I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this year because I can’t stop things I’m not thankful for imposing on my consciousness and making me miserable. “Get these memories out of this room!” says one of three collegial madwomen in a memorable scene from “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” “I won’t have them sitting around staring at me!”
Exactly.
But enough about me. My friends continue to be frightening in their mental deterioration: that cartoon above was just posted by one of them…with a wave of “likes” of course. How much has one’s critical thinking skills been corrupted to think that perspective is anything but woke garbage? The mind boggles.
Meanwhile,
1. Here’s Biden’s paid liar, (the competent one) Jen Psaki, sounding idiotic on a podcast (Who has the time and tolerance to listen to junk like this? I’d rather watch re-runs of “Three’s Company”) attacking current press secretary Karoline Leavitt:
JEN PSAKI: It’s a very good question. Here’s the challenge of that. If I would say Peter Doocy, bless his heart, is not as bad as Benny Johnson.This is the group we’re living in, we’ve got the rank order of options. Is that if the Associated Press and the Washington Post and the New York Times and ABC News say, you know what, we’re walking out of this White House briefing room. That’s the best thing that could ever happen to Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Because that’s what they’re trying to reshape without saying they’re doing it. And in that room, and this is what I find to be so challenging, is the things that are happening behind the scenes that you can’t always see or know unless you’ve lived it. And I think this is true in law firms, in the Department of Justice and places too, is that in that briefing room, the Benny Johnsons of the world are slowly but surely taking over more and more of the questions in the briefing, right?And having a greater and greater presence in these press pools where you have a smaller group of reporters in the Oval Office. And sometimes Trump and a foreign leader will take 45 minutes of questions. And it’s Benny Johnson and little Benny Johnson, whoever that may be.And yes, maybe there’s one or two other real reporters, but the problem is they’re taking up so much real estate. So if all of these other reporters leave, that’s all the real estate. And then you know what we have?We have what the Kremlin press corps is. And that’s the challenge. So if you’re these reporters, I don’t know what the answer is and what you do. There’s still very smart people in there. They’re just getting overtaken in terms of space and real estate by people the White House selects to say things like, Donald Trump looks so good in his workout. What is his workout?That was literally a question one day.
ANGIE “PUMPS” SULLIVAN, CO-HOST: It’s crazy. Yeah. Okay. And one thing. Okay. So I’m going to tell you what a big nerd I am.
PSAKI: We’re all nerds. It’s a safe place.
WELCH: So I get on social media. And then when I would get home after work, I would watch your press conferences when you worked for Biden.
PSAKI: Oh my God. God bless you. Thank you.
SULLIVAN: It’s just to see like, okay, what’s the real story before I got into the meat of it? Because I was like, okay, what’s the White House saying? Because I’m getting all this disruption. And I think that it’s a, you know, it’s precious for the United States to have a representative of the president to come out and talk about policy. You had a stack of books this tall. I couldn’t even believe all the crap you went through. Now I am enraged every time I see Karoline Leavitt who prays before she goes out there and lies her fat ass off. So she goes out there and lies and it’s propaganda after propaganda. Is there no check on that? Like, is there no, like, I guess there’s no law that the press secretary has to be honest, but like when she acts like, I can’t even believe you would insinuate Donald Trump would make money off of the presidency as the Trump watches are going. So is there no like rules or anything? I guess they don’t care about rules, but does that break your heart to see what it’s been turned into?
PSAKI: It does. And I say this as obviously I worked in Democratic politics for 20 something years. I’m not shy about my views, but even for people who like Dana Perino or dare I say even Sean Spicer, I don’t know if I should use him as an example.It’s a very different briefing room now than it was then. Dana Perino is probably a better example of this, right? I disagree with Bush on a bazillion things, right? But you had to go in there and answer questions from the same type of reporters and often the same reporters I had to answer questions from. And this is a part of how the United States is unique as a democracy is that you do have a person who goes out there at the White House and answers questions even on days and believe me, there are some days where before you walk out into the room, you’re like, “oh shit.” There’s no information. That’s not the reporter’s fault. It’s like, there’s nothing I can offer and they’re going to just yell at me for 45 minutes. It’s sad because there aren’t so many people who’ve ever done that job and what it feels like it is diminishing the job. It is diminishing the role of the press secretary, the honor of being in that job, which is speaking on behalf of the United States of America, which sometimes it’s edgy. A lot of times it’s not. Sometimes people think it’s boring, but it’s important and this is really changing what it is and what the expectations are around it. And that is sad for the White House. It’s sad for the institution. It’s sad for anyone who’s had that job. And it really takes it away as something that the American people can rely on as at least a source of information.
