January 25, 2025

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

KRISTI NOEM CONFIRMED as Homeland Security Secretary.

Posted at 11:57 am by Glenn Reynolds

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.

I know that sounds odd. 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.

Thomas Carlyle would have been impressed by Donald Trump. The author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) thought that history organised itself around great men the way that iron filings form patterns in a magnetic field.

The eighteenth century, Carlyle thought, had lost its moral elasticity and spiritual tautness. He prophesied that his own time would be a crucible of renewal in which “the world will once more become … a heroic world”.

Over the last year, Donald Trump has emerged as a Carlylean figure, an historic man of action who, having triumphed over extraordinary adversity, has become a totem of the age, a man through whom the highest ambitions of the country find expression.

I know that sounds odd. 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.”

He is a powerful figure, but he is also a vehicle for the Normals, at home and abroad, who have finally had enough.

Related: Trump Inaugurates a New Era.

Posted at 8:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPANK THEM HARD:

Posted at 7:41 am by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds