Archive for 2021
December 12, 2021
WATCH WHAT THEY DO, NOT WHAT THEY SAY: It’s true, if you want to know what the Left is up to, just listen to what they are accusing the Right of doing. How long have we been hearing about that evil “dark money” on the Right? Well, there’s at least $1.7 billion of it on the Left, according to Capital Research Center’s Hayden Ludwig and Parker Thayer.
21st CENTURY TINY MUMMIES: The French Dispatch and the New Yorker’s Collapse into Resistance Journalism.
Just as with the Michael Cohen story, Michael Avenatti seemed to be pulling levers behind the scenes. In May of 2018 [Ronan] Farrow had dined with Michael Avenatti. A week after the Blasey Ford accusation in September, Avenatti would accuse me and Brett of being present at 10n high school parties where girls were gang raped. Just before the accusation broke, I got a phone message from Jane Mayer, who along with Farrow is a Marquee New Yorker writer. Mayer breathlessly revealed that there were “shocking and horrible” allegations about me and Brett that were about to surface. She didn’t specify, and when I called her back three times, Mayer never picked up the phone.
A few months earlier, in the March 12, 2018 New Yorker, Mayer had published an exclusive piece: “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” It was a profile of Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had produced a dossier claiming that Trump had been involved in scandalous behavior with Russian prostitutes and that the Kremlin was using the information to blackmail the president. In the years since, the dossier story has collapsed, with major media outlets like the Washington Post retracting large chunks of their coverage and adding editor’s notes to many stories.
Special prosecutor John Durham had revealed that the entire thing was produced and promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. In her New Yorker piece Mayer also reported that Robert Hannigan, head of GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan then briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.
Journalist and Russiagate debunker Matt Taibbi raised a question that William Shawn or any other solid old-school editor would have asked: what did “illicit” mean? Taibbi explains: “If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?”
Read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Scientists just spotted a massive storm from a sun-like star. “Scientists observed EK Draconis as it hurled a burst of plasma into space that proved more massive than any previously recorded for a sun-like star. Our sun may have had similarly powerful storms in its past, which could have left their mark on Earth and its neighbors, the researchers concluded on December 9 in Nature Astronomy.”
So long as it doesn’t have similarly powerful storms in its future.
STAND UP STRAIGHT FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Posture Brace Shoulder Support Posture Corrector Made in USA. #CommissionEarned
MEL BROOKS WRITES IT ALL DOWN:
My grandfather Arthur Motzkin, a first-generation American Jew, liked to tell stories about his unlikely cameos in world history. When George Washington was crossing the Delaware and took a wrong turn, a voice piped up from the back of the boat: “Never fear! Arty’s here!” The day was saved. I thought about this tale while reading Mel Brooks’s new autobiography, “All About Me!” My grandfather was the same generation as Brooks—both were born in New York in the nineteen-twenties and served in the Second World War—and my grandpa’s running joke was, essentially, the same one that Brooks deploys, with a thousand times the wit, in his comedy routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” and in his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I.” Possibly more than anyone else, Brooks epitomized American Jewish humor in the twentieth century, much of which rested on the idea that it’s funny when a kvetchy Jewish guy shows up where he doesn’t belong, which is most places. Case in point: when Kenneth Tynan profiled Brooks for this magazine, in 1978, the piece was titled “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”
“When you parody something, you move the truth sideways,” Brooks writes in “All About Me!” The book, which comes out this week, covers his ninety-five years of life with a tummler’s panache: his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, his years writing for Sid Caesar, in the fifties, his creation (with Buck Henry) of “Get Smart,” in the sixties, his marriage to Anne Bancroft, and his remarkable run of movies, among them “The Producers” (he won an Oscar for the screenplay), “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.” More recently, he modelled social distancing with his son, the zombie-fiction writer Max Brooks, and began work on the long-awaited “History of the World, Part II,” which will be a Hulu series. When I spoke to him, he was sitting in his den on a bright California day, watching “a great big tan-and-gray owl in one of my cypress trees outside.” In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we talked about comedy, sandwiches, and the truths he’s told sideways.
Read the whole thing.
CHRIS WALLACE LEAVING FOX NEWS AFTER 18 YEARS.
Wallace joins CNN+, where his politics seem like a much better fit:
UPDATE: “The suspicion that Chris Wallace leaked negative anonymous dirt to Brian Stelter for his anti-Fox News book ‘Hoax’ just multiplied by 10,” Tim Graham of the Media Research Center tweets.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST BIGOTRY: Mixed-race cop on policing in 2021: ‘I’ve been called racist and a Nazi.’
THIS APPLIES TO MORE THAN COVID: “People around the world have been through so many alarms — both real and false — that many have been conditioned to stop fearing Covid-19 in the same way.”
Plus, from the comments: “Omicron is starting to look like, ‘hey, we have this great apparatus built to lock down and nudge behavior we better use regardless of the actual risk.'”
Related:
HE WILL BE DEEPLY AND SINCERELY NOT MISSED: Shock: Chris Wallace quits Fox News. But really, calling Chris Wallace a “hard news journalist?” Please.
UPDATE: Via a friend: “Chris Wallace announces he is leaving Fox News to pursue his dream of being viewed by far fewer people.”
The departure does seem sudden. That always makes me wonder if someone’s jumping out ahead of a scandal, but maybe he just wants a change.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I see above that he’s leaving for the new CNN+. Maybe he’ll actually do hard news journalism there. Hey, it could happen.
THE DEMAND FOR RACISM IN AMERICA EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY, DRAWING IN LOW-QUALITY SUBSTITUTES: Howie Carr: About that UMass probe. . .
The investigation continues.
That’s the official word from the University of Massachusetts about their very thorough investigation of some racist emails, a probe that was announced with such fanfare and righteous indignation earlier this fall but now appears to be sputtering out, with no suspects.
No suspects? How can that possibly be?
Most people had forgotten about the racist emails at ZooMass until the Jussie Smollett trial fizzled out the way you always knew it would — the “crimes” exposed as an utter fraud and hoax.
But Jussie’s scam reminded everyone of the recent UMass emails and the endless publicity they initially got. I started mentioning the “probe” daily on my radio show.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one inquiring about the investigation. On Friday, just as I was getting ready to file a FOIA request for information, I saw that ZooMass had decided to get ahead of the curve with “An Update into the Investigation of Racist Emails.”
“To date no perpetrator has been identified,” the statement read. “It is not uncommon for the results of a cyber inquiry to be inconclusive and it is possible that, despite their exhaustive investigation, they ultimately may be unable to identify the source of the racist emails.”
How anticlimactic is that? The next thing you know, they’ll be telling us there was nothing to that Russian collusion deal with Donald Trump.
The UMass update was signed by Christopher Misra, the $248,100-a-year vice chancellor for information services and chief information officer, and Nefertiti Walker, the $252,483-a-year vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion.
That’s middle-income for U Mass administrators.
Plus:
Like O.J., they pledge to spend eternity chasing down the real killers. But so far, apparently, not a single MAGA hat or Let’s Go Brandon! T-shirt has turned up at the scene of the crime. Not even a discarded pay stub from a real job.
The snowflakes of Amherst are, as you might expect, baffled.
It’s certainly discouraging, isn’t it, how few of these campus white supremacists are ever brought to justice. In fact, usually they’re never even found. They seldom leave behind a single clue.
Remember the incident a few years ago at Harvard Law School where the portraits of Black professors were taped over — not spray-painted or slashed, just taped over.
Odd, wasn’t it, the racists’ solicitude for the portraits of prominent African Americans?
The usual uproar occurred — candlelight vigils, nonnegotiable demands, groveling apologies by clueless administrators, vows to prosecute… somebody.
A nationwide manhunt was promised to drive those racist miscreants from the People’s Republic of Cambridge. That was in 2015. The last update on the dragnet was in January 2016, reporting the customary no progress. I guess you could call it a cold case now.
And now UMass follows in the tradition of campus hate crimes.
The investigation continues.
When they don’t produce a culprit, it’s generally because they know who’s behind it and don’t want you to know.
STILL POPULAR: The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes. #CommissionEarned
OUT ON A LIMB: The media will never apologize for going all in on Jussie Smollett.
Not a single writer, or pundit, or CNN anchor, or MSNBC host, who pushed how grotesque this “attack” was will stare down the camera during one of their shows, and say “I was wrong — we need to be better.” They have had ample opportunity to do so. CNN’s Brian Stelter who once said both on air and on Twitter that no one was there, and “we may never know the truth of what happened that night” could have used his widely read (at least among his media cronies) newsletter to admonish his colleagues for abandoning journalistic ethics. But he did not.
Instead his toadie, Oliver Darcy, launched into an accusatory tirade against “bad-faith actors on the right” and Sean Hannity, for simply taking notice of their own screw-up. Darcy then fleshed this out more in a CNN piece: “How Sean Hannity and right-wing media personalities are using the Smollett verdict to attack the media.” If Oliver Darcy and his pals don’t want his worst nemesis pointing out their massive failure of journalistic curiosity, then perhaps they should stop proving their critics right.
Related: No Mea Culpa from Smollett’s Media Enablers.
As anyone who has ever been in a relationship can tell you, occasionally saying “I was wrong and I’m sorry” can go a long way. But the media can never say “We’re sorry.” Because then Republicans might pounce.
Consider this chart:
Eleven percent among Republicans? Thirty-one percent among independents? What media executive looks at this chart and doesn’t hear five-alarm sirens going off in his head? Answer: virtually all media executives, because becoming outspoken defenders of the Left has made the media very popular with Democrats, the cosseting and flattering of whom is now most of the media’s chief survival strategy. If no one trusts us except liberals, we’ll only say stuff liberals like to hear!
And then wonder how Trump happened. Or as Glenn wrote, right around this time six years ago: Choose the form of your destructor.
CHINA MAY NOT BE CRITICIZED ON CAMPUS, THEY GIVE US MONEY, OR MIGHT: Purdue U. professor under fire for using ‘Wuhan virus’ on his syllabus. Just because it’s a virus that came from Wuhan. . .
WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF CNN UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: CNN producer who worked with Chris Cuomo arrested for luring mother and 9-year-old daughter to engage in ‘unlawful sexual activity.’
DEAL OF THE DAY: Ray-Ban Men’s Rb8318ch Chromance Mirrored Rectangular Sunglasses.
THE PICTURE IS PRECIOUS: ‘#CUonStrike’: Columbia student workers on strike for $140 million in school funds.
ROGER KIMBALL: Civilizational Suicide, Not Omicron, Is Killing Us. “Meanwhile, the World Health Organization reports that it has documented zero deaths from the Omicron variant of the world’s most popular virus.”
CHANGE: The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
If the trendlines continue, the Democratic Party could end up as a parochial regional party with extremely limited statewide appeal outside the Northeast and the West Coast. But the trendlines are not guaranteed to continue; the onus is now on Republican leaders to ensure the party’s new coalitional inroads are nurtured, not squandered.
That’s the hard part. But yeah, the GOP is becoming a multiethnic party of small business and the working class, while the Democrats are becoming the party of rich white urbanites.
Related: Students suing Yale Law show America’s elites have a low opinion of minorities.
Also: Dems are losing the multiracial working class on basic lifestyle issues.
Plus: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering. “Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Social studies teacher cites Mill Valley’s first female, person of color, to be elected as mayor as example of local racism.