Diogenes' Middle Finger: The Brian Stelter Memorial Award for Worst Quote of the Year 2023

 Diogenes' Middle Finger: The Brian Stelter Memorial Award for Worst Quote of the Year 2023 (diogenesmiddlefinger.com)

Our Favorite Kickball Squinty Joe Takes Top Honors!! 

"NewsBusters - It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2023 and declared a winner. This year the winner is Joe Scarborough! 

"The MSNBC host won for his absurd and dire prediction that if Donald Trump wins re-election he will “imprison” and “execute” his political opponents. The former Republican Congressman, on the November 21 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe also claimed that the federal judiciary was the “only thing that stood between” Trump and “the destruction of American democracy” when he was in office.

“Joe Scarborough spews out this kind of insanity every morning. But this particular attack on President Trump and his supporters was so absurd it managed to stand out from the everyday nonsense you typically hear from Joe, Mika and the rest of his crazy leftist cronies on that tire fire of a show. Scarborough was full of crazy rants in the AM this year. 

He also claimed Trump would wipe out the “free press.” He dismissed President Joe Biden’s many senior moments as he bragged that “behind closed doors” Biden is “sharp” and “on top of everything” and has made “Europe safe for democracy.” Scarborough also shamed GOP House members as a bunch of “weirdos, insurrectionists and freaks” for trying to impeach the President over “Biden crime family nonsense.”  

  "The Runners Up Came as No Surprise Either - READ MORE HERE"

CA Law to Punish Stores for Not Having Gender-Neutral Toy Section

  The Punching Bag Post

"The Assembly Bill AB-1084 was signed into law by California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2021 and it takes effect early next month. The law mandates a separate toy section for children at all major department stores in the state that sell children’s toys. On the official California Legislative Information website, the bill’s draft justifies the law as:

"Keeping similar items that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys separated makes it more difficult for the consumer to compare the products and incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate.

"Reporting on the issue, The New York Post cited Jonathan Keller, president of the conservative California Family Law Council, criticizing the law. He said:

“ 'Activists and state legislators have no right to force retailers to espouse government-approved messages about gender. It’s a violation of free speech, and it’s just plain wrong.”

"Liberals have largely supported the new law for breaking through what they consider gender stereotypes in children. Conservatives, on the contrary, see it as a political move to confuse children about their gender. Many conservatives, including some celebrities in the entertainment industry, have moved out of California owing to Newsom’s far-left policies. One conservative ex-resident of California, Joey Frank, responded to the news of Newsom’s law on gender-neutral toys by writing on Twitter/X that he left California because of “idiots like Newsom.” . . .

Applying to college has changed for Jewish students since Oct. 7 –

  The Forward

"Josie LaMere, a Jewish high school senior in Minneapolis, looked at 15 or 20 colleges before picking Occidental College in Los Angeles as her dream school. She was about to submit an early decision application when she learned that 59 Occidental professors signed a letter condemning Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide,” without mentioning the Hamas massacres that prompted Israel’s attacks.

“I don’t know if I can learn from these teachers who are telling me that this is what I have to think,” she told her mother, Melanie.

"Josie’s college counselor reached out to Occidental for reassurance. “It took eight days for them to get back to us with a non-answer,” Melanie LaMere said. “It was heartbreaking.”

"So Josie never sent that application to Occidental. “My priorities have radically transformed,” she said. “Now, more than ever, I know I want a Jewish community wherever I go,” and a school where she will “feel safe, supported, and authentically me, as a Jewish person.”

The war on campus

"Josie is one of many Jewish high school students for whom the college application process has changed since Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 240 in surprise attacks on kibbutzim and a music festival near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip.

"Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground invasion that Hamas officials in Gaza say has killed 15,000 people there. Many U.S. college campuses are now hotbeds of antiwar activism — and antisemitic incidents — as pro-Palestinian student groups and professors blame Israel for the war without condemning Hamas.

