BILL MAHER (ACCIDENTALLY?) EXPLAINS HOW EXPOSING KIDS TO GENDER IDEOLOGY IS GROOMING:

On Friday evening, leftist comedian Bill Maher once again criticized the way the transgender cult is targeting children, and I have to say it’s encouraging to see he hasn’t been bullied into silence on this issue.

“Contrary to current progressive dogma, children aren’t miniature adults wise beyond their years. They’re morons,” he pointed. out. “They’re gullible morons who will believe anything and just want to please grown-ups, and they don’t have any frame of reference, so they normalize whatever is happening. That’s why endlessly talking about gender to six-year-olds isn’t just inappropriate.”

Maher continued, “It’s what the law would call entrapment, which means enticing people into doing something they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

For example, after 9/11, there were several cases of overzealous federal agents leading sad losers into terrorist plots like the undercover FBI agent who got seven out-of-work dudes in Liberty City, FL, to sign onto a plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Oh please, these guys didn’t even have a gun, but when someone said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we taught the man a lesson and blew something up?” They said, “Yeah, that would be kind of cool!”

Entrapment, suggesting someone into something they wouldn’t otherwise do. And if you think some of that isn’t going on with gender in schools, you’re not watching enough TikTok videos.

Maher then played clips from TikTok videos of LGBTQ activist teachers who were clearly abusing their positions to indoctrinate children.

More here: Watch: Bill Maher Stuns With Monologue on Trans Ideology and Children, but There’s a Problem.

This is where I’m going to break away from the typical fist-pumping by conservatives anytime a left-winger says something we remotely agree with. Maher is right that transgender ideology is essentially entrapping kids into permanently altering their bodies at the behest of activists. He’s right that companies like Disney are trying to indoctrinate children. He’s correct that teachers use their platforms to push their political culture wars onto their students. He’s even right that children’s media, including books, are being written and pushed specifically to do just that.

Where Maher goes wrong is that he continues to try to stake out a middle ground where one doesn’t exist. He claims the idea of a “gay agenda,” which translates to pushing “queerness” (centered on transgenderism) is “mostly” nonsense. That’s the wrong approach, and it will lead to more proliferation of what Maher is decrying. You can’t just pretend away that this is a massive, targeted effort to corrupt and harm children.

I assume Maher has plenty of security: Hilary Cass: I can’t travel on public transport any more.

Her final report — the world’s biggest review into the contested field of transgender healthcare — involved trans patients, families, academics and doctors.

Cass said she was pleased that, for the most part, both sides in the debate over the treatment of children with gender dysphoria had not “weaponised” her report. But she has still had to deal with a “pretty aggressive” response from some, particularly those in activist groups. She is also staying away from Twitter/X.

Cass said: “There are some pretty vile emails coming in at the moment. Most of which my team is protecting me from, so I’m not getting to see them.” Some of them contained “words I wouldn’t put in a newspaper”, she said.

She added: “What dismays me is just how childish the debate can become. If I don’t agree with somebody then I’m called transphobic or a Terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist].”

Cass said the abuse spiked every time the review said something “people don’t like”.

Online discussion hardened following her interim report, in 2022, and the selection of Liz Truss as Tory Party leader and prime minister, she said. “That was when the debate got more aggressive and people got into bunkers, then the online furore heats up.”

But Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is remaining resolute, despite being thrown into the middle of the culture wars.

Asked if the abuse had taken a toll on her, she said: “No … it’s personal, but these people don’t know me.

“I’m much, much more upset and frustrated about all this disinformation than I am about the abuse. The thing that makes me seethe is the misinformation.”

She added: “I’m not going on public transport at the moment, following security advice, which is inconvenient.”

Cass shouldn’t have any problem on American public transportation, though: Left-Wing News Orgs Completely Ignore Bombshell Trans Report. “Various left-wing news organizations completely ignored the bombshell Cass Review, a report commissioned by England’s National Health Services (NHS) which found there was ‘weak evidence’ for the efficacy of puberty blockers in minors, a Daily Caller review found. CNN, ABC News, Axios and Vox haven’t covered the story on their websites at all. NPR, CBS and NBC have four combined stories on the review, one from NPR, one from CBS and two from NBC.”

Related:

It turns out for pedophiles in Hollywood, "It's A Small World After All." pic.twitter.com/4qUtOhXZYL

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 20, 2024

Why, it’s as if Hollywood is a sex-grooming gang or something.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Uncle Bosey Edition.

Exit question:

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF HARVARD UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Serial Plagiarist Claudine Gay To Teach ‘Reading And Research’ Ethics Class At Harvard.

Gay resigned as the president of Harvard University in January over charges of plagiarism.

The university assured her she would remain employed for a salary of around $900,000 a year as an administrator. This week, Harvard announced Gay would assume the role of teaching a graduate-level “Reading and Research” course at Harvard.

Yes, you read that correctly.

A woman outed for serial plagiarism – or “inadequate citations,” the phrase that the school used to euphemize her misdeeds – will preside over a “research” course that emphasizes proper attribution.

How this is real-life and not a skit on “SNL” or a headline from the Babylon Bee is amusing.

Harvard says the course does not provide letter grades. Letter grades uphold a grading system that disproportionately favors white students, several Harvard administrators argue.

Grades are racist.

The school adds that the course requires “written work of sufficient quantity and quality so that the course is equivalent to a lecture course or a seminar.”

Got it.

Future employers can rest assured that students who pass the course will be well-equipped to publish adequately-cited work after learning from Dr. Gay…

Just as future media employers can be assured of their hires having learned their ethics from this man: Great news: Brian Stelter got a gig at Harvard.

NEWSWEEK SPOTS REPUBLICANS POUNCING AND SEIZING! Teen Suspended for Saying ‘Illegal Alien’ Sparks Republican Outrage.

“Because of his question, our son was disciplined and given THREE days OUT of school suspension for ‘racism,'” Leah McGhee said in the email, per the Carolina Journal. “He is devastated and concerned that the racism label on his school record will harm his future goal of receiving a track scholarship. We are concerned that he will fall behind in his classes due to being absent for three consecutive days.”

On Tuesday, Leah McGhee appeared on The Pete Kaliner Show, which airs on the radio station WBT, and discussed the matter in more detail. She said the family had once lived in England, and Christian mentioned how people from that country also need green cards to reside in the U.S.

McGhee said she and her husband met with the school’s assistant principal and told him “illegal alien” is a term their son can look up in the dictionary.

“It is a term used as federal code, and it is a term that is heard frequently on many news broadcasts,” she said. “I feel that if this was handled properly in the classroom, it could have easily been used as a teachable moment for everyone.”

The Carolina Journal reported that Republican state Senator Steve Jarvis contacted the school district’s superintendent for information on the incident. He told the newspaper he asked school officials to seek a fair outcome but declined to state a position without knowing more about what happened.

“I do not see [how] that would be an offensive statement, just in getting clarification,” Jarvis said to the Journal. “But there again, I don’t know. I don’t know the situation of this particular incident.”

How bipartisan was Newsweek’s reporting?

Thank you, Newsweek, for using our reporting, but couldn't help doing the "Republicans pounce" headline thing huh? But I'm sure you checked the party registration of everyone who thought that suspension was ridiculous. #ncpolhttps://t.co/Pj2FQOz5zF

— David Larson (@DavidLarson83) April 17, 2024

WE WERE SOMEWHERE AROUND CAPITOL HILL ON THE EDGE OF THE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE WHEN THE DRUGS BEGAN TO TAKE HOLD: Mark Judge: A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant.

While reading One Way Back, the new “memoir” by Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 confirmation hearings, I was reminded of a frequently reoccurring scene on the show Cops: A perpetrator has been caught red-handed doing something wrong—let us say he’s got drugs in his car. As the police question and arrest him, the suspect proceeds to talk about everything in the world except the drugs. He was at his brother’s house. His dog is missing. He works afternoons at his job. He talks, incessantly, about absolutely anything but the bag of cocaine in his trunk.

So, it is with One Way Back. Christine Blasey Ford is an expert at not answering basic questions about the singular thing that made her famous while going on mindlessly about other things: surfing, her family, and what it’s like to stay in Oprah’s house.

Of course, how could Ford respond to basic questions regarding her attempted upheaval of the American political system? Doing so would require her to unmask herself and the plot in which she was involved.

Ford is, of course, the woman behind the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Brett was confirmed, but the allegation upended Washington and caused serious trauma to many of us involved. As Kathleen Parker recently noted in the Washington Post of all places,  Ford couldn’t care less about the lives she has damaged. So it’s no surprise that One Way Back and her ongoing book tour reveal Ford to be a petulant narcissist.

Ford mentions me only once in this new book, and this time it is cautiously and only in the context of official government transcripts and records. The reason for her caution is obvious. As my lawyer put it, “liberals don’t want Mark Judge owning St. Martin’s Press.” Ford already ran over me, a private citizen, once. To do so again would be not only indecent, but enough to risk her reputation and litigation.

Read the whole thing.

VDH: Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?

Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.

Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.

Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?

Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?

Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?

Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?

In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.

But where will all those leftist Americans on their New York Times “holidays in hell” tourist junket visit instead?

Related: Soviet-era tech and 1970s American jets: inside Iran’s ageing air defenses.

Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.

[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.

The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.

Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.

Iran’s strength is believed to lie in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpiles of ballistic and cruise missiles.

At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.

No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”

And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

All too often, “snapshot in time” is a convenient tactic for commentators and politicians to scoff at or dismiss poll results that contradict their partisan preferences.

More commonly, the phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

But if the goal was demoralize potential Trump voters to believe there was no use in even going out to the voting booth, then 2020’s wonky polls certainly their job as far as the DNC-MSM is concerned! Read the whole thing.

BUNKERTIME: NPR’s Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets.

[Uri] Berliner’s tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher’s tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories.”

* * * * * * * *

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

“The newsroom is entirely independent,” she said. “My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans.”

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet’s reach.

“Are we growing our audiences?” she asked. “That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom.”

We’ve all seen veteran newspaper columnists who swear up and down that they’re totally objective, and then, when bumped up or transferred over to write opinion columns, invariably start producing nothing but cant that’s so far to the left it would make Che Guevara blush. Maher has simply reversed the process — after more than a decade of being a Titania McGrath clone, now she wants us to believe that her radio network is totally objective and “serving all Americans.”

One person who isn’t buying her shtick: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?

Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.

Rufo: In another clip, she says explicitly that she worked with governments to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia.

Sanger: Yes, but how did she do that in the Wikipedia system? Because I don’t understand it myself. We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.

Exit quote:

Given her current position as head of state-run radio, her obsession with top-down government control and propaganda, and with racial identity, exactly!

As for the rest of us: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Pushes to Defund Taxpayer-Funded NPR.

Faster, please:

Once again, and magically, old-school lib @NellieBowles at TGIF crystallizes my right-wing-religious-nut thoughts precisely, as Paul Shaffer used to do for David Letterman. From today's TGIF newsletter: https://t.co/EGRwQQopQh pic.twitter.com/1fWwxnEarf

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 19, 2024

But of course, as Jesse Walker writes at Reason: Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR. “Maybe someday we’ll get there. But if [Jim] Banks [R-IN] and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I’ll eat an NPR tote bag.”

‘CONSPIRACY THEORIST’ MAX AZZARELLO DEAD AFTER SETTING HIMSELF ON FIRE ACROSS FROM TRUMP TRIAL IN NYC.

RIP: “Dickey was larger-than-life, and his loss will be felt worldwide:” The Allman Brothers Band’s Dickey Betts has died at 80.

TRIGGERNOMETRY: Jimmy Carr on Politics, Religion and Cancel Culture (Video).

THE LONG-AWAITED TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE/TOTAL COELO MIXTAPE FINALLY DROPS: Joe Biden suggests his uncle was eaten by ‘CANNIBALS’ after his plane was shot down over Papua New Guinea during World War Two.

Joe Biden suggested his war hero uncle may have met a grisly end among flesh-eating savages after his plane went down over Papua New Guinea in World War II.

The president said there were ‘a lot of cannibals at the time’ in the area where his uncle Ambrose J. Finnegan’s plane crashed in the 1940s – and his remains were never located.

However, Biden’s account was inconsistent with Pentagon records which showed the plane was not ‘shot down’ as he said.

According to his own Defense Department it was a ‘courier’ flight that suffered engine failure and ditched in the ocean off Papua New Guinea on May 14, 1944. His uncle was a passenger rather than the pilot.

Biden made the ‘cannibal’ comments on a trip to Scranton, Pennsylvania where he visited a war memorial bearing the name of his relative, who was known by the family as ‘Uncle Bosie’.

The president said: ‘(He) got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time. They never recovered his body.

‘But the government went back when I was down there and they checked and found parts of the plane and the like.’

Biden went on to tell how ‘Uncle Bosie’ – who he called a ‘hell of a guy’ – had ended up in a jungle populated by cannibalistic tribes.

He said: ‘When D-Day occurred, the next day, all four of my mother’s brothers volunteered to join the military. Three of them made it, one of them couldn’t go.

‘Ambrose Finnegan – we called him Uncle Bosie – he was shot down. He was in the Army Air Corps, before there was an Air Force, flew those single engine airplanes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea.

At Power Line, John Hinderaker asks, “What’s Eating Joe?” “You can see in these videos how feeble Biden is. He doesn’t make sense on even the most basic points. For example, he says that his uncles all went down to the recruiting station and volunteered the day after D-Day. Which would have been a little late. In fact, Joe’s uncle’s plane crashed a month before D-Day. No doubt Biden meant to refer to Pearl Harbor. But he can hardly get through a sentence without descending into incoherence.”

As Jon Gabriel notes:

He's at the stage of dementia where childhood memories merge with Looney Tunes shorts from the 1930s. https://t.co/wHzNNK4tPf

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) April 17, 2024

Classical reference in headline:

MICHAEL WALSH, FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY IN THE NEW YORK POST: How the Obamas could easily win eight more years in the White House.

Biden’s already on record as saying he’ll choose a woman. But none of the defeated female candidates for the nomination, including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, excited much interest from the Democratic base during the primaries, and while there’s a small Stacey Abrams boomlet currently going on, her record as the defeated candidate for Georgia governor doesn’t inspire much confidence — even if, in her own mind, she still thinks she won.

So the choice is clear: Michelle Obama. Never mind that she has even less political experience than Hillary Clinton did when she ran for the White House, and has long said she disdains public office.

Currently, Michelle is in talks to possibly endorse Biden via a video and is said to be lending her name to a campaign fundraiser as early as next week, according to The Hill. “If she engages, God help Donald Trump, because she’s tough as nails and enormously popular,” former Democratic Party chairman of South Carolina Dick Harpootlian told the outlet. With her husband finally having endorsed Biden last week, the stage is now set.

Well, close enough, considering her husband is behind the scenes in the (P)resident’s administration, pulling the strings, “serving as a third-term president in all but name.”

HEADLINES FROM FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Canadian “Social distancing” police fine Christian Pastor $1,200 for feeding homeless people.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Quotations from Chairman Maher.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”

If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”

Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not “currently in the market for a baby” and would not be “tending her ovaries” according to the dictates of American capitalism.

Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Related: Where are Uri Berliner’s defenders in the press?

What should be most troubling, however, is that Maher flaunted a Biden campaign hat in a post from 2020, as she canvassed a Get Out the Vote operation in Arizona. NPR now has a dilemma: they can keep Maher as CEO (which I believe they will), but they can no longer dispute the accusations of what Berliner claimed the network has become in recent years. I would argue this is what NPR wants, and has wanted for a while. NPR, their hosts and their CEO can now exhale and stop pretending to be anything other than another progressive media outlet. The problem for NPR in that realm now becomes an issue of public funding (cue a Marsha Blackburn bill to defund NPR). This debate has be re-energized by Berliner’s resignation and NPR’s stiffening spine in defending their new activist CEO.

