GRETA DROPS THE MASK: Greta Thunberg throws in her lot with the anti-capitalist Left.

So now we are finally seeing the contours of Thunbergism. Run your eye down the contributors to The Climate Book and you can see who she’s been reading: Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, Naomi Klein. For these people the climate crisis isn’t man-made. It’s made by capitalism, as are the other forms of social injustice which plague society. There’s no GDP growth — especially of the capitalist sort — without increasing carbon emissions. The only solution to this state of emergency is for rich countries to immediately abandon economic expansion as a social goal.

* * * * * * * *

It is hardly surprising that Greta thinks this way given how closely tied environmental activism has become with the more experimental end of the modern Left. De-growth is surely not the only feasible solution to the climate crisis, but Greta appears to have no doubts. And, like the bulk of her generation, she has lost any faith in the gradualist, establishment Left’s power to change things. Her teens spent chiding national governments have made her one of the most famous people in the world — her twenties look set to be far more explosive, and even revolutionary.

Exit question from Jon Gabriel: “Wait, so it wasn’t a good idea to base your national security and economy on the tantrum of a scientifically illiterate Swedish teenager?”

EXIT POLLS: Netanyahu’s Coalition Has Re-Taken Israel’s Knesset.

UPDATE: Hold Your Horses, Bibi Didn’t Win Yet. “Just as a final count might push Balad over the threshold, it may push other borderline parties, such as Yisrael Beiteinu, under the threshold. The chart below shows the election projections from three major news sources. Oh, and the party I supported מסיבת ממתקים וגלידות (Candy and Ice Cream Party), did not meet the threshold. Keep checking The Lid for election updates.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THIS IS CNN: Aaron Rupar seems mad that Lee Fang went on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss bombshell Intercept scoop. “Good point; why isn’t he also on every other cable news show on tv? It’s a big story!”

THAT’S NOT FUNNY!

There’s an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday on the rise of right-wing comedy, and you won’t be surprised to learn that this is no laughing matter.

Left-of-center satire is becoming an endangered species, Times opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom begins. Trevor Noah is retiring from “The Daily Show,” and James Corden is following his lead. Samantha Bee’s TBS program was canceled. Desus and Mero broke up. The late night shows, most of which have transformed into flaccid group-therapy sessions for anxious progressives, are struggling to retain viewers. And in their place, comedy with a distinctly right-wing flavor has become an emerging cultural and financial powerhouse. Humor that is utterly devoid of any social mission beyond its entertainment value is back in vogue.

The retreat of the left-wing comedy scene is a cultural phenomenon, McMillan Cottom observes. “Audiences have different orientations toward humor and political talk,” she writes. “Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs.” Indeed, much of mainstream center-left comedy predictably caters to those “psychological needs,” and predictability is the enemy of the joke.

As the late satirist P.J. O’Rourke told me in an interview for my book The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, the laugh is a product of “two planes of meaning at an unexpected angle”—emphasis on “unexpected.” But the extirpation of frisson from the equation is only part of the problem.

As the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said:

“Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

Just think of the left as a substitute religion, and their own fatwa on humor makes perfect sense.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: With whom does Emily Oster want an amnesty?

First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like these women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit their freedoms. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of your living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose a true threat to you as a woman.

Read the whole thing.

HOW THE MEDIA TRAINS JOURNALISTS TO LIE: By ‘ratioing’ NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent.

NO. The Atlantic calls for COVID amnesty.

Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

So no, I will not forgive and forget, and neither should anyone else. These were not innocent mistakes, but the result of a plan to exploit people’s fears–fears that the elites did everything to stoke–for their own benefit. Trillions of dollars were transferred from ordinary people to billionaires, children suffered enormous learning loss, lives were ruined, literally. People still cannot enter the US (legally) without a COVID vaccine. It is insane.

