Archive for 2024
March 2, 2024
MATT TAIBBI: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage.”
“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”
Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.
White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading, is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America:
The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
As Taibbi writes, it’s one of the left’s oldest tropes, and it’s reoccurred on a regular basis since the late 19th century, as American “Progressives” search for their own hoarders and wreckers as scapegoats to demonize. Fortunately, today’s Kulaks know how to culture jam: Conservatives on Twitter Send a Message to Leftists by Taking Over #WhiteRuralRage Hashtag.
I got cow kisses on my walk this morning.
I guess that's part of the whole #WhiteRuralRage thing.
🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋— 𝓐𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓷 𝓡𝓪𝔂 42 (@2CynicAl65) March 1, 2024
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO?! Axios: Hunter Biden’s Sobriety will Save Democracy.
Hunter takes his narcissism to a new level during the interview. He claims he has to stay sober to save democracy. He wants to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and that, in his mind, will save democracy.
Hunter knows his father, who is running for re-election, is worried that his addict son may relapse because mean Republicans are attacking the Biden men. Joe Biden is worried about Hunter’s legal problems. So, Hunter is doing all he can to stay clean and sober. He doesn’t want his drama to be a reason that Trump wins the election in November.
“Most importantly, you have to believe that you’re worth the work, or you’ll never be able to get sober. But I often do think of the profound consequences of failure here,” Hunter said.
“Maybe it’s the ultimate test for a recovering addict — I don’t know,” Hunter Biden said. “I have always been in awe of people who have stayed clean and sober through tragedies and obstacles few people ever face. They are my heroes, my inspiration.”
He added that in this case, “I have something much bigger than even myself at stake. We are in the middle of a fight for the future of democracy.”
Wow. What an ego. Like other Democrats who claim that a Trump win will be the end of democracy in our constitutional republic, he doesn’t bother to give specifics. It’s a Democrat talking point and they are sticking with it.
As Jim Treacher quips, “Hunter Biden, who claims to be clean and sober, says his newfound clarity is crucial to the future of democracy. So just imagine how grandiose he is when he’s on drugs.”
Related: Huge: Joe Biden Contradicts Hunter Biden’s Testimony.
REPORTER (@stevennelson10): "You didn't have dinner or lunch [with your son's business partners]?"
BIDEN (lying): "No!" pic.twitter.com/GV7SnjISXv
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 2, 2024
“The problem is that Hunter testified exactly the opposite on Thursday. Hunter confirmed that he accompanied then-Vice President Biden on Air Force Two to Beijing, where he introduced his father to business partner Jonathan Li, and Joe subsequently wrote a college letter of recommendation for Li’s son.”
NANCY ROMMELMANN ON PORTLAND’S HANGOVER FROM THE SUMMER OF LOVE: Drugs 1 – Oregon 0.
When I moved to Portland in 2004, the junkies in downtown’s Pearl District, romanticized in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, had been replaced by farm-to-table restaurants and a flagship REI store. Portland was on the up, a media darling poised to become the next great American city.
Then came the record scratch that was 2020.
With the nightly riots in Portland entering their seventh month and the air ringing with chants of “DEFUND THE POLICE!,” citizens were asked that November to vote on Ballot Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act. Offering addicts a soft landing rather than jail time – those possessing and using hard drugs in public would face no penalty other than a possible $100 citation, waived should the user voluntarily enter drug treatment – was in step with the year’s anti-carceral mood. Its passage would also give Oregonians the distinction of being the first state in the nation to fully decriminalize drugs.
Dozens of organizations supported Measure 110, from the editorial board of The Oregonian to the Oregon ACLU. Harm reduction advocates saw Measure 110 as a “humane, effective approach that will save lives” and a positive step toward granting bodily autonomy to those who chose to do drugs. Portland’s newly elected progressive district attorney Mike Schmidt said Measure 110 “sends a clear message of strong public support that drug use should be treated as a public health matter rather than a criminal justice matter.”
Measure 110 passed with 59 percent of the vote.
Flash-forward to 2024:
Huge shoutout to @AlexanderSoros, @ChanZuckerberg, and @DrugPolicyOrg who spent so much money to get a bill passed that killed hundreds and was immediately regretted by everyone. https://t.co/bTapPceyXA
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) March 2, 2024
READER FAVORITE: DMoose Weight Lifting Grips – Gym Grip Straps with Rugged Anti-Slip Technology. #CommissionEarned
OLD AND BUSTED: Lebensraum.
The New Hotness? Leidensneid! Neo explores the topic of “Victim Envy:”
Jillian Becker writes of a phenomenon she calls Leidensneid. It’s a word she made up, one of those composite German terms that combine two other words, in this case “leiden” (to suffer) and “Neid” (envy).
Leidensneid is a part of virtue signaling and is particularly rampant on the left these days. But it’s been around for much longer than that. Becker, who previously wrote a book about German leftist terrorists of the 1960s, writes that back then:
… [M]ost of the tens of thousands who marched with anti-West banners in West Berlin—or the hundreds of thousands in all the university cities of Western Europe—were not ideologically Marxist, nor wanting victory for the Communists in the Cold War. What those well-off, well-fed, well-educated sons and daughters of the free world wanted was to be seen as voluntary co-sufferers with the wretched of the earth; to qualify by their gestures for membership of an imagined community of underdogs.
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“To provoke the fascist out of the police” was one of the declared purposes of the West German protest movement; and though most of its members had been born after the Second World War, they were, they maintained, still having to combat Nazism. As evidence that the liberal democracy of the Federal Republic was not very different from the Third Reich, they pointed to the many persons in positions of authority who were erstwhile Nazis, and claimed that they, the young protestors of 1968, were “up against the generation of Auschwitz.” In crowded public meetings and in interviews with the press they would often say, “We are the Jews of to-day.”
And yet these German terrorists of the 60s had little use for the Jews either, foreshadowing our present union of left and Jew-hatred:
The notorious terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, when she herself was in custody and giving evidence at the trial of a comrade, declared that the Nazis had been right to kill the German Jews because they were capitalists (“were that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews”). She insisted, however, that she was anti-Nazi and had fellow-feeling for the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. In sum, she considered it wrong to kill Jews genocidally as a “race enemy,” but not wrong to kill millions of them as “class enemies.”
When the German police recently arrested an alleged member of the Baader-Meinhof Group, now age 65, I was reminded of the stunt casting of the 2008 German film The Baader–Meinhof Complex, which co-starred Bruno Ganz, Heino Ferch, and Thomas Thieme, who had previously portrayed Hitler, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann in 2004’s Downfall, as the German authorities doggedly pursuing the far left Baader–Meinhof Gang. I knew those terrorists had the desire, as Neo quoted Jillian Becker above, “to provoke the fascist out of the police,” but it’s good to see this warped ideology given a name. Or as Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 2009 review of the film:
It doesn’t take long for the sinister ramifications of the “complex” to become plain. Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and “action” become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a “Red” resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts. (The gang bought its first consignment of weapons from a member of Germany’s neo-Nazi underworld: no need to be choosy when you are so obviously in the right.) There is, as with all such movements, an uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty, and between casual or cynical attitudes to both. As if curtain-raising a drama of brutality that has long since eclipsed their own, the young but hedonistic West German toughs take themselves off to the Middle East in search of the real thing and the real training camps, and discover to their dismay that their Arab hosts are somewhat … puritanical.
Which brings us back to Neo’s post. Read the whole thing, which takes victim envy to its “unexpected” 2024 conclusion.
PANDORA’S BOX: American TV at the Crossroads of the Streaming and Cable Wars.
My review of Peter Biskind’s new book on the last quarter century of the TV wars, and where streaming goes from here, over at EdDriscoll.com.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: University of Florida eliminates DEI office, DEI positions and DEI contracts.
HOW SWEDEN PROVED THE WORLD WRONG ABOUT LOCKDOWN:
Certainly, Sweden did not do everything right during the pandemic. The government itself admitted that in 2022, when it concluded its inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. However, Sweden did manage to succeed in a few key areas where other nations failed spectacularly. Notably, it did not panic during the crisis. It considered how its policies would impact society as a whole. It did not just focus on limiting cases of Covid. And it did not ignore the potential long-term effects of lockdown. Above all, it recognised that the pandemic policy of China’s authoritarian government should not have served as a guide for a liberal democracy.
Of course, our study isn’t perfect. We could never possibly cover every single health aspect or economic indicator. And yet our analysis does reveal some cold, hard facts about the real cost of lockdowns. The burden is now on the pro-lockdown camp to prove that their disastrous policies were worth it.
As John Tierney wrote here in August, “Sweden’s ‘Laissez Faire’ Pandemic Policies Paid Off. Sweden, which the media denounced in 2020 as a ‘pariah’ and a ‘cautionary tale’ because it stayed open and and told its citizens not to wear masks, has come through the pandemic with the lowest rate of excess mortality in Europe, as Johan Norberg shows in a Cato Institute report. All the more reason its public-health leaders deserve a Nobel Prize.”
Not surprisingly, John’s post was titled, “Why the Media Doesn’t Talk About Sweden Anymore.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Dickies Men’s and Women’s Apparel. #CommissionEarned
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Communist group disrupts Timothy Snyder’s Yale lecture, forces evacuation.
Snyder is a historian specializing in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, and he has been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine’s resistance effort since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. His class focuses on Nazi and Stalinist regimes in the mid-twentieth century.
The demonstrators walked into the back of class and held up signs while Raymond Lotta, the group’s leader, declared, “No class as usual today!” Lotta called on Snyder to condemn the United States for its support of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza and accused him of “brainwashing” students with “anti-communism.”
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Lotta continued to shout while other demonstrators stood in place and held signs such as “Where’s Snyder’s moral outrage over US backed genocide in GAZA?” and “Hitler killed 6 million Jews and Stalin saved 1.6 million Jews.”
After five minutes of shouting, students and Snyder began filing out of the classroom. Shortly after, Lotta and his group were escorted out of the building by Yale security.
Speaking to the News afterward, Lotta called the demonstration a “success.”
“This was meant to be a jolt,” Lotta said. “We wanted to be dramatic and stir students up. This is a challenge for Snyder to debate me on the past and future of the Communist revolution.”
Why is Yale such a hotbed of white supremacy? Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”
As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”
SHE’S NOT WRONG: MTG rips GOP ‘hypocrites’ in abandoning Jan. 6 riot suspects.