Archive for 2021

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Racist Democrats Throw White Women Under the Bus. “We can not only take comfort in the Republican victories, but we can also thoroughly enjoy the way the leftist narrative machine is flailing. Seriously, it’s fun to watch. I’m canceling most of my streaming subscriptions now.”

SARAH HOYT NEEDS HELP. I DONATED. Her GoFundMe is here. (Bumped).

She commented on people’s extraordinary love and generosity here.

DON’T WORRY, THERE’S PLENTY MORE TO EXPOSE: Democratic Panic Rises as Virginia Loss Exposes the Party’s Failures. “When Mr. Biden arrived in Virginia for a campaign rally a week before Election Day, he trained his fire heavily on Mr. Trump, barely mentioning his own agenda. The remarkable tableau of a president devoting his bully pulpit to the man he had defeated only served to underscore how little of an affirmative message Democrats were offering to voters.”

BOB ZUBRIN: Biden Moves to Wreck U.S. Oil Industry: New EPA methane-emission regulations will strangle domestic oil production, enrich our adversaries, and damage the global environment. Well, that’s in line with Administration goals.

Flashback: As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

As I noted in late 2019, “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Plus, via a friend on Instagram:

The #Resistance, Simon Jester division, is at work.

THE REVOLUTION EVENTUALLY DEVOURS ITS OWN: Terry Gilliam’s Into the Woods cancelled by Old Vic after reports of staff unease.

The show was due to run next spring at the prestigious venue, whose artistic director is Matthew Warchus.

Stephen Sondheim, the writer of Into the Woods, was said to have approved the production because he was impressed with Gilliam’s proposed treatment.

But after the show was announced, it is understood some staff expressed concern about Gilliam’s views on issues such as the Me-too movement, diversity and trans rights.

Gilliam has previously described the MeToo movement as a “witch hunt”, adding there were many “decent people” who were “getting hammered” as the industry grappled with sexual abuse.

Several allegations were made against the Old Vic’s former artistic director Kevin Spacey as part of the MeToo movement, which began in late 2017.

Last year, Gilliam told The Independent he was “tired of white men being blamed for everything wrong with the world”. In the same interview he said: “When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?”

He also recently defended the comedian Dave Chappelle, whose most recent comedy special included comments deemed by some to be transphobic.

In August, the Daily Wire reported: ‘Woke Generation Is Rewriting Rules On What Can Be Said:’ Legendary Monty Python Actor To Release Series On Cancel Culture.

Hopefully his fellow Python member will join Cleese to discuss his own story.

Related: John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

Via Jordan Peterson, who tweets, “They cancelled Terry Gilliam, folks. Of Monty Python. The funniest group of people in the English speaking world.

IF I HAD MY WAY, I’D SHUFFLE OFF TO BUFFALO: Buffalo Says No To Socialism: Voters overwhelmingly reject socialist candidate despite Democratic nomination. “Walton, who is black, performed best among white progressives, while Brown, who is also black, beat her on the city’s predominantly black east side. (Buffalo is about 37 percent black.) This is noteworthy because Walton wanted to defund the police—a cause that’s more fashionable in safe, white, liberal neighborhoods than in poor, dangerous, black ones. She tried to repackage this message as ‘reimagining’ policing, much as have Democrats across the country, but Buffalonians didn’t buy it.”

Related: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering.

OUCH: Starlink delays orders by years for unlucky customers who played with the site’s digital map.

According to the report, some users on the r/Starlink subreddit moved their service area by just a few feet using the digital map tool on the site and wound up having their preorder dates moved from late 2021 to as far as 2023. One user wrote, “I moved it from the end of my driveway to my house this morning and just looked back and it had changed to 2022-2023.” In the same conversation, another noted, “I moved the location from my barn to my house which is literally 13 feet in real-time and now I’m mid to late 2022.”

As Ars Technica notes, the map tool was always on the site, but Starlink recently made some changes to the site’s layout and also removed any mention of Starlink being in beta. The update seemed to have pushed the map tool to a more prominent location and also gave users a notification to check their location for “accuracy.” Naturally, anyone excitedly checking the status of their preorder would feel inclined to change their service location if they noticed an error.

Apparently, this type of preorder delay with Starlink isn’t a new issue either — it’s just been become more common due to the new map location. Another Reddit user says “people here have been warning others about it for nearly a year now. If you don’t already have service and move your address you go straight to the back of the line.”

I signed up for the beta back in February, haven’t messed around with the mapping tool, and still haven’t received my Dishy McFlatface.

MICKEY KAUS: Klain in Vain.

There’s a remote—but increasingly less remote— possibility that Dems will wind up with neither of their two big spending bills: 1) the bipartisan “BIF” hard infrastructure (bridges, roads, etc.) bill and 2) the partisan Dem social spending laundry list, aka “Build Back Better” (BBB).

Why would that happen? Because Terry McAuliffe’s upset loss in Virginia could freak out vulnerable Dems, who then bail from the second, BBB bill — the way an Eric Cantor loss in Virginia freaked Congress out about “comprehensive immigration reform” and sank that legislation in 2014. But if BBB dies … well, since many progressives only support the bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill if it’s twinned with BBB, it’s possible enough of them might vote against the bipartisan bill to sink it too. (It would only take 4 or 5, out of a “Progressive Caucus” of 94 members, to do that.) Biden’s agenda dies in a Tarantino gunfight.

Still an unlikely scenario, as it’s always been almost inconceivable that the Democrats would screw things up so badly they’d end up passing nothing. But this achievement is now within reach, and if it happens, it looks like there will be an obvious fall guy: Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff.

Read the whole thing.

JOEL KOTKIN: Did critical race theory lose Virginia? The Republicans’ shock win proves Bidenism is dead.

Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.

The Virginia results made evident these failures, particularly on radical education and transgender policies. A state that was on the verge of becoming a deep blue bastion, largely based on the affluent Washington suburbs, moved to the Right in part due to resistance among parents to a new progressive education agenda that prioritised issues such as race, slavery and gender. State-wide polls taken just before the election showed Governor-elect Gregg Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McCauliffe by 15 points among parents. . . .

Clearly the far-Left agenda is not popular even in safely blue areas. In a sharp reversal from early in the pandemic, the desire for more government has fallen to barely 40%, while support for the huge Green New Deal remains tepid at best. On Tuesday, Minneapolis overwhelmingly rejected a police defunding initiative and Eric Adams, a former cop and centrist-sounding Democrat, became Mayor, succeeding the unpopular Leftist Bill de Blasio while defeating his ideological heirs.

The problem the Democrats face is that the progressive agenda now increasingly dominates the party, with even the redoubtable Nancy Pelosi seeming to be led around by boisterously socialist members of the caucus. Along with their powerful allies in the public employee unions, they have tied Biden to a radical programme that would embrace CRT, undermine America’s still-large energy industry, support steps to densify the suburbs and turn against Israel. Suffice it to say that these are not winning positions in much of the country.

Increasingly, the progressives and Biden are increasingly desperate.

Well, watch out. A cornered rat is dangerous.