THE STIG CRASHES: The Onion Mocks Corey Comperatore’s Death.

The Onion once stood alone as the country’s premier Fake News site.

The platform, first in print and later via the web, delivered deliciously fake stories on politics and culture. Then, much like other comic institutions, The Onion got woke.

And worse.

It mostly stopped mocking Democratic politicians, becoming yet another propaganda outlet. Earlier this year, it seemed like The Onion was headed for the trash heap of history.

New management came along, revived the site and installed Ben Collins as its guardian. Who’s Ben Collins? He’s NBC’s former “misinformation” specialist who proved as biased as his peers.

Maybe worse.

The Onion continues to hammer Republicans and give Democrats a pass. It’s why The Babylon Bee, right-leaning but more balanced and infinitely funnier, eats their lunch 24/7.

Yet The Onion’s Tweetstorm during the Trump/Harris debate Tuesday proved the site can still scrape the bottom of the barrel.

There’s “punching down.” And then there’s this:

As Mary Chastain of Legal Intellectual asks, “The tweet has over 80,000 likes, too. What is wrong with people!?”

Earlier: The Stig Crashes an Expensive Lemon.

BREAKING NEWS FROM 2020: There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab.

What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe – the Covid pandemic began as a result of a laboratory leak, then what happened in Wuhan, China was worse than a thousand Bhopals. It killed around 28million people – and was by far the most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred.

* * * * * * * *

Opinion polls show a similar result – two-thirds of Americans believe the virus originated in a lab in China – yet most senior scientists seem to be sublimely unbothered by the fact that the public holds this view. They show little or no interest in getting out there and persuading people to change their minds. Instead, they just hope the whole topic fades into history. That reluctance even to try persuading the public betrays either a marked lack of confidence in their own case or a guilty conscience.

Where does Tom Cotton go for his apology?

GREAT MOMENTS IN CONTRARIANISM: It Looks Like Trump May Have Helped Himself in the Debate.

Perhaps because of what I do for a living, I’m extra critical of Donald Trump’s performance. I’ve been pointing out for days now what Trump needed to do in the debate, and seeing him miss opportunity after opportunity was beyond frustrating. But according to a report from Reuters, undecided voters largely shifted to him after the debate.

“Kamala Harris was widely seen as dominating Tuesday’s presidential debate against Republican former president Donald Trump, but a group of undecided voters remained unconvinced that the Democratic vice president was the better candidate,” the outlet reported.

Reuters interviewed ten undecided voters before and after a debate. Six of them shifted toward supporting Trump, three leaned toward Harris, and one remained uncertain. That’s a rather solid outcome for Trump.

“Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds,” wrote Reuters.

That must have painful to write up in the Reuters newsroom, based on this February 2017 Daily Caller story: Reuters Instructs Reporters To Cover Trump Like An Authoritarian Regime.

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Is it offensive to call someone ‘middle-aged?’

A new victimhood group has just dropped: middle-aged people. Yes, according to language guides published by Bristol and York St John universities, it isn’t just ‘BAME’ or ‘BIPOC’ or ‘LGBTQIA+’ folk who must be protected from words that are too old-fashioned or insufficiently ungainly to be uttered in public. Apparently, those on the downward slope to 50 desperately need this kind of obsessive, paternalistic speech-policing, too.

According to these style guides, unearthed by the Sun, ‘middle-aged’ is basically the n-word for men greying around the temples and decked out in Superdry. ‘Language is a powerful tool. It can empower and be a force for change, but it can also offend, marginalise, trivialise, and perpetuate harmful attitudes and stereotypes’, proclaims York St John, before sternly instructing readers to say ‘Gareth is 49’ rather than ‘Gareth is middle-aged’. Apparently, OAP is out-of-order, too. ‘People of pensionable age’ is much better, says the guide. (Personally, I prefer the more elegant People of Age.)

Not to be outdone, Bristol’s guide suggests we should also ‘avoid using euphemisms or patronising language to describe older people’, including ‘silver surfer’ or ‘of a certain age’. In fact, we should forgo generational labels entirely, because ‘Generation X’, ‘Baby Boomers’, ‘Millennials’, etc, ‘can reinforce negative stereotypes’ – presumably about those snowflake Millennials, rich, racist Boomers and insufferably cynical Gen Xers.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?”

OLD AND BUSTED: The Woke Left.

The New Terribleness? The Woke Right. Konstantin Kisin: Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right (Video).

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Gosh, Would Be a Shame If THIS Video of Kamala Telling David Muir She’ll TAKE Our Guns Went Viral (Watch).

HMMM: Taylor Swift’s Post-Debate Endorsement of Kamala Is Telling About the Democrats’ Confidence.

The timing of Swift’s endorsement makes it seem like the Democrats also knew this wasn’t going to go as well as they’d like and needed a distraction directly after the debate happened. Sure enough, here comes Swift’s Instagram post for the world to see and for news organizations to talk about.

In fact, if you were watching CNN last night, that’s exactly what they did. They stopped talking about the debate and started talking about Swift’s endorsement very, very quickly. CNN very rarely gets that kind of news out that quickly, at least about social media posts, which also suggests they had been informed this might happen.

On Monday, showbusiness bible Variety ran a story headlined, “If Taylor Swift Doesn’t Endorse Kamala Harris, She’d Be Entering a New Era,” the timing of which presupposed that an endorsement would soon follow, lest Swift be accused of playing footsy with white supremacists again by the DNC-MSM.

ED MORRISSEY: Should Republicans Wet the Bed Over the Debate? Depends.

The fundamentals of this election cycle still favor Trump. Harris still belongs to a deeply unpopular administration, and Trump has more trust on the issues that matter most to voters in this cycle — inflation, immigration, crime, and national security. Trump needs to remain focused on those issues, and the rest of us need to put these game shows in the correct perspective.

Addendum: My pal Jim Geraghty is more pessimistic than I am about the debate, but on the same page about the impact:

So — again on paper — Trump was terrible, and you would think his poll numbers, nationwide and in the swing states, would nosedive. But what we saw Tuesday night wasn’t all that different from the same Trump we’ve seen year after year. And remember when Trump’s conviction was supposed to be a game-changer? The numbers barely budged.

Trump isn’t neck-and-neck in this race because Americans are charmed by his personality. He’s neck-and-neck in this race because of the national exhaustion with the Biden administration status quo, and frustration with inflation and the high cost of living, an insecure southern border, and a sense of growing chaos overseas. So, yes, in theory, this should have been a Harris knockout blow. But if this sort of contrast works, and one sort of performance is so much better than the other . . . why is Trump still so close to reaching 270 or more electoral votes?

I don’t think he was as terrible as people think, largely because they expected Harris to fold like a cheap suit under pressure. Mike Pence tried to warn people about setting that expectation this week. Jim’s correct, though, that the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Curiously, Trump supporters are shocked to discover that the House of Stephanopoulos was the House of Stephanopoulos last night. Jesse Kelly writes that the GOP will take serious action on their massively biased approach:

The GOP will have a severe response to ABC for this ridiculous, biased debate.

They’ll make them wait four years before agreeing to do another one on ABC.

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) September 11, 2024

UPDATE: Roger Kimball: ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate. The immoderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, repeatedly pecked at one candidate and not the other.

Unexpectedly!

OUTKICK GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Tyreek Hill Isn’t An Innocent Angel, And The Media Is Lying To You.

Related: The Left Wanted Body Cams on Cops, Until They Saw the Truth.

UPDATE: Jack Dunphy: The Tyreek Hill Affair: They Should All Be Ashamed. “[N]ow that I’ve seen that body camera footage, I think it’s fair to say the incident was not the Miami-Dade Police Department’s finest hour. Nor was it Tyreek Hill’s, who, in speeding in his $300,000 sports car, brought himself to the attention of the police and was something of a jerk after being stopped.”

MATT TAIBBI: Official Donald Trump-Kamala Harris Debate Drinking Game Rules.

THE PARTY TOLD YOU TO REJECT THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR EYES AND EARS. It was their final, most essential command:

“But a lot has changed.” The New Black Panthers could not be reached for comment.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden raises eyebrows with ‘doing 9/11’ comment ahead of debate.

President Joe Biden bluntly said he’s ‘doing 9/11‘ tomorrow in a head-scratching comment to reporters who asked his plans ahead of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

The gaffe-prone 81-year-old was heading to Marine One on the White House lawn when he made the comments just one day before the 23rd anniversary of the terror attacks.

‘I’m going up to my granddaughters birthday in New York,’ Biden began. ‘Then we’re gonna watch the debate, then tomorrow doing 9/11.’

The president’s remark concerning the September 11 attacks on America caused social media users to express shock and amusement at his poor choice of wording.

As with Springfield’s cats, the potential for memes are endless, including:

HOW IT STARTED: Community groups pressure City Council members to defund Oakland police.

—ABC7 News, June 15th, 2020.

How it’s going: Three shot dead, TV crew robbed over violent weekend in Oakland.

Adding to the weekend’s turmoil, an ABC7 news crew was robbed at gunpoint around 5:30 p.m. Saturday while reporting near 44th and Market streets, according to a statement from the Oakland Police Officers Association.

According to that statement, three suspects brandishing firearms pushed a crew member and took her backpack before stealing equipment and a security guard’s handgun and fleeing east along 44th Street in an old-model gold Toyota Camry 4D. Oakland police did not share information about the robbery when asked, and ABC7 declined comment late Sunday morning.

In the statement, Sgt. Huy Nguyen, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, criticized city leadership for the spike and blamed “staffing shortages in the police department and … policies that fail to hold criminals accountable” for increasing crime rates.

HITLER REDEEMED: May the Farce Be With You: The Hill Says Dick Cheney, Once the GOP’s Darth Vader, Is Now Luke Skywalker.

Given that, as the Washington Post reported in 2015, “The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified,” it’s a shame to see one of the good guys rapidly morph into a communist-inspired slave-owning religious fanatic, with an enormous body count in his wake.

STEVE HAYWARD: The Unoriginal and Superficial Nihilism of the Right.

I once heard James Q. Wilson offer an extemporaneous synoptic account of the 20^th century that I don’t think he ever published, but which I think is correct. It ran something as follows: We are mistaken in thinking the bad turn in our modern culture and political character was anchored in the 1960s.  To the contrary, all of the intellectual roots of the direct assault on Western civilization were alive, in place, and advancing as early as the 1920s. Modern art—the visual expression of nihilism—was advancing as fast as the “existentialist” philosophy of Heidegger and others (like the Frankfurt School, widely noted in recent years for its delayed influence in America), who were taking the European intellectual scene by storm by the late 1920s. Marxism was also advancing. It is not an accident that the baleful effects of these intellectual currents landed first and hardest in Germany.

Wilson’s conclusion is that our modern rot was on the way early on, but were postponed in America by both the Great Depression and World War II. My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. Wilson thought that in the absence of the Depression and World War II, the derangements of the 1960s might have started happening perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s, because all the antecedent radical doctrines were already long in place and advancing.

This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940.

Footnote: [a predecessor to Tucker’s recent guest, the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico’s] Churchill article opens thus:

“When, in a few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: ‘Who was the Man of the Century’ there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.”

Works for me.

Indeed. Whatever Churchill’s flaws and past misdeeds, history has proven him to be the right man, and the indispensable man, at the right time.

HOW JAMES EARL JONES BECAME THE VOICE OF DARTH VADER – FOREVER:

James Earl Jones approached Darth Vader as simply another gig – if even that. He requested that his name be omitted from the Star Wars credits because he was “just a special effect”. Little could he have guessed that Vader would follow him throughout his career. It would do see even after he had retired. Jones last voiced Vader in a cameo in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. But while he was done with Darth Vader, Star Wars was not finished with him, and in 2022, he agreed to allow his voice to be “cloned” by a Ukrainian AI company so that it could be used in the Disney prequel series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The process of breathing digital life into Jones’s voice proved unexpectedly fraught – not least because Russia invaded Ukraine late in production, and the developers found themselves fine-tuning Darth Vader as missiles thundered overhead.

Fortunately, they got the project over the line with Jones helping as a consultant – a sort of “benevolent godfather,” according to supervising sound editor Matthew Wood. He wasn’t the first Star Wars actor to be digitally recreated by Disney. The same Ukrainian developer had used AI to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian.

But while “AI” Darth Vader had the actor’s blessing, the issue of digital recreation of actors’ voices is still a fraught one – especially when the original performer has passed. There were misgivings over the “cameo” by the late Ian Holm in the new Alien: Romulus sequel (Ridley Scott, who directed Holm in the original Alien, said the actor would have been delighted to return to the franchise). Most notorious was the appearance in the 2016 Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, a digital likeness of Moff Tarkin actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994 when computers were still coming out of the Stone Age.

Cushing’s estate consented to his appearance in Rogue One. But the use of his image is now the subject of legal action. Disney is being sued by Tyburn Film Productions, a London-based film company that says it signed a contract with the actor, giving it a veto over the creation of his image using special effects. Disney contends it has the right to use Cushing’s image from the original 1977 movie.

The case is to go to court, and the judgement will have implications for the use of the CGI likeness of dead actors. However, this will not have much impact on the future appearance of Darth Vader. Jones was happy to have his voice conjured by AI and was always appreciative of Star Wars and its fanbase – and more than willing to recite such iconic Vader-isms as “No, I am your father”. He has now left us, but Darth Vader will remain a beloved villain for decades to come.

As I wrote in 2019: All-Digital Hollywood Actors? Arthur C. Clarke Called It Over 30 Years Ago.

Related: James Earl Jones: 10 Iconic Performances.

AND THE ROLE OF EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN WILL BE PLAYED BY…: Liberals’ Knives Come Out for Nate Silver After His Model Points to a Trump Victory.

GOODER AND HARDER, CA: Powerless In California.

The only things “renewable” about energy generation in California are the supply of lies and the suffering being imposed on Californians.

Problems with the power grid in the state have been getting worse for years as Gavin Newsom and the Democrats keep pushing to electrify everything while simultaneously replacing reliable nuclear and fossil fuel electricity generation with so-called “renewable” energy.

The results have been horrific. Costs for consumers have skyrocketed, and the current grid is creaking under the weight of multiple and conflicting requirements and consumers can no longer count on electricity being delivered to their homes and businesses.

How bad has it gotten? This bad: Hotel California: Legendary Hollywood Bowl Goes Dark Due to Power Outage.

Here’s a truth: it’s been hot in Southern California this month. Very hot.

Here’s another truth: it’s always hot in Southern California in September. This heat wave may be bigger than some, but it’s not unexpected or a stunning surprise.

But if you went to catch a show featuring “Vance Joy, Grouplove and Tiny Habit” Sunday night (admittedly I have no idea who those acts are), you were disappointed—because the legendary Hollywood Bowl went dark due to a power outage. The Bowl has hosted numerous iconic musical acts over the decades, including most famously, the Beatles in 1964.

But not on Sunday:

Despite what the Eagles sang in “Hotel California,”you can check out anytime you like (I did, eight years ago), but these days, you may need extra protection to escape:

MICHAEL WALSH: Publishing Today: Against the Corporate Media.

MATTI FRIEDMAN: When We Started to Lie.

The ideas I saw shape Israel coverage, in other words, have spread through the press and tamed the formerly independent and unruly world of journalists—a world where we may have been wrong most of the time, but not all the time, and never all in the same way.

In some cases, it’s not just the ideas that have moved from here across the media world, but the same people. One example is the editor who oversaw all Mideast coverage for much of my time at the AP, and who bore overall responsibility for much of the reality I described in my essays. From the Mideast, that editor, Sally Buzbee, went on to head the AP’s Washington bureau as most of the American press botched coverage of the 2016 election in an attempt to help the right people. She was then promoted to lead the entire Associated Press. More recently Buzbee became executive editor of The Washington Post, which has descended into a state of abject ideological confusion that became acute during Israel’s current war with Iran and her proxies, and which has been hemorrhaging money and readers. (She resigned in June.)

It’s not that ideological fantasy doesn’t afflict outlets affiliated with the right—just last week Tucker Carlson enthusiastically introduced his mass audience to a “popular historian” more sympathetic to the Nazis than the Allies.

The world has always been rife with fantasy and conspiracy, but the mainstream press was meant to be where you went to become oriented—to get what journalists called “the first rough draft of history,” that is, an account of what happened as best understood at the time of telling. The activists who now hold sway have mostly abandoned that role but still want to claim the mantle, appending the attribution “experts say” to their own ideology, and dismissing dissent as disinformation.

That’s why the transformation I witnessed matters. When I began working for the American press in 2006, someone with my center-left Israeli opinions may have been someone to disagree with, like a conservative Democrat or moderate Republican. In 2024, someone like me is a suspected racist who probably wouldn’t be hired. With some exceptions, the institutions have sunk into the Manichaean fantasy world they helped create.

It took me several years at the AP, and then a few more after I left, to grasp the change and put it into words. What was true of the Israel story ten years ago is now true of almost everything. Most journalists have abandoned “What’s going on?” for “Who does this serve?” The result is that huge swaths of the public know what they’re supposed to support, but lack the tools to grasp what’s going on.

Friedman’s piece is titled “When We Started to Lie,” but the DNC-MSM lying for partisan purposes isn’t all that new a development. Walter Cronkite was essentially a DNC mouthpiece during his entire career. Dan Rather famously imploded in 2004 for attempting a false late hit on George W. Bush. The media lied about the state of his father’s economy in 1992. Global warming should have killed us many times over, considering how many times we’ve been told since the 1970s that “we only have ten years to save the earth.”

Tucker playing footsie with the Reich Stuff is simply the flipside of Cronkite claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi in 1964, except now there are loads of media outlets willing to point out that the man with the microphone is lying to his audience.

DON’T GET COCKY: I Don’t Want to Say It’s Over for Kamala Harris… But It’s Over for Kamala Harris (VIP).

I’m trying really hard not to count my chickens before they hatch, but with so many eggs, it’s hard not to say I won’t wind up with a lot of chickens regardless of how many make it.

Kamala Harris is not doing well. Try as they might, every day brings a new embarrassment, usually born from an issue the Biden-Harris administration caused. On Monday, news hit the X feeds that Haitian migrants were eating ducks, geese, and house pets in Springfield, Ohio. With immigration being such a massive issue with the Biden-Harris administration, this naturally became another argument to vote for Trump. Memes rained down from the sky like manna from Heaven, doing more damage to the Harris campaign than a thousand stuffy political speeches.

Related: The Memes From the Haitian Invasion of Ohio Have Been Gold.

And they have been, but focusing on them ignores the serious problems that “Haitian invasion” has caused the town of Springfield:

RIP: James Earl Jones, Authoritative Actor and Voice of Darth Vader, Dies at 93.

UPDATE:

METAL AF:

If Trump wins in November (or whenever elections are decided these days), he should frame this cover and put it in the oval office. As Stephen Miller tweets, “I continue to implore you guys to stop making Donald Trump look metal and cool.”

UPDATE: Check Out The Atlantic Cover Meant to Make Donald Trump Seem Scary, but Makes Him Look Bada** Instead.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Flashback to July: Say, Remember When Kamala Backed ‘Defund the Police,’ Asks … CNN?

Related: When Your Little Ohio Town Becomes Port Au Prince and No One Cares.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn?’

There is one point on which everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: The destruction was orchestrated largely by agitators, not local protesters. Some of them were militant anarchists, and some were far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the “Aryan Cowboys.”

“People there with a First Amendment right to protest were being used as cover, whether wittingly or unwittingly, for the destruction,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous.

[Minneapolis police lieutenant Kim Voss], who went undercover decades ago to investigate Antifa, told me that “this is what trained activists do. They found a crowd that was really ripe for it. A lot of the looters were local people—ones that got caught up in it. But they were puppets. The activists were the puppeteers.”

More than anyone, though, Voss blames Walz. She recalled once hearing Walz use the line, “We don’t abandon our folks,” referring to Democrats who were calling for Biden to exit the presidential race.

“I thought, You’re so full of shit,” she said. “You did. You left us all behind.”

Related: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’ “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”

Walz’s daughter was also apparently pro-rioters as well back then: