Archive for 2023

September 23, 2023

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Celebs Rally Against ‘Book Bans,’ Ignore Real Censorship.

Here is a partial list of the actors involved in the new “book banning” statement.

Mark Ruffalo, Billy Porter, Chelsea Handler, Constance Wu, John Leguizamo, Christie Brinkley, Angie Thomas, Raquel Willis, Idina Menzel, Roxane Gay, Adina Porter, Judy Blume, Busy Philipps, Garbage, Jodi Picoult, Natasha Rothwell, Andy Cohen, Sarah Paulson, Emma Roberts, Abigail Disney, Jazz Jennings, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ian Black, Sharon Stone, Judd Apatow, Nikki Giovanni, Alyssa Milano, Bill Nye, Zooey Deschanel, Patton Oswalt, Aisha Tyler, Natasha Lyonne, Maia Kobabe, Zoe Lister-Jones, Alok and Ava Max.

How many of those stars have spoken out against sensitivity readers? Big Tech censorship? The Biden administration’s censorship regime? Attacks on comedians for telling the “wrong” jokes?

None, to this reporter’s knowledge. If that is incorrect please share the details in the comments section.

Heck, Disney tried to censor “Jihad Rehab,” a film she previously championed after the woke mob targeted it for extinction.

It’s one thing for Hollywood stars to remain silent on modern censorship. It’s gross, but we can’t force celebrities to speak out on every issue of the day, even one that directly impacts their art form.

Of course Hollywood leftists are for censorship – Communist China is a major source of foreign revenue. As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 23rd, 2023

WHY ARE LEFTISTS OUTRAGED AT THESE SWEET JAPANESE MCDONALD’S ADS? “They see a happy family.”

The radicals on the left hate the idea of a nuclear family. They’ve made it very clear on several occasions that the destruction of the nuclear family is a major goal in the reformation of the West. Their idea is that the kids that are born should belong to the state so that they can be brought up in the leftist way of thinking, not the parents who will raise them to value traditional American beliefs.

It’s an old Marxist goal. Even Black Lives Matter, led by their self-professed “trained Marxists,” had it up on its website before they quietly took it down.

What the McDonald’s office in Japan is doing is dangerous to that plan. What the radical left wants from corporations, or people with large platforms, is to carry the message of social justice either subtly or very, very directly. . . .

So when they see ads like the ones from Japan, they lose it and begin spouting off nonsense about white supremacy, antisemitism, homophobia, and whatever else they’ve been trained to say upon encountering anything that defies their narrative.

What they don’t understand is that they’re so angry because, in their heart of hearts, they want this, but they can’t let themselves have it. They’re deeply unhappy, and so in their minds, everyone else has to be too.

Given that leftist politics is basically weaponized mental illness, it’s no surprise that most angry leftists are also crazy.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 23rd, 2023

JUST NBC THE RACISM! Leslie Jones Says ‘SNL’ Made Her A Caricature Of Herself: “Either I’m Trying To Love On The White Boys Or Beat Up On The White Boys Or I’m Doing Something Loud.”

“They take that one thing [about you] and they wring it,” she says. “They wring it because that’s the machine. So whatever it is that I’m giving that they’re so happy about, they feel like it’s got to be that all the time or something like that. So it was like a caricature of myself. … Either I’m trying to love on the white boys or beat up on the white boys, or I’m doing something loud.”

Jones says a chat on the topic with a former cast member (she didn’t say who) provided additional context.

“I was talking to another cast member that retired and they said ‘But in fairness, that’s how they do all of them. Not just the Black ones,’” Jones says. “I look back and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s right, Taran Killam!’ Taran wanted to do so much other stuff, but they would only have Taran in those very masculine [roles] and singing and stuff and I said, ‘Oh! This is a machine.’”

Jones also says she understands the pressures on executive producer Lorne Michaels to keep “the machine” running smoothly.

“I used to always be like, he’s the puppet master,” she says. “So he has to make the cast happy, has to make the writers happy, he has to make the WGA happy, he has to make NBC happy. Then he has to make a family in Omaha, Nebraska, who’s watching the show happy. Imagine the strings that have to go out to him. So it’s a machine that has to work.”

To be fair, it’s nice of Lorne to give some thought to the one family in Omaha that’s actually tuning in to watch the ancient low-rated late night variety show.

Exit question: Is It Finally Time to Put ‘Saturday Night Live’ to Bed?

NBC’s best option would be to return to their roots and resume showing Johnny Carson reruns at 11:30 on Saturday nights.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 23rd, 2023

DEMOCRACY DIES IN SMEARING THE TARGETS OF YOUR ARTICLES: Washington Post Admits It Smeared Dave Portnoy Just To Get Barstool Pizzafest Sponsor To Respond.

While the WaPo’s Emily Heil cancelled her 10 am interview with Portnoy and tried to reschedule it for just before the article dropped, there was one man she was able to get in touch with — the “conscience of the food and restaurant industries!”

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 23rd, 2023

DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO VODKAPUNDIT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: N.J. restaurant at center of David Brooks’ viral $78 Newark Airport meal running $17.78 special.

After reading the results of some social media sleuthing, Hallett no longer wondered where Brooks dined.

As an X post from Rebekah Jones pointed out using reference photos showing a similar burger and tables, it looked like Brooks had purchased a burger and fries from Hallett’s restaurant, Smokehouse BBQ, located in Terminal A at Newark Airport.

From the crinkle-cut fries to the burger garnish, Hallett, seeing the additional photos, immediately made the connection.

“I knew right away,” the restaurant owner tells NJ Advance Media.

Along with the fact that food and drink will often cost more at an airport, something else was glaringly apparent to many responding to Brooks’ tweet.

The conservative columnist, who as of late Thursday night hadn’t surfaced on X since posting the message, seemed to leave out a mention of the cost of liquor … if that was indeed what was in his glass.

David Brooks hasn’t been a conservative for almost two decades. In 2016, Glenn explored “How David Brooks created Donald Trump:”

“Trump voters,” [Brooks} wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.”

* * * * * * * *

Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

To be fair, “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard” was also the motto of the man with the brilliant trouser creases whom Brooks supported.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 23rd, 2023
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