WATCH: James O’Keefe confronts leftist protesters outside NY Young Republicans.
O’Keefe asks them if they’ve heard of Project Veritas and reveals that he’s the CEO. They proceed to call him an ‘insurrectionist’ and make false claims about him, including that he ‘edits’ his videos.
When he asks them to substantiate these claims, to find out why they are saying it, they either clam up or can’t cite any proof whatsoever. It’s just insults, like always.
Somewhere, Andrew Breitbart smiles.
JUSSIE SMOLLETT TRIES TO CONVINCE THE COURT ‘THERE WAS NO HOAX:’ “As I wrote back in February of 2019, the Smollett incident is a vital reminder that some hate crimes are hoaxes; it would behoove the media to tread lightly with respect to sensational claims that only feel true because they confirm certain biases. On college campuses, where what passes for hate crimes are termed bias incidents, and are often investigated by university officials, most go unsolved. But among those that do get solved, the vast majority are either deliberate hoaxes or misunderstandings: Somebody left some wires or shoelaces hanging from a tree or a doorknob, and an alarmed person reported it. There are, of course, thousands of real hate crimes committed every year, but the flashiest incidents—the ones that neatly conform to stereotypes about racist Trump supporters— should be approached with caution.”
47,000 MORE PEOPLE DIED OF THIS DISEASE IN 2020 DUE TO LOCKDOWNS, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION REPORTS:
Governments around the world took drastic measures in 2020 in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, in many cases locking down economies and confining people to their homes for months on end. The extent to which these measures actually helped contain the COVID-19 pandemic is highly dubious. But the death toll from the unintended consequences of lockdowns continues to mount.
The World Health Organization (WHO) just reported that pandemic measures delayed and disrupted medical care for the global malaria crisis, leading to tens of thousands of additional deaths. An astounding 14 million additional malaria cases were recorded in 2020 compared to 2019, the WHO says. So, too, we saw 69,000 more malaria deaths in 2020 compared to 2019, 47,000 of which the organization says are directly attributable to disrupted diagnosis and treatment stemming from government pandemic restrictions.
If only there was a proven method to fight malaria. If only.
INSERT HENRY KISSINGER IRAN-IRAQ WAR JOKE HERE*: Chris Cuomo claims CNN boss Jeff Zucker knew about involvement in gov scandal.
Canned CNN host Chris Cuomo has fired back at the network — accusing his boss of knowing everything about his involvement in trying to quash ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sex scandal.
In a new statement, a spokesman for the fallen TV star threw his longtime ally CNN President Jeff Zucker under the bus, while insisting the journalist “has the highest level of admiration and respect” for him.
“They were widely known to be extremely close and in regular contact, including about the details of Mr. Cuomo’s support for his brother,” the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal Sunday of Chris Cuomo’s shady support for his big brother as the governor’s sex scandal unfolded.
“There were no secrets about this, as other individuals besides Mr. Cuomo can attest,” the spokesman added.
* Or not. As Jim Treacher writes, “I don’t doubt Zucker knew what Cuomo was up to, just like he knew what Matt Lauer was doing for years. And I assume there’s plenty of blackmail material to prove it. For the first time ever, I’m rooting for Chris Cuomo to defeat his enemies.”
OUR BLOOD AND HIS GUTS: Anthony Fauci and the Creation of the Bio-Security State.
A new populist spirit, represented by Donald Trump, among others, has led to a reshuffling of seemingly settled ideological alliances.
The reshuffling is ongoing.
I know this because I find myself approving of at least parts of “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” the new bestseller book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It is odd indeed that I find myself in nodding agreement with an anti-vax, climate warrior named Kennedy, but there you are—or, rather, here we are.
Towards the end of a long and riveting interview with Tucker Carlson about his book, Kennedy reflects on the extraordinary—indeed, “totalitarian” is not too strong a word—government impositions upon individual liberty in the name of battling the COVID pandemic and issues a critical admonition that we forget at our peril.
“We have to love our freedom,” he said, “more than we fear a germ.”
Can we pause for a round of applause?
The risks of COVID to the general population were and are wildly exaggerated.
Everyone knows that now, though not everyone is yet ready to admit it.
