[guest post by Dana]

Various reports have assured us that there will be any number of organized and unorganized protests in the capitol before, during and after Trump’s inauguration. As such, the city is taking the necessary precautions, deploying 5,000 National Guard troops throughout the city, as well as 3,000 officers from various jurisdictions.

The anarchist group, #DisruptJ20, working with Black Lives Matter among other protest groups, claim that while they recognize they will be unable to stop PEOTUS from being sworn in, they intend to at least “ruin the notion that this is a peaceful transition of power.” Another planned protest, the Women’s March on Washington D.C., will hold their march the day after Trump’s swearing in. This group plans to band together to protest Trump and his degrading behavior toward women, as well as publicly echo Hillary Clinton that “women’s rights are human rights.”

Except there’s a hitch with this effort at solidarity: Women in the march are turning on their sisters with a big Just shut-up already! exhortation in an effort to claim the upper berth of victimhood. Consider this from Ms. Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina who had been looking forward to attending the march with her daughter but has since cancelled her plans:

Ms. Willis read a post by ShiShi Rose, a 27-year-old blogger from Brooklyn.

“Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” Ms. Rose wrote. “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.”

It rubbed Ms. Willis the wrong way.

“How do you know that I’m not reading black poetry?” she asked in an interview. Ms. Willis says that she understands being born white gives her advantages, and that she is always open to learning more about the struggles of others.

But, she said, “The last thing that is going to make me endeared to you, to know you and love you more, is if you are sitting there wagging your finger at me.”

Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do.

“I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said.

That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?”

Blech. Count. Me. Out. I can’t think of any place I’d rather not be than lost at sea with thousands of self-righteous women clamoring for the upper berth on the ship of victimhood.

As these women turn on each other, there is yet another group being turned on by organizers. This feminist group because they have the audacity to support unborn women and their right to live. From their Facebook page:

New Wave Feminists are here to take feminism back from those who have corrupted it.

Sometime before we were born our womanhood was traded for a handful of birth control pills, the “privilege” to pose for playboy, and the “right” to abort our children.

We embrace the early American feminism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Also, we’re way funny and have super rad hair.

Anyway, the group had been named as a partner of the march:

On Sunday, pro-life group New Wave Feminists announced that the women’s march officially accepted them as partners. “Super pumped to rep prolife feminism at theWomen’s March on Washington,” [sic], the group’s Facebook post read:

But not long after this was posted, the New Wave Feminists were dropped from the list of partners, thanks to feminists like Jessica Valenti and others who jumped on the You-can’t-be-a-real-feminist-if-you-don’t-agree-that-unborn-women-should-be-able-to-be-barbarically-put-to-death protest wagon:

“Plse reconsider – inclusivity is not about bolstering those who harm us.”

Of course the GIGANTIC irony of her plea was lost on her and her fellow supporters of the butcher brigades…

Eventually the Women’s March apologized for their error on the partners list:

What else would you expect from a group that eats their own for lunch and spits them out at dinner?

–Dana

My email address is on the right sidebar.

For the foreseeable future, if you have something you want me to see, email me. Don’t leave it in comments.

Two items for your reading pleasure.

ITEM ONE: CROWLEY OUT

Monica Crowley is out, for pulling a Melania Trump. (Dana has her own take on this here.)

GOP foreign policy adviser Monica Crowley said Monday she will relinquish the senior job she’d been poised to take in the Trump White House.

Ms. Crowley, who had been tapped to be senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, had been dogged in recent weeks by questions about whether she lifted portions of her past written work from other writers. Her move seemed designed to keep that from becoming a distraction as the Trump team prepares to take office.

“After much reflection I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said in a statement. “I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal.”

It’s kind, if inaccurate, for the Washington Times to describe the controversy as “questions about whether she lifted portions of her past written work.” It was the strongest case of pulling a Melania Trump since Melania Trump.

I’m pleased to see that Donald Trump does not want someone with such poor ethical standards in his White House. If there’s anything more important to Donald Trump than decorum, it’s ethics.

ITEM TWO: GATEWAY PUNDIT’S VICTORY DANCE

Item two: Jim Hoft’s blog Gateway Pundit (admittedly through another writer named Ryan Saavedra) declares RedState.com to be the worst of the worst:

RedState had a rough year after backing failed GOP candidates, trashing Donald Trump for months and losing audience and respect in conservative circles.

Now a writer from Red State has come completely unhinged attacking The Drudge Report, The Gateway Pundit, Dinesh D’Souza and Sarah Palin.

The Gateway Pundit, Sarah Palin, Drudge Report sensationalism is not an asset for the Right.

— Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) January 12, 2017

. . . .

Kimberly Ross represents everything that is wrong with the Republican party and people on the right.

Ross was criticizing Hoft, Palin, etc. because of this piece from the Washington Post explaining how Hoft, Palin, and Drudge pushed a totally bogus story:

Trolls decided I was taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes. I wasn’t even there.

What it’s like to be at the center of a fake-news conspiracy theory.

By Doris Truong

There’s a joke among Asian Americans that people think we all look the same. That joke became my own personal Pizzagate late Wednesday: I got caught in a terrible case of mistaken identity that was exacerbated by the speed at which false information spreads on social media.

I work as a homepage editor at The Washington Post. Because Wednesday was my day off, I hadn’t been online much. But before I went to bed, I noticed a message request on Facebook. Someone I didn’t know asked: “Any comment on you taking photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes?” When I checked Twitter, I had to scroll for several minutes to figure out what was going on. It seemed to start with this post: “Who is this woman and why is she secretly snapping photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes?”

. . . .

I lost track of the tweets, retweets and variations of tweets, including some with my Twitter handle superimposed on a photo from the hearing. People demanded my firing and questioned my ethics as a journalist. Top editors at The Post had heard about it. The false narrative snowballed early Thursday because a Gateway Pundit post was picked up by the Drudge Report.

@markberman sadly, no pic.twitter.com/kk39CaxTH3

— J. Freedom du Lac (@jfdulac) January 12, 2017

Even Sarah Palin tweeted it.

Busted.

Strikes me as creepy – reporter snooping & sneaking pics of Trump Cabinet nominee's notes today during… https://t.co/3h5uZFie6h

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) January 12, 2017

Here is the Gateway Pundit post. Sample:

Wow! Reporter Caught Sneaking Photos of Rex Tillerson’s Notes at Senate Hearing (VIDEO) –Updated

Jim Hoft Jan 11th, 2017 11:28 pm 591 Comments

The Liberal Media Becomes More Unhinged by the Day–
A reporter was caught on film sneaking photos of Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson’s personal notes at his hearing today before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee today in Washington DC.

The reporter obviously forgot about the cameras running on Tillerson’s seat during the break.
Now the entire world knows she’s a thief.
What an idiot.

Skipping over the update, where Hoft is forced to acknowledge he got the story completely wrong, we see the origin of the story: one Mike Cernovich.

Via Mike Cernovich:

Watch @DorisTruong secretly snap shots of Rex paperwork while confirmation was on break despicable @washingtonpost @DanScavino pic.twitter.com/V7J1zZYXed

— ⏰Brian "0" Negan⏰ (@_0Hour1__) January 12, 2017

Cernovich to Hoft to Drudge — that’s how “facts” circulate in our wonderful Trumpy New Media.

All Kimberly Ross from RedState did was . . . criticize this incredibly sloppy reporting.

In Gateway Pundit world, the lesson learned from all this is: check out your stories before printing them RedState is terrible for criticizing a fellow Republican and not supporting Trump at all times — that’s why I get clicks and they don’t, hahahahahaha!

Remember, Hoft might do something stupid and embarrassing like that every week or so, usually accompanied by ALL CAPS AND MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! . . . but he’s a Trump supporter and RedState isn’t. He predicted Trump would win and RedState didn’t. Therefore, he is the New Paragon of our media, and deserves your clicks, no matter how shitty and riddled with errors his posts might be.

So there are your two stories. In one, the Trump administration surprisingly upholds an ethical standard. In the second, his supporters throw ethical standards to the wind, and attack anyone who criticizes them for it.

