BEHOLD THE POWER OF RACISM! (Is there anything it can’t do?): The National Electrical Grid is teetering on collapse. The shift away from full-time available power (like fossil fuels, LNG, etc.) to so-called “green” sources has deeply impacted reliability.

Hey, guess what? Solar farms don’t work at night! Who knew?

Also, as more whale-killing off-shore wind farms are planned, the Biden administration forgot to plan for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that will be needed. And in a perfect example of leftist autophagy, there is considerable opposition from enviro-groups who will tie up the construction of wind farms and transmission lines in court for decades. Snail darters and sacred tribal land, you know.

But Representative Cori Bush (D-Crazyland) has it all figured out. It’s not the science, cost or technology that puts our energy grid at risk: it’s racism!

JustTheNews reporting that Bush said recently that:

“We also cannot ignore the actions of domestic extremists, including white nationalists and white supremacist who have violently attacked electrical grids, to stoke chaos and fear,” Bush said. She did not cite any examples of white nationalists being accused, let alone held responsible, for attacks on the grid […] Bush pointed to two incidents, including a 2022 attack on two substations that left 45,000 people without power, resulting in the death of a woman who relied on an oxygen tank. That case has resulted in no arrests, and so the identities, races, and motives of the person or persons who carried out the attack are still unknown.“ (Emphasis added).

But wait, there’s more! Bush continued: “She also claimed that impacts of increasing extreme weather from climate change was another factor impacting the nation’s grid reliability.”

White supremacists combined with “climate change.” Wow! That’s better than Jews with weather machines and space lasers. Although that’s probably next…

RIP: Norman Lear, TV Legend, Dies at 101.

Lear’s publicist confirmed to Variety that he died at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes. A private service for immediate family will be held in the coming days.

“Thank you for the moving outpouring of love and support in honor of our wonderful husband, father, and grandfather,” Lear’s family said in a statement. “Norman lived a life of creativity, tenacity, and empathy. He deeply loved our country and spent a lifetime helping to preserve its founding ideals of justice and equality for all. Knowing and loving him has been the greatest of gifts. We ask for your understanding as we mourn privately in celebration of this remarkable human being.”

Lear had already established himself as a top comedy writer and captured a 1968 Oscar nomination for his screenplay for “Divorce American Style” when he concocted the idea for a new sitcom, based on a popular British show, about a conservative, outspokenly bigoted working-class man and his fractious Queens family. “All in the Family” became an immediate hit, seemingly with viewers of all political persuasions.

Lear’s shows were the first to address the serious political, cultural and social flashpoints of the day – racism, abortion, homosexuality, the Vietnam war — by working pointed new wrinkles into the standard domestic comedy formula. No subject was taboo: Two 1977 episodes of “All in the Family” revolved around the attempted rape of lead character Archie Bunker’s wife Edith.

Lear made one major miscalculation with All in the Family. By the early 1970s, most conservative-leaning characters on TV had been tossed into the dustbin of history by Lear’s fellow McGovern-supporting Democrats in Hollywood, due to efforts such as CBS’s then-recent “Great Rural Purge.” Because of these efforts, with Archie emerging as the last major character standing on the right, Nixon-era “Silent Majority” audiences loved him, despite his myriad foibles. Since then, as Rob Long wrote in Commentary in June of 2020, every generation of TV producers and audiences accidentally stumble upon the same phenomenon:  How Right-Wing Characters Become Sitcom Sensations:

In the early 1970’s, All in the Family captured the tumultuous controversies of its time. The show’s main character, Archie Bunker, was a reactionary bigot always mixing it up with his progressive, liberal son-in-law, Meathead. The show was designed by the producer Norman Lear to be a form of left-wing agitprop that would expound on the virtues of the younger, modern, and open-minded generation while exposing and mocking the petty small-minded prejudices of Archie. He would rail weekly against the changing American culture using scandalously edgy language that today is utterly unthinkable. Archie Bunker was supposed to be the butt of the joke, the dinosaur heading to extinction, a symbol of everything that was wrong with America in 1970.

The fans, though, refused to see it that way.

Archie Bunker caught fire with audiences. He became a national sensation, his catchphrases on T-shirts and lunch boxes and used in Johnny Carson monologues. The progressive writers and creators of the show may have thought Archie was the bad guy, but the audience saw a hard-working veteran who paid the bills and put food on the table—Archie held down two jobs!—all the while being forced to listen to his ultra-lefty layabout jobless graduate-student son-in-law tell him what a terrible person he was, often with his mouth full of a pork chop Archie had paid for. If Archie occasionally refers to Jews, African Americans, and homosexuals with hateful slurs, well, hey, the guy pays the mortgage. He’s earned the right to rant a little.

It helped that Archie was, by far, the most hilarious character on television at the time. Comedy writers, even really really liberal ones, naturally want to write for the character who brings the most heat to the screen. The more talented the writer, in fact, the more likely it is that he will sell out his principles for a really solid laugh. Still, it must have rankled Lear and his team to see Archie embraced by the audience, to realize that the character wasn’t theirs anymore—that the fans preferred their own version.

Had Google existed back then, and had you Googled “insane theory about All in the Family,” you’d probably be directed to something like this: “All in the Family is a show about a guy who dreams of being an empty-nester with his devoted wife but who instead is forced to support his married daughter and her lazy, super-woke husband. To get them to move into a place of their own, he does everything he can to drive them away, including loudly emitting a fusillade of reactionary notions. But the kids, especially his worthless son-in-law, are too lazy to move.”

Hollywood liberals keep making the same mistake. They try to create a right-wing villain and end up writing an audience favorite. When Gary David Goldberg created Family Ties, the story goes that he pitched it to NBC as a show about parents from the ’60s generation raising a family in the Reagan ’80s and trying to instill the progressive values of their youth in the kids of today.

And again in 2009, with Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson. Lear managed to revitalize Hollywood, in spite of himself.

At least until the SJWs and #metoo crowd decided it was time for plenty of leftist autophagy, starting almost a decade ago, perhaps because these days, there’s no need to imagine Archie Bunker’s fever-swamp anti-Semitism, when it’s being piped out of the establishment left’s academic citadel – and into Hollywood – on a daily basis.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Just Stop Oil protesters disrupt London pride parade over ‘polluting’ sponsors.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Turkeys Away! Dems Drop Cheney Like WKRP.

It can’t be Thanksgiving without the classic 1978 clip from the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, in which the radio station hired a helicopter that dropped live turkeys. Chaos ensued when the birds hit the ground below “like sacks of wet cement.” It’s one of the most hilarious clips from 70’s TV — or from any decade, for that matter.

And now, because of some disgruntled Dems, Liz Cheney may meet the same fate as those turkeys: dropped from their favor because of her obsession with Donald Trump. They also suspect her of using the January 6 committee — of which she was one of two Republicans — as a stepping stone to her political future.

Which, of course, is toast anyway, but Liz doesn’t yet believe that.

According to the Washington Post, fifteen anonymous staffers are miffed that the committee may be deep-sixing the information they had brought to the table. Their work, part of the “Blue Team,” focused on law enforcement and how it failed to assess the predicted attack on the Capitol. Other groups, like the Green Team and the Purple Team, examined financing for the January 6 event, along with militia groups and extremism.

But that’s all taking a back seat because of Liz Cheney’s fixation on Trump. Even the name of her group provides a clue: it’s the “Gold Team.”

One former staff member said:

“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public. But when [the committee] became a Cheney 2024 campaign, many of us became discouraged.”

Live look at the leftist autophagy, already in progress:

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: “NBC reporter’s comment about Fetterman draws criticism,” notes…AP (the Associated Press, not the artist formerly known as Allahpundit):

[NBC’s Dasha] Burns’ Friday interview with Fetterman, which aired Tuesday, was his first on-camera interview since his stroke. He used a closed-captioning device that printed text of Burns’ questions on a computer screen in front of him.

Fetterman appeared to have little trouble answering the questions after he read them, although NBC showed him fumbling for the word “empathetic.” Burns said that when the captioning device was off, “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”

“This is just nonsense,” business reporter and podcaster Kara Swisher, who had a stroke herself in 2011, said on Twitter. “Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.”

Swisher recently conducted an interview with Fetterman for her podcast and said, “I was really quite impressed with how well he’s doing. Everyone can judge for themselves.” Swisher has called attacks on Fetterman because of his health “appalling.”

