AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Haitian Cannibal Gangs Pour Over US Border After Seeing How Fat Americans Are https://t.co/MI66XNbTFv pic.twitter.com/V94o42UvGN

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

THIS IS THE WAY: England Gender Identity Clinics No Longer Prescribing Puberty Blockers to Children.

HERE ARE THE MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENTS FOR DEMOCRATS DURING HUR’S TESTIMONY:

Democrats had a bad day on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as they simultaneously insisted that the Hur report absolved Joe Biden of having committed any criminal act, while also calling the report a partisan hit job.

There’s no doubt the hearing didn’t go as they’d hoped, and they repeatedly embarrassed themselves in the hopes of undermining former Special Counsel Robert Hur and his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) clearly expected a different answer when he asked Hur, “At any point in your investigation, did you have any reason to believe that President Biden lied to you?”

Hur replied, “I do address in my report one response the president gave to a question we had posed to him that we deemed to be not credible.”

Oops. That didn’t go as planned.

And speaking of not planned:

Charred Penises, Car Noises, And Dr. Jill In A Bikini: Biden's Very Strange Conversation With Robert Hur@FreeBeacon w/ @SaysSimonson https://t.co/5j6wMwTiG1

— Andrew Kerr (@AndrewKerrNC) March 12, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM YEAR ZERO: Maryland city equity official says she wants US to burn to the ground: ‘MY ideology can rise from the ashes.’

[Kayla Aliese Carter] believes it’s not enough to be not racist, one must be actively antiracist and working to “dismantle this s–t.” Some of her posts contain defenses for violence, asking, “Why do Black people always have to rationalize our violence and anger?

“Remember we are at war against colonialism,” read a post on Instagram from Feb. 2021. She captioned it with, “We can’t forget.”

The header for her X account says the following: “I can’t wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!”

“Today I cohosted and occupied space with dozens of people who have committed their lives, businesses, and money to Black liberation. On all days, every day, each day. Light workers. Already planning (BEEN PLANNING) for how we will eat and live and grow after we burn it all down,” she wrote in May 2020.

This likely sounded better in the original German. In his 2004 book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, Frederick Taylor wrote:

A short while after the bombing of Dresden, [Robert Ley, head of the National Socialist Labor Front] wrote a ranting article under the title “Without Baggage,” in which he bizarrely celebrated the destruction of Dresden as liberating Germany from the “burden” of its architectural heritage, and by implication its freethinking, humanist past.

* * * * * * * *

After the destruction of beautiful Dresden, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture. Onward!…Now we march toward the German victory without any superfluous ballast and without the heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage.

Wasn’t 2020 enough Year Zero for everyone, though?

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBITS: Legendary singer/songwriter, who faced widespread backlash for supporting Trump, dies at 74.

Screencap here if NJ.com comes to their senses over the late Eric Carmen:

I missed the obit headlines that read “Frank Sinatra, legendary singer and actor, who faced widespread backlash for supporting Reagan, dies at 82.”

Or heck, based on the rumors that later circulated around him, “John Lennon, legendary singer/songwriter, who faced widespread backlash for supporting Reagan, dead at 40.”

(Via Nick Gillespie.)

HOUSE PASSES BILL TO FORCE TIKTOK’S CHINESE PARENT COMPANY TO SELL PLATFORM OR FACE U.S. BAN:

A bipartisan coalition of House members voted Wednesday to pass a bill that would effectively force the Chinese parent company of TikTok to sell the video-sharing platform or face a ban in U.S. app stores.

The bill passed 325 to 65, with 15 Republicans and 50 Democrats voting against it. The TikTok legislation is now headed to the Senate, where it will face a more difficult path. President Joe Biden said he would sign the bill should it reach his desk.

In the meantime though: Biden campaign courts young voters by joiningTikTok: ‘lol hey guys.’

Related: Obama’s Man in China Now Beijing’s Man in Washington.

