ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: HuffPo: Sure looks like Black Lives Matter was a racket, eh? Update: BLM responds.
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ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Pelosi: AOC Wanted to be ‘Queen Bee’ of the Left and It Cost Democrats.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Patrisse Cullors blasts ‘despicable’ New York magazine coverage of BLM’s $6 million mansion.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Andrew Sullivan Says He Was ‘Ambushed’ by ‘Unprofessional’ Jon Stewart in Interview: ‘Foul Race Essentialism.’
The show went predictably sideways after Sullivan made the obvious point that he is not responsible for bad stuff other White people do, especially those who were alive before he was born:
BOND: You know, because quite honestly if White men were going to do something about racism, you had 400 years. You coulda done it.
SULLIVAN: I am 58 years old.
BOND: I’m shutting you down right now.
SULLIVAN: I am not responsible for anyone before me.
BOND: The point is I am so tired of just engaging in this conversation and this deep hurt that Andrew has about talking about racism…. All of us White people do this.
Bond also said she wasn’t there to “argue with another White man.”
Stewart sided with Bond and said Sullivan was “doing a pretty good job” of at least appearing to be racist.
In a Substack post published Friday, Sullivan said he’d been “ambushed” because a booker for The Problem with Jon Stewart told him he’d be the only person on the show. He also reiterated his position on show’s subject matter.
Sullivan stated a booker called him to ask if he wanted to appear on the show to talk about race:
“Why would I go on a show just to be called a racist?” “No, no, no,” she replied. “Nothing like that would happen. This is not a debate. It’s just you talking one-on-one with Jon, and he’d never do that.” I said I’d think about it — especially since they seemed desperate with just 24 hours till taping — and later I called to say sure, if it’s just Jon. “I trust him to be fair.” I hadn’t had time to read the email invites, so I trusted the booker’s word.
Why on earth would anyone do that, given Stewart’s long track record of manipulating guests? Particularly conservative guests — which Sullivan still purports to be. In 2020, Deadline reported that “Jon Stewart Says His Biggest ‘Daily Show’ Regret Is Legacy Of ‘Evisceration Expectation.’” And yet here he is, back in full-on “Jon Stewart destroys Andrew Sullivan!!” mode.
Incidentally, Sullivan’s Substack briefly linked to above by Mediaite, is well worth a read in its entirety: The Problem With Jon Stewart. How painfully, cringingly super-woke must a comedian get to stay relevant?
When I tried to explain that I immigrated in 1984, and that a white man in 2022 cannot possibly be held responsible for something that happened four centuries ago, [Bond] replied: “I’m going to shut you down.” Stewart was enthralled. Then she spelled out exactly what she meant:
All white people do this. I don’t care if we say we’re Abolitionists, I don’t care if we say we’re Progressive, I don’t care if we are literally members of the KKK. Every single white person upholds these systems and structures of white supremacy, and we have got to talk about it.
This is the poisonous heart of CRT: that white people, by virtue of merely existing, are all morally problematic and always will be. Even if all the systems have been repealed. Even if you’d never racially discriminate yourself. Even if you spent your life fighting racism. That is why Bond called the Abolitionist movement indistinguishable in terms of its racism from the KKK! Why? Because whites are only ever whites.
Absorb that for a moment. This foul race essentialism, this view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others. It’s being used to make even more money for rich white people, to provide some elite whites with a weapon to destroy their career rivals, and to help build a new racial spoils system that leaves any notion of colorblindness or individual rights behind. (And the bigotry is palpable. When I spoke of the need to help a generation hobbled by absent fathers, high crime, and deep poverty, Lisa Bond responded: “Like you care about black kids.” There is no ad hominem these fanatics won’t stoop to.)
Is that a way out of where we are? Or is it, in fact, a fast way back to where we started?
