GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: A failure to communicate: California government cuts back press access.
Related: Gavin Newsom Just Won’t Quit His Weird Obsession With Florida.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
April 6, 2023
REBEKAH JONES CLAIMS DESANTIS KIDNAPPED HER SON; UPDATE: video/warrant.
According to the Pensacola News Journal, her son was not “kidnapped” but rather Jones turned her son into the local sheriff’s office:
So what actually happened?
Well, it sounds like Rebekah’s son has some mental health problems, from which I hope he gets relief soon. He appears to suffer from depression and alienation, and he has been acting out.
More particularly he has been threatening to shoot up a school.
This is hardly “sharing memes.” It is a deadly serious threat.
The Pensacola News Journal seems to have the most complete story as of now, so I will rely on them. As you can see the real story seems a bit different from what Jones has been pushing on social media.
Unexpectedly! The Ultimate ‘Florida Woman?’ It’s Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.
April 5, 2023
TRUMP’S TRIAL IS ABOUT WINNING IN 2024. IT’S ON GOP VOTERS IF THEY FALL FOR THE DEMS’ PLOY:
Ultimately Trump’s fate will not be decided by a Soros-backed prosecutor in New York, or one in Georgia, or by Jack Smith, who is attempting to build and obstruction case against Trump. The point here is not to “serve justice” but to prolong and publicize, and thereby block out any other candidate that may pose a stronger opponent to the current President.
Trump’s fate will be decided by GOP primary voters. They can choose to rally around Trump and ride him into the general election, with the backing of the Democrats and the media, or they can finally decide the drama and the chaos are all too much, and turn the page.
Trump’s fate, and the fate of 2024, is ultimately only up to them. It just depends on how much they love or hate the show the media is putting on for them, once again.
Last month, Ed Morrissey wrote, “As one of my colleagues put it on Twitter, you might personally like Trump and think he got the shaft in 2020. But do you want to spend a general election campaign talking about payoffs to Stormy Daniels and ‘stop the steal’ efforts in Fulton County? Especially if a viable and proven alternative is at hand? That’s why DeSantis is running, and why he always was going to run in this cycle.”
DON’T HOLD BACK VARIETY, TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL: Don Lemon’s Misogyny at CNN, Exposed: Malicious Texts, Mocking Female Co-Workers and ‘Diva-Like Behavior.’
Back in 2008, Don Lemon was co-anchoring CNN’s “Live From” weekday show with Kyra Phillips, a gig that he landed after he arrived at the network two years prior from local news in Chicago. For months, tensions between the pair kept mounting. On more than one occasion, a “Live From” producer and a newsroom supervisor had to pull Lemon off the air during a commercial break because of the anchor’s provocative antics, not unlike his recent declaration that the 51-year-old Nikki Haley isn’t a viable presidential candidate because she “isn’t in her prime.” Amid the charged atmosphere, sources say Lemon disrespected colleague Nancy Grace on the air and Soledad O’Brien during an editorial meeting attended by roughly 30 staffers.
But his antipathy toward Phillips was particularly concerning and had many members of the close-knit Atlanta news team on edge. While Phillips was on assignment in Iraq — a high-profile gig that Lemon coveted — he vented his disappointment at being passed over by tearing up pictures and notes on top of and inside Phillips’ desk in the news pod they shared, according to two sources who worked there at the time. When she returned from Iraq, things only got weirder. One night while dining with members of the news team, she received the first of two threatening text messages from an unknown number on her flip phone that warned, “Now you’ve crossed the line, and you’re going to pay for it.” Phillips was visibly rattled and quickly enlisted CNN’s higher ups to identify the sender. Remarkably, the texts were traced back to Lemon, according to those same sources. A human resources investigation was launched, and while the findings were never disclosed to the growing pool of staffers who were aware of the situation, Lemon was abruptly pulled from his co-anchor duties with Phillips and moved to the weekends. It was a demotion by any objective measure and understood to be some kind of disciplinary action. It appears to be the last time he was paired with a female anchor until his most recent assignment on “CNN This Morning With Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.”
