Archive for 2020
September 23, 2020
OPEN THREAD: It’s yours.
PEACEFUL PROTEST INTENSIFIES: “At least two police officers were shot in Louisville, Kentucky, MetroSafe confirmed to NewsNation. Both were taken to the hospital. Their conditions are currently unknown.”
UPDATE: “Both officers who were shot are stable Louisville PD announces at press conference,” Breitbart.com’s Charlie Spiering tweets.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? The Almighty Gavin Newsom Orders New Gas-Powered Cars Banned by 2035.
Well, besides this: “Genius. Weeks ago there were rolling brownouts, and we were ordered to turn off our electricity. Given that Newsom has no plans to build zero-emission nuke plants, where’s all the juice going to come from? California: the state of magical thinking,” Joel Engel tweets.
“SHE CAN’T PULL THIS OFF:” “Democrats worry Feinstein can’t handle Supreme Court battle/Colleagues fear the oldest senator may struggle to lead Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.”
Plus: “Another Democratic senator said party leaders were ‘in an impossible position,’ pointing out that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) and other senior Democrats can’t replace a female senator for hearings on an expected female nominee to replace a deceased female Supreme Court justice….”
Well, she doesn’t have her longtime Chinese spy/driver to tell her what to do now.
SOMEONE — BY WHICH I MEAN THE PRESS — HAS DECIDED THAT VIOLENCE AND DEATH THREATS FROM THE LEFT ARE JUST FINE: Dear Berggruen Institute: Renounce Death Threats Now.
As you may by now be aware, on Monday, September 21, 2020, your employee, Nils Gilman, tweeted what is tantamount to a death threat against Michael Anton, a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute. Specifically, Mr. Gilman compared Mr. Anton to Robert Brasillach, a Frenchman who was executed by firing squad in 1945 for what have been characterized as “intellectual crimes.” Still more specifically, Mr. Gilman wrote that “Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate,” which can only be interpreted to mean that Mr. Gilman is approving of, if not calling for, Mr. Anton to be shot to death.
This is incitement to political violence. Mr. Gilman has yet to retract his inflammatory words.
Is the official position of the Berggruen Institute that its political opponents should be killed?
You really don’t want political violence to become widespread.
Rioting to influence jury decisions was a lesson easily transferred to elections. If elections were a form of silent riot, then, in the simple-minded analysis of race-baiters, open riots have an equal claim to be elections. Elections, in their perfervid imaginations, are thus taking place in cities nationwide today, directed by BLM and Antifa with the complicity of the Democratic Party.
These riots can disrupt or cancel previous forms of election by intimidating voters and candidates, to say nothing of canceling elections. In fact we may no longer need elections. The logic of “no justice, no peace” has been extended to elections. Michelle Obama practically said as much at the Democratic National Convention: “if you think things cannot possibly get worse,” she warned, “trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”
As Michael Anton explained on this website recently, Democratic operatives are now speaking openly of rejecting the results of the election. A recent article in the Daily Beast states that “the larger game plan is to apply pressure through mass mobilization.” Within the Democrat Party today “there is dispute over whether Biden should even concede if he wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College.” What I warned of in the ’90s is now playing out in real time: Riots are fast on their way to becoming elections by other means. If leftists have their way, they will decide all electoral questions from here on out with mob rule. Many of them have been aiming at this target since the ’90s, and probably before. It all makes sense now.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”
* * * * * * * *
In an interview with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, Hannah-Jones stated explicitly that the 1619 Project makes evocative arguments such as, “What would it mean to consider 1619 our founding and not 1776?” Here is video of the conversation, which took place not a year ago, or even several months ago, but just last week: September 15, 2020.
* * * * * * * *
But the claim is inarguably part of the 1619 Project, and it’s absurd for Hannah-Jones to pretend it isn’t—especially while she continues to describe the project in exactly these terms. To say that conservatives imagined or manufactured this is ridiculous. It’s gaslighting—and it undercuts the credibility of the author and her work.
It’s a good thing the Times doesn’t have a history of Pulitzer-approved leftist gaslighting dating back to the 1930s that would have caused more cynical readers to believe this is but the latest example.
