booed back into my chair,” Whitehouse said. “I got told ‘oh, no, no, the Supreme Court relies on public confidence, we can’t possibly do that.’ So I realized I had to do my homework. And that’s where… the book and all of that came from. Prove your case, write your prosecution memo.”
In Whitehouse’s frame, an “omertà” of secretive groups funded by malevolent billionaires — whom he tags as fossil-fuel interests bent on preventing bipartisan climate-change policy — are operating the court like shabby robed puppets.
“We don’t know all of that yet,” Whitehouse said. “I think we’re going to find out a lot more.” Invited to make the case for his latest piece of legislation targeting all of this (is this a Slate podcast or a Democratic activism group?), Whitehouse calls it “one of the silver linings of this set of really sickening revelations about the Supreme Court.”
“This is a multi-front battle,” Whitehouse said. “Moving the legislation forward, I think we’ll hit tipping points as the behavior of the Supreme Court justices becomes more well known, as further revelations come. We’re preparing for that moment.”
There’s little subtlety in Whitehouse’s comments to a friendly DC crowd about the degree to which the activity swirling around the Supreme Court is an ideological information operation. Democratic politicians have all the reason in the world to promote the effort to do so: the biggest funders of their partisan priorities are all paying for it.
Of the justices targeted in the recent spate of hit pieces, Samuel Alito has been the most aggressive in pushing back. He wrote a prebuttal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after ProPublica sent him a series of questions inquiring about a fishing trip he took as a guest of right-leaning billionaire Paul Singer. Alito’s response was thorough and ruthless, detailing the skewed and inaccurate framing of the piece and prompting ProPublica’s story to be redrafted, with an explainer for the “Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal.”
If leaking Alito’s opinion in Dobbs was supposed to have cowed the justice, it clearly hasn’t. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told the Journal in April. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” The experience prompted the justice to be more confrontational. If he were a meme, one former clerk joked, Alito would be Michael Jordan in The Last Dance: “And I took that personally.”
Whitehouse and his fellow leftists would do anything to alter the conservative course the court has taken in recent years — even radical steps like court-packing. In the fall of 2019, along with four other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse sent a brief to the court on a New York gun rights case. “The Supreme Court is not well, and the people know it,” they warned. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured.’”
For Whitehouse and those who would blow up the Supreme Court, dark money spent to this end is the good kind, and the activist groups and the journalists they push to echo their priorities are the noble pursuers of truth. The Judicial Crisis Network is a conspiracy, but progressive organizations like Fix the Court and Demand Justice are pure crusaders. The conservative Federalist Society is evil, but the leftist American Constitution Society is good. What this effort seeks to establish is a mutually justifying feedback loop. Democratic senators level severe allegations, activists parcel fever swamp stories to the press who then report on it, allowing the senators to point to these reports as legitimizing what was claimed in the first place.
Assisting in this effort are multiple billionaire-funded advocacy groups, bent on echoing the case for extreme measures to transform the court. They include Fix the Court, a spinoff from the New Venture Fund, managed by for-profit company Arabella Advisors, the center of the left’s dark money network — it spent over $1 billion in liberal efforts in 2020. Demand Justice, another Soros-backed group, was more explicitly focused on the push to pack the court — its board includes Elie Mystal, an MSNBC commentator who is most famous for calling the Constitution “trash.”
“While Whitehouse is championing supposed ‘ethics reform’ at the Supreme Court, he himself has sponsored environmental legislation pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, a group that has paid his wife as a consultant and policy advisor for years,” JCN president Carrie Severino said. “This isn’t about ethics for Whitehouse, but rather increasing the number of tools the left has at its disposal to intimidate the conservative members of the court.”
The central role of ProPublica should not escape notice. It was founded and continues to be funded by the Sandler family of San Francisco, who sold their bank Golden West to Wachovia right before its ludicrously profitable collection of dubious adjustable-rate mortgages played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. Their family foundation is a huge backer of leftist causes, including the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch and Earthjustice.
Today ProPublica is also backed by a who’s-who of partisan Democratic billionaire donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Sussman and, until it was compelled to return the first tranche of a $5 million donation, notorious crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. All this billionaire largesse helps ProPublica pay top dollar for staff — its editor in chief currently makes more than $100,000 more each year than a justice of the Supreme Court.
For some reason, these billionaires don’t raise the hackles of Sheldon Whitehouse or Joel Anderson, or lots of others who are likely to tune into a multipart Slate podcast framing Clarence Thomas as a man who sold out black people for white money. Or, as one of the night’s other guests proclaimed of Thomas’s long ago divorce, “trading the black doll for the white doll.” There are hoots, laughs and murmurs in response.
