The theme of our recent Quarterly Fundraiser at Gates of Vienna was (more or less) “websites we think are worth your time”. In other words, some of the places we often visit. In that brief week it was obvious we couldn’t make a dent in the list of those places: the breadth and depth of information accumulated and available in the blogosphere is daunting merely to list, never mind exploring in detail. And while there are occasional places in the comments where it would be appropriate to bring one to your attention, that’s a hit-and-miss affair. Several times the idea of simply doing a post on “The Ones We Missed” would come up but again, unless we made it “sticky” that post and those websites mentioned would be gone off the page in a day or so. Places where you could find information you wouldn’t likely see otherwise would be quickly buried as newer posts went up.

This is a workaround which may be of interest across a large range of our readers: to regularly feature one blog or website whose current information is worthwhile, but whose information will never, ever be covered by the MSM.

Here’s the impetus for using some of my limited energy to offer Gates of Vienna readers insights into what lies beyond the MSM’s boundaries:

The lickspittle jornolists who carve a comfortable living from the ‘work’ of making the world safe for Obama have created a large and growing area of no-go subjects. This includes the real no-go zones in immigrant communities world-wide. Until the Word Police suddenly and pre-emptively ruled that term verboten, it was a useful way to describe places — largely urban areas — taken over by immigrant populations who refused to allow first responders into a geographical area to provide emergency services. To call an area a “no-go-zone” was merely to describe a dangerous neighborhood for firefighters or policemen or emergency medical services.

That many of these “news” people are serial liars has been proven repeatedly and yet they remain in place until they are so thoroughly exposed their bosses are forced to act. A good example of the MSM’s perfidy is that grossly overpaid nightly “news anchor” whose long history of compulsive prevarications led finally to a six-month suspension without pay.

In the real world such a glaring lack of integrity would mean the end of the perpetrator’s career. But this anchor-turned-albatross will certainly be rehabilitated, no doubt with “counseling” for his characterological flaws. After all, the bosses have sunk extraordinary sums into this fellow and THEIR bosses need to see an ROE (Return of Earnings) on their investment. In other words, he’ll be back unless they realize some things can’t be extirpated by simply letting enough time go by for their audience to “forget”. It’s unfortunate we no longer have an authentic cleansing ritual for Public Liars. If instead of a “suspension” the miscreant had six months of wearing sackcloth-and-ashes then the pervasive images of this jornolist in his Liar’s costume might have a cumulative effect on the consumers of MSM “news”; viewers could possibly begin to comprehend the nature of the people who routinely lie to them while being paid a princely sum to do so.

These famous-people-jornolists may not understand when their own behavior is beyond the pale, but they have a highly-developed sense of political correctness. They grasp intuitively the difference between safe topics and those that can never be mentioned. In the future, when this 24/7 “news” culture comes to be analyzed by 22nd Century historians, what will seem remarkable is The Silence: the huge numbers of seemingly innocuous subjects that became No-Go-News-Zones, smothered out of existence by the ruling elites. Yes, they will no doubt begin with the French term (and reality) of Zones Urbaines Sensibles. ZUS sounds so much more umm… urbane, perhaps? Less awkward than the English rendering of NoGoZones?

The trajectory of the sudden meteor fired by the Word Police against that phrase took the average person by surprise. With astonishing rapidity, and sans appeal, the term was simply ruled out of polite conversation in their kangaroo court. Millions of Words of Righteous Outrage were employed to rail against the obvious hatred implied in this term, as though it had always been out of order and incorrect. In a tepid pushback, thousands of other words were employed in a vain attempt to explain the commonsensical nature of the phrase. But the vigilant(e) Word Police were having none of it: no-go-zone was inherently racist and… and, what? Oh, that’s right: it violated the norms of social justice.

If the statue of Lady Justice is an upright female whose eyes are covered and who raises scales in one hand while holding a sword in the other, in comparison Social Justice is no lady. She has long since ripped off the blindfold and pawned the scales. She weights reality in favor of those she deems “victims” and against those she deems “unfairly fortunate”; her sword is used to beat the heads of the latter in righteous rage. Put simply, Social Justice has a social disease and her mission is to spread that misery in a thin layer over any and all upon whom Fortune may ever have smiled.

Gates of Vienna has long been cast out among the other victims of this Harpy. We’re racist, elitist, etc., ad nauseam ad infinitum. We used to care but that was before we realized the Fix was in, had always been in against those who dared to speak anything but Political Correctese.

Are we marginalized? Ah well, a great deal can be done at the margins, since that is where Reality resides, right next door to Courage and Authenticity. To paraphrase the song, “laughing with the sinners” is a lot more fun than lying with the Politically Correct and their minions, the Word Police. In their grey universe the reign of Grim is eternal.

Which brings us to another member of the marginalized, a website definitely worth your time: they call themselves “The Misfits”, and rightly so when you consider their full name: (A) Rag Tag Bunch of Conservative Misfits. Given the behavior of other so-called “conservatives” — the prominent ones, at any rate, I’ve given up on conservatism. As currently manifested in the political world, conservatives betray all the principles Russell Kirk laid down (and William Buckley sometimes emulated). Thus, like many others among the American electorate I’ve lost my home. Oh well, as Dr. Kirk points out, “conservative” is an adjective rather than a noun; the failure to understand that fact may be one of the roots of the current confusion and fragmentation in political thought on the Right.

These Misfits have brought a number of events into the light of Reality, stripping them of their “narrative” costumes and leaving them out on stage in their bloomers so you can see them as they are. First the Misfits exposed the Trayvon Martin “racist consensus” in Florida and then used a similar method to throw light on that very same Grievance Committee’s incendiary rhetoric in Ferguson, Missouri.

New venue, same old opportunists fighting over the body of a dead black boy whose worst luck was having the parents he did. There were no new lessons to be learned by or from this tawdry traveling road show.

In late January, the Misfits posted the means by which the “Scheme Team” (their own wonderfully apt designation) planned to sue for justice for both families. Hint: Trayvon Martin’s family and the parents of Ferguson’s Mike Brown needed one thing to go forward with endless (and lucrative) litigation — they had to have a conviction, which they hadn’t got in either case. As The Misfits’ admin, Sundance, put it:

The Ferguson Police Department in Missouri learned from reviewing the exploitation of the Sanford Police Department in Florida and did not acquiesce to the pressure applied by the Black Grievance Industry.

This industrial-sized pressure comes from Al Sharpton, the NAACP and the AME Church Network which includes the federal DOJ community relations service.

The Ferguson Police and the Saint Louis prosecutor both held firm on following the established legal process for a complaint. This frustrated Parks and Crump, who were using the successful model from Florida but not getting the desired response.

To return to the essentially flawed nature of the MSM (who largely drove both “narratives” to a place where the BGI could step in): they hired one of the leading miscreants from the Black Grievance Industry, Al Sharpton, a player with a long, well-known rap sheet. Americans can tell you how tired they are of this man who never seems to have held an honest job in his life, yet whose oratory we cannot escape.

[That link above originated with a column written by Larry Elder, a black conservative essayist and talk show host. However, the essay dates from 2007; the original is a dead end. If the MSM were not so venal and tied to their mission to make the world safe for Obama, Mr. Elder would have made a credible choice by the MSM in place of Sharpton. The latter is utterly infamous for his racialist diatribes but — and this is key — he also has influence with President Obama, who has appeared in public on Sharpton’s behalf despite the latter’s millions in unpaid tax debt and his deplorable criminal past.]

So much for preamble. It’s long because I’ve not wit enough to be brief. I’m concerned that the thickets are too briery to let you wander in by yourselves, sans context or explanation. Even sharing a language doesn’t mean we’d share the same meanings. Yes, Europe has its problems but they don’t have jornolistic demagogues with quite the disreputable or dysfunctional past ours have. Not even Mr. Fisk comes close. Nor does the loathsome Piers Morgan, fired by CNN, make it to the first line of scum baskets in the U.S. news industry. Despite his kissy-face with the Clintons and his monotonous idée fixe regarding American gun owners, Morgan can’t compare with the mendacity of Brian Williams… or the “commentator” Al Sharpton. At least in Britain MSM news “anchors” are more accurately termed “readers” since that is all any of them do — i.e., read the news (prepared by their Ivy-League minions) from teleprompters . The pretty faces of the MSM haven’t been genuine reporters in a generation or more.