THE MISTAKES ALL GO ONE DIRECTION: A Biased Reuters Makes It Personal—and Gets Election Fraud Completely Wrong.
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR’S REPORTING ON BLACK LIVES MATTER HASN’T BEEN UP TO ITS USUAL STANDARDS, AND THIS STORY IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE: Armed protesters in America create stress test for police. Take this bit:
For instance, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, gave armed white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse a water bottle and chatted amiably with him before he allegedly killed two people and injured a third during a night of protests. Days later Kenosha police arrested at gunpoint at a gas station a crew of Seattle cooks, known as the Riot Kitchen, who said they traveled to the city to feed protesters. Officers believed the cooks’ jerry cans might be bombs.
Earlier this month, police in Olympia, Washington, shot and killed a left-wing extremist, Michael Forest Reinoehl. Mr. Reinoehl was wanted by Oregon authorities on suspicion of targeting and killing a right-wing Patriot Prayer counter-protester in Portland.
Okay, Rittenhouse hadn’t shot anybody, and was acting legally and expressing support for the police. They were friendly to him. Reinoehl killed someone in cold blood. The Riot Kitchen people said they were just there to feed people, and I suppose some journalists believe that. Frankly, the whole thing reads like it was inspired by a SPLC press briefing. Disappointing.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES NOT HAPPY: Fed up Reporters Blow Lid off Kamala’s Limited Availability, One Says It ‘Has a Foul Stench of Insecurity.’
AT AMAZON, BK Cookware Skillet Black Carbon Steel, 10′.
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO POWER THE ELECTRIC ONES? California governor signs executive order to ban gas-powered cars and trucks. Post-election, I hope we’ll see some federal supervision here.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Local Anarchists Miffed By Trump’s Designation Of NYC As Anarchist Jurisdiction.
The Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, an active NYC-based anarchist group, condemned the move in a statement released Tuesday.
“We denounce Trump’s attempt to scapegoat anarchists, distract from his disastrous regime in the run-up to the election, and pit other leftists and progressives against us so that we fight each other rather than building the world we want to see,” it read.
The group, whose organizing principles are “horizontalism, anti-oppression, mutual aid, direct democracy, and direct action,” said NYC had a long way to go before it could claim the mantel of full anarchism.
In Anarchist NYC, all New Yorkers will be as involved in building and caring for our city as they want to be, from block associations to councils for local food production or promoting racial justice. NYC will be free from hierarchies based on race, class, gender, or anything else. Our city will run on cooperative economics based on mutual aid and solidarity, not capitalism based on profit or competition. All New Yorkers will get our needs met and our desires nurtured simply because we exist, regardless of our identities, immigration statuses, bank accounts, or disabilities. We will embrace transformative justice and collectively determined community agreements over punishment, policing, or locking people in cages. The land of the five boroughs will be collectively nurtured and called upon to restore our health and our communities instead of sold, owned, rented, or polluted upon.
Bane could not be reached for comment.
SYR-ACCUSE UNIVERSITY IS A DISASTER: Joke about “Wuhan Flu” and get suspended from teaching. Seriously, Syracuse is just so very bad on free speech that its School of Communications has to be the most ironic piece of architecture in the known world.
A PLAN SO CRAZY IT MIGHT JUST WORK: Governor DeSantis Has an Amazing Plan to Deal With Rioters and Mostly Peaceful Protesters™: Prosecute Them.
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ: A Trump-supporting App State prof describes how an inadvertently warped story about an “anti-conservative survey” in his class went viral.
How much better off would we be, as a society, if people DIDN’T just immediately believe everything they read? Geez.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The How of Happiness. At 5 pm Eastern time today, in a Zoom symposium at the Aspen Institute, I’ll be interviewing the social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky about her research into what makes people happier (and what doesn’t). Any suggestions for what I should ask her? You can post them here, or click on the link to join the symposium and ask her yourself.
BLACK BEAR LIVES MATTER: Real bear skin draped over Foothills Parkway entrance sign, vandals still not found. Sounds like it was meant to be a warning for bears to stay in the park.
LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: VIP Gold Live Chat with VodkaPundit, Kruiser, and Preston.
Hot takes, cold drinks.