A New York magazine reporter, Rebecca Traister, who interviewed the candidate for a cover story titled “The Vulnerability of John Fetterman,” tweeted that his “comprehension is not at all impaired. He understands everything. It’s just that he reads it and responds in real time … It’s a hearing/auditory challenge.”

Burns said she understands that different reporters had different experiences with Fetterman.

“Our reporting did not and should not comment on fitness for office,” Burns tweeted on Wednesday. “This is for voters to decide. What we push for as reporters is transparency. It’s our job.”

Funny, I don’t remember the DNC-MSM having that standard from 2016 to 2020.

It’s exceedingly rare for leftist journalists to comment negatively on their fellow Democratic Party operatives with bylines. (Recall that Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings gave Dan Rather a pass in October of 2004, and MSNBC avoided Jeff Zucker’s scandals at the start of the year.)  This is AP’s way of telling Burns, “Nice job you have. Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to it by negatively reporting on Democrats.”

UPDATE: “Hey Siri, show me how the media treated a Republican candidate after a stroke:”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NPR ‘Founding Mother’ Unloads on Public Editor Over SCOTUS Story: ‘She’s Not Clarifying Anything!’

A spokesperson for NPR told The Daily Beast late Thursday that “we stand behind Nina Totenberg’s reporting.” The NPR offical added: “The public editor is independent and does not speak for NPR.”

McBride, for her part, told the Daily Beast on Thursday night that she stood by her recommendation, and that she does “think NPR should clarify the language in the story.”

But in her own telephone conversation with the Beast, Totenberg — a towering presence at NPR who has been there since 1975 — responded to McBride, the justices, and general criticism of her story.

“A non-denial denial from two of them doesn’t work,” Totenberg said, referring to the statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch. As to Roberts, she said, “the other just refuses to accept the fact that I did not say that he requested that people do anything, but in some form did.”

“I have got nothing to say, except that I am sticking by my reporting,” Totenberg said while eating dinner. “I think it is absolutely valid.”

As Ed Morrissey wrote on yesterday:

It sounds suspiciously like NPR and Totenberg needed material for a narrative more than an accurate look at the inner workings of the court, especially as it chews on highly controversial topics like Roe v Wade and vaccine/test mandates.

And this last bit from [Robert Barnes of the Washington Post] more or less seals Totenberg’s fate on this report:

On the bench Wednesday, all of the justices again were masked, although a few took their face coverings off for brief periods. Sotomayor again participated remotely.

D’oh! So much for the NPR narrative.

Totenberg sounds like she’s entered into Dan Rather’s ”If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story” territory.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Cornel West quits Harvard with blistering letter attacking racism and ‘spiritual rot’ at university.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D for COVID-19: a case to answer? “Interest in a potential role for vitamin D in the prevention or treatment of acute respiratory infections dates back to the 1930s, when cod liver oil was investigated as a means to reduce industrial absenteeism due to the common cold. Meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials conducted from 2007–20 reveal protective effects of vitamin D against acute respiratory infections, albeit these effects were of modest size and with substantial heterogeneity.1
The striking overlap between risk factors for severe COVID-19 and vitamin D deficiency, including obesity, older age, and Black or Asian ethnic origin, has led some researchers to hypothesise that vitamin D supplementation could hold promise as a preventive or therapeutic agent for COVID-19. From a mechanistic angle, there are good reasons to postulate that vitamin D favourably modulates host responses to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), both in the early viraemic and later hyperinflammatory phases of COVID-19. Vitamin D metabolites have long been known to support innate antiviral effector mechanisms, including induction of antimicrobial peptides and autophagy. . . . Pending results of such trials, it would seem uncontroversial to enthusiastically promote efforts to achieve reference nutrient intakes of vitamin D.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, PART DEUX: Taylor Swift Hits Soros Family for ‘Shameless Greed.’ “Swift endorsed Brett Kavanaugh backer Phil Bredesen (D.) in his 2018 Tennessee Senate contest against Republican Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn won the contest by nearly 11 points. Swift has since become more vocal about her support for Democrats—unless they are interfering with her music career.”

Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics: Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.

SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76! “‘It is important that Iowa and Nevada have spoken,’ Joe Biden says, presumably meaning New Hampshire as Nevada hasn’t yet spoken.”

