GREAT NEWS FOR LABOR DAY! KJP Tells Us That Biden Has Created ‘Ten Thousand Million Jobs’ Since He Took Office.

JEFF DUNETZ: The Munich Olympics Massacre – 50 Years Later.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: President Biden Says He’ll Attend Detroit Auto Show Because He’s A “Car Guy.”

President Joe Biden is going to be expected at the forthcoming Detroit Auto Show that will be taking place in two weeks. It’ll mark the first time he has visited Detroit since his days as Vice President, Bloomberg noted last week.

“I’ll be there. I’m a car guy, as you kind of noticed,” Biden said last week when asked if he was going to attend.

Sure, we noticed. In fact, we couldn’t help but notice that Biden is such a car guy that his administration is trying to force through counterproductive and burdensome environmental and EV requirements for auto manufacturers. Biden apparently has such reverence for the industry he has decided that it needs to be changed in its entirety.

The new requirements and subsidies under the Biden administration have forced automakers to fundamentally change their vehicle lineups and how they operate. They’ve also become a tax on the American people that is dropping straight to the bottom line of auto manufacturers, as we’ve noted over the last week that automakers are raising their EV prices by almost the exact amount that the Biden administration is offering in subsidies to buyers.

And he’s such a fan of U.S. auto companies that Biden has barely acknowledged U.S. automaker Tesla’s existence, simply because the company isn’t embracing unionization amongst its workers.

And don’t get Pete Buttigieg started on America’s racist road system: Buttigieg launches $1B pilot to build racial equity in America’s roads.

But with midterms approaching, Biden wants us to forget all that — and Thursday “Dork Brandon” debacle — by reverting to his Corvette-loving old image temporarily.

UPDATE: Biden last year: “We will take, literally, millions of automobiles off the road — off the road, saving tens of millions of barrels of oil, dealing with cleaning up the air. This is not hyperbole; this is a fact.”

MORE: Granholm: California’s New Gas Vehicle Sale Ban ‘Could Be’ a National Model. “Elex Michaelson [of Los Angeles’ Fox affiliate] asked [Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm], ‘California made national headlines by becoming the first state to say, by 2035, we’re not going to have any gas-powered vehicles that are new that are being sold. You can still drive your old ones, but you can’t sell new ones. Do you like this concept?’ Granholm responded, ‘Yeah, I do. I think California really is leaning in. And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric.’”

(Updated and bumped.)

OUT ON A LIMB: Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward.

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.

When Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia the other night, he might have been thinking of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 31, 1936, at the end of his presidential campaign against Alf Landon—and, by the way, three months before he tried to pack the Supreme Court. That night, Roosevelt boasted that his enemies (Republicans, plutocrats, et al.) “are unanimous in their hate for me.” With a flourish, he added, “I welcome their hatred!”

Americans, lamenting the divisions of 2022 and, some of them, entertaining fantasies of a new civil war, should refresh their historical memories. The country has been bitterly divided against itself any number of times. The hatreds and convulsions of the 1930s (the era of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, of homegrown tribes of Trotskyists and Stalinists) culminated in the ferocious battle between isolationists and internationalists that lasted until the Sunday morning of Pearl Harbor.

Well no, “the hatreds and convulsions of the 1930s” would go on for quite a while longer. FDR gave a Nazi Iron Cross to a conservative reporter he didn’t like in 1942, and retroactively smeared Calvin Coolidge as a fascist in his 1944 State of the Union address. President Truman would go on to compare his Republican opponent in 1948 to Hitler, setting a trend from Democrats that would go on to the present day.

Related:

IN FASCIST LETTER, SALVADOR DALI CALLED FOR SLAVERY OF ‘ALL COLORED RACES:’

In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”.

“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”.

As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí‘s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity.

Philip Johnson. Walter Gropius. Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier. Ezra Pound. H.G. Wells. Why did so many pioneering modernists know all the lyrics to “Springtime for Hitler?”

CHILEANS DODGE BULLET: Breaking: Chileans overwhelmingly reject new socialist constitution.

THE HARSHEST TWITTER BURNS AGAINST THE SAN FRAN* TECH BROS AT BURNING MAN:

For every passionate Burning Man attendee, there are three equally passionate haters waiting in the wings to fire off a tweet about the people who choose to spend a week on the playa.

And this year, after COVID-19 rendered Burning Man a digital-only festival, the festival is back in full force — and so are the dunks against its attendees.

BACKWARDS RAN THE PRONOUNS UNTIL REELED THE MIND. WHERE IT ALL ENDS KNOWS GOD: Say what? Time uses woke pronouns to describe controversial author of Gender Queer.

Time magazine published a glowing profile of a controversial LGBT author whose book, which features questionable illustrations of sexual activity, happens to be the No. 1 most banned book of 2021. The magazine’s tweeted description, however, is confusing social media users.

In describing the interview, the magazine used new, gender-neutral pronouns, calling the biologically female author by “eir” and “ey,” which operate the same as pronouns their and they.

“TIME spoke to ‘Gender Queer’ author and illustrator Maia Kobabe on about eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment,” Time tweeted Wednesday night.

Flashback: We’ve Descended Into Some Sort of Bizarre Hell-World in Which Van Jones is a Voice of Sanity: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

He said the elites use strange rhetoric that does not appeal to working class voters.

“Those people talk funny,” he continued. “I’ve never met a LatinX, I’ve never met a BIPOC … There’s this weird stuff that all these highly educated people say. It’s bizarre, nobody talks that way at the barbershop, the nail salon, the grocery store, the community center. But that’s how we talk now, so that’s weird.”

It’s also a reminder of how radically Time has changed from moderate Republican Henry Luce’s original brief in the 1920s, in which he wrote, “Nothing will be too obvious. We assume nothing—e.g. that our readers know what 5-5-3 means, or who is John Masefield or Babe Ruth…. [It would] serve the illiterate upper classes, the busy business man, the tired debutante, to prepare them at least once a week for a table conversation.”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

TEN PEOPLE KILLED, 15 INJURED IN STABBING SPREE IN SASKATCHEWAN, SUSPECTS STILL AT LARGE.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden Puts the ‘Total’ in Totalitarianism.

Joe Biden certainly set the punditocracy abuzz with his neo-totalitarian performance piece at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The significance of that speech can be broken down into three parts, two of which have already received abundant commentary.

The first has to do with the theater of the piece, its optics or stagecraft. As many commentators (myself included) noted, the feel of the event was distinctly, and distinctively, bombastic. The melodramatic red lighting, the presence of armed Marines flanking the president, and Biden’s hectoring, gesticulating delivery made the event seem eerily reminiscent of a speech by Stalin, Mao, or—the closest parallel—that diminutive former house painter who, for a few short years, mesmerized the world with his elaborately staged rallies before pushing ahead with more kinetic activities.

To those who object that I am flirting with Godwin’s Law by invoking old AH, I reply that the flirtation was not mine but the doing of Biden’s producers and puppeteers. The visual similarity between Joe Biden’s event and some nighttime events at Nuremberg are just too striking to be coincidental. Leni Riefenstahl, as someone noted, would have been proud. Those who point out that Biden’s speech took place on September 1, a fraught day on the Polish border anno domini 1939, may be too ingenious for this historically illiterate age, but who knows? Often these things are, as our Marxists friends like to say, no accident. There are wheels within wheels.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: The Architecture of Doom.

HOW WEED BECAME THE NEW OXYCONTIN:

“I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen,” she told me. “And the worst delusions I have ever seen.”

These cases were even more acute than what she’d seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by “severe violence.” But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.

Stuyt wasn’t alone: Health care professionals throughout Colorado and all over the country were seeing similar episodes.

Ben Cort, who runs an addiction recovery center in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, watched a young man jump up on the table in the emergency department and strip naked, claiming he was the God of thunder and threatening to kill everyone in the room, including two police officers. A collegiate athlete Cort worked with also had a psychotic episode and was shot five times by the police with a beanbag gun before he was subdued. In Los Angeles County, Blue Stohr, a psychiatric social worker, had a patient who climbed a 700-foot crane and considered jumping off of it, not because he was suicidal but because he thought he was in a computer simulation, like The Matrix.

Those patients, too, were high only on cannabis.

Flashback: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”

GET WOKE GO BROKE – BIG RIG EDITION:

[US Xpress CEO Eric Fuller] offers contrition for being born a straight, white male, of course. But as a white savior, he is still not above using racist terms such as “Latinx,” a word that is well-documented as being a culturally offensive slur favored by affluent whites.

