SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: TikTok astrologers are convinced this election isn’t over.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
November 11, 2024
SEMAFOR: The old media grapples with its new limits.
When Semafor asked what new CEO Mark Thompson thought the election’s results said about the reach and impact of legacy news media, a CNN spokesperson pointed Semafor to several memos the network chief sent out over the last year. In them, Thompson said that “to succeed, we must abandon our preconceptions of the limits of what CNN can be and follow the audience to where they are now and where they will be in the years to come. We will still stand for the same things — video-led breaking news, delivered as it happens with honesty and insight — but with greater flexibility about the how and multiple new forms of monetization to complement existing revenues.” The network’s position is that legacy media will die if it doesn’t transform to meet these audiences.
It isn’t just a problem of reach or distribution. To some media executives, it’s a sign that the quality of news offered to Americans is not satisfying them, a view that Axios founder Jim VandeHei described as “gut-check time for traditional media.”
“The verdict is not debatable: Half the country thinks traditional media is biased and often useless,” he said. “They feel reporters treat Republicans like a crime beat and Democrats like friends in need. I don’t think this is usually the case, but it happens enough to give critics pause.”
It sure does — note that this Semafor column shares a byline between Maxi Tani – and former(?) Journolister Dave Weigel.
Also, note that old media is also grappling with how to break the Mobius Loop it’s trapped itself in for the past twenty years:
‘MANAGING STRESS DURING CHANGE:’ Biden-Harris State Department Holds Therapy Session After Trump Win.
The Biden-Harris State Department organized an in-house therapy session for employees early Friday following Donald Trump’s election victory, four sources with knowledge of the meeting told the Washington Free Beacon.
“Managing stress during change,” read an internal State Department email sent across the agency that encouraged employees to attend a one-hour session in which they could discuss their feelings about Tuesday’s election results. The department’s Employee Consultation Services in the Bureau of Medical Services hosted the session, according to a copy of the email notice described by sources to the Free Beacon.
“Change is a constant in our lives, but it can often bring about stress and uncertainty,” the email said. “Join us for an insightful webinar where we delve into effective stress management techniques to help you navigate these challenging times. This session will provide tips and practical strategies for managing stress and maintaining your well being.”
The session was led by a licensed clinical provider. A second one is scheduled for Nov. 13, according to the email notice.
The State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which oversees American diplomacy in the war-torn Middle East, also held a group discussion Friday with assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs Barbara Leaf and acting undersecretary for political affairs John Bass, according to three sources briefed on the matter.
One source described the meeting as a “cry session” over Trump’s victory, which is likely to usher in wholesale change at Foggy Bottom. Officials in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs have been working for months to sanction the Jewish government and withhold critical arms shipments, alleging Israel is not doing enough to provide humanitarian aid in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. They are said to have discussed the difficulty of Trump’s victory and urged employees to share their feelings in private settings.
“For four years, within the rank and file, there has been an over emphasis on people’s feelings, often with a college campus-like fervor, rather than the work of advancing America’s interests,” one U.S. official with knowledge of the meetings told the Free Beacon.
“This meeting was hopefully the last gasp of that,” the source said, adding that there is “lots to unf—k” at the State Department after four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
If the State Department is having a therapy session after a presidential election, there sure is.
TRUMP OFFERS ELISE STEFANIK U.N. AMBASSADORSHIP:
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly offered Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) the position of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump said in a statement. “Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter.”
Stefanik, who is the chair of the House Republican Conference, made noise earlier this year when her intense questioning during hearings on anti-Semitism on college campuses forced two Ivy League presidents to resign their posts.
As Roger Kimball wrote last December: The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents.
It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.
You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.”
“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”
I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.
Back in January, I wrote Mitchell and Webb should update their “Are we the baddies?” sketch, with the other Nazi replying, “Well Fritz, to be honest, it depends on the context.”
I’m looking forward to Stefanik generating similar results from an even more wretched hive of scum and villainy starting next year.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY IMITATES WOODY ALLEN’S SLEEPER: Wanna Know How Devastating Kamala’s Loss Really Was for the Left? Just Check Out What Mark Cuban Did-LOL.
To paraphrase the futuristic historian in Sleeper, some of us have a theory that she might once have been a candidate to be President of the United States, but that she performed so horrendously, all records, everything was wiped out about her. There is nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps, money, or what people from your century called “social media.”
WHEN YOU’RE A LEFTIST WHO’S LOST MAUREEN DOWD…: Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat in a red congressional district in Washington, narrowly held her seat. The 36-year-old mother of a toddler and owner of an auto shop told The Times’s Annie Karni that Democratic condescension has to go. “There’s not one weird trick that’s going to fix the Democratic Party,” she said. “It is going to take parents of young kids, people in rural communities, people in the trades running for office and being taken seriously.”
Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
On CNN, the Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said that Democrats did not know how to talk to normal Americans.
Addressing Latinos as “Latinx” to be politically correct “makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do,” she said. “When we are too afraid to say that ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”
Kamala, a Democratic lawmaker told me, made the “colossal mistake” of running a billion-dollar campaign with celebrities like Beyoncé when many of the struggling working-class voters she wanted couldn’t even afford a ticket to a Beyoncé concert, much less a down payment on a home.
And Camp Kamala sympathizes; they allegedly couldn’t even afford Alanis Morrissette tickets!
Sources close to the campaign revealed to The Post that the funds spent on these concerts have drained the campaign’s coffers. The campaign’s financial woes were hinted at earlier when they canceled a planned performance by ’90s alt-rock icon Alanis Morissette, reportedly in a bid to save money.
C’mon, you know you want to say it:
Canadian Alanis Morissette had to cancel giving her support to Kamala Harris because the check would not clear.
Isn’t that ironic. pic.twitter.com/Fcvmrq9euy— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) November 10, 2024
But seriously, Dowd’s column is nice, although obviously it would have had far more impact prior to election Tuesday. But when will the Times’ newsroom stop being a permanent Maoist struggle session and start reflecting the worldview of most Americans?
The NFL has fined San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa for sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat during a post-game interview.
Following a 30-24 win over the Dallas Cowboys on October 27, Bosa crashed an interview on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” where several of his teammates were speaking to network reporter Melissa Stark.
Bosa ran up behind quarterback Brock Purdy, pointed to his white and gold “MAGA” hat, and ran off-screen. The entire incident lasted less than five seconds.
The star player has since been fined $11,255 by the NFL over the political message, reportedly violating league rules. Players are prohibited from displaying personal messages or political messages of any kind on game day, according to NFL rules.
The NFL rulebook states the league “will not grant permission” for any player to wear messages that “relate to political activities or causes, other non-football events, causes or campaigns, or charitable causes or campaigns.”
File that away if the “woke Olympics” start up again next season in the NFL once Trump returns to office.
THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN—And I suspect he might just be slightly more effective than Joe Biden’s Border Czar:
JUST IN: Donald Trump announces former ICE director Tom Homan will be his new “Border Czar.”
Here is a previous spat Homan had with AOC.
“I am pleased to announce that the Former
ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration,… pic.twitter.com/acZfsy2WoE— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 11, 2024
JUST NBC THE MELTDOWN! ‘Unhinged’ NBC Reporter Rips Off Daily Wire Story, Nerfs It, Then Self-Immolates On X When Called Out.
The story went viral – and was eventually picked up by NBC News reporter Mirna Alsharif (formerly CNN), who proceeded to not only rip off the report without citing the Daily Wire, she completely nerf’d it — failing to adhere to basic journalistic standards despite all of that information having been reported by DW.
When she was called out for her shitty reporting, Alsharif had a complete meltdown on X — claiming that the Daily Wire wasn’t her source, and hurtling High School insults at reporters.
And while she just deleted her account, we’ve got receipts…
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: FEMA is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful federal agency I have ever known in my life!