What cannot be ignored is the lack of outcry from Berliner’s fellow journalists and his union. Berliner was made to be a leper in the media cool-kids’ clique simply for telling the truth of what NPR is. Berliner’s public flogging is a warning to anyone else who dares speak out about what media organizations, and the journalists working for them, have become. They all know what they are, and they all now know what happens to them if they speak out about it like Uri Berliner did.

More: Dozens of NPR Staffers Sign Letter to CEO and Unwittingly Prove Uri Berliner’s Point.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!

People.

This is not good. And don’t whatabout me on Trump. I’m not a Trumper. https://t.co/DGhjCspNsx

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 18, 2024

Was it over when the Hawaiians bombed Pearl Harbor?!

NPR’S QUEEN OF THE KARENS:

Sometimes, a person enters the public spotlight and is such an embodiment of an established stereotype that it seems impossible for him or her to be a real person. If Tom Wolfe wanted to capture the essence of arrogant, alienated progressivism, he would reject NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as too unbelievably on point.

The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.

She then got internships with the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group in London and Germany before landing a job in New York City at UNICEF. She had stops with the National Democratic Institute and the World Bank, among other global nonprofit groups, before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019.

It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.

And her tweets prove she is the perfect person for the job.

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”

Related: ‘Bat Guano Crazy:’ NPR CEO Katherine Maher Says Truth Is a ‘Distraction’ to ‘Getting Things Done.’

This is more devastating than the silly tweets. It is a prepared & rehearsed repudiation of the journalist's historic responsibility and contradicts what NPR once claimed to be about. https://t.co/998xJyXDAO

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) April 17, 2024

Related: Remember the 1960s, when Marshall McLuhan envisioned an interconnected “global village” with everyone wired together and sharing ideas? Right around the same time that Martin Luther King envisioned a world in which people were judged by the content of their character, and not their skin color? So much for those ideas:

Tom Wolfe may have left this plane of existence in 2018, but the Matrix he spent years programming is still working absolutely perfectly.

JONATHAN GLAZER, LIBERAL JEWISH PROPHET:

Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words.

“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October—whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.

Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.

In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.

Related: Karol Markowicz on “Jeremy Piven and an all-too-apt performance:” “The film [The Performance] was made before the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and had indeed been in the works for many years, but it’s entirely believable as an allegory for the way Hollywood has responded to those attacks. [Harold May—actually Harold Marcovitz, a floundering tap dancer who is recruited to perform in Berlin in 1936, played by Piven] is not wildly dissimilar from Jewish Hollywood celebrities who have stayed nauseatingly quiet after Oct. 7. They, too, want the success, the money, the accolades. They, too, have worked hard to get where they are, and they don’t want to throw it away to defend an identity that barely registers. They, too, are confident that the Jew-haters don’t mean them, not with their talent and beauty; they must mean some other Jews who had had the wrong opinions or live in the wrong place. Would they shake Hitler’s outstretched hand? It happens off-screen, but we know Harold does after his one-night show. It’s survival at that point, the argument can be made. But when the riches and the acclaim mean that he’ll have to shake it some more, Harold chooses to do just that.”

NPR WHISTLEBLOWER URI BERLINER RESIGNS: ‘I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.’

Longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who was suspended after blowing the whistle on liberal bias at the organization, announced Wednesday he has resigned.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.

Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, who took over last month as President and CEO and has gone viral for past social media posts showing far-left personal views.

Berliner penned a piece in the Free Press that criticized NPR’s coverage of Russiagate, the COVID lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop, embrace of the theory of systemic racism and accused the organization of downplaying antisemitism following Oct. 7.

Ed Morrissey speculates that “The mention of disparagement seems like a warning to NPR’s lawyers, or maybe Maher’s personal attorneys.”

Old and busted on the left: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The new hotness?

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.

NPR's censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024

URI BERLINER BURNED HIS BRIDGES AT NPR, THEN SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE:

In a profession where journalists and pundits read these sorts of big dishy insider pieces differently than normal folks do — searching for hidden implications, listening for dog whistles, and frankly sometimes wearing tinfoil hats — that paragraph instantly sounded a blaring klaxon. “PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS INCOMING BOSS WHO I WILL MENTION BY NAME AND WHO I MIGHT ADD LACKS ANY JOURNALISTIC BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER.”

