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Democrat Rob Quist / Getty Images

BY: Andrew Kugle May 26, 2017 10:00 am

After the Republican candidate won Montana's special election on Thursday, liberals took to social media to express their disbelief and anger at the outcome.

Republican Greg Gianforte beat Democrat Rob Quist in a special election forMontana's lone at-large House seat. The office was vacated by former Rep. Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.), who left to become interior secretary.

The election gained national attention when Gianforte was charged with assault after reportedly body-slammingGuardian reporter Ben Jacobs, one day before the election. The altercation occurred when Jacobs tried to ask Gianforte about the CBO score of the Republicans' health care bill. Witnesses of the altercation said Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck and threw him to the floor, where he continued to hit Jacobs. Gianforte was charged with assault.

Gianfortereleased a statement about the incident, alleging that Jacobs was aggressive. But after Gianforte declaredvictory, he apologized for his actions.

"When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it,"Gianforte said during his victory party. "That's the Montana way. Last night I made a mistake and I took an action that I can't take back and I'm not proud of what happened. I should not have responded in the way that I did and for that I am sorry. Ishould not have treated that reporter that way and for that I am sorry Mr. Ben Jacobs."

Liberals on social media reacted to the news that Gianforte won despite being charged with assault.

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Liberals React to Dem Loss in Montana - Washington Free Beacon

Ivanka Trump is seen at a ceremony where her father received the Order of Abdulaziz al-Saud medal from Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)

Media bubbles: everybody's got one and everybody thinks the other side's stinks. For those of you who may lean conservative and not know what's trending on your liberal brother-in-law's Facebook page, here's a look at what was hot from left-leaning media and commentators this week. And for liberals, here's what the right was reading.

Daily Kos writer Jen Hayden implied last weekend that there was a link between the massive$110 billion arms deal President Trump inked with Saudi Arabia and the$100 million contributionfrom Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to a global women's initiative championed by Trump's daughter, Ivanka. Citing a CNN report, Hayden points out that Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner may have helped secure the arms deal. Shethen lays a heavy dose of sarcasm on the denialsthat the global women's fund and the White House are linked:

The donations and the White House are not tied. Definitely not. No way!It is a total coincidence the $100 milliondonation is being made the same weekend a $110 billion arms deal is announced. And never mind that Ivanka Trump is traveling to Saudi Arabia in her official capacity as an assistant to the president of the United States.

The article does mention a Wall Street Journal story that points out that Ivanka herself does not solicit donations for the initiative, but doesn't address the fact that German ChancellorAngela Merkel is also a sponsor of the World-Bank managed fund.

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New York Magazine slammed the Trump administration for a $2 trillion "double-counting" error in its first budget proposal. The White House said its proposal would balance the budget within in 10 years,partly by assuming a $2 trillion revenue increase spurred by coming tax cuts. The problem? The budget proposal assumes the $2 trillion in added revenue will both balance the budget and offset the tax cuts, and experts are clear that you can't count the same money twice.

New York Magazine delivered this burnin response tothe White House's fuzzy math:

It seems difficult to imagine how this administration could figure out how to design and pass a tax cut that could pay for itself when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush failed to come anywhere close to doing so. If there is a group of economic minds with the special genius to accomplish this historically unprecedented feat, it is probably not the fiscal minds who just made a $2 trillion basic arithmetic error.

President Trump was widely ridiculed on social media for a video the appears to show him shoving aside the prime minister of Montenegro during a meeting of NATO leaders in Brussels Thursday. The Huffington Post jumped on atweet fromHarry Potter author J.K. Rowling in which sheshared a GIF of the incident, along with the caption, "You tiny, tiny, tiny little man."

The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 Monday that race played an excessive role when North Carolina lawmakers drew congressional maps after the 2010 Census in favor of Republicans. To the delight of progressives, the staunchly conservativeJustice Clarence Thomas joined in the majority decision.

As Slate's Mark Jacob Stern wrote:

The broad ruling will likely have ripple effects on litigation across the country, helping plaintiffs establish that state legislatures unlawfully injected race into redistricting. And, in a welcome change, the decision did not split along familiar ideological lines: Justice Clarence Thomas joined the four liberal justices to create a majority, following his race-blind principles of equal protection to an unusually progressive result.

Republican candidate Greg Gianforte won Montana 's special election for its open House seat Thursday, despite being cited for assaulting a reporter on the eve of the election. Salon politics writer Amanda Marcotte said Gianforte's actions reflect a growing trend towardpolitical violence among conservatives.

"Whats interesting about these alt-right wannabe street brawlers is that they invariably frametheir violent impulses in terms of self-defense, arguing that they need to crack skulls and spray mace into crowds to protect themselves against violent revolutionary left-wingers," Marcotte wrote.

Alt-right street fighters are a tiny fringe right now, and the danger they pose shouldnt be needlessly exaggerated. But there are startling parallels between their rhetoric and what Gianforte and his supporters have said in seeking to defend or minimize his alleged actions.

