Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami

From Ronald Brownstein, at the Atlantic, "Even with a surge in overall participation, white working-class voters could still remain decisive in the 2020 election":

Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history.

But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election.

With Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency stirring such strong emotions among both supporters and opponents, strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.”

In a recent paper, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, an enormous increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, recently forecast that the 2020 contest could produce a massive turnout that is also unprecedentedly diverse.

“I think we are heading for a record presidential turnout at least in the modern era, and by that I mean since the franchise went to 18-year-olds,” in 1972, says Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “And I mean not only in total numbers [but also] in terms of the percentage of eligible voters [who turn out]. The emotion behind politics … is sky-high, and I don’t think it’s just on one side. I think it’s on both sides.”

McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated.

Experts on both sides point to an array of indicators that signal turnout may reach new heights next year. Signs of political interest, from the number of small-donor contributions made to presidential candidates to the viewership for cable news, are all spiking. In polls, very high shares of Americans already say they are paying a lot of attention to the 2020 presidential race.

But the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.

Yet one of the key questions for 2020 is whether Democrats will benefit as much from the likely expansion of the electorate...

Keep reading.

It's gonna be great.

As long as the economy holds up into late next year, Trump is going to be a very formidable incumbent, and difficult to beat.

A lot depends on who the Democrats nominate, and I'm hoping they nominate one of their far-left wing avatars, Bernie, Elizabeth, or Kamala. I'm positive Trump will make short work of them. Biden would be a tricky opponent. And I do think he could cut into some of Trump's working class support. But we'll see. We'll. see.

Rita Ora in Red Bikini

She's a hot chick.

At Drunken Stepfather, "RITA ORA BIKINI OF THE DAY."

And at London's Daily Mail:

Rita Ora sends temperatures soaring in skimpy red bikini on post-tour getaway https://t.co/FK0ofILm2c

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 8, 2019

And bonus topless on Twitter.

Megan Parry's Wednesday Weather

She's a sweetie.

At ABC 10 News San Diego:

Why We Still Read 1984

I love it.

From Louis Menand, at the New Yorker, "“1984” at Seventy: Why We Still Read Orwell’s Book of Prophecy":

There are some parts of “1984” whose relevance seems never to fade. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state. Another is Newspeak, the abuse of language for political purposes. https://t.co/Pv4RdQ74eG

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 9, 2019

George Orwell’s “1984,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” (1940). “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?

Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84—four million copies were sold that year—because, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump.

The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature—outmoded almost from the start. This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism. Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” (1941).

It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates—not three, but two—and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that.

There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state—Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes.

But “1984” is a novel, not a work of political theory, and, in the end, it’s probably as literature that people keep reading it. The overt political material—such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the (very long) book that the commissar O’Brien gives to Winston and Julia as he lures them into the trap—is likely now skipped by many readers. (The book’s analogue is “The Revolution Betrayed,” Leon Trotsky’s attack on Stalinism, published in 1937, but it is also a parody of “The Managerial Revolution.”)

O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. (Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 1936 and 1938, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured. So Orwell was right about that.)

But who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with.

Keep reading.

And buy the book here.

And actually, I love "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism": it's a perfect description of today's Democrat Party and its Antifa-Occupy radical left base.

Trump Blasts Biden in Iowa (VIDEO)

OMG this is funny.

From Vodka Pundit Instapundit, "HE FIGHTS: Trump Blasts Biden in Iowa, Says Obama ‘Took Him Off the Trash Heap’ in 2008."

And at LAT, "Trump and Biden trade barbs as they cross paths and split screens in Iowa."

Trump's Early Lead on Facebook

At the L.A. Times, via Memeorandum, "Trump’s big, early lead in Facebook ads deeply worries Democratic strategists":

Almost every time voters who lean toward President Trump visit Facebook, they get deluged with invitations to his rallies or pleas to support his immigration policies: That’s no surprise — the platform was central to his victorious 2016 campaign.

What they probably don’t expect is that the Trump campaign also follows them to more distant corners of the internet — placing ads that supporters see on YouTube channels like Epic Wildlife, Physiques of Greatness and BroScienceLife, even the liberal site Daily Kos. The campaign’s willingness to spend money on such sites may or may not pay political dividends, but its willingness to gamble points to something bigger that unnerves the Democratic Party’s top digital thinkers.

“His campaign is testing everything,” said Shomik Dutta, a veteran of Barack Obama’s two campaigns and partner at Higher Ground Labs, an incubator for progressive political tech. “No one on the Democratic side is even coming close yet. It should be gravely concerning.”

Trump is using the advantage of incumbency, a huge pile of campaign cash and a clear path to his party’s nomination to build a digital operation unmatched by anything Democrats have. His campaign is testing all manner of iterations, algorithms and data-mining techniques — from the color of the buttons it uses on fundraising pitches to the audiences it targets with short videos of his speeches.

By the time Democrats pick a nominee, some of the party’s top digital strategists warn, Trump will have built a self-feeding machine that grows smarter by the day. His campaign has run thousands of iterations of Facebook ads — tens of thousands by some counts — sending data on response rates and other metrics gleaned from the platform to software that perpetually fine-tunes the campaign messages.

As with most campaign tactics, no one knows for sure how much difference the flood of money and advertising on Facebook might make. Despite all the testing of how people respond to specific messages, even the richest political campaigns don’t spend much money on rigorously researching the ultimate question of what, if anything, sways voters, especially with an incumbent who inspires such strong feelings — positive and negative — as Trump.

Still, the central fact of the 2016 election likely will remain true for 2020: Trump’s victory margin in key states was so slim that just a handful of voters staying home or showing up could make the difference...

Jay Leno's Garage: Dodge Hellcat Redeye 2019 (VIDEO)

Jay Leno loves cars, and he really loves the Dodge series Challengers.

Previously, "Jay Leno Takes the Dodge Demon to Pomona Raceway."

At the video, they first discuss the red 485hp Challenger "Scat Pack" wide-body, which is going to be my next car in a few years, lol. They're extremely affordable at under $40,000, and Dodge has transferred much of the technology from last year's Demon down to the lower price-range vehicles.

And Jay's endorsement is off the charts. A great show:

All-Carbon Body '70 Dodge Charger (VIDEO)

It's at Hoonigan's, the life-style hot-rod burnout brand, based in Long Beach. I blogged about them here, "HOONIGAN Mazda Miata Long Jump (VIDEO)."

