AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Relieved To No Longer Have To Pretend To Like Soccer.

NOW DO ISLAM: Stanford band mocks Christians during BYU halftime show.

THE BANALITY OF GOOD: In his recent book, Mattias Desmet takes on a new totalitarianism not enforced by jackbooted thugs, but dull bureaucrats imposing consensus.

One might quibble with Desmet’s arguments about the extent to which “the Science™” got things wrong, or riposte that the unknown severity of the virus excused overreach, but it is difficult to argue that the pandemic fundamentally accelerated extant trends in how our society is monitored, who has overweening authority over it, and what the consequences of noncompliance can be. The book might have enjoyed even greater success if Desmet had considered the complementary woke phenomena ushered in by the #MeToo movement, critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and their consequences for free speech and behavior. Like COVID and its performative safetyism, all of those orthodoxies advanced broad social controls based on emotion, anxiety, and shaky data, much of which have also been exposed as exaggerated or fraudulent. Strikingly, they emerged in the Anglosphere at times that overlapped with the pandemic. The technocratic authorities who enforced them were similarly bland, bureaucratized, and in most cases protected from any significant liability. We might forgive Desmet for leaving them out, however, for the collective hysteria around race, gender, and sex did not travel well outside of the English-speaking world.

The question we should all be rushing to answer, of course, is how to fight back. Desmet parrots the standard middle-class professional’s argument that dissidents should speak out, but only in polite, sincere ways that avoid antagonizing the dominant ideology. His hope is that this will penetrate the mass formation sufficiently to expose its dynamics to broad majorities who go along with it without necessarily believing in it. He would know better if that could work in Belgium, but Americans have already amassed decades of evidence showing that this spells failure, if not disaster. However strongly worded their letters may have been, polite dissenters have proved remarkably easy to ignore for at least the last 50 years. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful woke mandarins have implemented their agenda of social control, long secure in the knowledge that their opponents were little more than gracious losers. Like him or not, it took the abrasive Donald Trump and his army of “deplorables” to challenge this dismal outcome with considerable success, through aggressive media activism, the majesty of the law, and perhaps most significantly, ridicule that no tyranny can withstand.

Read the whole thing.

SUNLIGHT AS DISINFECTANT: University of Florida med school pulls ‘anti-racist’ website content following report: The revised admissions page no longer includes the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges have a serious diversity problem. Just not the one they think.

We need higher education that looks like America.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Hillary Clinton Says Saving Unborn Babies from Abortion Is Like…Terrorists Killing, Raping Women.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Pentagon debuts its new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider.

But how can we be assured that the non-binary fliers who crew it have the right pronouns?

ACTUALLY, MORE LIKE INTO THE MEDIA ENGINE ROOM: This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden had a pretty good week until late Friday when Elon Musk’s Twitter sent several shots across the bow.

ANOTHER VOTE OF “NO CONFIDENCE” IN THE (NEWLY WOKE) UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO:  Some of you read James Allan’s essay on the mass retirement of USD’s more conservative law faculty members.  At the time of the essay, the count was four–Larry Alexander, Kevin Cole, Steven Smith, and me.  Well, you can add one more–Tom Smith.  This is a three-year process for all of us.  We won’t be out the door till 2025.  But if you know somebody who was considering attending USD School of Law because of its reputation for having an ideologically diverse faculty (we do get a fair number of those), you may want to give them the bad news.  There are still a few conservative faculty members left, but their numbers are dwindling fast.

HOWIE CARR: Newly liberated Twitter blows lid off Democrat tainting of 2020 election.

“More to come from the Biden team,” was one message on Oct. 24. Another one was: “An additional report from the DNC.”

The response back from Twitter: “Handled these.”

The Democrat fluffers instantly shut down the Post’s Twitter account. They cancelled the White House press secretary’s. They’d already banned President Trump. Anyone who tried to get around the bans was likewise cut off.

This was an insurrection — the real insurrection.

The First Amendment? Democrats don’t need no stinkin’ First Amendment!

All of Twitter’s multi-millionaire conspirators came from the same fabulously pampered backgrounds — including membership in multiple protected classes and graduate degrees from elite American-hating universities, as well as few, if any, connections to any traditional national institutions such as the military, religion, the working classes or public schools.

The leader of the Twitter coup d’etat against MAGA appears to have been one Vijaya Gadde. Born in India, Vijaya went straight to the Ivy League — Cornell, and then to the even more expensive NYU School of Law.

NYU Law, by the way, is also the alma mater of Colinford Mattis, the equally woke New York lawyer who firebombed an NYPD cruiser during the BLM murder-arson-looting riots of 2020.

Gadde wept when she found out that Musk was going to blow the lid off her sinister conspiracy, but don’t cry for her. She made $7 million in 2020 and then $17.3 million last year for her service above and beyond the call of duty to the New World Order.

Gadde was fired from Twitter by Musk, along with the new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who arrived in this nation in 2006 from India. He was immediately admitted to Stanford University, which is where the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, the mega-fraudster and donor of $5 million to the Biden campaign, are employed as tenured professors.

I wonder which political party Gadde was affiliated with?

MOST VOTES OF ANY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE EVER, AND YET: Joe Biden, Bookstore Poison.

SAD NEWS: Pele ‘moved to end of life care’ after severe turn in Brazil legend’s health.

HOLIDAY DEAL: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Philadelphia approves “permanent” 10 pm curfew. “Every time you asked a Democrat or one of their MSM stenographers about the rising crime rates in America’s cities during the run-up to the midterm elections, you were told that it was a mirage. It’s not really that bad. These are just Republican talking points. New York’s Governor even expressed disbelief as to why anyone would even bring it up. Perhaps someone should point these people to the current situation in the City of Brotherly Love. (A tragically hilarious name given the current circumstances.) If things are going so well, why would the City Council vote to make the 10 pm curfew that was in place for almost everyone under the age of 18 all summer permanent? And yet that’s what happened on Thursday and one of the Democrats who voted in favor of the measure specifically called out the city’s rampant crime rates and the threat crime poses to her own child as the reason.”

THE JOURNOLIST WAS HOPPING ON FRIDAY NIGHT: The Twenty-Seven Most Embarrassing Reactions to Taibbi Thread About Twitter Censoring Hunter Biden Tweets.

TREAT THEM ACCORDINGLY: “[T]here is increasingly no place for social conservatives in many large law firms.”

BIDEN THROWS DOWN AGAINST NETANYAHU: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is headlining a conference later this week of a group that makes no bones about its hatred for recently elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Adam Kredo reports for The Washington Free Beacon.

“Multiple sources, both within and outside the State Department, who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon said Blinken’s decision to attend J Street’s conference is part of an effort by the Biden administration to undermine the new Netanyahu government and distance itself from the incoming prime minister’s conservative coalition,” Kredo writes.

No word on whether Blinken will be accompanied by close State Department aides Winken and Nod.

HE’S A QUICK LEARNER: “I was initially skeptical of Elon Musk. After all, he has never been, or claimed to be, a conservative, and he voted not only for Barack Obama but for Slow Joe Biden. But give the man credit: he is catching on fast.”

VIDEO: The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

THE SOUTHERN OCEAN CAN BE DEADLY, AND SAILORS FEARED IT FOR CENTURIES: Viking Polaris: Passenger killed after ‘rogue wave’ hits cruise ship.

Now they send cruise ships there, totalling tens of thousands of tourists per season, but the danger hasn’t entirely been overcome.

OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Saturday night.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Rocket Lab launches subsidiary focused on national security market.

A GIFT FROM THE DEEP SEVENS: Earth’s Oxygen Came From an Unexpectedly Deep And Hot Source, Study Suggests.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: New Washington Post Communications Chief Moonlights as Board Member of Far-Left Activist Group.

THEY ALREADY KNEW ABOUT HARVEY WEINSTEIN, TOO: