HE’S NOT WRONG: Blame academia for the insanity at Thursday’s Dem debate. “The longer I watched the debate, the more it started to sound like a stage full of radicalized college professors trying to impress their radicalized students.”

That’s how far the Gramscian Damage has spread.

WELL, HE’S THE LEAST CRAZY GUY ON THE CLOWN CAR: Andrew Yang No. 1 on Google, searches 171% higher than Biden.

JOE BIDEN, RECORD PLAYERS, AND RACISM:

As weird as the record player remark was, it’s probably not going to hurt Biden much, if at all. The fact that he’s decades behind the times is baked into the cake of public opinion about the former vice president.

In fact, it may be beneficial to Biden that he made the record player reference. Why? Because it diverts attention from a potentially more harmful portion of his statement, which some are claiming is racist.

Ed Morrissey directs our attention to the claim of Time Magazine editor-at-large Anand Giridharadas that Biden’s insinuation that Black parents don’t know how to raise their kids is “appalling — and disqualifying.” Giridharadas says that Biden may have set a new low for racism in a Democratic presidential debate.

As unfashionable as it might be, perhaps before hollering “racism” we should consider whether it’s true that kids coming from a very poor background will hear 4 million fewer spoken words before attending school then kids from a more prosperous background — and more generally, whether it’s true that they show up at school in a disadvantaged position.

I don’t know whether the claim about 4 million words is true, but it has currency. Actually, the usual claim is that there’s a 30 million word gap. Researchers have said this figure is way too high (which it surely is), and put the gap at around 4 million. I’ve heard liberal friends cite both figures.

They do so as an explanation for why poor Black students tend to be outperformed at school from the get-go. They do so, as Biden did, in support of calls for liberal programs to help poor Black kids get a head start before they begin kindergarten.

Biden didn’t pick up this theme at a KKK meeting. He picked at up in the liberal circles he (or maybe his handlers) frequents.

Nor should Biden’s statement be construed as an attack on poor Black parents. A young child will probably hear more spoken words in a two-parent home than in a home with just one parent. A young child will probably hear more spoken words in a home where a parent isn’t working two jobs or a night shift to make ends meet.

It certainly freaked out the ultra-woke brigade on Twitter including the aforementioned Giridharadas, but as Glenn has written (including in his new book), the wokescolds don’t represent the majority of the Democratic Party. As Ed Morrissey wrote yesterday at Hot Air:

Is this the way African-American voters will take this, though? Biden has a good relationship with this “beating heart of his party,” which is of course why his competitors have taken shots at his record on issues like busing and reparations. He has a long track record of relative goodwill on which to rely when interpreting stream-of-consciousness ramblings like this one. Giridharadas imputes racism when simple ignorance might be a better explanation. Or Biden just being the crazy-but-benign grandpa that Biden has been for a very long time.

If those voters do share Giridharadas’ interpretation of this answer, watch out.

We’ll know soon enough how the polls break for Biden — clearly the far left is willing to throw everything at him to knock him out of the race, but as Jonah Goldberg noted earlier this month, “black voters, particularly black women — the king- or queen-makers of the Democratic primaries — are pragmatically focused on defeating Trump rather than on making the perfect the enemy of the good. And that’s a big reason that Biden commands such a large share of the black vote, particularly among older voters.”

“WE SHOULDN’T LET BOYS RUN FOR OFFICE ANYMORE.” New DCCC Chief Wants to Cancel Male Candidates. Good, run with that.

Plus: “It is unclear if two male Democrats that supported the hiring of Guinn, Reps. Tony Cardenas (D., Calif.) and Scott Peters (D., Calif.), are aware of Guinn’s potential ban of male candidates. Neither returned requests for comment. Guinn’s hiring comes at a time of turmoil within the DCCC. Former executive director Allison Jaslow, a gay combat veteran, resigned after the Washington Free Beacon discovered anti-gay and racist tweets sent by recently promoted staffer Tayhlor Coleman.”

All they have to do is not be crazy, and yet . . . .

THE EXORCIST AS COUNTER-COUNTERCULTURAL PARABLE:

In many ways, [Exorcist author William Peter Blatty] was a man of his times, and those times were confusing. In the summer of 1969 (the summer of Woodstock and the Tate-LoBianca murders), as he was holed up in a Lake Tahoe cabin, hammering out the first draft of The Exorcist on an IBM Selectric typewriter, America was in the midst of cultural and political upheaval—the arrival of the Pill, the rise and demise of the hippie counterculture, the Stonewall riots and the beginnings of the gay rights movement, the Women’s Liberation movement, and the rejection of puritanical attitudes towards sex and marriage. The liberalization of abortion laws by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade would follow the publication of The Exorcist by two years—the same year William Friedkin’s film appeared in US theaters.

By that time, Blatty had already spent about a decade toiling in that most godless of trades, the Hollywood film industry, where he wrote screenplays, most of them sex farces, which is hardly the kind of work you’d associate with a devout Catholic. His second marriage was already on the rocks, and he was writing a novel that would soon become a film that earned the condemnation of the Catholic Church. Clearly, he wasn’t anybody’s idea of a family-values conservative. But if his id was in charge of his Hollywood playboy lifestyle, his superego seems to have been firmly in control of his literary imagination as he cranked out The Exorcist over nine months.

Notwithstanding the Church’s reflexive condemnation, The Exorcist is a deeply religious novel in which Catholic priests play the most heroic roles, martyring themselves to save the life of a little girl who isn’t even Catholic. (In 2011, the publisher brought out a 40^th anniversary edition that had been lightly revised by Blatty to, among other things, make it more Catholic-friendly; if you plan to read The Exorcist, I recommend finding the original.) And, although the book is a cautionary tale about the harm that divorce can do to children, it is not a call for an end to all divorce, nor is it an argument against women in the workplace.

Although the demon inside of Regan accuses Chris of bringing about the divorce by putting her career ahead of her marriage, Blatty indicates that this isn’t the case. He portrays Chris as a loving mother and wife, who still hopes to reconcile with her husband. The divorce is clearly the result of Howard’s fragile ego and his inability to handle his wife’s success. Just before they begin the exorcism, Father Merrin reminds Father Karras not to speak with the demon, warning him, “Especially, do not listen to anything he says. The demon is a liar.”

Nevertheless, it is Merrin who makes the clearest plea for Americans to reconsider the idea of ending their troubled marriages.

Read the whole thing.

TO BE HONEST, THAT STARTED AT LEAST AS FAR BACK AS HOWELL RAINES’ QUIXOTIC ATTACKS ON AUGUSTA NATIONAL: Andrew Sullivan: The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism.

In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers: “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start: “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

They’re vicious, somewhat crazy, hacks, doing their best to expand the Gramscian Damage.

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Beto Is a Disaster for the Gun-Control Movement.

He almost certainly doesn’t realize it, but Beto O’Rourke is likely to be the worst thing to happen to the gun-control movement in decades — and, if he continues in this mode, he may turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the Democratic party in a long time, too. In Houston last night, O’Rourke abandoned his cloying euphemisms (“mandatory buybacks”) and delivered a deliberate, carefully scripted endorsement of gun confiscation, which, within minutes, his campaign began to sell on t-shirts. “Hell yes,” Beto said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”
​​
​​Thus, upon the instant, did two decades’ worth of Democratic rhetoric go up in a puff of smoke.

“’That clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies,’ said Dem Sen. Chris Coons to CNN this morning of O’Rourke’s vow to confiscate assault weapons.”

Add that the Democrats’ “ban all the things” rhetoric at the CNN “climate change town hall” from last week, and it begs the question: what’s left that they don’t want to ban? (And Biden has signed off on his support for the Green New Deal. So much for his posing as the moderate among the candidates.) As Bryan Preston wrote afterwards, “If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela. Thank you, CNN, just for letting these people talk. Do it again next week? Please?”

Surprisingly, the House of Stephanopoulos was eager to comply.

