OUR FRIENDS, THE MULLAHS: DOJ indictment shows Iran plotted to kill John Bolton while Biden, EU negotiated for renewed JCPOA.

CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR..METALLICA? Some Stranger Things Fans Are Now Trying to Cancel Metallica, Twitter Reacts.

However it’s described, in her video, Trueblood presses Metallica about their past actions caught on photo or video, including when members such as former bassist Jason Newsted appeared to do Nazi salutes onstage. She also shows footage where Metallica seemed to make fun of the death of Kurt Cobain after the Nirvana singer’s 1994 suicide. (One includes Megadeth‘s Dave Mustaine, but he was already out of Metallica at the time.)

Trueblood further claims Metallica singer James Hetfield kept Ice-T‘s Body Count off a 1992 Metallica tour with Guns N’ Roses due to the hip-hop artist’s race. She includes a classic MTV News clip suggesting the source of the rumor as Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose.

Naturally, Metallica fans on Twitter reacted in droves to Trueblood’s video. One tweet summarized, “The fact metallica welcomed and defended all the new fans that came from the stranger things fandom and they’ve gone and THROWN IT BACK IN THEIR FACES…”

But another seemed to counter in support of Trueblood’s take, saying, “Metallica fans proving they’re racist lmao.” Yet another replied to the drama, “Search Metallica cancelled… all about racism etc.” See more Twitter reactions down under the video.

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

And as a result, we live in the dumbest timeline imaginable.

WHITE HOUSE CLAIMS BIDEN WAS NOT BRIEFED ON FBI RAID AT MAR-A-LAGO:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that President Biden was not made aware that the FBI planned to searchformer president Donald Trump’s personal residence at Mar-a-Lago before the action was carried out on Monday.

“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”

There’s a possibility this is actually true, given how undisciplined this White House has been. As Matthew Continetti asked last month: Who’s In Charge?

If all the White House has to offer is excuses, if decisions are made either slowly or randomly, if the communications team and the president and vice president seem to live on different planets, if incompetence and mismanagement appear throughout the government, it is because the chief executive allows it. No conspiracy is required to explain the ineptitude. This is Joe Biden we are talking about. Lately, though, I have been having second thoughts. Not that Barack Obama or Ron Klain or Dr. Jill are running the show in secret. What I have been wondering, instead, is whether anyone is leading the government at all. There is no power, either overt or covert, in or behind the throne. The throne is empty.

Think of the economy, the border, and Ukraine. From time to time, Biden addresses these issues. He may even answer questions about them. The White House sends out press releases describing its latest initiatives. Vice President Harris or the second gentleman pops up somewhere to talk about all the good she and he are doing.

Yet each of these elements—the president, his staff, his spokesperson, his vice president, his policy—comes across as disconnected, discombobulated, as if each inhabits a separate sphere of activity. Whether because of Biden’s age, or his weekend trips to Delaware, or years of remote work, or lower-level staff turnover, or a painstakingly slow decision-making process, or ideological stubbornness, or a lack of a strategic plan, this administration drifts from crisis to crisis, and from one bad headline to the next. And nothing improves.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago certainly helped to get a lot of bad headlines for Biden out of the press, by putting Trump front and center in the media again, which the administration is thrilled about. It will likely dominate the Sunday talk shows, getting Team Brandon past yet another disastrous news cycle.

CRISES BY DESIGN: The US Industrial Complex Is Starting to Buckle From High Power Costs. Surging bills are forcing companies to scale back industrial operations, threatening a greater drag on the economy.

GOP HOUSE MEMBER WHO VOTED TO IMPEACH TRUMP CONCEDES: “Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of two Republican members of Washington’s congressional delegation who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, has conceded her reelection bid after being overtaken in late vote tallies by an intraparty challenger. Trump had targeted the six-term incumbent and endorsed Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, in the 3rd Congressional District contest. The district is in southwest Washington state, across the border from Portland, Oregon.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Albuquerque Cops Identify Suspect Muhammad Syed in Murders of Muslim Men.

