Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA

Very much worth your time.

From UCLA Anthropology Professor Joseph Manson, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "The ideological takeover of my university has ruined academic life for anyone who still believes in freedom of thought'."

Why the Left Truly Is Evil (and Not Stupid)

At FrontPage Magazine, "'When a person shows you who they are, believe them'”:

In America this minute leftists can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt. They are pushing an agenda that is evil. They are hellbent on accomplishing it and they are saying so publicly.

The late Charles Krauthammer was the person credited for the intriguing binary observation that “conservatives view the left as stupid,” but that “liberals view conservatives as evil.”

We see evidence of that second part constantly. The vehement hatred of those who support America First is proven every day. The hatred burns so deeply in fact that they seek out ways to create out of whole cloth imaginative conspiracies of Trump working with Russia and double impeachments based on literally no evidence.

They justify the advancement of ludicrous stories of deranged presidents lurching at steering wheels—even when one or more secret service personnel were present and are able to testify to the opposite.

They claim pro-lifers hate women. They claim that parents who don’t want drag queens in their kids’ schools are bigots. And they especially despise people who are faithful to God, family, and nation.

Nope, there exists plenty of evidence that the second part of Krauthammer’s theory is true.

So what about the first half? Should conservatives any longer give the left the benefit of the doubt as to their policies? Should we innocently believe they are simply misinformed as opposed to radically devoted agents to an agenda that is not only anti-American but that in fact is… evil?

New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz my long time friend and weekly guest on my show has consistently chided me on the air to take Krauthammer’s observation as true. Because I believe Karol to be immensely insightful and one of the most important voices of common sense in America—I usually try.

Yet with apologies to Charles and Karol, I can no longer.

Maya Angelou is famous for saying, “When a person shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Well this week (and honestly for the duration of their term in office) the Biden *Administration has been and is telling us exactly who they are.

When asked directly by a CNN anchor on live camera, “What do you say to a family who can’t afford $4.85 a gallon for months, much less years?”

Brian Deese a top economic advisor to *President Biden responded in essence by saying that the “stakes are too high” and that this is about “the future of the liberal world order,” and that they’d “have to stand firm.”

In other words families who can’t afford to pay double or triple for the energy they need to merely survive must absorb the punch to the face and make the sacrifice for the greater good. And if we can’t do so, tough bananas our sacrifice will have been worth it all.

He’s not lying or shading the message - he means exactly what he said and they are standing firm.

They are willing to impose suffering onto the people they work for in order to bring about their newly enlightened, “we know better than you,” reality. This is Hitler gassing humans, Thanos snapping his finger, Stalin executing dissidents, and Bin Ladin toppling buildings—all for some greater good.

And it’s not just energy, this group doesn’t care if babies have formula, your family has food, or if women bleed out from their monthly cycles.

They don’t care if a boy exposes his penis to your daughter in her locker room, or if cashless bail states release criminals that just tried to rape or assault her.

They accept all forms of racism so long as God fearing men ultimately get blamed for everything. They despise police—who are here to slow or stop evil in progress. And they help elect prosecutors who will refuse to hold evil people accountable.

This is what the liberal world order looks like.

But in order for them to bring it about they must starve the serfs and take away any resource that would prevent them doing rebelling. Hence no money or guns for you and me.

Nope Charles and Karol, I’m taking a rare step in disagreeing with both of you.

The left is evil—full stop.

They are willing to kill, maim, bleed, assault, and starve you until you comply.

And I think it’s time we take Ms. Angelou’s observation, call it what it is, and stop them.

They are showing us who they are!

 

The Sinister Symmetry of CRT and GRT

From Andrew Sullivan today, on Substack, "The extremes of right and left on immigration are fueling each other":

The MSM rushed last weekend to explain the previously obscure conspiracy theory that motivated a mass-murderer on a shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. We didn’t get to read the warped “manifesto” of the mass shooter, but we were told about its account of “Great Replacement Theory.” It posits that a shadowy, global elite (in this case — surprise! — Jewish) is deliberately fostering mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The goal is a minority-majority country in which the Republican Party is doomed by inexorable racial demographics, and a whole new multiracial society can be built on the smoldering ruins of “white supremacy.”

“Wait a minute!” as Homer Simpson might say. Haven’t I heard some of that kind of talk before? It’s coming back to me now. Here’s one devotee: “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Here’s another: “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.” And another: “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing.”

These quotes are from then-VP Joe Biden, Univision founder Jorge Ramos, and sassy Dem Party hack James Carville celebrating the implosion of white America. This was also the theory that drove the 2016 Clinton campaign to ignore white swing voters and focus instead on the non-white: “What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” was how the genius Robby Mook put it, before he helped elect Trump.

No, these people do not represent a secret conspiracy — let alone a Jewish one — to dilute the “whiteness” of America. There is nothing secret about it at all. The majority-minority enthusiasts represent instead a transparent movement to see Americans primarily in racial/generational terms, to view a multi-racial society as a zero-sum endeavor in which a gain for whites always means a loss for non-whites, and who therefore cheer the declining percentage of Americans who are deemed “white.”

Whole libraries could be constructed by the books outlining this thesis. It really got started with John Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (2002), Sid Blumenthal’s “The Strange Death of Republican America” (2008), Carville’s “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” (2009), Ron Brownstein’s Next America project (2012), Paul Taylor’s “The Next America” (2014), and William Frey’s “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America” (2014), to cite a few. All of them argue that mass immigration is a critical factor in making America majority non-white and therefore Democratic. And all of them are pretty much psyched.

When I say “psyched,” there is a spectrum. Here’s Michelle Goldberg not so long ago: “Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority” — and she “felt good” about that non-white future. Here’s Jen Rubin, reacting to the news last year that the Census found numbers of white people falling: “This is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” And who can forget Michael Moore’s reaction to the same news “Best day ever in U.S. history.”

None of them seemed concerned that the thesis could boomerang on them. By “boomerang,” I mean racializing politics so aggressively that you actually help create and legitimize a racially white party — because of negative partisanship. In the words of Michael Barone: “When you keep telling white Americans that they will soon become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’ — then many non-college graduate ‘deplorables’ may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively.” Exactly.

And when this demographic prediction is combined with constant denigration of “white people,” and when a simple white majority is suddenly redefined as “white supremacy” — indistinguishable from the era of Jim Crow — then feelings might get, shall we say, “triggered.” If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: “so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.”

As for the GRT notion that demographic transformation was somehow imposed on America by cunning elites, there’s no real evidence for that. The key moment — the Immigration Act of 1965, which made non-white immigration a priority — was not deemed demographically revolutionary at the time. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified: “This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America.” Senator Edward Kennedy pledged:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

His brother, Bobby, told the House subcommittee his prediction of Asian immigration under the bill: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle, it would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear … we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.” Emanuel Celler, House sponsor of the bill, insisted: “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European.”

And yet by 1998, Patrick Reddy, a Democratic consultant, boasted that the act had “resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.” And by 2018, 78 percent of immigrants were non-European, and Europeans made up a mere 9.8 percent of new green-card holders in 2020. As for Bobby Kennedy’s prediction of 5,000 immigrants from Asia, the number now is 14 million. Not a plot. Just a massive predictive error.

Mass illegal immigration has also lent legitimacy to gripes about rapid demographic change against the majority will. You could argue that the 1965 Act was a democratic process; but you can’t really say that about subsequent illegal immigration. The GOP liked the cheap labor; the Democrats believed that it would eventually help them win elections. That wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a kind of anti-democratic mutual understanding — and you can’t blame someone for thinking it felt like one. Voters repeatedly voted for border control, but even Trump failed...

If we are to get past the kind of ugly violence and race essentialism in Great Replacement Theory, then we also need an antidote to the toxins of Critical Race Theory. The two illiberalisms are profoundly connected. They need each other. And, in their racialized heart, they are morally exactly the same.

 

Buffalo and the Myth of Racist America

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "Democrats want to create another George Floyd moment."

Twitter, the Supreme Court, the Progressive Revolution

From Caroline Glick, at the Jewish News Syndicate, "As long as revolutionary progressives maintain their control over key U.S. national institutions, Republican election victories will be insufficient to save the U.S. and restore liberty to its citizens":

May 8, 2022 / JNS) America is in the throes of a revolution. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, progressives now control nearly every national institution. They control Wall Street, Silicon Valley, universities, local school boards, the teachers’ unions, the entertainment industry, the vast majority of the media, the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. military, and currently, the White House and both houses of Congress.

Progressives use their control over these institutions to change both the character of the United States and the rules of the game in a manner that will enable them to perpetuate their power regardless of the sentiments of the American people.

Progressives are rewriting American history. They are taking aim at God and believers, and at the nuclear family, while indoctrinating children against their families and their country. There is no area of human endeavor that progressives have not politicized.

One of the last national institutions where the conservatives hold sway is the Supreme Court. And last Monday, the Supreme Court came under a malicious assault whose clear goal is to subvert its independence. In a move without precedent in U.S. history, Politico published a draft Supreme Court decision written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is a member of the Court’s conservative majority.

Today’s Supreme Court comprises five conservatives, one centrist and three progressives. Alito’s draft explained why the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which removed the power of states to determine the legality of pregnancy termination, making abortions legal nationwide, was unconstitutional and overturned it. If Alito’s decision, which is supported by his fellow conservative justices, becomes final, the power to determine the legality of pregnancy termination will devolve back to the individual states.

