YOU CAN SEE VIDEO OF MY C-SPAN APPEARANCE THIS MORNING, where I talked about the First Amendment and libel law with First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, here.
Archive for 2021
March 27, 2021
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Goes Berserk on Georgia Election Law. “Biden can disagree with some of the provisions of the law, but nothing in the law justifies the racialist rhetoric. Georgia’s election integrity law is absolutely not ‘Jim Crow in the 21st Century,’ and it is far from un-American to defend election integrity. However, such rhetoric is not exactly surprising, coming from a president who has endorsed Marxist critical race theory. That ideology teaches that a hidden racism permeates American society, regardless of laws preventing discrimination.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE 2024 PRE-GAME SHOW: Kristi Noem’s Star May Have Faded Faster Than Chris Christie’s.
In 2020, a dire year for conservatives for many reasons, Noem became a bit of a cult hero on the right for standing up to the media and resisting COVID-19 restrictions. There was a high death toll in her state, but the deaths per capita were lower than several other states that were more locked down, including New York, where until recently, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s performance was praised by the media.
Over the past year, more and more people were talking about her as a serious contender to be on the 2024 Republican ticket — if not at the top of it.
But she may have blown all of that good will with the stroke of a pen. She took the wrong action, in the wrong manner, at a particularly heated moment in the cultural wars. She may never recover in the eyes of conservatives.
As Kurt Schlicter writes in an article headlined, “Oh Noem, Not Another Squish!” “Candidates, understand this. We are woke. We expect you to be woke. Period. If you don’t know what time it is, it’s time for you to go away. There’s no way to split the difference, no needle-threading or insulting ‘explaining’ that will mollify us. We didn’t like Trump because he was on TV (we didn’t watch that crap), or because he was an ideological conservative (he was not), or because he sent mean tweets (okay, a little). We supported Trump because he fought for us and did not compromise with the people who hate us and want us disenfranchised, subservient, or dead. Noem did not fight for us and she did compromise – she said on Tucker that she was afraid she might lose! – and now we will always have to worry that she will go all 1940 France every time the other side cries.”
ROGER SIMON: Stop Critical Race Theory Before It Destroys America.
The U. S. Civil War was an extraordinary and unique event in world history. For the first and only time a country sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in a righteous fight to end the evil of slavery.
That fight had begun years before with many heroes risking their lives, but the war was the moment of truth. Slavery would be abolished or the country would cease to exist. Good prevailed.
Since then, the struggle for racial equality has continued and, despite many twists and turns, some extremely disheartening, has generally headed in the right direction… until now.
Something called Critical Race Theory intervened to turn our society around, head it back toward racial enmity and, to be blunt, destroy our country, and with it our common humanity, unless it is stopped.
Unlike slavery, which was overt, CRT is a growing cancer infecting our schools, media, entertainment, and businesses. It is everywhere, often unseen and more often not even known or recognized by a large percentage of the public, so all the more dangerous.
Many definitions and explanations of Critical Race Theory exist, a literal phantasmagoria of intellectual obfuscation, the stuff of theses and “studies,” some of it quite brilliantly, if sophistically, executed, but CRT boils down to something quite simple.
Martin Luther King’s justifiably famous dream that the day will come when we judge each other by our characters and not by the color of our skins has been turned on its head.
The color of our skins is to be the be all and end all of our existences, no matter what, no escape. That is what determines our position in life and our fate, beyond class and, apparently, beyond our character as well (i. e. how we actually behave and what we have done).
Race is everything. In order to be considered good, you must acknowledge that, literally bow to it, and behave accordingly.
And, it goes without saying, the Caucasian race (variously defined according to the situation—there is now something called a “White Hispanic”) has, in this construct, done virtually everything that is bad and is inherently the root of all evil. Hence we have “white privilege,” “white ’splainin’” and so forth.
Minorities cannot be racist, only whites.
This idea does not comport remotely with reality or with the DNA of homo sapiens (in which race is a barely visible, minor component) and is, in essence, racist itself.
CRT was an outgrowth of Critical Theory, which was developed by frustrated European Marxist intellectuals who were trying to deal with the failure of the working class to do what they were supposed to—opt for the workers’ state.
They gave up on the recalcitrant workers and decided the route to communist nirvana was a “march through the institutions” (media, the academy, entertainment) to take over those three key areas and inculcate their form of Marxism from above.
It worked to a great extent—just look at what has become of these institutions throughout the West— but that wasn’t enough. A coup de grace was necessary. Western civilization must crumble altogether and be replaced by their diktats of how we must all live, act, and think—or else.
This could not be done easily by Westerners, except perhaps in the background, since the classical liberalism they abhorred was a product of the West.
Enter Critical Race Theory. That would cement their totalitarian stranglehold on society because race is immutable.
Related: Is The Left On The Cusp Of Permanent Triumph, Or Is It Committing Suicide?
“TRUTH IS AN ABSOLUTE DEFENSE TO LIBEL. SHOULDN’T IT BE A DEFENSE HERE TOO?” “G*ddamn liberal f***s”: Southwest pilot in hot water for cursing Bay Area, Hyundais on mic.
Audio at link. If the pilot is sacked, he’s got a very strong future in politics. Southwest Pilot’s 2024 GOP presidential campaign should be epic.
LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND…This is CNN:
IS AMERICA APPROACHING A SEX DEPRESSION: Writing for the Institute for Family Studies, Nicholas Wolfinger examines the data and concludes that, yes, a strong case can be made for the suggestion.
Wolfinger also notes this about the role of social media:
“We’ve been bowling alone for decades now, withdrawing from various social institutions. Perhaps withdrawal from sex is the logical next step? Some Americans have somehow sublimated, submerged, or substituted their innately human desire for sex in lives increasingly lived online, in social media, and in video games.”
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Minnesota Theater Company Cancels Cinderella for Being Too White.
So… staging a production of Cinderella is a violation of “social justice”? It’s probably racist to note that this idea is incredibly stupid, so I won’t.
It’s a sign of how quickly things are changing that this theater decided to stage “Cinderella” in the first place. After all, it’s the story of a peasant girl in 19th Century Europe who becomes a princess. It’s about as white as you can get! Which apparently was acceptable when Chanhassen Dinner Theatres decided to stage it, but then the hammer of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” suddenly smashed down on it. That’s how quickly it can happen. One minute you’re just trying to put on a show, and the next minute you’re the most horrible racist in the world.
If this sort of racial panic were limited to dinner theaters in Minnesota, nobody would care. But this is just one small example of a nationwide trend. Everywhere you look, everybody’s trying to be less “white” than the next guy. Ovmer the past year, The Simpsons and other animated shows have been shamed into replacing white actors who voiced non-white characters. Sesame Street just introduced two African-American Muppet characters in the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and other buzzwords, which is very strange because black people have been a part of the show for over 50 years.
(When I watched Sesame Street as a little kid, I saw people who didn’t look like me and I wanted them to be my friends. I loved Gordon and Susan and Maria and Luis and the rest. Sesame Street was a world where everybody got along, no matter what they looked like. Clearly, that was just my burgeoning white supremacy at work.)
Regarding Sesame Street, Rod Dreher adds:
Gordon was my favorite human character on Sesame Street. I wanted him to be in my life — and in a way, he was. Even as a small child, I sensed that Sesame Street was radical. The way race was depicted on that program was not like what I saw in real life. It showed how we could live together, if we learned to see each other first as fellow humans, not as bearers of racial identity. I’m telling you, Sesame Street was the only place this vision existed for little white kids in the South (and little black kids too). It was the only place kids like me received a counternarrative to what daily life programmed into our heads about black-white relations.
I hadn’t realized how deeply the new progressive racial obsession bothered me until I saw that clip above, and realized that woke Sesame Street is now setting out to undo all the work that had been accomplished in the generations the show catechized. You know who taught my generation of children to see color? White people who longed for segregation’s return, and black people who lived in fear of white people who longed for segregation’s return.
Who had PBS essentially cancelling a half century of their most popular series on their 2021 Bingo cards?
THE PEOPLE DON’T WANT IT, THE RULING CLASS DOES: Thumbs down on gun control, won’t stop shootings: Rasmussen. “A new survey of voters following this week’s mass killing at a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store found that most do not believe more gun control laws will stop the shootings. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey said by a margin of 51% to 39% that ‘stricter gun control laws’ will not prevent shootings like the one in Boulder. In two other questions, the survey indicated that the public is eager for another answer than more anti-gun laws.”
AT 9:00 AM EASTERN, I’M SCHEDULED TO BE ON C-SPAN’S WASHINGTON JOURNAL WITH FLOYD ABRAMS, talking about libel and the First Amendment. You can call in if you like, as they’ll be taking calls from viewers.
DID HISTORY’S MOST INFLUENTIAL MAN NOT EXIST? British philosopher Bertrand Russell once argued the Jesus of the New Testament never actually existed. Shane Morris of the Colson Center offers three solid reasons the facts prove otherwise.
By the way, could it be that arguments like Russell’s presage our own era in which secular progressive proponents of Critical Race Theory present with straight faces claims that on their face have only the remotest connection with reality?
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: San Francisco School Board votes 5-2 to strip Alison Collins of leadership role. “Whether she admits it or not, being stripped of her leadership and being accused of racism must really upset Collins. Best I can tell, this is the only issue she truly cares about. Complaining about racial issues at SF schools is what she has been doing since at least 2016, not just in the tweets that got her in trouble but in appearances before the school board as well. Now suddenly, she’s being publicly and widely identified as a racist. But Collins of all people should know that language matters. Here she is in 2016, about the time she was writing those offensive tweets about Asian parents and teachers, saying schools and the school board need to do more about racist language and hate speech. She got her wish.”
SCIENCE! Sweden Saw Lower Mortality Rate Than Most of Europe in 2020, Despite No Lockdown. “Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively. Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.”
KAROL MARKOWICZ: The Cuomo Scandals: This Is CNN.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a new scandal, and this one involves CNN. The Albany Times Union reports that, early in the Covid pandemic, Mr. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker directed high-level state health officials “to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor’s relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration.”
Last spring the governor was often seen bantering on CNN with the host of “Cuomo Prime Time”—his younger brother, Chris. In the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, Andrew and Chris kept their spirits up by making jokes and ribbing each other. The host didn’t ask the governor tough questions about deaths in New York nursing homes.
“We generally do not get involved in the medical decisions of our employees,” CNN spokesman Matt Dornic said Wednesday of the latest controversy. “However, it is not surprising that in the earliest days of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, when Chris was showing symptoms and was concerned about possible spread, he turned to anyone he could for advice and assistance, as any human being would.”
Yet CNN was very much involved in the medical situation of this employee. The network literally made a show of it.
Flashback: ‘It’s Good TV:’ CNN’s High-Drama Coverage of the Pandemic Hits Close to Home: “But another current CNN employee who spoke with THR criticized Cuomo’s appearances, particularly the dramatic moment last Monday when he was filmed leaving the basement where he was quarantined to reunite with his family, as ‘reality TV.’ ‘Him coming out of the quarantine with the cameras there, that’s all Jeff Zucker reality TV, and that screams Zucker,’ the person says, referring to the network president who brought The Apprentice to NBC and helped make Trump a star.”
FROM BECKY R. JONES: Academic Magic.
Zoe O’Brien has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.
Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. But first, she must learn to master her new-found powers.
EMOLUMENTS ARE STILL A THING? Seth Barrett Tillman: A Letter to Politico.
EVEN MORE FEARSOME THAN THE COMFY CHAIR! Why your comfy old couch could be killing you.
THE EVIDENCE IS STILL BEING ASSEMBLED: 1 report, 4 theories: Scientists mull clues on origin of COVID-19.
And by “assembled” they really mean “created.”
SHE SOUNDS DANGEROUSLY CONSERVATIVE: Scarlett Johansson says her political views shouldn’t affect her career.
I mean, if we judge on merit only, how can we be sure only the left right people do well?