AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Relieved To No Longer Have To Pretend To Like Soccer.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
December 4, 2022
THE BANALITY OF GOOD: In his recent book, Mattias Desmet takes on a new totalitarianism not enforced by jackbooted thugs, but dull bureaucrats imposing consensus.
One might quibble with Desmet’s arguments about the extent to which “the Science™” got things wrong, or riposte that the unknown severity of the virus excused overreach, but it is difficult to argue that the pandemic fundamentally accelerated extant trends in how our society is monitored, who has overweening authority over it, and what the consequences of noncompliance can be. The book might have enjoyed even greater success if Desmet had considered the complementary woke phenomena ushered in by the #MeToo movement, critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and their consequences for free speech and behavior. Like COVID and its performative safetyism, all of those orthodoxies advanced broad social controls based on emotion, anxiety, and shaky data, much of which have also been exposed as exaggerated or fraudulent. Strikingly, they emerged in the Anglosphere at times that overlapped with the pandemic. The technocratic authorities who enforced them were similarly bland, bureaucratized, and in most cases protected from any significant liability. We might forgive Desmet for leaving them out, however, for the collective hysteria around race, gender, and sex did not travel well outside of the English-speaking world.
The question we should all be rushing to answer, of course, is how to fight back. Desmet parrots the standard middle-class professional’s argument that dissidents should speak out, but only in polite, sincere ways that avoid antagonizing the dominant ideology. His hope is that this will penetrate the mass formation sufficiently to expose its dynamics to broad majorities who go along with it without necessarily believing in it. He would know better if that could work in Belgium, but Americans have already amassed decades of evidence showing that this spells failure, if not disaster. However strongly worded their letters may have been, polite dissenters have proved remarkably easy to ignore for at least the last 50 years. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful woke mandarins have implemented their agenda of social control, long secure in the knowledge that their opponents were little more than gracious losers. Like him or not, it took the abrasive Donald Trump and his army of “deplorables” to challenge this dismal outcome with considerable success, through aggressive media activism, the majesty of the law, and perhaps most significantly, ridicule that no tyranny can withstand.
Read the whole thing.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Hillary Clinton Says Saving Unborn Babies from Abortion Is Like…Terrorists Killing, Raping Women.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Pentagon debuts its new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider.
But how can we be assured that the non-binary fliers who crew it have the right pronouns?
HOWIE CARR: Newly liberated Twitter blows lid off Democrat tainting of 2020 election.
“More to come from the Biden team,” was one message on Oct. 24. Another one was: “An additional report from the DNC.”
The response back from Twitter: “Handled these.”
The Democrat fluffers instantly shut down the Post’s Twitter account. They cancelled the White House press secretary’s. They’d already banned President Trump. Anyone who tried to get around the bans was likewise cut off.
This was an insurrection — the real insurrection.
The First Amendment? Democrats don’t need no stinkin’ First Amendment!
All of Twitter’s multi-millionaire conspirators came from the same fabulously pampered backgrounds — including membership in multiple protected classes and graduate degrees from elite American-hating universities, as well as few, if any, connections to any traditional national institutions such as the military, religion, the working classes or public schools.
The leader of the Twitter coup d’etat against MAGA appears to have been one Vijaya Gadde. Born in India, Vijaya went straight to the Ivy League — Cornell, and then to the even more expensive NYU School of Law.
NYU Law, by the way, is also the alma mater of Colinford Mattis, the equally woke New York lawyer who firebombed an NYPD cruiser during the BLM murder-arson-looting riots of 2020.
Gadde wept when she found out that Musk was going to blow the lid off her sinister conspiracy, but don’t cry for her. She made $7 million in 2020 and then $17.3 million last year for her service above and beyond the call of duty to the New World Order.
Gadde was fired from Twitter by Musk, along with the new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who arrived in this nation in 2006 from India. He was immediately admitted to Stanford University, which is where the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, the mega-fraudster and donor of $5 million to the Biden campaign, are employed as tenured professors.
I wonder which political party Gadde was affiliated with?
THE JOURNOLIST WAS HOPPING ON FRIDAY NIGHT: The Twenty-Seven Most Embarrassing Reactions to Taibbi Thread About Twitter Censoring Hunter Biden Tweets.
December 3, 2022
JACK SHAFER: The Confession of Sam Bankman-Fried.
“Please, shut up.” This is what lawyers tell clients who have been charged with crimes — or are in danger of being charged — because anything they say will only be dredged up by the prosecution to prove their guilt. Sam Bankman-Fried, the wunderkind behind the FTX and Alameda crypto trading scandal in which upwards of $8 billion has gone AWOL, rejected this foundational advice on Wednesday afternoon to give New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin a lengthy, live tele-interview.
Bankman-Fried didn’t just give prosecutors a few leads as he rambled. He essentially confessed in serial fashion to his many potential offenses.
“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” Bankman-Fried said near the top of the interview, as he began to shovel himself into the trench he has been digging since the scandal broke in early November. “Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes or things I would give anything to be able to do over again,” he said, adding vinyl wood paneling to his new underground home. “I was responsible ultimately for doing the right things and I mean, we didn’t. Like, we messed up big,” he said, installing a wet bar in his space. And then came the rug that pulled it all together. “There absolutely were management failures, huge management failures. I bear responsibility for that. There were oversight failures, transparency failures, reporting, like, so many things we should have had in place. I think that a lot of it was on the risk management side,” Bankman-Fried said. “Look, I screwed up.”
While SBF keeps digging, why hasn’t he been arrested yet?
I certainly understand why people would bristle at all of these sources of potential delay, but this sort of investigative slog is much more common in a white-collar case than a quick arrest. For instance, it took almost a year for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan (which is reportedly handling the FTX investigation) to charge the founder of the electric-truck start-up Nikola with fraud even though the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research seemingly did all of the work when it published a lengthy report that precipitated the investigation in the first place. And it took nearly two years for the department to charge Holmes even after the Journal’s John Carreyrou publicly exposed the central problems at Theranos.
Prosecutors at the Justice Department cannot — and do not — simply indict people based on what they read in the press, no matter how damning it may seem. Even if they desperately want to charge someone, prosecutors have to conduct their own investigation to develop robust, admissible evidence of criminal misconduct, which requires gathering and reviewing documents and data, speaking with witnesses, and — perhaps above all — time.
Rudy Giuliani made his bones in 1987 by ordering financial executives with insider trading charges escorted out of their offices in handcuffs; lots of investors presumably believe SBF deserves a similar fate.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Elon Musk Vows To Reveal Government And Media Collusion Once He Figures Out Where These Red Dots Are Coming From.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Please, America, don’t get into soccer.
MARK JUDGE: The 1980s on Trial.
Compared to previous generations, kids today are less likely to have sex, drive, work, drink alcohol, date, or go out without their parents. A lot of this has to do with the advent of smartphones and social media. Kids these days are terrified that if they do something bold—or stupid—it will wind up on Facebook, YouTube, or Snapchat. In 2015, pop singer Ariana Grande, then 22, licked a doughnut—and it wound up on “The Today Show.”
But it wasn’t just Brett and me who were on trial. It was the entire era in which we grew up. An era of robust cultural confidence when men and women were equally celebrated, the 1980s have now, in the rearview mirror, become fodder for our modern media scolds.
For instance, several journalists noted during the hearings that I had written in praise of Hugh Hefner, who is now considered a symbol of toxic masculinity. This was taken as evidence of my retrograde sexual attitudes and projected onto Brett as proof of his being unfit for a seat on the nation’s highest court. What a crock of bullshit. The farther away I get from it, the angrier I feel.
For the record, my view of Hefner is equivocal. Hefner helped usher in the age of pornography, which is now a serious global problem that warps healthy and romantic sexual interaction. His grandiose claims about being a revolutionary are often hyperbolic, even silly. He’s also a terrible dancer.
And yet an honest man cannot completely dismiss him. Hefner, in fact, made the case for a type of man who is increasingly rare these days, who may indeed be disappearing in the era of #MeToo and weaponized sexual politics. Playboy, whose first issue was published in December 1953, defended the man who is urbane, intelligent, interested in art, literature, music, and architecture—and who loves women. Indeed, I would argue that Hefner didn’t always strictly treat women as sex objects. The Playboy man was educated, employed, and well-dressed, and he could entertain a young lady at his modern bachelor pad for an evening of conversation about Nietzsche, Picasso, and jazz, culminating in mutually satisfying sex.
Hefner’s magazine rejected the rugged outdoorsman type celebrated in most men’s magazines of the 1950s. He also criticized some of the counterculture of the time, rejecting the “noise” of rock ’n’ roll in favor of sophisticated jazz. The “Playboy Man” loved capitalism and disposable income, and Playmates from the early issues were photographed in tasteful ways, with their personalities and accomplishments frequently celebrated.