As Ed Morrissey speculates, “if Variety is publishing this long record, maybe this week is when new CNN/Discovery management begin recalculating Lemon’s value.”
April 4, 2023
ROGER KIMBALL: The truth comes out about Beijing’s balloon.
Well, well, well. The world seems amazed at the news that the Chinese spy balloon that meandered over the entire continental United States this winter was, you know, spying. That’s what spy balloons do: they spy. They collect intelligence — in this case, information from some of America’s most sensitive sites (I was going to say “secure sites,” but that would clearly be inaccurate). What do they do then? Like bees collecting pollen, they transmit what they collected back to the hive, which, mirabile dictu, just happens to be located in Beijing.
Anyone who was paying attention knew this. Did secretary of state Antony Blinken? Did puppet-in-chief Joe “Chocolate-Chip” Biden? Probably. But there is knowing and then there is knowing. The latter includes acknowledging what you know, which neither they nor SecDef Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin nor chair-entity of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark “White Rage” Milley did.
Nope, it was ostrich time all around — by which I mean that our heads were buried in the sand. Which is why the NBC report that — can you believe it? — Beijing’s spy balloon was not only collecting secrets but also transmitting them back to Comrade Pooh-Bear Xi caused a little ripple in the pond of public complacency yesterday. “Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence from sensitive US military sites, despite US efforts to block it.” You don’t say?
In accordance with the prophecy: Biden Says He’ll Shoot Down Chinese Spy Balloon As Soon As He’s Done Letting It Spy.
— The Babylon Bee, February 3rd.
FILM LADD: The Avengers vs The Wild Bunch (Video).
OUT ON A LIMB: John Lennon — No Model to Emulate.
THE TYRANNY OF CLICHES: ABC’s Donna Brazile: DeSantis Running on a 1950s America, Not 2050s.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Radical enviros want Great Salt Lake given personhood.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: After NPR’s Major Layoff, Employees Accuse CEO Of Racism.
Triggered employees leapt into Zoom’s chat feature and declared [CEO John] Lansing’s reaction “racist.” One wrote, “Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.”
In a wonderful reap-what-you-sow moment, another employee posted a link to an NPR segment titled “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.”
Sounds like Lansing better voluntarily commit himself to an inpatient DEI program — and quick.
In 2022, NPR’s David Folkenflik wrote an article about NPR’s “struggles to retain high-profile journalists of color. Hosts have complained to the network’s leadership of pay disparities along racial and gender lines.”
At the time, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said, “That sounds systemic, and weird, considering 99 percent of NPR’s programming is about promoting equity.” His segment included a brief yet tasty sampling of the madness in NPR’s programming.
Why is the institutional left such a cesspit of racism?
April 3, 2023
REPORT: Trump to be charged Tuesday with 34 felony counts, but spared handcuffs and mug shot.
Donald Trump will be placed under arrest on Tuesday and informed that he has been charged with 34 felony counts for falsification of business records, according to a source who has been briefed on the procedures for the arraignment of the former president.
A New York City Police arrest report summarizing the charges against Trump will then be prepared and entered into the court system before he is led into a courtroom to be formally arraigned on the charges, none of which are misdemeanors.
But, the source said, Trump will not be put in handcuffs, placed in a jail cell or subjected to a mug shot — typical procedures even for white collar defendants until a judge has weighed in on pretrial conditions. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which has been consulting with the Secret Service and New York City court officials, concluded that there was no reason to subject the former president to handcuffs or a mug shot.
It’s by Michael Isikoff, the man who inadvertently launched the Drudge Report, a key mile-marker on the way to the creation of the Blogosphere.