Second, the leaker sought to incite righteous rage among progressives, that will pressure the two remaining moderates in the Democratic majority in the Senate to vote to abrogate the Senate filibuster. By preventing Republicans from using the filibuster, the razor-thin Democrat majority will be able to ram through radical legislation ahead of their expected losses in the congressional elections in November.

Among other things, unfettered by the filibuster, progressives will be able to expand the number of justices on the Court from nine to 15. And if they move fast enough, President Joe Biden will be able to pack the court with an additional six progressive justices and thus effectively seize permanent control of the high court.

As for those elections, all major polls foresee progressives suffering crushing, historic defeats in both houses. Until Obama’s presidency, when progressives seized control of the Democrat Party, polls like the current ones would have compelled the Democrats to abandon their progressive policies and make a ninety-degree turn to the center. But today, every demonstration of public opposition to progressive policies convinces progressive revolutionaries to double down. When last year parents began protesting anti-American, racist and increasingly pornographic indoctrination of their children in K-12 schools, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to treat protesting parents like “domestic terrorists.”

Progressive-controlled state and local governments have responded to public outcries against skyrocketing crime rates by passing laws banning pre-trial detention and bail, sending violent criminals back on the streets.

In every sphere of public endeavor, progressive politicians, bureaucrats and activists have met public opposition and protest with tyranny and rebuke.

One of the main weapons in the progressive arsenal is disinformation—the deliberate distortion of information to advance an agenda...

This disinformation campaign brings us to Twitter, the social media platform purchased last month by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past decade, Twitter became the social media network with the largest influence on the public discourse. No self-respecting journalist, activist or policymaker can afford not to have an active account.

Twenty years ago, the internet and the social media platforms it generated became the largest free market of ideas in human history. They were also the engine for political victories for conservative politicians in the United States. For the first time, the internet gave conservative candidates the ability to communicate directly with voters, without the mediation of liberal/progressive media behemoths. All of this began to change during Obama’s presidency, as more and more conservative voices suffered a spectrum of sanctions, from shadow bans, which blocked their audience from seeing what they were posting, to banishment from Facebook and other social media platforms.

The process accelerated and became more extreme in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump’s victory was a grave embarrassment for the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Clinton blamed them for her loss. Her basic claim was that had Facebook, Twitter and Google not permitted the Trump campaign more or less the same use of their platforms as they ostensibly offer everyone, Trump would not have won. As Clinton and her supporters put it, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their colleagues were supposed to prevent Trump and his supporters from “disseminating disinformation,” that is, campaign materials, on their platforms. Freedom of expression, Clinton and her supporters insisted, wasn’t for everyone.

Chastened, to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020, Zuckerberg donated $340 million to election non-profit groups he founded for the purpose of increasing Democrat vote numbers in key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter initiated a censorship campaign against Trump and his supporters the likes of which no one had ever experienced.

That censorship campaign reached its height weeks before the election, when the New York Post published the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. President Joe Biden’s son, a crack addict, had abandoned his laptop in a repair shop in Delaware. After his efforts to return the laptop were unsuccessful, the owner of the store turned its contents over to the FBI because the computer contained evidence that Biden and his family may have committed several felonies.

At a minimum, the contents of the laptop exposed that Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from foreign firms with direct ties to the Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian governments. Hunter Biden seemed to implicate his father in the influence-peddling operations in several of his emails.

The Post story was explosive because it was entirely true. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. All the details of the deals were authentic. They exposed a web of influence peddling with hostile governments that made clear that Biden and his family were ripe for extortion by those governments. Yet, rather than allow their platforms to be used to inform the American people of this information, Twitter led the way in preventing the public from hearing about it. Twitter de-platformed the New York Post and private users who dared to link to the story. Facebook followed suit. Fifty retired U.S. intelligence and security chiefs proclaimed the story was “Russian disinformation.”

It took a year for the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that the laptop was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the New York Post stories were entirely true. In the meantime, in the name of fighting “disinformation,” Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants had denied the American people access to information that, as post-election polls made clear, would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.

Since its first days in office, the Biden administration has openly pressured technology giants to increase their censorship and block conservative voices, claiming that such silencing and suppression is necessary to fight racism and fake news...

 

Boston School Has Transgender Explain to 4 and 5-Year-Olds That Sometimes Babies Are Assigned the Wrong Sex

At AoSHQ, "David French: Republicans Are 'Against Free Speech' Because They're Instructing Government Employees What They Can Teach Kindergarteners."

Your Priority Is the Emotional Comfort of Powerful Elites

It's Glenn Greenwald on the creepy, vile social media lifestyle reporter Taylor Lorenz and her enablers in the Democrat-leftist "mainstream" media establishment, "Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them" Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object."

The Lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas

 At FrontPage Magazine, "A hospitalized justice, a racist campaign, and the media heckler’s veto":

Even as Justice Clarence Thomas was hospitalized, a leftist lynch mob rallied on social media calling for his impeachment or death. They weren’t especially picky about which one it would be.