What does it take to make a BIG muscle car like the '70 Dodge Charger handle? Try dropping around 900lbs. Getting that much weight loss ain't easy without ending up looking like ShartKart... so Speedkore turned to Boeing-levels of weight loss tech, by going all carbon on the body. Wild.

Lauren Southern Retires

From the "far-right" internet thug life, lol.

She's a sweetie, and fearless to boot.

Read her farewell essay. (Hint: She's tired of the fight, having achieved great things, and wants to go back to school.)

She directed a film full-length feature film, "Borderless," which is a pretty stunning thing for a young hottie like that.

Farewell ❤️

I've enjoyed this all greatly but it's time to start a new chapter of my life. Thank you to all my incredible colleagues who I'll be cheering on in their fight for truth - and my wonderful supporters who made all I've done possible.https://t.co/iK4tu4gGw0

— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) June 3, 2019

Watch the full movie here, "Borderless (2019): Official Documentary."

Evelyn Taft's Weather Record-Setting Forecast

It's going to be really hot today. Stay cool folks!

Here's the fabulous Ms. Evelyn, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles.

Barbara Palvin Luisda Films 2019 (VIDEO)

She's nice.

As Homelessness Crisis Worsen, Democrat Presidential Candidates Stay Mum

You'd think homelessness would be in the Democrats' policy wheelhouse, but it's not.

And that's no surprise. Homelessness hits white working-class families particularly hard, and the Democrats hate white people.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Homelessness is a crisis in California. Why are 2020 candidates mostly ignoring it?":

When new figures released last week showed a jarring rise in homelessness around Los Angeles, the response throughout Southern California was shock and indignation.

The reaction from the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates: silence.

While White House hopefuls crisscross the country, making big promises on issues such as college debt relief, climate change and boosting the working and middle classes, they have largely ignored an issue — the soaring number of unsheltered Americans — that has reached a crisis point in communities on the West Coast and elsewhere.

The reason, said Sam Tsemberis, is simple.

“It doesn’t have a constituency or an advocacy group that has enough money,” said Tsemberis, who leads Pathways Housing First, a Los Angeles nonprofit that works to end homelessness. “The National Coalition for the Homeless is not the National Rifle Assn.”

Not that voters are uninterested. In California, for instance, a sizable majority of likely voters — Democratic, Republican and independent — consider homelessness a big problem, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

But even as presidential candidates pay greater attention to California, mindful of its early March 3 primary, none has seized on the crisis as a rallying cry.

The silence is particularly notable coming from California’s Sen. Kamala Harris, who lives in L.A. Her campaign declined requests for comment on the latest homelessness figures. Harris and her rivals broadly address issues relating to homeownership or rent affordability, but offer little aimed at the desperate plight of those already living on the street.

Harris has two housing proposals: One is a subsidy for renters paying more than 30% of their income on housing. The second is a monthly cash stipend for low- and middle-income workers.

Both plans, her campaign says, would target the neediest and save people from evictions, a leading cause of homelessness.

The twin issues of affordable housing and homelessness are a “crisis [that is] not receiving the kind of attention that it deserves,” she said in a speech to the National Alliance to End Homelessness last year before she launched her candidacy.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former mayor of Newark, is the only one with a housing proposal that specifically talks about eliminating homelessness nationwide, by doubling funding to $6 billion for federal grants geared toward serving that population.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s housing plan ties in factors like affordable-housing scarcity, housing discrimination and the needs of people who require substance-abuse treatment, all issues that influence a person’s vulnerability to homelessness.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign website features his stands on 25 issues, but housing is not among them. When he ran for president four years ago, Sanders called for increased federal spending on rent vouchers for the poor, repairs to public housing projects and construction of low-rent housing.

In March, Sanders tweeted that the country has “a moral responsibility to make certain that no American goes hungry or sleeps out on the streets.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign did not respond to requests for the candidate’s plans to address homelessness.

Julián Castro, who was Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Obama, stood out among Democratic rivals by highlighting homelessness on the campaign trail. On an April visit to Nevada, he toured a storm-drain tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Strip where hundreds had set up encampments.

“This is not the kind of issue that a lot of people open their arms to, but they should,” Castro said Thursday in an interview.

He is set to release his housing agenda, including plans to reduce homelessness, in the weeks ahead...

They're all a bunch of idiots and losers.

The Making of a YouTube Radical

I was fascinated with this piece, even though it's a pathetic smear of conservatives. The New York Times was appropriately dragged for it.

.@PatriarchTree The New York Slimes smears “far-right” #YouTube personalities. 🙄 #YouTubePurge cc. @MichelleMalkin https://t.co/87jNXdKpP0

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 8, 2019

See also, the Daily Caller, "The New York Times Somehow Continues to Lose Even More Credibility."

And at Twitchy, "New York Times: The path to YouTube radicalization leads through economist Milton Friedman."

Jennifer Delacruz's Hot June Forecast

I thought we were supposed to have June gloom, lol.

I was out in Palm Desert this weekend, and it was scorching. Supposed to be 113 out there tomorrow.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer with the week's forecast, for ABC News 10 San Diego.

Shoko Takahashi

On Twitter, plus some more women in the thread.

See, Playboy Hall on Twitter.

Roaming Millennial on Populism (VIDEO)

She doesn't go by "Roaming Millennial" anymore, because she couldn't get the coveted blue check on Twitter. Hmm, but let's talk about elites, lol.

I'm kidding. Lauren Chen's a good lady, and she pretty much nails it on populism.

Lucy Nicholson ‏

Nice lady.

Hi everyone, just wanted to address this as many people have been saying it’s not actually me on here😘 pic.twitter.com/StJdBc1Ww4

— Lucy Nicholson (@UnitedLuce) June 3, 2019

What’s worse than a heartbreak? pic.twitter.com/wRHGInEYq9

— Lucy Nicholson (@UnitedLuce) June 5, 2019

Kristen Stewart

At Drunken Stepfather, "KRISTEN STEWART TOPLESS OF THE DAY."

President Trump's Comments at 75th Anniversary of D-Day Landing at Normandy (VIDEO)

At USA Today, "'He can be a statesman': Trump's Normandy speech well-received by critics, Scarborough says, 'I hope he means it'."

(Fuck Joe Scarborough.)

Visting Normandy American Cemetary

This is a phenomenal essay.

Very moving.

From Rachel Donadio, at the Atlantic, "Nothing Prepares You for Visiting Omaha Beach."

On the 75th anniversary of D-Day tomorrow, President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron will participate in a commemoration at the Normandy American Cemetery. I visited this part of Normandy recently and it left an indelible mark. https://t.co/4ulsjFeDIv

— Rachel Donadio (@RachelDonadio) June 5, 2019

Lindsay Lohan Nude for Playboy Magazine

At London's Daily Mail, "Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot... complete with peroxide blonde tresses, vampish nails, sky-high heels and nothing else."

Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot https://t.co/TXSt7MwDZp

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 6, 2019

Women Taking Selfies

At Drunken Stepfather, "TOP 10 SELFIES OF THE DAY."

The Quietest Generation: Yellowed World War II Records Vividly Show Valor That Veterans Concealed

This is such an interesting story.

At the New York Times, "Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War. Their Children Want to Know Why":

NEW ORLEANS — All his life, Joseph Griesser hungered to hear the story of his father’s Army service in World War II.

What he had were vague outlines: that Lt. Frank Griesser had splashed onto Omaha Beach on D-Day; that his lifelong pronounced limp had come from an artillery blast. But the details? They remained largely unspoken until the day his father died in 1999, leaving Mr. Griesser wishing he knew more.

“He never talked about it; I just knew he was injured in the war,” said Mr. Griesser, who lives in Stone Harbor, N.J. “We went to see the movie ‘The Longest Day’ together, but that was pretty much the extent of our conversation about the war. I think he just wanted to put it behind him.”

Many of the Americans who fought to crush the Axis in World War II came home feeling the same way — so many, in fact, that those lauded as the Greatest Generation might just as easily be called the Quietest.

Where did they serve? What did they do and see? Spouses and children often learned not to ask. And by now, most no longer have the chance: Fewer than 3 percent of the 16 million American veterans of the war are still alive, and all are in their 90s or beyond.

But that has not kept their children and grandchildren from wanting to know their stories, especially as the 75th anniversaries of the D-Day invasion and the other triumphs of the war’s final year have neared. And a growing number of them are turning to experts to help glean what they can from cryptic, yellowed military records.

“We have people calling every day to try to find out about their fathers,” said Tanja Spitzer, a researcher at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. “They regret that they didn’t do anything when their parents were alive. We get a lot of apologizing about it. For them, it is very emotional.”

Ms. Spitzer tells them it is not too late. Among the nation’s many staggering accomplishments in World War II were the billions of pages of personnel files that War Department and Navy clerks amassed to keep track of everyone in uniform. Most of those records still exist, stored in a climate-controlled facility in St. Louis by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The repository is immense, with enough boxes of files to stretch more than 545 miles. The boxes hold everything from the mundane, like payrolls and medical screening forms, to the heart-tugging: photos of young recruits, letters from worried mothers, medal citations. Researchers can use them to recreate the individual stories that many troops never told.

“We can tell a lot,” Ms. Spitzer said. “If you know what you are looking for, you can really create a full picture.”

Responding to the growing interest, the museum created a research team this year focused solely on piecing together profiles of veterans from the archives, joining an array of military historians-for-hire who work with families like the Griessers.

“It’s a lot of sons and daughters, wishing they had the conversations that were too painful to have when their fathers were still alive,” said William Beigel, an independent historian in Redondo Beach, Calif., who has been researching World War II veterans for 20 years. He said demand has been surging as the ranks of living veterans have dwindled, and he now gets as many as 25 requests a day.

*****

Dolores Milhous remembers her father, Lt. James E. Robinson Jr., only as the tall man who came through the screen door and hoisted her onto his shoulders shortly before he shipped out. When he was killed in combat in the spring of 1945, she was 2 years old.

“Mother always talked about him,” said Ms. Milhous, 76, who lives in Dallas. “But there was so much I didn’t know — things I wished I asked before Mother passed away, but I hesitated because it made her so sad.”

Knowing that the memory of her father would only erode further as it was passed down to her five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, she asked the museum researchers to look for his file.

They returned with a stack of 240 partially burned pages from the archive, detailing a stunning story she had known in outline but not detail: Her father, a slight 25-year-old with a slim mustache and a Texas accent, had turned the tide in a battle involving thousands of men, and was posthumously awarded the military’s highest award for heroism, the Medal of Honor.

Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day

A new edited volume, with Rick Atkinson.

At Amazon, Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day.

Liel Leibovitz on the Ahmari/French Debate Over Conservatism

A big story on Twitter right now is Steven Crowder getting demonetized by YouTube, after a homosexual dude known as @GayWonk got his feelings hurt and mounted an all-out jihad against Crowder, claiming "homophobia," "racism," and who knows what else?

The Other McCain blogged on this a couple of days ago: "Totalitarian @GayWonk Is Attempting to Silence Conservative @SCrowder."

Meanwhile, I'm very interested in the debate Sohrab Ahmari kicked off with his blistering essay at First Things. I blogged about it here: "Our Existential Struggle."

I'm on Sohrab's side, but boy is this debate getting testy.

I'll have more, no doubt, but definitely read this piece from Liel Leibovich, at the Tablet, "Why Jews Should Pay Attention to the Recent Debate Rocking American Conservatism":

One of the best entries to the fun conservative debate of the moment. Among other things, it looks at whether NeverTrumpism is as civil as it loudly claims to be. https://t.co/HS3JyYCnEG

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 4, 2019

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

It is therefore particularly strange to find that David French lent his considerable conservative credibility to the Russiagate lunacy. Here he is, for example, mocking those calling Russiagate a hoax by accusing them of being complicit with Trump receiving oppositional research from a foreign power—which, ironically, is precisely what the Clinton campaign had in fact done, in compiling the “dossier” in the first place. And here he is cheering for the now highly contested BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump instructed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress, an allegation that is contradicted by the Mueller report itself. And here he is dismissing the suggestion, by then backed by mounting evidence, that Russiagate may be a hoax or itself some kind of conspiracy.

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale.

Which, really, wouldn’t be much of a problem if the Never Trumpers were all as genuinely committed to gentility as David French. Sadly, they’re not, and you needn’t go much further than Stephens’ column to understand why. Stephens and Ahmari are friendly. It was Stephens who helped Ahmari get his first job at The Wall Street Journal. And Stephens is thanked in Ahmari’s recent memoir, a candid, thoughtful, and deeply moving account of his journey to Catholicism. And Bret Stephens is a gentleman, in a way that Donald Trump surely is not. Yet it is possible to imagine Stephens as the wrong kind of gentleman when reading his column contra Ahmari: Sounding every bit like a bigoted member of a 19th-century gentleman’s club railing against the papists, Stephens casually and cruelly robs his former protégé of the intricacies of his faith-based argument for the pleasure of painting him as “an ardent convert” merrily rolling along on his way to a Handmaid’s Tale-like future for America.

