SO MUCH FOR COOLER HEADS PREVAILING: Is anyone really interested in deescalation?

On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a statement to House Democrats declaring that she spoken to Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to discuss President Trump’s possession and authority of the nuclear codes. ‘The situation of this unhinged president could not be more dangerous,’ she said. ‘We must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy.’

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Pelosi has zero power or authority within the military chain of command to issue any orders or procure any authority of her own concerning the military until Trump and Mike Pence are removed from office. Instead, let’s take her statement for what it is: another dangerous escalation of events, a signal to foreign governments all over the world that any military action on their behalf be met with confusion and strife at home.

Then there is the matter of Twitter banning the President’s Twitter account. The consequences of that action, as well as Google and Apple taking steps to ban Parler, will reach far and beyond the events at the Capitol. What those moves certainly won’t do is lead to any form of depolarization. These tech platforms are not going to be able to disappear 70 million people from the internet. Those people will simply be chased further underground where they will develop more mistrust that corporate media and Big Tech are in fact their enemy. Neither the media or Big Tech will do much to earn the trust of those people back.

Trump will slink away and out of power, just as he did at the conclusion of his speech on Wednesday. That much is known. However if Joe Biden and the media have any intent on ‘healing’ and ‘unifying’ post-Trump and Trumpism, they haven’t done much to show it. Maybe this is because it’s in the best interest of the Biden agenda, and the revenue of Big Tech, and the audience retention of the corporate media to keep us as we are — a nation divided.

Since the goal of the DNC and the MSM (but I repeat myself) is to recreate a zombie version of the Obama administration, analysis: true. Amd thus, the Trump era ends where the Obama era ended:

AMERICA’S YELTSIN MOMENT:

The first US presidential election after the collapse of the USSR almost rendered the same verdict on the regime in Washington. The 1992 election saw a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush from within his own party. Pat Buchanan didn’t win any primaries, but his performance in the early contests suggested that up to a third of the GOP had lost faith in the incumbent. Buchanan not only took on Bush the politician, he assailed the politics of the Bush party: foreign interventionism of the sort that had seemingly gone so well in the Gulf War a year earlier; trade policies that had hurt American manufacturing jobs; and a lackluster commitment to fighting what Buchanan characterized as a ‘culture war’ with the ideological left.

Bush and Bushism survived the encounter with Buchanan only to face another populist insurgency in the general election. The billionaire H. Ross Perot was as unexpected an element in the 1992 contest as Donald Trump would be in the 2016 race. Perot imploded but Bush lost anyway. The man who beat him, Bill Clinton, was a self-styled New Democrat and, at just 46, the third-youngest president in history. The 1992 election was nowhere near as dramatic as the events that brought an end to the Soviet Union a year earlier. But in the US as in the USSR, the old politics had lost its grip on legitimacy. The public asked for a fresh start, if not, in our case, for a new constitution. The fall of the curtain on 42 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives after the 1994 midterm elections drove home the point. An era had closed.

The new era that began in Russia with Boris Yeltsin soon proved bitterly disappointing. Oligarchs and gangsters stripped the nation’s wealth. Small wars could not be won, and a great power’s foreign policy became an ongoing embarrassment. Life expectancy declined. Mutatis mutandis, does this sound strangely familiar?

Yeltsin was something of a liberal, at least compared with what came after him. Since the end of the Cold War, America’s leadership has been nothing but liberal — left-liberal or neoliberal or, as some Republican publicists like to say, ‘classical liberal’, but liberal through and through. Even Trump was no radical departure from this: one of his signal achievements, after all, was a free-trade deal, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. He started no new wars, but the unwinnable old war in Afghanistan stretches into its 20th year.

Trump was the mildest of corrections to the failures of post-Cold War liberalism after a quarter century of its monopoly on American politics. Yet he was treated by liberals in the media and intelligentsia as if he were authoritarianism personified — and, of course, the puppet of an actual authoritarian in Moscow. If this is how American liberals respond to the least of populist reforms, one cannot expect our Yeltsin-like ruling class to so much as recognize its own mistakes, let alone atone for them.

