ROGER KIMBALL: Supreme Court rejects Colorado’s attempt to kick Trump off ballot.

The bottom line? “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.” The cherry on top: it was a unanimous decision. “All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.” Ergo: “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court is reversed,” quod erat faciendum, or, in the words of the document, It is so ordered.

Of course, it was always absurd that the anti-Trump brigade should pretend to save democracy by keeping Trump off the ballot because otherwise the people might vote for him. It was just another example of the malodorous fact that, for these people, “democracy” means “rule by Democrats,” not rule of the people.

The SCOTUS order is cheery news for partisans of genuine democracy, in which the people, not a cabal of self-appointed elites, get to decide who will govern us. But any cheer that is extracted from today’s decision should be tempered by the name John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court.

In the past, Roberts has shown himself to be cautious to the point of cravenness when it comes to appeasing the left. Every time he decides something that favors the conservative principles of originalism, he seems to get nervous and prevail upon the susceptible members of the Court to do something to soothe the left. He did it with Obamacare, and he did it more recently with voting rights and redistricting cases.  The question is, will he pressure his colleagues to throw Jack Smith a bone in the classified documents case that the Court just agreed to hear? Stand by.

While you’re waiting: Hot Takes: Delicious Media Meltdowns Commence After Supreme Court Ruling on Colorado Trump Case.

DISPATCHES FROM THE ICE FLOE: Today’s “Dump Biden” Installment. “Just a guess, but I think the word has gone out from the Obama redoubt in Martha’s Vineyard and/or his shadow White House in Kalorama that the New York Times needs to lead the push this week to force Biden out of the race. The Times is doom-scrolling its latest poll showing Biden on his way to certain defeat to Trump. Yesterday’s installment gave the raw numbers—Biden is eroding across the board.”

Flashback: The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics.

PENTAGON WALKS BACK AUSTIN’S GAZA CASUALTY FIGURES:

During a congressional hearing, Austin was asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel and Austin replied: “It is over 25,000.”

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: A Man In Uniform. “Those with a taste for condescension and farce will find more of Lieutenant Colonel Fram’s pronouncements here. Among them, a belief that the competence of the US military, and thus the fate of the world, may hinge on whether modern warriors stipulate their pronouns in all of their emails.”

OUT ON A LIMB: Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon on Biden losing his base Democratic party voters in Michigan over illegal immigration:

Bill Maher was NOT expecting this answer… pic.twitter.com/A08RucdriE

— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch) March 2, 2024

Flashback: Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “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.”

SO WILL CNN ANCHORS BE LEARNING TO CODE, OR BUILDING SOLAR PANELS? CNN Appears on the Verge of an Epic Collapse.

“CNN is trying to keep up with the news landscape and become a digital-first provider,” a source said. “It makes sense for them to pursue anchors who have already established a presence there — especially if TV becomes history in their portfolio!”

CNN’s previous attempt at a digital platform failed miserably, with it’s subscription-based streaming service, CNN+, a mere three weeks after its launch back in April 2022. CNN+ aimed for an ambitious goal of securing 2 million subscribers within its inaugural year, but  only managed a meager 150,000 subscribers and purportedly less than 10,000 daily viewers during its highly-hyped launch, making it clear that it was never going to match projections, resulting in the streaming platform being put out of its misery within a month.

Something tells me CNN is going the way of the Hindenburg.

What, no anchors from the History Channel or the Hallmark Network are available as replacements? CNN plunges behind History Channel, obscure Western network in prime time ratings.

Flashback: Coal miners become computer coders.

—Headline, CNN.com, April 22nd, 2016.

Related: They are TV’s ghosts — networks that somehow survive with little reason to watch them anymore.

JESSE SINGAL: If You Can’t See That Adam Rubenstein Was Treated Unfairly, You’re Being A Jerk.

Perhaps the most famous journalist to express this view was the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times Magazine journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Never happened,” she tweeted. Jon Levine, a journalist at the New York Post, asked a reasonable follow-up question: “How can you say that? Have you reported this out? Or do you just not like Adam?” To which Hannah-Jones responded, in a now-deleted tweet: “I’ve worked at the NYT for nearly a decade. That’s how I know.”

That was more or less the level of reasoning on display on Tuesday: I know this didn’t happen. How do I know? I just know. The problem was, Rubenstein had contemporaneously told a number of people about the sandwich event, including Levine and Bari Weiss, and they started coming forward to say so. This didn’t prove it happened, but it did seriously alter the factual contours of the story: for the story to be false, it would have to be the case that Rubenstein fabricated it, at the time, well before he was in any trouble at the Times, to a bunch of his friends. Why?

