Showing posts with label Lies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lies. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

The 12 Biggest Lies, Exaggerations and Half-Truths from John Oliver’s Anti-WWE Screed

Unpacking the dishonesty, disinformation and flat out deception from the much ballyhooed Last Week Tonight segment

Monday, October 9, 2017

This Week in Social Justice Warrior-Dom (Oct. 9, 2017 Edition)

Trigger warning activated! Our biweekly recap of everything that irked, irritated and aggravated SJWs is back with a vengeance!


 By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

The media would prefer you dwell on NFL protests rather than a black immigrant from Sudan shooting up a church full of white people

 Remember back in 2015, when Dylann Roof walked into a church in South Carolina and killed nine black people? In case you forgot, it led to a national purge of all things "Confederate," with the media desperately, direly trying to equate all things Dixie with unabashed white supremacist ideology. Walmart pulled tee shirts with rebel flag designs, TV Land took Dukes of Hazzard reruns off the air and before long, statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were getting yanked down all over the country. Indeed, so wretched that "confederate" stench that in Memphis, city officials voted to exhume the corpses of dead Klansmen from their cemeteries. 

 Hey, remember just a couple of weeks ago, when all those white guys marched in Charlottesville, Va. carrying Tiki Torches, and James Fields plowed into a bunch of protesters, and the media tried to get everybody worried about a white supremacist uprising, even though Fields didn't kill a single non-white person, and the only person who did die in the incident succumbed to an obesity-related heart attack and apparently wasn't even touched by Fields' car? Well, that led to MTV turning its annual awards show into an ode to white guilt, with Congress forcing POTUS to sign a totally pointless document denouncing "neo-Nazism" and "white supremacy" as domestic and existential threats to American civility. At that point, the media Wehrmacht had made up its mind as cultural dictators: it was time to eradicate "white prejudice" in all its incarnations and forms by any means necessary. And in a perfect display of glibly unaware totalitarianism in action, the gullible masses decided hate was such a distasteful and disdainful thing that the only reasonable thing to do was promulgate widespread hatred against those they accuse of fostering hate. In short, it became fashionable - if not socially condoned - to publicly air prejudice against "white people" in much the same fashion the Jews and gypsies were "acceptable targets" in post-Wiemar, pre-Hitler Germany.

 Of course, it's a bit unusual how the media runs with the whole "racism MUST be eradicated" shtick whenever the aberrant "white supremacist" crime goes down, but the very same news-and-entertainment-industrial-complex goes out of its way to play apologists whenever Muslim radicals embark upon anti-white mass murder (which is certainly FAR more common than instances of "neo-Nazi" mass murder or "white supremacist" mass murder, without question.) And it's especially interesting how the media approaches the issue of racist black violence against whites, which occurs a whole lot more often than CNN or MSNBC would like its viewers to think. 

 Naturally, MTV didn't host a four hour long screed against black supremacist violence when militant honky-hater Micah Xavier Johnson shot and killed five police officers in Dallas last year. Nor did the media embark on a sweeping jihad against black supremacist violence when disgruntled, homosexual of color Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed two white co-workers on live television. And, of course, while the media had a field day covering the noble St. Louis protests in the wake of Jason Stockley's acquital, they didn't say a peep about the arrest of Fredrick Demond Scott, a black spree killer in Kansas City who only murdered middle-aged white men and left such cryptic comments on social media as "kill all white people." Nor does the national media even trudge up the alarming disparity in interracial rapes, homicides and violent assaults in the U.S., which all tilt heavily towards black-on-white victimization as opposed to the much more popular misconception of white-on-black hatred. 

 The latest FBI Uniform Crime Report findings make it clear as day. In 2016, there were 533 incidents of black people murdering white individuals. Conversely, there were 243 incidents of white people murdering black individuals, but that number can be scaled down to just 148 if you factor out the murderers who identify as Hispanic. So despite the massive discrepancy in the number of white people in the U.S. (about 65 percent of the total populace) versus the number of black people in the U.S.  (about 13 percent of the total populace), white people in the U.S. remain almost five times likelier to by killed be a black person than a black person is to be killed by a white person. That ... sounds like something that's statistically significant, yet I guarantee you will NEVER hear any talking heads on The View or Nightline trudge up that little nugget of knowledge before a live studio audience. 

 The term "narrative" gets thrown around a lot these days, but it's absolutely unmistakable that the mainstream media is actively trying to push a numerically false "black victimization" agenda down our throats. Even the tiniest, teeniest "microagression" perpetrated by white folks gets national coverage, but when three black people storm into a house in Alabama and MURDER a grandfather and his grandson JUST because they had the audacity to wave a rebel flag on their porch, you better believe Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post or ABC News ain't going anywhere near it. Long story short, it's suitable news to *them* if it furthers their "white people ought to be ashamed" storyline, and anything that contradicts the great fable of our time MUST be ignored, if not flatout suppressed from reaching the public consciousness. 

 And nothing demonstrates that more than the media coverage we got on Sept. 25. Just hours earlier, 25-year-old Emanuel Kidega Samson - a black immigrant from Sudan, whose social media posts appear to suggest an affinity towards certain black power politics and off-kilter Islamic ideologies - walked into the Burnett Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, Tenn. and opened fire, killing 39-year-old Melanie Crow Smith and wounding six other worshipers at the almost 100 percent white church. Of course, the mainstream media totally ignored the matter so they could yammer on and on about the anti-Trump NFL protests instead, with many top publications and programs glossing over the mass shooting altogether. Case in point: that morning's edition of the New York Times didn't even get to the incident until page 14. 

 Alas, the mainstream media - unlike in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston shooting - didn't go on a memetic pogrom to rid the culture of black power iconography. And unlike in the aftermath of the Charlottesville crowd plowing incident, you didn't see MTV run a four-hour special bemoaning the horrors of black identity politics violence, nor did a single member of Congress draw up a resolution demanding Donald Trump denounce acts of radical, anti-white terror. And even after seven white people got shot during a church service by a psychotic, rage-fueled black identitarian, the fucking mayor of Nashville's big concern isn't in containing and stamping out such acts of racial violence, but convincing her constituents to not jump to conclusions about the shooter's motives.

 You don't need me to tell you that if the script was reversed - with a white man shooting up a black church during Sunday service - that it would be the nation's biggest story and make international headlines. The media would puff it up as a dire warning about racist white sentiments in American society, and the entertainment-industrial complex would go on a jihad to condemn, discourage and destroy any semblances, real or imagined, of pro-white ideology like they were trying to eradicate the sociopolitical version of smallpox.

 But they never do that after racist, hate-filled black people kill, injure, maim or mutilate white people for ideological purposes - indeed, most times, it feels like the media is actually playing defense force for them, doing everything they can to either sweep the incidents under the rug or make it seem like there was some other mitigating factor in the violence besides seething resentment of the victims based solely on their skin color. 

 This is not an opinion - the empirical evidence is both ample and obvious. The big question now is why the media/entertainment Cerberus is so goddamn hypocritical when it comes to how they cover, analyze and interpret racial violence depending on who's doing the killing and who's the ones getting killed.

 In fact, that might just be the greatest question of our generation, the more that I think about.
Oklahoma lesbians get 20 years in prison for beating five-year-old child with hammers, kicking his groin until blood started pouring out of his genitals

 One of the great mythologies of our time is that women are non-violent creatures - this, despite the fact mothers are responsible for 70 percent of all filicides and that countries with female heads of state are bout 27 percent likelier to go to war than ones with male leaders. Another great mythology of our time is that homosexuals are almost exclusively victims of violent crimes as opposed to perpetrators - this, despite the well-documented, non-hetero sexual orientations of serial killers like Eileen Wournos, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Well, the Sooner State just gifted us a story that dispels both popular narratives in one feel swoop. On Sept. 20, Rachel Stevens, 29, and Kayla Jones, 26, were sentenced to 20 years in prison for the torture of one of their five-year-old children. According to police documents, the lesbian couple not only kept the child locked up like an animal and underfed him, they beat him with hammers and whips so mercilessly that he wound up having two abuse-stimulated strokes. Additional documents say the couple also took turns kicking the child in the groin until he started bleeding from his genitals. Amazingly, the couple tried to start a GoFundMe page to pay for the child's injuries they themselves caused, claiming his seizures and facial injuries were the result of an accidental fall. Of course, we here at The Internet Is In America would NEVER want our readers to get the idea that all fish taco eaters display similar behavior - but then again, that doesn't really cancel out the fact there's a whole hell of a bunch of dykes out there who are really, REALLY fond of beating the hell out of their kids, despite UCLA's assertions that child abuse in lesbian households is virtually non-existent.
Black students at Cornell demand fewer black students at Cornell