Police on Tuesday announced they’ve charged an Albuquerque man with the murders of two Muslim men in a spate of recent slayings that have shaken New Mexico’s largest city in recent weeks.

Muhammad Syed, 51, also faces possible charges for the murders of another two Muslim men who were killed in Albuquerque in the last nine months. Ahmad Assed, president of the city’s largest mosque, told The New York Times that authorities informed him the shooter is a Sunni Muslim who may have targeted the victims because he was angry over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.

Thus, this story will likely be quickly memory-holed.

TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME! Israeli students accuse Ben & Jerry’s of occupying tribal land in Vermont.

Israeli students claim that ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is “illegally” occupying land in Vermont that once belonged to a Abenaki native American tribe and should practice what it preaches and immediately evacuate the properties.

A cheeky letter sent to B&J — signed by more than 1,000 Israeli students and academics affiliated with Students for Justice in America — accuses B&J of of hypocrisy.

“We have concluded that your company’s occupation of the Abenaki lands is illegal and we believe it is wholly inconsistent with the stated values that Ben & Jerry’s purports to maintain. Ironically, in July of the last year you announced that you would discontinue the sale of your products in Israel because you object to the Jewish State allegedly occupying Palestinian territories,” the letter to B&J’s chairperson, Anuradha Mittal said.

Over to you, Ben & Jerry’s. When will you be departing the land you’re illegally occupying?

OKAY, GROOMERS: LA school district shares video on ‘preferred pronouns’ with links to non-binary biological male’s ‘boudoir photos.’

ROGER SIMON ON THE MAR-A-LAGO RAID: DOJ and Dems Risk Civil War to Save Their Jobs.

Barely more than a week ago, on July 31, The Epoch Times published an article of mine—Would the Indictment of Donald Trump Lead to Civil War?

How fast things move; not even Usain Bolt could keep up.

What’s behind the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home besides a burst of Neo-Stalinism reminiscent of Comrade Beria’s “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” mixed with an effort to prove once-and-for-all that the USA is becoming a banana republic run by characters out of ”Seven Days in May.”

What made 30 (or was it more) FBI agents give a former president the Gestapo treatment in the early hours of the morning, allegedly rummaging in multiple rooms of his house, not looking so much for anything in particular—anything would do—while breaking into his safe in the process?

Call it The Big Panic. Call it something more insidious—the instigation of one-party rule.

The Democrats, the Deep State, the Justice Department (DOJ), the FBI, and all the intelligence agencies, globalists, propagandists of mainstream media, all the adherents of that one-party rule and enemies of republican government, will do anything … anything … to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election.

That includes courting civil war, and endangering millions of lives in the process, even though some of these panic-stricken individuals must realize they could ultimately lose that war.

It doesn’t matter to them. They need to stop Trump. They know the current list of candidates on their side has no chance to win in a country whose economy and global importance are tanking simultaneously.

Worst of all—they would lose their jobs, many of which are lifetime sinecures.

Trump’s main goal now is to end the Deep State, including such things as simply closing down the Department of Education, which has done nothing positive for education since its inception. He has said as much in recent speeches, often to wild applause.

Exit quote: “This is an untenable situation for a democratic republic, not that we are one anymore. To put it bluntly, we are already China—or something very close. Pay attention.  Act accordingly.”

Related: Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) says the FBI seized his cellphone one day after Mar-a-Lago raid.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Report: Judge who signed off the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion donated $2,000 to Barack Obama’s campaign and represented Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express pilots, his scheduler and ‘Yugoslavian sex slave.’

DARK BRANDON: Now Biden Can’t Even Dress Himself. “This is fine. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just the most powerful man in the free world, who doesn’t know where he is or who he is or what’s happening from one moment to the next. Yeah, okay, so he can’t even dress himself anymore. What’s the problem?”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: In the course of five seconds Biden forgets that he already shook hands with Chuck Schumer.

HEAD OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S UKRAINE ARM RESIGNS AFTER BACKLASH TO REPORT:

The leader of Amnesty International’s Ukraine arm resigned Friday amid fallout from a scathing report the human rights organization issued criticizing the Ukrainian military’s tactics amid the ongoing Russian invasion.

Driving the news: The report accused Ukraine of endangering its own civilians and allegedly violating international law. It prompted Oksana Pokalchuk, the leader of the watchdog organization’s Ukrainian arm, to resign, saying in a Facebook post the report had become “a tool of Russian propaganda.”

What she’s saying: “If you don’t live in a country invaded by occupiers who are tearing it to pieces, you probably don’t understand what it’s like to condemn an army of defenders,” Pokalchuk said.

This is what lit the spark:

Not surprisingly, in between Annie Leibovitz photo shoots and posing with actress Jessica Chastain, Zelensky went apoplectic:

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the report Thursday. Amnesty International, he said, was attempting “to grant amnesty to the terrorist state and to shift blame from the aggressor to the victim of the aggression,” Politico reported.

There’s further fallout as well: Will Amnesty condemn Islamic Jihad’s tactics as it did Ukraine?

Amnesty International’s contentious Thursday report, claiming that the Ukrainian military endangered civilians with its tactics, saw the organization lambasted for promoting Russian propaganda. But it is the fighting that began a day later, between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, that threatens the human rights group’s global credibility.

Islamic Jihad is clearly using the exact same tactics that Amnesty International accused Ukraine of. If the NGO does not condemn the terrorist group for these actions, it will show the world not just its political bias, but a staggering display of hypocrisy as well.

To be fair, Amnesty already accomplished that years ago.

THE TYRANNY OF THE ‘CURRENT THING:’

For a while, the Current Thing was #MeToo. From 2016 until 2018, the Current Thing was Russian collusion. After that scheme unraveled, we moved through a series of Current Things, each of which was said to compound the grave threat Trump supposedly posed to Our Democracy: in March 2020, it was Covid-19; for a few months that summer, it was systemic racism; then, it was the Delta variant; finally, for a stretch of early 2021, it was the January 6^th “insurrection.” And when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine became the Current Thing. You knew it was the new Current Thing because all the smart people suddenly changed how they spelled and pronounced “Kiev.”

So, you know what the Current Thing is. What, then, is “Current Thingism”? Current Thingism is the default mindset of a certain segment of the American population: typically, the professional, liberal, educated, urban caste of society. Current Thingism is an enduring assumption that whatever the Current Thing happens to be, it should, in fact, be the Current Thing—the issue among issues.

Current Thingism also enables some judgment on the part of the Current Thingist. Because the Current Thing deserves our total attention and deference, anyone who disputes the existence or the urgency of the Current Thing is a problem. The person who does not concede the urgency of the Current Thing is dumb, dangerous, or both. Remember the treatment of those who doubted the efficacy of masks? Those who were reluctant about mRNA vaccines? Those who doubted the wisdom of sending billions of dollars to fund Ukraine’s defense? Such is the fate of those who don’t get in line with the Current Thing.

Read the whole thing, which seems remarkably timely given the DNC-MSM’s reaction to last night’s events (the O-face on Nicolle Wallace’s face on the screen grab says it all).

WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: This is a provocation. They are trying to get a reaction that allows a further crackdown.

Don’t take the bait. Being stupid isn’t tough, it’s just stupid.

I flipped back and forth between CNN and MSNBC. At least when I watched, they were not engaging in the expected celebrations. There was a palpable dread that this could backfire against the Democrats. Bigly.

Be smart.

Read the whole thing.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: A 2004 BBC documentary titled, “Why I Hate the Sixties,” with conservative Peter Hitchens, author of The Abolition of Britain, among those interviewed (video).

