The theme from “Rocky” topped the charts on July 2, 1977. Remember that Apollo Creed won the fight, so maybe “Rocky” won’t be banned as racist.
1. Stop making me defend Alyssa Milano! Not that I don’t enjoy watching the obnoxiously woke being hoisted by their own petards, but the has-been actress turned Twitter scold is being accused of appearing in blackface because of this:
Alyssa is irate, tweeting at the “gotcha!” critics, “Hey, assholes! The picture is me parodying Jersey Shore and Snookie’s (cq) tan. Snookie’s tan (she is a sweetheart by the way) is worthy of parodying as is Trump’s ‘tan.'”
“Snookie,” in case you have a life and never watched “Jersey Shore,” is Italian, not black.
Milano’s defense is solid, except that her woke allies seem to regard dark make-up as blackface when it suits their needs. Wasn’t the dark make-up that prompted the Washington Post to get a D.C. woman fired for her 2018 Halloween Party costume satirizing Megyn Kelly? What are the rules here?
2. What will it take for CNN to finally admit that Chris Cuomo is an idiot and an embarrassment to the network, his profession, and homo sapiens, and fire him? In the latest episode of “I Love Fredo,” the CNN anchor accused St. Louis attorney Mark McCloskey, who used his guns to confront a mob of George Floyd protesters who had broken through an iron gate to access his private property, the “face of white resistance” to the Black Lives Matter movement. McCloskey responded,
First of all, that’s a completely ridiculous statement. I am not the face of anything opposing the Black Lives Matters movement. I was a person scared for my life, who was protecting my wife, my home, my hearth, my livelihood. I was a victim of a mob that came through the gate. I didn’t care what color they were. I didn’t care what their motivation was. I was frightened. I was assaulted and I was in imminent fear that they would run me over, kill me, burn my house.
Why wouldn’t he think that, based on what we have seen in the last couple of week?
Then Cuomo argued—he’s also a lawyer you know—that the McCloskeys committed wrongdoing by “pointing a loaded weapon at a group of people who were walking past. They did not go up your steps. They didn’t go to your house. They didn’t touch you, they didn’t try to enter your home or do anything to your kids, but you say you were assaulted.” But it was a mob. A mob advancing on one’s home is inherently a threat.
Prof. Turley has an extensive analysis of that issue here. In one of his equivocating moods, Turley concludes, to the extent I can decypher his overly careful discussion, that a conviction on the facts of the case would be a long-shot at best.
I’m more concerned about Cuomo echoing the popular extortion that if you are not supportive of Black Lives Matter, you’re a white racist. Black Lives Matter is a racist, crypto-Marxist, retrograde, hate-peddling group seeding insurrection that has seized on the George Floyd death to press its anti-American agenda, and many African Americans have figured this out as well. It is not appropriate or ethical for Chris Cuomo to use his position at CNN to promote BLM’s propaganda.
3. To be fair, it is possible to find a law professor somewhere who holds just about any ridiculous opinion you can imagine. Take Richard Albert, a professor of law and government at the University of Texas-Austin. He says that the Constitution has to be rewritten because “its gendered and racist words stand in the way of true reconciliation in this divided country and have no place in any modern society.” This reasoning, taken to its logical extension, would wipe out most literature and popular music, not to mention jurisprudence, written before 1970. The Constitution has the advantage that almost nobody reads it, not even the Bill of Rights. Either Albert’s proposition is a stealth effort to junk the funding documents, he’s so woke that he’s completely addled, or he’s grandstanding and virtue-signaling. If it’s the latter, and I think it is, then this stunt is irresponsible. Some people will take it seriously.
4. Wait, what? What’s going on here? An ABC News report about the National Parks devolved into lunatic race-baiting. “America’s national parks face existential crisis over race,” it asserted because those “premier outdoor spaces…remain overwhelmingly white.” ABC noted with horror that the National Park Service statistics according to the latest 10-year survey show that “23% of people who visited the nation’s 419 national parks were people of color, and 77% were white. But “minorities make up 42% of the U.S. population.” More alarming to ABC still was a study that showed “twice as many black and Hispanic Americans said they don’t know what to do in national parks than whites.” Joel Pannell, associate director of the Sierra Club told ABC, “The outdoors and public lands suffer from the same systemic racism that the rest of our society does.”
So the new theory is that any activity that doesn’t break down into representative demographic groups demonstrates systemic racism? Doesn’t that mean that the audiences at Tyler Perry movies prove that the movies are racist? How does the racial composition of National Parks visitors endanger the parks? Wait, are BLM and the George Floyd mob going to demand that we tear down El Capitan along with Mount Rushmore? Is this a call for some kind of camping and vacation affirmative action?
5. Yes, the New York Times appears to be completely, incurably, incompetent and anti-America. Here’s a quote from “America’s Enduring Caste System” by :
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out….India…Nazi Germany …the United States.”
She really wrote that, and a Times editor let it go to print. Here is the whole paragraph:
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
This is fake world history, and anti-American propaganda. It is not surprising that the Times includes a link to its discredited “1619 Project.” If Wilkerson really believes what she wrote, then she is stunningly ignorant of world history. Let’s ignore the fact that the United States does not have a “caste system” by any accurate definition of the word. All of Europe did, particularly France, England and Russia. Japan did. Rome did. An astute commenter on Instapundit points out, accurately…
None of the three entities mentioned have anything to do with each other in regards to a “caste system”. India can certainly be said to have an “enduring caste system”, as it has persisted for thousands of years. Trying to put Nazi Germany into the conversation is just the imbeciles’ way of trying to paint whatever one is comparing Nazi Germany to as evil. The NSDAP was in control of Germany for 12 years, so the adjective “enduring” applies to nothing in regards to that state. In addition, there was not a “caste system” in Nazi Germany. There was virulent anti-Semitism. Now, there was some classifications within the “Jewish” category, depending on how many of your grandparents were Jewish, but the vast majority of German population was considered to be of the “Volksgemeinschaft”, which is the exact opposite of a caste system. And there has never been any type of “caste system” in the USA. There has been racial discrimination in the past, but that is not a caste system. Even in the darkest days of the Democrat Party’s Jim Crow policies, there were black people who could succeed and achieve middle class or higher status. Maybe there is some sort of caste system/ nepotism involved in the newsrooms of the NYT and the rest of the MSM, but the country as a whole doesn’t have this problem. Could a member of the “untouchable” caste ever become President of India? It’s a ridiculous question. Yet we had a black man elected President of the USA twice. Morons.
Indeed.
But lying, divisive, dangerous morons.
Ethics Alarms 
#1. That’s OK, she has committed many more woke-gressions. To wit:
#1–“ ‘Snookie,’ in case you have a life and never watched ‘Jersey Shore,’ is Italian, not black.”
Never did, would, or will, but FWIW: Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper in True Romance) to Christopher Walken’s Vincenzo Coccotti on the origin of Darkly Complected Italians. (FF to 6:30)
Turns out she’s not even Italian. But Chilean and Iberian.
I hate that I know this, but yes, she was born in Chile and adopted by an Italian-American family as an infant.
So, by the new rules, wouldn’t this at least be “brownface”? Is it okay to mock people of Hispanic heritage through dark makeup?
In any case, I’ll put this into the “dressing up as a specific person is not what the term ‘blackface’ means, you goddamn idiots” pile. Besides, Milano is now taking heat for criticizing the Washington Redskins name while her fashion line sells Redskins-branded merchandise, which might be a more popcorn-worthy episode of “As The Left Eats Itself”.
On the subject of the late Dennis Hopper (mercifully, his status as formerly living will spare his being cancelled), he had a backface episode in the 1990 movie Flashback after a poison sumac encounter. (FF to 1:20)
‘Course, Kiefer Sutherland, who perpetrated the incident, is still around and fair game…
4. What’s going on is an assault from every conceivable angle against those who stand in the path of the progressive machine. If you assail your enemy from every direction, there’s a real chance he’ll cave from exhaustion and lost the will to fight on, or you might find that one weak spot where he especially vulnerable. The only question I have is whether we are seeing the middle of the assault, or the harrying of a routed foe. If we keep seeing more and more of these attacks, and more and more people cower before them, then I think we’re in the middle of a rout.
No one wants to lose their livelihood. No one wants to jeopardize his family to combat this insanity. I certainly don’t want to fight these battles. I just want to go to work, come home, relax for the evening, raise my kids to be decent people, play chess or Magic or Dungeons and Dragons, read some books, and go to bed believing tomorrow will be much like today. I’m trying to work up the courage to confront the reality that this time of prosperity we have lived through is unprecedented on the world stage, and could easily vanish if no one stands up to protect it.
1. I wonder if Alyssa will go to bat for “The Golden Girls” after this?
In fact, now that I think about it, if it’s so wrong to show white people in dark make-up, wouldn’t it be appropriate for all those grandstanding celebrities condemning old reruns of their shows or giving up lucrative voice-over work to donate their ill-gotten salaries (and residuals!) to minority causes?