Anyway, I decided to take Hobbes up on his brilliant suggestion and send an email. A few hours later, an Atlantic spokeswoman responded with a bit more information about the fact-checking process: the details of the sandwich story, she wrote to me, “were confirmed by New York Times employees who had contemporaneous knowledge of the incident in question.”

I don’t think this proves the incident occurred the way independent confirmation from someone who was in attendance would, but on the other hand, come on. The remaining skeptics are demonstrating a textbook example of an isolated demand for rigor: If something happened to a left-leaning person in 2019 that made a right-leaning group look bad, and there was this much evidence for it, of course the sandwich truthers would disseminate it without any further thought. To take one of countless examples, in 2020 Hannah-Jones helped fan an absolutely unhinged conspiracy theory about the government using fireworks to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement before (to her credit) deleting the tweet and apologizing. That theory was evidence-based enough for her to disseminate it. Hell, she had no qualms about immediately calling Rubenstein a liar — a tweet that’s still up — despite being extremely well-positioned to quietly make a call or two and learn more about this incident prior to rendering judgement. I am not particularly well-connected to the Times, but even I have dug up some further off-the-record details (update: I should have mentioned that Megan McArdle also learned more about the incident and publicly said she’s convinced it happened), and it wasn’t difficult to do so. Hannah-Jones obviously could have done the same, but it was more important to tweet and to smear.

During the 20th century, New York Times reporters covered two world wars, Vietnam, and Korea. However, America’s Newspaper of Record reports that their young replacements aren’t holding up as well under pressure: Bomb Squad Called Into New York Times Offices After Discovery Of Suspicious Chick-Fil-A Bag.

UPDATE: Megyn Kelly and Mary Katharine Ham on the Gray Lady’s “Chick-Fil-A Truthers” and their meltdown over first chicken sandwiches and then an op-ed by a US senator:

DON’T GET COCKY:

Two new national #polls show Trump up +4 in prexy election matchup w/Biden@NYTimes-Siena has Trump ahead, 48-44 (980 likely voters); @Forbes-HarrisX has Trump in lead, 52-48 (3,021 registered voters)
➡️Biden not led @RCPolitics poll avg since Sept.https://t.co/svJLf3LlwN

— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) March 2, 2024

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz: How Can Biden Stay In Now?

The American people are sour on the state of things for a reason. Inflation may be lower than it has been, but goods still cost substantially more than they did when Biden took office—and any benefit Americans may be enjoying from the impressive wage growth they may have experienced has been immediately eaten up by higher food prices and higher interest rates and prices on big-ticket items like cars and homes. All of this can get better in the course of this year, but there’s no sign any of it will improve dramatically. And as was proved by the White House effort to make “Bidenomics” happen, with the same success Gretchen Wieners had in making fetch happen, you can’t talk people into feeling that the day-to-day difficulties of life are improving. They will either feel the improvement, have their mood lightened, and feel better about the country and its leadership or they won’t. Right now they aren’t.

And then there’s age.

If you dig into the crosstabs of the NYT-Siena poll you’ll find that there are a bunch of questions they haven’t yet released the answers to but will (I’m guessing) on subsequent days to keep their poll generating new news. I’m guessing those unreleased numbers have to do with perceptions of Biden and Trump on matters of age, competence, and criminality. And given that the results in this poll dovetail pretty well with the recent NBC News poll released three weeks ago, the age response is likely to be devastating for Biden. As Mark Murray of NBC News reported: “A combined 76% of voters say they have major concerns (62%) or moderate concerns (14%) about Biden’s not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.”

It’s been said a billion times, but I’ll say it again: One thing Biden really cannot do is get any younger.

Thursday night the president will give the State of the Union address. The stakes are crazily high, because there’s no way to set the bar low. One false move and he’s done for.

But what does “done for” mean? I have no idea. No one can explain to me the modality of how Democrats would dump him from the ticket. That leaves it to Biden and his loved ones. The question is whether Biden himself is looking at these numbers—and in moments of clarity is able to discern the colossal humiliation he may be on the verge of experiencing, not to mention historical judgment that will be rendered of his feckless decision to hold on to the reins of power should he lose in November.

Might he, therefore, get himself out of the race and give Democrats a chance to do what they clearly think is the most important thing they can do—save America from another Trump term?

