April 28, 2024

CALL IT THE OLIGARCHY PROTECTION BOARD:

Because the purpose of a system is what it does.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

TRY THAT IN A RED STATE: 69 overnight trespassing arrests after Israel-Hamas war protest at ASU Tempe.

Though to be honest, it’s not going much better for them in Boston: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says she directed police response at Emerson College encampment. “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said she directed police to take down an Emerson College student encampment for public safety reasons, thereby empowering the commissioner to make 108 arrests to enforce the city ordinance it was violating. Wu, in remarks Friday, reiterated her support for a police response the prior morning that has been criticized by some community members and city councilors, including the body’s President Ruthzee Louijeune, as being ‘heavy-handed.’ The mayor added that she was behind that response, which led to clashes between pro-Palestinian student protestors and police, and had been working closely with Emerson school officials and Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox for several days before deciding to proceed with removal of the encampment.”

Wu has been a big lefty in the past, but I think her Asian-American constituents are dragging her to the center.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

April 27, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Do your thing.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ALL THE DISINFORMATION THAT’S FIT TO PRINT: Will heavy-handed U.S. intelligence spooks re-elect Trump? Will the New York Times help?

They’ll do their best:

We sometimes lose sight of how downright weird so much news reporting has become. Imagine you’re the New York Times. Donald Trump might return to the presidency so you report, as the paper did on April 12, on the “distrust” that exists between him and the U.S. intelligence agencies. But you leave out the part about top Obama intelligence officers going on national TV to call Mr. Trump a Russian agent. You leave out the part about FBI counterintelligence leaders knowingly trafficking in fabricated evidence about him. You leave out the part about 51 former intelligence officials lying to voters to influence an election and help his opponent.

How should we cover Mr. Trump, the Times famously asked on its home page in 2017. The answer might have been “fairly.” Don’t lie about him or anyone else. This fogey advice has now evidently given way to the psychology of “splitting,” a defense mechanism that involves editing out facts and realities that cause emotional dissonance.

For a Times reader who wants to think the worst of Mr. Trump, after all, it can be painful to realize, yes, Mr. Trump is awful but his enemies did lie about him, intelligence officials did abuse their powers in shocking ways. Times readers aren’t babies, you respond. They can handle emotional complexity. Difficult truths aren’t going to turn them into MAGA supporters. On top of everything else, you add, a world in which Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and the intelligence agencies are trying to thwart him, is an interesting world.

Exactly. The Times isn’t serving its readers, it’s serving itself. Whatever they say, readers tend to click on comfort food. More to the point, Times reporters and editors have learned they can be thrown overboard by management in any online controversy that erupts over reporting that seems to justify Mr. Trump or suggests less than total fealty to a groupthink worldview.

I saw this social fear at work first when certain conservative commentators panicked over a Trump threat to their insignificant personal “brands,” rendering them incapable ever since of commenting objectively or intelligently on the Trump phenomenon.

Hillary Clinton was a victim. In her terror lest she humiliatingly lose to Mr. Trump, she oozed a visible contempt for voters that likely cost her a close election.

It’s also possible the the media and our political class are just awful people. Plus:

His enemies made Mr. Trump, a novelty act now on his way to becoming a historical figure for good or ill.

The press thought it clever to lie about him. The little Walter Mittys (as I called them after the 2016 election) of the intelligence agencies decided they would punish Americans for how they voted.

Your text here is “The Simpsons,” Season 8, Episode 23. Frank Grimes is a coworker so frantic in his insistence that others acknowledge Homer’s laziness and incompetence that he causes his own death.

Whatever happens this fall, we are deluded to think we are done living with the consequences.

But there need to be consequences for the “cabal” that saddled us with a corrupt, demented, incompetent Biden Administration.

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BLAIR’S LAW: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’”

See also:

Posted at 6:15 pm by Ed Driscoll

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? Most never finish their degrees, and graduates wonder about the value of degrees they’ve earned. “So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.
Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it. The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished. . . . The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. A decline of as much as 15 percent is projected to begin next year.”