One more thing: the trope of a malign racial force existing through history across time and space is one Jon Stewart might have once recognized before he joined the woke cult. I wonder what he would have said if someone had come on his old show and said, “I did not come on this show to argue with a Jew,” or “every single Jew upholds these systems,” or it doesn’t matter what a Jew’s politics are, he’s still a Jew, and therefore a racist. What if she had bragged that her organization wouldn’t even engage with Jews because they were so toxic. And what if that person had looked straight at a Jewish guest of Stewart’s when she said it? What would he have said?
Somehow I don’t think it would be: “If I could finger snap, I would finger snap right now.”
It’s been quite a ride for a man who was telling his Daily Show viewers in 2010 that their “race card was maxed out.” Or as Sullivan asked his fellow leftists last year: What Happened To You?
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: AOC: Biden Faces ‘Collapse’ of Support From Key Democrat Voters.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Google is accused in lawsuit of systemic bias against Black employees.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Chris Cuomo is burning down CNN. And he’s taking Don Lemon with him.
Exhibit No. 1 for the plaintiff is Don Lemon, the CNN host whom Cuomo used to refer to as his “brother.” (Which is rich given how quick Cuomo was to nuke journalistic ethics to bail out his brother Andrew, the former New York governor.)
In November, actor Jussie Smollett testified under oath that Lemon had tipped him off that police in Chicago didn’t buy his claim that a pair of MAGA-hat wearing thugs had emerged from a snowstorm to beat him up and wrap a rope around his neck.
ow, in Lemon’s defense, hardly anyone outside the corridors of CNN believed Smollett’s saga when the fable was first told. It shouldn’t have been shocking to learn that Chicago cops, who hear more credible yarns from truant eighth-graders, had their doubts.
But I digress. Don Lemon’s decision as a self-confessed journalist to alert Smollett that the cops were on to him was an ethical breach almost as bad as helping a politician – who just happens to be your brother – cobble together a defense against sexual harassment allegations.
“Intervening in the ongoing investigation by texting Smollett was an inexcusable breach of ethics,” Cuomo’s lawyers wrote in the arbitration filing. “Yet CNN did nothing; Lemon was not disciplined in any way.”
Inexcusable breach of ethics. Employer looks the other way. Cuomo knows all about such things.
Read the whole thing. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger on the Iran-Iraq War, it’s a pity all of the players can’t lose.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Chris Cuomo’s $125M CNN Lawsuit Contains Stunning Corruption Allegations.
But then things get sexy and revealing… The way I’m reading it is that in order to prove he did not violate CNN’s standards and practices and was therefore unlawfully terminated, Cuomo pretty much comes out and says CNN has no professional ethics. To make this case, he basically says, Hey, everyone was doing it, including the people in charge!
CNN has a long-established pattern and practice of selectively enforcing its policies based on cynical calculations of public perception. Indeed, CNN fostered a culture in which “exceptions” to the network’s standards and practices were routinely sanctioned, and that culture began at the top with Zucker and Gollust. As long as CNN’s ratings would not be hurt, Zucker and Gollust were more than willing to overlook major transgressions by CNN personalities such as Don Lemon and Jake Tapper, or even to engage in blatant misconduct themselves.
Cuomo then — tee hee — names names…
Read the whole thing.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Drag Queen Who Says Biden Is a ‘Senile’ ‘White Supremacist’ Scheduled To Perform at Dem Retreat.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Oh, What Has Ilhan Omar Said Now? The Nets Don’t Care.
Related: Victor Davis Hanson: Russia’s Ukraine invasion a wake-up call to AOC and ‘Squad.’
If the United States is [energy independent] … then we don’t beg people in the Middle East or Russia to help us. If the oil price [is] moderate, the economies in the West thrive, and Vladimir Putin doesn’t have financial reserves that can subsidize as an invasion.
Just think of the lead-up to [the invasion]. In January, we had these hackers from Russia [going] … after the Colonial Pipeline in the United States. They took out a million barrels a day, and that was after we had been cutting back. … [Then] we had the Senate Democrats who [sic] wrote a veto to sanction the Nord Stream Pipeline. Energy is a subtext of all of the preliminaries up to this.
