Ms. Hostetter

I mentioned how once in a while the New York Times does "get it right," or nearabouts, which, as noted, is why I still read the paper (along with the L.A. Times) on most days. 

Now, I'm not saying this article is perfect, but it's pretty good --- and darned interesting --- as it's a story that literally "hits close to home," in the O.C. where I live, and where, actually, there are indeed a lot of crazy nut cases (and while I don't know if Ms. Hostetter is crazy, her husband sounds questionable, which adds to the intrigue here, so, well, that's it). 

At NYT, "A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began":

Kristine Hostetter was a beloved fourth-grade teacher. Then came the pandemic, the election and the Jan. 6 riot in Washington.

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Word got around when Kristine Hostetter was spotted at a public mask-burning at the San Clemente pier, and when she appeared in a video sitting onstage as her husband spoke at a QAnon convention. People talked when she angrily accosted a family wearing masks near a local surfing spot, her granddaughter in tow.

Even in San Clemente, a well-heeled redoubt of Southern California conservatism, Ms. Hostetter stood out for her vehement embrace of both the rebellion against Covid-19 restrictions and the stolen-election lies pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. This was, after all, a teacher so beloved that each summer parents jockeyed to get their children into her fourth-grade class.

But it was not until Ms. Hostetter’s husband posted a video of her marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 that her politics collided with an opposite force gaining momentum in San Clemente: a growing number of left-leaning parents and students who, in the wake of the civil-rights protests set off by the police killing of George Floyd, decided they would no longer countenance the right-wing tilt of their neighbors and the racism they said was commonplace.

That there was no evidence that Ms. Hostetter had displayed any overt racism was beside the point — to them, her pro-Trump views seemed self-evidently laced with white supremacy. So she became their cause.

First, a student group organized a petition demanding the school district investigate whether Ms. Hostetter, 54, had taken part in the attack on the Capitol, and whether her politics had crept into her teaching. Then, when the district complied and suspended her, a group of parents put up a counter petition.

“If the district starts disciplinary action based on people’s beliefs/politics, what’s next? Religious discrimination?” it warned.

Each petition attracted thousands of signatures, and San Clemente has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Ms. Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, not to mention shaping young minds in a classroom.

It has not been a polite debate. Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another’s social media posts; some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not — and they have the screenshots to prove it.

Even the local yoga community, where Ms. Hostetter’s husband was a fixture, has found itself divided.

“It goes deeper than just her. A lot of conversations between parents, between friends, have already been fractured by Trump, by the election, by Black Lives Matter,” said Cady Anderson, whose two children attend Ms. Hostetter’s school.

Ms. Hostetter, she added, “just brought it all home to us.”

Complicating matters is Ms. Hostetter’s relative silence. Apart from appearing at protests and the incident at the beach, she has said little publicly over the past year, and did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article. People have filled in the blanks.

To Ms. Hostetter’s backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone’s personal politics. Yet Ms. Hostetter’s politics, while personal, are hardly private, and to those who have lined up against her, she is inextricably linked to her husband, Alan, who last year emerged as a rising star in Southern California’s resurgent far right.

An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, Calif., Mr. Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.”

Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the American Phoenix Project organized protests against Covid-related restrictions up and down Orange County, and Mr. Hostetter’s list of enemies grew: Black Lives Matter protesters. The election thieves. Cabals and conspiracies drawn from QAnon, the movement that claims Mr. Trump was secretly battling devil-worshiping Democrats and international financiers who abuse children.

By Jan. 5, Mr. Hostetter, 56, had graduated to the national stage, appearing with the former Trump adviser Roger Stone at a rally outside the Supreme Court.

His appearance there and the next day at the Capitol prompted some of San Clemente’s more liberal residents to make bumper stickers that read: “Alan Hostraitor.” It also led the F.B.I. to raid his apartment in early February, though he was not arrested or charged with any crime. (He, too, did not respond to interview requests.)

Ms. Hostetter was there every step of the way, raising money and filming her husband as he rallied supporters at protests. When the American Phoenix Project filed incorporation papers in December, she was identified as its chief financial officer.

The Teacher

Ms. Hostetter grew up in Orange County back when locals still joked about the “Orange Curtain” separating its conservative and overwhelmingly white towns from liberal and diverse Los Angeles to the north. In the late 1960s, Richard M. Nixon turned an oceanside villa in San Clemente into his presidential getaway, christening it La Casa Pacifica. John Wayne kept his prized yacht, Wild Goose, docked up the coast in Newport Beach.

“Orange County,” Ronald Reagan once declared, “is where the good Republicans go before they die.”

It also was where surfers and spiritual seekers met cold warriors and conspiracy theorists, where some of the conservative movement’s most virulently racist, anti-Semitic and paranoid offshoots went. In the 1960s, Orange County saw a surge in the popularity of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization that in many ways presaged the rise of QAnon. In the 1980s, its surf spots became a magnet for neo-Nazis and skinheads. And in 2020, the onset of the pandemic produced a new generation of Orange County extremists.

If Ms. Hostetter had any strong political leanings before last year, she did not let on, said her niece, Emma Hall. She only picked up the first hint of her aunt’s rightward drift at small party to celebrate the Hostetters’ wedding in 2016.

“There were about six people, friends of theirs, that did not let up asking me if I was going to vote for Trump,” recalled Ms. Hall’s husband, Ryan.

Neither of the Halls gave it much thought. Ms. Hostetter seemed happy, and her new husband exuded the laid-back charm that typifies a certain kind of Southern California man in the American imagination...

More later.

 

Britain's Prince Philip, 'His Royal Highness', Queen Elizabeth's 'Beloved' Husband, Dead at 99 (VIDEO)

I first actually read the news of the passing of "His Royal Highness" at the New York Times, on the app on my iPhone.

And it did still include this headline, which has now been changed by the disgusting "Old Gray Lady, embedded at left, though I tried to "center it," but it messed up all the formatting of the rest...

...And you know, it's no surprise at all, as the New York Times, as much as I do enjoy reading the country's "newspaper of record" (as I do learn a lot there, and sometimes the editors "hit the mark" with real, good, and actual journalistic reporting), it's truly a trash site most of the times these days, with literally no "balance" of views, unless you consider columnists Ross Douthat and David Brooks actual "conservatives"; and don't get me going about the hack, hit piece "journalism" routinely published at that rag (here's looking at you, Taylor Lorenz); and I actually feel bad for longtime N.Y.T. science reporter, Donald McNeil, who was fired by the newspaper, after profusely apologizing, more than once, for simply having a discussion of the "N-Word," which he uttered himself during said discussion with a young person he was responsible for during a field trip to Peru a few years back. 

Here's the piece, with the changed title, though I'm not going to read it all again to see if the editors "fixed" their asinine and stupid editorializing about this truly great and candid Duke of Edinburgh: "Prince Philip, Husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Is Dead at 99."

The Los Angeles Times has a much, much better obituary, which I read in hard-copy yesterday morning, by Kim Murphy, a veteran foreign affairs correspondent, who started her career at the paper, and returned to it recently. And Ms. Murphy, who discusses Prince Philip's notable public and "gaffe-tastic" quips and rejoinders, puts up an overall balanced and well-meaning commemoration to the man, who, one might argue, literally save the British monarchy.    

See, "Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband and closest confidant and advisor, dies at 99":

It was an enduring alliance that outlasted the Cold War, 15 prime ministers, war and peace in Northern Ireland and Britain’s union with Europe — followed by the country’s shattering decision, 43 years later, to leave.

Side by side for as long as most Britons could possibly remember, Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II stood as a reassuring constant even during the most trying or turbulent times, an epic love story that seemed unshakable.

But the longest marriage of a reigning monarch in British history came to an end Friday when the prince — two months shy of his 100th birthday — died at Windsor Castle in England. The flag above Buckingham Palace was immediately lowered to half-staff, and the official announcement of Philip Mountbatten’s death was posted on the palace gates.

“It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement Friday, just after noon in Britain. “His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle.”

Standing outside No. 10 Downing St., Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised Philip for a life of service and endurance.

“Like the expert carriage driver that he was, he helped to steer the royal family and the monarchy so that it remains an institution indisputably vital to the balance and happiness of our national life,” Johnson said.

“Over the course of his 99-year life, he saw our world change dramatically and repeatedly,” President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden said in a statement. “From his service during World War II, to his 73 years alongside the Queen, and his entire life in the public eye — Prince Philip gladly dedicated himself to the people of the U.K., the Commonwealth, and to his family.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Philip and the queen had been staying at Windsor Castle, west of London. Though he enjoyed robust health for most of his life, he was hospitalized for a month this year, from Feb. 16 to March 16, during which he underwent a heart procedure.

He was treated for chest pains in 2011, was hospitalized for two days in 2017 and was hospitalized again for 10 days in 2018 for a hip replacement. He was forced to give up driving in 2019 — at the age of 97 — after smashing into another car while driving his Land Rover.

Prince Philip never held the official title of prince consort, as did Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert, but he nonetheless was Queen Elizabeth II’s closest confidant, most reliable political advisor and the undisputed master of the royal household for more than seven decades.

Philip was known equally as a curmudgeon and a charmer who could quickly put nervous guests at ease with an easy (and sometimes outrageous) one-liner. Courtiers, his own children and the queen herself backed down under the quick flash of his temper, and guests at Buckingham Palace were expected to stay up to speed with his lively intellect and encyclopedic command of facts or were hastily dismissed as being not worthy of the duke’s time.

While Elizabeth presided over affairs of state, Philip championed dozens of charities, including the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, which has promoted self-reliance, physical development and other personal accomplishments for more than 6 million youths around the world.

[EMBEDDED TWEET HERE.]

He also set down the ground rules for rearing of the royal children, wrote books about horses and equestrian sports, oversaw the palaces and handled hundreds of official engagements every year until he retired from his official public schedule in August 2017. (“Unveil your own damn plaque,” read a cartoon drawn specially for the occasion, to Philip’s delight.) He was nearly always at the queen’s side during more than 73 years of marriage.

“Prince Philip is simply my rock. He is my foundation stone,” the monarch said at a lunch in 1997 honoring their 50th wedding anniversary. “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments, but he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I and his whole family … owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know.”

Philip, for his part, seldom talked about his contributions to the royal enterprise, though he was known on rare occasions to reflect on what he had given up to be the man who walks two paces behind the queen, the husband of one monarch and the father of presumably the next, with no historic role of his own.

“It was not my ambition to be president of the Mint Advisory Committee,” he told the Independent on Sunday newspaper in 1992. “I didn’t want to be president of [the World Wide Fund for Nature]. I was asked to do it. I’d much rather have stayed in the navy, frankly.”

His chief contribution in the end was simply to have been there for the queen: a man of keen rationality and wide reading who in some ways intimidated her, who was not legally answerable to anyone and who was available as a voice of reason and dissent when all around had a habit of agreeing with her.

He had a slight reputation for pushiness and being opinionated … and he is as right-wing as ever, but there’s never been the slightest suggestion that he influenced the queen in that way,” said Robert Lacey, the British historian best known for his work on the award-winning drama “The Crown.”

“We can now see he was free to state his own opinions because he had no constitutional responsibilities,” he said. “So that made him a particularly strong and useful pillar for the queen.”

A former government secretary told the Daily Telegraph in 2001 how the Duke of Edinburgh had once quizzed him about a policy issue in his department.

“‘What’s the object of the exercise?’ he asked me. I stumbled through the answer and tried to explain that the aim was a bit of A and a bit of B. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but which is it — A or B?’ I replied, probably rather incoherently, that it really was a mixture of both. ‘I’d always thought that what was wrong with this country was that all the best brains went into the civil service,’ said Prince Philip, ‘but that was before I met you!’ — and walked away.”

He also had a knack for the painfully politically incorrect remark. Amid the recession of 1981, as more Britons sought public assistance, he observed: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.” When the royal couple were introduced in 2002 to a teenage army cadet who had been blinded in an Irish Republican Army bombing, the queen asked the 15-year-old boy how much sight he had left. “Not a lot, judging by the tie he’s wearing,” Philip quipped, as the crowd fell silent.

But Philip was also the ultimate salt-of-the-earth English country gentleman. Royal hunting weekends would not be complete without the sight of Philip, his head wreathed in smoke, barbecuing the day’s take of pheasants. He was an enthusiastic sailor, polo player and carriage driver who went bolting with his horses around the royal estates until well into old age, when Elizabeth begged him to give it up. (The Daily Mail carried photos of the prince once again at the reins of his carriage in November 2017, prodding his horses around Windsor Castle at the age of 96.)

There's still more at the link.

And Fox News' report from Friday:

I'll try to put up some more entries tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. (I'm watching Sunday Night Baseball, and I'm looking forward to a "normal" season, hopefully, and I plan to take my family to as many Angels games as possible, as that's, really, the best kind of "family therapy" I can think of.)

You Don't Say? Black Lives Matter Co-Founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Has Purchased $1.4 Million Home in Secluded -- All White! -- Topanga Canyon

Woo boy, this story's a doozy, but entirely predictable, sadly. 

From Jonathan Turley, "Twitter Censors Criticism of BLM Founder Buying $1.4 Million Home In Predominantly White Neighborhood":

We have been discussing the expanding censorship on Twitter and social media. The latest example involves the story of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, and her purchase of a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles whose population is reputedly less than 2% black. The professed Marxist received considerable criticism for the purchase, including from Jason Whitlock, an African-America sports critic who has also been a critic of BLM. When Whitlock called out Khan-Cullors, Twitter promptly censored the tweet — leaving a notice that it was “no longer available.”

Last week, various cites like dirt.com reported, “A secluded mini-compound tucked into L.A.’s rustic and semi-remote Topanga Canyon was recently sold for a tad more than $1.4 million to a corporate entity that public records show is controlled by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37-year-old social justice visionary and co-founder of the galvanizing and, for some, controversial Black Lives Matter movement.”

It produced a firestorm of critics who noted that Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.”

Jason Whitlock posted a link to a story but was promptly censored by Twitter:

[SCREENSHOT HERE]

The controversy is illustrative of the age of Internet censors. Tweets, and in some cases Twitter accounts, vanish without explanation. Twitter is notorious for not responding to media inquiries over such censorship and even less forthcoming on the decision-making process behind such decisions.

If Whitlock was expressing his contempt for the purchase, it is core political speech.

Even the head of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter is calling for an independent investigation into the organization’s finances in the wake of the controversy. This controversy follows an Atlanta-based figure being criminally charged with fraud. According to the Justice Department, Sir Maejor Page, or Tyree Conyers-Page is accused of using a Facebook page called “Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta.”

The New York Post and other publications have reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas. However, it is not clear if this money came from BLM which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She is married to Janaya Khan, a leader of BLM in Toronto, and published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book. She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda.

The issue for me is not the house or claimed hypocrisy. It is the censorship of Twitter of such criticism. Cullors is a public figure who is subject to public scrutiny and commentary. Twitter is rife with a such criticism over the lifestyle choices of figures on the right ranging from Donald Trump Jr. to Rand Paul. That is an unfortunate aspect of being in a high visibility position. I would be equally concerned if criticism of Trump Jr.’s big game hunting exploits or Giuliani’s lavish tastes were censored...

Still more.

And at London's Daily Mail, "BLM founder is branded a 'FRAUD' after buying a $1.4 million home in an upscale mostly white enclave in L.A." 

Personally, I don't care much that this woman bought a ritzy house in "exclusive" Topanga Canyon (good for her!); and the Twitter censorship is par for the course, in any case; and is, perhaps, less interesting to me than it is to Mr. Turley.

It's the hypocrisy and --- the literally satanic --- double-standards. Not only can I not stand "Black Lives Matter," as their movement is, obviously, a sham that's virtually 100 percent responsible for the "B.L.M." riots last summer than burned down darned near every Democrat-run city in the entire country, but this woman, as noted above by Mr. Turley, is a self-declared "Marxist"; that is, she's a real, dyed-in-the-wool communist, and for her to be out there scooping up million dollar properties, not just in L.A., but perhaps in the Caribbean as well, that's a bit rich for me, and I find it absolutely disgusting. (As, for one thing, the wealth-creation derived from such purchases is literally the same anathema that these ideological and partisan ghouls are always yapping about, and, frankly, I often sympathize with these very same "concerns" that they have about "capitalist racist oppression" or "structural racism," or, well, on and on and on, blah blah). 

What is more, as political science professor, at a genuinely "minority-majority" college, a place really filled with the kind of "marginalized" kids that these "B.L.M." hacks and liars constantly say they're "all about," I can't even say how much this pissed me right the f*ck off. But that's life, and honestly, lately I mostly just "get with the program" at my school, because radical leftists already tried to get me fired ("cancelled") 10 years ago, and I have no interest in dealing with any such sort of related campus-based ideological conflicts again, despite the fact that I'm tenured. It's just too much. You become a pariah, and it's even worse, because you become a pariah to a lot of people with whom you'd had perfectly fine and collegial relationships prior to such libelous, illegal, and FUBAR attacks. 

I mean, if you've heard folks online, or in commentary pieces, etc., argue that "it's hard" for conservative faculty members on America's college and university campuses these days, well, you have no idea. And take it from me, because I'm a pretty hardy soul, but also pretty mellow and totally friendly to those with whom I work, but no matter: All that good cheer and outstanding professionalism (and professional relationships) goes out the window should you wind up in the cross-hairs of these truly satanic ideological and partisan monsters. 

While I would never say this to a student of mine, I really don't recommend anyone WHO IS NOT a freakin' Marxist to go into college or university teaching, and that's to say nothing of just recommending graduate training in the humanities or social sciences (or even English literature, etc.) to my students, because as bad as it all is, I'm not one to crush a young person's dreams, and I'll only speak frankly on the cancerous toxicity of "academe" if the student brings it up herself (or himself, or "themselves," or whatever). 

Twins?

This is so freaky, right? 

They've gotta be twins, but it also looks like a "mirror image," as one woman would be right-handed and her sister left. This is "vewy, vewy" interesting, to borrow from Elmer Fudd. (At least their shoes give it away, dang!)

At Country Girls.

Also, Anne Hathaway and Demi Rose.

Shades of Blue

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

At Harper's Magazine (surprisingly):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still more.

 

Now THIS Is Some Big Pandemic News

It's at Gallup, "Americans' Worry About Catching COVID-19 Drops to Record Low."

Obviously this is monumental news, and it's especially big because this data goes against practically everything the elites in D.C. and virtually all the "blue states" are telling everyone --- which means, of course, they're lying. 

The only thing more they needed at the report here is a breakdown by party identity, because while the huge overall majority reports little to no worry about catching the "'rona," no doubt idiot leftist Dems are swallowing everything that comes out of the D.C. swamp (and the stupid so-called progressive "blue state" capitals, with their idiot governors, and Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer come to mind), and, naturally, these "woke" Democrats love their masks and social distancing, and are ready to keep up with this crap until mid-century, if not later. 

No need to quote the whole thing (just read it at the link above), although I'll post the conclusion here:

Americans have become substantially less worried about contracting COVID-19 as a growing proportion of adults have been fully vaccinated and as satisfaction with the vaccine rollout has improved. These shifts have occurred while coronavirus infection rates have fallen substantially from highs reached in January of this year. Optimism about the COVID-19 situation has also spiked to a record high. Gallup previously observed a meaningful relationship between Americans' perceptions of the coronavirus situation and changes in reported numbers of daily new cases.

After the March survey was conducted, infection rates began to rise again. This may be at least partially connected to the decrease in reported strict social distancing by Americans at a time when more contagious variants of the virus are spreading. Public health experts see the U.S. now in a race to get large numbers of Americans vaccinated before those variants spread further. The outcome of that race will determine the future course of infections in the U.S. and will likely determine whether Americans show continued increasing optimism about the COVID-19 situation or a course correction in their attitudes.

So, if you do decide to "RTWT," the graphs at the peace are real nice. 

UPDATE: Idiot me spoke too soon without checking on the tables (rather than the graphs), although, despite that, I'm not much wrong: Still half of all Democrats surveyed reported being being "worried" about catching the virus; although Dems are more likely to see things as "getting better," but that's an artifact, no doubt, of having the "Harris-Biden" administration in power, and these still stupid "woke" Dems are more likely to be "swallowing down" all the new "regime's" lies and propaganda --- so, I guess I wasn't too off in my estimations, despite the absence of a couple of more detailed graphs.

