21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Digital Clones Of Deceased Loved Ones Chat With Mourners At Own Funerals.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 21, 2022
The rest of the essay is an attack on presentism in recent Supreme Court decisions written by Justice Thomas and Justice Alito. Perhaps [James H. Sweet] thought that by ending with an attack on conservatives on the Supreme Court readers would be willing to overlook his criticism of the 1619 Project. But he was clearly wrong about that. I’d prefer to show you some of the tweets reacting to the essay but many of the primary sources (so to speak) have been hidden away by people protecting their tweets. So here’s a description of what happened from economist Phillip W. Magness at the American Institute for Economic Research. It’s worth noting that Magness has been a frequent critic of the 1619 Project.
Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter.
Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization is undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up on the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation. Cate Denial, a professor of history at Knox College, led the charge with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Executive Board with emails protesting Sweet’s column. “We cannot let this fizzle,” she declared before posting a list of about 20 email addresses.
Other activist historians joined in, flooding the thread with profanity-laced attacks on Sweet’s race and gender as well as calls for his resignation over a disliked opinion column. The responses were almost universally devoid of any substance. None challenged Sweet’s argument in any meaningful way. It was sufficient enough for him to have harbored the “wrong” thoughts – to have questioned the scholarly rigor of activism-infused historical writing, and to have criticized the 1619 Project in even the mildest terms…
Other activist historians such as the New School’s Claire Potter retorted that the 1619 Project was indeed scholarly history, insisting that “big chunks of it are written by professional, award-winning historians.” Sweet was therefore in the wrong to call it journalism, or to question its scholarly accuracy. Potter’s claims are deeply misleading. Only two of the 1619 Project’s twelve feature essays were written by historians, and neither of them are specialists in the crucial period between 1776-1865, when slavery was at its peak. The controversial parts of the 1619 Project were all written by opinion journalists such as Hannah-Jones, or non-experts writing well outside of their own competencies such as Matthew Desmond.
Read the whole thing, and note that “Nikole Hannah Jones herself has previously stated [in a series of since-deleted but screenshot tweets] that the 1619 Project was about journalism and narrative, not history. In other words, she has admitted this was exactly the sort of exercise in ‘presentism’ Sweet was saying it was in his essay: ‘The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history.’”
Live look at Sweet writing the usual groveling apology to the outrage mob:
Steve Hayward notes that the American Historical Association has locked down its Twitter account, adding that Henry Ford was right, “History Is Bunk After All.”
STEVE GREEN SMILES: Japan wants young adults to drink more to save alcohol industry.
BRIAN STELTER’S FINAL DELUSIONAL RANT SHOWS WHY HE GOT THE BOOT:
Curtis Houck of NewsBusters took the bullet for all of us and waded into the dreck.
“We’re barely five minutes into the final Reliable Sources and the arrogance and hatred for conservatives that “the truth is not neutral” with Stelter and Carl Bernstein is flowing. They’ve already shown why it’s being canceled.”
“Second segment for Brian Stelter’s final show — the risk to the lives of journalists and how dangerous it is to be one in America because of the far-right. Ah, yes. Being a journalist in America is JUST like reporting in China, Myanmar, North Korea, and Russia!” Houck said.
Criticizing and mocking bad CNN hosts isn’t threatening or putting their lives at risk.
But Stelter would like to present the illusion that he’s some kind of mystical knight fight for “democracy” against the evil Donald Trump. That’s not just false, it’s delusional–and it surely isn’t journalism.
“CNN’s Brian Stelter decries outside criticism of journalism as a “poisonous cloud” that’s spread throughout the country and around the world. He adds he’s “proud” to have worked at a network when they knew they had to fight and attack Trump,” Houck explained.
So, it’s wrong to criticize journalism? Wasn’t that what Stelter’s show was supposed to be about? Of course, that’s why he’s gone because his show wasn’t that; it devolved into a constant attack on Fox News and Trump. But it was sort of hilarious as he talked about why the media didn’t cover the important stories that should be covered. Then he and Carl Bernstein immediately went back to the narrative about “democracy” being in danger from authoritarianism (translation: to them, that means Trump).
Some authoritarianism is better than others, of course:
Bernstein was born in February 1944, the son of a radical labor union lawyer and activist mother. Both his parents were secret members of the Communist Party USA.
* * * * * * * *
“A case can be made that [Bernstein] should have disclosed the conflict of interest he brought to his Watergate exposes,” wrote New York media consultant Sidney Goldberg in 2003. “After all, he was brought up as a Nixon hater and readers might have been told that his family regarded Nixon as vile, as an enemy.”
Bernstein’s animus for Nixon is beyond dispute. He has written that anti-Communists such as Nixon and Joseph McCarthy unleashed a “reign of terror” in America. Yet he has always maintained that his motivation in pursuing Nixon was purely journalistic.
Bernstein also has said that growing up under the influence of his parents’ Communist values “has informed my beliefs about what is important.” Apart from his parents, one of Bernstein’s most admired role models is the radical journalist I.F. Stone.
Bernstein left the Washington Post at the end of 1976 to pursue other career opportunities. He worked for a time as ABC Bureau Chief in Washington, D.C. and later as its correspondent. In 1992, Bernstein was quoted as saying: “The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism,” he has said. “Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
Physician, heal thyself.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: The Baltimore City Council eliminated $22 million from the police budget. What does that look like?
—The Baltimore Sun, June 17th, 2020.
Chaser: Baltimore On Pace For Possible Record Murders As Local NAACP Asks Governor To Deploy National Guard.
—ZeroHedge, today.
GUT UND HART, DEUTSCHLAND: German economy minister rules out keeping nuclear plants running to save gas.
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck ruled out on Sunday extending the lifespan of the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants in order to save gas, saying it would save at most 2 percent of gas use.
These savings were not sufficient to be worth reopening the debate about the exit from nuclear energy given the consensus on the topic, he said during a discussion with citizens at the government’s open-door day.
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel initiated legislation to halt the use of nuclear power by the end of this year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 with a majority of voters in favour. But attitudes are shifting amid fears of an energy crisis this winter following a decline in Russian gas deliveries – with the three-way coalition itself divided on the matter. read more
“It is the wrong decision given the little we would save,” said Habeck, a member of the Greens party, which has it roots in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 80s.
Related: Nord Stream 1 pipeline to shut for three days in latest fuel blow to Europe.
JON GABRIEL: Out-of-touch politicians ask, ‘Is it me?’ then blame voters for their loss.
Though it had been predicted for months, Rep. Liz Cheney’s loss to Harriet Hageman dominated politics this week, in Wyoming and beyond.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain warned that the outcome proved “the American people are going to have to fight for their democracy.” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota doubled-down, asking of Wyoming voters, “What does that mean for our democracy?”
It seems the problem with our democracy is that citizens keep voting for people the Beltway doesn’t like. Both Democratic pols and Never Trump Republicans condemned the Cowboy State rabble.
It reminds me of Principal Skinner from “The Simpsons,” asking “Am I out of touch?” before quickly deciding, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”
Read the whole thing.
Related: Liz Cheney rips into Republican voters, leadership as ‘very sick’ after landslide primary loss.
Not surprisingly, the feeling is mutual among Republican voters.
DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION: Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds Of College Democrats Would Refuse To Room With A Trump Supporter; Republicans Far Less Likely To Reject A Biden Voter.
DEMOCRATS STILL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1860: MSNBC Host: “Civil War” is Here With Republicans. Tiffany Cross: “At this point, we need to have serious conversations around preparing for actual violence. People keep saying a Civil War is coming. I would say the Civil War is here.”
And so, as he flies the Blue Lady of the Skies into the sunset, we say “Aloha!” Five O’clock Tater, and return to our duties. Let me remind you, the Weblog is open twenty-four hours a day for your dining and dancing pleasure.
WAIT, TEDDY IS GOOD AGAIN?!
● Shot: Move over Abe! ABC’s Karl Compares Liz Cheney to Teddy Roosevelt.
Days after recently ousted anti-Trump Congresswoman Liz Cheney laughably compared herself to former Republican President Abraham Lincoln, ABC’s This Week co-moderator Jonathan Karl took it a step further and compared Cheney to former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Nice to see Teddy back from “Progressive” purgatory, however temporary his reprieve:
● Chaser: Red paint was splashed at the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History early Thursday, according to cops.”
—The New York Post, October 26, 2017.
● Hangover: Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from American Museum of Natural History.
—NPR, January 20, 2022.
Exit quote:
August 20, 2022
RULES FOR CONSERVATIVE RADICALS: Clever Billboards Pointing Out the Democrats’ Radical Excesses Pose Questions Republicans Must Answer.
One of the most interesting phenomena in politics at the current moment is how the left wing of the Democrat Party reacts when the Right points out what it is doing. First, the Right notices. Then Democrats tell us that it isn’t happening. When someone from the Right proves it is happening, the Left asks why we care.
To capitalize on this little dance, a group named Citizens for Sanity is placing billboards and ads all over the country pointing out the worst excesses of the radical Left.
The initial billboard slogans point to some of the worst ideas on the radical Left:
- “Protect Pregnant Men from Climate Discrimination.”
- “Open the jails. Open the borders. Close the schools. Vote progressive in November.”
- “Violent criminals deserve our compassion and respect. This fall, stand strong for progressive values.”
The group also launched a six-figure ad campaign addressing the controversy over boys playing girls in sports leagues if they identify as female.
Much more like this please.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Bulwark columnist gives a heads up about a couple of people wearing ‘1776’ hats.
President Donald Trump actually packed a lot into the final year of his term. He did what he could to root out critical race theory-based training from federal agencies (something President Joe Biden immediately reversed) and announced the “1776 Project,” a direct challenge to the “1619 Project” that had worked its way from the New York Times into the history curriculum of a lot of school districts. Trump wanted children to be proud of their country and proposed an alternative curriculum to do just that.
Bulwark columnist Amanda Carpenter spotted conservative columnist Ken Blackwell wearing a “1776” hat next to Brooke Rollins, and Carpenter broke out the red flags:
I so old, I can remember when Bill Kristol edited a magazine that actually celebrated America’s founding instead of believing it’s a dog whistle.
I DON’T WANT TO GO TO CHELSEA: Fancy Manhattan Neighborhood Now ‘24-hour Drug and Sex Den.’
In today’s edition of You Get What You Vote For, Manhattan’s once trendy and chic Chelsea neighborhood is now a 24/7 cesspool of drugs, sex, vagrants, and crime per this report from the Daily Mail:
Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood has become a ’24-hour drug and sex den’ according to some of its residents, as vagrants deal and use drugs in sight of a nearby school.
Parents told Fox 5 that their children have become exposed to nudity, sex acts and drug use while business owners deal with constant break-ins. Some said they are begging city officials and the police department to do something.
The new criminal activity is centered on West 21st Street between 8th and 9th avenues by P.S. 011 William T. Harris.
Why would anyone choose to live like this?
And yes, it is a choice.
New York does not have to be like this.
In fact, before New Yorkers decided to “own the cons” by voting Democrat, New York was not like this. Under Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York City was one of the safest, cleanest, and best-run cities — not only in the country but in the world.
But trendy New Yorkers didn’t like being safe, and were nostalgic for New York’s pissoir-like 1970s:
In contrast, New York has improved immensely since the period depicted in the original 1974 Death Wish. Naturally, New York’s bourgeois-bohemians, as David Brooks would call them, would welcome a chance to return to the hell of Manhattan in the ‘70s, as Daniel Henninger noted in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:
The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”
* * * * * * *
New York is famous for many things, and the reason the whole world knows this is because New York is a city of artists and writers. Though genius may find its muse anywhere, the Times’ commentators are correctly saying that most artists need to have personal flint chipping at social steel to spark the furnace within. But could it be that New York’s great weakness–beyond the public employee unions, beyond the economic obtuseness–is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city’s artists and writers? At the center of this New York myth is the belief that everyone here is clever, and so “anything is possible.”
But it isn’t. Everyone here isn’t clever.
Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn’t lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.
Many of the city’s most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can’t cop a “life” in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell’s hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply “free-rides” on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.
As Kyle Smith wrote this month, today he and fellow New Yorkers “grouse about soda bans and Citi Bikes. Twenty years ago, we worried about being mugged or murdered. Electing a Democrat who demonizes the police would ignore the luxury provided by two decades of safety.”
Meanwhile, in midtown Manhattan: SPAM goes on lockdown due to inflation in NYC.
FAREWELL BRIAN STELTER…FOR NOW:
One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter.
The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name.
I hate to burst the bubble of those celebrating the departure of one of the most dishonest figures in the national media, but Stelter, for some reason or another, is highly respected in the industry. His CNN newsletter is one of the highest circulated among journalists, whom Stelter worked to shield from controversy from atop his perch on the wall at CNN.
It’s been quite a run for the media’s janitor: Bye-Bye, Brian.