 The Egyptians were quite fond of this thing called an "ouroboros." Basically, it was a drawing of a snake or some other creature digesting its own tail; in that, it's a symbol that represents not only self-cannibalization, but an endless cycle of self-destructive behavior. Well, you might as well add Cornell University's Black Students Union to the Wikipedia article under the "really, really hilarious examples" section. Recently, the Ivy League student group mailed a ransom letter - or a list of demands, whatever you want to call it - to the school's president, demanding, among other things, that the university suspends an entire fraternity from campus for allegedly having a member who said the word "nigger" and then reallocate their frat house to them as a student of color safe space. But that's not all, folks: in that same letter, the BSU also implored the university to do something about the disproportionate number of black students on campus who hail from the Caribbeans and actual Africa, claiming "there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism." And if you think this deliciously ironic in-fighting among black identitarians is reason enough to smile ear from ear, just wait until you get a load of Damon Young's self-emasculating screed "Straight Black Men are the White People of Black People" over at The Root, in which the author suggests the unified women and queers of color gang up on men of color for their relatively privileged status in these United States. "We are the ones who get the biggest seat at the table," Young bemoans in the awe-inspiring column, "and the biggest piece of chicken at the table despite making the smallest contribution to the meal."
A round-up of the most recent moral hysterics involving ray-ray-RACISM

To say "racism" is an extremely trite and overused term these days is kinda' like saying water is wet, the sky is blue and Bill Maher is an ugly, unfunny piece of shit - it's self-evident to anyone possessing even the most basic faculties of their senses. Still, I reckon it would behoove each and every one of us to take a gander at the following recent events in which the dreaded "R" word reared its hideous, malformed head, so that we can truly grasp the severity of the issue in our contemporary cultural climate:

And if you thought hardened racial animus was just for adults, researchers at the University of Toronto would like to twist your ear for a minute. In a recent Child Development article, "researcher" Kang Lee declared that children as young as six months old can display signs of racial in-group superiority, and the only known cure is ample exposure to other races. Of course, Lee's study doesn't exactly prove that six-month-olds foster a strong disdain and distrust of differently colored people, just a certain affinity towards the same ethnic group - which, of course, is pretty much the same thing as racism, just as long as that ethnic group is mayonnaise-hued.

Colleges continue proud tradition of turning young adults into mush-headed, liberty-hating ideologues

 Of course, it's a bit of a disservice to host a feature called "This Week in Social Justice Warrior-Dom" without touching upon the proverbial breeding ground for tomorrow's next generation of oikophobic Democrats, so how about we take a quick glance at some of the more amusing/depressing stories to emerge from our vaunted universities as of late? Buckle your seatbelt, Sweet Susie - this stuff is going to make your head hurt a plenty:

And for those of you wondering what the absolute most deliciously ironic campus item of the last couple of weeks - hell, maybe in the history of American academia, the more I dwell upon it? At William & Mary College, a gaggle of Black Lives Matters protesters invaded a guest lecture, unfurled a giant sign reading "blood on your hands" and proceeded to scream "the oppressed are not impressed," "liberalism is white supremacy," and "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution" for 20 minutes. By the way, the lecturer who drew the ire of the student group was none other than Claire Gastanaga, a representative of that nefarious, diabolical, radical hate-group more commonly known as the American Civil Liberties Union.

SPLC blames racist massacres on a lack of Internet Censorship

Over in Europe - where the powers-that-be have not only accepted cultural suicide as their new manifest destiny, but openly embraced and lauded their own demographical demise - there's already quite a bit of hate speech suppression on the Webs, with several people being arrested and imprisoned for such horrible crimes as recording their pugs giving "heil Hitler" salutes and uploading it to Facebook. Well, the SPLC looks to take a page out of the lefty Limeys' playbook via their Teaching Tolerance publication, which gives out tips on how public school educators can sneak cultural Marxist propaganda into their 6th grade algebra curriculum. In a piece penned by Cory Collins - who, ironically enough, looks like he's the kind of guy that would gleefully let Milo Yianappolous fuck him in the ass - the author blames Dylann Roof's 2015 shooting rampage on Google's algorithms being "deaf to 'dog whistles,' or the coded language of white nationalist messaging and pseudoscientific racism." As such, Collins draws the only reasonable conclusion anyone would, which is to chide Google and Facebook for providing "gateways to hate" instead of instantly and immediately removing all non-SPLC approved materials from the Interweb (which was the actual fate of The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi satire site whose literal banning from the Web portends, perhaps, a grave future of Silicon Valley arbitrated free expression.) "In short, search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook take a user's information and web history [and] with that information, online agency becomes a facade," Collins continues. "Behind the curtain, a formula controls what users see and steers them toward content that confirms their likes, dislikes and biases; practically, this helps advertisers. Consequentially, it replaces the open internet of diverse perspectives with an open door to polarization and radicalization." Of course, Collins never notes that inherent contradiction of his spiel (if people already have likes, dislikes and biases, where did they acquire them before Google and Facebook rewired their brains?), nor the irony of suggesting suppression of controversial ideas is a natural segue to "diverse perspectives" and not cyber-authoritarianism. Alas, maybe Collins and his progressivist ilk will be a lot happier when the U.S. adopts a more U.K.-esque perspective on the scourge of "hate speech" - where people can now be sentenced to 15 YEARS IN PRISON for merely watching or reading "radical" online materials.
Humongous-breasted model spends more than $60,000 to turn herself artificially black

I don't think people truly realize just how close we are to metahumanism becoming a legitimate social issue. I assure you, transgenderism is just the tip of the iceberg; we've already got people getting plastic surgery to look like fuckin' Dungeons & Dragons characters, and God help us when the people who identify as "trans-dogs" finally get an opportunity to alter their DNA (with generous subsidies from the federal government, no doubt.) But why wait for the future, when the ability to cosmetically change races is already here? Enter 28-year-old fetish model Martina Big, who, as her name implies, has an absolutely enormous set of breasts. Alas, she wasn't just content with having artificially augmented titties, she wanted to literally transform herself into a black woman, which - via the aid and assistance of tanning injections and and a 50-tube sunbed - deep fried her skin the same color as an extra-thick batch of Yoo-Hoo. Naturally, Miss Big made her grand public debut as an artificial African-American on that exemplar of American journalistic excellence, The Maury Povich Show, complete with three gold chains displaying the word "Black" in cursive  around her neck and a new, kinkified 'do Rachel Dolezal would be plum envious of. Despite the predominantly black audience being mighty miffed by the joyous disposition of what is perhaps the world's first trans-nigga', Big didn't attempt to hide her recently race-switched exuberance. "It's better to be black, the feeling inside is just better," she said. "That is my race. I can't wait to go to Africa, because I hear the food is tasty."
China forces Muslims to assimilate at gunpoint; American liberals terrified of Donald Trump's alleged "Islamaphobia" say, do absolutely fucking nothing

 The big gaping problem with today's SJW ideology is that - at heart - it's a deeply hypocritical ethos that, for all its vaunting and reverence of globalization, almost never applies its mandatory equality Tao to peoples and places beyond their own national borders. For example, here in the States leftists go absolutely apeshit over Christian bakers refusing to make lesbian wedding cakes, but when it comes to THEIR presidential candidate accepting campaign contributions from nations where homo sex is punishable by execution, all of that "equality" stuff suddenly doesn't seem to be as great an imperative anymore. Case in point? The mainsteam media was dead silent when China announced plans in late September to FORCE Muslims living in the Xinjiang region to hand over all of the religious accouterments - their Korans, their prayer rugs, etc. - or face a suspiciously (and terrifyingly) nondescript "harsh punishment" at the hands of China's notoriously trigger-happy police forces. Of course, there has to be some sort of logical explanation why the very same big media Leviathans that were shitting bricks over Trump's proposed travel bans aren't making a peep about the world's largest country ACTIVELY trying to genocide Muslims, right? I mean, it's not like NBC's parent company is literally OWNED by a Chinese conglomerate, or ABC's parent company has billions invested in Chinese ventures, or CNN's parent company has a strategic partnership with China's state-media, or The New York Times lets China print propaganda under the guise of advertisements in their newspaper or anything like that ... 
Women's March organization fears increasing Twitter character count may be a boon for white supremacists