Mea culpa! Mea culpa, lol! 

The 'Woke' New Appeal of Totalitarianism

I don't know Roger Kimball, the bow-tie-wearing editor of the New Criterion (which I do not read), and the editor (publisher?) of Encounter Books.

But his essay today is quite good, and it's interesting to me, because I could've written it myself. I've been saying the exact same things all semester, in my (at least) twice-weekly "all class" announcements, where I sometimes add an "optional" section below the "all business" section that starts my messages, and then I offer some of my own (humble) thoughts on the news of the day --- providing links to books, as needed --- and if students read those or not, I tell them, it doesn't matter much to me, because, I also tell them, they are "free to choose" what's best for themselves; and they might not care one whit what I might have to say on the bloody, horrific violence, mayhem, and organized "mainstream" media hypocrisy that's very likely propelling us to a new --- and very "hot" --- civil war, not a "cold war," which is probably what we've been in since the 1970s, in the aftermath of the mayhem and murder inflicted back during the 1960s, care of the "Destructive Generation" that grew out of the "rights revolution" of the era, and especially the "antiwar" movement that arose in opposition to the alleged U.S. "imperialist" war in Vietnam (which was, actually, a war of the most vital national security interests), and one that's a shame we lost, as I doubt Vietnam today is anywhere near as successful, as, say, South Korea, which was not "unified" by the force of arms of both Chinese and Soviet military power.

All that said, just read Kimball, who, although he can't stomach baseball (which is strange to me, indeed), is a good guy, and a darned good thinker and writer.

At American Greatness, "The Appeal of the New Totalitarians":

It’s easy to understand and reject the horrors of totalitarianism. It is much less easy to grasp its inexorable logic or its seemingly implacable attractions.

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom.

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote?

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.)

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. Quite apart from its illuminating historical analysis, the book is a plea to turn away from the politicization of everything that stands behind such phenomena as sports concessions and airlines—to say nothing of Hollywood, the media, and the fount of it all, academia—insinuating politics into every dimension of life. “The choice here,” Soukup writes in his conclusion, “is simple.”

If we, as a civilization allow even the spirit of capitalism to become part of “the political” and part of the total state, then we will have order—for however long that lasts. If we resist the politicization of business and of capital markets, however; if we determine for ourselves that disorder and depoliticization are the preferable options, then we not only preserve liberty but also preserve the spirit of innovation and expression that harnesses liberty to create wealth and prosperity. I think Soukup is correct, and his analysis of the way the totalizing process of the politicization of everything has proceeded in other situations should give us all pause.

Political correctness has always had a silly as well as a minatory side. The silly side is evident in its juvenile narcissism. It is so obviously a product of a rich and leisured society that it is hard to take its antics seriously. There is a reason that it had its origins in the academy. Those privileged eyries could afford to allow their charges to prance around whining about how oppressed or “triggered” or offended they were since they occupied the coddled purlieus of a place apart—apart from the serious business of everyday life and in this country, anyway, apart from the less forgiving imperatives of genuine want...

Later, I'll write a full post linking this new book from Soukup, of which and whom I was unaware, but appears to be a real winner, and, obviously, reflects back well on Mr. Kimball.

And I should have more blogging tonight, or tomorrow, so thanks again for reading. 

Plus, there's still more of the American Greatness piece at the link.

 

Two Dead After 32-Year-Old Man Stabs Mother and Her Brother During Live Zoom Session With Four Others Watching (VIDEO)

Honestly, if it wasn't for my wife, who uses some news app on her phone, which bombards her all the time with stories (and me, as I had to finally download that sucker, as my wife constantly forward articles to me), I doubt I would've caught it.

The New York Times reported on the story last week, with a lot of details there, "Woman Is Fatally Stabbed by Her Son During Video Call, Authorities Say: At least four people were on a work video call when Carol Brown and her brother were stabbed in an Altadena, Calif., residence on Monday."

Also at KABC Eyewitness News 7 Los Angeles, "2 fatally stabbed at Altadena home in incident partially witnessed on Zoom, officials say: Part of the incident was witnessed on a Zoom call, officials say."

Apparently, Ms. Brown worked as "a coordinator of Pasadena City College's Black STEM Program," according to London's Daily Mail, and her son, Robert, is black.

So, there's not much point in belaboring the argument, but as Altadena is in Los Angeles County, which foolishly elected the radical, Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascón last year, it's hard to see how justice will be forthcoming for Ms. Brown and her brother.

And while it's likely that her son had mental issues, and as I don't see anything about the motive for the killings, one can bet that that ghoul Gascón will find some way, perhaps justified, but likely not so much, to let this man, Robert, get away with murder.

And I'm already grieving for the four witnesses, because no matter how much psychotherapy they're offered or go through, they'll never get those heinous images out of their minds. 

Please Shop Amazon Until I Can Get Back to This Blog, Tomorrow, or the Next Day

I'm heading out to Fresno/Clovis in a bit, so here's the link to Amazon, if you'd like to do some shopping, which is appreciated. 

And for some reason, I woke up with Elvis Costello's "Alison" on my brain, and I was singing the song in my head while taking my morning piss, heh.

I'll be back up blogging again as soon as I can. Have a great Easter holiday!

G. Gordon Liddy, 1930-2021 (R.I.P.)

Gordon Liddy has passed away.

I'll just note, briefly, that Liddy was, of course, one of the MAJOR figures in the Watergate scandal, a topic I cover every semester, and teach the history of which, during my week of coverage on the presidency in my POLSC 1 classes. And of note, while Liddy himself has been really no interest to me all these years, the Watergate scandal has been. You see, in my very first "Introduction to American Politics Class," at Saddleback College, in 1986, our professor had all students read two books (besides the required textbook), and students were required to write a review and analysis of their chosen books, and I read two by the late, great American journalistic icon, Teddy White, who was, perhaps, one of the most important chroniclers of the Watergate scandal. These two tomes were, The Making of the President 1960, and Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, both of which I still have copies sitting on my bookshelf; and which, especially the latter, I read parts thereof, from time to time (especially when similar such scandals erupt in current politics, and I need to "get a grip" and perspective on things).

In any case, read the obituary, at the New York Times (with video here, featuring Judy Woodruff, at the P.B.S. News Hour, who is not a "newbie," and would actually know something about what happened back then), "G. Gordon Liddy, Mastermind Behind Watergate Burglary, Dies at 90":

G. Gordon Liddy, a cloak-and-dagger lawyer who masterminded dirty tricks for the White House and concocted the bungled burglary that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died on Tuesday in Mount Vernon, Va. He was 90.

His death, at the home of his daughter Alexandra Liddy Bourne, was confirmed by his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.

Decades after Watergate entered the lexicon, Mr. Liddy was still an enigma in the cast of characters who fell from grace with the 37th president — to some a patriot who went silently to prison refusing to betray his comrades, to others a zealot who cashed in on bogus celebrity to become an author and syndicated talk show host.

As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.

But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.

A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.

In the context of 1972, with Mr. Nixon’s triumphal visit to China and a steam-rolling presidential campaign that soon crushed the Democrat, Senator George S. McGovern, the Watergate case looked inconsequential at first. Mr. Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary.”

But it deepened a White House cover-up that had begun in 1971, when Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, looking for damaging information on him. Over the next two years, the cover-up unraveled under pressure of investigations, trials, hearings and headlines into the worst political scandal — and the first resignation by a sitting president — in the nation’s history.

Unlike the other Watergate defendants, Mr. Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced by Judge John J. Sirica to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.

“I have lived as I believed I ought to have lived,” Mr. Liddy, a small dapper man with a baldish pate and a brushy mustache, told reporters after his release. He said he had no regrets and would do it again. “When the prince approaches his lieutenant, the proper response of the lieutenant to the prince is, ‘Fiat voluntas tua,’” he said, using the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer for “Thy will be done.”

Disbarred from law practice and in debt for $300,000, mostly for legal fees, Mr. Liddy began a new career as a writer. His first book, “Out of Control,” (1979) was a spy thriller. He later wrote another novel, “The Monkey Handlers” (1990), and a nonfiction book, “When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country” (2002). He also co-wrote a guide to fighting terrorism, “Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style” (2006), and produced many articles on politics, taxes, health and other matters.

In 1980, he broke his silence on Watergate with his autobiography, “Will.” The reviews were mixed, but it became a best seller. After years of revelations by other Watergate conspirators, there was little new in it about the scandal, but critics said his account of prison life was graphic. A television movie based on the book was aired in 1982 by NBC.

Mr. Liddy found himself in demand on the college-lecture circuit. In 1982 he teamed with Timothy Leary, the 1960s LSD guru, for campus debates that were edited into a documentary film, “Return Engagement.” The title referred to an encounter in 1966, when Mr. Liddy, as a prosecutor in Dutchess County, N.Y., joined a raid on a drug cult in which Mr. Leary was arrested.

In the 1980s, Mr. Liddy dabbled in acting, appearing on “Miami Vice” and in other television and film roles. But he was better known later as a syndicated talk-radio host with a right-wing agenda. “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” begun in 1992, was carried on hundreds of stations by Viacom and later Radio America, with satellite hookups and internet streaming. It ran until his retirement in 2012. He lived in Fort Washington, Md.

Mr. Liddy, who promoted nutritional supplements and exercised, was still trim in his 70s. He made parachute jumps, took motorcycle trips, collected guns, played a piano and sang lieder. His website showed him craggy-faced with head held high, an American flag and the Capitol dome in the background.

George Gordon Battle Liddy was born on Nov. 30, 1930, in Brooklyn to Sylvester J. and Maria (Abbaticchio) Liddy. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., a fearful boy with respiratory problems who learned to steel himself with tests of will power. He lifted weights, ran and, as he recalled, held his hand over a flame as an act of self-discipline. He said he once ate a rat to overcome a repulsion, and decapitated chickens for a neighbor until he could kill like a soldier, “efficiently and without emotion or thought.”

Like his father, a lawyer, Gordon attended all-male St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark and Fordham University in the Bronx. After graduating from Fordham in 1952, he took an Army commission with hopes of fighting in Korea, but was assigned to an antiaircraft radar unit in Brooklyn. In 1954, he returned to Fordham and earned a law degree three years later. In 1957, he married Frances Ann Purcell. The couple had five children. Along with his son Thomas and daughter Alexandra, he is survived by another daughter, Grace Liddy; two other sons, James Liddy and Raymond J. Liddy; a sister, Margaret McDermott; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Mr. Liddy’s wife died in 2010.

From 1957 to 1962, Mr. Liddy was an F.B.I. field agent in Indianapolis, Gary, Ind., and Denver, and a supervisor of crime records in Washington. He then worked in patent law for his father’s firm in New York for four years. He joined the Dutchess County district attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor in 1966.

In 1968, he began a dizzying, three-year rise from obscurity in Poughkeepsie to the White House. Challenging Hamilton Fish Jr. in a primary for the Republican nomination for Congress in what was then New York’s 28th District, he fell short, but his consolation prize was to take charge of the Nixon campaign in the mid-Hudson Valley, which the president won handily.

His reward was a job at the Treasury Department in Washington as a special assistant for narcotics and gun control. He helped develop the sky marshal program to counteract hijackers. Impressed, Egil Krogh, a deputy assistant to the president, recommended him in 1971 to John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, who recommended him to John D. Ehrlichman, the president’s domestic policy adviser...

Still more.

 

Corporations Get Political With 'Cancelling' Georgia After State Passes New Voting Rights Legislation (VIDEO)

At the video, Tucker Carlson shreds "woke" corporations who have, really, no business getting involved with "racial" politics in Georgia (or for any other state, frankly), and the only bummer about the video is it doesn't include the Turcker's interview with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sounds like a stand-up guy, and pledged not to back down to our wannabe corporate dictators (and it ain't just Coca Cola and Delta Airlines, to say nothing, sadly, of Major League Baseball).

Of course, there's "mainstream" news coverage at the Los Angeles Times, "‘There is no middle ground’: Corporate America feels the pressure on voting rights."

And, naturally, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, "Companies, facing new expectations, struggle with pressure to take stand on Georgia voting bill":

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to stay on the sidelines of the nation’s social and political debates after a year of intense protests that led many firms to declare their support for racial justice and opposition to attempts to overturn the presidential election.

On Friday, executives from more than 170 companies -- including Dow, HP and Estee Lauder -- joined the corporate push to protect voting access not only in Georgia but in states across the country, writing in a statement that “our elections are not improved when lawmakers impose barriers that result in longer lines at the polls or that reduce access to secure ballot dropboxes.”

“There are hundreds of bills threatening to make voting more difficult in dozens of states nationwide,” the companies said in the statement, which also included signatures from the CEOs of Target, Salesforce and ViacomCBS. “We call on elected leaders in every state capitol and in Congress to work across the aisle and ensure that every eligible American has the freedom to easily cast their ballot and participate fully in our democracy.”

But as major corporations speaking out about Georgia’s controversial voting law discovered earlier this week, deciding when to step in, how far to go and whether to follow up with actions, can be fraught.

On Fox News Thursday, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) compared early-voting rules in Georgia to other states and defended the measure. “They’re not going to get back on board because they’ve been pressured by their board of directors, who have been pressured by these activists. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”

He also said: “They’ll have to answer to their shareholders. There’s a lot of people that work for them and have done business with them who are very upset,” and said that “We are not going to back down when we have a bill that expands the opportunity for people to vote on the weekends in Georgia.”

After initially mild criticism of the measure, which was signed into law last week, companies scrambled to issue more forceful statements. James Quincey, the CEO of Coca-Cola, described the bill as “wrong” and “a step backward.” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian offered up an abrupt change in tone, calling the legislation “unacceptable” and contrary to the company’s values.

Those statements won guarded praise from activists — as well as calls for more concrete action. “Delta’s statement finally tells the truth — even if it’s late,” Nsé Ufot, head of the activist group New Georgia Project Action Fund, said in a statement.

But companies have struggled with growing expectations from the public and employees that they take stands on important social issues, forcing corporate leaders into positions on issues they’d probably prefer to avoid, from Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem to the “bathroom bills” that targeted transgender people to President Donald Trump’s statements about voter fraud in the 2020 elections.

Last summer, it was the Black Lives Matter protests, when many companies made clear their support for racial justice.

And now: voting rights.

At a time when public faith in a number of institutions — the presidency, Congress, the electoral process and the media — is faltering, many Americans continue to look at big companies and entrepreneurs with admiration.

“The whole idea of companies getting involved in political issues, it’s all pretty new. They prefer to stay above the fray,” said Bruce Barry, a management professor who teaches business ethics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “But now they are getting religion on these issues, including voting rights.”

For weeks, activists and civil liberties groups had been complaining about the proposed changes to Georgia’s voting laws — long before companies took serious notice. At first, the corporate reaction was mostly muted. The Georgia U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a statement expressing “concern and opposition.”

But on Wednesday, an open letter from 72 Black executives seemed to open the floodgates. The letter said the new Georgia voting bill would make it “unquestionably” harder for Black voters in particular to vote. The letter also said, “The stakes for our democracy are too high to remain on the sidelines.”

Executives from the companies that made Friday’s statement acknowledged these leaders, saying they “stand in solidarity with voters 一 and with the Black executives and leaders at the helm of this movement.”

“What we have heard from corporations is general statements about their support for voting rights and against voter suppression. But now we’re asking, put those words into action,” Kenneth Chenault, managing director and chairman of venture capital firm General Catalyst and the former CEO of American Express, who helped organize the letter from the Black executives, said in a CNBC interview... 

 

Wow! Tucker's Complete Opening Segment from Last Night's 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'! (VIDEO)

Well, I shouldn't be surprised. 

Fox News has been promoting Tucker as if he's the new reigning king of the American mass media, which, well, he most definitely is (at least in television news programming, as previously noted here). 

So, while I am surprised to see Fox News indeed upload his entire opening segment to YouTube, it's pretty logical, after all, considering that Tucker's doing the real news reporting --- including traveling the Central America to interview Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele --- that the idiot lying leftist "mainstream" networks refuse to touch (for all the regular reasons), for doing so would just totally f*ck up their stupid ideological lies and memes with all things related to illegal immigration, Trump's very laudable (yet also flawed and imperfect) policies on border security, and the Biden regime's epically dishonest and incompetent handling of the crisis (which these White Hose ghouls constantly refuse to identify as such). 

I'm not watching any news this morning, as I'm trying to get caught up on grading, but I did want to post some content here to the blog, as blogging's going to be light for a couple of days, as I travel out of town with my wife and young son to visit relatives in Fresno/Clovis. I should have an update on that perhaps later today, or early tomorrow morning, and I'll post some Amazon links for reader shopping opportunities, and of whose reader purchases are greatly appreciated.

Watch and enjoy:

Suspect Identified in City of Orange 'Mass' Shooting as 44-Year Old Fullerton Resident Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez (VIDEO)

Following-up from yesterday, "Four Killed, Including Child, in Latest 'Mass Shooting, in Orange, California (VIDEO)."

Well, first off, the suspect, Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, is obviously not a "white supremacist domestic terrorist," and thus the lying "mainstream" media --- at all the major leftist cable and network news outlets --- can't run with their continuous and despicable lying memes of this so-called epidemic of "right-wing extremist violence," which these ghouls must be hatin' to their everlasting regret. 

Lots of facts are still unknown, including the motives of the suspect Gonzalez; but it is known that the killings were completely premeditated, and the suspect knew the victims, and that he had secured bike-locks to the front and back gates to the business building complex there, and it appears, as O.C. District Attorney Todd Spitzer indicates at the video below, that the man is definitely eligible for the death penalty. 

And one thing about Spitzer --- who I don't really like, and who I never vote for --- is that while he's actually a craven career politician, he's a freakin' hardcore "tough on crime" mofo, and he will push it to the max to make sure this Gonzalez guy gets the full "justice" that's coming to him, and if it's not lethal injection, that f*cker will be going behind bars for a very long time, perhaps even for life in prison.

In any case, at the Los Angeles Times (and with the KABC Eyewitness News 7 segment on yesterday's press conference here), "Orange shooting gunman knew his victims and how to trap them":

The gunman knew his victims. He knew the office park — and how to trap them.

He locked the gates to the complex with bike cables before he slipped inside a manufactured homes business called Unified Homes, backpack slung over his shoulder, gun in hand.

That’s how police Thursday described the start of a shooting in Orange the night before that left four people, including a 9-year-old boy, dead.

Officers arrived at the scene about 5:30 p.m., minutes after receiving reports of shooting. They encountered gunfire and shot through the locked gates, wounding the gunman, said Orange Police Lt. Jennifer Amat. They used bolt cutters to enter the complex.

Officers found two victims in the courtyard — the boy and a woman who was alive and taken to a hospital, where she remains in stable yet critical condition. Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said it appeared that the boy died in the arms of a woman who “was trying to save him.”

The boy is believed to be the son of one of the victims who worked at Unified Homes. It is not clear if the mother is the woman hospitalized.

Police found three more bodies: a woman on an upstairs outdoor landing, a man in an office and a woman in a separate office.

The victims’ names have not been released because their next of kin have not all been notified, Amat said. The suspect is Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, a 44-year-old man last known to be living in Anaheim who police said had a “business and personal relationship” with the victims.

“It is a horrible, horrible tragedy,” Spitzer said, “that Mr. Gonzalez made a decision to use deadly force to deal with issues he was dealing with in his life. So he will suffer and face the consequences.”

Police recovered a semiautomatic handgun and a backpack with pepper spray, handcuffs and ammunition, “which we believe belonged to the suspect,” Amat said Thursday.

The suspect had been living in a motel room in Anaheim, and arrived at the business in a rental car, police said. A photo released by authorities showed a man entering the business dressed in black and gray with sunglasses, a baseball hat and a black bandanna covering his face. He had a backpack on his left shoulder and a gun in his right hand.

Two police officers discharged their weapons, said Kimberly Edds, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney’s office, which investigates officer-involved shootings. Both were wearing body cameras.

The incident — the third mass shooting in the United States in two weeks — stunned the quiet north Orange neighborhood.

Tim Smith was sitting in his living room watching TV news about a commercial fire in Compton when he heard the crack of gunfire.

Seconds later, three more shots. His wife, Kim, joined him. The couple has lived in their home on Dunton Avenue since 1992, and said the most disruption they deal with on a typical day is the sound of neighbors mowing their lawns.

They looked at each other as four more gunshots sounded.

They got low in the house to shield themselves. After a moment, Smith went to the back door and cracked it open to listen.

Smith’s backyard — lined with tall cypress trees — is feet away from the office building’s back parking lot. Smith heard a male officer’s booming voice barking a command: “Don’t move or I will shoot you.”

He watched from his shed as the SWAT team moved into the building, silently, and in strategic formation. Smith says he was heartened that police arrived so fast.

Still more at that top link.

Marc Morano, Green Fraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Forgot Maxine Nightingale!

Well, following-up on my post the other day, "Ooh Woo ... I Feel It Still (VIDEO)."

It turns out I'd forgotten about Maxine Nightingale, whose song, "Right Back Where We Started From," used to come on all the time at K-EARTH 101 Los Angeles. 

(And the same goes for Junior Walker and the All Stars, "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)?," which I've posted to this blog more than once; and that's not to mention the Bellamy Brothers, and a few other "oldies buy goodies" kind of folks.)

In any case, here she is, and looking good too. She's apparently still active, according to her Wikipedia entry.

Four Killed, Including Child, in Latest 'Mass Shooting, in Orange, California (VIDEO)

Well, first of all, what's a "mass shooting"? If I'm not mistaken, any "officer-involved" shooting in which at least two deaths occur, is defined as a "mass shooting." And who defines this? I don't know? Maybe it's a federal definition that's been on the books for years, if not decades. 

But the implication, especially for the hated leftist media, is that with such a "low bar" on defining such events, any and all such incidents, can be sensationalized, and of course, any person's wrongful death is a tragedy, the killings in the City of Orange yesterday, again, all horrific and despicable, can easily be exploited by these same disgusting media outlets, especially the "progressive" national cable networks (notably, CNN and MSNBC) who're always the first "off the gun," so to speak, to turn any and all of such terrible crimes into some new Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel-type of definitive "mass shooting" incident, involving the shooter, Stephen Paddock, 64-years-old, from Mesquite, Nevada, which left 58 people dead, and almost 900 people injured, in what was, really, one of the all-time deadliest gun-related murder-massacres in American history.

Now, as for the City of Orange, I grew up there, and the shooting took place maybe a less than a mile from my dental office (the guy who does root canals, of which I've had too many), and Orange is also the location of my young 19-year-old son's school, and, as he had a recent bad incident himself, on Monday, March 22nd, and of which he's still processing, he might not appreciate how worried all of this makes his parents. 

Helpfully, this L.A. Times story below is not very "sensationalist," whereas as this one, at CNN, is very much so, where the piece notes: 

The FBI's Los Angeles division confirmed to CNN it had responded to the shooting as a matter of routine, but the Orange Police Department is the lead investigative agency. 

This is at least the 20th mass shooting since the Atlanta-area spa attacks two weeks ago that left eight people dead. CNN defines a mass shooting as a shooting incident which results in four or more casualties (dead or wounded), excluding the shooter.

Now, CNN does go with the at least "four or more casualties (dead or wounded)," and in this case, the shooter himself was arrested. But still, even four "dead or wounded" remains a very low bar, and for CNN to lump in this number of "at least the 20th mass shooting" since the horrific Atlanta killings a couple of weeks back --- which itself was quickly politicized by CNN, before literally any genuine facts were known --- gives you a pretty good clue as to what exactly's going on, which, of course, is to perpetuate all the "Big Lies" that all the leftist media peddle, about the "epidemic" of gun violence in this country, with the media's "final solution" being to strip Americans of their God-given rights, and not just the Second Amendment, but perhaps even more importantly, the First.

In any case, at the Los Angeles Times, (and a KABC Eyewitness News 7 segment, from last night, below), "4 killed, including child, in mass shooting at Orange office complex":

Four people, including a child, were killed Wednesday evening and a fifth person was injured in a mass shooting at an Orange office complex.

It marks the third mass shooting in the United States in two weeks, coming after incidents at three Atlanta spas that killed eight people, including six Asian women, and at a Boulder, Colo., supermarket that killed 10.

Few details were immediately available about the victims or a potential motive for the shooting.

Lt. Jennifer Amat, a spokeswoman for the Orange Police Department, said officers received a call about 5:30 p.m. of shots fired and responded to a business at 202 W. Lincoln Ave. in Orange. The beige, two-story office complex at the address contains a number of small businesses.

The officers encountered gunfire when they arrived and opened fire, Amat said. The shooter was taken to a hospital with a gunshot wound and was listed in critical condition Wednesday night. It was unclear if the wound was self-inflicted or if he was struck by police gunfire, Amat said.

There is no current threat to the public, she added. A firearm was recovered at the scene.

Have a good day, and don't ever, let them try to take away your rights.

Victim-Blaming D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Dragged for Sharing 'Preventing Auto Thefts' Video While She Stays Mum on (Alleged) Murder of Mohammad Anwar (VIDEO)

I did see the video of the carjacking on Twitter, and I didn't want to jump to conclusions as to the race of the youth suspects, although watching the video in its entirety, it's clear at the end of it, that the two depraved "children" perpetrators were certainly not "white supremacist domestic terrorists" inflicting bloody murder-mayhem on a decent, immigrant family-man making some money, in his own car, delivering food during a pandemic for Uber Eats.

My wife and I were both stunned by this story, and personally, it's one of the worst crime stories I can recall in years, and that's saying a lot, considering how almost all the big Democrat-controlled cities in the U.S. have seen skyrocketing crime rates since the death of George Floyd, and the subsequent "peaceful protests" that burned down police stations, neighborhood shops, and more, during our dreadfully dishonest summer of "racial reconciliation" and "Black Lives Matter" lies.

At Twitchy, "Victim-blaming: Mayor Bowser gets called out by both sides of the political spectrum over VILE tweet on how to prevent carjackings."

And at Fox News, "DC mayor takes heat for sharing 'preventing auto thefts' video amid silence on Mohammad Anwar's death":

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is taking heat for sharing a video on "preventing auto thefts" amid her silence on the death of Mohammad Anwar, who died just days ago after two teen girls allegedly tasered him to steal his vehicle.

"Auto theft is a crime of opportunity. Follow these steps to reduce the risk of your vehicle becoming a target. Remember the motto, #ProtectYourAuto," Bowser wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

"Carjackings are a senseless act of violence that risk the lives of innocent individuals, and over the course of this month, we have worked to raise awareness about a troubling increase in this violent crime, related arrests and safety tips," a spokeswoman for the mayor told Fox News in a statement. "Today’s prescheduled social media post was part of that effort and should not detract from the tragic death of Mohammad Anwar. Our thoughts and prayers remain with his family and the families of those we have lost to violence."

Bowser's tweet received instantaneous backlash.

"Horrible timing on this clearly scheduled tweet. And even if Mohammed Anwar wasn’t dead, carjackings are a plague in DC — there isn’t a lot you can do [with regard to] risk reduction besides simply not driving a car. This was broad daylight," journalist Natalia Antonova wrote on Twitter.

"Blame the victim huh? How about cracking down on perpetrators to deter this behavior?" Twitter user Jesse Hunt wrote.

"Uber Eats driver Muhammad Anwar was the victim of a carjacking by two teenage girls, who committed felony murder, in DC. He died as a result of injuries. I presume this is a scheduled tweet but it’s extremely tone deaf. Bowser’s silence is deafening," media strategist Gabriella Hoffman wrote on Twitter.

Two teenage girls fought Anwar, a 66-year-old UberEats delivery driver, for control of his car, leaving him dead as he was flung from the vehicle when it wrecked. The suspects, who police say are ages 13 and 15, have been charged with murder.

The suspects, who police say are ages 13 and 15, have been charged with murder in the death of Anwar.

One of the girls told D.C. police officers that they had set out with a stun gun to steal a car on Tuesday, according to court testimony from homicide unit Detective Chad Leo.

The girls got into Anwar’s car around 4:30 p.m. at the Navy Yard Metro Station as he was making deliveries, Leo said.

Anwar drove the girls to Nationals Park where he pulled his car over and a struggle ensued between them. Officials, citing police, said Anwar partially left the car and was pinned between the door and the driver’s seat as the teens allegedly put the vehicle in gear, the New York Post reported.

The car then lurched forward, causing Anwar to be fatally flung out as the car made a sharp right turn, causing it to roll over on its side and crash into two parked cars.

Officials arrived on the scene and found Anwar suffering from "life-threatening injuries," police said. D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services responded to the scene and transported the victim to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead...

Also, at the video above, it turns out one of the youth suspects, not identified, had been arrested for a previous carjacking, so, I mean, what gives? Who's the racists here? The two girls, who (allegedly, as they've still got to face trial), or the court system, which let one of them off, presumably, with a slap on the wrist, not just because minors "have their whole lives in front of them," blah, blah, but, because, obviously, these two suspected murderers are black.  

And, I don't know, Mayor Bowser, she's stayed silent right? Is her team still brainstorming to figure out another way to pin it on this poor Pakistani-born immigrant, driving his own car, and not taking in Jamie Dimon-level wages for his hard work? Dimon is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, the same bank that delayed the recent pandemic-economic relief checks for two-days after the feds sent the money to his bank branches, so no doubt Chase could reap windfall interest-earning profits, on the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash that sat in their coffers for two days, while regular Americans were scratching out their next meals, and downing anxiety meds like candy, while stressing over whether they'll go totally bankrupt when their rental eviction moratoriums expire, and they'll be on the hook for tens of thousands in unpaid back-rent, and which there's literally no way the average family would be able to afford (including millions of ethnic minority families in "marginalized" communities), unless Congress passes legislation making the rest of us --- the rest of us regular citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender identity, also struggling to make ends meet --- bailout our corporate masters on Wall Street, whose lobbyists meet regularly with Washington D.C. power-brokers, especially Democrat Members of Congress and top Biden administration officials.

So tell me, again, who's the racist in all of this? 

Ooh Woo ... I Feel It Still (VIDEO)

So, I'm just back from Cerritos, where I came from visiting my young son, who was hospitalized this last week (due to a psyche breakdown dealing with his A.S.D.). He's coming home tomorrow, so I don't need to say too much more about that, other than, "Thank God," because working with these numbskull so-called "professionals" at such places is a nightmare.

Okay, in any case, driving back down the 91 freeway to I-5 South, I did have on 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, and it turns out they've screwed up their website, and I can't find the "playlist" of recent songs just aired, like I used to post back in the days of my regular "drive-time" musical updates. (I guess the station had to "consolidate" with some others on "radio.com," or some such bull, but no matter, at least it's still on, shoot.) 

I mean, 95.5 KLOS Los Angeles is still going strong, since back in the day when I was in high school, and K-EARTH 101 Los Angeles, which 20 years ago was an "oldies but goodies" station, playing everything from the Beach Boys to the Beatles to Sam Cooke to Dobie Gray to Elvis to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles to the Temptations, and more. Now it's just, basically, another "classic rock" channel, with a few 80s "new wave" hits thrown in, which is okay, but I miss KKLQ 100.3 FM "The Sound" Los Angeles, which, frankly, was just as good, and even better, when you figure in the nostalgia, as the old KMET Los Angeles, a.k.a., the "Might Met," which used to have D.J.s like Jim Ladd, who used to smoke "doobies" while on air, as well as Cynthia Fox, who years later, was back "spinning" the classics, at "The Sound."

The one other radio station I really miss was the Long Beach-based "Pure Rock" 105.5 KNAC, which used to have the most hilarious morning D.J., Norm McBride, who after I'd had a couple of "tokes" in the morning, my eyes would be watering and my stomach aching, non-stop, because I'd get the "lolz" bad. 

In any case, it's all iTunes and whatever the f*ck nowadays, so who really gives a rat's ass? Most of the old "classic rockers" are starting to kick the bucket now anyway (R.I.P. Eddie Van Halen), so I know I'm getting too old for this stuff anyway.

But I like Portugal. The Man, so I guess I should count my blessings that I'm still here, and I never O.D.'d on some damn stupid coke-cocktail, or some such dumb sh*t (heroin, f*ck, hated the "junk" myself, holy motherf*cker, and I only tried it once, and that was once too many, jeez), that some of my long lost buddies, from back in the day, succumbed to. 

And pfft, don't even get me going about "KROQ," as, frankly, with folks like "Darby Crash," former alcoholic lead singer of the "Germs," now also dead, I don't need to relive the experience; and Rodney Bingenheimer, the stuck up old c*nt, used to spin records at the "Starwood" punk nightclub, in West Hollywood, at the time, when I wasn't so smart as I am now. No need to relive that sh*t, sheesh.

Thanks for checking back in at this old fart's old blog.

Can't keep my hands to myself

Think I'll dust 'em off, put 'em back up on the shelf

In case my little baby girl is in need

Am I coming out of left field?

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might be over now, but I feel it still

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

Let me kick it like it's 1986, now

Might be over now, but I feel it still

Got another mouth to feed

Leave her with a baby sitter, mama, call the grave digger

Gone with the fallen leaves

Am I coming out of left field?

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might've had your fill, but you feel it still

Ooh woo, I'm a rebel just for kicks, now

I been feeling it since 1966, now

Might've had your fill, but you feel it still

We could fight a war for peace

Is it coming?

Is it coming?

Most Wished For Items

At Amazon, Most Wished For Items.

BONUS: Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.