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

On the subject of dissenters, the Never Trumpers eternal and immovable contempt merely apes that of their newfound pals on the left, for whom the president is a Nazi, the Republicans are perennially in the throes of a War on Women, and anyone who doesn’t fully subscribe to the latest lunacies of the identity politics-driven college campus cult is a racist creep. You may believe such an approach to politics is effective, but to pretend it is somehow morally superior is dishonest at best and, at worst, nefarious—a sleazy attempt to portray anyone who disagrees with you as not quite clean enough to be admitted into the league of enlightened gentlemen.

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

Presumably, the Never Trumpers and their ilk were simply manipulating the rubes and making bank when they denounced tenured radicals and liberal judges and the like under Clinton and Obama. In reality, they are perfectly content to live in a culture in which universities reject scientifically sound peer-reviewed papers for fear of offending the transgender community; in which pro-Israel speakers are routinely shouted down on campuses, and people with unpopular views are physically attacked; in which large technology platforms actively censor speech; in which journalists giddily defend the doxxing of a private citizen who created and shared a video they didn’t like; in which faith and those who practice it in earnest are dismissed as benighted bigots; in which the whims of unelected bureaucrats trump the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Never Trump was therefore a misnomer; they were simply elitist progressives who did an awkward kind of dance before arriving at their predestined home in the Democratic Party.

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American...

RTWT.

Lindsey Pelas on the Red Carpet

At Taxi Driver:

Lindsey Pelas Enormous Cleavage on the Red Carpet - https://t.co/xPJgD5RMFC - pic.twitter.com/2LSXArQwmN

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) May 29, 2019

Alexis Ren in the Shower

At Taxi Driver, "Alexis Ren Topless (but covered) in the Shower."

Emma Watson Bikini Photos

She looks good, ready for summer.

At Drunken Stepfather, "Emma Watson - seen in a bikini in Cabo."

And at Taxi Driver:

Emma Watson on Holiday in a White Bikini - https://t.co/xlWZgX1PWL - pic.twitter.com/ep9Mcwkcy3

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) June 5, 2019

'99 Luftballons'

It's Nena, from yesterday's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angles, "99 Luftballons."

Starlight
Muse
6:43am

St. Elmo's Fire
John Parr
6:39am

It's My Life
Talk Talk
6:36am

Basketcase
Green Day
6:25am

99 Luftballoons
Nena
6:21am

Wishing You Were Here
Pink Floyd
6:17am

The Middle
Jimmy Eat World
6:14am

Welcome To The Jungle
Guns N Roses
6:10am

People Are People
Depeche Mode
6:06am

Comedown
BUSH
5:53am

Our Existential Struggle

It's the culture war, and it's gotten so bad there's no room for compromise. Some conservatives want to take it to the enemy --- leftists --- and reverse the gun-sights, using the exact same destroying tactics they use on conservatives and the traditional culture.

I can dig it.

If you've been reading anything by David Horowitz the last decade or two, you'll know that the left gives no quarter, and if you want to beat them, you need to be just as ruthless and then some.

Sohrab Ahmari had a piece attacking the NeverTrump wussies at National Review (and elsewhere, really), with specific mention to David French (whom I usually ignore).

Boy, Mr. Sohrab sent all kinds of folks into conniptions of apoplexy.

See, "AGAINST DAVID FRENCH-ISM."

And here's the Google link to the responses.

And don't miss Roger Kimball, especially the second half of the essay, at American Greatness, "Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle":

Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle | @rogerkimball brings his peerless erudition to bear https://t.co/o1ozphUdW7

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 2, 2019

Again, more could be said about all of this, but let me move on briefly to what I think is the other key passage of Sohrab’s essay. It comes at the end. “Progressives,” he writes,

understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

This passage was Exhibit A for Sohrab’s critics. Imagine, consigning civility and decency to the status of “second values”! Praising “enmity,” endorsing our own values and (dread word) “orthodoxy.”

Some of Sohrab’s critics seem to think that such passages indicated that he was advocating a new theocracy. I think he is advocating realism when it comes to our opponents in the culture war. What they want is not tolerance but full-throated approbation, whether the issue is bringing children to public libraries to be indoctrinated by sexual freaks, unlimited abortion, radical environmentalism, or the smorgasbord of toxins populating the ideology of identity politics. What they offer is not tolerance, not debate, but an invitation to submit to their view of the world.

In such situations, dissent cannot succeed if it proceeds piecemeal. It must recognize that what is at stake is, in the deepest sense, an anthropology, a view of what man is. We are living among the fragments of a shattered inheritance, morally and socially as well as politically. The so-called liberals (so-called because no one is more illiberal) are bent on scattering those fragments and trampling underfoot the values they represent.

Sohrab Ahmari’s essay is certainly not the last word in how to respond to this onslaught. But it has the inestimable virtue of understanding that this battle is not fodder for a debating club but an existential struggle.

Perky Lily Mo Sheen

It's Kate Beckinsale's daughter, and she's taking after her mom in the looks department, if not the slutty Instragram influencer department. (*Indifferent emoji shrug here.*)

At Drunken Stepfather, "LILY MO SHEEN TOPLESS OF THE DAY."

And at Celeb Jihad, "LILY MO SHEEN HORNY TITS AND ASS SHOW."

Patriot Anna Timmer Blasts Rep. Justin Amash at Grand Rapids Town Hall (VIDEO)

This was a viral moment on social media, and the woman appeared on Fox News as well.

Thank you all for the love! Unexpected and greatly appreciated. This is a wrap for me for the week, but I'll be back in the Twitter game on Monday!

— Anna Timmer (@VeritasSola) June 2, 2019

David Epstein, Range

At Amazon, David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

Since Tiananmen, China Has Never Been the Same

A flashback to 30 years ago this week.

At the Los Angeles Times, "I watched the 1989 Tiananmen uprising. China has never been the same":

Former @latimes bureau chief David Holley covered the Tiananmen massacre 30 years ago. This is his memory of the experience: https://t.co/34chwcuUhp

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 1, 2019

In the predawn hours of June 4, 1989, the Chinese army was bringing a bloody end to seven weeks of student-led protests centered on Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s historic center.

