DAVID BERNSTEINS, FTW: (A different) David Bernstein’s Woke Antisemitism: How A Progressive Ideology Harms Jews is out! Highly recommended. And while you’re on a David Bernstein kick, you might as well pick up my Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
Fun fact: The editor for both books was another guy named David Bernstein. #CommissionEarned
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Experts offer tips for buying over-the-counter hearing aids. Sales became legal yesterday.
SEMICONDUCTORS: China Is F*****. “As Peter Zeihan notes, these sanctions screw not only China’s semiconductor industry, but every segment of the high tech assembly chain that depends on them.”
DISGRACED FORMER FBI AGENT PETER STRZOK: “9/11 is nothing compared to January 6. And the fact that the FBI and the rest of the government if they are not only on the same sort of war footing that they were on in the weeks and months and years after 9/11, shame on everyone!”
A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: There’s a Public School Child Sexual Abuse Epidemic No One Is Talking About.
WEIRD HOW THIS ISN’T GETTING MUCH PLAY IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Baby formula update: Still missing in action. “While it’s not drawing much attention, a significant percentage of families with infants are still unable to find the variety of formula their babies require on any given week. According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly one-third of such families are either being forced to go with a brand not suggested for their baby’s needs or they simply aren’t finding any without jumping through a lot of hoops.”
INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM: Identifying as Female Doubles Your Chances of Getting Into MIT.
WE NEED A JAN20 COMMISSION: The Most Telling Chart on Inflation You’ve Ever Seen.
INTERESTING BOOK: The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.. #CommissionEarned
THE EAST IS…WHITE? XI JINPING IS A CRACKER? Chinese racism and imperialism is really a manifestation of Whiteness, says white Aussie broadcaster.
Stan Grant, a white guy who is a leading commenter on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Oz’s BBC), believes that China’s hegemonic brutality is — wait for it — a manifestation of Whiteness.
* * * * * * * *
Imperialism is a White Supremacist construct, and therefore to be an imperialist power is to be a white power, even if you are, well, non-white. And say what you will about Grant, he carries this argument to its logical conclusion. Xi’s China might have represented the end of whiteness, he laments, but instead “the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness.” How can this be? Well, it has turned out that Xi is a Han nationalist, committed to the idea that “Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority.”
Grant is probably right about this. But instead of this leading him to question his own efforts to put all forms of capitalism, including the Chinese, indeed, arguably all forms of power, into the Procrustean Bed of White Supremacy, Grant doubles down, insisting that Han persecution of non-Han is nothing less white people persecuting non-white people.
One feels as if one has entered a lunatic asylum. The Han are not white, and somehow they are. But in Grant’s world, and in this he is in no sense expressing a fringe view but rather is an emblematic figure of a very wide current of an opinion, whiteness is a synonym for power, full stop. Thus, for Grant, the tragedy of Xi’s China is that it has become what he believes historically its opposed, whiteness, of which, he says, “Xi Xinping is its champion…the continuation of white power in darker skin.”
Whiteness as metaphor, in short. It is this metaphorization of understanding, no is the deepest intellectual, and in some ways, the deepest philosophical ill that afflicts us.
Earlier: “White Supremacy:” Is there anything it can’t do?
BLASPHEMY! Conservative students’ anti-Marxism display shut down at University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s scary that we may face disciplinary action simply because we passed out literature critical of a communist murderer and terrorist.” You left out racist and homophobe.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Veteran Hollywood actress turned activist Susan Sarandon tweets video of trash in Oakland.
Veteran Hollywood actress and political activist Susan Sarandon took to Twitter Monday to share a TikTok video showing a stretch of Oakland lined with homeless encampments and trash. The video, which Sarandon reposted from an account belonging to homelessness activist, Thomas Wolf, is shot from what appears to be a car driving along streets lined with tents, makeshift structures, discarded furniture and piles of trash.
There are no people visible in any of the shots and the only sound in the video is of the car’s engine.
Sarandon’s post has no caption, but the original post reads “This isn’t a shanty town in India. This is Oakland, CA. The crisis of our generation.”
— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) October 17, 2022
Oakland’s last Republican mayor left office in 1977.
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Digital license plates are now legal in California.
New technology is hitting the streets in California that lets motorists use high-tech digital license plates on their vehicles instead of the old-fashioned metal variety.
The Motor Vehicle Digital Number Plates Bill (AB 984), passed earlier this month, allows California vehicle owners to use the digital plates, made exclusively by California company Reviver.
The plates, which resemble tablets. connect to an app that offers registration renewal, vehicle location services and security features — such as reporting a vehicle stolen. They are the same shape and size as traditional license plates, and give users the option to change the plate’s background color by toggling between a light or dark mode. Motorists can also personalize a banner message on the plate.
The bill’s passage follows a successful pilot program in which approximately 10,000 California drivers demoed the new technology.
“Californians are known to be early adopters of emerging innovative technologies. We welcome new opportunities to automate and integrate as many parts of our lives as possible, enabling us to streamline mundane tasks and stay connected. Our cars are no exception,” Reviver co-founder Neville Boston said in a statement.
Besides the obvious risk of hacking, what happens when the iPad bolted to the front of the car is hit from debris in the road, or is backed into by a pickup’s trailer hitch? A bent metal license plate is still readable; a smashed LCD probably won’t be.
Ars Technica notes that digital license plates aren’t the only cutting edge option for California drivers. “A larger unanswered question is whether smart license plates offer enough personal utility to see widespread adoption beyond commercial vehicles and fleets. And if the thought of a $20/month subscription is too much to bear but you don’t want a metal plate like everyone else on the road, California also just legalized using a license plate wrap instead.”
UNDERCOVER VIDEO BACKFIRE: Conservatives Go Crazy for GOP Congressman’s Call to Break Up the FBI. “The video apparently came from a group called The Undercurrent, a low-rent lefty ripoff of Project Veritas.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hunter Biden’s firm took $40M payment from Russian oligarch “to enter the American market.”
DAVID HARSANYI: Fauci Can’t Whitewash His Disastrous Legacy.
Fauci now portrays himself as a humble public health official who had merely shared scientific advice and information with decision-makers. This self-serving depiction conveniently ignores his fearmongering, his coaxing and lying to manipulate behavior, and his partisan scheming. Governors regularly leaned on Fauci’s positions as justification for their unconstitutional shutdowns of churches, economic lockdowns, and school closures. And Fauci praised them for it. Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden urged governors to “listen to Dr. Fauci” for their guidelines. Most already had. When Biden won the presidency, Fauci blamed the alleged underperformance of the United States under Donald Trump on the “disparate responses of different states versus the unified approach.”
The unified approach, of course, was the Fauci approach.
If the spiritual leader of the “follow the science” knew, as he now claims, that “draconian” Covid policies would lead to “collateral negative consequences,” why didn’t he mention this fact back then? And why did he portray those who did as politically motivated and anti-science?
His entire office needs to be zeroed out by the next Congress to prevent the next little dictator.
PHIL HAMBURGER: America Needs a New Civil Rights Act: The 1964 law targeted racial discrimination. Today’s problem is the suppression of dissent.
The threat again comes from discrimination, but now by the federal government as well as states and private organizations. Most worrisome is federal and state encouragement for private entities to discriminate against Americans with dissenting views. Also significant is discrimination that bars Americans from participating in services ordinarily open to the public.
An example of the latter is PayPal’s recent announcement that it will confiscate $2,500 from customers who spread “misinformation.”
The company later claimed the announcement was “incorrect information”—dare one say “misinformation”? But it turns out that PayPal still threatens to take $2,500 from customers for promoting “intolerance that is discriminatory.” Perhaps it should fine itself.
At least PayPal’s sharp treatment of its customers ensured a sharp reaction. Many canceled their accounts, and the company’s stock price dropped 6% in one day. When companies are too crude in their censoriousness, cancellation can go two ways.
Too often, however, private and government discrimination isn’t as candid and doesn’t provoke a concentrated response. Private professional organizations—for example, those overseeing lawyers and even real-estate agents—are taking aim at practitioners who don’t have the most up-to-date views on race under the guise of barring racial discrimination. Yet the response is muted because the assault on dissent is subtle and many critics within the professions are fearful. PayPal is exceptional only in its ham-handedness, and we can’t assume market remedies will suffice for more sophisticated discrimination.
Private organizations don’t always act on their own. Government works through social-media platforms to censor Americans who refuse to follow orthodoxy on Covid-19 and election fraud. It uses interpretations of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in schools, to require private regulation of speech about sex, including dissent on sexual politics. For decades the federal government has demanded that universities establish institutional review boards to license much academic inquiry and publication, predictably with a tilt against scholars whose views are deemed old-fashioned or insensitive.
States are no better. Many leave the regulation of lawyers to bar associations, some of which are adopting rules that penalize lawyers for “discrimination,” understood to include insufficiently advanced opinion. Some police forces tie promotions to education—provided by organizations that discriminate against the unwoke.
If federal or state governments engaged in viewpoint discrimination, they would violate the First Amendment. But they seem to think they can evade constitutional limits by getting private entities to do their dirty work.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act, people said “they’re private companies, they can discriminate if they want to.” That changed, and it can change again with regard to censorship.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems’ Daddy Issues J6 Charade Isn’t Winning Hearts and Minds. “The dream was that the focus on J6 would distract from the fact that a loaf of bread now costs $475 and that the Oval Office is occupied by a guy who can’t string three coherent sentences together and is often seen shaking hands with phantoms.”
OUT: LIBERAL LAW PROFESSORS CALLING THE SUPREME COURT A MORAL TEACHER. In: Liberal Law Professors saying to treat the Supreme Court as a “hostile political actor.”
September: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve Is At Its Lowest Level Since 1984. “Over time the U.S. government began to fill the reserve. At its high point in 2010, the level reach 726.6 million barrels. Since December 1984, the level has never been lower than 450 million barrels — until now.”
Flashback: Remember When Democrats Blocked Trump from Filling the Strategic Oil Reserve While Gas Was Cheap?
Reserves are down by more than a third on Biden’s watch even before this new release.
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