OK, I gotta go to bed but I'm having a hard time not joy-scrolling through all of the Democrat meltdowns over the shutdown they started coming to an end.
Those meltdowns–which are basically universal and with no dissenting voices–show what a big win today was for President…
HOW IT STARTED: “It is not clear if Biden gave the green light to the acts of clemency that night on January 16, however, the exchange suggests that the Biden aides instead took action on what Posada said Biden ‘intended’ to do. The three documents signed early the next morning were for around 2,500 commutations. Biden has since said that the autopen was used to sign the clemency documents because there were ‘a lot of them,’ but there were only three documents that day that were signed with the autopen.”
Tucker, Georgia, is an eastern Atlanta suburb, located in the ultra-woke Dekalb County, so this story may not come as a surprise, but it’s infuriating a lot of people, so I thought I’d share.
It all started a few weeks ago with a man who identifies as a woman by the name of Sasha Swinson. He was at the Tucker-Reid H. Cofer Library, a place he claims he frequents regularly, and had just used the bathroom. The women’s bathroom. When he stepped outside, a DeKalb County police officer allegedly told him that he needed to use the men’s bathroom next time as there were women and young girls in the other. As you can imagine, that didn’t sit well with Swinson.
“I use the restroom, the women’s restroom, like I have been for months, if not years,” Swinson told local news outlets. “He says, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ So, misgendering me right away, just goes, ‘But you’re not a woman. That’s obvious.'”
In case you’re curious about just how obvious that was, here’s a video of Swinson enjoying his 15 minutes of fame as he complains about the situation. Even I didn’t expect that voice to come out that deep.
A DeKalb County police officer confronted transgender man Sasha Swinson in a Tucker, Georgia library women’s bathroom, telling him, "You're not a woman, that's obvious," while stressing his responsibility to protect women and girls. pic.twitter.com/LimppwwjZs
Two teenagers from one of New Jersey’s wealthiest suburbs were arrested this week for allegedly plotting to join ISIS and carry out mass killings of Jews.
According to federal prosecutors, Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel and Milo Sedarat, both 19, both from Montclair, had stockpiled weapons, posed with an ISIS flag, and fantasized online about attacks on Jewish communities.
Sedarat, the son of a well-known poet, reportedly said he wanted to “execute 500 Jews” and “mow down” pro-Israel marchers in his hometown.
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A generation raised without faith or moral grounding is now desperately searching for something to fill the void.
And when that search happens in the digital wilderness, without fathers, pastors or teachers to guide them, it leads not to purpose, but to poison.
The Montclair jihadis aren’t just a security threat.
They’re a warning: When a society stops offering its young men meaning, something else will.
And what steps in to fill that emptiness may be worse than anything we dare to imagine.
As G.K. Chesterton famously never said, “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.”
“It’s already happening, this is just going to accelerate it.”
In response, Wall Street’s top earners are turning to an unlikely corner of the country to shelter from Mamdani’s tax raid: Texas.
Or, more specifically, Dallas, where the booming financial district – nicknamed “Y’All Street” – benefits from a lower-tax, lower-regulation environment than New York.
For some, Mamdani’s new regime means Texas is on course to take New York’s crown as the financial capital of America.
“It’s hard to remain a financial capital when you despise capitalism. Cities run by people who have never run a business or met a payroll are killing their own proverbial golden goose,” says Chris Furlow, chief executive of the Texas Bankers Association.
Is there anything left to say about the Heritage Foundation’s pre-Halloween melodrama? It was quite a scary show. I am confident that when Kevin Roberts, president of that venerable bastion of conservatism, got outside his morning egg on October 30, he had no inkling that his two-minute and thirty-nine-second video clip would precipitate a seismic detonation that would rock the foundation and monopolize the news cycle for days.
The main purpose of the video, Roberts said, was to reaffirm that the commentator Tucker Carlson “remains and always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” This came on the heels of Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes, the obnoxious twenty-seven-year-old antisemitic scold who, among other things, idolizes Joseph Stalin and thinks that Adolf Hitler is “cool.”
Some prominent commentators defended Roberts; many denounced him. Roberts tried several times to walk back or apologize for his initial video. It didn’t work. The rhetoric of that first video (“globalist class,” “venomous coalition”) was impossible to sanitize. On November 5, Heritage’s regularly scheduled all-staff monthly meeting turned into an embarrassing extended struggle session. The world knows this because a video of the meeting (taped for the benefit of staffers who were out of town) was leaked and posted online, where it instantly became the object of obloquy and ridicule.
