January 23, 2025
FACE, MEET PALM: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s virtue signaling backfires.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has a nice warm office. So why instead hold a press conference out in the cold on the violence-ridden 16th Street Mall? Well, for image management, of course.
What better way to show how safe and non-stabby the streets of Denver are than a picture of Mayor Johnston calmly standing on those blood-soaked streets, worry free for his own safety.
I could almost see the mayor’s taxpaid, cocky communications expert saying, “I’ve got it mayor! Do a press conference out on the 16th Street Mall and when people see you’re not getting stabbed or accosted it’ll prove how safe you’ve made the city! They’ll love you even more!”
Brilliant! That is, until the mayor himself got accosted during his own press conference.
I spent more weekends on the 16th Mall than I can count. But that was when Colorado and Denver were still sane, and when the streets didn’t reek of pot and hadn’t been colonized by the psychotic.
ROGER SIMON: CNN Is Wallpaper in Europe Too.
Here in Germany there has been a knifing, killing a two-year old, in a place called Aschaffenburg by an Afghan (motive, of course, “undetermined”) and in Tel Aviv another brutal multiple knifing by a Moroccan with American papers (motive all too obvious) who somehow slipped through the notoriously tight Israeli airport security. Of course back in Nashville there was a high school shooting..
There’s a reason “safe travels” has replaced “bon voyage” as the familiar good-bye greeting these days.
Both the above knifings are getting play on the two large TV screens in front of me, one tuned to Germany’s Die Welt and the other to CNN,
Even more coverage though is devoted to the latest doings of one Donald J. Trump. It should not surprise that our new president is being dealt with more sympathetically or at least more even-handedly, by the German network. CNN has endless palaver by Christiane Amanpour, the British-Iranian journalist who has been pouring snide vitriol on anything American, particularly if it is to the right of Trotsky, for decades, another case of if-you-hate-us-so-much-why-are-you-here.
This doesn’t matter too much inside the USA where audiences are deserting CNN only slightly slower than the speed of light, but in the rest of the world it is a different story. The airports, railroad stations and hotels, as well as cable networks, of countries across the globe feature CNN far more than any other American media outlet. The network maintains this by paying for airport placement and similar means. CNN International is generally more extreme than the domestic variety as well.
And how. The late Roger Ailes had CNN International’s number decades ago:
More:
When you’ve been fed an original sin gospel by nature of your status as a white male, you at a certain point grow disdainful and come to reject it. When you see your cities ransacked in the name of fighting police brutality––which the “experts” said was fine as a one-time exception to the otherwise-pervasive lockdowns to control a virus that minimally harms you––you begin to wonder whether this actually helps minorities, and whether this is actually the level of public order we seek to maintain, whether our laws mean nothing.
My hunch is that, by and large, young people who have voted for Trump want slightly better cost of living––rent prices, food prices, ability to get education without going deep into debt––and, mostly, to be left alone by the hectoring scolds in the expert class and the little lackeys they’ve bred via academia, who’ve gone forth into a hundred different industries and multiplied like hydra heads. To have cities where you can expect to have the police show up when someone has committed a crime against you. To have genuine choice––both actual ability to pursue the lives they want *and* the freedom that comes from these choices not being culturally deemed heretical––to pursue the things that will fulfill them without being looked down on by fourth-wave feminists or vast swaths of the other gender.
Maybe these are my own blinders, but I mostly believe that people want a touch more “live and let live”, that we’ve been in a cultural moment where the laws are, socially, quite permissive but where the culture is profoundly judgmental about any more “traditional” choice or path.
More at the link but don’t miss this from the replies:
You said “we’ve been in a cultural moment where the laws are, socially, quite permissive but where the culture is profoundly judgmental…” I would add, “and punitive” to this sentence.
In other words, we live in an increasingly anarcho-tyrannical society that the progressive-left managerialists have crafted. Everyone senses the rules are different for different groups & they are arbitrarily imposed often on the whims of the elites in charge.
