BREAKING: David DePape Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Warren Smith Learns It’s Not Enough to Be Right.

A few months ago, a Massachusetts high school teacher named Warren Smith went viral for the following exchange with a student. In it, he helps the student understand why he’s been thinking about J.K. Rowling all wrong. She’s not a “transphobe” for knowing how chromosomes work.

* * * * * * * *

I suspect there was no conversation when they fired him, because they knew he would talk them out of it.

So now this excellent teacher is out of a job for making students think instead of riot. I hope he lands on his feet. He seems like a decent guy. He’s certainly handling this a lot better than I would.

If J.K. Rowling really wants to change things, she should start her own school. A real-life Hogwarts. Except instead of teaching magic, it teaches young people how to think. Staff it with people like Warren Smith.

You don’t need magic when you’ve got logic and reason.

It’s Jim Treacher, so read the whole thing.

JOHN NOLTE: Democrat-Run California About to Get Hit with 50 Cent per Gallon Gas Tax.

In today’s edition of Getting What You Vote For, the dummies in California are about to get hit with a 50 cent per gallon gas tax.

Remember, California voters have handed the Democrat party full power over the former Golden State. Democrats run everything from the governorship on down. Democrats not only hold majorities in the state legislature, they hold veto-proof majorities. In other words…

Republicans are powerless in California. And so…

According to Triple-A, the average cost of a gallon of gas in California today is $5.29. That’s nearly $1.70 more than the national average. In some parts of California, gas costs $6.32 per gallon. The lowest cost for a gallon of gas in that Democrat-run shithole is $5.02.

Now add 50 cents to those prices.

Tee hee.

Throw in “road diets,” banning gas stations, and some of the worst roads in the country, and it all adds up to California drivers continuing to get it gooder and harder.

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Joe Biden Says China’s EV Dominance Is a Problem. His Son Hunter Helped Beijing Gain a Foothold in the Industry.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday imposed sweeping tariffs on China’s aluminum and electric vehicle sectors, vowing to stop Beijing’s effort to “dominate these industries.” His son, Hunter Biden, brokered deals that helped China gain a foothold in those sectors while his father was vice president.

Hunter Biden was a founding board member of the Beijing-based BHR Partners and served on the company’s board when the firm brokered a Chinese state-owned firm’s purchase of a Congolese cobalt mine in 2016. China’s acquisition of the mine, which had been owned by an American company, gave Beijing a crucial supply of raw materials used to make batteries for electric cars. That same year, BHR Partners bought and sold a stake in Chinese electric vehicle battery maker CATL, the New York Timesreported.

Previously unreported emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that BHR Partners tried to broker a deal in 2015 between the American subsidiary of Chinese company Zhongwang and American aluminum maker Aleris. Zhongwang said the $2.3 billion deal would “strengthen Zhongwang’s leadership in [the] aluminum extrusion industry.” The Trump and Biden Justice Departments have since indicted Zhongwang and its owner for a scheme to evade tariffs levied against Chinese aluminum makers.

Hunter Biden’s work with BHR could prove awkward for his father, who saidTuesday he is “determined to ensure America,” not China, “leads the world” in the electric vehicle, aluminum, steel, and semiconductor industries. To reach that goal, Biden imposed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese aluminum and 100 percent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Oh, and when it comes to tariffs on Chinese industry, the(p)resident is going John Kerry’s flipflop on the Iraq War one better— Sundown Joe is now forgainst it, for it!

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he would remove Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from China, which are taxes on U.S. consumers and companies. An aide later asserted the former vice president “would reevaluate the tariffs upon taking office.” A Gallup poll in February 2020 detected positive views of Americans toward international trade, with 79% viewing trade as “an opportunity for economic growth,” while only 18% considered trade a “threat.” (Note: The article has been updated to reflect the Biden aide’s statement.)

—“Biden Says He Will End Trump’s Tariffs On Chinese-Made Goods, Aide Walks Back Statement,” Forbes, August 6th, 2020.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM—YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG:

Striking passage from @NellieBowles’s Morning After the Revolution, out today:

NYT colleague (an editor) calls her partner, @bariweiss, a “F-ing Nazi.” pic.twitter.com/t3wnsfAi2q

— Adam Rubenstein (@RubensteinAdam) May 14, 2024

UPDATE: WHOA: Nellie Bowles’ New Book Blows Lid OFF The New York Times, Exposing Rampant Misinformation and RACISM.

thank you for sharing this, freedom of speech is critical for democracy

sad the NYT mislead so many people 😔 pic.twitter.com/qoUyhueIJd

— Gail Alfar (@GailAlfarATX) May 14, 2024

As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.” All the way to the New York Times! Former (?) Obama flack Ben Rhodes wasn’t kidding — his party’s vacuous operatives with bylines really know nothing.

YES — AND IN RESPONSE, THEIR APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: Sports Illustrated Hates You.

This year’s issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition is the 60th, and the magazine is celebrating by not featuring gorgeous women in skimpy swimsuits.

In fact, the magazine’s cover features a photo of women in evening gowns—at least, mostly women. These days you can never tell who will show up in the magazine pretending to be female.

Gail King, a noted sex symbol, is prominently featured. She snagged an interview with the magazine’s editor, who explained the shift away from featuring women in swimsuits to more woke content, featuring plus-size women and men cosplaying them.

“This ain’t your dad’s Sports Illustrated,” we are told. And this is supposed to be a good thing. The formerly unabashedly male publication prefers old, fat, Queer readers these days. Because they are the core audience for sports, just as woke white women are the core audience for comic book movies.

This is why they have been so successful.

SI has been, at least, successful in jettisoning its former readers–circulation is down by half. So at least their strategy of offending much of their audience is working. What publication would want to be patronized by heterosexual men these days?

Good riddance!

Of course, jettisoning readers isn’t so good for the bottom line. They have had massive layoffs and almost folded, being rescued at the last minute by a last-minute buyer.

Gayle King, 69, makes her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue debut in sizzling one-piece: ‘Sexy isn’t an age’ https://t.co/STD6OzgTY2 pic.twitter.com/izolccisqc

— Page Six (@PageSix) May 14, 2024

Flashback: Leave Supermodels Alone!

The other night, after I’d had a little too much of this world, I decided to bathe in cleansing waters and scour my soul by watching the new E! True Hollywood Story episode on Victoria’s Secret.  (Yes, I know. Life is sad.)

Best I can tell, this investigative blockbuster was largely derived from a New York Times story from last year, subtly headlined, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret.”  The gory particulars of both the article and the E! documentary were enough to curl your hair, not unlike the bouncy locks of former VS model Jill Goodacre (a Victoria’s Secret OG). There were harrowing tales of handsy, lecherous  executives, and of models getting ready for Objectification Fest (the once-hallowed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show) by eating an apple a day with no sides.  Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s then parent company, L Brands, was so creepy, that he kept company with Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of whom posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter.  It was all genuinely awful.

But perhaps most unsettling of all, according to the ominous narration, VS didn’t show a commitment to diversity of body types  (women, you may have heard, come in all shapes and sizes!), and they continued to “market a standard of beauty that customers found male, stale, and hopelessly out of touch.” (Just imagine a woman so deluded, that she’d try to make herself attractive to a man while performing the sacred fourth-wave feminist rite of buying lingerie.)  After hearing this last bit, I sat there in stone silence for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes or so, until E! aired another rerun of The Bradshaw Bunch, in which former NFL great Terry Bradshaw “still stinging from their embarrassing loss last year…..coaches the family for a repeat appearance on Celebrity Family Feud.”

I hurt for my supermodel sisters.  I asked a lot of unanswerable questions like, “Why, God, why?”  Then I asked one last question, which you’re not supposed to utter in public: “Whatever happened to skinny, beautiful models, and will they be coming back any time soon?”

As Iowahawk likes to say:

And:

(Classical reference in headline.)

BUT JOE BIDEN ASSURES ME THAT THE BORDER IS FULLY SECURE:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Ashley Biden Wrote Letter to Judge Confirming That Diary Reporting That Biden Showered With Her Until a ‘Not Appropriate’ Age Is Real. “Snopes has been denying this for years — and this is one of the ‘fact’ checking outfits which social media companies use to decide whether to censor/throttle accounts. It was false for years, now it’s true. No apologies. No explanation of how or why this error (or ‘error’) was made.”

Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Bambie Thug has exposed the rottenness of the new Ireland.

To my mind, Bambie Thug sums up everything that is rotten about Ireland’s new elites. Yes, that’s right, she (not ‘they’, FFS) is the embodiment of elite culture, however much she might fantasise about being a zany witch sticking it to The Man, or whatever post-sex term these tossers use to describe manifestations of power. ‘Do you know what makes me special? I’m a queer’, she says, giving voice to the self-absorption of identity politics with its post-Enlightenment belief that your identity counts for more than your character. (And this is leaving aside the fact that Ms Thugs seems mostly to have boyfriends. Is this another bourgeois straighttrying to sprinkle a little exoticism on her missionary-position life by saying ‘I’m queer’?) There’s also her cloying sense of victimhood. She says she had a ‘horrible’ time at Eurovision – diddums – and even accused an Israeli broadcaster of ‘inciting violence’ against her. Eden Golan was met with protests by an army of haters drunk on their disdain for Israel and you want us to feel sorry for a talentless gremlin who got a bit of bad media coverage? Grow up, Bambie. You’re 31.

This, sadly, is what Ireland is all about these days. Well, Ireland’s elites. Woke, identitarian, slavishly devoted to the gender cult, ‘pro-queer’, convinced they’re the perma-victims of history. It is hilarious that Bambie considers herself a daring outlier when, in truth, she’s a chief priestess of this self-regarding elite. If you were to invent in a laboratory an individual who embodied the warped values of the post-Catholic, post-nationalist, post-self-respect movers and shakers of the Dublin chattering class, you’d get Bambie. A ‘queer’ writhing about on a Satanic star and then blubbing like a baby when someone criticises her – it’s 21st-century Ireland in a nutshell. A toxic mix of arrogance and fragility. A showy denunciation of the old religion of Catholicism combined with a feverish embrace of the new religion of victimhood. Out with the cult of God and nation, in with the infinitely worse cult of the self and the suffocating realm of emotion. Bambie’s the finger-wagging nun of the new regime.

We need to talk about the Irish upper classes’ hatred for Israel. It’s intense. Alongside Bambie crying because the Jewish State got to the final of a song contest – this isn’t normal, folks – we’ve also seen Irish politicians noisily denounce Israel and Irish sports teams refuse to shake the hands of Israeli sports teams. Well, you never know what you might catch. Ireland is considered one of the most anti-Israel countries in Europe.

Jim Treacher adds: Bambie Thug Proves Antisemites Can Be Boring.

Once again, a lefty critical darling is spewing the exact same rhetoric as these guys:

But because she wraps up her antisemitism in transgender ideology and liberal crybullying, it’s acceptable to our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters.

Well, if her music career doesn’t pan out, I’m sure she’ll find something else to do. Like gluing her hand to the counter at Starbucks to protest the price of oat milk. White women, am I right?

Exit quote: “In terms of sheer horror: Alice Cooper > Marilyn Manson > the guy who greets you at Walmart > Bambie Thug.”

It’s so much harder to epater les bourgeoisie when in 2024’s Europe, you’re firmly in the camp of the bourgeoisie. Or at the least, bourgeois camp.

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH THE U.N.(!) IS A VOICE OF SANITY: U.N. Cuts Gaza Death Toll Figures by Half, Confirming Hamas Is Lying About Casualties. “These figures have been used by the U.N. and American government for months to accuse Israel of intentionally targeting civilians, including women and children. But the massive revision indicates Hamas’s figures are riddled with inaccuracies, even as the Biden administration claims they are generally reliable and cites them as evidence that Israel may have committed war crimes during its seven-month war. These inflated figures are also being used by the Biden administration to justify its decision to pause American arms sales to Israel and threaten to withhold more military aid if the Jewish state moves forward with a full-scale incursion into Gaza’s Rafah neighborhood.”

I HOPE THOSE ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES IN MICHIGAN ARE WORTH IT FOR BIDEN AND HIS HANDLERS: Tom Cotton Accuses Biden Of Imposing A ‘De Facto Arms Embargo’ Against Israel.

Biden has imposed a “de facto arms embargo” against Israel, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on Sunday, offering his latest reaction to the commander-in-chief suggesting the United States could halt weapons going to a close ally.

Cotton, who has called for Biden to get impeached over the threat to Israel if it launches a full-scale ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, expounded on his criticism of the president during an interview on CBS News.

During a CNN town hall last week, Biden said he “made it clear” to Israel that if it conducts a major ground operation in Rafah, “we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

Cotton argued that a supposed clarification by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who appeared on “Face the Nation” just before him and suggested that Biden’s threat only applied to shipping heavy bombs to Israel, should be met with skepticism.

“What Tony Blinken says on this show cannot be credited when Joe Biden is out there imposing a de facto arms embargo on Israel at the same time he’s letting arms embargoes on Iran expire,” Cotton said.

Exit quote: “Cotton shot back [to DNC-MSM operative with byline, CBS’s Margaret Brennan], contending that Biden’s position is ‘de facto for Hamas victory at this point.’”

As Jim Geraghty asks, “Whose side are we on? Because right now, it really looks like we’re acting like Hamas’s defense attorney, trying to get it the best deal possible.”

I think we know whose side the (p)resident’s handlers are on:

As Biden attacks Israel to win antisemitic voters in Michigan, he seems to have forgotten: Israel did not start this war.

Hamas did.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) March 29, 2024

UPDATE:

"Hamas should be eliminated entirely… unless I'm at risk of losing Michigan." https://t.co/Ll5Aoq6iE3

— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) May 13, 2024

RIP: David Sanborn, Grammy award-winning saxophonist, dead at 78.

ON THE ONE HAND, IT WENT VIRAL, SO THAT HAS TO BE GOOD NEWS* FOR APPLE. ON THE OTHER HAND: Apple apologizes for its controversial iPad Pro ad.

Apple has apologized and admitted it “missed the mark” with its latest iPad Pro advertisement.

The ad, posted on social media Tuesday by Apple CEO Tim Cook, was met with backlash from internet users who felt that the ad celebrated technology’s destruction of human creativity and art.

In a statement to AdAge, Apple’s vice president of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, apologized.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad,” Myhren said. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Apple confirmed the statement it provided to AdAge but declined to provide further comment.

The ad shows symbols of human creativity, like musical instruments, paint cans, an ’80s arcade video game and a bust of a human head crushed by a giant hydraulic press. As the metal slabs of the hydraulic press lift, Apple’s new iPad Pro is revealed.

While everyone appreciates the amount of legacy technology that is now accessible — often for free — within an iPad or iPhone, people like owning physically tactile devices such as guitars and pianos. For example, the whole history of recording music via PC has been increasing the software’s ability to integrate with hardware devices that musicians and recording engineers have decades and decades of experience working with. On both an aural level and an ability to hands-on tweak the physical controls level, hardware devices are often much more fun than diving down into multiple levels of GUIs and onscreen menus.

Which is why Apple’s new ad is infinitely more appealing when run in reverse:

Hey @Apple, I fixed it for you (sound on) pic.twitter.com/OwVnYNgXhT

— Reza Sixo Safai (@rezawrecktion) May 8, 2024

* Even articles like the CNN/Yahoo piece above and this post are, of course, serving as more free advertising for Apple.

Earlier: Apple downplays the value of human achievement.

A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL PARTY: TX Democrat Colin Allred Attended Event Where Illegal Aliens Were Taught How To Evade Authorities: Report.

“Think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” Michael Walsh likes to say. Somebody appears to be taking that meme far too literally.

CBS’S ROBERT COSTA BEGS BILL MAHER TO STOP MOCKING LEFTIES, JUST MOCK REPUBLICANS:

CBS reporter Robert Costa put together a puffball interview for HBO Real Time host Bill Maher on their show Sunday Morning. They let him claim he’s not ideological and didn’t laugh when he said  “I speak for the normies. I speak for that vast middle that is tired of the partisanship. I don’t want to hate half the country, and I don’t hate half the country.”

Bill Maher represents the “vast middle,” the “normies”? Conservatives across America would make a face at that. At bottom, Maher is a bit of shock jock, so that when Democrats are in power he’s going to mock them as well, just as he suggested on Friday night that the Democrats “blew it” in all their legal warfare on Trump.

What was amazing in this profile was Costa imploring Maher to lay off mockery of the Left, just shine the spotlight on the right-wingers!

