Police Clear Ottawa Truckers at Gunpoint (VIDEO)

Canada's a police state.

I can't ever recall --- in my 45 years as a political scientist --- such an unjust authoritarian crackdown in a Western democratic country. French truckers shut down the entire country nearly every year or two. It's just a thing. I mean, Black Lives Matter is a protected group in American politics (thanks to coastal/beltway elites in cahoots with the Democrat media complex), but it's still something that riots continued throughout 2020 --- at least from the moment of George Floyd murder, practically up until today --- without a nationwide crackdown, fucking martial law! Regardless of ideology, most American cities won't allow citizens to burn it all to the ground. (But then there's always Portland. *Eye-roll.*)

It's the working class that's a threat to global elites, and their only response is to call fed-up workers racists, Nazis, and the "fringe minority." And freezing all assets of lawfully protesting Canadians (soon coming to America) is Beijing-level totalitarianism. Canada is a pariah state. Expect a mass voters' revolt now, especially in the rest of the country --- outside dirtbag Ottawa --- among the manly agricultural, rustic burgs across the plains, as citizens everywhere refuse to surrender their God-given rights, regardless of what civil liberties Canada's worthless "Charter" allegedly protects. 

What a damned disgrace. A woman was purportedly trampled to death under hoof, as Trudeau's mounted assassins charged overwhelmingly protesters. 

The New York Times is bad enough, but I've already checked the bloodthirsty Canadian newspapers, and I just can't. 

So, at NYT, "Ottawa Protesters Cleared From Parliament Encampment":

OTTAWA — The center of a sprawling protest in the Canadian capital was cleared of demonstrators for the first time in three weeks on Saturday, following an aggressive push by armed police officers to drive out the protesters.

Starting about 10 a.m. police advanced on trucks that had been parked on Wellington Street, the thoroughfare in front of the Parliament building, drawing guns on some vehicles, and arresting protesters inside and nearby the trucks.

The operation was an escalation by the authorities to finally end the protests, which began with a convoy of truckers rallying against vaccine mandates, and later inspired demonstrations around the world.

Officers, some brandishing batons, others holding rifles, pushed to regain the area in front of Parliament, expanding an operation that began on Friday to remove demonstrators and parked trucks that have blocked the city’s downtown core.

In the heart of the encampment, the police pushed people back with batons and irritant spray. They advanced methodically truck by truck as demonstrators shouted, “Shame on you!” At points, officers trained guns on individual trucks, or pointed them at the vehicles’ windows. They banged on doors, opening them up in an attempt to check for or dislodge any occupants who were still inside.

A recording played in French and English, as the police advanced. “You must leave,” it said. “Anyone found in the zone will be arrested.”

The police operation appeared to be a final salvo in the government’s belated effort to break up the occupation. In recent weeks, the demonstrations have attracted a variety of protesters airing grievances about pandemic restrictions, claims of government overreach and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s stewardship of the country.

By midmorning, police had cleared the demonstrators from what had been the occupation’s core, Wellington Street, in front of the house of Parliament, and set up barricades. Most of the trucks entrenched there for the past three weeks drove off when the advance began; a few abandoned vehicles remained...

Keep reading. 

The Truth About the Ottawa Truckers' Convoy

As the cliche goes, if you read one thing about the Ottawa freedom convoy, make it this. 

From N.S. Lyons, at the Upheaval, "Reality Honks Back:About those truckers…":

To simplify [his thesis], let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.

Much has rightly been made of the “working class” and their alienation from “the elite.” But this phrasing comes mixed up with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many (though not all) of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to frequently be either fairly solidly middle-class skilled tradesmen, relatively successful small businessmen, or land-holders (e.g. farmers, ranchers, real estate entrepreneurs) who are often actually relatively well-off. It is the character of their work that seems to shape the common identity and values of each side of the class divide more than income.

So too does this difference appear to widen – and perhaps even help explain the root of – the huge and growing gender divide in politics, given the fairly well-established preference (on average) by men to work with “things” (more concrete) and women to work with “people” (more abstract).

Meanwhile, this class divide also maps closely onto another much-discussed political wedge: the geographic split between cities, where most of the Virtuals are concentrated, and the outlying exurbs and rural hinterlands, where the Physicals remain predominant. I would suggest the nature of these two classes plays a significant role in shaping the local cultures of these places. And as anyone following events in the United States, U.K., Australia, or Europe over the last few years (such as Brexit, or the Yellow Vest protests in France) could tell you by now, partisan differences between urban metropolitan cores and provinces seem to have become one of the defining features of politics across the Western democratic world.

Below is a map of the eastern half of the United States showing at very high detail the geographic distribution of votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. The urban-rural divide between political parties couldn’t be more stark.

Differences in the Canadian electoral system mean I can’t show you a similar map for Canada, but you can be assured that the urban-rural divide there is just as significant.

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking breaks (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world.

It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening.

The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable...

RTWT. 

 

'Headlining an intimate show in Austin, Texas before a rapturous crowd of fans, the embattled comic and podcaster tackled his controversies — particularly the widely circulated viral video of the comedian using the n-word on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience...'

This is some twist. 

At the Hollywood Reporter, "Joe Rogan Returns to Stand-Up Stage, Mocks His Controversies."

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice

At Amazon, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News

This woman is hot!

At Amazon, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.

Also, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class."