Also, while, as you note, young white males in particular have a negative experience with all of this it the most for obvious reasons with the constant “anti racist” messaging of the uniquely evil nature of white males, males writ large experience this as well, as the suppsed purveyors of “toxic masculinity,” “rape culture,” & receivers of “male privilege.”
For young male US citizens of *any* racial background attempting to make a start in the world, this message is oppressive, dehumanizing, objectionable, insulting. Males are the enemy. This is the message.
Progressives believed that they could build a winning coalition by treating a huge group of voters as an enemy while failing everyone but the rich and/or well-connected at basic governance. And at Pacific Palisades earlier this month, even being rich and well-connected wasn’t a safeguard from Democrat malgovernance.
DON SURBER: Democrat Overkill Made Trump Stronger.
CHRISTIAN ADAMS: COVID Death Coverup: Trump-Hating Lawyers at DOJ Strike Again.
BOB GRABOYES: Generalissimo Franco, Dead Parrot, the ERA.
JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
There was a debate today on a subreddit about classical architecture, agonizing over the administration’s return to its previous position, which was, well, RETVRN. All Federal buildings will now be constructed in traditional styles. No more concrete monstrosities, no more deconstructed alien embassies, just nice sober structures with columns and porticos, connecting the present to the past. The group is predisposed to approve, but there are worries that the style will now be stained with Fascism.
During President Trump’s first term, when the former real estate developer attempted to steer federal building policy back to more traditional forms and stylings, it was absolutely hilarious watching establishment leftist sites such as Politico and Slate defend brutalist architecture. In the 2018, the latter had the headline, “Of Course Trump Hates Brutalism —Buildings like the FBI headquarters are everything Trump is not.”
It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be “a pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.” In the New York that shaped Trump’s aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towers—the antitheses of Trump’s new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the “Western traditions” venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of America’s treacherous urban elite.
It takes chutzpah to defend with a straight face soul-crushing architecture such as this:
Speaking of which, sad news for the movie celebrating the left’s favorite new architecture: Has AI killed The Brutalist’s Oscar chances?
Is it that time of awards season already? Time for the sudden and unexpected snowballing of negative media stories about an Oscar frontrunner that may, or may not, have a deleterious impact on its chances of winning one or more Academy Awards?
Step forward this year’s Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist. The film is a stunning historical epic about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, played by Adrien Brody, who becomes a celebrated architect in postwar America. Brody is hotly tipped to win the best actor Oscar, having bagged a Golden Globe, while the film’s equally lauded director, Brady Corbet, is considered a shoo-in for the directing and writing Oscars at the ceremony in March.
There’s just one snag. This week an article, originally published by the tech website Red Shark News on January 11, became the focus of attention online because it revealed that the editor of The Brutalist used AI software to correct some of the pronunciations of Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones during the few moments in the movie when they speak Hungarian.
In the interview David Jancso said: “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce … We also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR [automated dialogue replacement] these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
The social media frenzy (typical post: “This is a disgrace!”) became so intense that the detail-obsessed Corbet was forced to issue a clarifying statement where he explained that the AI software was used “specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed.”
RX, Izotope’s long-running audio cleanup program, is popular among Hollywood backroom boffins because of all of the ways it can digitally tweak an actor’s vocal performance, long after the shooting’s stopped, and he can’t be bothered (or isn’t contractually obligated) to return to the dubbing stage to loop his dialogue. It’s but one of numerous tools in a sound designer’s arsenal to manipulate dialogue when editing a movie or TV show.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this. All the people freaking out on social media about voices being replaced in a Hollywood movie then went onto YouTube to watch clips of Star Wars, where this actor’s voice was not only replaced, the replaced voice was tweaked electronically as well:
Incidentally, this detail about Hollywood’s Oscar wars is a riot as well:
Bradley Cooper, for example, was the obvious frontrunner for last year’s best actor Oscar. His performance as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro was extraordinary, and arguably more complex and demanding than that of the award’s eventual winner, Cillian Murphy, for Oppenheimer. But Cooper’s decision to wear a prosthetic nose was deemed antisemitic by moral guardians online. The charge was nonsense, rubbished by Bernstein’s own children. But it hung around the movie like a crazed, Oscar-killing, one-word summation.
I’d add that Orson Welles wore a fake nose in just about every one of his film performances — but he never won an Academy Award for acting, either. His only Oscar was for writing Citizen Kane. (Herman Mankiewicz, his cowriter, wasn’t nominated.)
Related: Actors wearing fake noses? You ain’t seen nothing yet, Hollywood!
There should be no outrage on the right. Let this dude take home the best actress trophy. The actual female actresses who get robbed deserve it. None of them have the courage to speak out. All of them supported this madness. Now the monster turns against them. Poetic justice. https://t.co/ej5vsAUXNj
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 23, 2025
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Elon Musk Needs to Sue Everybody.
Back in the dark times when I actively practiced law – I gave up my partnership on December 31st after 30 years of litigating on behalf of everybody from individuals to Fortune 500 companies – one of the things I spent a lot of my time on was counterintuitive. I spent a lot of time telling people they didn’t have a good lawsuit and shouldn’t bring one because they were going to lose or at least not gain enough to make the litigation nightmare worth living through. After doing that job, you can look at a case and have a pretty good idea of where it will end up. Of course, every case looks it’s very best the day the client brings it to you – it’s only after you file suit that you start seeing the problems, often brought to your attention by your opponent. In any case, talking people out of getting into lawsuits – whether bringing them or not settling them early if they are being sued – is a big part of any good trial lawyer’s practice. So, when I say that Elon Musk should sue a bunch of people over this Nazi salute lie, I don’t say it lightly.
Defamation lawsuits are among the hardest cases to win, and they should be because they involve speech, and the great weight of presumption in the law is in favor of free speech. To that end, the First Amendment fully protects an enormous amount of lying, deceit, and generally obnoxious comments. The burden is even higher when you’re bringing a case as a public figure – we presume that people are allowed to say pretty much whatever they want about public figures with some narrow exceptions.
Well, regarding the Elon Musk Nazi salute hoax, those exceptions apply. And it’s very important to discipline both the regime media and the individual liars to stop such hoaxes. Elon can do that by suing and hitting these scumbags where it hurts – the wallet.
That’s Kurt Schlichter so read the whole thing. And it’s a shame he’s retired from practice because Musk could do a lot worse than hire Kurt.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: DHS Says I’m a Dangerous Extremist (And So Are YOU, Comrade).
(Link fixed!)
STAY SAFE: Reusable Half Face Gas Mask with Safety Glasses. #CommissionEarned
RESULTS MATTER:
NEW PIECE from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on Pirate Wires: Trump will get America out of “manager mode”
• While SpaceX put more than 300 rockets into orbit for less than $10 billion, California has built 1,600 feet of elevated rail for $11 billion, and now projects its high… pic.twitter.com/4JdIuWBIsl
— Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) January 22, 2025
Full text:
• While SpaceX put more than 300 rockets into orbit for less than $10 billion, California has built 1,600 feet of elevated rail for $11 billion, and now projects its high speed rail project will cost a total of $128 billion.
• Congress earmarked $7.5 billion in 2021 for a half-million electric-vehicle charging stations. By May 2024, only eight had been built. Not 8,000. Not 800. Eight.
• The federal government allocated $42.5 billion on rural broadband and has connected zero homes after three years.
• Unimaginably large parts of Los Angeles were just destroyed by a devastating fire while its fire hydrants didn’t work, and while fire department leadership seemed more focused on DEI than saving lives.
Something has to change. Our politicians can no longer remain fixated on steady, predictable preservation of the status quo. Instead, we need a leader who will fight for the country, is willing to risk change, and who realizes America’s exceptional potential.
