• Tyndale House, the Christian industry publisher of Left Behind and the also-fictional The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, looks really, really bad in Michelle Dean’s deeper dive into the story of their cashing in on a blatant scam of a book. One part of that article includes a summary from conservative blogger Phil Johnson, describing a dynamic that’s all-too-familiar:
“The thread that runs through all their correspondence with Beth is that they wanted to corner her before they would be willing to investigate her concerns,” he wrote to the Guardian. “They kept pressing her to agree to a meeting where she and Alex would have to face Kevin and a phalanx of editors who were determined to press ahead with the project, no matter what objections Alex and she might have.”
Beth Malarkey simply kept complaining on the Internet. Tyndale House kept publishing a book with a quadriplegic boy’s name on the cover, even though it knew he had substantial objections to the book. And for years, nothing changed.
Tyndale House and Kevin Malarkey kept their gravy train going by silencing Beth — portraying her as unreasonable and pitting a “phalanx” of editors, lawyers and influential people against her, so that the only avenue left to her was “complaining on the Internet.” That silencing was effective — until people started listening to what she was saying on the Internet.
OK, then.
• Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx was the designated Laura Roslin for last night’s State of the Union ceremonies. I worked last night and haven’t had a chance to read/watch the speech and responses yet, but checked the news enough today to confirm Foxx is still just a cabinet secretary and not our new president. So that’s good.
• “The Black Country is an area of the West Midlands in England, north and west of Birmingham,” Wikipedia says. “The first trace of The Black Country as an expression dates from the 1840s and it is believed that it got its name because of black soot from heavy industries that covered the area.”
Congratulations, you now know more than the Fox News Press Team.
• Meanwhile, even after international hilarity and ridicule forced Fox News to apologize and retract its promotion of the far-right racist lie/scary story about “No-Go Zones,” this nonsense is still being repeated as fact by Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and by his old friend The Liar Tony Perkins. TLTP is warning frightened white Christians to stay away from Minneapolis, where he says that scary brown people have established an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-white Prairie Home No-Go Zone.
Rep. Keith Ellison, who represents Minnesota’s 5th District, has invited Perkins to visit Minneapolis:
That would be horribly embarrassing for The Liar Tony Perkins, except of course that The Liar Tony Perkins long ago proved that he was incapable of shame and embarrassment.
• Wonketeer Shrill helps us calibrate our BS detectors by dissecting an example of how the media covers/portrays white-on-white crime, “White Teenage Criminals Are Cuddly and Cute and White and Not Really Criminals Really!“:
There are several ways of editorializing about the relationship between an 18-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl he has taken from her parents’ house. “Kidnapping,” for instance, is one that comes to mind. “Brainwashed” is another term a writer might employ here. Then, too, is the fact that in Kentucky, an 18-year-old having sex with a 13-year-old constitutes second-degree rape. The writers choose none of these obvious descriptions of a relationship that we should intuitively see as predatory, and which is legally non-consensual. They don’t even use the value-neutral term “pair,” but instead, ratify the relationship with the most quaint, chaste, and cutesy noun they could possibly have used: “sweethearts.” …
It’s not possible that this story would have been covered in the same way if our two anti-heroes were black. The story wouldn’t have framed a relationship between, say, an 18-year-old black male and a 13-year-old black female as one of “sweethearts,” much less one between an 18-year-old black male and a 13-year-old white female. There’s no chance the story would have gotten three paragraphs in without mentioning Dalton’s criminal record or that he was fleeing prior burglary charges. The narrative of black criminality is the photo negative of those about white innocence.
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