THEY PROJECT LIKE AN IMAX: Democrats and the Media Have Spent Years Pushing Real ‘Cheap Fakes’.
Archive for 2024
June 26, 2024
WAS IT EVER IN RECENT YEARS? Biden’s Campaign Chair Admits Florida Is No Longer A Battleground State.
IF THEY DIDN’T HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Politically selective prosecution.
June 25, 2024
WE USED TO HAVE THAT SPIRIT HERE: Kenya Explodes in Violence as Protesters Breach the Parliament Building to Protest Planned Tax Increases.
Even in Tennessee, not that long ago.
RSS UPDATE: Old Feedburner feed no longer available. New RSS feed — also at the link at the top — is https://instapundit.com/feed/.
READER BOOK PLUG: From my former student turned Naval Intelligence officer and naval historian, Nathan Canestaro, The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay.
FIRE ALARM RESCINDED: ‘Squad’ Member Jamaal Bowman Loses Primary Race.
Decision Desk HQ projects George Latimer wins the Democratic primary for US House in New York's 16th Congressional District.#DecisionMade: 9:21pm ET
Follow live results here: https://t.co/friJx43L44 pic.twitter.com/XH8m3sfRY0
— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) June 26, 2024
Hopefully more of the Squad will join him in the unemployment line in the not too distant future:
Jamaal bowman has lost his election.
One down, 8 more squad members to go. Let’s get all of these losers out of Congress. pic.twitter.com/pPAMUAqkqn
— 🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 (@Travis_4_Trump) June 26, 2024
UPDATE: Jamaalcalypse Now? Live Primary Results from NY, UT, CO, SC.
UPDATE (10:01 pm):
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 https://t.co/MbIp9BjNro
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) June 26, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Child Soldiers of Ethnic Studies.
The nuclei of Middle East education at American universities are the Middle East and Islamic studies centers. There are around 50 such centers distributed across the country, depending on how you count them. Columbia University alone hosts three: the Center for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Institute, and the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies. These centers are no strangers to controversy. For at least two decades, scholars and policymakers alike have decried the centers’ whitewashing of Islamic extremism and anti-Israel bias. Yet the centers have remained mostly untouched, and a few new ones have even appeared.
Throughout their history, these centers have taken money from both the federal government and foreign governments. For instance, archived documents retrieved by the National Association of Scholars show that Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) relied heavily on foreign countries in its early days during the 1970s. Arab countries contributed two-thirds of the funding needed to help Georgetown leaders reach their $6.1 million fundraising goal for CCAS. During this same time, the foreign governments of Oman, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contributed more than $1 million for various professorships at CCAS. Today, the center is one of about a dozen Middle East National Resource Centers (NRC) that receive more than $3 million in funding from the federal government. Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies started in the 1950s with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and then-American-owned oil company Aramco. Soon thereafter, it received funding from the federal government as an early NRC. Beginning in the 1980s, the center helped secure tens of millions of dollars in funds primarily from Turkey and Saudi Arabia both for its own faculty and for affiliated programs at Harvard.
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The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Middle East Studies, along with other NRCs at the school, used federal funds in 2021 to host a critical race literacy workshop, where K-12 teachers “(Un)learn[ed] patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” The university claims on its website that the event supported “instructional goals for literacy standards for the State of Texas.” Or consider a toolkit on “Women and Gender in the Middle East” produced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Their set of readings directs students to a YouTube video of an overview of Edward Said’s Orientalism, produced by a channel called “Invictapalestina.” For those students who prefer a book, the toolkit points them to an anthology of Arab feminist writing, including by Columbia University professor Lila Abu-Lughod, who, ironically, in the past has criticized the “focus on gender-based violence” in Arab and Islamic countries as it “leave[s] aside the violence of states … like Israel.”