More here, "New Book: How Elite University Grads RUINED Media, Working Class Concerns IGNORED By Press."

And watch, with Megyn Kelly: 

Amy Chua at Yale

It's from Elizabeth Bruenig, who is a phenomenal writer.

She used to write at both WaPo and the New York Times. I'll bet she's making bank now, and I'm surprised the Atlantic has such deep pockets. *Shrug.*

At Atlantic Monthly, "The New Moral Code of America’s Elite: Two students went to Amy Chua for advice. That sin would cost them dearly":

Every striver who ever slipped the rank of their birth to ascend to a higher order has shared the capacity to ingratiate themselves with their betters. What the truly exceptional ones have in common is the ability to connect not only with their superiors but also with their peers and inferiors. And only the rarest talents among them can bond authentically—not just transactionally—with the people who will help them be who they want to be in the world. It’s a preternatural, almost Promethean gift if you have it, and Amy Chua does.

Thus begins the scandal dubbed “dinner-party-gate,” the latest in the annals of Amy Chua, Yale Law’s very own Tiger Mom, whose infamous defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the “dinner-party-gate” of its day approximately three years ago. Then, as now, Chua’s differences with some denizens of her milieu played out in the press, vituperations, allegations, insinuations, and all.

But whatever Chua had done this time, it was either so terrible that it was unspeakable, or so minuscule that it didn’t warrant mentioning in the pages of The New York Times, New York magazine, or The New Yorker. Even so, each outlet gave the mysterious affair a lengthy report. The New York Times declared the conflagration “murky,” something to do with Chua breaking her 2019 agreement with Yale Law School about socializing with students in off-campus settings; The New Yorker noted that the alleged get-togethers had taken place during the pandemic, and considered the rest “a riddle.” Nobody could produce a complainant or a victim; the only thing anyone seemed able to verify was that, whatever Chua had done last winter, the result was that this coming fall, she would no longer be leading a first-year “small group”—intimate cohorts of first-semester law students who are guided through their first few months by a faculty member who teaches, advises, and, per a 2020 budget memorandum from the Law School, likely lunches and dines with the lawyers-to-be.

The reporting left open a pair of related questions: What, exactly, had happened? And, perhaps more salient, if what took place really was something on the order of a minor violation of an ad hoc agreement between Chua and the Yale Law School dean, Heather Gerken, why had the news spilled into the nation’s most prominent news outlets rather than fading below the fold of a campus daily?

It appears to me that what transpired amounts to a skirmish between a notorious professor and an administration that seemed so eager to relieve itself of her presence that it lunged at an opportunity to weaken her position at the expense of two students who were left to deal with the consequences of the ultimately aborted campaign. Still, the answer to the latter question is more revealing than any single aspect of the whole affair. It has to do with the culture of elite institutions, where putatively righteous ends justify an array of troubling means, and noble public virtues like fairness and safety cloak more prosaic motives—the kind of vulgar envy and resentment that people with the best manners deny.

Everyone is just trying to get ahead, after all; this is no less true, and perhaps even more true, at a place like Yale Law School. It just comes more naturally to some than others. In that case one must take matters into one’s own hands.

The proximate drama begins with a trio of second-year law students, friends and acquaintances for a time. There was a person I’ll call the Guest—all three students asked not to be named, and, believing young people should have a chance at carrying on after having their reputation destroyed or destroying the reputation of others, I agreed—who was born and raised in California. He’d arrived at Yale Law School optimistic and younger than most, having come directly from UCLA. During his first semester, he’d befriended the Visitor, a young woman from a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, who had arrived on campus from Emory. The two made a happy pair: the Guest dreamier and prone to touches of poetry, occasionally drawn to Byzantine history and Christian theology; the Visitor shrewd, practical, and levelheaded, with a keen focus on the concrete facts of policies, problems, current affairs. After working together on a major project that fall, they became and remained close.

And then there was the Archivist, a young man whom the Guest had also befriended early in his time at Yale. The two young men bonded after meeting in their contracts class, after which they would find one another at bars and parties to chat about history, politics, and other shared interests. They met up in New York City for a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Guest eventually gave the Archivist a key to his apartment, where the latter would often stop by to visit or do his laundry. In the second semester of their second year, things seemed placid.

And they may have remained that way, had it not been for a minor snag in the Guest’s academic year that put him on a path that would eventually lead him to Amy Chua’s doorstep.

A natural provocateur, Chua has vexed the Law School for years: First with Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a wry ode to the high-pressure parenting tactics of Chinese matriarchs, which didn’t thrill the gently-brought-up sorts who sometimes pass through New England’s finest universities; then with The Triple Package, a book co-authored with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, on the specific qualities that enable certain cultural groups to succeed in America relative to others—you can imagine how that went over—then with a Wall Street Journal op-ed taking a stand for the embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who, she said, was a “mentor to women,” including her own daughter. All throughout, Chua routinely scandalized the school by making edgy comments (allegedly remarking that Kavanaugh preferred his female clerks on the comely side, for instance, which Chua says is a gross distortion) and, yes, having students over for dinner, serving alcohol, and declining to filter her decidedly piquant inner monologue.

There is another side to Chua. It seems that for every student who emerges from her acquaintance embittered and put off, someone else comes away with nothing but the fondest of feelings for her. Her Twitter feed is peppered with spontaneous congratulations for her accomplished students, and features photos of the professor embracing former protégés in celebration of their success. During this latest contretemps, students advocated in Chua’s favor—quietly, perhaps, but with no less fervor than their anti-Chua counterparts. On April 1, a student emailed a trio of Law School deans: “Professor Chua cares more about her students than any other professor I’ve encountered at YLS. Professor Chua does more to advocate for her students than any other professor I’ve encountered at YLS. Professor Chua does more to mentor her students than any other professor I’ve encountered at YLS,” he insisted. “As you are all likely aware, I am far from the only student who feels this way. Does that not count for anything?” A PDF compilation of student and alumni letters in support of Chua spanned nearly 70 pages of similar sentiments.

Chua’s gift for relationships has also vested her with a great deal of power. Chua does know judges; she does have connections. It’s inconceivable that anyone on staff at Yale doesn’t. But Chua’s roster is either unusually expansive or perceived as such or both, and her status as a legal-career “kingmaker” has cast her in a supercharged penumbra. It’s the sort of mystique that can breed all kinds of resentments, especially in an environment where relationships with people in power are a finite resource.

Then there are Chua’s private, personal relationships—most notably, with her husband, Rubenfeld, a fellow Yale Law professor whose time at the university has been stained of late by allegations of sexual misconduct with students. Per a 23-page brief prepared by Yale Law Women, a respected student advocacy group with a formidable reputation for defending women’s interests on campus, the Rubenfeld saga stretches back to at least 2008, when a poster on the Top Law Schools forum obliquely mentioned rumors of monthly parties at Chua and Rubenfeld’s residence. A decade hence, Dean Gerken hired Jenn Davis, an independent Title IX investigator, to look into a range of allegations concerning Rubenfeld’s behavior with female students, from drunken, unwelcome, off-color remarks to unwanted touching and attempted kissing, on and off school grounds. Rubenfeld has categorically denied the claims. In its report, Yale Law Women said that fear of retaliation by Chua—concern that she would sabotage opportunities for career advancement—discouraged women who resented Rubenfeld’s advances from complaining about them to the administration.

At the conclusion of Davis’s investigation, Rubenfeld was suspended from his duties for two years, a penalty that took effect in 2020. Instead of closing the matter, Rubenfeld’s penalty seemed to strike concerned student groups such as Yale Law Women as a half-measure that would leave the matter to simmer until student turnover and the passage of time permitted another eruption.

Not that the Guest had any reason to contemplate any of this when, early in the spring semester of 2021, he decided to step down as an executive editor at the Yale Law Journal. The Guest, who describes himself as half-Korean, had misgivings about the way the journal’s staff had responded to his questions about the lack of racial diversity in its ranks, and his suggestions for addressing it. Still, even after making his decision, the Guest felt uncertain and unsettled. He confided this to the Visitor, who as a Black student at Yale Law had wrestled with similar questions, and she took it upon herself to bring them up with Chua during a Zoom meeting that served in place of the professor’s usual office hours. At that point, the Visitor recalls, Chua casually offered to talk with the two of them about the Journal affair at her home in New Haven, and the Visitor called the Guest to pass the invitation along.

Unfortunately for the Guest, the Archivist happened to be doing his laundry at his friend’s apartment when the call came, and he overheard the conversation, later documenting it as follows:

Feb. 18. I go over to [the Guest’s] to do my laundry. While at his apartment, I hear him call [the Visitor], who explains to him that Chua has just invited them over for dinner tomorrow. They discuss what to wear and what they should bring (ultimately deciding to bring a bottle of wine). [The Guest] makes zero mention of going over because of any personal crisis. After the phone call, he says that he’s been invited to a dinner party at Chua’s. [The Guest] implores me not to tell anybody so that Chua doesn’t get in trouble.

Despite his gumshoe efforts, the Archivist seemed to come away with a vastly different impression of the meeting than Chua, the Guest, or the Visitor.

The Guest and the Visitor independently told me that the meeting took place sometime in the afternoon, and that Chua offered cheese and crackers, but mentioned that she had dinner plans later on. The Guest recalled that he offered the bottle of wine as a hostess gift, which Chua accepted, though she drank only canned seltzer; the Guest opened the wine, meanwhile, and recalls pouring some for himself.

The Visitor recalled a fairly serious conversation: Chua offered advice about how the Guest should handle the brewing tempest his decision had spawned in their shared teapot. “He was getting press requests,” the Visitor told me. “Should he talk to the press? Professors are like, ‘What happened?’ Should he tell professors? Should he tell anyone? Or should he internalize it? Should he tell judges? Judges are clearly going to know about this, and I’m sure they do. And she wanted to know the full story of what happened. I think a big question was ‘Did I make a mistake?’”

The Guest came away from the conversation feeling reassured. The Archivist, however, was perturbed. Earlier that day, he’d texted two friends that the Guest and the Visitor were “going to dinner” at Chua’s, which, he added, they were “banned by the law school from doing.” One friend replied that this was weird, to which the Archivist replied: “Weird is a nice way to put it!” Chastened, the friend tried again: “So they are still ok with nepotism and complicity as long as it benefits them?” That was the ticket. “Yup!” the Archivist replied. Moments later, the Archivist sent a text that seemed to be more of a press release than a remark: “I think it’s deliberately enabling the secret atmosphere of favoritism, misogyny, and sexual harassment that severely undermines the bravery of the victims of sexual abuse that came forward against Rubenfeld,” he declared. How, why, or whether the Guest or the Visitor actually did any such thing was evidently left to the reader to infer.

Later that night, the Archivist logged a call with the Guest in which, he later said, the Guest sounded “extremely intoxicated”; the Guest denies that he was. By March, the Journal imbroglio was boiling over into the public sphere. Several of the school’s affinity groups had released statements, and the Journal had released information about the racial makeup of its editors—then the conflict came to the attention of conservative media outlets. Once more, the Guest had a series of questions for someone familiar with bad press.

This time, the Guest and the Visitor brought a premade date-and-cheese plate, the sort of appetizer offering, I gather, that you pick up at Wegmans on the way to Bible study. Again the two of them joined Chua at her New Haven manse for what sounds more like a media-strategizing session than the kind of debauched rager that would eventually possess the imaginations of Chua’s campus detractors. Again, the Archivist recorded the get-together in his notes: March 13: [The Guest] texts me again at 9:18 PM that he’s outside, indicating he has once again gone to Chua’s but won’t commit to saying so in writing

At that point, it seems, the Archivist had finally had enough. It was time to tell the administration what they had done.

When I was a little girl growing up in suburban North Texas not so very long ago, my grandmother, a housewife of the ’60s, would turn my cousins and me outside to play in the summer so she could sit at her kitchen table and chain-smoke her way through her library of paperback bodice-rippers. And when one of us would inevitably bolt back inside to complain about being annihilated with a Super Soaker at close range or nailed with a Nerf dart to the eye, she would always eject us with the same dismissal: Don’t be a tattletale. As far as childhood admonishments go, it was an interesting one—she wasn’t telling us not to do something, but rather not to be something...

Keep reading.

 

Shades of Blue

From Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fellow I read from time to time at the Old Gray Lady, who hits the nail on the head here like Thor smashing some enemy antagonist to dust. 

At Harper's Magazine (surprisingly):

Late on election night, when the betting markets were just realizing that Trump’s path to victory had narrowed, and leading voices on the left were lamenting the failure of anything resembling a blue wave to swell up and wash the country clean, Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman from Arizona and an Iraq War veteran, tweeted a triumphant message to his supporters: “Az Latino vote delivered! This was a 10 year project.” Gallego had ample reason to rejoice. For the first time since 1996, a Democratic presidential candidate had won the state of Arizona, thanks in large part to strong Hispanic support. This development stood in sharp contrast to outcomes in Texas and Florida, where Latinos provided crucial votes for Trump, and in California, where they even helped to doom a pro–affirmative action ballot measure. In light of this fragmented result—and amid much hand-wringing in the media over whether Latinos still form a coherent category in our obsessively charted racial landscape—one user responded:

Ruben, honest question, how do we as a party improve our work with the LatinX community across the country as well as we’ve done in AZ? Its so frustrating to see so many republican LatinX voters, but I know its on people like me to help convince them dems are the place to be.

Gallego’s blunt reply went viral: “First start by not using the term Latinx,” he told him. The MSNBC host Joy Reid, who only hours earlier had referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Clarence,” popped into the thread dumbfounded, seeming surprisingly out of touch for a professional commentator. “Can you elaborate on this a bit more?” she asked Gallego, with what seemed like genuine incredulity. “I was under the impression that this was the preferred term, and as a Black person, I’m definitely sensitive to what people prefer to be called.”

In fact, not only is “Latinx” decidedly not the term most Latinos choose, but a significant number—about three fourths of the Latino population—have never even heard of it. A bilingual national survey conducted in December 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that a mere 3 percent of Latinos use the descriptor. And yet, the “new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative,” the report observes. It is what prominent progressives—from Elizabeth Warren to Ibram X. Kendi—insist on using to describe a community to which they do not themselves belong. During the Democratic primaries, Senator Warren tweeted, “When I become president, Latinx families will have a champion in the White House. #LatinxHeritageMonth.”

“When [Latinx] is used I feel someone is taking away some of my culture,” Gallego wrote in response to Reid’s question. “Instead of trying to understand my culture they decided to change it to fit their perspective.”

The disagreement over such progressive jargon may seem like inside baseball to those who aren’t extremely online, but it is worth considering seriously, emblematic as it is of deeper fissures in the always tenuous patchwork of identity groups and economic classes that constitutes the contemporary Democratic coalition. The lives of progressive, college-educated, predominantly white “coastal elites” have become far removed from those of white Republicans, but more significantly from those of the nonwhite voters their party depends on to remain electorally viable—and whose validation lends them an air of virtuousness. The battle over “Latinx” might be understood as an instance of what the conservative commentator Reihan Salam has called “intra-white status jockeying”—an opportunity for “those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites . . . to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites.” What Gallego knows, and can’t help but bristle at, is the fact that this semantic gatekeeping is ultimately not even about Latinos.

Last February, whites on the left expressed shock and disappointment when Joe Biden beat the surging Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary, due in large part to moderate and conservative black primary voters who chose to reject the socialism they’d been told was in their best interest. Why should this have been surprising? Again, according to widely publicized research conducted by Pew, black Americans’ self-reported ideology has remained relatively stable throughout the twenty-first century. In 2019, about 40 percent of black Democratic voters considered themselves “moderate,” while an additional 25 percent identified as conservative. Just 29 percent of black Democrats described their views as “liberal.”

