SLOW BOAT TO AFRICA: Why you might not get your stolen car back in New Jersey.

Well, it turns out this is going to be a much more interesting investigation that your average shipboard incident. Unbeknownst to me, it seems New Jersey law enforcement authorities can’t wait to crawl through the rubble thanks to activity that’s been heating up in the state over the course of the past year.

Stolen vehicles – no bigs, happens everywhere lately, right?

Yeah, but for some reason, NJ stolen cars wind up in West Africa.

Maybe take an Uber out to dinner if you live in NJ? Restaurant valet services seem to be a favorite target in some areas. Toss the kiddo the keys, and an hour later, woosh. “95 percent of those cars were destined to West Africa,” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Steve Sapp.

Not Albania?

JAMES LILEKS: “This was an occasion for the two-minute hate session on Twitter the other day:”

Why? Because it is important to trash the happy things — at least the happy things regarded as such by people who are irritatingly ordinary. The people who would not, for example, bed-rot. The people who, ugh, do things. Now, I don’t think that all of the people who are attracted to this ship are industrious go-getters who want five days of high-octane activities; maybe some are. Bring the kids. They’ll be amazed. Time of their life, even if they barely remember it. Others just want a spot on the deck, lots of food, a nice view, and some fun. A party atmosphere enlivens the vacation.

Thirty bars! Well that says it all! Yes, it does; that’s how the cruise line pays for this. But I’m sure it has a huge movie theater, evening shows, comedy clubs, a blues club, a nice little piano bar tucked away somewhere that’s sedate and civilized.

I’ve been on a similar-sized ship in this class. Behold the press and crush of humanity:

Read the whole thing.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: California Closes Gyms For Two Weeks To Slow The Spread Of Fascism.

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBFUSCATION: Christopher Wray ‘Not Sure’ There Were FBI Assets at Capitol on Jan. 6.

Biggs called him out for obfuscating: “You and I both know that we’re talking different things here, and please don’t distract here because we’re focusing on those who were there in an undercover capacity on January 6. How many were there?”

Wray played dumb: “Again, I’m not sure that I can give you the number as I sit here. I’m not sure there were undercover agents on the scene.”

“I find that kind of a remarkable statement, Director,” Biggs claimed. “At this point, you don’t know whether there were undercover federal agents, FBI agents, in the crowd or in the Capitol on January 6?”

Wray then changed his tune and claimed he couldn’t say how many there were because of ongoing legal cases.

“I say that because I want to be very careful. There have been a number of court filings related to some of these topics, and I want to make sure that I stick with what’s in them,” he claimed.

“I understand that, but I thought I heard you say you didn’t know whether there were FBI agents or informants or human sources in the Capitol or in the vicinity on January 6. Did I misunderstand you?”

“I referred very specifically to FBI agents,” said Wray.

“And so are you acknowledging then there were undercover agents?” Biggs demanded.

“As I sit here right now, I do not believe there were undercover agents on the scene,” said Wray.

“Did you have any assets present that day?” Biggs shot back.

“In the crowd, when it comes to what you’re calling assets or what we would call confidential human sources, that’s a place where, again, I want to be careful, as I said in response to an earlier question. There are court filings that I think speak to this that I’m happy to make sure we get to you, assuming they’re not under seal, and that can better answer the question,” said Wray.

Wray is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He claims at once that he doesn’t know the number of agents involved in the Jan. 6 protest, doesn’t believe there were any agents, and that he can’t talk about how many agents were there because of ongoing court cases. Which is it?

But this is all just failure theater by the GOP House. Wray knows nothing will happen to him.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Smells like a coverup.” Ya think?

THIS SHOULD BE FUN: GOP Field Braces for Tucker Carlson Iowa Inquisition.

Carlson is out at Fox News, half a dozen candidates have entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination since his exit, and whether they like it or not, six White House hopefuls will sit down Friday with the opinionated commentator described by one GOP campaign official as a “fast-talking, new age populist.”

Granted anonymity to speak freely, the aide wasn’t offering an endearing assessment. RealClearPolitics spoke to multiple campaigns scheduled to attend the Des Moines forum. Some love Carlson and see the sit-down as a friendly media opportunity. Others loathe him and still remember how he laid waste to numerous pols on his primetime show.

One by one, Carlson will grill Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Regardless of any private hesitation they may harbor, each of the campaigns who spoke with RCP ahead of the event say they take Carlson seriously. Most have spent considerable time preparing. And for good reason.

In Carlson, the candidates will confront a firebrand with a loyal audience but without sympathy for old-guard GOP orthodoxies. Campaigns have scoured his old Fox News monologues, read his private text messages made public because of litigation, and reviewed clips from his new Twitter show. “Am I preparing for this differently than I would for other interviews?” asked a senior operative, scouring the material. “Yeah, of course. I’d be f______ stupid not to. I’d get fired if I didn’t.”

To paraphrase the late Roger Ailes regarding Democrats and Fox News, if GOP candidates can’t handle Tucker, how can they handle the Taliban and the CCP? (Not to mention the DC swamp.)

DEMOCRACY DIES IN TONE POLICING JOURNALISTS: White House warns reporter Simon Ateba about his press-room outbursts.

Escalating its feud with an assertive reporter, the White House on Tuesday issued a formal warning to Simon Ateba that he is at risk of losing his entry pass if he continues to disrupt daily press briefings.

The warning — a first for President Biden’s press office — followed run-ins between press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the journalist from Cameroon who has interrupted her briefings to demand that he be recognized to ask a question.

Jean-Pierre has declined to call on Ateba for months and has repeatedly admonished him for speaking out of turn. Ateba, the owner and White House correspondent of a news site called Today News Africa, has portrayed himself as a victim of “racism and discrimination” by the administration.

In an unsigned letter, the White House press office told Ateba that he was at risk of losing his “hard” pass — the credential that enables reporters to enter the White House grounds at will — if he continues to disrupt briefings.

No word yet if Ateba will be yet another journalist that Biden locks in a closet:

● ‘Don’t Think About It:’ White House Aide Warns Journalist Against Asking Biden Questions During Event.

● Joe Biden Snaps at Another Female Reporter.

● Biden Snaps At Reporter For Asking About Bombshell New York Post Reports, Does Not Deny.

● President Wise Guy: “Joe Biden is playing hard to get. He’s involved in an unrequited love affair: The media adore him, but he hates them.”

● ‘Classy:’ Joe Biden Snaps At Reporter After Being Asked About Hunter’s Paternity Test.

● Bullying Biden Yells at Fox’s Doocy: ‘Ask the Right Questions!’

● Biden Accused of Sexism After Remarks to Female Moderator.

● Biden Explodes When Confronted On Lying About Charlottesville. Video Proves Biden Wrong.

And these classics from the Obama era:

● VP Biden’s Office Apologizes For Locking Reporter In Storage Closet During Fundraiser.

● Vengeance: Biden’s Office Seeks Investigation Into Unfriendly Journalist.

And of course, ground zero, from 1988: Why Joe Biden’s First Campaign for President Collapsed After Just 3 Months.

VARIETY: Oppenheimer First Reactions Praise Christopher Nolan’s ‘Most Impressive Work Yet’: A ‘Spectacular Achievement’ and ‘Total Knockout.’

And regarding the other big film opening on the 21st: Woke ‘Barbie’ Bait and Switch in the Works?

GUITARS ACROSS THE WATER: Rick Beato interviews Dan and Mick from That Pedal Show (Video):

NO. NEXT QUESTION? One Year After Chesa Boudin’s Recall, Is San Francisco Safer Under His Successor’s More Punitive Policies?

I AM BECOME DEATH, THE DESTROYER OF BRANDS: Dylan Mulvaney takes trip to Peru to ‘feel safe’ after Bud Light disaster: ‘I feel very safe’ outside of USA. In the TikTok video, Mulvaney also claimed to have done ‘shaman ceremonies.’

The latter isn’t all that surprising, to be honest: The Return of Paganism.