Yes, it was an exploitative nudie magazine. But it was also a long way from the charmless, ruthless porn of today. Old issues of Playboy, which published some of the best writers of the time, from Gore Vidal to Norman Mailer, read like Shakespeare compared to the Maxim mouth breathers that now represent a huge swath of the male population.
Hefner was also countercultural. As the entire country was getting married and moving to the suburbs, he defended spending a couple extra years in the city, driving a cool car, going to museums, reading great books, and buying the latest Dizzy Gillespie records. He created the kind of cool, urban bachelor who has all but disappeared in today’s world of niche personalities and interests. Men today are either frat bros, comic nerds, yuppie suits, IT geeks, or sulky, epicene hipsters. Nobody covers as much ground as Hefner anymore.
Hefner could have settled down with one woman and still stayed the man he created. Yet he was tripped up by sex, the very thing that made him rich and famous. Instead of making male sexuality something to be indulged with aplomb but not recklessness, Hefner made it a lifestyle, walking around all day in his trademark silk pajamas and red robe with a blonde on either arm. And that’s why he eventually became a joke. The journalistic quality of Playboy started dropping in the 1980s, and today it reads like a slightly more appealing issue of Details. The Playboy Mansion, Shangri-La in the 1970s, seemed gauche and tacky by the time Hefner died in 2017.
Read the whole thing.
Last weekend, I watched American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story, which was released on April 7th 2017, on Amazon Prime Video. It’s a fascinating very pro-Hefner drama/documentary series. Hef and other original staffers at Playboy appear in interviews, but many of the scenes are dramatically fleshed out by actors and actresses (pun not intended — well, maybe a little). As you may have surmised by the above release date, it was produced at the very end of the the period that such a series could be made. In October of 2017, #metoo became a household phrase, and Harvey Weinstein become a household name. A couple of weeks later, then-Amazon Studios chief Roy Price, who commissioned the Playboy series, and series by Weinstein, Woody Allen and former Mad Men producer Matthew Weiner, resigned.
The following year, in “The New Prudes,” author/illustrator Christopher R. Taylor wrote:
The people who told us “love the one you’re with” and “if her daddy’s rich take her out for a meal, if her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel” are now telling us that you have to get signed proof for every stage of sexual contact and even if you do, if she regrets it later, it was rape. The people who created Animal House are now wondering if its even okay to laugh at it. People routinely say “that could never get made today” about films like Blazing Saddles, but could you even make Pretty in Pink? Not according to its star Molly Ringwald.
Oceania has always been at war with the sexual revolution.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Apple working with China to suppress freedom protestors?
Related: Tim Cook’s Silence Just Said Everything.
🚨WATCH: Apple CEO Tim Cook ignores our questions on China as zero-COVID lockdown protests rage in the country. Full video 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/m0NpgRN6U4
— Hillary Vaughn (@hillary__vaughn) December 1, 2022
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.
THE STIG CRASHES BADLY: NBC’s Ben Collins’ pissiness over Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ speaks volumes about modern MSM.
(Classical reference in headline.)
OUT ON A LIMB: Kanye’s Downfall Shows Why Free Speech Works.
Well, that didn’t take long. In just a few weeks, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has gone from potential Republican superstar to a completely disgraced antisemitic lunatic.
Kanye’s fall from grace hit its nadir on Thursday during a stranger-than-fiction interview he did on InfoWars with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Ye said, and this is a direct quote, “I like Hitler.”
“I like Hitler,” Ye expounded. “The Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that. Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.”
It somehow got even stranger.
“[Nazis] did good things, too,” Ye went on to say later in the interview. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time. The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.”
In case there was any shred of doubt left as to Ye’s intent, he followed up the interview by tweeting out a literal swastika. (Yes, seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.)
As Dan McLaughlin wrote before the pro-Hitler rant: Kanye West Canceled Himself.
December 2, 2022
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Indiana Jones 5 Trailer — The Rumors Were True (Video).
FLASHBACK: CNBC Thinks Sam Bankman-Fried Is the Second Coming of JP Morgan (Supercut Video).
Related: Media treats fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried with kid gloves because he was a Dem darling.
Just look at how his friends at The New York Times have treated him. In recent weeks they have tried to portray the collapse of FTX as — at the worst — a case of unfortunate mismanagement. The poor diddums billionaire boy just became too successful too fast. Problems are bound to happen. You know how it is.
