QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Have Journalists Ever Met the People They Write About?

This isn’t a conservative-vs.-progressive thing. It’s not a Republican-vs.-Democrat thing. It’s not a coastal-elite-vs.-flyover-country thing. It’s not even a Trump thing. It’s a journalists-vs.-normal-people thing. Outside of the narcissistic and incestuous Thunderdome that houses the American media, it remains the case that people simply do not think in the way that the Beltway-media class believes they do. They are not traumatized by the daily news. They do not make key life decisions based upon the behavior of the president, nor wait for him to leave office before deciding that they are so disturbed that they no longer wish to work. They are not fixated upon the latest congressional MacGuffin or the implications of a given riot or the occasional mistakes of the police. And when they are looking to enjoy a good “cultural drama,” they do not look for it in the same places as the editors of the Washington Post do.

Only journalists and politicians do that. Why? Because they’re freaks. I mean that quite seriously, and I happily include myself in the description. People who argue about the national news every day are straight-up oddities — doubly so when they do it from New York or Washington, D.C.; triply so if they do it in pursuit of a comprehensible political ideology; and quadruply so if they do it using the digital funhouse we call Twitter. Don’t mistake me: There’s nothing wrong per se with being a weirdo. It’s a free country. But there is a lot wrong with being a weirdo who is totally unaware that he is a weirdo. And there’s even more wrong with being a weirdo who spends his days projecting his own interests, obsessions, anxieties, pathologies, and ideologies onto an unwitting and normal population that is nothing at all like him, while claiming that he is giving a voice to that same unwitting and normal population. Increasingly, I see it accepted that “Twitter isn’t real life.” Well, journalism isn’t, either, I’m afraid.

Yesterday, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman noted that Joe Biden had said, of journalists: “You’re the brightest people in the country.” Then he added, sadly: “Trump didn’t say that.” But why would Trump have said that? Why would anyone say that — other than, perhaps, a paid therapist? I’m sure there are some bright journalists out there, just as there are some extremely stupid journalists out there. But is there anybody with a pulse who believes that, as a class, journalists are the “brightest people” in the United States? If their output is any guide, half of them can’t even read.

Related flashback: “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”, Ace of Spades’ John Ekdahl asked on Twitter at the beginning of 2017. As Sean Davis of the Federalist noted in his article on that seemingly innocuous tweet, “Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.”

BRYAN PRESTON: Can We Talk About Joe Biden’s Horrible Choice to Give Putin a List of Things Not to Cyberattack? “What competent commander would then not expect his adversary to go straight away and attack those very targets? You’ve handed him a treasure map. Why would he then not go taking that treasure, checking items off the list as he attacks them?”

Flashback: Obama warns Cantor: ‘Don’t call my bluff.’

Neither one of that team was ever very bright.

JOHN NOLTE: Lin-Manuel Miranda Grovels to Woke Gestapo over ‘Colorism’ Following ‘In the Heights’ Casting Backlash. “Anyway, although the box office bomb In the Heights is populated almost entirely with blacks and Hispanics, some people on Twitter are still complaining over the movie’s lack of darker-skinned blacks and Hispanics. Naturally, Lin-Manuel Miranda (or is it Lin-Miranda Manuel?) responded with an estrogen-filled grovel loaded with so many woketard terms it reads like satire. . . . During the McCarthy era — I mean the first one, not this one — watching those old black and white newsreels of artists crouching and moaning and flattering the House Un-American Activities Committee is still difficult, but nothing like this. Actually, that’s not true. The truth is that I cannot even begin to tell you how much I enjoy watching the Worst People In the World humiliate and berate The Worst People In the World. These monsters deserve each other, so every day in WokeLand is Christmas morning — one beautifully wrapped gift after another.”

TREAT YOURSELF FOR FATHER’S DAY: How about a water bottle from Biblical Greek T-shirts, a Thomas Sowell T-shirt or a Hard Man Novel?

UPDATE: I see that Biblical Greek T-shirts has a new men’s t-shirt that carries a “warning”:” “* Wearers of this shirt should be aware that it may not meet with the approval of either Facebook, the Chinese Communist Party, or the mainstream media.”

SCIENCE! A Grad Student Tried to Correct a Misleading COVID Narrative. Rebekah Jones Tried to Ruin His Career for It.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Arizona Gov. Overrides State University’s Rule Forcing Students to Get Vaccine.

NO, PHILLY DECISION WAS NOT A WIN FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: Margot Cleveland, writing for The Federalist, makes the argument that the Supreme Court’s Fulton v. City of Philadelphia decision doesn’t protect religious freedom because it does nothing to repeal or substantially revise the controlling precedent, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith.

‘CANCEL CULTURE HAS REACHED HENDERSON COUNTY GOVERNMENT,’ COMMISSIONER SAYS: “The Henderson [NC] County Board of Commissioners called an emergency meeting on Thursday evening to respond to what the county manager called YouTube’s ‘blatant act of censorship’ in removing the video of Wednesday’s Board of Commissioners meeting from its platform.”

As Toby Young asked last year at the Spectator: Why is YouTube so afraid of free speech?

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: The Great Reset Comes for the Suburbs.

Plus:

• Crazy cat lady would rather be aborted
• Andrew Yang savaged for telling the truth about New York City
• Are you white and wondering where your free Wifi is?

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

STACY MCCAIN: State Sovereignty Still Matters. I was going to quibble with this title, as the states aren’t really sovereign — as Article I Section 10 of the Constitution makes clear, by forbidding them from doing things sovereign governments typically do, like make treaties, keep armies, impose tariffs, etc. On the other hand, if the United States government suddenly ceased to exist, the states would remain, unimpaired and in fact with expanded powers. So I’ll allow it in context.

However, the claim that the states created the federal government isn’t really correct. As the Preamble makes clear, it was We The People who did so, and that’s not just rhetoric. The ratification of the Constitution by conventions elected directly by the people, rather than by state legislatures, was designed to make just that point. Sure, those people voted in their states, but as Joseph Story said, where else could they have voted?

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Ex-Obama Doctor Torches Biden In Brutal Letter, Demands Biden ‘Submit To A Cognitive Test Immediately.’

READINESS: US Navy Punts on Building a Fleet to Compete with China.

The Navy budget proposal released last month seems an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Not only does it fail to acknowledge the obvious dangers of the present day, it further defers making good on long-overdue commitments to meet the threats of tomorrow.

Take a look around. Russia recently conducted large naval drills around Ukraine. Chinese aircraft and warships are busily trying to intimidate Taiwan and bully Philippine fishermen in the South China Sea. All the while, Beijing assiduously has been expanding its navy at breakneck pace.

To meet these aggressive Chinese and Russian behaviors, the United States should push to recapitalize its naval infrastructure, invigorate lackluster shipbuilding, and build needed end-strength. Unfortunately, the Navy budget proposed by the Biden administration does none of this. Instead, it shunts money from the field to the lab (R&D increases 12 percent over last year while overall procurement drops 8 percent) and busies itself with re-education.

The president’s proposal disappoints on several counts, starting with shipbuilding.

A Navy that can’t fight is just a big wokeness seminar, which I suppose is the point.

DEMORALIZING THE POLICE IS JUST AS ‘EFFECTIVE’ AS DEFUNDING THEM: Portland Police’s Entire Rapid Response Riot Team Resigns After Officer Charged, Antifa Released.

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Facebook employees are losing faith in Mark Zuckerberg. “Glassdoor, the online service that connects people to jobs and company reviews, recently revealed its annual list of top CEOs based on input from their respective employees, and for the first time since 2013, Zuckerberg was missing. Employees rated factors including sentiment on their CEO’s job performance as well as the pros and cons for working for their employer.”

IF WHITE SUPREMACY IS A THING, THEN WHY? Six white female academics have posed as scholars of color in recent years.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Everybody Was Fast-Food Fighting: Danger Looks in Burger Joints. “When Cherysse Cleveland couldn’t get three flavors of slushie in one cup at a Ravenna, Ohio, McDonalds, she did what every sane adult would do and attacked the staff.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U of Ottawa professor: ‘Sex work’ is ‘the best thing young people can do early in their careers.’

Well, the good news is, you don’t need an expensive college degree for that.

ICYMI: My RealClearPolitics column on voting reform, Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat.

REMEMBER THE NAME ‘CARTER JONES:’ His 29-page memo, as reported by Just the News, about “massive” election integrity and mis-management problems in George during the November 2020 election just may be the end of any doubt that Biden really deserves the moniker, His Fraudulency.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The tide is turning against the woke-liberal Blob that misrules us.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. John McWhorter: You Are Not A Racist to Criticize Critical Race Theory.

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.

However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it “CRT” in shorthand when:

1) these developments are descended from its teachings and

2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

In language, terms evolve, and quickly — witness, of late, how this has happened with cancel culture and even woke. To insist that “CRT” must properly refer only to the contents of obscure law review articles from decades ago is a debate team stunt, not serious engagement with a dynamic and distressing reality.

Engagement with reality is not the point.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ICYMI — Portland Is Still an Antifa/BLM/Commie Hell Hole. “It’s not likely that Portland can be saved. Its politics are left of Havana, its citizens too stoned and woke to see what’s happening in front of them. There doesn’t seem to be any level of awfulness that would prompt a correction back to law and order.”

ICYMI: INTERVIEW ON RETIREMENT QUESTIONS WITH KORVING & CO., publishers of Before I Go and Before I Go Workbook.

FEDS NOW GET 44 DAYS OFF EVERY YEAR: Lost amid the Left’s Juneteenth celebration is the fact turned up by Open the Books. As a result, the average career bureaucrat gets nine weeks of fully paid time off.

WHERE WE ARE NOW: IRS Denies Tax Exemption to Texas Religious Group Because Prayer, Bible Reading Boost the Republican Party. “An IRS official denied tax-exempt status to a Texas group that encourages church members to pray for state and national leaders, regardless of their party affiliation, because it benefits ‘the private interests of the [Republican] Party.'”