At the opening of the show, Anderson led off with an odd extended monologue focused on Thomas’s high-school sports prowess, interspersed with audio from interviews with multiple figures from his past, most of whom spoke in praise of his arm strength with a football and gift for quick passing on the basketball court. The audience laughed when they are told he tried out for the Holy Cross football team but that he struggled taking hits; Anderson closes by expressing skepticism that the 5’8” Clarence could ever dunk. The audience claps.
They clap to confirm each other in their viewpoints. To remind each other that anger at the Supreme Court, over abortion or affirmative action or everything else, isn’t a mark of Democratic impotence or foolish mismanagement of the filibuster or RBG’s refusal to retire under Obama, you see — it’s those evil fossil-fuel billionaires like Harlan Crow who are to blame. Because as the good Senator Whitehouse, a son and grandson of ambassadors and bishops, assured them at the podcast party, it’s Thomas who is a creature of “resentments.” It’s the skinny Gullah kid who ran through the Lowcountry scrub, the place where his ancestors ate their pint of grits and the creek shrimp they could catch, boiled in the brackish salt water for flavor. That kid is the one who took the wrong lesson from the American experience, who wants to pull up the drawbridge behind him. You see, you understand. He’s the resentful one. We can all agree about that.
There is no apparent awareness that the persecution of Thomas is rooted in their resentments: not of his rulings as such, but the fact that he survived the full force of their apparatus, that his origin story is his survival. They have to destroy him because he exists: because the force of the counterexample shows them to be impotent, shows there is another path. It is a species of derangement. As a threat, Clarence Thomas is literally existential. Of course Clarence Thomas can dunk. He’s been dunking on these folks for years. All they can do is podcast about it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.
Radical Leftists Block Doors of California Capitol Chanting “Shut It Down!” – Someone Call the DOJ and Launch the Early Morning Raids!
Attention Merrick Garland’s DOJ: We have another insurrection to report.
Radical leftists blocked the entrance to the California Capitol on Wednesday. They were chanting, “Shut it down!” and blocking all access to the building.
Bill Essayli tweeted: “The California Capitol was stormed today by radical leftists. They’re yelling “shut it down” which is a direct attempt to obstruct official proceedings. No word yet from DOJ on how many have been indicted for insurrection. I’ll wait…”
State worker protest is now blocking the front doors of the CA Capitol legislative swing space. Multiple hearings are happening inside. pic.twitter.com/k1Md0Ldhqe
This article comes from the “BuzzLoving.com” website and is written by a Trump-hating leftist calling itself “Milla” — you can see all 81 pages of articles it’s written by going HERE.
“Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes of the 1960s South” – US Supreme Court strikes blow against LGBTQ+ rights.
–Original Article headline
Before I get into the article proper, let me state my personal opinion to the rainbow community at large.
You have the right to be whatever you chose to be. Just like I have the right to be myself. You DON’T have the right to demand that I think your way and kowtow to your fantasies on penalty of being beaten, killed or labeled a bigot, a Nazi, or any other derogatory term you come up with. I don’t have the right to sue you for being what you chose to be, but you don’t have the right to try to enforce your fantasies on me via a lawsuit, either. You respect me, I’ll respect you, even if we don’t agree on life choices. Simple. That’s the way a mature person behaves.
End of disclaimer.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of an evangelical Christian web designer from Colorado who refused to work on invites for same-sex marriage, giving a significant blow to the rights of LGBTQ couples.
The Supreme Court cited free speech.
Evangelical Christian web designer Lorie Smith has a free speech right under the Constitution’s First Amendment to decline to endorse messages she disagrees with, it has been decided. This one decision could cause other owners of similar creative businesses to evade penalties under laws in 29 states that defend the rights of the LGBTQ community. (Notice the defendant is a biological woman. –TPR)
The statement from the Justice
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place, where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” He added, “At the same time, this court has also recognized that no public accommodation law is immune from the demands of the Constitution. In particular, this court has held public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech.”
Shutterstock photo
Smith sued on hypothetical grounds.
Smith opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds and sued the state in 2016 because she said she would like to accept customers planning opposite-sex weddings but reject requests made by same-sex couples. She was never disciplined for declining a same-sex couple, and it’s unclear if she ever did. Instead, she sued on hypothetical grounds.
(THIS IS NOT “HYPOTHETICAL” Colorado anyone? And the author’s painfully obvious bias is on full display here.–TPR)
Smith celebrated, but many expressed worry and dread.
