The leftist press really wants to disappear the story of the man who, accompanied by his husband, was kicked off of a Jet Blue flight for harassing President-Elect Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka. Having learned more about the ejected pair, I can understand why — but it's not the media's job to try to minimize and suppress the incident's details, which they are clearly doing.
TMZ broke the news early Thursday morning that "an out-of-control passenger on her flight began verbally berating her and 'jeering' at her 3 kids." Luckily, this happened while the plane was still on the ground, and "JetBlue personnel escorted the unruly passenger off the flight." They also ejected his husband. Yahoo News's joke of a headline: "Man kicked off JetBlue flight for questioning why Ivanka Trump was on it."
The harasser was Daniel Goldstein, who is alleged to have actually said the following:
“Your father is ruining the country,” the man told Trump, according to TMZ. “Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private.”
As JetBlue personnel escorted him off the plane, he purportedly protested, screaming, “You’re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?”
It's four weeks before the man gets sworn in as President, and he's somehow already "ruining our country."
The harasser's husband, Matthew Lasner, rather enjoyed things at first, and tweeted about it. Here is how he opened the festivities, apparently after seeing Mrs. Trump and Jared Kushner, her husband, who also boarded the flight:
For those who don't know, the "banality of evil" is a direct reference to Nazi Germany under Hitler, particularly the Holocaust, which was first made in a 1963 book "based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem." The thoroughly unhinged Lasner chose to make that his tweet's hashtag.
Lasner took a photo on the plane before the pair and their son were ejected, and tweeted the following accompanying text:
Oh, he did a lot more than that, Matt.
An hour later, Lasner was playing the victim card:
Even though Mrs. Trump didn't feel that ejection was necessary (another passenger reported that she said, "I don’t want to make this a thing"), JetBlue's crew took matters into their own hands:
“The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly,” a JetBlue spokesman said in a statement. “If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”
Lasner later deleted the tweets, and, according to Heavy.com, later deleted his Twitter account.
The Associated Press could only muster up a terse, unbylined five-paragraph item on the incident, and failed to report that Goldstein's statement that "Your father is ruining the country."
Heavy.com has "Five Things You Need to Know" entries on Goldstein and Lasner. Despite Goldstein being the harasser, it's Lasner who is apparently the real piece of work:
... Matthew Lasner is a professor at Hunter College. (Lasner's Hunter web page is now empty. It wasn't empty in early November. — Ed.)
... In a March 2016 interview with AM New York, Lasner said that Trump represents “an ascension of ego, of surface, and of explicitly catering to new wealth,” going on to call him “the Gordon Gekko of developers.”
... Lasner believes that Donald Trump is dangerous and he frequently tweets negatively about the president-elect.
For example, a week after the election, Lasner predicted that Trump will open privately-run internment camps.
... in the days after the election, Lasner participated in #NotMyPresident marches in Chicago, Illinois.
Here's a tweet from one of those Chicago marches (red underline is mine):
Given the Occupy movement's violent history, JetBlue appears to have made a very smart ejection call.
The longer this story lingers, the more people are going to want to know about its actors. The press clearly doesn't want that.
If this were two conservatives harassing a Democratic president's daughter, son-in-law and children, front-page headlines would be screaming for days, and the press would be digging into every little corner of the harassers' lives.
Additional examples of the press sanitizing this incident are here.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