THAT’S UDDERLY RIDICULOUS! Israel trained cattle to spy on Palestinian village, says PA daily.

Palestinian village elder fabricated a story about Israeli livestock participating in spying activity, which the official Palestinian Authority daily news outlet Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published as reality, according to a report by Palestinian Media Watch.

“On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail” in the village, the elder said.

The P.A. daily further claimed that a Palestinian village elder spotted Israeli cows that are actually “recruited and trained” spies. Rushd Morrar, a Khirbet Yanun village elder, told Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Dec. 27, “These are recruited and trained cattle, as on the neck of each cow they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

If there’s one thing I learned from years of reading Gary Larson’s Far Side, it’s that cows are incredibly devious — particularly when they think that no one is looking:

JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

Breaking: A member of the British radical group Palestine Action has destroyed a historic painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College in @Cambridge_Uni. pic.twitter.com/BUco8VU7va

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) March 8, 2024

It had to advance to the next step: actual destruction. In this case, an “activist” hacked and painted the portrait of Balfour, because, well, Balfour.

* * * * * * * *

You’re also certain that if someone had seen what she was about to do, and given her a stiff body check, and knocked the camera from the hand of the other Activist, that person would be taken into custody and charged, since a civilized society does not condone vigilanteism. A civilized society permits the barbarity to run its course while the bobbies are summoned. The price of letting the barbarians wreck what they wish is considered fair, when the alternative is people just knocking people down. We can’t have that. It’s not your job to interrupt the vandals.

Except, of course, that it is everyone’s job. It is the duty of every Englishman worth the name to see someone attempting to destroy a work of art, and knock her on her ass.

But what if she got a concussion? What if she really hurt her head on the hard marble floor?

(Whispering) I don’t particularly care.

It’s just a painting! There’s a genocide going on and you’re worried about a painting!

Yes, because this is the rationale that permits driving a truck bomb into St. Peter’s for, oh, fill-in-the-blank. This is the rationale that permits taking a sledgehammer to the Pieta because it reinforced the gender binary. This is the rationale for shooting an artist who drew a blasphemous picture. This is the rationale of the mad and impatient, the lunatics who attend a bedside with a skeleton on the sheets and tell themselves they are midwifing the future.

And as we saw in 2020, the “historians” who support their acts of destruction: Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.

Congratulations — you went full Taliban! Never go full Taliban: Taliban blow apart 2,000 years of Buddhist history.

SUMMER RERUN SEASON BEGINS EARLIER AND EARLIER: Biden and Trump clinch nominations, setting the stage for a grueling general election rematch.

THERE GOES (VAROOM! VAROOM!) THAT KANDY-KOLORED  TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE–FLAKED SCLEROTIC BRANDON! Vrooom: President Biden Was Making Car Sounds* During the Special Counsel Interview.

At times during the interview, according to the transcript, the president made noises like a car.

“By the way, you know how it works?” Biden asked Hur. “It’s really cool.”

Hur remarked, “Sir, I’d love — I would love, love to hear much more about this, but I do have a few more questions to get through.”

“You step your foot on the accelerator all the way down until it gets about six, seven grand,” Biden continued. “Then all the sudden it will say ‘launch.’ All you do is take your foot off the brake.”

The transcript then indicates “(Makes car sound)” as well as “(Laughter).”

Hur responded that it was something on his “bucket list” and once again steered the conversation back to classified documents.

Reading all of this you can see exactly how Special Counsel Hur came to the conclusion that a jury would likely see Biden as an amiable old man with a poor memory. No doubt Biden’s testimony on the stand would have been just as random and aimless at times. Perhaps he’d have told a jury how to launch a car, complete with engine noises. No one would have believed the old guy was up to no good despite the evidence showing Biden knew he had classified documents in his house and read portions of them to his ghost writer.

If the transcripts were supposed to help Biden, I think they only did so because the media is willing to find “nuance” where the evidence of a poor memory and a wandering mind is abundantly clear.

In between making car sounds, as Andrew Kerr and Joseph Simonson  of the Washington Free Beacon note, “Throughout the five hours of interviews on Oct. 8 and 9, Biden struggled to recall relevant details about his handling of classified records or when he served as vice president. The transcript also confirms Biden could not recall when his son, Beau, died, and further shows that the president raised that subject unprompted—contradicting the president’s claim during a Feb. 8 press conference that Hur raised the subject.”

* Presumably, despite being handed comedy gold, this week’s Saturday Night Live will attack Special Counsel Robert Hur instead. Because of course, the show has a long history of pulling punches when it comes to elderly presidents reported to be in their dotage…

(Classical allusion in headline.)

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Things Just Got a Lot Worse for Joe Biden.

Last month, the Hur report found that Joe Biden willfully retained, mishandled, and disclosed classified information but determined that he was essentially too senile to stand trial. According to the report, Biden struggled to remember details, and he couldn’t remember when his son Beau died.

Joe Biden angrily defended his memory in his unplanned address and attacked Special Counsel Robert Hur for bringing up Beau during his interview during the investigation, which managed to make things worse for him.

“There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” Biden said. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

Except that Hur didn’t bring it up. Biden did.

We’re in the Schrodinger’s Presidency phase of the Biden administration:

There are two choices this morning as Hur testifies.

1) Biden's memory is so bad he wasn't charged w/ illegally keeping classified info as a private citizen
2) Biden's memory is fine & he should be charged for willfully keeping of classified info as a private citizen

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) March 12, 2024

Presumably though, the swamp will protect its own.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Middlebury Students Tried To Host a Vigil for Victims of Oct. 7 Attack. Administrators Told Them To Remove the Word ‘Jewish.’

It was October 10, three days after Hamas had murdered 1,200 Israelis and abducted hundreds more, and Jewish students at Middlebury College were trying to organize a vigil for the victims. They reached out to Middlebury’s dean of students, Derek Doucet, with a draft poster promoting the event, which they invited administrators at the elite liberal arts school to attend.

“Stand in Solidarity With the Jewish People,” the poster read. “This will be an opportunity to honor the innocent lives lost in the tragic events that have struck Israel in the past days.”

It didn’t go over well.

In an email to students reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, Doucet, who has oversight of student activities, pushed to rename the vigil and strip it of references to Judaism so as to make it “as inclusive as possible.”

“Some suggestions that might help are stating that this gathering is to honor ‘all the innocent lives lost,’” Doucet wrote, and including a reference to the “tragedies that have struck Israel and Gaza.” He added that calls for solidarity with Jews could trigger “unhelpful reactions.”

“I recognize and deeply respect that there has to be a place for purely Jewish grief and sorrow,” Doucet said, “and yet I wonder if … such a public gathering in such a charged moment might be more inclusive with edits such as these.”

When did Hedley Lamarr go into academia?

SOUNDS AWFULLY INSURRECTION-Y: Defending Democracy? A Majority of Democrats Oppose Certifying a Trump Victory.

JIM TREACHER: Deadspin Now Just Plain Dead.

A few months ago, I noted that liberals sure do hate children. They want to abort as many babies as they can, and the ones who survive will be castrated in the name of “trans rights.” And any normal kids who just like doing normal kid stuff, like going to NFL games, will be libeled by liberal hack “sportswriters.”

Like this poor kid:

Holden Armenta never did anything to hurt anybody, yet he was defamed by a clown named Carron J. Phillips, who got paid by a clown blog called Deadspin. A grown man picked on a blameless little boy for money.

That happened back in November. If it made you angry, I’ve got some great news.

Exit question:

Now that Deadspin has laid off all their staff where should I go to get the latest defamation of a child articles?

— Magills (@magills_) March 11, 2024

JOHN PODHORETZ: I Refute His Oscar.

First, let’s take it literally and take it to mean Glazer and his producers “refute their Jewishness.” Obviously this is bad, because they are refuting their Jewishness as they accept an award for a movie about the effort made 80 years ago to destroy all Jewishness. Anti-Semites are falling all over themselves to defend Glazer from the charge that he has “refuted his Jewishness.” Rather, they say, he refutes that Jewishness offers a defense for Israeli actions after October 7, or for the “occupation,” or for whatever argle-bargle these putrid preachers of self-satisfied vanity decide is the “root cause” of things they don’t like.

His defenders include such notable champions of Zion as the former Bernie Sanders aide cum Koch-funded scholar Matt Duss once pictured posing in a Hamas tunnel, Mehdi Hasan, the recently axed MSNBC host and Hamas apologist, the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, a onetime radical magazine journalist who turned out to be winsome on TV, to his immense good fortune. One of his qualities is that he loathes Israel almost as much as he loves his $5 million salary paid by the Robertses, the Jewish family that owns Comcast. It’s blood money, Chris! Give it back! Otherwise it might get into the hands of occupiers!

Hayes should know to stay out of this. Like, don’t opine on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitic, smart boy, especially after hosting Al Sharpton for years on your show, whose contributions to Jewish refutation have included rallying people against a business in Harlem that was then set on fire by one of Sharpton’s fan boys, killing seven people while Sharpton continued to skate through life by scaring Democratic politicians and eating their souls rather than the fatty foods that used to define his rotund shape.

Not to mention you can refute your Jewishness all you like, Glazer, but if a terrorist arrived at a Golders Green synagogue where your nephew was becoming bar mitzvah and decided to bomb the place, you’d be as dead as you would have been had you not “refuted” it. This is the problem: They want to kill Jews. You’re a Jew. They want to kill you. Your refutation is immaterial.

Which is to say, the issue is not whether Glazer is comfortable with his status as a Jew but rather that he is living a life of existential risk after October 7 because of it. And he should know this all better than anyone, since his movie is about how merely to be a Jew is to be subject to efforts at mass extermination.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

Related: Feeding Their Fellow Jews to the Crocodile.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: NBC Frets End of Spring Break Chaos in FL Puts ‘Devastating’ ‘Pressure on Businesses.’

Like the rest of the liberal media, NBC News was a reliable ally over and over and over and over and over again for the pro-lockdown crowd during the coronavirus pandemic (and those links were a small sampling), but as we saw on Monday’s Today, the network believes something entirely different when it comes to common sense law enforcement measures during spring break in South Florida to counter what had been years of chaos and violence.

As per correspondent Sam Brock, it’s meant a lot of “pressure” on and “sacrifice for some businesses” to the point that it’s “devastating.”

Gee, where was this when the federal government under the last President and most governors (except for a few, such as Florida Republican Ron DeSantis) when they locked down Americans for months on end, causing devastating economic and mental ruin?

The story on spring break was billed as merely a look into how a surge of law enforcement was panning out. Co-host Savannah Guthrie spoke in one of three teases of “[t]he unprecedented crackdown in Miami Beach” triggering “smaller crowds”.

In the third tease, Brock raised concerns about the surge of law enforcement to ensure order was both “total transformation in Miami Beach” and “sacrifice for some business”.

This sort of bifurcated coverage, with no recollection of what had been reported previously was seen more and more as 2020 went on, depicted Covid as the smartest virus in history – like Santa Claus, it knew if you were being bad or good, and responded accordingly: Oopsies! NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell COVID-shames Nevada Trump rally and trips spectacularly over her own BLM riot coverage.

Speaking of Florida coverage, remember when this guy was a media hero for his (highly selective) pro-lockdown stance? Florida Man Will Wear Grim Reaper Outfit to Scare People Away from Beaches (and Raise Money for Dems).

REPORT: U.S. Embassy In Haiti Evacuating American Personnel Amid ‘Chaos’ From Street Gangs.