(How many is “many” there, cupcake? — TPR)
“This is a victory not just for me but for all of us; whether you share my beliefs or completely disagree with them, free speech is for everyone,” Smith told the press. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that this was a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities” and a type of “reactionary exclusion,” calling it “heartbreaking.”
“Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes.”
Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman shared that this was a major blow to human rights, writing, “Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes of the 1960s South & posit that the owners attest that they have sincere religious beliefs, reinforced by their pastor every Sunday, that Blacks are inferior and that serving them would force them to endorse a message they disagree with..” Litman added, “That’s where we are headed.”
(Oh oh, Not kowtowing is “racist” now, is it? *facepalm*– TPR)
“The opinion is out there like a loaded gun.”
The lawyer also clarified, “To be clear, I’m not saying that’s where we are headed, although to paraphrase Justice Jackson, the opinion is out there like a loaded gun for someone who wants to go that way. The point for today is just that the opinion doesn’t have a limiting principle that forecloses that result.”
(Bloviate much? Oh, I forgot, you’re not only a person with a law degree, but you’re also a bureaucrat. Silly me. –TPR)
Another important takeaway
Time wrote, “Put plainly: states can try to pass local anti-bigotry laws, but national religious liberties still supersede them.” The publication also connected how the ruling came a year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and Court watchers predicted that things would only get worse for women as well as LGBTQ rights.
(“For women?” Really. Sorry, that just won’t wash. Maybe for those females who are still emotional babies, but not for anyone who accepts the responsibility for their own actions. –TPR)
Imagine if liberals or the Dems had a nationwide messaging apparatus, an actual propaganda arm, which pumped out Jared Kushner’s name and alleged misdeeds daily, 100s of times. Then you start to understand the messaging imbalance in this country & how GOP gets away with so much. https://t.co/IZ9zlwre2a
Having terrible so called Journalists doesn't help. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
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Why CNN is failing. All you have to do is look at their so called Journalists that they have. Now of course you do have MSNBC wh most likely is worse, but they have NBC as a back up and has the finances to back MSNBC. CNN does not. Below are some of CNN gem stories. Or should we call it Hoax stories.
Let me guess. An Ironworker? (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
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What’s the media’s problem with black masculinity? The only black men now being showcased are those who’ve conceded their masculinity.
No experience in my many decades on this planet felt more degrading than being repeatedly referred to as “intimidating” by my former boss. As far as I know, the affluent, influential white women that I used to work with at Condé Nast lost their right to refer to their black male employees in such racially laden language long before the death of George Floyd. Especially when I was merely asking my (mostly white and female) underlings to simply do their jobs.
I’m reminded of this charge every time I see a black man done up like a woman — which is seemingly all the time these days. Take Alex Newell and J. Harrison Ghee, who were awarded Best Actor statues at the Tony Awards in June, and both accepted them clad in colorful gowns and full makeup. Or Billy Porter, who donned platform heels and a high-collared, vaguely clerical dress to receive his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last December. Or look in the pages of Architectural Digest, which recently featured RuPaul on its cover and — during my time working there — profiled the homes of celebrity stylist Law Roach along with Christopher Griffin, also known as the Plant Kween. All black, all stridently positioned and presented as femme.
Don’t get me wrong. I am gay and African American and appreciate efforts to showcase the widest range of men like myself in popular media. The problem is that the only black men — particularly gay black men — now being showcased appear to be those who’ve conceded their masculinity.
To be clear, there is a long tradition of black men costuming themselves as women across screens large and small. Indeed, Tyler Perry — perhaps the most successful black culture creator of all time — first attained stardom as Madea, the smart-talking Aunt Jemima-like caricature who helped make him a billionaire. Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx and Martin Lawrence have also cross-dressed for Hollywood — as have Shawn and Marlon Wayans, whose 2004 cult hit White Chicks rendered them not merely as women, but as white women to boot.
But this most recent embrace of African-American gender ambiguity marks a worrisome evolution from the era of Murphy and Madea. This should come as little surprise. Back in 2007, Oscar-nominated African-American film director John Singleton was already making clear that he was “tired of all these black men in dresses,” going on to wonder, rather presciently, “how come nobody’s protesting that?”
Three years later, Dave Chappelle straight-up declared to Oprah Winfrey, “why all these brothers gotta wear a dress?” Fresh off his $50 million fuck-you to Tinseltown, Chappelle went on to describe himself as a “conspiracy theorist… connecting dots that maybe shouldn’t be connected.” Nearly fifteen years later, those dots — and the power dynamics they connect — have never been clearer.