And, mother of God, look what turned up once people like Christopher Rufo did just that. You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

I cannot possibly do justice to the comical depth and breadth of her posting history. (Matt Taibbi has a fun summary here, framed as a journey through the American holiday calendar with NPR’s incoming CEO.) This is a woman who loudly condemns her own “cis white mobility privilege,” and I’m still not sure whether she’s referring to her ability to quickly change jobs or her ability to roll out of bed in the morning. Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.

Do you think Uri Berliner was unaware of any of this? Do you think he failed to do research on the background of the new CEO before he gave her a shout-out by name at the end of a piece savaging NPR’s decaying ethical culture? I don’t. He might as well have wished her luck with a capital “F.” He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling. He basically scripted his own one-act play: Waiting for Rufo. As it draws to its climax, I am left with one overwhelming question: Why on earth are American taxpayers footing the bill for any of this, again?

Excellent question. In the meantime – at least before Maher locks down or deletes her Twitter account – Rufo’s Twitter feed is currently full of Maher’s Titania McGrath-style woke performance art over the past decade.

Saul Alinsky smiles: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it:”

UPDATE:

This quote is best read in the voice of a Stasi officer speaking to a dissident newspaperman who is tied to a chair. https://t.co/g9ODXIFOKB

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 17, 2024

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Coronavirus: San Clemente Fills Skatepark With 37 Tons Of Sand After Skaters Ignore ‘No Trespassing’ Signs.

A popular skatepark in San Clemente was filled with sand to discourage skaters from using it during the coronavirus pandemic and to promote social distancing.

San Clemente had shut down all its parks and facilities on April 1 under the state’s stay-at-home orders, but skaters ignored signs warning against trespassing at the Ralphs Skate Court, 241 Avenida La Pata.

Since park facilities have been closed city officials say they routinely saw people visit the skatepark, even by some children accompanied with their parents, according to the San Clemente Times.

Later in April of 2020, Mark Judge explored: Skateboarding with Jordan Peterson—and Nietzsche.

“Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.”

That is Rule 11 in Jordan Peterson’s bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson explores how skateboarding is a way for boys to test danger and learn to deal with risk and pain, and as such is a valuable source of socialization and psychic health. To Peterson, the buzzkills who clamp down on skateboard riders suffer from acute resentment; they are bitter at the freedom, bravery, and style of the riders: “Beneath the production of rules stopping the skateboarders from doing highly skilled, courageous and dangerous things, I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.”

To drive the point home, Peterson offers this humdinger of a quote from Nietzsche:

For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883)

I would adapt Peterson’s rule only slightly: “Do Not Bother Children or Adults When They Are Skateboarding.”

Along with jazz, movies, modern dance, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million members in the United States, skateboarding fosters entrepreneurship, independence, physical grace and toughness, community, creativity, and freedom. The sport has been a friend to me for almost fifty years, reappearing at various times over the decades to thrill and re-enchant. When it was recently reported that a California skate park was filled with sand to prevent skating and promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, it felt to me like someone had spray-painted on the Lincoln Memorial.

No one knew in April of 2020 that defacing – and toppling — major cultural artifacts was right around the corner. In the meantime, there were endless quantities of what Roger Kimball dubbed “reverse gaslighting” yesterday to go around: “Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal:”

Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue. Out in the world, they obediently stand six feet away from one another because the same bureaucrats tell them such behavior will “slow the spread” of a seasonal respiratory virus that is dangerous to a minuscule part of the population. This insanity is deemed normal.

So is the insanity of censoring, firing or even imprisoning people who question this insane orthodoxy. In a repellent effort to capitalize on the moral authority of the Holocaust, such dissenters are repudiated as “Covid deniers.” They are ostracized by polite society and subject to all manner of sanctions. All this was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.

Suddenly, certain people are empowered to decide whose businesses are “essential” and whose are expendable. If you own a liquor store, congratulations! Your business is essential. Schools, churches, most restaurants, your aunt’s corner shop: sorry! They must be shuttered. This insanity is accepted, if grudgingly, as normal in the age of reverse gaslighting. You cannot visit your dying grandmother in her nursing home: that interdiction is said to be normal, not cruelly insane.

Thus just two days apart four years ago this week, headlines announcing “Exercise May Protect Against Deadly COVID-19 Complication, Research Suggests,” and news of skateboard parks filled with sand to prevent young people from doing just that. As Kimball wrote in the passage above, “This was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.”

(Fortunately, those who use the San Clemente skatepark were immediately able to see through the charade: A California city filled its skate park with sand to deter skateboarders. Then the dirt bikes showed up.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Journalist At NPR Suspended, Leading To Shocking Discovery There Was A Journalist At NPR.

A journalist and senior editor at National Public Radio has been suspended, leading to the astounding revelation that there was a journalist working at NPR.

Uri Berliner, who has worked at the taxpayer-funded media organization for 25 years, was suspended after he recently wrote an essay exposing how NPR had lost all trust among the nation’s public.

“Wow, they had a real journalist at NPR? That’s news to me!” said one member of the astonished nation’s public. “I thought they were just mellow voices on the radio that told me in a matter-of-fact, upper-crust, college-educated manner what Leftist narrative I was supposed to believe about any given story.”

Indeed; as our leftist betters become more and more surreal and comical, the Babylon Bee is increasingly doing straight-up reportage.

RIP: Legendary St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog dead at 92.

KUDOS TO CBS: ‘If a Bully Takes 350 Odd Swings at You and You Duck, How Is That a Win?’

CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil eschewed both approaches and did his job of asking tough, adversarial questions. …

When [Biden flack John] Kirby meandered and argued it all worked out for the best, Kirby both pushed back and took aim at those (including in the White House) arguing Israel should just take drones and missiles ad nauseam without being allowed to hit back:

Nobody wants a war in that region, not at all, but let’s take up this question of what a win is. You’ve described the Middle East there, Israel’s neighborhood, as a tough one. Deterrence matters, hitting back does. If a bully takes 350 odd swings at you and you duck, how is that a win?

Kirby replied he wouldn’t “get into what the future portends here and — and what the Israelis might or might not do”, but doubled down on not wanting “a wider war” while also this laughable and vague claim of “continu[ing] to hold Iran accountable”.

A wise community organizer famously advised his constituents to “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard.” Offer not valid in Israel, apparently.

CLOGGED ARTERIES: The unseen cost of road-blocking protests.

Recent events in Israel and Gaza have sparked a wave of protests, with some activists in major cities using a familiar tactic: obstructing traffic.

While this seems to have been an effective strategy by protesters across the political spectrum to draw attention to a variety of issues in recent years — including racial injustice, climate change, and pandemic restrictions — these protests raise an important question: At what cost do these disruptions come?

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about a demonstration disrupting traffic at the Los Angeles airport recently, Michael Beer, the director of Nonviolence International, said that it can be hard for protesters to cut through the media environment without disruptive action like blocking traffic. He then added, “But you have to think: Are you stopping the ambulance from getting to a hospital and somebody’s going to die?”

Research on road closures suggests the answer is probably yes.

* * * * * * * *

The issue at hand, of course, is not the right to protest; non-violent protest is a cornerstone of our democracy and our American identity. But a commonsense extrapolation of the marathon study, and other studies that illustrate how mere minutes matter in medical emergencies, tells us that even when the protest itself is peaceful and protesters clear the way for ambulances or other emergency vehicles, transit times will still be longer, particularly when accounting for the ripple effects that a blockage in one area can cause for motorists miles away.

If activists are indeed committed to peaceful protest, they must be cognizant of the real harms of road-blocking protests that are more problematic than a simple nuisance to commuters, nearby businesses, and others. It is unlikely that protesters would ever find out if an ambulance was delayed and a patient was physically harmed or died as a result of that delay. If protesters were aware of the extent to which those with life-threatening medical emergencies could be dying as a result of their blockade, would they choose differently?

Given that they share the same “Progressives Against Progress” anti-modernity worldview as the climate change apocalyptic narcissists who similarly block roads and destroy artwork, then the answer is “No.” Next question?