Archive for 2023

MARK JUDGE: The Hollywood Stasi and their botched anti-Kavanaugh film.

A new surprise documentary recently played at the Sundance Film Festival. Justice looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The film is being sold by filmmaker Doug Liman, who kept its existence a secret for years before premiering it to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards.

The verdict is that Justice is a nothing burger, with no new evidence and even the Hollywood Reporter calling it “a nonevent.”

I haven’t seen the film, but I was approached about it by Liman late last year. I played a role in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I was in the room when she was assaulted by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh in 1982. Ford famously could not remember the time or place of the alleged incident, and her claim was rebuked by a close friend of Ford’s who Ford said had also been at the party.

I wrote a book about my experience in The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. My thesis is that the media, opposition researchers, and Hollywood form a new American Stasi, similar to the old East German secret police. They use extortion, intimidation, and threats to destroy the lives of others, ignoring any facts or evidence that point away from their narrative.

Justice is a great example. My suspicion is that Liman and his crew were working on a heavily propagandistic film for years and were not expecting my book to drop.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN HINDERAKER VS. ChatGPT.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Chip Roy Gets Maxine Waters to Denounce Maxine Waters in Amazing Exchange.

Before he addressed Waters, though, Roy stated that “I was intrigued by an op-ed that I saw not too long ago by a Democrat from Cuba commenting on one of our colleagues, an avowed socialist [AOC], and essentially pointing out the extent to which ‘democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled except its proponents promised to be nicer when seizing your business.’”

“That’s the truth,” Roy remarked. “We can talk about these terms as if they don’t matter, but they do. They do matter. They’re actually at the core of who we are.”

“I’ve got one question for the ranking member,” Roy continued, looking at Waters and then his notes. “Ranking member Waters, in a 2008 hearing you said quote, ‘and guess what, this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing, would be about basically taking over the government and the government running all of your companies,’ end quote” Roy said. “Simple question: Do you stand by that statement?”

Waters responded by first claiming that socialism was “basically a non-issue” and saying that the federal programs she was trying to protect were the same ones Roy wanted to protect.

Roy didn’t take the bait and insisted on Waters addressing the 2008 remarks he referenced where she appeared to advocate for a government takeover of the oil industry. Waters denied twice during their back and forth that she was a socialist. She later claimed she was a “capitalist” in what hilariously came across as Maxine Waters denouncing Maxine Waters when all was said and done.

Now get her to denounce her numerous calls for violence:

Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

PANDEMIC REGRETS:

I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic, every kind of reaction to it and the way it’s sort of defined our time. To me, it’s already sort of becoming an embarrassing topic, and you can feel people not wanting to talk about it…. I feel embarrassed about being a little irrational about certain topics and the politicization of every single thing that happened in that whole time period, where how people handled their own health was a political topic. And that just doesn’t make rational sense. Also, how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda. I think that will eventually feel embarrassing, or it’ll hopefully turn into something else, because I feel like there’s no end to that thought process. It makes people go a little crazy and become conspiracy theorists or just totally isolated from all of their friends.

Do tell.

21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: Can Chat GPT3 Make Pennsylvania a Red State?

Microsoft has already pledged $10 billion to optimize Chat GPT3 toward profitability. Tens of billions more dollars are coming.

The last time policymakers were presented with displacement on this scale was the globalization that decimated the American working class. The solution for Pennsylvania policymakers was to pivot the state’s economy to “Eds and Meds,” which now constitute 44% of total employment.

Those industries were chosen because spending is generated predominantly by the government, which is historically stable. To quote Ronald Reagan, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear.” Pennsylvania policymakers knew that they were making safe bets as those markets would almost always exist.

The pivot worked, with Pennsylvania stabilizing its population decline. Communities able to make the pivot, particularly in the suburbs, saw prosperity.

Once reliably Republican, the suburban voters employed by “Eds and Meds” now constitute the Democratic Party’s base. The rise of conservative populism, which pointed the finger at college-educated elites for the decline of the working class, accelerated the trend.

The reticence of suburban elites to choose Republican candidates is understandable, considering some in the GOP’s working-class base label them the enemy. For many in the working class, the contempt is personal, as they perceive the college-educated as having enriched themselves at their expense, via globalization.