The first story is a little surprising, since the Trump transition team could have defended Crowley and called the allegations against her politically motivated. (Oh, wait, that’s what they did, just one week ago, after the PhD dissertation scandal had just broken.)

Despite the news, the Trump team continues to support the appointment. “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country,” a transition spokesperson told CNN.

I’ll take it as a hopeful sign that this sort of utterly dishonest response — which was doubtless applauded by the very same crowd that pushed the bogus Truong story — did not ultimately carry the day.

P.S. Folks ought to bookmark this story, because the Washington Post reporter uses the term “fake news,” not to describe knowingly fake news, but rather to describe a situation where people believed they were telling the truth, but got it horribly wrong through lazy and slipshod analysis filled with unwarranted assumptions based on partisanship. I don’t think this usage is accurate, because I think “fake news” should be reserved for actual fake news put out by people who know it’s fake. But many conservatives have been using the term that way to describe similarly inaccurate stories by Big Media — and now the Washington Post is using that same definition itself, which is a notable development.

If “fake news” has that broad a definition, then the Washington Post‘s own “Russia hacked the power grid” story was “fake news.” I wouldn’t have called it that, myself — but under their own definition, that’s what it is.

P.P.S. This should be obvious, but the reference to “wild-eyed Trump supporters” in the headline is not meant to declare that all Trump supporters are wild-eyed. It is meant to distinguish the wild-eyed ones (like Hoft and Cernovich) from those that aren’t (which is the vast majority of them, in my opinion).

UPDATE: Excellent post by Kimberly Ross at RedState calling out Gateway Pundit for repeatedly peddling bogus stories.

[guest post by Dana]

She will not become the senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council:

Monica Crowley, recently appointed by President-elect Donald Trump to a key national security communications job, said Monday that she would relinquish the post amid multiple allegations of plagiarism.

Crowley, who has been named senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, said in a statement that “after much reflection,” she had decided to remain in New York and “will not be taking a position in the incoming administration.”

“I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal,” Crowley said in the statement, in which she made no mention of the plagiarism charges.

Further:

The publisher of a 2012 book by Crowley said last week that it will stop selling copies until she addresses allegations of plagiarism. Crowley, a conservative pundit, is also under fire for allegedly plagiarizing passages in her PhD dissertation at Columbia University.

Patterico reported on the plagiarism allegations here.

While they may not have Crowley to kick around in this administration, obviously, a possible future-run as vice-president is not out of the question. Seriously, though, Crowley should address the accusations head-on in order to clear her once-good name and reputation. It is up to her to clarify or explain, if she can, and then let her supporters and detractors decide for themselves about the plagiarism allegations. That she chose not to, is telling.

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Noor Salman Mateen has been arrested:

FBI agents took Salman into custody at a home in Northern California, authorities said.

Salman is charged with obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting the attempted provision of material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Salman will be transferred from Northern California to the Middle District of Florida, the FBI said.

As a reminder:

Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during the standoff at Pulse Nightclub on June 12, where 49 people were killed and dozens more were injured.

On a side note, here is how the New York Times reported on the arrest:

WASHINGTON — The wife of the man who carried out a deadly terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla., has been arrested in connection with the mass shooting, a law enforcement official said Monday.

The woman, Noor Salman, was taken into custody by F.B.I. agents at her home outside of San Francisco. Prosecutors had been weighing charges against her in the aftermath of the attack that killed 49 people and wounded dozens. A person familiar with details of the arrest said Ms. Salman was charged with obstruction.

Ms. Salman’s husband, Omar Mateen, was killed in a shootout with police during the rampage in a gay club on June 12, 2016. Investigators interviewed Ms. Salman for hours after the attack and came to believe she was not telling the truth about her husband’s plans to carry out the rampage.

She is expected to make an initial appearance on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco.

It’s curious that the noted newspaper of record mentioned only the obstruction charge, and seemingly relied upon a “person familiar with the details” for the information, yet that “person familiar with the details” apparently didn’t know about the other charge of “aiding and abetting the attempted provision of material support to a foreign terrorist organization”…

Oh, which reminds me of President Obama’s last national security speech given, ironically, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, wherein he claimed, “Over last eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland”.

–Dana