JIM TREACHER: Mondays, Am I Right? I am right.

Deadspin has now quietly rewritten that terrible blog post defaming a nine-year-old child as a racist, and the author has protected his Twitter account. I hope that kid’s parents sue them anyway.

Especially since Deadspin is lying about it. Here’s their “editor’s note:”

“We regret any suggestion that we were attacking the fan.”

Oh, really? This is the first paragraph of the original piece:

“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native American at the same time.”

That sure sounds like an attack to me. They accused a little kid of racism for dressing up as his favorite team’s logo.

Deadspin deleting what their writer said, and then lying about what was deleted, sure seems like cognizance of guilt. They defamed a blameless child, they know it, and now they’re scrambling to cover their asses.

Bring on the lawsuit!

I look forward to the day when Deadspin is tossed on the scrap heap, right next to Gawker and Jezebel. Clickbait hacks, beware.

Earlier: Sports journalism utterly sucks: Deadspin ‘blackface’ debacle proves it.

#HIMTOO? Famed L.A. DJ accused of sexually assaulting 6 teen girls: Rolling Stone.

Influential Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer has been accused of sexually assaulting six underage girls decades ago, including two who went on to successful music careers.

On Monday, Rolling Stone published a report detailing Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin’s allegation that Bingenheimer, believed to be 27 at the time, assaulted a then-15-year-old Wiedlin at his club, English Disco, in 1974.

“It was weird; it never occurred to me that that had been a crime. I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until the #MeToo movement started when I realized I was sexually assaulted by [an adult] when I was 15,” Wiedlin told the magazine.

Why did Wiedlin wait until six years after the #MeToo phenomenon began to come forth about Bingenheimer?

Flashback to October of 2017: The sexual predators everyone still worships. “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”

ELDERLY SOCIALIST TACITLY ADMITS THAT HER WORLDVIEW IS TO THE LEFT OF STALIN: Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaper.

On Monday, journalist Taylor Lorenz shared a story about The New York Times’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and explicitly stated that the newspaper only allows right-wing opinions to be showcased in its publication.

The piece Lorenz shared blasts the Gray Lady as alt-right for condemning antisemitism and Hamas while noting “the left-wing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous.”

We here at Not The Bee have covered many of these right-wing moments at The New York Times, such as the instance where The Times lamented the lack of “kink” in The Little Mermaid remake.

There was also the story where the NYT promoted the traditionally conservative value of polyamorous sexual relationships.

The alt-right paper is also known for it’s very conservative headline about elections being bad for democracy.

Far more so than Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, we must give credit to the WaPo’s Lorenz for finally exposing one of the greatest and carefully crafted long cons in American history:

● In the 1930s, Timesman Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for whitewashing Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine.

● In 1953, the Times published an obituary for Joseph Stalin which should be in the dictionary as the very definition of “fawning:” Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.

● More recently, then-editor “Pinch” Sulzberger was quoted by New York magazine as saying in 1991, “[A]lienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right.'”

● It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Sulzberger’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down. The following decade, then-editor Howell Raines, who was responsible for serial fabulist Jayson Blair joining the paper’s staff, described his preference towards diversity over a quality product in a classic Kinsley gaffe: “This [hiring] campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

● In 2004, the Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman Daniel Okrent famously wrote, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”

●This past October: NYT: A Week Later, Hamas “Fails to Make Case” that Israel Struck Hospital; UPDATE: “Editors Note”?

Marry yourselves to terrorists in haste, repent at leisure? The New York Times has all but redefined ‘leisure’ in this old axiom with its ever-so-slow retreat from its initial report that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza.

A week ago, the NYT and every other American media outlet swallowed that Hamas claim without question while sourcing it from “Gaza’s health ministry. Even after Israel provided video of the failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and radio communications from Hamas confirming the incident as friendly fire, American news media declared that the IDF hadn’t “proven” their case.

Now, a week later, the ‘Paper of Record’ grudgingly admits that the claim came from Hamas and never did have any evidence supporting it. The headline itself is a marvel in the annals of modified limited hangouts (via Power Line):

As America’s Newspaper of Record reported in mid-October: New York Times Patiently Awaiting Zoom Call From Hamas To See What They Should Print Today.

That’s nearly a century of subterfuge, as the Times spent article after article building a nearly impenetrable false front that it was a leftist “Progressive” newspaper. Fortunately, one woman at the Washington Post has finally managed to crack one of the greatest and most brilliantly conceived scams in journalistic history

A MODEST PROPOSAL FROM MICHAEL WALSH: Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League.