As of this writing, damage reports regarding the self-inflicted wound suffered by Heritage are still trickling in and being assessed. But even sympathetic commentators understand that the damage is serious. “After 40+ years,” ran the headline to one such column, “the Heritage Foundation is collapsing.” Perhaps that is precipitate or overstated; as of this writing, the tea leaves are still swirling. Still, there can be no doubt that there is trouble in paradise.
Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has died at the age of 84, his family have announced.
Tagliabue reportedly died on Sunday morning in Chevy Chase, Maryland as a result of heart failure complicated by Parkinson’s disease. He leaves behind wife Chandler, son Drew and daughter Emily.
Tagliabue served as NFL commissioner between 1989 and 2006, when current incumbent Roger Goodell took over.
During Tagliabue’s 17-year stint as commissioner, the NFL experienced labor peace, saw skyrocketing television deals, construction of new stadiums across the nation, and expansion to the current 32-team makeup.
He also maneuvered the league through such crises and events as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.
Despite those credentials that continued pro football’s surge to the top of American sports, it took until a special centennial class in 2020 for Tagliabue to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after retiring in 2006.
Tagliabue wasn’t the second coming of Pete Rozelle, but the NFL’s product during his era was still pre-woke, and far more watchable than Goodell’s version of the sport.
“The president continues to post about ending the filibuster,” Stephanopoulos began. “Is that the best way to end this shutdown right now? Is that what the administration position is?”
“No, George, the best way to do it — and look, you were involved in a lot of these in the ’90s. And you basically called the Republicans terrorists and, you know, you said that it is not the responsible party that keeps the government closed,” Bessent replied. “And so what we need is five brave moderate Democratic Senators to cross the aisle, because right now it is 52 to three — 52 to three — five Democrats can cross the aisle and reopen the government. That’s the best way to do it, George.”
“I can disagree with you about the history there,” Stephanopoulos said with a half smile. “We don’t have to get into a history lesson right now —”
“George —” Bessent tried to push back.
“Let’s talk about —” Stephanopoulos interrupted. “Let’s talk about what’s happening right now.”
“If you want, I’ve got all your quotes here,” Bessent offered.
“I’m sure you do, but let’s talk about the situation —” Stephanopoulos tried again.
“I read your book, so you got one purchase on Amazon this week,” Bessent quipped. “And that’s very much what you said.”
In that vein, [Dick] Gephardt bitterly attacked incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and his allies, calling them “trickle-down terrorists” and asserting that their legislative program was based on “division, exclusion and fear.”
—The Tampa Bay Times, December 14th, 1994.
And from Stephanopoulos himself:
Stephanopoulos: No one knew who would get blamed more for the shutdown, Democrats or Republicans. But there was more than the shutdown involved. First, there was also this threat that they would not extend the debt limit, that this was the big hammer that would force the president to accept whatever the Republicans wanted.
Our strategy was very simple. We couldn’t buckle, and we had to say that [Republicans] were blackmailing the country to get their way. In order to get their tax cut, they were willing to shut down the government, throw the country into default for the first time in its history and cut Medicare, Social Security, education and the environment just so they could get their way. And we were trying to say that they were basically terrorists, and it worked.
Molly McNearney, Jimmy Kimmel’s wife and the co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, just gave the world a front-row seat to what happens when politics becomes your entire personality.
* * * * * * * * *
McNearney admitted she feels “angry all the time” toward relatives who supported Trump’s election. Yet in the same breath, she claimed to feel “sympathy” for them, describing them as “deliberately misinformed.”
So they’re idiots who need her pity, but she’s also furious at them. Got it.
McNearney once proudly voted Republican and gave her dad a Rush Limbaugh tie. Then she moved to Los Angeless and became a brainwashed Hollywood liberal. Turns out fitting in beats independent thought.
“Part of me goes, ‘Don’t let politics get in the way,’ but to me, this isn’t politics. It’s truly values. And we just were not aligned anymore,” McNearney said.
Part of being a functioning human being is being able to deal with people who disagree with you. But apparently, that’s too much to ask from someone who thinks voting differently is a personal attack.
Greg Gutfeld has a question:
Why does this estrangement only go in one direction? Any stories ever about Trump supporters disowning liberal relatives? Rare, at best. Says something about how politics for the left is hopelessly intertwined with ego and self worth. https://t.co/eMzRyZzL4Y
The Washington Post editorial board asserted that a “new era of class warfare has begun” in New York City after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won last week’s election — criticizing what it described as his “change in character” since the campaign.
In a Saturday editorial titled “Zohran Mamdani drops the mask,” the Post slammed the mayor-elect for his “seething” victory speech, arguing that Mamdani “abandoned his cool disposition” and showed the world what he really stands for.
The sub-headline warned, “The mayor-elect divides New Yorkers into two groups: the oppressed and their oppressors.”
“Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to ‘the bosses’ who exploit workers — and then crushing them,” the editorial board wrote. “His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word ‘growth’ didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.”
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In conclusion, the Post argued that you don’t need a college degree to understand the impact that Mamdani will have on New York City — only a familiarity with the city’s history.
If only the Post had aggressive young reporters who could get ahead of a hot story like this!
HELLO, SUCKERS:
Mamdani had a CASH BAR at his victory party. If you can’t get a free vodka from this guy something tells me the free food and buses ain’t coming. Congrats, suckers.
Toronto police said a 21-year-old from Toronto was charged with obstruction of a peace officer, a 23-year-old from Toronto was charged with forcible entry and unlawful assembly, and a 29-year-old was arrested for obstruction and assault of a peace officer.
A Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) student group called Students Supporting Israel (SSI) said in social media posts that an off-campus event it organized was targeted.
Videos posted by the group show broken glass and people shouting.
A post on SSI’s Instagram page said protestors “forced their way” into the event that featured two Israeli soldiers as part of the national “Triggered: From Combat to Campus” tour.
It said one of the invited soldiers was injured in the incident from shattered glass.
Another TMU student group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), said in a social media statement that students protesting the event “were grabbed, shoved, chased and thrown to the ground” by one of the soldiers.
The left screams “Globalize the Intifada.” Why should they be surprised when Israelis fight back throughout the globe?
This video is pure fun! A bunch of Canadian pro-Hamas shit eaters violently burst into a private Israeli conference at the TMU so a former IDF soldier just picked them up and threw them out like the garbage they are. pic.twitter.com/8Bu8nSRlye
Susan Sontag is a writer worth quoting, and “Fascinating Fascism” is one of her most deliciously sententious essays; an exhortation to share in her disdain for the justifiably reviled figure of Leni Riefenstahl. But beneath the rich supply of aphorism and wit, excoriation and outrage, we find a treacly moralism and naïve disengagement with historical precedent that reverses her earlier praise and defence of the director. It says as much about Sontag’s sensibility as it does about the aesthetic choices of her adversary.
The published versions of that essay—its first appearance in the New York Review of Books in 1974 and its revised publication in Sontag’s 1980 collection, Under the Sign of Saturn—set out to eviscerate “the Führer’s favorite filmmaker” and thereby extinguish any vestigial hopes the auteur had of rehabilitating her image. In making Triumph of the Will, Sontag contended, Riefenstahl had exploited every existing cinematic technique to astonish the viewer, and even contrived some new ones at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. In return, she basked in the fortune of being Hitler’s chosen documentarian and advanced her fortunes with monstrous self-interest.
Ostensibly a double review of Riefenstahl’s lavish coffee-table book on the Nuba of Sudan and a niche collectors’ publication titled SS Regalia, “Fascinating Fascism” is actually an assault on the depths of Riefenstahl’s debt to Hitler and an admonition about the deviant sexual appetites Sontag believed were conjured by Triumph of the Will. As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels held an unrivalled official position, but Riefenstahl had been personally anointed by Hitler, whose glories were also featured to elegant effect in the two-part documentary Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations and Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938). Hitler’s rise was her rise. Then, when the war ended, Riefenstahl orchestrated a hide-saving campaign of revisionism and denial, furiously abjuring any suggestion of wrongdoing and repudiating the exclusivity of her access: a life story, Sontag decreed, “full of disquieting lies.”
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and his wife, executive producer, and co-head writer Molly McNearney, stopped by the Thursday episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast to look back on Kimmel’s recent suspension. While the words “Charlie Kirk” were never mentioned once during the nearly 70-minute episode, Kimmel and McNearney claimed they told their children that President Trump was the one responsible for his suspension.
