HBO's Bill Maher in 'What's behind the mask?' (It ain't pretty.)        

It was recently reported that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was again hospitalized, and receiving cancer treatment.

Gateway Pundit reported President Trump sent 'Well wishes' to Justice Ginsburg: 

"I hope she does really well. And our thoughts and prayers are with her. I'm hoping she's going to be fine. She's pulled through a lot. She's strong. Very tough. We wish her well."

On Friday, the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight also expressed compassion for a stricken fellow human being, political ideology being irrelevant.

"We learned today that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been diagnosed with another recurrence of pancreatic cancer," said Carlson. "Ginsburg is an impressively tough person. We wish her the best, and hope for her recovery."

Bill Maher, on that same evening's edition of HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher,  addressed the recent death of financier and Republican mega-donor David Koch.

"I guess I'm going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer...As for his remains, he asked to be cremated and have the ashes blown into a child's lungs...He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades...So, fuck him! I'm glad he's dead, and I hope it was painful!"

It's common for attention-hungry celebrities like Maher to be calculatedly provocative, even tastelessly so. And, as surely as if he'd rung Pavlov's bell, mainstream outlets awarded him ink.

Presumably, the baggypants commentator's terminal disease-wisecracks are supposed to be edgy. But they aren't. In this painfully polarized atmosphere, attacking the opposite camp with slimy drool is a safe option. 

No risk, at all.

Besides, Maher is no Lenny Bruce, an irreverent outsider pointing up establishment pretensions. He is as 'of' the status quo as any corporate-retained congressman. He lives comfortably in their bubble, and entertains at their parties as a tolerated court jester.

If public relations attentiveness and philosophical prejudice partly explain his vile spectacle, what else accounts for it?

Maher's is the latest example of liberals ditching pretended decency in this Trump Age. 

They once marched against racial prejudice. Now, they organize college courses against "whiteness."

They once advocated passionately for the rights of the accused, including the presumption of innocence. Now, to them, an unsubstantiated charge is as good as a conviction. Ask Justice Kavanaugh.

They once endorsed free speech and that 'unpopular voices' enjoy audience. Now, they enforce speech codes and shout down speakers.

They once were patriotic and genuinely concerned about blue-collar America. Now, they increasingly call for open borders and a recession that would greatly harm working folks.

And they once urged peace and extolled icons like King and Ghandi. But now, they cheer when Antifa riot and assault pedestrians; attack ICE facilities; guffaw about cancer; and, with repulsive gusto, urge presidential assassination.

They've dropped their masks. And what lies beneath is gruesome.

Latest media attack on Trump comes as union workers rally to his banner

A Pennsylvania Shell facility recently hosted President Trump. Employees who chose to attend were paid overtime, while those absent did not receive it.

But workers who stayed away were given the option of paid time off.

24/7 anti-Trump CNN cast the innocent phenomenon as an outrage. The non-story was picked up by numerous online sites like Axios, Huffpost, and Slate. Esquire and Newsweek hyped it.

Newspapers including the Washington Post and New York Times also desperately pumped oxygen into it. The Drudge Report linked to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette portrayal.

(A pre-event memo instructed employees to observe basic decorum while on the premises. Many writers treated that as somehow scandalous.)

There's no issue, here. The alternatives are 'meeting mandatory, without pay' and 'all employees paid, whether or not on job site.'

Paying workers who sat at home would be unfair to those in attendance. It was right to compensate employees who gave up their leisure time. 

As a United Food and Commercial Workers chief steward, I opposed the company practice of forcing workers to attend official events without compensation.

There was no issue here. Just an excuse for observers prejudiced against America's president to pretend anger.

Tomorrow, they'll find something else. Bet on that.

First Freedom under assault
It didn't start with Antifa. But it has worsened. 

Around 1988, I researched racist hate groups. Among literature I considered was a pamphlet from People Against Racist Terror (PART). PART boasted they'd shut down an address by one Prof. William Shockley.

According to his Wikipedia page, Shockley had been a research scientist at Bell Labs, in the 1940s and '50s. He helped develop the transistor. 

Shockley was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of three Bell scientists to receive a 1956 Nobel Prize. And he went on to a position at Stanford.

But later in life, Shockley endorsed Eugenics. He devoted himself to distasteful racial-genetics theories. He posited IQ levels to be of racial determination, and even suggested persons of lower intellectual capacity be paid to undergo sterilization.

I was revolted by Shockley's Eugenics proselytization, but I was no less aghast at PART's boasting of speech suppression. Stifling a citizen's First Amendment rights is as antithetical to American ideals as racism. 

In America, every man has the right to voice his arguments, whether they be fine or foul. Debate is healthy. The open exchange of ideas can expose the weakness of inferior ones, and make plain the superiority of others.

If banned and driven underground, ugly ideas can fester. They can seem plausible to uncritical listeners if not openly challenged. 

'The solution to bad speech is good speech,' long advised First Amendment theorists like Nat Hentoff. 

But in 2019, the Overton Window has been narrowed far beyond Shockley.

Now, keeping listeners from ever hearing legitimate messages is the goal. The hope is that boots-on-throats will profit totalitarian progressive advancement. 

Expression of any perspective not conformative to accepted progressive orthodoxy is undeservingly consigned to the same garbage yard as Eugenics. 

Patriotism, Constitutional regard, America First, and mainstream conservative thinking are cast as pernicious.

But those are not hostile fictions contrary to our nation's charter. They exist within reasonable parameters, and amplify traditional values and principles. Their enrich our Great Conversation.

Crushing others' freedom to communicate is an anti-intellectual exertion, in which the primacy of one voice is valued over an equally accessible 'marketplace of ideas' from which can come innumerable benefits.

Making impossible public speaking by ideological opposites, and otherwise denying First Amendment rights to citizens, is now a standard pursuit of Antifa.

Like PART in 1988, Antifa's masked rioters apparently believe their mission absolves them of censure for rights-deprivations. It may even be they do not believe adversaries deserve rights.

And just as their anti-free speech efforts are more expansive, so is the danger. Antifa's regular employ of physical violence, arson, and property destruction are criminal ploys predecessors seldom leveraged.

Ours is not a country in which popular revolution is justified. Unlike the time of our break from England, we are not oppressed by an unrepresentative monarchy.

The results of democratic elections aren't always to our liking. But losing is a possibility. We all know that, going in. 

No one side is superior, its desires to be adopted regardless of ballot outcome. Were that the case, elections would be unnecessary.

There is no moral argument to be made for raging against an orderly system through which men already enjoy the liberty to chart their country's course.

Antifa is not noble. They wield the same repressive cudgel as did a horde of barbarous despots before them.

Against speech. Liberty. Us.

Universal postpones anti-Trump The Hunt
But the paean to sporting-murders for political 'wrongthink' not forever gone. And its bigotry has real-world champions.                

Source: NowTheEndBegins.com 

Traditionally, in America, men were equally free to voice ideas without apprehension of assaults. That openness was understood to be a strength, something important in democracy's interest.

Today, though, we see Antifa rioting; nationwide assaults on MAGA hat-wearers; Maxine Waters' exhortation to physical confrontation; Big Tech censorship of conservative perspectives;  and Reps Ilhan Omar's and Ayanna Pressley's refusals to condemn attacks on ICE and desecrations of America's flag.

It was recently reported flyers that advocated Trump supporters be interned in death camps were posted in Long Island.

Universal has now postponed release of The Hunt, which depicted blue-collar "deplorables" being hunted and murdered by private-jet-flying 'I'm With Her' sorts.

I haven't seen it, in its entirety; just a trailer the studio issued. (Assumably, that clip presented the film as Universal wished the public to regard it.)

I won't be commenting on pacing, subplots, or lighting. But I can speak to its basic messages.

1932's The Most Dangerous Game may have been somewhat inspirational. But The Hunt, reportedly first titled Red State vs. Blue State, was/is Hollywood's rancid endorsement of political violence.

"Did you see what our ratfucker-in-chief just did?" one character asks.

"'At least The Hunt's coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables," another answers.

Beset by critical storms, Universal insisted that their movie had all along been a satire. Not having seen the film, I can't categorically reject that.

But the PR band-aid seems as implausible as Marianne Williamson putting her Birkenstocks up on the Resolute Desk. And it reminds of the many public figures who, contriving to deflect anger over outrageous utterances, declare they were 'just joking.'

The Hunt will eventually be released. And the satire justification will again be broadcast. But examination of its producer's record hardly inspires trust. 

Producer Jason Blum's hostility toward President Trump and conservative Americans has enjoyed representation in his previous works. His 2018 film The First Purge, for instance.  

"The marketing for The First Purge...trolls Trump, and the story doesn't shy away from how much the current administration has shaped the prequel, in which the NRA-backed third party New Founding Fathers of America (aka as the NFFA) rules the White House in a dystopian alternate reality," wrote USA Today.

(The poster's MAGA hat-appropriation was, laughed writer / executive producer James DeMonaco, "a nice goose on Donald.")

Previous Blumhouse TV efforts included a Showtime miniseries critical of late Fox News boss Roger Ailes. The effort was based on Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman's hostile 2014 book The Loudest Voice In the Room.

Sherman adapted his book for the screenplay. And he was later reported to be developing a scornful Trump movie. 

"We also acquired a book called Devil's Bargain, by Joshua Green, which is another sort of political piece," said Jeremy Gold, Blumhouse TV co-president, in a Feb. 2019 Lunacy Productions interview. That book focused on President Trump and Steve Bannon's "storming" of the White House.

All that makes it likely The Hunt's filmmakers' hearts were soundly in it. No joke.

It is theoretically possible for avowed despisers of Pres. Trump and the grassroots, regular-Americans MAGA movement to produce a politically centered movie not reflective of their sentiment. But it's as unlikely as doddering Joe Biden giving an entire speech without saying something stupid.

Controversy is free advertising. When The Hunt does appear on nationwide screens, cash registers will sing.


"Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves 'Elite,' but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order... to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our country!"
- Pres. Trump Aug. 9 tweet.

"We pay for everything. So, this country belongs to us," said one The Hunt elitist, as others who would soon murder Trump-backing deplorables sipped pricey libations in a luxuriously appointed boardroom and private jet.

