TWO DISNEYS IN ONE!
Shot: Snow White Remake Actress Rachel Zegler Slams Disney’s 1937 Classic In Ongoing Marketing Nightmare.
—Outkick the Coverage, August 14th, 2023.
Chaser:
—My inbox, Friday.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
November 5, 2023
GUT UND HART, DEUTSCHLAND: After migrant parent pressure, Anne Frank daycare center to be renamed.
Parents in Saxony-Anhalt German State promoted the decision to rename the “Anne Frank” daycare center in Tangerhütte, a small town in the state, according to reports in German media.
The move was driven by parents who found it difficult to explain Frank’s significance to their children. According to Apollo News, a German news site, in a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, a daycare center has become the center of a local scandal.
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The BILD newspaper added “Ultimately, the parents and employees wanted a name that was more ‘child-friendly’ and ‘better suited to their concept.’ Their needs are more important than the global political situation.”
The daycare center has been called Anne Frank since 1970. “Now parents want to rename it to ‘World Explorers’,” BILD said.
According to the report, Frank no longer aligned with the “new focus on diversity.” Brohm stated that the desires of many parents to rename the daycare center held more weight than the global political situation.
Related: Can’t Imagine Why: Majority of Germans Now Completely Over Muslim Immigration.
ROGER KIMBALL: This Time Israel Will Finish The Job.
The other chief reason that this grisly event may inspire gratitude alongside revulsion is that it seems to have shaken the world awake, disrupting the pathetic radical-chic infatuation with this species of violent, anti-Western guilt mongering. Yes, Western colleges and universities, especially the richest and most pampered of them, are full of anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian animus. From Harvard to Stanford, from Columbia and Cornell to Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania, students and faculty are making fools of themselves by mouthing such goads to genocide as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
But these little eructations, along with the carefully coordinated mass rallies in major cities throughout the Western world, conceal an inexorable process of disenchantment. Much publicized has been the withdrawal of financial support by scores of major donors to the university industrial complex. The loss of money may sting at some few campuses. For most, it will be but a rounding error. What will matter much more is the loss of that much more precious form of spiritual currency, legitimacy.
Whatever else it accomplished, the murderous attacks perpetrated by Hamas tore the mask off the “poor, suffering Palestinians” and revealed the entire operation as the bloodthirsty, anti-civilizational impulse we have long known it to be. For that, at least, we must be grateful for this excruciating moment of clarity.
Read the whole thing.
The orchestral scoring session you and Paul did at Capitol Studios in L.A. took place quite a while ago, we know. There’s such a thing as NDAs, but it’s still surprising that that many people could be involved and keep a secret, until Paul himself first spoke about it this spring.
Well, the orchestra didn’t know what they were playing on. They weren’t aware that this was a Beatles recording. I think they thought it was just a Paul McCartney project that I was working with him on. It’s one of those things that I didn’t really think about at the time. I’m thinking about the string arrangement, the players playing the right thing, all that stuff. But they weren’t privy to the information, so they had nothing to hide. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Not in this case: A little knowledge actually worked quite well. But it is funny how we finished this last year, and it hasn’t got out.
Speaking of the orchestral part, why did it feel important to do an orchestral part, in the ultimate expansion of John’s demo? Of course great orchestral parts are a big part of your lineage.
Paul came and played me the track he’d been working on, and I said, “Maybe we should add some strings to it.” He was like, “Well, yeah, we should try it, but I don’t want to make it too corny.” Also, I think he was nervous about us collaborating away from the other Beatles, funnily enough. How much do you add without them? I just said to him, “Why don’t we do something, and then we can always delete it? No one will know.” There’s no teams that hear stuff. It was just me and Paul, at that stage — and Ringo, obviously, and then Sean and Yoko and Olivia. It’s a very small network, so therefore you have that freedom to try things.
With the strings, I thought I might as well rip off my dad — which I did do. My dad was an amazing string arranger. If I’m gonna rip off my dad, you might as well do it for the last Beatles song. There were some times where Paul was like, “We shouldn’t do that, you’re going a bit too far, or “We should try and do this.” Because, even with my dad, even with “Yesterday,” the first string thing (with the Beatles), Paul would have very, very strong ideas about how you want things to sound. And generally, obviously, it’s the Beatles — he’s right. I’m pleased we added the strings. I just wanted it to be as Beatles as possible, basically. I wanted people to listen to this and go, “Yeah, this is a Beatles record.”
The songwriting didn’t seem quite complete in the demo John did that many people have heard. They would say it starts off strong and then loses something along the way. Compositonally, was it Paul’s job to bring it across the finish line?
Completely Paul’s job, as it should be. He wanted to finish this track, and his collaboration with John is, let’s face it, the most successful songwriting collaboration of all time. … What’s interesting is: Someone said, “Paul didn’t really write a middle-eight to it.” And I said, well, he put the guitar solo in [where a bridge might go] as a tribute to George, really. There’s no point in Paul writing a middle section just for the sake of it, so he could write a middle section, which he could have done easily. So that was purely down to him.
I’ll admit that the finished song has a haunting quality to it, thanks to the strings, McCartney’s Harrison-esque slide guitar work, and the nostalgia of hearing John Lennon singing again. Ultimately though, it’s a wisp of a Lennon demo that McCartney and Giles Martin threw the kitchen sink of audio restoration, production and arranging techniques at.
Given the advanced state of audio restoration, I assume Peter Jackson’s crack team will have a go at separating and restoring Lennon’s vocals from “Free as a Bird” and Real Love” from the mid-1990s Anthology sessions (where work on “Now and Then” began, but the technology didn’t yet exist to separate Lennon’s voice from his piano playing) at some point in the future. Meantime, I’m looking forward to hearing Giles Martin’s remixes of the Beatles’ early songs that Jackson’s team were able to generate fresh multitracks when the Beatles’ 1962-1966 greatest hits collection drops next week.
STILL FAKEY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS:
Behind these malevolent forces lurks a deeper dynamic, the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood (DSM), the rule of unreality. As noted here previously in the cases of Barack “Barry Soetoro” Obama and Ammar Yasser Najjar, this totalitarian dynamic demands that people accept the fakery and deny what their own experience confirms. And so now we add to that roster Buffy Sainte-Marie, who should be paired with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the fake Cherokee who ran for president. Under the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood, the possibilities are indeed limitless.
Exit question: In a regime supposedly dominated by “white supremacy,” why do so many people want to claim minority identity?
Iron Eyes Cody (Espera Oscar de Corti) would be shedding two tears if he were alive to hear the news about Sainte-Marie being a Pretendian.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Hamas Caving?
It looks like Hamas realizes that is is outmatched by Israel’s military power, and is getting desperate. According to recent reports, Hamas is now offering to release civilian hostages in exchange for a short, five-day ceasefire.
“Although the terms have varied in recent weeks, Hamas has indicated most recently that it would release all civilian hostages in exchange for a five-day pause, according to diplomats familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive matter. Israeli military captives, whose precise number is unknown, would be retained, possibly to eventually be offered in trade for Palestinian prisoners in Israel,” reports The Washington Post.
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We’ve seen that scam before, too. The fact is, Hamas never misses a trick, and at the moment, it looks like Israel isn’t about to fall for the terror group’s games. According to The Washington Post, Netanyahu “rejected any effort to link hostage talks with a pause in the fighting, saying just minutes after Blinken publicly called for it that consideration of any cease-fire would happen only after all of the hostages were freed.”
Either way, the scheme reeks of desperation, and it’s clear that Israel’s military is overwhelming Hamas.
Overwhelm them much further: Flood the Gaza Tunnels.
¡NO PASARÁN! WITH GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM: Echo Chant Overheard on the Paris Metro — “We Are Nazis, We Are Proud!”
Plus ça change: The Mufti and the Führer.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Thousands of pro-Palestinian marchers descend upon WH chanting ‘Allahu akbar,’ ‘F–k Joe Biden’ as they demand ceasefire.
Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters massed in Washington, DC, Saturday afternoon before descending upon the White House to chant, “Allahu akbar” and “F–k Joe Biden” as they accused the president of genocide and demanded a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the crowd dotted with Palestinian flags and signs cried at the start of the event, which drew attendees from across the country.
The chant – which is growing increasingly popular in the wake of Hamas’ deadly incursion into southern Israel last month and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory attacks on Gaza – is widely considered antisemitic because it implies the elimination of the State of Israel and its people.
Others chanted, “Long live the Intifada,” an Arabic word used to refer to Palestinian uprising, specifically to conflicts that ran from 1987 and 1993 and from 2000 to about 2005 that left thousands dead.
Unofficial reports estimate 300,000 showed up to the protest, but DC Police could not confirm, telling The Post it does not estimate crowd size.
This seems awfully insurrection-y:
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1720962838343389621
UNEXPECTEDLY! Mask Mandates Officially Return In California.
The return of mask mandates is officially here.
Yup, even in late 2023, masks are back.
Starting Wednesday, several counties in Northern California have reinstated mask mandates in hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare settings. This had previously been rumored, but officially took effect this week. In far left Marin and Santa Clara Counties, those rules apply not just to employees but to anyone entering those facilities.
Contra Costa, Alameda, San Mateo and Sonoma Counties are set to punish all healthcare workers with masking, though won’t require the public to mask. Yet.
They’re back. And they’re not going away anytime soon.
Thanks to the unimaginable incompetence of local health officials, masks will be required in at least those settings until the end of March. Why? Because of flu season, of course!
This is what the endless misinformation from Fauci, the CDC and other health “experts” has created, a permanent state of rolling mandates in far left areas unwilling to accept reality. A culture of safetyism, where panicked administrators enact preemptive mandates that will, inevitably, accomplish nothing.
And it’s exactly why combating that misinformation remains as important as ever.
Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.
TOM COTTON READS THE RIOT ACT: “See what happens when we take back the majority.”
Sen. Tom Cotton point-blank reads Democrat colleagues the RIOT ACT: “See what happens when we take back the majority"🔥 pic.twitter.com/28dM4sn1yS
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 3, 2023
November 4, 2023
WHEN TOTALITARIAN SOCIALISTS MEET: Mr. Newsom goes to China. On his recent trip to China, the California governor met with President Xi Jinping to talk clean energy, clean transportation, and climate action. But he couldn’t resist a glamorous photo op.
Later that night, Newsom’s press team posted photos to Flickr showcasing the governor’s day at the wall. One of them in particular caught the attention of folks back home. In it, Newsom, sporting aviators and a crisp white shirt, leans one arm against the wall and looks off into the distance, mouth slightly ajar, the late afternoon sun beaming across his face as the wall snakes into the mountains behind him. From that pose (all studied nonchalance) to that hair (salt and pepper and coiffed just so), he looks like the romantic lead of an action movie.
Mockery ensued.
People took to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, to superimpose his photo on different backgrounds: homeless encampments, workers in a mine, the oval office. “The new Ann Getty’s rug,” cracked one commentator, referencing the infamous 2004 Harper’s Bazaar spread where Newsom and then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle — dubbed “The New Kennedys” — lay together on the floor of an ornate room in Ann Getty’s mansion. (“One of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie,” the article gushed of the then-San Francisco mayor and his spouse.)
In politics, a photo tells a story more so than anything else. The Great Wall photo elicited a lot of eye rolls, but it was far from the most important image to come out of Newsom’s one-week trip to China. That would be the photo of him shaking hands with Xi — a political feat at a time of geopolitical tension that would be nearly impossible for any other governor, and hard for even national leaders, to land.
Did Newsom take any governing tips from the man who has locked up over a million Uighurs in concentration camps and welded people inside their homes when COVID hit?
This is all an unprecedented turn of fortune for a company that has enjoyed a nearly uninterrupted string of hits ever since it started independently producing its movies with 2008’s “Iron Man.” That wildly profitable run culminated in the $2.8 billion success of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” a high-water mark for the studio that has earned nearly $30 billion over 32 films.