Related: From ¡No Pasarán!: If the Trump Arrest Means Anything, It Is the Fact That It Confirms the Millionaire’s Charges Against the Deep State.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY WAS RELEASED 55 YEARS AGO TODAY; an illustrated Twitter thread well worth your time delves into its writing, lengthy shoot, and (a little of) its symbolism:
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was released 55 years ago today. Acclaimed as one of the greatest and most influential films to come out of Hollywood, the making of story behind Stanley Kubrick’s classic is as epic as the film itself.
A THREAD
1/29 pic.twitter.com/LO6sI3K7Bn
— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) April 3, 2023
Carolyn Geduld’s 1973 Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the very best books to crack the film’s themes and subtext.
ACE OF SPADES REVIEWS THE NEW DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS MOVIE:
This is a movie which has 90% fresh ratings from both critics and audience members — I think it’s 91% fresh from critics, 94% from audience — and scored a high A- rating from Cinemascore’s exit polls of people just leaving the movie at theaters.
It even got Critical Drinker’s seal of approval. Spoiler alert: He drops a small but fun spoiler in that.
It should have made more money — but Hasbro is a woke greedpit of shitlibs, and the writers of the movie openly bragged about how fun it was to “emasculate” the film’s male characters.
61% of this film’s audience were males, and I can guarantee you that at least half of the women going to the movie only went because their husband or boyfriend was going.
And the film-makers decided to brag about emasculating men for entertainment purposes.
Which isn’t even really true. The film is not that woke by 2023 standards, and the male heroes actually do come off as heroes.
It’s all fun and games baiting and disrespecting unfashionably straight cis white males, until you realize, oh, right, straight cis white males are our core audience. Maybe we shouldn’t have attacked them just before we begged them to come give us some of their straight cis white male money.
Seeing headlines along the lines of “The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Intentionally Emasculates Its Leading Men” likely caused lots of potential audience members to sit this one out, further causing movie theaters to struggle, post-pandemic and the related explosion in streaming platforms.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I saw it on a whim yesterday when a friend asked me to go with him since his wife wasn’t interested. It was a nice upbeat action movie, not super-believable but then it is a movie based on a fantasy game. I didn’t think the male characters were emasculated, though my friend said it did underscore his longstanding belief that Bards were basically useless characters. And yet that’s who kept the team together, so . . . Anyway, yeah, not bad and not emasculating. And really, writers who disrespect their audiences shouldn’t find further work.
ROGER KIMBALL: At the Threshold or Turning Point.
The sharp erosions of our freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in the history books, or at least in the official manual of totalitarian crowd control.
How easily the entire population was cowed into submission.
People abandoned their businesses, cowered in their homes, wore pointless masks, and pretended to believe that liquor stores were more “essential” venues than houses of worship.
Amazing.
But it’s also important to remember the martyrs to the ideology of the deep state, the people who were chewed up and spit out as the regime went about the business of consolidating its power and its control over the climate of opinion.
An incomplete but representative list includes the following:
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who was set up and destroyed by the FBI in order to make room for the Russian collusion hoax.
John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump, who, even as I write, is in the process of being smeared and possibly disbarred because he dared to offer the former president legal advice.
Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser, who, though he lived practically next door to the FBI building in Washington, was apprehended while boarding a plane. The G-Men slapped the 72-year-old man in handcuffs (and leg irons!) and threw him into a cell once occupied, they were careful to tell him, by John Hinckley, the lunatic who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Then there are parents who object to schools’ force-feeding their children with the radical Marxist teachings of critical race theory, not to mention the latest forms of sexual exoticism.
For challenging those orthodoxies, Merrick Garland, attorney general of the United States, instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, after suggestions their protests might be “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
To combat this fantasy crime, Garland called (pdf) for a “partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
It was all-in to crush the upstarts.
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?
We finally moved to the museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”
My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature. Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
“A religion,” one kid answered.
“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.
“Normal,” a girl said.
