PRONOUN POLICE GO AFTER MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS: I got called the “Hairy It” (a play on my surname) in elementary school even though “it” was not my pronoun of choice. That was before Title IX, so I wasn’t able to turn it into a federal case. Instead, I had to come up with similar epithets for my rowdy playmates … which, upon reflection, was kind of fun.
Archive for 2022
May 15, 2022
CORPORATE WOKEISM: Dropbox advertises that it intends to violate Title VII.
JOHN McGINNIS: “Lawyers for Radical Change.“
OPEN THREAD: I’m digging your scene.
A Satellite with A View: Timelapse of Earth rising over the Moon.
THE LEFT CREATED ‘GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY:’ Hans Bader describes the history of the “Great Replacement Theory” the Left has been peddling for decades. That’s the idea that immigration and the passing of the Boomer generation are bringing a new non-white majority to power in American politics. And no, Tucker Carlson is not the originator of GRT, contrary to a chorus of the prevaricating suspects on CNN and MSNBC.
QUESTION ASKED: Are you sure you want to call the Roe protests “the summer of rage?”
Thus far we haven’t seen any serious incidents of violence associated with these protests, so keep your fingers crossed. But when you start inflaming your followers by tossing around words like “rage” and “outrage,” don’t act surprised if some of them start taking your advice to heart. The very first BLM marches in 2020 actually were “mostly peaceful” and the media happily picked up the phrase. But then they insisted on continuing to use it even as the demonstrations quickly devolved into riots, with federal buildings and police stations being set ablaze, mass looting destroying retail areas, and law enforcement officers being assaulted.
Yes, that was the “summer of love.” And now we’re being warned to prepare for the “summer of rage.” Some liberal activists aren’t waiting for anyone else to issue marching orders, by the way. At Yale University, liberals are demanding “unrelenting daily confrontation.” And the subject in question on any given day doesn’t really matter. They simply want any of their fellow students or faculty members who express any sort of conservative opinions to be physically driven from the public square. (Free Beacon)
Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are “conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about.” Why, she asked, are they still “coming to our parties” and “laughing in the library” without “unrelenting daily confrontation?”
Some of her classmates were less moderate.
“It’s not time for ‘reform,’” first-year law student Leah Fessler, a onetime New York Times freelancer, wrote on Instagram. “Democratic Institutions won’t save us.” It is unclear how Fessler will apply that view as a legal intern this summer for federal judge Lewis Liman. Judge Liman did not respond to a request for comment.
While it might fit on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt, “democratic institutions won’t save us” isn’t really a very good message, particularly if you’re in the process of seeking a law degree. Also, even if you believe that unsavory maxim, please enlighten us as to what the alternative to democratic institutions might be? I hope I’m wrong, but the only thing that springs to mind is mob rule. Is that where you think this is all heading?
Err, yes? As Jon Gabriel tweets, “Gonna be tough to top 2020’s Summer of Rage, but let’s see what you got.”
Read the whole thing — the last paragraph is a hoot.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Midler, Colbert, Kimmel and More: The ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Celebrities.
“TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand,” [Bette Midler] Tweeted, ignoring the countless women who struggle to breastfeed for often heartbreaking reasons. Surely a 70-something woman has met a few moms in her life who shared their motherhood struggles.
The Biden administration claims it’s been working on the problem for some time, apparently with little or no net results. Tell that to the mothers scrambling to find formula for their infants.
That collective suffering doesn’t bother Midler. Why?
It might negatively impact President Joe Biden specifically and Democrats as a whole. So Midler pushed their concerns aside to land some cheap partisan points.
Let them eat cake.
* * * * * * *
And Colbert championed another “cake” closeup earlier this year following more gas price hike headlines.
“Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4 per gallon. Okay, that stings, but a clear conscience is worth a buck or two … I’m willing to pay. I’m willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.”
Mary Antoinette would be proud, assuming you believe the historical myth.
Colbert morphed into Paris Hilton so slowly, I hardly even noticed:
JEFF JACOBY: “Who’s Afraid of Liberal Media Bias?” (I’m not half as confident as he is that liberal media bias has been overcome.)
ON THIS DAY IN 1940: Two brothers named McDonald–Richard and Maurice–opened the first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Ray Kroc, then a milkshake mixer salesman, became involved in 1954 and purchased the company in 1961 for $2.7 million.
I WAS THERE IN DALLAS FOR THIS: Justice Thomas talks about the leak … and much more.