Replicating that kind of phenomenon is never easy. However, the source of Marvel’s current troubles can be traced back to 2020. That’s when the COVID pandemic ushered in a mandate to help boost Disney’s stock price with an endless torrent of interconnected Marvel content for the studio’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. According to the plan, there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment.
But the ensuing tsunami of spandex proved to be too much of a good thing, and the demands of churning out so much programming taxed the Marvel apparatus. Moreover, the need to tease out an interwoven storyline over so many disparate shows, movies and platforms created a muddled narrative that baffled viewers.
“The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It’s possible,” says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler, who covers Disney. “The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs.”
“The Marvels,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball past the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The movie, which cost $250 million and sees Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is tracking to open to $75 million-$80 million — far below the $185 million “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” took in domestically in its debut weekend last year.
Directed by Nia DaCosta, “The Marvels” unites Larson’s heroine with two superpowered allies, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau (introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision”) and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (first seen in the 2022 series “Ms. Marvel”). But instead of seamlessly building on the success of “Captain Marvel,” this move resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline.
Then eyebrows were raised again when DaCosta began working on another film while “The Marvels” was still in postproduction — the filmmaker moved to London earlier this year to begin prepping for her Tessa Thompson drama “Hedda.” (A representative for DaCosta declined to comment.)
“If you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of weird for the director to leave with a few months to go,” says a source familiar with the production.
The Critical Drinker is wondering why Variety is finally working his side of the street. (He speculates that Kathleen Kennedy and/or her minions want to shift focus to another failing Disney-owned franchise to take the heat off of her — at least for a while.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE HAMAS WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Rashida Tlaib Posts Video Pushing Genocidal Rhetoric against Jews.
In one part of the video, a crowd is featured chanting “from the river to the sea” — and text appears on screen further emphasizing this message. As I have written previously, this is a call for genocide against Jews:
The issue is that “from the river to the sea” refers to the entire area in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an area that encompasses not just territories captured by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War, but the entirety of Israel. Referring to that entire area as “Palestine” is not a call to end the occupation, to create a two-state solution, or even to return Israel to the borders that existed before 1967. It is a call for the elimination of Israel in its entirety. Israel is home to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population. The only way you can eliminate Israel and turn that whole area into Palestine is by killing millions of Jews.
This is not a random video Tlaib reposted which she could claim to have not fully vetted. It is a video in which she herself appears, and it’s posted under her own account. She is well aware that she is calling for genocide against Jews and doesn’t care.
Why should she care? She used the phrase before in December of 2020 without reprisal; why should this year be any different?
Related: Doug Ross tweets a “Moral Equivalency Cheat Sheet” to the Democrats’ Hamas Wing:
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Federal Anti-Semitism Probe Launched Into Oberlin College Over ‘Professor Of Peace’ Who Called For Israel’s Elimination.
JIM TREACHER: Obama’s Gonna Save Us from Artificial Intelligence, Everybody.
It can depict any scene you can imagine, in any style you choose. It can mimic human voices. It can mimic human faces. It can generate endless reams of legible text. It’s fascinating, and it’s terrifying. These machines will at least attempt to do whatever you tell it, and the quality of the results is increasing exponentially.
As noted fictional mathematician Ian Malcolm once said: The scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
This looks like a job for… er… the government???
Former President Barack Obama quietly advised the White House over the past five months on its strategy to address artificial intelligence, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with top West Wing aides at President Joe Biden’s request, according to aides to both men…
“You have to move fast here, not at normal government pace or normal private-sector pace, because the technology is moving so fast,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden saying. “We have to move as fast, or ideally faster. And we need to pull every lever we can.”
First of all, it’s nice to know all the conspiracy theories about Obama scuttling around behind the scenes of this White House were absolutely true.
Second, which is worse: artificial intelligence, or politicians exploiting artificial intelligence to further their ideology?