As soon as I heard that, I recalled these words:

"I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product...I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward."
Hillary Clinton, at Mumai's 2018 India Today Conclave

And:

"The Blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail. And they still use the mail. They turn on the TV, and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There are no Real Housewives of Toledo, or CSI: Lubbock. There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you 'What are you wearing?' because the answer is always Target.

"There are two Americas...We have Chef Wolfgang Puck and they have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels, theirs have last year's Christmas lights. We've got legal bud, they've got Bud. We have anal bleaching, they have Congressman Steve King. The flyover states have become the passed-over states. That's why Red State voters are so pissed off. They don't hate us, they want to be us."
- Bill Maher, in a Feb. broadcast of HBO's Real Time

Class bigotry and snooty disdain for working people in the Heartland are flatly incongruous with Jefferson's "all men are created equal" declaration.

You don't need an overflowing bank account to be as American as the next guy, even if he is a preening celebrity. The farmer, the local business owner, and all the regular folks of small-town America are now and always have been just as American as the high-hats on Manor Hill.

The worth of citizens is measured by what's in their hearts, not their wallets. You can have every costly mark of material distinction. But without loyalty to our nation and its founding principles, you're nothing compared to the neighborhood cop with genuine patriotism in his veins.

The anti-democratic fancy is that a person's valuable to a nation, and entitlement to influence its course, depends on their financial contribution. And it's not new: Some in America's birth time believed only propertied men should vote. 

And the divide between powdered aristocrats and commoners is a built-in feature of monarchical lands.

There's not a great distance between pompous Democrats today lecturing on supposed Blue State supremacy/Red State inferiority and the poisonous, possibly looming declaration that patriotic, average citizens are only three-fifths human.

Then The Hunt will be on, for real.


Note: Lest that last seem an unwarranted observation, consider 'unpersoning' phenomena already existent. These include international banking, credit card, and online financial institutions denying service for ideological reasons; Big Tech silencings and demonitizations; retail businesses refusing service to perceived Trump supporters; organized doxxing of persons; violent home protests; efforts to provoke job loss and economic hardship; property destruction; and street assaults.

No mass physical conflict would be necessary in a new civil war, as Rush Limbaugh recently noted. Those of influence in the financial sector, and employers, could simply make it impossible for tens of millions to participate economically. 

To survive, to feed their families and keep roofs over their heads, patriotic citizens would need to hide their faith. War over.

Breakdown: Chris Cuomo of Fake News CNN goes mental

Source: EURweb

(Viral video from That's the Point with Brandon)

Liberal voices were immediately raised in defense of CNN's Chris Cuomo, when a video of his cartoonishly disproportionate raging at a one-word heckler went viral.

The man reportedly asked Cuomo to pose with him for a picture, and addressed the CNN host as "Fredo."

"Punk-ass bitches on the right call me Fredo," snarled Cuomo, according to Breitbart. "I'm Chris Cuomo. I'm an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from The Godfather. He was the weak brother."

Cuomo later threatened the man. "I'll fuckin' ruin your shit! I'll fucking throw you down these stairs like a fuckin' punk.

The anchor later claimed "Fredo" to be an anti-Italian slur.

Breitbart presented Twitter reactionsto that strained-beyond-sensible attempt at justification.

"So Chris Cuomo says that Fredo -- a character on The Godfather -- is the same as the n-word? Equating the twi is the very definition of white privilege and diminishes the generations of hate African-Americans have had to endure."
- Stephen Cheung, ex-UFC, Trump campaign, and White House assistant.

"The N word is a dehumanizing word used against blacks who endured years of oppression. Fredo is a term from The Godfather, referring to the dumb brother."
- White House advisor Katrina Pierson

Pierson later tweeted: "Hey @NAACP, do you agree with @ChrisCuomo that saying 'Fredo' is the equivalent of the 'N' word? #askingforafriend"

"Chris Cuomo once referred to himself as 'Fredo' in radio interview," headlined the New York Post. The paper an audio clip of a 2010 Cuomo appearance on Curtis Sliwa's New York program.

Others noted Cuomo had not objected when professional anti-Trumper Ana Navarro once used the term on his show.

Anti-MAGA sorts like Cuomo cheered mobs assaulting Trump officials in restaurants and at theaters. And also when protesters massed at Tucker Carlson's home.

Numerous political and media notables hostile to America's president applauded Antifa rioters sabotaging speakers' events. A recent guest on Cuomo's program called for "torches and pitchforks" at Trump-donors' homes.

So, it's hard to feel bad for him 'cause some random guy said something the loosely wrapped host interpreted as disrespectful.

Cuomo has for years been rightly criticized and ridiculed by Trump, as well as countless citizens. CNN's viewership has plummeted . He may be on his last nerve. And this manic episode may bespeak a looming full breakdown.

Jeff Zucker may soon be calling the guys with the butterfly net.

"Would Chris Cuomo be given a Red Flag for his recent rant? Filthy language and a total loss of control. He shouldn't be allowed to have any weapon. He's nuts!"
- Pres. Trump Aug. 13 tweet