Toddlers forced to wear masks:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1587149047634087936

Schoolkids’ development damaged. Families disrupted. Health issues that couldn’t be treated due to the lockdowns. Businesses shuttered. And since Oster mentioned Los Angeles in the above quote, let’s flashback to what a veteran of the L.A. Times was saying at the start of the year:

As Ace of Spades adds, “Should we all just ‘call it a draw’ with the Kathleen Parkers of the Democrat Party? The crazed cat-lady Karens, low-value and low-status women who thirst to exert control over everyone around them, and do so by shrieking until the Democrat Party sees a demographic complaint it can satisfy and exploit and begins encoding their hysterias into positive law? Should we just keep Turnkey Fascism in place so they can do this all again next time, the next time a Fauci Special escapes from a lab? No, we won’t be doing that, Emily. Never Again, Emily. Never Again.”

Related: Republicans in hot races put Democrats on defense over strict COVID-19 policies.

Well, good.

Z CHANNEL: CLOSED-CIRCUIT TV FOR HOLLYWOOD’S RULING CLASS: My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON THE CROW (Video):

LIBERTARIAN HORROR MOVIES: New video from Reason TV.

MORE “BAD LUCK” FOR SOUTH AMERICA ON THE WAY: Bolsonaro falls as South America tilts toward socialism.

After a bruising campaign, the leftist former president of Brazil Lula Ignacio Da Silva appears to have won back control of the Palácio da Alvorada, the Brazilian presidential residence. Lula defeated conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by the narrowest of margins and is now poised to bring back socialist leadership to the world’s fourth-largest democracy.

However, the result was by no means a blowout for Lula and his Workers’ Party, which polls had suggested could win a landslide victory. In reality, Bolsonaro outperformed expectations just by taking the vote to a second round, while his Social Liberal Party maintained control of Brazil’s congress.

Nevertheless, the outcome marks an incredible comeback story for the 77-year-old Lula. All the more so because he was sentenced to 22 years in prison as part of the notorious Operation Car Wash scandal, though his conviction was quashed on a technicality, allowing him to realize his ambition of running again for the presidency.

The result will be warmly welcomed by the Biden White House, which inevitably favored Lula over the man who was regularly dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics.” They will see him primarily as a key ally in the fight against climate change given that Bolsonaro was widely criticized for his alleged failure to protect the Amazon. While Biden was serving as vice president, Obama praised Lula as “one of the most popular politicians on earth” in reference to his high approval ratings. After his term finished, Obama even lobbied for him to become the next president of the World Bank, although plans for this never materialized.

What could go wrong? I’m sure “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle” will repeat in Brazil, right?

DON’T GET COCKY: A Stunning Number of Americans Believe the Country Is ‘Out of Control’ Thanks to Democrats.

As Glenn likes to say, “Seriously, if you care about this election, you need to be out volunteering and donating. Commenting on the Internet doesn’t count.”

JIM TREACHER: How Did David DePape Get into the Pelosis’ House? “I dunno, sounds like a typical San Francisco resident to me. Blaming Republicans for this is grasping at straws. But WaPo and the NYT and the rest have gotten their marching orders, I guess. Oh, one last question: Presumably the responding officers had body cams. Showing us the footage would shut down all these conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it? Hello? Anybody?”

JOHN NOLTE: WaPo Reporter Admits Media ‘Afraid’ to Tell Truths That Anger the Left.

Here are the key parts of [Erik] Wemple’s confession:

To date, the lesson from the set-to — that publishing a senator arguing that federal troops could be deployed against rioters is unacceptable — will forever circumscribe what issues opinion sections are allowed to address. It’s also long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense.

It’s because we were afraid to.

…

Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late. Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique of the Times’s flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required. Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management. With that, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.

Whatever, whatever, whatever…

Here’s what matters…

Here’s what you need to remember…

On the single most important issue in journalism — defending free speech — the very people charged with defending free expression were too “afraid” of the political left to 1) tell the truth about how outrageous this was and 2) stand up for the bedrock principle of their own profession.

Now, ask yourself this…

If these cowards are too “afraid” to tell that truth and defend that principle, imagine the other truths people like Wemple and the Washington Post are “afraid” to tell.

Imagine all the other principles they are refusing to defend.

Imagine what the corporate media know about but are “afraid” to report — aka Hunter’s laptop, John Fetterman’s health, voting irregularities, Joe Biden’s senility — out of fear of the monsters they allowed into their own newsrooms.

Monsters their editors at the WaPo, the Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlantic asserted no control over when they were hired.

And then there’s the average DNC-MSM journalist’s fear of the social media mob: ‘It Can Ruin Your Career:’ Glenn Greenwald Explains Why Journalists Are Terrified To Question Paul Pelosi Narrative. “Greenwald went on to explain that even journalists who had questions about the prevailing narrative — on any topic — often felt as though they couldn’t say anything without risking their jobs or even their entire careers. ‘It’s so crucial to understand the dynamic dominating journalism. Few journalists have career security,’ Greenwald continued. ‘Imagine you’re a young journalist at a big media corporation. You know if you ask these questions, Twitter will explode and it can ruin your career.’”

KURT SCHLICHTER: Everyone Is Laughing at the Ridiculous Pelosi Big Lie.

Look, it’s pretty clear that this was just one more Trump-inspired attack on Our Democracy, and to fail to accept this wholeheartedly is to be a conspiracy theorist who is blaming the victim and doing Putin’s bidding. It’s also racist.

That’s certainly one way to look at it. Perhaps a guy walking through San Francisco in his Fruit of the Looms with a hammer in his hand at 2 a.m. might not draw a lot of attention, but a lot of things don’t quite add up. Hey, I don’t know about you, but I have a few questions, some of which could be quickly answered with a House oversight committee deposing Paul Pelosi once he recovers and, just to be sure, sending a subpoena to Grindr.

An official investigation? Yes, please! This is a serious matter, we’re told. After all, the regime media and Democrats such as Ilhan Omar are out there making charges like “A far-right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.” Heck, Our Democracy is at stake, so the incoming Republican majority must get to the bottom of this alleged act of political violence.

I somehow think the Democrats will be reluctant to help, though Speaker McCarthy should not let any Democrats on the panel in the first place as payback for the 1/6 kangaroo committee. But why not investigate? These are serious charges, albeit from unserious people. Omar, a commie ingrate whose stupidity is exceeded only by her dishonesty, could not resist trying to leverage some cheap advantage from this grody scenario, but she should have passed on strategic if not moral grounds. By trying to place the blame for this on us, she triggered the Streisand Effect just when Democrats least needed to be associated with even more weird nonsense than they are already. Blaming Republicans for what appears to many people to be a sex tryst gone sour guarantees the wrongly accused – us – are going to hammer the Democrats unmercifully about it.

Exit quote:

Related: Gypsy Taub Speaks! Pelosi Attacker’s Former ‘Life Partner’ Definitively Torpedoes the Media Narrative.

THE MEDIA FEAR LOSING THEIR GATEKEEPER RIGHTS ON TWITTER:

The tipping point came during the 2020 presidential election, when Twitter froze the sharing or linking of an explosive New York Post story involving Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and a laptop. Reporter Jake Sherman had his Twitter account suspended briefly for attempting to share it. The problem was that the story was accurate. Twitter put its powerful thumb on the scale of a presidential election.

It’s notable that much of the corporate media are now so bereft at Elon Musk’s completed purchase. Reuters has even set up a live cam outside the company headquarters building in San Francisco. Are they waiting for jumpers? Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz bluntly stated, “It’s like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight,” (which made Musk’s move sound pretty cool, to be honest). NBC News’s reporter Ben Collins declared that “all the red lights are flashing here.”

Still, the absolute best thing that can happen to Twitter is that it becomes less important. Newsrooms are often glued to the platform because of how it acts as a live heartbeat of news. However, in recent years, they’ve also used it to elevate and cancel even the most randomized and powerless of users to teach them a moral lesson. Yet much of the country is not active on Twitter, even if a small number of hall monitors in the media are.

This report is angering Twitter’s self-appointed hall monitors: Twitter to start charging $20 a month for verification under new owner Elon Musk.

The company plans to raise its optional $4.99-a-month premium subscription called Twitter Blue to $19.99 a month. However, that price is subject to change, the outlet reported, citing internal correspondence and people familiar with the matter.

Twitter will add more features, including verification, to bring its subscription up to par with the cost hike.

The billionaire plans to make verified users fork over the cash to keep their status.

Existing verified users have 90 days to subscribe to the new Twitter Blue after its launch or they’ll lose their checkmarks, according to The Verge.

The current Twitter Blue launched about a year ago and offers subscribers a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers as well as additional customization settings.

Musk has been outspoken about his desire to grow subscription numbers to account for half of Twitter’s revenue as well as his eagerness to overhaul the platform’s verification process in the months ahead of his $44 billion takeover of the company on Thursday.

The answer here is simple then, Iowahawk writes:

Roger those todgers, Elon — Twitter’s financial woes are over!

DISPATCHES FROM THE JOURNOLIST:

● CBS Wails: It’s The End of Democracy if Democrats Don’t Win Midterms!

● MSNBC Portrays Midterms As Democracy Versus Fascism.

● The San Diego Union-Tribune: Republicans regain momentum despite Democrats’ push on abortion, democracy.

● Biden Adviser: ‘MAGA Republicans’ Would ‘Disrupt Our Democracy,’ ‘Destroy’ the USA.

Finally, from America’s Newspaper of Record: After Using FBI To Suppress Son’s Crimes And Raid Political Rival’s Home, Biden Warns Democracy In Danger.

FINALLY: The Hollywood Reporter connects the dots between Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast and Donald Trump: Orson Welles‘ War of the Worlds Broadcast: Its Ominous Echoes for a Fractured Media.

Every year there are new essays about unveiling the truth behind Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that aired on CBS radio on October 30th, 1938. We know the truth – the stories about mass hysteria were overblown. For anyone looking for a straightforward history of what happened, look no farther than A. Brad Schwartz. The reason corrective stories keep coming up is that some people prefer to believe that the radio play sparked a nationwide mass panic. It sure makes for a great story. But while there were many confused listeners, some scared by the play’s deceptive production methods, there was not mass panic coast to coast. Finding the truth takes work, not unlike any fact-finding mission today, because we need to sift through a lot of salacious attention seeking information to find the facts. Then, as now, media literacy is a key facet towards intelligent public engagement.

* * * * * * * *

When War of the Worlds was broadcast, it was dramatic theater for some and revealed as orchestrated misinformation for others. At its core was harmless entertainment. Consider the partisan reporting on the January 6th committee versus what is being discussed and presented by both Republicans and Democrats in the investigation. A small percent of the population being confused about War of the Worlds was one thing and it is quite another when many in the population believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Tell them that judges across the nation have thrown Trump’s case out and it doesn’t matter – they’re already hoodwinked. They prefer the panic narrative.

I knew the Bad Orange Man sent the monsters from the Evil Red Planet!

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Burned Fetterman Sign Was on Farm of DNC Speaker.

A few things were immediately curious. How does one happen to snap a close-up photo of the sign mid-burn, in which it’s burned almost exactly to the point where the burning stopped (as evidenced in the next day’s photo), at 1:30 a.m., and how was the sign not completely engulfed by the time two firetrucks arrived to a rural area? How is it that only a few blades of grass were singed? How is it that the fire department put the fire out at the same time in the burn that [Jane] Switzer’s photo was snapped – and if they were busy putting the fire out, how was Switzer ALSO there?

If the verbiage with Switzer’s post didn’t give it away, she’s a Fetterman supporter and a hyper-partisan.

