Ann Althouse for some mysterious and perhaps disturbing reason felt the extreme screed by some guy who “writes about influence and the new right” deserved attention. It’s worth reading, I guess, if you still need to be convinced that the New York Times has become little more than propaganda arm of the increasingly bonkers Left and is really working hard to get the vote out for Democrats. Let’s get the feminist base of the Democratic Party—you know, the pro-abortion, pro-child strangling, and now revived “believe all women” fanatics!—energized by advancing the absurd narrative that Lucy Craig is a misunderstood victim of a gang rape that she helped organize, got completely smashed to prepare for, and later airily excused of any claims of illegality with the old abortion trope, “our bodies our choice“!
This jerk earned a platform in the Times by writing in part,
The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on…Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners…
Gee, I wonder why they would think that—after the woman signed a police report indicating there was no rape, waited 20 days to file a complaint, and sued Cornell and the seven Cornell students after her own statements and conduct made a criminal conviction of any of them well nigh impossible? Boy, those conservative conspiracy theorists.. Sorry for interrupting. Back to the op-ed:
“…The message embedded in the right’s freakout is that feminism’s moral permissiveness is corrupting women, our institutions, traditional values and even the left as a whole. The conservative influencer Michael Knowles suggested that [Lucy] is not a victim of violent masculinity, but rather of “hookup culture” run amok. Another conservative, Matt Walsh, declared that “feminists fundamentally reject the idea that women can ever be truly responsible for any wrongdoing of any kind.”
I think they suggest that because it’s true. And the right’s “freakout”? Are these conservatives screaming?
Liberal women scream uncontrollably in Las Vegas during ‘Jane Doe’ protests over the Cornell 7 case. pic.twitter.com/2MWF2jCh1D
Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…
You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…
“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”
Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,
“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”
Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.
I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.
Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,
“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”
Immediately, Vance should have said,
“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”
If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.
I have watched Netflix’s “The Diplomat” for four seasons now, and until the last episode of the latest season, I would have recommended it to anyone as well-written, well-acted, and consistently entertaining, dramatic and interesting.
However, in the last part of that final episode, which I watched tonight, the script repeatedly indicated that if the Vice-President of the United States didn’t please the President, the President would “get rid of him.”
That’s impossible. The VP, even an appointed VP (confirmed by the Senate as in the case of Hal, “The Diplomat’s” husband) cannot be fired or replaced by POTUS.
Stuff like this is why the public is so absurdly ignorant about the Constitution and our government, and is so vulnerable to misinformation from elected officials and aspiring candidates.
Shame on everyone associated with the show for allowing “The Diplomat” to make Americans more civically obtuse than they already are thanks to our miserable education system. Especially blameworthy is Keri Russell, the star and executive producer. Bradley Whitfordand Allison Janney spent all those years on “The West Wing,” and I would think they’d know better. Apparently not. Rupert Sewell (Hal, the Veep) is British, so I’ll give him a pass.
I thought the final scene in Brian DePalma’s “The Untouchables” where Al Capone’s lawyer pleads guilty while his client protests (and after the judge switches juries with a different trial after evidence and testimony has been given) was the most unforgivable example of a script flagrantly distorting the law and procedure. It probably still is the winner, but “The Diplomat’s” imaginary Presidential power is close.
In Washington, the ultimate reductio-ad-absurdum scenario occurred in the ongoing woke insanity of allowing male athletes to compete against females once they “identify” as female. At Camus High, boy’s cross-country team member Logan Mihailoff, a junior, finished 76th in a boys’ JV cross-country race on September 15th. So on September 29th the same kid, with no changes in his anatomy or physiology, joined the varsity girls’ team. He had “identified” as female, see. And miracles of miracles, he went from 76th to first in a track meet against Union High!
The school later took legal action against a father who held up a protest sign against this obvious cheat that was enabled by the woke lunatics in charge of overseeing athletics at the school, and they took legal action against him. He chanted, “Keep boys out of girls’ sports,” and now is banned from campus for a year. OutKick reporter Matt Calkins interviewed parents at Camas High and tried to interview an assistant cross-country coach. “Nobody wants to talk to you,” the coach said. “I’m trying to be nice.” The logical and ethical contrast between the parents trying to protest their daughters’ rights to compete in a fair contest and the woke defenders of an indefensible policy was striking.
“We’re about as liberal as it gets,”said parent Kent Lake. “I just don’t agree with that [boys competing against girls]. I mean, if they find your body in 300 years, what are they going to say you were? Look, you can live any way you want. You got my blessing. But I mean come on, in competitions? It’s like stock car racing. It’s gotta be even, and it’s gotta be fair.”
Not especially articulate, but still clear enough. “When I first heard about this story, I was like, ‘Is this real? That can’t be real’,” said a mother of a cross country runner, who requested anonymity because she was probably was afraid that the woke mob would storm her house with torches and pitchforks. “We have daughters, and it’s robbing them of an opportunity to compete.”
Follow-up question, ma’am? Why do you live in this crazy state?
On the pro-letting boys magically turn themselves into girls so they can win races, games and scholarships side—you know, morons—Outkick got responses like “There are more important things in sports than that” from one experienced progressive rationalizer. (I have heard and read that dodge regarding everything from open borders to DEI discrimination.) There is, in fact, no good defense of what the blurry kid above did. Can you guess which one is the boy?
After the September 29th travesty, a dozen female cross-country runners on the Camas High School team refused to compete against the cheat on October 13. About half of the girls competing in last week’s race walked off the field in protest while the newly minted “Miss” Mihailoff took of with the remaining of female runners. (And what brainwashed woke weenies those girls are on the way to becoming!) The 11 protesting female students slowly walked past the starting line with their arms linked and left the field.
There is hope.
Listen to this babbling idiot, the head of the state’s school system, try to defend the school policy:
OH MY GOD. The head of Washington's public school system just said it's NOT unfair for the Camas girls to have to race against a boy because "their brains aren't fully developed." HUH? This is the same guy who thinks kids should be able to chop their genitals off. SCREW YOU CHRIS… pic.twitter.com/joCpppEuBk
Yikes. He also is employing the apparent desperation fall-back position of the pro-trans cheating cabal as Initiative 638 comes up for a vote on November 3. It would keep cheating males like Logan Mihailoff out of the women’s competitions in K-12 sports, so opponents say it will require “invasive” checks. No, it wouldn’t. If the dude didn’t decide he was a she until after puberty, then he’s out. Too bad abut that “inclusivity” thingy, but there’s always the chess team. Also being a member of the boys team two weeks earlier is also a big clue. No ‘nads checks required.
How can Americans vote for these people? I don’t get it.
“Well, it’s an extraordinary insult, but he continues to repeat it. And what’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…”
Jeffries was talking to the execrable Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW so of course there was no push-back. Such a classy exchange between a President and a Congressional leader! “You’re stupid!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re stupider!” I can just imaging Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun talking to each other like that.
Actually I can’t. Those career-long adversaries has respect for the positions they held, our institutions, and, yes, each other. They also understood the importance of civility.
Donald Trump’s penchant for stooping to ad hominem attacks is another one of his obnoxious and self-destructive habits. I wish someone would explain to him that “IQ” does not mean “intelligence” and that it is ignorant, indeed stupid, to think so. I’d bet at some point Trump’s IQ was tested, probably as a kid, registered in the relatively high range, and his parents or teachers told him it meant something. (My father told me that what proved one’s intelligence was what you did, not how you scored on a test.) The President has always been obsessed with ratings, scores and numbers (“Subscriptions way down!). Heck, if I used that to measure the value of my life, I would have killed this blog years ago. Maybe myself too.
You could excuse Trump a bit, especially given his “tit for tat” reflex, for resorting to ad hominem since his political foes constantly use the practice. Trump is fat, he’s orange, his hair is weird, he’s nuts, he’s demented, he’s stupid. It’s still no excuse for him returning fire in kind. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that Hakeem Jeffries is “low IQ.” He had an impressive academic record, he was a law review editor in law school and graduated at the top of his class, clerked for a judge and was a corporate litigator before entering politics.