And file under Annals of Leftist Autophagy: “Joe Biden’s Campaign Was a Disaster for Liberalism and the Democratic Party.” Jonathan Chait of New York magazine absolutely tears into Biden, before concluding that his “campaigns in 1988 and 2008 ended in disaster for Biden. His 2020 campaign is going to end in a disaster for the whole party.”

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Seattle Progressives slam ‘problematic’ performance of ‘Mrs. Doubtfire.’

The Seattle Times and humorless Seattle activists believe the new 5th Avenue Theater production of “Mrs. Doubtfire” is “problematic” because a male character plays a woman. Some want it cancelled. It’s the latest Progressive woke brigade feigning outrage so they can tell you how inclusive they are and how evil you are.

The play is based on the hit Robin Williams movie about a divorced dad, named Daniel Hillard, who dresses as an elderly Scottish nanny in order to spend more time with his three children. It’s a classic comedy.
Though no Seattle Times writer is brave enough to put their name to the initial hot take, the piece declares the play is “problematic” in the headline. They take the position that “a man in a dress doesn’t cut it as a punch line in 2019 — not without serious and necessary conversations.” With that in mind, they connected with “five theater artists — some transgender, some queer” to get their takes before and after they saw the play.

I hadn’t expected the left’s cancel culture to come so quickly to anything associated with the late Robin Williams, but that’s where we’re at, as 2019 winds to a close — and given Robin Williams’ solid credentials as an unwavering San Francisco Democrat, “leftist autophagy,” indeed.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Arizona State U. group gets women empowerment poster removed due to ‘blackface.’

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, AND ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: ‘Shame on you’: WaPo’s apology for tweet whitewashing Labour Party’s anti-Semitism arguably makes their initial offense even worse.

“The fact that they’re apologizing for the typo as opposed to the actual content of their tweet arguably makes their initial take even more offensive, because it appears that they’re going out of their way to avoid blaming the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism for the Labour Party’s reputation as anti-Semitic,” Twitchy notes.

And they’ve since deleted that tweet — the Post’s social media operation is really having a bang-up day today. Or as the Babylon Bee would say, paraphrasing Monty Python, “We apologize for the fault in the reporting. Those responsible have been sacked.”

Meanwhile The Root, the black identity politics-themed Website created under the watch of the Graham family, the former owners of the Post until Jeff Bezos bought it with money he found under his sofa cushion, is having a spectacular day as well: “Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF,” columnist Michael Harriot writes:

So, when a clip surfaced of Buttigieg explaining why negro kids fail at school so often, his answer made perfect sense.

“Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg explained whitely, when he was running for mayor in 2011. You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids—especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

I want to be clear: Pete Buttigieg is a lying motherfucker.

Or as Newsweek noted, “Buttigieg Slammed for ‘Racist Paternalism’ After Saying Minority Children Lack Role Models for Education.”

Harriot slammed the South Bend, Indiana, mayor for claiming that children from poorer, minority neighborhoods had no role models who testified “to value of education.” He also said the mayor’s remarks about minority and poor children were “bulls***tery” and “insidious double-talk” that camflouaged a real problem.

In a resurfaced 2011 TV interview with Buttigieg, which was picked up on social media Sunday, the then-South Bend mayoral candidate said there were “a lot of kids” from “especially low income, minority neighborhoods” that didn’t know someone personally “who testifies to the value of education.”

The Democratic primary candidate was scorched on social media shortly after the film surfaced, with commentators calling his argument “bulls**t bootstraps racist paternalism” and “victim blaming.”

The Root essay not only highlighted Buttigieg’s difficulty in connecting with black voters—a crucial Democratic demographic—but likely deepened it. He is polling strongly in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first caucus and primary states, but the battle for the Democratic nomination quickly moves (after Nevada) to South Carolina, where African-American support will be key.

To his credit, Buttigieg called and spoke with The Root columnist personally, as Harriot wrote in a follow-up column:

I figured one of his surrogates would argue with me for a few minutes and I could continue my day trying to be a thorn in the side of white supremacy (The third thing you should know is that I actually keep a small photo of the mouse from Pinky and the Brain beside my bed that says: “What are you going to do today, Michael?” The answer is always the same: “Fuck with white people.”)

Luckily, as soon as I agreed to take a phone call, the phone rang. The voice sounded vaguely familiar and I knew it wasn’t a surrogate or a campaign volunteer when the person said:

“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a ‘lying motherfucker’ before.”

