DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF #HIMTOO? AND NAME THAT PARTY, CALIFORNIA EDITION: “Authorities on Nov. 10 raided the home of former Windsor mayor Dominic Foppoli, who has been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and misconduct, and revealed Tuesday what evidence was recovered in the raid.”

MAKING HER AN OFFER SHE CAN’T ACCEPT: Bill Maher calls out AOC for dismissing ‘wokeness’ critics, challenges her to appear on his show.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: The London Independent Falsely Stated Rittenhouse Shot Three Black Men.

“The police shooting of Jacob Blake sparked the 2020 Kenosha riots. The current version of the Independent article mentioned that Blake was black, but did not acknowledge that the men Rittenhouse shot were white. Rittenhouse’s trial polarized Americans along political lines, with numerous politicians and celebrities calling his acquittal racist. Journalist Glenn Greenwald said that the same error had occurred in numerous Brazilian newspapers as well as in a Dutch publication Friday.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

TIME’S UP FOR TIME’S UP: Staff Fumes, Ashley Judd Weeps as Time’s Up Pink-Slips Almost Everyone.

The vast majority of Time’s Up’s remaining staffers were laid off Friday in what they described as a debacle that began with leaders revealing they gave the news to the Washington Post first and ended with board member Ashley Judd breaking down in tears.

The embattled organization, limping since its CEO and entire board resigned this summer, announced Friday that it would lay off the vast majority of its remaining staff. Leadership informed staff of the decision in a virtual meeting that started 15 minutes before the Post article made the pink slips national news.

“They said on the call, ‘The Washington Post is releasing a piece right now,’” said Stacey Ferguson, Time’s Up’s digital director. “Some staff members were like, ‘Oh my god, my mom is going to read about it before I can tell her.’”

“To paraphrase what a colleague shared on the call: For an organization that’s supposed to be advocating for fair and dignified workplaces, this feels like the opposite of that,” Ferguson added.

In a statement, the board called the layoffs a “major reset” needed to right the ship after the events of the last year. Multiple outlets reported over the summer that the leaders of Time’s Up—which was created in response to the #MeToo movement—had counseled then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on how to respond to sexual harassment allegations against him and had disparaged his accuser in text messages.

Flashback: “This week Anthony Weiner got a lengthy profile in the NYT. Today Jeffrey Toobin got his old job back at CNN. And of course, Bill Clinton is welcome anywhere at any time. Is there a sex pest the libs won’t welcome back for telling them what they want to hear?” Jim Treacher asks.

See also, Bad Touch Biden:

Last year, voters evidently decided that voting out #OrangeManBad was more important than #metoo:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Well-Acquitted Edition.

OUT ON A LIMB: The TSA’s 20th Birthday Should Be Its Last.

As President Reagan said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”

BIAS BY OMISSION: A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial:

Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.

When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.

Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.

Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.

There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.

Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”

If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.

Like 1968, 2020 was a dreadful inflection point in America’s history that will be studied endlessly to understand the left’s moral panic.

Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering.

At one level, the gap is surprising: The “oppressed” seem less enthusiastic about riots than those who worry about their oppression. At another level, it’s not surprising: The people whose neighborhoods are being destroyed are less sanguine about the destruction than are those who observe it from the comfortable environs of our nation’s capital. . . .

But this is mostly a class divide. The women interviewed in DC share the up-talk and vocal fry that characterize well-off, college-educated young women today. They aren’t people who run or depend on small businesses that can be ruined by one night of destruction; they aren’t people whose wages might suffer from business closures following mass violence. They speak in the most abstract of tones.

By “college educated,” we could also say “poorly educated,” these days. Plus:

The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent.

That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.

And they are.

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? NPR slammed for calling Boston’s first female, Asian American mayor ‘a disappointment.’

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Joe Biden and His Handlers Immediately Walk Back the President’s Kyle Rittenhouse Comments.

“Honestly, this presidency is the most predictable in history. Any time Biden manages to say something halfway not insane, his far-left handlers immediately rush to reshape his position. It’s so obvious he is completely beholden to the radicals, and it’s a terrible thing for a nation that desires some semblance of normalcy.”

Why, it’s as if social media is running John Gill’s White House.

INSERT HENRY KISSINGER’S JOKE ABOUT THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR HERE: College Democrats of America Imploding as They Embrace Cancel Culture and Accuse Each Other of Racism.

GETTING IT WRONG: Once more with feeling! Media coverage of the Rittenhouse case was hot garbage.

And if you missed it last night: Ranking the Top 10 Most Pathetic Reactions to Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict.

GETTING IT RIGHT: Here Are My Contemporaneous Articles About The Kyle Rittenhouse Shootings, Now Unlocked. From Jesse Singal:

Since the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is underway, I’ve decided to unlock the two contemporaneous posts I did about the shootings — scroll down and you’ll see both of them, one after the other. I wrote about this case twice because it demonstrated, to a disturbing degree, one of my biggest fears about the current media environment: what feels like endlessly accelerating Balkanization. We seem headed toward a point where every major news story generates at least two distinct versions of reality that are summarily adopted as true by many partisans. And the more explosive the story, the more disagreement about the facts.

The Rittenhouse case was a particularly good (or bad) example, because thanks to the number of cameras on-scene, we had a lot of details about what happened fairly quickly. Watching some major media outlets and otherwise trustworthy-seeming figures selectively ignore or tweak those details to fit a preferred narrative worried the hell out of me. It seemed pretty clear, simply from watching the videos and reading the relevant laws and legal analysis, that Rittenhouse at the very least had a decent self-defense case. Not ironclad, but decent. And yet I watched many influential media figures and politicians engage in this weird snowballing act of collective truthiness — they turned Rittenhouse into a monster, into someone who had committed obviously premeditated acts of murder, in a manner that ran dozens of laps ahead of the available evidence. As I argue in the below posts, this sort of distortion can have serious consequences, especially when it collides with the realities of a courtroom.

Read the whole thing.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: GoKAR!—The University of Texas’ CRT Plan for Four-Year-Olds.

For me and other alumni of the University of Texas, it has become less and less surprising how deeply the gospel of wokeness has permeated and corrupted the institution. Whether it is the dean of UT Law preemptively surrendering to the wokesters and neutering the newly endowed First Amendment Center before it even opened, or UT adopting an Orwellian DEI initiative that puts departmental diversity commissars in command of hiring, promotion, tenure, awards, and funding decisions, or having one of its noted scientists forced to withdraw his academic work because the enlightened feared it might undercut their social engineering efforts, those of us who have been paying attention have pretty much written the Forty Acres off as having gone around the bend. After all, how much worse can it get?

Once again, the administration of UT President Jay Hartzell responds, “hold my soy milk.” Not content to propagandize college students with CRT pseudo-scholarship, or to institutionalize its teachings as official UT policy, UT is now launching a program to “educate” four- and five-year-old children on “anti-racism”:

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Brought to a halt by a complaint: The university is reviewing a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights regarding a project designed by three faculty researchers. “Because we also expect all research projects to comply with the law and university polices, the university is conducting a legal compliance review of the complaint before this study is launched.”

More people should file these, and send a courtesy copy to University General Counsel, who are generally pretty sensitive to legal issues.

QUESTION: WHAT IF RITTENHOUSE HAD BEEN BLACK?

ANSWER: Andrew Coffee IV found not guilty on all counts of murder, attempted first degree murder. “Andrew Coffee was found not guilty on all counts of murder and attempted first degree murder Friday. Coffee is accused of firing at Indian River County Sheriff’s Deputies during an early morning drug raid at his home back in 2017. His girlfriend, Alteria Woods was caught in the crossfire, shot 10 times and later died. Coffee was charged with the murder of Woods after a grand jury exonerated two law enforcement officers for her death…Coffee was found guilty on a count of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was also found not guilty in the murder of Woods.”

FROM THE HOME OFFICE ON MARTHA’S VINEYARD: Ranking Top 10 Most Pathetic Reactions to Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict.

SQUAD OWN GOALS. Congratulations, Democrats: You Just Passed a Massive Tax Cut for the Rich.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Harris to take over as Biden undergoes anesthesia for colonoscopy before 79th birthday.

UPDATE: Our long national nightmare is over resumes: ‘In good spirits:’ Biden resumes duties after temporary transfer of power to Harris during colonoscopy.

TERROR IN THE CAPITOL TUNNEL:

McBride viewed three hours of surveillance video captured by Capitol security camera—the extensive system captured at least 14,000 hours of footage that the Justice Department and Capitol police are desperate to keep away from public view—and described for the first time what happened inside the tunnel where a combination of D.C. and Capitol police, ostensibly, were stationed to prevent protesters from entering the building:

“[Just] after 4:00 pm, Ryan is sprayed multiple times by an officer standing on a ledge in the tunnel,” McBride wrote in a November 1 filing. “He is also separated from a woman who stood next to Ryan at different times at the Western Terrace. She was middle aged and nice. Ryan promised to keep an eye on her. The woman was wearing a red shirt and a MAGA hat. Shortly thereafter, officers begin terrorizing people in and around the tunnel. People are screaming and getting crushed. There is a pile of human beings stacked on top of each other at the tunnel entrance. People are trapped and there is nowhere to go.”

McBride focused on the conduct of one officer in particular, with badge number L359 and wearing a white shirt. The unidentified officer begins “to beat a man for no apparent reason . . . [and] beats the man so badly that the man crawls over to the woman with the MAGA hat.”

At this point, according to the security video, the officer turns his sights on the woman. “Then for reasons that no fair minded or decent human being will ever understand—[the officer wearing the] White-shirt turns his attention to the woman and begins to pulverize her,” McBride explained. “The weapon this officer appears to be using is a collapsible stick, designed to break windows in emergency situations. This stick is neither designed nor to be used against another human being.”

Read the whole thing.

BIDEN NOM SAULE OMAROVA STOLE HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS OF MERCHANDISE FROM A T.J. MAXX.

Related: Lincoln Project calls GOP Sen. John Kennedy’s questioning of Saule Omarova ‘racist, plain and simple’ (no comment on Confederate coolers, though). “Wait do you guys think communism is a race?”

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Marriott refused to host Uyghur conference, citing “political neutrality:”

The big picture: The World Uyghur Congress has repeatedly drawn the ire of Chinese authorities, who have declared it a terrorist group for allegedly fomenting unrest in Xinjiang, though the group does not promote violence and is on no international terrorist lists.

• Ahead of the conference, the Chinese embassy in Prague condemned the Congress and the politicians who participated.
• Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib, who attended the conference, said in response: “I hear that China is unhappy about this conference being held here in Prague. Well, I am unhappy there’s a country in 2021 that has concentration camps.”

What they’re saying: The conference organizers found Marriott’s response “shocking,” Arkin says, adding that none of the other hotels they reached out to expressed any concerns.

• “We organize international events all the time and this is the first time we were given this excuse,” she says.

• “It is chilling because of the broader concept of how China is really disrupting Western democracies,” she adds.

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

STUCK RITTENHOUSE JURORS ASK TO SEE HOCUS POCUS OUT OF FOCUS ‘PROVOCATION’ VIDEO AND ALL HELL MAY BREAK LOOSE: “As has happened several times during this trial with ‘missing’ witnesses and other FBI spy video, prosecutors either said they had no idea from whence the video came, as in the case of the Hocus Pocus drone footage, or provided the defense team with a substandard version of the video, as happened in both cases of the drone footage and the FBI overhead surveillance video.”

