PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: An American security expert was targeted by North Korean hackers — so he responded by turning off North Korea’s entire Internet. “Thoughts and prayers to North Korea’s one IT guy who’s surely having the worst few weeks of his career if he’s not already dead (he’s probably already dead).”
JUST NBC THE CATACLYSM! “NBC is facing a cataclysmic loss of audience for the 2022 Winter Olympics as viewership tanked for Friday’s Opening Ceremony, averaging just 16 million.”
It is a record low for the Opening Ceremony (20.1 million for 1988 in Calgary was the previous record) and a whopping 43 percent below the 2018 Games in South Korea that notched 28.3 million viewers despite also dealing with a less than advantageous Asian time zone for American audiences.
It comes on the heels of Thursday’s ratings disaster that saw just 7.7 million people tune in, dramatically below same-night audiences of 2018 (16 million) and 2014 from Russia (20.02 million).
NBC said the 16 million is a “total audience delivery” and includes all of its networks and streaming. The television-only average audience was below 14 million for the day, per the preliminary data released by the network.
While ratings tend to increase over the first week, as more viewers get caught up in the action, NBC will have to work out of a ratings hole.
The host country, China, is a serious problem.
Yes, totalitarian gulag-filled communist hellholes tend to be that.
More here: Televised Coverage of Beijing Winter Olympics is a Snow-filled Ratings Bust.
DOMINIC GREEN: Vladimir Putin is rolling over the United States.
Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to send troops into Ukraine. He has already achieved his strategic goals — for now.
The leading European Union powers, France and Germany, are competing against each other for Putin’s ear, while Britain is competing against them by shipping arms to Ukraine. The United States is exposed as an unreliable protector, unable to defend its overextended position on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine. NATO is divided and powerless, a shadow of imperial overreach.
A decrepit caste of corrupt leaders is incapable of managing a controlled retreat from imperial overreach. America today, or Russia the day before yesterday? Vladimir Putin witnessed the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders. He is now returning the favor. He is pushing American and European influence out of Ukraine, and unpicking the already frayed bonds of NATO and the EU.
Geopolitics is not about morality. It is about the effective use of power. For thirty years, the smart opinion in Washington was that post-Soviet Russia was no threat to anyone because it had an economy the size of Portugal and its economy ran on carbon fuel exports. That these statistics were true shows how well Vladimir Putin has played his limited hand — and how arrogantly the US has mishandled relations with Russia while its experts tell each other flattering fictions.
Why, it’s as if: Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.
RIP: Todd Gitlin, a Voice and Critic of the New Left, Dies at 79.
Dr. Gitlin personified the cultural and political ambitions of the ’60s, with a continuous readiness to confront orthodoxies of whatever stripe. He was a president of Students for a Democratic Society, the national flagship student organization that called for constructive social change, whose ranks swelled with protesters against the war in Vietnam and then collapsed into factionalism. At S.D.S., he assisted in organizing the first national demonstration against the war and helped lead the first protests in the United States against apartheid in South Africa.
He later became a chronicler of the decade. He was sometimes a caustic commenter on the left and its tactics, which opened him up to harsh judgments by erstwhile kindred spirits.
Dr. Gitlin spent his entire adult life as an academic, practicing his commitment to social change through teaching and writing. He considered himself first and foremost a writer; in an interview, Harvey Molotch, a sociologist and longtime colleague from the 1960s, called him “a contemplative activist,” one who “searched for ways to integrate the urgent needs of everyday life with larger political and social goals.”
Gitlin’s 1983 look at the American TV industry, Inside Prime Time served as a textbook at my college, and presumably, loads of others.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), which is widely considered to be the umbrella for most BLM grassroots organizations, raised $90 million dollars in 2020.
Now it may stand as one of the biggest charity scandals in recent memory.
Founding BLMGNF member Patrisse Cullors didn’t waste any time in finding herself in a financial scandal and has since stepped down.
Cullors, a committed socialist and a woman who once bragged she was a trained Marxist, suddenly found herself the proud owner of over $3 million in personal real estate holdings.
Two of those purchases, making up the bulk of her real estate assets, came after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 — the same year her nonprofit exploded with donations.
Cullors denies that any ‘organizational resources’ went toward the purchase of her properties.
But regardless, it looks like social justice can be a very lucrative business.
Read the whole thing.
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH RUSSELL BRAND IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Russell Brand’s Hilarious Brian Stelter Take, as More Reports Show Why No One Trusts Him.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Why the $30 Trillion National Debt Could Soon Blow Up in Our Face.
TIM BLAIR: Imagine No Olympics. In a rare moment of generosity, China made it that much easier to boycott its Genocide Games by playing the worst song ever recorded.