Middle East faculty at top universities train the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-American activists by training K-12 teachers. For instance, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies partners with Jordan-based nonprofit Global Nomads Group to host an annual fellowship program for grades 7-12 teachers. During the fellowship, teachers create curricula to teach students about the Middle East.
New Utrecht High School teacher Nathan Floro’s curriculum, to take one example, would ensure students have a “basic understanding of orientalism and be able to critique various media through a post-colonial lens.” NYU also funded Newton Public Schools teacher David Bedar, whose fellowship at NYU focused on redeveloping college-level content for high school students on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), throughout 2018 and 2019, acquired Bedar’s curriculum materials and found in a detailed analysis that the course favored the Palestinian over the Zionist narrative of the conflict by distorting and omitting facts.
Read the whole thing. As Iowahawk has said:
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China returns samples from the moon’s far side in historic 1st (video).
Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.
Lorenz—who covers social media for the Post and often complains about being targeted by online harassment—reposted multiple comments on X, formerly Twitter, defending the synagogue protesters, promoting the false allegations, and slamming the media, including her former employer, the New York Times, for failing to give the allegations oxygen. The synagogue was in fact hosting an industry expo on real estate investing in Israel, and the false claims that Adas Torah was selling Palestinian land appear to have originated from radical anti-Israel groups, including Code Pink and the Palestinian Youth Movement, according to social media posts.
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In a separate incident this week, Lorenz also defended former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray’s remarks that the media should report on “Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners,” another unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
Lorenz said this was a “claim that’s being reported all over X,” and Gray was “just asking if any U.S. papers have investigated the claims.”
“It’s not like she’s asking about some random thing, it’s been a major topic of discussion on X all day.”
9/11, moon landing, and JFK assassination trutherisms, and other conspiracy theories are all “major topics of discussion on X,” but I’m so old, I can remember when Washington Post reporters were usually a bit more discerning than that.
Meet @washingtonpost columnist @TaylorLorenz. On multiple occasions, she reposted justifications for the targeting of an LA synagogue on the false claim it was "hosting a sale of Palestinian land."
The type of person who believes it's justified to target a synagogue is also the… pic.twitter.com/IsQXH8u41l
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 25, 2024
Related:
Much as @TaylorLorenz would like to pretend this is true, there is no legitimate journalist who is reporting this. “It’s been a major topic of discussion on X all day” because this app is a cesspool of antisemitic conspiracy theories, you idiot. pic.twitter.com/tMc5mwGh19
— Melissa Weiss (@melissaeweiss) June 25, 2024
THIS IS CNN: CNN Releases Statement Downplaying Obvious Anti-Trump Bias of Debate Moderators.
“Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are well respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades combined,” started the statement.
“They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.”
Earlier Monday, CNN host Kacie Hunt abruptly ended an interview with Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said that Trump was “knowingly going into a hostile environment on this very network, on CNN, with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years and their biased coverage of him.”
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We acknowledge the importance of not judging a performance before it begins. Perhaps Tapper and Bash will prove skeptics wrong on Thursday by moderating a fair and balanced debate.
However, skepticism is warranted. Tapper and Bash are not impartial journalists on the topic of Donald Trump.
Let’s start with Tapper, who has repeatedly likened Trump to Adolf Hitler.
And who has written a book about the president organizing a “plot to steal” an election. No not that Republican president, this one:
Props will not be allowed at the debate, so unfortunately Trump cannot just bring this book to the debate and place it on his podium facing the cameras.
By the way, Team Trump, if you bring up the title, Tapper will reply the editor chose the title or some b***shit like that. Be prepared for that, and be prepared to respond that he could have objected if he didn’t like the “editor-suggested” title. No author is forced to accept an editor-recommended title.
Tapper himself chose the title because he’s a hard partisan selling to a hard partisan audience and he knew a hard-partisan title would help sell books. (Although he doesn’t really sell books.)
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To be fair though, past performance is no guarantee of future — wait, it’s CNN we’re talking about here — who am I kidding?
It’s been twelve years since the infamous moment when CNN’s Candy Crowley interjected herself into the presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, providing a live “fact check” which was, in reality, her factually inaccurate opinion.
The moment was embarrassing enough that debate commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf would later describe their selection of Crowley as a moderator as a “mistake“; she was widely criticized for both inserting herself too much into the debate and letting it get out of hand.
Well, if you thought an Obama-Romney debate could go off the rails, just wait for this week’s Joe Biden Donald Trump rematch — moderated this time around by another pair of CNN anchors, including the woman who replaced Crowley as chief political correspondent, Dana Bash. Bash and co-moderator Jake Tapper will already be equipped with advantages other moderators haven’t had, including shutting off the microphones of the president and former president in between questions.
But as Charles Cooke predicts, “Thursday is going to be the mirror image of 2020:”
“Supermajorities . . . of Americans think he’s too old,” Cooke said, “so he’s going in and he doesn’t just have to survive. . . . This therefore has created a debate where the roles are reversed. I think what . . . Trump has to do is just seem normal.
“We can talk about all of the expectations we like,” Cooke said, “but to me . . . Thursday is going to be the mirror image of 2020.
“If Trump can stand there, deliver a carefully selected set of haymakers on topics that matter to people — not the election of 2020 — on topics that matter to people, get through his answers sounding reasonably coherent, I think he wins the debate.”
The spin from the DNC-MSM Thursday night will be absolutely incredible to witness, no matter what happens.
URI BERLINER, NPR WHISTLEBLOWER, JOINS THE FREE PRESS:
Bari Weiss’ Free Press keeps getting better and better.
The business model, if you could call it that, is pretty simple: scoop up all the best of the liberal to moderate refugees from the increasingly totalitarian progressive media outlets and give them a home to do real journalism.
It’s so good that I subscribed to it even before it officially existed–back when it was Bari Weiss’ Substack. It has only gotten better since then.
Bari has just scooped up Uri Berliner, the recently fired National Public Radio Business editor.
Berliner burned his bridges with NPR by writing a piece on how the news organization lost its way in the Trump years. All of us here at Hot Air wrote something about this story, but Ed wrote the definitive piece on Berliner’s original essay.
Bari is, of course, a refugee from The New York Times, as is her wife. Uri comes from NPR. Catherine Herridge, who just wrote a piece about her struggle to protect a source, was let go from CBS.
Which of course is why Berliner being hired by the Free Press earned this snarky subhead from the Daily Beast today:
If the Beast thinks of that lineup as being on the “right,” then the Website has just done an excellent job of triangulating itself rather far in the opposite direction.
OAKLAND MORPHED INTO CHICAGO SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Defiant Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao denies any wrongdoing in 1st comments following FBI raid; “I have done nothing wrong.”
Thao blasted the raid [on] her home early Thursday morning which she said came without warning and said the effort to have her recalled from office is a waste of time and city resources.
“I want to know what probable cause the FBI has. What evidence have they collected that justifies raiding the home of a sitting mayor without notice and without the courtesy of a conversation,” said Thao. “I want to know more about the handful of billionaires from San Francisco and Piedmont who are hell-bent on running me out of office. I want to know why the day following the qualification of a recall election, funded by some of the richest people in the Bay Area, seemed like the right day to execute a warrant.”
Federal authorities have not released any details about the probe or said who is the subject of the investigation.
Thao fought back tears while saying she would not be stepping down from office.
“I will not be bullied and I will not be disparaged and I will not be threatened out of this office,” Thao said. “There are a lot of radical right-wing forces who know they will never win an election in Oakland fair and square.”
And she’s right! The last Republican mayor of Oakland left office in 1977.
As a result of Thao’s freakout: Oakland mayor’s attorney quits after being surprised by news conference.
Embattled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s attorney has resigned as her counsel after the mayor gave a press conference Monday without informing him. Tony Brass, a high-profile attorney who also represents accused Bob Lee killer Nima Momeni, was retained as Mayor Thao’s counsel late last week after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided her Oakland home.
“I have officially withdrawn as Sheng Thao’s counsel,” Brass told Bay City News, via text message.
I blame “radical rightwing forces” for his resignation.
UPDATE: Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s chief of communications resigns following FBI raid. “This comes one day after noted attorney and former federal prosecutor Tony Brass resigned as Thao’s counsel, saying he will no longer represent her just hours after she held a news conference on Monday. He told the ABC7 I-Team’s Dan Noyes he had no idea Thao was going to give that speech and that he would not have approved of the angry tone and conspiracy content.”
STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: Critical Leak: How a Spacesuit Malfunction Compromised Spacewalk 90. This flight seems plagued with bugs.
WHY IS DOD SUPPRESSING THIS INFO? The Department of Defense Inspector-General (DOD-IG) reports it is impossible to know how many U.S. tax dollars in the Pentagon budget are ending up funding Chinese military research on pathogens with enhancement potential to lethal pandemic levels.
Why? Because DOD budget tracking is a joke — that’s my term, not the IG’s — and because of a little known authority to hide unclassified information. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) are moving against that authority, the Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) provision.
BOOM: EPIC Thread Explains Why Rainbow Crosswalks Are a Thing (and Why ‘Defacing’ Them Is a ‘Hate Crime’). “DEI for local governments:”
Why is this happening? Well, a less well known program of the @HRC is their Municipal Equality index. It is to cities what the Corporate Equality Index is to companies. Well guess what – these ‘pride crosswalks’ are a program of theirs. pic.twitter.com/xhsxFLHDFa
— Noah Wall (@NoahWWall) June 24, 2024
Read the whole thing.
RICK BEATO: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse (Video).
STAY COMFORTABLE: ComfiLife Gel Enhanced Seat Cushion – Office Chair Cushion. #CommissionEarned
Warning: The following post contains harmful misinformation that is likely part of a foreign influence operation to interfere in American politics. Some readers may find it disturbing, while other readers may be too dumb to avoid getting brainwashed. Please proceed with caution.
Hillary Clinton has written a new book. Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty is due out in mid-September, roughly eight years after the author suffered a health episode and nearly collapsed on the campaign trail in Manhattan.
We regret to inform you that, per the results of a Washington Free Beacon analysis, the promotional materials for Hillary’s forthcoming book are dangerously misleading at best. The author’s photo on the cover image, for example, has been deceptively edited beyond all recognition. Our analysts were unable to verify the identity of the individual who appears in the image.
Given the appropriate caution that media outlets have taken with respect to suspicious material—including the Associated Press’s decision in March to retract a “manipulated” photo of Kate Middleton—the Free Beacon is refusing to publish the photo without including the following crucial context to enhance our readers’ ability to discern fact from fiction.
Hillary morphed into Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so slowly, I hardly even noticed:
MICROBIOME NEWS: If You Get a Lot of UTIs, Improving Your Gut Health Could Help.
#FIGHTFOR15, #UNEMPLOYEDFOR20: San Francisco McDonald’s Closes. Guess Why. “In San Francisco’s Stonestown Galleria mall, a McDonald’s franchise has been serving up the usual assortment of burgers and fries to shoppers for more than thirty years. The restaurant also created countless entry-level jobs for teens and young people. But that all came crashing to a halt this weekend when the shop abruptly closed its doors and ceased operations. You might be tempted to suspect that this was caused by the soaring crime rates and migrant issues plaguing the city, and there have certainly been plenty of those issues to contend with. But Scott Rodrick, the franchise owner, told reporters that the final nail in the coffin was the state’s move to jack up the minimum wage to 20 dollars per hour for fast food workers this year. Combined with other rising costs, he said that finally pushed them over the edge. He called the decision ‘gut-wrenching.'”