As a straight, white male, what I see as positive characteristics for opportunity within our industry is different than what a gay, Black or female person may see — or someone of Asian descent, someone who is trans or Latinx.

Unsurprisingly, this privileged white man who inherited his executive position from his daddy, accused truck drivers of being toxic people with white privilege.

Start talking to team members from minority communities within your organization and listen to them. Ask them to tell you how they view the openness and inclusion within our industry. Put yourself in their shoes. Think about the advantages that you have and how different their experiences are than yours.

CEO Fuller really, REALLY likes slandering his employees and his industry as being racist, doesn’t he?

In the previous year, I’ve interviewed multiple, highly skilled candidates for roles at U.S. Xpress. While each candidate has his or her own story, overwhelmingly I heard them talk about the lack of acceptance of diversity and perceived lack of opportunity within our industry.

While I admit that U.S. Xpress has a long way to go in developing a more inclusive culture…

Mr. Fuller made it very clear that the focus of his leadership had nothing to do with shipping goods, or making a profit, but instead on things such as creating “a safe space for open dialogue about important issues that impact women, the LGBTQ+ community…”

Exit quote: “You’ll never guess what happened next.”

“JUST ANOTHER BLESSING OF LIBERTY:” David French talks about the ‘OK groomer’ crowd getting upset over being called ‘semi-fascist.’

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Jeff Dunetz: I Cried Thursday Night, But Biden Made Me Feel Better On Friday.

[B]ased on his speech on Thursday, President Biden taught me that the MAGA goals were all evil. I felt horrible.

He even stopped calling us Ultra MAGA. Whenever a cleaning product introduces a more robust version of their product, they use Ultra as a prefix to the product’s name. When our President called us Ultra, I thought it was meant as a complement.

Thursday night President Biden, who campaigned on the basis of uniting the country, but never kept that promise, was at his most divisive. He singled out the people whose political positions were close to mine as evil and unAmerican.

I took the Presidents words to heart and cried all night long.

But on Friday, I felt so much better because the POTUS no longer thought I was a bad person. I was no longer very evil, maybe as bad as Generalissimo Francisco Franco ( who, I have been told is still dead).

On Friday, the President made me feel so much better.

President Biden on Friday said he does not consider any Donald Trump supporters to be a “threat” to the U.S. He said things that most people who supported MAGA goals would agree with.

He said the failure to condemn violence for political gains was “inappropriate.”

Holy Cow. I agree. People who use violence to make a political statement are wrong, and our leaders should condemn them publicly. I may have been sick with COVID and missed when the President scolded the people who encouraged and attempted to kill Supreme Court Justices after they ruled that abortion was a State rather than a Federal Issue.

As Byron York asked on Friday, “Huh? Biden’s remarks at the White House cast a cloud of confusion over what he said the night before. Did he mean it? Did he fully understand the kind of accusations he was making in Philadelphia? Was he confused? The president’s rhetoric was terribly serious and terribly divisive. It was hard to understand why he even gave the speech. Now, it is not clear whether he understands it, either.”

Dan McLaughlin compared Biden’s Philadelphia debacle to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of 1979. But I don’t recall Carter saying “Whoops — never mind!” the day after.

LIBS OF TIKTOK RETURNS TO TWITTER, THREATENS LAWSUIT IF REMOVED PERMANENTLY: “Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik wrote in Human Events that ‘Mainstream media isn’t mad about gender surgeries on teens, they’re mad you found out.’ Twitter, WaPo, NPR, NBC and others aren’t looking into the hospitals themselves, or trying to uncover harms done to kids and teens for the purposes of medical gender transition, but instead seeking to blast the journalist who is working to expose it.”

BED BATH & BEYOND CFO COMMITS SUICIDE BY JUMPING FROM NYC SKYSCRAPER AFTER ANNOUNCING MASSIVE STORE CLOSURES: “The 52-year-old, who is also the company’s executive vice president, lept to his death as the company announced last week they were instituting mass layoffs and closing 150 stores. [Gustavo] Arnal made over $2.9 million in 2021 which resulted from a $775,000 salary and stock awards. According to the Daily Mail, Arnal was being sued for ‘allegedly inflating the Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock price in a ‘pump and dump’ scheme.’”

LEE SMITH: Why Did the FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago?

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ proposed damage assessment of the documents is a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. The extensive redactions on the affidavit the FBI used to get a warrant to raid Trump’s home are akin to the excessive redactions on the application that the FBI showed a secret court in 2016 to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. What was true for the original Russiagate holds here, too: The redactions are designed to hide not state secrets, but government corruption.

The Mar-a-Lago raid feels like Russiagate because, well, it is Russiagate: a conspiracy theory weaponized by the country’s courtier class to serve the interests of a delirious and deracinated oligarchy, spawning daily prophesies of doom fed by an endless supply of national security “leaks” asserting that the former commander-in-chief really was and is a secret Russian agent. And proof of the president’s treachery, chant the priestly keepers of the “collusion” mysteries, will soon be revealed to the public. It is their blanket justification for every past crime and every new banana republic-style abuse of power, accompanied by a drumbeat of ever more outlandish and violent threats.

It is in this context that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago should be understood: Government records and reports from political and media operatives and bureaucrats who previously starred in Russiagate I give evidence that the FBI raided Trump’s home to seize documents exposing the crimes that the FBI and Justice Department have been committing since 2016. The fact that Russiagate shows no signs of ending anytime soon is bad news for the republic, betrayed from within by a performative elite whose ability to project power outside its gilded bubble requires a steady supply of paranoia, fear, and hysteria.

Read the whole thing.

GOODER AND HARDER, OLD BLIGHTY: UK pubs must hike pint prices to £20 each or face closure this winter, expert warns. “Tom Stainer, the chief executive of real campaign group CAMRA, says the increase in energy prices will cause running costs at pubs to increase by 500-600%, putting an enormous amount of establishments at risk of closure.”

HOW IT STARTED: Florida puts New York to shame in rational pandemic policies.

It’s a lie, though, that Floridians aren’t taking the novel coronavirus seriously. What they have done is discard the policies that don’t work, while retaining the ones that do.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on the day he closed indoor dining in New York City, noted that COVID spread in restaurants amounted to 1.4 percent of cases. In Florida, they decided numbers like that meant indoor dining stays open. In New York, we foolishly didn’t.

In Florida, DeSantis prioritized school openings. In New York, Cuomo puffed out his chest and said he was in charge of schools but then washed his hands of them when it was time to do the hard work of getting them open.

And Florida’s policies bore good fruit. On Jan. 9, New York ­reported 17,839 new cases. Florida, with about 2 million more people than New York, had 15,445. An open state like Florida having fewer COVID cases than a mostly closed state like New York proves protracted lockdowns are a ­failure.

And that disparity has led people like Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Cuomo, to spin bizarro conspiracy theories on Twitter that Florida has “cooked the book on case numbers.” It’s much harder to admit that his boss destroyed restaurants and other businesses for no reason.

How it’s going: Democratic Socialist Professor Eric Alterman : Ron DeSantis Is an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist.

GREEN PARTIES IN EUROPE FACE SOBERING REALITY THAT THEY NEED FOSSIL FUELS AFTER ALL:

Greens in France, Great Britain, and other EU countries are out of power. They can bash the government for their reliance on fossil fuels to their hearts’ content because they don’t have to put any political capital where their mouths are.

Except in Germany. The Greens are members of Chancellor Olaf Schulz’s left-wing coalition and are now dealing with the uncomfortable realities of power. And one of those realities is that since Russia invaded Ukraine, German supplies of natural gas have largely been held hostage by Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose pipelines supply Germany with 27% of Germany’s overall energy mix. Before the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, just over half (55%) of gas consumed in Germany was imported from Russia.

Since then, Putin has played footsie with Europe by shutting down the Nord Stream pipelines for “maintenance” twice — the second time ten days ago. And now, Putin has shut the natural gas pipeline down “indefinitely,” forcing Germany and much of Europe into hard choices.

Spectator World:

Now the Greens are having to make a great energy leap. As members of the German government they are staring close up at the realities of soaring energy prices. They are having to face the prospect of the lights going off this winter, and of public buildings in major cities such as Hamburg already trying to ration the amount of electricity they use. The Greens’ demand that everybody else join them in a fantastical leap has now reversed into the Greens recognizing that their society simply is not ready.

Rick Moran’s article is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.

METAPHOR ALERT: Coal miners help push tourists’ dead electric car in West Virginia. “Because the vehicle was plastic underneath, there was no way to tow it, so a group of miners decided to push it. ‘So here are 5 coal miners pushing a battery car to the coal mine to charge up.’ You could even see mounds of coal in the background while the vehicle was charging.”

THIS MIGHT BE THE POLITICAL AD OF THE YEAR:

It’s Nixon’s 1968 “Law and Order” ad updated for 2022. As Charles Glasser wrote here in August of 2020, “[I] cannot stress enough how powerful and resonant this ad was in 1968. Ben Rhodes was right: The young reporters in the MSM don’t know anything, and I’d add neither do their readers. This ad could run today and still be effective. If you support Trump, you should be demanding that they start producing ads like this.”

Earlier: Clever Billboards Pointing Out the Democrats’ Radical Excesses Pose Questions Republicans Must Answer.

ED MORRISSEY: Biden’s soulless screed a smokescreen for what really ails the nation.

Last night, the same president who almost exactly a year ago disgracefully abandoned 14,000 Americans and tens of thousands of our allies to the Taliban decided to lecture the US on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation.”

Let that sink in for a moment or two.

In that speech, Joe Biden tried to take the high ground for democracy against authoritarianism — just a week or so after eviscerating the constitutional check on the presidency by claiming the executive branch has the authority to print and appropriate between $600 billion and one trillion dollars to transfer debt from Biden’s base voters to the rest of the taxpayers.

Let that one sink in for another moment or two. Especially after Biden described “the work of my presidency” as returning the US to the founding documents of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Joe Biden isn’t the solution for what ails the American soul. He’s not even really the main disease of what ails the American soul. Joe Biden is a demagogue who floated to the top of a morass that has been building for decades, and who only sees the problem to the extent that it benefits or harms Biden’s interests.

Read the whole thing, which is now un-paywalled from the Townhall VIP program.

Related: Infographic: “American Unity,” a Speech by Joe Biden.

GOODER AND HARDER, OLD BLIGHTY: Life in Blackout Britain: Experts warn energy rationing this winter could see people told not to cook until after 8pm, pubs close at 9pm, ‘three-day-a-week’ school, care homes cancel outings for residents and swimming pools left unheated.

The scale of energy rationing that may be required at home, in the NHS, schools, care homes, shops, pubs and on the streets of Britain because of surging energy prices and the threat of blackouts is laid bare today.

Experts have told MailOnline there is ‘no escape’ for the 66million people in the UK who will be encouraged to cut their use of gas and electricity this winter and even turn off the lights when the wind drops.

Kathryn Porter, from consultancy Watt-Logic, fears that the crisis will cost lives in the coming months and told MailOnline: ‘We should keep our fingers crossed for a warm and windy winter’. Ms Porter has said that it’s ‘very possible’ the UK will see plans for energy rationing, despite Liz Truss, the likely next prime minister, absolutely ruling it out, but the energy expert added: ‘It would be voluntary, asking people to make a small sacrifice to avoid blackouts’.

Today it emerged that Britons could be asked to limit energy use this winter to head off blackouts by avoiding using gas and electricity at peak times in a move that will hit every part of life.

At home people may be encouraged not to use washing machines, dishwashers and ovens between 2pm and 8pm while charging cars before 9pm is also not advised when similar measures were imposed in the US this year. Abandoning the family weekday dinner at 6pm or the Sunday roast at 5pm may be required and moved to after 8pm or swapped for a cold dinner or leftovers.

Related: Russia’s Gazprom indefinitely shuts gas flow to Europe.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Was Gina Carano Right All Along?

Carano lost her talent agency, UTA, and her professional future looked bleak before The Daily Wire hired her to produce and star in “Terror on the Prairie.”

Except Carano hadn’t played the Nazi card like her peers, none of whom have received an ounce of punishment for their comments.

Carano didn’t label any politician, Left or Right, as Hitler or Nazi-esque. She worried that conservatives and free thinkers alike were being treated like the “other” in western culture, and she feared what might happen next.

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

Her post had more nuance, and empathy, than peers who called Trump supporters Nazis.

Still, even some conservatives recoiled at her evoking Nazi-era Germany.

Carano, now starring in “My Son Hunter,” made those comments in February 2021. The America she described is inching closer to reality less than two years later.

Read the whole thing.