The same radical faction championing Biden’s selection of a black woman for the Supreme Court as a groundbreaking step forward and berating Republicans for refusing to support her were simultaneously demanding that the only sitting black justice on the court step down.

The calls for Thomas’ death are based on pure unadulterated hatred. And so are the calls for his impeachment. None of them have even the faintest basis in anything resembling the law.

The Women's March called for the impeachment of Justice Thomas because his wife, Ginni, had advocated against election fraud. Or as the racist leftist hate group put it, "The revelations that Ginni Thomas advocated for the overthrow of our democracy are disqualifying — not just for her as a human being of any decency, but for her husband.”

A “human being of any decency” wouldn’t be going after a judge by targeting his wife.

The only possible reason for disqualifying Thomas would be the presumption that men are obligated to control their wives. And prevent them from expressing political views in public.

Is this the exciting new feminist position that the Women’s March would like to debut?

Would any of the great minds at the Women’s March like to contemplate the legal implications of creating a male guardianship for women of the kind that might have existed in the 18th century?

Justice Breyer’s wife is a member of the English nobility, it doesn’t mean he answers to the Queen.

Judges whose spouses have an “interest” in a case are obligated to recuse themselves from it. But having political views about a national issue is not the same thing as having an “interest” in it. I doubt there’s a single judicial spouse who didn’t have an opinion on the 2020 election. And many of them may have signed petitions, posted comments, or otherwise urged an outcome.

Or participated in the Women’s March attacking the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election.

That’s political activism, it’s not an “interest”.

The New York Times and the New Yorker cited a federal law stating that judges must rescue themselves if their spouses have “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” A point of view is not an interest. If it were, there could be no married judges.

Nevertheless law professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted, “That clearly applied here.” How?

“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Stephen Gillers, an NYU prof quoted by the New York Times, convolutedly argued. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”

Millions of Americans have phoned, sent letters and emails to members of Congress advocating particular policies. Did they all join the “team” of every single public official whom they contacted? Should any judges they’re married to have to recuse themselves from those cases?

Had Ginni Thomas been formally employed by the Trump team, it would be another story. Instead she was an activist urging members of the team to do everything they possibly could.

It doesn’t make her a member of the team.

If that weren’t absurd enough, both media outlets have cited a law stating that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Is there any federal judge, appointed as part of a partisan process, whose impartiality can’t be reasonably questioned in partisan cases?

As usual the Left has invented a standard that it doesn’t intend to apply in any other cases. Certainly not in any cases where it would inhibit its stable of unconstitutional judicial activists.

“What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?” a New York Times op-ed demanded. The author, Jesse Wegman, a Times editor, presumably knows the political views of his wife, Kyra, and also, presumably, he writes his own views in his columns. Not hers.

This isn’t a complicated concept for any functional adult.

Supreme Court justices are aware of the storm of controversy over the cases in front of them. They’re expected to follow the law and rule accordingly without taking into account the views of family members, friends, and New York Times editors. That’s what they do for a living.

Thomas married Ginni in 1987. By then he was nearly 40 years old and had worked as a lawyer, a prosecutor, and as a civil rights official in the Reagan administration. He had developed his own point of view on the world. A unique one as testified by his rulings over the years.

Leftists and their media would like us to believe that the only reason Justice Thomas believes anything or rules on anything is because his white wife tells him to do it. That’s stupidly racist.

Even those who violently hate Thomas ought to be able to admit that he has a developed judicial philosophy and that his rulings reflect that unique worldview. The idea that a man who has defied expectations throughout his life, who has persevered despite being repeatedly hit with every racial slur in the book, is just following his wife’s lead is dumb beyond belief.

And yet this is the argument that the lynch mob targeting Justice Thomas is going with.

After all the fury over his wife’s activism, what does this amount to in Justice Thomas’ rulings? Where is the evidence of any conflict of interest or any violation of the law? It doesn’t exist.

The New York Times noted that "Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr." responded to the Supreme Court rejecting an election lawsuit by Texas by "issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down." Actually Alito wrote the dissent, with Thomas joining him, on procedural grounds. At the time the dissent was issued, the media and its legal experts argued that it was not a ruling on the election, but on jurisdictional standing.

The paper also misleadingly notes that, "Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures." The Supreme Court had previously deadlocked several times over the issue with previous dissents by Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, and the Thomas dissent highlighted by the paper had focused on the importance of providing "clear rules for future elections."

The media and its legal experts, shoddy as they may be, know all this perfectly well. They know that the paper is deliberately misrepresenting these cases in order to single out Thomas.

And that there’s no basis for doing so.

Thomas wrote as one of the court’s two leading conservatives, along with Alito, and there was nothing unique in his dissents that deviated from his judicial philosophy. Using his wife to attack him is the despicable tactic of a ruthless totalitarian movement with no shred of decency.

Having run out of any credible legal arguments, the lynch mob once again borrows the familiar logic of Russiagate to argue that their smear campaign proves that Thomas must recuse.

“Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said,” the New York Times argued.

Since the New York Times and its media partners are the source of the “uproar”, conservative judges would have to recuse every time lefties launch a vocal smear campaign against them.

That’s using the media as a heckler’s veto to bar conservative judges from cases.

And that’s what this is really about.

Rural Voters Key to Battleground Races in November's Congressional MIdterm Elections

I love this.

From Josh Kraushaar, at National Journal, "Over half of this year’s toss-up races are in districts with a sizable rural constituency. That reality makes holding the House—or even staying within striking distance—more challenging for Democrats":

The story of Democratic success since the Trump era has been one of political shifts in the suburbs. Well over half of President Biden’s voters in 2020 hailed from the suburbs, and he won suburban voters by a whopping 11 points. Of the 41 House seats Democrats picked up in the 2018 midterms, 38 of them were located in predominantly suburban districts. The suburbs remain the preeminent battleground in the country, as Republicans in 2022 gained back much of the ground they lost with Democrats.

But in this year’s House races, a disproportionate number of battleground races are taking place in either rural districts or districts with a significant rural segment. Of the 20 races that are ranked as toss-ups by The Cook Political Report, over half have a sizable rural constituency. It’s a reminder that Democrats can’t take rural America for granted, at least if they hope to hold a House majority for the long term.

Several of the rural House battlegrounds are newly drawn districts, like North Carolina’s 13th, which combines the burgeoning, Democratic-trending Research Triangle exurbs with the deep-red rural outposts of Harnett and Johnston counties. One is a brand new seat, Colorado’s 8th District, which includes parts of Weld County where “cattle sun themselves on grazing land and feedlots,” as The Denver Post put it. Others have always been competitive, like Maine’s expansive 2nd District, home to one of the most independent-minded Democrats in the House.

The best chance for Democrats to hold down their losses this year is to win many of those seesawing suburban seats. But even if they make a miraculous suburban turnaround, they still could lose their majority by failing to hold onto the smaller number of rural seats held by their party. As national Democrats cater to urban, progressive interests, they’ve all but abandoned the rural constituencies that once made up a major part of their coalition.

As former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock warned in The New York Times: “The Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.” He urged Democrats to “show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America” by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. A good start would be to spend time investing into the pivotal competitive House races taking place there....

If the Democratic Party can’t moderate its message on social issues, for instance, it’s easy to see even the most adept lawmakers getting swept up in the tide. The first step to getting things right is recognizing that, as important as the suburbs are, Democrats can’t write off rural America entirely. A winning political message for Democrats is one that accommodates their coalition to the interests of those being left behind..

 

Disney Admits It Wants to Queer Your Kids

From Rod Dreher, at the American Conservative, "Well, here you go."

BONUS: It's Karol Markowitz, at the New York Post, "I’m quitting Disney after seeing it boast about pushing ‘gender theory’."

Flaming Skull: Washington Post Verifies Some But Not All of Hunter Biden's Laptop Using Third-Party Cryptographic Signature Analysis ... Which the Daily Caller Did 17 Months Ago and Thereby Verified All of the Laptop's Contents

At AoSHQ, "Thanks to ... for that great 'Hunter Biden Flaming Crack Pipe' gif. I hope you'll forgive me for using it again. John Sexton at Hot Air reports on that, and in the except here, notes that the Post has finally verified that a Ukranian energy tycoon met with Joe Biden -- and Hunter Biden; but note "The Big Guy" was here for this meeting ... Twenty fucking months after the New York Post confirmed it."

GRAPHIC WARNING: Four Israelis Murdered in Terrorist Knife Attack in Beersheba, Southern Israel

I've never seen a knife attack this grisly. Frankly, I've rarely ever seen anything this grisly. It's personal when murdering by knife attack. 

God have mercy. How unbelievably horrific. 

Don't watch if you have a weak stomach, really. 

Brooke Goldstein has video on Twitter, "GRAPHIC: This is pure Jew-hatred. This is a sickness. 4 Israelis were killed today in a stabbing attack in Beersheba."

And at the Times of Israel, "4 killed, 2 wounded in stabbing attack at Beersheba mall; terrorist shot dead: Arab Israeli from southern Bedouin town stabs woman at gas station, rams cyclist, then attacks others at shopping center; attacker was formerly imprisoned for Islamic State ties," and "Funerals held for Beersheba terror victims as bereaved families mourn ‘heavy loss’: Addressing Doris Yahbas, husband says terrorist ‘cut you away from us’; Laura Yitzhak’s partner asks: ‘What will I do now?’; attending ministers heckled in 2 incidents."

