Archive for 2021
February 7, 2021
IT’S THE RETURN OF THE PALACE GUARD MEDIA! Late Night Entertainment Moves Radical Left To Salvage Post-Trump Ratings. “Stephen Colbert’s writer calls for reparations, calls Founding Fathers slave-owning ‘douche nozzles’…Late Night with Seth Meyers recently went to bat for Ilhan Omar. Meyers was outraged that anyone would compare her to Marjorie Taylor Greene”… Without Trump, late-night ‘comedy’ becomes even more insufferable.”
Then and now, it’s all about placating the dwindling base:
This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.
What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.
—Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political, Robert Tracinski, the Federalist, October 5, 2017.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Some of our gut microbiota predates the human-Neanderthal split.
AT THIS POINT, IT’S JUST PERFORMANCE ART TO FLAUNT HER POWER: Pelosi Under Fire For Breaking Her Own Rules, Evading Metal Detectors When Entering House Chamber.
RIP: George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, dies at 100. As secretary of state, Shultz had a key test for ambassadors:
When I was in the first period when I was secretary of state, there was in my office a big globe. And when ambassadors, who were newly going to their posts or in their posts and coming back to visit me, would get ready to leave, I would say to them, “Ambassador, you have one more test before you can go to your post. You have to go over to the globe and prove to me that you can identify your country.” So unerringly, they would go over and they’d spin the globe around and they’d put their finger on the country they were going to, pass the test.
So Mike Mansfield, great elder statesman in America, former Senate majority leader and who had been ambassador to Japan for a while before I was there, and he was a close friend of mine from back when I was in the Nixon administration — so he was visiting and he got ready to leave. I said, “Mike, I got to give you the same test I give everybody else. Before you can go back to Japan, you got to show me that you can go over to the globe and put your finger on your country.” So he went over and he spun this globe around and he put his hand on the United States, said, “That’s my country.” So I’ve told that, subsequently, to all the ambassadors going out, “Never forget, you’re over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You’re there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you’re representing the best country in the world.”
Sadly, I doubt many of Biden’s ambassadors could pass that test.
NEO ON THAT TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE: Time on the vast conspiracy to “save” the 2020 election before it even took place.
Looking at the people on the board of the Voter Protection Program, it is immediately apparent that it is, as expected, a combination of Democrats and of RINOs extraordinaire. The bulk of the latter consist of old Bush and McCain aides, many of whom backed John Kasich in the Republican race in 2016. There is an emphasis on lawfare to make sure that the innovations in voting rules that reduced voting security were defended in court, and on working with attorneys general of the various states. The Republicans on the board are people who have made themselves available to give a bipartisan face to the war against President Trump, and no doubt they were extremely eager to disassociate from him and work to destroy him in 2020.
Some people writing about the article indicate that it’s an admission that the participants gamed the election in various ways to enable Biden’s win. But the article does not admit that. It does something far more devious – it claims that everything this group did was non-partisan, had absolutely nothing to do with wanting Biden elected, and was merely for the noble purpose of guaranteeing a fair election and making sure people didn’t believe Trump’s conspiracy claims which they of course knew would be false even before the election occurred. And to do this, they paradoxically helped to relax the election rules so much that actual fraud and/or claims of fraud would be far more likely, and they did that only for the very noble purpose of stopping the nefarious “voter suppression” the GOP was trying to accomplish. You see, all efforts at voter security can be re-defined as voter suppression, and many courts will buy it.
This is the sort of thing the left and the current Democratic Party (as well as the self-righteous NeverTrumpers) specialize in. They define Trump as evil and any effort to stop him as noble rather than biased, because they are stopping evil and lies.
Still, since the article reads like a confirmation of what the right has been saying all along about the Democrats’ and their allies’ efforts to undermine Trump, why publish it?
Read the whole thing, which includes a (safe for work) Jeffrey Toobin cameo.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Bandwagon of Perdition.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.
The reign of “experts” has not lived up to the promises.
