Along with:
● New York Times Twists Heritage Report to Smear J. D. Vance as Right-Wing Bogeyman.
● The London Telegraph: School shootings are just a fact of life, says JD Vance.
● And the popular in the States London Daily Mail: JD Vance calls school shootings a ‘fact of life’ in wake of Georgia massacre: ‘psychos are going to go after our kids.’
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME SOCIALISM?! The Nation Aims for Worst Take of the Year Complaining About Democrats Embracing ‘Dark Side’ of Football. “This is certainly a take, and definitely in the running for the worst take of 2024:”
It may seem like the Democrats are playing offense. That certainly fits a sports cliché, but it gets the underlying political dynamic backward. Football—and the reclamation of patriotic symbology—is pulling the Democratic Party to the right. While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football, the last decade’s exposure of the sport’s corrosive nature is a good thing. People have the right to know the negative physical and psychological effects that can arise from playing the most popular sport in the country. Football and medical whistleblowers have exposed a right wing willing to look away from public health if it means pats on the back and campaign dollars from the reactionary billionaires that run the NFL.
“While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football,” we all know of one fella who really gave it the ol’ college try, speaking of sports cliches. Good luck with that, though:
THE GRIFTERS: Robin DiAngelo’s Plagiarism Exposes the Fraud Behind ‘Anti-Racism.’
Robin DiAngelo would never have registered at all in the American conversation about race except that she supplied such glib formulations of key elements in the great racial hysteria that broke out in full force after the death of George Floyd in police custody in May 2020. At that point, the demand for public excuses for riots and extortion exceeded the plausible supply. The general public had to be persuaded that it was a good idea to defund the police, decriminalize shoplifting and other urban sports, use prosecutorial discretion to let predators go free, and generally authorize a wide range of other assaults against justice and public order. That “general public” was not necessarily “white,” but it suited the narrative to describe it that way.
And that made DiAngelo’s book the gold standard of rationalization for racial violence and predation. To raise objections to the new disorder was to display “white fragility,” and therefore racism. Who believed this nonsense? Apart from the leftist agitators themselves, there were two categories who did so: the college students who were assigned White Fragility as a textbook of unquestionable authority and the white suburban women who supplied DiAngelo her core audience.
It remains to be seen how quickly DiAngelo’s standing will fade. Bogus books can have a long afterlife. I think of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, long exposed as fraudulent, but still appearing on college syllabi as part of the indictment of American imperialism in Central America. The concept of “white fragility” will no doubt remain standard on the playlist of the “anti-racist” Left for many years to come. But DiAngelo’s credibility with the broader public is at the beginning of the end.
It is not that plagiarism itself is seen as an unforgivable sin. It is exactly that in academic circles, but the general public is largely indifferent to the matter. What will stick to DiAngelo, however, is her shameless exploitation of minority writers and black grievance for her own personal gain. The whole “anti-racism” project was a grift from the start. It enriched the founders of BLM; made Kendi rich; and propelled Hannah-Jones to fame and fortune. But what DiAngelo will be remembered for is creating a grift on top of that grift. It was a fragile proposition all along.
There will be more, however. As George Leef writes at the Corner, Peter Wood of the American Spectator “is somewhat optimistic that Robin DiAngelo’s big days are behind her. I hope so. But it’s also possible that someone else will just copy her method and become the Next Big Thing in the racial-grievance circus.”
I think depends upon how much the left have put the ghosts of 2020 behind them. I’m not at all confident they have.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: Tim Walz promoted research facility that partners with China’s Wuhan lab.
DILIGENT RESEARCHERS AT WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY CONTINUE TO SURPASS ALL TARGETS, COMRADES! Chinese lab linked to Covid leak may have also released ANOTHER deadly virus, new research claims.
The Chinese lab that the FBI believes likely leaked Covid-19 may have also released a ‘highly evolved’ strain of polio in 2014.
A bombshell new study suggests that this polio strain, which infected a four-year-old boy amid a wider viral outbreak in China‘s Anhui province, is ’99 percent’ identical to a polio variant that was stored 200 miles away, during that same time period, at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Researchers at France‘s Pasteur Institute cannot say with certainty where this strain, dubbed ‘WIV14,’ originated. But they insisted two possibilities ‘must be explored’ — including the chance that WIV14 polio originated within the Wuhan institute itself.
