GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: The One Weird Trick Hollywood Doesn’t Want to Know About.

When The Daily Show became a runaway commercial and critical success twenty-five years ago it triggered Hollywood’s instinctive “monkey see-monkey do” response. Within a few years network, cable and later the streaming services, were immediately swamped with knock-offs of Stewart’s show. On the networks you got Colbert, Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Fallon doing Stewart’s same brand of Progressive politics married to clown-nose-on/clown-nose-off commentary masquerading as comedy. Even David Letterman spent his last few years on Network TV jettisoning the broad comedic sensibility had made him a late night staple in favor of an increasingly grating version of Stewart’s in-your-face progressive condescension. But even across the entire spectrum of free and paid TV you had a million other imitators who got their shot to do the same thing… from Samantha Bee and John Oliver to Bill Maher, Trevor Noah and now Jon Stewart again in a new incarnation on Apple TV. All of them trying to squeeze blood from an increasingly dry Progressive stone as they relentlessly carve up the same audience into smaller and smaller slices.

Now let’s compare how Hollywood responded to The Daily Show’s success to the very different reaction to the similar runaway success of Greg Gutfeld’s late night Fox News show. Perhaps you’ve heard that Gutfeld now has the most popular show in late night? Fox even bought a very expensive 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time to promote it. He is a ratings monster on paid cable, dwarfing what his progressive competitors are doing on free over-the-air network TV. And do you know how many networks, cable channels and streamers are looking to replicate Gutfeld’s success with conservative news, comedy and variety shows of their own?

Exactly zero.

Read the whole thing.

ROGER SIMON ON HYPOCRISY UNLIMITED: Hollywood’s Secret Counterfeit Vaccine Network.

My interlocutor says they began selling the cards in early April 2021. Between then and early October of that year, calls were apparently coming in every day for contraband cards.

The individual estimates that they sold at least 250 of the cards during that period. When asked whether they were afraid of the Justice Department and IRS because of this, the answer was affirmative.

The celebrities for whom this person made these counterfeits were almost uniformly liberals or progressives, at least publicly. In other words, if you asked them, they supported mandates, masks, and so forth, sometimes adamantly. Behind the scenes was another matter.

The stories this person told me were amusing, nauseating, and, in some sense, edifying all at once. We have long known that Hollywood types are some of the most hypocritical people on the planet—living large while endlessly lecturing the little folk on climate and the rest—but this may take the proverbial cake.

Many of this person’s clients, I was told, were well aware of details of the growing concerns about potential side effects of the vaccines—particularly in the reproductive area. Not surprisingly then, the person estimated 90 percent of the clients were female.

The general state of these people was described as fear and paranoia, reminiscent of the 1980 Lichtenstein-like cartoon in the LA Weekly that showed an anguished female studio executive intoning, “NUCLEAR WAR? There goes my career!”

Heh. But is it any wonder that counterfeit vaccine cards are being distributed when headlines such as this made the rounds last year as America was digging itself out of Fauci’s lockdowns? John Nolte: Fascist Law and Order: SVU Showrunner Regrets Not Blacklisting the Unvaccinated.

TIRELESS COMRADE WINSTON SMITH STILL BRAVELY TOILING AWAY IN THE MIGHTY OFFICES OF THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH! (Err, and also Amazon as well.) Roald Dahl ebooks ‘force censored versions on readers’ despite backlash.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

Having previously trashed their once excellent Prime Music app in the fall of last year, Amazon now seems deterimed to tank the popularity of their Kindle app as well for some reason. I love the Kindle’s ease of use and portability, but the Dahl story is a reminder of the importance of owning physical versions of books, music, movies, and TV series.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: The Day Your Doctor Won’t Treat You If You Aren’t the Right Kind of Patient Is Closer Than You Might Think.

THE JOURNALISTS WHO SMEARED TOM COTTON AND TARNISHED THEIR OWN REPUTATIONS OVER THE LAB LEAK THEORY:

“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”

The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a “Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists.”

Tom Nichols, a cable news “conservative” who has since been rewarded with a staff writer position at The Atlantic, approached Cotton’s comments even more scornfully. When Cotton pointed out to detractors that he had not said that the virus had originally been developed as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, and that there were several hypotheses worth exploring, Nichols responded by calling it an example of “why arguing with a conspiracy theorist rarely goes well.”

“It gives the person advancing the theory to keep repeating it ‘just as a hypothesis,’ as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he’ll repeat it, say it’s unlikely, and then say he’s just asking questions,” continued Nichols. One might wonder if such questions are worth being asked — especially by the press. But Nichols left that to Cotton, instead opting to mock the senator for doing so.

Anne Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”

In 2020, thanks to her attacks on Cotton (who was on his way to owning the New York Times that summer), the author of the 2003 book Gulag: A History was now receiving compliments from people who are very, very much pro-gulag:

In October of 2020, David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler” explored “Anne Applebaum’s Pride and Prejudice:”

Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to Applebaum’s opposition to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.

This account of Brexit, like everything else in the book, is utterly mendacious. Whatever one thinks of the “Leave” party’s case, Britain faced an authentic crisis over European Community-mandated immigration. Applebaum does not mention that Britain was inundated by 300,000 Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after those impoverished countries joined the EC in 2014, nor that Britain petitioned the EC in vain for relief from mass immigration. Democracy appeals to Applebaum only when people vote the way she thinks they should. In a textbook example of what William Empson called unintended irony, she champions the imperious, unelected bureaucracy of the European Community as the savior of democracy against alleged authoritarians who won a popular plebescite by a margin of 52 to 48 percent.

Leo Strauss ridiculed the sort of polemical caricature he dubbed reductio ad Hitlerum, and if it is possible to write a caricature of a caricature, Applebaum has managed it. She trots out Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “authoritarian personality,” that is a lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’” Along with Arendt, Applebaum quotes the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who claimed that a bias towards authoritarianism stemmed from such personality traits as repressed homosexuality. Whether one takes Arendt and Adorno seriously or not, when they used the term “authoritarian personality” they meant to reference actual supporters of Hitler and Stalin who murdered tens of millions of people.

Applebaum then substitutes the qualifier “illiberal” for “authoritarian,” expecting the reader to assume that they are the same thing. If that sounds incoherent, it is not my fault. What she means by an “illiberal” is someone who “wants to undermine courts in order to give himself more power.” This refers to Poland’s Law and Justice Party, which denied her husband Radek Sikorski a hoped-for ministerial position by the nefarious means of winning a popular election. The reader is expected to make the leap from Polish judicial reform to death camps.

Fortunately, by the following year, Applebaum was finally able to right the ship, and once again spot a true totalitarian bent on world domination:

As Robert Shibley quipped at Instapundit on July 30th, 2021, “If This is True, ‘Democracy’ Deserves it.”

THEN START CUTTING: CDC Refuses to Answer House GOP Questions About Codes to Track Reasons Why Americans Turn Down the COVID-19 Jabs. “Why won’t the CDC explain why it’s gathering data about Americans’ personal choices? House Republicans are not afraid to use the budgetary process to keep the CDC accountable to the American people.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Dear Lori Lightfoot: You Were a Terrible Mayor, Get Over Yourself. “Ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, as sure as the sun rises in the east, blames sexism and racism for her rejection at the polls yesterday.”

DECOUPLING: AirPods maker says Apple suppliers are rushing to get out of China faster than expected: ‘When can you move out?’

Behind the scenes, 9 out of 10 of Apple’s most important suppliers may be preparing large-scale moves to countries like India, which is dangling incentives to drive Narendra Modi’s Make in India initiative. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates it could take eight years to move just 10% of Apple’s capacity outside of China.

The GoerTek executive argues it’ll be far quicker.

Most Chinese tech manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure. “I would say currently 90% of them, they’re looking at that,” he added. “It’s the brand companies’ decisions.”

India is high on clients’ wish-lists — a reflection of its potential both as a market and a manufacturing base.

“We get requests from our clients almost every month. ‘Do you have any plans to expand to India?’” Yoshinaga said. “If they decide to build up the production lines in India, we may have to think about it seriously. Currently we are focusing on developing our Vietnam production facilities.”

Plus: Huawei Export Licenses Could Be Revoked by U.S. “The White House is now telling Commerce, ‘Cut off the 4G sales, the time has come to do more pain to Huawei, to try to finish their demise.'”

Positively Trumpian talk from the Biden White House.

HIGHER EDUCATION FASCISM: Protesters set fire to Matt Walsh flyers ahead of Stanford speech, Eventbrite cancels ticket sales.

“‘It’s easier to burn posters than show up and engage,’ YAF spokesperson said.”

THEY DON’T SEEM TOO UPSET WITH JOE: Iranian Mullahs Ratchet Up Threats to Kill Trump. “Armies of all kinds throughout history have invoked God’s help upon their activities in wartime, and so it’s no surprise that a commander in an avowedly theocratic regime would do so. It’s nonetheless worth noting, however, as those who are convinced that they’re fighting an apocalyptic struggle of good vs. evil are unlikely to give up easily.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: CUNY ends remedial courses as need for them rises.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: China’s CCP warns Elon Musk against sharing Wuhan lab leak report.

CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reported Tuesday morning on the warning from the social media pages of the Global Times, the English-language subsidiary of the government-controlled People’s Daily. The Global Times warned Musk that he could be “breaking the pot of China” after the Tesla and Twitter CEO responded to tweets that asserted that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan research laboratory.

The saying is akin to the idiom “to bite the hand that feeds you,” Yoon reported. Tesla has an expansive factory campus in Shanghai, and China is the electric vehicle manufacturer’s second largest market.

