GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: Shocking poll shows Zohran Mamdani overtaking Andrew Cuomo in NYC’s ranked choice primary.

Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor, according to a stunning new poll released Monday.

In its hypothetical initial round of voting, Cuomo’s lead shrinks to 3 percentage points, with 35% of likely Democratic voters supporting him compared to 32% for Mamdani and 13% for city Comptroller Brad Lander, the Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill survey found.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams follows with 8%, Scott Stringer 3% and 5% split between candidates Zellnor Myrie, Whitney Tilson, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake, with another 4% undecided.

But since no one garners the more than 50% of the vote needed to win outright, the ranked choice system kicks in. That means that even if a voter’s first choice is eliminated in successive rounds of calculations, their other picks could still be in the mix and emerge as the eventual overall winner.

Mamdani finally surpasses Cuomo in the eighth round of the simulated ranked choice voting — 51.8% to 48.2% — in the latest poll conducted June 18-20.

But these are just the preliminaries. As Jeffrey Blehar noted last week in a column titled, “I Love the New York City Mayoral Race,” “regardless of who actually wins the Democratic primary, this race will be rerun a few months from now in the general election:”

Yes, the New York mayoral race is exactly the sort of Carnival of Fools I live for, a circus of chaos with no heroes, not even protagonists, and no possible happy ending. And the best thing about it all is that this mess won’t even end on Tuesday night; in theory, that’s only when it begins. For one thing, the needlessly complex and misleading “ranked-choice” ballot adopted in 2021 likely ensures that it will be days before we know who has actually won the race. But even more ridiculous than that is the possibility that, once the race has been won, it will continue rolling onwards with the same cast of characters.

You see, because of New York’s ridiculous ballot access laws, Mamdani and Cuomo have already secured ballot lines for the November election — with different parties. (Cuomo has his own bespoke party line called “Fight and Deliver;” Mamdani will have the Working Families Party line handed to him if he wants it.) That means that regardless of who actually wins the Democratic primary, this race will be rerun a few months from now in the general election, this time with Republican Curtis Sliwa and the incumbent mayor himself also on the ballot splitting the vote. Perhaps one or the other will drop out before then — if Cuomo is humiliated on Tuesday, I’m not sure how he can remain in the race — but the potential for an epically disastrous four-car electoral pileup in November remains tantalizingly close.

And I’ll admit that, at this point, I’m rooting for it. I’m rooting for it as only a Chicagoan can: as an embittered man who watched his own city decline over the last 20 years, mayor by mayor, until we voted to commit suicide in the spring of 2023 by electing Brandon Johnson.

John Nolte adds, “should Mamdani win, he would make former Democrat Mayor Bill DeBlasio look like Barry Goldwater. Mamdani is a bona fide socialist who has promised disastrous rent freezes, despises Israel, would almost certainly kill any kind of school reform or choice, tie the hands of the police, and is anti-business. Mamdani is a radical activist who doesn’t hide his radical activism. New York is already in desperate straits and he would drive this once great city right to its knees.”

Hey, speaking of DeBlasio: 10 Questions With Zohran Mamdani. Including:

2. Who was the best New York City mayor in your lifetime?

In my lifetime? Bill de Blasio.

Plan accordingly, New Yorkers:

BLOOMBERG: Iran Stands Alone Against Trump and Israel, Stripped of Allies.

Iran’s leaders are discovering they’re on their own against the US and Israel, without the network of proxies and allies that allowed them to project power in the Middle East and beyond.

As the Islamic Republic confronts its most perilous moment in decades following the bombing of its nuclear facilities ordered by US President Donald Trump, Russia and China are sitting on the sidelines and offering only rhetorical support. Militia groups Iran has armed and funded for years are refusing or unable to enter the fight in support of their patron.