Related: Rittenhouse Verdict Watch: Has Jury Foreperson Gone Rogue And Holding Back Acquittal?

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT JOHN FRANKENHEIMER DIDN’T INTEND FOR THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: Chinese tennis star who accused party leader of abuse has disappeared and now (allegedly) recants by email.

Earlier this month, Peng wrote a post on the Chinese social media site Weibo accusing a senior member of the Communist Party named Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her:

In the 1,500-character post, Peng gave a detailed account of her encounters with Zhang, now 75, which began a decade ago. Peng claims, in her post, she had an on-again, off-again affair with Zhang, who was married, starting before he rose up the party ranks and became vice premier.

About three years ago, after Zhang retired from his role, he invited her over to his house to play tennis with him and his wife. She said he then sexually assaulted her while his wife stood outside guarding the door…

“I know that for someone of your eminence, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, you’ve said that you’re not afraid,” Peng wrote, according to The New York Times. “But even if it’s just me, like an egg hitting a rock, or a moth to the flame, courting self-destruction, I’ll tell the truth about you.”

That post Peng put up was deleted about 20 minutes later, but not before people saw it and copies were made. That was on November 2 and since then it appears no one has heard a word from Peng. Her social media accounts have gone dark and efforts to contact her have all failed.

It was radio silence until yesterday evening when a state media outlet published an email Peng allegedly sent to the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). As you can see, the email is retracting the #MeToo allegation against Zhang. Actually, it’s not retracting the allegation so much as claiming she didn’t make it in the first place even though it was released on her verified account. Adding “I’m not missing, nor am I unsafe” to a sketchy email from someone no one has seen or spoken to for weeks is a nice touch.

“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Related: Serena Williams speaks out for missing tennis star Peng Shuai: ‘Devastated’ Williams hopes missing tennis star Peng Shuai is found quickly.

OUT ON A LIMB: Of Course, We Should Blame the Greens for the Energy Crunch.

Shortly after he entered office, Joe Biden shut down oil and gas leasing on federal land and directed executive agencies to eliminate spending that serves to subsidize fossil fuel industries. Even as benchmark crude prices increased, Biden’s policies forced developers to abandon transit pipelines such as the Keystone XL pipeline, among others. The activist class is so dead set against pipelines they’re even opposed to the idea of transit networks that would store greenhouse gases in underground facilities. The technological marvels that produced the fracking revolution—the developers of which quickly became the world’s “swing” energy producers that could stabilize the global market in the event of a supply shock—have been handcuffed. No wonder speculative long-term investors in the development of energy sources are spooked.

The intended consequence of these policies was to create artificial energy scarcity and incentivize alternative fuel producers to enter the marketplace. “If you restrict the supply (of oil and gas), you alter the market and you create a better environment for more sustainable fuels,” New York University professor Max Sarinsky told the Associated Press. This was all part of the plan, to the extent there was a plan.

So, yes, there’s a lot of blame to go around if what Friedman forecasts to be a dark, cold, and scary winter materializes. No small share of that blame should be apportioned out to the central planners who sought to kneecap the existing energy market in favor of an insufficient alternative. Friedman calls these the “nice” greens. But if the intended consequences of their policy preferences result in engineered hardships for the developed world and increased geopolitical influence for despots and theocrats abroad, that doesn’t seem so very “nice” to me.

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.”

TAMPA BAY BUCS WR ANTONIO BROWN ALLEGEDLY OBTAINED A FAKE VACCINATION CARD TO AVOID THE NFL’S PROTOCOLS. “If Brown is found to have violated the protocols, he and the Buccaneers will be subject to fines. The Packers were fined $300,000, while unvaccinated quarterback Aaron Rodgers and receiver Allen Lazard were fined $14,650 each for violating the COVID-19 protocols earlier this month.”

BARI WEISS: The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse. Why so many got this story so wrong:

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

Take this, for instance, from CNN:

Read the whole thing.