January 26, 2025
I TALK ABOUT EXERCISE AND POLITICS WITH MARK RIPPETOE on the Starting Strength podcast.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: PJ PAUL JONES Men’s Crewneck Pullover Sweater. #CommisssionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Sanctioned Penn Professor Amy Wax Says ‘Possibility’ Trump Will Join Her Fight Against University That Punished Her for ‘Offensive’ Speech.
Professor Amy Wax, in an interview with the Sun, discloses that “the possibility has been brought up” that the Trump administration could join her federal civil lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania for violating “core principles of the First Amendment” and enforcing policies that are “racially discriminatory.”
Penn, as it’s called, has been trying to fire Dr. Wax, a tenured legal scholar who has argued cases before the Supreme Court and also happens to be a physician, for years due to statements she’s made — most controversially about the performance of her Black students — that have roiled the campus and made her persona non grata among the overwhelmingly liberal faculty.
Dr. Wax is now suing Penn after it punished her, including reducing her compensation, with what her complaint calls “academic discipline in the form of major sanctions.” The suit, in which the law professor uses a legal theory whose shape emerged in the wake of the attacks of October 7, 2023, to take on her hostile employer, could gain momentum from Washington’s help. The Trump administration could see in the polarizing professor an ally in its push to change the culture on America’s campuses.
Penn accuses Dr. Wax of committing a “major infraction” for “making intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic statements and actions that inflict harm.”
Penn’s faculty appears to have been especially incensed at Dr. Wax’s claims that “non-Western groups” are resentful toward “Western people” and that in her experience, Black students had rarely graduated at the top of their law school classes. She told the Sun in 2023 that she rejects the “premise that all groups are equal in their skills, ability, preferences, and talents,” but has always maintained that she has never discriminated against any student.
Penn and its lawyers ruminated on how to punish Dr. Wax in spite of her tenure. The university settled on a punishment that included a one-year suspension at half pay, the loss of a named chair and summer pay, a public reprimand, and a requirement that she note in the course of every public appearance that she does not speak for Penn. She calls the process that led to her sanctions “abnormal.”
Penn called her comments all sorts of things, except false.
JOHN PODHORETZ COMPARES AND CONTRASTS ANORA AND EMILIA PEREZ: The best and worst movies of 2024.
Emilia Perez is dreadful—both conceptually and in execution. See, according to writer-director Jacques Audiard, the problem with the psychotic mass-murdering Mexican drug lords who are destroying Western civilization is that they have been brainwashed by toxic masculinity. And what is the perfect cure? Transsexuality. The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed.
No, I am not kidding. No, this is not a comedy. But it is a musical (again, no I’m not kidding), mostly in Spanish but a little in English, featuring an immortal exchange in recitative between El Chapo’s lawyer and a doctor in a clinic in Thailand:
Lawyer: Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about a sex change operation.
Doctor: Man to woman or woman to man?
Lawyer: Man to woman.
Doctor: Penis to vagina!
You would know this yourself. You could. You almost certainly have a Netflix subscription and Emilia Perez has been available on Netflix for months. You might even have watched some of it. Many people have. The thing is, I haven’t met a single person who has made it past the 60-minute mark of this two-hour movie because (with the exception of Zoe Saldana, the blockbuster franchise actress who does a wonderful job playing the lawyer) its awfulness doesn’t even rise to the level of “this is a camp classic, I just gotta see how bad this is going to get the longer it goes on.” Rather, everybody shuts Emilia Perez off and then goes and takes a shower.
Or puts on a real estate flipping show.
Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet. The person playing Emilia Chapo, Karla Sofia Gascón, is nominated for Best Actress. If she wins, in part by defeating Mikey Madison, it will be a scandal—but hey, if actresses in Hollywood don’t have the courage to complain about their awards being taken away by biological males, then those awards should be taken away by biological males. It’ll serve them right.
The above scene from Emilia Perez is included in this clip featuring Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi (and on the right of the screencap, the overly-caffeinated Saldana), who notes that Hollywood lefties are getting a taste of their own medicine:
As Matt Walsh tweeted last week:
GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS: Was Pete Hegseth’s Accuser Offered A Quid Pro Quo For Her Bogus Affidavit?
BILL GATES: ‘I would be diagnosed with autism if I were a kid today.’
Bill Gates has claimed he would be diagnosed with autism if he were a child today*.
Gates has said that he believes his obsessive and socially-awkward behaviour as a child would have been labelled as a sign of neuro divergence if he grew up in today’s society.
The tech billionaire reflects on his “neuro divergent” behaviour as a young boy in his new autobiography, Source Code.
Gates, 69, said as a child he would miss social cues, often “rock in place” and was able to focus intensely on certain subjects.
Speaking to the Times, he said he would today be considered “on the autism spectrum”, adding: “My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.”
His claim comes amid an increase in autism diagnoses, with a 2021 study finding a 787 per cent rise in the number of UK diagnoses in the decades between 1998 and 2018.
* Isn’t everybody these days? As the New York Post noted 2012: “America’s false autism epidemic…is in fact the latest instance of the fads that litter the history of psychiatry.”
More recently, Julie Burchill wrote, “Life was so much cooler before we made every little foible A Thing. When I was growing up, only soldiers had PTSD; now I’ve heard a girl claiming she started up a podcast after she got it when her gran died. Every day I hear that someone who I’d thought was just a bit annoying is ‘on the spectrum’ – the spectrum of what, from being mildly tedious to being an ocean-going bore? Like self-harm and transing, I can’t help but believe that a lot of ‘neuro-diversity’ is an internet-borne virus. Never mind, what today’s youngsters are lacking in the three Rs they’ll be able to make up for with the three As; ADHD, allergies and attention-seeking.”
TIPPI HEDREN, CALL YOUR OFFICE! How Fowl! NYT Writer Relays Inaugural Plea from Birds: Trump Spells Doom for Climate Change.
A New York Times writer is using birds to wokescold the American electorate for turning the dial back on climate change progress by inaugurating President Donald Trump.
Siri, define birdbrain.
“On a Cold, Dark Inauguration Day, a Message From the Birds,” read the headline of Times contributing writer Margaret Renkl’s wacky January 20 guest essay. After seven paragraphs of mindless babbling about the symbolism of birds, Renkl then took to crying “fowl” over the incoming Trump administration. “At the dawn of a year that seems almost certain to make this country into an unrecognizable place, to make this world even less hospitable to birds and everybody else, it turns out I am less interested in symbolic associations than in practicalities,” Renkl whined. Uh, what? [Emphasis added.]
Birds are having a rough go of it lately. In 2023, the L.A. Times ran a story with the headline: How L.A.’s bird population is shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices.
And apparently, global warming as well, despite DC being so cold, Trump’s second inaugural was held indoors.
No word yet if Trump will be blowing the doors off the “birds aren’t real” conspiracy after he opens the vaults on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK.
FAKE NEWS, OR MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE? CBS: “Lesson plans about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots have been removed from the U.S. Air Force curriculum, a U.S. official confirmed Saturday.”
Kurt Schlichter has some questions for the network that brought you RatherGate, pro-Obamacare poetry readings, and Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi:
Mike Cernovich and Daniel Greenfield ponder what it means if the report is true:
ET TU, USAA?: Why did USAA de-bank John Eastman? (Click on link to see document. I couldn’t get it to show.)
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EXPLAINING LIFE TO IDIOTS:
The French have not been in Haiti in over 200 years.
In the past two centuries, Haitians have not managed to do anything except cause nearly animal to go extinct and to deforest 99% of the vegetation on their side of Hispaniola. https://t.co/lP9X1Kss9x
— Rich 🐺 (@heywildrich) January 25, 2025
January 25, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Saturday night.
BRAWNDO HAS WHAT PLANTS CRAVE: Electrolyte Drinks Can Make Things Worse When You’re Sick. Here’s Why.
COME BACK BARRY SWITZER, ALL IS FORGIVEN! Dallas Cowboys hire veteran OC Brian Schottenheimer as their next head coach.
Eleven days after announcing their divorce from Mike McCarthy, the Dallas Cowboys are hiring Brian Schottenheimer, Dallas’ offensive coordinator the past two years, the team announced Friday.
The decision follows Cowboys interviews with Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, former New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh, former Minnesota Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier and Schottenheimer.
Schottenheimer became a serious candidate later in the franchise’s search, meeting with club owner and general manager Jerry Jones and team brass first on Tuesday and then again Wednesday. No other candidate received a second meeting, while Schottenheimer’s conversations with Jones spanned multiple days.
And as a result: The Dallas Cowboys’ Brand is Dead: ‘America’s Team’ No Longer.
21ST CENTURY PARENTING: Octomom Nadya Suleman’s kids speak out for the first time: ‘She had to sacrifice so much.’
JONAH GOLDBERG: “They told me that if America elected Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right. I’m referring to Joe Biden and his pardon of Marcus Garvey.”
In the 1920s, when Italian fascism was new, and German Nazism was an obscure fringe political cult almost no one had heard of, fascism was very popular in America. In 1923, the New York Times declared that Benito Mussolini “has many points in common with that of the men who inspired our own constitution – John Adams, Hamilton and Washington.” Legendary progressive economist Charles Beard had similar, albeit more pointed views. Sure, Mussolini was hostile to democracy, but so what? The “fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire.”
Fact check: Untrue.
When someone asked how anyone could consider Mussolini’s brutality a “good thing,” Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism and the cofounder of The New Republic, wrote that it was not “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.” That might explain some of his support for eugenics.
Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the 1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that, “We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different editions of Rogers’ work.)
The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order and gave color to his meetings.”
James later recanted this assessment as the full scope of Hitlerism made the comparison unfair.
I’m no expert on Garvey, and things do get sufficiently confusing that I’m open to correction on some of this, but that Garvey passed the fascist duck test seems pretty defensible. He marched like a fascist, dressed like a fascist, and sounded like a fascist —particularly when he said he was a fascist! If you translated a lot of his rhetoric into German—“up, you mighty race!” and all that—you’d assume it was from a Nazi.
Biden was always going to pardon Hunter and James Biden. Until someone else takes credit for them, I’m going to assume that removing the Churchill bust was Obama’s first in-joke upon beginning his de facto third term in office, and posthumously pardoning Garvey was his last.
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