CNN's @abbydphillip: “The only person making an accusation that people are not getting what they’ve asked for is Trump falsely claiming that the administration is withholding resources because of political affiliation. That is just not true.” https://t.co/CAF3sfikCD
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 11, 2024
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘Can You Send Security Up? I Have a Boy Who Has a Trump Hat On.’ California Teacher Loses It on a Student. “Progressives fancy themselves as more evolved, more enlightened people — up until the moment they find someone who doesn’t agree with them.”
OLD AND BUSTED: The October Surprise.
The New Hotness? The November Surprise! California Punishes Voters After Historic Election, Slaps on Massive New Gas Tax.
Gooder and harder, California.
November 10, 2024
QUESTION ASKED:
JIM JORDAN: “The biggest question is, what happened to the 10 Million voters that Joe Biden got but didn't come up for Kamala Harris?”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 10, 2024
From yesterday’s Power Line Week in Pictures:
From Glenn in 2021: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Worst Election Media Meltdowns: An American ‘Nightmare.’
It’s been a rough few days for the leftist media elites, they have been in anguish ever since Election Day.
The mix of anger and sadness poured out as they called the massive win for Donald Trump and the GOP a “nightmare” and questioned if America had “given up on democracy.” Journalists like Stephanie Ruhle warned that the voters had just “f’d around” and were about to “find out.”
MSNBC’s Joy Reid lectured Latino men: “Y’all voted with….David Duke and against your own sisters.” MSNBC’s Claire McCaskill choked back tears as she worried that America had turned their backs on their “better angels,” by electing Trump.
The following are just a few of the most epic election meltdowns from the leftist media elite:
Earlier today, I wrote, “We Need a Mental Health Check On Millions of American Leftists.” In large part, the madness of individual Dems (particularly the performative stuff on social media) is driven by the freakouts by those who create the media they consume. And while Kamala staffers are having cognitive dissonance over how she flipped on a dime from “Hitler!!!!” to “Well, we’ll get ’em next time,” the media seemingly have no desire to dial back the hatred they displayed in the weeks leading up to the election.
WE NEED A MENTAL HEALTH CHECK ON MILLIONS OF AMERICAN LEFTISTS: After the election, the rage against white women.
White women who did not vote for Trump now seem to be having a collective meltdown at the actions of their sisters. One suggestion doing the rounds on social media is that female Harris-backers wear a blue bracelet so that they can identify one another and distinguish themselves from Trump voters. Elsewhere, women wanting to punish men for voting the wrong way are proposing a ‘sex strike’ and pledging ‘no sex, no dating or marriage and no having children with men – for the next four years’. And these women fancy themselves as feminists? It’s like the sexual revolution never happened.
No matter how many women don blue bracelets or refuse to have sex, Donald Trump will still be their president. It’s called democracy. So-called feminists can cry all they like about Harris not making ‘history as the first female president’. They fail to understand that voters do not want a ‘female’ president, they want a good president. They want someone who addresses their concerns, whether with the economy, inflation, men in women’s sports and changing rooms, gender identity and sexuality classes in schools, or immigration. Women voted for Trump not because he is male but because they weighed up the two candidates put before the public and decided he was the best choice. Those currently shouting ‘Karen’ and ‘internalised misogyny’ might not realise it, but women vote with their brains, not with their genitals.
And, as Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders liked to emote, “think of the children!” Post-election, the (liberal) moms are not OK — and it’s hurting their kids.
All of the grown-ups posting about how their kids are crying and scared are revealing the kinds of parents they themselves are.
Hint: They aren’t the good guys they think they are.
Observing the phenomenon on her own social-media feed, Emily Rose Chadwick, founder of the nonprofit Mama Wilder Foundation, posted, “If your young children are in tears over the election results, it’s because you’re the kind of parent who traumatizes your kids to feel good about your political choices.”
What are these liberal parents afraid of, anyway?
That Trump will close the schools or deny basic services to disabled children?
I have to wonder: Where was the outrage from these same liberals on the fainting couches when progressive teachers unions and their Democratic supporters closed schools for over a year and a half in blue areas, denying children the right to literally show their faces in public, play on a playground, let alone get an education?
Then there are the “White liberals after having to be nice to minorities for years.” (Language alert):
This is precisely how all white liberals are. pic.twitter.com/C6PZZuFDwb
— George (@BehizyTweets) November 10, 2024
Finally, from Jonathan Turley: Yale Psychiatrist: Harris Voters May Need to Cut Off Friends and Family Members.
With women pledging to break up with their boyfriends and divorce their husbands over the Trump victory, Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun is advising that it may also be necessary for your mental health to cut off your family and friends who supported Trump. In that way, you can avoid being “triggered” by opposing political views — much like Yale itself.
As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.Dr. Calhoun went on MSNBC’s Joy Reid to offer the curious take on good mental health. Reid has spent the week condemning the majority of voters (particularly minority voters) in the nation as racists and misogynists for the Trump victory.
Dive for those fainting couches!
STEPHEN MILLER: The election was a referendum on the American media.
In the final month of the 2024 election, the national media existed in another solar system from the country for whom is tasked at reporting accurate, unbiased and truthful information. The final month started with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic attempting to regurgitate their anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” hit against Trump from 2020. With the help of CNN and others, they resurfaced General John Kelly. Then they went and got their full Reich on by comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally there. At said rally a comedian known for celebrity roasts made a crass joke about Puerto Rico, which blanketed the whole of national media outlets for four days.
When the October jobs report was released on the final Friday of October, showing an anemic growth of only 12,000 jobs, the national media focused all of their attention on comments Trump made about former representative Liz Cheney, who had become a Kamala Harris campaign surrogate, regarding sending her off to fight the wars her family and in particular her father had endorsed.
The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC created an echo chamber of thought bubbles that only they were listening to. The country had completely tuned them out. None of these stories actually mattered to voting audiences and the election result, with almost every major voting demographic moving toward Donald Trump in an electoral blowout.
And now the MSM are currently attempting to play the “right wing media bias” canard on Barry Bonds-levels of steroids. At Power Line, in a post headlined, “The Left’s Parallel Universe,” Steve Hayward quotes “Michael Tomasky, a former thinker and current editor of The New Republic (a former magazine)” on “the real reason Democrats lost the election:”
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. [Emphasis added.]
Tomasky includes Elon Musk and Joe Rogan as part of “the right-wing media,” but Rogan was a former Bernie Bro, and Musk has been quoted as saying, “They try to paint me as a far-right guy which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles … I supported Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand.”
As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE MARGARET DUMONT PARTY: Rich Lowry writes that “Trans Moralism Is Killing the Democrats.”
This is what happened on trans issues in the election. Donald Trump’s “she’s for they/them” attack ad was the most effective and consequential political spot of this century.
After writing up “Progressive” Jay Michaelson’s performative struggle-session freakout on CNN when “Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton said a lot of families don’t think that boys should play girls’ sports,” which we mentioned yesterday, Lowry provides additional examples:
The longtime chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, just got defenestrated at least in part for daring to say the obvious on the trans issues.
“You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” he said in an election postmortem.
He’d have been better off saying that the party should in the future call for the official end of the gender binary, by violence if necessary.
* * * * * * * * *
A top aide to Democratic representative Seth Moulton resigned after the congressman had the temerity to say that his party may have gone too far on the trans stuff. “I have two little girls,” he said. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Well, he’s supposed to be afraid for a reason.
The co-chair of the Bay State Stonewall Democrats said his remarks were “harmful to the queer community.” Mass Equality called him out for using the terms “male or formerly male,” which, of course, are “harmful and factually inaccurate.” And so it went.
The Left’s moralistic browbeating may succeed in reinforcing the trans orthodoxy among its own, despite the bitter electoral consequences. As we learned last Tuesday, though, the rest of the country won’t play by these poisonously stupid and illiberal rules, nor should it.
That was the game the DNC-MSM tried to play for years by attempting to toss the phrase “illegal immigration” down the memory hole amongst polite company, until June, when Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, decided he wasn’t going to play along on MSNBC when confronted by former Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris flack Symone Sanders-Townsend: “That’s Sweet. They’re illegal aliens.”
MSNBC’s @SymoneDSanders: “I wanna be clear, we don’t use the term illegal, they’re undocumented individuals.” @KevinRobertsTX: “That’s sweet. They’re illegal aliens.”
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) June 22, 2024
As one of the characters working on the ever-shrinking “Newspeak Dictionary” in Orwell’s 1984 said about his job, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Which in the modern left’s fantasies means not voting for Republicans, ever. And when the voters have temerity not to follow the Inner Party’s rules, as James Piereson writes, their operatives with bylines lash out at them: Democrats and never-Trumpers blame the voters.
Jill Filipovic, a feminist author and columnist: “In the coming days there’s gonna be a lot of opining about what the Harris campaign did wrong, but this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”
Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Trinity Forum: “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”
George T. Conway, a never-Trumper: “America did this to itself. And now we must all suffer through it.”
Jonathan Last, of The Bulwark: “Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.”
William Kristol, also of The Bulwark: “The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. . . . After everything . . . the American people liked what they saw [in Trump]. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.”
David Frum, an author and columnist for The Atlantic: “Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.
Yes David, but we eventually got through the Obama years just fine. Speaking of whom:
As he’s been doing throughout the past week, allow Scott Jennings to put things neatly into perspective: ‘Fainting Party:’ Scott Jennings Advising the Democrats About Why They Suck Is Hilariously Brutal (Watch).
Not usually in the biz of advising Dems but until their party becomes something other than a professional fainting society they are gonna struggle with working class Americans. pic.twitter.com/nX07PBOK4n
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) November 10, 2024
Exit quote: “Even Van Jones laughed at that.”
November 9, 2024
FINALLY: AP Calls Arizona for Trump.
JOHN PODHORETZ: Pogrom 2024.
Early Friday morning in Amsterdam, in the shadow of the house in which Anne Frank hid and where her family was betrayed, rampaging mobs of Muslim men targeted Israeli attendees of a soccer match featuring the Maccabi team. They beat up men and women. They broke into buildings searching for Israelis to attack. They assaulted at least one child. For hours, the streets were not clear of them, as the authorities in the Dutch city had no clue what to do or how to engage. The mobs had been prepositioned at stadium exits, subway station entrances, and near and around the hotels at which Israelis who had come to town to support their team were staying. This was a pre-planned attack. We are mere days away from the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day when Jews and Jewish businesses were specifically targeted for arrest, injury, and destruction. We’ve only ever really seen still photographs of the damage. You want to know what Kristallnacht was like? Go to Twitter and watch the videos, taken by the GoPro cameras of the goons, and you’ll get some flavor of what the word “pogrom” means. We have just seen the first unambiguous pogrom after October 7.
Now go to the home page of the New York Times. Go to the home page of the Washington Post. Go to CNN. Go. See where they have placed this story. It is two screens down, in smaller type. Now, fair is fair—it happened in the evening and these organizations no longer have things like Amsterdam bureaus. So this is a rare moment to thank God for the existence of social media; without X the world would not have known that the horror was upon us.
Read the whole thing.
California has been ruled by Democrats since the mid-1990s. There hasn’t been a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term expired in January 2011. There hasn’t been a Republican mayor of San Francisco since 1964. So the Dems have been able to run the experiment. And the results of one-party rule are stunning.
State taxes on the well-off are amongst the highest in the US, and set to rise higher, driving the wealthy away to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas. At the same time, the state has made itself a magnet for illegal immigrants by establishing no fewer than 20 ‘sanctuary’ cities or counties that refuse to enforce immigration law.
And the results? California now has 12 per cent of the nation’s population, but over 30 per cent of its welfare recipients. According to a 2020 Census Bureau report, which took housing and other costs into account, the poverty rate in California is 17.2 per cent, the highest of any state.
There’s a chronic housing shortage, mainly because a plethora of regulations make the construction of affordable housing well-nigh impossible. The state’s public schools rank 34th in the country overall and have the highest pupil-teacher ratio. Oh, and there are recurrent wildfires because of chronic management of public woodlands, and periodic droughts because of insufficient investment in reservoirs.
When I first visited San Francisco in 1981, it was still one of the loveliest cities I had ever beheld. Now its streets are so filthy – human excrement and syringe needles are the principal hazards – that I avoid it. The leaders of Democraticy Inc. – the Donorcrats who raised the billion dollars squandered by the Harris campaign since July – thought they could seize control of the whole of America, red states and all, and so perform the same reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead from coast to coast.
Thank God, they were wrong. That is why their candidate Kamala Harris has joined the sad list of sitting vice-presidents who failed to win the presidency, along with Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore.
More news from the once golden state: California Air Regulators Vote on New Climate Program That Will Likely Increase Gas Prices Up to $1.50 Per Gallon After Election Where GOP Captured More Counties.
GREAT MOMENTS IN CULTISM: ‘Tis the Season to Not Be Jolly! Joy Reid Tells Lefties to Shun Trump-Voting Family During the Holidays.
The “how to talk to/how to survive being around your-MAGA-hat wearing relatives over Thanksgiving” articles that will be dropping shortly will be astonishing to read.
ABC NEWS CLEARLY TAKING TRUMP’S WIN WELL: Grocers ‘outraged’ after Whoopi Goldberg calls them ‘pigs’ over food inflation on The View.
Grocery store owners clapped back after Whoopi Goldberg on ABC’s “The View” called them “pigs” over food inflation — and raised concerns that the name-calling could expose store owners to further violence, The Post has learned.
The comedian claimed “the folks that own the groceries are pigs” as she blamed them for rising prices at supermarkets on the Thursday show — a day after Donald Trump won the presidential election by hammering on inflation in his campaign.
“Your pocketbook is bad, not because the Bidens did anything. Not because the economy is bad. Your grocery bills are what they are because the folks that own the groceries are pigs,” Goldberg said on the popular program.
Earlier: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.
THIS IS CNN: CNN Panel Meltdown Over Trans Issue Shows Left Learned No Lessons From 2024 Defeat.
A CNN panel discussion this past week perfectly exemplified the Left’s remaining blindspot on the transgender issue, which the Wall Street Journal called the “sleeper issue” of the 2024 election.
One guest, Jay Michaelson, yelled at strategist Shermichael Singleton for supposedly being
“transphobic” for explaining that boys who identify as trans playing in female sports is not a popular policy with families across the country. Moreover, CNN host Abby Phillips, amazingly, tried to police Singleton’s language instead of shutting down Michaelson’s tantrum.“They’re not boys! I’m not gonna listen to ‘transphobia’ at this table!” Michaelson interrupted Singleton. “Did you call a ‘trans girl’ a boy?! … When you use words as a slur, I’m gonna interrupt.”
“They’re not boys! They’re not boys!” Michaelson continued to interrupt. “I’m not gonna sit there and listen to that.”
Phillips tried to “reset” the discussion by saying the trans issue is a “heated” one, but notably called on Singleton to seemingly police his language to be “respectful” to Michaelson.
“I think out of respect for Jay, let’s try to talk about this in a way that is respectful,” Phillips said to Singleton.
It’s an astonishing bit of tag-team language bullying against Singleton, both by the world’s angriest rabbi, and the show’s equally leftist host:
Another remarkable thing about this clip is the casting of Singleton as if he’s the cultural aggressor, rather than a normal guy calmly pushing back against the redefinition of everything we’ve assumed since the dawn of time. He didn’t make this an issue; they did.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) November 9, 2024
UPDATE: As Richard Fernandez tweets, “One of the ways to defend a position is to insist on language that makes it impossible to attack or criticize it at all. Control of language is an immensely powerful tactic. Once you concede the vocabulary you are doomed.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY:
“I would absolutely trust Elon Musk over anyone in the American Federal Government to work out how to make savings”
Broadcaster Piers Morgan discusses the potential role for tech entrepreneur Elon Musk in Donald Trump’s administration.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/WOIgUzSY8s
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 6, 2024
Related: How Trump and Musk Could Cut $2 Trillion in Government Spending.