DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Joy Behar: ICE Is the New ‘Gestapo,’ Trump Wants ‘War’ With NATO and MN.

On Friday’s episode of ABC’s The View, fill-in moderator Joy Behar admitted that she needed therapy to deal with her Trump Derangement Syndrome. And during the Tuesday episode of The View’s Behind the Table podcast, Behar proved just how severe her TDS actually was. According to her, ICE was just like the Nazi Gestapo rounding people up for extermination. She also claimed that America was “at war” with NATO and President Trump wanted to launch a war against Minnesota.

The first step in trying to fix one’s self was to admit you had a problem. Behar admitted that she was getting her therapy idea from former first Lady Michelle Obama. “She talks about how she and Barack have been in therapy all these years because they’re dealing with the empty nest. I’m dealing with the next few years of Trump. I need therapy,” she quipped.

And boy, did she need it.

Behar kicked off their podcast with delusions of grandeur, proclaiming that she wanted her legacy to be taking part in getting Trump out of office; seemingly suggesting she played a critical role in the 2020 election results:

BEHAR: I want my legacy to be that I helped get Trump out of office. That’s what I really care about.

TETA: Well, you did once. [Laughter]

BEHAR: I did. I wanna do it a second time. This time he’s much more dangerous than he was before.

Behar would go on to claim that Trump was “10 times worse than Nixon was. At this point.”

I’m so old, I can remember when Nixon was compared to Hitler by no less than George McGovern, before having his reputation rehabilitated by numerous elite leftists to bash the New Hitler. Speaking of which, yet another New Hitler has finally come along:

ATHENA THORNE: I’ve Waited 40 Years to Dunk on Phil Collins About This. “The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. In this case, it’s been forty years since British establishment-pop workhorse Phil Collins incurred a young Athena’s wrath with his band Genesis’s mockery of the greatest president (up until then, anyway) of modern times.”

THE UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS’ NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

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AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO CHANGE THEM OUT BEFORE THEY GET THAT HOT? The Year of the Can: The White Hot Silencer Business 20 Days In. “Here at SHOT Show, the busiest booths are those of suppressor manufacturers, with retailers and buyers looking for what’s new, when it will ship, and what the pricing will be.”

REPORTING IN FROM TEXAS: Yes, We Have No Bananas (Or Winter Storm T-2).

I usually visit HEB Mondays and Fridays, but given the probability of an incoming ice storm (which now has the name Winter Storm Fern) I went this afternoon, when it was already very busy and the shelves were just starting to look picked for some items.

Except bananas. They were gone.

Stay warm, Texas. And don’t go… well, you know.

NIALL FERGUSON: How Trump Won Davos: I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.

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IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Except for the Arrest, That Was a Great First Date. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how to impress a girl on the first date, where not to stick somebody else’s meat, and what they’re serving in Maine.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Trump Pulls the US Out of United Nations’ International Gun Registry Scheme.

In a major move for national sovereignty and Second Amendment freedom, the Trump administration has formally withdrawn the United States from the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms, a UN-run reporting system that gun rights advocates have warned for years is part of the international bureaucracy’s long game to pressure nations into “standardized” gun restrictions.

What Is the UN Register of Conventional Arms?

UNROCA is a so-called “voluntary” United Nations registry where participating countries report information about weapons transfers, including categories of conventional arms and, in many cases, small arms and light weapons.

Supporters claim it promotes “transparency.”

But gun owners know how this game works.

Transparency is always the excuse and control is always the goal. Because once international bureaucrats start collecting data, they don’t stop at tracking tanks and fighter jets.

The same institutions pushing global disarmament narratives always work their way down to the civilian level, using “international norms” as the wedge to attack private gun ownership.

Whatever utility the UN might — might — have once had, it’s long gone.

We should be gone from the UN.

“EQUITY”:

DOD CLUELESS ON REMOTE WORKERS: New Inspector-General audit of Department of Defense explains why Pentagon had no clue how many remote workers it actually had after Biden told everybody to come back to the office.

“A GOOD TACTIC IS ONE YOUR PEOPLE ENJOY. If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic:” Operation Fakeout: Leftist Hotlines Send Protesters to Biker Bars — Surprise, No ICE, Just Laughs.

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(Classical reference in headline.)

MOST OF TODAY’S #JOURNALISM IS JUST MIDWITS POSTURING FOR OTHER MIDWITS ABOUT THINGS THEY DON’T ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND:

4. Many a reader has gotten fed up with “The Magic Mountain,” and she knows it, but I doubt that Susan B. Glasser would regard Thomas Mann as some kind of nut. I picture her denouncing the reader for not digging in, paying attention, trusting the author, and taking the time to understand.

