KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: America’s Eyes Are Now on the Kangaroo Court Jury. “It’s in the hands of the jury now, and there aren’t many of us on the Right who think that will go well. The mere fact that this ever went to trial is enough to make one fall permanently into despair over the state of the American legal system. If the jurors had been paying agenda-free attention during the trial they wouldn’t have had to deliberate for more than five minutes before returning a verdict of ‘not guilty.'”
Archive for 2024
May 30, 2024
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: “By Unlawful Means” and Jury Instructions.
WELL, GOOD — BUT IT CAN’T PLEASE THE FOLKS AT VOX WHO PUBLISHED THIS PIECE: Your favorite brand no longer cares about being woke.
For most of advertising history, “red” or “blue” as partisan loyalty signaled more your taste for Coke or Pepsi than your identity as Republican or Democrat. Mass markets, by definition, necessitated selling to both sides of the aisle.
As with so much else, the presidency of Donald Trump — built upon a self-conceived human brand — radically upended those norms.
Post-2016 election, one Adweek column thundered, “Brands cannot expect to play Switzerland as the rest of the world picks a side.” Consumer culture suddenly became the vehicle for political expression, with Madison Avenue giving voice to countless causes. The staid “corporate social responsibility” morphed into the more muscular “brand purpose,” which beget impassioned activism. Social justice became “trendy;” politics, the means to signal commercial “integrity.”
Today, just as during the Trump presidency, controversial issues abound, protesters convulse public spaces, and a divisive election looms. The world is picking sides — on abortion and Gaza and Trump’s trials. And from brand-land? By and large, the sound of silence.
They seem to have learned from their costly mistakes — which ought to be taught in business school as the biggest series of self-owns in corporate history.
WELL, MSNBC: Liberal Media Scream: MSNBC regular cites Clarence Thomas’s white wife in racist rant.
They’re really going after Justice’s wives.
LIMITED TIME ONLY: Dog Shock Collar. #CommissionEarned
KEYSTONE COPS [VIP]: Biden White House Shows Exactly How Not to Run a PR Campaign.
SHOULD I DECLARE VICTORY?: I’m really tempted to. Things look pretty good. But they can still change.
As many of you know, for the past eight months, I have been spending gobs of time trying to discourage the California Senate from passing Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 (“ACA7”) and preparing for a campaign in case it does. That’s why I haven’t been posting much. ACA7 passed the Assembly on a strict party-line vote back in the autumn. If it somehow passes the Senate before the end of June (or by July 4 at the latest), it will go on the November ballot. Increasingly, however, it looks like maybe, just maybe, it won’t. The bill seems to be stalled in the Rules Committee, and it’s getting pretty late in the day to put it through two committees and have it reach the Senate floor. (Alas, the Democrats won’t tell me anything, and the Republicans don’t seem to know anything.)
Some background for those of you who are not regular readers: ACA7 is the second attempt by the California legislature in less than four years to gut Proposition 209. Prop 209 was an initiative back in 1996 that amended the state constitution to say: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
I co-chaired that campaign (back when I was younger and cuter than I am now). Not only did it pass, but it also spread to several other states. And it literally made the history books. Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People spans from the Lost Colony of Roanoke to the end of the 20th century, but somehow he found room for a paragraph on Prop 209.
Then came Act II. In 2020, in the midst of the panic over George Floyd, the California Legislature floated a referendum—Prop 16—to repeal Prop 209 outright. The old Prop 209 gang got together again—with Ward Connerly as chair and me again as co-chair. Plus we had a lot of energetic new faces. We were outspent more than 14 to 1, but we beat the pants off the “Yes on 16” campaign. More than 57.2% (more…)
JEFFREY LORD, FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Journalists Forget Their Own Predictions: Millions of Americans to Die.
Let’s be plain: 100,000 dead Americans from the virus is horrific. Every human life is important.
But there is a curious something missing in all the many stories about the death toll of 100,000. Tim notes this question to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany from Politico and CNN’s Ryan Lizza:
“We’re about to cross the 100,000 dead American [sic] milestone… on Election Day, what does the White House view as the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?”
Well now. Thanks for asking Ryan. As a matter of fact your question as to “is there a number?” has already been answered – by your media colleagues. And no, the pandemic has yet to be “defeated.” But there has been a vivid success on the battlefront, even if the media pretends not to notice. Here are some samples about how many Americans would die according to the media, bold print for emphasis supplied:
From The New York Times on March 13: “As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.”
From The New York Times on March 16: “Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.”
From The Washington Post, March 19: “In the worst-case scenario, America is on a trajectory toward 1.1 million deaths.”
From MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, March 24: If Americans go to Easter services: “If that happened on Easter Sunday, just 19 days from now, then in May, you’d have millions of dead people all over the country. Millions,” O’Donnell said on his MSNBC show. “If you have packed churches all over the country, including California, on Easter Sunday, by May there could be a million dead people in California.”
From Andrew Slavitt, Barack Obama’s former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): “Currently experts expect over one million deaths in the U.S. since the virus was not contained & we cannot even test for it.”
From infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm to podcaster Joe Rogan the week of March 12: “We conservatively estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, 96 million cases actually occurring, over 480,000 deaths that can occur over the next three to seven months…”
From CNN: “On State of the Union, Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Brianna Keilar that in a worst-case scenario millions of people in the US could die from the coronavirus.”
From Yahoo: “At the low end of the projection this would mean about 700,000 deaths. At the high end it would mean 1.5 million deaths.”
In her recent book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles wrote, “San Francisco saw ninety-two drug deaths in 2015. There were about seven hundred in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of Covid.”
Also by way of comparison, Covid was yet another chance for the media to dust off the Katrina playback from 2005. As Bryan Preston wrote at Hot Air in November of the following year, “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”
There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.
Years later, DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But with May of 2020 concluding, this gloomy phase of American history was about to come to end. Get ready, dancing TikTok nurses, it’s soon to be showtime!
ED MORRISSEY: Convention? What Convention? Dems Kill Biden Escape Hatch.
Before this plan, the possibility existed (unlikely as it was) that the DNC could change the rules to release all delegates on the first ballot and have a real open convention for the nomination. This “virtual vote” of delegates necessitated by Ohio’s ballot-access deadline makes the convention entirely irrelevant, even more so than usual. It’s now just a huge anti-climax signifying nothing at all, not even the pro-forma elevation of the nominee. They will have done that in a smoke-filled back room, or maybe more accurately, a vape-filled back Zoom.
They’re stuck with Biden now because they will have no mechanism to replace him once that virtual vote takes place. In fact, it gets worse than that if Biden really does withdraw before and especially after the “virtual vote.” The DNC has no other mechanism than the convention to deal with a vacant ticket, so they lose Ohio access right off the bat. If they’ve already held the virtual vote, it’s not even clear how the convention can undo that, especially in transmitting Biden’s candidacy to the states. It’s not impossible, but replacing Biden becomes much more complicated with the early “virtual vote” process.
The Biden Replacement Theory has moved from Impossible to Highly Unlikely and back to Impossible again.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Maniac screams ‘I’m gonna kill all the Jews’ as he tries to run down students outside NYC Jewish school in antisemitic hate attack.
NOW OUT FROM KEITH WHITTINGTON: You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms.
INSURRECTIONIST RHETORIC:
On @TheView, author @JohnGrisham fantasizes about killing SCOTUS justices 'again,' 2 years after attempt on Kavanaugh https://t.co/rEIR52WFgh
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 29, 2024
WELL, YES, THAT’S THE GOAL: Trump Jury Instructions Invite Conviction Based on a Hodgepodge of Dubious Theories.
Related:
Judge Instructs Jurors They Need Not Believe Trump Is Guilty To Convict Him https://t.co/QVptl3fP0J pic.twitter.com/s0TpTXNTAS
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 28, 2024
PROBABLY THE ONE THAT’S TRYING TO IMPRISON ITS POLITICAL OPPONENTS: Ron Hart: Which Party Is The Real ‘Threat To Democracy’?
SACRIFICING DOESN’T MAKE THINGS MAGICALLY ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY: HVAC without electricity.
TED BALAKER: TikTok Might Not Agree with Harrison Butker’s Speech, But Guess Who Does. Basically everyone else outside the Lefty Outrage Bubble:
Reporters eagerly hunt for dissenting female students to quote, but it seems clear that most women in attendance stood with Butker. His “homemaker” line sparked a 16-second applause break and, at the end of his speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation—one that, from the looks of the short clip below, included just about everyone in attendance. . . . Skimming TikTok to gauge public opinion is something I’d expect from Jezebel or Teen Vogue, but The New York Times should aim higher.
Did the most prestigious name in news even consider venturing outside the outrage bubble? After all, a large and representative survey could help us determine how well the howlers’ opinions overlap with public opinion in general.
Enter sociologists Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang.
They turned to the General Social Survey (GSS)—the nation’s preeminent social barometer—and this is what they found:
M]arriage and family are strongly associated with happiness. The GSS shows that a combination of marriage and parenthood is linked to the biggest happiness dividends for women. Among married women with children between the ages of 18 and 55, 40% reported they are “very happy,” compared to 25% of married childless women, and just 22% of unmarried childless women.
In other words, the high value placed on family life stretches beyond a small Catholic college in Kansas. A Pew Research Center global survey shows just how far it stretches: When asked what makes their lives fulfilling, men and women of all ages around the world ranked family first, ahead of wealth, work, friends, and health.
And the fact that women were usually “more likely to mention family as a source of satisfaction in their lives than men” will be unsurprising to those who don’t spend their lives online or on campus.
Takeaway: “Maybe what the Eight Percenters want for women isn’t what many women want for themselves.” Nope. Gender relations in America are run mostly by a group of neurotics who prescribe behaviors for the general population based on their own neurotic preferences, not the needs and wants of the general population.
The media outrage/amplification cycle is what has allowed them to do this. It needs to be broken. And maybe this speech was a harbinger of change.
WHEN MARXISM DOESN’T WORK, (WHICH IS ALWAYS) THEY SCREAM HARDER ABOUT HOARDERS AND WRECKERS: This is a terrifying argument.
Every communist society ends up quartering strangers together. Every single one. So, call this the mask being ripped off again.
DON’T THOSE DELAWARE JUDGES KNOW HIS DADDY HAS INFLUENCE? Hunter Biden loses another ‘frivolous’ bid to stop Delaware gun case.
MAYBE MORE DEMOCRAT SENATORS NEED TO HAVE STROKES: Sen. John Fetterman dramatically whips off Harvard hood at Yeshiva University commencement: ‘Profoundly disappointed’.
YEAH, WELL, ‘THE PPEOPLE’ ARE THE LAST FOLK OUR RULERS TRUST WITH POWER: Democracy in Decay: Citizens’ assemblies take power from the people.
I’M SHOCKED. ARE YOU NOT SHOCKED? Big Pharma admits it lied over MMR vaccine.
SENDING YOUR CHILDREN TO PUBLIC SCHOOL IS CHILD ABUSE: NewsGuard: The Ministry of Truth in Your Child’s Public School.
AS WE HOLD OUR BREATH: As We Await the Verdict.
And hear in the distance, the very faint strains of the rough music.