Yet these glimpses into the heterogeneity of black and Latino—to say nothing of Asian—political preferences did not prepare influential progressives for the far less welcome November revelation that Donald Trump—whose behavior and associations have earned him the reputation of a kleptocratic xenophobe, if not an outright fascist—had gained traction with every major demographic (including Muslim voters, despite his travel ban). In a year of inescapable talk of racial identity and white supremacy, mass protests against systemic and interpersonal racism, and a fifteen-thousand-person rally in Brooklyn for black trans lives during the height of the pandemic, the extraordinary irony was that one of the very few groups whose support for Trump declined even modestly was white males.

“This is so personally devastating to me,” began an emotional thread of tweets from the New York Times columnist Charles Blow the morning after the election. “The black male vote for Trump INCREASED from 13% in 2016 to 18% this year. The black female vote for Trump doubled from 4% in 2016 to 8% this year.” Analyzing the exit polls (which are admittedly imperfect), he also picked out white women and LGBTQ voters for opprobrium—“the percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016. DOUBLED!!!”—before landing on an insight that should spur an enormous amount of introspection on the left:

The percentage of Latinos and Asians voting for Trump INCREASED from 2016, according to exit polls. Yet more evidence that we can’t depend on the “browning of America” to dismantle white supremacy and erase anti-blackness.

Not only did Latinos, Asians, and, it must be reiterated, black voters join whites in delivering Trump more votes than the record 69.5 million Barack Obama got in 2008—more votes, that is, than any candidate in the history of the United States except Biden—they also upended assumptions down-ballot as well. In California, Proposition 16, the lavishly funded proposal to once again allow race and gender to be considered in government hiring and contracting and in public-university admissions, was roundly defeated, despite the state’s shifting demographics in the twenty-four years since the ban on affirmative action was imposed (white people now make up 36 percent of the population, second to Latinos at 39 percent).

The measure commanded strong support in just five counties in the Bay Area as well as the city of Los Angeles, Alexei Koseff noted in the San Francisco Chronicle: The “yes” campaign “vastly outspent opponents and drew high-profile endorsements from across the political spectrum,” yet the supposed progressive landslide didn’t come.

Fashionable narratives about the Democratic coalition and its members’ goals and ambitions can efface what many minorities think is in their best interest. Such misreadings are not just insensitive but dangerous. They can lead Democrats to pursue ill-conceived, poorly articulated policies that backfire to the benefit of conservatives, or worse, inflict harm on vulnerable communities. The recent push to defund the police is one of the most extravagant examples of what is, at best, high-minded intellectual recklessness. Those calling to do so “have shown a complete disregard for the voices and perspectives of many members of the African American community,” Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil-rights lawyer who formerly led the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, told the Star Tribune in July, after the city council moved to defund the MPD in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. “We have not been consulted as the city makes its decisions, even though our community is the one most heavily impacted by both police violence and community violence.”

The tragic reality is that homicides in Minneapolis increased by 50 percent in 2020. More than 500 people had been shot by December, the most in a decade and a half. Meanwhile, the city’s mayor noted a “historic” rate of attrition among Minneapolis police, with twice as many leaving the force as in a typical year. Though 2020 was exceptionally frustrating for many reasons, most notably the substantial loss of life and of economic security wrought by COVID-19, it’s hard to imagine that a stark drop in officer morale didn’t contribute to the mayhem.

Like the niche semantic preference for “Latinx,” but with far more direct and dire consequences, viral slogans such as “abolish the police”—created by people of color, but powerfully amplified by whites situated at a considerable remove—have been foisted on black communities that have a far more equivocal relationship with policing than is often acknowledged.

Online, some very audible voices argue for the abolition of prisons and police departments. Offline, countless black Americans are forced to confront the harsh inadequacy of stark rhetorical binaries. They are overpoliced and underpoliced at the same time. Outside the brutal videotaped killings by police that fill our news feeds, or the numbing grind of quotidian degradations like stop-and-frisk, it is underpolicing that causes the most harm. Jill Leovy’s masterly 2015 book, Ghettoside, presents a thorough, unsentimental account of the social dynamics plaguing American cities and the senseless killings that routinely occur in them—often perpetrated, as we are so frequently reminded, by other black people. Leovy quotes the Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy: “The principal injury suffered by African-Americans in relation to criminal matters is not overenforcement but underenforcement of the laws.” The late Tupac Shakur put it most vividly in making a case for black self-defense in a 1994 BET interview: “We next door to the killer,” he practically screamed. “We next door to ’em, you know, ’cause we up in the projects, where there’s eighty n——s in the building. All them killers that they letting out, they right there in that building. But it’s better just ’cause we black, we get along with the killers or something? We get along with the rapists ’cause we black and we from the same hood? What is that? We need protection, too!” Anyone who speaks with black people outside of academic or activist circles knows that this is hardly a fringe view...

Still more.

 

Marc Morano, Green Fraud

I actually wanted to blog more tonight, but, alas, there's too much stuff going on around here at home (including responding to loads of student requests for "extensions" on their semester term paper assignments, which I scheduled to be due BEFORE the Easter break, so students could actually chill while they're supposed to be on vacation; though now that I've actually given some of those "extensions," they'll actually be working over the same Easter break, that I told them, *sigh,* they needed to have off to relax, recharge, and reflect). 

Oh brother, what's to come of this country? 

(Well, I guess that's a rhetorical question, "shouting to the wind," with no other purpose, in a sense, but to rant helplessly).