Nice car company you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

ICYMI: BRANNON DENNING AND I TALK ABOUT HOW THE SUPREME COURT RETCONNED HELLER IN THE BRUEN OPINION. The new opinion is certainly an improvement, but it is a new opinion and new doctrine.

Download it early and often — it’s good for us and our topic if we rise in the rankings. Thanks! (Bumped).

And thanks to everyone who’s downloaded it so far. I really appreciate you.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Lori Lightfoot Goes From Historic First to Historic Loser. “While Lightfoot focused on playing American Stasi with anyone who broke an arbitrary COVID rule, poorer parts of her city were under siege. She always seemed to be in denial about it, and that’s probably why even Democrats began to sour on her.”

THESE PRICES ARE MADE WORSE BY THE FACT THAT CUBANS DON’T HAVE MONEY: A Pound of Sugar Approaches 200 pesos ($8.30) on the Informal Cuban Market.

In the previous harvest, the production of Cuban sugar mills barely reached 480,000 tons of sugar out of the 911,000 that were planned, a failure to meet the target that caused a deficit of 60,000 tons for national consumption and seriously affected exports.

Given the disastrous numbers, the product has been even more restricted in the ration stores in recent months. “They only sold me one pound, and they say that this month it’s not my turn anymore,” a lamented a retiree this Friday, noting that she buys her basic normal basket in a place on Conill Street, in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución.

“During the Special Period (the crisis of the 90s) at least there was no shortage of sugar,” said the woman. “Many people survived those years thanks to sugar water, so now the situation is worse because we don’t even have that.” Comparisons between the current economic difficulties that the Island is going through and those suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union are frequent.

So collapse already.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE BUT COLLAPSE BECOMES INEVITABLE: ‘Stockpile food and water’: South Africa faces ‘civil war’ conditions if power grid collapses.

Western embassies including the United States and Australia have advised their citizens in the country to stock up on “several days worth” of food and water and be on high alert during extended blackouts sweeping the country.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national “state of disaster” on February 9 in response to the record electricity shortage, which has seen state-owned power company Eskom institute rolling blackouts – dubbed “load shedding” – lasting up to 12 hours in some cases.

“Rolling blackouts (load shedding) are occurring throughout South Africa which are affecting private residences, businesses, municipal lighting, traffic lights and hotels,” Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said earlier this month.

“Blackouts can also affect water availability, internet connectivity, mobile phone network coverage, fuel availability, residential security features, and food supply.”

DFAT warned power outages can increase crime. “For example, traffic jams due to power outages provide opportunities for smash-and-grab crime,” it said.

“Residences can be targeted when lights are out and security systems are not functioning. Ongoing conditions have led to increased protests and demonstrations, and in some cases, civil unrest, throughout the country.”

Here’s a lengthy and detailed Twitter thread from a South African citizen meticulously detailing a country he says already has collapsed.

This should be a bigger story and I suspect it will be shortly.

SHE HAS THE RIGHT SKILLSET FOR THIS ADMINISTRATION: Biden Taps California Official Who Oversaw Billions In COVID Unemployment Fraud To Serve As Labor Secretary.

Personnel is policy.

VICTORIA TAFT: Where Does Comedian Jon Stewart Go to Get His Lefty Credentials Back After COVID Report Vindicates Him?

THAT’S BY DESIGN: How Biden’s ‘Green Energy Economy’ is Benefiting Left-Wing Billionaires.

DEAL OF THE DAY: JUKMO Tactical Belt. #CommissionEarned

VIDEO: Dear Chinese Workers in 2023: Sucks To Be You. “The Chinese government is carefully covering up the situation of its major economic regression, so it isn’t easy to tell from the statistics how serious the situation is.”

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, Lawrence Person has done a fine job of breaking out the bullet points.

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Bob McManus: Black Democrat DA tells the truth on crime, but progressives won’t listen.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: First eggs, now *gulp* olive oil?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s Up With John Fetterman?

FROM SARAH A. HOYT:  Barbarella: The Center Cannot Hold #1

#CommissionEarned

BARBARELLA IS BACK IN A NEW STAR-SPANNING EPIC!
BARBARELLA SETS OUT ON A DESPERATE MISSION TO STOP INTERGALACTIC WAR BETWEEN GODLIKE BEINGS!
Beyond the edge of known space lies…the Unnamable. Myth? Gods? Malevolent force? No one knows. No one but the one force in the universe that can stand against the Unnameable: the Architects, hidden guides of our galaxy for untold eons.
Enter Barbarella, on a desperate quest to find and convince the Architects that a war with the Unnameable will spell the death of Every. Living. Thing.
Get ready for tension, excitement, espionage, and the secret of how to defeat an empire. Fun, romance, and cosmic adventure beyond the furthest reaches of the galaxy!

And here’s the link from Dynamite, where I believe (?) you can order paper copies.