On the other hand, it’s awfully subversive of whoever suggested “Imagine” be played at the CCP Olympics, considering that near the end of his tragically short life, Lennon (allegedly) supported the man who brought down another evil empire: Working class hero? John Lennon ‘was closet conservative and fan of Reagan.’ “But by the time he died, John Lennon was a closet conservative embarrassed by his radical past, according to his former personal assistant. Fred Seaman claims that the former Beatle was a fan of Ronald Reagan, who went on to become America’s Republican president in 1981 and forged a close political alliance with Margaret Thatcher. ‘John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on [Democrat] Jimmy Carter,’ he says in a documentary film.”
ATTACK OF THE TRANSPHOBIC PUTIN-NAZI TRUCKERS!
Some of my readers will probably remember a previous column in which I wrote:
“This isn’t an abstract argument over ‘the science.’ It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.”
This is it. This is that fight. It is not a protest. It is a game of chicken. A high-stakes game of political chicken. In the end, politics comes down to power. The power to force your will on your adversary. GloboCap has been forcing the New Normal on people around the world for the past two years. What we are witnessing in Canada is the power of the people, the power the people have always had, and which we will always have, when we decide to use it … the power to shut down the whole GloboCap show, city after city if necessary.
So get out there and support the Canadian transphobic Putin-Nazi truckers … or your local transphobic Putin-Nazi truckers. Don’t worry if you don’t have a swastika flag. The agents provocateurs and the official propagandists in the corporate media will take care of that!
Heh, indeed.
As Glenn writes in the New York Post: Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it.
So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.
Naturally, the left hates it.
For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.
A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.
Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere.
No word yet on what Rowan Atkinson thinks of the Canadian truckers.
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID! ESPN Guy Says China’s Genocide is No Worse Than Red States Requiring Voter ID.
The U.S. declared last year that the actions against Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China as genocide. But according to ESPN’s J. A. Adande, committing genocide against Uyghurs is no worse than red states requiring voter ID.
This moron actually said this on Friday’s Around the Horn. Adande said Americans should not question what these modern-day Nazis are doing to Uyghurs[.]
This creep is comparing voter ID to genocide, slave labor, concentration camps, forced abortions and forced sterilizations.
ESPN should fire this guy not for his incendiary comments, but for being this dumb on national television. Keep in mind, the city in which Adande lives, Chicago, has required ID to enter restaurants, bars and gyms.
And: China’s Long Tentacles Extend Deep Into American Media.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Anti-Semitism In Anti-Whiteness. Whoopi Goldberg just brought it out into the open:
Whoopi’s gaffe helps explain why the mainstream media now describes young black men assaulting Jews and Asians as expressing … “white supremacy”! This is what the WaPo op-ed page, referring to growing Latino support for Trump, called “multiracial whiteness.” If they are non-white and bigots, they miraculously become white. And notice how bigotry is exclusively ascribed to a single “race”: whites. Without whites, we’d have no racism at all.
This is not the only way critical theorists distinguish anti-Semitism from racism. “Whiteness,” disproportionately including Jewishness, is wrapped up in systems of oppression, especially capitalism, and defined by control of money and power. Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility that “white supremacy” exists in mainstream America by noting how many “white people” there were in various positions of power in 2017:
Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world). US Congress: 90 percent white. US governors: 96 percent white. Top military advisers: 100 percent white. President and vice president: 100 percent white. US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white. Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white. People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white. People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white. People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white. People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white.
She goes on to emphasize Hollywood’s influence, in particular. Now just put the word “Jewish” where the word “white” is, and her list reads a bit differently, doesn’t it: “People who decide which books we read: 90 percent Jewish. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent Jewish.” It’s an assertion that one race hoards power, controls the media, and directs the culture, a race so powerful it permeates everything. Sound a little familiar?
In her 1998 book, “How Jews Became White Folks,” Karen Brodkin argued that, as America diversified racially, a form of Jewish whiteness emerged “by contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.” (Just like Asians today!) In this worldview, Jewish success, like immigrant success, is never earned by merit, but won by attaching itself to “whiteness.” And so Jewish and Asian success is viewed as both rigged and zero-sum — taking away from the achievements of black Americans — when, of course, it’s non-zero-sum, and takes away nothing.
In a 2018 piece on anti-Semitic attacks in Crown Heights, the Forward’s Ari Feldman noted that “black people identify Judaism as ‘a form of almost hyper-whiteness,’ according to Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center … in that regard, Griffith said, the attacks may be an extension of animosity toward white people in general, who drive gentrification in Brooklyn.” Ressentiment is a powerful force, and anti-Semitism is often bound up in it.
In California’s proposed mandatory class in critical race theory, for example, one original curriculum question was “How did the Holocaust shift Jewish Americans’ position in American society?” The correct answer was: “gained conditional whiteness.” Yes, this is the upshot of the mass murder of millions of Jews, according to CRT: it gave them a leg-up in America! There are times when parochialism truly blinds.