ADDED: "Two mothers of 3, a Chabad rabbi, a brother of 4: The terror victims named: Doris Yahbas, 49, Laura Yitzhak, 43, and Menahem Yehezkel, 67, were stabbed to death; Moshe Kravitzky, 48, died when terrorist rammed his bicycle."

The U.S. Constitution Is Trash (VIDEO)

This is one bitter motherfucker.

Watch, Elie Mystal, a writer for the Nation, at "The View."

If you want to know how leftists will finally destroy the United States --- which is exactly what they want --- this is it:

Children Are Facing Learning and Speech Delays Due to Being Masked for Two Years

At AoSHQ, "'Kids are resilient!' -- The only harms we have to worry about are those suffered by the adult teachers!"

How Biden Lost the Plot

 It's Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected":

If I were president (I know, I know) I’d take an hour or two each week and observe a focus group. Presidents never get the full truth talking directly with the public, let alone the nuances of the feelings behind various positions — but if the prez is behind a one-way mirror, people are much less intimidated or showboaty. And because a president is constantly surrounded by like-minded people in politics, he can easily drift into internalizing the priorities of his peers and pleasing his activists and forget what ordinary people actually wanted when they elected him.

That’s my best take on why Biden had such a terrible first year — his marination in Democratic politics and his distance from moderate voters are the problem — and why his long presser this week was so starkly out of touch with political reality.

The NYT just published the transcript of a fascinating focus group — with Americans who voted both for Obama and Trump at least once. And they’re not happy with Biden. They’re sick of Covid restrictions, frightened by inflation, and unsettled by rising crime and social disorder. Here’s one quote from a member of the group:

I think they’ve taken us back to cave man time, where you would walk around with a club. “I want what you have.” You’re not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, OK? It’s a regression.

Another old white man? Nope. That’s a statement from a 60-year-old Latina woman. The group takes a rather complacent view of January 6, 2021, and when asked about their concern for democracy, one respondent said: “You see how the Democrats in power, they seem to be wanting — changing the rules, you know. Voting rights, we can’t win free and fair elections, so let’s change some rules there.”

Of those who said they’d vote Republican in November, there were two reasons given: “I just want to send a message. I think the Democratic Party is nuts at the moment, and the only way I can send that message is with my vote,” and “Yeah, the progressives have taken over the Democratic Party.”

Now imagine these people watching Biden’s press conference on Wednesday.

It would have said absolutely nothing to them. It would show that the president doesn’t share their priorities, that he sees no reason to change course, that he has no real solution to inflation, and that his priority now is a massive voting rights bill that represents a Christmas tree of Dem wishes, opposition to which he categorized as racist as Bull Connor. Biden was, as usual, appealing as a human being: fallible, calm, reasonable, and more “with it” than I expected. I can’t help but like him and want the best for his administration.

But the sheer gulf between the coalition that voted for him and the way he has governed became even wider as the time went by. Joe Biden can say a million times that he’s not Bernie Sanders. But when his priority has been to force through two massive bills full of utopian leftist dreams, and conspicuously failed to pass either, while also embracing every minor woke incursion in American life, he’s just a Bernie Sanders without the conviction or mandate. Which is … well, not great.

Voting rights matter, obviously. The filibuster is a very mixed blessing — capable of creating complete gridlock when the country is so deeply divided. I favor the anti-majoritarian ethos of the Senate, but there’s a decent case that the filibuster renders the minority far too powerful. I think most people are open to reforms on both, and I sure am.

But is this really what Americans want their president to be focused on right now? And the way in which Biden framed the question — as about the core legitimacy of future elections, and about racism — seems wildly off-base. In 2020, we had record turnout in an election that made voting far easier than at any time in history (and the GOP picked up seats in the House). If we are in a crisis of voter suppression, it’s a very strange one. The evidence that Republican vote-suppression tactics actually work in practice is absent; the assumption that higher turnout always benefits Democrats is highly dubious; and many Democratic states have appallingly cumbersome electoral systems, like New York’s. Does that make Chuck Schumer a “white supremacist”?

More to the point, laws — like that recently passed in Georgia — are far from the nightmares that Dems have described, and contain some expansion of access to voting. Georgians, and Americans in general, overwhelmingly support voter ID laws, for example. Such laws poll strongly even among allegedly disenfranchised African-Americans — whose turnout in 2012, following a wave of ID laws, actually exceeded whites’ in the re-election of a black president. In fact, the normalization of ID in everyday life has only increased during the past year of vax-card requirements — a policy pushed by Democrats.

And Biden did something truly dumb this week: he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in November now that his proposal for a federal overhaul has failed: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit.” No sitting president should do this, ever. But when one party is still insisting that the entire election system was rigged last time in a massive conspiracy to overturn a landslide victory for Trump, the other party absolutely needs to draw a sharp line. Biden fatefully blurred that distinction, and took the public focus off the real danger: not voter suppression but election subversion, of the kind we are now discovering Trump, Giuliani and many others plotted during the transition period. Reforming the Electoral Count Act could, in fact, help lower the likelihood of a repeat of last time. And if the Dems had made that their centerpiece, they would have kept the legitimacy argument and kept the focus on Trump’s astonishing contempt for the rules of the republic.

So why didn’t they? For that matter, why did the Democrats design massive cumbersome bills in 2021 — like BBB and the voting rights legislation — which are so larded up with proposals they are impossible to describe in simple terms? Why did they not break out smaller, simpler bills — such as the child tax credit — and campaign on one thing at a time?

And why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this “Jim Crow 2.0”? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states — three states Obama singled out for criticism — and found that they had already died in committee. To argue as Biden did last week in Georgia that the goal of Republicans is “to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore,” is to add hyperbole to distortion.

One explanation, perhaps, for Biden’s dense and hard-to-sell legislative juggernauts is that if he’d broken them up and prioritized any single policy, he’d have split his own party. Look what happened when infrastructure passed the Senate first: the left went nuts. In that sense Biden is not so much governing the country as trying to keep the Democrat coalition together, and in the end, achieving neither.

Another aspect of the problem is that so many Dem activists and groups have deeply imbibed the notion that America in 2022 is a “white supremacist” country, designed to suppress non-whites, and that we are now living in a system of de facto “legal fascism,” with a minority “white” party holding the country in its undemocratic grip, perhaps forever. The Democrats and elite liberals really seem to believe that we are back in the 1960s or 1890s or even 1860s, that we live in a black-vs-white world of good vs evil, and that the choice today is literally, in Biden’s words, between backing Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. This is as self-righteous as it is ludicrous. It’s MLK envy. It’s an attempt to recreate the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, in a country no one from 1964 would begin to recognize...

 

'Profoundly Unpresidential': President Biden's Disgraceful Voting Rights Speech in Georgia (VIDEO)

Watch Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speech, "Profoundly Unpresidential," at the video below. 

Peggy Noonan, at the Wall Street Journal, has thoughts, "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point":

It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.

By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.

He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.”

This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”

Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.

From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious...

Keep reading.  

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema Deals Death Blow to Democrats' Craven, Cynical Attempts at 'Filibuster Reform' (VIDEO)

I used to criticize this woman. I really don't have much criticism now, except to say she's in the wrong party. 

The speech is a freakin' stem-winder! 

At the New York Times, "Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback":

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s campaign to push new voting rights protections through Congress appeared all but dead on Thursday, after it became clear that he had failed to unite his own party behind his drive to overhaul Senate rules to enact the legislation over Republican opposition.

In an embarrassing setback for Mr. Biden, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, stunned her colleagues just hours before the president was slated to make his case to them in person at the Capitol by taking the Senate floor to declare that she would not support undermining the filibuster to pass legislation under any circumstances.

The announcement by Ms. Sinema, who had long opposed changing Senate rules, left Mr. Biden and Democrats without an avenue for winning enactment of the voting rights measures, which they have characterized as vital to preserve democracy in the face of a Republican-led drive in states around the country to limit access to the ballot box.

It came two days after the president had put his reputation on the line to make the case for enacting the legislation by any means necessary — including scrapping the famed filibuster — with a major speech in Atlanta that compared opponents of the voting rights measures to racist figures of the Civil War era and segregationists who thwarted civil rights initiatives in the 1960s.

And it raised the question of what Mr. Biden would do next, given that Republicans are all but certain to use a filibuster a fifth time to block the voting rights measures, and that Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change the rules to enable them to muscle the bills through themselves.

“Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we come back and try it a second time,” Mr. Biden said after emerging empty-handed from his session with Senate Democrats. “We missed this time.” But his visit to the Capitol was reminiscent of his experience last fall, when he twice made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to appeal to House Democrats to quickly unite behind the two major elements of his domestic agenda — a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a roughly $2 trillion social safety net and climate package — only to be rebuffed both times. He eventually won passage of the public works bill, but the other measure remains in limbo because of objections from Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who like Ms. Sinema reiterated his opposition on Thursday to doing away with the filibuster to push through the voting rights legislation.

It was a disappointing turn of events for a president who has emphasized his long experience as a senator and his knowledge of how to get things done on Capitol Hill.

In a last-ditch effort to bring the two on board, Mr. Biden met with Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin at the White House on Thursday night to discuss the voting rights measures, though neither of them had appeared to leave room in their statements for compromising on Senate rules.

Late Thursday night, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, announced that because of health and weather threats, the Senate would put off its consideration of the voting bill until at least Tuesday.

His announcement meant that the Senate would miss his self-imposed deadline of acting by Martin Luther King’s Birthday on Monday. But he said he intended to proceed despite the setbacks...

