Posted on 06/27/2018 9:08:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
On Tuesday, The Washington Post published an opinion piece in which former Gawker writer Tom Scocca justified the recent instances of harassment and stalking of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as “the right thing to do” in light of the Trump administration’s policy of arresting criminal illegal aliens at the border.
The piece, bluntly titled “Chasing White House officials out of restaurants is the right thing to do,” was published as part of the Post’s “PostEverything” initiative. At the time of its launch in May 2014, “Post Everything” editor Adam Kushner described his section of one of the world’s most influential newspapers as a vehicle for broadening the horizons of its readers by giving them fresh and informative expert opinions on a wide range of topics.
So Post Everything…is an attempt to expand the conversation outward. Should we worry about the robot takeover of U.S. jobs? Ask an economist. What are some of the dumbest things people think about American foreign policy? Ask a political scientist. How do football teams draft prospects, what does it feel like to confess to atheism in a deeply religious place, is Russia really seeding Crimea with more Russian citizens, and how did university sexual-assault policies get to be so daft? Ask the people who are in a position to answer.
For an expert opinion on whether it is okay to scream at, stalk, and harass women in public for their politics, the Postturned to Scocca, whose main qualification for the task appears to be that he once wrote an essay for Gawker on “smarm.” (Yes, seriously.) Consequently, Scocca’s defense for intimidating Sanders and Nielsen does not come off as a well-thought-out piece of moral philosophy, but rather a series of ridiculous, snark-laden questions about why anyone should care about the harassment as long as the Trump administration enforces American immigration laws by arresting criminals at the border:
The political press and the establishment class have been alarmed and confused by a restaurant owner’s refusal to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders this past weekend. Wasn’t this a betrayal of the basic norms that hold society together? Won’t it just offend and energize President Trump’s base going into the 2018 midterms? Doesn’t targeting Sanders — or Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who fled a Mexican restaurant last week after being confronted by chanting protesters — just mimic Trump’s own regrettable efforts to undermine civility?
A better question for the pundits, which might help clear things up for them, is this: What makes you think this is any of your business?
Children, some still in diapers, have been seized from their parents by the government and locked in cages, with no clear way to reunite them with their families afterward. That situation might seem more urgent, in itself, than the question of how people chose to react to the government seizing children and locking them in cages. Yet here we are, caught up in this fuss over — manners? Civility?
Scocca went on to reason out that both instances of harassment were justified because they were examples of private individuals expressing their political opposition to the Trump administration’s “extraordinary” law and order immigration policies and its attempts to bar transgender people from serving in the U.S. military:
What happened at the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., was not a contest between political parties, or between designated proxies of political parties. It was a private citizen telling a presidential administration official to go away, out of disgust with the fact that the administration is seizing children from their parents and locking them in cages and barring transgender people from military service. Likewise, the protesters who yelled at Nielsen were not aiming to be part of a normal political process, but to respond to extraordinary events with extraordinary actions.
At no point in Scocca’s rambling piece did he mention the fact that ?according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s father and former Governor Mike Huckabee ?Red Hen owner Stephanie Wilkinson did not just kick the Press Secretary and her family out of the restaurant, but actually followed some of Sanders’s family to another restaurantand harassed them there. Instead, Scocca disingenuously characterized Wilkinson’s unhinged and unprofessional conduct as the actions of an “ordinary,” “polite” citizen simply expressing herself through a laudable “act of conscience.”
Unsurprisingly then, Scocca concluded his piece with an impassioned call to his fellow liberals to abandon all calls for civility and to defend people who harass Republican women like Sanders and Nielsen. Scocca’s ultimate reasoning for this was that Americans on the political right cannot be reached by “appeals to decency”:
No appeal to decency can ever bring Trump and the Trumpists around. It is not possible to mollify a political cult that runs on outrage, and it’s not worth trying. People are moved to protest what they’re witnessing, and even in the most high-minded of times, there is no form of protest polite enough to be acceptable to the people and institutions being protested.
(…)
It is not any person’s duty to make life more comfortable for the White House press secretary, or for the head of Homeland Security, or for any of the other officials who conceived, carried out and defended the policy of tearing apart families. It is not a private citizen’s job to ask whether their revulsion and outrage have been correctly calibrated to fit party goals for the next two cycles, on the theory that the highest human calling is to be a successful campaign strategist. If pundits are worried about the relationship between manners and brutality, instead of asking whether people ought to be so rude to the administration, they might ask what they’ve accomplished by being polite.
After being called Nazis, fascists, and KKK-supporting genocidal maniacs who want to put people in concentration camps for the millionth time, perhaps conservatives should wonder what comes next if liberals stop being so polite in the future.
Scocca’s piece in the Post can be found at this link.
Leftist men hate women for the most part.
As long as the women will have abortions and give in to their sexual demands, leftist men are all for “women’s rights”; the minute a woman says “no” then she is a bitch, whore, what have you.
Another thing to consider: factor in all the homosexuals in leftism: it is well known that homosexuals hate women.
I’d rather see them paralyzed due to injury for harassing women.
I get what you’re saying. These creepy columnists from the Post need a good dose of their own medicine!
Great find! As an Anglo -Saxon + Anglo- Irish woman in my ninth decade of life, I am ready to fight back!!
#21. If the Leftists hate strong conservative women, it is only a character of their own male insecurity and weakness.
That is why so many liberal males are not ball-less mental and emotional eunuchs, afraid of a Sarah Sanders, Kelly Conway, DHS Secy Neilsen and Roseanne Barr (believe it or not).
Give me a strong-willed, knowledgeable, determined woman to work for any day. (I do re legal work). The greater majority are nice, open to suggestions and willing to ask questions about work-related issues or even things at home, good listeners, have nice smiles, good senses of humor and very professional in a pleasant way.
In 20-plus years of legal work, I’ve only encountered one SOB female attorney (long gone, hated even by her female colleges, and one administrator, now going, going, gone and not to be missed by anyone).
Some male attorneys could learn from their female counterparts on how to be a nice coworker without the superior male attitude.
Someday I’ll retell the story about a female police Lieutenant who was light-years ahead of her male counterparts on a criminal investigation/case I initiated. She got results. They got distain.
The Washington Post, today, is the most leftist, vile, disreputable, BS newspaper in America. Every day I underline the prejorative/nasty/smear words their writers use, from front page news stories (and I add “new” with quotes), to the far-left Society/Style pages, the book reviews (recruiting reviewers from the pysch wards, I assume), columnists, and even the sports pages.
A journalism teacher once taught me a similar test on how to find/spot “bias” in a news article (also applies to columns, etc). Just cross out any adjective and adverb the writer uses, such as “harsh” rhetoric or “rhetoric” itself; “far-right”, “alt-right” (instead of conservative or Republican);and mysoginistic, homophobic, racist, etc.
The 50 words left will be the actual news of the story. The rest is leftist smear work and hatemongering.
If anyone at FR does this, let us know what you find. Please cite the newspaper/article, date, author and title. I want people to see this fascistic/Marxist tactic in real items.
#26, The few dollars you spent on the Wash Post don’t mean diddly to their bottom line. However, the bias you find and alert friends and strangers to, is PRICELESS.
These smear-job writers are proving Pres. Trump, the Media Research Center, CAMERA, Campus Reform,and other media watchdog organizations on the side of truth as being accurate in their observations.
When you show a leftist/liberal the “proof” of how this bias is manifested in the WP, re reporting the “news” in an objective, unbiased, and complete manner, no matter what they say, they will know that you got them by their balls and you just squeezed their integrity/honesty, among other parts.
#35. Which one is Scocca? (I know, AH).
Going around my normal stops on the Internet, the Sarah Sanders ouster was one where many of the normal Democrat posters drew a line. They really didn’t like it.
For some, it was the end of the line. #Walkaway.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/walkaway?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Ehashtag
former Gawker writer Tom Scocca
It was either him, or hire a journalist. Thanks Kaslin.
So when we see Michelle Obama out and about somewhere it’s ok to harass her, we won’t be condemned and labeled with vulgar names?
Start putting a few holes in these m’fer’s and the sh!t will stop.
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