Archive for 2023

September 15, 2023

THE DOWNFALL: Tolkien’s warning against a corrupted empire and what the American right can learn from it.

In Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” he uses an analogy of a smudged window to describe a person’s view of universal truth. Man, by nature, can occasionally take the beauty of faith, family, and duty for granted. His view of beauty can become blurred, his window smudged. Tolkien argues that fantasy stories can be a strong tool for removing the smudge from your window to bring back into view the light and majesty of truth.

Tolkien used his fictional stories to convey universal and religious truths about how we should live, and the American right should take a few notes from them.

There really is a Tolkien lesson for everything, whether you’re discussing religion, technology, industrialization, history, politics, or environmentalism. The themes that dance across the pages of his writings seem endless, and you may discover a new point almost every time you read.

One Tolkien story conservatives can learn from is “The Fall of Numenor.” “The Fall of Numenor” or “Akallabeth” (“The Downfallen”) is the tale of the greatest nation of men to exist in Tolkien’s legendarium, one whose material success, technological prowess, and military might were surpassed by no other nation, whether of elves, dwarves, or other men.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2023

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Is Cackles the Millstone Around the Biden Campaign’s Neck? “When Anderson Cooper asked Pelosi if she thought Cackles was the best choice for Biden’s running mate, she fell back on the old chestnut of, ‘Biden chose her.'”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green on Sep 15th, 2023

BLUE STATE BLUES: Newest Sign of California’s Decline: Pirates. “The rule of law continues to decline all across California. Today’s case in point: Oakland Bay, where actual pirates are stealing and plundering ships.”

We used to hang pirates and they went away. We gave up the practice and they returned.

More seriously, the USN and the Royal Navy once virtually eliminated pirates from the high seas. Now we can’t even keep a handle on Oakland Bay.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green on Sep 15th, 2023

I WAS JUST MUSING ON BYZANTINE CATAPHRACTS ON THE WAY TO GET MY SECOND CUP OF COFFEE: How often do men think about ancient Rome? Quite frequently, it seems. “t’s been almost 2,000 years since the Roman Empire reached the historic peak of its power. But many men still contemplate it — quite a lot. A new social media trend prompting women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome reveals that it crosses the minds of many men on a weekly basis. Even daily. Or more — to the surprise and confusion of their loved ones.” And yes, I really was.

But why is this surprising? I mean, just look at our ruling class today.

Posted at 8:28 am by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 15th, 2023

FASTER, PLEASE: The Death of Late Night as We Once Knew It Seems Imminent.

Carson’s final show was watched by 55 million people. 55 million. Let’s put that number in perspective: President Biden’s State of the Union address was watched by 27.3 million viewers earlier this year — and Biden’s address was carried by 16 different networks in primetime. Carson was live at 11:30 p.m. on just one network, NBC.

So one could only imagine what Carson would think about what late-night has become, particularly during and after the Trump presidency: hyperpartisan, pious propaganda pushed by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah and a few others. It would be one thing if these hosts hit members on both sides of the political aisle, but that almost never happens. Conservatives are not only wrong on policy, audiences have been told on a nightly basis, but conservatives are bad people with nefarious intentions, all while Democrats are treated with reverence and portrayed as purveyors of truth.

“Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine,” Colbert once said of President Trump in a 2017 monologue. “You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign-language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s (expletive) holster.”

Could you envision Carson ever getting so personal and angry?

* * * * * * * *
Kimmel, who once declared that he hoped Trump supporters would never watch his program again, has seen his viewership drop to just 1.5 million nightly. Meyers, who has the old “Late Night with David Letterman” 12:30 a.m. time slot, saw his viewership crater to under 800,000 nightly. For context, in 1984, in the same time slot, Letterman averaged 2.5 million viewers nightly.

In 2021, Matt Purple of Spectator World referred to the myriad leftist cable hosts who followed in the wake of Jon Stewart’s version of The Daily Show (a show that itself was inspired by SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment) as churning out “partisan comfort food.” In the age of a massively splintered media, the palace guard approach seemed the safest method to holding onto an audience that’s a sliver of what Johnny Carson enjoyed:

This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.

What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.

And then the writer’s strike breaks the remaining viewers’ habit of tuning into their partisan comfort food, causing those numbers to shrink even further. But in one sense, Biden’s late night palace guard is safe. In 2011 at Ricochet, TV critic Richard Rushfield explored “The Cultural Imperialism of Mad Men:”

Next March, AMC’s Mad Men will return to the airwaves after a year and a half absence. It’s return will be treated as the most significant cultural event of the year. Its stars will blanket the covers of our glossy magazines. Articles will be written in the New York Times and our most elite literary journals dissecting the show’s meaning. Banana Republic will promote its high end Mad Men line.

Mad Men at its height was watched by 2.9 million viewers. In contrast, CBS’ military police procedural drama NCIS last week was seen by 19.7 million viewers. As far as I can tell, NCIS has never been featured on the cover of any major American magazine apart from TV Guide and one issue of Inland Empire, the magazine of California’s suburban Riverside and San Bernadino counties.

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The New York Times and GQ Magazine have the right to cover whatever shows they wish and are free to bury themselves in any obscure niche they like. Our great journals still behave and write however, as though their coverage is guided not by personal preference but totally and completely by that good old objective journalistic judgement of what is important. It would be one thing if the papers (and the New York Times certainly is not alone in this) were to say, here’s our picks for the new season or what we think is the most interesting show on TV, or perhaps more to the point, here’s what we believe that the rarefied niche of upscale, urban readers that we target will be interested in reading about.

But they don’t; they still operate under the frayed pretense that they are covering the “news” of culture, giving their readers a report on what the most important developments of the day in the entertainment world. By that standard, the “flood the zone” coverage of Mad Men is completely unjustified in comparison to the information blackout on NCIS.

Similarly, the PR accolades for the late night leftists will roll on no matter what their actual audience numbers are.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 15th, 2023

“SORRY, HONEY, IT ONLY MATTERS IF THERE’S A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT.”

Posted at 7:52 am by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 15th, 2023

HARDLY ANYONE CAN AFFORD A NEW CAR ANYWAY: UAW workers launch unprecedented strike against all Big Three automakers. “The strike came after the automakers scoffed at the union’s ambitious demands for increased wages, benefits and job protections for its members. With all three automakers reporting record or near-record profits, the union was trying to recapture many benefits they had been forced to give up more than a decade ago when the companies were cash starved and on the brink of bankruptcy.”

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Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green on Sep 15th, 2023
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