‘The findings underscore the shocking unsafe state of global virology research,’ Harvard-trained molecular biologist Dr Richard Ebright, who was not involved with the research, told DailyMail.com.
Evergreen: State Department Memo: The Wuhan Institute of Virology Wasn’t Operating Safely.
BIPARTISAN CONTRARIANISM: At Power Line, Steve Hayward explores the potential contrarianism on the left:
Ax yourself a question (as Kamala Harris might put it): If you are an ambitious Democrat—say, Gavin Gruesom, Wretched Whitmer, Josh Shaprio, etc—do you really want Kamala Harris to win this election? If she does win, it would seem more likely than not that she’ll be the nominee again four years from now, which means that your next shot at running will be 2032. Today’s fair-haired Democrats like Newsom and Whitmer will be yesterday’s news by 2032. Much better for their own self-interest if she loses, and 2028 will be an open seat race since Trump will be limited to one term. I’ll bet they’d all fail a polygraph exam on this question.
I think it’s a pretty safe bet that numerous high-ranking Dems wouldn’t mind being able to play the role of the “change” candidate after four more years of Trump. But at Spectator World, Ben Domenech sees a similar “winning by losing” mindset among much more rank-and-file Republicans, and reminds them: No, Republicans don’t win by losing.
Welcome to Thunderdome. Without fail, in every cycle, some media commentator will pen a ludicrous piece about why Republicans should want to lose. They follow a similar, all-too-familiar script: if the Democrat wins the presidency, they will be restrained by the power of the Congress and the Courts from advancing a truly radical agenda; historically, their victory will lead to a sizable midterm backlash setting up for a better election the next time around; and the sooner the GOP rids itself of the baggage at the top of the ticket, the sooner it can elevate younger rising stars who haven’t been thoroughly villainized yet by the national media.
This argument is bunk — and the author is usually not stupid enough to actually believe it themselves. But it’s a useful argument to make in an attempt to undermine partisans and confuse fringe voters, and generally create the kind of chaotic debate that can get the Republicans squabbling among themselves. So that’s why an argument this stupid shows up time and again.
This time around we have a perfectly crafted version of this twaddle from Politico’s Jonathan Martin, in a piece titled “If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big.” He vomits up this via his Acela corridor sources:
I’m not sure I agree with Domenech that this is all “twaddle” – there’s likely enough TDS among some Acela Republicans that they wouldn’t mind seeing the Bad Orange Man take a fall rather than return to the White House. Including, as Abigail Shrier speculated on Wednesday, one prominent conservative podcaster to justify his newfound historical contrarianism:
Curiously, with the iceberg looming dead ahead, Trump and Vance are dressed in their finest and prepared to go down like gentlemen:
WELL OF COURSE HE DIDN’T FINISH HIS DEGREE; HE WAS BUSY NOT SHIPPING OFF TO IRAQ: ‘He Did Not Complete the Degree Program’: Tim Walz Repeatedly Claimed He Was ‘Nearly Finished’ With PhD Years After He Disappeared from University.
WHOOPS: Walz, Sen. Tina Smith Use Bakery That Closed During His COVID Crackdown to ‘Own’ Vance.
The media made a big deal about Republican VP candidate Sen. JD Vance ordering doughnuts at a Georgia bakery.
Democratic VP candidate Gov. Tim Walz pounced, claiming he can easily order doughnuts.
Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith also pounced with a photo of her and Walz in front of Daube’s Bakery in Rochester, MN.
Well, Daube’s Bakery closed its last storefront shop in 2020 during Walz’s draconian COVID policies.
Not a good look:
KAMALA HARRIS NOW IN FAVOR OF FORCED BUSING: So Genuine and Authentic! Reporter Points to Hundreds Waiting to Leave Harris Rally in Buses.
JUST IN: Kamala Harris had to bus people in from up to four hours away to get them to her rally in Savannah, Georgia.
One man said he was bussed in from Atlanta which is about a three and a half to four hour drive away from Savannah.
“I was in Atlanta and I heard that the VP… pic.twitter.com/v2K9Uz5XAn
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 29, 2024
I’m so old, I can remember 2019, when Harris claimed to be against forced busing.
MARK JUDGE: A New Yorker writer’s mesmerizing new memoir fails to learn lessons about drugs, love, and life.
Near the end of her brilliantly written new memoir Health and Safety: A Breakdown, author Emily Witt offers this observation: “I knew people close to me—especially those who had not understood this season of my life from the outset—could look for a cause for what had happened to me and find it in the drugs that I used. It would be almost formulaic to say that 2020 was a comeuppance and that my having ended up childless and alone in my forties was an outcome I had engineered in pursuing a messy life. Our behavior had been antisocial, and look how it had ended.”
This seems to be an epiphany. But then Witt retreats: “On a bad day I could almost convince myself to frame my story this way, too. Almost, but not for very long.”
That’s a shame because accepting the truth would probably give Witt some serenity. She deserves it.
Health and Safety is the story of a dazzlingly bright person who made a wrong turn, got into drugs, and suffered for it. Just admitting that could bring her peace.
I’m reasonably certain that as awful as the year was, the horrors of 2020 weren’t engineered simply to be a “comeuppance” for the bad life choices made by a New Yorker writer — and I’m pretty sure Rick Blaine would agree.
JAMES, IT’S AN ELECTION YEAR, YOU DON’T NEED TO NUDGE THE DNC-MSM ALL THAT MUCH: James Carville Suggests Fact-Checkers Abandon ‘Impartial’ Reporting ‘To Help Save Constitution’ From ‘Republicans.’
Democratic strategist James Carville on Thursday suggested that fact-checkers should focus their reporting on “Republicans” to assist in rescuing the U.S. Constitution.
In a June episode of his “Politics War Room” podcast, Carville advocated for media outlets to increase their “slanted” coverage of former President Donald Trump to prevent his reelection, claiming “the entire Constitution is in peril.” Carville reiterated this stance during a Thursday episode, shifting his focus to fact-checkers and expanding his advocacy to include Republicans generally, rather than just Trump.
An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”
The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”
But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”
“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.
Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.
Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”
In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”
In 2004, that year’s boogieman was dubbed “Bushitler.” Last month, he was rehabilitated, given a new suit, and freed from the bunker by The Hill, which was thrilled to report that his aides were endorsing Kamala Harris.
SOHRAB AHMARI: Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.
Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric, but I use the term advisedly—and literally: How else to describe Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Darryl Cooper? In it, the amateur historian argued that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Nazi death camps were the result not of malice, but a logistical mishap: a failure to plan for the Wehrmacht’s oversupply of POWs. “Nazi Germany,” Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”
Carlson, a journalist I used to admire, hailed Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” and lent him the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter. As Cooper insinuated that unnamed “financiers” leaned on an indebted Winston Churchill to prolong the war, Carlson didn’t bother to ask, To whom, specifically, are you referring, Darryl?—like a curious journalist could be expected to do.
Long before he appeared on Carlson’s show, Cooper had made known his nutty views about the Jews as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich. In July, he declared that the Nazi takeover of France—which resulted in the deportation of 75,000 Jews to concentration and death camps—“was infinitely preferable in virtually every way” than the admittedly offensive drag queen “Last Supper” staged at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.
Two months earlier, Cooper posted a rant on X in which he urged Christians to “reckon” with the fact that “no god in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and bloodthirsty as the Yahweh of the Old Testament”—a rehash, in other words, of Marcionism: a second-century gnostic heresy that posited that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a capricious demon and not the God of Jesus. In 2019, Cooper agreed with an online interlocutor that “non-racist fascist” is a “decent description” of his politics.
As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Cooper has garnered some 26 million views on X, boosted by Elon Musk, who called it “very interesting” and “worth watching.” (He later deleted the post.) The denizens of the Barbarian Right space seem to have gotten what they wished for out of the Cooper interview. “A lot of good points,” said one. “Only thing missing is naming the group behind the majority of subversions.” Another chimed in: “The mass migration into Europe and America is a Jewish-led operation.”
Exit question: Is J.D. Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?
DISPATCHES FROM THE MODERN NFL: Washington Commanders Exec Suspended After Video Rant About ‘Homophobic’ Black Players, ‘Alcoholic Fans.’
That was not all he had to say about NFL players. He branded some of them “dumb as hell,” too.
“There’s obviously a spectrum. There’s some that are dumb as all hell, and there are others that are very smart,” he said. “I think there’s also a real sad but true reality that some start smart, and they get hit in the head so much that they don’t stay smart.”
In another segment of the recordings, Enteen went after the fans, calling many of them “mouth breathers.”
“Most of the NFL fans I would say, are high school educated alcoholics,” he insisted in one segment, while blasting fans for starting fights in the stands in another.
He did not spare the league itself, either.
He called the NFL’s commitments to social justice causes “performative” and only done for publicity, said that the league’s only real goal is to “make as much money as possible,” and even alleged that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is just an empty suit and figurehead and that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is really the man who runs the NFL.
Enteen also said he thinks Jones is a racist. “I think he hates gay people and black people,” he says on the video.
Flashback: A Word to the Wise Liberal. “This is a PSA to all male Democrat staffers: If a really hot chick goes on a few dates with you, there’s a 75% chance that she works for James O’Keefe.”
UPDATE: Commanders executive fired after trashing Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, NFL players and fans in undercover video. “The video was released on Wednesday by the O’Keefe Media Group, which is run by James O’Keefe. He told the Associated Press that the video was recorded back in June in a situation where Enteen thought he was going on a date, but the person he went out with was actually an undercover reporter for O’Keefe Media.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE: 9 Signs You Were The Bad Guy In World War II.
CHOOSE YOUR ADVENTURE:
● Top pollster finds Trump gains momentum against Harris – 58% chance of winning 2024 race.
—The New York Post, today.
● Kamala Harris will win US election, Telegraph poll predicts.
—The London Telegraph, yesterday.
● Trump’s campaign in chaos amid infighting among ‘grifters,’ ‘hucksters’ and ‘profiteers’ on his team.
—The London Daily Mail today.
—Also the London Daily Mail, also today.
SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald gives the background on Tucker’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper (the basics of which you’ve already read in the Mediaite story I linked to yesterday, and Steve’s piece at the PJ Mothership this morning) and writes, “A newsletter is not the place to ‘debate’ a podcaster over the most written-about subject in human history. Instead, we think it’s better to think about this episode from a political perspective:”
Who benefits from putting a World War II revisionist on the most popular podcast in America two months before an election? Well, for one, Carlson himself. One way to understand the interview is as a play by Carlson to draw a line on the right, with himself and the other brave “truth-tellers” (like Candace Owens) on one side, and the “neocons,” “Zionists,” and other establishment hysterics on the other. Sure, it shrinks the conservative coalition, provokes pointless infighting, and gives ammunition to Democrats and various sub-Lincoln Project grifters who would love nothing more than to distract from nearly a year of donor-funded, pro-terror protests on the left by portraying Donald Trump supporters as a gang of Nazi apologists. But it also puts Trump on the spot: Will you denounce your loyal followers to please liberals and “Conservative, Inc.” talking heads who hate you? Either way, Carlson wins.
Carlson wins, that is, and Trump loses*. As Abigail Shrier observes on X:
Kamala benefits….as does Barack Obama. This is trivially true in the sense that two-party politics are inherently zero-sum, but consider also the specifics of Cooper and Carlson’s discussion of Churchill. The implication isn’t merely that, say, Churchill was an overrated leader or a bad diplomat. Rather, it’s that Churchill was pushed by “Zionist” financiers to drag the United States into a war that it had no business fighting (never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for a war with Germany from the late-1930s on). Those Zionists, always trying to drag naive Americans off to war!
Of course, it’s easy to say this story evokes antisemitic tropes. But what in present-day American politics is it supposed to remind you of?
For help with that one, we can turn to Iranian agent, Obama ally, and Iran-deal salesman Trita Parsi, who felt that yesterday was an excellent time to turn the subtext into text by sharing a clip from Carlson’s previous interview, with Jeffrey Sachs:
Read the whole thing.
Related: We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again.
Carlson also spoke in a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He will be touring his show this month throughout the nation, with scheduled guest appearances in different cities by Vivek Ramaswamy, Charlie Kirk, recent Trump endorser Tulsi Gabbard, and none other than vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance himself.
I hope Vance enjoys answering questions from the media about why he’s joining a man who wants his viewers to give serious consideration to the possibility that the Nazis should have been allowed to invade Poland, liquidate its Jews and Poles, and repopulate it with Germans. (As a follow-up, ask Vance whether he thinks Hitler would have kept a promise not to invade the USSR.) Those questions might not be fair to Vance, but then again he would probably prefer answering those than telling people the truth: He will be there because that is where he thinks Republican voters are right now. And they are not in a good place if Tucker Carlson is their guide.
More: “A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about. Who’s the assignment editor now?”
* QED:
USA! USA! USA! Flagstock 2024: UNC Frat Bros Get the Rager They Deserve.
Well there must be some good reason
Why they didn’t want you there
It was a party, but only for the cool guys
Nobody you know was there
— “It Was a Party,” Dan ReederCHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Journalists don’t get invited to many parties that are actually fun. They always ruin the vibe. This sad truth was reiterated on Monday hours before Flagstock 2024 when a journalist from Politico (the news blog located many, many floors below the Washington Free Beacon) asked party organizer John Noonan about the lack of female artists scheduled to perform. Moments later, once the filthy journos had been escorted to the fenced-off fun exclusion zone where they belong, a group of supremely talented female artists arrived in the VIP tent—courtesy of Hooters, which also provided the catering. Representation matters, after all.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
KAMALA HARRIS’S BANANA REPUBLIC ON FREE SPEECH:
In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”
Does it?
Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation.
But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern Left’s gears: unsupervised conversations.
Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears.
We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship.
Related: What Kamala Harris means by ‘freedom.’
When Harris mentions the freedom to vote, which is certainly a cherished freedom in the U.S., what she means is this: “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.” Those are two bills Democrats have long been trying to pass that would federalize and restructure elections under terms favorable to Democratic candidates. Passing the two bills is the current Democratic definition of “the freedom to vote.”
So that is the Harris “freedom” platform. With the exception of abortion, in which Democrats seek to allow any woman to have an abortion at any time in a pregnancy, the listed freedoms don’t add any freedom at all. Indeed, some, such as the freedom to “live free from the pollution fuels the climate crisis,” could lead to the curtailment of freedoms people enjoy.
In the end, when Harris talks about “freedom,” she means giving people the freedom to live under the Democratic policy agenda. Of course, millions of voters would choose otherwise. That is what the election is about.
The Ghost of FDR would approve of the definitional slight of hand:
Is it possible that the History of the 20th Century can be explained by simple reference to a change in prepositions? That is the gist of the epiphany that struck me while watching David M. Kennedy on Booknotes (C-SPAN). He and Brian Lamb were discussing the fact that this book is part of the Oxford History of the United States joining James McPherson’s excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988). Suddenly, the switch from “of Freedom” to “Freedom from”, in the respective titles, struck me as emblematic of the pivotal change of emphases in the Modern world. The history of America from Plymouth Rock until the Crash was essentially the story of Man’s struggle for Freedom, but Freedom in a positive sense, Freedom to do things–to worship, to speak, to gather, etc. Thus, McPherson’s book details the great convulsion of the 19th Century, the Civil War and the struggle to free the slaves–a struggle to expand freedom. But Kennedy, charting the great 20th Century convulsion, has it exactly right, the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from “the vicissitudes of life” above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.
You may be surprised to see Hoover’s name there, but one of Kennedy’s great contributions in this book is this formal recognition by a liberal historian (joining the great conservative Paul Johnson, see Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) that Hoover, far from being a do-nothing antediluvian, was basically a liberal interventionist, who started us down the path that lead to the New Deal. (Of course, the great difference here is that Kennedy concludes that this makes Hoover a more laudable figure, while Johnson lambastes him.) In fact, Kennedy’s reappraisal of Hoover’s activism, coupled with the quotes above, unintentionally leaves the, I believe accurate, impression that the only achievement of the New Deal–the change in focus from government as a guarantor of individual freedom to a provider of succor in time of want–was not even unique to the New Deal, but was instead a general response to the intractable Depression.
Obama’s imaginary friend Julia and Footie Pajama Boy smile as well.
BRIDGES TOO FAR: Arnhem: The daring plan that ended in disaster. New video from the Imperial War Museum:
While Operation Market Garden was one of the Allies’ biggest failures in WWII Europe, it simply delayed in the inevitable outcome, as Mark Felton explored last year in a video titled “A German Bridge Too Far — The Nijmegen Counter Offensive:”
THEN SHE’S STILL IN FAVOR OF THEM: Kamala Supports Racial Reparations In Resurfaced Videos From Last Run, Has Not Denounced Position.
HEY, IT’S AFTER LABOR DAY. SHOULDN’T THERE BE NEW SHOWS ON, NOT OLD RERUNS? Biden administration to accuse Russia of sustained effort to influence 2024 election.
As Mark Hemingway writes, “Amazing how this comes out the day after a top Democrat is again busted harboring a Chinese spy.”
Good ole Obama-style “Stray Voltage” once again.
GAS PRICES: More decreases at pumps as nine states now have prices under $3 per gallon.
Gas prices fell yet again on Wednesday, continuing the recent trend of decreases at the pumps after the Labor Day weekend.
The national average price for a gallon of regular gas on Wednesday is $3.317, according to AAA. This is a drop from a week ago, when the average price for regular gas was $3.361 per gallon. Of particular note, nine states now have an average price for regular gas below $3 per gallon, the highest total number of states having such a cost in 2024. Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina have gas prices that plummeted to under that threshold.
Gas prices remain an important issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. With President Joe Biden deciding not to seek reelection, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, will have to indicate how she will address the country’s high gas prices and energy costs and how both affect the economy and people’s finances.
While prices have fluctuated in 2024, they have decreased in recent weeks and months. Nevertheless, gas prices remain higher than when former President Donald Trump was in office.
Which ultimately, Kamala believes is a good thing, right? Harris campaign dodges over EV mandate walkback.
Harris’ campaign has sent contradictory signals about her position on a mandate for automakers — a key issue in pivotal Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where many autoworkers are based.
I’ll take that as a “she still supports her 2019 mandate,” but is declining to say so, since the DNC-MSM is happy not to actually get her on the record on any issue. Besides, she’s the vice president of an administration that has been pushing for higher gas prices since it took office, and is full of Obama retreads who pushed for higher gas prices even before Barry took office.
POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE, POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE: Brian Stelter Returns to Clown Nation News.
What could go wrong?
October, 2020. Brian Stelter does an entire segment on how a fake news story is crafted.
"Manufacturing a storyline." From Russia to TV, by Brian Stelter.
The story that Stelter was calling fake? The Hunter Biden laptop story.😂 pic.twitter.com/f1H1D3sD9o
— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 4, 2024
DANIEL HANNAN: How Long Until People Are Willing to Hear That Lockdown Wasn’t Worth It?
We have forgotten the taped-off playgrounds, the drones sent up to pursue solitary walkers, the police in Derbyshire pouring dye into a lake so it would be less of a beauty spot, and the ‘pingdemic’ — that bizarre period when people were self-diagnosing so that, if they could not take time off work they would self-diagnose as being all clear, and if they felt like a little time off they would claim to have been infected. We have crammed all of these into some remote corner of our memory. In fact, the very difficulty of those things became an argument for continuing. We got into the worst kind of sunk cost fallacy. In fact, the Secretary of State at the time explicitly used that argument: we have been through so much, so let us not let it all be for nothing.
By then, almost everything was pushed into a retrospective justification for the measures that we and other Governments — with one exception — had taken. If infections went up, everyone said, “Well, we can’t relax the restrictions. It would be extremely dangerous.” If they came down, everyone said, “Oh, it’s working. We just need to carry on with this.” People kept on saying, “Follow the science”, but the one thing that we were not doing was applying the normal scientific method. Karl Popper defines science as something that can be disproved, but woe betide you if you even asked the most basic questions at that time about whether there was proportionality. We already had the evidence by the end of April 2020 that Sweden had followed the same trajectory as everywhere else: that the infections had peaked and declined in a place where there were only the most minimal of measures, banning large meetings but otherwise relying on people to use their common sense.
That is what a scientific approach would have done. It would have said, “Consider the control in the experiment.” We had a laboratory-quality control there all along — we had a country that had stuck to the plan that we were panicked out of following.
What can we see about the results in Sweden? First, and most obviously, there is not a smoking crater where its economy used to be. In fact, Sweden suffered less of an economic hit in the pandemic than it did in the 2008 financial crisis. The Swedish budget was back in surplus by 2021 — imagine that. The last Government was done for by our selective amnesia about the cost of these lockdown measures and the current one will be too, because people still do not like to face the fact that for the better part of two years we paid people to stay at home, we borrowed from our future selves, and that money would eventually need to be paid back.
What if it was all for nothing? Let us ask the question: what price did Sweden pay for sparing its economy? At the time we were told that there would be an almost civilisational collapse there. I remember the Sun had the headline, ‘Heading for disaster’, while the Guardian’s was, ‘Leading us to catastrophe’. The argument was not that Sweden might end up with a slightly better or worse death rate than other countries, it was that this would be an outlier by any measure — that there would be bodies piled up in the streets.
Remember in 2020 and 2021 when the left thought mass lockdowns were so cool, they could solve a myriad of other problems as well? I remember: Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?
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