Chris Wallace is “irate” at the ousting of CNN president Jeff Zucker and his future at the news network is uncertain, Radar has been told.
In a move that stunned Beltway television circles, the no-nonsense veteran anchor — son of legendary CBS correspondent Mike Wallace — announced he was leaving Fox News after 18 years for a prized gig at CNN’s new streaming-video outlet CNN+ in December.
At the time, the former Fox News Sunday anchor specifically cited Zucker as one of the reasons he joined the network.
“I am honored and delighted to join Jeff Zucker and his great team,” Wallace gushed in a statement just two hours after he quit Fox on December 12.
Zucker fawned over Wallace, too.
“It is not often that a news organization gets the opportunity to bring someone of Chris Wallace’s caliber on board,” the axed CNN boss said.
Wallace, 74, was slated to host a weekday interview program starting next year on CNN+, Zucker’s much-hyped new digital streaming platform.
In wake of the decision from WarnerMedia suits to oust Jeff Zucker, Wallace is said to be “second guessing his decision” even though he is believed to be earning $8 to $10 million per year.
Flashback to Daniel Greenfield in December: The Last Days of CNN.
CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.
So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.
Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.
But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.
CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.
CNN’s effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won’t even watch it for free.
CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”
The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.
I hope the Zuckerbucks — and all that came with it — were worth it for Wallace to jump ship.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY:
● Shot: How Bad is Crime in L.A.?
On a crisp Friday evening in early December, dozens of guests were milling about the backyard of a $5 million Spanish revival home perched high above the sloping chaparral of Temescal Canyon. It was a holiday event for a financial firm, but despite the flowing booze and endless traysof appetizers, a pall hung over the festivities.
Throughout the fall and into the winter, a wave of inexplicable violence and mayhem seemed to have descended on the city, and it appeared to be getting worse.
—Los Angeles Magazine, January 27th.
It can’t be that “inexplicable,” L.A. Magazine:
● Chaser: New DA George Gascón Announces Big Law Enforcement Reforms on Day One.
—Los Angeles Magazine, December 8th, 2020.
As Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
DISPATCHES FROM THE RELIGIOUS LEFT: Vegan NYC Mayor Eric Adams tries to force his diet on kids — haven’t they suffered enough?
Eric’s new crusade is giving me some grim flashbacks to my youth. In a mostly-Catholic town in Massachusetts, we were subjected to meatless Fridays in schools for 12 years because God. Non-believers, Jews, and even anyone who went to church every Sunday of his life but didn’t think Jesus actually cared if you had spaghetti and meatballs was forced to go along with this lunch-lady theocracy. Church and state, Mapleshade Elementary! You’re lucky I didn’t know about the Supreme Court when I was wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt.
Mostly those hideous Fridays meant an offer of cheese pizza, which was boring and tasteless. But at least it had cheese! Vegan pizza, otherwise known as “toast,” sounds like a euphemism for the child-hating bread-based lunch at a Victorian orphanage. If the kids across this city start busting out spontaneous song-and-dance numbers about child starvation, don’t say nobody warned you. Delete the B from the kids’ BLT and there’s no telling how many Sixties show tunes you might be subjected to.
More to the point, it’s becoming an increasingly disturbing characteristic of the prog army that any derivation of “live and let live” must die. Lefties won’t even go along with “eat and let eat.” Dining options are closely tied to faith and self-definition, and this country is kind of famous for allowing people to define themselves. Even if you define yourself as a joy-rejecting, bark-munching, grass-snarfing, Holy Church of Joaquin Phoenix cheesophobic freak. This is supposed to be the country where you do your own religion, and I pray for bacon-double-cheeseburger.
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.)
THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS — IN FACT, I’M PRETTY SURE THIS IS WHAT LAUNCHED THE FIRST TURF WAR OF THE FIVE FAMILIES: Pizza Isn’t Italian — It’s as American as Dixieland Jazz.
TREACHER PRAISES REACHER: Finally, a Reacher Who Measures Up. No offense, Tom! “Better Call Saul? More like Better Call Some Pallbearers. The tone, the unblinking gaze, the cold, almost trancelike joy at the prospect of doing physical violence to someone who deserves it… it’s like Reacher is stepping right off the page and putting his size 12 boot in your teeth. He’s an unstoppable force, and it’s fun to watch the bad guys try and fail to stop him. He’s nice to people (and animals) who are nice, and he’s a chilling, reptilian skull-crusher to everybody else. He doesn’t go around picking fights, but he doesn’t pretend not to enjoy ending them.”
ELON MUSK, RON DESANTIS SLAM GOFUNDME FOR CUTTING TIES WITH FREEDOM CONVOY:
Tesla founder Elon Musk and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have gone to bat for the thousands of Canadian truckers protesting the country’s vaccine mandates, railing GoFundMe for cutting ties with “Freedom Convoy.”
The fundraising company blocked the release of nearly $10 million in donations, citing “the promotion of violence and harassment” taking place during the protest. Musk took to Twitter to call out GoFundMe for its hypocrisy.
More: SUV Rams ‘Freedom Convoy’ Protesters in Canada, Multiple Injuries Reported. “The video was captured by the dashcam of an 18-wheeler. What it shows is the driver of a white SUV (possibly a Jeep Commander) swerving out of the lane the rest of the cars are passing in and accelerating into a group of protesters. It looks like one person is completely run over, with the SUV making no attempt to stop. Amazingly, that person was able to stand up afterward. What’s noteworthy here is that the protesters were not blocking traffic or threatening anyone. In other instances, such as during the 2020 George Floyd riots, cars were surrounded and drivers accelerated, having a right to fear for their lives. In this case, the driver was not being trapped or stopped. Rather, whoever it is chose to leave the lane of traffic and intentionally hit people.”
WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF BUILD-A-BEAR UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Yowza! Build-A-Bear Launches a Horny Teddy Bear Line.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Owning cryptocurrency may make you more desirable on the dating scene, study finds.
PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1936: Watch: Dutch Reporter Dragged Away By Chinese Agents During Live Olympics Broadcast.
Related: Cocktails and hazmat suits mingle in the Beijing Olympics bubble.
A bartender in the Chinese ski resort of Zhangjiakou wears a blue and white hazmat suit as he pours a cocktail, before passing the drink to a similarly attired waiter who shuffles across the room in blue plastic booties to deliver the drink.
The bar guests at the Nanshanli Condotel on Wednesday evening, most of them Olympics-related personnel and journalists, could see only a sliver of their servers’ faces behind white masks and giant plastic face shields.
The scene, which some participants have likened to dystopian fiction, is playing out around Olympics venues in the capital and Zhangjiakou in neighbouring Hebei province as Chinese officials try to minimise the chances of the Beijing Winter Games sparking a fresh coronavirus outbreak.
Nothing like a Martini with an extra splash of Soylent Green to help catch the Olympic spirit:
More: The 2022 Olympics Opening Ceremony revealed this truth: China has a lot to hide.
A day after the International Olympic Committee tried to claim these Games should be free of politics, the Chinese Communist Party staged an Opening Ceremony draped in dual-track political messaging for audiences both inside China and out that was as loud and clear as the fireworks that lit up the Beijing sky.
It was a sign of both Chinese strength in its ability to use the Olympics to spread its narrative and its hidden terror at the truth actually seeping out.
It ended with an affront to the sensibilities and a middle finger to much of the world, whose prominent governments — including the United States, India, Great Britain, Australia and Canada — refused to send diplomats to grant this absurdity any measure of legitimacy.
The Olympic cauldron was lit — a symbolic moment of prominence — on Friday in Beijing by two Chinese athletes, including Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross country skier, who, according to the state-run media, has Uyghur heritage.
That choice, a female Uyghur, was a direct shot at outside groups and governments who have condemned China for its treatment against Muslim ethic minorities who mostly reside in the far northwest part of the country.
China has a lot to hide — and NBC is happy to go along: Is NBC’s Savannah Guthrie Working For The Chinese Government? It Sounds Like It.
Welp, it didn’t take long to figure out who NBC’s Savannah Guthrie is working for at the 2022 Winter Olympics. It’s clear as day that Savannah’s daddy for the next two weeks is none other than the paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman Xi Jinping, and Ms. Guthrie clearly understands it’s her duty to fall in line.
How do we know that?
All you had to do was watch the opening ceremony Friday morning on NBC. Guthrie proved her worth to the Chinese regime during the co-lighting of the Olympic flame when the broadcaster said Xi’s choice of a Uyghur to help light the flame was “an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide and diplomatically boycotted these games.”
That’s what Xi said!
Flashbacks: Did Hunter Biden Help Facilitate NBCUniversal’s Beijing Theme Park?
Portions of Hunter Biden’s hard drive have now been shared with TAC. On the drive is an email from president of Rosemont Seneca Eric Schwerin, a company co-founded by Hunter and John Kerry’s stepson, saying that Chinese state-owned enterprise CITIC was hoping they would make introductions with Universal employees and propose the Beijing theme park.
“They’d like an introduction to Universal (Comcast) as they’d like to open a Universal Studios China theme park outside of Beijing,” Schwerin writes. “As I said, that one should be easy via Melissa Mayfield/David Cohen [two Comcast executives].”
More:
“THERE IS A REASON ‘THEY CALL ME THE BIDEN OF BROOKLYN:’” Eric Adams called white NYPD officers ‘crackers’ in 2019 video.
(Classical reference in headline.)
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