QUELLE HORREUR! “Our Daughter Lied to Us and Went to a Pro-Life Rally. I seriously thought she was a feminist.” A Slate reader emails their “Care and Feeding” column on Friday for advice:
Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter, a junior in high school, told us she was going to her boyfriend’s house. It turns out she lied.
I only found out because today, I casually mentioned Roe v. Wade may be overturned, and she replied, “I can’t wait. So many innocent lives will be spared.” We got into an argument in which she ended up confessing her actual whereabouts—she went to a “pro-life” rally with her boyfriend.
We’ve grounded her and taken away her phone for going behind our backs, but she’s showing no remorse. I just can’t believe it. This is the girl who dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween when she was 10. She’s heading to law school in a couple years. I seriously thought she was pro-choice and a feminist. I’ve been taking her to rallies and protests since she was a baby. We’ve been educating her about safe sex and consent. We donate to Planned Parenthood every year for Christmas. I’m fine with her disagreeing with us on other topics, but I had an abortion years ago. We live in a conservative state. I don’t want her right to choose to be taken away.
And I’m furious at her for going behind our backs. I’m suspicious of her boyfriend—I know he’s a conservative-leaning Christian and I don’t want to have raised a daughter who votes for whomever her boyfriend does. How do I convince her being pro-life isn’t helping her in the long run?
— Just Trying to Raise a Feminist
In a 2007 article by Norman Podhoretz, he quoted a Commentary staffer who said at a (very early) anti-Vietnam War protest in 1960, “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”
It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”
The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very “Establishment” they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) “the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known.”
More incredible yet, in a mere decade the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out.
And now that the American left has had decades of being the once-dreaded ”Establishment,” they seem shocked when their kids rebel to the other side, as teenagers universally are wont to do.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Vabogu Monocular Telescope. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Wisconsin middle schoolers accused of sexual harassment for using wrong gender pronouns.
BUT THE YEAR IS STILL YOUNG: Dana Milbank Writes the Most Morally Atrocious Column of 2022.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists tried to murder me and destroyed my office. They killed 3,000 of my fellow Americans. A decent human being would be respectful of the dead and the traumatized from that event in drawing comparisons of domestic political controversies to 9/11.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is not a decent human being. He is a moral monster, and he advertised that in today’s column, entitled “Roe’s impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America’s social fabric”: “Assuming little changes from the draft, overturning Roe would be a shock to our way of life, the social equivalent of the 9/11 attacks (which shattered our sense of physical security) or the crash of 2008 (which undid our sense of financial security).”
Evergreen flashback: That Dana Milbank column is even dumber than you think.
ONE-TERM BIDEN: Democrats Already Trying to Position Themselves for 2024.
Have you noticed that Elizabeth Warren keeps putting herself in front of every new current thing? When Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was the hot story, she put herself front and center, then did the same thing with abortion.
Do you think this is a coincidence, or is it more likely that Warren is trying to remind Democrat voters that she is standing by, ready to jump in when they drop Biden?
It’s not just Warren who’s doing this. Bernie Sanders has recently said that he is prepared to run again.
In the past, being primaried hasn’t ended well for sitting presidents:
If Biden is “primaried” in 2024, it would likely be “the kiss of death” to his presidency based on trends, according to historian David Pietrusza.
Pietrusza named William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Lyndon Johnson and Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Gerald Ford and Reagan in 1976, Jimmy Carter and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1980, and George H.W. Bush and former Republican aide Pat Buchanan in 1992 as examples.
“It’s not so much the fact of a primary but the circumstances of who and when,” Pietrusza said. “Right now, of course, Joe Biden is not a good ‘who,’ and 2024 is not a good ‘when.'”
For Paleologos, the Carter comparison drew the most parallels, but it could also be distinguished given today’s political partisanship.
“Keep in mind that back then there were more persuadables,” he said. “That’s what makes it a serious topic of conversation. You’ve got more people in that pool of left of center than there were in the 1970s, and that’s a bigger pool of people saying there might be a better alternative than the current president.”
Biden’s appearance alongside Rep. Abigail Spanberger in Culpeper, Virginia, last week raised eyebrows after she admitted she is “going to have a hard time getting reelected.” Spanberger secured a second term in 2020 with only a 1.8 point margin of victory.
Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel described Biden as being a “burden” to Democrats like Spanberger.
“From forcing masks on school children and skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, Biden has shown he doesn’t care,” she said.
It’s as if Biden himself “governs like a man who knows he’s not running again.”
FASTER, PLEASE: The Badly Needed EastMed Pipeline Awaits Approval.
“Financial and political support by the EU can facilitate the final investment decision-making process by the private entities that are considering their participation in the project,” Michalis Mathioulakis, an energy expert at the ELIAMEP think tank, said recently, adding that the significant rise in natural gas prices in Europe favors the economic viability of the pipeline.
It was all the more surprising, therefore, when in January, the United States, in a complete policy reversal, unofficially communicated to Israel, Greece and Cyprus that it no longer supported the pipeline. Then, on April 6, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland made it even clearer that the US was officially killing off the EastMed project. As the final feasibility report on the project is still underway, the US decision seemed to come out of the blue.
During a visit to Greece, Nuland said in an interview with the newspaper Kathimerini:
“We don’t need to wait for 10 years and spend billions of dollars on this stuff. We need to move the gas now, And we need to use gas today as a transition to a greener future. Ten years from now we don’t want a pipeline. Ten years from now we want to be green. So we’ve got to use LNG [liquefied natural gas] and we’ve got to use electricity connections that we can do more quickly.”
Nuland’s comments came across as remarkably tone-deaf at a time when the US has actively been seeking to lower oil prices worldwide by appealing to dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and even courting Venezuela. If anything, oil is even less “green” than natural gas, and the projected time during which the EastMed pipeline can be built is probably not ten years, but significantly less. Furthermore, natural gas is likely to be relevant for decades to come. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that there will be enough renewable energy to cover European energy needs within the next decade. Fossil fuels will most likely still be needed for the foreseeable future to manufacture those electric cars and fly those airplanes. The greatest beneficiaries of the US and the West closing down their energy industries will be Russia, Iran and other countries set to make a windfall selling their fossil fuels.
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
LINCOLN PROJECT FOUNDER MELTS DOWN, PART 348913:
The latest drama began over the weekend amid news that Meghan McCain’s book Bad Republican hadn’t even managed to sell 300 copies. Schmidt joined in the Twitter pile-on, accusing McCain of “14 years of abuse and attacks” and being a “raging, screaming, crying” baby on the 2008 campaign trail. “The tantrums were beyond anything I have ever witnessed from any other human being,” Schmidt said.
Given that rumors have long swirled about McCain’s difficult behavior when she was a co-host on The View, Cockburn isn’t dismissing this accusation out of hand. But Schmidt then turned his fire on a once-unthinkable target: John McCain, a man he’d long claimed to admire. Schmidt claimed that McCain had privately admitted that he’d had an affair with a Washington lobbyist named Vicki Iseman, an allegation that surfaced in 2008 but that both McCain and Iseman denied.
Schmidt also said McCain was scared of his own veep nominee, Sarah Palin. “The bravest man that I had ever met turned out to be terrified of the creature that he had created,” Schmidt lamented. He then let out a wail of agony and tore at his shirt with his own fingernails.
Cockburn notes that if there’s a messier bitch in all of Washington, then he has yet to emerge.
More details of Schmidt’s lengthy Twitter bender at Fox News: Steve Schmidt unloads on NY Times, NY Mag, AP, claims reporting on Lincoln Project will be ‘discredited.’
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt guaranteed that stories from multiple mainstream media outlets outlining dysfunction and scandal at his organization would be “discredited” on Thursday.
“By the time the sun sets on the West Coast of the United States of America the below stories will all be discredited. I will be asking @nytimes, @NYMag @AP for FULL-THROATED CORRECTIONS,” he tweeted.
Schmidt, who says he no longer has involvement with the disgraced PAC known as much for its anti-Trump exploits as its myriad of scandals and public fiascos, assailed the New York Times (“21 Men Accuse Lincoln Project Co-Founder of Online Harassment”), New York Magazine (“The Predator in the Lincoln Project”), and the Associated Press (“How a leading anti-Trump group ignored a crisis in its ranks”) over their stories in 2021 about fellow co-founder John Weaver’s online harassment of young, gay men.
* * * * * * * * *
As of Friday afternoon, no corrections or addendums to the stories Schmidt targeted have been added. Spokespersons for the New York Times and AP didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Vox Media, which owns New York Magazine, backed up its report.
“We stand by this story; we have not been made aware of anything requiring a correction,” Vox Media spokesperson Laura Coates told Fox News Digital.
Schmidt’s online rage over the stories is the latest odd turn in the saga of the Lincoln Project, which raised nearly $90 million in 2020 but was later consumed by Weaver’s scandal, as well as reports of financial self-dealing, bitter in-fighting, a toxic work environment, and calls by even its own former members to shut down.