If only there had been some sort of warning offered.

Related: Education Apocalypse Now?

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: All The President’s Men.

The New Hotness? WaPo Runs 5,000 Word Profile Of Man Imprisoned For Threatening Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“What had made March 3, 2022 a different kind of day?” reads the Post story. “Maybe it was the [electroconvulsive therapy]. Maybe it was timing, the mania and depression coming together in his brain. Maybe Greene was ‘the worst person at the worst time to cross my path,’ he says. Maybe he needed to ‘be heard,’ he says, and the threat had been an expression of his loneliness and regrets. If he still spoke to his children, if his mom were still alive, if he still worked full time, if he hadn’t been watching so much TV news, if the news wasn’t about a country where so many people were making so many threats, maybe that night would have been different.”

[Joe] Morelli said he was “manic” but “clear and focused” the day he called Greene’s office and issued threats in March 2022, the Post story reads. Morelli felt “untouchable, like he could jump from a building and land on his feet.”

Morelli had made the threats to Greene after seeing a campaign ad on TV depicting her firing a .50-caliber sniper at a Toyota Prius with the word “SOCIALISM” plastered on the side of the car, explaining she was “going to blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” according to the Post. This angered Morelli, who was suffering from mania and depression.

“A few things Morelli hated about that ad: He had especially disliked Greene ever since he saw a video of her heckling a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, outside the Capitol in 2019,” the Post story reads. “He also hated guns, like the one she had pointed at the word “SOCIALISM.” Then there were times when Morelli hated himself, and his connection to that word, because he relied on disability benefits, which he considered to be a form of socialism, one he believed in, but one that had been a source of some shame, too.”

Yes, it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and “Gazpacho Police.” But it’s still astonishing to read the WaPo’s fawning profile of a man who threatened a politician. But then for the Post, no enemies to the left, to coin a socialist-approved phrase.

Also from that same WaPo profile (this version should be outside the paywall if you’d like to read it in full):

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, to 99 percent of people, I’m an extremely polite, sweet guy,” Morelli told the Post. “In ordinary life, it takes a lot to get me upset.”

“He takes a sip of coffee. He gets up from the couch, opens the back door, and for now, at least, as he leaves the apartment, he feels no anger. He is a stone in a lake, gently and slowly floating,” the story ends.

I didn’t know stones could float. Say what you will about Ben Bradlee, but he would have had the good sense to draw a red pencil through at least that line, if he didn’t nix this story entirely. In contrast today, as Josh Barro asked in 2022: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post? As Iowahawk noted around the same time, Barro was clearly asking the question rhetorically:

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

UPDATE: “We’re Going to Get the Society We Incentivize,” John Hawkins writes, asking, “What kind of society do you want to live in?” “This is another reason why it’s so dumb to cheerlead protesters going to people’s private residences or confronting politicians in public. One day, you’re AOC cheerleading on the dirtbags harassing Brett Kavanaugh in public…Next thing you know, you’re the one being harassed in public. The video starts with her saying, ‘I need you to understand that this is not okay.’ This is why it’s valuable to have rules of conduct that apply universally, as opposed to, ‘Anything my tribe does is okay and anything those other guys do is bad.’ It never ends up working that way long-term.”

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

COSPLAYING JUDAISM ON BEHALF OF HAMAS: It’s hard to keep track of all the grossly offensive actions of pro-Hamas campus demonstrators, but here’s one that hasn’t received much attention.

In an effort to ward off accusation that their encampments, run by pro-Hamas groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, are antisemitic, protestors are pretending to be practicing Jews. Here, for example is a printed Passover “Seder plate” at a Passover dinner at USC reportedly attended by fifty students. Not a single one of the attendees seems to have noticed that all the Hebrew words are backwards, something that would be obvious to anyone who had a bar or bat mitzvah or otherwise learned even the most basic Hebrew.

And here’s a link to a tweet with a video of a “Shabbat service” at Columbia. As the video pans out, you can see that almost none of the students know the song, which is an extremely common Sabbath hymn that any Jew who ever attends real Shabbat services would be familiar with.