QED: NYC employers must soon mandate proof of COVID-19 vaccine, de Blasio announces.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED ‘Has CNN Lost Trust?’ Brian Stelter Explores the Consequences of the Chris Cuomo Scandal for His Network.
Flashbacks: CNN Host Angry Conservatives Don’t Trust the Media, But Here’s a Few Examples Why.
It wasn’t that long ago that CNN was falsely trying to tell you that Joe Rogan was treating his COVID-19 sickness with horse de-wormer and now a host on the same network is complaining that the right is somehow in the wrong for not believing the media.
This is, of course, right after they dedicated a segment advocating that the mainstream media should, indeed, discriminate against the right when it comes to reporting.
To give you some background, the drama started when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox News and told Maria Bartiromo that the corporate media lies its head off that it’s pretty much a given at this point to not believe much of what they say.
This apparently upset the host of CNN’s ironically named “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter, who began ringing the alarm bell about the “GOP’s anti-media streak and made it seem as if people should be aghast that a leader of conservatives should be telling conservatives that the biased media controlled by the left lies about conservatives.
Gee, Brian, where to begin?
Dana Loesch: How CNN Set Me Up For The Near-Riot Parkland Town Hall.
And of course, even Stelter doesn’t believe what CNN tells him, particularly involving global warming:
And then there’s one of Stelter’s favorite guests on a show called “Reliable Sources:” A gentleman named Dan Rather.
As Glenn wrote in the aftermath of Rather’s meltdown in 2004:
The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)
The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.
That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.
(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in — nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that’s been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress — except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).
You can also refine your arguments, updating — and even abandoning them — in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It’s part of the deal.
This also means admitting when you’re wrong. And that’s another difference. When you’re a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation’s component involves being willing to admit you’re wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.
When you’re a news anchor, you’re not just putting your arguments on the line — you’re putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you’ve violated people’s trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you’ve missed something, and now you’re going to set it right.
What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer. I think Dan Rather does, too.
That seems like pretty good advice. Naturally, Stelter completely ignores it, week after week.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Alec Baldwin and wife Hilaria delete Twitter accounts days after Rust interview.
Flashbacks:
● Alec Baldwin Quits Twitter Again Amid Fallout From Gillian Anderson Dig.
—The Huffington Post, March 4th.
● Alec Baldwin leaves Twitter after uproar over wife’s heritage.
—CNN, January 19th.
● Alec Baldwin quits Twitter permanently after row with Daily Mail reporter.
—The Grauniad, July 3rd, 2013.
52 YEARS AGO TODAY: Altamont: 6 December 1969.
From your humble narrator, last month: 52 Years Before the Astroworld Concert Disaster, There Was Altamont.
DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM: Bomb Squad Called To UK Hospital After Man Gets WWII Mortar Stuck In His Rectum.
JOE BIDEN ENTERED THE BUBBLE LAST NIGHT AND PERFECTLY ILLUSTRATED THE TWO AMERICAS:
“The fact that Weija Jiang, a CBS News reporter who often claimed racism during the Trump administration, was apparently there only further underscores how incestuous the beltway is. The politicians get standing ovations at buildings paid for by taxpayers and the press fawn over them as if they are covering royalty. Meanwhile, normal people are out on a Sunday evening paying $3.50 a gallon for gas so they can go to work the next day. By the way, Jiang still hasn’t told us who supposedly used the phrase ‘Kung flu’ to her face at the Trump White House. Weird that even after he left office, she’s never revealed who was behind that horror, right? But I digress.”
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Pelosi Looking To Punish Boebert For Islamophobia But She Ignores Antisemitism.
WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Ron Klain cannot gaslight Biden’s way to reelection.
We are used to White Houses of all political stripes lying to us, but the lies the Biden administration tells are betrayed by everyone’s eyes, ears, and pocketbooks. It doesn’t matter how great Klain boasts our (artificially) tight labor market when we all know service is getting slower, worse, and more expensive.
Biden can bleat about how “transitory” this inflation is, but can you believe that when your paycheck covers less and less of your regular budget? The average person spends the majority of that budget on food, transportation, and housing — the three things exploding in price right now. Not only are those things we experience and ascertain as fact, but these are things that directly infuriate us.
At some point, maybe Klain and company will realize lying to voters about how great things are is a losing strategy. But by then, it may no longer be their government to control.
The article is focused on Team Biden trashing the economy, and doesn’t even mention the other big reason for Brandon’s sagging poll numbers: Americans give Biden low marks on Afghanistan pullout: Reuters/Ipsos poll.
JUST IN TIME FOR ALL YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING NEEDS: ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ store opens in Massachusetts.
SAN FRANCISCO RESTAURANT DEFENDS DENYING SERVICE TO ARMED POLICE OFFICERS: ‘We were uncomfortable.’
The co-owner of a San Francisco restaurant defended refusing service to three uniformed police officers following backlash over the move, calling the establishment a “safe space.”
“It’s not about the fact that we are anti-police,” chef and co-owner of Hilda and Jesse, Rachel Sillcocks, told ABC7 News. “It is about the fact that we do not allow weapons in our restaurant. We were uncomfortable, and we asked them to leave. It has nothing to do that they were officers. It has everything to do that they were carrying guns.”
“We understand how much the police support and protect the community,” she added. “We want to again reiterate the fact that this is about guns being in our space, and we don’t allow it.”
Well, that’s one way to (temporarily, alas) tank your Yelp rating.
GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: Manhattan workers warned not to use public transit. Is this the new normal?
There is at least some hope that when Bill de Blasio is finally gone next month and Eric Adams is in office, a greater measure of security will be restored and a more normal commuting routine will be possible. One CEO told reporters that he hoped this was the case but, “it’s almost like he can’t get here soon enough to restore law and order.”
The subway stations are not safe. If you’re not being shaken down for money, somebody may be along shortly to randomly shove you onto the tracks. The sidewalks near Penn Station and the bus terminal are danger zones, with people regularly being stabbed, shot, or mugged as soon as the sun goes down. People didn’t ride out the pandemic just to have their city stolen from them by gang members. Something has to be done sooner rather than later.
If only there was a system with a proven track record designed to lower crime in Manhattan.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Epidemic of smash-and-grab crime is definitely man-made.
Crime is raging across the country, from violent attacks to brazen shoplifting to mob “smash and grab” attacks. The White House this week had a simple answer for the cause of this rising lawlessness: It was not “defund the police” efforts, or more restrictive policies for police and prosecutors. It was the familiar scourge cited in debates ranging from infrastructure to supply chains to tax increases — the pandemic.
The pandemic now seems to have reached the mythic levels of gods who once were blamed for everything that went wrong in life. Africans had Anansi the Spider, while the Norse had the trickster Loki. Both were known to assume different identities to wreak disorder or steal precious things.
For politicians, it is useful to have a lurking Loki to explain that social problems are not really of their making, the result of their failures. The Loki factor was evident in the press conference this week when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about the rising lawlessness seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles: “Does the president still think that crime is up because of the pandemic?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied that “many people have conveyed that.”
Doocy persisted: “So when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, a Nordstrom, a Home Depot until the shelves are clean — do you think that’s because of the pandemic?” Psaki replied: “I think a root cause in a lot of communities is the pandemic, yes.”
To be fair, there’s a connection in one sense: San Jose Spends COVID Aid to Fight Flash Mob Robberies. “The San Jose, Calif., city council has approved spending a portion of COVID-19 pandemic funds in an effort to combat smash-and-grab robberies in the Bay Area, according to CBS affiliate KPIX. The city council unanimously voted to allocate $250,000 of pandemic funds toward license plate readers (LPRs). The $250,000 came from the $18.3 million the city received from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act, according to KPIX.”
EXPLORING THE IMPORTANT ISSUES: Ultimate Proof That 6 Wheels Are Cooler Than 4.
QUESTION ASKED: How’s ‘shutting down the virus’ going, Joe?
We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again?
Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were “xenophobic”, are suddenly back in vogue.
It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?
Back in October 2020, then-candidate Biden — or whoever was running his Twitter account at the time — proudly tweeted, “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” That’s right. Joe was going to shut down the virus all while eating ice cream, wearing aviators and saying things like “God love ya.”
Unfortunately that tweet has aged about as well as the president. The only thing Biden has shut down since taking over in January is the Keystone XL Pipeline.
We are now eleven months into the Biden presidency and more people have died from Covid on Joe’s watch than under his predecessor. You might think that counting and comparing deaths in order to score political points is ghoulish and unproductive. I’d agree. But since Biden gladly used this tactic during a 2020 debate with Trump, it’s only fair he be held to his own standard.
It was a Trump-like boast from Team Biden — and apparently, no one in his administration thought that he’d be judged by it once in office: Democrats livid over GOP’s COVID-19 attacks on Biden.
ROGER KIMBALL: Oh, Oh, Omicron!
So far, I have to say, it’s been pretty much of a dud—unless, that is, you’re the stock market, which has taken a beating this last week or so, in part because of this new kid on the medical block (there is also that much more toxic financial emergency, the Biden Administration, but that’s for another day). The new variant has also been a godsend for scolds, nags, bureaucrats, and meddlesome so-called public health
officialsnannies who are just itching for another excuse to lock down your world, introduce new travel restrictions, and impose new testing protocols.How will it all play out? TSTS—Too Soon to Say, but I suspect this sequel is going to be a flop at the box office. For one thing, although only recently named, there is abundant evidence that Omicron has been around for months. If it had been previously unnamed, that is perhaps because it is no big deal. The South African doctor who first identified the strain noted that while the virus was possibly more contagious than versions named for letters earlier in the Greek alphabet, symptoms tended to be mild, indeed “very mild.” A typical news report notes that “patients mostly suffered from mild muscle aches, scratchy throat and dry cough.” (Remember colds? Remember the flu?)
So why the panic? Partly, it is because panic is an antidote to boredom. People are heavily bored. Panic also licenses the people who want to run your life to, well, run your life. “Most Omicron cases so far have been mild,” runs one headline, “but experts say it will take weeks to understand how severe the variant can be.” Ah, “experts”! What would we do without them?
One thing we’d do is ride public transportation without wearing a mask. But apparently there are sufficient numbers of people who are cowed enough, or bored enough, to don the little badge of their submission and pretend that they are not only “staying safe” but keeping you safe, too. Where did your mother tell you that road paved with good intentions led?
Here’s the reality: the COVID “pandemic” is over. I hasten to add: also, it will never end.
Earlier: Panic is a Lifestyle Brand.
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING: Is America—and the world—prepared for what comes next?
Whatever happens, I find I cannot escape the sense that America has reached an impasse, that it has arrived at a moment of transition, and not just on the matter of abortion. Whether one looks at politics, economics, or the world, one sees a realignment of forces, a shuffling of players off and on the stage, to prepare for the next act in the drama. The Trump presidency seems less like the harbinger of a new beginning than a spectacular climax to a historical epoch. If so, we are living through a sort of denouement, a working through of conflicts left unresolved. “It feels like the order we have all taken for granted since the end of the Cold War is badly decaying, and has gotten so fragile that it might well shatter soon,” wrote Damir Marusic of Wisdom of Crowds last month. Question is: What replaces it?
If the Court does overrule Roe next summer, America will have entered uncharted territory. Many states will ban abortion immediately. Others will legalize it for the duration of a pregnancy. Still others will restrict and limit the practice. Abortion will be a matter for legislatures—including the U.S. Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans believe that abortion would become a major issue in next year’s midterm campaign, with unforeseeable consequences. Would a pro-choice backlash help Democrats? Perhaps. Then again, some of us thought that Texas’s fetal heartbeat law might help Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. That didn’t happen.
Conversely, if the Court does preserve Roe, many conservatives and Republicans fear a pro-life backlash directed at the GOP infrastructure and conservative legal movement. No less an authority than former attorney general Ed Meese wrote in the Washington Post that the “success” of constitutional originalism depends on the Court’s ruling in Dobbs. Tension already is high within the conservative legal movement over former president Donald Trump, his attempt to remain in office, and the intellectual challenges from “common-good” constitutionalists and from advocates of judicial “engagement” over “restraint.” A disappointing ruling may not only deflate Republican enthusiasm, but also turn grassroots conservatives in more radical directions.
Read the whole thing.
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