It remains in operation today, but it’s viewed warily even by some Democrats. For instance, Democratic Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan’s campaign recently urged it not to assist in his race against Republican J.D. Vance.
And finally, a question asked and answered: Who was ever dumb enough to make Steve Schmidt famous?
The media’s janitor, that’s who:
UPDATE: Former John McCain Campaign Manager Steve Schmidt Says He Didn’t Vote for Him. “He also told us something he’s never revealed before: his disillusionment with McCain was so deep by the end of the 2008 campaign that he didn’t think McCain should be in the White House. ‘The only conceivable conclusion that you could get to after watching his conduct in this campaign was that he’s completely unfit to be president,’ Schmidt told us. ‘Truth is, I didn’t vote for him either.’ He left the presidential line on his 2008 ballot blank.”
(Updated and bumped.)
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: Cornish pub will not change name despite letter from Vogue owner.
In a cease-and-desist letter, Condé Nast’s chief operating officer, Sabine Vandenbroucke, argued that the company was the proprietor of the Vogue mark, not only for the magazine first published in 1916 but for “other goods and services offered to the public by our company”.
At first the pub’s landlords, Rachel and Mark Graham, were surprised. But it did not take long for their shock to dissolve to humour. “If someone had obviously taken the time to look us up, it wouldn’t have taken five minutes to say: ‘Oh, there’s a place called Vogue,’” said Rachel, 49, who is not a reader of the magazine.
The letter, dated 1 March, said: “We are concerned that the name which you are using is going to cause problems because as far as the general public is concerned a connection between your business and ours is likely to be inferred.”
The Star Inn has been in the small village of Vogue, near St Day, for hundreds of years, Mark wrote in response – in which his answer to the request was a “categorical no”.
The magazine’s letter was “hilariously funny”, he wrote. He believes it was sent in confusion after the couple changed their trading status to a limited company.
He added: “I presume that at the time when you chose the name Vogue in the capitalised version you didn’t seek permission from the villagers of the real Vogue. I also presume that Madonna did not seek your permission to use the word Vogue (again the capitalised version) for her 1990s song of the same name.”
I wonder if Anna Wintour tossed the lawyers into the piranha tank upon hearing their failure, a la Blofeld dealing with bungling SPECTRE agents in the James Bond movies?
GREAT MOMENTS IN CUSTOMER SERVICE: Craving Persecution. Or, The Minefield Of Modern Progressive Manners:
THERE’S A ZUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE: Inside the Collapse of CNN+, The News Channel’s ‘Apollo Mission:’ Hundreds of staffers were drawn to the streaming venture, positioned as network’s future; $5.99-a-month service lasted one month.
For the more than 400 workers involved, it’s also the story of the dashed hopes of those caught up in a startup’s woes. CNN+’s rise and fall speaks to the risks people are willing to take to be on the ground floor of something big, especially in a legacy media industry that is searching for a future-proof business model.
Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in CNN+ describe a culture where excitement over what one top producer described as CNN’s “Apollo Mission”—a reference to the program that successfully landed the first humans on the moon—gave way to the realization that failure was arriving swiftly and mercilessly. Many employees of the streaming service started in the past six months or even just a few weeks before the service launched. Several said they left stable jobs or freelancing gigs.
It’s a ridiculous analogy: Apollo was built on sound engineering principles throughout — the numbers to make CNN+ feasible simply weren’t ever there:
Now, help me with the math. CNN, a network whose most popular show pulls in around one million viewers a night, was going to convince two million people to pay for supplemental programming — and 15 million people to do so within four years?
To put that in perspective, per Charles Cooke, NFL Sunday Ticket has two million subscribers. Granted, Sunday Ticket costs much, much more than a CNN+ subscription does, but the NFL fan base is much, much, much larger and more enthusiastic than CNN’s. And still: “Only” two million subscribe. So where did CNN get its target numbers from?
Care to guess how many viewers per day CNN+ is actually averaging lately? According to sources who spoke to CNBC, it’s … just 10,000.
As Daniel Greenfield of Frontpage Mag predicted in December:
CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.
So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.
Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.
But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.
CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.
CNN’s effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won’t even watch it for free.
CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”
The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.
Once Jeff Zucker was resigned/was pushed out in early February, the clock was ticking on CNN+. I wonder how Chris Wallace enjoyed his role as a would-be Apollo astronaut?
(Updated and bumped.)