COSTA: You write a lot of throughout this book that the left irritates you, frustrates you at times, but the right often alarms you.

MAHER: Yes. They’re very alarming. They’re extremely alarming. More alarming.

COSTA: What do you say to your critics, though, who say that you should just focus on them, Bill, if they’re more alarming to you than the Left. And why not shine the spotlight on them only?

MAHER: The truth isn’t one-sided like that. The Democrats constantly are,running against Trump with the idea ‘You people out there couldn’t possibly vote for this guy.’ And people are saying, ‘Watch me. Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again.’

Costa got his start at NRO and the Wall Street Journal, and yet, like fellow Post employee Jennifer Rubin and her former colleague David Weigel, who also began at conservative or libertarian Websites, as the MSM likes say to about a politician who slowly begins to lean further and further hard left, he sure has grown in office!

PEPPERMINT PSAKI ATTEMPTS TO MEMORY HOLE HISTORY, and even Axios is calling her out: Psaki’s new book falsely recounts Biden’s watch check in troop ceremony.

Many family members of the 13 soldiers killed during the explosion at the Abbey Gate base in Kabul have consistently said in interviews and appearances before Congress that Biden checked his watch as the caskets went by.

• Mark Schmitz, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, told Congress in August of 2023 that “while I stood there on the tarmac watching you check your watch over and over again, all I wanted to do was shout out, ‘It’s two f***ing thirty, asshole.’ “
• The day after the ceremony on Aug. 29, 2021, Shana Chappell, the mother of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, wrote on Facebook: “I watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!! What the f*** was so important that you had to keep looking at your watch????”

What they’re saying: [Jen] Psaki initially declined to comment, but after this story was published she said in a statement that the “detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook.”

• She added: “The story on Afghanistan is really about the importance of delivering feedback even when it is difficult told through my own experience of telling President Biden that his own story of loss was not well received by the families who were grieving their sons and daughters”

• Psaki’s publisher, Scribner, did not respond to a request for comment.

Zoom out: Psaki’s account is part of a larger pattern of Biden officials trying to recast the administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

The gaslighting will continue — even after Biden’s officials go through the revolving door to the MSM side of the DNC.

UPDATE:

If you think Jen Psaki barking about disinformation about over Biden meeting with Gold Star parents is bad, wait until you remember this one. https://t.co/CJSb6fqIb6

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 13, 2024

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

Well, um, the – er – so the – I mean – again, some of the stuff gets – some of the language that the – erm – some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money, and it definitely lends that money, which is why – erm, er – the government definitely prints money, and then it lends that money by – er – by selling bonds – er – is that what they do? They, they – erm – they – yeah, they, they – erm – they sell bonds – yeah, they sell bonds, right, so as they sell bonds and people buy bonds and lend them the money – yup – so a lot of times, a lot of times – at least to my ear – with [Modern Monetary Theory] the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to – um, er, uh – er – so – um – yeah, I – I – I guess I’m just – I don’t – I can’t really talk – eh, I don’t – I don’t get it – I don’t know what they’re talking about, like, ’cos – it’s like – the government clearly prints money, it does it all the time, and it clearly borrows, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this that ’n’ defic – conversation, so I don’t think there’s anything confusing there.

—“So who was that? A trans sociology major at Columbia? One of the hosts of The View? No. It was Jared Bernstein, the Chairman of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.”

If that name rings a bell, here’s a flashback from Bernstein: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

Biden warned voters on the 2020 campaign trail that if he’s elected president, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” (Sadly, not that he ever was in America.) But nobody in the MSM-DNC deigned to ask who would be replacing him.

Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Address Sparks Walkout by Antisemites at Duke University.

Seinfeld, who is Jewish, is the parent of two Duke students and an active supporter of the university. He has been vocal in his support for Israel following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7. His wife also funded a pro-Israel protest at UCLA last week. When Seinfeld was announced  as this year’s commencement speaker, some students expressed opposition to his appearance over his support of Israel, and warned that there would be a display of opposition at the commencement ceremony.

The 70-year-old comedian also made headlines recently for blaming “the extreme left” for ruining comedy.

“Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. Used to be you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M.A.S.H.’ Is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. Oh, ‘All in the Family’ is on. You just expected there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what? Where is it?” Seinfeld said last month. “This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups: ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’ Well, that’s the end of your comedy,” he said. “They move the gates, like in skiing. Culture, the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that wherever they put the gates, I’m gonna make the gate.”

Exit quote:

Oh no. I hope Jerry Seinfeld can handle a tough audience. https://t.co/ZfkHybI3U1

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) May 12, 2024

UPDATE:

Organizer Of Walkout Against Jerry Seinfeld Revealed https://t.co/lMLCO8C1OG pic.twitter.com/OkD06vlo97

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 12, 2024

MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED REACHES EXPIRATION DATE: Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.

So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.

Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.

Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.

The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.

Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.

That image of Greta in Malmo, looking very satisfied with herself, summed up the role the keffiyeh plays in the life of the 21st-century activist. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to you. Look at me in my Arab garb, aren’t I good and hyper socially aware – that’s the needy cry of these hipster appropriators.

Yet beneath their radical chic, darker sentiments lurk.

Not least of which is radical environmentalism embracing its nihilistic origins. Plus ça change: the original European environmentalists who had a strange coalition with Islamists were awfully totalitarian as well.

UPDATE:

pic.twitter.com/xkIAuP9AL7

— Declaration of Memes (@LibertyCappy) May 12, 2024

(Classical reference in headline.)

THEY HATE US, THEY REALLY HATE US!

In her speech, Pelosi argues that voters are “blocked” from making good, rational decisions and voting Democrat because of their culture and views on God

Watch: pic.twitter.com/YAtkNoBGVN

— Winston Marshall (@MrWinMarshall) May 11, 2024

I can’t say it’s at all surprising to see Pelosi channeling Meryl Streep channeling Hillary in the climactic scene from her dystopian 2015 Harvey Weinstein-produced movie The Giver— it’s leftists all the way down:

UPDATE: Oxford Union Debate: Mumford and Sons Musician Rips Pelosi’s Elitism Apart.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Far-left U. Wisconsin student groups suspended after antisemitic chalkings.

The University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mecha have been placed on interim suspension pending an investigation into chalkings which “endorsed violence, supported terrorist organizations and/or contained antisemitic comments.”

According to the student paper The Daily Cardinal, an interim suspension means a group “must cease activities [during] an investigation and decision from the CSO [Committee on Student Organizations].”

The report notes last weekend’s chalk messages had included “Al-Qassam you make us proud, kill another soldier now,” “Power to Al-Qassam” (the military wing of Hamas), “Power to Hezbollah,” and “Down with ‘Israel’ down with ‘USA.’”

Others praised the Houthis, who use the slogan “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.”

Why would a college student group even think of deploying chalk when all the best people assured me in 2016 that it was one of the most dangerous powders of mass (mental) destruction that could be deployed on a campus?

It began at Emory University, but has quickly spread across the country like a calcium carbonate plague. #TheChalkening has now terrorized college students from the University of Michigan to Arizona State, with temporary, hand-scrawled messages of support for Donald Trump on public sidewalks and stairways. While various campuses have dealt with the scourge in different ways—some creating safe spaces for the triggered teens, some encouraging the free exercise of ideas in temporary outdoor media—one school, DePaul University in Chicago, is turning to extreme measures. They’re banning chalk. Or, at least, they’re banning the use of chalk. Whether the campus intends on performing door-to-door dorm searches for paraphernalia remains to be seen.

Why were the University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mech exempt from such searches?

WHY GAZA AND NOT THE UIGHURS?

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

* * * * * * * *

Israel is a prominent target of that ideology. Why? Because, for the left in the US, Canada and Europe, the Jewish state represents so much they hate, wrapped into a single package: capitalism, nationalism, Western religion and economic prosperity success thanks to hard work, intensive education and merit. Since the state’s formation in the 1948, Israelis have resolutely avoided the self-conception of “victimhood,” on which all campus politics is built.

Had Israel chosen to depict itself as the “wretched of the earth,” it had every right to cloak itself in victimhood. The Holocaust, a true genocide, killed more than 6 million and destroyed European Jewry. Arab states have repeatedly launched wars of annihilation against Israel and expelled virtually all Jews from their territories, where Jews had lived for centuries. The ideological left and their Muslim allies demean those refugees as part of a “settler colonial” influx.

