January 25, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Saturday night.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

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.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

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.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness?

The article with the above headline is paywalled, but Greek PM Mitsotakis repeats the quote in this interview:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I have submitted this proposal together with Donald Tusk in a letter that I’ve sent to all of my colleagues. We need to do two things: we need to spend more at the national level -that, we will not escape. Greece is already spending more than 3% of its GDP on defence. We need to spend more both on the national level and on the European level, because at the end of the day, it’s our security that is threatened.

Asked whether he agreed with an earlier statement by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski that he feared Germany’s weakness more than its power, the Prime Minister replied:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We cannot envision significant progress in the European Union and strengthening the European economy without a competitive Germany. So Germany needs to get its act together. There are structural issues related to the German economy, they’ve been well discussed in the German public debate. I think this is a time for bold action and more radical reforms. I’m convinced that from the discussions that I had, that Friedrich Merz has this agenda and knows exactly what the German economy needs.

Other areas where Germany “needs to get its act together” include this: Many Germans fear for safety after horrific crimes.

In a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, a two-year-old boy and a forty-one-year-old man were killed in a park on Wednesday. Three more people were injured, among them two-year-old girl. A suspect has been arrested and identified as an Afghan national with a history of violence and psychiatric issues.

The horrific details of the incident were released by police and the Bavarian minister of the interior Joachim Herrmann shortly after and caused widespread outrage. The twenty-eight-year-old suspect reportedly targeted a particular boy, who was in the park with other children from his kindergarten group. He walked up to him and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. A bystander intervened and was also killed.

The suspect then stabbed a small girl in the neck three times before attacking another seventy-two-year-old man. A kindergarten teacher broke her arm as she tried to flee. The injured victims were taken to hospital and don’t appear to be in critical condition. Other bystanders and police chased down the perpetrator. He was arrested and taken into custody.

* * * * * * * *

The incident came just a month after the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg in which six people were killed and at least 299 wounded when a car plowed into the crowds at high speed. The driver was arrested on the scene and identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, who came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in 2006 and was known to the authorities for making terrorist threats.

The two attacks are not directly related, but they fall into a recent spate of incidents in which the suspects had claimed asylum in Germany and had then gone on to commit serious acts of violence. What many Germans will take from this is that the authorities were unable to stop any of the men from killing, injuring and terrorizing innocent people, including children.

Even Chancellor Olaf Scholz issued a sharply-worded statement that went much further than the usual expressions of empathy and promises to investigate the incident and punish the perpetrator. “That isn’t enough,” he wrote, adding that he was “fed up with such brutal acts occurring every few weeks in our country — committed by perpetrators who had originally come to us to seek protection. In light of this, misguided tolerance is completely inadequate. The authorities must investigate promptly why the assassin was still in Germany in the first place. From those findings consequences must follow — talk is not enough.”

Scholz’s opponent Friedrich Merz, the man most likely to become the German chancellor following the snap elections on February 23 also demanded action: “It can’t go on like this. We must restore law and order.”

Germany’s mainstream parties will be worried that the anger, frustration and fear triggered by this most recent attack will fan the flames of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) whose core issue is immigration. They are currently polling in second place on around a fifth of the vote, and have recently sharpened their manifesto further, embracing the idea of mass deportations of foreigners from Germany under the term “remigration,” which the party had previously dropped.

NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford rounds up coverage of Germany’s upcoming election next month and writes their choice is simple: Put Up/Tear Down that Wall.

Germany’s opposition leader Friedrich Merz is under fire for vowing strict border controls if he is elected chancellor, with the frontrunner citing a deadly knife attack that was allegedly carried out by a rejected asylum seeker as justification for a migration overhaul.

The leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on Thursday presented a five-point migration plan calling for, among other things, a “de facto entry ban” for all people without valid documents and permanent control of all of Germany’s borders.

Merz announced his plan a day after two people, including a 2-year-old boy, were killed and three others injured during an attack in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg.

The suspect, arrested shortly afterwards, is a 28-year-old Afghan with a history of psychiatric problems and violence who said over a month ago that he would leave Germany voluntarily.

Germany already has “temporary”  border controls in place (something permitted under the EU’s Schengen rules). Those are due to expire on March 15, although they can be extended under certain conditions. Merz has (correctly) described the EU’s internal border regime as “recognizably dysfunctional”, a view not shared by parties to his left. Merz, who has referred to Germany’s right to assert the primacy of German law (a heretical idea in the EU) is planning to press on:

“I refuse to recognize that the acts of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg are supposed to be the new normal in Germany,” he said. “Enough is enough. We are faced with the shambles of an asylum and immigration policy that has been misguided in Germany for 10 years.”

But Time magazine dubbed Angela Merkel “person of the year” in 2015, writing glowingly about her policy choices:

Germany would bail Greece out, on her strict terms. It would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it. And it would deploy troops abroad in the fight against ISIS. Germany has spent the past 70 years testing antidotes to its toxically nationalist, militarist, genocidal past. Merkel brandished a different set of values—humanity, generosity, tolerance—to demonstrate how Germany’s great strength could be used to save, rather than destroy. It is rare to see a leader in the process of shedding an old and haunting national identity. “If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations,” she said, “then that’s not my country.”

And so this time, the woman who trained as a quantum chemist did not run the tests and do the lab work; she made her stand. The blowback has come fast and from all sides. Donald Trump called Merkel “insane” and called the refugees “one of the great Trojan horses.” German protesters called her a traitor, a whore; her allies warned of a popular revolt, and her opponents warned of economic collapse and cultural suicide. The conservative Die Welt published a leaked intelligence report warning about the challenge of assimilating a million migrants: “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other people as well as a different understanding of society and law.” Her approval ratings dropped more than 20 points, even as she broadcast her faith in her people: “Wir schaffen das,” she has said over and over. “We can do this.”

I hope it was worth it for all concerned:

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE GREAT NAZI MORAL PANIC:

“Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant,” read a particularly Orwellian proclamation by the Orlando Sentinel.

Oh, please. We’ve seen this movie before. Musk is as guilty of throwing out the Sieg Heil as the Conservative Political Action Conference is of sneaking a Nazi rune into its stage design.

Remember that? In 2021, the events design company that created the stage for that year’s CPAC conference in Orlando, Florida, was compelled to respond to allegations that it intentionally designed the set to resemble an obscure rune embraced by the Nazis. “We had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did,” Design Foundry told Insider.

What the set designers failed to understand was that they were simply the latest targets in a very stupid and deliberately dishonest moral panic. Before the Nazi rune dustup, you had groups such as the New York Times warning about milk’s supposed ties to white supremacy (“Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk [and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed]”). You had entire news cycles dedicated to the allegedly dark meaning behind the “OK” hand sign, which began as an online in-joke aimed at the press’s notorious gullibility. You had reporters applying the white supremacy label to everything from the Betsy Ross flag to obscure tattoos to Hawaiian shirts to the House Mace to the “SPQR” acronym for the “Senate and People of Rome.” Donald Trump found himself compared to Benito Mussolini merely for waving from a White House balcony. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was accused of harboring white supremacy allegiances for flying the George Washington–commissioned Appeal to Heaven or Pine Tree flag outside his beach house in New Jersey. Natalism, working out and performing at Madison Square Garden are also Nazi-coded, according to American news media.

Perhaps the most insane moment in this long-running moral panic occurred in 2019 after the back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio on August 3. In the aftermath of the tragic events, Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until August 8. This was a victory for the Nazis, former FBI official and MSNBC regular Frank Figliuzzi warned at the time. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8. That is 8-8,” Figliuzzi said during an appearance on MSNBC.

He added, “The numbers 8-8 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movements. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and to them, the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ We’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk at 8-8. No one is thinking about this.”

There’s more. These are just a few brief examples from the past seven years.

The point is this: we’re clearly in the throes of a moral panic. There’s a devil under every doily, as they say.

Because this has been going for so long (much longer than seven years), Jonathan Turley dubs it: Nazispolozza: The Left’s Third Reich Mania Collapses into Comedy.

One of the least successful efforts of the left and many in the media this election was to paint Republican voters as “Nazis” hellbent on destroying democracy.

While once verboten as a political comparison, liberal politicians and pundits have developed something of a Nazi fetish, where every statement and gesture is declared a return of the Third Reich. It seems like each news event presents a Rorschach test where every inkblot looks like a Nazi.

That mania reached absurd, even comedic, levels with the attack on Elon Musk over an awkward gesture during the inauguration celebration.

An exuberant Musk told the crowd, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” As he gave those words, he placed his right hand on his chest and stretched his arm outward, his palm facing the floor. He then repeated the gesture before putting his hand on his chest again.

It was all done in a matter of seconds, but it was enough for the usual mob to erupt in faux outrage.

The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace — with only a momentary pause this week:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW IT STARTED*: New York Times health reporter: Wuhan lab leak coronavirus theory has ‘racist roots,’ isn’t ‘plausible.’

“A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way,” she wrote to a critic of her original point. “Doesn’t make the roots any less racist or the theory any more convincing, though.”

She later wrote that the notion the virus escaped from a lab was “possible” but not “plausible.”

“And almost impossible to disprove, meaning it will probably not go away till people lose interest,” she wrote.

Reached for comment by Fox News, she wrote, “I deleted it because it unleashed some incredibly nasty tweets and DMs. So please don’t write about it.”

—David Rutz, Fox News, May 21st, 2021.

How It’s Going: C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins.

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.

There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.

The analysis, however, is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.

A spokeswoman for the agency said the other theory remains plausible and that the agency will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting.

Some American officials say the debate matters little: The Chinese government failed to either regulate its markets or oversee its labs. But others argue it is an important intelligence and scientific question.

John Ratcliffe, the new director of the C.I.A., has long favored the lab leak hypothesis. He has said it is a critical piece of intelligence that needs to be understood and that it has consequences for U.S.-Chinese relations.

The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

—The New York Times today.

* Yes, we’re missing a crucial step in our “How It Started” headline: Don McNeil: Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn, Racist Slurs, Twitter and Mao: on Passing the Torch at The New York Times.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

KRISTI NOEM CONFIRMED AS DHS SECRETARY:

It’s a massive upgrade from Alejandro Mayorkas to Kristi Noem, and now it’s official: the senate voted Saturday to confirm Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security by a 59-34 vote. (Occasionally sensible Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., voted for the nominee.) There is now a very real chance that the southern border will be secured, and that the government will take a more realistic approach to national security than it ever came close to doing during the long four years of Old Joe Biden’s misrule.

During her confirmation hearings last week, Noem, who has been governor of South Dakota since 2019, declared: “I was the first governor to send National Guard troops to Texas when they were being overwhelmed by an unprecedented border crisis. If confirmed as secretary, I will ensure that our exceptional, extraordinary border patrol agents have all the tools and resources and support they need to carry out their mission effectively.”

Contra POTUS DJT, to be perfectly honest, I have yet to feel at all under the weather over all of the winning so far this week.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE MONSTER OF SOUTHPORT — AND HIS ENABLERS: Axel Rudakubana could have been stopped. Why wasn’t he?

To the end, he was a monster.

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana – the 18-year-old Brit who murdered three young girls, and tried to kill many more, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July – suddenly changed his pleas to guilty.

Today, we found out just how guilty, how depraved, how evil, he is as he was handed down a 52-year minimum sentence at Liverpool Crown Court – for murder, attempted murder, possession of terrorism materials and production of the biological toxin, ricin.

Having at least spared the victims and their families a lengthy trial, Rudakubana offered them a final insult. He had to be ejected from court for disrupting proceedings, screaming that he was unwell and needed medical attention. He killed defenceless kids, then couldn’t stomach facing their families. Utter scum.

He was 17 when he walked into the Hart Space studio in Southport last summer, pulling out his knife as the girls made friendship bracelets. His age at the time of the attack has spared him a formal ‘whole life order’ – which is reserved for the most hellish crimes, provided the perpetrator is over the age of 18. Nevertheless, the judge reassured a reeling public that Rudakubana would likely never be released from prison.

That felt like a welcome reminder that the system can, on occasion, deliver some semblance of justice, common sense and peace of mind, after a trial that exposed one catastrophic state failure after another.

* * * * * * * *

Whenever there is an ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘sensitive’ dimension to an alleged crime or potential perpetrator, officials become even more crippled. A state that allows child-rape gangs to proliferate for fear of stoking ‘community tensions’, or grants asylum to a convicted sex offender before feigning surprise when he acid attacks a refugee woman and her kids, can no longer claim to care about the safety of ordinary people.

Britain’s media invariably has a similar reaction as well:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History. Is he defining the Zeitgeist, or merely riding it? You might as well ask the same question of Napoleon or Caesar.

A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?

Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.

There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.

Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”

The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been levelled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character”. Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley reportedly called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.

I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn to Horace Walpole for the first. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”.

In his interview with the Daily Wire, Puck News’ Dylan Byers noted the change in tone at CNN:

You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.

And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.

I hope their first term hysteria over Trump, compounded by four years of hiding Joe Biden’s senescence was worth it for all of the credibility the DNC-MSM lost: Nostalgia Time! Drew Holden Walks Down Memory Lane With the Media’s Hara-kiri on the Steele Dossier.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll