JAY LENO’S GARAGE: This Mustang Chases Porsches for a Living (Video).

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Pro-Trans, Pro-Palestine: Celebrities Condemn Harry Potter and his Mother.

Comedian Jon Stewart, formerly of The Daily Show, has just accused J.K. Rowling of anti-Semitism. And why? Because her depiction of the “goblins” who run Gringotts, the underground bank where everyone’s gold is stored is, in his opinion, an anti-Jewish stereotype. He wonders why the “goblins” are the underground bankers… Get it?

Apparently, fiction, even fantasy, must conform to rigid speech code rules. But unlike Wagner’s Nibelungen, Albrecht, (a “dwarf” or a descendent of a “race of dwarfs’) who stole and who hoards the gold which can control the world in Wagner’s four part opera The Ring Cycle—Rowling’s “goblins” merely guard it and release it to its rightful owner—just like the Swiss do.

Call me crazy but once I read the comedian Jon Stewart’s allegation, I immediately thought that Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, (changed his name, wonder why—nah, I know why) must also favor Palestine i.e. his anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism. Bingo! Even Al-Jazeera mourned his departure and bid him a “fond farewell” as one of the only Americans who told the truth about Israel and Palestine.

Stewart, a genuinely funny guy, is one of those “As a Jew” people who stand tall upon their own ethnicity in order to critique Israel. Well, he’s one of those dangerously crazy-funny guys.

As Jim Treacher writes: Jon Stewart Believes Goblins in Harry Potter Books Are ‘Anti-Semitic’ — And so are you if you think that’s silly.

Okay. Or maybe… they’re just goblins?

I mean, goblins aren’t anything new. They’ve been part of European folklore for a thousand years. They’re magical little creatures who love gold and causing mischief. When Rowling was creating her fantasy world, why wouldn’t she turn goblins into bankers? How is it a secret signal to anti-Semites?

Is the Green Goblin anti-Semitic too? After all, he’s a rich, greedy guy who does bad things.

Were Stan Lee and Steve Ditko anti-Semites as well?

Nah. It’s just fashionable these days to bash J. K. Rowling, ever since she made the mistake of saying women are women and men aren’t. Acknowledging biological reality has made Rowling a pariah among her peers in the entertainment industry, so it’s easy to accuse her of being an anti-Semite too. They’ve already falsely branded her as one kind of bigot, so why not falsely brand her as some other kind of bigot?

This sounds very much like the Grauniad writer who in late 2002 decided to score some cheap points at the height of the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s cinematic popularity by declaring Orcs racist. As Jonah Goldberg wrote at the time:

Sigh. Okay, yes, it’s true. Many of the Orcs (and the super-Orcs) are dark-skinned and have slant-eyes. They are also — how shall I put this? — Orcs! Ya frickin’ idjit!

One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people — like me — who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, “Cool, Orcs!” On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt, who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim “black people!” Maybe he should spend less time vetting movies for signs of racism and more time vetting himself if, that is, he free-associates black people with these subhuman monsters.

The intersection of pro-Palestinian and trans activism isn’t confined to Stewart and Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, of course: What would the suffragettes make of Marks & Spencer selling hijabs for 4-year-old girls — and throwing open its female changing rooms to trans women?

UPDATE: And now, the walkback: Jon Stewart Clarifies He Does Not Think ‘Harry Potter’ is Antisemitic.

Clown nose on, clown nose off, as Treacher would say.

MORE: Jon Stewart forgets that he’s Jon Stewart:

(Updated and bumped.)

ROGER SIMON: George Soros’ Many Gifts to the Republican Party.

Why am I thanking Soros? It should be obvious. The billionaire’s habit of opening his very deep pockets to elect “woke” district attorneys across the country has been remarkably successful. He, more than anyone, is personally responsible for the crime wave currently engulfing America with murder rates in our big cities the highest in decades.

That, as much as anything, is sending people out of the blue states on what is called in the country classic “Wagon Wheel,” “the Southbound Train.”

That the vast majority of those murders are black on black doesn’t seem to have deterred George (although he surely must know it because the statistics are widely available), nor does it appear to deter Alvin Bragg, the newly elected black Manhattan DA.

They—the mayor of Chicago, the DAs of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and many others—don’t seem to care about this. They apparently have other priorities. Like Black Lives Matter itself, they don’t seem to think black lives actually do matter. Power (theirs) is all that matters. And that they look good. (To whom, I wonder?)

The people who really do care about black lives are the people who are supposed to disdain them—the cops (many of whom are themselves black).

According to the Post, one high-ranking policeman said of Bragg’s new dictum that his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except for homicides and a “handful” of other felonies, “It will lead to more young lives lost to gang violence and innocent people being hurt both physically and emotionally.”

Another added: “This is outrageous. He was elected to enforce the law. If he wanted to change them, he should have run for a state office.”

True enough, but as some woman once said of another crime that was never punished, “What difference does it make?” The police have been leaving New York too. More will now.

Bad, even horrific, as that is, we do have something to thank George Soros for that is considerably more important than whatever jokes we want to make about red state property values.

Exit quote: “More than anyone—with the possible exception of the current resident of the White House—George Soros will be responsible for a sweeping Republican victory in 2022 and possibly 2024.”

SMALL SIGNS OF SANITY IN CALIFORNIA: Liberal Beverly Hills votes to recall DA George Gascón for eliminating bail and dropping charges for many crimes after wealthy enclave is rocked by robberies, including home invasion where Jacqueline Avant was shot dead.

Note though that, “The city council’s 5-0 vote in favor of a resolution demanding Gascón’s recall is not legally binding, but expresses the wealthy enclave’s fury over his policies as crime soars in the area.”

As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California extends mask mandate through Feb. 15 amid surge of COVID-19 cases.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Alvin Bragg’s psychotic policies are a gift to the GOP.

Indeed, the growing GOP advantage on criminal-justice issues was one of the three pillars of its spectacular rise over the three decades following the 1964 election (the others being the economy and foreign policy), in which LBJ won 61 percent of the vote while Democrats emerged with a 155-member majority in the House and 69 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

What Alvin Bragg has done here must be seen in conjunction with the “Defund the police” and “decarceration” activists who have dominated the Democratic Party’s discourse on criminal justice for the past two years.

Bragg’s memo is the most radical manifestation of the “progressive prosecutor” movement — the systematic effort on the left to elect activists for social justice rather than defenders of the right of ordinary citizens to live unmolested by crime.

Other such prosecutors — Chesa Boudin, now facing a recall election in San Francisco, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — laid the groundwork. But Bragg is the DA in the most important borough in the most important city in the United States, and if he has his way, the 1974 movie “Death Wish” will soon seem like today’s newscast rather than a piquant period piece.

And this is why he is such a gift to the GOP. Every Republican candidate at every level for every office in the United States can and will cite Bragg’s memo as a vanguard document of the Democratic Party.

“Today, it’s Manhattan,” they’ll say. “Tomorrow, it’s Springfield.” The psychotic ideas unfolding in the Big Apple now will be dominating the Biden Justice Department in short order, they’ll say.

As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

ANN COULTER: The Great Epstein Cover-up, Part I.

The jury’s courageous delivery last week of five “guilty” verdicts against Epstein’s pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a sort of reverse jury nullification. The U.S. attorney’s office — the prosecution — did everything it could to get an acquittal, but the jurors defied them.

As for media coverage, did you even know that the FBI found Epstein’s cache of sex tapes labeled “(name of underage girl) + (name of VIP)” — and then lost them?

Immediately after Epstein’s arrest at Teterboro Airport in July 2019, the FBI executed a search warrant on his New York mansion. Following a daylong search, agents discovered a hidden safe in the closet of a fifth-floor dressing room, used a saw to break into it, and found an enormous collection of photos of naked girls, and CDs of the girls apparently having sex with influential men.

Then, the agents left — abandoning the photos and CDs, with Epstein’s employees free to wander about the place. As Kelly Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the search, explained during Maxwell’s trial, they only had a warrant to search the house, but not to remove evidence — evidence at the heart of the entire sex trafficking scheme.

It didn’t occur to Maguire to leave a single agent behind to guard the CDs? How about the intern who just gets coffee?

You’ll never guess what happened next.

The FBI, you say? Ray Epps, call your office!

DESANTIS BANKS YET ANOTHER BIPARTISAN ENDORSEMENT! Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell follows AOC’s lead by going maskless in mandate-free Florida, days after blaming Republicans for ‘canceled vacations’ and going back to wearing ‘masks everywhere.’

As DeSantis recently said: “If I had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I’d be a pretty dog-gone wealthy man, let me tell ya.”

CHANGE! For the First Time Ever, the Best-Selling Carmaker in America Isn’t an American Carmaker.

Toyota has been at the top of global sales for a decade, partly because General Motors began ceding foreign markets during the Obama years. This followed the Obama administration’s takeover of GM in 2009, under the guise of rescuing it from bankruptcy and saving American jobs, earning the carmaker the derisive nickname “Government Motors.” The once-proud iconic American manufacturer has never been the same since.

Toyota’s victory over GM caps a year when the American carmaker’s sales shrank 12.9% as it sold 2.2 million vehicles in the United States. By contrast, Toyota’s sales increased 10.4% in 2021 compared to 2020, as it sold 2.3 million cars to Americans.

Analysts believe Toyota was able to sell 114,034 more cars in the states than did General Motors because the domestic company had supply chain issues. Gearhead site The Truth About Cars says that GM “claimed its numbers were down due to the global semiconductor shortage that continues to disproportionally impact American automakers. While there are a few sound logistical reasons for that, the chip deficit also becomes a convenient excuse for brands that cannot seem to get their general supply chains under control. No matter how you slice it, GM looks to have screwed up managing inventory and Toyota is picking up the slack.”

Note that GM had previously led US sales every year since 1931.

MICHAEL ANTON: Fighting the impulse for national divorce with spousal abuse.

Blue America’s message problems don’t stop there. The remainder boil down to the ruling class’s stance on democracy—both with respect to specific issues and to the overarching concept itself.

As to the former, Blues insist that any policy Reds want that Blues don’t is ipso facto illegitimate, or worse. Border wall? Workplace enforcement? Skills-based immigration? All not merely unacceptable, but “racist” and evil. Tariffs or some form of protection for American workers and industries? Unacceptable, unworkable, economically illiterate—and also racist, if only because everything Reds want is. Ditto the Red desire to stop fighting endless, pointless, winless war and to reduce America’s overseas commitments. Strategic folly, a betrayal of allies and of our “core values,” collusion with our enemies, even “treason.” (And, of course, it’s racist to doubt the efficacy or strategic value of democracy wars in the Third World.)

It’s important to understand, lest one fall into a common Blue propaganda trap, that these policy positions favored by millions of Reds are not “conservative” as that term has been understood for at least a generation. The “conservatives” have consistently supported open, or at least lax, borders, rigid free trade, and ground troops wherever a single Islamic extremist might wistfully contemplate striking the West. As for the slander that these positions are somehow “far right,” one need only be over 40 to remember a time when Democrats were the party of protectionism and peace, when even Bill Clinton and the New York Times professed support for limiting immigration.

Suddenly all that is not merely unacceptable; it’s fascism. Blue America makes very clear to Red: you deserve and will get none of this. There will be no compromise. You are evil merely for wanting it, much less voting for it. Should you manage, against our every effort and precaution, to elect people who threaten to enact these things, we will be justified in “resisting”—i.e., blocking implementation by any means necessary—to protect “our democracy.”

On New Year’s Day, the New York Times—arguably the most powerful institution of any kind in America—thundered that all opposition to the Blue agenda is violent insurrection. Hilariously, the Times intones that a “healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time.” Really? Was that the Democratic response to 2016? Or that of Stacey Abrams and all her supporters—none of whom, including the vice president of the United States—has ever conceded that she lost in 2018?

Read the whole thing.

BATTLEFIELD PREPARATION FOR THE MIDTERMS: Six Things to Expect From Jan. 6 Committee in 2022.

Related: Federal authorities won’t say why armed Capitol rioters disappeared from FBI’s most wanted list.

Federal authorities won’t explain why three men who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have mysteriously disappeared from the FBI’s Capitol Violence Most Wanted list.

One unidentified man wore an earpiece during the riot and was filmed carrying what appeared to be a concealed handgun on his left hip. The man was pictured on the FBI’s most wanted list for over five months until he was removed without explanation on the same day the New York Times reported an FBI informant was at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

More: Actually, Democrats Are Less Accepting of Presidential Election Defeats Than Republicans.

WILL TED CRUZ BE JOINING THE LINCOLN PROJECT OR THE BULWARK NEXT? Ted Cruz Calls January 6 Riots “A Violent Terrorist Attack on the Capitol.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): C’mon, Ted. Really?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Colleges Shutting Down for Spring Semester are Betraying Students.

JOE DID IT: Worse than Trump on economy, US might. “There appears to be no bottom to President Joe Biden’s drop in the polls. While he has gone from liberal hero to 1,000-pound drag on Democrats in record time, Biden has now hit lows that neither of his two predecessors did even at their worst points.”

As his former boss tried to warn us, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”

UH-OH. I SMELL ANOTHER CHEAP CARTOON-CROSSOVER: “The first case of flurona – the combination of both influenza and coronavirus – has been detected at the COVID-19 testing center at the Getty Center” in Los Angeles.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Scientists Propose Jumpstarting Mars’ Magnetic Field to Make It Habitable. Even NASA is on board.

UPDATED AND REPOSTED: RealClearInvestigations’ Jan. 6-BLM Riots Comparison.

• The summer 2020 riots resulted in some 15 times more injured police officers, 23 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot.
• Authorities have pursued the largely Trump-supporting Capitol rioters with substantially more vigor than suspected wrongdoers in the earlier two cases, and prosecutors and judges alike have weighed Capitol riot defendants’ political views in adjudicating their cases.
• Dozens of accused Capitol rioters have been held in pretrial detention for months, where they have allegedly been mistreated.
• In the summer 2020 riots, the vast majority of charges were dismissed, as they were in the Inauguration 2017 unrest. Prosecutors have dropped a single Capitol riot case.

Related: Trump Just Rained on the Democrats’ January 6th Parade. “It seems like Trump realized that, as he cites the machinations of the January 6th committee as the reason for his cancellation. Whatever the reason, it’s a smart move on his part to deny them the viral clips and talking points they were banking on. I’m sure he and his advisers sat down and figured out what the game was here and chose not to play along. Now, what do the Democrats have? Some low-rated CNN coverage and a short speech from Joe Biden that no one will watch unless he has another senile moment that causes it to go viral. And that’s if the iced-up roads in the city of Washington, D.C., are even cleared in time for them to hold any live events. As it stands, it might snow again on Thursday.”

More: Is The FBI Ever Going To Get Around To Finding The Jan. 6 Pipe Bomber, Or Nah?

Heck, We’re still waiting for them to uncover the motive of the 2017 Las Vegas mass murderer. Or as America’s Newspaper of Record noted last year: FBI Assures Nation They Will Get Back To Figuring Out Why That Guy Shot 400 People In Vegas After They’re Done Investigating Parent-Teacher Meetings.

