BYRON YORK: A story everyone should know: Harris, Biden, and Gianfranco Torres-Navarro. “Wait a minute, some Democrats might say. Are you arguing that every person who crosses the border illegally is a murderer? Of course not. What the Torres-Navarro case shows is that U.S. authorities, under Biden and Harris, are not really checking anybody. If they let a man wanted for 23 murders through, they’ll let anybody through. And indeed, they do.”

As York writes:

If the Trump campaign has any say in it, voters should learn the name of Gianfranco Torres-Navarro. According to U.S. authorities, Torres-Navarro is the leader of a Peruvian crime gang and is thought to be personally responsible for 23 murders. He is a notorious figure in Peru, where he is known as “Gianfranco 23,” clearly “a reference to the number of people he is alleged to have killed,” according to the Associated Press. He has a girlfriend who, also according to the Associated Press, “has a sizable following on the social media platform TikTok where she showed off their lavish lifestyle, including designer clothes, resort vacations and shooting targets at a gun range.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but Torres-Navarro’s gang is known as “Los Killers.”

As with Al Gore kicking off the snowball that ultimately made Willie Horton a household name in 1988, gentlemen, start your ad campaigns.

FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN LITTLE CANADA, MINNESOTA: The Top Ten Reasons Tim Walz Stinks, According to a Minnesotan.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Return of the King (of Twitter).

PAUL VERHOEVEN CREATED ROBOCOP AS A WARNING, NOT A HOW-TO GUIDE: Coming To San Fran? Viral Video Shows ‘Sub-Lethal’ Remote Gun Protecting Commercial Building.

ED-209 (no relation), call your office!

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Paranoid Android — Watch as San Francisco parking lot full of confused driverless AI taxis causes misery for locals by honking at each other day and night.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Holocaust inversion is going mainstream – it’s deeply disturbing.

Holocaust inversion transposes the guilt of the abusers, the Nazis, onto the abused, the Jews, and leaves no room for any other possibility. It plays on a widespread societal belief about abused children: they can grow up to become abusers themselves – though of course most do not. But Holocaust inversion takes it a step further. Projecting this archetype about individuals onto a nation, it does not merely take the possibility that the abused can become abusers, it assumes, as Mishra did, that it is inevitable that the abused become abusers, and leaves no room even for the possibility that the abused is actually innocent.

This troubling trend continued. In April, after claiming that the Jewish state is conducting “a war against humanity itself,” Chef José Andrés told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week, “if somebody knows suffering, that’s the people of Israel. If somebody really understands the meaning of suffering, if somebody should be holding the highest standards of humanity, I will say that’s also the people of Israel.” His obvious implication is that what the Jews are now doing to the Palestinians, is the same as what the Nazis did to the Jews. Andrés, the founder of the World Central Kitchen relief agency, invoked Jewish suffering during the Holocaust in order to imply an analogy to what Gazans were experiencing, even as he parroted Nazi-esque language himself. Raddatz offered no push-back, and his statements aired on a major network.

The point of Holocaust inversion, of course, is to legitimize violence against Jews. After all, if they are Nazis, they must deserve it. This was made clear in June, when Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani led those who gathered to protest an exhibit about the Nova music festival in a chant claiming the festival was “like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust.” Gaza, in her absurd analogy, was like the gas chambers. And the Israeli ravegoers, according to her logic, deserved what they got.

And then last month, John Oliver brought Holocaust inversion to HBO using language almost identical to that of Cynthia Nixon. “A phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is ‘never again,’ an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it’s always been open to two interpretations. There’s the one that means, this must never again happen to the Jewish people and the one that means, this must never again happen to any people anywhere, and in the West Bank as in Gaza right now it’s pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored.”

Flashbacks:

● Columbia University makes no mention of Jews in Holocaust Remembrance Day post.

● The rise and rise of Holocaust envy.

● Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance About The Holocaust Is What Happens When Intersectionality Rots People’s Brains.

● Zone of Interest: The Real Problem With Jonathan Glazer.

● Glazer’s Partners Refute Glazer.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON THE SNOW WHITE TRAILER: Nightmare Fuel (Video).

Evergreen:

GONE WITH THE WINDY CITY: Chicago population hits lowest point since 1920. “At the 1920 Census, Chicago’s population was 2.7 million, up over 516,000 in a decade. More than 100 years later, Chicago’s population is 2.66 million, a loss of 128,034 from nine straight years of decline.”

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

C’MON JAMES, FIND A NEW PLAY TO RUN, HUH? James Carville Says GOP Supports Israel Because ‘Jews Are Whiter Than The Palestinians.’

Flashback:

DEMOCRACY DIES IN GASLIGHTING YOUR READERS: Washington Post reviews star columnist Taylor Lorenz’s ‘war criminal’ jab at Biden.

Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.

The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”

A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.

Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.

“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.

I just can’t see something like this coming from Lorenz:

I really can’t: ‘Al Jazeera On the Potomac:’ WaPo Reporter Taylor Lorenz Boosts Defenses of Los Angeles Synagogue Protest.

Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

“AN IRRESISTIBLE MIX OF ART AND GENITALS:” How a classy, A-list historical film turned into a $17 million hardcore porno.

“Caligula,” one of cinema’s oddest and most tawdry experiments, was produced by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione, the massively wealthy publisher who poured his own money into the project about the infamously depraved ancient Roman emperor.

Opposed to the serious drama that director Tinto Brass and screenwriter Gore Vidal desired to make, Guccione commandeered the production in post and added graphic scenes of hardcore sex to spice things up.

* * * * * * * *

A lot of sex. Multiple, unsimulated orgy scenes leave nothing to the imagination — and go well beyond what most imaginations can whip up. For instance, at Emperor Tiberius’ (O’Toole) home on the island of Capri, a completely nude woman wields a live eel.

Penthouse even published a special collectors edition in January 1981 called “Girls of Caligula,” the same of which could not be said of “Cleopatra” or “Spartacus.”

Critics were appalled at the gratuitous filth. Roger Ebert, generally open-minded, called it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.”

But starting Friday, a new version of that trash called “The Ultimate Cut” will begin playing select theaters.

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren must be so proud this week.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE WAPO: When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls? It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.

But they worked so well for Richard Nixon…

UNEXPECTEDLY: V For Vendetta Got It Wrong: Tyranny Comes To Britain Under The Political Left.

Whenever scientific dictatorship is envisioned by fiction writers the end result is usually very similar to already existing socialist regimes.  Soviet doctrine and the ideals of the Third Reich were inspired by Karl Marx; meaning, both regimes were built on far-left philosophies.  Progressives today often maliciously associate Nazis with conservative thought, but both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were avid followers of Marx.  As Hitler noted on January 27, 1934, in an interview with Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt:

“National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism. Volksgemeinschaft: that means a community of all productive labor, that means the oneness of all vital interests, that means overcoming bourgeois privatism and the unionized, mechanically organized masses, that means unconditionally equating the individual fate and the nation, the individual and the Volk…”

Hitler presented himself as a Christian patriot to win over the German public as they faced economic and moral degradation during the unchecked liberalism of the 1920s, but in private he was not a fan of the religion.  Hitler is noted by Albert Speer as saying:

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

In fact, finding and defining a “conservative” totalitarian regime is almost impossible in modern times.  Without the defense of free markets, individual liberty, meritocracy and a healthy respect for constitutional fairness one cannot call himself conservative.  The Nazis were no more conservative than Neo-Conservatives are conservative, they are simply leftists that pursue ultimate power using nationalism as a proxy instead of pure globalism.

How the “right wing” was culturally associated with authoritarianism is all thanks to modern Hollywood.  The same people that write endless tales of Nazi horror have long ignored the even greater genocides of communism in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere.  And, whenever a modern dictatorship is portrayed in art or film it is usually tied somehow to a conservative (and often Christian) takeover of society.

This brings us to a little film called V For Vendetta released in 2006, and it brings us to the tyranny now accelerating in the UK.

QED: The riots have unleashed a torrent of class hatred.

The likes of David Goodhart, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Embery have been writing in recent years about one of the most profound social upheavals of the past 50 years, which has become even more acute and obvious of late – namely, the alienation of the white working classes from the better-off who profess to care for them. For many, the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the class hatred that abounded in its aftermath, confirmed many of their suspicions – that middle-class liberals regard the lower orders as ignorant, low-information scum.

Yes, we must condemn those guilty of acts of criminality and acts that make ethnic-minority people feel fearful. But don’t pretend that imperious disdain and naked contempt for the white working class in general, which may serve to boost your ego and earn you peer approval, will make matters better. It might just make them worse.

Earlier: When the elites loved rioting. From the London riots to BLM, liberals and leftists have spent far too long celebrating street violence as virtuous.

So much so that they kneeled in their presence:

ON GOV. TIM WALZ, COVID LOCKDOWN FANATIC:

Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.

Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.

How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.

Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.

Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.

But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.

But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.

Read the whole thing.

WHEN FICTITIOUS PRESIDENTS MEET: Lame-duck Biden urges Trump to ‘get a job’ while spending dwindling moments of his own with Martin Sheen.

Flashback: Magical Sorkinism:

Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.

As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.

It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week—not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.

Or as Megan McArdle reminded leftists at the Daily Beast a decade ago: Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn’t Actually Work.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR AIRBRUSHES! Attorney General Kamala Harris Was Even Worse Than You Think.

—The Bulwark, August 19th, 2019.

HEH, INDEED:

If Ukraine starts installing first-world plumbing in the areas they’ve occupied, Russians will turn against me.

— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) August 15, 2024

RIP: Bay Area rock icon Greg Kihn passes away at 75.

Kihn has passed away at 75, according to a blog post on his official website. Kihn, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but made his name as a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, lost his battle with Alzheimer’s disease earlier this week.

Known for his distinct songwriting style that blended folk, classic rock, blues and pop, Kihn scored a string of hits in the early 1980s with “The Breakup Song,” “Remember,” and “Lucky.” He is best remembered, however, for his 1983 smash “Jeopardy.” The song was Kihn’s only Top 10 hit, reaching number 2 in May of 1983, just behind Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

It was also immortalized in the Weird Al Yankovic parody, “I Lost on Jeopardy.”

In addition to his successful career as a musician, Kihn was a morning radio host on KFOX for 17 years.

In addition to his hit songs, he became a highly talented DJ in his second career in the 1990s and 2000s; I’m sorry to read of his death at such a comparatively young age.

HOW HOWARD STERN BECAME THE MOST IRRELEVANT MAN IN MEDIA:

Stern has made more than Rush Limbaugh. More than Hannity, Beck, Imus, and Schlessinger combined. No radio talent has ever matched his checkbook.

For a time, he was so omnipresent in popular culture, that an article like this would never see the light of day. First of all, the premise alone would be preposterous — how the hell is Howard Stern irrelevant?! He’s everywhere! And second, journalists were terrified of Stern. If he turned his spotlight on you, it was brutal: His insanely loyal fans would terrorize you in public. Go ask Kathie Lee Gifford how fun it was to be caught in Stern’s crosshairs.

And really, that was the secret to his success: More than anything else, it was the connection Stern forged with his audience that made him so special. If he had an autograph signing or an appearance somewhere, thousands of his fans would huddle together in the pouring rain — waiting for hours — just to get a glimpse of their radio deity. His book “Private Parts” became the biggest literary smash-hit Simon & Schuster had ever published. His audience hung on to his every word. The emotional bond between him and his audience was unbreakable.

Or so we thought.

Then something strange happened: Howard Stern became the world’s first celebrity to go behind a paywall.

It was a clever move by Sirius: For satellite radio to succeed, they needed to figure out a way to convince audiences to pay for something that they’re accustomed to getting for free. So, if you’re Sirius, what’s the fastest, most efficient way to build a paying audience?

Answer: Find the biggest name in the talk-radio universe with the most loyal audience — fans so faithful, they’ll follow him anywhere — and sign him to an exclusive contract.

And that’s exactly what Sirius did. Stern left terrestrial radio and jumped to satellite in 2006.

Originally, this was pitched to his fans as an amazing new development for creative content: Before, Stern was limited by the FCC. Now, he’s finally free to do the show he’s always wanted to do — it’ll be wilder, crazier, and waaaay more explicit! Oh, can you imagine the antics Stern might pull without any risk of censorship?!

Does the wacky Stern 1.0 exist at all today? Between the clips of Stern fluffing celebrities on YouTube, Bruce Bower’s damning portrait of him in City Journal, in January of 2020, before the covid lockdowns, and Stern’s germophobic behavior since, that version of the definitive “shock jock” seems long gone. Stern tossing Biden the gentlest of softball questions in late April is yet another indicator that the once maniacal perpetual manchild is now just another cossetted megastar, arguably terrified of being cancelled over the past behavior that made him a household name in the 1980s and ‘90s.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Moment CitiBank guard punches climate change activist in face during protest at firm’s NYC HQ.

A climate protester was hospitalized with facial injuries on Wednesday after being punched by a security guard at Citibank’s New York headquarters, Common Dreams reports.

The incident occurred as activists with the Summer of Heat campaign were gathered in the bank’s lobby.

Eren Can Illeri, the injured protester, was part of the protest demanding a meeting with Citibank executives to address the bank’s continued investment in fossil fuels.

Summer of Heat, a coalition backed by New York Communities for Change, Planet Over Profit, and Stop the Money Pipeline, has made Citibank a primary target this summer.

Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Citibank has invested $396.3 billion in coal, gas, and oil infrastructure projects.

‘We have been asking Citi to meet with us for weeks to talk about what it can do to tackle the climate emergency,’ Alicé Nascimento, a spokesperson for Summer of Heat told Common Dreams. ‘But rather than meet with us, they have sent their security guards to physically attack peaceful climate activists after weeks of intimidation and threats.’

Video footage of the incident shows Illeri filming with his phone when a security guard approached him and attempted to grab the device.

The guard then punched Illeri in the face and pushed him to the ground.

‘Citi backs violence and it’s sickening,’ said Alice Hu, a climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change, who said the violence that took place at the company’s HQ is a direct reflection of ‘the violence of fossil fuels and climate chaos.’

The increasingly deranged climate protestors believe that an ever-changing climate is an existential threat. They shouldn’t be surprised when their chosen targets respond in-kind, particularly when their private property is invaded.

OLD AND BUSTED: Make America Great Again.

The New Hotness? Make America Cuba Again! Castro writ large: Kamala Harris declares war on wreckers and hoarders.

If you thought the economy couldn’t get worse under Joe Biden, wait ’til you get a load of what Kamala Harris has in store for it.

According to The Hill:

Vice President Harris on Friday will outline a series of economic policy proposals as part of her presidential campaign, including a call for a federal ban on corporate price-gouging.

Harris will deliver remarks in North Carolina, a battleground state in November, where her campaign said she will focus on plans to lower the cost of groceries. The vice president will say that soaring meat prices in particular have contributed to a spike in grocery bills, and she will call out corporate consolidation in the market.

Those meat hike price rises, like everything else, including the price of oil, are the direct result of government overspending and money-printing that have brought us inflation. Harris proposes to control these prices, as if any business raising prices is “greedy,” cracking down on what the Bolsheviks used to call “hoarders and wreckers.”

But inflation and the interest rate hikes used to control it, hit every aspect of the economy, not just groceries, from rents to housing stock, to medical care, to credit card rates, to consumer goods. And they are all the function of too much money chasing too few goods, which is why prices go up.

On everything, everywhere. Inflation, as Milton Friedman has stated, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

And then there is a Mobius Loop feel of the Vice President simultaneously feigning an attempt to fight inflation while her administration is insisting that inflation is not a very big issue: “It’s worth noting how contradictory that is. On the one hand, the Biden-Harris administration is claiming that inflation has been solved*. On the other hand, they are saying Republicans want to do nothing to solve inflation. In a saner media environment, such an idiotic inconsistency would be lambasted as unserious. Unfortunately, we do not live in that environment. In short, the best case here is Harris is pumping out communist drivel to win the election without any intent of actually enforcing whatever executive order she’d release. The worst case is she’s serious and the entire US economy ends up looking like something that would make Nicolas Maduro blush. Neither is a good option.”

Finally, as Victor Davis Hanson asks as the first two of “ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:”

1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?
2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist agendas, or to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?

Politico indicated their approach to VDH’s second question yesterday, choosing the former option: “Trump moves to tie Harris to Biden on the economy: ‘They are a team.’”

* So much so that yesterday, a “Frustrated Biden Snaps at Reporter for Asking About Inflation. ‘My policies are working. Start writing that way, okay?’ Biden told reporters.”

RIP: Gena Rowlands, a luminous leading lady of independent film, has died, age 94.

ALL-DAY BREAKFASTS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED ON THE DOOM LOOP: Owner blames rampant crime as last Denny’s closes in San Francisco.

NEO: Can Trump get through the firewall?

The media is bound and determined to present Trump in the worst light possible, and Harris in the best light possible. To do this they will outright lie, distort the facts in more subtle ways, and ignore what doesn’t fit their narrative. For the most part, social media puts its finger on the anti-Trump scale, too.

It is propaganda, and do not underestimate its influence, which is pervasive.

One of Trump’s many problems, now that the Democrats got the impediment of Joe Biden out of the way, is to cut through all of that. During the 2016 campaign the anti-Trump propaganda was already present, but since then we’ve been subjected to nine years (starting in the summer of 2015) of it, nonstop and escalating. The lies build on the previous lies to form an edifice of anti-Trump lies, and there is also widespread ignorance about the good things that haven’t been covered or that have hardly been covered.

At this point there are a lot of Trump supporters and there are also a lot of people who would never vote for him (or perhaps for any Republican). It may be that those two groups are roughly equal in number, so let’s ignore them for a moment. It’s those voters in-between who matter in this particular election. But even they have been subjected to that relentless 9-year anti-Trump campaign in all its manifestations.

Read the whole thing.

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX RISES ALMOST 3% AGAIN, 20% SINCE HARIS-BIDEN DESTROYED THE ECONOMY; Key Democrat Propagandist Susan Rice Ties Kamala Harris to the Economy, Calling Her a “Integral Architect” of Biden’s Agenda.

The old spin was that “supply chains” were “snagged.” Two years after the reopening of the economy, that spin could no longer be spun, so Biden/Harris changed the propaganda: Now the only reason for inflation was “greedy corporations” jacking up prices. They were simply lying: No corporation was just increasing prices out of greed. They were increasing prices because the costs of their raw materials and labor had all gone up, because the dollars was now worth about 75% of it was before Biden flooded the world with cheap funny-money fake dollars.

Biden-Harris is basically North Korea, but operating out of the White House.

Presumably, the Northeast Corridor will not change its course, despite the bad news it’s been receiving since 2021: New Jersey/New York Tops National Inflation Rankings, New Study Reveals.