W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What people say today about the first televised presidential debate, between Nixon and JFK, doesn’t match first reactions in 1960.

What the public is often told nowadays about that first-of-its-kind debate, which took place without an audience in a television studio in Chicago, does not quite square with reactions and perceptions that circulated at the time. As the debate’s aftermath made clear, first assessments can be fleeting and prone to dramatic revision.

I examined scores of newspaper articles, editorials and commentaries written in the debate’s immediate aftermath in researching a chapter for “Getting It Wrong,” my 2017 book about media-driven myths. There was, I found, no unanimity among newspaper columnists and editorial writers about Nixon’s appearance. Not all of them thought Nixon’s performance was dreadful or that Kennedy was necessarily all that appealing.

The Washington Post, for example, declared in an editorial two days after the debate: “Of the two performances Mr. Nixon’s was probably the smoother. He is an accomplished debater with a professional polish, and he managed to convey a slightly patronizing air of a master instructing a pupil.”

The debate moderator, Howard K. Smith of ABC News, later was quoted as saying he thought “Nixon was marginally better” than Kennedy.

Flashback to Campbell in 2017: No, ‘Politico’ — Viewer-listener disagreement is a myth of JFK-Nixon debate.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Hawk Tuah girl ‘in talks with Hollywood talent agency UTA after going viral with crude sex tips.’

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Crude, not necessarily wrong:

AS ALWAYS, ESCHEW COCKINESS: Nate Silver’s First Presidential Election Forecast Is Out, and Democrats Are Losing Their Minds.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Matt Yglesias on ‘Elite Misinformation.’

The last section of his piece has a subhead that reads “Lying to people is bad.”* I agree but I think at this point Yglesias underestimates what capable liars some people are. He writes, “the political system is too large…to operate on a conspiratorial basis.” Maybe that’s true on a longer time scale but I’ve personally seen the left try to operate on a conspiratorial basis too many times to shrug off the possibility that it can work sometimes.

I won’t rehash the old days at great length but Democrats did their very best to trick Americans into accepting a version of Obamacare that was intended to lead inevitably to a single-payer program that progressives really wanted. Within their own ranks they were explicit that this was their goal, but to Americans in general they just lied. There was a genuine conspiracy to mislead people. Instead of telling the truth they went with “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”

And frankly, you could look at the more recent claims about Donald Trump and Russia. The Steele Dossier was given credibility by a lot of reporters who later walked away from it when it became clear it was mostly a dumpster fire of misinformation funded by the Hillary campaign as an October surprise. But for at least two years a lot of people were leaning hard on it.

* Like I said, past performance is definitely no guarantee of future results: Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advocates lying on Twitter.

But what set off a flurry of Tweets today – and Yglesias’s advocacy of lying – was a charge by Yglesias via Twitter that Washington Times reporter Eli Lake has a “deserved reputation for dishonesty.” Hemingway, Lake and others confronted Yglesias on Twitter about the charge, pointing out that Yglesias himself had actually advocated dishonesty.

Then, Yglesias dug in, saying lying was a necessary part of politics.

Yglesias’s Twitter opponents also charged he does not take criticism well.

“When [Yglesias] gets frustrated because he can’t counter an argument, he calls people ‘dishonest’,” Lake said, also calling him “a child.”

In concluding his interview with The Daily Caller, Yglesias said “go f**k yourself” and hung up the phone.

Good times, good times:

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Politics Over Science: Biden Administration Pushed to Remove Age Limits for Gender Surgery.

FIRE ALARM RESCINDED: ‘Squad’ Member Jamaal Bowman Loses Primary Race.

Decision Desk HQ projects George Latimer wins the Democratic primary for US House in New York's 16th Congressional District.#DecisionMade: 9:21pm ET

Follow live results here: https://t.co/friJx43L44 pic.twitter.com/XH8m3sfRY0

— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) June 26, 2024

Hopefully more of the Squad will join him in the unemployment line in the not too distant future:

Jamaal bowman has lost his election.

One down, 8 more squad members to go. Let’s get all of these losers out of Congress. pic.twitter.com/pPAMUAqkqn

— 🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 (@Travis_4_Trump) June 26, 2024

UPDATE: Jamaalcalypse Now? Live Primary Results from NY, UT, CO, SC.

UPDATE (10:01 pm):

💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 https://t.co/MbIp9BjNro

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) June 26, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Child Soldiers of Ethnic Studies.

The nuclei of Middle East education at American universities are the Middle East and Islamic studies centers. There are around 50 such centers distributed across the country, depending on how you count them. Columbia University alone hosts three: the Center for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Institute, and the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies. These centers are no strangers to controversy. For at least two decades, scholars and policymakers alike have decried the centers’ whitewashing of Islamic extremism and anti-Israel bias. Yet the centers have remained mostly untouched, and a few new ones have even appeared.

Throughout their history, these centers have taken money from both the federal government and foreign governments. For instance, archived documents retrieved by the National Association of Scholars show that Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) relied heavily on foreign countries in its early days during the 1970s. Arab countries contributed two-thirds of the funding needed to help Georgetown leaders reach their $6.1 million fundraising goal for CCAS. During this same time, the foreign governments of Oman, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contributed more than $1 million for various professorships at CCAS. Today, the center is one of about a dozen Middle East National Resource Centers (NRC) that receive more than $3 million in funding from the federal government. Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies started in the 1950s with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and then-American-owned oil company Aramco. Soon thereafter, it received funding from the federal government as an early NRC. Beginning in the 1980s, the center helped secure tens of millions of dollars in funds primarily from Turkey and Saudi Arabia both for its own faculty and for affiliated programs at Harvard.

* * * * * * * *

The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Middle East Studies, along with other NRCs at the school, used federal funds in 2021 to host a critical race literacy workshop, where K-12 teachers “(Un)learn[ed] patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” The university claims on its website that the event supported “instructional goals for literacy standards for the State of Texas.” Or consider a toolkit on “Women and Gender in the Middle East” produced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Their set of readings directs students to a YouTube video of an overview of Edward Said’s Orientalism, produced by a channel called “Invictapalestina.” For those students who prefer a book, the toolkit points them to an anthology of Arab feminist writing, including by Columbia University professor Lila Abu-Lughod, who, ironically, in the past has criticized the “focus on gender-based violence” in Arab and Islamic countries as it “leave[s] aside the violence of states … like Israel.”

Middle East faculty at top universities train the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-American activists by training K-12 teachers. For instance, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies partners with Jordan-based nonprofit Global Nomads Group to host an annual fellowship program for grades 7-12 teachers. During the fellowship, teachers create curricula to teach students about the Middle East.

New Utrecht High School teacher Nathan Floro’s curriculum, to take one example, would ensure students have a “basic understanding of orientalism and be able to critique various media through a post-colonial lens.” NYU also funded Newton Public Schools teacher David Bedar, whose fellowship at NYU focused on redeveloping college-level content for high school students on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), throughout 2018 and 2019, acquired Bedar’s curriculum materials and found in a detailed analysis that the course favored the Palestinian over the Zionist narrative of the conflict by distorting and omitting facts.

Read the whole thing. As Iowahawk has said:

‘AL JAZEERA ON THE POTOMAC:’ WaPo Reporter Taylor Lorenz Boosts Defenses of Los Angeles Synagogue Protest.

Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.

Lorenz—who covers social media for the Post and often complains about being targeted by online harassment—reposted multiple comments on X, formerly Twitter, defending the synagogue protesters, promoting the false allegations, and slamming the media, including her former employer, the New York Times, for failing to give the allegations oxygen. The synagogue was in fact hosting an industry expo on real estate investing in Israel, and the false claims that Adas Torah was selling Palestinian land appear to have originated from radical anti-Israel groups, including Code Pink and the Palestinian Youth Movement, according to social media posts.