Republican Greg Gianforte won Montana's U.S. House seat on Thursday, one day after he was charged with assaulting a reporter. Gianforte apologized to Ben Jacobs by name, saying he should not have responded the way he did, and that he's sorry. (May 26) AP

Don't forget to check out the conservative-leaning content that was trending on social media this week.

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What really fired up liberals this week? - USA TODAY

Do liberals and conservatives experience messages in a fundamentally different way? Photograph: Carlos Barria / Reuters/Reuters

(Preface: all of the research reported in this post has been done with American voters and not those in the UK, where equivalent research is lagging. While there may be some interesting correlates, conservatives in the UK differ in important ways from conservatives in the US.)

Believing what we are told is critical to our development as a species. It allows us to accumulate knowledge and build on it rather than having to learn slowly through trial-and-error or evolutionary selection.

Yet if you have too much credulity, you risk being deceived and taken advantage of. From childhood, we regularly manage this tension between what to believe and what to reject, and our decisions guide who we trust in the future.

There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this negativity bias than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in whether there are measurable differences in values and personality between liberal and conservative voters. For instance, I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.

These are heterogenous groups, but the averages seem to differ reliably. Liberals and conservatives also score differently on personality tests. While liberals are, on average, more open-minded and novelty-seeking, conservatives are more conventional and well-organised.

In this months Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour.

They established the political leaning of 948 people, mostly white men and women, by asking them how they felt about a range of social, military and fiscal issues. Respondents were then asked to rate a series of plausible but false statements on a scale from 1 (I am absolutely certain this claim is FALSE) to 7 (I am absolutely certain that this claim is TRUE). Half of these concerned a benefit (e.g. Eating carrots results in significantly improved vision) and half concerned a hazard (e.g. Kale contains thallium, a toxic heavy metal, that the plant absorbs from soil).

There was no difference found in peoples tendency to believe the benefit statements. However, the more conservative respondents were significantly more likely to believe the hazard messages than the more liberal ones. That is, their threshold for credulity to possible threat was significantly lower than the average liberal.

Based on the results, the authors propose that politicians alarmist claims will affect liberals and conservatives differently. While liberals are more likely to disregard them, conservatives are more likely to believe them.

The authors also imply that conservatives are more susceptible to fake news, especially where it concerns possible threats. In support they point to recent claims that right-wing audiences are more gullible to dis-information.

This seems unlikely. There are several, common psychological biases that underpin gullibility. Among others: the illusory truth effect repetition increases belief; the confirmation bias we seek out information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs; the continuous influence effect the tendency to believe false information even after it has been corrected and the bias blind spot the tendency to see yourself as less biased than other people. These are general psychological tendencies that we know are as common in the left as they are in the right.

The strength of a persons negativity bias likely reflects how dangerous they believe the world is and what strategies they think are necessary to protect against those dangers. Conservatives tend to side with authority and tradition to ward off danger, liberals with diversity and change.

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Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - The Guardian

Whether its tagging legitimate news stories they disagree with as fake news or launching increasingly-violent protests to shut down opposing viewpoints, its clear: the left is gearing up their war on free speech.

Like most wars premised on indoctrination, young adults are the ones being overtly radicalized. Protected by tenure, radical leftists seemingly dominate most institutions of higher learning. Once a free marketplace of ideas, todays academia seems increasingly a modern inquisition against any who challenge the increasingly cult-like radicalism being infused into the minds of college students. According to a recent Gallup survey, a whopping 72% of college students now think the government should ban all offensive speech. What they find offensive, of course, is any remark outside of politically-correct liberal orthodoxy. And they protest riot for it.

These arent your fathers college protests. Todays mob rule on campus is something new.

At Californias Claremont McKenna College, protesters blocked the entrance to a campus building to prevent conservative author Heather MacDonald from speaking. Despite being a well-respected commentator, left-wing radicals justified their anti-intellectual actions by claiming to be preventing fascism and racism from taking hold in America. Undeterred, MacDonald entered in secret through a back door. When she arrived on stage, however, she found the hall nearly emptybecause the mob also refused to let anyone interested in hearing her ideas enter the building.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, a protest against economist Charles Murray turned ugly. A self-righteous mob of 150 students violently attacked conservatives as they attempted to leave an auditorium, injuring the professor who was interviewing Murray. Students at Middlebury pay $60,000 a year to live in an enclave where totalitarian-style tactics are encouragedso long as they toe the liberal line of thinking.

Most recently, students at Evergreen State College berated a biologist and demanded his resignation, after he objected to an event in which all white students were asked to leave campus for a day. When this liberal-but-not-enough professor tried to engage in thoughtful discussion, he was shouted down and a student screamed, We dont care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on termson terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one. Encouraged by radical mentors, old liberal ideas of tolerance and free speech are being washed aside by young adults who deny even liberal-but-not-enough supporters a voice.

While colleges bend over backwards to cater to demands from the likes of Black Lives Matter in the name of politically-correct diversity, nothing has been done to protect conservatives who simply want to share such crazy ideas as personal freedom and responsibility. Neither Claremont, Middlebury, nor Evergreen have moved to suspend or expel a single student for silencing, and even violently attacking, conservatives. In the eyes of todays collegiate faculty and administrators, conservative speech isnt really worth protecting.

Some conservatives are beginning to fight back, however. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill last month to restore free speech and equality by making it illegal for colleges to disinvite speakers based on their political beliefs and banned universities from charging conservative students more in fees to host speakers, under the pretense of needing increased security to protect them from mobs.

In California, a Republican-sponsored bill currently being debated would end the restrictive free speech zones at Californias public universities. This proposal would allow anyone to speak freely anywhere on campus isnt it shocking they cant? Liberals administrators would no longer decide when and where students can speak their minds. Similar bills are slowly advancing in a handful of other states. But despite these signs of progress, its clear the lefts public war on free speech is only continuing to grow.

The overt leftwing war on the open mind isnt just on campus. Major social media players are suppressing conservative speech while elevating liberal viewpoints. Facebook and Twitter actively work to change how people receive information about the world. Twitter seems to constantly ban conservative celebrities, like Milo Yiannopolous, for attacking the left, but when high-profile liberals wish death to conservatives, like Kurt Eichenwald did last month, nothing happens.

Hypocrisy rules the day when the left-leaning judges and juries of online speech control what information regular Americans have available to them.

Facebook, in their quest to combat the fake news they think snatched the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, has employed far-left fact checkers in order to determine what news is correct. Like fact-checkers at liberal newspapers, the results have been predictable: numerous legitimate conservative-leaning news sites have been deemed fake news because they dont kowtow to the prevailing liberal media narrative. Even worse, small platforms for speech and the trading of ideas have been simply relegated to the bottom of Facebooks algorithm, if allowed to exist at all. Despite Silicon Valleys praise for disruptors, Facebook and their ilk appear hellbent to keep the liberal media complex as the status quo.

By attacking any outsider voice offering a new perspective as fake news, liberals are showing that they no longer want to debate. Today, the leftand, increasingly, some on the rightbegin and end with anonymously-sourced denials and ad hominem attacks. They wont debate ideas, or engage with those who espouse them, because, like the college radicals who claim people are racist fascists in order to justify shouting them down, they have predetermined what is and is not a legitimate discussion.

A free society is predicated on free speech and free association democracy can only persevere if everyone can speak their mind, even if some find it offensive. If conservatives dont start fighting back soonat rallies, on social media, and at the ballot boxfree speech as we know it may only apply to the liberal elites, their corporate allies, and their growing throng of mindless collegiate brown shirts.

The rest is here:
Liberals Launch Their Latest War On Free Speech - The Daily Caller

BY: Cameron Cawthorne May 26, 2017 3:35 pm

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) spoke Friday at an LGBT rights event at the Pride Center at Equality Park of South Florida, where she touted how liberals in the Democratic Party only voted for the nation's defense spending bill for fiscal year 2011 so they could repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

"Don't tell anybody I told you this," Pelosi said, before explaining how she was able to get liberal Democrats onboard to support theNational Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, the annual federal law that specifies the Defense Department's budget and expenditures.

Pelosi described how in 2010 Democrats put an amendment into the NDAA for fiscal year 2011 that would repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the U.S. policy on homosexuals or bisexuals serving in the military for nearly two decades. She said Democrats had very few Republican votes to pass the bill with the amendment attached, so she had to approach the liberal faction of the Democratic Party, which she said never votes for the defense bill.

"I went to my Barney Franks, [Rep.] Barbara Lee [D., Calif.], [Rep.] John Lewis [D., Ga.], you name it, the liberal contingent in which I'm a member" Pelosi said. "And I saidto them, We are making history today.'"

Pelosi said she told them they were going to vote for the defense authorization billand that she knew Republicans were not going to vote for it becauseof the amendment repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

"Never. We never vote for the defense bill," they said, according to Pelosi.

The California Democrat recalled how party roles were reversed, with most Republicans who always vote for the NDAA not doing so because of the amendment, while many Democrats who never vote for the defense funding bill did so that year.

"So there they go down the center aisle, John Lewis, Barney Frank, Barbara Lee, you name it, all down there to make history and vote for the first time in their careers for the defense bill." Pelosi said, reflecting on the vote in an excited tone.

"I want you to know that some people made some sacrifices they did not expect to make in the interest of passing the [defense bill]," Pelosi added.

Former President Barack Obama signed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repeal Act into law in December 2010.

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Pelosi: Liberals Only Voted for 2011 Defense Spending Bill so They Could Repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' - Washington Free Beacon