From the windows of a deserted coffee shop at the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards east of Tiananmen, I could look toward the square and see several hundred soldiers forming lines across the capital’s broad main street. In front of the hotel was an angry and brave crowd of a couple thousand Beijing residents. These protesters were furious at the army for shooting its way into the city center, tanks and armored personnel carriers smashing obstacles, soldiers spraying bullets at crowds blocking its advance. Now I watched as the soldiers periodically fired into this crowd.

For me, what the Chinese call simply “June 4” — a date that fundamentally shaped today’s China — had begun the previous evening.

I was the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief then, and had overseen the newspaper’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests since they began in mid-April. The Times’ team had been taking turns staking out the square, and my shift was to begin at midnight. Before leaving home late on June 3, I learned that the army had begun smashing its way through crowds several miles west of Tiananmen.

I grabbed my bicycle and raced toward the square.

As I pedaled, I passed hundreds of Beijing residents fleeing on foot and bicycle away from the square and the main body of troops approaching from the west.

Soon a single armored personnel carrier came hurtling around a corner, headed toward the square. As it clambered over red-and-white concrete traffic barriers placed by protesters, I nearly kept up with it, weaving my own way around the barriers — which might stop trucks and cars but not tanks and bicycles. Finally the driver stopped when he encountered too thick a crowd on a side street at the northeast corner of the square. It seemed he was unwilling to start killing masses of people by running them over. Once the armored vehicle stopped, someone thrust a thick metal bar into its treads.

The furious crowd threw burning blankets and Molotov cocktails onto the vehicle; a few young men got on top and began banging the hatch. They managed an opening and started throwing burning objects inside. Three soldiers jumped out, scattering into the crowd. I followed one, and watched as he ran in a zigzag pattern while being severely beaten with pipes and sticks. Blood dripped down his face, which held a look of terror. Then two or three students grabbed him away from his tormentors, who almost certainly were not students, and put him into a nearby ambulance.

I interviewed students at the center of the square, who planned nonviolent resistance to the end, and nonstudents, more inclined to fight back, who dominated the fringes. I moved from the pedestrian part of the square onto Changan Avenue, which passes the famous portrait of Mao Tse-tung on Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Then I realized that I was within bullet range of soldiers.

I decided to telephone the bureau from the Beijing Hotel — mobile phones were still a rarity in Beijing at the time. At the hotel entrance, security searched me for cameras or film. I found a phone in the dark coffee shop, and to my relief the hotel operator put me through to my office. I watched the shooting through the windows and periodically phoned in more notes.

Rumors and unconfirmed reports spread among the international reporters, Chinese and other foreigners in the hotel, and many inside came to believe that the sounds of gunfire audible from the direction of the square meant the students who stayed behind were being killed. I figured that was probably what was happening.

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor as China’s paramount leader, had ordered the army to take the square by dawn — and authorized it to do the killing necessary to achieve this. The slaughter ranged over much of the city, mostly along several miles of the western approach roads to Tiananmen.

The Tiananmen uprising came during a fateful year in which communism was under siege in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall would fall that November; two years later, the Soviet Union would cease to exist. Deng’s fateful decision may have been timed in part to a desire to clear the square before a June 4 election that would end communism in Poland. Deng was not seriously afraid of the students, but he did fear a Polish-style Solidarity movement.

The months of protest in China had been triggered by the death of a popular former Communist Party leader, Hu Yaobang, who lost the party’s top post in 1987 partly on charges of being too soft on protesters. In the spring of 1989, students were planning pro-democracy demonstrations for the 70th anniversary of a watershed protest on May 4, 1919. The students moved their plans earlier by bringing wreaths to Tiananmen Square to honor Hu upon his death.

That was an implicit criticism of the surviving leaders. Yet it was difficult for the police to immediately suppress this because superficially it began as mourning for a top Communist.

Officials under Deng divided bitterly over the protests, which gathered momentum during a visit by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in mid-May.

When Deng decided to use the army to clear the square, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the leading economic reformer who was relatively liberal politically, refused to go along.

Word of Zhao’s opposition leaked, and when troops tried to enter the capital on May 20 massive crowds blocked them. The people of Beijing, supporting the students’ calls for more freedom and an attack on corruption, peacefully held their country’s army at bay for two weeks, as the protests morphed into an attempt to force Deng out and perhaps throw power to Zhao. But by then it was too late: Zhao was under house arrest, and Deng along with the other tough old warriors ruling China had no intention of losing this battle...

RTWT.

Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families

At Amazon, Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.

The Cable-Social Media Feedback Loop

Jonathan Martin is on to something I think, but few reporters outline current politics as such: the powerful role activist media plays in current partisan campaign mobilization.

Check this tweetstorm for the NYT piece, via Memeorandum, "You Don't Have to Be in Des Moines.' Democrats Expand Primary Map, Spurred by Social Media."

NEW: Morning from San Fran, where 14 (!) Dem candidates have gathered for the Calif Dem convention

At the same time, Biden is in...Ohio tonight.

How and why the 2020 race went national - and IA & NH have lost their stranglehold >>https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m pic.twitter.com/YLhPIgFXIe

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

Hope you’ll read the story, but this map from @jsonkao really paints the picture:

the Dem candidates have already visited over 30 states + territories for non-fundraising events.

And the year isn’t halfway done https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m pic.twitter.com/8qNLXPqzee

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

It’s not *just* Super Tuesday.

The nature of Dem coalition & Trump has made ‘20 the mirror of ‘08:

Obama spent 89 days in Iowa and won the nom in part bc he showed there he could win rural whites. Now the candidates must prove they have a message for, and can win, non-whites.

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

It’s hard to overstate how central the cable-social media feedback loop has become to this primary. Staff judge events in part on if cables went live from venue. And they’re fixated on creating settings& moments that can go viral.

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

Warren has won plaudits for her meaty policy proposals, but no candidate besides Biden has benefited as much from Trump. Why?

Because cable TV drives polling and cable is fixated on Mueller

After Warren called for impeachment her cable mentions soared and polling followed...

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

...and then Warren helped herself w a good turn at, wait for it, a *cable* town hall just 3 days after calling for impeachment post-Mueller report

It’s no accident polls show she’s doing best of any non-Biden candidate among the most engaged Dems: they’re glued to cable/social

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

BUT: The early states still thin the field@davidplouffe warns that campaigns are making a mistake if IA and NH aren’t their “the north star”

“If you need to come in third but you came in fifth you’ll say, ‘Shit, if only I had spent three or four more days in Iowa.’”