Those white settler colonialists are an “unexpectedly” diverse coalition!

Israelis 🇮🇱 admitting that they are “white colonizers” 👇
pic.twitter.com/K0mH6riLLC

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) May 7, 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: Beyond Reason: How Shame and Disgust Shape Law and Society.

It might seem that the meditations of a seventeenth-century French philosopher are pretty distant from the conundrums facing us in the twenty-first century. In some ways, this is true. But Descartes did an enormous amount to define the methods, goals, and ideals of scientific rationalism, a worldview that systematically deprecates the significance of any experience not amenable to rational analysis. Paul Valéry summed up the problem in his brief sketch for an essay on Descartes. Like many moderns, Valéry found himself bewitched by the heroic solipsism of Descartes’ formula, cogito ergo sum. Yet he knew that a corollary of that formula was a world in which “the word ‘knowledge’ is increasingly denied to anything which cannot be translated into figures.” Among other things, this meant that, as Valéry put it, “the truth for modern man, which is exactly related to his freedom of action over nature, seems more and more to be in opposi­tion to everything that our imagination and our feelings would like to be true.” As Valéry understood, we owe our humanity not only to our ability to reason but also to our status as creatures of feeling, imagination, and moral responsibility. In the end, the idea that we are the “masters and possessors of nature” is a risible illusion bred by overweening cleverness. For ultimately, it is nature that masters and possesses us, a fact we deny to our intellectual peril and moral diminishment.

What has all of this to do with the law? For a first answer to that question, let’s broaden the field from hunches to those great underrated human resources, prejudice and the feelings of disgust and moral outrage. On those subjects, I can think of no better place to begin than with Martha Craven Nussbaum, who, among other attainments, is a professor of law, philosophy, classics, and divinity at the University of Chicago. In her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law and some related articles, Professor Nussbaum argues that “the law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.”

Really? I suspect “most of us would agree” that the law ought to be society’s protection against crime. But perhaps Professor Nussbaum thinks that prejudice is itself a crime—though surely not all prejudice. Edmund Burke said that prejudice “renders a man’s virtue his habit.” He meant that if we have a predisposition—a prejudice—toward the right things, they more easily become second nature. Surely Professor Nussbaum would not wish for the law to protect us from that sort of prejudice. And it must be said that she herself is clearly prejudiced against anything she labels “conservative.” I doubt that she believes that the law should be society’s protection against prejudice directed at conservatives.

Read the whole thing.

NY GIANTS GREAT LAWRENCE TAYLOR TAKES TIME OUT OF HIS WEEKEND TO ATTEND TRUMP RALLY IN NJ: “Taylor was one of just 40,000 expected to support Trump at the latest stop on his campaign trail. He is one of several former or current NFL players who have voiced support for the 45th president of the United States over the past several years.”

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: San Francisco Giving Homeless Vodka, Courtesy of Taxpayers.

Homeless alcoholics in San Francisco are getting vodka, wine, and beer at the expense of taxpayers, thanks to a crazy program that claims to provide health benefits and save lives. At this point, the reality of life under Democrat rule is far loonier than any satire or slapstick comedy.

The zany program in Democrat-run San Francisco allegedly aims to “curb excessive drinking” among the excessively large homeless population of the city, The UK Daily Mail reported on May 10. The unhoused (to use a silly leftist phrase) can booze it up to the tune of $5 million a year on the taxpayer dime, as vodka shots, wine glasses, and beer bottles are distributed by the City of San Francisco. Instead of aiming to sober up the homeless, the government there is allegedly only trying to provide small and short-term health benefits.

Nurses from the woke city’s “managed alcohol program” administer alcohol to the homeless addicts, the Daily Mail explained, allegedly helping curb the extreme addiction by controlling how much booze the individuals consume. The city claims success from the program, but we know that assurances on expensive and moronic government programs from Democrats are far more worthless than a can of Mulvaney-endorsed Bud Light. Does the program really keep homeless people out of jail or hospital? Who knows for sure? And, of course, it is responsible taxpayers who have to foot the bill.

In December of 2009, SF Weekly had this classic Fox Butterfield-esque line: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”