Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Look, all these so-called conservative Trump supporters are applauding Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec, after the two tried to shut down the Caesar production of Shakespeare in the Park last night.
While I definitely think the right should practice more of the left's Alinsky politics, I don't agree in this case. It's about speech. You can't complain about leftists shutting down conservatives speakers if your response is just to ape them with the exact same bullying and violence. I'm not tweeting a whole lot about this, since I'd prefer not to lose a bunch of followers. But frankly, folks on the right are being stupid and über-tribal. I rarely agree with Ben Shapiro, but I agree with him here:
Met Police says first #GrenfellTower victim has been identified; 58 people are missing and are assumed to be dead - the number may increase pic.twitter.com/gjyi28sJHM
I don't see video of Jennifer Delacruz posted tonight, which is strange, since she tweeted she'd be doing the weather through the rest of the week.
No matter, here's the lovely Ms. Amber for CBS News 2 Los Angeles. It's heating up, people. Wasn't too bad today. I hung around the apartment most of the day, but Father's Day's going to be scorching. Keep your daddy cool and hydrated.
It's not the biggest blockbuster you'll ever see, but I really like Kate Mara, so I made it a point to see this one. Plus, I rarely miss a war movie. I went to the early-bird budget matinee, so the theater was almost empty. I don't see the opening weekend numbers online, although at least the movie's not straight to DVD. It's heavy on the personal relationships, especially Corporal Leavey's relationship to her dog, Rex. It's a tear-jerker as well, but a true story.
It's worth a look, either way. Most refreshingly, the director eschewed any inclinations towards leftist antiwar anti-Americanism. Indeed, the conclusion's hella patriotic, but I'll leave it at that not to spoil things.
It’s also a movie that doesn’t wear its issues on its stripes. Without feeling the need to brand itself either a woman-in-the-military movie or animal-activism yarn, [director Gabriela] Cowperthwaite quietly goes about humanizing everything so that both of these elements, which might get treated as hot-button topics elsewhere, gain a kind of understated momentum all their own. Sure, that gives it the slight tinge of a chummy, politics-free, armed-services recruitment video — especially when Common’s around to play the supportive sergeant always this-close from breaking into a smile. But the battle scenes are direct and tense, if not exactly original, and even when the screenplay tosses in a burgeoning flirtation with a fellow K-9er (the charming Ramon Rodriguez), “Megan Leavey” makes it feel like an extra color in a soldier’s story, not a predictable story beat for a heroine...
We're sending more troops to Afghanistan, and President Trump has given Defense Secretary James Mattis authority to set troop levels for that entire deployment.
So, I suppose this is a good time to re-up J. Kael Weston's recent book on the conflict, now out in paperback.
What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties, and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at Your Make Believe Friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover will watch on television next season. It is between “I accept the court’s decision” and “Bake my cake.” We look down on each other, fear each other, increasingly hate each other.
Oh, to have a unifying figure, program or party.
But we don’t, nor is there any immediate prospect. So, as Ben Franklin said, we’ll have to hang together or we’ll surely hang separately. To hang together—to continue as a country—at the very least we have to lower the political temperature. It’s on all of us more than ever to assume good faith, put our views forward with respect, even charity, and refuse to incite.
We’ve been failing. Here is a reason the failure is so dangerous.
In the early 1990s Roger Ailes had a talk show on the America’s Talking network and invited me to talk about a concern I’d been writing about, which was old-fashioned even then: violence on TV and in the movies. Grim and graphic images, repeated depictions of murder and beatings, are bad for our kids and our culture, I argued. Depictions of violence unknowingly encourage it.
But look, Roger said, there’s comedy all over TV and I don’t see people running through the streets breaking into laughter. True, I said, but the problem is that, for a confluence of reasons, our country is increasingly populated by the not fully stable. They aren’t excited by wit, they’re excited by violence—especially unstable young men. They don’t have the built-in barriers and prohibitions that those more firmly planted in the world do. That’s what makes violent images dangerous and destructive. Art is art and censorship is an admission of defeat. Good judgment and a sense of responsibility are the answer.
That’s what we’re doing now, exciting the unstable—not only with images but with words, and on every platform. It’s all too hot and revved up. This week we had a tragedy. If we don’t cool things down, we’ll have more.
And was anyone surprised? Tuesday I talked with an old friend, a figure in journalism who’s a pretty cool character, about the political anger all around us. He spoke of “horrible polarization.” He said there’s “too much hate in D.C.” He mentioned “the beheading, the play in the park” and described them as “dog whistles to any nut who wants to take action.”
“Someone is going to get killed,” he said.
That was 20 hours before the shootings in Alexandria, Va.
The gunman did the crime, he is responsible, it’s fatuous to put the blame on anyone or anything else.
But we all operate within a climate and a culture. The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating anipathy. You don’t need another recitation of the events of just the past month or so. A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head. New York’s rightly revered Shakespeare in the Park put on a “Julius Caesar” in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the president. A CNN host—amazingly, of a show on religion—sent out a tweet calling the president a “piece of s—” who is “a stain on the presidency.” An MSNBC anchor wondered, on the air, whether the president wishes to “provoke” a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president, in a rant: “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.” Those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more.
Too many in the mainstream media—not all, but too many—don’t even bother to fake fairness and lack of bias anymore, which is bad: Even faked balance is better than none.
I had a student last semester claim that John Lennon was one of our "political leaders," or at least "past leader," along with Martin Luther King, Jr., etc., if I remember correctly. That's how deeply the popular leftist culture has burrowed into and infected the youth demographic. They don't know anything. They don't know history going back even to last year, much less the 1960s and '70s. It's out of control.
It was hot today in the O.C., but not sure if it was record-breaking (I'll check later, lol).
But parts of San Diego County were just a couple of degrees over the record for this day, and there's some real record heat coming over the next week, especially in the desert areas.
Here's the beautiful Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:
LAURA INGRAHAM: It's a level of viciousness and vitriol that we see on social media but usually that's an anonymous thing. But now people are emboldened and they are saying it in person. They're doing chalk drawings of people and their families on their driveways so they wake up in the morning and they see a chalk drawing.
I think Charles is right. This apocalyptic language we hear on other cable networks, where these are supposedly very respected hosts who get up every morning and say, 'Will be republic survive Donald Trump?' In other words, the resistance is a physical resistance. If you believe your survival is at risk, you have the moral duty to physically resist that. And I think this freak yesterday took it to heart.
But if you were on Twitter last night you would have seen the outrage. NYT's editors blamed the Gabby Giffords shooting on the bogus and debunked meme of the "GOP climate of hate" and the "cross-hairs map" that allegedly put then-Representative Giffords' life in danger.
(1/2) @nytopinion - commonsense suggestion by a journalist, am talking to attorneys this AM and exploring options. BTW, wonder.. pic.twitter.com/jACvxwUBZH
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