With all that as background, here is a recent post by those Misfits at the Conservative Treehouse. This will be a snip; given all the work they’ve done on the subject of Benghazi, complete with sources, it is only fitting that the whole thing be read there. For conservative Americans Benghazi is not going to go away. We know the stalling is full of Democrat obfuscation and we know that Americans charged with protecting our foreign embassies were not protected in turn by this administration. We also know that had such a snafu happened on a Republican watch, we’d have been knee-deep in the scandal from Day One. But that’s the thing about our mendacious MSM — they long ago put this story out of bounds. Like many other inconvenient mirrors into Obama’s dereliction (with shades of the jornolistic behavior during Clinton’s reign) this one is now off-limits for ‘serious’ MSM reporters. Their main job is to protect Obama; in order to do that and to keep the perks of their jobs, Truth is scuttled in favor of a place at the table. Truth — whatever that is — is left at the door of the White House press room. These fellows are like Pilate, washing their hands of any responsibility. When the hard questions start they make for the fire exits.

But power and place and influence don’t concern The Misfits. They want the truth and they’re persistent. Lord, are they persistent. If you had to use one phrase to characterize The Misfits, it would have to be doggedly persistent. Honestly, they remind me of the Baron in some ways; they all share an integrity and tenacity reminiscent of a bulldog.

A reminder: most conservatives met The Conservative Treehouse when they were featured on Bill Whittle’s video about the shame of the MSM, and of the President, during the Trayvon Martin case. In contrast to the Mainstream, Mr. Whittle uses CT as an example of what he terms citizen journalism. Indeed it is. And to show you how rare that virtue is, since the video first went up in July 2013, it’s been viewed more than two million times. When we put it up at Gates of Vienna, it was new. Now, in addition to those views, there are almost 14,000 comments, the most recent having been added several days ago. Many of those messages are predictably foul… thank heavens we don’t have to endure that here. Is 14K a record number of comments for a single video? I don’t know, but one thing is certain and Whittle describes it to a T: the pusillanimous MSM was shown up by the sourced reporting of The Conservative Treehouse, which continued to follow the trail of this sadly American story through years of thickets until it melded withthe Ferguson story a few months ago. I don’t know why we tend to call the first tale by the thug’s name: Trayvon Martin, yet the second thug’s death is known by the name of the town, Ferguson Missouri. By the way, those opportunistic parents of Trayvon Martin — the very ones who seriously neglected their son in his brief life — have yet to give up trying to turn him into money for themselves.

The Treehouse follows lots of stories, but it has been particularly tenacious regarding the Benghazi debacle.

This latest essay of theirs is a recap with the addition of new information; it has been reworked and reposted several times as new information became available. The latest post is two things: (1) the current definitive story of this administration’s shameful mess-up of a situation they’d caused in the first place and, in addition, (2) it’s a work in progress. As new evidence becomes available, The Misfits will share it.

Many professionals and their families have suffered because of this administration’s incompetence in Benghazi. Further, many innocent people have died because of our bored President’s witless and seemingly impulsive decisions. With each new idiocy, from the fictional “lead-from-behind” policies that sent Libya spiraling into chaos to the current crisis in Yemen, the finger of history’s judgment points straight at our Commander-in-Chief. But he can’t see it; he can’t see beyond the pleasure of the moment.

Here’s the snip I mentioned earlier. I have left the links in place, but they aren’t ‘live’. In order to see the information collected, go to that original URL.

Against the newly released secret Hillary Clinton tapes of Libya found by, and reported by, The Washington Times, we can review the material within The Benghazi Brief for context. What we find is the brief is factually affirmed with the additional reporting from the Hillary Tapes.

Here’s The Full Benghazi Brief

Grab a cup of coffee because it’s a long read with over 350 citations and reference source links for confirmational material. We think you’ll get hooked and find 95% of your Benghazi questions of your Benghazi questions answered. And if you can find a factual flaw I’ll buy the coffee. SD

We know from the Bret Baier interview with Hillary Clinton that she was physically located at her 7th floor office in Washington DC on the night of the attack. Unfortunately we also know during the November 2012 Thanksgiving holiday a mysterious fire took place in that building. Well, actually directly above her exact office — cause undetermined.

A “fire” which preceded an unfortunate slip and fall for the Secretary, resulting in a concussion, which led to the discovery of a blood clot, that ultimately delayed her congressional testimony before a Senate Hearing into the events of the night in question.

We know the Libyan uprising began on February 10th of 2011, and we also know that sometime around the end of February 2011 President Obama signed a presidential directive authorizing the State Dept and CIA to begin a covert operation to arm the Libyan “rebels”.

We also know of a Second Presidential Finding Memo authorizing additional CIA covert action in 2012, this time in Syria. However, unlike the 2011 Libyan operation we do not know the operational name of the second action in 2012 Syria.

We know the Libyan “rebels” were positioned in two strategic places. Benghazi, and the port city of Darnah, both located in Northeastern Libya.

