THIS COURT IS AN EMBARRASSMENT TO KANGAROOS: Dershowitz Destroys Judge Merchan After Attending Trump Trial.
May 21, 2024
CLIMATE CHANGE: U.S. hasn’t seen an EF5 tornado in 11 years, longest gap in history. I seem to recall being told that global warming was going to bring us more frequent and more violent tornadoes.
EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: “City Journal” Details the Ideological Capture of Science Journalism.
Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.
If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.
Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).
We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.
Turn on the lights and watch the roaches scatter. And stomp on any that don’t.
MARK JUDGE: Help Me Hire a Stripper to Read My Audiobook.
We still don’t know for sure if it was a stripper or a belly dancer.
We do know, however, that the dancer who performed for our high school music teacher at a bachelor party in 1982 was part of the news cycle in 2018. That’s when the American political left and the Stasi media tried to destroy me.
That’s why I need to hire a stripper to do the audio version of my book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.
It’s not a prank. Getting a professional adult dancer to read The Devil’s Triangle would work aesthetically and as a broader cultural commentary on modern politics and media. It would defy the new liberal Stasi who buzzkill everything, and even make a few tight-ass conservatives who were afraid to defend me nervous.
Our 1982 bachelor party erupted in the news in 2018, during the nightmarish Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Opposition researchers—including a couple of disgruntled classmates from my time at Georgetown Prep—tried to sink Kavanaugh, a classmate of mine, by depicting me, him, and the entire class 1983, as party people and womanizers. They found a description of the 1982 bash with the stripper in something I’d written years before, and were off to the races. It was The Wild Life meets The Lives of Others. The Washington Post employed a reporter to find out if we’d hired a belly dancer or a stripper. There’s still a debate about that. I only remember the dancer as very pretty and nice.
I survived the 2018 hit and wrote a book about the experience. The Devil’s Triangle recently got some media attention when I was interviewed by Martha MacCallum for a documentary that’s now airing on Fox Nation. This was followed by a blistering column by Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post—defending me.
Now, if we sell enough books, there will be an audio version.
Hiring a stripper to read The Devil’s Triangle is an in-your-face move, but there are also some layers to it. The first is artistic. Juxtaposing a narrative about an evil political plot and 1980s teen stream-of-consciousness with a rich feminine voice would work brilliantly. Two opposite elements that produce something dynamic.
As Ross Douthat wrote in 2018 during the Kavanaugh hearings, “The Year of Our Lord 1982, upon whose disputed summertime events a Supreme Court nomination now hinges, was part of the Reagan era but not a particularly conservative year.”
STANDING UP AGAINST SEGREGATION AND BIGOTRY: MIT Program Open Only To “Women of Color” Challenged By Equal Protection Project As Violating Civil Rights Laws. “We just celebrated the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in public education. It is sad and disheartening to see that institutions like MIT that receive federal funding are re-segregating the student body through exclusionary programs.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: How to Murder a Popular Restaurant Chain with This 1 Weird Trick. “There’s so much more to the story than a money-losing menu item.”
“PUBLIC HEALTH” IS A CULTURE OF LIES AND CORRUPTION: Britain covered up tainted blood scandal that killed thousands, report finds. “The British government ‘did not put patient safety first’ while covering up a multi-decade tainted blood scandal, leading to thousands of related deaths, a report published Monday found. Britain’s National Health Service allowed blood tainted with HIV and Hepatitis to be used on patients without their knowledge, leading to 3,000 deaths and more than 30,000 infections, according to the 2,527-page final report by Justice Brian Justice Langstaff, a former judge on the High Court of England and Wales. . . . The report blames multiple administrations over the time period for knowingly exposing victims to unacceptable risks.”
The Red Cross has had similar scandals here, of course. Then of course there was the Tuskegee scandal, a multidecade public health atrocity marked by lies and corruption.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Starfish Space lands $37.5 million Space Force contract for on-orbit servicing vehicle. “DoD’s satellites in GEO typically lack the ability to easily move themselves around. The Otter spacecraft would provide augmented maneuver by docking and attaching to the client satellite and using Otter’s own propulsion systems, giving the military satellite a push or a pull, making specific movements or adjustments to its orbit.”
