2023 HAS EXPOSED THE MORAL DEPRAVITY OF THE RADICAL LEFT:

When Hamas sent men on paragliders, motorbikes and in jeeps into southern Israel on 7 October – murdering, raping, mutilating and kidnapping as many Jews as they could find – I thought those on the anti-Israel left would be forced to reassess. Forced to rethink their years of Hamas apologism – their thinly veiled support for these Jew-hating maniacs, who they have long whitewashed as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’ in Palestine.

After all, that dark day these supposed leftists were – or rather should have been – confronted by the barbaric consequences of their own luxury beliefs. They were shown, beyond doubt, that Hamas’s genocidal founding charterwas not just talk – that Hamas was not in fact ‘dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and long-term peace and social justice in the whole region’, as one Jeremy Corbyn once put it.

But they didn’t reassess. Many leftists openly celebrated the pogrom, hailing it as a ‘day of celebration’. The Socialist Worker called on its nine readers to ‘rejoice’. Many initially giddy tweets were deleted, as the more savvy left-wingers settled in to blaming Israel for being attacked and refusing to believe women were raped. It was victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale; atrocity denial for the Twitterring, TikToking age.

These supposed anti-racists happily provided cover for the world’s oldest bigotry. Many openly engaged in it themselves. Meanwhile, these supposed anti-fascists turned a blind eye as ‘pro-Palestine’ protests turned our streets into an open sewer of Jew hatred. Genocidal slogans were chanted. Swastikas were brandished. Hate crime soared. And they just didn’t care.

Of course, some things haven’t changed much, such as hiding behind moralistic euphemisms, something the left has specialized in for almost a century: This Isn’t ‘Bibi’s War’—It’s Israel’s.

The suggestion that this military campaign is some right-wing adventure or that it is Netanyahu’s alone is insulting to Israelis, who have banded together to show that their politically divided society can act as one the instant something more important than electoral jousting demands it. Warren, Castro, Sanders, and others cannot seem to wrap their heads around the concept. They should try harder.

But they won’t.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Gov. Mike DeWine Vetoes Bill Protecting Kids From ‘Gender-Affirming Care.’

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to protect minors from experimental transgender medical interventions that are euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”

DeWine, a Republican, framed his veto of House Bill 68 on Friday as an effort to bring consensus on a divisive issue and to avoid having the government decide what medical decisions are best for children.

“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents,” DeWine said.

And yet, like the late John McCain, his fellow RINO, nothing DeWine will do will ever please the friends he desires on the left: Mike DeWine Seemed Like One of the Few Republicans Serious About Fighting COVID. He’s Not.

UPDATE: Why did Ohio voters have such a sense of Stockholm Syndrome?

https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1740805020814135450

MORE: GOP Gov Who Vetoed Trans Bills Received Over $40,000 From Children’s Hospitals Supporting Sex Change Procedures.

(Updated and bumped.)

CONSEQUENCES ARE FOR TRUMP SUPPORTERS: Charges dropped against UChicago ‘United for Palestine’ sit-in trespassers.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World.

(Classical reference in headline.)

MARK JUDGE: H.L. Mencken and the Worst Experience I Had as a Journalist.

2024 is the year to get out of journalism. The mainstream press has gone woke, which makes for very boring copy. The conservatives hire through nepotism and the buddy system and produce dull journalists. It’s all angry politics, wokeness, and celebrity stalking. There’s no real freedom. There’s no great coverage of the arts that’s the result of years of study and experience. It’s all hackery. A media crisis? It’s a catastrophe.

100 years ago, in January 1924, H.L. Mencken launched a new magazine—The American Mercury. Mencken historian Charles Mott described the Mercury: “It made an impressive appearance as a whacking big octavo in double-column Garamond-set page sheet bound in green covers. It was clearly planned for the more thoughtful reader of a free thinking sort who had fifty cents to spend on a magazine in those inflationary years. For such a reader the contents of the new review were both intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining.” They reviewed the best books and artists and challenged the prevailing social mores, all with a great sense of fun. The writing was, is, astonishingly alive.

What media product today is “intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining”? The Bulwark?* National Review? The Nation?

I recently re-read some classic Mencken, including his famous obituary of William Jennings Bryan. It was published in the Mercury in 1925 and is still fantastic: “Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest… He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

One hundred years after being written, and four decades after I first read those words as a college student in the 1980s, Mencken still remains more real, hilarious and bracing than anything I’ve read in the media in years.

* The Bulwark, of course! Just ask its founder: Hilarious! Bill Kristol Claims He Is Still a ‘Reagan Republican’ and Twitter Collapses In Giggles.

GOOD MORNING! Happy 123123!

MAYBE PUTTING THE ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION IN CHARGE OF EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN WAS A BAD MOVE: SHOCKING POLL: 30% of Gen Z thinks Osama bin Laden’s ideas were a ‘force for good’.

WELL, GOOD: ‘Trump Democrats’ helping destroy ‘Obama coalition’ of black people, Hispanics, and youth.

HARSH, BUT FAIR.

L.A. REMAINS TRAPPED IN 2020: Los Angeles And Other Blue Areas Bring Mask Mandates Back For 2024.