We know this 2011 Libyan covert operation came to be known as “Operation Zero Footprint“, and fell under the military command authority of NATO not (important to repeat), NOT, the U.S. Military.

We know by the time operation “Zero Footprint” began, AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham was removed from OPSEC oversight in the Libyan campaign and NATO commander Admiral James G. Stavridis was in charge.

Stavridis was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) at the time of the Libyan uprising. He retired as SACEUR in 2013.

In 2011, 57-year-old Stavridis was the perfect pick for NATO Libyan intervention considering he is the son of Turkish immigrants. Turkey played a key role in what might be the most politically dangerous aspect of the events to the White House once the goals changed to redirection of the weapons from Operation Zero Footprint…

Sundance, and a lot of other responsible reporters, have known for some time that the reason for the State Department presence in Benghazi was to collect some of the many weapons dispersed to the Libyans…in order to arm the Syrian rebels. I strongly urge you to go over to the story. If you’ve been reading it all along, pick up where you left off. If the information is new, begin at the top and work your way down. Of if you want chronological order, begin the end and work your way up.

Sundance and his crew have a whole lot of other stories you’re not likely to see elsewhere. Like Mississippi Burning, a tragedy that has near its center a strange young Yemeni storekeeper in the middle-of-nowhere-dirt-poor Mississippi. In one of his summations two days after Christmas, Sundance says:

[…]

19-year-old Jessica was attacked on Saturday evening December 6th — she was burned alive. Jessica died a few hours later at 2:23am on Sunday December 7th.

By Monday morning December 8th, the media had reported the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI) was taking over the case because Jessica’s father worked for the Panola County sheriff’s department, and then, something else — the U.S. Marshals’ office was “assisting the investigation”.

Initially, everyone noted the odd addition of U.S. Marshals, but moved on to other matters to try and understand what led to such a horrific death.

By the time we reached Day #6 and Day #7 we had discovered some really unbelievable aspects about Panola County, Courtland Mississippi, the Sheriff’s office of Dennis Darby, District Attorney John Champion, gas station owner Ali Alsanai, and a myriad of gang/criminal aspects that would fill every character of a John Grisham novel…

It would be too much to consider coincidental for us to have outlined significant questions about a Yemeni gas station owner, Ali Alsanai, in an innocuous little Mississippi town; then to have the FBI announce involvement in the Chambers case; then a week later to have the FBI to broadcast a public alert about a known al-Qaeda terror threat, originating in Yemen, surrounding this same innocuous town and a Memphis bridge.

And that’s just a few paragraphs from a long series of reports at the Treehouse. No one else seems to have followed it, though I did make an effort to find information after his report on Day #6.

They also unearthed an old essay on Brian Williams from an Esquire interview in 2005. Sundance prefaces his post with this possibility:

Perhaps we’ve finally figured out why Brian Williams loves President Obama so much. They both are notorious liars, and stretchers of truth…. I wonder if they drink Dos Equis?

Seriously, this story goes all the way back to the 1970s, when Williams claims he was doing a good deed for a church, selling Christmas trees.

Can you say serial liar?

The Conservative Treehouse has an excellent search engine on the sidebar. Lucky for them it hasn’t proved a security leak, as ours did. They also have the stories arranged by subject — take your pick because everything you can imagine about American politics is there.

When I think of the future, a time when the internet has been replaced with some other, better technology, I often wonder what will become of this important archival material. I wonder the same thing about Gates of Vienna sometimes. What future generation will comb through the posts looking for Fjordman’s essays or reading about England’s gasping final days…or perhaps they aren’t “final” at all. Perhaps we are witnessing the dark before a dawn we can’t imagine or see yet.

Meanwhile, for many of us there is the unswerving conviction that President Obama’s deeply incompetent foreign policy has ruined generations of past and future relations with the rest of the world. Even now, as Yemen falls apart and U.S. personnel once again eat mud, we know surely that this pile o’ garbage being renamed — wait for it — “strategic patience” is just another of Obama’s onanistic dances of the veils. They are supposed to distract us from the fact of his gob-smacking incompetence. Are you distracted yet?

These posts take much longer than they ought to, longer than they used to. This one took three days, off and on. Nevertheless, I’ll return with another one soon. Chronicling my forays into the intertubes is important for my own sense of well-being. Besides, there is the notion I have, garnered from our readers’ emails that there are people who want to hear about the places that influence me and the Baron.

I’ll return, in the not-too-distant-future.

Thanks for reading.