PREDICTION: No apology will be forthcoming.

THE PRESS IS NOW CALLING THESE PEOPLE “ELECTION DENIERS:” One-third say Biden cheated in 2020, 61% of GOP.

VIA A FRIEND:

Related:

THANKS FOR ALL THE CHRISTMAS/HOLIDAY PAYPAL DONATIONS: They’re much appreciated. Thank you notes are underway.

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE:

No, seriously: W.H.O.: No deaths reported as a result of the Omicron variant to date.

OPEN THREAD: Times are gone for honest men.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Private space stations are coming. Will they be better than their predecessors?

BE PREPARED: TurboTax Deluxe 2021 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return with Federal E-file [Amazon Exclusive] [PC/Mac Disc]. #CommissionEarned

DENISOVANS FOR THE WIN: Our Extinct Cousins Reached ‘The Roof of The World’ a Long Time Before Homo Sapiens.

STILL AVAILABLE: New Apple AirPods Pro. #CommissionEarned

DAVID MASTIO: “I have to admit, I am engaged enough in the culture war that I enjoyed seeing Jussie Smollett convicted of five felonies for staging a heinous anti-gay and anti-Black hate crime to bring attention to himself. As a conservative, it is delicious to have the self-described truth-tellers of the media and the ‘reality-based community’ of the left made to look foolish.”

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Jussie Smollett faces $130k lawsuit from City of Chicago and separate filing from Osundairo siblings.

DEMOCRATS’ EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKERS: Truck drivers work ‘thankless’ job, face worker shortage.

Ask anyone at Capitol Waste Services for one word to describe the work truckers there do, and you’ll often hear some version of “thankless.”

“People are calling, saying that the barrel wasn’t put exactly back at the same exact spot where they put it,” said Eric Manning, operations manager at Capitol Waste Services in East Boston. “One barrel at their house is what they think is all that they’re picking up. They don’t understand there’s thousands and thousands more.”

“If you sat there for the first half hour in the morning and listened to the calls that come in, it’s horrendous, horrendous, the things people squawk about and things that come out of their mouth,” Leo Merullo, Capitol Waste’s supervisor, added, explaining that the issue is new since the pandemic hit.

Douglas Cruz, a driver at Capitol Waste for 10 years, is the first to acknowledge that the job isn’t for everyone. “Nobody wants to do this job, because it’s hard work,” he said. “We have to wake up, cold, hot and rainy and snow, and a lot of people like easy jobs, you know?”

Sounds like a field that women are underrepresented in. Where are the feminists demanding “equity?”

JOHN KASS: Jussie Smollett, Lest We Forget.

Now that entertainer and Obama White House star Jussie Smollett has been convicted on multiple counts of faking an anti-gay, anti-black, anti-Trump hate crime against himself, what do we hear?

We hear a predictable chorus from Woke Media World:

Let it go. Forget it. Leave it alone. Yes, he’s guilty. And that’s a good thing. But let’s never speak of Jussie again. The mention of his name vexes us. Hush. Please, just let it go.

Really? Let it go? Just forget about it?

I ask you, cui bono, who profits by not speaking of Smollett again? Who profits by pretending this didn’t happen?

The politicians who joined him in screaming about hate crimes and lynching. And media that carried Smollett’s hateful and dangerous hoax. They profit by your forgetting.

But the public doesn’t profit by letting it go. The rule of law does not profit. Confidence in our system of justice isn’t strengthened by forgetting. It is weakened by forgetting.

The high priests of grievances would rather we just let Smollett go away, because he failed in epic, Homeric fashion. And now he embarrasses them.

But not everyone is so gullible. Not everyone wants to stick their idiotic head in the sand.

One woman stood up. And with all the talk and all the voices going round and round the Jussie Smollett saga, and with some telling you to forget it and move on, and others shaking their fists at the wrong clowns in this clown show, it would be a shame if you didn’t remember her:

Retired Judge Sheila O’Brien.

Her dad was a cop. Her mother was a nurse. They raised her to not let things go. O’Brien is the one who heroically pushed for a special prosecutor in the Smollett case, incurring the wrath of the political class. And about an hour after the guilty verdict, after I was done playing talking head on TV, I called her.

“John, it’s not about me,” O’Brien said. “Twelve people did their job and upheld their oaths as jurors, as a testament to our system of justice. It was never about me. It was about our system of justice. The law demanded a special prosecutor. The court did the right thing, and a jury fulfilled their oath”

But she forced the issue. She demanded an accounting. If you care about the criminal justice system, if you don’t think politics should put its greasy thumb on the scales of justice, if you believe half the crap you see on those television courtroom dramas when some actor makes The Big Speech about Big Justice, you won’t forget.

You’ll remember her.

Indeed. Plus:

Forgive me, but I’d rather not shut up about Jussie right now. Instead, I think we should thank him. Because by telling and retelling his lies in court, by perjuring himself before the jury and the judge, he’s actually done America a great service.

He exposes he fetid alchemy between the dying corporate legacy media and elite Democrats who used his mewing to stoke racial division for votes. These are the high priests of the new religion, and it sanctifies victimization for profit and power.

They falsely seized on Kyle Rittenhouse as a racist (he wasn’t) and Nicholas Sandman as a racist (he wasn’t) and many others. Without stoking racial strife, how would they motivate their voters?

How, indeed?

THE CHICOMS ARE SUPER CEREAL ABOUT CREATING MANBEARPIG! China Develops Humanized Pigs to Simulate COVID-19 Infection for Future Testing of Vaccines and Drugs.

Chinese scientists from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS) announced the discovery of a scientific process that created humanized pigs where they could infect with the novel coronavirus and use it for research.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is the world’s largest research institution of its kind, presenting their humanized pigs first in a study titled “Establishment of a Humanized Swine Model for COVID-19,” which was published in August in the journal Cell Discovery. It promoted genetically modified pigs with high similarities with the human body for COVID-19 research.

I blame Al Gore:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend texts: “BTW re the Chicom humanizing pigs for covid research. OK, I’m not going to make any cheap jokes about who’s a pig and who could use humanizing in the Chicom. But doesn’t that start to sound a little like where the superbad swine covid originates? This is a bad Pogo comic … or a really good one, I guess.”

CALLS GROW FOR CHICAGO STATE’S ATTORNEY KIM FOXX TO RESIGN AFTER SMOLLETT VERDICT.

TRUST THE SCIENCE: Investigation fails to replicate most cancer biology lab findings.

ROGER KIMBALL: Civilizational Suicide, Not Omicron, Is Killing Us.

Early on in our experience of Wuhanomania, many commentators, including me, noted the pertinence of Farr’s Law in understanding the behavior of the “novel coronavirus.” William Farr’s name has receded from the commentary on the disease, but the pertinence of his model has not. Epidemics, Farr noted in 1840, follow a predictable bell-curve-like course. They are born, rise in virulence, and then recede. They do this with or without human intervention.

As I noted at the time:

“Our panic has destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, impoverished millions, and handed much of society over to the machinations of socialistically inclined bureaucrats. It has also precipitated a huge and irresponsible disgorging of federal funds, the baneful effects of which will be felt for decades if not generations.”

That was in April 2020.

One of the most percipient commentators on COVID is Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley technical writer. In March 2021, Ginn predicted that when the COVID crisis was finally over, we should expect “massive confirmation bias and Pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of “I’m the government and I helped.’”

It’s too early to say whether Ginn will be proved right, but all indications are that he will. Commenting on Ginn’s prediction at the time, I invoked the political philosopher James Burnham, who famously observed that civilizations tend to end not because they are invaded by an external enemy but from an inner collapse. “They are not murdered; they commit suicide,” I wrote, and went on to observe that “The really scary thing about this latest health scare is not the disease but the unexpected depths of passivity it revealed.”

Some things never change.

On the other hand, when the potential for a mid-term shellacking looms, it concentrates even the most stubborn of minds wonderfully:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

JOE CONCHA: Amid multiple crises, Biden runs to NBC’s safe space with Jimmy Fallon.

PORTLAND GAME CROWDFUNDING: Virtue Signal game designer William Dalebout is still crowdsourcing for his new upcoming game and is up to 46% of his funding goal. You can check it out here.

You can also find the Virtue Signal games here if you would like to purchase them for gifts or for yourself! You can use the coupon code HELENSMITH to get a 10% discount at checkout.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Stephen Colbert Keeps Wading into Fox News Christmas Tree Being Lit on Fire in the Most Cringeworthy of Ways.

Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld took the unfunny joke in stride, responding that it is “already beating [Colbert] in the ratings.” The tweet has performed far better than Colbert’s.

Colbert also went after Fox News during his monologue on Wednesday night’s show, as he called for “thoughts and prayers,” and it got worse from there. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, but the ghost of Hugo Chavez has an alibi,” Colbert joked. “Of course, this never would have happened if the tree had a gun. Give a squirrel a gun or something like that.”

The host also went after a former Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly. “Homeless and mentally ill? Oh my God, the fire was set by Bill O’Reilly! So it doesn’t look like this holly jolly arsonist was politically motivated, but Fox News is still going to eight maids a milk it,” Colbert joked, also making fun of the suspect.

Tamanaha, as Joe Marino and Jesse O’Neill reported for the New York Post, is indeed mentally ill. “Oh, he’s a nut. I can’t control him,” Richard Tamanaha of Hawaii said about his son. “Mentally, he’s not all there.”

Notice how the rival networks are egging on further arson, as long as it doesn’t happen to their office building. (See also: CNN’s Atlanta offices last year. “Riots for thee, but not for me,” Amy Holmes wrote at the time for Spectator World, when the radical chic crowd saw the urban destruction they called for get way too close to their stylish homes.)

What could go wrong, this time? When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos, Freddie deBoer wrote last month:

At the time of the Kenosha riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.

Well, look: chaos is chaotic. Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen… anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity to do things that you don’t like. You can’t endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way that you hadn’t intended. This seems totally obvious to me, and yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It’s like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.

The left-liberal stance towards political violence, at present, is beyond confused. . . . For many posers on the left antifa is less the expression of authentic political strategy and more a tool to define oneself as an aesthetic radical. If you go to various protests and riots and encounter the self-defined antifascists there, I can assure you very few of them will be remotely interested about what happens in the courts at all. Because – and I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types – most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.

Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

More: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering. “The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent. That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”

OOPS: Report: The End of 3G Could Leave Your Vehicle With Fewer Features.

TOP SELLER: DOCKERS Men’s Classic Fit Easy Khaki Pants (Regular and Big & Tall). #CommissionEarned

ABOUT THAT SCHOOL BOARD LETTER DISASTER: Boy, the National School Boards Association (NASB) “messed up big time,” according to Capital Research Center’s Michael Watson. Just how big?

The explosion of protests prompted by that letter “exacerbated existing internal disputes over [NASB’s] internal governance, some of which we discussed with the Ohio School Boards Association on the InfluenceWatch Podcast. At the same time, it drew unprecedented scrutiny from opponents of totalitarian COVID restrictions on low-risk children, opponents of left-progressive gender ideology, and opponents of ideologically charged teaching inspired by critical race theory.”

According to Watson’s latest count, 18 state school board associations have left NASB, taking with them millions of dollars in dues revenue. Another nine have unofficially cut ties with NASB. The big question now, Watson points out, is how can the Right encourage what happened to NASB to be repeated by other groups and institutions co-opted by the Left?

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Youngkin plans to withdraw Virginia from interstate climate pact.