The world is on fire with Weekend at Joey’s at the helm of the once most powerful nation on earth. So it’s really no surprise that numerous countries are falling into chaos.

The latest example is Haiti. So destabilizing is the situation in Haiti, that the U.S. is evacuating embassy personnel.

What’s the count so far? Last year, Newsweek reported: Joe Biden Slammed for Evacuating ‘Four Embassies’ During Presidency.

“Joe Biden has had to evacuate FOUR embassies in less than 3 years. The media said Biden & Blinken were ‘experts’ and ‘the adults are back in charge.’ The world has been on FIRE since their disaster in Afghanistan. Pray for our country & the 16,000 Americans Biden left in Sudan,” [Rep. Mary Miller D-IL] wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

In addition to Sudan, the United States has also suspended embassy operations in Afghanistan after withdrawing its troops in August 2021 and in Ukraine when Russia invaded the Eastern European country last February. However, the embassy in Ukraine reopened last May. The U.S. has also suspended operations in Belarus—whose President Alexander Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin—due to “security and safety issues stemming from the unprovoked and unjustified attack.”

Meanwhile, Undersecretary of State for Management John Bass said on Saturday that temporarily shutting down the embassy in Sudan was “the only really feasible option for us in this case,” according to CNN.

And of course, there was the embassy lost by Joe’s former(?) boss: Benghazi: Ten Years Later And Forgotten.

THE BUTTIGIEG PRINCIPLE:

Ok, so what exactly is your husband's work experience that qualifies him to be in charge of the Department of Transportation for the entire country? https://t.co/VcrhEuZHqR

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) March 11, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “That’s Not Writing, That’s Just Typing.”

The New Hotness? That’s not writing, that’s just copy and pasting! Oscar-nominated film The Holdovers accused of plagiarism by screenwriter in bombshell allegations day before event: ‘Genuinely overwhelming.’

On the eve of Sunday’s Oscars, Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” has been accused of being “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film written about ten years ago that was never made, according to a report.

Simon Stephenson, best known for working on popular movies “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” made the bombshell allegations in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America that were obtained by Variety.

The screenwriter alleges in the missives that “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne likely read a script for his eerily similar movie “Frisco” when it made the rounds around Hollywood in 2013 on the industry’s “black list” of most like scripts, where it peaked at number three.

“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from “Frisco” is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen,’” Stephenson wrote in the email he sent to the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after speaking with him about the movies’ similarities.

The American television industry has long suffered from what the late Todd Gitlin called “Recombinant Culture” in his 1983 book Inside Prime Time; but if Stephenson’s accusations are correct, the big screen may be really getting carried away by the notion.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:

What's that line liberals always trot out about "when they tell you who they are, believe them"? They want to manipulate and surgically mutilate kids. This is evil, and I'm not going to even entertain the idea there's nuance here. https://t.co/1JwJAvX1fx

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) March 11, 2024

Tom Wolfe left the New York magazine office long ago, but to borrow from a portion of his epochal 1975 essay on “The ‘Me’ Decade,” I’m sure he’d get a wry laugh seeing how it’s transformed over the decades:

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman—as Me—becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora … or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.

Among men the formula becomes: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Casanova or a Henry VIII” … instead of a humdrum workadaddy, eternally faithful, except perhaps for a mean little skulking episode here and there, to a woman who now looks old enough to be your aunt and has atrophied calves, and is an embarrassment to be seen with when you take her on trips. The right to shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones was once seen as the prerogative of kings only, and even then it was scandalous. In the 1950s and 1960s it began to be seen as the prerogative of the rich, the powerful, and the celebrated (Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and show-business figures), although it retained the odor of scandal. Wife-shucking damaged Adlai Stevenson’s chances of becoming president in 1952 and Rockefeller’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and 1968. Until the 1970s, wife-shucking made it impossible for an astronaut to be chosen to go into space. Today, in the Me Decade, it becomes normal behavior, one of the factors that have pushed the divorce rate above 50 percent.