Los Angeles Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, who lives in Brooklyn Heights but who lives somewhere rurally to escape Covid, recently had a dilemma: her Trump-loving neighbors did something nice for her. She doesn’t know what the right thing to do about it is.
Now, stop right there. Normal people don’t have this problem. Normal people think, aww, how nice, and start thinking of ways to return the kindness. But normal people are not Harvard-educated New York-based liberal journalists. Hence Heffernan’s revealing column. Excerpts:
Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.
How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?
These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.
This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.
It takes a New Yorker to be confronted with someone doing something nice for them, and get suspicious about the angle.
As Dreher asks:
So, the Snowplow Test: Do you live in a place where people will plow your driveway without wanting something in return, because it’s the neighborly thing to do? If so, then that’s where you want to live. If not, well, better hope that when hard times come, you’ve made enough money to take care of yourself and your family, because you’re going to need it.
Read the whole thing. It’s curious how paradoxical the term “Progressive” is, since much of their belief system has been fixed in place for decades. As the late Charles Krauthammer wrote in in 2002, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” But there’s a problem, Christopher Caldwell wrote a couple of years later: “For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”
TO BE HONEST, I MISS AL HIRT AND UP WITH PEOPLE: Five Great Classic Rock Moments in Super Bowl Halftime History.
IF A WOMAN SAID THIS ABOUT MEN, IT WOULD BE ALL “YOU GO, GIRL!” Tokyo Olympics Chief Apologizes for Remarks Demeaning Women: Yoshiro Mori suggested women’s speaking time in meetings should be limited “or else we’ll never be able to finish.” He apologized, but said he would not resign.
WE TAKE THE PRESSURE, AND WE THROW AWAY: 1970s Musical About 1950s Teens Meets 21st Century Stupid: Social Media Is Hating on Grease Now.
WHEN DOES SAN FRANCISCO CHANGE ITS CITY’S NAME? These S.F. streets are named for people who were morally suspect, or worse, by school board standards.
ANY AMOUNT IS TOO MUCH FOR THIS RIOT-INCITING GRIFTER: EXCLUSIVE: Docs reveal how much Al Sharpton makes teaching ‘political science’ at Tennessee State.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: NYC’s COVID vaccine hubs are ghost towns as DOH mum on distribution.
The city’s 15 vaccination hubs were ghost towns last Saturday, and the city Department of Health is refusing to reveal just how bad distribution went.
One DOH staffer stationed at the Hillcrest High School hub in Queens on Jan. 30 said he did nothing all day.
“You cannot imagine how much nothing it was,” he said of the demoralizing day.
He said there were about 70 workers on hand — some earning overtime pay for 12-hour shifts — and about 10 people to vaccinate.
The worker said several appeals were made to DOH officials to be able to vaccinate people without appointments, and they were denied. He said the hubs had about 400 to 700 doses.
“We could have used that day to vaccinate thousands of people … and we just blew it,” he said.
Even the New York Times has noticed that progressive regions are screwing up the vaccinations.
MICHAEL BARONE: ‘Mostly peaceful’ violence and dueling double standards. “As a law student, I worked in the mayor’s office in Detroit during the 1967 riot, and I can tell you what happens to major cities with sustained increases in violent crime: Very large parts of them are destroyed. That’s what I fear could happen again.”
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: It’s Official: Linguistic Intent No Longer Matters at The New York Times.
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn explained bluntly in a memo Friday.
McNeil, 67, went as a representative of the Times on a 2019 trip with American high school students in Peru. There, according to his farewell note to colleagues—which, tellingly, was the first time the context of his career-ending comments had ever been reported during the 8-day life cycle of this journalism-world controversy—McNeil “was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”
After receiving complaints back then from at least six parents or students—one of whom said “He was a racist….He used the ‘N’ word, said horrible things about black teenagers, and said white supremacy doesn’t exist”—the Times “conducted a thorough investigation and disciplined Donald for statements and language that had been inappropriate and inconsistent with our values,” according to a company statement January 28. “We found he had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.”