Well, for one thing, we have to endure at least, what, the next 18-months with these idiot leftist totalitarian crackpots now hunkering down in the "Capitol," and I don't mean Washington, D.C., but the "Capitol of Panem," from the film (and novels) "The Hunger Games"?

Because, like just suggested, we're at the mercy of stupid, privileged, and hypocritical elites, like A.O.C., "Transportation Secretary" and now "climate expert, former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, and, last but not least, lying "Fauxcahontas" Senator Elizabeth Warren, who wants to raise your taxes (but not hers) for you to pay for all of this "new" technology (which isn't; I mean "windmills"?, c'mon, how long has world civilization relied on those ancient dealybobs, until these same starving and freezing folks, actually, didn't have to rely on that ancient technology that much anymore, because fossil fuels made their lives and work less burdensome and onerous, while at the same time improving the economic/material quality of life at rates that had never been seen in human history); but what do I know? If I don't shut up soon, I'll be up at the "Capitol" competing in some to-the-death "reality show" that would be a bit "too real," with me being called up from the "district" of KKKalifornia, to fight and, perhaps, die, for the entertainment of the same stupid "elites," who'd be stuffing their faces with the most obnoxious and expensive foods and wine, looking ahead to the next "spectacles," like those they had in Ancient Rome, and where human life was devalued and squandered (then, just like now), without so much as the bat of nicely, and cosmetically touched-up, eyelashes.

In any case, here's Marc Marano, at Amazon, Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse than You Think.

Marano was on "Tucker" earlier this evening, and the both of them, thankfully, I guess, inspired me to spin out this little tale of our coming "utopia" over this next 18-months; and frankly, if we do, indeed, survive until the next election, the 2022 midterms, maybe all us "rubes" in "flyover country" back in the "districts," will, at last, freakin' rise up and kick some muthaf*ckin' ass, and boot these "Green New Infrastructure" idiots back to the own sh*thole "blue states," where they can choke on their own, environmentally-friendly, and non-carbon baked, arugula cream pies. 

The Sovietization of the American Press

A great piece, from the surprisingly amazing Matt Taibbi, at his Substack page:

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden's historic victory for America

The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:

Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”:

It doesn’t take much looking to find comedians like James Adomian and Anthony Atamaniuk ab-libbing riffs on Biden with ease. He checks almost every box as a comic subject, saying inappropriate things, engaging in wacky Inspector Clouseau-style physical stunts (like biting his wife’s finger), and switching back and forth between outbursts of splenetic certainty and total cluelessness. The parody doesn’t even have to be mean — you could make it endearing cluelessness. But to say nothing’s there to work with is bananas.

The first 50 days of Biden’s administration have been a surprise on multiple fronts. The breadth of his stimulus suggests a real change from the Obama years, while hints that this administration wants to pick a unionization fight with Amazon go against every tendency of Clintonian politics. But it’s hard to know what much of it means, because coverage of Biden increasingly resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions.

When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the “cost” of “breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies” was too high, the New York Times headline read: “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach.” When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties because “the world is a very dangerous place” and “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.

“In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.”

This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.

The old con of the Manufacturing Consent era of media was a phony show of bipartisanship. Legitimate opinion was depicted as a spectrum stretching all the way from “moderate” Democrats (often depicted as more correct on social issues) to “moderate” Republicans (whose views on the economy or war were often depicted as more realistic). That propaganda trick involved constantly narrowing the debate to a little slice of the Venn diagram between two established parties. Did we need to invade Iraq right away to stay safe, as Republicans contended, or should we wait until inspectors finished their work and then invade, as Democrats insisted?

The new, cleaved media landscape advances the same tiny intersection of elite opinion, except in the post-Trump era, that strip fits inside one party. Instead of appearing as props in a phony rendering of objectivity, Republicans in basically all non-Fox media have been moved off the legitimacy spectrum, and appear as foils only. Allowable opinion is now depicted stretching all the way from one brand of “moderate” Democrat to another...

Keep reading.

 

Hunter Biden Planning 'Art Show" With 'Shady' Dealer 'Who Was Charged With Terrorist Threats

And his dealer has "links to China"?

Well blow me down! 

This can't be true. And we know this can't be true because the leftist-Dem-Big-Tech-Media Oligarchy suppressed any information about our "beloved and wonderful" Hunter, to rig the election last October in favor of Hunter's most "honest and caring" father, the serial liar, Joseph Robinette Biden.

Funny how the idiots in the lamestream fake-news media assume their non-readers are just bunches of backwoods redneck rubes. *Eye-roll.*

At the New York Post, "Hiding Hunter Biden laying low in LA, starting art career with shady dealer":

As federal prosecutors continue their criminal probes into Hunter Biden’s taxes and international business dealings, the President’s son — shuttling between Washington DC and a sprawling Hollywood Hills home — is lying low, consulting with lawyers and focusing on his new career in art.

Biden, who turns 51 next week, is prepping a solo show with Soho art dealer Georges Berges, who currently represents Sylvester Stallone. Berges was once arrested for “terrorist threats” and assault with a deadly weapon in California and has strong ties to China.

Biden, who continues to hold business interests in a billion-dollar Chinese investment firm, moved into the 2,000-square foot hilltop Los Angeles home with his wife Melissa Cohen in January 2020, two months before the birth of their baby boy.

The home is connected to Shane Khoh, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and real estate investor who is CEO of SXU Investment Holdings LLC, the California company that has owned the $3.8 million property since 2011, according to public records. Khoh, an American who is fluent in Chinese, sits on the board of Siong Heng Realty Pte Ltd., a Singapore-based real estate holding company, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is also listed as a “venture partner” of Diverse Communities Impact Fund, a private-equity group that features former Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on its board of advisors.

The house was featured in a New York Times profile of Biden as an emerging abstract painter last year. Last year Khoh told The Washington Examiner that Biden was paying $12,000 a month for the property, which features a pool house that Biden has turned into an art studio. Khoh denied any prior relationship with Biden to the newspaper...

Still more.

I'm just gobsmacked at how stupid I've been to actually hold on to any thread of optimism that this miraculous new era of national "unity" is indeed truly on the way. Don't leftist always say, "Help is on the way"? 

Well, I don't want any of their help, except to have the Democrat-idiots now in "power" indeed fulfill some of their many, many promises to reach out and "help" regular folks. I mean, shutting down the "Keystone Pipeline," putting tens of thousands of highly skilled tradesmen and women out of work has just gotta do wonders for pulling people back together, to say nothing of "reviving" the economy. But it's still early morning, and I've cut back on my coffee consumption, because drinking coffee right now only compounds my not-so-positive reactions to the daily monstrous stupidity I see from our totally and morally bankrupt Democrat coastal and beltway elites now claiming a "mandate" to literally destroy what's left of our once-beloved republic.

Hedge Fund Manager Claims Victim Status; Claims 'We Have to Work Together and Pull Together'

It's AoSHQ.

Just head over there for your morning jolt, anyway, including this "flaming skull" bombshell post, "Kevin Clinesmith, the Corrupt FBI Lawyer Who Forged Documents to Frame an Innocent Man, Gets... NO JAIL TIME, HAS TO PAY A HUNDRED DOLLAR FINE," not to mention all the other tricks and treats the gang over there is wont to post from time to time, lol.

Have a great day, the proud but few "Band of Brothers" who continue to log on to visit my humble blog, lol. 

I appreciate your support as readers, but I probably don't say that enough.

Have a great weekend.

'How is That Not Rigging The Game?' CNN's Poppy Harlow Questions Ethics of Cutting Off Reddit Investors but Not Hedge Funds (VIDEO)

Watch, at Mediaite.

PREVIOUSLY: "GameStop Stock Soars as Reddit Investors Take on Wall Street Elites!"

GameStop Stock Soars as Reddit Investors Take on Wall Street Elites!

This is the best, I'm telling you, lol!

At the Other McCain, "GameStop: The Best Story EVER!":

Oh, my! Oh, my! What a storm of hilarious schadenfreude has overtaken the stock market this week! The hero of this saga is a guy with a Reddit account called “DeepF**kingValue” who, in September 2019, accumulated $53,000 in stock in the retail chain GameStop.

From any objective analysis, this was the Stupidest Investment Ever, because GameStop’s business model — selling physical copies of videogames and equipment in brick-and-mortar stores, mostly at shopping malls — is doomed in the online digital era. And yet . . .

“DeepF**kingValue” had a hunch that GameStop was drastically undervalued when it was selling as low as 30 cents per share. His argument was that the retailer was shifting to online sales, competing with Amazon, while cutting costs by closing many of its brick-and-mortar stores. So he kept buying, and the share price kept going up, and as “DeepF**kingValue” shared his story on the Reddit channel WallStreetBets, a cult following developed. By December, with GameStop selling at $4 a share, “DeepF**kingValue” was a legit millionaire.

God Bless America, land that I love!

You can imagine every agent in Hollywood trying to get their client the lead role of “DeepF**kingValue” in The GameStop Story, a yet-to-be-made movie that will win every Academy Award. And the brilliant plot twist, the Second Act turn, is when actual corporate guys started to notice what was happening with this Reddit-driven phenomenon. Ryan Cohen, CEO of the online pet-supply business Chewy-dot-com, ploughed $82 million into GameStop at an average price around $9 a share (as much as 30 times what “DeepF**kingValue” had paid for his shares in 2019), which got Cohen a seat on GameStop’s board. Meanwhile, the Reddit crew on WallStreetBets discerned that hedge funds, which considered GameStop a sure loser, had gone short on the company, i.e., investing money on the proposition that its share price would go down.

Billions. B-I-L-L-I-O-N-S — these hedge fund wizards were so sure that GameStop was overpriced that they shorted the stock to the tune of something like $13 billion. And they got screwed. Bad.

Prison gang rape is the only metaphor that comes to mind for how badly the hedge funds got screwed on their GameStop shorts. How bad was it? So bad that NASDAQ intervened, so bad that Discord shut down the WallStreetBets chat channel, so bad that the Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating the Reddit crew.

The “creative destruction” of capitalism can be a beautiful thing to watch, and if I were asked to write the script for The GameStop Story, the closing scene would be when “DeepF**kingValue” (played by Seth Rogen with a neckbeard) drives up to Mar-a-Lago in his gull-wing Lamborghini, with a Swedish supermodel named Elsa in the passenger seat.

Donald Trump comes out to greet him, personally...

Sill more.

Also, at Memeorandum, "Robinhood Stops Users From Trading GameStop Stocks, Other Reddit YOLO Picks."

Lincoln Project's John Weaver Comes Out as Gay! Who Knew, LOL?!!