Related: Former Anheuser-Busch executive ‘shocked’ by company’s losses: Mulvaney partnership ‘was a mistake.’

Axios reported Modelo Especial overtook Bud Light as the top beer seller in the United States in May.

[Anson Frericks, the former president of operations] said Anheuser-Bush needs a CEO that can come up with a clear vision for the company and the brand.

“[Bud Light] was the largest brand in the U.S. because it was remarkably apolitical. It was always about sports, it was always about music, it was about bringing people together. That’s why it was a mistake that they did this campaign in the first place because they were unable to come out,” he said.

No, they certainly came out (including serving as a sponsor of Toronto’s Pride Parade last month), but this was compounded by former exec Alissa Heinerscheid insulting Bud Light’s customer base. As Ed Morrissey wrote in May:

[T]he problem here isn’t so much Mulvaney as it is Alissa Heinerscheid and the execs at Bud and A-B. If not for her derogatory comments about Bud Light’s consumer base, the one-off can for Mulvaney may have passed with only a mild and short-lived impact. Other brands have gone farther in choosing trans endorsers; David wrote yesterday about Smirnoff and its massive parent Diageo, for instance, and Nike actually paid Mulvaney to endorse its line of sports bras with a ridiculous video that all but mocked the athleticism and skills of legitimate female athletes. Why didn’t those brands take the same kind of damage, at least thus far?

Because their execs didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who buy their product. This one-minute clip will likely get at least five lectures in the Death of Bud Light Harvard Business case study.

Exit quote: “In sixty-four seconds, Heinerscheid demolishes her career at A-B as well as any impression that the beermaker knows or cares anything about the people who buy its industrial-level lagers:”

THE STIG CRASHES: Ben Collins is incensed that ‘country club weirdo’ Jonathan Chait would suggest that he’s a bit of a hack.

#HIMTOO? Huw Edwards named as BBC presenter accused of paying teen for explicit pictures.

The tone here makes it sounds like he died. https://t.co/ag8Srwl7Ve

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) July 12, 2023

A CASE STUDY IN HOLLYWOOD HYPOCRISY: How It Deals With Stars From the Left and Right.

As Hollywood rolls out the red carpet for the superhero movie “The Flash,” it is hoping you forgot all you’ve heard about the star, Ezra Miller.

Or, at the very least, Hollywood hopes you forgive him quicker than the conservative actors it has canceled.

You may know Miller, 30, as Patrick from the 2012 young adult book-to-movie adaptation of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Miller also starred as Credence Barebone in the Harry Potter prequel series “Fantastic Beasts.”

Now, he’s starring in the title role in “The Flash”—but this time, with more allegations of sexual misconduct and petty crimes under his belt than last time he donned the red supersuit in 2021’s “Justice League.”

Miller’s fall from grace is nothing short of bewildering. What’s more unbelievable than his resume of offenses is the way Hollywood has collectively decided to turn the other cheek to his rap sheet while punishing other actors—conservative actors—for the much lesser “offense” of disagreeing with Hollywood’s left-wing orthodoxy.

Pay no attention to Miller’s rap sheet. However, it’s imperative that you notice that Jim Caviezel is QAnon-adjacent: The media’s bizarre Sound of Freedom freakout.

The media is committing a rhetorical trick and logical fallacy by linking all child trafficking to one vague if well-known online conspiracy. “QAnon believes children are abducted for weird spirit cooking rituals and therefore all child trafficking is a conspiracy theory.” On CNN, a guest said that “these films are created out of moral panics… it specifically is looking at QAnon concepts of these child trafficking rings.” These segments seem to exist solely due to the personal politics of the lead actor.

Yet when a new Top Gun or Mission: Impossible film is released, we are not flooded with stories about star Tom Cruise’s role in the kooky Church of Scientology from the Washington Post or CNN. Why is this?

Good question. Why does the media campaign hard to defend child exploiters?

TYLER O’NEIL: Will the Federal Government Force Transgender Ideology on Employers? Senate to Vote on Biden EEOC Pick.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE AGAINST FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: COVID-19 and obesity: Doctors studying link between excess weight and severe disease.

