MEDIA FREAK OUT AND DECIDE VANDALISM IS BAD AGAIN AFTER WOMAN PAINTS OVER BLM ‘MURAL:’

They are probably stretching the definition of what a mural is in this case, but nonetheless the media are none too happy that a woman painted over part of the words “Black Lives Matter” in California.

This was revealed via video showing the woman, who the media are breathlessly describing by her race even though they never apply that standard to left-wing vandals.

* * * * * * * *

You know who I haven’t seen the media describe as vandals, nor put any effort into identifying? Those tearing down 100-year-old statues across the country, including those of abolitionists and Founding Fathers. If a guy in a black mask and an anarchy A throws red paint on century-old Washington statute, it’s part of a “peaceful protest” against systematic racism. But let a white woman throw some paint on a two week old BLM screed and it’s suddenly all hands on deck.

Related:

TYLER O’NEIL: Did the Supreme Court Just Eviscerate the Central Purpose of the Electoral College?

LONGTIME TRUMP CRITIC QUIN HILLYER: Trump’s Rushmore speech was monumentally splendid.

Despite so much media drivel about President Trump giving a “dystopian” or “dark and divisive” or out-and-out racist speech at Mount Rushmore, his Friday speech, as written, was the single finest of Trump’s presidency.

It featured realistic, entirely justified pushback against civilization’s despoilers. And it married that with an appropriate, much-needed celebration of the essential goodness of the United States and its history, along with plenty of unifying thoughts and proposals. . . .

First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”

Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.

Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

Since when is a rejection of such destruction, married to concrete achievements and aspirational themes, somehow “dystopian?” Only an establishment media and corporate culture that are morally twisted, themselves committed to the destruction, could somehow treat a defense of decency as if it were an affront.

Well, to them it is, because they’re on the other side.

Related: Byron York: Distorting Trump’s Words. “That much news coverage is biased against President Trump goes without saying. But every now and then there comes an episode of bias so egregious that it deserves attention. The coverage of the President’s July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore is one of those episodes.”

Think of the press as a psychological warfare operation against normal Americans and you won’t go far wrong.

The full text of Trump’s speech is here. Read it and make up your own mind.

BUT THEY’LL STILL BE STICKING SOME OF THEM FOR ROOM AND BOARD, BECAUSE WHY LEAVE MONEY ON THE TABLE? Harvard to Implement Online Learning for All Students, Tuition Remains $50,000. “Up to 40 percent of undergraduate students will be cleared to live on campus this fall, including all incoming freshmen, according to a statement posted Monday on Harvard’s website. All Harvard seniors will be allowed to return to campus in the spring semester, with freshmen returning home. However, even those students who choose to live on campus will be required to take part in online instruction.”

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MY FRIEND LIZ MCCULLOUGH HAS MADE THE QUARTER-FINALS IN THE MAXIM COVER GIRL COMPETITION. If you can drop by and vote for her, I’d appreciate it.

MOUNT RUSHMORE: Once Iconic, Now Canceled (super-cut video).

Too bad the Democratic Party gave the game away by publishing this tweet, before deleting it:

UPDATE: “MSNBC’s Al Sharpton wondered in 2013 if President Barack Obama deserved a spot alongside Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, as did MSNBC’s Chris Matthews,” in the above clip. Flash-forward seven years: MSNBC’s Sharpton Condemns Mount Rushmore as ‘Love Letter to White Supremacy.’

THOSE WHO REGARD THE PRESS AS ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE WILL NOT SHED A TEAR: Newsonomics: There’s no Knight in shining armor coming to rescue McClatchy.

MICHAEL WALSH: America Should Shed the Mask of Zorro.

What began as an admonition, “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve,” has since morphed into a semi-permanent series of lockdowns, issued in direct violation of the Constitution, especially by various petty tyrants in states like California, New York, and Illinois—the bluest of the left-wing “blue” states.

Dire warnings, and even police action, against Americans who chose not to take a knee before arbitrary tyranny were quickly forgotten, however, when the death of a criminal in Minneapolis police custody, however occasioned, was seized upon by the institutional Left as the pretext for widespread riots and other civil disorder in order to affect the outcome of this fall’s election.

Right on cue, the media temporarily abandoned its self-appointed roles as hall monitors against the kind of traditional Americans they despise and switched to their preferred mode as cheerleaders for “progressivism” of any kind. As the cities went up in flames, statues were ripped down, and hordes of rage-filled protesters filled the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder against “systemic racism,” the New York Times, CNN, and the like cared not one whit about the “social distancing” they were insisting upon just a few days earlier.

Indeed, a recent Times story summed up the media’s hypocrisy: “Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests last spring as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism.”

How about that!

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” said an epidemiologist at the University of Texas in Houston. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

The reason should be obvious: your attitude toward the pandemic is directly related to your politics at this divisive moment, and all principles are to be forged accordingly.