Heh. 

Following-up, "Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver Accused of 'Grooming' Young Men, Offering Jobs for Sex."

At the Other McCain, "John Weaver: ‘The Truth Is I’m Gay’":

Sunday, I blogged about the accusation that John Weaver, the former top campaign aide to John McCain and co-founder of the anti-Trump “Lincoln Project,” had been sexually harassing young men. Now he has been forced out of the Lincoln Project:

Lincoln Project cofounder John Weaver is no longer affiliated with the Democratic Super PAC after admitting — in the classic tradition of the Friday evening news dump — to having “inappropriate” sexual conversations with young men.

“The truth is that I’m gay,” Weaver told former Washington Free Beacon journalist Lachlan Markay in a prewritten statement. “And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place.”

Weaver reportedly took a medical leave of absence from the Lincoln Project over the summer, and will not be returning to the controversial Super PAC.

Over the past few days, dozens of young men have come forward with accusations that Weaver engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct, including text messages and phone conversations, as well as “grooming” them by promising lucrative career opportunities in exchange for sex. The allegations were broght to light through the reporting of journalists Ryan Girdusky and Scott Stedman.

Weaver admitted to making the young men “uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations,” which included at least one instance in which Weaver allegedly emailed an unsolicited photo of his penis. However, he appeared to suggest the men accusing him of grooming them, or offering favors in exchange for sex, are lying, perhaps for nefarious reasons.

“While I am taking full responsibility for the inappropriate messages and conversations,” Weaver wrote in the statement, “I want to state clearly that the other smears being leveled at me … are categorically false and outrageous.” The emergence of the allegations, Weaver suggested, was facilitated by political critics of the Lincoln Project.

Wait — “dozens of young men”? This implies a number in the 25-30 range, at least. Your homosexuality is not really secret, if you’re engaged in such large-scale solicitation...

Maybe they're all homos at the Lincoln Project,  NTTAWWT!

Still more at the Other McCain.

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

Unthinkable? As Pandemic Rages, Colleges Cut Tenure

At Tax Prof, "WSJ: Hit By Covid-19, Colleges Do The Unthinkable and Cut Tenure":

When Kenneth Macur became president at Medaille College in 2015, the small, private school in Buffalo, N.Y., was “surviving paycheck to paycheck,” he said. Enrollment was declining and the small endowment was flat.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. The campus shut down and revenue plummeted 15%. Dr. Macur saw what he considered an opportunity: With the approval of the board of trustees, he suspended the faculty handbook by invoking an “act of God” clause embedded in it. He laid off several professors, cut the homeland security and health information management programs, rescinded the lifelong job security of tenure and rewrote the faculty handbook, rules that had governed the school for decades.

“I believe that this is an opportunity to do more than just tinker around the edges. We need to be bold and decisive,” he wrote in a letter to faculty on April 15. “A new model is the future of higher education.”

Dr. Macur and presidents of struggling colleges around the country are reacting to the pandemic by unilaterally cutting programs, firing professors and gutting tenure, all once-unthinkable changes. Schools employed about 150,000 fewer workers in September than they did a year earlier, before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department. That is a decline of nearly 10%. Along the way, they are changing the centuries-old higher education power structure.

The changes upset the “shared governance” model for running universities that has roots in Medieval Europe. It holds that a board of trustees has final say on how a school is run but largely delegates academic issues to administrators and faculty who share power.

This setup, and the job protection of tenure, promote a need for consensus and deliberation that is one reason why universities often endure for centuries. But this power structure can also hamper an institution’s ability to make tough personnel decisions or react quickly to changes in the labor market or economy.

In recent months, the American Association of University Professors, which advocates for faculty and helped establish the modern concept of tenure in 1940, has received about 100 complaints from professors around the country alleging power grabs by college presidents. The organization has labeled the changes at colleges a “national crisis.”

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

What's Her Face: 'We're Talking About the Transformation of Humanity Into a Godless Transhumanist Nighmare From an Orwellian Hell' (VIDEO)

I love this lady, lol.

Victims of Communism

One can't be reminded enough of this historical abomination.

At WND:

NEW COLUMN: #Nazism, at about 25 million dead, turned out to be distinctly less murderous than #communism, whose grand total of victims, estimated at between 85-100 million murdered, is the most colossal case of political carnage in history." #BLM https://t.co/OgFOX74hnp

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) July 31, 2020

The Lincoln Project Attacks President Trump (VIDEO)

Sarah Rumpf has it, at Mediaite:

Lincoln Project Gets Personal In New Ad, Mocking ‘Impotus Americanus’ Trump’s Weight and ‘Ruddy Orange' Color https://t.co/1nBvF2SALd via @mediaite

— Sarah Rumpf (@rumpfshaker) July 31, 2020

This is the most merciless @ProjectLincoln ad yet.

I would not want to work in the White House today.#ImpotusAmericanus https://t.co/oJHMGSkzxQ

— Jesse Damiani (@JesseDamiani) July 31, 2020

Commentary at Althouse, "The Lincoln Project indulges in fat shaming, color shaming, and the depreciating masculinity in this tone-deaf attack on Trump":

I only got half way through this before clicking it off. It might be funnier to fans of David Attenborough nature programs, but to me the reliance on a English-accented supercilious male voice was just embarrassingly out of touch with present-day America...

Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy

At Amazon, Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class.