CNN Is Useful After All

You might have seen this on CNN on Friday:

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote the foreword and publicly promoted a 2022 book that spread baseless and discredited conspiracy theories and used derogatory homophobic insults.

Written by Scott McKay, a local Louisiana politics blogger, the book, “The Revivalist Manifesto,” gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories often embraced by the far-right — including the “Pizzagate” hoax, which falsely claimed top Democratic officials were involved in a pedophile ring, among other conspiracies.

The book also propagates baseless and inaccurate claims, implying that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was subjected to blackmail and connected to the disgraced underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

So says Andrew Kaczynski, formerly of the well-respected (cough, cough) journalistic organ BuzzFeed and currently producing something called the “KFile” for CNN’s website.

Somebody at CNN thought it was a devastating indictment of Mike Johnson that he wrote the foreword for The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win the Next American Era (which is the full title of the book, and you’ll note that it’s italicized, as book titles are supposed to be, and not in quotes as the illiterate troglodytes who edit articles for CNN’s website have presented it) because there are lines and phrases in the book that offend Andrew Kaczynski’s delicate woke sensibilities.

I can go through them relatively quickly and save you the hassle of clicking on CNN’s website to read this rather cranky screed.

The book doesn’t spend much time giving “credence” to Pizzagate, though it does point out that most of the allegations and suspicious items that originated out of the leaks of John Podesta’s emails in 2016 have never really been explained or debunked. What it does do with Pizzagate is include it among a substantial list of revelations and controversies afflicting the Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 that ultimately piled up into a narrative, embraced by many Americans, that Clinton was too disgusting and too toxic to be elected president, and that was why Donald Trump won that election.

It’s not that Pizzagate was particularly true or not true; it’s that it was something a lot of people were grossed out by and that their votes may well have been influenced by.

But given the allegations and recent arrest of Slade Sohmer, a longtime friend of Podesta and editor-in-chief of the Democrat website the Recount, on child pornography charges, one could argue it’s not so strategic for Kaczynski to have led his critique of The Revivalist Manifesto with scoffing about Pizzagate.

Just saying.

Then there’s the “implying” that Roberts was enmeshed in the Epstein mess. What the book says is that many Americans have lost faith in the Supreme Court as an institution because they believe Roberts has been compromised, and reports that his name is on the Epstein flight logs don’t help dispel those concerns.

Kaczynski also got a case of the vapors over the book’s noting that there were attempts to cancel Joe Rogan for the use of the “N-word” on his show. What The Revivalist Manifesto says about that incident is that Rogan’s old uses of the word were made into an issue almost immediately after he departed from the ruling-class narratives on COVID treatments and vaccines; shockingly, all of a sudden he was a racist for having used the word…

…when quoting rap lyrics.

Then there are complaints like this:

The book also disparages poor voters as “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency” and easy to manipulate with “Black Lives Matter ‘defund the police’ pandering.”

And?

Making poor voters “susceptible to government dependency” is the central project of the modern Democrat Party, and there isn’t a single honest observer of American politics on the left or the right who challenges that statement. Honest lefties will say that government dependency is a beneficial thing. But, of course, in this modern Obama age, there are no more honest lefties, and that certainly includes Andrew Kaczynski.

Another one:

The book repeatedly disparages Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, calling the former mayor a “queer choice” for the Cabinet position and saying he had “queer sanctimony” and was “openly, and obnoxiously, gay.” At one point, the book labels him “Gay Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

Here’s something to ponder: If Pete Buttigieg is not obnoxiously gay, then which of the following are true?:

• It’s impossible for anyone in modern America to be obnoxiously gay;
• It’s possible for someone to be obnoxiously gay, but you aren’t allowed to notice; or
• There is a threshold for being obnoxiously gay that Pete Buttigieg has yet to meet.

If it’s the third option, then apparently it wasn’t obnoxious for Buttigieg to take that photograph with his husband in what looked like a birthing bed with their adopted kids while Buttigieg was taking two months off from his job in the middle of a supply-chain crisis. Or it wasn’t obnoxious for him to claim he was a better Christian than those people who pointed out that his homosexual lifestyle is explicitly described as sinful by Scripture.

Buttigieg’s political career is modeled after Barack Obama’s (and, yes, my new book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama talks all about this) in that he attempts to use his sexuality the way Obama used his race — namely, as a shield against any and all criticisms. If you aren’t on board the P-Butt train, you’re a bigot, just like you were a racist for asking questions about Obama. (RELATED: Racism, Revenge and Ruin: The Hellish Forces of Barack Obama)

That this idiocy isn’t laughed completely out of the public sphere is a reasonably new phenomenon for which we have Obama to thank. We also have him to thank for the stupidity of the modern legacy corporate news media in which Democrat opposition research like Kaczynski’s moronic piece is passed off as journalism.

And then there is this, which is the granddaddy of them all:

The book also spreads a conspiracy theory that the Biden administration deliberately allowed undocumented immigrants into the country to turn them into voters.

As we say down south, bless your heart, you sweet summer child. Democrats bragged for 20 years about how immigration from the Third World would make a permanent majority for their party and gave illegals the right to vote in local elections in New York and California and a few other places, and then this BuzzFeed bozo comes along to inform you that it’s a “conspiracy theory” that throwing open the border to millions of invited invaders is an attempt to change the demographics of the country. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: On Foreign Policy, Dirty Joe Piles Up the Ls)

It’s so bad, so ham-handed, that you almost feel for this guy. He’s grossly out of his depth here.

Kaczynski and his co-author Em Steck clearly didn’t read The Revivalist Manifesto — because, while it takes an irreverent and iconoclastic view of lots of Democrat sacred cows, it isn’t about any of the things they found “offensive” in the book. It’s about big subjects, the biggest being the assertion that the reason it feels as though nothing works in this country is because we’re coming to the end of a major age in our history, one that began with the New Deal in the 1930s, and a lot of the assumptions and institutions fundamental to that age no longer work. We’ll soon be entering a new age in politics, economics, and culture, and who will control that age is up in the air; it will either be the hard Left, the Obama Democrats, or a populist-conservative Republican Party that finally throws off the Stupid Party/Bush Republican crowd and gets bold and aggressive enough to make some real change.

That’s what the book is about, and that’s what got Mike Johnson interested in writing the foreword.

You don’t get that when all you do is a keyword search looking for things that woke Karens who listen to NPR and constantly hit refresh at CNN.com might find offensive. Which is likely what Kaczynski, in all of his “journalistic” zeal, did in preparing this hit piece on Johnson.

If it sounds as if I’m complaining about Kaczynski, let me correct that impression. I’m not. His piece dropped on CNN’s website Friday morning, and by Saturday The Revivalist Manifesto was topping Amazon’s comparative politics chart. When I looked on Monday, it was still there.

So, no, I have absolutely nothing against Andrew Kaczynski. How could I? He’s made me a lot of money.

I just want him to do the same stupid keyword search on Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama because he’s bound to find lots more vapor-inducing horrors in the new book. And maybe he can launch a scoldy screed about that one on CNN’s website and run Racism, Revenge and Ruin up to No. 1 as well.

At some point, these news organizations who employ hacks like Kaczynski are going to start going out of business. CNN already had a colossal failure trying to launch a streaming service, CNN+, which essentially demanded that people pay for more of something they refuse to watch for free.

Extinction is coming for these people.

And until late last week, I’d have told you it’ll be glorious to see. Now? I’m thinking it’s more bittersweet. I’m getting to like the fact that somebody like Kaczynski can make me a lot of money swinging and missing at Mike Johnson.

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