CELEB AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL GETS ROASTED FOR DUMB (AND HYPOCRITICAL) TAKE ON REMOTE WORK:

Celebrity author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell is getting roasted online—and for good reason. He attacked remote work during a recent podcast interview, and his remarks went viral over the weekend.

“It’s very hard to feel necessary when you’re physically disconnected,” he said. “As we face the battle that all organizations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary.”

* * * * * * * *

There are so many problems with Gladwell’s argument, which is unfortunately shared somewhat widely among the elite class, that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Malcolm Gladwell is a Work-From-Home Hypocrite

Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that Malcolm Gladwell himself has a long history of working remotely.

In fact, New York Magazine reported in 2010 that despite living just miles away from his publication’s office, Gladwell almost never went into work:

“He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. His Lexus IS—a car, he concedes, he rarely drives—is parked down the street in the space he pays a small fortune to lease. A couple of miles north in Times Square are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker, who don’t see him in the office very often—owing to his self-professed ‘aversion to midtown’—but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials, lest he be forced to overcome that aversion.”

Similarly, Gladwell declared in 2005, “I hate desks. Desks are now banished.” The Guardian reported that, “He starts the day writing at home, but this is always done from his sofa, using his laptop.”

In 2010, Gladwell described himself as “someone who writes in coffee shops for a living.”

Further thoughts from Colby Cosh:

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WATCHING A POLITICS-FREE ESPN: ESPN Fails Because It Continues To Promote Deluded America Haters Like Jalen Rose.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Hunter Biden Breathes Sigh Of Relief As FBI Raid Team Passes By His House On Way to Mar-A-Lago.

“DARK BRANDON” MAY BE ON LIFE SUPPORT, POLITICALLY. Stelter: Hey, Hunter Biden is “not just a right-wing media story” any more, you know.

Why was it only a “right-wing media story” in 2020? Because mainstream media ran interference for Joe Biden in 2020. Why is it a legit story now? Because mainstream media now wants to jettison Biden in order to salvage the standing of other Democrats.

In the meantime, the actual facts of the story haven’t changed at all. The laptop data is the same, the testimonies of others around have remained the same, and so on. The only additions have come because the New York Post and other “right-wing” media outlets kept investigating and reporting on the story while the “mainstream” media and Big Tech platforms kept calling it “Russian disinformation.”

It’s narrative journalism at its worst … in both directions.

Joe Concha ripped Stelter and the media bias on display on Fox News. He also brings the receipts on Stelter’s hypocrisy:

[Video at link]

“Now that he has a new boss,” Concha says about Stelter, “I guess he’s trying to keep his job by actually doing his job.” That gives Stelter too much credit here. He’s trying to keep his job by helping Democrats push the Bidens to the sidelines.  Although, according to Puck News, the layoffs may be a-comin’ at CNN soon. Stay tuned … or not.

And possibly not just CNN: As David Zaslav Goes Straight Savage Cutting and Cancelling Everything #Woke at Warner Discovery, SJWs Start Shrieking About MuhFakeJobs.

Rumors are flying that Zaslav is going to end, mostly, DC’s monthly comic business, and either start publishing just the occasional graphic novel, or perhaps license out their eight or ten actually-valuable characters to some other company. The result will be a lot less work for the people who killed the American comic book industry.

And they’re screaming. They think that calling Zaslav a racist will work.

Here’s one of DC’s more obnoxious SJWs attempting the “I’ll call my boss a racist to keep him from firing me” card.

Not this time.

The Warner empire went woke — Zaslav is now in cleanup mode to prevent it from going broke.

SPRINGTIME FOR BRANDON: Yes, The White House’s ‘Dark Brandon’ Memes Contain Nazi Imagery With CCP Influences.

‘Dark Brandon’ is the Biden White House’s cringetastic effort to win back the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that haunted the perennially COVID-hit President through late 2021 and early 2022. The efforts, shared by taxpayer-funded White House staff, combines an almost year-late rebuttal to the Brandon memes with the Byronic aethestic of the well established “Dark MAGA” movement.

One more problem: it’s extremely ‘Third Reich‘ in nature.

That’s right. On the day the media wants us to buy the idea that Donald Trump demanded his Generals behaved like Nazis, the current White House is actually promoting Nazi memes to hype its passage of the Inflation Recovery Act (IRA). The timing by the White House isn’t bad, to be honest, since the IRA (another irony not lost on us) does in fact empower the U.S. government with a Stormtrooper-style IRS to snoop through your taxes (all at your expense, of course).

But there’s more to this story than the White House using the Reichsadler or Parteiadler in its memes. 

Including:

But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.

“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego, told POLITICO.

That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.

Related: “[T]he problem with the left as has been said in the past is that they can’t meme. First, the problem is that because Biden is feeble and incoherent, it just looks silly and desperate when you are trying to imbue him with special powers. Not to mention as my colleague Brittany Sheehan pointed out, it’s a bit of a rip-off already of memes of Trump. Big surprise, the Biden team sort of plagiarizing an idea once again. But then because they can’t meme, they came up with something that is not only dumb, but actually problematic. If Trump had come up with it you know the liberal media would be screaming ‘Nazi imagery’ because of the eagle in the background. They would be crucifying him 24/7.”

Exit quote:

Related: DARK BRANDON suits up for action!

<"This is fine" dot gif> https://t.co/VOuDq1qYb4

— Ken Gardner (@KenGardner11) August 8, 2022

RIP: Olivia Newton John dead at 73.

DON’T SAY GAY — IF YOU’RE A LOCAL ATLANTA ABC AFFILIATE: Metro Atlanta couple charged with using adopted kids to make child porn.

Evergreen:

UPDATE: I normally pair the above tweet by Iowahawk with this tweet from Jim Treacher…

…But I wasn’t sure of the aforementioned couple’s political worldview. Andy Ngo writes that “they’re liberal activists” in a Twitter thread on their politics that’s worth your time:

(Updated and bumped.)

WHY IS THE NEW YORK TIMES SO OBSESSED WITH LOATHING BRITAIN? It’s not just Brexit. It’s Oedipal.

They’ve done it again in the grey building on 826 Eighth Avenue, New York City, NY, USA. They – the editors of the New York Times – have launched a tumultuous broadside against the most degraded, pathetic, hopeless, rancid, ugly, stupid, ridiculous, doomed and offensively anti-democratic country in the entire world. That is to say, the United Kingdom.

This particular fusillade is quite something. Under the shouting headline The Fantasy of Brexit Britain Is Over, the author – Richard Seymour (and we shall come back to him) – serves up a grand, all-you-can-eat buffet of UK hatred.

Britain, according to Mr Seymour, is ‘economically stagnant, socially fragmented, politically adrift’. The right’s ‘Brexit fantasy’ is now a ‘nightmare’; the country is ‘corroded’, it is ‘unravelling’, its economy is ‘abysmal’, and its people are ‘dying in hospital’ in their ‘tens of thousands’. And all this is just a ‘familiar nightmare’ of ‘chaos’, ‘crippling strikes’, ‘structural problems’, and ‘chronic labor shortages’. What’s more, whenever we Brits do manage to raise a snaggle-toothed smile – for, say, the football – we are merely ‘flag-bedraggled, drunk and delirious’; we are horrible crowds ‘nourished by nationalism… roaming empty commercial streets’.

Nor does it end there. The writer gets so priapically excited by his thesis he actually questions whether Britain has a right to exist, or whether it even, you know, exists. As he puts it ‘what even is Britain’? He’s not quite sure of the answer, but that doesn’t matter, because he adds – and you can feel the author’s relishing spittle as you read the words – Britain is finally being ‘cut down to size’.

Don’t take it personally chaps — for decades, the New York Times hasn’t been sure that America exists — and if it does, the Gray Lady knows for sure that it definitely needs to be cut down to size.

GASLIGHTING: How the Mainstream Media Tries to Drive You to the Left.