* * * * * * * *

In a separate incident this week, Lorenz also defended former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray’s remarks that the media should report on “Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners,” another unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

Lorenz said this was a “claim that’s being reported all over X,” and Gray was “just asking if any U.S. papers have investigated the claims.”

“It’s not like she’s asking about some random thing, it’s been a major topic of discussion on X all day.”

9/11, moon landing, and JFK assassination trutherisms, and other conspiracy theories are all “major topics of discussion on X,” but I’m so old, I can remember when Washington Post reporters were usually a bit more discerning than that.

Meet @washingtonpost columnist @TaylorLorenz. On multiple occasions, she reposted justifications for the targeting of an LA synagogue on the false claim it was "hosting a sale of Palestinian land."

The type of person who believes it's justified to target a synagogue is also the… pic.twitter.com/IsQXH8u41l

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 25, 2024

Related:

Much as @TaylorLorenz would like to pretend this is true, there is no legitimate journalist who is reporting this. “It’s been a major topic of discussion on X all day” because this app is a cesspool of antisemitic conspiracy theories, you idiot. pic.twitter.com/tMc5mwGh19

— Melissa Weiss (@melissaeweiss) June 25, 2024

THIS IS CNN: CNN Releases Statement Downplaying Obvious Anti-Trump Bias of Debate Moderators.

“Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are well respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades combined,” started the statement.

“They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.”

Earlier Monday, CNN host Kacie Hunt abruptly ended an interview with Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said that Trump was “knowingly going into a hostile environment on this very network, on CNN, with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years and their biased coverage of him.”

* * * * * * * *

We acknowledge the importance of not judging a performance before it begins. Perhaps Tapper and Bash will prove skeptics wrong on Thursday by moderating a fair and balanced debate.

However, skepticism is warranted. Tapper and Bash are not impartial journalists on the topic of Donald Trump.

Let’s start with Tapper, who has repeatedly likened Trump to Adolf Hitler.

And who has written a book about the president organizing a “plot to steal” an election. No not that Republican president, this one:

Props will not be allowed at the debate, so unfortunately Trump cannot just bring this book to the debate and place it on his podium facing the cameras.

By the way, Team Trump, if you bring up the title, Tapper will reply the editor chose the title or some b***shit like that. Be prepared for that, and be prepared to respond that he could have objected if he didn’t like the “editor-suggested” title. No author is forced to accept an editor-recommended title.

Tapper himself chose the title because he’s a hard partisan selling to a hard partisan audience and he knew a hard-partisan title would help sell books. (Although he doesn’t really sell books.)

* * * * * * * *

Tom Elliot has posted a thread of some of former Democrat aide and former spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc. (literally the name of the organization) Fake Jake Tapper.

To be fair though, past performance is no guarantee of future — wait, it’s CNN we’re talking about here — who am I kidding?

It’s been twelve years since the infamous moment when CNN’s Candy Crowley interjected herself into the presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, providing a live “fact check” which was, in reality, her factually inaccurate opinion.

The moment was embarrassing enough that debate commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf would later describe their selection of Crowley as a moderator as a “mistake“; she was widely criticized for both inserting herself too much into the debate and letting it get out of hand.

Well, if you thought an Obama-Romney debate could go off the rails, just wait for this week’s Joe Biden Donald Trump rematch — moderated this time around by another pair of CNN anchors, including the woman who replaced Crowley as chief political correspondent, Dana Bash. Bash and co-moderator Jake Tapper will already be equipped with advantages other moderators haven’t had, including shutting off the microphones of the president and former president in between questions.

But as Charles Cooke predicts, “Thursday is going to be the mirror image of 2020:”

“Supermajorities . . . of Americans think he’s too old,” Cooke said, “so he’s going in and he doesn’t just have to survive. . . . This therefore has created a debate where the roles are reversed. I think what . . . Trump has to do is just seem normal.

“We can talk about all of the expectations we like,” Cooke said, “but to me . . . Thursday is going to be the mirror image of 2020.

“If Trump can stand there, deliver a carefully selected set of haymakers on topics that matter to people — not the election of 2020 — on topics that matter to people, get through his answers sounding reasonably coherent, I think he wins the debate.”

The spin from the DNC-MSM Thursday night will be absolutely incredible to witness, no matter what happens.

URI BERLINER, NPR WHISTLEBLOWER, JOINS THE FREE PRESS:

Bari Weiss’ Free Press keeps getting better and better.

The business model, if you could call it that, is pretty simple: scoop up all the best of the liberal to moderate refugees from the increasingly totalitarian progressive media outlets and give them a home to do real journalism.

It’s so good that I subscribed to it even before it officially existed–back when it was Bari Weiss’ Substack. It has only gotten better since then.

Bari has just scooped up Uri Berliner, the recently fired National Public Radio Business editor.

Berliner burned his bridges with NPR by writing a piece on how the news organization lost its way in the Trump years. All of us here at Hot Air wrote something about this story, but Ed wrote the definitive piece on Berliner’s original essay.

Bari is, of course, a refugee from The New York Times, as is her wife. Uri comes from NPR. Catherine Herridge, who just wrote a piece about her struggle to protect a source, was let go from CBS.

Which of course is why Berliner being hired by the Free Press earned this snarky subhead from the Daily Beast today:

If the Beast thinks of that lineup as being on the “right,” then the Website has just done an excellent job of triangulating itself rather far in the opposite direction.

OAKLAND MORPHED INTO CHICAGO SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Defiant Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao denies any wrongdoing in 1st comments following FBI raid; “I have done nothing wrong.”

Thao blasted the raid [on] her home early Thursday morning which she said came without warning and said the effort to have her recalled from office is a waste of time and city resources.

“I want to know what probable cause the FBI has. What evidence have they collected that justifies raiding the home of a sitting mayor without notice and without the courtesy of a conversation,” said Thao. “I want to know more about the handful of billionaires from San Francisco and Piedmont who are hell-bent on running me out of office. I want to know why the day following the qualification of a recall election, funded by some of the richest people in the Bay Area, seemed like the right day to execute a warrant.”

Federal authorities have not released any details about the probe or said who is the subject of the investigation.

Thao fought back tears while saying she would not be stepping down from office.

“I will not be bullied and I will not be disparaged and I will not be threatened out of this office,” Thao said. “There are a lot of radical right-wing forces who know they will never win an election in Oakland fair and square.”

And she’s right! The last Republican mayor of Oakland left office in 1977.

As a result of Thao’s freakout: Oakland mayor’s attorney quits after being surprised by news conference.

Embattled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s attorney has resigned as her counsel after the mayor gave a press conference Monday without informing him. Tony Brass, a high-profile attorney who also represents accused Bob Lee killer Nima Momeni, was retained as Mayor Thao’s counsel late last week after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided her Oakland home.

“I have officially withdrawn as Sheng Thao’s counsel,” Brass told Bay City News, via text message.

I blame “radical rightwing forces” for his resignation.

UPDATE: Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s chief of communications resigns following FBI raid. “This comes one day after noted attorney and former federal prosecutor Tony Brass resigned as Thao’s counsel, saying he will no longer represent her just hours after she held a news conference on Monday. He told the ABC7 I-Team’s Dan Noyes he had no idea Thao was going to give that speech and that he would not have approved of the angry tone and conspiracy content.”

BOOM: EPIC Thread Explains Why Rainbow Crosswalks Are a Thing (and Why ‘Defacing’ Them Is a ‘Hate Crime’). “DEI for local governments:”

Why is this happening? Well, a less well known program of the @HRC is their Municipal Equality index. It is to cities what the Corporate Equality Index is to companies. Well guess what – these ‘pride crosswalks’ are a program of theirs. pic.twitter.com/xhsxFLHDFa

— Noah Wall (@NoahWWall) June 24, 2024

Read the whole thing.

RICK BEATO: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse (Video).

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON REFUSES TO PUBLISH HILLARY CLINTON’S NEW BOOK COVER: The Reason Is Obvious.

Warning: The following post contains harmful misinformation that is likely part of a foreign influence operation to interfere in American politics. Some readers may find it disturbing, while other readers may be too dumb to avoid getting brainwashed. Please proceed with caution.

Hillary Clinton has written a new book. Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty is due out in mid-September, roughly eight years after the author suffered a health episode and nearly collapsed on the campaign trail in Manhattan.

We regret to inform you that, per the results of a Washington Free Beacon analysis, the promotional materials for Hillary’s forthcoming book are dangerously misleading at best. The author’s photo on the cover image, for example, has been deceptively edited beyond all recognition. Our analysts were unable to verify the identity of the individual who appears in the image.

Given the appropriate caution that media outlets have taken with respect to suspicious material—including the Associated Press’s decision in March to retract a “manipulated” photo of Kate Middleton—the Free Beacon is refusing to publish the photo without including the following crucial context to enhance our readers’ ability to discern fact from fiction.

Hillary morphed into Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so slowly, I hardly even noticed:

SUBURBIA’S IRREDEEMABLE REPUTATION IN THE AMERICAN CANON:

“My God, the suburbs!” John Cheever, the short-story writer who has rejoiced in the nickname “the American Chekhov,” had what can only be described as ambivalent feelings about the twentieth-century housing developments that grew up on the outskirts of major cities. He said of them that “they encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity, and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.”

Cheever was not wholly consistent himself. The prospect of glacial monotony did not stop the author moving to the suburbs and putting down some very firm roots both of the familial and literary kind. TIME magazine styled him “the Ovid of Ossining,” a reference to the scenic Westchester village where he lived from 1961 until his death in 1982. Admirers of Mad Men might recognize Ossining as the hometown of the ultimate suburban couple, Betty and Don Draper. This was a conscious homage; as the show’s creator Matthew Weiner has said, Cheever’s stories were a considerable influence on his writing. The show might be named for Madison Avenue, but when it comes to suburbia, “mad” is also the operative word. For a whole generation of writers trying to make sense of postwar America, the suburbs offered particularly fertile ground for “madness in the mundane” storytelling. Commingled with all that ennui, there could be sex, drink and existential messiness galore.

Back in May of 2009, in a Wall Street Journal article titled, “The End of the Affair,” the late P.J. O’Rourke wrote an encomium to cars, which the Obama-Biden administration was then just beginning its war on (as part of its still-ongoing war with many other aspects of American life), that was also at times, an encomium to the suburbs:

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

And get on with our lives in relative peace and happiness. No wonder the left hates the suburbs so.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: ‘MckArthy [sic] Era:’ Columbia Middle Eastern Studies Chair Decries Free Beacon Report on Deans’ Anti-Semitic Text Exchanges.

Columbia College dean Josef Sorett, under fire for his role in a texting scandal that landed three of his fellow administrators on leave, has support from at least one prominent Columbia faculty member: Gil Hochberg, a Hebrew professor who chairs the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department.

In a Sunday post shared to her private Instagram account, Hochberg linked to the Washington Free Beacon‘s June 12 report exposing vitriolic text messages sent between Sorett and his colleagues amid a panel on campus anti-Semitism. Hochberg rallied behind Sorett, calling him a “dear friend” whose critics are part of a new “MckArthy [sic] Era.”

“I hope no one is taking a photo of my screen as I post this. I mean, how can this be real?????” Hochberg wrote in the post, which was obtained by the Free Beacon. “Josef Sorett dear friend. We will not be quite [sic] about this!”

Quite.

WATCH: CNN Anchor Has Tantrum After Trump Spokeswoman Calls Out Jake Tapper’s Bias.

One of the biggest challenges Donald Trump will have to face in his upcoming debate with Joe Biden on CNN on Thursday — assuming Biden shows up — won’t be handling the president but having Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as the moderators.

Tapper and Bash are about as anti-Trump as you get, and when Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt appeared on CNN Monday to discuss the upcoming debate and happened to mention their bias, anchor Kasie Hunt had an absolute tantrum on the air.

When Leavitt pointed out that Trump was preparing to “go into a hostile environment on this very network with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years,” Hunt insisted that both Tapper and Bash were “professional.”

But Leavitt came with receipts.

‘Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google Jake Tapper, Donald Trump, to see” that Tapper consistently likened Trump to Adolf Hitler. Then Hunt lost it and accused Leavitt of “attacking” her colleagues.

“I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump — who you work for — if you’re here to speak on his behalf, we will have this conversation,” Hunt added.

“I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past,” Leavitt responded.

“I’m sorry, guys … Karoline, thank you very much for your time. You’re welcome to come back at any time,” Hunt replied.

Jake Tapper biased? I just can’t see it myself: Tom Elliott Presents a Retrospective of CNN Debate Moderator Jake Tapper.

Kasie Hunt biased? I can’t see that, either. I mean, it’s not like the photo atop her Twitter homepage shows her shaking hands and grinning approvingly with a smiling Joe Biden:

I hope Trump knows what he’s in for on Thursday:

Again, Trump agreed to all of it, with zero pushback over clearly CNN working with the Biden campaign on these rules, moderators and format.https://t.co/A5F4RAo7Y4

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 24, 2024

JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER, REACHES PLEA DEAL TO AVOID PRISON IN US.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: What Will Replace the Marine Corps?

In his book on maritime power, To Rule the Waves, author Bruce Jones points out that, if the United States is to wage war with anyone other than Canada or Mexico, we need to do it with naval power. Ever since the invasions of Normandy and Okinawa, where the Army provided significant amphibious landing forces, the leading edge of the projection of combat power ashore has been the United States Marine Corps. That is no longer the case. 

Since 2019, the Marine Corps has largely abandoned its amphibious capability in favor of a limited mission of deterring or fighting a war with China in the South China Sea, all to fulfill the vision of the former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger. The concept is called “Stand-in Forces.” To buy the anti-ship missiles required to carry out his vision, Berger divested the Marine Corps of all of its tanks, much of its artillery, all of its heavy engineering and assault bridging and breaching capabilities, as well as significant aviation assets. But, as Jones points out, we still need some way of projecting naval power ashore. The question now is: Who will do it? There are several possibilities. (READ MORE: Biden Has Allowed the Marine Corps to Become Irrelevant)

Just as long as their pronouns are perfect — that’s the main thing.

UPDATE: There Is Now an Official Air Force Pride Patch.

SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” DESPERATE FOR SPOTLIGHT ONCE AGAIN: AOC doubles down on bizarre, cringeworthy antics at pro-Bowman rally: ‘It’s called organizing.’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defended her manic cameo at a weekend Bronx rally in support of fellow far-left Rep. Jamaal Bowman, saying the R-rated event had been “fun as hell.”

“Fox News is big mad that we’re for the many, not the money,” the “Squad” member wrote on X along with a clip of her on-stage gyrations at St. Mary’s Park in Mott Haven.

“We rallied 1,200 people in the Bronx to take on dark money, get fired up, and send busloads of volunteers to canvass and phone bank.

“It’s called organizing. And it’s fun as hell.”

It’s particularly fun when the press appear to equal or outnumber the civilians:

That HUGE rally AOC jumped around the stage for, screaming to the throngs of people…?

There were about 50 folks there. Most of them campaign workers and media!

Watch. 👇 pic.twitter.com/UdidWZq66B

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) June 24, 2024

LIFE IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA: There’s A Charlottesville Every Week, And Most Democrats Are Fine With It.

A few days ago, Snopes, a left-wing “fact checking” site, finally admittedthat Donald Trump had never called the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, “very fine people.”

For years, Democrats, including Joe Biden, have repeated this false claim. Indeed, Biden, who’s been running for the presidency since 1987, ludicrously told the press in 2019 that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s alleged reaction, inspired him to run in 2020.

Well, there’s a new Charlottesville every week in America nowadays. They aren’t led by a few hundred Nazi cosplayers, but thousands of Islamists and leftist fellow travelers whose goals are supported by numerous administration officials, congressmen, and newsrooms.

* * * * * * * *

The truth is Biden, who has repeated fake “genocide” casualty numbers to Muslim audiences, is scared to offend the pro-Hamas faction in his party. And it’s not just words. While Biden’s DOJ is raiding the homes of pro-life protestors who pray in front of abortion mills or trying to throw elderly anti-abortion activists into prison, it does nothing about the systemic, highly funded, violent antisemitic movement that have erupted on campuses.

No enemies to the left.

UPDATE: American Institutions Have Chosen Breakdown and Disorder.

We have often compared the current outbreak of anti-Jewish riots to the Charlottesville hate rally in 2017, but that might not be strong enough. After all, the second Charlottesville march attracted almost nobody on the white supremacist side but thousands of counter-protesters. The thirty Unite the Right participants were surely outnumbered by media alone. These pro-Hamas demonstrations, many of which turn violent, are planned openly and publicly and now are a common feature of life in America.

Media coverage may have something to do with why Charlottesville was a one-and-done and the Hamas protests became a movement that shook down the Democratic Party’s leadership and won concessions from the president himself. But it is only a part of the story. The reasonthe media participation likely outnumbered skinheads at the second rally is because of the urgency of burying such a rally before it can grow arms and legs. That urgency applied equally to the Hamas protests, but it was not politically convenient to do the right thing in this case. The political and media establishment is capable of squashing these burgeoning hate movements but simply chose not to do so. That’s it—that’s the story.

The continuation of the left-wing Cossack-wannabe movement is a choice. It is a choice by the media to treat it with kid gloves. It is a choice by universities to kowtow to it. It is a choice by congressional anti-Semites to egg it on. And it is certainly a choice by the president of the United States to join such figures at political events and praise them to the heavens.

As Glenn wrote in 2017: Welcome To Our Crazy Years. “But you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler. There are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the people charged with maintaining a liberal polity are too corrupt and incompetent — or crazy — to maintain a liberal polity. If you don’t like the consequences, don’t do the thing that produces the consequences.  Anything else is just crazy.”

DAVID THOMPSON: Don’t Oppress My People With Your White-Ass Folk Music.

In crushed-by-niche-culture news:

University of Sheffield researchers handed taxpayer cash to ‘decolonise’ folk singing.

A mere £1,485,400, since you ask. A gnat’s eyelash. For an issue of such fundamental importance to the turning of the world.

The project… has also been granted extra funds on top of this from bodies such as Research England.

Whew. I was getting worried there.

Taking place at the University of Sheffield, researchers “will take an unflinching look at the white-centricity of folk music repertory, performers and audience by conducting fieldwork to shed light on long-standing vernacular singing practices of ethnic minority cultures in England.”

Simultaneously, England is hard at work solving the highly problematic issues involving milk: British taxpayers are funding research into the white supremacist origins of drinking milk.

Finally.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Time to pull the fire alarm. Jamal Bowman “will be remembered for pulling the fire alarm next to an emergency exit in one of the House office buildings in order to delay a vote on the House floor. That was a crime. Pulling the fire alarm on this guy now would be a blessing:”

Jamal Bowman is upset that a religious minority wants to live in a place where they can be close to synagogues, kosher grocery stores, and where they can raise their children with Jewish identity. This is the sort of thing you say if you want American Jewry to disappear. pic.twitter.com/q4sbmfoAp9

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) June 23, 2024

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Uh…What? WV Mayor Says He Wants To Take ‘Pride’ Mural Vandal ‘Over My Knee and Wear Him Out.’

GOODER AND HARDER: Illinois Bleeding Tax Payers Dry with $100K+ Salaries, Education Waste, and More.