It could do the same to the other guy’s satellites, too.
READER FAVORITE: COOFANDY Mens Casual Button Down Shirts. #CommissionEarned
JIM TREACHER: Paul Pelosi’s Attacker Was Neither a Male Prostitute Nor a Trump Supporter. But the whole thing was weird*, and still is:
The whole thing was just bizarre. The “male prostitute” thing started because a local reporter said one of the two men was in his underwear when he opened the door for police. This claim was quickly dropped, and nobody has ever explained why it was made.
(I never understood why it would be a scandal anyway if a man was attacked in his own home while wearing only underpants. He was in his house in the middle of the night!)
Then NBC aired this report:
This sequence of events has been vindicated by police bodycam footage, but at the time it was different than the version that had been given to the public.
Instead of explaining, NBC deleted the video from their website, and reporter Miguel Almaguer suddenly disappeared. Almaguer no longer works for the network, after 18 years of service, and has never explained anything about the incident.
That’s weird, man!
Jim Geraghty adds: The Detail About Pelosi’s Attacker That Everyone Chose to Ignore.
I have no objection to Paul Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, being sentenced to 30 years in prison. Throw the book at the bastard.
But I notice a strange detail in the coverage in the New York Times:
Judge Corley said in court that she had taken into account Mr. DePape’s lack of a previous criminal record and his vulnerability to conspiracy theories.
Lack of a previous criminal record? He was in the country illegally! His tourist visa expired in 2008! He had been residing in the country illegally for fourteen years when he attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband!
The New York Times described DePape as “a Canadian citizen who moved to San Francisco in his 20s,” and the Associated Press labeled him “a Canadian who moved to the U.S. more than 20 years ago.” Those descriptions are really misleading. DePape’s illegal immigrant status is not mentioned in the coverage from CNN, CBS, the BBC, The Guardian, and many other news reports on the verdict.
The Times characterized Pelosi’s attacker as almost an inevitable consequence of the fierce criticism of his wife:
Mr. DePape reflects the underbelly of American politics: a man driven by online conspiracy theories who seemed to embrace the rhetoric of many right-wing figures, who have used dehumanizing language for years to describe Ms. Pelosi and call her an enemy of the United States.
Yes, online conspiracy theories are bad, and no one should break into any lawmaker’s house, seeking to break their kneecaps, and violently assault a lawmaker’s spouse.
But there are some other lessons to be taken from DePape’s crime. One is that some of the people who either enter the country illegally, or those who enter legally and then stay beyond the legal limit, and who then move to sanctuary cities, are bad and dangerous people who should be deported.
* And speaking of weird: What’s Going On Here? Paul Pelosi’s Attacker Has Already Been Tried and Sentenced – Meanwhile, the Man Who Wanted to Kill Justice Kavanaugh Hasn’t Even Gone to Trial.
THEY’RE NEVER SATISFIED: People Watching WNBA Now Is Great and All, But It’s Unfair that Caitlin Clark is White. “Caitlin Clark has created some interest in the sport, and I have to say that the little I know of her makes her look wholesome and nice. She likes babies, seems humble, and apparently is quite talented. It’s almost like she is a person, not a sports star, and people seem to like that. She hasn’t even derided America, beat anybody up, impregnated some groupie, or come out as trans. What’s not to like? Well, she is straight and White, and that seems unfair. People have fallen in love with her instead of others higher up on the intersectional ladder.”
STEVEN MALANGA: The New Road Rage. Bad government policies are contributing to soaring auto insurance costs, which now worry Americans more than the costs of health care or mortgages.
IT ISN’T THAT BIDEN FORGETS, IT’S THAT HE SAYS SO MANY THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED: Biden Questions Intelligence of Trump’s Next Supreme Court Pick, Forgetting His Own Dumb Nominees.