I KNOW IT’S STUPID, BUT I KINDA WANT ONE NOW: Ford Releases New Footage Of The Long Lost Big Red Gas Turbine Truck.

NEO: Why new facts often don’t matter once a belief system has been established.

Removing a keystone – if a person has a keystone within his or her belief system – can cause a system to collapse in a fairly sudden and dramatic manner. I think that, during my own change process, both things happened – a slow accruing of evidence as well as some more sudden and important revelations (my change story contains some examples of each, but here’s one of the latter). Another person who had a “keystone” change experience was David Horowitz, a far left activist whose change to the right was originally sparked by learning that certain leftists he thought were decent were actually cold-blooded killers.

Most people’s belief systems are very very recalcitrant to change, and some are even impervious to it. In the latter cases – which I think are quite common – every small brick that might be removed from the edifice is almost immediately replaced with another brick, making the structure about as strong as before. Maybe even stronger, because it’s withstood many challenges. That’s the function of propaganda – to suppress the truth if it undermines the preferred narrative, but if the truth gets out, to immediately change the subject and come up with a new story to replace it. Then when that’s challenged, there’s another story and another and another for people to use to shore up anything that might be crumbling.

Read the whole thing.

“RULES FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME:” Biden Getting Together With Family For Easter, Despite Urging Against Gatherings Until July.

THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: High-Speed Rail Advocates Should Pay Attention to California’s Costly Disaster. New video from Reason TV:

With a Democrat in the White House and a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan on the table, excitement about high-speed rail is on the rise again. A map by graphic designer and transit advocate Alfred Twu, featuring possible routes for bullet train lines crisscrossing the U.S., has been making the rounds on Twitter. The map was the subject of a recent Vox article that was tweeted out by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“Gen Z is dreaming big,” he wrote. “It’s time we all did the same.”

“I want her so fucking much,” which was accompanied by a picture of Twu’s map, was how one viral tweet summed up the prevailing mood back in January of 2020.

But anyone taking the promise of high-speed rail seriously should consider California’s disastrous attempt to build a bullet train in recent years—the project is unfinished and over budget, and one of its key political backers has turned against it.

Building high-speed rail requires bulldozing neighborhoods and disrupting communities, and would be a drain on a state’s finances if completed. In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed building 8,600 miles of high-speed rail and received $10.1 billion from Congress toward that goal. The money went to upgrading Amtrak instead.

Railroad’s ability to spread massive amounts of money around obviously appeals to grafting SUV enthusiasts such as Buttigieg. But disrupting communities? The Politico reports “Biden’s Department of Transportation is invoking the Civil Rights Act to pause a highway project near Houston, a rare move that offers an early test of the administration’s willingness to wield federal power to address a long history of government-driven racial inequities.” After Joe and/or President Harris are gone, don’t be surprised if such language is used by their GOP successors to block further expansion of “the desire named streetcar.”

MAKE BED, LIE IN IT.

TRUMP THE GORGON: “Why am I writing about this? Well, for one thing, I remember that book fondly. But the real reason is that last night I read this RedState piece entitled, ‘Social Media Removes Interview With Donald Trump Because the Sound of His Voice Has Been Banned.’ So Donald Trump has become the auditory Gorgon, whose very voice is so dangerous it can turn people to stone and against which they must be protected.”

ROGER SIMON: Virtue Signaling Replaces Baseball as America’s National Pastime.

Forget the actual details of the Georgia voting law they claim to be protesting.  Facts are immaterial.  The national pastime has joined the ranks of the “woke” virtue signalers.

Yes, that national pastime has scarcely been what it was for some time, but then what is?  Basketball and football are also in decline. No sports are left, really, at least spectator sports.

Virtue signaling itself has become our national pastime.

Everyone, at least that percentage of the country who voted for the current president, practice it on a daily or even hourly basis, like a catechism.

The president himself we could call the Virtue Signaler-in-Chief.  He began his “virtuous” journey in law school where he was almost ejected for plagiarism, begged to stay in, and then later told us he graduated at the top of his class. (He actually graduated at the bottom, as would any plagiarist, if they graduated at all.)

And then there were numerous other “virtuous” cases of plagiarism, including from the British politician Neil Kinnock, but no matter.  Our great legal scholar president knows the Georgia election law is wrong.  Not only is it wrong, it’s racist.

So he led the charge in moving the game out of Atlanta and essentially gave permission to the league executives to make their reactionary move.

The result, baseball is virtually dead from virtual signaling.  Call it murder by idiotic ideology.

But baseball is just a game and America is no such thing.  It was once the beacon of all humanity when it came to democracy and freedom but that is no more.

Like any good moral narcissist (i. e. he or she who virtue signals) we are no longer liberty and freedom lovers. We are now “woke.”

“Woke,” however, is not an American idea.  Neither were, completely, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  To some extent they came from Europe, influenced, as many readers know, by John Locke, among others, but they were developed and enhanced in a uniquely American way by Jefferson, Madison, et al.  The Federalist Papers were a flower of the Enlightenment.

Not so “woke.” Its antecedents are entirely European and have little to do with democracy and freedom and everything to do with a kind of neo-Marxist, top-down power game of a fascistic nature.

The American idea and ”woke” are, in essence, opposites.

Perhaps I’m being a bit snobbish, but I’d wager the Major League executives who just exercised their supposedly anti-racist druthers have never heard of the man many believe is the godfather of “woke,” its John Locke, so to speak— the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

I’m skeptical our Virtue Signaler-in-Chief has ever heard of him either, or perhaps only vaguely, although I imagine some of his more educated cabinet members, those who made it through law school without plagiarizing, like Anthony Blinken, are familiar. And Chuck Schumer may have pretended to have read the Frenchman way back in some Harvard bull session.

But just who is this godfather of “woke”?

Well, there’s a lot of convoluted graduate school rhetoric, but it turns out the reality of the man may not be very flattering. Rumors of a certain amount of perversion have surrounded Foucault for some time but now testimony has surfaced that is distinctly “unwoke.”

I have never done this before. In fact, I despise the idea of trigger warnings in general, but if you are easily nauseated, I would suggest you move on before reading the following:

“French-American professor Guy Sorman accused French philosopher Michel Foucault of being a ‘pedophile rapist’ in an interview with The Sunday Times. Sorman, a friend of Foucault, said that the philosopher sexually abused Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.

“Stating that he learned of the situation when he visited Foucault, Sorman said: ‘The young children were running after Foucault to say, what about me? Take me, take me. They were 8, 9, 10 years old. Foucault was throwing money at them and would say, ‘let’s meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.’ He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.’”

Speaking of Foucault’s postmodernism, and its massively corrosive effect on society, Michael Walsh has a review of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, at the National Association of Scholars: Down from Liberalism.

THEY’RE THERE TO SELL A NARRATIVE, NOT TO GET AT THE TRUTH: CBS News severely misrepresents university research into anti-Asian incidents.

GOYA’S DECEMBER EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH NOW JUST PHONING IT IN: AOC was one of least effective members of Congress: study.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in his latest G-File, on Matt Gaetz’s various woes, “Readers of this ‘news’letter should be familiar with my view of what ails American politics. We have politicians who think their job is to be pundits and social media trolls. That’s literally why they run for office—not to get things done, but to become famous for complaining about what is being done. They don’t know how to legislate or govern, and they think being concerned with such things is the hallmark of suckers and losers.”

That certainly fits AOC, who’s much more obsessed with scoring sick Twitter burns than crafting actual legislation.

WHATEVER: University researcher: ‘Intelligence is a White man’s mythology.’

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NARRATIVE: New York Times: Minority Entrepreneurs Struggled to Get Small-Business Relief Loans. Buried in the text: “The vast majority of lenders did not report demographic data on the 3.6 million loans they made this year, but of the 996,000 that included information on the borrower’s race, 71 percent of the dollars went to white-owned businesses.” But over eighty percent of U.S. businesses are owned by whites, and because many of the businesses owned by minorities are owned by immigrants, they tend to be less established. So all things equal, one might expect the baseline to be that more than eighty percent of “the dollars” would go to whites. So how the New York Times concludes that its “analysis of data from several sources” “show that Black- and other minority-owned businesses were disproportionately underserved by the relief effort” is a mystery not explained in the article.

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: New liberal line: Biden is “afraid of looking soft” on illegal immigration.

THE OTHER BERNSTEIN: On this day in 1922, a great American composer and conductor named Bernstein was born. No, not Leonard.  Elmer.  And no, they’re not related.

Elmer Bernstein wrote the scores for The Ten Commandments (1956), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Great Escape (1963), Animal House (1978), Ghostbusters (1984) and many other movies.

By far the most important to me is the theme for The Magnificent Seven (1960). (If you haven’t seen the movie, you might remember it as the theme music for the Marlboro Man ad campaign of the 1960s).

When I cook, I sometimes play it. I like a little drama with my cooking.

HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU. HE NEVER DID. Arizona attorney general: Biden tells border states to ‘pound sand.’

JOHN FUND:  Biden Aims to Outshine Obama as a Progressive Reformer.

INVERTING THE CLAUSEWITZ CLAUSE: Questions The Media Should Ask President Biden About His Call For Economic Sanctions On Georgia.

As I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.” Biden’s handlers have dusted off Obama’s old playbook, and our sclerotic “President Unity” apparently has no qualms with putting it to work.

SALENA ZITO: Why Christian voters want more politicians like Donald Trump. “Christians want to support the leader who will have a backbone. And who will stand up for all others to protect religious freedom. That protection is why my family came to the United States.”

The notion that Christianity equals niceness isn’t just wrong, it’s destructive.

Plus: “In the last campaign we heard constantly what a devout Roman Catholic Joe Biden was, right? And then he signs onto removing all restrictions from any state abortion laws and funding Planned Parenthood. There’s a great space between what people are identifying as a man of faith and what his actions are.”

But mean tweets!

MORE BIDEN ‘UNITY?’ White House Says Bills Are ‘Bipartisan’ Even If They Have No GOP Votes.

THEIR TALK OF “DECENCY” IS A FRAUD: Twitter bans Trump, but Iranian ayatollah, Louis Farrakhan, Chinese propagandists still active.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: The Strange Sinovac Vaccine Phenomenon, Countries Report Increased Cases After Using Vaccine.

Even the Chinese don’t trust it: “Since the Chinese vaccine data lacks transparency, people are concerned about the safety of the vaccines. There were news reports of low acceptance of the vaccines in Shanghai and other first-tier cities. As of March 27, the vaccination rate in China was only 7 percent.”

WHAT WE NEED: The Coalition of the Un-Woke.

The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.

As if out of a dystopian novel, though, the woke ideology has nonetheless become the unifying creed of the American ruling class. That ruling class, which extends from public sector bureaucracies to the Fortune 500 to Hollywood to Silicon Valley and sundry others in between, has in recent years universally come to imbibe, promulgate and disseminate the core tenets of wokeness.

What’s more, that universality often takes the more insidious form of cross-institutional collusion: As Matthew Schmitz put it in a Tablet essay last September, “Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith.” Thus has the woke ideology completed, a la the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, its long march through the institutions. And let’s not mince words: This is Marxism. As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay last August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.” . . .

There are certainly some high-profile left-liberal defectors from the woke ideology’s institutional “long march.” Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, for instance, has become something of a one-woman cottage industry in calling out the execrableness of “critical race theory,” the widespread media gaslighting with respect to the true identity of anti-Asian hate-crime culprits and other woke excesses. There are many others, such as Caitlin Flanagan and even popular HBO host Bill Maher. But in their present condition, left-liberals are too outnumbered and too ill-equipped to take on the wokesters themselves. Instead, some sort of new tactical/strategic alliance is needed.

Indeed.

FROM MONALISA FOSTER:  Pretending to Sleep: A Communism Survivor’s Short Story.

Based on actual events, this short story provides a quick glimpse into life under Ceaucescu’s brutal communist regime. Like so many Romanians, ten-year-old Renata lives in fear of Securitate (Ceaucescu’s secret police). They don’t always take you in the middle of the night. In a world where the living envy the dead, not all examples are made in the shadows. Some are made in the light of day.

HAPPY EASTER TO THOSE WHO CELEBRATE AND WHO CELEBRATE TODAY:   Many of us have closed or restricted churches.  And yet, we still worship. without the sanction of the state-cowed-churches.

Alleluia!

AND EACH TIME IT WORKS LESS:  Our Flexible, Malleable Media.