Archive for 2024

YOU CAN’T MOCK THEM ENOUGH:

Robin DiAngelo is a grifter who has made millions off a hateful book titled White Fragility. She is one of the left-wing “anti-racists” who were interviewed by Matt Walsh in the Daily Wire film Am I Racist?, which opened yesterday and which I reviewed at the link.

Walsh’s interview of DiAngelo is one of the film’s highlights. She has no idea who Walsh is, and he introduces himself as “Matt.” You can’t be too careful these days, she says. The high point of the interview is when they talk about reparations, which DiAngelo favors. It happens that a member of the film crew named Ben is black. Walsh calls him on camera and gives him $20 (I’m going from memory here) as his own personal reparations. He then asks DiAngelo whether she will do the same.

By this point, DiAngelo is visibly uncomfortable, but her ideology gives her no easy out. So she digs in her purse, finds $30, and gives the $30 to Ben. DiAngelo (like the other “anti-racists” who agreed to appear in the documentary) got paid–in her case, $15,000 for what couldn’t have been more than an hour or so of her time. Talk about price gouging!

During each of the interviews of “anti-racists,” the amount that the production company paid the interviewee is shown on the upper left of the screen. When DiAngelo gives Ben–who manages to keep a straight face–her $30, the amount on the screen ticks down to $14,970. It is a hilarious moment.

When word of DiAngelo’s humiliation began to spread, she deleted her social media accounts. Then she issued a statement about her experience.

In a note on her website titled “About That Film,” the “White Fragility” author says the “sequence of events” that ended with her taking $30 out of her purse to pay reparations to a black producer on set was “unsettling,” and that she figured out she “had been played” before the trailer for the film was released in July.

“After reviewing the sequence of events and discussing it with colleagues, I realized that they had lied about their agenda and I had been played,” DiAngelo says.

But what was the lie? DiAngelo doesn’t say. In fact, there was no lie: DiAngelo was asked whether she would appear in a documentary on anti-racism, and she said she would do so for $15,000. What she means, apparently, is that she is too fragile to be interviewed by anyone but a fellow left-winger.

Exit question: How did Robin DiAngelo get away with it for so long? “This is the irony of the white shame that is so à la mode in cultural circles: it hides a new species of white pride, where educated whites fancy themselves as morally superior to both unlearned white people and pained black people. The former they must enlighten, the latter they must repair.”

Related: The ‘conservative Michael Moore’ taking on the ‘crazy’ diversity industry. “Matt Walsh has been described as the Right-wing Michael Moore, a satirical filmmaker who invites people to walk into a trap of their own construction.”

A SULZBERGER ELEGY: We Don’t Hate the Liberal Media Nearly Enough.

It’s been “a DNC proxy outlet” for quite some time — the last Republican the New York Times endorsed for the White House was Eisenhower in ’56. But Democrats have been comparing Republican presidents and presidential candidates to National Socialists since over a decade prior to that, all the way to the Gray Lady’s latest reactionary gesture.

Related: Fatality! JD Vance Takes Zero Prisoners Owning Dana Bash During Back and Forth on Springfield, OH (Watch).

ROGER KIMBALL: On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. The debate last week on ABC was, from one point of view, a dog’s breakfast, but, from another, it was a mesmerizing exercise in vertiginous, pseudo-Nietzschean legerdemain.

As has become widely recognized, the debate was really a sort of ambush in which the execrable immoderators blatantly took sides, constantly “fact-checking” Trump with erroneous objections while letting Harris slide with a steady stream of lies emitted according to the fixed convention of Democratic talking points.  As I said at the time, the real loser in that exchange was ABC News, whose credibility is now in the gutter.

Various public-spirited people, from media stars like Laura Ingraham to ordinary citizens with an X account, have come forward to provide inventories of Harris’s—and the moderators’—lies.  One of the most complete was provided by @BelannF, who posted this useful inventory in paratactic summary:

Project 2025 – Lie

National abortion ban – Lie

“Very fine people” hoax – Lie

Will be a Dictator – Lie

Blaming Trump for Afghanistan- Lie

Racism and division by Trump – Lie

Never said she will ban fracking – Lie

Rally goers leaving early – Lie

“I will go over my plan” – Lie

Police died on Jan 6th – Lie

“Bloodbath” comment – Lie

Trumps stance on IVF – Lie

Won’t take guns – Lie

Trump weak on foreign policy – Lie

Trump friends with Putin, Un – Lie

Trump inciting Jan 6. – Lie

No military in combat zones – Lie*

She provides no sources for these assertions, but you can look them up in a nonce. I’ll go first with three to get you started. Early on in the evening, Harris angrily recycled one of the most thoroughly “debunked” (i.e., refuted) claims: that Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides at the neo-Nazi demonstration at Charlottesville.  Here’s a video clip of his remarks. Far from describing the thugs as “very fine people,” he castigated them in the strongest terms.  Then why is this lie so frequently recycled?  Perhaps it is a political application of the old adage repititio mater memoriae: “Repetition is the mother of memory.”  If you repeat a lie often enough people come to believe it, or half believe, or at least wonder about the veracity of its contrary.

Harris also claimed that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he were not elected.  But what he actually said was that the auto industry would face a financial bloodbath if the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies were enacted.  And so they would.

Perhaps my favorite lie was her claim that there were no active-duty American military personnel in a war zone at present. Anyone who reads the news knows that is not true, as these American soldiers testified with refreshing candor.

What has been fascinating to watch is how the post-debate consensus has evolved.

Read the whole thing.

* Watch: The Best Fact-Check of Kamala Harris in History, and You’ll Never Guess How It Ends (language alert):

Related: ABC News Is Perplexed: Why Isn’t Kamala Harris Getting a Post-Debate Bounce? The Answer Is…

HEY, SPEAKING OF CRAZY CAT LADIES: Kamala Harris’ new climate director said she is hesitant to have children because of climate change threats.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign hired a new climate director who has frequently said the effects of climate change are part of what’s stopping her from having children.

Camila Thorndike, who previously worked in the Senate managing the climate portfolio of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was given the title of climate engagement director for the Harris for President campaign in September 2024, according to her LinkedIn page.

Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Thorndike said on several occasions that she considers climate change a factor when deciding whether to have kids.

“I was 15 when I first saw the climate ‘hockey stick’ graph. I realized that this skyrocketing arrow of temperature would take place in my lifetime. All of the big milestones of life that I was looking forward to would be in the context of this big global crisis. It led to the question of whether or not to have kids – which is still a big question for me – where I would put down roots, what my family would do,” Thorndike said in 2018 when she was the D.C. campaign director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Again in November 2019, Thorndike described it as an “ethical question that keeps me up at night.”

“I have always been someone who enjoys children and loves the idea of a family, and that’s why I have wrestled with this, because my logical mind and the facts of the future I can see bearing down on us are not supportive of the life I would want for them,” she told Yahoo News at the time.

Curiously, this doomsday loop has been around since 1970 (1968, if you include Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb into the equation, and you should), and yet somehow, the Final Countdown never quite arrives:

You should see how the media went out of its way to terrify people during the previous decade (when global cooling was all the rage):

As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2018 on the Blueanon left comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.

Eventually, the doomsday mindset started to have a result among the true believers, as I wrote in a post at EdDriscoll.com in 2011 headlined “In Search of the Missing Frisco Families.” San Francisco, on its way to becoming Detroit by the Bay, was concurrently “becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines,” as a headline at the San Francisco Examiner noted in 2011. Three years prior, in an effort to save the planet, the puritans at the San Francisco Chronicle explored how readers could throw “less-is-more birthday parties:”

Forget the twisty straws, Tootsie rolls and Dora the Explorer plates with matching cups, hats and tablecloth. There are signs that more parents would like to.

Anxious about the economy, global warming and our national image as people who would rent a limo for a kid’s party while a polar bear’s ice floe melts, many are toning down the trappings of that classic annual ritual, the blowout birthday party. They are saying no to plastic toys and water bottles, paper plates, gift wrap and new toys. There is even a modest backlash against the goody bag, the sack of candy and plastic knickknacks usually thrust into each sticky hand at the end of parties.

* * *

“There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” said Sarah Lane, a founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values. “You should see what gets thrown away. It’s disgusting.”

Trust me, there are numerous things more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party in San Francisco.

On the flipside, the Politico warned its readers in April about — I hope you’re sitting down for this! — The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.

This just in: religious people seek to make babies!

UPDATE: In addition to everything else going wrong in the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy spent his timeout as Spock absolutely terrifying the nation:

UPDATE (9/15/24): The enviro-leftists at the L.A. Times have a similar mindset:

SPACE: Crew Dragon splashes down to conclude Polaris Dawn mission. “A Falcon 9 launched the Crew Dragon spacecraft into an elliptical orbit Sept. 10, initially placing it into an orbit of about 190 by 1,200 kilometers. Dragon raised its orbit later in the first day of the mission, reaching an apogee of 1,408.1 kilometers, according to SpaceX. That marked the highest altitude on a crewed Earth orbital mission and the highest altitude by any crewed mission since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972. . . . The highlight of the mission was the first commercial spacewalk, which took place on Sept. 12. All four crewmembers wore SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits as the cabin was depressurized. Isaacman and Gillis briefly exited the hatch in the nose of the Dragon spacecraft in a “standup” spacewalk, testing the performance of the suits.”

SOMEONE NEEDS TO START PRESSURING BANKS NOT TO DO BUSINESS WITH LEFTY ACTIVISTS: Climate Nazi Alert: Banks Urged to Stop Financing Livestock Production. “Over 100 climate groups are pressuring JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and other private banks to stop financing global meat and dairy companies. Agriculture Dive Dot Com says the institutions’ lending activities undermine their environmental commitments. An open letter from groups led by Friends of the Earth to some of the world’s biggest banks calls for a halt on any new financing that expands industrial livestock production and to add requirements that meat, dairy, and feed clients disclose their climate action plans. The letter calls out the banks by name for supporting the world’s biggest meat, dairy, and animal feed producers like JBS, Tyson Foods, and others.”

OPEN THREAD: Happy Saturday.

LEO BEATS GEO: United Airlines bumps GEO operators off fleet for Starlink Wi-Fi.

United, which has more routes across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans than any other airline, plans to offer passengers high-speed, low-latency Starlink Wi-Fi for free.

“Everything you can do on the ground, you’ll soon be able to do onboard a United plane at 35,000 feet, just about anywhere in the world,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement.

According to United, supported Starlink services would include live streaming, gaming and the ability to connect multiple devices at once under one user.

On the one hand, yay, progress. On the other hand, I usually don’t even connect to existing aircraft wifi because I enjoy reading my book in peace.

NOT JUST AT COLUMBIA: Bill Barr: Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia.

UPDATE: There is some news in Barr’s post. His law firm is represent two Columbia custodians who were held against their will by the Hamasniks who took over a building last Spring. I hope the firm is suing not just Columbia, not just the students who directly held the custodians, but all of the students involved in the takeover as co-conspirators.