DEMOCRATS STILL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1859: CPAC 2023: Tulsi Gabbard accuses Democrats of becoming ‘racists they claim to hate.’

GERMANY STILL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Monument of Fundamental Rights Vandalized by Climate Activists Near German Parliament.

A group of activists known as the “Last Generation” has caused outrage after pouring black paint over an art installation known as “Basic Law 49” in Berlin.

The installation, created by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, consists of 19 panes of glass, each engraved with one of the 19 articles of the Basic Law in their 1949 version.

Flashback: Rupert Darwall on the Alarming Roots of Environmentalism.

If you look at what the Nazis were doing in the 1930s, in their environmental policies, virtually every theme you see in the modern environmental movement, the Nazis were doing. It happens to be historical fact that the Nazis were the first political party in the world to have a wind power program. It also happens to be a fact that they were against meat eating, and they considered…it…terribly wasteful that so much grain went to feed livestock rather than to make bread. It’s also the case that they had the equivalent of fuel economy rules because they had the most expensive gasoline in Europe and so they basically had very few people driving cars…I think actually the most extraordinary thing that I came across was this quote from Adolf Hitler where he told an aide once, “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in changing people’s lifestyles.” Well, that could be…That’s extraordinarily contemporary. That is what the modern environmental movement is all about. It’s about changing people’s lifestyles.

Given Karavan’s background, is “Basic Law 49” also starting to become fascinated by what the National Socialists were doing in the ‘40s as well? (And/or what they were doing in 1937.)

ONE MAN’S TERRORIST IS ANOTHER MAN’S FREEDOM FIGHTER: Reuters: 70 years after death, Stalin’s polarizing legacy looms large.

On the eve of the 70th anniversary of Josef Stalin’s death, attitudes to the Soviet Union’s wartime leader remain mixed in the nations he once ruled with an iron fist.

During three decades of dictatorial rule, Stalin oversaw rapid industrialisation and victory over the Nazis but also the deaths of millions in purges, Gulag labour camps and famine.

With Russia embroiled in conflict again in Ukraine, in what the Kremlin says is a fresh existential battle for national survival, memories of the Soviet dictator loom large.

“Firstly, thank you for the victory (in World War Two),” said 21-year-old Madina in a typically mixed view of Stalin’s legacy among people on the streets of Moscow.

“Secondly, he is a negative person for me because there were a lot of deaths. A lot of executions, shootings, expulsions, arts were banned, etc. So it’s impossible to have a clear position one way or the other,” she added, declining to give her second name.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, aged 74.

Though public commemorations remain largely taboo and streets no longer bear his name, his reputation has in recent years undergone something of a renaissance.

To boldly go where the New York Times went in 1953: “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE NYPD HAS HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR MASK OBSESSIVENESS, MANHATTANITES: NYC police want shoppers to remove masks before entering stores.

Face masks, once an essential Covid-19 protective measure, are now being worn by criminals to conceal their identities, according to New York police who are urging businesses to unmask customers before letting them in stores.

The recommendation is a 180-degree turn from mask-wearing norms at the onset of the pandemic. During peak periods of infection, federal agencies mandated mask-wearing in public places, while many businesses required customers to wear them on the premises.

Now, however, some businesses are banning customers from entering the premises with face masks on, saying the policy change is needed to identify thieves. And after numerous incidents, the New York Police Department is urging business owners to make shoppers remove their face masks and flash their features before being let in.

“We’re seeing far too often where people are coming up to our businesses, sometimes with masks and latex gloves, and they’re being buzzed in, they’re being allowed to enter into the store and then we have a robbery or some kind of property being stolen,” NYPD chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey said recently in an address to the local business community.

It’s good to see the NYPD is following the science these days, even if many New Yorkers have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of their Mass Formation Psychosis. Or as fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney wrote late last month: The Real Science on Masks: They Make No Difference.

MARK JUDGE: Want to cure American amnesia? Teach history backward.

There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.

That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.

It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.

It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.

It sounds like a reverse-action version of Whig History, which is much more enjoyable for most students than its successor, Black Armband History.

IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times Discovers a New Source of Racism, and This One Could Be the Most Ridiculous Yet.

The New York Times, that intrepid warrior for anything and everything that the Left is hysterical about, on Friday published a lengthy piece about a source of systemic racism that no one has ever noticed before: It seems that equestrian helmets are racist because they don’t accommodate the dreadlocks that some black horse riders wear. One black rider’s mother lamented: “Mostly everything in this sport isn’t designed for us.” Well, that’s got to change, and these Jackie Robinsons of the Coiffure, with the Times’ generous help, are leading the way to the Equestrian Helmet Justice that our society so desperately needs.

Chanel Robbins, the Times tells us solemnly, “has been riding horses most of her life, ever since her grandmother traded a cow from their family’s farm in Ontario for a pony when she was 7.” Horse riding “offered an escape from thoughts that weighed on her,” which included the fact that “she was the only Black girl in the neighborhood.” But when she grew dreadlocks, her helmet didn’t fit anymore, and that, as you must know by now, is racist.

Fighting back tears (really, the Times actually said she was), Robbins said: “I finally freaking feel like myself, and now society is asking me to change. I just want to be able to ride.” How dare Whitey do this! Is there nothing to which he will not stoop? Poor Chanel Robbins can only find relief on the back of a horse from the systemic racism that confronts her every hour in Amerikkka, but now Whitey has taken even that away!

I eagerly await Bruce Springsteen’s protest songs and his actual protests as a result of this shocking development.

DODGING BULLETS. David Thompson writes:

Via Mr Muldoon in the comments, a shocking revelation:

Resumes including ‘they/them’ pronouns are more likely to be overlooked, new report finds. 

Not so much overlooked, I think, as warning signs heeded.

As we’ve seen many times, pretending to be a they does rather send a message regarding neuroticism, pretentiousness, captiousness, and the likelihood of disruption. If a job applicant in effect announces that they expect anyone nearby to indulge their tedious psychodrama and pretend along with them, this will not always be met with enthusiasm. Demanding that others lie – and ignore or contradict the evidence right in front of them, daily – is, in short, rude. An act of hostility.

Similarly, I’ve seen people put their veganism into their LinkedIn profiles, which means it’s likely in their resumes as well. However, as one resume writer told her readers, “Unless you are applying for a position at a religious organization or a political organization, recruiters and hiring managers do not need to know your religious or political views. Unless you are applying to cook at a vegan restaurant, they do not need to know that you are a vegan.”

But she repeats herself.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Lightfoot Meets Bigfoot.

COMRADES, PLEASE TUNE YOUR TWO-WAY TELESCREENS TO THE CHANNEL SHOWING MINISTRY OF TRUTH: THE NEXT GENERATION! Revealed: Roald Dahl books were neutered by woke consultants aged eight to 30 — led by ‘non-binary, asexual, polyamorous relationship anarchist who is on the autism spectrum.’

UNEXPECTEDLY! ‘I’m a Black Woman in America:’ Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Blames Election Loss on Racism, Sexism.

Chicago has been a Democrat-monopoly stronghold since 1931. The last time the city’s voters elected a Republican to be their mayor was 1927. Almost a century later, Lightfoot calling her (now thankfully former) constituents sexists and racists is yet another reminder of how out of touch she was. Similarly, her administration being forced to deal with a pandemic that it was completely unprepared for simply “accelerated the contradictions,” as her fellow socialists like to say.

ROGER SIMON ON HYPOCRISY UNLIMITED: Hollywood’s Secret Counterfeit Vaccine Network.

My interlocutor says they began selling the cards in early April 2021. Between then and early October of that year, calls were apparently coming in every day for contraband cards.

The individual estimates that they sold at least 250 of the cards during that period. When asked whether they were afraid of the Justice Department and IRS because of this, the answer was affirmative.

The celebrities for whom this person made these counterfeits were almost uniformly liberals or progressives, at least publicly. In other words, if you asked them, they supported mandates, masks, and so forth, sometimes adamantly. Behind the scenes was another matter.

The stories this person told me were amusing, nauseating, and, in some sense, edifying all at once. We have long known that Hollywood types are some of the most hypocritical people on the planet—living large while endlessly lecturing the little folk on climate and the rest—but this may take the proverbial cake.

Many of this person’s clients, I was told, were well aware of details of the growing concerns about potential side effects of the vaccines—particularly in the reproductive area. Not surprisingly then, the person estimated 90 percent of the clients were female.

The general state of these people was described as fear and paranoia, reminiscent of the 1980 Lichtenstein-like cartoon in the LA Weekly that showed an anguished female studio executive intoning, “NUCLEAR WAR? There goes my career!”

Heh. But is it any wonder that counterfeit vaccine cards are being distributed when headlines such as this made the rounds last year as America was digging itself out of Fauci’s lockdowns? John Nolte: Fascist Law and Order: SVU Showrunner Regrets Not Blacklisting the Unvaccinated.

TIRELESS COMRADE WINSTON SMITH STILL BRAVELY TOILING AWAY IN THE MIGHTY OFFICES OF THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH! (Err, and also Amazon as well.) Roald Dahl ebooks ‘force censored versions on readers’ despite backlash.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

Having previously trashed their once excellent Prime Music app in the fall of last year, Amazon now seems deterimed to tank the popularity of their Kindle app as well for some reason. I love the Kindle’s ease of use and portability, but the Dahl story is a reminder of the importance of owning physical versions of books, music, movies, and TV series.

THE JOURNALISTS WHO SMEARED TOM COTTON AND TARNISHED THEIR OWN REPUTATIONS OVER THE LAB LEAK THEORY:

“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”

The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a “Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists.”

Tom Nichols, a cable news “conservative” who has since been rewarded with a staff writer position at The Atlantic, approached Cotton’s comments even more scornfully. When Cotton pointed out to detractors that he had not said that the virus had originally been developed as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, and that there were several hypotheses worth exploring, Nichols responded by calling it an example of “why arguing with a conspiracy theorist rarely goes well.”

“It gives the person advancing the theory to keep repeating it ‘just as a hypothesis,’ as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he’ll repeat it, say it’s unlikely, and then say he’s just asking questions,” continued Nichols. One might wonder if such questions are worth being asked — especially by the press. But Nichols left that to Cotton, instead opting to mock the senator for doing so.

Anne Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”

In 2020, thanks to her attacks on Cotton (who was on his way to owning the New York Times that summer), the author of the 2003 book Gulag: A History was now receiving compliments from people who are very, very much pro-gulag:

In October of 2020, David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler” explored “Anne Applebaum’s Pride and Prejudice:”

Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to Applebaum’s opposition to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.

This account of Brexit, like everything else in the book, is utterly mendacious. Whatever one thinks of the “Leave” party’s case, Britain faced an authentic crisis over European Community-mandated immigration. Applebaum does not mention that Britain was inundated by 300,000 Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after those impoverished countries joined the EC in 2014, nor that Britain petitioned the EC in vain for relief from mass immigration. Democracy appeals to Applebaum only when people vote the way she thinks they should. In a textbook example of what William Empson called unintended irony, she champions the imperious, unelected bureaucracy of the European Community as the savior of democracy against alleged authoritarians who won a popular plebescite by a margin of 52 to 48 percent.

Leo Strauss ridiculed the sort of polemical caricature he dubbed reductio ad Hitlerum, and if it is possible to write a caricature of a caricature, Applebaum has managed it. She trots out Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “authoritarian personality,” that is a lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’” Along with Arendt, Applebaum quotes the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who claimed that a bias towards authoritarianism stemmed from such personality traits as repressed homosexuality. Whether one takes Arendt and Adorno seriously or not, when they used the term “authoritarian personality” they meant to reference actual supporters of Hitler and Stalin who murdered tens of millions of people.

Applebaum then substitutes the qualifier “illiberal” for “authoritarian,” expecting the reader to assume that they are the same thing. If that sounds incoherent, it is not my fault. What she means by an “illiberal” is someone who “wants to undermine courts in order to give himself more power.” This refers to Poland’s Law and Justice Party, which denied her husband Radek Sikorski a hoped-for ministerial position by the nefarious means of winning a popular election. The reader is expected to make the leap from Polish judicial reform to death camps.

Fortunately, by the following year, Applebaum was finally able to right the ship, and once again spot a true totalitarian bent on world domination:

As Robert Shibley quipped at Instapundit on July 30th, 2021, “If This is True, ‘Democracy’ Deserves it.”

LORI LIGHTFOOT ELIMINATED IN CHICAGO MAYOR’S RACE.

UPDATE:

VDH: Refighting the Vietnam War.

 We talk of a “Vietnam War.” In fact, it was a Cold War communist proxy effort that saw over 100,000 Chinese auxiliaries engaged in supply and repairing Vietnamese infrastructure, while thousands of Soviet “advisors” manned tanks, flew planes, and organized and operated anti-aircraft systems. Vladimir Putin’s current objection to U.S. military aid to Ukraine is again ironic, given Russia was historically an active participant on the ground in Vietnam and both directly and indirectly killed Americans in efforts to defeat the United States.