* * * * * * * *

Switzer’s neighbor, farmer Rick Telesz, is also quite partisan. He spoke at the DNC in 2020 and appeared in a Biden ad declaring that he made a mistake by voting for Donald Trump in 2016 but was going to correct that in 2020.

Then, on Election Day 2020, Jill Biden swung by the Telesz farm for a small rally between appearances in Erie and Pittsburgh. A barn cat interrupted that rally, and Jill Biden later adopted the cat, who’s now named Willow and resides at the White House. Telesz also ran for Congress in 2022, but lost in the Democrat primary.

So many remarkable coincidences here!

CREEPY JOE: Watch: Did Joe Biden Cop a Feel With His 18-Year-Old Granddaughter?

Biden, stop. pic.twitter.com/ZzBjFKpx8z

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 30, 2022

It’s the return of Bad Touch Biden:

In 2020 voters evidently* decided that voting out #OrangeManBad was more important than #metoo:

* Or not: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST WEIGHS IN ON NATIONALIZING SOCIALISM:

Believe me, Democrats and their operatives with bylines have definitely been running the 1948 playbook this year, Bernie:

UPDATE: Although this time, the calls are coming from inside the house!

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR ON THE BAY: Nudist ex-lover of Paul Pelosi attacker is female PEDOPHILE who harassed boy, 14, and who bought sex dolls ‘for their sons to use.’

JOHN NOLTE: Imploding CNN Cuts Back on Series and Films. “Chris Licht, the chairman of CNN, said on Friday that the network would stop buying documentary films and original TV series as part of its cost-cutting efforts. ‘This was a very difficult decision to make,’ he wrote in an email to employees. The only reason disgraced former CNN chief Jeff Zucker got into this non-news programming was vanity and kickbacks. Acquiring these series and movies allowed Zucker to hobnob with the Hollywood elite and play the big shot. It also allowed him to pour millions of dollars all over his left-wing friends, the people who created this garbage.”

THE COMPLEAT KEITH ELLISON:

According to Ellison, Soliah/Olson was a social justice warrior fighting the good fight. The case had nothing to do with the attempted murder of police officers; that was but a pretext. The Los Angeles district attorney was pursuing the case in bad faith: “This is not about justice. This is not about accountability, this is not about public safety. THIS is about SYMBOLISM. This is about MAKING A POINT. This is about saying to you and to me that we are going to get you if you ever try to stand against what we’re about. WE’RE GOING TO GET YOU. And we’re going to lock you up and we don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to get you. There might be people who get book deals, or there might be private revenge, there might be all these things, but no prosecution like this would really float unless it had a very important, symbolic meaning that tied it together for the people involved in it. And it is the idea that the people who fought for social justice and to elevate humanity in the 60’s and 70’s were WRONG! They were wrong and we’re going to prove it because we’re going TO LOCK HER UP. That’s what it’s about.”

In 2006 Greg Lang dug up the text of Ellison’s speech as edited by Ellison himself and posted it on a site Lang dedicated to the Soliah case. Fearing that the site might disappear, as it has, I posted the speech in its entirety here on Power Line. The whole thing is indeed worth reading. To say the least, it reveals Ellison to be hostile to impartial enforcement of the law and indifferent to the lives of police officers. It is a shocking speech that betrays his unfitness for any public office, let alone attorney general. Then Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten devoted a column to Ellison’s National Lawyers Guild speech at the time Lang dug it up. When she sought out Ellison he declined to comment on his current view of Soliah/Olson or Chesimard/Shakur and he has not been asked about it since.

From the time of his third year at the University of Minnesota Law School (1989–1990) through the 2000 National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison was a hustler peddling the toxic Nation of Islam line. By 2002, when he ran a second time for office as a state legislator, he had jettisoned the Nation of Islam baggage. The vicious radicalism remained.

Vicious radicalism, you say?