DECOUPLING: Apple Triples iPhone Production In India As Split With China Accelerates.

DAN SNYDER REACHES DEAL TO SELL THE WASHINGTON COMMANDERS FOR BILLIONS: Report. “Dan Snyder’s tenure with the Washington Commanders appears to be over after nearly 30 years. Snyder agreed to sell the Commanders to a group led by Josh Harris, the co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils for $6 billion, Sportico reported Thursday. Snyder and Harris are reportedly hoping to execute a contract in a few days. The Harris group also included billionaire Mitchell Rales and NBA legend Magic Johnson.”

HMM: Children Can Have High Blood Pressure, Too. Here’s What to Know.

THE DEMAND FOR RACISM STILL VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Fraudulent Studies Withdrawn as Professor Is Caught Faking the Racism Narrative.

SO YOU’RE SAYING THE PHRASE “OLD, WHITE MEN” IS HARMFUL LANGUAGE, EVEN VIOLENCE? Those who think positively about aging more likely to regain memory, study says.

A HEARTWARMING STORY FROM BATTLESWARM BLOG: Social Justice Karens are worst Karens.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST is for paid subscribers, but I made the free excerpt long enough that you may still find it worth reading: Thoughts On Tolerance, Virtue, and Failure: What we can learn from Lee Bollinger’s words — and actions.

JOEL KOTKIN: Rescuing Ireland won’t save Biden: The only Democratic future is post-woke.

President Biden may have received a rapturous welcome in Ireland yesterday, but Democratic strategists in Washington will have taken little notice. With next year’s election looming, they increasingly look like they are stuck with a candidate who most in the party do not want and whose poll numbers remain consistently underwater. And these foreign forays won’t do much for this. While media baths can be helpful, the key challenge for Biden and the Democrats lies not in promoting his leadership profile, but in finding ways to distance the party from the divisive agenda associated with progressive politics.

To an extent, this shift is already taking place, as leading Democrats, from Biden to California’s Gavin Newsom, start to inch away from orthodoxies of 2020. Take the movement to “defund the police”, which, observes former Clinton advisor Bill Galston, “is now over”. Even the increasingly Left-leaning USA Today admits the slogan has little support and that it is particularly resented among Latinos and African-Americans.

Well, woke politics is a luxury good for spoiled, affluent white people.

WOKE WON’T WIN WARS: The Biden Pentagon’s latest assault on the religious freedom of U.S. service members is tossing a group of Catholic priests out of Walter Reed and using Beltway Bandit staffers instead.

This is wrong on multiple counts, according to Mike Berry of the First Liberty Institute and The Right Reverend Derek LS Jones, Executive Director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. More here in my latest PJ Media column.

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: ‘Dementia Joe’ Needs Hunter to Help Him Answer a Question from… a Child?

JONATHAN HAIDT AND ELI GEORGE: Do the Kids Think They’re Alright? It’s hard to find members of Gen Z who think their phone-based childhoods benefitted them.

AMERICA MOVING TO TRUMP COUNTRY: Remember that “Emerging Democratic Majority” predicted by Ruy Texiera and John Judis in 2002? The growth of Hispanic and other non-white voting groups would inevitably turn America into a Blue nation. Well, maybe not. Turns out the implementation of lunatic Blue (but I repeat myself) policy is its own worst enemy.

Issues & Insights points to the nationwide county-to-county migration data published by the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows that “there’s a mass exodus underway, with people leaving Biden strongholds and heading to MAGA country. New Census data show that, from 2021 to 2022, more than 2 million people moved out of urban areas that are largely controlled by Democrats and relocated to exurbs and more rural areas that largely voted for Donald Trump.”

The Issues & Insights folks promise further analyses of these data are coming.

Put another way, people, including those of all ethnicities, are fleeing the high crime, high taxes, high infrastructure deterioration, high failure of public education, etc. etc. that increasingly define America’s bluest cities and suburbs. They are moving to Red states and counties, places where the word “normal” still has concrete meaning.

Correlation is not causation, but that may be a distinction without a difference when there is such a clear relationship between left-wing policy become steadily more entrenched in a community, and the subsequent decline in the quality of life that prompts population exodus to more civilized climes.

EVERYBODY IS SICK OF JOE: Biden 2024? Most Voters Want Democratic Primary Challengers. “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 39% of Likely U.S. voters believe Biden should run for reelection as president in 2024, while 48% think Biden shouldn’t run again. Another 13% are not sure. In February, only 32% said Biden should seek reelection in 2024.”

“SAFE, LEGAL, AND RARE” IS SEVERAL POLITICAL LIFETIMES AGO: Sick CNN Is Sad About 32,000 Fewer Abortions Post Dobbs.

DEAL OF THE DAY: HOMCA Cervical Pillow Memory Foam Pillows. #CommissionEarned

CHANGE: Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta.

“I’m already fired,” added a former Meta employee who worked in the company’s business division for nearly four years before most of his team was laid off this year. “But who can keep track?”

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company’s work force.

At the same time, some of Meta’s top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv.

The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Before Facebook went public, Zuckerberg rigged the share structure so that he couldn’t be ousted like Steve Jobs was from Apple 40 years ago. So no matter how deep a hole he digs at Meta, there’s no one who can tell him to stop digging.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: National Public Radio Denies Being National Or Public.

DO TELL: Cars are a ‘signifier of status’ and ‘power,’ professor says. But you’re not against status and power, professor, you just want to redistribute them at someone else’s expense.

BURIED LEDE: CNN IS ACTUALLY CAPABLE OF JOURNALISM! CNN digs up Hakeem Jeffries’ editorial defending his uncle’s anti-Semitic remarks and Louis Farrakhan.

MEGAN FOX: American Library Association Mobilizes to Intimidate Parents Into Silence. “In the clip below, you can hear an excerpt from one of the books pushed by the groomers who want to destroy children’s innocence and separate them from their families. I warn you, it’s so explicit that I had to set an age restriction on YouTube, and at the age of 46, I had never heard some of this stuff before (and wish I hadn’t).”

A GOOD PLAN: Divert DEI Funding to Make a Real Impact: The massive spending on DEISJ industrial complex does nothing to close the widening academic achievement gap, reverse the historic drop in basic proficiency levels, and instill essential critical thinking skills.

HMM: Tennessee Dem expelled for storming state Capitol reinstated. “On Wednesday, Justin Pearson, one of the two Tennessee state representatives expelled from the House for leading a gun control protest on the House floor late last month, was reinstated to the state House.”

Wait… which Justin Pearson?

LIGHTNING DEAL: COOFANDY Men’s Cotton Linen Henley Shirt. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘Pay No Attention to That Jihadi at the Mexican Border…’ “It’s yet another case where the Democrats’ reality denial is putting American lives at risk and building a body count.”

ROGER KIMBALL: The Surveillance State Is On The March.

Siegel’s brilliant if melancholy overview shows in exhaustive detail how the U.S. government, abetted by the mainstream media and what has come to be called “elite” or “ruling class” opinion generally, has repurposed surveillance tools developed to combat terrorism and turned them against the American people.

I know that sounds dramatic.

It’s actually an understatement.

We have been vouchsafed glimpses of life behind the curtain for a while now.

Siegel focuses mostly on developments in the United States.

But it’s worth noting that the story he unravels is an international concession, proceeding, for example, with initiatives such as the Davos-inspired “Great Reset.”

I have written about various aspects of the phenomena that Siegel aggregates in his sinewy and alarming essay.

For example, I wrote about Matt Taibbi’s exposé of “Hamilton 68,” a shadowy group of anti-Trump activists who succeeded in publicly branding anyone or anything they didn’t like as emanating from “Russian disinformation.”

“Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes,” Taibbi notes, “Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.”

Simply in terms of volume, Taibbi estimates that Hamilton 68 “may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.”

Virtually every major news organization in America was involved: NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Even fact-checking sites such as Politifact and Snopes, Taibbi notes, “cited Hamilton 68 as a source.”

The people at Hamilton 68 simply targeted individuals they didn’t like, individuals such as Devin Nunes, Mike Flynn, Tulsi Gabbard, or Donald Trump—and then smeared them as witting or unwitting stooges of Vladimir Putin.

The whole scheme, Taibbi shows, was a splendid example of “digital McCarthyism, taking people with dissident or unconventional opinions and mass-accusing them of ‘Un-American activities.’”

But Siegel shows this was the but the tip of the censorship iceberg.

They mean to rule unchallenged.