Read the whole thing.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? A bright fireball over Tokyo explodes with the force of 165 tons of TNT: A space rock reportedly causes a sonic boom as it crashes into our atmosphere over Japan.

OPEN THREAD: We’re going boom, boom, boom, and that’s the way we live.

SO ON THE ONE HAND, YOU DON’T NEED TO BE HERE ON A STUDENT VISA IF YOU CAN ATTEND ONLINE FROM HOME: ICE Says Foreign Students Can’t Attend Online-Only College This Fall, Despite Pandemic. On the other, this is a big financial blow to the many universities that depend on a lot of full-freight-paying foreign students to make their nut. Then on the gripping hand, there’s this email from a friend: “Trump has just kicked out all Chinese University students by hiding it in a sea of ejected international students. . . . Universities can either help Trump get re-elected by returning to in-person classes or going bankrupt and cutting off money from the Democratic Party.”

Trump’s usual strategy is to bluster against his enemies on Twitter, than do something subtle that leaves them facing economic wreckage.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Why the Epstein Scandal May Be the Most Important Story of the Decade.

The Epstein scandal was one of many recent events that suggested the custodians had betrayed their stewardship. If culture is the mind of a civilization, no society can long survive the corruption of its own legacy and symbols. The photo of Ghislaine Maxwell and Kevin Spacey seated on the thrones of England as guests of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton respectively seemed to do just that.

The barbarians were at the altars. Some would argue the discovery of cultural aliens in high places came about only because the Woke exposed them. But as Michael James Coudrey pointed out, many high-status sex offenders have been prosecuted during the current un-Woke administration and the exposure of so many villains may have less to do with the relative morality of bureaucrats than the breakup of the defensive box formation the elites formerly sheltered in.

Like characters in a science fiction movie who discover special glasses that show the aliens among them, the public sees them now. The same insights that fueled the populist rebellion also weakened the mutually protective networks that prevented their previous detection. When the old boy system failed, it did with such suddenness that many tycoons, media personalities, politicians from both parties, artists, academicians and even royalty were taken by surprise.

Related: What did Ghislaine Maxwell want? He had the money but no upper class connections. She had the connections, but no money. “She introduced him to class, was his match in every way, and would eventually become his partner in one of the darkest schemes one could ever imagine.”

More: Reddit’s Former CEO Admits Epstein’s Sex Slave Trafficking Was Common Knowledge:

Pao became infamous to many on the right in 2015 for her role as SJW/CEO of Reddit, summed up by her column in the Daily Mail sanctimoniously headlined, “I fought the trolls in the trenches,” and then losing a gender bias suit against Kleiner Perkins, and having to pay $275K towards the firm’s legal fees. In 2018, she tweeted this:

But Epstein and Maxwell? We all knew, but hey, we’re not gonna rock the boat over that.

INEZ STEPMAN: Post-Coronavirus, What Will Become of Our Schools? Education is in for an overhaul. It won’t all be good. “America’s public system, even before the virus upended schools across the nation, is a dismal failure. Out of the United States’ largest 100 school districts, not a single one lists the name of our country or the word “patriotism” in their mission statements. Big surprise then, that fewer than one in five adults under the age of 45—nearly 90% of whom were ‘educated’ in public schools—can pass the basic citizenship test my parents took in order to become naturalized citizens.”

BOB MCMANUS: What it’s going to take to reverse New York City’s crime spike.

You say you didn’t like stop-and-frisk? Well, how do you like duck-and-cover?

Stop-and-frisk was a front-line NYPD safe-streets policy for two decades. So was broken-windows policing. As were the flying squads of anti-crime cops. They’re all gone now. Perhaps you think New York is better off without them?

If so, you’re complicit in the calamity that descended on Gotham over the holiday weekend: at least 11 people shot dead and 45 injured, including two cops whose patrol car came under fire in The Bronx. And all of this on top of the bloodiest June since 1996.

Not impressed? Maybe you should go out and help hose the gore off the sidewalks, if not today, then next weekend, or the next. This isn’t going to stop soon.

This new darkness isn’t a random, natural malevolence — unpredictable, unavoidable and thus demanding no accountability. It’s the result of a deliberate unstitching of arguably the most sophisticated and successful anti-crime strategy ever implemented in this nation.

The left is always blaming its enemies for people’s deaths, but never takes responsibility for the people it kills.

SPACE FORCE: Air Force says 26 states have submitted bids to host U.S. Space Command.

YESTERDAY’S SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES IS A MODEL OF DISPASSIONATE OBJECTIVITY:

As Glenn has been saying recently, think of the press as a psychological warfare operation aimed at normal Americans and you won’t go far wrong. When does the Times’ young staffers go all-in and form Rob Long’s “New York Times Autonomous Zone?”

DISNEY SIGNS COLIN KAEPERNICK TO FIRST-LOOK DEAL. Expect programming that Kap has signed off on to begin appearing on Disney-subsidiary ESPN. At Outkick the Coverage, Clay Travis responds:

Only in America can you become fabulously wealthy by ripping the entire country and its institutions to shreds.

This is one of the most transparently dishonest media moves I have ever seen, the attempt to turn Kaepernick into some sort of hero despite the fact that he’s a dishonest fraud. I can’t wait for the hagiography ESPN produces that attempts to make Kaepernick Muhammad Ali.

Now I understand why many of you are angry about ESPN turning their backs on the average sports fan. But to be honest, this is tremendous news for Outkick. ESPN has effectively told at least half of the American sporting audience: “We don’t care about you at all. We’re going to reward a non-athlete with millions of dollars and hours and hours of attention.”

They’ve fulfilled every MSESPN claim I’ve ever made in one fell swoop.

And then some.

Like Comcast putting Al Sharpton on the payroll, this serves as protection money for Disney, which also owns ABC in addition to ESPN. Additionally, regularly broadcasting Kap’s boiling hatred of America might help ensure that China won’t close the Shanghai and Hong Kong Disneylands anytime soon, or block the Marvel and Star Wars movies, which is ultimately what it’s all about for Disney:

Earlier: The neoliberal counter-revolution. “Does anyone seriously believe the American establishment — Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the trustees of Ivy League universities, the major sports leagues, even Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake — would sign on to a movement that genuinely threatened its material interests?”

IT’S DEJA BARRY ALL OVER AGAIN:

As Mark Steyn, quoting one of his readers, paraphrased the stump speeches of Biden’s soon-to-be-boss in 2008, “My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.”

I thought this was so cute, I posted it on the Web at National Review. Whereupon one of those Internetty-type things happened, and three links and a Google search later the line was being attributed not to my correspondent but to Sen. Obama, and a few weeks after that I started getting e-mails from reporters from Florida to Oregon, asking if I could recall at which campaign stop the senator, in fact, uttered these words. And I’d patiently write back and explain that they’re John Gross’ words, and that not even Barack would be dumb enough to say such a thing in public. Yet last week his demand in his victory speech that we “come together to remake this great nation” came awful close.

Speaking personally, I don’t want to remake America. I’m an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there’s nowhere for me to go – although presumably once he’s lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there.

What will Biden’s version of “fundamental transformation” look like? Since Biden has signed off on his support for the Green New Deal (so much for his posing as the moderate among the candidates), Bryan Preston wrote after one the Democrats’ presidential debates last year, “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?”

In other news from the Biden front: Tammy Duckworth is having a moment. The Illinois senator passes the ‘do no harm’ VP test with flying colors.

Well, at least she did until the Independence Day weekend: Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) refuses to rule out tearing down statues of George Washington. (Like John Kerry, another military vet who embraced radical chic, Duckworth is forgainst the idea: Wait Until 2020 Tammy Duckworth Hears What 2015 Tammy Duckworth Thought About Mount Rushmore.)

THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Hundreds of Scientists Warn of ‘Airborne Transmission’ of Coronavirus.

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THINK OF THE PRESS AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE OPERATION AIMED AT NORMAL AMERICANS AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG:

Anything to give a false impression that fits the preferred narrative.

ANALYSIS: We Can’t Have ‘National Dialogues’ If People Get Fired For Talking Honestly.

BRYAN PRESTON: Do We Still Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident?

Taking the words of the Declaration together with the preamble to Constitution and Douglass rightly saw the ideas that would inevitably end slavery, as long as the republic endured long enough to see it. In 1852, as now, this was not ironclad. So, to the free man, the Fourth of July represented his guarantee. To those still enslaved, the Fourth of July represented hope of freedom to come. Frederick Douglass’ experience led him to see this more clearly than anyone else of his age and probably anyone since or now.

The storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake Douglass spoke of came, in the form of a destructive civil war. America paid in blood and treasure as it never had before, and slavery was ended. Douglass lived through it as one of abolitionism’s most ardent, eloquent, passionate, and heard spokesman. He had risen from slavery to become a friend of presidents, as a citizen, though not yet in full. Few have the power of oration without experience, and Douglass had experienced it all. He had lived under unjust law. He had broken that law. And he also respected and served the higher law, the Constitution, which he respected as a means of reaching understanding and offering hope. He was a true American on July 4, 1852, more true than many others.

On July 4, 2020, people as yet unknown damaged and toppled the statue of Frederick Douglass in Rochester that marks his moment and his speech. The damage was so extensive that it will probably have to be replaced.

Read the whole thing.

MY LATEST FOR THE PJMEDIA MOTHERSHIP: Charlie Daniels, RIP: He Saved the Republic. “Maybe you think I’m indulging in hyperbole, and maybe you’re right. Nevertheless, that’s how I think of Daniels whenever his 1980 song, ‘In America’ comes on.”

This one is just for our PJMedia/Townhall VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.