—NBC News, September 8^th, 2020.

● Chaser: MSNBC Writer Hilariously Complains That GOP Candidates, RFK Jr. Have Gone Full Gym Bro Mode In Lead Up To 2024.

—The Daily Caller, today.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: List: Ten climate lies on 35th anniversary of global warming warning.

It has been 35 years since the start of global warming was declared by climate educator James Hansen and carried on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Many doomsday calls have followed, but the worst of the warnings have not been seen, according to critics and supporters.

It’s all probably far too late. After all, as Hansen warned the Grauniad in January of 2009, incoming President Obama “has four years to save Earth.”

DON SURBER: Montana drops woke library association.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company says it’s ceasing operations.

RIP: Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being author, dies aged 94.

Exit Quote: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

—Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The violent purging of womanhood.

I couldn’t help thinking of these self-punishing brides of Christ as I read Elliot Page’s disturbing autobiography, Pageboy. Once Ellen, an actress well known for her turns in Juno, Inception and numerous other movies, Elliot Page of course seems starkly different to yesteryear’s self-flagellating seekers after Christ. Yes, Page has also ‘amputated from nature and spirit what made them female’ – including her breasts – but she is not ‘religious at all’, she says in passing in her life story of transing from female to male. And yet the self-loathing and self-harm of the crazed saints of the early Church find an eerie echo in this tome, on nearly every page. It’s chilling, and we need to talk about it.

Like those women, Elliot writes of her dread of womanhood. She speaks of female physiology with a contempt that would be damned as misogyny if it came from a man. Her first period horrifies her: ‘That smell of metallic blood, [like] a robot leaking.’ Puberty, and in particular the growth of her breasts, sickens her. ‘I’d forever feel this disgust, and I punished my body for it’, she writes. She does everything she can to conceal her breasts – no, not beneath a nail-studded hairshirt, like our poor saints, but under ‘oversized concealing t-shirts’. And also through contorting her body: ‘My posture began to fold, shoulders caving in.’ ‘The unbearable weight of… self-disgust’ is how she describes her emotional response to turning from a tomboy who was often mistaken for an actual boy into a woman. She no longer felt ‘present in my flesh’. Instead, she felt a ‘compulsion to tear apart my flesh, a sort of scolding’ (my emphasis).

Like the female saints, Page cut herself, starved herself, repressed herself. ‘People cut themselves, I’ll try that’, she writes. She would ‘take a small knife to my room… pressing down, dragging it slightly, enough to see that red, enough for that relief’. Like St Margaret Mary Alacoque, she used a knife to mortify her womanly flesh. ‘People stop eating, I’ll try that’, she writes. In response to her developing body, she eats less and less. She relishes the opportunity to play ‘a character that was partially starved to death’ – in the 2007 film An American Crime – because it means she can ‘lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself’. Where female saints starved themselves ‘in the service of holiness’, in Rudolph Bell’s words, Page starves herself in the service of alleviating the ‘filling out’ of her body, her ‘growing breasts’. Her stomach feels like ‘a dirty old cloth’, ill-deserving of food, she writes.

And like the saints, she hears voices. This part of the book feels incredibly disquieting. It is undeniably religious. A voice tells her to stop eating. ‘[It] spoke with a sinister tone’, she says. ‘That can’t go inside of you’, the voice demands in relation to a pizza Page orders. This ‘minacious voice’ returns. It tells her, ‘You deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination.’ Later, however, ‘that fucking voice’ brings salvation: it reveals unto her the trans resurrection she must undergo to deliver herself from self-hatred. ‘You don’t have to feel this way’, it says. What is this? God? The same being that instructed Catherine of Siena to eat nothing but the Holy Eucharist? We never find out. But I guess if God can tell St Catherine not to consume food, He can tell Elliot Page not to eat pizza.

Earlier: The Return of Paganism.

As G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote, “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Call me crazy, but if the voice has a “sinister tone” it probably doesn’t come from God, but from the other guy.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? A 10% stake in Led Zeppelin’s music is for sale. Here’s how it ended up on the market.