From MSNBC to major fashion magazines, black women — propelled by the intersecting potency of #MeToo and BLM — now lead much of mainstream media. But this status shift has yet to be extended to black men. In fact, when I became head at Alexa, the New York Post’s lifestyle broadsheet, in 2016, I was the only black male editor-in-chief at a major publication in the entire nation. There are still no others.
Things appeared to be slightly better in Britain, where Edward Enninful was appointed editor-in-chief of British Vogue in 2017. Unlike me — supremely skeptical of all things “woke” — Enninful proved masterful at navigating the ideological zeitgeist now required to succeed as a top corporate creative. He aggressively adopted the race- and gender-first mantras currently powering pop culture, even going as far as to suggest that British Vogue become “gender-neutral.” Yet Enninful was ousted in early June, a casualty of a losing power struggle with his American counterpart, Anna Wintour — the white female boss of my former white female boss with the nasty habit of calling me “intimidating.”
Coincidence, perhaps — but Enninful’s demise can’t help but remind me of Chappelle’s theorizing from so long ago. Women such as Wintour remain unrivaled gatekeepers to rarified worlds of elitism and privilege that are rapidly eroding all around them. Indeed, Wintour is credited with overhauling the sartorial standards of awards shows like the Tonys, where Newell and Ghee recently triumphed so glamorously.
Yet while they front as champions of diversity, these women actually promote a limited view of inclusiveness that reinforces the worst stereotypes of black men — scary, uncivilized, minstrel-like, dangerous. Rather than remedy such outdated views with truly comprehensive displays of what black manhood can be, they erase and neuter them instead. And there’s no better way to do so than to put these men in a dress.
As evidenced by Wintour’s now infamous banishing of the late Vogue editor André Leon Talley — who actually preferred elaborate capes rather than dresses — in the eyes of many powerful white women, powerful black men are little more than dispensable and disposable. Widely regarded as an inevitable successor to Wintour herself, Enninful is now making do with lucrative commercial ventures while staying on at Condé Nast in a hastily-manufactured “global advisory position.”
Meanwhile, as nearly 60 percent of black kids grow up without fathers, this year’s Pride month offered endless additional examples of dudes done up like ladies. Again: representation is a good thing — it matters. But most black men — gay or straight — bear little resemblance to Billy Porter in full make up. Sadly, with black men mostly absent from media C-suites, this is unlikely to change anytime soon — just as women like Wintour have probably always wanted it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2023 World edition.
Does the mainstream media need Competition? Ren LaForme/Poynter)
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Does the mainstream media need to bring back the ombudsman to restore credibility and trust? Liberal journalists should acknowledge it’s natural that people wronged by the Bidens would be welcomed by the conservative media, just as Trump-haters (like angry niece Mary Trump) would be celebrated by the liberal media.
In case you didn’t know, the MSM tends to leave out stories and articles that point out the wrong doings of the Biden Administration and their far left allies.
But they don’t pass up an opportunity to report negatively on Conservatives even when they don’t have verification on the articles that they print. How do we correct that?
Here’s parts of an interesting article from The Poynter.
Despite a slight increase since 2016, the public’s low level of trust in the mainstream media is of deep concern for the future of journalism.
Nearly half of people surveyed listed inaccuracies, bias and “fake news” as factors in their low confidence. A general lack of credibility and the perception that reporting is based on opinions was also cited for the loss of trust. But the Gallup poll did offer a glimmer of hope. Nearly 70% of all respondents said they felt trust could be restored somehow.
Would the return of ombudsmen improve public trust in the mainstream media? If so, what changes in the traditional ombudsman role would make its use even more effective? Eight former ombudsmen weigh in with their thoughts on the current state of journalism and the role of ombudsmen in the era of online journalism.
“The ombudsman was thought to be an independent, autonomous person, on a level with the editor-in-chief of the paper’s organizational level, but not reporting to anyone in the newspaper,” said Mark Prendergast, who from 2009 to 2012 was the ombudsman at Stars and Stripes.
Doughty bitch slapping the Biden administration. Again.
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DOJ files an appeal. Wishes to continue having Social Media block Conservatives. It looks as if the DOJ is upset that the federal judge put a clamp on their ability to spread false information using Social Media. Well the judge had good reason to do this.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at the Trump judge for granting a preliminary injunction, blocking the federal government from censoring conservatives online.
The State Department canceled its future meetings with Facebook just one day after US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who still honors the US Constitution, accused the Biden Regime of violating the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views in a blistering 155-page opinion.
So let’s see if it comes out that the government had other secret meetings with other Social Media Venues.
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