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MCNEARNEY: I mean, I bought my dad a Rush Limbaugh tie in high school. I voted Republican straight ticket, and that’s what I was told to do. And then I left St. Louis, Missouri, and I met people from different backgrounds, and I started to understand different things and different needs and different people and there’s so there’s like a little bit of sympathy I have for people in my family that I feel are kind of being deliberately misinformed every day and they’ve—
KIMMEL: Not kind of.
MCNEARNEY: Yeah, they’re deliberately being misinformed every day, and they believe it, but it hurts me so much because of the personal relationship I now have where my husband is out there fighting this man. And to me, them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family and I unfortunately have kind of lost relationships with people in my family because of it.
It’s like this is not just Republican versus Democrat for me anymore. It is to me. It’s family values, and it’s really hard for me because I grew up believing in these Christian ideals of taking care of the sick and taking care of the poor. And I don’t see that happening with this Republican Party, and so it’s, I feel like I’m kind of in constant conflict, and I’m angry all the time, which isn’t healthy at all, but I, like, personalize everything now when I see these terrible stories every day I’m immediately mad at certain aunts, uncles, cousins who put him in power and it’s really hard and my it’s—I wish I could like deprogram myself in some way, but I get really angry. And I sent, I’ve sent many emails to family, like, right before the election saying, “I’m begging you. Here’s the 10 reasons not to vote for this guy. Please don’t.”
And I either got ignored by 90 percent of them or got truly insane responses from a few. It’s definitely caused a strain. I’ve definitely pulled in closer with the family that I feel more aligned with, and I hate that this has happened, you know, it feels silly, you know, part of me goes, “Don’t let politics get in the way.” But to me this isn’t politics. It’s, it’s truly values and we just, we’re not aligned anymore.
I made a conscious effort to deprogram myself. I stopped watching the news on the Left. I stopped reading the New York Times. I didn’t read my own social media feed. This is a feedback loop where the same opinions are enforced, and the same hatred is pushed to like-minded people. Then, I tried to consume only news from the Right. I wanted to see things from their perspective and understand where they’re coming from.
I wanted to see if the feedback loop on the Right would make me feel the same way, and of course, it did. Then, I realized I needed to find a way to navigate between the two worlds. But all I could see on the Left was that same hatred. It never ended, not even when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck. That’s why your husband was so quick to blame the other side for his death and could not absorb that your side is the side that believes what the assassin believed, that Kirk “spread too much hate.”
I was able to see the cartoon version of the Democrats by the Right when I was on the Left. I could see how they dehumanized Obama and Hillary Clinton. But I couldn’t see that we’d done the same thing to Donald Trump and his supporters, not until I left and I began to see who they really were and not the version we all invented, including and especially your husband, Jimmy Kimmel who lies about Trump every single night, feeding his viewers more “two minutes of hate,” Orwell style.
To see the human being behind the cartoon isn’t ever easy. But it isn’t impossible either. Trump is a troll. He says things that upset people. But he isn’t what we all pretend he is. He isn’t the supervillain, Hitler, or Voldemort. It is a mass delusion that has been cycled and perpetuated by the media and social media. But more importantly, the people who vote for him have their “values” too. They might not align with yours, but that doesn’t make them bad people.
The truth is that none of this has ever been about Trump. It’s been a ten-year refusal by the people with all of the power to relinquish that power. It is about a working class that has been abandoned by all of you. And your answer to that, your husband’s answer, Hollywood’s answer was to raise the drawbridge and say, “You are not welcome here.” How disgusting. Somewhere down deep, I know you agree.
In a recent Substack, “George MF Washington” looked at how Aaron Sorkin’s writing has hardened and become even more cynical and haranguing since his Hollywood debut in 1992’s A Few Good Men:
It’s easy to forget that before Trump Derangement Syndrome there was Bush Derangement Syndrome. Florida’s hanging chads were the real origin story of the left’s descent into radicalism, not Trump’s trip down the golden elevator, and you can see the telltale waypoints in the highlights of Sorkin’s post “Few Good Men” career as his view of the world got steadily darker and angrier.
They have never forgiven America for the 2000 election. And now, post-Trump, Aaron Sorkin has morphed from an angry guy who just couldn’t get over “Bush v. Gore” into the final boss of woke Hollywood messaging with his upcoming film “The Social Reckoning” in which he promises that if you buy a ticket you will learn why he “blames Facebook for January 6th.” Sorkin has even gone so far as to re-create the January 6th riots on a set in, where else but Canada.