(As an aside, remember the story of Geoffrey Owens from “The Cosby Show” who ended up working at Trader Joe’s after his residuals dried up when the show was yanked from the airwaves after Dr. Cosby’s creepy bedside manner was exposed? What is the responsibility to character actors or actors appearing in recurring roles that have their residual checks cut because someone has deemed an old episode offensive?)
2. I saw this article. Cuomo came out with guns blazing. It’s almost as if he had his mind made up about the incident before he even spoke to his guest. I can’t imagine what could make an objective, dispassionate journalist do that.
3. That’s the goal. Discredit the Founding Fathers as racist, misogynist, rich old white men and you discredit anything they wrote.
That’s what cancelling means. Yank them off their TV show, cancel their contracts, get them fired or expelled. You can’t fire the Founding Fathers, though, so you have to destroy their legacy some other way. This is the way we get a new Constitution where hate speech, guns and due process are banned, but abortions, free healthcare and equal pay are enshrined. It’s how a new caste system is begun with white heterosexual males at the bottom.
4. I read that article, too. It was insulting to the extreme. Are black people going to be forcibly bussed into National Parks to correct this horrific error?
5. To be frank, I think of Hollywood and the news media as being contained in such impermeable bubbles that they think the rest of the world is like this. Of course, celebrities think all men are sexual predators when the entire culture of Hollywood is sex obsessed and the rules of the game involve submitting to unwanted advances in order to get ahead. They don’t know anyone who doesn’t think like them so their war against the corporate execs at networks and production companies is carried out on a global scale.
It’s like the grandchildren of Queen Victoria who couldn’t keep their family feuds to themselves and decided to hold a World War to solve the problem instead.
For all we know, the NYT does have a caste system.
Not too long ago ‘they’ were telling us blacks don’t go to national parks because of all the trees.
Re: No. 4; Wilkerson’s Caste System.
I read that linked article and wished I hadn’t. It is quite something for Isabel Wilkerson to issue rebukes of US culture by declaring that we are fundamentally a caste system. Comparisons to India and Nazi Germany strain to the point of breaking. First, the Hindu/Indian caste system was based, primarily, on the religious of belief that higher castes obtained their status by moving up the reincarnation hierarchy, and accordingly, there is very little social mobility. That may have changed with the global economy and outsourcing. However, it has absolutely no application to the US. Comparing the US to Nazi Germany is beyond stupid, unless the point is to say that, because of its history with slavery and indigenous peoples, the US is, and always will be, evil.
Furthermore, Isabel Wilkerson sees everything in terms of caste, which she believes is race-based. How, then, does she explain Pres. Barack Obama being elected twice and the many pictures she has had taken with him as President? Additionally, were her argument true, she wouldn’t be printed in the New York Times and she certainly would not have been the Chicago bureau chief of the NYT. She would not have taught at Emory University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, Boston University, or served as a board member at Columbia University.
The really disconcerting part of her piece, though, is the underlying implication that Blacks have no place in US society, should want no place in US society, and should completely reject US society in favor of Black-based society. She, and BLM, are advocating apartheid.
jvb
1. Eddie Murphy played a white Jewish guy as one of his roles in “Coming to America.” That has to be just as offensive as a white person doing blackface…
…doesn’t it?
Noice (sic) catch Joel!
Now; would you like to self-report to the Reeducation Gulag, or shall we send a car…
#4. I think we already went through this. I recall the “news” from a couple years ago saying the exact same thing – disproportionate numbers of white people in the parks – and proclaiming something needed to be done about it. If I’m correct, they also mentioned the same problem at ice skating rinks.
A followup article from another source claimed polling of PoC showed they just didn’t like skating and camping as much as your “average white person”.
Now that it’s old and forgotten, perhaps this time a major issue can be made of it. Surely Trump is at fault.
Also listening to Lawrence Welk music, attending Gilbert and Sullivan productions, buying Beatles albums, playing croquet and badminton, clogging, wearing shorts, doing the backstroke, reading Agatha Cristie, watching Peach Party movies. The new rule is that anything black citizens don’t like must be racist.
ABC News is either lying or ignorant. Have its crews never visited Grand Canyon NP?!? My wife and I have…twice in the last three years. Staggeringly, stunningly, indescribably beautiful. The English language isn’t rich enough…
Anyway, I can safely say the majority of visitors were neither black nor white, but Asian. And let me add that they appear fearless, all but hanging one-handed off a precipice to get a memorable picture.
Suck on that, ABC Suck Toast!!
I apologize for that outburst…
No apology necessary. Completely appropriate.