For most people across the country, mask mandates are a distant, hated memory. But for the remaining sane individuals in heavily populated areas like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York or parts of Illinois, they’re once again becoming an immediate, horrifying reality.

Just last month, a number of counties in Northern California reinstated mask mandates in healthcare settings.

While some of those counties limited the mask requirements to the employees working in hospitals, a few others also required patients and visitors to wear face coverings. And now those rules are expanding to the nation’s largest county, yet again.

Los Angeles County public health covertly changed their masking requirements on Friday evening, based essentially on nothing. Out of nowhere, the county now requires everyone entering healthcare facilities to wear a mask. Employees, patients, visitors…everyone. Because of a nonsensical, meaningless CDC created metric on COVID hospitalizations.

Entirely coincidentally, I’m sure: Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time.

Earlier, from Jack Dunphy: The Slow, Agonizing Death of Los Angeles. “I was born in Los Angeles and spent most of my life within its city limits. My father was born there, also, and by the standards of L.A., where most people’s roots are as deep as a tumbleweed’s, this is rather like tracing one’s lineage back to the Mayflower. About twelve years ago, while still employed with the Los Angeles Police Department, I made what was at the time an anguished decision to move my family to the suburbs. Today, the only anguish I feel about Los Angeles comes when I’m obligated to go there for some work, social, or entertainment activity, and I’m grateful these are more infrequent as the years pass.”

CAN WE EXPAND THIS TO UN OFFICIALS? ‘Not a Crime’ To Kill an Israeli Soldier, UN Official Says. But seriously, if it’s total war then let the spirits of Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay govern.

NO on CALIFORNIA’S ACA7:  Here’s our new web site.  Onward!!!

AT AMAZON, Shop the Winter Sale. #CommissionEarned

HE’S CLEARLY UNFIT: The New Rules Dictate That Biden Be Struck From the Ballot With the 25th Amendment.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows met with Biden and called Electoral College ‘white supremacy’ before barring Trump from ballot — as she reveals her home was swatted.

MAKING YOUR LIFE WORSE ISN’T A SIDE EFFECT, IT’S A POLICY GOAL: Biden Admin Targets Fridges, Freezers in Latest Slew of Appliance Crackdowns.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Degenerate Animals. “Upon re-reading this post, I realize that I may have inadvertently maligned the animal kingdom. To be clear, there is no animal species, no predator, anywhere near as cruel, as heartless, as vicious, as ignorant, as the Muslims who carried out the atrocities of October 7–and the much larger number of Muslims and Western liberals in the press, at Harvard, Penn, MIT, etc., who cheered those atrocities. No animal species has sunk that low.”

OPEN THREAD: Happy New Year’s Eve Eve.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Japan’s ispace shows off a tiny moon lander for its 2nd moon mission in 2024.

HMM: Intermittent Fasting Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to The Human Brain.

GET IN SHAPE: Yes4All Kettlebell Vinyl Coated Cast Iron. #CommissionEarned

WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL: Suicide rates for Vietnam veterans no higher than general population.

JOHN HAWKINS: How Many Load-Bearing Walls Have to Come Down Before America Collapses? “Like spoiled trust fund babies living an opulent lifestyle off the profits of a company grandpa built, but they don’t understand, many Americans (including many Americans with power) simply have never put any thought into why our society has succeeded or what makes it work.”

ALEX BERENSON: On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7: We cannot ignore the depravity of these attacks, or what they mean for women.

We cannot, but Western feminists certainly have found it easy. And this is the kind of thing they’re ignoring: “The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.”

Plus:

So. Why? Why single out women for this special abuse?

And the answer appears to be that the men of Gaza bore a particular rage for these women who lived free and secular lives – in particular the teens and twenty- and thirty-something women they captured at the Nova rave.

The freedom of these women, in particular their sexual freedom, became worthy of the most hellish punishment (un)imaginable. They were unworthy even of being vessels for children. And so they weren’t bred. Instead their sexual organs were mutilated and their bodies desecrated even as they were raped – and sometimes further after they had been killed.

It’s as if these people are a bunch of degenerate animals, which is because that’s what they are. Hamas and the — majority — of Palestinians who support them. And their western supporters — including the Western feminists who went crazy about a fictional frat-house rape that left its “victim” alive and unscarred — are utterly complicit as well.

And we’re supposed to pretend somehow that these degenerate animals aren’t degenerate animals because of a bullshit Cultural Marxist theory created by people whose goal was always to undermine Western civilization and replace it with something that looks a lot like a cross between Hamas and Stalin. Garbage ideas from garbage people who deserve to be treated like the garbage that they are, but that are instead amplified and legitimized by our academic/media/political complex, which is itself no better. It is important to make that truth utterly clear and to repeat it and throw it in their faces.

RIP: Tom Wilkinson, Oscar-Nominated Actor Known for ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘The Full Monty,’ Dies at 75. “His other film credits include playing Gotham villain Carmine Falcone in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins and former president Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma and roles in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Debt, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Belle, Sense and Sensibility, RocknRolla, Rush Hour, The Patriot, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Black Knight, Valkyrie, The Lone Ranger, Denial and Snowden. On the small screen, he also appeared in The Kennedys, The Gathering Storm and David Copperfield.”