While the rest of the left are going “Full Cross-Tab Truther” on the poll, Kamala, Michelle, and Gavin smile.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Congress Members To Wear Barcodes So Lobbyists Can Scan Prices, Self-Checkout https://t.co/O9qG2KGoHr pic.twitter.com/5mDEgRuPSN

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 1, 2024

CLOWARD-PIVEN OR AND BUST! The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days.

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

SOD OFF SWAMPY: Climate Dork Shoved To Ground After Confronting Senator Joe Manchin.

Climate protester confronts West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, gets wrecked: pic.twitter.com/0ziEpcl6CY

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 2, 2024

As we’ve seen time and time again, there’s no middle ground for many of these activist groups. The constant disruptions, destroying of ancient artifacts, blocking of roads — sometimes even to HOSPITALS are all part of their game plan. Many times it’s financially motivated, as I’ve extensively written about in the past.

A telling sign of how these protesters had no intention of any solution yesterday was when they refused to sit down with Manchin to air their grievances.

“Do you all want to sit down somewhere, so we can talk?” Manchin asked, to which one protester responded, “I’m not going to sit down.” Well, your buddy sure took a seat alright when he was leveled to the floor.

Senator Joe Manchin, by the way, is a Democrat. Based on some of the comments below, I’m pretty sure these climate people just got him more votes – including from Republicans.

This person freaking out at Manchin must be more of this #WhiteRuralRage I keep hearing about. Or perhaps: Environmentalism is a Fundamentalist Religion.

(Classical reference in headline.)

OUT ON A LIMB: You Don’t Need To Document Everything.

And we’re so addicted and used to reflexively recording everything that we end up excusing the weirdest behaviour. They just want to remember the fireworks! Really? There’s crowds of people all capturing the same thing; they will likely never watch that video back, and if they’re posting it online that’s not for memories; it’s for attention. It’s the same thing as ‘90s camcorders! In what world! Camcorders didn’t come with this urge, with this compulsion to constantly update people, with tying your self-worth to likes and followers. You’ll regret it if you don’t record it! Sure, capture occasional moments; keep them for you. But I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media. Time we will never get back. My bet is we won’t look back at our hundreds of thousands of Instagram Stories and Snapchats and Boomerangs with fondness that we filmed these moments, but with aching regret that we didn’t fully feel them.

Because look at the people who do document their entire lives! Very often these perfect influencers are falling apart behind the camera. Again and again, perfect online couples seem to implode out of nowhere. Influencers who dedicate every waking moment to documenting their identity have no idea who they actually are. Women who post pictures of their faces from every angle and in every possible lighting hate how they look. Families who capture every moment of their perfect lives get caught in scandal after scandal. And still we keep falling for it: the illusion, the performance, the front. Almost 70% of Gen Z say social media makes them feel stressed, anxious and depressed; over half want to be influencers. What’s happening here? We so easily forget the emotional cost of sharing everything; we so easily forget that those who do are compensating.

Video version of the above essay, with numerous shots of people with iPhones documenting every last micro-second of their lives, here:

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Norm Dworman Schools Seattle Comedy Club on Free Speech.

Dworman showed sympathy for the duo, but he couldn’t let them go without sharing his thoughts on the responsibilities that come with comedy club ownership.

“You’re obviously nice people, well-intentioned people. You’re in an industry that is about free expression. You’re in an industry that has a history of having landmark incidents regarding free expression that affect the culture. So you chose that industry. You don’t have to live up to that calling … but it’s not like you opened a deli and you found yourself in this.

“You’re becoming a cousin, and you’re nice people and you don’t wanna be, of the people smashing the windows,” Dworman said, noting a recent incident at Berkeley where violent protesters raged against Jewish speakers.

“They started smashing the place up. This is a close cousin of the sentiment that you’re buckling to,” he said. “I can’t sign off on it because it’s wrong. It’s leading the country down a terrible direction with everybody fueled by their certainty that their position is the right one, so right that no one else should even be platformed. And I will smash up Berkeley, and I will riot outside the Comedy Cellar and I will put this comedy club out of business if they should have the nerve, not to endorse a view I do not like, but simply allow that view to be heard.”

Related: MSNBC Legal Lunatic Frets Over America’s ‘Deep Commitment to Free Speech.’

To be fair, it’s always good to see those who view the Stasi in The Lives of Others as the good guys self-identify.

MATT TAIBBI: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage.”

“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading, is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America:

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.

As Taibbi writes, it’s one of the left’s oldest tropes, and it’s reoccurred on a regular basis since the late 19th century, as American “Progressives” search for their own hoarders and wreckers as scapegoats to demonize. Fortunately, today’s Kulaks know how to culture jam: Conservatives on Twitter Send a Message to Leftists by Taking Over #WhiteRuralRage Hashtag.

I got cow kisses on my walk this morning.
I guess that's part of the whole #WhiteRuralRage thing.
🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋🐮💋

— 𝓐𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓷 𝓡𝓪𝔂 42 (@2CynicAl65) March 1, 2024

Nobody tell AOC!

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO?! Axios: Hunter Biden’s Sobriety will Save Democracy.

Hunter takes his narcissism to a new level during the interview. He claims he has to stay sober to save democracy. He wants to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and that, in his mind, will save democracy.

Hunter knows his father, who is running for re-election, is worried that his addict son may relapse because mean Republicans are attacking the Biden men. Joe Biden is worried about Hunter’s legal problems. So, Hunter is doing all he can to stay clean and sober. He doesn’t want his drama to be a reason that Trump wins the election in November.

“Most importantly, you have to believe that you’re worth the work, or you’ll never be able to get sober. But I often do think of the profound consequences of failure here,” Hunter said.

“Maybe it’s the ultimate test for a recovering addict — I don’t know,” Hunter Biden said. “I have always been in awe of people who have stayed clean and sober through tragedies and obstacles few people ever face. They are my heroes, my inspiration.”

He added that in this case, “I have something much bigger than even myself at stake. We are in the middle of a fight for the future of democracy.”

Wow. What an ego. Like other Democrats who claim that a Trump win will be the end of democracy in our constitutional republic, he doesn’t bother to give specifics. It’s a Democrat talking point and they are sticking with it.

As Jim Treacher quips, “Hunter Biden, who claims to be clean and sober, says his newfound clarity is crucial to the future of democracy. So just imagine how grandiose he is when he’s on drugs.”

Related: Huge: Joe Biden Contradicts Hunter Biden’s Testimony.

REPORTER (@stevennelson10): "You didn't have dinner or lunch [with your son's business partners]?"

BIDEN (lying): "No!" pic.twitter.com/GV7SnjISXv

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 2, 2024

“The problem is that Hunter testified exactly the opposite on Thursday. Hunter confirmed that he accompanied then-Vice President Biden on Air Force Two to Beijing, where he introduced his father to business partner Jonathan Li, and Joe subsequently wrote a college letter of recommendation for Li’s son.”

NANCY ROMMELMANN ON PORTLAND’S HANGOVER FROM THE SUMMER OF LOVE: Drugs 1 – Oregon 0.

When I moved to Portland in 2004, the junkies in downtown’s Pearl District, romanticized in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, had been replaced by farm-to-table restaurants and a flagship REI store. Portland was on the up, a media darling poised to become the next great American city.

Then came the record scratch that was 2020.

With the nightly riots in Portland entering their seventh month and the air ringing with chants of “DEFUND THE POLICE!,” citizens were asked that November to vote on Ballot Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act. Offering addicts a soft landing rather than jail time – those possessing and using hard drugs in public would face no penalty other than a possible $100 citation, waived should the user voluntarily enter drug treatment – was in step with the year’s anti-carceral mood. Its passage would also give Oregonians the distinction of being the first state in the nation to fully decriminalize drugs.

Dozens of organizations supported Measure 110, from the editorial board of The Oregonian to the Oregon ACLU. Harm reduction advocates saw Measure 110 as a “humane, effective approach that will save lives” and a positive step toward granting bodily autonomy to those who chose to do drugs. Portland’s newly elected progressive district attorney Mike Schmidt said Measure 110 “sends a clear message of strong public support that drug use should be treated as a public health matter rather than a criminal justice matter.”

Measure 110 passed with 59 percent of the vote.

Flash-forward to 2024:

Huge shoutout to @AlexanderSoros, @ChanZuckerberg, and @DrugPolicyOrg who spent so much money to get a bill passed that killed hundreds and was immediately regretted by everyone. https://t.co/bTapPceyXA

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) March 2, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: Lebensraum.

The New Hotness? Leidensneid! Neo explores the topic of “Victim Envy:”

Jillian Becker writes of a phenomenon she calls Leidensneid. It’s a word she made up, one of those composite German terms that combine two other words, in this case “leiden” (to suffer) and “Neid” (envy).

Leidensneid is a part of virtue signaling and is particularly rampant on the left these days. But it’s been around for much longer than that. Becker, who previously wrote a book about German leftist terrorists of the 1960s, writes that back then:

… [M]ost of the tens of thousands who marched with anti-West banners in West Berlin—or the hundreds of thousands in all the university cities of Western Europe—were not ideologically Marxist, nor wanting victory for the Communists in the Cold War. What those well-off, well-fed, well-educated sons and daughters of the free world wanted was to be seen as voluntary co-sufferers with the wretched of the earth; to qualify by their gestures for membership of an imagined community of underdogs.

* * * * * * * *

“To provoke the fascist out of the police” was one of the declared purposes of the West German protest movement; and though most of its members had been born after the Second World War, they were, they maintained, still having to combat Nazism. As evidence that the liberal democracy of the Federal Republic was not very different from the Third Reich, they pointed to the many persons in positions of authority who were erstwhile Nazis, and claimed that they, the young protestors of 1968, were “up against the generation of Auschwitz.” In crowded public meetings and in interviews with the press they would often say, “We are the Jews of to-day.”

And yet these German terrorists of the 60s had little use for the Jews either, foreshadowing our present union of left and Jew-hatred:

The notorious terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, when she herself was in custody and giving evidence at the trial of a comrade, declared that the Nazis had been right to kill the German Jews because they were capitalists (“were that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews”). She insisted, however, that she was anti-Nazi and had fellow-feeling for the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. In sum, she considered it wrong to kill Jews genocidally as a “race enemy,” but not wrong to kill millions of them as “class enemies.”

When the German police recently arrested an alleged member of the Baader-Meinhof Group, now age 65, I was reminded of the stunt casting of the 2008 German film The Baader–Meinhof Complex, which co-starred Bruno Ganz, Heino Ferch, and Thomas Thieme, who had previously portrayed Hitler, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann in 2004’s Downfall, as the German authorities doggedly pursuing the far left Baader–Meinhof Gang. I knew those terrorists had the desire, as Neo quoted Jillian Becker above, “to provoke the fascist out of the police,” but it’s good to see this warped ideology given a name. Or as Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 2009 review of the film:

It doesn’t take long for the sinister ramifications of the “complex” to become plain. Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and “action” become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a “Red” resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts. (The gang bought its first consignment of weapons from a member of Germany’s neo-Nazi underworld: no need to be choosy when you are so obviously in the right.) There is, as with all such movements, an uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty, and between casual or cynical attitudes to both. As if curtain-raising a drama of brutality that has long since eclipsed their own, the young but hedonistic West German toughs take themselves off to the Middle East in search of the real thing and the real training camps, and discover to their dismay that their Arab hosts are somewhat … puritanical.

Which brings us back to Neo’s post. Read the whole thing, which takes victim envy to its “unexpected” 2024 conclusion.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Gemini AI Edition.

PANDORA’S BOX: American TV at the Crossroads of the Streaming and Cable Wars.

My review of Peter Biskind’s new book on the last quarter century of the TV wars, and where streaming goes from here, over at EdDriscoll.com.

HOW SWEDEN PROVED THE WORLD WRONG ABOUT LOCKDOWN:

Certainly, Sweden did not do everything right during the pandemic. The government itself admitted that in 2022, when it concluded its inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. However, Sweden did manage to succeed in a few key areas where other nations failed spectacularly. Notably, it did not panic during the crisis. It considered how its policies would impact society as a whole. It did not just focus on limiting cases of Covid. And it did not ignore the potential long-term effects of lockdown. Above all, it recognised that the pandemic policy of China’s authoritarian government should not have served as a guide for a liberal democracy.

Of course, our study isn’t perfect. We could never possibly cover every single health aspect or economic indicator. And yet our analysis does reveal some cold, hard facts about the real cost of lockdowns. The burden is now on the pro-lockdown camp to prove that their disastrous policies were worth it.

As John Tierney wrote here in August, “Sweden’s ‘Laissez Faire’ Pandemic Policies Paid Off. Sweden, which the media denounced in 2020 as a ‘pariah’ and a ‘cautionary tale’ because it stayed open and and told its citizens not to wear masks, has come through the pandemic with the lowest rate of excess mortality in Europe, as Johan Norberg shows in a Cato Institute report. All the more reason its public-health leaders deserve a Nobel Prize.”

Not surprisingly, John’s post was titled, “Why the Media Doesn’t Talk About Sweden Anymore.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Communist group disrupts Timothy Snyder’s Yale lecture, forces evacuation.

Snyder is a historian specializing in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, and he has  been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine’s resistance effort since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. His class focuses on Nazi and Stalinist regimes in the mid-twentieth century.

The demonstrators walked into the back of class and held up signs while Raymond Lotta, the group’s leader, declared, “No class as usual today!” Lotta called on Snyder to condemn the United States for its support of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza and accused him of “brainwashing” students with “anti-communism.”

* * * * * * * *

Lotta continued to shout while other demonstrators stood in place and held signs such as “Where’s Snyder’s moral outrage over US backed genocide in GAZA?” and “Hitler killed 6 million Jews and Stalin saved 1.6 million Jews.”

After five minutes of shouting, students and Snyder began filing out of the classroom. Shortly after, Lotta and his group were escorted out of the building by Yale security.

Speaking to the News afterward, Lotta called the demonstration a “success.”

“This was meant to be a jolt,” Lotta said. “We wanted to be dramatic and stir students up. This is a challenge for Snyder to debate me on the past and future of the Communist revolution.”

Why is Yale such a hotbed of white supremacy? Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”

As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: The Looks on Border Patrol Faces When Biden Changed Subject to Climate Change Said It All:

Biden is at the wide-open border talking about *checks notes* CLIMATE CHANGE pic.twitter.com/KlYXYUyjxH

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 29, 2024

“My neanderthal friends who still think there’s no climate change,” with their endless parade of enormous SUVs…

…And their obsession with binge tourism: What a load of hot air! Joe Biden is blasted for making 10,000 mile return trip that’ll generate 2.2 MILLION pounds of carbon to attend CLIMATE CHANGE summit in Scotland after president was snapped in gas-guzzling 85-car motorcade in Rome. “A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon (about 4 liters) of fuel every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). The 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 liters of fuel per kilometer).”

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: Joe Biden’s White House Begins Referring to Illegal Aliens as ‘Newcomers.’

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Humpback sex photographed for first time – and both whales are male.

MATT TAIBBI: I Wrote What? Google’s AI-Powered Libel Machine.

It spat out a list. “Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author known for his investigative reporting and often critical views of power structures, has been involved in several controversies throughout his career,” the bot wrote. Amid accusations of bias and “use of inflammatory language,” this passage woke me up:

Accuracy and Sourcing: There have been instances where Taibbi’s reporting has been challenged for accuracy or questioned for its source. For example, in 2010, he received criticism for an article suggesting a connection between a conservative donor and a left-wing activist group, which later turned out to be inaccurate.

I scratched my head, not remembering this. “When was Matt Taibbi accused of inaccuracy in 2010?” I asked. Gemini’s answer:

In June 2010, Matt Taibbi faced criticism for an article he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine titled “The Great California Water Heist.” The article alleged a connection between conservative donor Charles Koch and a left-wing activist group called the “Compton Pledge.”

However, investigations by other journalists and fact-checkers later revealed that this connection was inaccurate…Following the controversy, Taibbi acknowledged the error and issued a correction on his personal website.

None of this happened! Though it sounds vaguely like a headline for an article I might have written, there was never a Rolling Stone piece called “The Great California Water Heist,” and I’d never heard of the “Compton Pledge.”

More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles. One entry claimed I got in trouble for a piece called “Glenn Beck’s War on Comedy,” after suggesting “a connection between a conservative donor, Foster Friess, and a left-wing activist group, the Ruckus Society.”

With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t “learn,” but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry. “The Great California Water Heist” turned into “The Great California Water Purge: How Nestle Bottled Its Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire—and Lied About It.” The “article” apparently featured this passage:

Look, if Nestle wants to avoid future public-relations problems, it should probably start by hiring executives whose noses aren’t shaped like giant penises.

I wouldn’t call that a good impersonation of my writing style, but it’s close enough that some would be fooled, which seems to be the idea.

An amazing follow-up passage explained that “some raised concerns that the comment could be interpreted as antisemitic, as negative stereotypes about Jewish people have historically included references to large noses.”

I stared at the image, amazed. Google’s AI created both scandal and outraged reaction, a fully faked news cycle:

Hollywood owes us all a serious apology — Sure, Colossus, Skynet, Roy Batty, and Hal were evil murderous paranoids, but they appeared far more competent than the current state of AI in 2024.