But generative artificial intelligence is poised to inflict the same level of economic devastation on suburban elites as suffered by the working class through globalization. Some elites will undoubtedly find sure footing in the pending economy created by generative artificial intelligence. But many others will not.

As Glenn wrote at his Substack, “Famous writers and artists may be brands, unique enough not to be replaced by machine intelligence. But most writers and artists aren’t famous, and aren’t brands, and are hired simply to do a good enough job, cheaply enough, to meet client needs. When machines can do the job as well or better for less money, they’ll be out of work. Well, this is all good news for plumbers and auto mechanics. Their jobs are safe unless and until they can be replaced by actual robots, something that’s much further away. It’s just a lot more difficult to manipulate atoms than bits.”

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: 4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech.

An AI startup that lets anyone clone a target’s voice in a matter of seconds is being rapidly embraced by internet trolls. 4chan users have been flocking to free voice synthesis platform ElevenLabs, using the company’s tech to clone the voices of celebrities and read out audio ranging from memes and erotica to hatespeech and misinformation.

Such AI voice deepfakes have improved rapidly over the past few years, but ElevenLabs’ software, which seems to have opened up general access over the weekend, offers a potent combination of speed, quality, and availability — as well as a complete lack of safeguards.

Abuse of ElevenLabs’ software was first reported by Motherboard, which found posters on 4chan sharing AI generated voice clips that sound like famous individuals including Emma Watson and Joe Rogan. As Motherboard’s Joseph Cox reports:

In one example, a generated voice that sounds like actor Emma Watson reads a section of Mein Kampf. In another, a voice very similar to Ben Sharpio makes racist remarks about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a third, someone saying ‘trans rights are human rights’ is strangled.

It’s an unintentionally viral ad for ElevenLabs, which I hadn’t heard of before this story broke last night, and looks like a product that will have all sorts of narration and recording uses.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Tyre Nichols and the new black-cop white supremacy.

Had the officers been white, their race would have led every report on the incident. But since all were black, such reticence bought time until a new racism reporting protocol could be developed.

CNN commentator and Obama White House veteran Van Jones initiated that new protocol. Connoisseurs of academic identity politics are familiar with the nostrum that only whites can be racist, since, according to black studies ideology, racism equals power plus privilege (and blacks allegedly lack both).

But that “blacks can’t be racist” line has changed. Now we learn from Van Jones that blacks can be racist, too — at least as regards other blacks.

“It’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers black lives,” Jones wrote on the CNN website last Friday. “It is the race of the victim who is brutalized, not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

In other words: anything bad that happens to blacks is a function of racism, determined solely by the race of the victim, not by the intentions or identity of the perpetrator.

Only cops are subject to this new “the victim alone determines the reality of racism” rule, however. Those black teenagers who shoot at their gang rivals on a near daily basis and who regularly take out young black children as collateral damage are not deemed “anti-black” by the mainstream media and its academic sources.

The rest of the race industry quickly coalesced around Jones’s lopsided definition of racism, from which whiteness has been provisionally suspended (to be restored the next time a white cop is caught on videotape using force against a black suspect).

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg bellowed on The View, “‘Seems things don’t seem to make sense to people unless it’s somebody they can feel or they can recognize. But how many times do we have to – do you we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?’ Goldberg wondered during her opening screed. She followed up by claiming she wasn’t suggesting what she was clearly suggesting. ‘I’m not suggesting that. So, don’t write us and tell me what a racist I am,’ she whined.”

MARK JUDGE: The Hollywood Stasi and their botched anti-Kavanaugh film. “A new surprise documentary recently played at the Sundance Film Festival. Justice looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The film is being sold by filmmaker Doug Liman, who kept its existence a secret for years before premiering it to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards. The verdict is that Justice is a nothing burger, with no new evidence and even the Hollywood Reporter calling it ‘a nonevent.'”

OUCH: DeSantis backhands Trump with perfect comeback: I got reelected. “Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) hasn’t announced he is running for president yet. But judging by Donald Trump’s recent statements, he is living rent-free in the former president’s head.”

I’d happily support either as the nominee, but Trump shouldn’t be lobbing attacks at DeSantis. And like Trump, DeSantis knows how to punch back.