THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Stuck Out on the Border Edition.

KEEP ROCKIN’! L.A. Times Columnist To People Leaving California: Don’t ‘Insult’ The Hellhole On Your Way Out.

Are you packing up and leaving California because you can’t get a burger without having your car stolen?

Just remember to not insult California after the U-Haul hits the Nevada, Arizona or Oregon borders.

That’s the message that was published Saturday by Los Angeles Times’ (which laid off 20% of its workforce on Tuesday) letters editor Paul Thornton.

“To the people leaving California: May the road rise to meet you as you seek better lives in new places. Now, can you please extend some goodwill to those of us who remain?” Thornton wrote in Saturday’s column titled, “Commentary: If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.”

As for the rest of flyover country, it’s apparently fair game at the L.A. Times (or what’s left of it) to make sclerotic comparisons of it to occupied Europe during WWII, complete with a photo atop the column of a Nazi with a machine gun: Commentary: What 2024 in America has in common with Norway in 1940.

I was sitting in our apartment in Glendale, but I may as well have been on another planet that day in 1993.

My grandmother, helping me with a sixth-grade report, was vividly recalling the depredations of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II: the rationed bread filled with sawdust, the teachers disappeared from their classrooms, the tantrum she threw on a train to thwart her older sister’s arrest by a German officer. Decades after the war, these details came to her with riveting clarity, even though she was barely a teenager when the occupation ended in May 1945.

I recall plenty from that interview with my mor mor (Norwegian for “mother’s mother”), including harrowing tales of resistance. But in 2024, with American democracy frayed and misinformation running rampant, what haunts me more than anything she said is the story of her family’s utter disbelief when the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940.

Her story makes me wonder how we’ll react if America should tip into authoritarianism. Will we be able to recognize it?

—Paul Thorton, the L.A. Times, January 13^th.

Related: Woke L.A. Times Columnist is Shown No Mercy After Announcing Her Layoff on Twitter.

Yo, @jeanguerre, who called me a “white supremacist,” you’ve been canned by the broke @latimes. Bet your equally bigoted, but black colleague, @Erika_D_Smith, who called me “the black face of white supremacy,” still has a job. She’d pull out the race card in a L.A. minute.#DEI pic.twitter.com/N3fAvUXxdt

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) January 24, 2024

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professors rip Haley’s, Ramaswamy’s ‘colorblindness’: gives credence to white supremacy.

JAMES PIERESON: “Shattered Consensus” revisited.

Like most, I did not foresee the rise of Donald Trump, who had announced his candidacy just a month before Shattered Consensus was published. No one in the establishment of either party took him seriously, though the same could not be said of Republican primary voters and a significant swath of independents and conservative Democrats—many of whom were happy to give the upraised middle finger to leaders in Washington.

Trump outdid Obama by challenging the post-war consensus with regard to foreign policy, criticizing trade with China, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the failure of European nations to ante up for their own defense. More importantly, Trump countered Obama by charting a cultural revolution of his own in response to the “diversity” revolution. Many in Washington and in the press claimed that Trump’s campaign was “unfair,” as, in their view, Obama’s revolution was legitimate while Trump’s was not.

The Washington establishment, which generally accepted Obama’s agenda, did not take kindly to Trump’s more fundamental objections to the post-war order or to his defense of the political and cultural claims of those white voters across the country who were expected to step aside peacefully as Obama’s diversity coalition took their place. Democrats in Congress, with the assistance of officials in the fbi and the Justice Department, did what they could to sabotage Trump’s presidency and drive him from office. They had some success in that enterprise, though at the expense of alienating seventy million voters across the country who cast ballots for Trump in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump has not gone away, as officials in Washington hoped—and expected—he would. This year he is looking to finish what he started in 2016. In light of recent polls, he may succeed.

Trump’s presidency and the opposition to it, along with his presidential campaign this year, has provoked a “legitimacy crisis” in the United States in which millions of Americans have lost confidence in key institutions, including the federal establishment in Washington, leading universities, and the mainstream news media. Obama’s diversity coalition continues inadvertently to threaten those same institutions from a different direction by undermining their legitimacy—see Claudine Gay—thus intensifying the crisis. What happens when a majority of the population loses confidence in the legitimacy of the political order? Will they still send their sons and daughters into the military? Will they still make sacrifices to fight wars in foreign countries, or to support wars like those taking place in Ukraine and Israel? Will they still accept the judgments of courts of law? At some point they may stop paying their taxes. The United States is beginning to look like an “administered” polity that does not have the support of its population.

See also: It Is Not Texas That’s Defying the Law — It’s Biden.

IT’S TIME TO ADMIT THE SHUFFLEBOARD TOURNAMENTS ON THE TITANIC ARE THRIVING:

Shot: It’s time to admit the economy is thriving.

—Business Insider, December 31st.

Chaser:

In an internal email this morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff pic.twitter.com/VY6HIt7ktc

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) January 25, 2024

HOW’S THAT RECRUITMENT CRISIS GOING? No diploma? No problem! Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Virgin Galactic launches 1st Ukrainian woman to space  —  and 3 others  —  on Galactic 06 suborbital flight (video).

IT’S LIKE A WHITE JURY AND A BLACK DEFENDANT IN 1940S ALABAMA: Jan. 6 lawyer says suspects ‘can’t get a fair trial’ in DC.

That prejudice alone is grounds for pardons from some future president who cares about justice.

JAMES LILEKS: The Extraordinary Ordinary of Traveling.

NIALL FERGUSON: THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS.

It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.

Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.

Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.

Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff:

Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?

Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?

Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”

Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!

Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.

Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome.

Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation. For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.

Related: An ‘Eichmann Trial’ for Hamas’s Crimes. “The Oct. 7 version of Holocaust deniers have come out of the woodwork already, existing as they do in a postmodern world of ‘living your truth.’ The library of evidence that Israel is currently building is the proper antidote to the lobotomizing poison of such a world.”

HAHA:

Oopshttps://t.co/ddldcxkeqV

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) January 27, 2024

IF YOU WANT AVERAGE PEOPLE TO GO TO COLLEGE, COLLEGE STUDENTS WILL BE AVERAGE PEOPLE: College students aren’t all that smart: IQ average falls to 102.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today.

Before Hamas, they were smashing windows for abortion, BLM and Occupy Wall Street, and against the Iraq War and to protest the World Trade Organization. Some of the same men in black who are smashing Starbucks windows now for Gaza were smashing them back in Seattle in the WTO protests of 1999. Before too long they’ll need to retire and collect Social Security.

A quarter century of smashing Starbucks windows clearly has nothing to do with Gaza.

They don’t care about black lives, the lives in Gaza or Iraq, or the lives of the poor: these are just the pretexts that provide them with moral superiority so they feel justified smashing things.

The pro-Hamas riots are a carbon copy of the BLM riots. Like the eco-terrorists, who have taken to vandalizing classical art in museums, their goal isn’t persuasion through awareness, it’s terrorism. They block traffic, airport holiday travel and holiday events for whatever cause happens to be trending at any given time. Few of these leftists have any real sense of what Hamas is, fewer still know who the Houthis are, but they’ll still scream about an ‘Intifada.”

What they actually want has less to do with Gaza than with right here at home.

“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism,” Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum, which receives funds out of Communist China and has been linked to many of the pro-Hamas protests, promised.

As David Horowitz frequently reminded us, sixties radicals preached that, “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read the whole thing.

SHOCKER: DHS knew risks of mail-in voting but continued censoring concerns anyway: Lawsuit.

AT AMAZON, Shop the Winter Sale. #CommissionEarned

LEARN TO CODE: Mass Layoffs at LA Times and Taylor Lorenz Worries About the Trend.

Flashback: The Coming Symbolic Analyst Meltdown.

Related (From Ed): As America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2021: Laid-Off Journalist Trying To Learn To Code Horrified To Discover The Code Is Binary.

DEVON ERIKSEN:  Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1.

#COMMISSIONEARNED

At the frozen edge of the solar system lies a hidden treasure which could spell their fortune or their destruction—but only if they survive each other first.

Marcus Warnoc has a little problem. His asteroid mining ship—his inheritance, his livelihood, and his home—has been hijacked by a pint-sized corporate heiress with enough blackmail material to sink him for good, a secret mission she won’t tell him about, and enough courage to get them both killed. She may have him dead to rights, but if he doesn’t turn the tables on this spoiled Martian snob, he’ll be dead, period. He’s not giving up without a fight.

He has a plan.

ELITISM MARCHES ON: SCOTUS Law Clerk Signing Bonuses Hit $500,000. “The clerks are like many former aides across Washington — whether on Capitol Hill, at regulatory agencies or in the White House — whom law firms value because of their time spent in proximity to power and relationships with influential officials.”

BOOK REVIEW:  Theft of Fire

MORE LIKE THIS:  Major donor to Cornell pulls funding, demands firing of university president.

ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION:  Biden’s EPA Planning to Ban Methylene Chloride, an Industry-Essential Chemical.

Really, we just need to ignore the heck out of them now.

ALL THE MEDDLING FROM GOVERNMENT CATCHES UP WITH YOU:  Why are Thousands of Pharmacies Closing?

POTENTIAL THREATS TO THE ADMINISTRATION WILL BE REMINDED WHO HOLDS THE WHIP:  Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed at least 13 female employees, retaliated against ex-staff: Feds.

IF TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME IS CRIMINALIZED WE’RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF TRIALS:  Georgia rep moves to impeach DA Fani Willis, accuses her of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’.