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

AND:

the new rules from the DNC on debate access will only incentivize candidates to focus more on breaking thru on TV and spending more on social/TV https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 2, 2019

Mindy Robinson Patriotic

On Twitter:

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/iFMcBZnWEi

— Mindy Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) May 31, 2019

Stacy Poole

On Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/cH7Q2RPZqp

— 🍀GODDESS (@duljc) June 1, 2019

And skim the topless fan page.

Bree Daniels on the Balcony

Check the photos.

And on Twitter.

Woman Changing

Amazing.

See, "Changing Clothes."

'Stray Cat Strut'

I haven't posted the Stray Cats for six years. See, "'Storm the Embassy'."

And I was just thinking about it after hearing "Stray Cat Strut" at 93.1 Jack FM while out to the bank.

Rocket Man
Elton John
2:04pm

Seven Nation Army
The White Stripes
1:54pm

You Shook Me All Night Long
AC/DC
1:50pm

Words
Missing Persons
1:46pm

November Rain
Guns N' Roses
1:40pm

Sweet Dreams
EURYTHMICS
1:37pm

Fat Bottomed Girls
Queen
1:32pm

Something Just Like This
Coldplay / The Chainsmokers
1:22pm

Tom Sawyer
Rush
1:17pm

I Will Die 4 U / Baby You're A Star
Prince
1:11pm

Comedown
Bush
1:06pm

If You Leave
O M D
1:01pm

Iron Man
Black Sabbath
12:51pm

Stressed Out
Twenty One Pilots
12:48pm

The Waiting
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
12:44pm.

"Stray Cat Strut" came on just before Tom Petty, but I'm just now checking the website and the playlist.

I saw the band twice at the Roxy in Hollywood back in the day.

The Stray Cats are the only band I can ever remember that botched a song on stage and had to start over. Brian Setzer forgot the lyrics --- it was probably "Rock This Town," now that I think about it --- and drummer Slim Jim Phantom banged his snare drum --- twap, twap!! --- stopped and looked over at Setzer with a look saying, "WTF man" (plus an eye-roll lol).

Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri

At Amazon, Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri.

Woke Los Angeles is the New Typhus Hotbed: Homeless Catastrophe Makes City of Angels Unlivable (VIDEO)

Why are Democrat-run cities such hellholes of infectious disease and humanitarian catastrophe?!!

And don't even get me going about San Francisco, where the current California Governor Gavin Newsome left behind a legacy of human feces, heroin junkies shooting up on the sidewalks, and progressive NIMBY losers turning away with indifference.

California really is a lost cause.

At the New American, "“Sky High” Piles of Trash Making Downtown Los Angeles Unlivable."

And the Los Angeles Times, "Rats and other vermin infest LAPD downtown station, sparking anger among officers."

LAPD Officers Diagnosed With Suspected Case of Typhus, Salmonella Typhi: Los Angeles has no formal rat abatement program. But, yay, we have the Olympics. https://t.co/pDVY4eJVtw via @nbcla

— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) June 1, 2019

When state officials inspected the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division station last November, they uncovered rodent infestations and other unsanitary conditions at the facilities responsible for protecting skid row and other parts of downtown.

The conditions have now become the source of growing anger inside the station, with some officers threatening to seek transfers and city leaders scrambling to address the problems.

The issues at the Central Division come amid larger concerns about disease and filth across downtown, notably a vermin infestation at City Hall last year. One city employee was diagnosed with typhus, a disease that can be spread by rodents. City Hall workers said they saw fleas, rodent droppings and plants eaten by vermin in the building.

The California Department of Industrial Relations issued six violations and a $5,425 fine to the LAPD on May 14 and two violations and a $1,910 fine to the Department of General Services, records reviewed by The Times on Thursday show.

On Thursday, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the LAPD said they are working to resolve the problems. The division has 414 sworn officers — the largest number in the city.

“Our officers work hard every day to protect our city, and they deserve the best working conditions,” said Alex Comisar, a Garcetti spokesman. “Whether the issue is bad plumbing or something else, the mayor is working with the department to get to the bottom of this situation — and will take every possible step to protect the health and safety of all our employees.”

The department added: "The state’s report is concerning and we are taking steps to ensure the men and women who work for the Los Angeles Police Department can come to work in a healthy environment.”

The LAPD announced late Wednesday that an employee who fell ill at the downtown LAPD station had contracted the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever and was being treated for the condition. The LAPD confirmed that a second employee had a lower intestinal infection, but a specific diagnosis has not been determined...

What a nightmare.

Still more at the link.

Alex Morgan Behind the Scenes (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2019:

Italian Fashion Model Chiara Bianchino

At Drunken Stepfather, "CHIARA BIANCHINO NAKED OF THE DAY."

Kara Del Toro Lingerie

At Drunken Stepfather, "KARA DEL TORO LINGERIE OF THE DAY."

BONUS: "Maxim Model Kara Del Toro Unveils Her Scorching Hot Bikini Body in Mexico."

Gillette's Woke Transgender Son Shaving for the First Time Advertisement (VIDEO)

So lame.

Megham Murphy nails it, at Feminist Current, "The ‘intersectional’ masses celebrating Gillette’s new ad reveal their empty politics":

"Much less amusing is the fact that not only multi-billion dollar companies, but LGBT 'allies,' are pushing young people down an incredibly harmful path without any concern for the consequences." https://t.co/2UXVnseluo

— Feminist Current (@FeministCurrent) May 31, 2019

In their ongoing attempts to use politically correct politics to sell razors, Gillette has hit another home run. This time, the company produced an ad depicting a father helping his daughter learn how to shave.

Naturally, there is a woke twist. The daughter, named Samson, is “trans,” and we are meant to understand she is a man. The ad, called “First Shave,” begins with Samson saying, “Growing up, I was always trying to figure out what kind of man I would become.” While we could choose to read this as a celebration of a supportive father, lovingly teaching his child the rituals of entering manhood, it makes far more sense to read this as a company’s attempt to glom onto the most saleable trend right now: transgenderism.

To be clear, I have little interest in criticizing this father and child, who are clearly doing their best in a culture that finds the most superficial, profitable solutions for personal, cultural, or social problems.