And I think in retrospect, we’re going to grow up. We’re going to look back at AOC’s insane efforts and people in the Squad in the hard left to shut down voluntarily almost 3 million barrels a day of oil production. … [T]hat results in … real deaths — people die when you do that, and they have to realize that — it’s crazy.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, left-leaning Axios noted: Squad politics backfire as Democrats struggle with party image.
As Glenn has joked, getting Omar, AOC and the rest of “the Squad” elected was Roger Stone’s last and greatest political dirty trick.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Video Of The Fired Diane Feinstein Staffer Dancing In Her Office On Psychedelic Mushrooms While Smoking A Joint Is Must-See TV.
Video has emerged showing Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s former aide dancing in her office while smoking a joint and high on psychedelic mushrooms jamming out to “I Like It” by DeBarge after he was terminated from his role last month.
Jamarcus Purley, who holds degrees from Harvard and Stanford, was fired last month from his role as a legislative correspondent at Feinstein’s office, according to Latino Rebels. In an act of rebellion, Purley decided to have one last hoorah at the office.
In the video posted to Youtube, Purley is first seen lounging at a desk with a suit on, beginning to dance as he smokes a large blunt. Purley then pulls his feet onto the chair and begins dancing again before almost falling off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzyYkVqfCbM&feature=youtu.be
Isn’t the real news here that people are still listening to DeBarge in 2022?!
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: AOC-Led ‘Squad’ Reveals Latest Strategy Designed to Give Joe Biden Midterm Election Nightmares.
At a time when rank and file Democrats are scrambling to contain the losses that are expected to take place in November, due in part to Biden’s disastrous “leadership” and the GOP playing it smart in the messaging wars by tying vulnerable members to the soft-on-crime far-left wing, it was announced Wednesday by the Working Families Party that Rep. Rashida Tlaib – an original to the “Squad” – would be taking the unusual step of giving a response to Biden’s upcoming State of the Union address:
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Though the speech won’t air on any of the major TV networks, it will be broadcast on the Working Families Party’s Facebook page, where GOP operatives will no doubt be combing for material to use in upcoming campaign ads.
As Glenn has joked, getting Tlaib and the rest of “the Squad” elected was Roger Stone’s last and greatest political dirty trick.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Left-wing Green group that targeted Keystone pipeline plagued by accusations of ‘white supremacy culture.’
350.org, a left-wing green group focused on grassroots efforts to fight climate change, is being plagued by accusations of “white supremacy culture” within its own organization despite efforts it claims to have undertaken to increase diversity amongst its staff, as well as the climate change movement.
According to Politico, 350.org, which was largely responsible for the staunch opposition by climate change activists to the Keystone XL pipeline, “struggled to overcome its founding by a group of white people” when it followed efforts to hire more people of color with mass layoffs and increased workloads amid financial struggles.
The struggles for the group began in 2019 when executive director May Boeve announced an increase in the annual budget to an amount more than the organization had ever raised in a single year. Included in the new budget were plans to hire nearly 130 new employees.
The plans eventually broke apart with the organization failing to meet the required financial needs, which led to a fallout that included “mass layoffs, departures, exhaustion, distrust and a protracted labor battle.”
A restart of the pipeline, a public apology by Biden, and a return to $2.00-a-gallon gas is the only solution to this omnipresent racism.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NFL Hires Obama-Era Attorney General Loretta Lynch To Fight Brian Flores’ Discrimination Lawsuit. “In his lawsuit against the NFL, Flores is accusing the organization of pervasive racial bias and has named three teams — the Broncos, Dolphins and New York Giants — as defendants. Now, in quite a twist, it will be Lynch, the first black woman appointed to head the Justice Department, who will be defending Roger Goodell’s shield and those who’ve been accused of racial bias in hiring practices…In his CBS interview [Wednesday], Mr. Flores was asked if ‘clubs have the right to hire the person they think is the best qualified for the job or the person they feel is right for them?’ Mr. Flores responded, ‘They do. That’s very reasonable to me…’ That is exactly what we did.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: UC Berkeley must slash new enrollment by a third unless high court intervenes.
UC Berkeley will have to significantly reduce the number of undergraduate and transfer students it admits for 2022-23 unless it gets the California Supreme Court to intervene in a lower court ruling, the university said Monday.
About 5,100 fewer high school seniors and transfer students will be offered a place at Cal for the next academic year because of an Alameda County Superior Court ruling that ordered UC Berkeley to freeze enrollment at the same level as 2020-21. The 24% drop in offer letters would bring about 6,450 new students to Cal — about 32% fewer than in a typical year.
UC Berkeley applied for a stay of the decision to the California First Court of Appeal, but the court turned down the university’s request on Thursday, Feb. 10. . . .
The drop in student enrollment would also cost Cal about $57 million in revenue, according to UC Berkeley.
The order to cap enrollment at the 2020-21 level of 42,347 as opposed to the current enrollment of 45,057 is the result of a lawsuit filed in June 2019 by a neighborhood group, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, against UC Berkeley, the Regents of the University of California and others. The city of Berkeley had been party to the lawsuit until it withdrew after signing an $82.6 million letter of agreement in July with the university.
Leftists institutions crippled by leftist organizations using leftist lawfare. Gooder and harder!
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Mayor Eric Adams rips press, claims white journalists misrepresent him.
“If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job and we just can’t live in this alternate reality,” a clearly angered Adams said.
Adams also warned that if the coverage of him doesn’t improve, “I’m just going to come in and do my announcements and bounce.”
Adams repeatedly suggested that race played a factor in news coverage of him, telling an almost all-white group of reporters who were hand-picked by his office and invited to cover the City Hall news conference, “I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me.”
“How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written?” he said.
“How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms?”
Adams also accused the reporters of “writing through your prisms” before adding: “Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”
The article reads like a scene from Bonfire of the Vanities — it’s good to see the version of the Matrix that Tom Wolfe programmed shortly before his death in 2018 is still running smoothly.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too: Nikole Hannah Jones criticizes Rev. Al for admitting shoplifting is out of hand.
And that brings us to Morning Joe which talked about the Hamburglar story yesterday morning. As you’ll see, even Rev. Al Sharpton thinks things have gotten out of hand. “There are those, including me, who are concerned about overloading the system and the jails with petty crime,” Sharpton said. He continued, “But at the same time you cannot have a culture where people are just— at random— just robbing and stealing and it’s out of control and it’s put on the covers of newspapers which only encourages others to do it.”
For saying something fairly obvious about the need to bring down petty crime when it is up more than 23%, Nikole Hannah Jones lashed out at Sharpton and accused him of legitimizing “the carceral state.”
A couple of obvious points here. First, it may be a given on the left that putting people in prison for crimes caught on camera is illegitimate but I think if you look around you’ll find that’s increasingly a minority view. Most people think this brazen theft is outrageous.
Second, what alternative is Hannah Jones proposing to make people stop boosting merchandise? She doesn’t say. We’re right back to the foolishness of the defund the police movement, i.e. demanding cities tear down the existing system without any real plan for what comes next. And no, I’m not talking about specific programs like body cameras for police or sending out special teams to respond to mental health situations. Those ideas never required defunding the police. I’m talking about people who wanted funding cut and wanted to abolish prisons as well without any explanation of how to deal with either serious crime (shootings and murder) or low-level but persistent crime (shoplifting). There’s no plan, just a vague belief that it will all work out in the end. Except it isn’t working out as a review of recent violent crime and robbery figures will show.
* * * * * * * *
One guy stealing 10 steaks isn’t national news, but thousands of guys just like him stealing millions from retailers in cities on both coasts is a national story which deserves some national attention. Anyone who says the problem should be ignored is just asking for more of the same. That’s not smart, it’s not ethical and it’s not sustainable. The stores will close and then the same progressives winking at shoplifting will move on to whining about “food deserts.” But it turns out you can’t have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too. Until someone has a better idea, putting the army of petty thieves in jail should be an option.
Nicole Hannah-Jones’ job here is simple: convince the management of the New York Times to remove the security guard(s) in the lobby of the Times’ building on Eighth Avenue, and then she can lecture the rest of us on urban crime and police policies.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: John Nolte: Fascist Law and Order: SVU Showrunner Regrets Not Blacklisting the Unvaccinated.
More anti-science hate from left-wing Hollywood as a Law & Order: SVU showrunner regrets not blacklisting the unvaccinated.
In two tweets loaded with misinformation, showrunner Warren Leight writes, “To my sadness we are still offering parts to actors only to learn they STILL aren’t vaccinated… Our community has to look out for each other,” he adds, “especially when working unmasked in close quarters. The stream of misinformation is toxic.”
“The vast majority here are also vaccinated, he added in a follow-up tweet, “but I’ve been surprised that even some older members of our community have chosen to play Russian Roulette with Covid.”
The only thing Leight wrote that is not misinformation is “the stream of misinformation is toxic.”
Yes — yes, it is, and this showrunner’s tweets are a perfect example of that toxic stream of misinformation.
While the Law & Order franchises have filmed in the New York since the early 1990s, Leight effectively works in Hollywood — an industry rife with anti-vaxxers: Change: Oscars won’t require proof of vaccination to attend this year’s show. “The ugly truth, THR theorizes, is that the Academy is kowtowing to celebrity egos with this policy, something that very much would be in keeping with industry culture. There are likely anti-vaxxers among the nominees and presenters and the Oscars doesn’t want to risk having them boycott the event given the pitiful ratings the show has drawn in recent years. They want maximum star power. Result: No vaccines required…Rest assured, though, that all of the ushers, production crew, and other wage slaves at the Oscars will be triple-vaxxed, masked, and tested. VIPs are famously immune from COVID, after all, but the hoi polloi remain at perpetual risk.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: PETA pokes Fauci with mosaic photos of brutalized animals.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, upset with the use of animals to test drugs, including some at the agency COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci heads, today unveiled a mosaic of him made from tiny photographs of caged and brutalized animals. . . .
“No one likes Anthony Fauci more than Anthony Fauci,” said PETA.
Well, they’ve got that part right.
ANNALS OF LEFT-INSTITUTION AUTOPHAGY: NCAA officer resigns amid transgender policy controversy as reports of Lia Thomas’ ‘entitlement’ surface.
Dorian Rhea Debussy, a member of the NCAA Division III LGBTQ OneTeam program, recently resigned over the organization’s updated policy on transgender athletes.
“I’m deeply troubled by what appears to be a devolving level of active, effective, committed, and equitable support for gender diverse student-athletes within the NCAA’s leadership,” Debussy said, according to Fox News, after the national organization adopted a “sport-by-sport” approach to determining transgender athlete’s eligibility to compete on opposite-gender teams.
According to Fox News, Debussy said, “As a non-binary, trans-feminine person, I can no longer, in good conscience, maintain my affiliation with the NCAA.”
Prior to this announcement, reports of University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas have recently surfaced accusing him of being arrogant and self-satisfied.
One of Thomas’ teammates came forward in an interview with the Washington Examiner, telling the outlet that the swimmer has compared himself to Jackie Robinson, the African-American baseball player who pioneered racial integration in the sport.
The teammate, who chose to remain anonymous, told the Washington Examiner, “She said she is like the Jackie Robinson of trans sports.”
The teammate also explained how the trans athlete’s sense of, “entitlement, selfishness, and a general disregard for overall performance,” has caused a “toxic” team environment.
Which is funny, because Jackie Robinson displayed none of those qualities.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Infighting: Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain Accused of Hidin’ Biden.
As Biden’s Chief of Staff, Klain is the nucleus of office politics, which are said to be rife with “grumbling” “personal score-settling and constraints… on Biden’s ability to reach out,” though top White House officials denied the report.
When Biden was asked at Wednesday’s press conference about what his 2022 reset would entail, Biden blamed coronavirus and not Klain for his detachment from his pragmatic way of “connecting with people.”
“I find myself in a situation where I don’t get a chance to look people in the eye because of both Covid and things that are happening in Washington, to be able to go out and do the things that I’ve always been able to do pretty well — connect with people,” Biden claimed.
Biden’s decision to escape the White House and speak with Americans is reportedly not in line with Klain’s priorities.
Biden’s confidants told NBC News that “Klain knows Biden ‘can be influenced by his old friends,’ and that ‘frankly, he should be, because there’s a lot of experience there.’”
The report also accused Klain of giving “outsize credence to cable news and social media” and supported the claim with evidence of incessant tweeting and retweeting to pacify the media.
Flashback: Journo Twitter runs the Biden administration.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: London Breed criticizes white San Francisco progressives again.
Breed said that her own “experiences of growing up in poverty and growing up in war zones similar to the Tenderloin” informed her decision-making process and took a shot at critics she perceives to be overly ideological.
“I think a lot of people, like some members of the Board [of Supervisors], like Boudin, did not grow up in poverty in San Francisco,” she said. “They did not grow up in these kinds of conditions. They have a theory as to what they believe based on their ideology. But they’re also white. They are not Black people who’ve had these unfortunately traumatizing experiences in communities where there’s not trust with the police, but also there’s a desire to be safe, right? And I’ve worked many of my years of growing up in this community to really turn that around because of the violence. ”
The unnamed members of the board she’s referring to are likely Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen. The former voted against Breed’s Tenderloin emergency declaration, while the latter threatened to undo the emergency ordinance if the San Francisco Police Department’s budget increases. Later in the interview, Breed specifically mentions District 5, which is Preston’s district.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Is NPR In The Grips Of (Checks Notes) White Supremacy?
Celeste Headlee, who has hosted several public radio programs and written extensively about race in the industry, said she couldn’t speak to the specific reasons individual hosts have left but called the departures concerning. “It’s so common for companies to put resources into recruiting people of color and then put no resources into really retaining them or supporting them in the roles they have so that they will continue with the organization.”
She said she regularly hears from public-radio staffers of color who say they deal with daily slights and resistance to their ideas, despite a sense they got their jobs to help expand the audience.But Headlee — who founded a nonprofit for minority public-radio employees — credited John Lansing, NPR’s president and chief executive, for being “dead serious about solving these issues.” She added: “If there ever was a chance for our industry to move forward, now is the time.”
NPR employees raised questions about the exodus of women of color during an all-staff meeting last month headed by Lansing, who is generally well-regarded within the organization. But he received a cool reception when he told employees that turnover was common in the news media and that NPR couldn’t stand in the way of staffers seeking greater opportunities elsewhere, according to one participant.
Read the whole thing, as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks fight it out.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Let Them Fight: Steve Schmidt Blasts The Lincoln Project over the tiki torch stunt. “Lincoln Project’s fake-Charlottesville stunt backfired so badly that group co-founder Steve ‘Generational Wealth’ Schmidt is desperately fleeing, hanging his former comrades-in-arms out to dry. Don’t look at me! I have almost nothing to do with those guys!”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Putin’s poke at intolerance by ‘woke’ left revealing. “When Vladimir Putin throws Martin Luther King in your face, you’d better watch out. That is what the Russian leader, a one-time KGB agent and propagandist, did last week in a speech critical of far-left U.S woke ideology at a conference in Sochi. He said that wokeness in America is no different than what took place in Russia during the 1917 revolution after the Bolsheviks assumed power and sought to remake Russian culture. The Bolsheviks called everybody tovarish (comrade) even when they were arrested and got a bullet in the back of the head in the basement of the notorious Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. While Putin, no doubt with a wink and a nod, took jabs at U.S. progressives and their militant wokeism, his words at times made more sense than the blather that often comes out of President Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders, who just happens to be the shadow president.”