RALPH NORTHAM’S ADMINISTRATION WINDS DOWN IN STYLE: I-95 winter storm traffic disaster: Drivers are fuming and demanding answers from Virginia officials. “‘We had absolutely no idea what we were going into,’ Catalano added. ‘You had all these fancy signs on the highway [saying], ‘Mask up, mask up’, ‘Save lives, mask up.’ Turn the signs on and say, ‘Turn around,’ you know, ‘50-mile backup,’ something.’”

UPDATE: Northam Moonwalks His Foot Into His Mouth After I-95 Fiasco:

Angry drivers tired from having to sit in cold vehicles with little to nothing to eat and nowhere to go to the bathroom as temperatures hovered below freezing are directing the blame squarely at Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and the Virginia Dept. of Transportation, both of which drivers have said were ill-prepared to handle the storm before the first snowflake ever fell.

They have a pretty strong case, considering what NR’s Dominic Pino wrote last night detailing the notification failures, what the VDOT did and did not do in advance of the storm, the years of corruption within the department, as well as their botched handling of other situational things as the crisis unfolded.

But it’s what Northam said in response to the fiasco on I-95 that has left a lot of people scratching their heads. As the Washington Post reported, Northam took no responsibility for what happened and instead blamed the drivers:

State Police and transportation officials took to the air to monitor progress because highway traffic cameras went dark amid power outages, Northam said. While expressing sympathy for stranded motorists, Northam said more should have heeded warnings to stay off the roads.

“We gave warnings, and people need to pay attention to these warnings, and the less people that are on the highways when these storms hit, the better,” he said. “I feel for these people that are stranded but just want to let them know we’re doing everything we can to get to them in a very challenging situation.”

Good grief. Think he could fit his foot any further into his mouth on that one?

While it’s good – and pretty standard advice from state officials – to advise people not to get on the roads if they don’t have to when bad weather events like this one are forecast, it strikes me as extremely poor form not to mention bad leadership to blame the people who got stuck, especially when you don’t know the circumstances for why they were on the road in the first place.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’ sense of timing remains as superb as ever:

(Updated and bumped.)

MARK JUDGE: The New Movie Version Confirms It: Hillary Clinton Is Lady Macbeth.

The new film adaptation of Macbeth, my favorite Shakespeare play, is wonderful. It’s also relevant in 2022. Directed by Joel Coen, the film uses elements of film noir and German expressionism to tell the story of the ambitious 11th century Scottish warrior who killed his own king to ascend to the throne. Macbeth’s mind unravels as he tries to control the fallout from his evil act. At the end (spoiler alert!) he is beheaded and replaced on the throne.

Macbeth could also be the story of an ancestor of Hillary Clinton. Clinton has often been compared to Lady Macbeth, the power-hungry wife of Macbeth. The new film makes that analogy even more pronounced.

Macbeth the man is magnificently played in the new film by Denzel Washington. A proud general, Macbeth is only outdone in his ambition by his wife, Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand). After the Scottish King Duncan hears the news that his best generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two invading armies, Macbeth is named the thane of Cawdor. Yet it’s not good enough.

Macbeth has heard a witch’s prophecy that he himself will be king one day. Macbeth writes to Lady Macbeth, telling her all that has happened. The couple then invites the king to visit them at Inverness, their castle. The Macbeths then plot to murder the king so that Macbeth himself can attain the throne.

Exit quote: “Unlike Lady Macbeth, who comes to a bad end in the play, Hillary refuses to go away. She’s giving a master class, doing interviews on TV, writing books. Her lust for personal power is evident even through her strained, fake smile. As Shakespeare put it, a ‘false face must hide what the false heart doth know.’”

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: New Manhattan DA Claims Decriminalization ‘Will Make Us Safer’ in Memo to Staff.

As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

JULIE BURCHILL:  Why ‘Hot Mess’ women of the world – think Bridget Jones and Fleabag – are doomed to be screwed over by patronising men.

While they might be celebrated by some as being a progression from the Hollywood honey or Chelsea chick, in reality Hot Messes appeal to the worst side of men – if women are a mess already, they’re going to be even easier for men of bad intent to mess with. A new show runs this month at the Soho Theatre in which the comedienne Liz Kingsman takes on the idea of the Hot Mess Dream Girl. She told the Guardian: ‘I don’t relate to those messy-women narratives. None of my female friends talk about their sex lives a lot. And I’d be hard pushed to find a single one who is aimless: everyone is hustling and working really hard.’

The Hot Mess Woman does exist though; I’ve known a few, but sadly they’ve long passed their youthful hotness which is the one time when being *ditsy* can be viewed as in any way cute. They tend to think of themselves as *feisty* and *sassy* and *free spirits* – far too *vibrant* to bother with the boring bits of life, such as paying one’s bills on time. When they go bankrupt, they’re amazed. But the minute they bounce out from the claims court, they’ll be off buying candles costing the best part of fifty quid and cushions saying I SEE SHOES!

Read the whole thing.

BIDEN PLANS TO BEAT BIG MEAT! Biden To Invest $1 Billion In Producers After Blaming Inflation On Greedy Meat Mongers. “The meat industry is consolidated specifically because the federal gov’t overregulates it. Ask any farmer. As one of many examples, ranchers can’t slaughter their own meat due to @USDA regs. As usual, Democrats blame the private sector for problems of their own creation.”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Related: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

LEFTISTS DISCOVERING YET ANOTHER LIMIT TO POLITICIZED FOOTBALL: Leftists completely lose it after Aaron Rodgers says Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is on his bookshelf: ‘Trade him. F*** it.’

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Chicago Public Schools to Cancel In-Person Classes in Anticipation of Expected Teachers Union Strike.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which David Alexrod is a voice of sanity:

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS: Crib Notes From the Joe Rogan–Dr. McCullogh Interview Everyone Is Talking About.

Rogan: So you believe this is a premeditated thing that they were doing? So they realized that in order to get people enthusiastic about taking this vaccine, the best way to do that was to not have a protocol for treatment.

McCullough: It’s not just my idea now. It’s completely laid out by the book by Dr. Pam Popper, the book recently published by Peter Breggin, COVID-19 and The Global Predators: We Are the Prey. I wrote one of the introductions. Dr. Leefleet and Dr. Vladimir Lesenko wrote the other introductions. These books are basically nonfiction. They have 1,000 citations in the Breggin book, showing how it was coordinated and planned. Now Bobby Kennedy has his book out, The Real Anthony Fauci. I’m the most mentioned physician in that book. I can tell you that if you want to find the evidence that Moderna was working on the vaccine before the virus ever emanated out of the lab, if you wanted to find the collusions and the operations between the Gates Foundation and Gavby and Sepi and Pfizer and Moderna and the vaccine manufacturers and the Wuhan lab and the National Institutes of Health and Ralph Barrack and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and how all this was organized, if you want to see the Johns Hopkins planning seminar called the SPARS Pandemic in 2017, where they had a symposium, people showed up. They wrote up their symposium findings. They published this. It says it’s going to be a coronavirus. It’s going to be related to MERS and SARS. It’s going to come over here to the United States. It’s going to shut down cities and frighten people. There’s going to be confusion regarding the drug hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. And we’re going to utilize all that in order to railroad the population into mass vaccination. It’s laid out in the Johns Hopkins sparse pandemic training seminar. The only thing they got wrong was the year; they said it was going to be 2025. Instead, it landed a few years early.

Exit quote: “The left is quick to denounce Rogan every chance they get. YouTube deleted the video of Rogan speaking with McCullough. The left accused him of taking a horse dewormer to beat the bat flu. (He didn’t.) Why does the left fear him? He is crushing everyone, including Tucker Carlson, in the ratings.”

Speaking of Rogan’s traffic: