Archive for 2022

OPEN THREAD: Have fun, kids!

NOT SOMETHING I USUALLY BLOG ABOUT, BUT THEY’RE HAVING AN EXCEPTIONAL YEAR: Andrew Davis on Tennessee Football. And hey, the last year like this was 1998, and I didn’t have a blog then.

FINALLY: The Hollywood Reporter connects the dots between Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast and Donald Trump: Orson Welles‘ War of the Worlds Broadcast: Its Ominous Echoes for a Fractured Media.

Every year there are new essays about unveiling the truth behind Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that aired on CBS radio on October 30th, 1938. We know the truth – the stories about mass hysteria were overblown. For anyone looking for a straightforward history of what happened, look no farther than A. Brad Schwartz. The reason corrective stories keep coming up is that some people prefer to believe that the radio play sparked a nationwide mass panic. It sure makes for a great story. But while there were many confused listeners, some scared by the play’s deceptive production methods, there was not mass panic coast to coast. Finding the truth takes work, not unlike any fact-finding mission today, because we need to sift through a lot of salacious attention seeking information to find the facts. Then, as now, media literacy is a key facet towards intelligent public engagement.

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When War of the Worlds was broadcast, it was dramatic theater for some and revealed as orchestrated misinformation for others. At its core was harmless entertainment. Consider the partisan reporting on the January 6th committee versus what is being discussed and presented by both Republicans and Democrats in the investigation. A small percent of the population being confused about War of the Worlds was one thing and it is quite another when many in the population believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Tell them that judges across the nation have thrown Trump’s case out and it doesn’t matter – they’re already hoodwinked. They prefer the panic narrative.

I knew the Bad Orange Man sent the monsters from the Evil Red Planet!

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Burned Fetterman Sign Was on Farm of DNC Speaker.

A few things were immediately curious. How does one happen to snap a close-up photo of the sign mid-burn, in which it’s burned almost exactly to the point where the burning stopped (as evidenced in the next day’s photo), at 1:30 a.m., and how was the sign not completely engulfed by the time two firetrucks arrived to a rural area? How is it that only a few blades of grass were singed? How is it that the fire department put the fire out at the same time in the burn that [Jane] Switzer’s photo was snapped – and if they were busy putting the fire out, how was Switzer ALSO there?

If the verbiage with Switzer’s post didn’t give it away, she’s a Fetterman supporter and a hyper-partisan.

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Switzer’s neighbor, farmer Rick Telesz, is also quite partisan. He spoke at the DNC in 2020 and appeared in a Biden ad declaring that he made a mistake by voting for Donald Trump in 2016 but was going to correct that in 2020.

Then, on Election Day 2020, Jill Biden swung by the Telesz farm for a small rally between appearances in Erie and Pittsburgh. A barn cat interrupted that rally, and Jill Biden later adopted the cat, who’s now named Willow and resides at the White House. Telesz also ran for Congress in 2022, but lost in the Democrat primary.

So many remarkable coincidences here!

 

BOB MCMANUS: Hillary Clinton goes to bat for her clone, Kathy Hochul. “Kathy Hochul’s faltering gubernatorial campaign has enlisted Hillary Clinton for a last-minute rally this Thursday at Manhattan’s Barnard College – an ironic and amusing maneuver. . . . It’s ironic because Clinton was 2016’s prohibitive presidential favorite – and the candidate now forever known as the only Democrat in America who couldn’t beat Donald Trump. And here is Hochul, also a morning-line sure-shot, struggling mightily against a high-profile Trump acolyte in cobalt-blue New York. It’s amusing because Clinton and Hochul’s respective campaigns are so similar: strategically clunky, simultaneously uninspired and uninspiring – and featuring candidates incapable of cracking a convincing smile even in friendly crowds.”

Even the Democratic press (but I repeat myself) is floundering:

And, really, if you criticize someone who’s been “the target of anti-semitic tropes” you’re somehow automatically an antisemite? That’s criminally dishonest, and dumb. But then, so is being a reporter for The Forward and not knowing — or worse, knowing but not admitting — that there’s a Jewish candidate for Governor in New York. Putz.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, JUST TOSS THAT PLASTIC BOTTLE IN THE TRASH: Even Greenpeace Admits That Recycling Plastic Makes No Sense. Greenpeace has finally acknowledged what was obvious a quarter century ago, when I set a record for hate mail at the New York Times Magazine with a cover story, “Recycling Is Garbage.”  Environmental groups published lengthy denunciations and went on convincing municipal officials to keep adding more and more plastics to their recycling programs.  They kept up this fantasy for decades, but now a report from Greenpeace’s finally admits that recycling plastic is a hopeless cause — utterly impractical, a waste of money, and bad for the environment. Unfortunately — but inevitably — Greenpeace is now pushing an even worse alternative.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST WEIGHS IN ON NATIONALIZING SOCIALISM:

Believe me, Democrats and their operatives with bylines have definitely been running the 1948 playbook this year, Bernie:

UPDATE: Although this time, the calls are coming from inside the house!

18 TRILLION FEET OF YOU: Actually, that’s just the total length of all the DNA strand in the three trillion cells that make up one human body, if they were laid end-to-end, according to the latest on HillFaith.

JOHN NOLTE: Imploding CNN Cuts Back on Series and Films. “Chris Licht, the chairman of CNN, said on Friday that the network would stop buying documentary films and original TV series as part of its cost-cutting efforts. ‘This was a very difficult decision to make,’ he wrote in an email to employees. The only reason disgraced former CNN chief Jeff Zucker got into this non-news programming was vanity and kickbacks. Acquiring these series and movies allowed Zucker to hobnob with the Hollywood elite and play the big shot. It also allowed him to pour millions of dollars all over his left-wing friends, the people who created this garbage.”

COMING SOON!:  The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Harvard/UNC affirmative action cases tomorrow.  Then at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, the Manhattan Institute will be presenting a virtual post-argument analysis with Wai Wah Chin, James Copland, Ilya Shapiro and yours truly.  It should be interesting!  You can register here.

(And here’s the amicus curiae brief that Pete Kirsanow and I did for the case.)