Read the whole thing.

LIKE FUSION POWER, THIS HAS BEEN A DREAM FOR DECADES: Killing cancer by unleashing the body’s own immune system.

SAY ANYTHING: Dem Congresswoman Accuses GOP Members of Conducting ‘Reconnaissance Tours’ for Rioters.

PAST PELOSI IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Tulsi Gabbard Pulls Back the Curtain on Why Congress Won’t Act Against Big Tech. “Google will have a bit reception and members of congress will go and pick up their checks. Facebook will have a big reception and they’ll go and ‘hey, where’s my check?’”

BREAKING: McConnell shoots down emergency session for impeachment trial.

NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE: Democrats Are Using The Recent Capitol Riot To Consolidate Power.

PROGRESS: Nanoparticle immunization technology could protect against many strains of coronaviruses.

IS THIS THE ACTION OF A PARTY CONFIDENT THAT IT ACTUALLY WON THE LAST ELECTION? House Dems Introduce Bill To ‘Abolish Electoral College.’

HEH: Twitter Competitor Gab Backed Up Trump’s Twitter Account and Recreated It on Their Platform.

KIND OF LIKE TECH PROGRESS TODAY: Mergers may have stunted growth of early galaxies.

PORTLAND MAYOR OFFENDED WHEN REPORTER ASKS HIM IF PORTLAND’S MONTHS OF RIOTS WERE A PRECURSOR TO THE DC RIOT:

Related: The Capitol Insurrection: Our Altamont Moment.

Like a shard of lightning illuminating a darkened landscape, a single event can bring an entire historical era into sharp focus. What had been half-hidden becomes nakedly exposed. Such a moment occurred on January 6 when supporters of President Trump assaulted, occupied, and ransacked the Capitol.

The insurrection of January 6 was this generation’s Altamont Moment. As did Altamont, it shattered delusions that never deserved to be taken seriously in the first place.

An infamous December 1969 rock concert in southern California that descended into mindless violence, Altamont demolished fantasies of the Sixties as an Age of Aquarius. Occurring just months after Woodstock had seemingly affirmed illusions of peace, love, and good dope giving birth to a new and more enlightened society, Altamont exposed the dark underside of such expectations. A post-mortem published in Rolling Stone accurately characterized Altamont as “the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude,” and sheer greed.

If you are looking for terms to describe America in our own age—not simply the age of Trump, but also of Iraq and Afghanistan, Amazon and Google, Fox News and Facebook, Antifa and Proud Boys, epic government dysfunction and the havoc wreaked by COVID-19—egotism, hype, ineptitude, and greed provide a good place to start.

After 9/11 and the costly military disappointments that ensued, why should anyone be surprised at the inability of the Capitol Police to secure the building that moist-eyed members of the media have suddenly christened the “people’s house”? Incompetence combined with hyperbole are twin signatures of our times.

The Great Insurrection of 2021 rings down the curtain on the post-Cold War era: that is what this event signifies. The mirage of American global preeminence, nursed in official circles since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has now become untenable. Once tantamount to a civil religion, American Exceptionalism has devolved into little more than an excuse for ignoring facts and evading responsibility—like the organizers at Altamont hiring Hell’s Angels to serve as an improvised concert security force.

In exchange for their dubious services, the Hell’s Angels got free beer. Members of the mob that stormed the Capitol will get indictments and rightly so.

Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan compared her leftists’ insurrection to “the Summer of Love” — at least until the rioters showed up at her doorstep. Given the speed of the Internet era, we shouldn’t be all that surprised at how quickly Altamont would have arrived.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Twitter Is The Worst Company On Planet Earth. Here’s How To Bet Against The Stock— and Deactivate Your Account. “For a social media platform to censor a world leader—while still giving a voice to preachers of hate like Louis Farrakhan Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and even O.J. Simpson—isn’t just wrong from a free speech perspective, it’s actually terrible business. So, Twitter has shown little to no sequential growth in its user base of late (details below) but it is still valued like its Big Tech growth-y brethren. Twitter is not growing, it is shrinking, if measured versus the growth rate of the global economy, and that reduction will accelerate dramatically now that Twitter has offended every Conservative in America with its action to ban President Trump.”

The link goes to web.archive.org because Forbes memory-holed the original page.

NO SURPRISE: Study links pandemic to big rise in U.S. heart deaths.

MY STRONG ADVICE, AND ADMIRAL AKBAR’S, IS DON’T ATTEND THESE EVENTS AND DON’T PROMOTE THEM:

SISTER TOLDJAH: Former Prosecutor Reviews ‘Incitement’ Allegations Against Trump, Says Dems Have Big Problems.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Betsy DeVos, and the Poisonous Politics of Malice She Endured.

COLLUSION: Beijing-Linked Group Tries to Sway US Media with Reporter Trips, Dinners with Execs.

CHARMING: Left-Wing Jewish Americans Cheer Death of Jewish Philanthropist.

THE SPURNING OF OLD BOOKS: The Devaluation of the Past Threatens Higher Ed.

Jacobs tells of a university student who, disgusted by Edith Wharton’s anti-Semitism, threw his volume of The House of Mirth in the trash, saying “I don’t want anyone like that in my house.” Despite the fact that Wharton’s novel has survived the decades, she was summarily dismissed. This student is representative of a growing cohort for whom “stood the test of time” is a phrase more likely to arouse suspicion than good will or respect.

At the other end of the intellectual maturity spectrum lies Frederick Douglass, whose moral depth and acumen allowed him to study the work of the Founding Fathers and develop a dual framework. Jacobs cites Douglass’s famous 1852 Fourth of July speech in which he simultaneously lauds and denounces the country built upon the Founding Fathers’ Enlightenment precepts.

While Jacobs admires Douglass’s qualities of mind, it seems unlikely that Edith Wharton’s zealous detractor would be capable of entertaining such nuance, let alone practicing it. Protesters tore down a statue of Douglass this summer.

Why? What is going on in the minds of supposedly educated people in 2020 that makes them believe that reading the wrong sort of thing literally harms them?

Jacobs attributes this “sense of defilement” by old books to information overload and “social acceleration.” The rush of contemporary life, he argues, has forced moderns to perform “informational triage” simply to make their lives manageable. Thus, people play safe by eschewing the old in favor of the familiar.

This analysis is not wrong, but it does not come to grips with key factors. True: Out of necessity, we turn away from much information, but the question as to what we choose to set aside (or choose never to pick up) and why we make those particular choices is left hanging. Indeed, how does “informational triage” account for the hypersensitivity and overreaction exemplified by throwing a book in the trash? Is the impulse to bin so very far away from the impulse to burn?

Setting aside the more mundane reasons that people don’t read old books, moralistic stances have lately risen to the top, and these stances are mostly taken by the political left.

Within a generation, the torch for literal-mindedness, pinched morality, and scolding righteousness has passed from a relatively small group of people on the marginal right to a growing number of people on the trendsetting left. The trend even reaches into popular culture. Some Evangelicals sought to ban Harry Potter in the 90s, but today, J.K. Rowling’s comments on the transgendered and women’s rights have given the Potter industry a black mark. Now, it’s progressives who call for banning, boycotting, and shunning her.

To acknowledge the obvious, books have long frightened and disgusted some conservatives as well as progressives, but some differences are noteworthy. Whereas conservative readers are more likely to resist modern content, progressives are more likely to be outraged by the past. Conservative readers fear the influence of new ideas not in keeping with their established beliefs or traditional value systems. Progressive readers feel morally superior to their predecessors and thus fear contamination by association with them.

C.S. Lewis, call your office:

Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery.” It is defined as the belief that “the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.” If we add, “and therefore wrong and also racist” to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs.

Historian Larry Taunton defines it as “imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.”

And Ray Bradbury, too. As Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

Speaking of which: Antifa Forces Portland Book Store to Stop Selling Andy Ngo’s Book About Antifa.

HOW’S THAT UNITY THING WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Pelosi: Capitol Rioters Chose ‘Their Whiteness Over Democracy.’

MICROBIOME NEWS: Study: Gut microbes could play a role in anorexia.

A TRUMP ACCOMPLISHMENT SO HUGE THAT NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT: The Death of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A big problem that the Biden administration suddenly won’t have to deal with.

I hope not, but it may come back: As Barack Obama said, never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.

WILLIAM VOEGELI IN CITY JOURNAL: About “Whataboutism:” When turnabout is never fair play.

Many things are complicated—but not everything. If you condemned the Antifa/Black Lives Matter violence that took place around the country in 2020, as all conservatives did, then you must condemn the Trumpist riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Period.

Suppose, however, you spent last summer applauding the riots, or dissembling about them, or dismissing them. In that case, to deplore last week’s violence credibly is not so simple. If you demand that your political adversaries adhere to a principle, but exempt people whose cause you endorse from having to comply, then that preference you enjoy boasting about is not really a principle. It is not a standard of conduct applicable to all, in other words, but just another rhetorical device used for political combat.

If you’re Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, a question in July about mobs toppling statues in public spaces elicited not a denunciation but a koan: “People will do what they do.” Indeed, people will do what they do. Some people, for example, will break into the Capitol and occupy the Speaker’s office. But limiting oneself to the serene observation that this is what they do would constitute a grave failure to repudiate an offense against law, order, and democracy.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for creating the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” also expressed equanimity and even pride regarding last year’s unrest. “It would be an honor,” she said, if the burning police stations and looted stores came to be described as the “1619 Riots.” In any case, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Hannah-Jones went on to explain, “Any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property, but these are not reasonable times.” Reasonable people also say that mobs should not overrun the seat of government or be gratified if someone calls that assault the “1776 Riots.” But if declaring “these are not reasonable times” changes everything, then the loophole devours the rule, or even the idea of having rules.

When protesters surrounded a Seattle police station, forcing officers to evacuate it, and declared the adjacent area an “autonomous zone,” mayor Jenny Durkan was reassuring: “Don’t be so afraid of democracy.” Civic and political leaders in Philadelphia were equally non-judgmental about the shattered glass and boarded stores on their streets. “I don’t think we need to be parsing whether there needs to be looting,” said one city council member. Rioting was “understandable but regrettable,” Jesse Jackson said in June, a quasi-criticism no one would think to apply to the Capitol Hill mob.

In the wake of last week’s riot, formulations like these have become deeply embarrassing. What is to be done? One option would be for the people who put them forward, and their many political allies, to admit the obvious: since riots are bad—utterly, always, and everywhere—justifying them, or praising them with faint damns, is also colossally irresponsible. The people who set last summer’s fires, looted stores, or assaulted motorists and pedestrians should be condemned, and the people who made excuses for their behavior should be ashamed. Reader, you are borne through life with a sunnier view of human nature than I if you are dismayed that no such apologies or retractions have yet been offered.

A different response to conservatives who have started 2021 by rudely calling attention to the riot apologists of 2020 is: Shut Up. A more sophisticated way to say Shut Up is to accuse conservatives whose memories go back more than three months of engaging in “whataboutism.” This is the position of University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth R. Mayer, who believes that any public official “who does not immediately and unequivocally condemn [the Capitol riot] without using the words ‘I understand,’ ‘but,’ or any variant suggesting that the rioters had a point but went too far, should forfeit their right to hold public office.” Furthermore, “any elected official who engages in ‘whataboutism,’ or complains that the other side does it too, should leave next.”

Similarly, “Whataboutism is the last refuge for someone who can’t admit they’re wrong,” says journalist Tod Perry, who demands that we “stop equating Trump’s Capitol insurrection to Black Lives Matter protests.”

“Whataboutism” is a deflection-term whose function is to distract from obvious leftist hypocrisy.