April 25, 2024

April 24, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Make your mark.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution.

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further.

The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents.

The West’s favored methods of supporting Color Revolutions include fomenting dissent, organizing activists through social media, promoting student movements, and unleashing domestic unrest on the streets. Americans hold varying opinions on such efforts, but what many don’t realize is that they occur not only overseas but also here in the United States. The summer of rioting following the death of George Floyd, which ushered in the new DEI regime, was in many ways a domestic Color Revolution, advanced by progressive NGOs, media entities, and political actors.

A minor figure in these movements, a woman named Katherine Maher, has recently come to greater prominence. Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s. She was also the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and was just recently named the new CEO of National Public Radio.

At NPR, Maher has already been embroiled in controversy. Longtime editor Uri Berliner, who has now resigned, accused her of left-wing bias and suppressing dissent. Following these accusations, I did extensive reporting demonstrating that Maher has a troubling history of arguing against the notion of objective truth and supporting censorship in the name of democracy.

Now I have gathered additional facts that raise new questions about Maher’s role as a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at her predecessor’s last days at NPR:

Translation: like the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, NPR’s John Lansing couldn’t leave fast enough once his troops turned on him during the early days of America’s Color Revolution.

Posted at 9:18 pm by Ed Driscoll

RICH LOWRY: The KKK at Columbia – why shouldn’t it camp out at the university, too?

Is there space for more haters at Columbia University?

Imagine if a contingent of alt-right students established their own encampment on a corner of the quad and began to shout antisemitic slogans — say, the infamous chant “Jews will not replace us” from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Would the president of Columbia, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, hesitate to have them arrested as many times as necessary to make them go away?

Would a huge contingent of faculty walk out to protest the arrests?

Would the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, quickly lift the suspensions of the arrested students?

Answers: No, never, and of course not.

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — an execrable but relatively small-scale event — caused a near-national crisis. According to Joe Biden, it was such a galvanizing moment that it, and Trump’s response, prompted him to run for president.

The protests at Columbia have been widely criticized, but they have also garnered elite sympathy, most notably from supportive left-wing members of Congress and the school’s own faculty, who have clearly been staying Shafik’s hand. Meanwhile, more than 1,400 academics from a variety of schools are calling for a boycott of Columbia for allegedly being much too tough on the protesters.

There are obviously differences between Charlottesville and Columbia. The rally in Virginia featured violent clashes with counter-protesters and led to a murder. The groups involved were explicit hate groups, like the KKK, with violent pasts. Still, the bottom line is that the antisemitism of “Unite the Right” was roundly condemned as such.

Based on events on the past several days, I would assume “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party” would feel quite at home at Columbia:

Posted at 8:42 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRY THAT IN A RED STATE: Watch: Texas DPS Shows Up at a Pro-Hamas ‘Encampment,’ and Beautiful Chaos Follows.

Posted at 7:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DAMON LINKER: Thoughts inspired by Taylor Swift’s 31-song notebook dump.

Bruce Springsteen gave Dylan a run for his money as a curatorial editor, especially in the years when he was most prolific. The Boss reportedly recorded as many as 70 songs for his fourth record, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). The final album included 10 of them. Springsteen gave away several songs to other artists, held onto others for his next album, and left the overwhelming majority of them in the vault. When 20 or so of them were released in a few batches decades later, fans were shocked by how many of the abandoned songs were gems. But Springsteen considered them either too derivative of other artists or too overtly commercial to fit his stark, uncompromising vision for the Darkness album.

The same thing happened with his next album, The River (1981). Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded something on the order to 50 songs in several sessions. One version of the final album included ten songs. Then Springsteen changed his mind and expanded the project into his first and only double album of new material. The final version included 20 songs, which meant another 30 were left behind. Once again, the extraordinarily high quality of the abandoned songs thrilled his fans when many of them were released a number of years later.

Now imagine Springsteen’s early career took place in the streaming era, without the constraints imposed by vinyl pressings and the need to produce and ship a physical product. In this alternative timeline, the Boss puts out almost everything. In addition to the 30 songs he actually released in those years, he releases 40 more. That could have meant four more single albums of new songs from the Boss in these crucial years of his career. As I’ve noted, there’s an abundance of great material there. Many fans would have been ecstatic. But what would have been the artistic consequence of flooding the market in this way?

Most likely, Springsteen and his fantastic band would have come to be known as prolific craftsmen of highly enjoyable pop songs and expert musical ventriloquists capable of mimicking the sound of a 1950s ballad on one track and the amped-up punk aggression of The Clash on the next. They might have sold a lot more records, but they also might have sold fewer, as Springsteen lost much of his distinctiveness as an artist, and his universe of fans was kept fat and happy with a steady diet of new material and never left hungry for more.

Good-Enough Songs

The past five years have been a period of mind-boggling productivity for Taylor Swift. By my rough count, she has released 138 “new” songs since August 2019. (This includes the track listings of the new studio albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, plus the vault tracks/outtakes/b-sides included on the re-recordings of her albums Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989.)

In terms of quantity, that’s an extraordinary songwriting accomplishment. But I wonder if the volume of output—especially with her latest release—speaks to a failure or disregard of curatorial editing. It’s one thing to release 17 songs on Folklore and then another stylistically similar 17 on Evermore five months later. It’s a lot, but at least listeners had some time to digest the first batch before the second was dropped into their laps. But now imagine she combined the two albums into a single record with only the very best songs from each included, holding the rest for release years or decades from now. Wouldn’t that have been better, elevating this imagined single album above the extremely accomplished records she actually did release?

What happened on Friday of last week is as far away from such an approach as one could imagine. That’s when the previously announced 16-track new album was released but then became a 31-track magnum opus two hours later. This is a bigger version of what happened when Midnights was released in October 2022 with 13 tracks that became 20 later that night, when then the “3am Edition” dropped.

* * * * * * * *

It’s an old modern story: As external, received constraints on our choices are removed (through political reform, moral and theological liberalization, or technological advances), we are left with the burden of imposing constraints of our own choosing on ourselves—or else opting to give up on limitations altogether. I fear some of our greatest popular artists are showing signs of taking the latter path, and with less-than-entirely-positive results.

Of course, in just a few years, we’ll all look back at how quaint things were when songwriters actually had a process they carried around in their heads, instead of letting Brill Building GPT craft their material: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHRIS QUEEN: Adventures in Bourbonland, Part 3.

But the real magic happened after the tasting was over. The employee told us about one of the bourbons (which I would’ve tried if I’d heard the story before) that the company believes is the only bourbon using the original Old Crow recipe. They call it ¡Cuervito Vivo! (The Little Crow Lives!).

Here’s where the story gets even better. Glenns Creek received a cease-and-desist letter not too long ago, but it wasn’t from Jim Beam, the current owner of the Old Crow brand. The letter came from Jose Cuervo, which wants Glenns Creek to avoid the Cuervito branding, even though Jose Cuervo makes tequila and not bourbon. Oddly enough, Jim Beam sent Jose Cuervo a trademark warning in 2011 over the crow in its branding.

After hearing that story, Matt and I both had to buy a bottle of ¡Cuervito Vivo! It was our way of sticking it to the man.

On our way out the door, another employee met us in the parking lot and struck up a conversation. When he asked us what we bought, we told him about our ¡Cuervito Vivo! rebellion. I told him that I was going to work the story into one of my columns, so he asked me who I write for. When I told him, he revealed to us that he’s a somewhat regular PJ Media reader as well as a volunteer in GOP politics and Tea Party activism in Kentucky.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll