Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
December 24, 2021
OUT ON A LIMB: The government is not your God.
Politics is a bad religion.
People may argue about the purpose of religion. For some it is a moral code—a set of principles that provides guideposts to living a virtuous life and that helps man to win the fight against his own human nature. For others, it creates a sense of purpose or belonging to a community.
Of course, wherever there is a religion that people follow and a related deity to worship, there are sure to be bad actors that try to exploit others’ faith. Any religion has to balance that potential for downside against its upside.
Now, I am a person of faith, and while I can’t tell you exactly where you can find God, I am willing to stake a large bet that God is not in Washington, D.C.
Politics has come to encompass both the veneration and exploitation that happens in religion. Politics has all of the bad aspects of what can go wrong with worship, following and faith, with absolutely none of the good.
Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from 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.)
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Florida’s Plague Is the Media’s Cold.
Now it can be said: Covid-19 isn’t going away. CNN’s Brian Stelter lectured his audience Sunday on “what living with Covid really means.” He cited “a highly transmissible variant” that has caused “many, many, many cases . . . here in New York City,” and said: “It seems that in some media circles this was the week that getting Covid became an inevitability.”
All the right people are coming down with what BuzzFeed’s Julia Reinstein dubbed the “media variant.” Suddenly getting Covid is cool. “You have about 12 hours left to get covid if you want to stay on trend,” tweeted Business Insider’s Jake Swearingen. “I don’t think this means shutting back down,” tweeted podcaster Lydia Polgreen. “I think it has to mean accepting that getting COVID is just a thing that’s going to happen to all of us, so behave accordingly (and get vaccinated).” Even President Biden is easing off, with his speech Tuesday stressing the importance of keeping schools and businesses open.
But when the virus was surging in the South this summer, media figures took a different tone. Covid could be stopped, they insisted, if only those rubes would behave correctly. Florida was a particular target because its governor had ended lockdowns and mandates early and was pushing for schools to stop requiring masks. A typical piece, by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, was titled “ Ron DeSantis ’ priorities on Covid-19 are all screwed up.” A chastened Mr. Cillizza tweeted last Friday that he had learned the vaccine “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected,” and that “I realize I am way behind lots of other people in doing that.”
That’s for sure. A lot of the information that media types finally seem ready to accept has been available for some time. The World Health Organization said in September that the virus will continue to mutate like the flu. “People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program. “No we’re not—very, very unlikely.”
The reason it took so long for this reality to penetrate the media bubble is political. Journalists believed red states would get sick while blue ones would be spared. Some still do: A Dec. 17 Washington Post piece by columnist Paul Waldman was headlined “The red covid wave is here.”
Earlier: The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn’t Normal, It’s Psychotic.
TOP STORY OF THE DAY: Gosh, How Can I Get Readers to Pay Attention to the NFL’s COVID-19 Policy? “Why isn’t Tucker Carlson booking Rachel Bush as a guest? This is the spokeswoman we need at this crucial moment in our nation’s history, and if you follow her Twitter account, you’ll find that she’s still speaking out for freedom, especially since Cole Beasley (‘Bease’) got banned from Sunday’s game with the Patriots.”
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Jill Biden breaks White House rules to go maskless as Joe is accused of staging bizarre dancing nurses show at the White House to distract from his catastrophic failure to order enough COVID test kits.
I’m having bad flashbacks to last year:
● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.
● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.
December 23, 2021
TONIGHT ON PARKS AND RECREATION: Oh, So That’s Why So Many Aides Are Waiting to Flee the Biden White House.
The Biden White House is incompetent. We all know this. It’s in their execution. It’s in their policies. It’s now seen in the polling. This guy is on Pluto. We have several crises hitting the nation—and Joe Biden is nowhere to be found. He can’t keep up. He’s too old. And he cannot handle the rigors of the job, which is why his staff does most of the work. His people say the economy is roaring. It’s not. Voters know it’s not, but they’re not changing course on messaging. That’s bad news for working families who are being crippled by the inflation fiasco that Joe’s team doesn’t care about. It’s good political news for Republicans as Biden’s sinking poll numbers show a red tsunami that’s about to crash into DC yet again.
Yet, what about the Biden White House staff. Isn’t it awesome working for the president even though his brain is oatmeal? No. In fact, it’s a pit of misery. Reports are that scores of White House staff are “eyeing the exits.” They can’t stand the work environment. The holiday parties are mostly grounded in a lottery system for staffers. It’s a cold, dark place working for Joe Biden (via Politico):
* * * * * * * *
Christmas parties mean a lot these days, I guess. Still, this looks like it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe this revenge from the senior staff who most certainly read the stories about how aides mute the televisions in the White House when Joe Biden speaks because he’s so painful to watch. It’s a little tit-for-tat action, maybe? Either way, it all feeds into the same narrative that this White House is a total train wreck—and holiday parties were the tipping point for most. Who knew?
