HMM:

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence…

DENVER: Blue city mayor defunds police force by more than $8 million to aid migrants.

A Democrat-controlled city announced $45 million in funding for programs to help deal with the skyrocketing number of migrant arrivals it is facing, resulting in over $8 million in budget cuts for the police department.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced last week a package of $45.9 million to fully fund programs for “newcomers” for 2024 and avoid worst-case scenarios projected by the city. That’s in addition to $44 million in spending already secured for the program through previous budget moves.

Spending on migrants in the city skyrocketed last year from $2 million a month in August to $15 million in December. In January, migrant numbers peaked at around 5,000 in shelters but have since dropped to around 1,000, according to official figures.

“Newcomers,” LOL.

I must have spent 20 years making the drive up to Denver from Colorado Springs at least once a week to meet friends, have a nice dinner, go to a nightclub, etc. But that seems like a long time ago.

NPR’S QUEEN OF THE KARENS:

Sometimes, a person enters the public spotlight and is such an embodiment of an established stereotype that it seems impossible for him or her to be a real person. If Tom Wolfe wanted to capture the essence of arrogant, alienated progressivism, he would reject NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as too unbelievably on point.

The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.

She then got internships with the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group in London and Germany before landing a job in New York City at UNICEF. She had stops with the National Democratic Institute and the World Bank, among other global nonprofit groups, before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019.

It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.

And her tweets prove she is the perfect person for the job.

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”

Related: ‘Bat Guano Crazy:’ NPR CEO Katherine Maher Says Truth Is a ‘Distraction’ to ‘Getting Things Done.’

Related: Remember the 1960s, when Marshall McLuhan envisioned an interconnected “global village” with everyone wired together and sharing ideas? Right around the same time that Martin Luther King envisioned a world in which people were judged by the content of their character, and not their skin color? So much for those ideas:

Tom Wolfe may have left this plane of existence in 2018, but the Matrix he spent years programming is still working absolutely perfectly.

OUCH:

MARKETING: Alan Ritchson Doubles Down on Cops, Attacks DeSantis.

Alan Ritchson has a funny way of promoting movies.

The star behind “Reacher” hits the big screen once more Friday with “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” The Guy Ritchie romp, loosely based on true events, casts him as a World War II-era soldier battling the Nazi menace.

Instead, he’s spent the last few weeks attacking:

• Christians
• Donald Trump
• Law enforcement

And, now, he’s expanding his target list to include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That’s from Christian Toto, who also noted on Twitter/X: “He has a movie opening nationwide Friday. So, naturally, he’s alienating as many groups of moviegoers as possible!”

Actors, as a group, never struck me as particularly bright. But studios at least used to know how to manage their actors’ PR.

JONATHAN GLAZER, LIBERAL JEWISH PROPHET:

Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words.

“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October—whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.

Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.

In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.

Related: Karol Markowicz on “Jeremy Piven and an all-too-apt performance:” “The film [The Performance] was made before the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and had indeed been in the works for many years, but it’s entirely believable as an allegory for the way Hollywood has responded to those attacks. [Harold May—actually Harold Marcovitz, a floundering tap dancer who is recruited to perform in Berlin in 1936, played by Piven] is not wildly dissimilar from Jewish Hollywood celebrities who have stayed nauseatingly quiet after Oct. 7. They, too, want the success, the money, the accolades. They, too, have worked hard to get where they are, and they don’t want to throw it away to defend an identity that barely registers. They, too, are confident that the Jew-haters don’t mean them, not with their talent and beauty; they must mean some other Jews who had had the wrong opinions or live in the wrong place. Would they shake Hitler’s outstretched hand? It happens off-screen, but we know Harold does after his one-night show. It’s survival at that point, the argument can be made. But when the riches and the acclaim mean that he’ll have to shake it some more, Harold chooses to do just that.”

SO I FIGURE FOR THAT KIND OF MONEY I SHOULD GET A TEACHER WHO CAN USE AN APOSTROPHE CORRECTLY: