GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: CNN Staff Fears Right-Wing Billionaire Will Turn It Into a Dumpster Fire.

The fallout from the firing of Brian Stelter and the cancellation of Reliable Sources continues this week.

CNN insiders tell Confider that staffers cannot shake the feeling the shocking move was made to appease John Malone, a right-leaning billionaire, close friend of the Murdoch family, and key Warner Bros. Discovery board member who has made it well-known that he would like CNN to be more “centrist”—whatever that means.

Perhaps being able to define “centrist” might be a good first step in repairing both CNN and the Huffington Post.

Related: Stelter Doubles Down On His Claim That “Journalism” Doesn’t Require Fairness, and That It’s “Dangerous” to Criticize the Leftwing Media (But Only the Leftwing Media).

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: 10-Year-Old Praised as Youngest Trans Model To Walk New York Fashion Week.

WHY IS THE GRAY LADY SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? People of color at the New York Times get lower ratings in job reviews, union says.

CALIFORNIA’S NOT SENDING ITS BEST TO CONGRESS: Eric Swalwell Takes a Swipe at DeSantis, but Commits an Embarrassing Self-Own.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN PAYING $300,000 PER FLIGHT TO TALIBAN TO ALLOW U.S. CITIZENS AND AFGHAN ALLIES TO CONTINUE EVACUATING:

NATO allies vehemently opposed Biden’s unconditional withdrawal to such a degree that Secretary Blinken had phoned his boss from a NATO summit to tell him he had gotten a “jolt” in “in quadraphonic sound” opposing the move. His own military advisers had told him not to do it.

Nothing Biden and his people said about their botched evacuation from Afghanistan was true.

After withdrawing forces while leaving thousands of Americans behind on the ground, Biden reluctantly approved a limited evacuation whose military personnel were cut off from the start. Mobs overran the airport, with mostly young men filling up planes which took off. The State Department failed to plan for an evacuation or vet evacuees leading to dozens of Afghans with terror ties coming to America and massive backups of Afghan evaucees abroad.

After its Saigon moment, the Biden administration has been paying “approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating.” Air Taliban is being funded by the United States with State Department officials confirming “that the cash-strapped Taliban are profiting from these payments.“

The Taliban had every incentive to sabotage our evacuation to profit from Air Taliban.

As an Obama-era retread, Biden sure loves giving pallets full of cash to Islamic terrorists.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Build a Bug Out Kindle: A Digital Survival Library at Your Fingertips.

ANTHONY FAUCI WILL STILL GET $350,000 A YEAR FROM THE GOVERNMENT AFTER HE RETIRES: “Of course, Fauci will be able to make much more money than that. He will surely write books and give speeches. Indeed, the doctor is well-positioned to capitalize on his newfound fame as a hero to Team Blue. No public official, not even President Joe Biden himself, personifies the U.S. government’s pandemic approach quite like Fauci, who quite deliberately positioned himself as the avatar of correct COVID-19 behavior. Fauci even said that critics who undermined him were attacking science itself.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Texas Has ‘Bused Over 7,000 Migrants to Our Nation’s Capital Since April.’

Meanwhile in Florida: “Responding to a question about an upsurge in Cuban migration during a recent interview on a South Florida Spanish-language radio station, Florida Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez said the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis will send migrants who arrive to Florida illegally to Delaware…But a spokesperson for the Governor’s campaign later said Cubans coming to South Florida would be exempt.”

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS: New York Times Claims ‘Republicans of Color’ Are Distorting the American Dream.

New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa wrote:

“For decades, politicians have used the phrase ‘the American dream’ to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work.”

“Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies.”

She continued:

“But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message … The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle. They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”

More here: Headline Fail of the Week.

The New York Times published an article on “How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground,” in which reporter Jazmine Ulloa claims, “A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase ‘the American dream,’ is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.”

The article says that “a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies,” and notes that many of the Republicans doing so are people of color, “including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.”

In what is perhaps the most insane line in a deeply flawed article, Ulloa claims that “in the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.”

The Gray Lady wants it both ways: to claim with the “1619 Project” that America was born from Original Sin and is therefore irreparably damaged and evil. But also that “the American Dream” is a racist dog whistle when used by the right — and especially by “Republicans of color.” (Though as James Taranto likes to say, “if you can hear the whistle, then you’re the dog.”)

(Classical reference in headline.)

UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden takes two-week break as vacation time outstrips Trump, Obama, Bush.

Call him the “Out of Towner.”​

President Biden will wrap up a two-week vacation at his beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., Wednesday as one unofficial count indicates he has spent more time away from the White House than his three immediate predecessors at the same point in their terms.

The president and his family, including disgraced first son Hunter Biden, left Washington for their latest getaway on Aug. 10, spending almost a week at a $20 million mansion on South Carolina’s exclusive Kiawah Island.

As The Post reported earlier this month, the first family stayed for free at the nine-bedroom oceanfront estate owned by Democratic donor Maria Allwin, the widow of hedge fund founder James Allwin.

The president interrupted his vacation for one day to return to the White House on Aug. 16 and sign the Inflation Reduction Act​.

Related: The puppet-master’s victory lap.

While Biden’s Out of Office schedule shouldn’t surprise anyone, it is unfortunate that the president had to skip out on all of the post-signing gloating.

Fear not though Joe: a man was waiting in the wings who was thrilled to act as your pompous understudy.

Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain, took a break from retweeting Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post columns, to give an interview to Politico about Biden’s winning streak.

Klain answered questions about what Joe Biden is dubbing “a season of substance.” He listed a variety of accomplishments including several pieces of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Like so much of Biden’s presidency in Klain’s eyes, the passing of these incredibly expensive bills is historic. In fact, Ron Klain retweeted Robert Schrum, who pointed out that Joe Biden is the most legislatively successful president since Lyndon B. Johnson! Of course, The Spectator’s Stephen L. Miller was quick to rain on the parade, replying, “How’d that work out for LBJ?”

Exit quote: “In this same interview, Biden’s right-hand man also revealed that he can get a lot more work done when the president is not at the White House. Lucky for Ron, that seems to be quite often nowadays.”

NO. FULL STOP: Yikes! World Economic Forum Claims ‘Solid, Rational Reasons’ for Microchipping Children.

UMASS LOWELL BANS STUDENTS FROM VIEWING ‘OFFENSIVE’ MATERIAL:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) highlighted UMass Lowell’s “acceptable use” policy for its monthly series spotlighting egregious free speech violations on campuses. This policy applies to all school-provided computers, but also any networks and/or services connected to the university, such as email or campus wifi. It provides the use of any such technologies to transmit or access “offensive material.”

This is deeply problematic and constitutionally suspect. After all, what, exactly, constitutes “offensive?”

For example, is a student who receives right-wing news sources in their email inbox violating it? It’s safe to say that many of the views commonly expressed in conservative media are considered “hate speech” by many woke campus administrators—but they’re also protected expression under the First Amendment.

“The Supreme Court has explicitly held, time and time again, that speech cannot be restricted by the government merely because it offends others,” FIRE points out. “In spite of such clear precedent, colleges and universities routinely ban offensive speech in campus speech codes, especially in IT policies. Whether a person is burning a flag at a protest or advocating for (or against) flag burning on Twitter, a ban on ‘offensive’ speech calls for impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”

Like Randi Weingarten, I blame Ron DeSantis.

KURT SCHLICHTER: IT’S NOT 2005 ANY LONGER, AND THE SITUATION IS TOO DESPERATE TO CONTINUE INDULGING WEAK AND FECKLESS MEN LIKE MIKE PENCE AND TIM SCOTT WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS. As Ace of Spades responds, “it’s not true that these people don’t want to fight. They do want to fight. It’s just that they want to fight actual conservatives.”

SEAN DAVIS NEEDS JUST A FEW SCREENSHOTS TO SINK EX-SURGEON GENERAL’S PRAISE FOR DR. FAUCI’S HUMILITY:

Earlier today Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he would be stepping down as head of the NIAID “to pursue the next chapter of my career.” If Sen. Rand Paul has anything to say about it (and if voters give the Senate back to the Republicans) part of that “next chapter” will be getting grilled at more hearings.

Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams noted Fauci’s announcement by claiming that the doctor never sought the spotlight…Sean Davis offered up a few screenshots that would indicate otherwise:

HERE’S HOW IT MIGHT HAVE LOOKED IF TODAY’S ‘FACT CHECKERS’ HAD BEEN ABLE TO CENSOR SPEECH THROUGHOUT U.S. HISTORY:

Imagine some hippy in 1968 speaking out against the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam on his Facebook, only to have “Missing Context” pop up to warn his followers:

‘End the War! Bring our troops home! Screw Johnson!’

Facebook Warning: *Independent fact-checkers* have found that this and similar posts are missing context. The Pentagon and statements by White House officials have suggested that U.S. efforts in this conflict have been productive.

* * * * * * * *

[I]magine a conservative sharing on Facebook in 2009:

‘I don’t trust this president, I want to keep my doctor and this government is only to make health prices go up!’

Facebook Warning: *Independent fact-checkers* have found that this and similar posts are missing context. Obama Administration officials have assured Americans that they will be able to keep their health plans and their doctors. 