“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
All of a sudden, things changed. Kelley Szany, the museum’s senior vice president of education and exhibitions, had told me that the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum. But the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum. No wonder: Survivors who had lived long enough to tell their stories to contemporary audiences were young before the war, many of them younger than the middle schoolers in my tour group. They did not have a lifetime of memories of anti-Semitic harassment and social isolation prior to the Holocaust. For 6-year-olds who saw their synagogue burn—unlike their parents and grandparents, who might have survived various pogroms, or endured pre-Nazi anti-Semitic boycotts and other campaigns that ostracized Jews politically and socially—everything really did “suddenly” change.
Read the whole thing.
AOC MORPHED INTO MITT ROMNEY SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Move Over, Pierre Delecto: It Looks as If AOC Has a Burner Account, and It’s a Doozy.
On April 1, AOC defended her rudeness to Chaya Raichik, that is, Libs of TikTok, by tweeting: “NYC doesn’t play with bigots and transphobes and neither do I.” Another Twitter user responded by attacking AOC from the Left: “But you vote to send money to Nazis and to fund the Israeli apartheid. But hey, at least you stood up to a TikTok star.” To that, AOC replied, but from the zaza demon account: “Lol and what makes you think that i did anything to support nazis? You’re delusional. Seek help.” Whoops.
Well, now that you mention it…
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: The CMT Country Music Awards last night featured a drag queen performance. Yes, I am serious.
This outrageous display comes less than a week after the Nashville school shooting that many liberal outlets and voices implicitly or explicitly blamed on Tennessee’s new law banning drag shows in front of children.
Ballerini, a Tennessee native, clearly offered this performance to be a rebuke of that law, a signal of “allyship” with the LGBT+TBA community, and a co-sign of drag queens dancing sexually in front of children. Sponsored by CMT.
In the same weekend we got Dylan Mulvaney becoming a spokesman for Bud Light and cross-dressing men taking over the stage at the country music awards. Lord have mercy.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported: Beverage Pretending To Be Beer Features Man Pretending To Be Woman.
April 2, 2023
JEFF DUNETZ IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Did Moses Get Cheated On Passover?
Moses endured Pharaoh, the Exodus, and forty years of wandering in a desert-like wilderness with Jews constantly complaining about the food. But on the holiday, remembering the Exodus from slavery— he doesn’t even get offered something to drink! Not even a glass of freaking water (which today he could get without beating up a rock).
But Elijah, Mr. “ride a flaming chariot into heaven,” gets a glass of wine at every Seder, in every Jewish house worldwide.
The last line of the entire Torah begins with, “And there was no other prophet who arose in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” But the rabbis decided Elijah gets to party during Passover seders.
And guess what? Elijah is rewarded at every bris (ritual circumcision). The child’s parents put out an extra chair– for Elijah! So, while the guy who wouldn’t pray for the Jewish people gets wine on Passover and then bagels and whitefish at every bris. On the other hand, Moses, the prophet like no other who arose in Israel-gets bubkis.
Moses is called Moshe Rabbeinu, which means Moses, the Teacher. Perhaps he can join a teacher’s union and get to take off with full pay during a worldwide tragedy even when it’s over (like the AFT). After all, if anyone deserves union protection to be prevented from being cheated out of recognition, it’s Moses, the screwed prophet.
Read the whole thing.
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay.
That’s right: Xi Jinping, one of the most powerful and repressive government officials in the world and most deserving of political skewering and mockery will be one of the few exempt from it, at least where Midjourney is concerned. Some other terms are restricted, though Holz won’t make the list public — “Afghanistan” for example, and now some depictions of arrests after the fake Donald Trump arrest fiasco — but Holz reportedly treats China as a unique case.
His quote about it is a doozy. From The Washington Post:
But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.
“We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”
He wants you to simultaneously believe that his program is so important that it must do whatever is necessary to remain accessible to people within China, but so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if fundamental political expression about one of the most powerful authoritarians in the world can’t be created on it. It doesn’t add up.