One hardly needs to watch the film to know what the message will be, we have seen it on the mainstream news networks every night for going on six years now. Sorkin’s movie may well wind up being the first major American studio wide-release to openly advocate for government censorship of constitutionally protected speech… and wouldn’t that be something?
Regardless, it’s hard to imagine there could be anything new to say about January 6th, but we are going to get it good and hard anyway because this is what Hollywood has become… an endless series of “you will learn your lesson, rubes” films that audiences are tuning out in what has been perhaps the most powerful market signal a customer base has ever delivered. And the signal is that progressive messaging creates bad drama… bad drama makes for bad movies… and we aren’t going to pay for bad movies anymore.
The value of the Heritage Foundation is that it provides us with rich resources with which to defend and promote ordered liberty in the American sense, in which the true constitutional order constrains government in both law and subsidiarity through federalism in order to promote the flourishing of a free people. Those who sympathize with — or worse, promote — the ideals of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are the opponents of liberty and federalism, no less so than those who sympathize with and promote the systems of China, Iran, and Russia today. Not only should we criticize those on the Left who espouse those positions, we should even more passionately oppose those who do so while claiming to be on the Right. That is the purpose of our intellectual institutions — to stand for principle rather than to shrink from debates.
If the Heritage Foundation does not see that as its mission, it is difficult to understand what its mission actually is. Nothing that Mr. Roberts or the Heritage Foundation board has yet said gives any confidence that the organization can articulate it, other than as measured in vote counts rather than intellectual and moral clarity and rigor.
Nonetheless, I certainly hope that the organization will recover its purpose and mission in the days ahead, and will find leadership that meets this moment.
Heritage is certainly leaning in hard these days to Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
Jay Jones made history this week as the first person to be elected attorney general of Virginia after fantasizing about murdering a political opponent’s children and urinating on Republicans’ graves. So it makes sense that Jones would seek the counsel of another Virginia politician who knows what it takes to overcome a scandal involving moral depravity. (Step 1: Refuse to step down. Step 2: Be a Democrat.)
Jones announced Thursday that former Gov. Ralph Northam (D., Va.) was among the “distinguished and experienced leaders” who would serve as co-chairs of his “Standing Up for Virginians” transition team. Northam is best known for surviving a racism scandal that prompted widespread, bipartisan calls for his resignation.
But only temporarily:
Northam refused to step down, and eventually, Democrats gave up. Their enthusiasm waned when Northam’s would-be successor, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D., Va.), was credibly accused of sexual assault by several women. Attorney General Mark Herring (D., Va.) was third in line for the governorship, but he also admitted to wearing blackface at a college party in 1980. If all of them resigned, the speaker of the House of Delegates—a Republican—would become governor. So the Democrats just pretended like it never happened.
Then COVID-19 happened. Then George Floyd. Northam embraced the prevailing wokeness of the time, stressing the importance of “inclusion,” and applauding the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond. His former critics flip-flopped without shame. They started appearing with Northam in public and praising his leadership. Then-president Joe Biden, who said Northam should resign because he had “lost all moral authority,” commended the governor at a rally in 2021. Pete Buttigieg, who denounced the “terrible” yearbook photo and demanded Northam’s resignation in 2019, said he was “honored” to appear with the governor at a press conference two years later. The Washington Post editorial board, which had also called on Northam to resign, celebrated his “hard-earned” comeback and “genuine humility.”
The Washington Post called for Northam to step down in February 2019, then backtracked at the end of that year, then wrote glowing hagiographic praise for Northam at the end of his time in office:
With partisan divisions flaring thanks to the Trump-inflamed climate in Washington, Northam stumbled into the national crosshairs that January by making unclear comments about a late-term abortion bill that conservatives seized on to accuse the doctor-governor of supporting infanticide. It was a false allegation, but Northam did little to clarify his remarks.
Curiously missing though from that “false allegation,” is a quote in the article of Northam’s actual words in the late January 2019 interview with a DC news radio station shortly before the yearbook photo was published:
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
He’s offering this to make the case that the new bill is less draconian than its right-wing critics claim. Yes, he allows, there will be situations where a child is delivered alive and then killed on the table on mom’s instructions — the logical end point of liberal abortion laws, as pro-lifers have warned about for years. But it’ll be “kept comfortable.” Why, they might even revive it if it isn’t breathing when it’s born, like saving the life of a death-row inmate during a suicide attempt so that he can be properly executed the next day.
What’s all the fuss about?
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The only spin the left is offering on Northam’s comments is that he must be describing an unviable fetus, a baby that’s too sick to live for long after delivery. That’ll probably be his spin too after the outrage wave reaches him. But that’s missing the point: Although the idea of a doctor killing a child on the table after it’s been born alive is especially gruesome, there seems to be no dispute that Tran’s bill would allow the child to be killed right up to the point of birth.
One star, cannot recommend; worst reboot of The Odd Couple yet, but the two should get along famously.
The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.
The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbors as earlyas 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.
WIRED obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute—including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails—through a public record request filed to the Palo Alto Department of Planning and Development Services. (Mentions of “Zuckerberg” or “the Zuckerbergs” appear to have been redacted. However, neighbors and separate public records confirm that the property in question belongs to the family. The names of the neighbors who were in touch with the city were also redacted.)
The documents reveal that the school may have been operating as early as 2021 without a permit to operate in the city of Palo Alto. As many as 30 students might have enrolled, according to observations from neighbors. These documents also reveal a wider problem: For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking.
Share a thought for the plight of the average Palo Alto millionaire leftist and the plight he faces living next to the Facebook billionaire. The struggle is real.
OLD AND BUSTED: The 1970s Hollywood trope of bitter PTSD-inflicted American soldiers broken by years of service in Vietnam.
The New Hotness?
What a heartbreaking existence. Thoughts and prayers for Michelle Obama as she continues her recovery from 8 years as The First Lady…that ended almost a decade ago. https://t.co/tl66NFLUBO
Her question “Where is the woman who can live off the rack?” is like something from a Renaissance drama. It combines beautiful poetic rhythm, sweeping existential searching, and remarkable social cluelessness. pic.twitter.com/Jqobg96Y5V
“Unexpectedly,” the Grauniad is not happy about this:
Yeah he just sends rockets into space, lets you connect to the internet via satellite, drills huge holes under ground, made the electric car cool, is helping paraplegics have a better life, is generating power via the sun, is building robots.
With the exception of Noam Chomsky, perhaps no intellectual has been more influential on today’s American neo-communists and radical progressives than Howard Zinn. The far-left academic, who died in 2010, literally wrote the book on the left’s revisionist history of the United States.
With his A People’s History of the United States, a bestseller thanks to generations of academics forcing their students to buy it, Zinn outlined a comprehensive vision of this history—likely drawn from Stalinist propaganda—that portrays the United States as a conspiratorial fraud got up by white racists and rapacious capitalists.
The conspirators, Zinn claims again and again over hundreds of pages, brutally exploit the American people, who are too duped or stupid to realize the truth of their plight. Thankfully, Zinn is there to enlighten them.
It is impossible to overestimate the power this vision exercises over today’s radical left. They have effectively adopted Zinn’s claims wholesale without the slightest question. Zinn’s influence is palpable in the tearing down of statues, demonization of the US as a racist and genocidal entity, and even “mainstream” efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If the radical left has a vision of what the US is, it is Zinn’s vision.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S THE DEMOGRAPHY, STUPID:
the greatest danger of having lived for so long in a very high-trust society of people with low time preferences (ability to delay immediate gratification for long-term gain) is that you lose the ability to imagine how low-trust people with high time preferences behave.
Cutting the “climate desk” wasn’t censorship — it was a long-overdue correction to years of sanctimony.
The great tragedy of our time, at least to those who dwell in the climate-alarmist press, is not hurricanes, floods, or famine—but a network trimming its propaganda department. When CBS News laid off most of its “climate crisis” staff, the media class responded as though free speech itself had been outlawed. According to Truthout, “CBS News has fired most of its climate crisis production staff” and, in the process, “gutted” its sacred climate desk. The story was dressed up as an obituary for truth itself, complete with talk of “bloodbaths” and “new conservative management”.
To anyone outside the activist echo chamber, it looked like a normal corporate reshuffling. CBS’s parent company had merged with Skydance, and the incoming leadership did what executives always do after mergers—trim redundancies, change direction, and try to make the business profitable again. But to those who had mistaken climate coverage for a holy mission, this was blasphemy.
At the heart of the melodrama was Tracy Wholf, the now-former head of CBS’s climate desk, who had urged colleagues to insert a line into hurricane coverage reading: “The above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures, made worse by climate change, helped Melissa rapidly intensify into a category 5 storm.” That suggestion was presented in Truthout as “accurate reporting.” In reality, it was speculative editorializing—a sentence of moral certainty grafted onto a story about weather.
The URL of the above post at Watts Up With That is “cbs-turns-off-the-climate-alarm-clock” – the climate “alarm clock” has been going off non-stop at CBS for about 55 years now. In his 2012 biography of Walter Cronkite, fellow leftist Douglas Brinkley wrote:
At the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, there was a post–Silent Spring belief that the Tiffany Network had an obligation to spread the gospel of the age of ecology. A CBS Reports segment in September 1962 had Eric Sevareid famously interviewing the literary biologist Rachel Carson about the perils of the insecticide DDT at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Cronkite, at the time, had been focused on the Earth-orbiting flight of the second Mercury launch. But now that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.”
Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News—inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”
In January 1970, the promise of a new environmentalism brought about the end of The Twenty-First Century (which had succeeded The Twentieth Century in June 1967). No longer would Cronkite tolerate Union Carbide (a major polluter) as a sponsor. The Texas-based Fortune 500 company was the enemy of “Earthrise,” he told Bonn. At Cronkite’s insistence, CBS canceled The Twenty-First Century to coincide with the debut of the “Can the World Be Saved?” segments.
No one at any of the Big Three networks, with the exception of Charles Kuralt, cared about environmental issues with the passion of Cronkite. By assigning his science producer Bonn, a trusted ally since their trip to South Vietnam together in 1965, Cronkite was getting way ahead of the news curve on the environment. In the mid-1960s, Bonn had done a couple of landmark CBS News Special Reports on global warming and overpopulation. Together, Cronkite and Bonn decided to begin CBS’s coverage of the environment with an eight-minute piece on April 20—two days before Earth Day. CBS Evening News’ graphics department made a special bumper slide for the “Can the World Be Saved?” segment that consisted of Bonn’s hand clutching Earth (a photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew). “Earth, you understand, wasn’t in the palm of my hand,” Bonn explained. “We were trying to show humanity squeezing the Earth to death.” The image became synonymous with the CBS Evening News, essentially the show’s visual calling card.
* * * * * * * *
The Nixon administration’s top environmental lawyer, William Ruckelshaus, who in December 1970 became the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, believed that Cronkite’s coverage was a key factor in getting Nixon to back a spate of environmental legislation in the early 1970s. “Once Cronkite got on the environment, everybody started talking about it, worrying that we were destroying America,” Ruckelshaus said. “Back when Sevareid interviewed Carson, the environmental problem was in black and white. By 1970, with Cronkite’s ongoing ‘Can the World Be Saved?’ series, the belching smog and landfills and burning rivers were in color. That’s what grabbed the public’s attention.”
Sandy Socolow, along with many others at CBS News, thought that Cronkite had gone eco-mad. Riled up about polluters, Cronkite was, as Socolow put it, the “grizzly bear” at CBS who insisted that the ecologically charged “Can the World Be Saved?” be a prime feature on the Evening News. “Walter was almost a nutcase about the environment,” Socolow recalled. “He was really, really bothered by big companies’ pollution and the destruction of America’s natural resources. Everybody bemoaned that their stories were getting crowded out due to Walter’s need for a new environmental awareness. He was over the top, a real pioneer in getting the mass media to profile American landscapes being desecrated.”
Many of the CBS News technicians and producers thought that Cronkite was going a little gaga with his “Can the World Be Saved?” obsession. Whenever Cronkite ran an ecology story, the “Earthrise” graphic would appear behind him, with Bonn’s hand holding the planet. CBS Evening News director Ritchie Mutchler would regularly bark to his assistant, “We’ll need the hand job tonight!” To CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, it was akin to “Quiet on the set!” Feeling that he was being mocked, Cronkite, usually unflappable, called Mutchler aside. “Uhmm, could we call that thing something else?” he asked. “Every time I hear you call it that, my mind sort of wanders.”
I don’t know, I think “hand job” nicely sums up the masturbatory theme of radical environmentalism quite nicely.
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