 

'The NYT editorial today makes it sounds like the burning of the Reichstag...'

From Tana Geneva, on Twitter.

She's talking about this absurd piece at the New York Times, "Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now."

SOURCE: "New polling on January 6 is a MAJOR BUZZKILL to Brian Stelter and many other journos."

Facebook's Pushback

I just learned of this, but the "Facebook Files" are available for download, here.

It's actually a full-blown investigation and a massive amount of information, but nevertheless vital for understand what's going on in social media today, and especially Zuckerberg's very threat to civil order and the maintenance of society.

More, from last week, at WSJ, "Facebook’s Pushback: Stem the Leaks, Spin the Politics, Don’t Say Sorry":

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg drove response to disclosures about company’s influence; sending deputies to testify in Congress.

he day after former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen went public in October, the company’s team in Washington started working the phones.

To lawmakers and advocacy groups on the right, according to people familiar with the conversations, their message was that Ms. Haugen was trying to help Democrats. Within hours, several conservative news outlets published stories alleging Ms. Haugen was a Democratic activist.

Later, Facebook lobbyists warned Democratic staffers that Republicans were focused on the company’s decision to ban expressions of support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., and who was later acquitted of homicide and other charges.

The company’s goal, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the company’s outreach, was to muddy the waters, divide lawmakers along partisan lines and forestall a cross-party alliance that was emerging to enact tougher rules on social-media companies in general and Facebook in particular.

Ms. Haugen’s revelations, and the thousands of internal documents she took with her when she quit Facebook earlier this year, showed the company’s influence on political discourse, teen mental health and other matters. The resulting backlash was emerging as the company’s biggest crisis in years. Pushing politics to the forefront was one part of Facebook’s response, in keeping with a sharp-elbowed approach driven by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company conducted reputational reviews of new products. To deter further leaks, internal access settings for research discussions on topics, including mental health and radicalization, were restricted to those directly involved in the work, according to employees and others familiar with the restrictions. Company researchers said they have been asked to submit work on sensitive topics for review by company lawyers, who have sometimes asked for examples of problems to be excised from internal posts.

Mr. Zuckerberg later changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc., to emphasize what he called a new focus on building the metaverse, an immersive digital world he has described as the next phase of the internet. He has been conducting meetings in virtual reality, with digital avatars standing in for the executives, according to people familiar with the meetings. He has encouraged other employees to do the same.

The implication is that Facebook should look toward the future and not get bogged down in the messy past.

Former executives said Mr. Zuckerberg has told employees not to apologize. In contrast to previous controversies, in which the CEO publicly claimed ownership of the company’s mistakes and typically addressed them head-on, Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken little publicly about Ms. Haugen’s disclosures and sent deputies to testify before Congress.

“When our work is being mischaracterized, we’re not going to apologize,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “We’re going to defend our record.”

Facebook has acknowledged changes to its research operations but pledged to continue the work to understand the impact of its platforms. The company has also said that it invests billions of dollars to protect the safety of its users.

Starting in September, The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles, called The Facebook Files, which identified harm caused by the social-media giant’s platforms, as identified by its own researchers, and its challenges in addressing them. Based in part on Ms. Haugen’s documents, the articles detailed such matters as how Facebook’s algorithm fosters discord and how its researchers concluded that its platforms, especially Instagram, could negatively affect teen mental health.

Ms. Haugen subsequently made the documents available to other media outlets, which published their own articles.

Since then, there have been four U.S. congressional hearings related to issues raised in the articles; a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general launched an investigation into Instagram’s effects on children; and more than a half-dozen prominent Meta executives and other senior employees have departed or announced their departures.

“The documents speak for themselves,” said Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the leading Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee and a member of the consumer protection subcommittee. He said he is pursuing legislation that would promote more market competition in social media and add more protections for children online.

Facebook has responded to criticism by citing billions of dollars of investments it has made in online safety, as well as partnerships with outside entities and experts. During a Sept. 30 hearing, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, pointed to the company’s work with its safety advisory board, created more than a decade ago, which includes internet-safety experts from around the world.

Facebook has previously said it conducted its own research to identify issues and devise ways to address them...

Still more.

PREVIOUSLY: "Frances Haugen's Testimony (VIDEO)."

San Francisco Out of Control

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: 'San Francisco’s vaunted tolerance dims amid brazen crimes' — and after 30 or so years of a city in decline, the AP is finally on it!"

Another smash & grab in #SanFrancisco. This time the victims, including 2 toddlers, were inside the van when it happened. The victims visiting from a Chicago say the suspects stole a bag w/ a laptop, headphones, passport & the kid’s birth certificates.More tonight on @kron4news pic.twitter.com/31q1BUKjhP

— Taylor Bisacky (@TaylorBisackyTV) December 9, 2021