It’s no surprise that a tech CEO would be willing to make trade-offs for the Chinese market. At this point, it’s more surprising if one won’t do so. But Holz’s position is particularly careless and reveals an increasingly serious threat to free expression on and offline today: individual countries’ censorship laws, particularly those of powerful countries like China, are setting global rules sometimes enforced by tech companies anxious to display their compliance. It’s not just Midjourney’s China-based users that can’t satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States.
Local laws are suddenly not so local anymore, and people like Holz have no qualms about aiding their illiberal international spread.
At the moment, there are workarounds, but how long will they last?
Flashback: A Slow Kowtow to China.
Demanding obeisance has a rich history in Chinese culture. In 1793, British envoy Lord George Macartney was charged with opening permanent trade relations with China. The Chinese still clung to the old feudal demand of the kowtow. In the old days, the Chinese believed that the emperor literally ruled the world, which meant foreign rulers were more like vassals. And all vassals must acknowledge the supremacy of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. The problem was that Macartney was essentially a stand-in for the British crown, and he couldn’t in good conscience recognize the emperor as his sovereign.
Kowtowing requires three kneelings and nine prostrations—meaning the supplicant actually lies face down on the floor—in order to demonstrate total inferiority. Macartney agreed to kneel out of respect, but he wouldn’t put his head to the ground nine times.
The Chinese were offended and Britain and China didn’t get the trade deal. I bring up this anecdote for three reasons. First, it’s worth recognizing that the trade deal was in the interests of both countries. Lots of “realists” think that countries do things solely out of raw self-interest. That’s arguably true. But the definition realists use for self-interest is way too narrow. Notions of national pride and honor are also forms of self-interest.
Which brings me to the second reason. America should have some notion of honor. We don’t have a crown, but we do have certain ideas and ideals that we like to claim similar loyalty to. We also like to claim that these ideas and ideals are universal. When we figuratively kowtow to China, we are openly admitting to China that both claims are untrue—or at least negotiable. You can’t claim to believe human rights are universal and inviolable while simultaneously excusing or ignoring the mass violation of human rights that defines China under CCP rule.
Last, none of this is in our interest. It’s not like the Chinese respect us for our groveling. They enjoy watching us bend to their demands and mock our obsequious desire to gain favor as proof of their superior system. They use our self-flagellation over race as a cudgel in their propaganda and diplomacy. Such appeasement only buys greater demands and worse moral and strategic compromises.
* * * * * * * *
I whiggishly believe that one day China will be a free country. And when it is, the Chinese will not look back on America today as a spiritual ally the way those who were slaughtered at Tiananmen Square did. They will see us as a country that sought approval from the regime that persecuted their ancestors for the cheap at any price of Fast and Furious 9 ticket sales.
As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
ALVIN BRAGG HAS HIS PRIORITIES: ‘New York City is a Joke:’ Manhattan Prosecutors Charge Victim of Assault With Attempted Murder.
“Let me get this straight – the suspected thief shot the victim, who wrestled the gun away and shot the guy who just shot him, and…they’re charging THE VICTIM with attempted murder and unlawful possession of a firearm?” Wrote Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Amy Swearer. “New York City is a joke.”
As Tom Cotton wrote in 2021: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: McDonald’s reportedly temporarily shuts its U.S. offices and prepares layoff notices.
Burger chain McDonald’s is temporarily closing its U.S. offices this week as it prepares to inform corporate employees about its layoffs as part of a broader company restructuring, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
In an internal email last week to U.S. employees and some international staff, McDonald’s asked them to work from home from Monday through Wednesday so it can deliver staffing decisions virtually, the report said. It is unclear how many employees will be laid off.
A lot of low-level employees are eventually going to get replaced by Chat Mickey D’s: Have It Your Way! McDonald’s first fully automated restaurant —with no human contact in Fort Worth.