 Mass psychosis is nothing new. In the 1500s the Holy Roman Empire was besieged by a literal dancing mania where people thought they had some sort of demon inside them and flailed their arms about for days on end until they dropped dead from exhaustion. In the 1960s in Tanzania, a school closed down because all of the students just wouldn't stop laughing and the adults had no idea what the fuck to do. And of course, throughout the 1980s Reagan's America lived in trembling fear of the great Satanic Panic, even though all of the actual child sexual abuse they were terrified of was going on in the Catholic Church and public schools at the time. But those little trifles don't have dookie on the great social paranoia of our day, which is the great boogeyman of white supremacy. Indeed, so utterly obsessed with that dastardly phantom of Caucasian bigotry, the aggrieved and self-oppressed are seeing invisible Nazis and make-believe Klansmen everywhere they go, with even the most distant, detached and neutral news items somehow getting reconstructed and reconfigured so as to tie back to their incessant honky fear mongering. Case in point? The fine bitches, sluts, skanks and whores behind the Women's March from earlier this year immediately decried Twitter's decision to expand their maximum character length per tweet because, in their eyes, "280 characters is 280 characters too many to spread white supremacy." Despite several emails, however, the organization has yet to get back to me on the matter of whether or not a four pack of ink pens is four too many to spread white supremacy, nor have they told me if a 32 GB flash drive offers 32 gigabits too much racial bigotry than anyone should ever be allotted.
So busy grasping for straws to blame election results on Russia meddling, media forgets to report on Trump's economic accomplishments

 Almost a year down the road and the media is still desperately, direly trying to drum up some sort of international collusion conspiracy theory to rationalize why their candidate didn't win. Now, while a quick one hour survey of Walmart customers in rural Michigan would tell ABC and CNN everything they need to know as to why Trump won the election, the news-entertainment-industrial complex has resolved itself to find SOME smoking gun that proves once and for all those dastardly Russians brainwashed our innocent citizens into casting their ballot for the Trumpster. Alas, while spending God knows how many millions of dollars and man hours trying to find links between Russia and Facebook and the Trump campaign team, they seem to have completely blocked out the rather remarkable economic boons that have occurred since The Donald took office - i.e., the fulfillment of the campaign promises that one might assume are the reason people in formerly blue states voted for him in the first place. Surely, there's a reason why the media has willfully ignored the news that U.S. household wealth has jumped up a full trillion dollars in Donald Trump's first eight months in office, or why the CNNs and ABCs of the world won't go anywhere near the news that barely six months into his presidency, the nation's GDP growth has increased a monumental 3.1 percent ... a feat, we might add, that the walking Democratic dildos at NPR said was flat out impossible back in June. Alas, rather than focus on these financial matters - which, as polls have indicated time and time again were the electorate's single most important election issue - the mainstream media continues to berate the Trump White House for all the usual canards, ceaselessly trying to convince middle America of the President's shameless sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and xenophobia. Which, as the astute Rob Robb of The Arizona Republic recently observed, is sure but to have one affect: a landslide reelection come 2020.
...and a few headlines that speak for themselves...
















Monday, January 30, 2017

There Is No 'Muslim Ban,' You Idiots

There is a LOT of media-perpetuated misconceptions about Trump's controversial executive order ... and just about everything your liberal friends have told you about it is flat out false.


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

 You know, liberals don't actually give a shit about Muslims. They same way they don't really care about the substandard living conditions of blacks, homosexuals and Hispanics, they don't give a fuck how crappy an Islamic person's life is, just as long as they agree to vote for their candidates. Democrats don't see Muslims as people - they see them as political weapons, and their only practical purpose is to make Republicans look like Hitler. Beyond that - and their precious electoral points - liberals have no use (nor any cares) for the Islamic community. All the proof you need of this is the deafening silence from the party of tolerance on the scores of Middle Easterners blown asunder by decree of one Barack H. Obama from 2009 to 2016. 

 And that's a major, major mistake on the Democrats' part. Right now, the liberals are all huffed up and pissy about Donald Trump winning the election so they've concocted a gameplan to win in 2020 by forming a coalition of basically everybody who isn't a straight white Christian male. The problem there is that the basic virtues and morals - let alone political wants - of all the disparate special interests groups not only don't gel, they're logically incompatible.

 If you've been following the libs' "intersectionalist" strategy, you might notice something fairly peculiar. Like the Teutonic weregild espousers of yore, the Democratic strategists have literally assigned a marginalization points systems to their electoral bread and butter. There very much is a pecking order when it comes to who and what is most marginalized in the eyes of contemporary liberals, and as a result, you get this weird pyramid scheme of self-victimization going on. For those of you who do better with visual aides, I've done you the kindness of drawing up the following pictograph:
So as you can see, not everybody is oppressed equally according to contemporary Democrats, and the more "persecuted" you are - which, really, is just code word for "the most demographically opposite of the aggregate Donald Trump voter" - the more "value" you have as a political cudgel. 

 For example, straight men, Christians and white Republicans[*] (ironically enough, the very people who not only founded the Democratic Party but have been the bulk of its constituency for a good 90 percent of its existence) all have the same overall score - which is zero. That means liberals gain zero sympathy points for pretending to defend them from rampant cultural "oppression" and/or "prejudice."

[*] You disagree? Seeing as how the Democratic Party was founded by hyper-nationalist Indian-slayer Andrew Jackson - not to mention almost all of the Jim Crow supporters in the South had a big old "D" next to their names - I don't think there's any way around it.
And if you don't think the modern Democratic Party doesn't have at least a couple of ounces of genetic white supremacist blood swishing around in its capillaries, just look at how ferociously liberals of all colors malign and attack any Republican who isn't a straight white male. The attacks of the left on conservative leaning women, homosexuals and ESPECIALLY African-Americans are far more caustic, vicious and personal - just take a look at what black liberals have to say about Ben Carson. Indeed, defending them from perceived oppression or prejudice actually COSTS the liberals sympathy points - in that, the sub-foundation literally becomes an indefensible grab-bag of social pariahs whom liberals cannot came to the aide of for any reason whatsoever. 

 The rest of the persecution pyramid pretty much explains itself. A black man is inherently a victim of American society just out of principle, according to the Democratic moral orthodoxy, but the same script says white women are even bigger ones, so defending a white woman must always take precedence over defending a black man. However, the narrative posits black women as even bigger victims than white women, so if they are ever in opposition to each other, it's the Democrats' duty to take the side of the victim with the higher point total. And while the Democratic dogma states that black women have it really, really bad, the secular religion also declares transpeople to have it even worse than they do, so if the two demographics are ever in conflict, again, the "persecuted" population with the greater marginalization value is automatically "the right one."

 ...I think you can see the fatal flaw with this approach already. Building an entire political brand around identity politics won't work if you're going to ask those same people to simultaneously consider their own identity less important than a more "victimized class." When your entire core identity revolves around an ethnocentric persecution complex, something tells me you probably won't be too happy when "your people" don't win the gold at either the summer or winter Victimization Olympics.

 Well, for whatever reason, today's Democrats have decided unilaterally that nobody's more persecuted than the Muslims. Defending them, per the great liberal code of honor, takes precedent over defending all other potential democratic voters, including the demographical bloc's sworn arch enemies, the Jews (who, up until recently, were the absolute apex of persecuted liberals ... their annual earnings, naturally, notwithstanding.) 

 Why this is the case is pretty hard to fathom. As a whole, Muslims represent less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population - and of those, at least 20 percent are native converts, the bulk of them black - so their electoral impact is rather negligible. Economically, they post lower earnings than the aggregate white family, although they are collecting advanced degrees in astonishingly high numbers. Indeed, according to one 2011 assessment, one out of 10 Muslim heads-of-households had a doctorate in something. 

 But Muslims remain underrepresented in the two industries that mean the most, politically - general business and media. As far as the cash they can kick into the Democrats' coffers, it's not a whole lot - and certainly not enough to consider alienating the ethnic bloc that's more or less the financial backbone of the entire party.

 So why prop up the Muslims as the ultimate liberal victims, when the electoral and economic rewards of doing so are so minimal?

 Because Democrats desperately, direly, deeply want the Republicans to do the same things to them that the Nazis did to the Jews. They WANT Muslims to be FORCED to register on a national list and they WANT to see them denied the same basic rights as everybody else. The whole reason they give a shit about Muslims to begin with is because they are props that can be used to conjure up Godwin's Law incessantly for the next four (and potentially, eight) years. Literally the only intrinsic value Muslims have for the Democratic Party is that their plight can be used to show just how mean and bigoted the Republican Party is. Their actual plight doesn't mean a damn thing to the liberal big wigs - what's important is how they can exploit their plight in such a way to possibly, maybe get more votes come 2020 (and naturally, collect some cold, hard "walking around money" in the lead up to the general election.) 
Looks like Starbucks' refugee job training program is already off to a rousing start!

Nothing exemplifies this more the recent brouhaha over Donald Trump's alleged  "Muslim Ban" executive order. 

 Never mind the fact that the EO doesn't even have the word "Muslim" in it. 

 Never mind the fact that the EO didn't bar people from the six countries with the highest number of Muslim residents - Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), India (172 million), Bangladesh (145 million), Nigeria (75 million) or Turkey (74 million) - from entering the country. 

 And for those who have tried to pass on the narrative that Trump excluded Muslim-majority nations where he had business interests, never mind the fact that Trump doesn't have investments in Pakistan (96.4 percent Muslim), Algeria (98.2 percent Muslim), Morocco (99.9 percent Muslim), Uzbekistan (96.5 percent Muslim), or Niger (98.3 percent Muslim) - yet none of those countries have travel restrictions placed on them. 

 And especially never mind the fact that nationals from all seven countries "banned" by Trump - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen - were already banned via the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016. 

And of course, never mind the fact that even IF Trump wanted to enact an actual "Muslim ban," the President has full Constitutional power to ban whoever the fuck he wants from entering the country at any time, thanks to 8 U.S. Code Section 1101 and 8 U.S. Code Section 1182. 

 And please do never mind the fact that Trump struck a deal with the governments of the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia to house more Syrian refugees just a day after signing the traveling restriction E.O. 

 And please, with sugar on top, never mind the ban is only in effect for 90 days, with the whole point being to set up more intense vetting procedures before allowing additional refugees into the country, with Trump himself saying the visas are going to start flowing like wine around mid-April. 

 But of course, if you tune into CNN or click on over to The New York Times, they're convinced - convinced, Allah damn it - that Trump's about to send every Koran-owner in the U.S. into a concentration camp. Despite the fact such a statement is a bold-faced lie, they continue to circulate "news" of the E.O. under the drumbeat that it directly targets a specific religion, that such a move is beyond the Constitutional powers of the Oval Office and that it's the first step towards a wide scale expulsion of an entire demographical group.

 So in other words, they're literally spreading disinformation and intentionally obfuscating the truth in order to create hysteria among the dyed-blue liberal base and their sad-sack sympathizers. For people who sure do like to bring up Orwell's name to attack Trump, it's the liberals themselves who have mastered the art of The Two Minutes Hate - indeed, the "mainstream" media has more or less devolved into nothing but a echo chamber of people screaming just how much they hate Trump (and especially how much they hate the fact that other people don't hate them and they can't just send them to a re-education camp to change their minds) while still having the audacity to claim to be unbiased spectators.

 Once you peel back all the hysterical emotional outrage and dig deep into the facts of U.S. immigration policy, it becomes woefully apparent that Trump's travel bans aren't much ado about nothing, they are much ado about something that's already been the case for almost two whole years but nobody said nothing because it was done by somebody they liked as opposed to somebody that didn't. 

 It's all bullshit, kids, just like pro 'rasslin but with worse acting. All of the bleeding heart liberals and their bed buddies in the media want you to hate Trump so bad that they're willing to make shit up and obfuscate the clear-cut truth to get you to think what they want you to think. 

 And unfortunately, I reckon we're going to be seeing a lot more - a whole lot more - over the next decade. 

 Get your bullshit detecting goggles on tight, folks - we're going to need 'em.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

26 Errors, Inaccuracies and Flat-Out Lies in the Documentary '13th'

Ava DuVarney's Netflix doc is practically a lock for an Oscar nod come next February. Unfortunately, the film is littered with copious mistakes, misstatements, overbroad generalizations, selective edits and - yes - more than a few brass-balled lies masquerading as "journalistic truth."


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X


- Common, "Letter to the Free" (2016)

- Richard Pryor, Live On The Sunset Strip (1982)

All documentary films, to a certain degree, are propaganda films. There are no so-called "journalistic" standards for movies of the sort, and as such, they are inherently subject to the biases and prejudices of the filmmakers. Now, to the degree that a film ports about its own skewed sociopolitical leanings differs. A straight up "encapsulation of a moment" documentary like Restrepo, Whores Glory or The Decline of Western Civilization may not have much in the way of a directly stated political agenda, but each film certainly seeks to establish the directors' interpretation of reality as the authoritative truth on the subject in question. The more abstract documentaries - stuff like Gates of Heaven and Samsara -  may have a more oblique sociopolitical agenda, but you can generally determine where a filmmaker leans on the identity politics spectrum by how they edit together sequences (I am immediately reminded of the second Paradise Lost film, which pretty much did everything EXCEPT come out and call Mark Byers a child murderer who also killed his own wife.) And then, there's the obvious "propumentary" stuff from Michael Moore, Dinesh D'Souza and even Steve James, whose films are about as devoid of brass balled, politically motivated editorialization as Triumph of the Will is devoid of Nazism.

 Now, even transparently biased documentaries can be enjoyable and entertaining. For example, I wholeheartedly disagree with the core theses of  The House I Live In, Food Inc. and West of Memphis, but I didn't let my own personal beliefs prevent me from enjoying the films as well put-together advocacy projects. Alas, as C.P. Scott once famously remarked, "comment is free, but facts are sacred" - these movies may be of value as gloriously one-sided activist hit pieces, but as containers of factual information and legitimate knowledge? They ultimately have about as much merit as journalistic accounts as The Eternal Jew or Reefer Madness. 

 Which brings us to 13th, a Netflix documentary helmed by Selma director Ava DuVarney which -  due to the Academy's newfangled efforts to diversify it's awards recipients in a sort of entertainment-industrial complex form of affirmative action - is almost certain to pick up a Best Documentary nod (if not the preliminary favorite to win it outright.) 

 As of mid-October, the film held a stellar 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 91 on Metacritic. "The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change," writes film critic Odie Henderson (who, perhaps it should be noted, once gave a film a "zero" score because he didn't think the leading actress was black enough.) The film "is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things," writes Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. It is "a titanic statement by a major American voice," writes Entertainment Weekly's Joe McGovern. "Viewing - right now - should be mandatory." Indeed, it seems like all of the racially-conscious adulation and adoration originally reserved for box office dud The Birth of A Nation (which quickly lost favor with the media when it was revealed its director probably raped a white co-ed back in college) has instead been refocused and hoisted upon 13th. And really, it's not like so many critics can be wrong, can they?

 Even as mere preaching-to-the-choir propaganda, 13th is by and large a boring film, devoid of any of the visual or narrative intricacies that made similar racially-tinged docs like The Interrupters or The House I Live In such compelling (albeit painfully one-sided) works. Instead of feeling like a built for the big screen documentary undertaking by Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, the entire film feels like a slightly higher budgeted PBS special. As for the content, it's your usual assortment of liberal pundits who make hundreds of thousands a year working for think tanks and publicly subsidized universities trying to outdo each other in the victimization Olympics, with a sprinkling here and there of conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who are seemingly only included in the film to provide chopped up, out-of-context quips that further the filmmakers' logically inconsistent thesis that the American "carceral state" is indeed a modern form of slavery. 

 As you'd imagine, the film more or less pummels the corpses of Nixon and Reagan for expanding the "War on Drugs," which 13th suggests has led to the "criminalization" of blackness. The film plays it a little looser when it comes to Bill Clinton, although really, his 1994 omni-crime bill did more than any of Nixon's or Reagan's policies to put large numbers of African-Americans behind bars. And of course, while Hillary is pretty much given a slap on the wrist for her comments about "super predator" black youths in the early 1990s, the film paints Donald Trump as nothing short of a slobbering Imperial Wizard, whose cherry picked quotes concerning rally gate crashers - in one of the boldest displays of editorial malfeasance in recent memory - are mangled in such a way as to make it sound like he's talking about a deep-seated desire to personally engage in fisticuffs with black people.

 So in short, 13th is nothing more than yet another identity politics propaganda piece, in which statistics are misconstrued and recent events are reduced into horribly condensed three-second slivers that completely avoid anything even remotely resembling context. But aside from being a very underwhelming piece of activist agitprop, it's also a film absolutely glutted with inaccuracies, half-truths and utterly inflated statistics, as well as some of the most underhanded examples of selective editing in the history of the medium.

 Below, you'll find no less than 26 errors, exaggerations, inaccuracies, half-truths and brass-balled lies contained in 13th. And unlike Ava DuVarney, The Internet Is In America actually fact checks its statements and formally cites its sources, so - in stark contrast to the talking heads featured in the critically acclaimed doc - you actually know I'm getting the deets from somewhere other than the Department of Made-Up Bullshit I Want To Believe...

01.) Woodrow Wilson never said The Birth of a Nation was "history written with lightning." - Early on in the film, a commentator brings up a long misattributed quote allegedly uttered by the president during a 1915 screening of D.W. Griffith's ultra-controversial, KKK-espousing drama. In reality, Wilson's top aide, Joseph Tumulty, sent a letter to the N.A.A.C.P. explicitly stating that Wilson "at no time has expressed his approbation" of The Birth of A Nation, with Wilson stating he disapproved of the "unfortunate production" in a letter to Tumulty. The quote was almost certainly a fabrication by Thomas Dixon, whose book The Clansman served as the basis for The Birth of a Nation, to drum up interest in the motion picture adaptation.

 02.) The "burning cross" was NOT introduced in the film The Birth of a Nation. - One commentator says that, before The Birth of a Nation, members of the Klan never burned crosses. Indeed, the burning cross itself goes back all the way to the 1100s, when the crann tara was used first as a general warning sign and later as a symbolic declaration of war in Scotland (in fact, during the War of 1812 burning crosses were common sights on the battlefields, especially in the Ontario theater). Furthermore, the co-option of the Scot custom as white supremacist calling card has its roots not in The Birth of the Nation, but the 1905 novel penned by Thomas Dixon called The Clansman, which included an illustration of Klan cartoon characters standing underneath a flaming crucifix. 

 03.) Thousands - but not tens or hundreds of thousands - of black people were lynched between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era - At one point, a talking head in the film declares that, between the end of the Civil War and World War II "thousands of black people" had been killed in lynchings. As to just how many black people were killed in these racist, extrajudicial killings, however, is a matter of debate. The Equal Justice Initiative released findings in 2015 that 3,959 black people (including women and children) were killed in lynchings in former Confederate territory between the years 1877-1950. This number, however, may very be a considerable overcount, seeing as how the Tuskegee Institute lists the total number of blacks killed in lynchings throughout America from 1882 to 1968 to be only 3,446. Another revelation from the Tuskegee findings, that for some reason 13th totally glossed over? The fact that during that same timeframe, 1,297 white people were also killed in extrajudicial lynchings. 

 04.) LBJ may have ushered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he was also arguably the most racist person to ever reside in the Oval Office - One of the incredible oversights in 13th involves the downplaying of Lyndon B. Johnson's well-documented racism. While the film doesn't so much as mention LBJ by name, they do include clips of several of his speeches to indicate just how much legislative civil rights progress came about in the 1960s. While LBJ may have had a major hand in pushing measures like the Fair Housing Act through, he was ironically an out in the open racist, colloquially referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as "the nigger bill" to his White House staff and rationalizing his appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court by declaring "when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he's a nigger." 

 05.) There is plenty of reasons to be suspicious of John Ehrlichman's bombshell quote about Nixon's crime policies - Fairly early on, we get the following statement, which was allegedly uttered by former Nixon domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Of course, 13th never tells the audience WHERE the quote came from. And in this case, it was culled from an extremely pro-legalization screed written by Dan Baum (yes, the same guy who wrote Gun Guys) for Harper's in 2016. The tricky thing is, Ehrlichman died in 1999, so there's no way to affirm or disconfirm the attributed quote as authentic. That said, one has to wonder why Baum sat on such a damning quote for more than 20 years - additionally, waiting another 15 years after the person who allegedly gave the quote kicked the bucket. Furthermore, if Baum was initially interviewing Ehrlichman for a book against the War on Drugs that would eventually get published in 1996, then why in the hell did he NOT include said quote in his own tome? That three leading members of the White House Special Office for Drug Abuse Prevention released a joint letter rejecting Baum's assertions - plus the fact that Baum refuses to speak to the press about the factuality of the quote in question - ought to make you feel very, very iffy about the legitimacy of the statement. 

 06.) Nixon's "War on Drugs" did very little to influence incarceration rates in the 1970s - In 13th, the filmmakers draw a direct causal line between Nixon's Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and the rise of incarceration rates in the U.S. In reality, general incarceration rates in the U.S. remained practically static from 1970 to 1976, and didn't even surpass the 200 per 100,000 people threshold until Jimmy Carter was in office. And for all the talk about Nixon's draconian policies, the documentary never mentions the fact that the CDPCA - among other things - actually repealed harsh mandatory sentences for marijuana possession and distribution and, during Nixon's presidency, allocated more federal funding for treatment programs than law enforcement expenditures. 

 07.) There is a very simple explanation why blacks are overrepresented in prison - Despite the film's blunt-as-a-sledgehammer attempt to posit the incarceration rates of black people in the United States as some sort of insidious, racist holdover from the Jim Crow era, there is indeed a VERY simple, one sentence explanation for why African Americans are jailed at higher rates than Caucasians - as the indisputable F.B.I. data demonstrates, it's mostly because, get this, black people tend to commit crimes at disproportionately higher rates than white people. And for those of you STILL convinced that there's some sort of magical, supernatural ethnic totalitarianism at the root of incarceration disparities along racial lines in these United States? Just for kicks and giggles, here's a totally not at all relevant Wikipedia article.

 08.) Quibble over the "Super Predator" terminology all you want, but crime in the United States unquestionably exploded during the 1990s - Without a doubt, the early 1990s were the most violent time in U.S. history, with the aggregate number of violent crimes recorded between 1990 and 1994 an absurd 1.8 million per year. For comparative purposes, the violent crime tally in 1970 was just 738,820, and today, it is only 1.2 million. In 1993, the U.S. logged its highest national homicide count in history (24,530 murders), in 1992 it recorded it all-time highest forcible rape tally (109,060) and in 1991, it posted its highest annual number of robberies (687,740) to date. In that, Clinton's "tough on crime" stance wasn't even remotely rooted in racial animosity - rather, it was a downright reasonable, if not even tepid, response to hard statistical evidence.

 09.) You REALLY don't want to bring up interracial rape stats - At one point, an interviewee states that, historically, rape in the United States has largely been white male on black female. Methinks the term historically wasn't just arbitrarily selected, seeing as how the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice reveals a pretty one-sided portrait of interracial sexual assaults in modern America. From 1996 to 2008, there were 24,304 white on black sexual assaults. That's really, really bad. Alas, the tally for black on white sexual assaults was substantially worse - a colossal, head-spinning 271,224. The numerical evidence makes it clear as day: in contemporary U.S. society, a white woman is officially eleven times more likely to get sexually assault by a black man than a black woman is to get sexually assaulted by a white man. But clearly, the crimes of 150 years ago are vastly more important than addressing, you know, the crimes going on right now. 

10.) Mandatory minimum sentencing legislation came about BECAUSE advocates said it would prevent racial discrimination by judges - One of the most amazing "get the hell out of here" moments in the film is a segment in which the talking heads bemoan mandatory minimum sentencing and "three strikes" laws as indicative of systemic racism. Oh, how soon we forget - in reality, mandatory minimum sentences were actually brought to life by black activist organizations, who believed that such legal protocols would eliminate racial disparities in sentencing. Indeed, one of the most conspicuous omissions in the entire documentary is the policymaking of New York Governor David Paterson - the man whose infamously tough-on-crime "Rockefeller Drug Laws" served as the first true illicit substance mandatory-minimum laws in the modern U.S. legal system. Huh ... I wonder why he never gets name-checked on the list of insidious, clearly racist, neo-slavery perpetratin' politicians? 

 11.) You may not like it, but there's ample evidence the much-maligned 1994 crime omni-bill did indeed lower America's crime rate substantially - Really, the numbers here don't lie. Since the contentious, controversial and highly criticized Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was authorized, violent crime in the U.S. has been on a huge downward trajectory. The year the bill was passed, the violent crime rate was 713.6 per 100,000 Americans. The very next year, the rate dropped to 684.5 per 100,000, and it's been precipitously declining ever since (albeit, with a brief uptick that quickly reversed itself between 2006 and 2010.) And today, the U.S. violent crime rate stands at 372.6 per 100,000, representing an astonishing 50 percent drop-off since the bill was enacted. Of course, of all the hypothetical correlative evidence the movie throws out, the one it doesn't dare trudge up is the clearly coincidental decline in violent crime running concurrently with the uptick in incarceration numbers. 

 12.) No, the U.S. legal system hasn't done away with parole as an alternative to incarceration - Even in a film glutted with gloriously hyperbolic statements, few in 13th are as astounding as the interviewee who proclaims that the American judicial system has "done away" with parole as a jailing alternative. Hate to burst your bubble, folks, but there were indeed 853,200 cases of incarcerated individuals receiving parole in 2013 - i.e., the equivalent of releasing nearly 40 percent of the United States' prison population.
Surely, academia would be just as receptive to a presentation titled "Black People are a Detriment to American Society," right?

13.) Sorry, but the Black Panthers weren't totally non-violent pacifists railroaded by "the man" - In another fantastic bout of historical revisionism, one interviewee - who attempts to express how the Feds had it out for the Black Panthers, because racism - says that not only were there not enough people in the Black Panthers to represent any kind of major civic threat, they - by and large - were extraordinarily peaceful. As for the size of the Black Panther Party, well, seeing as how their newsletter circa 1968 had a circulation of 250,000 people and satellite offices in nearly 70 cities across America, yes, I'd argue that they INDEED had the manpower capable of enacting mass civil "change" (and certainly more capacity than a group a'la the Aryan Nations, the much, much, MUCH loathed white supremacy outfit whose world conferences barely drew 200 people at their peak.) But the Panthers were definitely peace-loving individuals, though. I mean, it's not like the co-founder of the group shot and killed a cop, murdered an 18-year-old woman on the streets of Oakland and put out hits on trial witnesses or anything. And the Black Panthers NEVER tortured and executed their own members. And for certain, it's not like the organization's first recruit was killed during an attempted ambush on Oakland police officers. 

 14.) Since 2000, incarceration rates in the United States have remained relatively static - Now here's a huge statistical oversight that truly torpedoes 13th's central thesis about incarceration in the U.S. Simply put, the number of people imprisoned in the country over the last 17 years has been practically flat, with the total number of people in the nation's prisons increasing by just 180,300 prisoners between 2000 and 2013. And really testing the merits of the film's "carceral state" claims? The fact that U.S. incarceration rates have actually been on a considerable downturn since Obama came into office, with the total number of people in jail or prison declining by about 90,000 (or a year-over-year three percent net decrease) since 2008. 

 15.) Holy shit, where to begin on the segment about Trayvon Martin - Now we're getting into straight up Michael Moore levels of deliberate distortion. For starters, the little sliver of audio from George Zimmerman's 911 call was carefully edited to leave out the fact that the operator asked him what Martin's race was - you can get the backstory in full here. Furthermore, 13th completely discards not only the documented police reports that confirm Zimmerman was locked in a life-or-death struggle with the teenager, but the numerous eye witness accounts affirming that Martin was the aggressor. Oh, and all of that hullabaloo about Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law covering Zimmerman's alleged racially fueled hate crime? That would be a highly intriguing little plot twist, except for the fact that Zimmerman's lawyers never even brought up the law in court while defending their client. Oh, and a historical aside, can you take a wild guess which white-supremacist, gun-crazed special interests group once aggressively lobbied for the very same law 13th castigates as an implement of black genocide? Well, if you said the N.A.A.C.P. ... believe it or not, you'd be right on the money. 

 16.) Sorry, but ALEC isn't responsible for the so-called "carceral state" - Every heavily biased political documentary has to have a central, lurking-in-the-shadows villain, and in 13th that obscure object of resentment is an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-free market consortium of conservative politcos and business-folks who bandy around legislative proposals about, well, pretty much everything. In 13th, the filmmakers pretty much declare ALEC the masterminds behind the growth in the number of incarcerated Americans (you know, completely disregarding the fact that maybe a general increase in the overall U.S. population could result in an increase in the nation's jailed population by sheer mathematical default), as evident by their chummy relationships with the nation's two largest private-prison firms, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut Corp. (now GEO). So, naturally, the film emphatically states that ALEC has gotten in the ears of state legislators to toughen up their crime laws, so more people would get arrested and jailed, and therefore, feed private prisons a steady stream of revenue. Of course, this is an idea crippled by the government's recent announcement to phase out all privately held federal prisons, the fact that states like New York and Illinois passed legislation outright banning privately held detention facilities as early as the 1990s, that barely six percent of the entire incarcerated population in the U.S. was housed in private facilities in 2010 and that, since 2010, a good three dozen state bills have come forward - yes, even in incarceration-happy locales like Louisiana, Georgia and Arizona - seeking to decrease the number of overall people shipped through the state's prison systems. Indeed, ALEC itself has drifted away from its "tough on crime" approach in favor of cost-cutting prison policies, which includes - surprise, surprise - more investments in community-based incarceration alternatives, like probation. Which brings us to the million dollar question: if ALEC wasn't the diabolical Dr. Claw behind the scenes orchestratin' all these "truth in sentencing" bills, who was? Well, according to the United States Department of Justice National Institute of Corrections, the driving force for the legislation was Bill Clinton's 1994 omnibus bill, in which 60 percent of states mulling such policies said their own state laws were directly molded around the recently-passed federal act (with 20 percent of states declaring that was the only reason they pursued their own state-level incarceration models.) 

 17.) Walmart's profits aren't tied into "Stand Your Ground" laws whatsoever (and for one VERY good and logically inescapable reason) - One of the more astoundingly unfounded - and illogical - accusations the filmmakers lob concerns America's no. 1  private employer. Per 13th, Walmart lobbied hard for states to adopt "castle doctrine" laws, which - according to the filmmakers - allowed them to reap plenty o' profits from firearm sales. There's just one teeny, tiny catch with that assertion - chiefly, the fact that Walmart hasn't sold handguns (you know, like the one George Zimmerman used) in its stores since 1993. And seeing as how shotgun and rifle homicides barely even eclipsed the 600 mark in 2013, perhaps the producers of the film should have investigated Walmart's insidious ties to the cutlery industry instead - after all, easily three times as many Americans are killed each year with knives, box cutters and scissors than they are long guns. 

 18.) Private prisons in the U.S. are nowhere near as ubiquitous as the movie suggests - The way 13th puts it, you'd think private prisons have a monopoly on the U.S. incarceration system and make bajillions of dollars each year herding prisoners through 'em like cattle. In reality, the number of privately operated jails in the U.S. is declining, with CCA and GEO operating just 121 of the nation's 1,800-plus state and federal-level detention facilities in 2010. Indeed, as of 2010, the number of prisoners - state, federal or local - held in private jails or prisons represented just eight percent of the entire U.S. incarcerated populace. And while GEO recorded  an impressive $1.6 billion in profits in 2010, you have to recall the entity is indeed a multinational, with 40 percent of its annual profits culled from international services and (how about this) comprehensive reentry services. And as for CCA's annual revenue spread of $1.7 billion? Well, a lot of that cashflow can be explained by the Obama Administration, which granted the company $1 billion to construct and manage the South Texas Family Residential Center - a detention center not for prisoners, but Central American asylum seekers. 

19.) One little thing you should know about plea bargains - Not that you would've realized it from the apoplectic ranting and raving in 13th, but plea bargains aren't mandatory and defendants have every right in the world to forego them and pursue a trial jury. If you're pissed about the staggering number of people who take prosecutors up on their reduced sentencing offers, don't blame it on "the system" - blame it on the individuals who voluntarily choose them over waiting it out in a court of law.

20.) Probation is FAR and away the nation's number one response to criminal prosecutions, and it isn't even close - One of the absolute biggest problems with 13th's "carceral state" accusations can be found in the nation's probation numbers ... which, for some inscrutable reason, the documentary never brings up. Alright, so a good 2.3 million people are in federal, state or local detention centers at any given time in America, right? Well, what the film doesn't let you know is that at any given time in America, about 3.8 million convicted offenders are also serving probation as an alternative to incarceration. Factoring in those on parole, America has easily twice as many convicted felons under community supervision than those behind bars ... and in that, can you really call it a prison state when barely 40 percent of those convicted of crimes in America are actually punished with jail time?

 21.) The total percentage of young men arrested by the age of 18 really doesn't vary that much by race - Throughout 13th, several interviewees repeatedly harp on the "discrepancies" in arrest rates for young black men. Alas, actual arrest rates for 18-year-old men of ALL races in the U.S. are fairly comparable, with the journal Crime & Delinquency reporting in 2014 that 30 percent of all black males in the U.S. have been arrested at least once for a non-traffic offense, while the number for Hispanics and Caucasians rest at 26 percent and 22 percent, respectively. The numbers stay well within the 10 percent margin of error when expanding the sample size to include those up to the age of 23, with about 49 percent of black men, 44 percent of Hispanic men and 38 percent of white men all being arrested at least once in the United States. So yes, there is about a 9 percent-to-11 percent difference in arrest rates for 23-year-old black and white males, but keep in mind that doesn't take into consideration other factors, like how long the individuals were detained after being arrested, the severity of the charges leading to their arrest and whether or not they were actually convicted of any crimes (and, of course, seeing as how there are far more white men in the U.S. than black men, that means - just in terms of bulk numbers - far more young white men age 23 or younger have experienced jail time than black men age 23 or younger.) And then there are the arrest rates for women, which are even closer than the arrest rates for males - by the time they reach the age of 23, 20 percent of all black women in the U.S. have been jailed, compared to 18 percent of all white women and just 16 percent of all Hispanic women. 