5. It’s not as though Glasser drew upon deep literary experience to come up with material from “The Magic Mountain.” It’s the famous book set in the location where Trump spoke. To quote it is like quoting your last fortune cookie or scrap of litter right at your feet.

6. What does Glasser really know of “The Magic Mountain”? She’s got 2 quotes, and if you go to Goodreads, you’ll find both quotes within the top 6 quotes from the book. They are #5 and #6.

Probably would have been a deeper piece if she’d just used Chat GPT.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Blue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse — next launch will refly booster.

The second New Glenn mission launched on November 13, just 10 weeks ago. If the company makes the late-February target for the next mission—and Ars was told last week to expect the launch to slip into March—it will represent a remarkably short turnaround for an orbital booster.

By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear.

SpaceX successfully landed its second Falcon 9 booster in April 2016, on the 23rd overall flight of the Falcon 9 fleet. This booster was refurbished and, after a lengthy series of inspections, it was reflown successfully in March 2017, nearly 11 months later.

With New Glenn, Blue Origin is seeking to refly a booster on just the third overall flight of the New Glenn fleet and turn the rocket around in less than four months. Even for a well-capitalized program with the benefit of learning from both Blue Origin’s own suborbital New Shepard rocket and the industry’s experience with the Falcon 9, this represents an impressive turnaround in first stage reuse.

Godspeed.

IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times Hiring a Reporter To Cover US Jews.

The New York Times, whose executive editor a decade ago publicly acknowledged, “We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives,” and which has been afflicted with a series of errors on basic matters of Jewish literacy everywhere from the crossword puzzle to the food section, is now hoping to hire a reporter who knows something about Judaism.

A recently posted Times job listing seeks “an experienced and versatile journalist to join the National desk as a religion correspondent … with a particular emphasis on Jewish life in America.”

The posting indicates that the Times is adding a reporter focused on American Judaism and also another one “on the Muslim experience in America,” kind of a Times-job-listing version of the higher-education-administrator and Democratic-politician tic of adding “and Islamophobia” every time anti-Semitism is mentioned. As even a Times editorial acknowledged, “University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia.” The rise of Islam in America, like the Christian religious revival that is also under way in America, is a newsworthy story in its own right; that Islam-related job listing does not appear to be posted yet, but it could be a promising beat for a reporter skeptical enough to tackle, say, the Minnesota welfare fraud story.

The Times is doubling the size of a religion reporting team that is already double what it was when then-executive editor Dean Baquet lamented, in an NPR interview, “We have a fabulous religion writer, but she’s all alone. We don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives. And I think we can do much, much better.”

And how, but of course, the Gray Lady is far from alone among US newspapers when it comes to not getting religion. As Rod Dreher wrote in his classic 2003 article, “The Godless Party:”

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”*

In the main—and I’ve had this confirmed to me by Christian friends who labor elsewhere in the secular media—the men and women who bring America its news don’t necessarily hate religion; in most cases, they just believe it’s unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don’t know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated. For example, to hear journalists talk, Catholics are berated from the pulpit every Sunday about abortion and birth control; reporters think I’m putting them on when I tell them that I’ve been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and I’ve only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. For another, outside the Jewish community, there are no stronger supporters of Israel than among American Evangelicals, and that’s been true for at least a generation. The news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where I’ve been startled to discover a general assumption among Jews and non-Jews alike that these “fundamentalists” (i.e., any Christian more conservative than a Spong-ite Episcopalian) are naturally anti-Semitic.

In a further comment, that New York Post city editor inadvertently revealed something else important to me about the way media people see religion: As far as he was concerned, Catholics and Jews were the only religious people who counted in New York City (he himself is a non-practicing Jew), because they were the only ones who had any political pull. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity in the only way they know how—in terms of secular politics. Thus, when your average journalist hears “Southern Baptist,” she immediately thinks of an alien sect whose rustic adherents lurk in the shadows thinking of cunning ways to manipulate Republican politicians into taking away a woman’s right to choose. The trouble is, she doesn’t think much further, and it is unlikely that anyone in her professional and social circles will challenge her to do so.

If only the New York Times hadn’t run a journalist eminently qualified to write about US Jews out on a rail in 2020. If only.

* That’s a paraphrase of Kael’s legendary moment from 1972: The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER LIST:

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But try explaining that to your purple-haired Aunt Karen.