October 3, 2024

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: Having attempted to rehabilitate the Nazis and denigrate Winston Churchill last month, Tucker sets his sights on more immediate world events: Tucker Carlson: Do You Really Believe Iran Is a Threat?

I asked whether he meant the FBI’s assertion that there were teams of Iranian-backed groups in the US trying to kill Donald Trump. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” he interrupted. I denied it. “Okay, good. Because, you know, I’ve been around the block, and since 2003 it seems like everyone in the intel community shouts ‘Iran, Iran, Iran,’ every time there is a national security threat,” he said. “It’s truly shocking that people, especially those on the right, still believe that Iran is our greatest national security threat.”

I asked Tucker for his reaction to Mark Levin’s recent suggestion that the United States should treat Iran’s speculated involvement in the assassination attempts on Donald Trump as an act of war. He scoffed, “That’s truly deranged. Hard to believe and take seriously. Anyone who is repeating this line about Iran is a liar. Realistically, Iran does not want a hot war with the United States and has tried to avoid one for the last year. It is one of the most sinister lies out there.”

I asked him whether he thought, despite Donald Trump’s anti-war posturing and his selection of J.D. Vance as a running mate, the neocon/hawkish wing of the Republican Party had been fully ousted from influence of the electorate. “Are you kidding me? We haven’t exorcized the neocon establishment at all!” he said with a laugh. “You have to understand though that this is not a right/left thing. Just look at the second guy who tried to kill Trump. Fundamentally, he believes the same exact things that someone like Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Victoria Nuland believe.”

“That’s the scary thing. You have all of these people telling us that Iran, Russia, North Korea, are the greatest threats to our national security and I just simply don’t believe that,” he continued. “It really seems at this point that the Democratic Party and the national security establishment are in fact our greatest threats to national security.”

I know this is crazy talk, but maybe both could be worrisome in 2024.

Earlier: What Happened to Tucker Carlson?

Becoming a TV superstar can have deranging effects on anybody, as Carlson noted in his 2003 book. “If running for office can encourage you to imagine millions of supporters [who don’t exist], hosting a show can entirely separate you from reality,” he observed. “If you’re not careful, you can permanently lose all critical distance from yourself. One morning you wake up, and you’re living in your own irony-free world.”

That could be the world Carlson is living in today.

Could be.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL?

More:

When Jordan Seidhom woke up Saturday morning, he saw a Facebook post that tens of thousands of people were commenting on and sharing. A family was stranded on a mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina.

They ran out of water a day earlier and just enough food to last less than two days.

Seidhom, the former head of the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, knows a thing or two about finding people. He researched the mountain chain where the family was located and found a place to land on his mapping software.

He loaded bottled water and food into his helicopter and headed toward Banner Elk.

“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” Seidhom told Queen City News Chief Investigator Jody Barr.

What followed was a few heartwarming rescues of people Biden-Harris had left behind.

Then:

Seidhom landed in a parking lot at Boys Camp Road and Memorial Highway near the Lake Lure Flowering Bridge where he said he spotted a group of first responders gathered.

“Once we landed where emergency personnel were, I was met by a fire chief or maybe a captain, and he asked me who I was. I told him who I was, who I was with, just a local volunteer,” Seidhom said. The man was from an out-of-state fire department who’d traveled to N.C. to help in the rescue efforts, Seidhom said.

He believed the chief was from somewhere in Michigan.

“I told him my background experience, law enforcement, firefighting, and pilot and he immediately started helping with coordination. He gave me radio frequencies to coordinate with them on, set up a landing area for me to come back with the other victim, and just basically started the rescue efforts; the policies and procedures that you would take coordinating with someone from an outside source or outside agency. And in the middle of the whole conversation and them blocking the road off, I was greeted by the – at that time I didn’t know – but the Lake Lure fire chief, or assistant chief, maybe. And he shut down the whole operation.”

More: “If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave no issue. And I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them, it was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them, I was going to leave them there.”

Tar, feathers.

Posted at 11:28 am by Stephen Green

LIFE UNDER HARRIS-WALZ WOULD BE THE SAME AS Life in Kamala’s California.

It’s election season, and because California is a one-party state, we don’t see very many campaign ads for Kamala Harris. But ballot initiatives are another story. One hotly contested ballot initiative, Proposition 33, if approved by voters, will enable California’s cities and counties to impose rent control. How the rent control advocates make their case is typical. Greed and oppression against hapless, helpless, innocent victims. But the government is here to help!