 22.) Oh my god, the diatribe about Donald Trump is an absolute fucking nightmare of selective editing and cherry picking - In one of the film's more sensationalist moments, 13th "produces" a series of shaky, cell-phone recorded videos of black people being pushed around at Donald Trump rallies and Trump supporters shouting racial pejoratives, all while brief, cut-and-paste audio snippets of Trump saying ominous things like "back in the good old days" (clearly, a "dog whistle" for bringing back Jim Crow, right?) and "knock the crap out of them" (not direct quotes, by the way, but you get the gist of it) play in the background. Of course, the audio samples don't have anything at all to do with the visual incidents accompanying them - for example, the "knock the crap  out of them" line stems from an incident in Iowa in which protestors physically attacked Trump with tomatoes, while the "good old days" line was actually followed by Trump criticizing law enforcement for not removing an aggressive demonstrator from one of his private functions faster. Of course, black people have been accosted by white attendees at Trump rallies (but by that same token, quite a few white protestors have been knocked goofy by black Trump supporters at the same events, too.) That said, whatever vitriolic comments or shoving contests you can pull from Trump rallies absolutely pale in comparison to the hostility and physical aggression displayed by anti-Trump protesters, who have beaten, bloodied and in some cases burned those who dare had the audacity to support a politician they don't like. The scenes showcased in 13th may be lamentable, but they don't hold a candle to the sort of anti-Trump violence we've seen over the past few months at events in New Mexico, Ohio, Las Vegas, Arizona, Anaheim,  San Diego, San Jose, St. Louis, Houston, Orlando, Southern California, Oregon, North Carolina and especially Chicago, where Anti-Trump demonstrators - who may or may not have been paid by Democratic backers - instigated an honest-to-goodness riot to prevent Trump from speaking at an engagement. 

 23.) Yeah, about that "one in three black men will end up in prison" statistic - Throughout the movie, you'll hear various talking heads drop a couple of stats regarding black male incarceration rates. One of the more damning tidbits circulated as God-given fact by an interviewee is that one out of every three black males in the U.S. will wind up imprisoned at some point in their lives. As it turns out, the little number isn't a factual estimate, it's a prediction of what the lifetime incraceration rates COULD be if 2001 incarceration rates held steady from a report originally released in 2003. And as fate would have it, incarceration rates for black males has ... wait for it ... decreased by 20 percent over the last 15 years. So yes, not only is the "33 percent of black men get imprisoned" claim totally baseless, empirical evidence from the B.J.S. themselves reveals that the exact opposite of what 13th claims is happening coast-to-coast to black men is indeed the real reality we dare not speak. 

 24.) Speaking of the War on Drugs ... - Stop me if you've heard this one before: did you know that a majority of America's prisoners are jailed because of drug offenses? Aye, such is indeed the case - but only if you look at the nation's 211,000 federal prisoners. In the nation's state prisoner population, drug offenders only account for 212,000 of the 1.35 million individuals incarcerated and they only make up 160,000 of the 640,000 people - convicted or non-convicted - sitting in the nation's local jails right now. On the state and local level, there are roughly the same percentage of prisoners booked for property crimes as there are those booked for drug convictions and roughly three times as many people imprisoned for violent crimes. Oh, and that old chestnut about people put behind bars for decades for having joints in their pockets? Yeah, that's a bunch of bullshit, seeing as how there are only 20,000 people in the U.S. jailed in state or federal prisons for marijuana offenses - and of that, just 200 are estimated to be imprisoned for marijuana possession alone.

 25.) When it comes to arrest rates, socioeconomics plays a MUCH larger role than race or ethnicity - Sorry, Mrs./Ms. DuVarney (I am for real), but no, race is not the greatest predictor of whether or not a person will wind up in jail in the U.S. Study after study after study finds that childhood poverty is more or less the single greatest predictor of incarceration, whether an individual is black or white. Indeed, for those still doubting that classism, not racism, is the greatest driver of incarceration rates in these United States, a Duke University study looking at data since 1979 makes it clear as day: "higher levels of wealth were associated with lower rates of incarceration," regardless of race or ethnicity. And pray tell, what is the single greatest predictor that a child will grow up in poverty? As Harvard research determined, simply having both biological parents in the home is generally enough to keep an individual out of prison and functioning as a productive member of society. So if fatherlessness is the most common cause of poverty, which in turn is the most common cause of incarceration, why aren't folks like DuVarney doing more to extol the importance of the proven-to-be-successful nuclear family model in the black community? Surely, it has nothing to do with having to suck it up and say that single motherhood has been a direct cause of the so-called "incarceration boom" and admitting that Patrick Moynihan had it right more than a half a century ago, does it? 

26.) And lastly, there's even MORE cherry picking and selective editing when it comes to the film's account of black victims of police violence - As you would expect, the grand finale of 13th is a montage of several famous "victims" of police violence over the last few years  - Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, etc. - being shot and choked while cameras rolled. While this segment is fairly devoid of narrative context, the alignment of the imagery and audio quips seem to suggest police killings of black people - especially unarmed "victims" - is a substantially bigger problem than police killings of white individuals. Well, all you have to do is take one gander at The Washington Post's final tally of lethal police-involved shootings to realize what a bunch of malarkey that is. Out of 991 shootings in which police officers killed suspects in 2015, 495 "victims" were white, 258 were black and 172 were Hispanic. Just 93 unarmed people were killed all year round, with a grand total of five more black people without weapons being gunned down by cops than unarmed white suspects (and when it comes to those killed carrying toy guns, there were twice as many white people gunned down than Hispanics and blacks combined.) Alas, despite 13th's valiant attempts to make it seem like black youths are being blown away by racist white cops in record numbers, the actual government data reveals that the rate of young black men killed by police officers has declined 80 motherfucking percent since the late 1960s, with subsequent Harvard research revealing that there are no - I repeat, no - racial disparities "in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account" of police-involved shootings in the U.S. 
But does that include the
 58,000 or so black cops in the United States, as well?
And to conclude this long, drawn out condemnation of the film's aversion to documented truths, I'd like to go back to the film's core thesis - that today's carceral state is indeed the last remaining vestiges of that old economic institution we used to call slavery. 

 From the get-go, DuVarney's argument is critically hampered by the fact that incarcerating people isn't profitable. Indeed, lots of people - most notably, African slave traders - made a lot of money off the Atlantic Slave Trade, but considering the fact the U.S. loses $80 billion a year in taxpayer dollars on the nation's prison systems while the much maligned private prison contractors barely generate $5 billion annually, it's pretty hard to see where she comes away with the idea that imprisoning people is any, way, shape or form economically beneficial, especially for the state. Hell, even if you include the estimated $1 billion in economic growth derived from prison labor, you're still chalking up a loss of $79 billion each and every year. Indeed, if ANYBODY is a loser when it comes to prison profiteering, it's the unskilled American labor, whose job prospects are now being outsourced to convicts. Much to DuVarney's chagrin, that means that - in all statistical reality - the people most hurt by prison labor aren't the prisoners, but poor, uneducated and - irony of ironies - white lower class workers. 

 Now, as to the notion that incarceration represents some kind of extension of the discriminatory policies of the Jim Crow era? Since racism is an abstract, metaphysical concept that cannot be quantified or even qualitatively measured, this is like trying to prove or disprove the existence of God - you either believe what you want to believe or you say "naw, I'll pass" based on a lack of tangible evidence. That said, chalking up mass incarceration rates due to the invisible specter of white racism overlooks many other, clearly tangible factors that - quite frankly - do a much more rational job of explaining why black Americans wind up in jail at disproportionate rates compared to white Americans. A much, MUCH better documentary about black incarceration titled Elementary Genocide paints a far more convincing portrait of why African-Americans - particularly, young men - are at such high risk of being arrested, convicted and imprisoned: simply put, they don't learn the appropriate socialization and rudimentary literacy skills as young children to function in even the most unskilled of occupational positions, and as such, are left with few other "job opportunities" than career crime. As early as 1965, Patrick Moynihan was sounding alarm bells about the intersectionality of father absenteeism and criminal proclivities, a dire sociological reality in the black community that has been verified as a direct corollary of black crime time and time again. Even graver, a wealth of child neurological research indicates that the environmental impacts of early developmental stressors not only produce cognitive deficiencies that are irreversible, but many unchangeable mental patterns that are locked in place as early as kindergarten. Factoring in a pseudo-barbarian youth culture that produces and champions such horrific displays of child abuse as this as heroic, and I'm fairly confident stating that there are FAR more believable "root causes" of the epidemic of black incarceration in the United States than simply screaming "ray, ray RACISM" like a dumbfounded, self-victimizing Scooby Doo. 

 But perhaps the ultimate slight against 13th is its screaming, apoplectic hatred of the American judicial system. A film clearly aghast at the Scientific Method's foremost pillar - that is, instead of trying to verify what you want to be the case, you first attempt to disprove your own hypotheses - 13th immediately begins with the assumption that America leading the world in incarceration rates is something that is very, very clearly bad. Of course, DuVarney never even MULLS the alternative hypothesis that - instead of viewing America's 2.3 million prison population as a negative - perhaps it's simply tangible proof that our judicial system is far more efficient at finding, prosecuting and penalizing people who commit crimes than anybody else? Indeed, with the F.B.I. confirming that 1.2 million violent crimes and nearly 8 million property-based felonies are committed each year, that 2.3 million incarcerated populace most certainly is dwarfed by the number of Americans who have commit imprisonable offenses and gotten away with it, been found not guilty or given a community-based alternative sentence in lieu of jail-time. The F.B.I. numbers are unquestionable - considering at least 10 million people are arrested in the U.S. each year, the fact that only 15 percent of them actually wind up in a federal or state prison cannot be considered anything short of extraordinary judicial leniency writ large. 

 In that, why should the U.S. be ashamed of prosecuting and imprisoning 2.3 million people a year - the vast majority of them not people booked on draconian drug charges, but indeed the kinds of sordid individuals who commit violent felonies, like setting elderly women on fire during home invasions, raping women as "revenge" for slavery and drowning their own children in strip mall water fountains - when rapists, muggers, drug dealers and serial killers roam around with virtual impunity in third world hell holes in South America and pretty much the entire Sub-Saharan continent? Why should the U.S. be more ashamed of its 2.3 million incarceration stat than countries with astronomical homicide rates like Brazil, Venezuela and Papua New Guinea, or countries like the U.K., Sweden and Germany, who literally sweep mass rapes, homicides and organized child prostitution rings under the rug? Why should the U.S. be ashamed of jailing 2.3 million people a year when countries like Haiti, Mexico, Burma and Iraq are so prone to police corruption that you can literally bribe your way out of murder charges for the equivalent of $10 U.S.D.? Why should the U.S. be ashamed of its 2.3 million prisoners when there are 18 million slaves right now in India and the number of illegally indentured servants in China eclipses the total U.S. prison populace by at least one million people? Why should we be ashamed of our 2.3 million prisoners when even our scummiest facilities are Shangri-Las compared to the horrid conditions prisoners in countries like Thailand, Rwanda and Turkey have to survive - not live - in? Why should we be ashamed of our 2.3 million prisoners when people are being executed in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria for being gay and Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia mandate death sentences for even low-level drug offenses that wouldn't even pass muster as misdemeanors in the States? Why should our incarceration rates be any more embarrassing or regrettable than South Africa's rape statistics, or Zambia's starvation numbers, or China's annual number of state-endorsed executions (which easily eclipse the U.S.'s yearly totals ten-fold?) Why should Americans be any more ashamed of a domestic "carceral state" that directly impacts just 0.7 percent of the entire national populace when entire societies live in absolute totalitarian squalor in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Angola and 47 other dictatorships across the globe? 

 These are all heavy, heavy questions that 13th lacks the moralistic backbone and intellectual honesty to address. Rather, it's yet another half-assed, pro-black-victimization opus bankrolled, ironically enough, by multi-millionaire African-Americans and mindlessly praised as revolutionary by brainwashed media tools who are too cowardly/gullible to even think about second-guessing the film's extremely flawed - and in many cases, glaringly fabricated - arguments. Instead of confronting the indisputable reality of black crime and the moral and intellectual devastation of predominantly black communities that has served as a catalyst for those crimes (a gospel endlessly preached by black cultural leaders like Thomas Sowell and almost immediately hushed down by counter-ideologues who cling to the "racism as original sin" creation myth like security blankets to explain away any and all problems within the black community) 13th instead regurgitates the same old pseudo-sociological, "systemic discrimination" rhetoric from The New Jim Crow as if it were mathematically-validated statistical evidence. (As an aside, how telling is it that the woman who penned that trend-setting screed about "black persecution" has gone on to make beaucoup bucks by simply telling her overwhelmingly white readership base they are the reason African-Americans "can't" succeed in today's America?) In an absolutely brilliant critique of the film (which somehow concludes with the extolling of The Geto Boys' underappreciated 1995 album The Resurrection), Armond White puts it perfectly:
"How ironic that DuVernay’s 'experts' — post-civil-rights patricians and quislings — exemplify the group that DuBois labeled 'the Talented Tenth.' In a 1903 essay, DuBois predicted a class of educated blacks — one out of ten — who he dreamed would help lead their fellows out of post-slavery misery. More than a century later, the black educated caste (professors, pundits, foundation-funded 'activists'), bolstered by the privileges of academia and the media, are an embarrassment to DuBois’s prophecy. These select few have hijacked the grievances of the less-successful to justify their own protected professional standing and to broadcast their individual resentments as if grinding the axes of the masses."
For the scant convincing arguments 13th puts forth about discrepancies in cocaine and crack sentencing and why convicted felons should be able to vote after being released from prison, the movie endlessly occupies itself with another half dozen scientifically or statistically unprovable claims about that dreaded, dastardly "institutional racism" manifesting itself in "stop and frisk" policies and the disproportionate number of unarmed black police killed in police-involved shootings - a national sample size, it perhaps should be noted, that consisted of a staggering 38 people in 2015 (for comparative purposes, the number of unarmed white people shot and killed by cops that year was 32 ... but really, those five extra corpses TOTALLY makes this a social problem that belongs ONLY to black Americans.)
Let me introduce you kids to this term called
"cognitive dissonance" real quick...
In that, 13th is a film firmly more committed to continuing its black victimization narrative than actually ADDRESSING the core issues making black life so miserable in the first place. Of all the statistics the movie launches at the viewers, the one it doesn't dare bring up is seven. As in, black males in the United States are seven times likelier than white males to be arrested for homicide, per the 2013 findings of esteemed Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Another statistic 13th conveniently glosses over? 53 percent, as in 53 percent of all homicides committed between 1980-2008 were by black individuals (give or take 90 percent by black males.) Which means, despite making up less than 7 percent of the total national populace, one ethnoracial group was responsible for nearly HALF of all murders in the country over the course of three decades. Another number you won't see anywhere in 13th? 2,205, which is the total number of black individuals killed by other black individuals in the year 2014 (which means all but 246 of that year's 2,451 murders of black people were intraracial.) And for those of you looking to exploit a racial angle there, you have precious little to work with, seeing as the number of white people killed by black people in '14 was 2.3 times greater than the number of black people killed by whites.

 In that, 13th is a gravely racist film itself, denying black Americans to take responsibility for their own actions and instead blaming the fact that African Americans commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate of white people - with the majority of the victims of said crimes also being black - not on a grimly nihilistic inner city culture that celebrates drug running, pimping and drive-by shootings as noble, but by golly, the fact that white people in the 1920s were just so dadgum mean. Never mind the fact that over the course of two years, more black people killed each other than all of the recorded white-on-black lynchings since the Civil War. Never mind the fact that - despite deeper poverty and codified racism in the law - crime rates for black Americans were considerably lower in the 1950s than after the Civil Rights Movement. And never mind the fact that - despite whatever historical or contemporary grievances you may have with "the system" - nowhere on the planet  is there a country with more than one million black inhabitants in which said black individuals enjoy a higher standard of living and quality of life than in the U.S. (lest we forget, the United States - that white privilege hegemony it is - is home to more than 30,000 black millionaires and the first two black billionaires in modern history.)

To wrap this thing up, I'm going to leave you with just two more numbers: 840,000 and 10 percent. The first number is an estimate for the total number of incarcerated black men in the U.S. legal system. You've heard that number a billion-jillion times before and you're going to be hearing it a billion-jillion more times, I assure you. But the second? That's a stat I guarantee you'll never hear anybody talk about in pro-victimization agitprop like 13th - the total number of black households in the country with annual incomes north of $100,000. Well, seeing as how there are about 16 million black households in the states, that means there's at least 1.6 million black households socioeconomically designated as very well to do upper middle class t0 downright wealthy upper class families. And don't let Ava DuVareny's camp in on this, but despite their incessant prattling about the carceral state "enslaving" black America, with the 2010 Census stating the average American household is home to 2.58 people, that means we've got at least four million black Americans living privileged lives of unquestionable luxury and comfort (and that, I remind you, is almost certainly a vast undercount.) But despite the fact that we have easily four times as many African-Americans living in upper class homes than there are African-Americans who are imprisoned, when was the last time - if ever - you heard someone talk about the unsung (yet statistically more common) epidemic of black affluence?

 Yeah, don't expect to hear such idle words and meaningless data points seep out of the mouths of the chattering meat puppets in the next great, universally celebrated "woe is Black America" documentary. After all - why ruin a perfectly good narrative with troubling, discomfiting facts about how far more members of an allegedly victimized class are well off financially than they are in so-called "modern bondage?"

 Indeed, to do that is to commit the post-Obama equivalent of secular heresy - to dare fathom that, perhaps, the ghost of "racism" doesn't explain away all the unpleasant demographical discrepancies in contemporary society.
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