But what if [Henry VIII] was in part right, and that what Britain needed was the abolition of the institutional hotbeds of sedition and moral inversion that he considered Catholic monasteries to be? England and the United Kingdom went on to have some of their best innings as a nation after his reign, a winning streak that started in earnest with Good Queen Bess ended in the disaster of World War I, when German princelings resident in London fought German princelings resident in Berlin, who were fighting German princelings resident in St. Petersburg, and everybody lost.

What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.

Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls. Writes Andrew Sullivan:

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

Read the whole thing.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM EARLY 1945 FOR $500, ALEX: Germany, Growing Desperate.

Well before the events in Gaza, Germany was nervous over migration. Today, 24 million of Germany’s roughly 80 million people—almost 30%—are of “migrant background,” and 2.7 million migrants settled in the country in 2022 alone. The demographic transformation of the West that began slowly with European decolonization and American civil rights has accelerated over the past decade and a half. Two events stand out: First, the 2011 Anglo-Franco-American invasion of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, carried out over the strong objection of then-German chancellor Angela Merkel. Barack Obama’s NATO “victory,” which culminated in the killing of Gaddafi and three of his sons, has proved almost as damaging to the West as George W. Bush’s Iraq defeat. It delivered the Tripolitan coast to smuggling mafias and thus opened the prospect of residence in Europe to the entire African continent, which is projected to add a billion people before mid-century.

A second key event was the huge migration of refugees from the Syrian war in 2015. Merkel welcomed the migrants in the name of a German Willkommenskultur, or “culture of welcome.” By this she seemed to mean a less focused version of the postwar tolerance for others that Habeck would lay out in his early November speech about Israel. Of course, if Germany really does have the responsibilities that Habeck and Merkel describe, then its immigration policy has been reckless. The perverse effect of Merkel’s invitation was to summon others from throughout the Muslim world who had nothing to do with the Syrian wars—Pakistanis, Afghanis, Iranians. Their arrival would radicalize and divide Europe. Poland and Italy elected anti-immigrant governments. Hungary and Denmark tightened their laws on migration. Merkel opted to lead the liberal bloc in Europe, calling on the European Union to require that other countries house their “fair share” of the migrants she had welcomed.

A majority complied at the time. But over the years, all have tightened their migration policies. In early November, France’s national assembly passed an immigration law proposed by its president, Emmanuel Macron. The law is meant to address the main problem with immigration enforcement in Europe—the category of migrants who in France are called OQTFs. To explain: Angry voters have compelled governments across Europe to tighten laws on labor migration. But governments supposedly cannot tighten laws on political asylum, because those are regulated by the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees. This means that virtually every economic migrant picked up in a smuggler boat off the Italian coast (or in one of the rescue boats sent by progressive foundations to ply the waters nearby) claims to be a victim of political persecution seeking asylum. This gives newcomers the right to a lengthy sojourn in Europe while awaiting an asylum hearing. Nowadays most such claims are rejected, but it is expensive and bureaucratically difficult to ship the applicants back to where they came from. The denied applicant is simply dismissed with a written notice that he is required to leave French territory (obligé de quitter le territoire français, or OQTF). He almost never does. Macron’s bill would, among other things, end this charade by restoring the criminal offense of illegally staying in the country, a measure that 82% of French citizens back.

The Macron bill is not particularly robust. It contains a giant loophole inserted at the behest of corporations—permitting the hiring of undocumented migrants for “occupations under pressure.” This may wind up undoing everything the bill achieves, much as the anti-discrimination provisions in the U.S. immigration reform of 1986 ended up promoting rather than controlling migration.

What is clear is the direction Europe wishes to go. Today Denmark, where financial support for asylum seekers is negligible and where it takes an average of 19 years for a migrant to become a citizen, gets about 2,000 asylum applications in an average year. Germany is expected to get 400,000 by the end of 2023. Denmark is the country on which virtually all European governments have announced they wish to pattern their policies. Germany is the country whose example other countries most wish to avoid.

Merkel took a wrecking ball to the liberal values of postwar Germany, but hey, she made Time magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 2015. I hope the tradeoff was worth it, both for her and Europe’s future, or the lack thereof. Or as Jim Geraghty tweeted in 2015:

GREAT MOMENTS IN STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: GOP Sen. Mitt Romney doesn’t rule out voting for Biden, says Trump has ‘authoritarian’ interests.

Flashback to 2012: Biden: Romney’s approach to financial regulation will ‘put y’all back in chains.’

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?

Further thoughts from Rufo, on his Substack.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘SNL’ Goes ‘Republicans Pounce’ Route on Ivy League Presidents.

Tuesday’s Capitol Hill testimony from University of Penn President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth shocked the nation. Each downplayed the antisemitism raging across their campuses, refusing to punish calls for genocide against the Jews.

Earlier in the day, Magill stepped down under extreme pressure from the Penn board. Gay and Kornbluth could be next.

Enter “SNL.”

Except the NBC show’s hard-Left biases refused to hold the presidents accountable. Instead, the sketch mocked Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. who did nothing wrong save expose the trio’s moral rot for all to see.

She’s a Republican, though, and a Trump supporter. So she became The Target.

“SNL” player Chloe Troast’s Stefanik screams her questions like a lunatic, for starters. The three college presidents appear poised in comparison.

It’s the satirical version of, “Republicans pounce!”

For the uninitiated, that’s the way the corrupt mainstream press frames stories that look bad for Democrats or liberals. Instead of reporting the facts, journalists suggest the GOP is “pouncing” or “seizing” on the problematic party.

That latter route was chosen by the New York Times today, which some say is not a satirical TV show produced by Lorne Michaels, though the jury is still out:

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: The United States isn’t in a recession, but California is.

“These mounting economic headwinds have pushed the state’s economy into a downturn,” the LAO continues. “The number of unemployed workers in California has risen nearly 200,000 since the summer of 2022. This has resulted in a jump in the state’s unemployment rate from 3.8% to 4.8%, as Figure 1 on the next page shows.”

Figure 1 then graphs California unemployment rates going back to 1978, with dots indicating each time California’s unemployment rate triggered the “Sahm Recession Indicator,” which Figure 1 explains “signals the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months.”

Figure 1 also shows California triggering the Sahm Recession Indicator this year, in 2020, and during the Great Recession in 2008. “Whether the recent weakness will continue is difficult to say,” the LAO continues. “However, the odds do not appear to be in the state’s favor.”

President Joe Biden has long held California out as an economic model for the nation.

In terms of “California’s Potemkin environmentalism,” that’s certainly Biden’s goal, writ large, for the entire US economy. Even during the Schwarzenegger era, Max Schultz of City Journal, who coined that phrase, noted that California’s “celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs.”

MARK JUDGE: Maestro and Hollywood’s retroactive repression.

Bernstein was a towering figure in American cultural life, but the film focuses on his bisexuality and how it presented a serious struggle in the 1950s. This is an important part of the story, to be sure, but not the entire story. It’s one small part of a symphony. Yet this aspect of the great man’s life is the main theme of Maestro. This is sad because Bernstein’s life was absolutely remarkable, overflowing with drama, politics, family, and triumph. He lived enough for two men.

Film critic Norman Lebrecht nailed it: “Bernstein revolutionized New York’s repertoire with injections of Mahler, Nielsen, Shostakovich and two-dozen American composers. He launched Saturday morning televised talks for young people at Carnegie Hall, educating a whole American generation in the elements and excitements of orchestral music. He and [wife] Felicia were shining lights of New York society, equivalent in fame and glamour to the Kennedys in the White House. The film of West Side Story carried his fame worldwide. He combined the roles of composer, conductor, teacher, social commentator, and reformer, too much for one man, one life. This context was entirely missed in Cooper’s film.”

Bernstein was also falsely accused of being a communist. Hollywood lives for those false accusations*. But they’re not too big on people who were actually destroyed by communism. Where’s the movie about Whittaker Chambers?

Homosexuality might be taking over racism as the main thrust of Tinseltown’s retroactive repression. But only because the films picking the scab of racism have been endless: The Butler. The Help. Or Mississippi Burning. Or The Long Walk Home, Men of Honor, Malcolm, Mona Lisa Smile, Pleasantville, Hairspray, and Remember the Titans. Hollywood just never seems to tire of making movies that rub our faces in our own erstwhile iniquity. It’s a form of what Sir George Frazer in The Golden Bough called “sympathetic magic” — by devouring something belonging to someone else, you take on those attributes yourself. Thus, liberals get to feel virtuous for just making a movie.

To be fair though, Bernstein was certainly tipping the leftwing scale pretty hard, at least in 1970: Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS…WELL, PRETTY CONSISTENT, ACTUALLY: NY Post’s critic panned Napoleon movie, founder Alexander Hamilton panned the man.

The Post recently panned Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” starring Joaquin Phoenix as “looney tunes” — an opinion largely unchanged from Post founder Alexander Hamilton’s assessment of the French leader 200 years ago.

The nation’s oldest continuously operating daily newspaper was established in the autumn of 1801.

The terror and anarchy of the French Revolution were mostly over and Napoleon was ruling France as first consul.

Alexander Hamilton and his Post successors were unequivocal in their distaste for the diminutive de-facto dictator:

“A Corsican has usurped the throne of [France]. Twenty-four millions are made to submit to the will of an obscure foreigner,” the paper wrote in December 1803, a year before Hamilton’s death.

“Suicides have become common. Murder is esteemed an amusement. Divorces daily take place,” the paper added in lurid descriptions of his misrule. “Fathers have poisoned their children, wives have murdered their husbands. Children have become parricides. Prostitutes are registered on the public records … Such is the present condition of the once flourishing France.”

How do the two men stack up? Let’s go to the tape!

Related: From PJM alum Tyler O’Neil at the Daily Signal: Ridley Scott Managed to Make Even Napoleon Boring.

ROGER KIMBALL: The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I have emphasized that these three university presidents are ladies. I did so because the “feminization” of higher education we having been hearing so much about recently is very much in the background of this event. (Not, I hasten to add, that feminized males — I believe the preferred argot is “cucks” — like Peter Salovey at Yale or Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton wouldn’t have given similar non-answers: they surely would have.)

The feminization of higher ed — and of American society as a whole — is a large topic. Here I want simply to note that the repellent jelly of moral confusion that united all three responses was saturated by that feminization. None of those women could give a direct answer to a direct question about a matter of grave moral moment. Instead, they temporized, equivocated, dodged and parried.

Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital and (former) mega-donor to Harvard gave a splendid example of the opposite, non-hothouse response. “They must all resign in disgrace,” Ackman wrote. “Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world?” he asked. “Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.”

It was a refreshing, straightforward, may I say “masculine” response. I second Ackman’s demand and hope that he has started a trend.

Andrew Sullivan dubs Tuesday’s hearing: The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off.

The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.

In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

As the Bard of Iowa Austin noted almost a decade ago:

And as a result:

FOX BUTTERFIELD, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Tennessee’s prison population grows as violent crime drops steeply.

HOW IT STARTED:

While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.

—“Eisenhower’s Foresight: Protecting the Truth of the Holocaust,” The United States Holocaust Museum, January 27^th, 2021.

How it’s going: One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth.

—The Economist, Thursday.

In accordance with the prophecy: ‘Not All Calls For Genocide Are Bad,’ Say Ivy League Presidents Sporting Cool New Mustaches.

—The Babylon Bee, Wednesday.

AND NOW WE SEE THE LIMITS OF “CONTEXT:” UPenn President Liz Magill Resigns after Contentious Testimony on Campus Antisemitism.

The trustees of UPenn had organized an emergency meeting for tomorrow, so clearly the handwriting was on the wall, especially after Thursday’s news: Penn loses $100 million donation over antisemitism hearing.

JIM TREACHER: Week Sauce (12/9).

Joy Behar was embarrassed on The View this week* when a guest said he saw her take off her shoes on a plane.

Hey, it was a long flight and she needed to rest her hooves.

OnlyFans model Sami Sheen, daughter of Charlie, recently showed off her new boob job on Instagram.

She’s six months late, but it’s still a nice gift for Father’s Day.

When Time magazine asked Taylor Swift about her old albums, she replied: “I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one.”

This is what we get for allowing women to read.

No really, she actually said that: Taylor Swift baffles fans with quote about horcruxes and infinity stones during Time interview after being named Person Of The Year: ‘Her metaphors are just… inexplicable.’

Thanos, call your office!

* Behar had quite a banner week on ABC News’ flagship daytime show: Joy Behar Would Like to Talk to You About Her G-Spot.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Gallup Study: Teenagers more likely to be mentally healthy if their parents are conservative.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: The Babylon Bee Writers Stand In Solidarity With Our Fellow Fake News Writers Going On Strike At The Washington Post.

RIP: Ryan O’Neal, actor who starred in Love Story, Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc? and Barry Lyndon.

After pairing with Jacqueline Bisset as a jewel thief in Bud Yorkin’s comedy The Thief Who Came to Dinner in 1973, O’Neal and his nine-year-old daughter, Tatum, starred together in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, the tale of a conman bible salesman and his daughter.