This isn’t just about Obama, although I’d sooner trust Edward Scissorhands to give me a prostate exam. Nobody in government should have that much power over information. But I’m not comforted by the fact that the president of the United States is trusting this to an unelected functionary. I don’t want control over the robots going to the propagandist who convinced millions of people that “Yes We Can” was a winning message.
Hey, remember when Obama’s lackies assured us that he wouldn’t be the leftist politician delivering 1984? Good times, good times.
OUT ON A LIMB: Will universities clean house of antisemitic profs? Don’t bet on it.
Or consider elite Williams College, whose German department wants an assistant professor “committed to inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy,” especially in the areas of “migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches.”
These are just a few of the current university job ads in the humanities and social sciences; I have enough to fill a file cabinet.
The irony of the Williams German department seeking a plainly ideological hire is that these centers of virulent antisemitism would have been at home in the pro-Nazi German universities of the 1930s.
University presidents and especially provosts, who are supposed to be the quality-control officers of higher education, could put a stop to this by exercising their authority to veto such ads or disapprove tenure and advancement of politicized professors.
The invertebrates who serve as college presidents will do nothing meaningful beyond appointing a task force to look into the issue, as Harvard has done to cover its shame.
That is to say: Ward Churchill was a one-off.
Our universities are so far gone and the number of professors deserving of dismissal so large that every school will shrink in terror from the controversies any housecleaning will cause.
The inmates run the asylum.
Indeed: The Shame of Academe.
A great school has a strong leader who is willing to say no to the jackals. Ben Sasse of the University of Florida, for example. “Our educational mission here begins with the recognition and explicit acknowledgment of human dignity—the same human dignity that Hamas’s terrorists openly scorn,” Sasse wrote in a remarkable October 11 statement. “Every single human life matters. We are committed to that truth. We will tell that truth.”
Too many of Sasse’s colleagues are dedicated to truth’s opposite. The past two years have seen the world tumble back into the 1930s. America retreated from Afghanistan. Russia launched the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. Hamas, and its Iranian masters, invaded Israel and sparked another war in the Greater Middle East. World order is collapsing, and the consequence is death and misery.
Nor is it only geopolitics that resembles the interwar period. The intellectual climate does, too. As Allan Bloom observed in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, German universities in the 1920s and 1930s were seedbeds of fascism. The most prominent German philosopher of the age, Martin Heidegger, belonged to the Nazi Party. He never apologized for his affiliation or behavior. Heidegger’s abstruse thought laid the foundations for the postmodern “critical theory” that has dominated the academy since the early 1990s. The result: Two generations of students cannot tell right from wrong, good from evil, justice from terror.
Or if Berlin in 1933 is too strong a model, how about England in 1933? The Harvard Crimson’s antisemitism disturbingly echoes Oxford in the 1930s.
On a cold February evening in 1933, the students of the Oxford Union debated and passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The debate, which took place a week or so after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, became an international sensation.
The students’ pacifism and lack of patriotism was viewed as emblematic of the degeneracy of an ungrateful and self-indulgent young intellectual elite. Winston Churchill called the vote “abject, squalid, shameless,” and “nauseating.”
The Oxford Union debate was not simply an academic exercise. At the time, many observers claimed it reinforced the view in Germany that the English were soft.
Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote to the former Oxford Union president who organized the debate: “I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill starred Resolution. … If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.” Churchill would later write that as a result of the “ever shameful” motion, “in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.”
In our own time, just 18 months ago, the academic aristocracy at the Harvard Crimson endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that targets Israel. The BDS movement arose in 2005 as a policy advocated by Palestinian civil society groups to delegitimize and isolate Israel, similar to the anti-apartheid fight against South Africa.
As was the case with the Oxford pledge, the publication of the Harvard Crimson’s editorial immediately attracted national media attention. The editorial argued that BDS could help the Palestinian cause in the same way that BDS helped win liberation for black South Africans.
The breathtaking scope of the proposed academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel would, for example, ban Israel from the Olympics, withdraw American and other foreign investments in Israel, and suspend Israel from the U.N. A few years ago, the German Parliament designated the BDS movement as antisemitic.
A principal objective of the boycott is to pressure Israel to agree to a right of return for approximately 7 million Palestinians. While the concept of such a right of “return” may have a superficial appeal to some, such a position, if now implemented, would be a demographic Trojan horse that would destroy Israel.
Which would make academia extremely happy: ‘Columbia Is Lost:’ President of Columbia U. Is ‘Grateful’ For The ‘Persistence’ of Pro-Hamas Students.
November 3, 2023
CURIOUSLY, JEFF BEZOS HAS A VERY DIFFERENT OPINION ABOUT RON DESANTIS THAN THE NEWSPAPER HE OWNS: Jeff Bezos Says He Is Leaving Seattle for Miami.
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon out of his Seattle garage in 1994 and plowed billions of dollars into transforming the city into a tech boomtown, said on Thursday that he was leaving his home of three decades and moving to Miami.
Mr. Bezos, 59, announced his move in an Instagram post on Thursday night. He said his parents had recently moved back to Miami, where he attended high school, and that he wanted to be closer to them and to his partner, Lauren Sanchez.
Another factor, he said, was that operations for his rocket company, Blue Origin, are increasingly shifting to Cape Canaveral, Fla., just over 200 miles by road north of Miami along the state’s Atlantic coast.
Why, it’s as if: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Biden Is Living In A Different Reality Than His Progressive Base, Daily Caller Reporter Explains.
Over 30 student groups at Harvard University wrote a joint letter to the school’s administration affirming their support for Palestine and blaming Israel for the attack. Harvard University President Claudine Gay said the student groups’ view does not represent the position of the university in an Oct. 10 statement, without explicitly taking the side of either Israel or Palestine.
More than 70 faculty members at the university called on Gay to condemn critics of the pro-Palestine protesters and argued Palestinian students are the most marginalized on campus.
I think you misspelled “Biden Is Living In A Different Reality Than His Progressive Boss,” Daily Caller.
November 2, 2023
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Snow cover in the Lower 48 is at record levels as November starts.
OLD AND BUSTED: Delta seeks to secure ‘world’s most trusted airline’ slogan.
—The L.A. Times, June 22, 2014.
The New Hotness? Delta says pilot accused of threatening to shoot the captain no longer works for the airline.
Jonathan J. Dunn was indicted Oct. 18 and charged with interfering with a flight crew over an incident that occurred during a flight in August 2022. The Transportation Department’s inspector general says Dunn, who was the first officer or co-pilot, threatened to shoot the captain after a disagreement over diverting the flight to take care of a passenger with a medical issue.
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The indictment was issued just a few days before an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot riding in the cockpit jump seat tried to shut down the engines of a Horizon Air jet in midflight. Joseph David Emerson of Pleasant Hill, California, pleaded not guilty last week in Portland, Oregon, to charges of attempted murder and interference with a flight crew.”
—The Washington Times, yesterday.
NEO: The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed.”
One of the tenets of leftism is the idea that the world divides neatly into oppressed and oppressor. You are one or the other, and there’s no escaping it. What’s more, the oppressed are defined as good no matter what their behavior; there are no objective standards for judging them except their defined status as oppressed. That is why we see it said that black people cannot be racists, even when they obviously are expressing hatred towards other races. That is why the George Floyd riots were perfectly okay and the J6 defendants were evil. That is why Nick Sandmann had a face so many wanted to punch, and his harassers were protected by the press and the left.
And of course that is why murderous savagery by Hamas is justified by virtue-signaling college students. Hamas is oppressed and Israelis are oppressors – or “colonialists” or “settlers” or whatever the term of art. That means Hamas can literally do no wrong.
Hamas leaders are well aware of this and exploit it.
Read the whole thing.
November 1, 2023
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: ‘We May Never Know Exactly What Hamas Wants’ Says Reporter In Front Of Hamas Holding ‘Exterminate Jews From Existence’ Banner.