もっとこうしてください: Japanese man who claims to be ‘a woman inside’ arrested in women’s bathing area.

DAVID HOROWITZ GROUP THAT HELPED LAUNCH CANDACE OWENS’ CAREER CUTS TIES WITH HER OVER ISRAEL STANCE:

The conservative group that helped launch the career of Candace Owens is cutting ties with the political commentator, citing her “ignorant, hateful and morally obtuse remarks about Israel and the Jews.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center released a statement on Monday disavowing its years-long association with Owens, the former blogger who rose to become a prominent social media personality and podcaster.

The move comes amid a row between Owens and her fellow Daily Wire star Ben Shapiro, who had a similar falling out over her views on Israel.

Speaking of whom: Whoa: Ben Shapiro Directly Goes After Candace Owens, Calls Her ‘Disgraceful.’

UP IN SMOKE: The biggest pot distributor in California has collapsed.

“I do feel like we’re going to see a significant and material number of closures, up and down the supply chain,” Wesley Hein, the president of the Cannabis Distribution Association, told SFGATE.

CHANGE: Louisiana GOP Takes Full Control of Statewide Offices.

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Biden Turns 81 — Say, How’s That ‘Bridge’ Coming?

On the menu today: Don’t expect the White House to make a big deal of it and remind everyone about one of Joe Biden’s biggest campaign liabilities, but today is the president’s 81st birthday. NBC News greeted the president with a new poll showing him trailing Trump nationally and his approval rating hitting the lowest number ever recorded in its survey. Even young voters, traditionally a demographic that Democrats win handily, appear surprisingly split about their options in a Biden–Trump rematch. Finally, former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod warns that Biden’s odds in a matchup with Trump are less than 50–50, and that, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is relying on Trump’s odiousness to put him over the top — an unsafe bet. And if Axelrod is saying that publicly, how likely is it that former president Obama concurs privately?

* * * * * * * *

Back in 2019, Biden himself reportedly signaled to aides that he would serve only a single term. There was a lot of talk back then about Biden being a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, and more than a little of that talk came from Biden himself. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said at a March 9, 2020, campaign rally with Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” (Looking back at historical events from early March 2020 feels like watching events from the first ten days of September 2001. The world’s about to suddenly change, and nobody on screen knows it.)

But Biden clearly hasn’t been a “bridge” to anyone or anything. If you wanted Biden to be a transitional president, then the work of preparing the American public for President Kamala Harris would’ve had to start much earlier.

Well, Biden has certainly tossed many projects towards Harris to, depending upon how charitable you are, either demonstrate that she’s ready to take over, or (more likely) as revenge for her calling him a racist during the 2020 primaries:

● Psaki insists Harris still border czar after Guatemalan leader claims no contact.

● ‘How do I know it’s actually working?’ Kamala Harris really inspires confidence in her ability to fulfill new role as Biden’s electric vehicle ambassador.

● “Biden announced that Harris would head up the administration’s efforts to monitor and combat what he called the Republican Party’s ‘unprecedented assault on democracy.’”

● Biden: I’m putting Kamala Harris in charge of getting voting rights legislation passed through Congress. “Ah, that’s nice of him. Something new for her to fail at instead of just failing to ease the border crisis.”

Flashbacks:

● How Joe Biden is Hanging Kamala Harris Out to Dry.

● DOCTOR Jill Biden Told Kamala ‘Go F*** Yourself’ for Attacking Her Husband.

THE LID: Nov. 19, 1863: Lincoln Delivers Greatest Presidential Speech Ever At Gettysburg, PA.

WHY IS EURO-SOCCER UPPER MANAGEMENT SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM? Israel and Poland Defy European Football Association and Hold Moment of Silence for 10/7.

FRENCH CRITICS RUSH TO SUPPORT RIDLEY SCOTT’S NAPOLEON: Director Ridley Scott Dismisses Critics: “The French Don’t Even Like Themselves.’

Ridley Scott has been typically dismissive of critics taking issue with his forthcoming movie Napoleon, particularly French ones.

While his big-screen epic, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the embattled French emperor with Vanessa Kirby as his wife Josephine, has earned the veteran director plaudits in the UK, French critics have been less gushing, with Le Figaro saying the film could have been called “Barbie and Ken under the Empire,” French GQ calling the film “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally clumsy” and Le Point magazine quoting biographer Patrice Gueniffey calling the film “very anti-French and pro-British.”

That’s good enough an endorsement for me; I’m really looking forward to seeing the film in a theater during its brief run before streaming on Apple TV.

GOODER AND HARDER, EMPIRE STATE: NY ranked ‘Least Free State,’ with high taxes, debt, regulation: study.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why does the left hate white women?

All of my ladies out there who read this newsletter are probably familiar with the food blog “Half Baked Harvest.” Tieghan Gerard, the thirty-year-old founder and owner of the blog, has posted a cozy and delicious recipe nearly every single day since 2012, inspiring women everywhere to dust off their crockpots and grease their baking pans. Fellas, if the woman in your life suddenly decided to try her hand at pumpkin cinnamon rolls or made white chicken chili for game day, there’s a good chance she snagged the recipe from Half Baked Harvest.

Gerard has millions of loyal followers and naturally this has led to criticism from bitter, jealous losers. The New York Times recently managed to snag an interview with Gerard (no, Tieghan, run!) and used it as an excuse to rehash allegations that Gerard doesn’t deserve her success: “Ms. Gerard has also become an unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism.”

In November of 1991, New York magazine spotted then-Maximum Timesman Pinch Sulzberger racially insulting one of his core subscribers:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”

“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating 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.”

You didn’t think the Times’ ever-metastasizing racialism would only ever obsess on white men, did you?

DAVID THOMPSON: Bad Language.

One might think that the employees having babies and therefore on maternity leave are, in fact, by definition, mothers. One might even think that a hospital, and a maternity hospital in particular, is a place where physical realities of this kind would be difficult to avoid. And yet.

While none of the hospitals’ current staff classified themselves as confused about which of the two sexes they are, it is, I suppose, possible that at some point one of the mothers taking maternity leave may, potentially, be sexually dysmorphic – i.e., mentally ill. But mental illness, even fashionable mental illness, isn’t generally something that one should affirm. Nor should it be a basis for the coercion of others. Farce, after all, soon loses its charm.

As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language:”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Which leads to “The Cambridge University Hospital Trust, which manages a maternity hospital called the Rosie, lost points because staff use the term ‘mother’ when referring to the policies it had in place regarding paid leave, instead of broadening it to include gender-neutral alternatives.”

RIP: Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter dead at 96.

ROGER KIMBALL: Flirtation With Evil Will Not End Well for Leftists.

In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe,  by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.

That may buy the company a little time in the court of public opinion. But more and more Americans, I suspect, have come around to Josh Hawley’s perspective about TikTok. It is, he just said on X, “a spy app for the Chinese Government—and now it’s a hotspot for antisemitic, pro-Hamas propaganda.”

Bingo. Sen. Hawley got it in one. The sudden resurrection of Osama bin Laden did not take place in a vacuum. It is happening in the midst of a recrudescence in America of an anti-Semitism more vicious than anything seen in decades in this country, maybe ever. The large-scale pro-Hamas public demonstrations are startling in their size and virulence. Equally shocking are the displays of violent (and, it should be noted, historically illiterate) anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.

It is curious how people romanticize evil and insanity. The habit, I believe, is born in part of naiveté, or at least inexperience. The college student who prances about in a T-shirt bearing the image of Che Guevara, for example, generally has no idea of what a malignant figure Che was, how treacherous, how cruel, how murderous. He sees only a handsome “freedom fighter” swaddled in the gauze of exotic Latin flamboyance. The grubby reality escapes her entirely. Ditto with respect to Hamas.

As Charles Cooke adds, “Face It, the bin Laden TikTokers Are Just Stupid.”

“I suppose the only good thing that has happened here,” Cooke remarked mordantly, “is for once the people of TikTok have stopped claiming that George W. Bush carried out 9/11 and have now acknowledged that it was Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, they have appended the word ‘good’ to that analysis.

“And these people are stupid,” he continued. “We can talk around this if we want to, but these people are stupid. They don’t know anything.”

He said that if a conservative opposes gay marriage, he becomes a non-person. “But when Osama bin Laden says that homosexuality must be banned in the new caliphate,” he noted, “they skip over it*. There’s so much in that bin Laden letter that should have been appalling to the TikTok brigade, but they seem to ignore it.”

Roger Kimball believes that “TikTok’s days may be numbered in the U.S.” Much faster, please.

* Same with the aforementioned Che Guevara as well, of course.

MARK JUDGE: Muzzle: A Powerful Movie About Honor, Made by People Who Don’t Hate Americans or Christians.

When a movie on Rotten Tomatoes has a high audience approval rating and a low critical rating, it usually means that conservatives will like it. It’s usually a movie for the people and not for the “elites.”

Such is the case with Muzzle, a film that was released in September and is now out on DVD. Muzzle is is a good solid piece of movie-making created by that rarest of breeds: Hollywood people who don’t hate normal Americans. The film is rated 16+. Criminals are depicted as awful people, drugs as soul-killers, and moms and newborn babies as healing miracles. There is no nudity.

Read the whole thing, which makes for quite a contrast with what Disney is churning out these days: Movie Executives With Strange Pronouns Can’t Understand Why Movies Flop.

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE GENE RODDENBERRY HAS GONE BEFORE: Bernie Sanders wants to bring socialism to space.

The growth of an asteroid mining sector does have certain drawbacks. The sudden influx of what are now precious metals such as gold and platinum would diminish their unit value, causing economic disruption. Certain countries in Africa, dependent on the export of raw materials, would have to diversify their economies, much in the same way as the Persian Gulf states are moving from oil and gas to high tech.

But far from being a bad thing, as Sanders suggests, asteroid mining would usher in an age of abundance on Earth. Many of the raw materials mined in space would be used to create products in space-based manufacturing facilities. Since these manufacturing processes would take advantage of microgravity and other environmental factors unique to space, products that are impossible to create on Earth would become available to consumers. Space mining could lead to space manufacturing.

People such as Musk would become even more fabulously wealthy. Jobs would be created, and the world’s economy would rise faster than what otherwise would be the case. The argument for socialism, which Sanders favors, would be further diminished.

The senator will just have to grin and bear it.

Don’t worry — Roddenberry assures me this sort of profiteering will become passe by the time of the United Federation of Planets. (In-between making “his estimated $500 million fortune off of his creation and its many spin-offs.”)

JAMES PIERESON: Martyr of the Cold War.

These were the myths that grew up around Kennedy’s death and, curiously enough, remain widely believed. Many who doubted Oswald’s guilt traced the assassination to a “climate of hate” created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and a few media figures. This became the prevailing interpretation of the assassination.

The facts pointed in a different direction: President Kennedy was a martyr (to the extent he was a martyr of any kind) in the Cold War struggle against Communism. Kennedy spoke often and clearly about the threat Communism posed to the United States and free nations everywhere. He emphasized foreign policy and the Cold War in his inaugural address in 1961. He was an articulate Cold Warrior before he became an outspoken civil rights advocate.

The assassin was a Communist and hardly a right-winger. He was also one of the biggest “creeps” ever to insert himself into history’s pages, a pathetic figure, even by the standards of assassins. He was haughty, arrogant, and insolent; he beat his wife; he could not keep a job; he was obsessed with politics and revolution. He gave a bad odor to Marxism, if that was possible. Like Richard III, he was “determined to prove a villain/and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Everyone who knew him agreed afterward that he was entirely capable of carrying out such an attack.

Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He pledged to turn over military secrets to Soviet authorities and may have done so. He returned to the United States with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet Communism but not disabused of his Marxist beliefs or his contempt for America. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba.

In April 1963, Oswald tried to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as Walker sat at a desk in his dining room. (The bullet struck a window frame, and Walker was unhurt.) Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration, his criticisms of President Kennedy, and his demand that the United States overthrow the Castro regime. The rifle Oswald used in his attack on Walker was the same one he used seven months later to shoot Kennedy. Oswald’s wife was well aware that he had taken a shot at Walker and had reason to think he might try to strike again. Dallas police did not identify Oswald as the assailant in the Walker case until after Kennedy’s assassination.

Read the whole thing.

HOW IT STARTED:

President Joe Biden tied the wars in Ukraine and Israel together during a primetime Oval Office address Thursday, making an impassioned appeal to the American people to support two fellow democracies that he says are facing existential threats.

The president has often cast this moment in history as an “inflection point” – a battle between the world’s democracies and autocracies.

—“Biden makes the case for wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine in primetime address,” CNN.com, October 19th.

How it’s going:

Democracies do not ban opposition parties. The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution. Then in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law. The list included the Opposition Platform for Life, which had held fully 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces, and the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Democracies do not ban elections, but Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial law in 2022. This hiatus was supposed to be temporary, but it has been repeatedly extended, most recently in July 2023. As a result of that vote in the Ukrainian parliament, where all opposition parties have been removed, the parliamentary elections scheduled for last month were canceled. Presidential elections were scheduled for March 2024, but under current rules they too will not be held, and Zelensky has stated that “now is not the time for elections.”

—“Ukraine Sure Doesn’t Look Like a Democracy Anymore,” Newsweek, Friday.

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO ’24: A Flood of Retirements in Congress Threatens to Upend the 2024 Election.

DISPATCHES FROM AL SHARPTON’S NETWORK: ‘Glorified the massacres:’ An NBC journalist in Israel was arrested on suspicion of inciting terror.

A journalist employed by the NBC was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization.

Marwat Al-Azza, a 45-year-old journalist, employed by NBC and living in east Jerusalem, was arrested on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization. This was after four posts on her personal Facebook in recent times concerning the terror attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

The police claim that Al-Azza “arrived ready for arrest”, without a mobile phone, and even wrote phone numbers on her leg.

To be fair, she’s far from the first anti-Semite employed by Comcast: How Al Sharpton Inflamed The Crown Heights Riot And How The Media Lied.

GREAT MOMENTS IN WORD OF MOUTH: Marvels Plummets up to 80 Percent in Box Office Nightmare.

It didn’t help that director Nia DiCosta slammed critics of the MCU’s woke makeover earlier this week.

“There are pockets where you go because you’re like, ‘I’m a super fan. I want to exist in the space of just adoration — which includes civilized critique … then there are pockets that are really virulent and violent and racist — and sexist and homophobic and all those awful things. And I choose the side of the light. That’s the part of fandom I’m most attracted to.”

Those so-called racist, sexist, homophobic and violent movie goers stayed home, apparently.

As a legendary fictitious rock manager famously said, I wouldn’t say that Marvel’s audience is shrinking; their appeal is merely becoming “more selective.”

Particularly as Disney continues Hollywood’s decade-long trend of trashing their own audiences:

Or to paraphrase Principal Skinner, “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the moviegoers who are wrong.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Deja Vu All Over Again Edition.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Californians Set Up President Xi Dummy So Newsom Will Keep The Cities Clean All The Time.

RAVING AND DROOLING: Roger Waters denied hotel stays in Argentina and Uruguay over antisemitism allegations days after saying Hamas were ‘morally bound to resist occupation’ and Israelis were ‘making up stories.’

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO EXPLAIN THE BEHAVIOR OF ANY BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATION IS TO ASSUME THAT IT IS CONTROLLED BY A CABAL OF ITS ENEMIES: Oof! Bud Light Paid Dylan Mulvaney Six Figures to Destroy Its Brand.

Bud Light was once the top-selling beer brand in America. It was, to say the least, iconic. Then, on April Fools’ Day no less, trans activist Dylan Mulvaney revealed his partnership with Bud Light, taking to Instagram to show off his customized beer pack featuring his surgically altered faux-woman face in honor of his full year of pretending to be a woman, while pretending to be oblivious to what March Madness is and which sport in involves.

The damage to Bud Light was catastrophic. Users boycotted Bud Light along with other Anheuser-Busch brands. It got so bad that Anheuser-Busch was literally giving beer away for free just to move product and lost billions in market value.

Everything Anheuser-Busch did to make amends failed, and it even sought to distance itself from Mulvaney, denying that an actual partnership even existed. “This was one single can given to one social media influencer,” Anheuser-Busch’s CEO claimed in an apology letter. “It was not made for production or sale to the general public. This can is not a formal campaign or advertisement.”

Well, it turns out that wasn’t the case at all. Once again, Steven Crowder has the receipts, and the receipts show that Anheuser-Busch paid Mulvaney $185,000, making it crystal clear that the two parties did have a formal business arrangement.

Related: Anheuser Marketing Chief Out as Bud Light Sales Tank.

Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief marketing officer Benoit Garbe is leaving after the company reported a 29% decline in U.S. third-quarter earnings and backlash against Bud Light continues, CNN reports.

AB InBev issued a statement saying Garbe, who has been CMO for two years, “will be resigning at the end of the year in order to embark on a new chapter in his career.”

Kyle Norrington, Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief commercial officer, will assume Garbe’s duties.

Garbe oversaw Bud Light’s ill-fated advertising partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, launched on April 1 with a post on Instagram. It pictured Mulvaney holding a personalized can of Bud Light to celebrate “365 Days of Girlhood.”

His departure comes on the heels of Captiv8, the California ad agency behind Bud Light’s disastrous transgender campaign, firing 30 employees, about 20% of its workforce, last month.

Immediately after customers’ backlash against the campaign, AB put Bud Light marketing VP Alissa

Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief marketing officer Benoit Garbe is leaving after the company reported a 29% decline in U.S. third-quarter earnings and backlash against Bud Light continues, CNN reports.

AB InBev issued a statement saying Garbe, who has been CMO for two years, “will be resigning at the end of the year in order to embark on a new chapter in his career.”

Kyle Norrington, Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. chief commercial officer, will assume Garbe’s duties.

Garbe oversaw Bud Light’s ill-fated advertising partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, launched on April 1 with a post on Instagram. It pictured Mulvaney holding a personalized can of Bud Light to celebrate “365 Days of Girlhood.”

His departure comes on the heels of Captiv8, the California ad agency behind Bud Light’s disastrous transgender campaign, firing 30 employees, about 20% of its workforce, last month.

Immediately after customers’ backlash against the campaign, AB put Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid and AB group VP Daniel Blake on leave.

and AB group VP Daniel Blake on leave.

According to Heinerscheid’s LinkedIn page, she was still on the Anheuser-Busch payroll until October, despite her one-woman wrecking crew role in declaring Bud Light’s (now former) customers as being a “fratty” and “out of touch” bunch.

(Classical reference in headline.)

SPEAKER JOHNSON RELEASES J6 FOOTAGE, AND THE LEFT IS GONNA FLIP OUT.