As Jewish students studied inside the Cooper Union library, a pro-Palestinian protest formed on the other side of the glass. Courtesy of Abigail Mottahedeh

"Jewish students have been targeted in dozens of incidents. At Stanford, an instructor ordered them to stand in a corner, then labeled them “colonizers.” At Manhattan’s Cooper Union, Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library while pro-Palestinian activists pounded on the windows." . . .

Leftist Lunacy Fuels Hamas Atrocity –

  Issues & Insights  "Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left.  Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology.  The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.  

"As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it.  The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages.  Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”

"Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered:  “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”

"Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent.  Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.

"First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings.  Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists.  And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for.  So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.

"Second, the inequality in this exchange is also of Hamas’ making.  From a moral standpoint, Hamas sent in terrorists and took out innocent civilians.  From any civilized moral perspective, there is no equivalency here.  The transactional inequality is therefore inherent: the innocent for the guilty, the unsuspecting for the premeditated. " . . .

“The anti-American activists are the anti-Capitalist activists are the anti-Israel activists”

 Legal Insurrection

My appearance on the Mark Reardon Show about antisemitism on campuses: “Jews end up becoming a proxy for everything that these groups hate about our own society. So if you did one of Kamala Harris’s Venn diagrams and you had things that were over overlapping … anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Israel, there is a huge overlap.”

 "There have been so many really, really important pieces that have been written and published here since October 7th. And I found another one from William Jacobson, who is a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, founder and president of a group called The Legal Insurrection Foundation. And the headline of this piece was Hatred of Western Civilization Stokes the Campus Antisemitism Crisis Campus – Mobs would Destroy Israel First, then America. I’ve made the case here over the last few weeks that this is really, a lot of this is about our way of life. It’s about western civilization. And William, welcome to the show. I think you did an exceptional job of painting the picture in a very appropriate way. How are you this afternoon?

"I’ve covered a lot of the atrocities and we’ve talked about these professors and the things that they’ve said this week. But let me kind of skip ahead to the question that you ask here and your answers and your question is, why did American campuses erupt with expressions of hatred for Israel and Jewish students? What could possibly motivate college students to act in such an inhumane, deplorable way? And we’re still seeing this on full display. So you go back a little bit to the 1980s, right? So explain your perspective on this.

. . ."Sure. Well, I was there when what we now call critical race theory and critical theories and intersectionality and all those racialized ideologies were in their formative stages at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s. And nobody really paid attention to them then. But what they were doing is they were beginning, even back then, to cast the Israeli Arab dispute in very racial terms, that they would build coalitions of non-white student groups against Israel. Now, it wasn’t as strong, it wasn’t as big as it is on campuses now, but you can see how over 30, 40 years that became institutionalized in colleges.

"And now everything in colleges is about race. I know, because I teach on a college campus, at Cornell. So every dispute is now in terms of white oppressor versus non-white oppressed. And that is how the Israeli Arab dispute or Israeli-Palestinian dispute is portrayed relentlessly on campuses." . . .

Satan welcomed. Jews must hide. - Don Surber (substack.com)  "While the devil gains acceptance in America, Jews face an historic rise in anti-Semitism. Instead of sympathy following the Palestinian attack, rape, torture and murder of 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240 people on October 7, many anti-American liberals have embraced the Hamas terrorists and are attacking Jews.

20% of young people are Holocaust Deniers, according to one poll.". . .

We Are Well Beyond Hypocrisy; Have we again forgotten the subpoenaed Trump children?

 

Victor Davis Hanson › American Greatness  "The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.

Impeachment

"The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out-of-bounds entirely.

"So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be automatically acquitted in the Democratically controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s reelection efforts.

"All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began, and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month, $40-million-special-counsel Russian-collusion hoax).

"The Democrats tried to remove an elected president over a phone call without a special counsel’s report. So Trump was impeached only after the 2018 election led to a Democratic House majority, which went from eating up nearly two years of his administration in the Russian-collusion hoax straight into the impeachment farce. There was no concern about the cost to the nation of putting an elected government into a continual state of siege.