Given that these students and hangers-on are at the very least willing to join protests organized by Hamasniks, it’s hardly surprising that they have no respect for other people’s religious practices and are happy to cosplay practicing religion to serve political ends. But it’s still disgusting.

Posted at 3:02 pm by David Bernstein

THIS IS THE WAY 1968 ENDS:

Even though all of this is a direct violation of these universities’ alleged codes of conduct, as well as numerous local, state, and federal laws, those who have the power to stop them have refused to do so. Many have endorsed the mob and more still are too terrified to take action against what they know to be evil.

They have good reason. They know quite well that if they were to take effective action, if they were to enforce their own codes, laws, and alleged principles, they would have to expel large sections of their student bodies. They would have to fire equally large numbers of faculty. They would have to cleanse their administrations of enablers and collaborators. They would have to break the regime. This, they are utterly unwilling to do.

The reason is 1968. Even if they know that the mob is immoral and indeed monstrous, those who should know better—who do know better—are still ‘68ers. They believe in the basic tenets of 1968ism: America is corrupted by racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and their attendant evils. Radical action is necessary to change this. There are no enemies to the left. The chickens come home to roost by any means necessary. Ideological deviationism cannot be tolerated. Ideological deviationism is whatever they happen to disapprove of at any given moment. If all else fails, exterminate all the brutes.

The result of all this is now clear: The ‘68ers and the radical left as a whole have collapsed into something very like Nazism. Whatever their protestations otherwise, the parallels are obvious: Theirs is a minority movement that wields the mob to impose its ideology on the majority. It sees the past as compromised and corrupt and will redeem it by any means necessary. It looks to a glorious future of tyrannical virtue. It takes over institutions of education, government, and culture and uses them to destroy those institutions and impose a totalitarian regime. It is perfectly willing to use horrific violence to achieve this. Its capacity to tolerate dissent is nil. And now, it has embraced racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Exterminate all the brutes.

All of this was probably inevitable. Radical movements always compound their radicalism and the world always resists them because that is the nature of the world. In the end, their compounded radicalism results in compounded and enraging failure. Indeed, despite their best efforts, the ‘68ers have succeeded in only partial conquest of elite institutions. A strong conservative movement parries them at every turn. They know that to impose a totalitarian regime on a nation with a 250-year history of political and social liberty is all but impossible. The only recourse is vengeance through apocalyptic violence. If they can’t have the country, no one else can either. They feel compelled towards a seppuku, a glorious suicide, a mass self-immolation, and they intend to take everyone else down with them.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN NOLTE: Biden Appears on the Howard Stern Show After Snubbing the New York Times:

Few things make me happier than this kind of blue-on-blue violence.

If that’s not already awesome enough, imagine the look on Times’ publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s face when he learned that Biden would sit down for a Howard Stern interview, the guy responsible for all this.

Better still, imagine the look on Sulzberger’s face when Biden made news on Stern’s Sirius XM show for finally agreeing to debate former President Trump (at least for now).

Whether it’s a Republican or Democrat doing it, I do not care. Nothing makes me happier than watching the elite corporate media, especially a fake news outlet like the serial liars at the New York Times, treated with contempt because that’s what they all deserve: scorn and contempt.

Whatever it takes to knock these outlets off their unearned pedestals is okay with me.

And the Times is in a real pickle. Normally, to pressure a president or politician to do its bidding, a news outlet will hammer and hammer the guy until the pressure makes him fold. The Times can no longer do that to a Democrat, especially Biden. The tail (subscribers) wag the dog (Sulzberger) over there. If the Times hits Biden too hard or begins to tell too many truths about him, their far-left subscribers will revolt and cancel subscriptions. This is a newspaper beholden to its extremist customers, which has killed its independence.

This means Biden can snub them without any fear of the Times doing something that might cause any serious political damage to his reelection campaign.

Still though, it’s worth asking: What Happened to Howard Stern?

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll