Can you legislate love and hate? More anti-hate laws coming...

Scraped from "Toronto film fest nixes Oct 7 doc screening, cites Hamas ownership of massacre clips", Blazing Cat Fur, 13/8/25. 

You'll see there a reference ther to Triumph of the Will, which has now disappeared from YouTube. Ed. knows where to find it but hesitates to post it here for fear of the thought police.

Anti-semitism then and now

"You are powerless against my assault rosary!!!"

Earlier this month, The Atlantic, which used to be a reasonably fair journal of opinion*, published "How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary", by one a self-described "online hate researcher" -- an "expert" no doubt -- by the name of Daniel Panetton. That the original title was "How the Rosary became an extremist symbol" tells you all ye need to know about the biases of the author.

In "Of 'rad-trad' Catholics, 'battle beads' and belly laughs", our old friend Rex Murphy, who was raised Catholic but is by no meands one of us "Trads", calls the piece "the funniest thing I've read in decades...[in] the tradition of National Lampoon or Mad Magazine...a scream from beginning to end."

Mr Murphy writes:  A few minutes later, after composing myself, I read the article’s first sentence: "Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the Rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or 'rad trad') Catholics."

Almost as good is that sly dig at "Christian nationalists" (they may even exist -- I won’t contest it) for whom "the AR-15 has become a sacred object." Another luminously funny revelation. The AR-15 -- sacred? Is it only that munition? Or do the 12-gauge shotgun, the .30-30 Winchester and the humble .22 exert an equal sacerdotal aura? I expect to this author they do, but like all great humorists he doesn’t overload (a useful verb here) his exposition."

He concludes: ...watch out for those rad-trad Rosary-toting Catholic nationalists. They may be hiding a print of The Lord's Prayer in their ammunition case.

The Babylon Bee "your trusted source of Christian satire", takes up the cudgels with "Catholics Unveil High-Capacity Assault Rosary" Here's part of their tongue-in-cheek report.

Pope Francis issued a papal bull Thursday authorizing the production of a new HM-18X Assault Rosary. The pope detailed key features of the innovative new rosary in his edict, including rapid-fire decades, an extended crucifix clip, and a laser sight....

"For centuries the holy rosary has been our greatest and most stylish tool to fight evil," said Pope Francis during morning mass in St. Peter's Basilica. "But the time has come for more aggressive spiritual warfare to fight evil climate change and protect marginalized communities." 

"Oh, and serve God," he quickly added.

Swiss Guards deployed in Vatican City have advised Catholics not to aim the new rosary at anyone they do not wish to bless.... A pew research study indicates conservative Catholics have latched onto the new rosary, impressed by how many prayers they can shoot off in five minutes. Liberal Catholics are dismayed at what they see as "too much prayer" and are currently advocating for common sense rosary reform.

And finally... a little-known (to Walt, until now) blog called The American Catholic reposted "Assault Rosaries Banned In Virginia" a piece by Guy McClung, first published over a year ago... as satire!

A couple of quotes: The photo above is of a United States government issued “combat rosary” supplied to U.S. soldiers in WW I. They were made of chain and some – the more “deadly” versions – included a miraculous medal and a St. Benedict medal].

"Our law enforcement personnel and national guard troops have done a fantastic job," said Virginia Governor Shearing Northcut following this weekend's raids on homes, churches, and businesses across the state. "In a short 36 hour period, they found and confiscated over 40,000 of the rosary hate weapons. They will all be destroyed."

One state senator, who asked to remain anonymous, told this reporter, "It just makes common sense. No one needs to say 53 of the same prayer or even 6 of the same prayer, over and over. It is in the interest of all the people that these chains or necklaces or whatever they are be limited by law."

In his update, Mr McClung writes: I am working on a new prophecy: "Vatican Bans Assault Bibles; Democrats Exalt."

[That's enough parodies of an article that parodies itself. Ed.]

* Until they started giving space to the TDS-challenged cuckservative, David Frum.

From the inside: Matt Taibbi explains why the media want to keep Americans perpetually at war...

...with each other!

In fact, "Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" is the subtitle of Matt Taibbi's latest book, Hate Inc. (OR Books, 2019), which I have just finished reading and recommend highly. Mr Taibbi's political views are quite different from mine, but I always enjoy reading his accounts of what's really happening in American politics. He is a worthy successor to Dr Hunter S. Thompson.

Hate Inc. is something of a confession, a mea culpa for the part Mr Taibbi played in creating and feeding Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), both before and after the revolution of November 2016. See Walt's review of Insane Clown President, WWW 10/8/17.

The author now admits having been deceived by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and having deceived himself into being part of the "groupthink", the "conventional wisdom" purveyed by the lamestream media, which held that someone as worthy as Hellery Clinton couldn't possibly lose to such a patent phony as the Donald. To his credit, Mr Taibbi gives numerous examples of where he went wrong, while at the same time pointing out that he wasn't the only one.

But Hate Inc. is not an apologia for the honest mistakes of the media, because very little of the "news" they fed us was "honest". Mr Taibbi argues that what they gave us, and are still giving us, is a twisted and highly hyped form of the kind of entertainment epitomized by a WWE wrestling match! It wasn't an election, he says, but the grand finale of Wrestlemania, complete with a "babyface" (Mrs Bill) and a "heel" (Mr Trump) straight out of a reality TV show.

The "face" was supposed to win, but somehow managed to defeat herself, and that's a story already told by Mr Taibbi and countless others. The real story of Hate Inc. is why the media did it, and how they are still doing it. The answer is simple. Anger and hatred attract more viewers/readers than sweetness and light. More viewers/readers means more advertising revenue. More advertising revenue means more profit! Especially when you don't have to pay for the content! In fact, election advertising is a hyuge revenue stream for the meeja. The more elections, the more hotly contested, the more money they make.

And you, fellow "news consumers", are swallowing every drop of vitriol, every morsel of loathing, and begging for second and third helpings. In Hate Inc. you will find countless examples of the media's most egregious manipulation of your ignorance, prejudices, and fears. They whipped you into a frenzy, gentle reader, and want to keep you there so you won't log off their websites or turn off your TV, even though "some viewers may find this disturbing!"

I would like to post some excerpts, but Ed. tells me I have gone on long enough and must find just one for the conclusion of this review. Here `tis:

News consumers on both sides today behave like cultists; self-isolating intellectually, kept that way with a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens. Red-staters are told liberals are terror-sympathizers, desperate, out of white guilt, to eviscerate American cultrure from within.

Blue-staters are peppered daily with stories of fellow travelers and traitors in their midst, an incredible example being NBC's effort to paint presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of the Kremlin.... 

This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be.... We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict, not just for the grubby commerical reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.

What other things? Read the book! If doing so causes you to stop reading WWW, I won't be offended, as long as you also stop watching The View and Rachel Maddow and [That's enough biased "news" sources! Ed.]

Footnotes:
Hate Inc. doesn't have an index (tsk, tsk) but it does have an appendix entitled "Why Rachel Maddow is on the cover of this book". Enough said?

A second appendix is an interview with Noam Chomsky, co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Walt recommends reading this appendix first, before the book itself, to understand where Matt Taibbi is coming from. In the interview, he says to Prof. Chomsky: The main idea of Manufacturing Consent is...that it looks like we have a vigorous system of independent journalists, but the debate has been artificially narrowed. Why that is so is what Hate Inc. is all about.

Portrait of a hater

Remind you of anyone you know? Anyone you've seen on the TV news? Congresspersons, perhaps? Squaddies?

Further reading: "Here’s why Ilhan Omar's claim that 'white men' are greater threat than jihad terrorists is wrong", by Matt Walsh, Daily Wire, 25/7/19, reposted by Dr Rich Swier, 7/8/19.