Moyer ends volume two on a mixed note. An exhausted and beaten North was negotiating in fear that its massive losses of 1967-1968, if continued, would have threatened the Hanoi regime itself. An elected Republican hawk Richard Nixon, inheriting a war that already had cost 35,000 dead, was now opposed by the same Democrats who started it. A growing number of frustrated Americans wanted either to win the war or to get out. Nixon would soon take the gloves off, ensuring that a nearly defeated North would be subject to greater bombing pressures—even as the anti-war Left enjoyed complete control of a Congress that was suddenly liable to cut off aid to Saigon, could more easily mobilize against a now oppositional and conservative White House—and the ingredients of the Watergate debacle were on the distant horizon.

The so-called “Watergate Congress” of Democrats elected in 1974 pulled the plug on funding for our defense of South Vietnam the following year. But prior to their election, as Lewis Sorley quoted counter-insurgency expert Sir. Robert Thompson in his 1999 book, A Better War: 

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
    you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

Or lost, depending upon who was in charge in DC:

Related: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle:

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE MAYOR DALEY AGAIN: Chaos Reigns in the Chicago Mayoral Race.

The Chicago mayoral election is today! Can you feel the excitement? Yes, we here in the Windy City, on a terminal February day in an off-off-year — the “Why are we even doing this, in this weather?” timing chosen quite by design — have been appointed to decide the fate of incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot (D — but why even bother clarifying), who is running for reelection as Chicago mayors inevitably tend to do.

The topline takeaway is this: It is extremely possible that Lightfoot will be ejected from office tonight. It’s not a guarantee, because (1) polling is so variable nowadays, especially in local races; (2) all the candidates have strengths and weaknesses that will appeal to various voter demographics in a city famously divided by them; and (3) almost everyone is triangulating their final vote. If that were to happen, it wouldn’t exactly be historic in Chicago history — it happened in 1983, more about which below — but it would be rather notable as a marker in the breakdown of Democratic machine politics within big cities, among which there are few bigger than Chicago.

And I do think it’s over for her, either tonight or in the runoff: Whether you’re a committed Leftist who thinks Lori Lightfoot has let you down by fighting the various unions and not defunding the police — while still alienating them; this is classic Lightfoot — or you’re just some guy with a wife and a kid worried about getting mugged or having masks forcibly tied to your weeping son’s face by agents of the state, you’re done with Lori.

It’s all so unfair. Nobody knows how to clean up a city like Lightfoot:

SONNY BUNCH REVIEWS COCAINE BEAR: “Are you here for backstory? Do you really care about Keri Russell’s relationship and why it’s annoying her daughter? Do you want to know more about the trio of ruffians who have named their gang after Marcel Duchamp? Really? Of course you don’t. No one wants backstory from Cocaine Bear. They just want cocaine and a bear. And, I’m glad to say, Cocaine Bear delivers on this promise.”

SNL WAS STILL MAKING NIXON JOKES IN 1980: ‘SNL’ is Afraid to Satirize Biden, Remains Focused on Trump.

It’s not only Trump who appears more frequently than Biden. Defeated GOP candidates Kari Lake and Herschel Walker have made double the appearances of the president.

The show also hasn’t found a bit suitable for Rachel Levine, a kooky transgender admiral, or Sam Brinton, Biden’s former nuclear official/luggage thief.

Content gold gone to waste.

Both the Left and Right provide endless fodder for satire. But brands like “SNL,” “The Daily Show,” and late-night programs pander only to one-half of the country.

Thus, the viewership exodus of each program.*

In 2021, Matt Purple of Spectator World referred to the myriad leftist cable hosts who followed in the wake of Jon Stewart’s version of The Daily Show (a show that itself was inspired by SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment) as churning out “partisan comfort food.” In the age of a massively splintered media, the palace guard approach is the safest method to holding onto an audience that’s a sliver of what Johnny Carson enjoyed:

This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.

What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.

—Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political, Robert Tracinski, the Federalist, October 5, 2017.

* And Greg Gutfeld becoming the new king of late night TV: Conservative Night Live. “The winner in the Who Can Hate Republicans the Most Contest could rely on about 1.5 million Democrats to remain loyal daily viewers, and that’s all they needed to remain competitive—and even on top—in the ratings battle. The only problem is you drive away everyone else. Four or five hosts were competing for the liberal Democrat audience, and the rest of us—half of the country, at least—have nothing to watch. What we could not choose was a show hosted by a center-right personality. If you were watching a nightly talk show, you were watching a liberal.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): On the other hand, they weren’t afraid to open with this.

Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19:

"The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in… pic.twitter.com/i0PfNrlcGd

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 26, 2023

UNEXPECTEDLY: Turns Out They Are Coming for Your Gas Stoves. “A new Biden administration rule on cooking appliances would effectively ban half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market from being sold, according to an Energy Department projection.”

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, TRUTHER:

Yes, that’s right, folks: It’s a Black Op. MAGA-world’s most dedicated sleeper agent has finally accomplished her mission, sitting through nearly a year’s worth of grand-jury testimony and only now breaking her silence to strategically discredit the entire set of jury recommendations in the most brilliantly indirect way: not by making direct partisan statements, but by revealing herself in public, forever, to be a blithering goddamned idiot. Beschloss is such an eminent historian that I’m forced to defer to his unquestionable authority, so I must take him at his word: Trump has truly pulled off an intelligence/deep-cover coup here, the likes of which mark him out as having a political operation to be taken gravely seriously as a stealthily subtle force in the campaign to come.

While the Georgia foreman forewoman foreperson was thrilled to talk with CNN and MSNBC, there are curious limitations as to which cable news networks she’ll appear on: ‘Cat’s Got Her Tongue?’: Fox News Anchor Wonders Why Talkative Grand Juror Passed On Invite.

ELIZABETH WARREN COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Rights to ‘Crying Indian’ ad to go to Native American group.

Since its debut in 1971, an anti-pollution ad showing a man in Native American attire shed a single tear at the sight of smokestacks and litter taking over a once unblemished landscape has become an indelible piece of TV pop culture.

It’s been referenced over the decades since on shows like “The Simpsons” and “South Park” and in internet memes. But now a Native American advocacy group that was given the rights to the long-parodied public service announcement is retiring it, saying it has always been inappropriate.

The so-called “Crying Indian” with his buckskins and long braids made the late actor Iron Eyes Cody a recognizable face in households nationwide. But to many Native Americans, the public service announcement has been a painful reminder of the enduring stereotypes they face.

The nonprofit that originally commissioned the advertisement, Keep America Beautiful, had long been considering how to retire the ad and announced this week that it’s doing so by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians.

Note that it’s not until the ninth paragraph that AP points out that Cody was an early trans-Indian:

Cody, who was Italian American but claimed to have Cherokee heritage through his father, was typecast as a stock Native American character, appearing in over 80 films.

Flashback: The True Story of ‘The Crying Indian.’ “In 1996, a journalist with The New Orleans Times-Picayune ventured to Gueydan, Louisiana, the small town Iron Eyes had allegedly grown up in, and sought out his heritage. Here, it was revealed that ‘America’s favorite Indian’ was actually a second-generation Italian. ‘He just left,’ recalled his sister, Mae Abshire Duhon, ‘and the next thing we heard was that he had turned Indian.’”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: Republicans Justify ‘Distrust of Government, Because They Do Such a Bad Job Protecting the Public.’

—CNS News, Thursday.

Chaser:

But as we’ve witnessed over the last weeks of protests and demonstrations, social controls are not sustainable. They require more and more oppressive means of containing people who stand up against the oppression.

In any event, the core of America’s identity is not the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity. It is the ideals we share, however imperfectly achieved.

Moving toward those ideals requires that we relinquish social control and renew our commitment to social investment.

For starters, defund the police and invest in our communities.

—“Robert Reich: ‘Defund the Police’ Means Moving From Social Control to Social Investment,” Newsweek, June 23rd, 2020.

In case, Reich would likely split the difference by declaring, “I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.”

DNC-MSM DUMPS DILBERT: Hundreds of newspapers drop ‘Dilbert’ comic strip after racist tirade from creator Scott Adams.

The move came after Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind “Dilbert,” effectively encouraged segregation in a shocking rant on YouTube. His comments came in response to a poll from the conservative firm Rasmussen Reports that said 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.”

The Anti-Defamation League has noted that the phrase emerged on the infamous message board 4chan in 2017 as a trolling campaign and has a “long history” in the white supremacist movement.

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to th is poll — that’s a hate group,” Adams said Wednesday on his YouTube show “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f**k away … because there is no fixing this.”

Adams has since said on Twitter that he was only “advising people to avoid hate” and suggested that the cancellation of his cartoon signals that free speech in America is under assault.

Having been pro-Trump since 2015, no doubt many publications were looking for an excuse to drop Adams. Why did he make it so easy for them?

(See also: Derbyshire, John in 2012.)

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: A Grand Time Edition.

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Alien Confused After Being Taken To Our Leader President Biden.