ANALYSIS: TRUE. There’s No Difference Between the Media and the Biden Campaign.

ON THE BELATED BALLOT: Trump’s Middle East Peace Prize. Trump earned a Nobel. Obama didn’t. Leftist Nobel Peace Prize privilege? My latest Creators Syndicate column. (bumped)

BONE TRAINING: A USAF B-1B Lancer lands after completing a training mission during a Bomber Task Force deployment at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. Photo taken Nov. 3, 2020.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Gov. Newsom Breaks State COVID-19 Guidelines For a Birthday Party in Napa County: Many chastise Governor for breaking state guidelines after months of touting them for all Californians.

POLICE GO GALT: Minneapolis violence surges as police officers leave department in droves. “Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said more than 100 officers have left the force – more than double the number in a typical year – including retirements and officers who have filed disability claims, some citing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to the protests over Floyd’s death.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox.

The journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence.

The move may prove a good fit for Yglesias, who began his career as a highly successful independent blogger before blogging at The Atlantic and then elsewhere. But his absence as a staffer (a Vox spokesperson noted that he will continue to host a podcast, The Weeds) will make the publication he co-founded less ideologically diverse at a moment when negative polarization makes that attribute important to the country.

Like Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack after parting ways with New York magazine, and Glenn Greenwald, who joined Substack after resigning from The Intercept, which he co-founded, Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.

* * * * * * * *

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”

Yglesias had been personally kind and supportive of her work, she wrote, but as a trans woman, she felt the letter should not have been signed by anyone at Vox, because she believed that it contained “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions,” and that several of its signatories are anti-trans. The letter’s authors reject those characterizations.

I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”

Safetyism claims yet another scalp, just as it did during the Tom Cotton freakout at the New York Times this past summer, and at the Atlantic (where the above article appears), whose crybully staffers suffered a collective meltdown when Kevin Williamson was hired to write there.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “They are broken over there at CNN:” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour uses anniversary of Kristallnacht to compare Trump to Hitler:

She continued as images of Nazi book burnings flashed across the screen, saying, “and in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on fact, knowledge, history, and truth. After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden/Harris team pledges a return to norms, including the truth.”

That is what we call a non sequitur — not even a clunky transition from marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht to praising the 2020 Democratic ticket.

“And every day,” Amanpour added, “Joe Biden makes presidential announcements about good governance and the health and security of the American people, while the great brooding figure of his defeated opponent rages, conducting purges of perceived enemies and preventing a transition.”

It is true that Trump, like failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and some other politicians, has refused to concede electoral defeat in a timely manner. But no one can “prevent” the transition. Biden will be the president come January 2021, no matter how uncooperative Trump wants to be. That is one of the many great things about our system of governance. That and the part where we are decidedly not a mirror image of the Third Reich.

Until January, Trump is still the president, and as has been the case for the last four years, Amanpour can say the craziest stuff about Trump she likes — with no repercussions, other than a lack of ratings. Worst. Hitler. Ever. 

THE SPLC IS A RACIST, EXTREMIST ORGANIZATION: Southern Poverty Law Center: Teachers Are ‘Weaponizing’ Whiteness.

HEADLINES FROM 1939: Critical Race Theory’s Jewish Problem.

[Bari] Weiss is correct in her diagnosis and in her identification of the underpinnings of the new ideology replacing liberalism. She describes it as “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality,” to which we should add at least a few drops of the Rousseauian assignment of primacy to instinct, emotion, intuition, feelings, and passion over reason and evidence. The only place her description leaves anything to be desired is in her claim that “No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism.” That may well be the case in that we haven’t decided on the name we’ll use for this ideology, but it does have a name. This ideology is called by at least some of its proponents by the name “Critical Social Justice.” In short, Critical Social Justice—colloquially “Wokeness”—is a toxic fusion of cherry-picked aspects of the many lines of thought just identified, each chosen for its practical utility in advancing its particular line of fundamentally anti-liberal activism.

People need to understand that the new growth of anti-Semitism that Weiss asks us to stop being shocked at seeing is, if not a deliberate feature, a reliable consequence of the ideology of Critical Social Justice when put into practice. Because of the way Critical Social Justice views the world, it generates certain unavoidable and irreconcilable contradictions where Jews are concerned, and lacking the means to resolve them, it finds itself faced with what some are rightly naming a Jewish question that leads to it having a Jewish problem. As few, if any, clear explanations for this worrying trend currently exist, this essay aims to provide one in thorough detail.

Read the whole thing. If your ideology is debating the “Jewish Question,” it’s time to ask yourself, “Are we the baddies?” Although in this case, the question answers itself.

https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU

FEDERALISM: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem won’t comply if Biden pursues national mask mandate.

FASTER, PLEASE: Trump on Operation Warp Speed: Five Times Faster* Than Fastest Prior Vaccine.

* Offer void in New York: Trump rips Cuomo, says NY won’t get COVID-19 vaccine until gov OKs it.

Or as CNBC attempts to spin the news:

THERE’S MUCH ABOUT THE TRUMP ERA THAT WE WILL LOOK BACK ON WITH FONDNESS: Why we might look back on Trump’s foreign policy with fondness. Joe Biden’s election signals a return to Washington’s default liberal and progressive values, especially in foreign affairs.

Of course, some members of the swamp are already getting a head start on a return to “normal:”

HYPOCRISY: Disgrace: House holding dinner for new members — indoors — while urging public to sacrifice Thanksgiving.

But as it turns out, they still have some capacity for shame: Pelosi scraps in-person dinner with new Democrat members of Congress after photo sparks backlash during COVID: ‘Covid rules are for the little people,’ one critic reacted.

DON SURBER: Don’t Blow Off AOC. “You may not see her appeal, but millions of Democrats do. She is the soul of the soulless Democrat Party. AOC’s danger is that unlike Obama, Manchin, and the rest of the 50 and older crowd in the Democrat Party, she does not seek power. She seeks a revolution.”

AT AMAZON, Bose Sleepbuds II – Sleep Technology clinically Proven to Help You Fall Asleep Faster.

BUT ALL THE BEST PEOPLE HAVE ASSURED ME THAT VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH:

OPEN THREAD: Talk, talk.

SPACE: Space insurers hoping to break even after recent losses.

LEFTY RAGE MOBS ATTACK THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL: Major law firm withdraws from Team Trump election challenges in PA; Update: Boycott Jones Day? “In recent days, two Jones Day lawyers said they had faced heckling from friends and others on social media about working at a firm that is supporting Mr. Trump’s efforts.”

Well, I certainly wouldn’t hire a law firm that would buckle under a Twitter campaign. Grow a spine. You’re supposed to be lawyers, not running for prom queen.

And remember — they tell us it’s Trump who has undermined decency and social norms.

LEFTIES WILL BITCH, BUT THEY CHEERED WHEN RUTH BADER GINSBURG SPOKE OUT: Alito: Senators’ Threats In 2A Case “Affront To The Constitution.”

FIGHTING TRUMP’S UNDERMINING OF OUR INSTITUTIONS BY undercutting civilian control of the military.

With press approval, natch.

HMM: Age is decisive for positive or negative effects of the diabetes drug metformin. “The research team led by Dr. Ermolaeva found that the very same metformin treatment that prolonged life when C. elegans worms were treated at young age, was highly toxic when animals of old age were treated.”