KINSLEY GAFFE:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX): “I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action, particularly in higher education.” pic.twitter.com/OSRVQQsMrF

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 11, 2023

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The ‘Banned All Over’ Book Antifa Gave Me.

This question puzzled the woman with the Antifa button, who finally handed me a copy of the graphic novel “Drama” by Raina Telgemeier.

“This one is banned all over,” she assured me.

Putting the copy of “Drama” in my bag, I stepped away from the table of “banned literature” and walked into the Marriott to get the opinions of Moms for Liberty chapters from around the nation.

What better time than this group’s national summit to hear damning criticisms from different states’ moms of what the Antifa activists described as the “banned all over” book?

But I couldn’t find one mom at the summit who had ever heard of “Drama,” much less could tell me about efforts to restrict minors’ access to it.

I called a few left-leaning journalists of my acquaintance on K-12 education beats at Chalkbeat, Education Week, CNN, and USA Today. None had ever heard of any efforts to ban “Drama.”

The only reference to the “banned all over” graphic novel I found was an ACLU report claiming that three Texas public school districts moved “Drama” from elementary and middle school libraries to their high school libraries.

“Maybe the book just hasn’t been looked into yet,” I thought.

Certainly Antifa activists wouldn’t lie about a book to create drama of their own.

So I wasted an hour reading a comic book with no plot—just a grown adult fantasizing about eighth grade theater students coming out as “gay” or “bi.”

Why it’s as if: There Are No Banned Books.

CHARLES COOKE GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Joe Biden Is an Asshole.

At Axios, Alex Thompson reports the apparently surprising news that Biden “has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.” Among the president’s favorite admonitions are: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!,” and “Get the f**k out of here!” Per Thompson, these revelations are important because, like his refusal to acknowledge his own granddaughter, they threaten to damage Biden’s “carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle.” But that image is for cretins and sycophants. Joe Biden has never been a “kindly uncle” — or anything approaching one. For his whole life, Joe Biden has been a plodding mediocrity with a Delaware-sized chip on his shoulder. What about him, I wonder, would not lead him to shout stupidly at people? He’s a bully. Check. He’s insecure. Check. He’s senile. Check. He is hostage to his precarious record of lies. Check. His anger is as inevitable as the sunset.

We don’t need Axios to tell us about it. In 1987, during his first run for president, Biden was in spiffing form. Asked by a voter in New Hampshire about his academic record, Biden grew unhinged. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” he said, before rattling off a sequence of falsehoods that ought by rights to have ended his career. He said that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. He did not. He said that he went to that law school on a “full academic scholarship.” He did not. He said that he “won the international moot-court competition,” “was the outstanding student in the political science department,” and “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” None of that was true. In closing, Biden betrayed what the exchange was really about. “I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,” he jabbed. Mr. Dunning-Kruger, your table is ready.

Character matters. Biden has none. As president, the man spends his days considering how he can mislead voters about his record, how he can get around the Constitution, and how he can demagogue the other branches. All that talk in 2020 about “the soul of America”? That was guff. Flotsam. Malarkey. There is nothing the man won’t lie about. He lies about inflation. He lies about gas prices. He lies about the deficit. He lies about the border. He lies about having been arrested for his civil-rights activism, and about having been raised by Puerto Ricans and Greeks and Jews, and about having traveled to Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a Navy hero, and about his son’s death, and about the crash that killed his first wife and baby daughter, and about the small kitchen fire that he had 15 years ago, which, in his inimitable style, he has managed to transmute into “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.” In 1987, he plagiarized a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock that contained a completely different backstory from his own. In 2012, he accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put African Americans “back in chains.” Push a pin into a history book, and you’ll find Joe Biden lying about something.