This week the paper went one further. They actually hosted the fraudster at a New York Times event. Their description of him in the event program was “29-year old American investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist.” Well that’s one way to describe him. At the end of the event the moderator asked everyone to join him in applauding their guest and the audience dutifully did so.
Can anyone think of another example of this happening. Did Bernie Madoff get soft-soap articles about him after his fraud was discovered? Did he have invitations to major public events to put his side of the story after his ponzi scheme collapsed? Not that I remember. But Bankman-Fried has been given all the soft treatment possible. Now why should that be?
The answer would seem to be that he has been a huge donor to the Democrats as well as causes close to the Democrats’ hearts.
Well, that and the buckets of cash he showered upon a variety of leftist media outlets: Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean. “Putting it bluntly — every media organization that accepted funding from Bankman-Fried should come clean and offer full transparency as to the nature of their agreement with him and their financial arrangements. As Semafor’s Max Tani reported, these grants and their funding mechanisms have been put on hold. ProPublica announced that they had received ‘the first tranche of the $5 million grant in February of 2022. The remaining two-thirds of the grant are due, respectively by April 1, 2023 and by April 1, 2024.’ Happy April Fools’ Day indeed.”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Florida Withdraws $2 Billion from BlackRock Over ESG Investing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Baal Distances Self From Balenciaga. “Baal is the latest of many entities that have sought to disassociate from the beleaguered fashion brand. Lucifer, Beelzebub, Sathanas, Abadon, Mammon, Belphegor, and Asmodeus, the demons of pride, gluttony, wrath, sloth, greed, envy, and lust have each distanced themselves from Balenciaga…At publishing time, Baal had also attempted to distance himself from the Biden administration.”
KANYE WEST NEWS: Elon Musk tells rapper ‘FAFO’ as he is suspended from Twitter for posting swastika.
“Who made you the judge,” West fired at the tech billionaire.
Musk wrote back “FAFO” – short for “F*** Around and Find Out.”
The Twitter suspension and Nazi diatribe on Jones’ show comes after West was recently dumped by Adidas, GAP and Balenciaga over a string of antisemitic comments.
Meanwhile: Parler halts intent of sale to Kanye West, parent company announces.
Finally, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Kanye Releases Brand New Album, ‘My Struggle.’
UPDATE: Speaking of satirists, Bill Burr gets it:
Bill Burr's take on Kanye West aged like fine wine. pic.twitter.com/MUX5wdvCJe
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) November 29, 2022
December 1, 2022
QUESTION ASKED: Did the pandemic create an ‘urban doom loop?’
You probably remember how there were so many people fleeing New York City in the early days of the pandemic that they helped seed outbreaks of the virus around the country. Here’s a bit of what the Washington Post reported in March of 2020:
From the Catskills to Wisconsin’s Door County, communities whose economies usually revolve around seasonal visitors are asking them to stay away. Over the weekend, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) urged people with cottages on the Jersey Shore to “stay at your primary residences,” while Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) warned that those with property on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard should “stay on the mainland.”
Their concerns aren’t exactly unfounded. In Vermont, where ski towns have been “bustling at levels normally seen at peak times during winter holidays,” according to alt-weekly Seven Days, one of the first confirmed coronavirus cases was a man from Westchester County, N.Y., who fled to his vacation home in hopes of avoiding the virus. Within 24 hours of arriving, he had started to show symptoms.
One Long Island resident was quoted by the NY Post saying, “We’re at the end of Long Island, the tip, and waves of people are bringing this s–t. We should blow up the bridges. Don’t let them in.”
This was happening all over the place but it was especially conspicuous around New York City where lots of wealthy people with second homes immediately began acting like doomsday preppers planning to ride out the zombie apocalypse at their cottage in the Hamptons or Vermont or wherever. So many people fled New York, often taking the virus with them, that the Times later reported the state had been the “primary gateway” for outbreaks around the country.
But as Edsall pointed out, what was at first a temporary situation for a lot of people gradually became permanent. As the lockdowns lingered and more and more white collar workers were doing business from home over zoom, many of them realized there was no reason to maintain an expensive apartment in the city. Many of them decided to relocate permanently. And that in turn has a major impact on cities.
Don’t overlook the out of control crime, looting, road blockages by protestors, and rioting that followed in the spring of 2020 as yet another reason why telecommuting looks especially desirable these days.