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Evangelical Christian furries are worried they’ll be targeted for their faith.

Beto O’Rourke could not be reached for comment.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Randi Weingarten admits to sharing fake list of ‘banned’ books: ‘My bad.’

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten admitted to sharing a false tweet claiming that certain books were banned in Florida on Sunday.

“I should have double checked before I retweeted this list. My bad. Looks like some of the books weren’t banned. Book bans are very real & dangerous,” she said on Sunday. Weingarten included a screenshot of her original tweet, which said, “Books we have taught for generations!!!!!”

The list, posted by an account called “Freesus Patriot,” claimed that Florida has banned books such as, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “A Wrinkle in Time.” The account also tweeted that they would not reveal the source of the list.

“I’m not going to say where this list came from due to protecting sources but if this list is wrong then I invite @RonDeSantisFL to publicly state the books on this list will not be banned in Florida schools & he intends to protect student’s rights. I will take it down if he does,” the account tweeted.

Social media users responded to Weingarten’s walk-back and original tweet, which has since been deleted.

Including:

MICHAEL WALSH: ‘Our Democracy’ Needs a Great Reset.

You know the American Republic is on its last legs when those trying to destroy it consistently refer to it as “our democracy,” which is exactly what it is not and what it was never intended to be. Historically, democracies don’t last long, because they quickly turn into tyrannies after passing through the parasitical stage. Democracy in ancient Greece was hardly what we might call “democracy” today, as voting was restricted males with a stake in the system. No votes for women, slaves, or helots. The young male hoplites of Athens had to complete military training as ephebes to earn their right to vote, and not simply achieve their majority, which was effectively 20; additionally they had to buy their own armor and weapons and be prepared to go to war on practically an annual basis. (Any resemblance between this society and the world of Starship Troopers is entirely intentional.) 

Read the whole thing.

ROGER SIMON: #DemCast Takes Democrats War on Truth to a Much More Dangerous Level.

“DemCast is a non-profit organization utilizing social media to push left-wing narratives online through tens of thousands of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

“Garnering an estimation of over 50 billion impressions since just 2019 — DemCast aims at manipulating public opinion surrounding the topics of COVID, war with Russia, January 6, and even swaying local elections throughout all of the 50 states. …

“[A]n unlisted YouTube video posted to DemCast’s YouTube channel … details a major function of DemCast’s strategy — using thousands of private chatrooms to artificially amplify messaging on the platform, garnering millions of impressions, artificially amplifying content to sway public opinion.”

To do this, they utilize something called the Speechifai platform wherein (obviously left-wing) organizations are provided with “an accompanying hashtag, ensuring that when thousands of individuals post to social media, they appear as though they are authentic to the normal user — rather than auto-generated” (from a specifically left-wing bot).

I repeat: over 50 billion impressions so far, undoubtedly growing exponentially even as we read this. Not even Orwell dreamed of this for his Ministry of Truth. Who needs the imprimatur of the New York Times—controversial to some of us diehards—when you have millions of people unwittingly repeating the received mantras without a hint of bias acknowledged? It’s from folks just like you, folks. No pundits, no media, nada, not even celebrities.

I can already see the gleam in Klaus Schwab’s eyes as some putatively harmless and logical version of “You will own nothing and you will be happy” makes its way through the chat rooms and then invades half the computers of the world to be tweeted and retweeted until our heads explode.

Exit quote: “So I reiterate my call to get off what we could call social media’s axis of evil and thereby destroy their business models. We have the numbers to do that if, for once, we hang together.”

BIDEN HASN’T BEEN ABLE TO FREE BRITTNEY GRINER: Maybe Dennis Rodman Can? “Of course, when you read between the lines, it sounds like the administration is afraid that Rodman might show them up and accomplish something they couldn’t: Griner’s release. Honestly, I have more confidence in Dennis Rodman securing that ungrateful American’s release than in the Biden administration doing so. Rodman credits himself with securing the release of American prisoner Kenneth Bae from North Korea back in 2014. So, I guess Rodman has experience being better at diplomatic negotiations than Democrat administrations.”

AXIOS: Golly, NYC and the Beltway are feeling “overwhelmed” by…”Texas migrants?” “Again, we have ‘migrants’ with no explanation of origin. It sounds as though Abbott is sending Texans off to live among the big-city folk. (Those wouldn’t be ‘happy to leave,’ trust me.) In this entire report, the word ‘border’ never appears, let alone ‘border crisis.’ For that matter, neither do the words ‘Mexico,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘asylum,’ or ‘Biden.’ Axios treats this as though Abbott created a crisis out of thin air, rather than an 18-month catastrophe on the border that Joe Biden has steadfastly refused to address honestly.”

RIP: Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s right-hand man, dies at 74. “Before meeting Kubrick, Vitali was a rising actor in England, appearing in several British television shows including ‘Softly, Softly,’ ‘Follyfoot,’ ‘Z Cars’ and ‘Notorious Woman.’ Then in 1974 he got his biggest break yet, when he was cast in ‘Barry Lyndon’ as Lord Bullingdon, the son-in-law of Ryan O’Neal’s title character. Vitali was so fascinated by Kubrick and his processes that he made an unusual decision: He gave up on acting and devoted himself entirely to the famously demanding director for over two decades. His next Kubrick credit was as ‘personal assistant to the director’ on ‘The Shining,’ though that’s only part of the story — Vitali famously helped cast 4-year-old Danny Lloyd to play Danny Torrance and Louise and Lisa Burns as the creepy Grady twins (citing Diane Arbus as inspiration).”

THE DOCTOR IS OUT: Anthony Fauci reveals when he will retire. “Fauci announced Monday that he will retire at the end of the year.”

Related: Politico Is Shocked that Conservative Criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci Is Growing ‘More Intense and Personal.’

UPDATE: From America’s Newspaper of Record: World In Panic As Science Announces Retirement.

HE REALLY WAS WEARING THAT SKIRT AWFULLY SHORT: The American Conservative denounces Salman Rushdie, complains that his book was ‘deliberately insulting to Islam.’

JULIE BURCHILL: Cultural appropriation has killed modern music.

ZE Records was started up in New York City in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, Zilkha a 24-year-old entrepreneur (his father, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant to Britain, was Mothercare) and Esteban a 27-year-old French artist, mentored by the legendary John Cale, and the boyfriend of a young Anna Wintour. This combination of dirty cash tangling with both avant-garde and haute couture would add up to an awful lot of well-bred young Americans pretending to be French – and a lot of brilliant music, a fearless fusion of punk and disco. Their best acts were ‘Was (Not Was)’, Cristina Monet (the Zelda Fitzgerald of pop) and Suicide (with the most terrifying music ever recorded, Nick Hornby writing of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ that you would listen to it ‘only once’). You’d never heard anything like ZE – but you knew you’d been waiting all your life to listen to it.

* * * * * * * *

ZE closed in 1984 – it was only active for six years, which makes its reach all the more remarkable. Suicide’s icy genius now soundtracks a perfume ad; Cristina died of Covid. Many on the left now espouse ideas of cultural purity that would shock the Aryan Brotherhood. And if you Google ‘Ze’ you’ll find the likes of this on dictionary.com:

‘pronoun (occasionally used with a singular indefinite pronoun or singular noun antecedent in place of the definite masculine he or the definite feminine she): “My friend didn’t want to go to the party, but ze ended up having a great time!”’

Did ze, though? What was the music like? Did ze approve, or should ze have had a trigger warning before Fonda Rae started singing ‘Touch Me’? Was it so beautiful and bad that it made ze sad? Never mind – in five years’ time, pronouns will have gone the way of the antimacassar. But the magnificent music of the mutant disco will play on forever.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Gwen Stefani is a voice of sanity: Gwen Stefani Is Right: Cultural Appreciation Is Not Cultural Appropriation.

An obsession with cultural appropriation also reveals the deep unseriousness of self-proclaimed “anti-racists.” The modern left, with its influence in boardrooms and newsrooms and classrooms, takes every opportunity to lecture weary Americans about the enduring evil of whiteness and of white supremacy.

While their racially charged screeds are almost always unfounded, within their rhetoric is a message that threatens to cultivate white pride where it didn’t exist before. By reinforcing the idea that cultural appreciation is cultural appropriation and therefore racist, woke warriors encourage white people to insulate themselves from the cultures and experiences of others and fully embrace tribalism wherein race is a focal point.

“Most critics of cultural appropriation, coming from the far left, also fear the rise of white supremacy,” wrote Julian Adorney here at The Federalist in 2018. “But the best way to combat white supremacy is to encourage people of all races, whites included, to borrow at will from other cultures — as drawing more lines between races and cordoning off the exploration of other cultures is wholly contradictory to the end goal of creating a harmonious, diverse, and pluralist society.”

Americans who take pride in the melting-pot nature of this grand experiment would likely agree with Adorney, as does Stefani. “If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know?” she said. “We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more.”

Take a tip from Stefani. Don’t let the race-baiters bully you into giving up cultural appreciation.

Related: “As Richard Fernandez tweeted: ‘The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.’ It was fatal: ‘People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.’”