It was Pete Buttigieg.

Well, I thought. Maybe he does want to fight.

* * * * * * * * *

“But do you disagree with the point I was making?” Mayor Buttigieg asked, listing a few programs designed to alleviate this specific problem. “Sometimes children don’t get to see the possibilities. Do you think the lack of positive examples of educational success can lead to mistrust and a lack of confidence in the system?”

“No…well, yes,” I answered. “But the lack of confidence doesn’t have anything to do with role models or support from parents, it’s because the shit is true!”

Look, I know I shouldn’t be using obscenities around the maybe-president (Please don’t tell my mother), but he said “motherfucker” first!

No actually, Harriot did. (I’m surprised his editors bothered to censor the word in his article’s headline.) So much for the left portraying Trump as a uniquely vulgar individual — but then, as James Taranto tweeted last year, “A lot of the complaints about Trump’s departures from norms seem to me to be justifications for the critics’ own departures from norms.”

QUESTION ASKED: Will Cancel Culture Find Out About Karl Marx The Racist?

Here’s a quote on how Karl Marx felt about Mexicans: “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” 

Marx, whose parents converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was also a raging anti-Semite:

Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844 contains the following:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

And in addition to all of the above, Marx and Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, weren’t keen on blacks, as Walter Williams has noted.

Of course, for 21st century leftists, Marx is guilty of the worst sin of all — being a white male — and for that, he already has gotten at least one taste of posthumous cancel culture. As James Lileks spotted in 2015, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.

In response, Lileks wrote:

If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.

By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.

Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.

Earlier: Question Asked: Since cancel culture is circling around Gandhi, when does it come for Mohammed? And then what happens?

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Root Writer Blasts Joe Biden’s ‘Negro Summer Safari Adventure’ With ‘Corn Pop The Gansgta.’

The Root’s Michael Harriot called out a recently-surfaced video of former Vice President Joe Biden, referring to claims that he faced off with a gangster named Corn Pop as “Biden’s Negro Summer Safari Adventure.”

Biden’s story revolved around a summer he spent working as a life guard at a pool in a primarily black neighborhood and a confrontation with a group of guys carrying straight razors.

Biden claimed that he met Corn Pop and the others and threatened them with a length of chain, and that was how they came to respect him and ensure that others would leave him alone.

But Harriot wasn’t buying it.

“I’m always astounded by the imaginings of white people as it relates to race. Many of them have this fictionalized jigaboo version that is almost alien-like. And one of the greatest examples of this ever is Joe Biden’s story about Corn Pop the gangsta,” his thread began.

Harriot apparently didn’t check The Root’s archives before trashing Biden. In 2010, the left-wing African-American-themed Website ran a puff piece titled “Joe Biden’s Black Pass,” built around Biden and “Corn Pop:”

Shortly after he ousted a guy named Corn Pop for breaking the rules at the all-black pool, Joe Biden considered calling the police to escort him to his car once his shift ended.

Corn Pop belonged to a gang known as the Romans, and Biden, the lone white lifeguard at Prices Run—one of the few public pools in Wilmington, Del., open to non-whites during the 1960s—made fun of the man’s pomade-slathered hair before kicking him out.

Word from the black lifeguards was that Corn Pop, who took his coiffure pretty seriously, would be waiting outside with a straight razor, ready to fight. Calling the cops was a no-no, Biden was warned, unless he planned to never return to the pool.

Biden, then a 19-year-old college student, didn’t take long to deliberate. He made his way to one of the back rooms and emerged with a 6-foot-long piece of chain wrapped around his arm. He knew what he had to do.

Luckily, a little public posturing was enough to satisfy Corn Pop, and the two men made peace; Biden even apologized for the insult.

It was possibly the first in a long line of verbal slip-ups that would land the vice president in hot water, but to let Wilmington’s black residents tell it, that day at the pool was fateful. It was there that Delaware’s star politician earned the respect of the African-American community, which would see him through many elections.

“That’s where it all started,” says Joe Brumskill, a former Wilmington school board president who worked on several of Biden’s U.S. Senate campaigns. “He grew up working with black people, and we got to know him well.”

Of course, Biden’s interactions with “Corn Pop” are still up for debate; and I certainly understand Harriot’s skepticism, especially given Biden’s many other gaffes and mis-remembrances. The story also sounds far too similar to T-Bone, Corey Booker’s frequently mentioned imaginary friend.