No, there are few allies left:

And: Tucker Carlson Plays Gotcha with Sen. Cruz on Iran.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

China: "Do not close the Strait of Hormuz"

Russia: "Israel is kind of a Russian country, so we're not intervening"

Hezbollah: "We don't have hands, eyes or dicks, so we can't help you but good luck bro" pic.twitter.com/yi0FJW5ed1

— 𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) June 23, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: ‘We Came, We Saw, He Died:’ Dems’ Breathtaking Hypocrisy On War Powers.

After last night’s strikes on Iran, Democrat politicians reached screeching levels of hypocrisy over Donald Trump’s decision to act rather than wait for an Iranian nuclear weapon deployment. Chuck Schumer demanded action from Congress, as did Hakeem Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led calls for impeachment. Practically every Democrat on Capitol Hill — with the notable exception of John Fetterman — rushed to promote their “authoritarian” narrative about Trump.

All of this venting reveals very short memories on the port side of Capitol Hill. Fourteen years ago, they couldn’t get enough of presidential strikes on a nation in the very same region. Remember Hillary Clinton’s chortling over the fall of Moammar Qaddafi and the role she and Barack Obama played in it? “We came, we saw, he died,” she raved to Leslie Stahl after a joint US-EU bombing campaign decapitated Qaddafi’s regime, and left a failed state in its wake:

In March 2011, Obama ordered a series of military strikes on regime targets in Libya, not because of a clear and present danger to US security or assets, but because of a “responsibility to protect” doctrine promoted by Samantha Power. The Qaddafi regime was brutally suppressing dissent at the time, as Qaddafi had done for decades, but Qaddafi had also cooperated with the West on nuclear non-proliferation. Nevertheless, Obama and the Left wanted Qaddafi gone, and without going to Congress conducted military attacks with the express purpose of collapsing his regime in favor of the rebels in and around Benghazi — a bitter irony, in the end.

Obama never even bothered to formally report the action to Congress, as required under the War Powers Act, with the lame excuse that he ordered the strikes to support the action led by NATO. At the time, Harold Koh argued that the War Powers Act didn’t apply because of the limited nature of the conflict — which had been going on for three months at that point — and the administration’s interpretation of the word “hostilities” in the act. As long as US ground troops weren’t involved, Koh argued, the president had full authority and no responsibility to notify Congress at all, Koh argued.

Nancy Pelosi is in full “past performance is no guarantee of future results” mode:

The Squad is similarly Big Mad at – checks notes – Trump preventing Ayatollah Khamenei from acquiring a nuclear weapon:

As for the rest of us:

Flashback: The New York Times, January 24^th, 1981:

Bruce W. German, one of the freed hostages, said today that some of his colleagues were having more problems than others in adjusting. ”They showed us videotapes of the embassy takeover,” he said, ”and some of the group simply would not look at them.”

Mr. German, from Rockville, Md., was the budget officer at the United States Embassy in Teheran. He described what it was like to be in the embassy on Sunday, Nov. 4, 1979, when the Iranian militants broke in.

”I was working in the basement of one of the buildings in the compound,” he said. ”Sunday is just another working day in the Islamic world. We could hear the crowd yelling and cheering. Then someone came in and told us we’d better move upstairs to a safer location. We barricaded ourselves in but it didn’t make any difference. We had to let them in or they would have torn the whole place down. That first day was the closest I’ve ever come to total terror.”

Asked if he considered resisting or escaping, Mr. German replied, ”When there is a gun being cocked in your ear, you don’t have many options.”

Would Return ‘in a B-52’

Mr. German, 44 years old, said he believed that the hostage crisis could make life difficult for other diplomats. ”There is just no way you can make an embassy safe from half a million angry people,” he said. Mr. German added that he would never take a foreign post where new security measures, now being planned, were not in effect. As for Iran, he said he would return there – ”only in a B-52.”

Today of course, the current iteration of the New York Times is in full “better dead than rude” mode:

UPDATE:

I’ll just note that, given the very small number of female B-2 pilots, even acknowledging a female was among those on the mission could’ve gotten the female pilot ID’ed (the pool of names is small & public), when at this point DoD has not revealed the ID of anyone on the mission. https://t.co/Cr5llcabnf

— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) June 22, 2025

MORE: “Suddenly we know what a woman is?” Caleb Hull tweets. 

JOE HILDEBRAND: Baited by the bauble: How the outrage-obsessed left ended up backing Iran.

For an activist class famous obsessed with being “on the right side of history” and who love to condemn others for “the company you keep”, it is a masterclass in hypocrisy that would be ingenious if it wasn’t so dopily unwitting.

It is obvious to everybody – except them — where I am going with this. The activist left has been so consumed by its hatred of Israel and Donald Trump that it has ended up on the side of Iran.

And not even just Iran, but the Iranian regime who the Iranian people themselves despise for decades of brutal oppression.

This is a government that is almost cartoonishly evil and yet somehow the most self-declaredly politically astute minds on the internet have been effortlessly goaded into backing it or its interests simply on the basis that if Israel and Trump are against it then they must be for it.

This might come with disclaimers that they don’t support the regime – the old “I’m not a racist but …” — or be couched in some pretence of principle but it amounts to the same thing.

If forced to choose between Israel and Iran or Trump and Iran, these guys are going all the way with the Ayatollah.

Their embrace of Iran is a vestige of the Obama years, when Obama did everything he could to facilitate a nuclear-armed Iran as a counterweight to Israel in the Middle East. But this reactionary impulse in general among the left has been prevalent for a long time: Tevi Troy: Mastering data before Google: Remembering the legacy of Ben Wattenberg.

Wattenberg did not just complain. He tried to offer the Democrats a way out: Democrats “will serve their country and their party better if they acknowledge that their real problem — which is the issues they have come to represent — than they will by trumpeting a phony one, that television did them in. A wrong diagnosis yields a wrong remedy.” He also warned Democrats to avoid what he called “the Reagan trap”: “Reagan said, several million times, that government is not the solution — it’s the problem. Many Democrats took the bait. If Reagan said government was so very bad, and Reagan was such a silly fellow, then Democrats must therefore say government is so very good. Trap snaps! Republicans win the White House.” This dynamic sure sounds a lot like how Democrats deal with our current president — and Wattenberg would have liked the alliterative sound of “the Trump trap.”

As Glenn concluded his latest Substack: Five Takes on Bombing Iran.

I do think the Democrats attacking this action are once again on the 20% end of an 80/20 issue.

Iran, as I mentioned above, seems to be an example of the “irrational regime hypothesis,” in which the actions needed to achieve internal power in a regime are at odds with the actions needed to succeed in the outside world. (World War II Japan is a classic example.) But it looks as if the Democratic Party today is another such irrational regime, in which the actions needed to move up the ladder with internal activists and donors are counterproductive in the larger world.

It generally takes a big shock to overcome this dynamic once it’s in place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did it for the Japanese. The Israeli/American air campaign may do it for Iran. I have no idea what might turn around the Democratic Party.

It’s going to take more than losing another election, though.

In the meantime though, their reactions this week will be astounding to watch:

WWIII BEGAN WHEN KAREN BASS GOT HOLD OF A NUCLEAR WEAPON:

“Closely monitoring” seems to be the talking point du jour among leftist politicians throughout North America today.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

WELL, I’M GLAD WE CLEARED ALL THAT UP:

ROGER KIMBALL: What Trump’s Critics Still Don’t Understand About Iran.

We are assured that it’s not the group that calls itself an Islamic State because our political leaders and our media have told us so. It’s the same with Boko Haram. They regularly slaughter Christians, women and children included. Spokesmen for Boko Haram say that they represent Islamic teaching, but no: our leaders have assured us that that is not the case. “No religion,” said Obama, “condones the killing of innocents.”

Has the former president contemplated the glorious history of Islam and the glittering deeds of Mohammed? We have it on the highest—and for Muslims, the only—authority that the Prophet regularly slaughtered innocents. Consider, to take just one example, the siege of Medina in the year 627, then home to a Jewish tribe. After a couple of weeks, the inhabitants surrendered unconditionally. Mohammad then had the 600-800 men butchered and sold the women and children into slavery.