At this point it’s almost cliché to say so, but what Stelter meant when he used words like “misinformation” was right-wing. For all the Reliable Sources anchor’s garment-rending about declining trust in the media, he spent a disproportionate amount of time covering for his industry’s egregiously biased, activist behavior over the course of the past few years. He defended his colleague Chris Cuomo’s unethical role as an adviser to his brother, the disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He regularly offered up his show as a platform for Biden officials to repeat White House propaganda. On Jussie Smollett, he argued: “We may never know what happened.” And he himself regularly engaged in “misinformation,” including championing the fraudulent “Steele dossier” narrative. (When new details about the dossier’s fraudulent nature emerged, Stelter protested: “I’m a media reporter, and I’m not a Steele dossier reporter.”)
Stelter also served as the mainstream media’s attack dog when right-leaning outlets published stories that were inconvenient for Democrats. As Isaac Schorr and Brittany Bernstein pointed out, for example, Stelter went to the mat to discredit the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop:
Instead of praising the Post for its work, Stelter responded to the story by running a segment called “How the latest anti-Biden narrative was manufactured,” in which he attacked the Post for its reporting, called it part of the “right-wing media machine,” and asserted that the story didn’t “add up.” One year later, precisely none of the Post’s reporting has been debunked and much of it has been confirmed.
Related: Brian Stelter Torched After Being Ousted By CNN: ‘Contemptible, Vapid, And Unbearably Smug.’
New CNN chief Chris Licht reportedly informed Stelter of the decision to cancel his show, “Reliable Sources,” yesterday. Licht started to evaluate the hyper-partisan “talent” at the network shortly after he joined CNN as he aimed to dial down the extreme partisanship that has plagued the network in recent years.
News of Stelter’s ouster from the network sparked a wide range of comments mocking him, with many saying that he had a toxic impact on the news industry.
“Brian Stelter was the most contemptible, vapid, and unbearably smug news-tv character of the past two decades. Good riddance,” Washington Examiner columnist Harry Khachatrian wrote on Twitter. “His departure has ameliorated cable news.”
“Everyone’s dunking on Brian Stelter since his show got canceled, but I honestly feel really bad for his fan,” conservative political commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said.
And he bravely outed himself yesterday!
(Updated and bumped.)
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is modern environmentalism a pagan religion?
The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that “the modern environmentalists worship the created, not the creator.” I was reminded of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $300 billion to the climate change-industrial complex.
Pelosi (D-CA) claimed the wind, solar, and electric subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act would placate an “angry” planet. “Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of that,” the speaker said.
This is a highly revealing statement. Do Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues really believe that spending $300 billion on Tesla subsidies (with batteries made in China), windmills (made in China), and solar panels (made in China) is going to save the planet, stop the rise of the oceans, and lower the global temperature?
This is the same gang in Congress that can’t stop the daily drive-by shootings in our cities, can’t secure the U.S.-Mexico border, can’t come anywhere near balancing the budget, and can’t provide the resources our military needs for our national security.
Even if this additional $300 billion were to work as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports that the impact on global temperatures in the coming decades would be to lower them by 0.001%. So, instead of the global temperature being an average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit, it will be 58.999 degrees. Thank God! We are saved from Armageddon.
But as Pelosi’s quote makes clear, this is about symbolism. It is about ruining the economy as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. Marc Morano, the journalist who runs the Climate Depot website, asks: “Will human sacrifices be next to appease the ‘angry’ Earth gods? Actually, this bill will create human sacrifice by imposing even more suffering from energy deprivation, supply chain issues, good shortages, inflation, debt, and bad science.”
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
DAVID SOLWAY: The Great Reset: Testing, Testing…
It is disturbing to note that the greater portion of the public do not seem to be aware of the vast ideological movement for social transformation called the Great Reset. Those who are at least partially informed consider it merely another conspiracy theory. Some among the so-called elite—the media, the academy, the political stratum—consider the Great Reset as a rational and benevolent response to the specter of overpopulation and the threat of populist uprisings. Others among the patrician class, doubtless a majority, are engaged in promoting what they know to be a concerted attempt to destabilize and supplant the long-established order of ideally democratic governance that has slowly and incrementally characterized the liberal societies of the West, dating from the Magna Carta (1215) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the approximate present.
We should make no mistake about this. The revolutionary project, whether denominated as the New World Order, the U.N.’s Agenda 2030, or the Davos-centered Great Reset—different terms for essentially the same impetus—under the influential leadership of Klaus Schwab is apocalyptic in its aims. It envisages a world in which the middle-class will have been expunged, the global census markedly winnowed, and a China-like social credit system introduced in which citizens will be under constant digital surveillance determining what they are allowed to possess, rent, use or spend.
Read the whole thing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Seeing The Jump In Trump’s Poll Numbers, Biden Orders FBI To Raid His House Too.