You know I have a low tolerance for publicized lists that are badly researched, careless, lazy, and reflect cultural illiteracy. Many are the product of unresolved biases The latter was the obvious crime of the last list that set my brain oozing out of my ears: CNBC’s “Worst States to Live In,” which, I’m sure you can guess since the list emanated from CNBC, meant “States That Haven’t Been Overrun By Democrats.” Recent non-political lists that exploded my poor head with the compilers’ total lack of qualifications to create included The Guardian’s “Greatest Novels” list (that included “The Handmaiden’s Tale” but no Mark Twain) and the “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time” compiled by “experts” whose average age was about 25 and who apparently never heard of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland,Julie Andrews or Linda Ronstadt.
What annoyed me so much about the list of “Ultimate Classic Halloween Classics” that somehow ended up in my mailbox is that it accused me of picking this careless top ten list, because I have made the mistake now and then of landing on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie rating and review compilation site (that has no integrity and is regularly manipulated to cheer bad movies and sink good ones for political reasons). I wouldn’t have picked that dog’s breakfast of alleged “scary” movies after I had been hit over the head with a shovel. I know horror films: my late wife was addicted to them, and there are undoubtedly some great ones I haven’t seen, I also have the perspective and taste to know what doesn’t qualify as a top ten “classic” scary movie. “Classic” implies historic. I wrote in one of my first essays on this topic, ““If you are going to write about history, there is a duty to perform diligent research, even for a silly online list.” Anyone who looked at the list and assumed that these are the top ten scary movies of all time would be seriously misinformed. And if you are going to use “ultimate” to describe your list, is sure as hell better reflect some consistent criteria and astute critical thought.
These are the movies on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Ultimate Classic Halloween Watchlist” ranked 1 to 10:
“Halloween”
“Nightmare on Elm Street”
“The Exorcist”
“The Shining”
“Beetlejuice”
“Friday the 13th”
“Poltergeist”
“The Nightmare Before Christmas”
“Psycho”
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
To begin with, the ranking is indefensible and reflects the ignorance of the voters, which figures, since they are people who hang out at Rotten Tomatoes. I won’t quibble that the original “Halloween” now qualifies as a classic: it launched a franchise and too many imitations to count as well as a best-selling Halloween mask, but it isn’t the #1 horror movie of all time by any legitimate criteria. “Black Christmas,” originally “Silent Night, Evil Night” (1975) was before John Carpenter’s hit, the real progenitor of the serial slasher film, and is scarier as well as much better acted.
There is no film on the list before “Psycho”(1960). The Hitchcock film looks surprisingly stilted and tame today (yes, even the famous shower scene), but audiences had never seen anything like it, so sure, it belongs on a “classic scary movie” list—but so do the silent “The Phantom of the Opera,” Todd Browning’s “Freaks,” both of James Whale’s “Frankenstein” movies (“Bride of Frankenstein” is even scarier than the first) and some others we could debate about before 1950.
Leaving out all the Fifties horror movies is indefensible: two absolute classics from that decade, which generated in horror movies as in popular music unmatched creativity and variety, were the original “The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” (1956) and Howard Hawk’s “The Thing From Another World” (1951). The decade also gave us the original “The Fly”(1958) and the iconic “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” (another movie that launched a great Halloween mask.)
President Trump last week capitulated to common sense and reality and canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Secretary of War Hegseth had said that the execution would be broadcast via livestream, and initially the President agreed. However, Trump consulted his advisers in the wake of widespread criticism, and it seems that the fact that Hasan is paralyzed tipped the scales against a public firing squad execution.
Maybe, as I did, he had flashes of “Blazing Saddles,” when the executioner “Boris” is about to hang a man in a wheelchair. Be that as it may, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he still believed a televised execution would be a “strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with terrorists and SCUM,” but was now hesitant because “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.” Neither half of that statement makes any sense, but you know, that’s our President. Public, private, the deterrent is the execution, not who gets to see it. No one who would rather not watch Hasan die had to watch. Well, what matters is the decision, not how or why he made it, and cancelling the live stream was the ethical and practical move. I explained in the previous post on this topic why the public execution was unethical.