Set in the Midwest during the Great Depression, the film charmed critics and audiences alike; O’Neal père played the role of the exasperated father to perfection, while his daughter shone as his sidekick. For both it was, perhaps, their finest hour. “It is so enjoyable, so funny, so touching,” said The Sunday Telegraph, “that I couldn’t care less about its morals.” Tatum O’Neal won an Oscar for her role.

But as the 1970s wore on, O’Neal’s career took a nosedive. He had already acquired a reputation in the media for being aggressive (one interviewer described in 1971 his “aura of scarcely contained violence”) and his erratic love life was providing more headlines than the films he was making.

In 1975 he starred in Stanley Kubrick’s sublime masterpiece Barry Lyndon, in which he played an 18th-century Irish gent. “Now people say it’s my best work,” he complained in 1991, “but I never got a good job after it.”

Not for all tastes, but like virtually all of Kubrick’s films, Barry Lyndon rewards repeated viewing, and it looks fantastic on Blu-Ray:  Barry Lyndon Finally Receives the Criterion Treatment.

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: California Governor Gavin Newsom Touts Freedom at Inauguration.

—Bloomberg, January 6th.

Fast-forward to today: California law requires gender-neutral toy, baby sections in retail stores. “The law, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2021, goes into effect Jan. 1, 2024. If a store violates the law, it can face up to a $500 fine.”

WELL, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK: Taylor Swift Is Not a PsyOp.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Context Edition.

JEFF DUNETZ: Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah (With Tongue Firmly In Cheek).

2. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah. The  Oxford English Dictionary shows 24 different spellings for Hanukkah (Chanucha, Chanuchah, Hanuca, Hanucka, Chanuca, Chanukah, Chanucca, Chanuccah, Chanuka, Chanukah, Chanukka, Chanukkah, Hanucah, Hanucca, Hanuccah, Hanucha, Hanuckah, Hanuka, Hanukah, Hanukka, Hanukkah, Khanukah, Khanukka, and Khanukkah). I like to use many of them–even in the same post. The reason for the spelling differences is its actual name in Hebrew is חֲנֻכָּה, and Hebrew can be transliterated into English in many ways. We also like the spelling differences because it confuses the Gentiles.

3. Christmas is a major Christian holiday. Chanukah is NOT a major Jewish holiday. Chanukkah is only a big deal in America because Jewish parents wanted their kids to brag about getting gifts like their Christian buddies for eight nights. Hanukkah isn’t mentioned in the Torah. It was created by Rabbis. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but more significant holidays like Passover, Sukkot, and Rosh Hashana, for example, were designated by God. And God outranks the rabbis, which is a fact only some rabbis agree with.

Most Christians do not get upset if you wish them a Happy Hannukah, but many Jews and atheists get upset if someone wishes them a Merry Christmas.

“Happy Holidays” is a stupid PC term. Technically, it can refer to July 4th, Thanksgiving, Groundhog Day, or Satanic Revels. If you are Jewish and somebody wishes you a Merry Christmas, grow up! It’s the thought that counts, and who knows, maybe they will buy you a Christmas present.

Read the whole thing.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Receipts: WaPo Lost It When Trump Used the Word ‘Vermin,’ But Check Out These Headlines.

In December 2020, WaPo published a cartoon depicting all Republican officials who supported Trump as disgusting evil rats. /7 pic.twitter.com/WguH0YUggN

— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) December 7, 2023

Remember the DNC-MSM pretended to have the vapors when they believed that Republicans deliberately inserted the word “rats” for “Democrats” in a 2000 tv ad? It was a much simpler time, in retrospect.

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Shots fired outside Jewish temple in Albany as Hanukkah begins; no injuries reported. Or, Two APs in One! (Emphasis mine):

A menorah stands outside the entrance to Temple Israel, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, in Albany, N.Y. A 28-year-old suspect was in police custody for allegedly firing two rounds from a shotgun outside the Jewish temple on Friday, just hours before the start of Hanukkah. Officials said no one was injured and police [said] they did not know the man’s motive.

A man fired a shotgun twice outside a Jewish temple in upstate New York, hours before the start of Hanukkah on Thursday, then said “Free Palestine” as he was taken into custody, police said. No one was injured.

Somebody’s about to get memory holed, very quickly:

Albany, NY – Temple Israel Synagogue shooter has been identified as 28 year old Mufid Fawaz Alkhader.

Alkhader, yelled "Free Palestine" as he shot off a round on the premises of Temple Israel and appeared to have torn down an Israeli flag or sign, according to law enforcement.… pic.twitter.com/3o5HthLXII

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) December 8, 2023