The Root was one of the last Internet redoubts of the Graham Family, until they sold it to Univision in 2015. The Grahams previous sold the beleaguered Washington Post in 2013 to Jeff Bezos for $250 million — tip money to Bezos — after off-loading Newsweek for $1.00 three years prior.

BICOASTAL: Feds Charge Michael Avenatti with Extortion in NY, Embezzlement in CA. “Sources told The Wall Street Journal that Mark Geragos, the attorney for Jussie Smollett, is Avenatti’s co-conspirator.”

Talk about annals of leftist autophagy — Geragos is (was?) also Nike endorsee Colin Kaepernick’s attorney, — and is/was a CNN legal analyst:

Related: “Jussie Smollett Hires Michael Jackson’s Attorney Mark Geragos: All His Famous Past Clients” — from People magazine on Friday.

UPDATE: CNN Drops Mark Geragos After Legal Commentator Reported as Co-Conspirator in Avenatti Scheme.

The Media Research Center calculates that CNN alone gave Avenatti “74 appearances and adds that Avenattti made a total of 147 TV appearances over 10 weeks; that means CNN hosted more than half of his appearances ‘which almost certainly makes Avenatti the most ubiquitous guest in the network’s history.’”

MORE: Last year, CNN’s Brian Stelter touted Avenattti as a ‘serious’ contender for the 2020 presidential election.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Claire McCaskill on Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m a little confused why she’s the thing.’

This might be confusing to Claire (what isn’t?), but given that AOC is photogenic, doesn’t have decades of negative baggage, and her wild-eyed socialist politics are held by most members of the DNC-MSM, even Scooby and Shaggy could dope out this mystery out.

BRIAN LEITER IS UNHAPPY: Thought crimes watch: comparing trans-racialism to transgenderism verboten! It’s a feminist journal, so I love his reference to “whatever passes for peer review” there. Ouch! Plus:

Apparently the “harm” to Prof. Tuvel of a public apology by the majority of the editorial board of the journal that published her article was outweighed by the “harm” of her thought crime to transgender people. (Addendum: no thought crime is complete without a public letter of protest. What is chilling about this is that instead of this campaign of vilification of a junior faculty member and demand for “retraction” of her article, someone could have written a response piece and sent it to the same journal. But this is obviously not a scholarly community, but a political one. Those familiar with the history of 20th-century Marxist movements will recognize what’s going on here, and it isn’t a happy sight.)

Well, leftist autophagy isn’t an entirely unhappy sight. (Bumped).

KARL MARX CALLS MEXICANS LAZY. WILL SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS DEMAND NOTED RACIST KARL MARX BE BANNED FROM STUDY ON CAMPUS?

In addition to slurs against Mexicans, Marx, whose father had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was none too keen on Jews and blacks, as well.

But the SJWs are already on the case! They want to see Marx removed from the college criteria not because he was a stone cold racist totalitarian, but — wait for it! — because he’s yet another dead white European male. As James Lileks wryly observed back in January, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.

In response, Lileks wrote:

If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.

By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.

Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.

FASTER, PLEASE: Unique Peptide Has Therapeutic Potential Against Cancers, Neurological Disorders, and Infectious Diseases.

UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have synthesized a peptide that shows potential for pharmaceutical development into agents for treating infections, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer through an ability to induce a cell-recycling process called autophagy. . . . In their latest findings reported online in the journal Nature, Center researchers were able to synthesize a peptide called Tat-beclin 1, which induces the autophagy process. Mice treated with Tat-beclin-1 were resistant to several infectious diseases, including West Nile virus and another mosquito-borne virus called chikungunya that is common to Asia, Africa, and India. In additional experiments, the team demonstrated that human cells treated with the peptide were resistant to HIV infection in a laboratory setting.

Hmm.

SCIENTISTS advance nanotechnology safety. “In a study published online today (Thursday 11 June) in the newly launched Journal of Molecular Cell Biology [1] Chinese researchers discovered that a class of nanoparticles being widely developed in medicine – ployamidoamine dendrimers (PAMAMs) – cause lung damage by triggering a type of programmed cell death known as autophagic cell death. They also showed that using an autophagy inhibitor prevented the cell death and counteracted nanoparticle-induced lung damage in mice.”