As Rick Moran adds at PJM, “Staff gripes about a busy workplace are nothing new in politics or anywhere else. But these are supposed to be the president’s true believers, and to talk about leaving after less than a year should set off alarm bells among senior aides who are apparently treating those lower on the staff totem pole with little respect. Some presidents have reportedly been impossible to work for — Nixon and Truman were both supposed to be SOBs to the staff. Biden himself may be a reasonable man, but his top aides apparently are not.”
Even before he entered his current Trunalimunumaprzure phase, Biden himself was not a reasonable man.
DON SURBER: She’s right. They don’t treat Kamala like a male VP.
The New York Times chivalrously defended Kamala today with a lengthy story on her vice presidency. The spin is Biden used her to get elected and now wishes to discard her.
Duh.
Paragraph 13 caught my eye, “Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male. She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration. The White House has pushed back against scathing criticism on both fronts, for what activists say is a lack of attention.”
True.
Spiro Agnew never made the cover of Vogue.
On the other hand as Ace writes, “Kamala, if you were a white man, you would be running title checks in a real estate office:”
A friend said about the “I did that!” gas pump stickers that Brandon is seeing levels of contempt, disgust, and pure disregard that even Obama didn’t.
Maybe, but then, Obama demonstrated that if you publicly show him contempt, you’ll be fired: remember the rodeo clown who dared do what American citizens had done for 250 years before– he made fun of the sitting president.
He was immediately fired.
Obama could have stepped in and been a statesman and said, “Now, now, come on, people are allowed to make fun of the president; let’s not punish a man for exercising a time-honored right.”
He did not. He wanted that man made to be an object lesson. He wanted it known throughout America that you dared to insult him at your very grave peril.
But yes, we are seeing higher levels of open mockery and contempt for Biden. Such as the “Let’s go Brandon” chant at public events and its more vulgar cousin.
Remember how the leftwing media used to claim that criticism of Obama could only be explained as racism?
So what’s animated the Let’s Go Brandon phenomenon? A resurgence of Anti-Irish Animus?
And note that the media used to shriek that we could not insult or sport fun about Obama because it was “racist.” They can’t make that claim with Biden, so now they just say we can’t chant “Let’s Go Brandon” because it’s… um…
Because it’s “vulgar.” Because it “coarsens our public discourse.”
And of course the media would never abide any vulgar coarsening of our public discourse.
Semi-serious question: Is Harris even aware of the FJB/Let’s Go Brandon chants that Biden has received? Given the self-centered bubble she exists in, it’s possible she isn’t. It doesn’t appear she’s even been asked about the chants by the DNC-MSM.
DAVE BARRY’S YEAR IN REVIEW: Wait, wasn’t 2021 supposed to be better than 2020?
Let’s fast-forward straight to December:
President Biden, in a reassuring address to the nation on his strategy for dealing with a potential winter coronavirus surge, urges Americans to “do what it says on the teleprompter.”
Meanwhile the news media, performing their vital, constitutionally protected function of terrifying the public, run story after story documenting the relentless advance of omicron, with headlines like “First Omicron Case Reported in Japan,” “Omicron Now Reported In California,” “Omicron Heading Your Way,” “OMICRON IS IN YOUR ATTIC RIGHT NOW,” etc.
In federal-budget news, congressional leaders, facing what we are required, by the rules of professional journalism, to describe as a Looming Deadline, work feverishly to prevent an unprecedented partial shutdown of the government for the 27th or 28th time. Finally they hammer out a deal under which the government will be temporarily funded via a loan from an individual named Vinny, to be repaid in cash by Feb. 18 or else Vinny takes legal possession of the nuclear aircraft carrier of his choice.
No, that would be insane. Although not as insane as the way we actually fund the federal government.
The big economic story continues to be inflation, which is the worst it has been for decades, with the hardest-hit victims being low-income consumers and major college-football programs, which are being forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to obtain the services of even mediocre head coaches. In another disturbing economic development, the Federal Reserve Board issues a formal statement admitting that it has no earthly idea what a “bitcoin” is, and it’s pretty sure nobody else does either.
In international news, President Biden and Russian President Putin have a two-hour video call to discuss the situation in Ukraine, with a White House spokesperson reporting that the two leaders made “encouraging progress” toward locating the unmute button.
Elsewhere abroad, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reports that a prestigious Saudi beauty pageant for camels, with $66 million in prize money, disqualified over 40 contestants because they received Botox injections, facelifts and other artificial touch-ups. We are not making this item up.
In sports, Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires, raising the possibility of a work stoppage next season, not that anyone would notice, inasmuch as the average professional baseball game this season lasted as long as the gestation period of a yak, but with less action.
In holiday-season news, travel in the Midwest is snarled when the U.S. Department of Agriculture, seeking to alleviate a shortage of Christmas hams, releases 17 million head of pig from the Strategic Pork Reserve, blocking every major road into and out of Iowa and causing the region to smell, in the words of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, “even worse than usual.”
Finally, mercifully, the troubled year nears its conclusion. As the nation prepares to celebrate New Year’s Eve, the mood is subdued and thoughtful. People are still getting drunk and throwing up, but they’re doing this in a subdued and thoughtful manner. Because nobody knows what 2022 will bring. Will it suck as much as this year? Will it suck more? Or will it suck a LOT more? These appear to be our choices.
Perhaps, as we face the new year, we should look beyond the confines of our troubled planet for reasons to hope. Perhaps we can turn for inspiration to the plucky NASA rover Perseverance, which, as 2021 draws to a close, sends a message back to Earth across millions of miles of space. It’s a simple message, but one that resonates deeply with all of humanity: Perseverance has detected omicron on Mars.
OK, so that’s not very hopeful. But don’t let it stop you from ringing in 2022 on a festive note. For one night, forget about the bad things. Be festive, party hard, and, in the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, “lower your mask before you throw up.”
Meanwhile Jim Treacher is much more succinct with his review of 2021: “Just kidding. I’m not going to review 2021. I just want it to be over.”
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? New York Saw Greatest Population Loss in U.S. This Year, Census Bureau Estimates.
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Politico Playbook: Biden’s testing mess.
RIP: Joan Didion, legendary American writer, dead at 87.
Twenty years ago, reviewing The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Orrin Judd wrote, “Thankfully, we muddled through the decades-long period of dread out of which these pieces grew, but anyone who is trying to recapture the pervasive sense of desperation and gloom that drenched the late ’60s and the ’70s can do no better than to look here. At least in these two early collections, Joan Didion’s work must rank her with Tom Wolfe as one of the most perceptive observers of late 20th Century American culture. I really just can’t recommend them highly enough.”
STACY MCCAIN: Joe Biden, Blamer-in-Chief.
After 20 months of this constant crisis-mongering, I think I’m probably not the only one who’s thinking, well, if it hasn’t killed me yet, it’s probably never going to kill me. Pandemic fatigue, so to speak.
Don’t tell me about The Science. This is really about The Politics, and more specifically The Politics of Blame, because Democrats are trying to distract the public from the catastrophic failure that is the Biden presidency. So they wrote this speech, with its veiled allusion to Fox News (“dangerous misinformation on cable TV”), leaving me to wonder what specific “misinformation” Biden’s speechwriters had in mind. I haven’t been watching Fox News regularly in recent weeks, but if there was some specific misinformation Joe wanted to call out, why didn’t he name names? Tucker Carlson? Sean Hannity? Laura Ingraham? Who was it spreading this “dangerous misinformation”?
No, there’s just this vague accusation, without details, so that the Democratic voters listening to Joe’s speech can imagine that Fox News is 24/7 vaccine “misinformation,” in quite the same way that they imagine who the “unvaccinated” are — it’s those Evil Right-wing Republicans!
Saboteurs! Wreckers! Kulaks!
Why it’s as if: As His Presidency Founders, Biden Scapegoats The Unvaccinated.
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH NEWSWEEK IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Jen Psaki Mocked Free At-Home Tests Three Weeks Before Omicron Testing Crisis Hit America.
Earlier: This Scientist Created a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pandemic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It:
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: San Francisco DA Upset at Mayor For Wanting to Crack Down on Crime.
Liberal San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced earlier this month she’s cracking down on the crime spike her policies created. But that move has angered Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s even further left district attorney.
Specifically, Breed targeted the Tenderloin neighborhood for intervention efforts given the “pipeline of illegal drugs that has been fueling a surge in gun violence and deadly fentanyl overdoses,” reported CBS San Francisco.
“It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerate of all the bullsh*t that has destroyed our city.”
On Monday, Boudin criticized the plan during a news conference.
Related: Tom Cotton: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
More: Ayaan Hirsi Ali asks: Will California ever be safe?
THIS SCIENTIST CREATED A RAPID TEST JUST WEEKS INTO THE PANDEMIC. HERE’S WHY YOU STILL CAN’T GET IT:
When COVID-19 started sweeping across America in the spring of 2020, Irene Bosch knew she was in a unique position to help.
The Harvard-trained scientist had just developed quick, inexpensive tests for several tropical diseases, and her method could be adapted for the novel coronavirus. So Bosch and the company she had co-founded two years earlier seemed well-suited to address an enormous testing shortage.
E25Bio — named after the massive red brick building at MIT that houses the lab where Bosch worked — already had support from the National Institutes of Health, along with a consortium of investors led by MIT.
Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale.
Bosch’s prototype attracted a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which pitched in $2 million.
“We are excited about what E25Bio is capable of shipping in a short amount of time: a test that is significantly cheaper, more affordable, and available at-home,” said firm founder Vinod Khosla. (Disclosure: Khosla’s daughter Anu Khosla is on ProPublica’s board.)
On March 21 — when the U.S. had recorded only a few hundred COVID-19 deaths — Bosch submitted the test for emergency authorization, a process the Food and Drug Administration uses to expedite tests and treatments.
A green light from the FDA could have made a big difference for the many Americans who were then frantically trying to find doctors to swab their noses, with results, if they were lucky, coming back only days later.
But the go-ahead never came.
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.
Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.
On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci said Republicans who criticize him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” He isn’t “science.” And it’s also dangerous for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent, without which it’s easy to make tragic mistakes. A scientific debate over pandemic policy was and still is in the public interest, especially during a once-in-a-century plague.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: High-Profile L.A. Crimes Spark Rush for Bullet-Proof Cars, Rolex Replicas and Safe Rooms.
Earlier: Tom Cotton: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Kenosha Prosecutor From Rittenhouse Case Wants the Public to Know He’s Not Gay.
In a bizarre email exchange with the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, James Kraus, who acted as part of the prosecution team in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, wrote that he and prosecutor Thomas Binger are not—I repeat, NOT—having a homosexual affair.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: PA Gov. Tom Wolf vetos curriculum transparency bill, calling it a ‘dangerous and harmful imposition.’
“Under the guise of transparency, this legislation politicizes what is being taught in our public schools,” Wolf said in his veto message.
The bill would have required school administrators to post and periodically update course syllabuses, course summaries, the state academic standard to each instructional course, and title or link to textbooks used in the school, unless it violated a copyright law.
The governor opposed this bill from the outset. In his veto message, he said, “This legislation is a thinly veiled attempt to restrict truthful instruction and censor content reflecting various cultures, identities, and experiences. My administration is committed to creating a safe learning environment for all students, and we will not take part in this dangerous and harmful imposition.”
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Andrew Lewis, R-Dauphin County, said many schools already do this so his bill intended to standardize this practice across all school districts, charter schools, intermediate units and career and technical schools. Private and parochial schools would have been exempt from the bill.
In a statement in response to the governor’s veto, Lewis said, “It is infuriating that the governor wants to maintain the status quo and have parents jump through hoops to access information about their own children’s education.”
Flashback: The left is playing dumb on the ubiquity of its radical ideology in our schools.
How did that play out? Glenn Youngkin Defeated Terry McAuliffe Because Democrats Betrayed Parents.
THE BRANDON WHITE HOUSE’S ENERGY INCOMPETENCE:
In its first year, the Biden administration operated under the assumption that it could mollify the climate activists within the Democratic collation with policies that would make energy more expensive and, thus, justify what Press Sec. Jen Psaki admitted was the White House’s “focus on clean energy options.” At the same time, however, they seemed to think that policies designed to produce scarcity and the associated price hikes would be quietly absorbed by the general public. Both of these assumptions were unfounded. Restive climate activists on Joe Biden’s left flank are not satisfied by what they regard as half measures, and the popular backlash against the rising cost of living has become an existential threat to the Democratic Party’s political prospects.
Needless to say, this is not a coherent energy policy. It’s improvisatory theater designed to satisfy whatever political constituency the administration happens to be addressing at the moment. Granholm’s frivolity may titillate the handful of Americans for whom the workings of government is a source of entertainment, but all the saucy impudence in the world can’t paper over abject incompetence.
Earlier: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
December 22, 2021
IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post Discovers World War II-Era Survey, Cancels the Greatest Generation.
Fox News noted, however, that there seemed to be an ulterior motive in the presentation of this “uncensored” material. “Critics took to social media to blast The Post’s framing of the surveys, with some questioning the desire to view people in the 1940s through a 21st-century lens, and others suggesting that there was now an ongoing effort to cancel the grandparents of some Americans.” Nick Timothy, a columnist for the UK’s Telegraph, tweeted: “Next you’ll be telling me William Wilberforce wasn’t in the Parliamentary LGBTQ society, and Gandhi didn’t support Black Lives Matter. Historical figures lived with different social and moral norms. This is not news, or a novel academic discovery.”
Indeed. It is noteworthy also that the Post saw fit to highlight, out of 65,000 pages of surveys, racist and sexist remarks, rather than material that might have provided insight into the challenges that the men who won World War II faced and the difficulties they overcame. The Post’s article, and apparently the entire Virginia Tech project, if its focus is reflected accurately in the article, is akin to the pulling down of statues that has become a fad all over the country. The Left wants Americans to be ashamed of our history. Washington? Jefferson? Not statesmen, not men of courage, not key framers of the most successful republic and freest society the world has ever known, but just racist slaveowners, to be repudiated and abhorred, not respected or celebrated. Lincoln? He didn’t free the slaves; that’s the “white savior complex.” He, too, must be rejected as a racist, paternalist white supremacist. The Greatest Generation? Yes, they fought and won World War II and came home and made the United States the greatest power on earth, but you see, they did not hold woke attitudes.
In accordance with the prophesy:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As I’ve noted before, our elites are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.
UPDATE (From Ed): 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 plenty of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as well. “It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’”
(Updated and bumped.)
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Does this mean Antifa is officially racist now? Woke Journalists Compare Antifa Riots to D-Day Landings.
IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL, Y’ALL; IT’S JUST BIDNESS: A writer with Dallas roots unravels the rare secrets of the best movie ever — The Godfather.
Before The Godfather began shooting, the film’s producer, Al Ruddy, was being threatened. Constantly. He and his staff “would trade cars,” Seal says, to avoid being trailed. One night, his female assistant parked Ruddy’s car in front of her home, only to hear gunshots blasting out the windshield, with a note attached “saying they didn’t want the movie made.”
And that, the author says, “was only the beginning.”
Coppola wanted to shoot, not in the Midwest, as his bosses fervently hoped he would to keep costs as low as possible, but in New York City, where the Mafia was headquartered.
Soon, Ruddy was forced to meet with Anthony Colombo, head of the Italian American Civil Rights League, who as Seal says was fighting hard against the “stereotyping of Italian Americans in popular culture.” And making headway.
Ruddy was badly in need of keeping the Mafia at bay. Prime locations were being denied. Truck drivers were threatening a work stoppage. There were bomb scares.
So, Ruddy made a proposal that felt a bit like a Hail Mary. By his agreeing to omit the single word “Mafia” from any Godfather script, Colombo was satisfied. “One deletion,” Seal says, “led to a world of cooperation. From that point on, doors opened.”
And then, a new surprise: Real-life mobsters all but demanded being cast.
At the center of it all was Coppola, who badly needed a break. Initially, Coppola was skeptical of Puzo’s novel becoming anything more than a marginal motion picture. A breakthrough came when the director finally began to see it as the saga of a king and his sons, a Shakespearean story of family, which in Seal’s view gave it the magic it needed.
Even so, moments after its release, Coppola felt less like a potential Oscar winner and more like a doomed failure. It wasn’t until his wife phoned him in Paris, where he had traveled to write the screenplay for another Evans-Paramount film, The Great Gatsby, that he began to see what soon became obvious — that he’d created something great. His wife told him that, in New York City alone, people were lining up around the block, clamoring to see his movie.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Anthony Colombo was actually a Mafia member, as was his father — who was actually shot at a rally opposing steretyping of Italian-Americans as mobsters.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Christopher Rufo: Florida v. Critical Race Theory. Governor Ron DeSantis takes a stand against racialist ideologies in public institutions and businesses.
Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”
DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.
The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”
As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”
Read the whole thing.
HOW IT STARTED: New bill funds mental health experts, not police, to respond to emergencies: ‘mental illness is not a crime.’
Congress wants to make it easier for state and local governments to defund the police by instead funding mental health services and empowering them to respond to emergency calls instead of armed officers.
“We should be connecting people in crisis to care, not tossing them in jail,” Rep. Katie Porter, who reintroduced the bill on Thursday, said in a statement. “Mental illness is not a crime, and we have to stop treating it like one. Most police officers are not trained to care for individuals experiencing mental health crises, which too often tragically leads to unnecessary violence.”
The Mental Health Justice Act has the backing of Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
—The Hill, February 26th.
How it’s going: U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon carjacked and robbed in South Philly after touring FDR Park.
—The Philadelphia Inquirer, today.