“We are not at war with Islam,” our leaders tell us. “We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

The impolitic question is, where are all those unperverted Muslims? In the common rooms of American universities? Maybe. In our cities and suburbs? Perhaps. But I think we can agree that it is not (to make an arbitrary and woefully incomplete list) the people behind such actions as

• The 9/11 terrorist attacks
• The Bali nightclub bombing
• The Ft. Hood “workplace violence” event
• The London tube and bus bombings
• The Madrid train bombing
• The Boston Marathon carnage
• The Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket slaughters in France (“folks shot in a deli” was how Obama described the latter)
• The Danish shootings by another “Allahu Akbar”-shouting chap.

Islam, or a perversion of Islam? At some point, as Hillary Clinton might put it, what difference does it make? As we contemplate the future of Iran, I would suggest pondering the possibility that, even if “we are not at war with Islam,” Islam may well be at war with us.

New York’s potential next mayor is quite concerned about the safety of New Yorkers — living in Fordow, apparently:

Mamdani’s appearance tomorrow night on Colbert will be a brilliant folie à deux of doubletalk and obfuscation:

UPDATE: Here’s one of many topics Colbert won’t be bringing up with Mamdani:

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

I served on the National Security Council under President Clinton. I was Joe Biden’s Deputy Staff Director of the Senate foreign Relations Committee. I voted for Kamala Harris and have been a vocal critic of many dangerous and undemocratic actions taken by President Trump.

But…

— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) June 22, 2025

I DON’T REALLY CARE, MARGARET: ‘You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About:’ Rubio Wipes the Floor With Brennan Over Iranian Nukes.

OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER: How U.S. B-2 Bombers Struck Iran Undetected.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Many Have Tried to Fix Penn Station. Can Trump Get the Job Done?

Events this weekend may allow Trump to accelerate the tearing down process of rebuilding the station exponentially: 

🚨 #BREAKING: Pro Iran rioters have just STORMED Penn Station in NYC, and most of them are wearing face coverings

Face coverings should be BANNED in public.

And EVERY SINGLE ONE of these foreign rioters needs to be deported NOW! pic.twitter.com/vpgPEjsM8q

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) June 21, 2025

DANIELLE PLETKA: #WTH Iran won’t give up its nukes.

So, what happens now? If the Iranians were as smart as I suggested at the outset, they would cry uncle and agree to inspections, relinquishing enrichment (for the moment), accepting a regional nuclear agreement, and more. They would understand that the world’s focus will inevitably falter, and that then, they could safely return to status quo ante. Instead, however, they are trapped in their ideological mire, and cannot accept the need to bend the knee to Washington, and by extension — at least in their minds — to Israel.

Perhaps the regime will fall, though it seems a slim likelihood. Perhaps Ayatollah Khamenei will crawl out from his bunker and beg for peace. Ditto. More likely, Iran will seek to reconstitute that which it lost over the last 21 months — its proxies, its allies, its weapons, and its pride. This is the worst possible choice for Tehran, and dooms the Iranian people to yet another cycle of violence down the road.

But for the moment, we can thank America’s incredible armed forces and its commander-in-chief that the danger of a fanatical regime armed with nuclear weapons has receded.

Related: “The big question now is whether Iran’s nuke program just went back a few years, or if it’s been totally erased:” 

I'm gonna say something a bit different from what that source told the New York Times. He said Fordo was damaged Severely but wasn't destroyed. So I'll tell you what Israel's current assessment is.

First off all Natanz was completely wiped out. For Fordo and Isfahan, we're… pic.twitter.com/KQ9OTlh7Oo

— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) June 22, 2025

HMMMM:

Wisconsin: Election Fraud, Conspiracy Theory No Longer

Corrupt government actors force citizens to sue them repeatedly in courts for embarrassing public records that they control. @PeterBernegger did this and attests to what those records show. Then critics go silent.
1/6 pic.twitter.com/tMtJGtQTwv

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) June 22, 2025

STACY MCCAIN: How Trump Ruined the Media’s Weekend.