“‘If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!’ (You have only to fill in the blank.)” In the 21st century, what could possibly go wrong?

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY:

[Four years ago today], the World Health Organization declared the spread of what was then called the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic. Some 4,200 Covid-19 deaths had been confirmed at that point. Almost 7 million would follow, though the true number of lives lost is believed to be much higher. In March of 2020, the pathogen had already spread to more than 100 countries. Horrific waves would sweep across Europe and the US, which for much of the pandemic suffered the worst death toll of all. No part of the planet would be untouched, as India later suffered a crushing surge and, more recently, China after the sudden lifting of precautions. The constant wail of sirens that punctured the night in cities like New York—an initial epicenter of the global disaster—has receded. But with close to 1,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths every day all over the world, the pandemic isn’t over.

Bloomberg continues to track the global coronavirus pandemic. Click here for daily updates.

How odd. Joe Biden told me that he was going to shut down the virus:

It’s not all that surprising that some quarters of the authoritarian left wants the pandemic to continue indefinitely: “The sinister cruelty of lockdown has been laid bare. We now know just how drunk on tyranny the political class was during the pandemic.”

ZONE OF IRONY: ‘As a Jew’ Oscar moment shows how woke antisemitism works.

Unless you’re a film buff, you may not have heard of Jonathan Glazer before his viral moment at this year’s annual Academy Awards ceremony. After “The Zone of Interest”—a highly-praised film about the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp that is very loosely based on a Martin Amis novel with the same title—was named the winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, Glazer appeared on the stage along with the rest of the production team to accept their trophies. Standing with producer James Wilson and their billionaire financial backer Leonard Blavatnik, Glazer, who wrote and directed the movie, chose not to speak extemporaneously but instead read the following prepared statement:

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. 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?”

The tortured syntax of his comments notwithstanding, what Glazer said wasn’t merely deeply offensive. It marked a new low in Hollywood’s descent into fashionable rationalizations of hatred for Jews. It also showed us how the new woke antisemitism works, especially when its standard-bearers are Jews with little or no connection to their heritage. As such, it was the quintessential “as a Jew” moment in which persons invoke their Jewish identity to denounce other Jews.

* * * * * * * *

To link the Holocaust to Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip to eradicate the organization that perpetrated the atrocities committed in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is to turn history on its head. Pretending that it is the Jews who are today’s Nazis, rather than Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, is a big lie. It is the Palestinians of Hamas who are the contemporary torch-bearers for Adolf Hitler’s plans for the genocide of the Jewish people, as made explicit in their charter and all of their propaganda, which seeks Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its population. This sort of inversion tactic is—as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of the term makes plain—textbook antisemitism.

As Seth Mandel tweeted last night:

Jonathan Glazer made a movie about a man who builds his own professional success on his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him.

The man is immune to irony.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 11, 2024

At the PJM Mothership, Rabbi Michael Barclay adds: The Academy Awards Are Again on the Wrong Side of History… and Boring!

Actors and filmmakers really should stick to their craft: fantasy and make-believe. Every time these imbeciles leave their overpaid fantasy world, they demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of reality. And they did it again at this year’s Academy Awards; which has a sordid history of being a soapbox for self-indulgent narcissists to show their consistent hubris and foolishness.

This year, the director of [Zone of Interest, which won best international feature], Jonathan Glazer, most demonstrated the insanity when he spoke for his partners and said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.” Clearly, they refuted being Jewish long ago and are painfully unaware of the irony of the statement: had they been in one of the areas attacked by Hamas, they would now be dead or hostages.

And Glazer seems oblivious to the fact that close to 90% of Gazans still support the horrors of October 7 and the charter of Hamas, which calls for the “obliteration” of all Jews, as well as anyone who doesn’t support their fanatical brand of Islam. But hey, it’s the Oscars and a time for film people to show their stupidity.

Some of the attendees demonstrated just that quite proudly:

See those red hand pins that certain people were wearing at the Oscars..? It symbolizes one of the most egregious and barbaric Palestinian terror attacks prior to October 7: https://t.co/MqPj7MG37t

— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) March 11, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: The Zone of Interest.

The New Hotness? The Zone of Moral Equivalence: Will Hollywood’s Relative Silence On Gaza Continue At The Oscars?

The reluctance to publicly broach what’s happening in Gaza is also highly noticeable in a year when there are multiple awards contenders that grapple with moral quandaries about war, genocide and the selective ways that history memorializes these, including Best Picture nominees “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “The Zone of Interest.” When developing awards campaigns for movies, publicists and strategists often tout the timeliness and relevance of a film (regardless of whether those labels truly apply). It’s not hard to imagine connecting each of those historical movies to the present. The connections are right in front of us.

Only “The Zone of Interest” has admirably made that connection. At the BAFTA Awards in mid-February, producer James Wilson gave one of the few acceptance speeches this season that has explicitly mentioned Gaza, drawing a direct parallel with the themes of the film. The haunting and unsettling movie depicts the daily routines of a Nazi commandant and his family, living a life of comfort and privilege while overseeing the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp literally next door to their capacious home.

“A friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind,” Wilson said in his acceptance speech for Best Film Not in the English Language. “Those walls aren’t new, from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen, in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol [in Ukraine] or in Israel … or anywhere else in the world. And thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”

If “The Zone of Interest” wins the Oscar for International Feature Film as expected, hopefully Wilson and others behind the movie will choose to reiterate those sentiments. It would be a meaningful moment — and a welcome break from the silence.

Having made a massively overrated critically praised film on the Holocaust, its producer then turns around and blames the Jews for fighting back after 10/7. Vanessa Redgrave smiles.

UPDATE: Zone of Interest wins best international film Oscar; Glazer goes full Vanessa Redgrave in his acceptance speech: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has lead to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

MORE:

Jonathan Glazer made a movie about a man who builds his own professional success on his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him.

The man is immune to irony.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 11, 2024

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You Can Thank Rich Folks For All The Clay-Colored Cars.

When a normal non-car person, like Tik Tok Science behemoth (and author and YouTuber and all around pretty cool dude) Hank Green, begins to notice automotive trends that have been in play for nearly two decades, clearly it has reached its zenith. The trend of desaturated non-metallic car paints has trickled its way down from the Lamborghinis and Audis through the Porsches and McLarens to touch your most basic Honda Civics and Toyota crossovers. This was a less noticeable trend when it was confined to the world of the upper-crust sports car, but now that seemingly every dealership in America is selling a car with zero paint flake, usually a grey or desaturated blue or green, it’s kind of hard to avoid.

Cars have increasingly trended toward greyscale color palettes over the last thirty years. Allegedly these were the inoffensive colors that second buyers preferred, and they would improve resale when you were done with your ownership experience. Long gone were the days of “resale red” and the time of greys and whites were here to stay.

Of course, there are larger trends at play here. From the prominence of “Millennial Grey” in home decor and wall paint, to black and heathered grey being the most popular shades of t-shirt. People, particularly Americans and Europeans, are trying to blend in and stay under the radar. The idea of buying a grey Lamborghini is borderline offensive to me, but “stealth wealth” was a big part of culture from the 2000s to today. And the trends that wealthy people popularize begin to trickle down to the middle class, where they become borderline universal.

For decades metallic paint was the hot shit, but after the success of Audi’s Nardo Grey, the trend has increasingly become putty-lookin’ ass whips.

Battleship gray cars is a trend that’s long been played out. Make car paint great – or at least exuberant – again!

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.

Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing.

I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.”

Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair.

As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.

But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.

Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.

—Paul Farhi, the Washington Post, September 23^rd, 2016.

Chaser: The Media Are Getting Easier to Push Around.

—Paul Farhi, The Atlantic, today.