WELL, BUT TO BE FAIR, HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THEM: Cuomo’s war on pipelines means pain for little people.

THE BABYLON BEE BECAME THE PAPER OF RECORD SO GRADUALLY I BARELY NOTICED: Beto: ‘Hell Yes I’m Going To Violate My Oath To Defend The Constitution.’

HE’S A DEMOCRAT — VICIOUS SCAPEGOATING IS WHAT THEY DO. Vicious Scapegoating Is the Whole Point of Beto O’Rourke’s Gun Grab: The “assault weapons” that the presidential contender wants to confiscate are not especially deadly, but the symbolism of that policy is poisonous.

SO I SAID I WAS IN A LOT OF ANTHOLOGIES, LATELY.  HERE’S ANOTHER ONE:  To Slip the Surly Bonds (The Phases of Mars Book 2).

Throughout the human experience, historians have wondered, “What if?” What if Americans had fought on the side of Germany in World War I? What if Germany had invested in naval aviation in World War II? What if Russia had started World War III?

Wonder no more, for these questions, along with many others, are answered within the pages of this book. Told by a variety of award-winning authors, like Sarah Hoyt, the 2018 Dragon Award Winner for Alternate History, Richard Fox, the 2017 Dragon Award Winner for Best Military Science Fiction, and Kacey Ezell, the winner of the 2018 Baen Reader’s Choice Award, “To Slip the Surly Bonds,” deals with aviation warfare that never happened in our world…but easily could have.

The second book in the exciting new “Phases of Mars” anthology series, there is something for everyone inside! From fighting alongside the Red Baron, to flying a P-38 Lightning, to present day air warfare, “To Slip the Surly Bonds” traces a century of aviation warfare…that wasn’t. From learning how the PBY got to the new world in Taylor Anderson’s “The Destroyermen” series…to fighting the French in a very different Vietnam, this book has it, so come aboard and find out “what if” all of these things had changed history…just a little. You’ll be glad you did!

THEY ALSO DISSENT ON REALITY:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor Dissent On Trump Immigration.

MIND YOU, IT WASN’T A VERY GOOD MASK:  Joe Biden Unmasks Comrade Bernie Sanders.

HE COULD DO IT IN WORSE WAYS, LIKE BY THREATENING TO VIOLATE OUR SECOND AMMENDMENTS:  Lamborghini driver doing 131 mph tells cops he was ‘just showing off’.

ALSO, DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GIVE A RAT A VASECTOMY?  Earth to animal activists: New Yorkers don’t care about rats’ ‘rights’.

CAN’T BE A LIE, AFTER ALL BARRACK OBAMA, SUPER GENIUS, BELIEVED THEM (AND IF THERE’S ANYTHING THAT MAN IS AN EXPERT IN, IT’S LYING.  AS IN, YOU KNOW HE’S LYING IF HIS LIPS ARE MOVING):  Netanyahu exposes more of Iran’s lies.

THAT A GROWN ASS WOMAN NEEDED TO “REALIZE” THAT TELLS YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE LEFT:  ‘Did it work, Mommy?’’: Top Obama aide describes moment she realized reality was more important than rhetoric.

ONLY IF I’M WRITING A PARTICULARLY HEROIC SCENE. AND QUIETLY, SO AS NOT TO SCARE THE CATS:  Almost half of us cry at work, sad survey finds.

I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN OVERPRICED COFFEE AND BUGGY SOFTWARE WERE ALL SEATTLE EXPORTED:  Proposal would buy bus tickets for Seattle-area homeless.

WE NEED A BIG, BEAUTIFUL FENCE ON OUR NORTHERN BORDER. OR PERHAPS A BIG, BEAUTIFUL BACON CURING PLANT:  Feral hogs from Canada may go hog wild in US: report.

REMEMBER THEM ALL:  9/11 survivors: We were saved by the man with the red bandanna.

RUB THEIR NOSES IN IT: Ted Cruz reminds PolitiFact of prior ‘False’ ruling on ‘Beto wants to take our guns’ claim.