Added Baquet in an internal memo: “During the trip, he made offensive remarks, including repeating a racist word in the context of discussing an incident that involved racist language. When I first heard the story, I was outraged and expected I would fire him. I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but that it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious. I believe that in such cases people should be told they were wrong and given another chance.”
That’s what Baquet believed last week, anyway.
This week, the newsroom revolted via a remarkable group letter in which more than 150 staffers at one of the country’s leading newspapers argued that word-choice intentions are “irrelevant,” because “what matters is how an act makes the victims feel.” Signees, declaring themselves “outraged and in pain” and “disrespected,” demanded a reinvestigation of the 2019 incident, an apology to the newsroom, and an organizational study into how racial biases affect editorial decisions. They also alleged that the controversy had surfaced new internal complaints about McNeil demonstrating “bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years.”
Read the whole thing.
Charles C.W. Cooke adds: The New York Times’ Internal Mob Takes Down Another of Its Own:
Andrew Sullivan suggests that this reads like “a confession procured by the Khmer Rouge,” which is correct but understates the case. In order to extract its “confessions,” the Khmer Rouge used grotesque instruments of torture and hung the ever-present threat of the killing fields over those they were trying to control. The New York Times, by contrast, has . . . what? In Cambodia, the fact that the apologies were extracted under duress made the willingness of the targeted to acquiesce understandable, and, by extension, made it less likely that anyone watching would believe that the tortured really meant what they said. And in Manhattan . . . ? At one level, I am disinclined to blame the victim here. At another, though, I am absolutely appalled by McNeil’s failure to stand up for the truth, and for himself. At some level, at least, he must know that he is dealing with witch-hunting lunatics who, having entered themselves into a never-ending frenzy of self-righteousness, have lost their capacity to reason. At some level, he must know that there is a profound difference between using a racial epithet in the course of a discussion about that racial epithet’s use, and using a racial epithet to diminish or to wound someone. At some level, he must know that it is not only acceptable to ask in what context a word was used, but that if one wishes to comprehend what happened during a given incident, it is imperative. Or, put another way: At some level, the 67-year-old Donald G. McNeil Jr. must know that he has done absolutely nothing wrong.
And yet he won’t say it.
At some point, elite leftists decided that Soviet and CCP show trial-like confessions were the polite way to respond to cancel culture. When does cancel culture come for Karl Marx, a stone cold racist?
STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY: North Carolina’s black conservative lieutenant governor responds to racist attack from the media.
TIME PUBLISHES AN ASTONISHING STORY ABOUT A ‘CABAL’ AND ‘SHADOW CAMPAIGN’ THAT HELPED BIDEN WIN:
Time published a story that provides absolutely astonishing details and framing of activities that took place around the 2020 election. As readers, you deserve a detailed analysis of this story and the people and organizations involved. The recounting of the story in Time is longer than a chapter in many novels. Time says additional details will be provided in a series of articles over the next several days. This article is an introduction.
The title is provocative enough. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The story goes on to describe in precise detail a coalition of various powerful special interest groups that united, beginning a year before the election, to ensure Joe Biden would win.
In accordance with the prophesy:
CATCH-AND-RELEASE: Career Criminal Arrested in Deadly San Francisco Crash.
Let’s recap: While out on “supervised release” on a theft conviction, Lyons was arrested Dec. 6 driving under the influence in a stolen car. Within a month, however, he was back on the streets and arrested again for driving under the influence on Jan. 5. You might think that two DUI arrests in less than a month would be enough to put somebody in jail and keep them there, but this is California, where the “catch-and-release” policy turns criminals loose as soon as they’re arrested.
Remember, this is the state that elected Kamala Harris to the U.S. Senate. All the sane people left California a long time ago, and the entire state is now basically an open-air lunatic asylum, with murderous psychopaths roaming around looking for victims to rob, rape or murder.
The state’s already beleaguered condition made far worse by locking itself down: L.A. budget crisis: Deficit projections climb to $600 million.
WHAT HAPPENS IN GALT’S GULCH STAYS IN GALT’S GULCH: Nevada governor touts proposal to allow tech companies to create local governments.
Related: Nevada Bill Would Bring Back the ‘Company Town’ With a Big Tech, Big Brother Twist.
TO MY FRIENDS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AISLE, YOU’LL REGRET THIS AND YOU MAY REGRET IT A LOT SOONER THAN YOU THINK: Kevin McCarthy got exactly what he wanted from the Marjorie Taylor Greene vote.
While McCarthy said many of Greene’s statements — most made before she was elected to Congress — “do not represent the values of my party”, he still condemned the very idea of voting to remove her from committee posts as “cynical” and “hypocritical”. He also cited a number of controversial statements made by Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (a Black Muslim woman who was a frequent Trump target) and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters of California.
But a number of current and former House staffers — as well as a prominent historian of the House — say that in their opinion, McCarthy’s opposition to Thursday’s vote to remove Greene from her committee assignments was all for show. Instead, the entire exercise was meant to goad Democrats into giving him a weapon to entrench one-party Republican rule by targeting their members wholesale if he is ever permitted to hold power.
“Kevin is just about as happy as a pig in s**t right now,” said one House veteran, an aide to a long-serving Republican member who called the events of the past few days an “entirely predictable” exercise that will be cited in the future as a failure by Democrats to think in the longer term.
Kurt Bardella, a former aide to Republican Representative Darrell Issa, suggested that McCarthy got exactly what he wanted by Greene being voted off committees without his support.
And note this:
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, posited that McCarthy’s refusal to take any action was possibly deliberate, meant to goad Democrats into giving him the precedent for future revenge.
“We’ve seen that the Republicans have often weaponized the kind of mechanisms that are intended to make Congress better or create more accountability and use them for partisan gain,” he said. “The fact that Republicans decided not to really do anything about their Congresswoman Greene problem suggests that the scenario [of letting Democrats give them the power to remove minority members from committees] wouldn’t be outrageous in their mind.”
It’s different when we do it. How dare the GOP use our own tactics against us when they’re in power!
(Classical reference in headline.)
CAROLINE GLICK: Biden’s Drive to War in the Middle East.
On June 18, Iran will hold presidential elections. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif will both leave office. All of the current viable candidates hail from the Revolutionary Guards Corps and they can all be guaranteed to abandon the JCPOA. So at best, the JCPOA’s remaining shelf life is four months.
Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Malley and their colleagues all must be aware that this is the case. The fact that they are moving ahead with their failed strategy all the same indicates that they are ideologically committed to their plan and will stay with it even as it drives the region to war.
This brings us to Israel. During the Trump years, Israel and the US were fully coordinated in their joint and separate actions to undermine Iran’s nuclear program and its operations in Syria and Iraq. As a senior official in Trump’s National Security Council explained recently, “Working together the intelligence agencies of both countries were able to accomplish more than they could on their own.”
Obviously, those days are over now. And as Biden’s team makes its presence felt fully, Israel’s options for blocking Iran from becoming a nuclear power are diminishing.
When IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi announced last month that he had ordered the relevant IDF commanders to prepare operational plans to strike Iran’s nuclear installations, most commentators assumed his target audience was the Iranian regime. Others argued he was issuing a warning to the Biden administration. The former claimed he sought to force Iran back from the nuclear brink. The latter argued he was demanding the Biden administration take Israel’s positions seriously before it moves ahead with abrogating the sanctions.
But in the face of the Biden team’s strategic fanaticism and Iran’s race to the nuclear finishing line, it’s at least equally likely that Kochavi’s intended audiences were neither the Iranians nor the Americans. Instead, he may well have been telling the Israeli public to be prepared for what is coming. And he may also have been telling Israel’s regional partners that the time for joint action is now.
Read the whole thing.