Parents are stuck between a rock and a hard place, as they are told over and over again, by a multitude of institutions, including public schools, governments, mainstream media, LGBTQ organizations, the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical industry, that if their child announces they are either transgender or literally the opposite sex, they must affirm this assertion and support their child to transition, or be labelled abusive, oppressive, or even responsible for mental illness and suicidal ideation.

Children and teenagers are inundated with propaganda telling them that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body; that if they don’t feel perfectly comfortable with rigid gender roles, they must actually be the opposite sex (a scientific impossibility); and that if they feel either a desire to have the body of the opposite sex or to reject the gender stereotypes associated with that sex, their only option for a happy life is to transition. Telling young people that their only route towards fulfillment lies in numerous cosmetic surgeries and a lifetime of hormones that destroy their bodies and render them sterile and unable to experience sexual pleasure is irresponsible, cruel, and dangerous. Yet this is what Gillette is selling. Or rather, using in order to sell.

Initially, I was confused as to why a company that sells shaving products to men would imagine their consumer base would be propelled to buy more Gillette products by imagery of a young woman shaving. I suspect most men don’t buy into gender identity ideology, and certainly “transmen” are not a large enough group to support any jump in sales. But apparently their last ad, which aimed to associate the company with the #MeToo movement, by demonstrating “good masculinity” vs “bad masculinity,” actually did succeed in broadening their audience (despite the fact that thousands of men hated the ad). I suppose the assumption is that new audiences will translate to new consumers, in the long term.

I’m not an ad executive and I certainly have no idea how to make money (I mean, look at my career choice…), but if all this attention from liberals and the media translates into dollars, good for Gillette, I guess… That is their goal, after all. What I find most amusing about this ad and the conversation happening around it online, though, is the way it is being universally celebrated as “progress” by people who will, in the same breath, claim to be “intersectional” — a term intended to communicate a commitment to understanding the intersections of race, class, and gender on individual people’s lives. So, people who are using a concept that is intended to be critical of capitalism (i.e. the thing responsible for class oppression) and gender in order to sell themselves to the world as Very Good and Righteous are celebrating the most brazen co-optation of the most regressive ideology, by a company owned by Procter & Gamble. L-o-fucking-l, you chumps.

What is much less amusing, of course, is the fact that not only multi-billion dollar companies, but LGBT “allies,” are pushing young people down an incredibly harmful path (one that will lead them right into the hands of other multi-billion dollar companies, of course) without any concern for the consequences...

Still more at that top link.

Peter Caddick-Adams on D-Day (VIDEO)

This is great!

Here's the book, at Amazon, Peter Caddick-Adams, Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day.

And at Prager University:

Sponsors Bail on Fresno Grizzlies After Class AAA Affiliate Showed Memorial Day Tribute Video

I love this video!

Good on the Grizzlies!

Let's just hope the woke sponsors just chill the fuck out and get with the patriotic program. Don't cave to the censoring Democrat Party left.

At LAT, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video spurs more sponsors to drop Fresno Grizzlies."

And USA Today, "Fresno Grizzlies losing major sponsors in aftermath of offensive Ocasio-Cortez video."

Disneyland Manages Wait Times at the New Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

Disney's now gone all woke with corporate social justice policies, and CEO Bob Igor's a fool.

But their crowd management techniques for the new attraction are definitely putting paying customers first. Everything's pricey, but heh, you gotta pay the price to feel nice.

At LAT, "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge forces Disney to tap eons of crowd-control expertise":

Disneyland first wrestled with crowding on opening day in 1955 when restaurants ran out of food and drinks, lines formed at the bathrooms and visitors sneaked in with counterfeit tickets.

In the 1960s, Disneyland pioneered the use of stanchions and tape to create switchback queues for waiting visitors and provided entertainment to pass the time. The park took another swipe at the problem two decades ago, when it introduced “Fastpass,” the virtual queueing system.

But the opening this weekend of the biggest expansion in park history — the 14-acre Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge — pushed Walt Disney Co. to launch perhaps its most comprehensive crowd-easing effort yet, in effect acknowledging that the 18.7 million people estimated to have visited Disneyland last year is a record primed for breaking.

“It’s always been an area of work for us because we know intuitively that it does impact the experience,” said Kris Theiler, vice president of Disneyland Park. ”By coming at it from a comprehensive perspective, we’re able to make some really big impacts.”

On Friday, the first day that the expansion was opened to the public, the hard-core Star Wars fans for the most part moved about the $1-billion land with ease. But the lines to the only operating ride as well as the cantina and the most anticipated shops — attractions in their own right — fluctuated from brief to excruciatingly long.

Giovanni Peraza, a recent high school graduate from Chandler, Ariz., complained that he waited an hour to ride the interactive Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. “It was too long,” he said.

But Karen Covington and her husband, Bill, from Del Mar said they were happily surprised that their wait for the ride was only 25 minutes.

“They are doing a good job of crowd control,” Bill Covington said.

“I hope it stays this way,” Karen added.

To keep crowds from creating gridlock, Star Wars employees directed parkgoers to move in a counterclockwise direction, starting at the Millennium Falcon ride and circling to the Middle Eastern styled marketplace.

About 90 minutes after the land opened, workers were seen putting black tape on the ground to create switchback lines near the opening of Savi’s Workshop, where visitors can build their own lightsaber. At about the same time, Oga’s Cantina, the space-themed pub, reached capacity and only allowed new entrants when the crowds thinned.

Disneyland executives, who stood by to assess the opening day, said they saw no surprises.

“It happened exactly as we thought it would,” said Josh D’Amaro, president of Disneyland Resort.

Anticipating an out-of-this-world demand for the fictional land, Disneyland required parkgoers to book a four-hour reservation period to visit the Star Wars expansion during the first three weeks. Visitors were given colored wristbands to identify those who were allowed in and those whose allotted four hours had run out.

When the reservation period for a Star Wars land visitor ended, the guest was not allowed to board an attraction or enter a shop and was told: “Your credentials have expired.”

The reservation system allowed the park to control how many people are in the Star Wars land at any given time. But even with such restrictions on guests, the wait time for the Millennium Falcon ride fluctuated Friday from 20 minutes to 70 minutes.

Disneyland is the second-most visited theme park in the world behind Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida, according to an annual attendance study by the Los Angeles consulting firm Aecom and Themed Entertainment Assn., a trade group for theme park designers and producers. Disneyland drew 18.7 million visitors last year while the Magic Kingdom hosted 20.9 million visitors, both up 2% from the year before.

Disney doesn’t release daily attendance figures, although longtime Walt Disney Imagineering art director Kim Irvine recently revealed that Disneyland attendance of 65,000 is a “normal” day. During holiday seasons, Disneyland has had to temporarily shut its gates from time to time when the park reached capacity, a ceiling that has never been publicly disclosed but some insiders have said is about 80,000 visitors.

Some industry experts say crowding worsened at Disneyland after the resort began in 2009 to offer monthly payment plans to make it easier for more visitors to afford annual passes.

Such passes range in price from $400 to $1,400.

To cope with the expected crowds during the 60th anniversary of the park in 2015, Disneyland opened up behind-the-scenes pathways to direct crowds around gridlock areas.

A year later, the theme park adopted a “demand pricing” policy that lowered admission ticket prices on a typically slow day — maybe a Wednesday in September — and increased prices on high-demand days. Disney portrayed the move as a crowd-management technique.

A study by the Los Angeles Times found that the queues at the park grew longer even after the dynamic pricing scheme was adopted.

In 2015, only three years after the Walt Disney Co. acquired Lucasfilm for $4 billion, the theme park announced plans for a $1-billion land based on the blockbuster Star Wars sci-fi franchise...

Still more.

The Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost -- In Australia

The Chronicle of Higher Education did a recent feature on Quillette, with the totally unexceptional knee-jerk headline, "The Academy’s New Favorite Hate-Read: Is ‘Quillette’ an island of sanity — or reactionary conservatism for the Ph.D. set?"

(It's behind the paywall, but you get the gist of it from the embedded tweet there.)

Claire Lehmann's the founder and editor-in-chief, and it turns out she's a darned good writer and analyst. I enjoyed this piece from a couple of weeks back on the Australian national elections.

See, "At Australian Ballot Boxes, the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost":

For as long as champagne socialists incessantly attack the values & cultural tastes of working class folk, centre-left parties cannot take their votes for granted. My piece on the Australian election result https://t.co/51UeV6M2Yg

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) May 20, 2019

The result of Saturday’s federal election in Australia is being treated as the most staggering political shocker in my country since World War II. Scott Morrison, leading the Liberal Party, looks to have won a majority government—a result that defies three years of opinion polling, bookie’s odds and media commentary.

In the aftermath, analysts on both sides are trying to explain what went wrong for the centre-left Australian Labor Party, and what went right for the centre-right Liberals. Some attribute the result to Morrison’s personal likeability, and his successful targeting of the “quiet Australian” demographic—the silent majority whose members feel they rarely have a voice, except at the ballot box. Others cast the result as Australia’s Hilary-Clinton moment: Bill Shorten, who resigned following Saturday’s loss, was, like Clinton, an unpopular political insider who generated little enthusiasm among his party’s traditional constituencies. In 2010 and again in 2013, he roiled the Labor Party by supporting two separate internal coups, machinations that cast him as a self-promoter instead of a team player.

The swing against Labor was particularly pronounced in the northeastern state of Queensland—which is more rural and socially conservative than the rest of Australia. Many of Queensland’s working-class voters opposed Labor’s greener-than-thou climate-change policies, not a surprise given that the state generates half of all the metallurgical coal burned in the world’s blast furnaces. Queensland’s rejection of Labor carried a particularly painful symbolic sting for Shorten, given that this is the part of Australia where his party was founded by 19th century sheep shearers meeting under a ghost gum tree. In 1899, the world’s first Labor government was sworn into the Queensland parliament. Shorten’s “wipe-out” in Queensland demonstrates what has become of the party’s brand among working-class people 120 years later.

*   *   *

Picture a dinner party where half the guests are university graduates with prestigious white-collar jobs, with the other half consisting of people who are trade workers, barmaids, cleaners and labourers. While one side of the table trades racy jokes and uninhibited banter, the other half tut-tuts this “problematic” discourse.

These two groups both represent traditional constituencies of mainstream centre-left parties—including the Labour Party in the UK, the Democrats in the United States, and the NDP in Canada. Yet they have increasingly divergent attitudes and interests—even if champagne socialists paper over these differences with airy slogans about allyship and solidarity.

Progressive politicians like to assume that, on election day at least, blue-collar workers and urban progressives will bridge their differences, and make common cause to support leftist economic policies. This assumption might once have been warranted. But it certainly isn’t now—in large part because the intellectuals, activists and media pundits who present the most visible face of modern leftism are the same people openly attacking the values and cultural tastes of working and middle-class voters. And thanks to social media (and the caustic news-media culture that social media has encouraged and normalized), these attacks are no longer confined to dinner-party titterings and university lecture halls. Brigid Delaney, a senior writer for Guardian Australia, responded to Saturday’s election result with a column about how Australia has shown itself to be “rotten.” One well-known Australian feminist and op-ed writer, Clementine Ford, has been fond of Tweeting sentiments such as “All men are scum and must die.” Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who also has served as a high-profile newspaper columnist, argues that even many mainstream political positions—such as expressing concern about the Chinese government’s rising regional influence—are a smokescreen for racism.

In an interview conducted on Sunday morning, Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek opined that if only her party had more time to explain to the various groups how much they’d all benefit from Labor’s plans, Australians would have realized how fortunate they’d be with a Labor government, and Shorten would’ve become Prime Minister. Such attitudes are patronizing, for they implicitly serve to place blame at the feet of voters, who apparently are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.

What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement.

Taking stock of real voters’ needs would require elites to exhibit a spirit of empathic understanding—such as by way of acknowledging that blue-collar workers have good reason to vote down parties whose policies would destroy blue-collar jobs; or that legal immigrants might oppose opening up a nation’s border to migrants who arrive illegally. More broadly, the modern progressive left has lost touch with the fact that what ordinary people want from their government is a spirit of respect, dignity and hope for the future. While the fetish for hectoring and moral puritanism has become popular in rarefied corners of arts and academia, it is deeply off-putting to voters whose sense of self extends beyond cultish ideological tribalism.

*   *   *

The class-based realignment of party politics isn’t unique to my country. All over the world, left-wing parties increasingly are being co-opted by politicians who reflect the attitudes and priorities of voters with higher incomes and education levels, while right-wing parties increasingly attract blue-collar workers who’ve become alienated by parties that once championed the little guy. It’s been three years since Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, and so this phenomenon no longer can be described as new or dismissed as transient. Yet progressives seem to imagine that it can be dispelled, as if by a magic spell, simply by incanting the right hash tags or bleating mantras about anti-racism...

Keep reading.