Not just potential but real results from companies like SpaceX. That’s exciting stuff and, I’d wager, a yuge reason why young Americans have swung hard for Trump.
CHANGE: ‘Countercultural groundswell’: Yale freshmen want stronger free speech protections: Students are pushing back on ‘massive censorship,’ ‘woke ideology,’ law student says. ‘Noble said she believes the results echo “a broader cultural vibe shift [that] will have an impact on Yale long into the future.'”
UNIVERSITY ‘INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARDS’ ARE OUT OF CONTROL. “In one study, researchers sent three versions of an application for a proposed study to university IRBs. When the topic of the proposed study was discrimination against short or obese applicants in hiring, the proposal sailed through IRB approval. However, an identical study on discrimination against women or minorities was denied about half the time, and about two-thirds of proposed studies on discrimination against white males were not approved.”
IT HAD TO COME TO THIS BECAUSE OF COURSE IT DID: Colorado Supreme Court Rules Elephants Are Not Human and Must Stay in a Zoo.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: NYU suspends nearly a dozen pro-Palestine students for a year after ‘sit-in’ protest during finals week.
NOBODY SHOULD: Truckers File Lawsuit Arguing They Shouldn’t Lose Second Amendment Rights Just Because They Cross State Lines. We need legislation establishing mandatory national carry reciprocity.
BRAVE SIR ROBIN BRAVELY TURNED AND FLED:
After it was revealed that the reporter behind the Hegseth hit pieces is the subject of a complaint accusing her of making phony accusations of sexism & misogyny she did what all leftists do — she went into hiding and denial. pic.twitter.com/HNuWgSKLcS
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 22, 2025
By choice or did NBC’s legal department make her do it?
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Kidde Carbon Monoxide Detector, Plug In Wall with 9-Volt Battery Backup. #CommissionEarned
SO I MENTIONED YESTERDAY THAT LSU LAW PROFESSOR KEN LEVY IS BEING “replaced pending an investigation” of the remarks he made about the election. The remarks seem to be transcribed here, and honestly they sound utterly acceptable to me. They don’t even seem to come close to violating the Louisiana policy that’s mentioned in the letter. I can’t imagine that any student would have felt “intimidated” by them, and any student who did is probably too fragile to be in law school anyway.
Flashback: Reverse Speech Codes Aren’t the Answer. I get that there’s a temptation to play the turnabout is fair play card, and in some cases that may even be true, but this just looks like a big nothingburger to me.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Team Trump Packed a Month’s Worth of Work Into Its First 2 ½ Days. “It sure is weird having a president who shows up to work every day and can stay awake past 4 PM, isn’t it? I’m not going to double check this, but I think that Joe Biden had taken three vacations by Wednesday of his first week in office.”
BEHIND THE CURVE: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins defends DEI.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins defended DEI initiatives during an Axios interview on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.
Why it matters: Robbins also serves as chair of the Business Roundtable, one of America’s most powerful corporate trade organizations.
The big picture: Corporate DEI has become a political flashpoint, with President Trump on Tuesday encouraging the private sector to eliminate such programs.He did so in an executive order that dismantled DEI policies at federal government agencies and set the stage for DEI-focused government employees to be laid off.
What Robbins said: “I think the pendulum swings a little wide in both directions. And for us, it’s about finding the equilibrium … You cannot argue with the fact that a diverse workforce is better. There’s too much business value …”
Business value, eh? Over the last five years, shares in Cisco have underperformed the S&P, with an overall return of 42%. The S&P 500 grew 82% in that same period.
OFFER A BOUNTY TO PLAINTIFF’S LAWYERS WHO SNIFF THINGS LIKE THIS OUT:
What’s beautiful is that thanks to the Interwebs and X, they can’t hide this stuff anymore.
We are unleashing the power of thousands of autistic guys with time on their hands to dig in deep and uncover the lies and deceptions. https://t.co/AGqViv1WrG
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) January 23, 2025
