Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“You disgust me.”
First, for those who may have missed it, some background:
About a week ago, the WSJ hired a young reporter away from Business Insider. Her name is Katherine Long, and her pinned post on X reads, in part: “If you work with or around DOGE, I’d love to speak with you.” Two days ago, the WSJ published her piece, titled “Exclusive | DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts”. The following Mashable piece, titled “DOGE staffer resigns after racist posts uncovered. Elon Musk might bring him back,” does a pretty good job of going into the details, including what ensued over the following day or so:
https://mashable.com/article/doge-resignation-racist-posts-elon-musk-poll
Which brings us to …
Rep. Ro Khanna (D, CA-17; Indian descent, married to woman of Indian descent with whom he is raising two kids), addressing the following X post to VP Vance (married to woman of Indian descent with whom he is raising three kids):
I will now quote VP Vance’s supercalifragilisticexpialisplendiferous reply in its entirety:
“For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up.
Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.
I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern.
My kids, god willing, will be risk takers. They won’t think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.
They will tell stupid jokes. They will develop views that they later think are wrong or even gross. I made mistakes as a kid, and thank God I grew up in a culture that encouraged me to grow and learn and feel remorse when I screwed up and offer grace when others did.
I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro?
That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressm[a]n who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts.
You disgust me.”
The message from Trump/Vance HQ has gone out over our country’s amber waves of grain, its purple mountain majesties, its fruited plains from sea to shining sea, and it couldn’t be any more LOUD and CLEAR:
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! The Dark Age of Cancel Culture Wolves is OVER! The Golden Age of Culture-Saving Sheepdogs now BEGINS!
I say …
‘Bout damn time!
PS:
The young man has been rehired, btw, and is back doing DOGE things.
Published in Politics
Amen
I’m glad for the summary as I was seeing pieces of it on X, and didn’t understand how it all unfolded.
Vance is a national treasure.
They can’t cancel us if our response is “Margaret, I don’t give a damn”
He really turned the blender up to “frappe,” didn’t he? A thing of beauty.
I miss ethnic jokes.
On the positive side …. the Left has been reduced to attacking the investigators personally rather than pushing back on what the investigators are reporting to the public.
When you are losing the argument, try to change the subject.
The Left is so screwed …. not because of the revelation of the Left’s institutional malfeasance, but because of the loss of Federal funding of the Left’s ideological projects and what they had come to believe were their permanent sinecures.
That has been their MO all along, for two generations, going back to Alinsky Rule #13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
What’s changed is that the Republican Party is now led by Scarred Sheepdogs instead of Preencipled Poodles.
Yup.
I am listening to Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as an audiobook. He is an impressive man. He was 31 when he wrote it, and apologized for writing a memoir at that age, because “I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.” He was wrong, of course. It is well worth reading, and not just to learn how he became as based as he is.
If you have a chance, see the movie as well. The combination of both, IMO, is greater than their sum.
Thanks for highlighting this. I missed it, and it’s a great example of why I come here.
In addition to the VP’s wise words, I also learned that the WSJ “news” section has continued to decline. Hiring from Business Insider?
He narrated it himself, too. Author narrations are a crapshoot, but if he got good engineering I’m sure it’s a good production. He certainly has the speaking skills. I’ll have to listen to this one as soon as I wrap up my latest project. Thanks for the tip!
It is an excellent production. Having him read the book gives it an authenticity that is hard to beat. Since I listen to audiobooks when I am commuting it is like having him in the passenger seat as I drive.
I share much of Vance’s background and experiences but I’m a southern hillbilly from North Georgia. I’m sure Vance heard this expression as early in life as I did:
sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me
A million trillion “likes”. Don Rickles is the greatest human being that ever existed on earth. lol
Heck, I was born and raised in upstate NY, and we heard those from every parent.
Of course, I would make sure I had a stick and a stone handy at all times.
Things started to go awry when elementary schools started to teach little children to be hurt by name calling when my kids were still in public school in the 80s. They would say to me, “That’s a putdown and putdowns hurt”. They seriously thought that they had used a trump card on me. I would reply, “Go and live with your social studies teacher if you want to luxuriate in hurt feelings all day long”.
Funny story , one of them came home in tears because some kids had been chanting at him, English, English. I replied, well you are English, we’re all English except Thomas and Elizabeth. What’s wrong with that? No more tears.
Not just anybody from BI. The young “journalist” in question made a name for herself as being noticeably adept at, for instance, what’s called “doxxing”. Here’s an excerpt from a just-published Spectator piece (titled “Who is Katherine Long?“) written by one of her targets:
“Back in July of last year, while I was still an anonymous poster and writer under the name “Raw Egg Nationalist,” Ms. Long sent an email to one of my local farm shops asking the owner to reveal my personal details to her so she could tell the whole world who I really am.
I discovered this one day when I rocked up to the shop to buy some eggs and artisan cheese. As I entered the shop through the beaded curtain, the owner rushed out from behind the counter waving a piece of paper. “Charlie, Charlie: look at this!”
This is what the piece of paper said:
Hello, My name is Katherine Long.
I’m a journalist for Business Insider. I’m on a reporting quest and I believe you may be able to assist me. I have been interested for some time in an influential blogger named Raw Egg Nationalist. Though he is from the UK, he is increasingly prominent here in the US, where he has affiliations with a well-funded think tank, the Claremont Institute, and has been featured in a Fox News documentary. His primary thesis is that men should eat more raw eggs and more raw milk as part of an ethos of vigorous white, male nationalism based on what he describes as traditional values.
I’m emailing you because, based on photos he has posted on social media, I believe he does much of his grocery shopping — or, at least, he did, at one point — at X farm shop. Do you or any of your staff know of a man who regularly buys large quantities of eggs and milk? (By “large quantities,” I mean dozens of eggs a week — he claims to eat more than 10 raw eggs a day.) If so, I would be very grateful if you could pass along his name. I am happy to keep our conversation confidential, i.e. I would never tell anyone how I had learned his name.
I expect this is not a typical email for your farm shop to receive! I am happy to chat over the phone to share more about my reporting and why I think this person is of such particular interest. I am reachable on Signal at…
Warmly, Katherine
I left the farm shop a little shaken, with the cheese and eggs I’d come for and also a whole heap of questions I hadn’t. I considered it a lucky escape — yes, I had been sloppy and posted an image of a raw-milk carton whose label was still partially visible — but I didn’t think anything more would come of it. I’d tighten my Twitter security and carry on as before.
Two weeks later, I was “doxxed” — had my personal information revealed — by a left-wing activist organization called “HOPE not hate” that has ties to the British government. Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer pounds have been given by successive governments, including Conservative ones, for “anti-extremism” training by HOPE not hate.”
The WSJ knew exactly what it was getting: someone to help them go after the DOGE team. Just a week after they hired her, she delivered.
LOL. Vance got played.
The staffer in question, Marko Elez, is 25. The racist posts were made last year when, depending on his birthday, he was either 24 or 25. Some kid.
I like JD Vance more and more every day.
Yup. Pretty amazing kid, considering that, in less than the 3 weeks that have passed since noon on January 20th, as part of the DOGE team, he’s already been of more benefit to our republic than all of the self-professed Saviors of Conservatism at Defending Democracy Together/Bulwark/Lincoln Project/etc. over the entirety of their professional careers, combined. All thanks to the fact that, despite their best efforts to prevent it, …
Play the ball, not the pitcher.
Same attitude towards athletes and artists and politicians – I measure you by whether I am getting value for money. Not by whatever stupid ideas you may otherwise have in your head.
CancelCulture is evil.
DOGE is going to save our country. Its work is beyond important. I could not care less if the people working there are racist antisemites who like to eat newborn kittens as snacks. The value is in what they DO.
It is the very same reason why I have so much contempt for most government employees. They are parasites on hardworking people.
When this is the Left’s big “gotcha” story to push back the MAGA onslaught …. the Left is so screwed
Only the hard Left and severely afflicted TDS’ers would take the work DOGE is doing finding waste, fraud, and corruption in our Federal Agencies and sincerely believe this “story” doxing a DOGE worker for a private ethnic joke matters to anything ….. it only reeks of desperation.
Keep up the deep research into twenty something DOGE workers … you’re
wasting your timedoing God’s work.There’s isn’t a God, of course, even a capitalized one, but if there were, I have no doubt it would endorse my humble efforts to maintain standards while so-called conservatives fall over themselves lining up to worship a lying, thieving, vendor-stiffing, charity-defrauding, tax-cheating, sexual-assaulting serial adulterer. The fictitious divine being is reputed to have rather serious views on this sort of behavior.
I REALLY wish we had a down vote button!!!!
Or a Btfsplk button.
Fun to discover just one more trigger for our resident TDSer …. any mention of organized religion.
BTW: My mention of “God” was done in jest, with no intention of calling on a capitalized God in any prayer or anything else …. just a common expression never intended to upset the hyper upsettable.
I am not “triggered” by mention of religion, organized or not. As soon as I recognize that a post concerns religion, for example the exegesis of a scriptural text, I immediately and silently scroll past it. I never attempt to engage deists on the subject of their beliefs, here or elsewhere, as it is a matter of no interest to me. Triggerin’ don’t enter into it.
You certainly don’t miss out on telling the deists that there is no God.