Only immediate families of Hasan’s victims will be allowed to witness the execution.
Noren, an ESPN employee for two decades, revealed in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that her resignation in 2023 was provoked by the network’s decision to launch its own branded sports gambling app, ESPN Bet. Noren said that she knew first hand the dangers of gambling, and had good reason to believe encouraging or enabling it, and certainly profiting by it, was unconscionable.
“My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas,” she said. “It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.”
Her grandfather and father, as well as her brother “were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction,” Noren told the publication. “I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.”
So when ESPN decided to embrace legalized sports gambling in’23, “I was out,” she says. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
Noren also accused the network of suppressing stories critical of the gambling industry.“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories were greenlit,” she told the Review. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”
There was even an interactive primer on point spreads, totals, and parlays for new bettors with animations that were “pretty much made for kids.” “What bothered me most was a seeming disregard for the dangers and not thinking about the ramifications of ESPN normalizing gambling for an audience that looks to ESPN as sort of their sports guide, essentially—not looking down the road at the parallels between gambling and other addictive things in our country that have been normalized, such as opioids and cigarettes, that ended up becoming major public health crises.”
Brava, though Noren’s resignation was until now only a personal statement with no broader impact on society or this expanding ethics problem, which EA has been discussing for many years. ESPN Bet is dead, lasting only through last year, but that’s just moral luck. Noren was right: her employer willing to get “blood on its hands” in exchange for money in its metaphorical pockets, so the ethical course was to refuse to be a part of a corrupt organization and its culture.
What are desperately needed now are executives, broadcasters, celebrities and athletes who are willing to take similar stands against teams and sponsors. A politician or two would be nice too.
President Trump posted an AI-generated video last week that showed him chasing, tackling and befriending a Siberian tiger, obviously inspired by the horrible incident at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Doncaster, England where a mentally disturbed young man, William Chapman, entered a tiger enclosure and was mauled to death. Trump posted the fake video, which was accompanied by The Tokens classic, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
That might be excusable for a junior high school student today, but since a man died in the tragedy it should be obvious to anyone at least as mature as Ralph Malph that the video is in terrible taste, and would be even for a sanitation worker. This is the President of the United States posting such junk, however. I don’t care if it’s “trolling,” or if it’s ‘just a joke,” no American can feel secure and confident about the leader of their nation when he acts like that.
What’s wrong with him? Whatever it is, it’s been wrong with him for a long time, and he’s clearly not going to get over it. The same instinct that served Trump well when he did his McDonald’s bit during the campaign undermines his authority, trust and support when he slips down several notches to this, having fun with a the death of a troubled man. I’ve been trying to imagine any previous POTUS who, given the technology, would behave similarly in his most rash and irresponsible moments. There isn’t one. Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and even Calvin Coolidge were known to play practical jokes on friends and staffers. Silent Cal was fond of pressing his desk buzzer to summon Secret Service agents and then hiding under his desk. But none of them would think posting the tiger video was wise, or anything but harmful to both the office and Trump’s policy agenda.
I’ll take this opportunity to comment on the “No Kings” protests yesterday. Several friends posted photos of themselves, family members and others embarrassing themselves, apparently unaware that anyone, like me for example, would conclude that their participating in this foolishness reflects terribly on them all. It does seem that the majority of these protesters are seniors, and I suspect that many of the geezers participate out of boredom. They meet other wokified, Trump Deranged Democrats, and maybe hook up for a canasta date or an early dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s.
I sure hope that’s the reason, because I care about some of the people participating in these rallies, and I have to fight myself tooth and nail to avoid losing respect for them completely.
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.@ElissaSlotkinpic.twitter.com/p7NBJpDcQW
The most frightening thing is that they are so open about it, as if there is nothing wrong with a party saying, “When we get in power, we’ll make sure no one feels safe opposing us.”