You can see Biden being an asshole as early as this 1974 profile by Kitty Kelley:

In his office in the New Senate Office Building surrounded by more than 35 pictures of his late wife*, Biden launched into a three-hour reminiscence. It wasn’t maudlin—he seemed to enjoy remembering aloud. He was the handsome football hero. She was the beautiful homecoming queen. Their marriage was perfect. Their children were beautiful. And they almost lived happily ever after. “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don’t really know what I lost because they never knew what I had. Our marriage was sensational. It was exceptional, and now that I look around at my friends and my colleagues, I know more than ever how phenomenal it really was. When you lose something like that, you lose a part of yourself that you never get back again.

“My wife was the brains behind my campaign. I would never have made it here without her. It’s hard to imagine ever going through another campaign without her. She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I’m smart but Neilia was ten times smarter. And she had the best political sense of anybody in the world. She always knew the right thing to do.

“Let me show you my favorite picture of her,” he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?

“My beautiful millionaire wife was a conservative Republican before she met me. But she changed her registration. At first she didn’t want me to run for the Senate—we had such a beautiful thing going, and we knew all those stories about what politics can do to a marriage. She didn’t want that to happen. At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn’t work out because I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else. That’s when she started campaigning with me and that’s when I started winning. You know, the people of Delaware really elected her,” he says, “but they got me.”

Who talks like that – to the press(!) — about a recently deceased spouse? As Cooke wrote above, “Character matters. Biden has none.” It’s not just “a stutter” — it was always so.

UPDATE:

Some exceptions do apply to that “rule,” however.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Like they say:

Everyone can see that we've now reached the "pretend he's an angry alpha instead of an Alzheimer's patient" stage in the news cycle. Anyone who's cared for a loved one with dementia knows exactly what's going on here. https://t.co/2nu5gWqPIR

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 10, 2023

* UPDATE (From Ed): For years, Biden lied about both Neilia Biden’s death, and claimed the truck driver involved in the accident was drunk: Joe Biden’s false claim about drunken driver draws renewed scrutiny. “Now-retired Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the investigation as chief deputy attorney general, told Politico, ‘She had a stop sign. The truck driver did not.’ In 2008, he told [the Newark (Delaware) Post] that rumors about alcohol playing a role in the accident were ‘incorrect.’” As one person tweeted in 2019, “This is awful. Did you know for years [Biden] told people his wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed by a drunk driver, when in fact the accident was tragically her fault. The truck driver was haunted by the accident until he died.”

(Updated and bumped.)

WOKE CORPORATIONS EMERGE AS AMERICA’S ‘BIG BROTHER:’

The rise of left-wing corporate marketing and environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards are creating a form of corporate dystopia that effectively gives Democrats control over your life without your consent. The soft totalitarianism of conformity can be seen by the increased control we’ve given corporate America. And that control is being abused every day. If you’re concerned about “Big Brother,” he probably won’t be pulling your strings from Washington, but rather, through the “death by a thousand paper cuts” enabled by your ideological and social betters at big corporations.

There is no better recent case in point than a man whose home’s “smart” devices were disabled by Amazon after a delivery driver falsely accused him of hurling a racial slur via a Ring doorbell. The homeowner, who is Black, was not home during the purported incident and yet was locked out of his smart devices for a week while Amazon conducted a “review.” It turns out, the smart doorbell did not emit a racial epithet but instead issued the automated response, “Excuse me, can I help you?”

The incident serves as a succinct illustration for woke overreaction and the power of our modern corporate state. There likely will not be a Chinese-style social credit system passed by Congress, at least not in the next decade. However, consumers are little by little accepting the idea that their lives will be controlled by tech companies increasingly equipped with artificial intelligence technology and far-left goals.

It may seem weird to paraphrase Gerald Ford at this moment, but a device powerful enough to control nearly all aspects of your domestic life can take it away just as fast. If you step out of line, you could lose your window into the modern world. Just ask supporters of the Canadian truckers’ 2022 convoy to protest COVID vaccine mandates, who temporarily lost access to their bank accounts for making donations to the effort as small as $50. Here in the U.S., Amazon ceased web hosting for the conservative social media site Parler, citing “dangerous” content, and PayPal cut off GoFundMe competitor GiveSendGo.

I’m pretty sure that Norman Jewison didn’t intend for Rollerball to be a how-to guide for giant corporations.