There is no sign marking the entrance to Barman Dictat. The bar under 44 Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv boasts the largest mezcal collection in Eastern Europe. On a typical night you can find it by noting the crowd of people wafting cigarette smoke into the evening air. Inside, you’ll find shelves of more than 400 glowing bottles perched above a steel bar stretching more than thirty feet. You’ll find bespoke cocktails — Kraken, Smoky Voice and Tickle Balls. And, on one particular May evening, you’ll find the seventy-first secretary of state of the United States of America at center stage.
Clad in black and wielding a scarlet electric guitar, Antony Blinken seemed less enthused about the moment than his staff had perhaps anticipated. “Listen, I know this is a really, really difficult time,” he told a small crowd of Ukrainians. “Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously. But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you, too. So maybe we can try something?” And, displaying all the effort and verve of a sixty-two-year-old whose guitar skills are more rust than steel, he meandered his way through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
The stunt didn’t play well. MSNBC worried that it conjured up “a kind of Nero fiddling as Rome burns vibe.” Ukrainian officials denounced it as tone-deaf. One Ukrainian veteran who lost both his legs in com- bat described it as “as inappropriate as possible.” And the choice of song came under attack, too. Rather than some rah-rah rocker advocating for pride in the Western world, Young’s lyrics depict American malaise and decline — which seems oddly appropriate for Blinken to misunderstand. The headline inNew York magazine was blunt: “Antony Blinken Sucks at the Guitar and Should Stop Playing.”
—The Washington Post, through then-subsidiary publication Newsweek, February 16th, 2009, as Obama began his first term in office.
How it’s going, deep in his third term: “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson writes:
Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.
The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.
Like Brezhnev, Biden’s rhetoric is ridden with clichés, but of a different, folksy kind. At the time when political slogans are catchy and provocative — Make America Great Again, Black Lives Matter — Biden’s yard signs read ‘Our best days are still ahead’, and ‘Build back better’. His Twitter account is full of platitudes like ‘This is our moment — ours together — to write a newer, bolder, more compassionate chapter in the life of our nation.’ He’s just a boring ordinary guy — until he lashes out at a voter, or bites on his wife’s finger.
Is Biden the candidate of American stagnation? His cognitive and physical decline is increasingly difficult to hide and it’s highly disturbing to witness it become a subject of speculation. I’ve lived through it before and it gives me the creeps. Free citizens of a free republic shouldn’t need a Kremlinologist to decipher what’s wrong with their president.
A progressive “Squad” Democrat could see his career in the House of Representatives end after New York’s congressional primaries next Tuesday.
On one side of the contentious primary race in New York’s 16th Congressional District is Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a former middle school principal who is backed by the progressive left, including self-described Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
On the other side is Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a more moderate candidate who has scored backing from Hillary Clinton, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who is vying to get back into Congress himself.
The fight is part of a wider fracture within the Democratic Party caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.
Liberals claim to be in favor of democracy–or, at least, Our Democracy™️–but if someone actually runs against them, they take it as a personal offense. Consider this tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom I take as a good exemplar of contemporary liberalism:
People everywhere need to understand how disgusting and abnormal it is for special interests to dump nearly $15 million to unseat a member of Congress in a primary.
This is corruption. It is a core threat to American democracy. It also fuels Trump.
There is nothing shocking about $15 million being spent on a Congressional race. In the 2022 cycle, a number of House races drew more than $40 million in total spending. And Ocasio-Cortez herself knows how to spend money: she spent $18.9 million on her own 2020 House race.
When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.
* * * * * * * *
Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.
“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.
Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.
Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.
The coda for Bowman’s scramble to win reelection is quite the summation of where the far left in general have positioned themselves in recent decades: “In late spring of 2022, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) reached out to a local Jewish leader in Westchester County to ask for an unusual favor as he prepared to defend his seat in an August primary against two Democratic challengers who were each gaining support from the district’s sizable Jewish community. ‘Do you have pics of us?’ Bowman texted the Jewish leader, with whom he had previously maintained a cordial if uneasy relationship, according to a screenshot of the message shared with Jewish Insider. ‘So I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish People.’”
What Post staffers are angry about is the very idea of newsroom reforms. These spoiled and entitled fascists believe they have the RIGHT to continue lying to the public to stop Trump. They also believe owner Jeff Bezos should drop $100 million a year to honor that right.
Apparently, Lewis and Winnett think differently. At the very least, we know the Trump-haters at the Post and New York Times believe Winnett might institute some serious reforms. Why else would the Post be running stories like this…?
Headline: “Incoming Post editor tied to self-described ‘thief’ who claimed role in his reporting”…
Sub-headline: “Unpublished book drafts and other documents raise questions about Robert Winnett’s journalistic record just months before he is to assume a top newsroom role.”
* * * * * * * *
For anyone who hates the corporate media, it does not get any more glorious than this. And trust me, this has zero to do with “journalistic credibility” or “integrity.” For crying out loud, let’s not forget that the New York Times and then CNNLOL hired the disgraced Mark Thompson to run their shops. Thompson is credibly accused of looking the other way for years as the late Jimmy Savile allegedly abused countless children at the BBC. There were no internal hit pieces on Thompson, though. Why? Because Thompson’s smart. He makes it clear that he has no intention of reforming anything.
But like I said, this is good news. No one should want any reforms at the Washington Post. The Post has no credibility. The Post can no longer move the public opinion needle. That’s right where we want them. That annual $77 million loss is merely icing.
According to John Podhoretz during a recent Commentary podcast, the Times apparently makes enough money from services such as its cooking site and Wordle to survive its loss of readers. (And the vacation trips to fun-filled places like Iran!) The Post doesn’t (yet?) have that sort of ancillary income. Good luck righting the ship, fellas, when the young staffers are deliberately sabotaging their incoming boss.
UPDATE:
To summarize, the current leadership at the Post brought back the editor who ran the paper into the ground to oversee a series of hit pieces targeting their new incoming editor.
LOS ANGELES, CA — The most powerful man in America was forced to deal with an unexpected emergency last night, with former President Barack Obama suffering a moment of panic due to his Biden remote control suddenly losing connection.
The incident occurred during a ritzy fundraiser where Obama was once again using his state-of-the-art remote control to guide President Joe Biden through a pre-programmed routine as he rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities to raise cash for his re-election campaign.
“Oh… oh no… not again,” Obama was heard muttering on stage as Biden appeared to experience yet another of his frequent glitches and freeze, leaving Obama at a loss as to what to do. “Why can’t they get this thing fixed?! C’mon, man! He’s frozen out there like a mannequin again. Those maintenance techs are going to get a piece of my mind!”
By the way, is Teleprompter XD-235 still gainfully employed by the White House? Has anybody inquired as to how it’s holding up under the massively increased strain these days?
So let’s see if I have this straight. The New York Times will review a bad book I wrote in 1997, offer it some faint praise, then have that faint praise butchered by a reporter — who is walking arsenic — for the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times (and Los Angeles Times and Washington Post) will then all refuse to touch The Devil’s Triangle, a 2022 book that has important historical and cultural meaning and answers every question the Stasi media bombarded me with in 2018. Then, in the copy of a different book entirely that attacks me, New York Times reviewer Alexandra Jacobs expresses longing for me. She is the same reviewer who refuses to download my book and read it.
Adhering to leftist orthodoxy can sure get confusing.
Confusing for the Democratic party stenographer, but usually pretty simple for the reader:
Can a bot powered by artificial intelligence run a city? Wyoming resident Victor Miller thinks so.
Miller, 42, filed paperwork for him and his customized ChatGPT bot, named Virtual Integrated Citizen or “Vic,” to run for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Miller — who filled out the candidate paperwork with his own information under the name Vic, which is also his nickname — said he planned to serve as a “meat avatar” for the bot. He’ll do the ribbon-cutting while the bot will handle the decision-making — if he advances out of the crowded nonpartisan mayoral primary in August and wins the November election.
But Miller’s bid has run into a speed bump: Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said it is not legal.
“Wyoming law is very clear that AI is not eligible as a candidate for any office,” Gray, a Republican, said in a radio interview last week, noting that only eligible voters can run for office. “An AI bot is not a qualified elector.”
Sunol California’s former mayor, Bosco the Dog, is looking better all the time.
An artificial intelligence candidate is on the ballot for the United Kingdom’s general election next month.
“AI Steve,” represented by Sussex businessman Steve Endacott, will appear on the ballot alongside non-AI candidates running to represent constituents in the Brighton Pavilion area of Brighton and Hove, a city on England’s southern coast.
“AI Steve is the AI co-pilot,” Endacott said in an interview. “I’m the real politician going into Parliament, but I’m controlled by my co-pilot.”
When writers at The Atlantic, where [Anne] Applebaum is a contributor, talk about “The Democrats’ Last Chance to Save Democracy,” they aren’t lamenting Biden’s unprecedented executive abuse, but the “democratic deficits in the Senate and the Electoral College” — as if these institutions weren’t specifically instituted to diffuse centralized control. They know the difference.
Democrats who want to “expand” the Supreme Court for failing to follow democratic trends, don’t care about the “republic.” After all, many of the high court’s most historic decisions, including Dred Scott and Plessy, cut the legs out from under “democracy.”
Or take the so-called moderate Democrats who want to get rid of the filibuster or use the slimmest of fleeting majorities to shove through massive, generational federal “reforms” without any national consensus — Obamacare or The Deficit Reduction Act [sic]. They’re aware that “reforms” will overturn hundreds of state and local laws. They want local minorities subordinate to the whims and vagaries of national majorities.
Then again, the more “democracy” we have, the more demagoguery thrives. Of course they’re fans.
As it turns out, according to CNN a number of Trump supporters also understand the distinction even if they are unable to articulate it in poli-scientific terms.
At Outkick the Coverage, David Hookstead adds, “It’s great to see the internet come together to win one for the good guys. Chuck Schumer is one of the most powerful people in the country and has been for a long time. Yet, it didn’t save him from being bullied into deleting a grilling photo. The internet can truly be an incredible place at times. How is it possible that Chuck Schumer doesn’t know how to grill a simple burger patty? Cheese on raw meat? What was he thinking? A child could have done it better, and yet, a powerful Democrat Senator couldn’t.”
RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: On Friday, the Atlantic breathlessly announced publication of the following story:
At which point, readers may wonder how Ms [Xochitl] Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?
Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:
Writing novels is intrinsically solitary. Which is no small part of why I switched professions in the first place. Despite wearing the coat of an extrovert, I am pure Greta Garbo. I want to be alone.
This point is expanded upon:
The early pandemic found me without a permanent residence and on a deadline. In March, while getting my MFA in Iowa, I’d come home to New York City for a quick visit to celebrate having just sold my first novel. Three months and one case of COVID-19 later, I was quarantining with my best friend, her husband, and their toddler in their Brooklyn apartment. Before long, the close quarters and endless sounds of sirens made revising my novel there untenable. I decided to head upstate.
And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”
Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.
In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.
Disney’s new Star Wars series, “The Acolyte” is further evidence that Kathleen Kennedy and her acolytes (for life imitates art), are not just creating entertainment but are actively engaged in the cultural revolution.
Kennedy has recently become a meme for this movement, thanks to her on-the-nose lampooning by “South Park.” The predictable corporate response has been canned articles with titles like, “Star Wars Boss Kathleen Kennedy Is Not a ‘Woke Warrior’ at Disney (Report)” which, as anyone who’s paying attention knows, is like printing, “COVID was absolutely NOT the result of a lab leak!” in March of 2020. For “Acolyte,” Kennedy brought in Leslye Headland, a woke lesbian with an axe to grind against her religious upbringing who admits that she rooted for the evil witch Ursula in “The Little Mermaid” and spent four years as Harvey Winstein’s assistant.
The transformation of iconic characters and narratives from the original saga into vessels for neo-Marxist propaganda underscores this strategic shift. In the original saga, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo epitomized the hero’s journey, representing the values of traditional culture. One as the farm boy with the secret lineage who heeds the call to adventure to avenge his dead father and reclaim his role in the world, the other as the redeemable bad boy or the beast to be tamed by the princess. Obi-Wan served as the sage archetype or Jungian wise old man common in such retellings of the eternal story, while Leia was both damsel in distress and leadership material. But that must be forgotten, as the world was obviously an oppressive patriarchy until five minutes ago, 1979’s Ellen Ripley be damned.
You can make the case that the original Star Wars was “Maoist Hackery” as well – Lucas wanted to write a parable about the Vietnam War, with Palpatine as Nixon and eventually, the Ewoks as the Vietcong. (No, really.), but was smart enough to bury that theme deep into its subtext. And he knew how to tell a story, blending and borrowing disparate elements from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials to Dune to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Face. Lucas had a vision and a goal that transcended his cookie-cutter Bay Area far left politics:
There was no shortage of sci-fi in Hollywood at the time. But most were dark, dystopian tales like Rollerball, Logan’s Run, or THX 1138 (Lucas’s 1971 feature-film debut). Lucas was determined to make a different kind of sci-fi movie—something fun that was aimed at 14- and 15-year-olds.
“The reason I’m making Star Wars is that I want to give young people some sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run around in,” he said in an interview. “I have a strong feeling about interesting kids in space exploration. I want them to want it. I want them to get beyond the basic stupidities of the moment and think about colonizing Venus and Mars. And the only way it’s going to happen is to have some dumb kid fantasize about it — to get his ray gun, jump in his ship and run off with this wookie into outer space. It’s our only hope in a way.”
And despite all of the “Force is Female” boosterism of Kathleen Kennedy et al, Lucas was saved in the editing bay, way back in 1977, by his then-wife: Five Ways Marcia Lucas Gave Star Wars Its Heart.
UPDATE: I much prefer the Critical Drinker’s solo rants than his online chats with fellow pop culture critics, but in the most recent example of the latter format, he brings up another negative aspect to the Acolyte, which might be dubbed Michael Burnham Syndrome:
There’s a pattern here, right? Whether it’s Doctor Who, whether it’s Star Trek, whether it’s Star Wars, of taking something that used to be a unique to one specific male character, whether it’s Captain Kirk, he was the first character that we had that was venturing out into space. Or [Doctor Who,] the very first one, was played by William Hartnell, a white guy. To going back, reconning the history of these franchise, so that actually a Strong Diverse Woman actually did it before them, and we just didn’t know about it at the time. Star Trek’s done it with Michael Burnham. Doctor Who’s done it with the Timeless Children. And now we’ve got it here with Star Wars with with episode three of the Acolyte. I just think it’s such a consistent pattern, there has got to be intent behind this. They think they’re so smart by doing it, but like I don’t know, man, like I’m starting to notice this pattern occurring.
Later in the chat, the Drinker adds:
I could draw a lot of parallels between where Star Wars is at now, and where Doctor Who is at as a franchise. It’s that feeling of the game is almost up, we’re running out of time, running out of money, and it’s just like, we’re into pure “f*** you mode” now. We know you don’t like what we’re making, and we just say f*** you, we’re just going to put everything in that we want to put in: All the sociopolitical messaging, all of our own personal hang-ups, all of our own personal politics, all of it. It’s just going to get rammed down your throat, because we know we’re in The Last Chance Saloon right now, so why not? Why not just throw all the s*** up a wall and see what sticks, and Doctor Who’s exactly the same way.
I’m sure the producers and writers think that their work on the Acolyte and similar product from Kathleen Kennedy is simply their first or latest step in what they hope is a lengthy career in Hollywood, but based on “Streaming and Screaming,” Rob Long’s latest column at Commentary, they might want to think twice:
The limitations that kept the television business small and nasty and profitable—only so many hours in a day, only so many networks in business—began to loosen as basic cable stations emerged and produced original programming of their own. But it wasn’t until the introduction of streaming services that the business broke loose. With unlimited bandwidth to deliver hours and hours of content, unlimited storewidth to amass an endless library, and unlimited money coming in from Wall Street, the streaming services could make as many TV shows as they wanted. They hired writers and produced TV shows with money-drunk abandon, and the greatest thing about those go-go years was, you didn’t need to wait for someone else’s show to get cancelled. Nobody had to die and get out of the way. They just kept adding shows. How many shows? Put it this way: In 2019, the Writers Guild of America had about 11,000 members. Today, five years later, it has around 20,000.
Five years from now, unfortunately, it will probably have a lot less. Show business is going through a painful contraction. In 2023, American television production declined by 15 percent. In the first quarter of 2024, it’s down another 7 percent. Studio space, for the first time in 10 years, is operating at 70 percent capacity. It doesn’t matter how many shows you make, it turns out, if there are still the same number of hours in the day to watch them. So some of those 20,000 members of the WGA are not going to last long enough in the business to get old and in the way. Some of them are going to have to find another line of work now, while they’re still young.
“I’m outta here,” a former writer colleague of mine posted on a group text we share. “Heading to Missouri. Done with this crap.” He has spent the past two years writing and rewriting a project for a big streaming service, weathering the budget cutbacks and two major strikes, only to be told last month that his project is dead. Without the prospect of a show in production, and facing another year or two of unemployment, he and his wife had a complicated and fraught conversation about money (the most complicated and fraught topic there is), and they decided it was better to sell their house and move than stick around and struggle and, eventually, have him shuffle around the Brentwood Country Mart shouting at young people.
I’ve heard the same calculation from writers, directors, even people in talent management: cutbacks, tight belts, more people fighting over fewer opportunities, all signals to get out of the business while there’s still some money in the bank to start over, in some other place, in some other business.
Matthew Weiner should be a cautionary tale for those who produce streaming entertainment — ten to 15 years ago, at the height of Mad Men’s popularity among hyper-online critics, he was the subject of glowing interview after interview, and his name was mentioned in most of the cover stories and profiles of the show’s cast. The amount of ink and pixels spilled over the show was in direct proportion to its actual popularity among television viewers (hey, remember them?), as TV critic Richard Rushfield wrote in 2011:
Mad Men at its height was watched by 2.9 million viewers. In contrast, CBS’ military police procedural drama NCIS last week was seen by 19.7 million viewers. As far as I can tell, NCIS has never been featured on the cover of any major American magazine apart from TV Guide and one issue of Inland Empire, the magazine of California’s suburban Riverside and San Bernadino counties.
Then came #MeToo in 2017, and Weiner’s Hollywood career seems effectively over. One way or another, Kathleen Kennedy’s acolytes (pun intended) will have people gunning for their jobs as well, particularly if streaming viewership continues to contract.
In the spring of 1979, a few weeks after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, more than 65,000 people marched on the United States Capitol chanting “No Nukes, No Nukes.” As a young reporter at the Washington Star assigned to cover this new movement, I interviewed march organizers and noticed that all of them had previously organized protests against the Vietnam War. This struck me as curious: How had they suddenly become so passionate and knowledgeable about nuclear power?
I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too. Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?
These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.
For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.
* * * * * * * * *
The March of Dimes syndrome is an ancient social affliction that is especially virulent today and destined to get even worse. Kings, generals, and high priests have always tried to maintain power by declaring new crusades—new enemies to conquer, new sins to extirpate. But it has gotten steadily easier for leaders to rally the public because of another phenomenon, known as Spencer’s Law, named after the Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer, who observed a paradox in the reform movements of his day to combat poverty, hunger, child labor, illiteracy, and alcoholism.
These problems were widespread in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. Then, as the Industrial Revolution lifted incomes during the nineteenth century, the working classes saw a dramatic improvement in their diets and living conditions. By mid-century, most Britons were literate because children were going to school instead of being put to work. Alcohol consumption fell dramatically. But it was only late in the nineteenth century, after so much progress had already occurred, that reformers captured the public’s attention with campaigns to help the needy, mandate universal education, and pass temperance laws. “The more things improve,” Spencer wrote in 1891, “the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”
Other astronomers, meanwhile, have proposed that the putative Dyson spheres might just be interference from nearby, hot, dust-obscured galaxies (or Hot DOGs), which are “surrounded by enormous, thick clouds of dust” and are “very good at emitting infrared radiation.”
The scientists who discovered the potential spheres are more than willing to admit that they might not in fact be what they appear to be. They’re going to do what every good scientist does in these situations: Seek more data, particularly via the James Webb Space Telescope, which can make direct observations of the stars.
Also, look for an elderly former chief engineer preserved within a transporter loop inside a starship atop the Dyson sphere:
Modern New York City is a crucible of progressivism. From 2014 to 2022, progressive mayor Bill de Blasio held the reins at City Hall, and until early 2023, progressives held a majority in the city council. Since the 2018 Democratic state legislature victory, progressive policies have reshaped New York, introducing major criminal-justice reforms, higher income taxes, legalized marijuana, and widespread e-bike availability. With weak, moderate Democratic leaders in New York State and City—Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams—and with both levels of government until recently flush with cash, progressives have freely pursued their agendas in the legislature, council, and high-profile district attorney offices.
Under this regime, though, New York City is regressing. On any life-safety metric, from homicides to fire deaths, and on any measure of prosperity or well-being, from population to job growth, Gotham is stagnant or sliding backward. A walk around town reveals no enlightened, well-funded urban oasis but something more like a twenty-first-century version of Frank Capra’s dystopian Pottersville, with neon cannabis-for-sale signs blinking on storefronts, addicts nodding off on sidewalks, and street vendors selling stolen toiletries, even as drugstores lock up merchandise to deter shoplifters.
When I was down in Florida just before he passed away, Dad was fighting dementia. He was desperately trying to hold on to his memory, continually reviewing everyone’s names, his kid’s names, the names of his children’s kids, the layout of our homes, etc. Incredibly, through that desperate struggle, my father kept talking and singing happily because that was my Dad.
I have two adult children, who bring me joy all the time. But celebrating Father’s Day together on Sunday can’t be as joyous as it was five years ago because my Dad won’t be there.
Biden spokesmen objected that the clip was taken “out of context.” The president, you see, was merely registering the presence of another parachutist who landed just out of the picture’s frame. My own view is that more context makes Biden’s performance seem even worse. As one naughty commentator put, if you look at the longer clip, Biden’s behavior is “even more horrifying,” more geriatric, more porous, “A dull head among windy spaces,” as T.S. Eliot put it in “Gerontion.“
Speaking of Eliot, Joe Biden is the perfect “objective correlative” for the G7 and kindred pustules of globalist exhibitionism. The pop singer Michael Jackson popularized a dance move known as the Moonwalk. Joe Biden gave the group its signature move: an alarming rictus, hoisted upon a vacant stare by a wizened, trembling hand, propelled uncertainly forward with halting steps and slow. Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s the Joe Biden Shuffle. It will not, I am confident, be widely imitated — outside the parlors of late-night comedy, anyway — but it is certain to be long remembered.
He’s fine, absolutely fine:
Everyone freaking out about that Biden clip at G7.
I found the full video. The longer clip, in context, is even more horrifying. pic.twitter.com/obFINP7RNE
Besides, Barry assures me his former veep is fine as well:
Obama has to grab his hand to signal it’s time to move and then has his hand on his back the entire time to guide him off stage. Biden is not okay. They’ll all tell you not to believe your eyes, but my gosh is this obvious. https://t.co/3CJ72PYhA0
Jews have been terrified; one Jewish parent at Columbia, withdrawing his freshman daughter in April, analogized his experience to evacuating a refugee from a war zone.
Perhaps colleges and city centers will see a brief respite, as would-be revolutionaries jet off for summertime gigs at tony investment banks or do-goody nonprofits.
Such a respite would be nice.
But one would still be forgiven for asking the obvious question — which I’ve pondered often as a former law clerk on the US Court of Appeals and a frequent law school speaker: Why are none of these “protesters” in jail?
Nearly every American city afflicted by mass protesting and rioting in 2020 ended up settling and paying out millions in taxpayer money to radical protesters who were allegedly subjected to force by law enforcement.
Denver settled to pay $1.6 million to just seven people.
Austin settled to pay $17.3 million.
The cities, led by Democrats, don’t even bother to fight the cases, preferring to write a check.
The settlement cash doesn’t just end up rewarding the protesters, awarded inflated attorney fees are used to reinvest in the legal groups to grow the operation for the next cause. Additionally, law enforcement morale declines as they are punished for doing their jobs.
But lawsuit settlements aren’t the only way that militant protesters and riot suspects get paid.
I assume there’s a similar dynamic going on today: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
Besides, the authorities have invented much more severe crimes to prosecute these days:
What [Alvin] Bragg did was to turn a misdemeanor — whose statute of limitations had expired — into a felony under a New York statute that requires an accompanying crime without ever explaining what that secondary crime was.
We are bequeathing our children and grandchildren a completely different country than the one our parents, grandparents and Founders bequeathed to us.
Read the whole thing. Joe’s boss did promise “fundamental transformation,” so he can least boast that he delivered just that.
For the first time in recent memory, conservatives have triumphed over the left’s control of mainstream thought. It’s a testament to their collective strength that hardly a person in America would deny the influence of pharmaceuticals on Biden’s behavior. While progressives may dominate the media and social media, conservatives have consistently proven their ability to reshape the narrative.
* * * * * * * * *
This narrative has gained traction because it’s not a far stretch of the imagination to believe that Biden’s doctors have a drug cocktail they administer before he’s set to go out in public. His speeches often start with a high energy level, with him practically yelling at the crowd. As the speech progresses, he gradually lowers his voice, culminating in his signature smile and whisper routine before exiting the stage in the wrong direction.
Before the debate on June 27th, Biden’s handlers may want to dial things back a bit from whatever was in the adrenochrome cocktail they gave him before his State of the Union speech.
Or as Jim Geraghty wrote afterwards in March, “President Steroids Shouts His Way through the State of the Union:” “Taken as a whole, Biden’s speech started to sound like Howard Beale’s monologue from Network. But keep in mind, the number of Americans who watched the whole speech, beginning to end, is considerably smaller than the number who will see brief excerpts on the television news, or YouTube, or other social media. By shouting through almost the entire speech, Biden maximized the odds that any clip or segment that went viral would have him looking fired up and impassioned rather than like the sleepy, whispery, mumbling octogenarian that Americans have soured on so thoroughly.”
The Biden and Trump campaigns have put the finishing touches on their debate on June 27th. We already knew that Jake Tapper and Dana Bash would moderate. Now the two sides have agreed to several ground rules.
There will be two commercial breaks instead of one. No interaction with campaign staff will be allowed. Will they allow a bathroom break?
Mics will be muted when it’s not the candidate’s turn.
“Both candidates agreed to appear at a uniform podium, and their podium positions will be determined by a coin flip,” according to CNN.
No audience will be present.
No opening statements.
The moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion,” according to the network. That means no talking over the other guy.
As Rick Moran writes, “With the inability to interrupt the other, there probably won’t be a lot of fireworks. But given how much they hate each other, you have to wonder if they’re even going to shake hands before the debate. Other than that, I’m going to be watching the expressions on both their faces. Daggers and arrows, man. Daggers and arrows.”
Last month, the president’s public approval reached its lowest point in nearly two years. Biden’s approval rating among young Americans is particularly low.
His administration’s inability to connect with this crucial demographic spells trouble for the Democrats. The youth vote could prove to be a decisive factor in November.
Enter “Won’t PAC Down,” a new super PAC with a star-studded Hollywood lineup. The group’s mission? Rejuvenate Biden’s appeal among young voters.
Imagine writers and comedians from “Saturday Night Live” and “Parks and Recreation” joining forces with political strategists to inject some much-needed energy into Biden’s image.
Well, imagine no more.
Hollywood vets and Biden alums launch super PAC to shore up his youth vote problem https://t.co/JMvn7ZOKgi
Their primary goal is to make Biden appear humorous (no easy feat). They intend to achieve this by using a potent mix of comedy and insight designed specifically for Millennials and Gen Zers. Instead of banking on tired celebrity endorsements, they’re enlisting young writers, directors and producers to craft stories that resonate with youth culture.
But is the goal to actually get Biden to the finish line, or simply keep some positive media attention on him in the interim? As Charles Cooke writes:
In life, as in science, it can be useful to extrapolate, and here, in the summer of 2024, it comes time to do just that. It is by now near-universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is too old to perform his duties. It is less universally acknowledged that this has serious implications — the chief among which is that, for all the rococo pageantry that attends his reelection campaign, Joe Biden is not, in fact, running to be president of the United States.
I do not offer this observation in a conspiratorial tone. Joe Biden won the 2020 election legitimately; he is currently serving as the rightful occupant of his office; and he remains eligible to run again, to win again, to take office again, and to exercise all the levers of power that the Constitution would grant his office during a second term. Instead, I mean that Biden is operating as a stand-in, a widget, or a MacGuffin, whose primary purpose is to make it to November 5 of this year without expiring. Most candidates have plans for their coveted four years; Biden has none. He does not expect to be there, and the public agrees with his hunch.
Exit quote: “Biden is little more than a political instrument, to be played for the benefit of his team. Presently, Biden’s utility lies in his staying in the race. Twenty-three seconds after he has won, this will change. And, when it does, the reversal will be astonishing in both speed and scope.”
UPDATE: Finally, a Hollywood superstar emerges, who will do wonders to jump-start Biden’s image among centrist pro-military voters, and those who think his handlers have pushed him far to the left on environmental issues…: Jane Fonda to join Jill Biden at Reno appearance to engage senior voters.
Periodic reminder the Gaza Pier is a stunt designed to buy votes in Michigan and to undermine Israel by boosting the narrative of a humanitarian crisis. It’s costing hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars and endangering the lives of US servicemembers. There’s not even a coherent defense of it. On the merits the Pier is unnecessary for getting aid into Gaza, because more than enough comes in through land, and would be ineffective even if it was necessary, because it’s a dumb way to move aid. The whole thing is just brazenly an electoral and geopolitical performance act.
Breitbart News got a hold of a video from the pier itself moving in the “rough seas.”
This week President Joe Biden’s pier in Gaza washed away, and along with it, $320 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
That a temporary pier built in the open ocean broke up in a storm should not shock anyone who has ever looked at the sea or watched the Weather Channel. Sailors since the days of the Phoenician trireme have used the expression, “any port in a storm.” For that reason, most piers are built in ports, anchorages and harbors.
President Biden’s pier disaster is not unlike President Jimmy Carter’s “Operation Eagle Claw,” the botched attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in the final months of his presidency. I would say let’s hope this latest military bungle is Biden’s final Jimmy Carter moment, but that’s unfair to the president from Plains, Georgia. President Carter deservedly had higher approval ratings than Biden at this point in his presidency.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record suggested at the time:
Let us also not forget that you supported the Occupy takeovers of yester-decade. You supported the state rotunda takeovers by unionized thugs. You supported the BLM riots. You supported the CHAZ in Seattle and similar secessionist movements in other cities. You supported the attacks on churches and pregnancy centers after the Dobbs ruling. You supported the Stalinist show trial against Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the mob that tried to storm the Supreme Court to prevent his swearing-in.
You supported the attack by James Hodgkinson against Republican congressmen playing baseball. You supported the attack on Rand Paul by his neighbor. You supported the campus attacks against conservative speakers and activists. You supported every random street attack against anyone wearing a MAGA hat.
You supported every act of violence, censorship, social coercion, government repression, and outright insurrection so long as it was seen as beneficial to advancing your agenda and, more importantly, as long as it never affected you personally. These shock troops are disciples of the secular religion that you — yes, you, traditional liberals — have propagated for decades. With your winks and nods, you have taught them that trampling other people’s rights in pursuit of your cause du jour is both permissible and preferable.
And the entire time, you told us that “this is what democracy looks like.”
You are who Lenin accurately referred to as “useful idiots.” But I’m not so sure that you still support what democracy “looks like,” now that it “looks like” it has reached your front yard. When they scream that they want to burn the entire country to the ground, they mean exactly that. The monster that you constructed, animated, fed, riled up, and let roam free to dispatch your political enemies is now peering through your bay window, staring at you with a ravenous look in its eyes that evinces neither “solidary” nor “inclusion” with you.
Frankenstein’s monster always comes home to his castle.
Why does Democratic Party governance seem less effective on the West Coast than on the East Coast?
Sometimes I wonder if the West is less serious about policy than the East and less focused on relying on the most rigorous evidence. There’s some evidence for that. But I’m not sure, for it’s also true that West Coast states have managed to innovate exceptionally well in some domains. Oregon pioneered “death with dignity” through physician-assisted suicide and led the way to vote by mail, an important step for democracy. California has some of the smartest gun safety laws in America, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. As a result, California has a firearms death rate 40 percent below the national average.
So my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.
I ran for governor in Oregon two years ago (I was ousted from the ballot by Oregon’s then-secretary of state, who said I didn’t meet the residency requirement). While running, I’d meet groups of liberal donors in Portland, as the city’s problems cast a shadow over all of us; we’d all be wondering nervously if our catalytic converters were in the process of being stolen. The undercurrent in such a liberal gathering would be the failures of Republicans — but Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.
Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.
“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”
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