Ads in favor of Prop. 33 are masterpieces in emotional imagery. One after another, a diverse collection of beleaguered tenants appear on the television screen, each of them repeating the phrase “The rent’s too high.” Another ad promoting a yes vote on Prop. 33 follows the same pattern, but this time, one after another, a collection of forlorn tenants asks, “Where will I live?” while superimposed on the screen is written, “Average Rent, $2,800.”

In both cases, viewers are advised to “vote for rent control.”

The naked dishonesty of these ads is lost on most Californians. They have been conditioned to believe that high home prices and high monthly rents are the result of price gouging by greedy landlords when in reality there is a housing shortage because the Democratic majority in the state legislature has passed countless laws that make it almost impossible to get permits to build homes. No wonder the median price for a home in California is $904,000.

Just wait until rent control creates severe shortages.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK:

And:

Previously: “Please note, however, that Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 27th, and its massive damage was predicted days before that.”

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

Biden did finally on Wednesday approve “the deployment of up to one thousand active-duty soldiers to support ongoing hurricane response and recovery efforts.”

But as Publius reminds X readers, “Please note, however, that Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 27th, and its massive damage was predicted days before that.”

Also from Publius:

Here is the full list (in no particular order) of all POSSIBLE reasons why active duty military helicopters have not yet been deployed en masse to disaster relief in North Carolina:

1. The Harris/Biden Administration is grossly incompetent, both in terms of not pre-staging assets and in terms of not being able to cut through Title 10 red tape now to get the assets flying.

2. Units like the 101st Airborne (Air Assault), 82nd Airborne, XVIII Airborne Corps aviation and 2nd MARDIV are currently under classified deployment or standby orders to deploy to Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Taiwan or some other world hotspot, and they therefore cannot spare their rotary wing assets at this moment in time.

3. The classified readiness rates of America’s military helicopters and their crews are vastly worse than anyone outside the military understands.

4. Hurricane Helene damaged most military helicopters in NC, GA and TN, and that fact is being kept secret.

5. The military helicopter assets are not needed and everything is just peachy-keen, A-OK fine with the limited assets currently in use, and those limited assets are totally sufficient to do the job.

6. The conditions on the ground, the availability of aviation support units and/or the availability of aviation fuel make it impossible to establish forward bases for the helicopters to operate from.

7. The Harris/Biden Administration and/or the Democrat NC governor are maliciously and deliberately denying or delaying the use of these assets for nefarious reasons only they know.

One nefarious reason might be to hinder voters in some redder parts of North Carolina to tip the state to Harris-Walz.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ROY COOPER?

Posted at 8:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

MATT TAIBBI: “There are no working-class censors.” “The dirty secret of content moderation all over the world is that it’s a tiny sliver of educated rich correcting everybody else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it, basically. The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history. . . . These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism, which is unique to them, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They are simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off. They may have one idea, and it’s not even an idea, but a sensation. Fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat. They’re afraid of each other. But they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set, and they live in near constant dread of being caught with even one original opinion.”

Posted at 8:16 am by Glenn Reynolds

ICYMI: Kamala Must Combat ‘Frightening!’ Commie Memes, but She Can’t Because She Is One. “The Left, which so often beats us at creating politically effective imagery, understands all too well the power of those Commie Kamala memes. Those seven House Dems, the screeching NPR lady, the buttisnky who got you suspended from Facebook for sharing wrongthink images — they aren’t worried about deep fakes. They’re scared that Grok has given the Right a tool to produce effective political imagery.”

PJ Media readers asked for more longer-form pieces and I’ve been happy to oblige.

Posted at 8:06 am by Stephen Green

DAVID HARSANYI READ “THE MESSAGE” SO YOU WOULDN’T HAVE TO: The racist protocols of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Palestinians of The Message are uncannily peaceful, yearning to write poetry and plow the “sacred land” beneath their feet. Nowhere in his book, not once, does Coates bother mentioning “Hamas” despite writing it right after one of the largest massacres of Jews in history. Nowhere in his polemic about the Palestinian struggle does Coates type the words “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or “PLO” or “Fatah,” much less “Hezbollah” or “Iran.” “Yasser Arafat” wasn’t important enough to make an appearance.

Because Coates distances himself from the Holocaust, his readers will be blissfully unaware of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who personally implored Adolf Hitler to “burn” the Jews of Europe years before Israel ever existed. It would, no doubt, be a heavy lift for Coates to explain why Arab pogroms occurred with regularity before the “occupied territories” or “Nakba.”

The word “terrorist” makes one appearance in the entirety of The Message, and it is preceded by the word “Zionist.”

Because of course.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green