Oh, sure, it was a bad Saturday for the Ayatollah, but try to imagine what it was like for the news media. Suppose you’re the lead national security reporter for the Washington Post or the New York Times. It’s a Saturday in June, so maybe you’re out at the beach for the weekend, having a nice seafood dinner with friends at some beachside bistro on the Maryland shore. You’re probably on your third glass of wine when, shortly before 8 p.m., your phone explodes with messages from your editors.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT! THAT SON OF A BITCH!”

Which is how reporters talk, by the way, especially when they find out on a Saturday night that they’ve got barely an hour to write the lead for a front-page story in the Sunday paper, and the only information they’ve got is a Truth Social message from Donald Trump. Bwa-hahahahaha!

David Frum must not be feeling too happy this morning:

Two more people not having a good Sunday:

Nothing says "America First" like Candace and Nick Fuentes being featured on Iranian state television pic.twitter.com/u17DM7rLlj

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 22, 2025

UPDATE:

Democrats watching Iran lose their nukes pic.twitter.com/JAns2iLbWm

— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) June 22, 2025

ROGER SIMON: Yes, Iranians Can Throw Off the Mullahs.

Evil as Xi and Putin may be, they are at least, to us, somewhat rational actors. Not so the mullahs. They follow a bizarre messianic eschatology—”Twelver” Shia Islam—through which they wish (or wished) to take over the entire world. At least some of them do. Others may be playing along for profit. But whatever the case, that is who is putatively in charge.

In all, it’s a kind of religious insanity.

As is generally known, they exercise power with incredible brutality, especially toward women, with levels of misogyny that are horrifying to read about, let alone witness or experience.

I have spoken with victims of this misogyny—rape is almost the least of it—and wonder what American women like AOC and Whoopi Goldberg are thinking when they make their moronic pronouncements. Nothing much, I’m afraid, except about themselves.

But more interesting in this situation is what the Iranian people themselves will do.

Read the whole thing.

‘GOD BLESS AMERICA:’ Netanyahu Praises Trump for Iran Strike.

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

If the strikes work, and Iran is neutered, the Middle East will be a far more peaceful place. These people aren't against war. They just want the war on Israel to continue. https://t.co/xJfBseJaFi

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) June 22, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Wealthy Whoopi Goldberg fails to see the irony of her ‘oppression’ narrative – or that the US is NOTHING like Iran.

One of the many problems with weaving a victim narrative is that it transports you into an ideological oblivion, making you nearly ­incapable of recognizing how self-unaware you sound to normal people.

Watching millionaires on “The View” trash a nation that has given them lives of abundance is absolutely nauseating to ­witness — and, to the average American, comes across as ­incredibly ungrateful.

Like Goldberg, many wealthy black people, lacking any ongoing sense of personal struggle, feel guilty for their success.

Yet they believe being black in America is synonymous with strife — and through race association, they can live the poor black experience vicariously, safe inside their gated communities and ­penthouses.

Goldberg is one I would classify as a “verbal victim,” because she has in fact overcome a multitude of personal and social obstacles to achieve worldwide fame and ­fortune.

Yet she pathetically holds on to her oppression narratives because they carry no negative ramifications in her luxurious world, only applause from victim-enabling white leftists like Joy Behar.

Goldberg could instead hold up her life as an example of an American success story — but then she’d have no struggle to complain about.

After being fired by ABC News earlier this month, Terry Moran claimed:

“I guess I’m a Hubert Humphrey Democrat,” he said, “I’m old enough to remember him. And you know, get practical things done that people need in a decent way, and stand up for what’s right.” Humphrey was a liberal Democrat pushing LBJ’s massive “Great Society,” not a centrist. It’s like saying I’m a centrist who’s a Ted Kennedy Democrat or a Jimmy Carter Democrat. But he suggested that because [Trump aide Stephen] Miller “degrades” the civil discourse, he’s “dangerous.”

[Tim Miller of the never-Trump Bullwark] pointed out that Republicans might say, aha, he’s outed himself as a Democrat. The mask is off. Then Moran did the screw-objectivity thing.

“My own feeling is that you don’t sacrifice your citizenship as a journalist. And your job is not to be objective. There is no Mount Olympus of objectivity where a Mandarin class of wise people have no feelings about their society. We’re all in this together. What you have to be is fair and accurate.”

Oh. Well if that’s the case: ABC News Needs to Apply the Terry Moran Standard to The View. 

Incidentally, if Moran can claim in 2025 that he “guesses” that he’s “a Hubert Humphrey Democrat,” how would Whoopi’s ideology be defined? Eve Barlow attempted just such a thing three years ago when the ABC News employee claimed on air that “the Holocaust isn’t about race:”  Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance About The Holocaust Is What Happens When Intersectionality Rots People’s Brains.

UPDATE: Bill Maher says Democrats need to ‘do something’ about The View after Whoopi Goldberg’s Iran comments.

ACE OF SPADES: The New York Times is Boohoo Whinin’ and Cryin’ That Unrealistic Extremists in the ACLU Brought the Tennessee Trans Case to the Supreme Court and Lost Bigly.

The article is trying to be nice to their trans allies, but the general thrust is that these people are so isolated in their progressive trans bubbles that they have no idea of what the rest of the country thinks about their extremist crusade to sexually mutilate children.

It’s a long, long, super-long article. I’ll just quote the parts where the NY Times hints that maybe the trans movement is too strident and delusionary for its own good.

Note the article talks a lot about the transgender lawyer who argued the case for the ACLU. “Chase Strangio” — super-realistic name there, “Chase,” totally sounds like your parents gave you that name and totally not like you just went through YA Novels looking for “kewl” teenager names — is actually a woman, though she dresses like a man and really thinks she’s passing.

I’ll try to change the incorrect pronouns he/him/his to she/her/hers, but if I miss any, well, I tried.

If this is too long for you: The main point that true-blue Super Liberal Propagandist Nicholas Confessore is making is that the trans movement is extremist and refuses to see any nuance on any issue and is determined to just ride roughshod over all those who question the Strange New World they’re trying to will into being.

They went too far in going after the kids like they’re shrimp cocktail at a wedding reception, and by doing so, they have put their own movement and the entire Democrat-Media Party in a precarious place they may not be able to get out of.

Including this moment in the Times’ article:

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH VAN JONES IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

🚨NEW: CNN's Van Jones calls on "progressives" to "GET ON BOARD" with Trump's stance that Iran *can't* have nuclear weapon🚨

"I think progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is. Iran is not a normal country. Normal countries don‘t blind women because they showed some hair.… pic.twitter.com/HFQloc2Gwg

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) June 21, 2025

IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH THESE DAYS: Gavin Newsom and Dems Lose Their Minds After JD Vance Disses Senator Alex Padilla By Calling Him ‘José.’

THE TIPPING POINT:

Guam, you say?

And since we didn’t mention it yesterday, in the interest of being a full-service news aggregation Weblog, we must now warn more sensitive readers in advance that what is heard cannot be unheard. Watch: Hank ‘Guam Might Capsize’ Johnson Releases Anti-Trump Song and Good Lord, Make It Stop.

Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) – he of ‘Oh noes, Guam might capsize’ fame – put out an anti-Trump song on social media for reasons known only to him.

It’s genuinely an injustice that his staff didn’t stop him from releasing it. I mean, tackle the guy out of his chair before he hits the ‘post’ button if you have to. Just make sure this never sees the light of day.

Johnson uploaded the video to his X account, where he is celebrating June as Black Music Month.

“This year, I decided to come back with another jam session for you all,” he wrote. “Here is my rendition of ‘Hey Joe’ by the Godfather of Rock, Jimi Hendrix.”

Iowahawk is succinct in response:

This video summoned zombie Jimi Hendrix back from the grave, just to light Hank Johnson's guitar on fire pic.twitter.com/nogTfjDY6g

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 20, 2025

Barring that, could someone at least give Johnson a decent guitar tuner before he inflicts another video upon us?

THIS WILL END WELL:

In his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), David Frum wrote:

Americans over a certain age are often surprised to see diminutive women patrolling their city’s meanest streets. The policemen of their childhood were tall, commanding figures. Have the cops shrunk? Well, yes. In March 1973, the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration issued an order forbidding any local police department that received federal funds (that is, all of them) to maintain minimum height requirements—the rules disqualified too many women. In 1977, the Supreme Court seconded LEAA by striking down Alabama’s minimum height requirement as a violation of the 1964 act. The federal government lived up to its own principles. In 1971 it waived size and strength requirements for its own police forces. In 1977, New York City acceded to a judicial order and permitted women to apply for fire-fighting jobs. None of the applicants passed the department’s strength test so the judge ordered the strength test made easier until sufficient numbers of women could pass.

Thus leading to this cringe-inducing moment, which made the rounds on social media in January during the devastating L.A. fires:

LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson:

"Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place." pic.twitter.com/BofTVr6dWP

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 9, 2025

LET’S TALK ABOUT CHATGPT-INDUCED SPIRITUAL PSYCHOSIS:

Responding to the recent New York Times article that depicted people such as an accountant becoming convinced via ChatGPT that “he was trapped in a false reality and could escape by disconnecting from this simulated world—eventually believing ChatGPT when it told him he could jump from a building and fly,” Katherine Dee writes, “this always happens with new communication technology:”

And with similar severity, too!

Twenty-five years ago, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce traced this history in his book Haunted Media, showing how we have consistently linked new communication technologies with the paranormal and esoteric. It’s not a random coincidence or sign that we’re in a “uniquely enchanted” age1 but rather a predictable cultural response, one we’ve been replaying over and over for hundreds of years.

Spiritualist mediums claimed to receive messages from the afterlife through Morse code. These operators saw themselves as human receivers, bridging the material and astral. The technology that sent messages across continents without physical contact made it easy to imagine messages crossing the veil.

Radio seemed to throw every word into what Sconce calls an “etheric ocean,” a limitless and invisible sea where messages bobbed about like bottles adrift. By the late 1920s, the big broadcast companies tried to “net” that ocean with fixed frequencies and scheduling. Sconce writes about how fiction reflected this taming of the radio waves. The wistful romances of amateur “DXers”2 scanning the dial gave way to sinister tales of mass hypnosis, government mind-control rays, and Martians commandeering the airwaves.

Television, again, added another layer, perhaps most iconically portrayed in the 1982 film Poltergeist:

Read the whole thing.

DAVID THOMPSON: Dumb, Yes, But Fashionable.

From the world of cinema and pretentious agonising:

* * * * * * * *

The dogmatic scolds who bang on about “cultural appropriation” rarely display much understanding of how culture comes about. Perhaps they imagine that the world would be richer and more pious without Akira Kurosawa’s vivid reworkings of Shakespeare, or his ‘appropriation’ of American band music of the 30s and 40s, and without Kurosawa’s own films inspiring Sergio Leone and George Lucas, etc. The riffs and copying, the to-and-fro, are to a very large extent what culture is.

There is a easy remedy for Boyle if he truly wishes to expunge his guilt:

Otherwise, as Rob Henderson of City Journal tweets, “Get all the money and applause for making it, then all the moral credit for saying you wouldn’t make it. Some people always know precisely the correct next move on the chess board.”

The left is still trapped in Redneck Nation territory; consider the implications for potential audiences. As one wag commented in response to Wayne Burkett’s tweet above, “If a white person can’t tell that story because they can’t learn about India and tell it…then there’s no point to a white person WATCHING that story or buying a ticket to see it, either. You already told me I won’t understand it, and can’t learn from it, because of my race.”