"There is one difference, though, between the Trump impeachment and the Biden impeachment inquiry. Donald Trump was impeached because he accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil fuel expertise, an astronomical sum to serve on the Burisma board—as the costly quid that earned the lucrative quo from his dad Vice President Joe Biden.

"No one now denies that Joe Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by threatening to cancel legislatively-approved U.S. aid. Shokin knew about the skullduggery through which the Biden family eventually received $6.5 million from Ukraine—and so Biden ensured his firing, and publicly bragged about it in performance-art fashion." . . .

Former Biden Spox Reckons White House Wants Hunter Biden To ‘Stop Talking In Public’ | The Daily Wire

Who is teaching Jew-hate to the young?

  Monica Showalter - American Thinker   "The strange outburst of pro-Hamas, antisemitic demonstrations on multiple college campuses in recent weeks suggests that it's more than a fringe of the student body that finds this repugnant kind of protest appealling.

"Now a new Harvard/Harris poll confirms it:" . . .

New Harvard/Harris poll results: 67% of respondents aged 18-24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors," 60% of respondents aged 18-24 agree that Hamas’ October 7th massacre can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians, and 31% of… pic.twitter.com/Ma5WHLO1OO

— Eden Cohen ✡︎ עדן כהן (@edencohentweets) December 16, 2023

. . . "This antisemitic freak was a leader, telling other teachers what they should do, and her activities stretched over months and months without so much as a blink from her fellow union leaders. Obviously, a rotten culture is happening there, as if we didn't know it already based on other indicators.

"Besides having hideous people like this allowed to be around children, a second problem is that very little teaching -- about the Holocaust, about Israel, about Jewish people, about antisemitism -- goes on at these places of higher learning. What kind of Holocaust education do kids get these days? It may well be that the only people they hear from are the deniers.

"Obviously, the picture is unfolding, and this needs far more study, but it signals some kind of moral crisis. It's astonishing that the young generation should sound like the Hitler generation, while older generations harbor far more reasonable and fair minded people.

"Something has contaminated the youth pool and the suspect list needs much, much, more examination if it is to be rooted out. Jew-hate should be an ugly memory, not the next hot trend among the young people.

Satan welcomed. Jews must hide. - Don Surber (substack.com)  . . ."Now let me try to wrap my head around this. When you want to display the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, freedom of religion blocks you.

"But if you want to display Satan’s seven fundamental tenets prominently in the Rotunda of the state Capitol that is covered by free speech. The Rolling Stones are not the only ones with sympathy for the devil.

(Representative Brad) "Sherman said, “The outrage and disgust for this satanic display is widespread, but few people think there is much that can be legally done about it because of free speech and freedom of religion. However, I disagree.”

"I do too. Our rights come from the Lord. I am sure He would not protect Satanism because He wants to protect mankind from evil. God isn’t a RINO.

A Republican House Can Impose Order On Colleges

 This is called the “power of the purse.” Republicans do not need to negotiate with themselves. Democrats simply have to take the bull by the tail and face the situation. They created a monster, and now the bill has come due.

Ted Noel - American Thinker   “ 'College.” It sounds so good. “Everyone needs to go to college.” Sounds good again. But we know that’s a crock. We all need plumbers, electricians, carpenters, welders, and a host of other tradespeople just to keep life going. None of them need college. With apologies to grammarians and Norman Whitfield, we must ask, “College, what is it good for?”

"At the moment, while it may be worth a bit more than “absolutely nothing,” the list of its “benefits” includes a lot of “graduates” who can’t repay their Federally Insured Student Loans, others who can’t find productive employment, and many who think that their primary duty is to protest. The object of the protest does not require any evil character. It simply demands the possibility of demands. Irrational, emotional protestors only have to have a target.

"Obviously, the recent antisemitic protests on various college campuses raise huge questions. Who is paying for them to be in college? Who is paying for them to be there without regard for the primary purpose of education? And why are colleges tolerating them? Or supporting them? We know that certain of the Poison Ivy League are inflating grades, which helps make their “students” appear to be eligible for the next loan. Hmmmmm…"