Where to start? Of course Jen thinks the Times, the Post and the rest are journalism gold, since they abdicated all journalistic integrity to cover for her White House and her party. Funny that she thinks Leavitt has debased the Paid Liar job when Psaki never criticized her pathetic successor, Karine Jean-Pierre. And needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, for any former Paid Liar to criticize another one for lying isn’t just hypocrisy, it is lying in a position where lying is unethical.
Then there’s the barely coherent Mean Girls banter. How does that illuminate or entertain?
2. As you know by now, two National Guardsmen were shot in Washington, D.C. Go ahead, tell me that the Democrats’ “storm trooper” rhetoric wasn’t the catalyst for this.
3. The lame and unethical Georgia racketeering case against President Trump was finally dismissed, almost certainly for good. Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of Georgia’s nonpartisan prosecutor council issued a 22-page filing in which the career prosecutor explained how the “Get Trump!” lawfare case originally brought by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, was without merit and politically motivated. “It is not illegal to question or challenge election results,” he pointed out ( as Ethics Alarms has been insisting for, oh, five years). Willis, of course, also thoroughly disgraced herself while prosecuting the case, hiring her adulterous huggy-bug as part of the prosecution team and lying about their relationship.
4. More “good racism” (that is, racism against whites): The University of Minnesota’s “Culture and Family Lab” has this on its website:
“Racism is an epidemic (CDC, 2021) that can also be considered a pandemic given its large cross-national proportion and spread (APA, 2020). However, there is another pandemic lurking behind and driving the racism pandemic – the Whiteness Pandemic. Whiteness refers to culture not biology: the centuries-old culture of Whiteness features colorblindness, passivity, and White fragility, which are all covert expressions of racism common in the United States. Naming the Whiteness Pandemic shifts our gaze from the victims and effects of racism onto the systems that perpetrate and perpetuate racism, starting with the family system. At birth, young children growing up in White families begin to be socialized into the culture of Whiteness, making the family system one of the most powerful systems involved in systemic racism.”
Nice!
5. Voter competence and responsibility test in Tennessee! On December 2, 2025, voters in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District will select a new Representative to replace Republican Mark Green who resigned his seat to accept a lucrative business opportunity. (He is unethical and a disgrace as a public servant.) The choice is between Republican Matt Van Epps and Democrat Aftyn Behn. Just as early voting saved Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones from the defeat he deserved after justifying child murder as a fine way to sway political foes, so it might allow Behn to sneak into the House. Called the AOC of Tennessee, Behn has, as a recently uncovered podcast revealed, said that she hates the major city in her district, Nashville. “I hate the city,” she said. “I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville. I hate it.” Now she claims she didn’t mean it. This week, in another clip that went viral,Behn can be heard speaking about her sessions with her therapist. “My therapist always asks me to transcribe my dreams when they happen, and the recurring dream I’ve had is standing up in a cafeteria full of women – I don’t know why I was there or whatever – and saying, ‘I don’t want children. I want power!’ And just screaming it at the top of my lungs,” Behn can be heard saying.
Why would anyone vote for such a creep? Oh…right. “Affordability.” And she hates Trump.
Ethics Alarms 
Apropos of nothing: Gov. JB Pritzker Wants Phones Out Of The Classroom.
MONEY QUOTE: “Let kids bring their phones to class when you want them to stop learning.”
Bravo India November Golf Oscar!
With everything else he’s done to ruin the Land of Lincoln, it’s hard to believe that Pritzker’s advocating to remove them from classrooms….and has been for over eight (8) months.
But this does go in his Plus Column…where it sits alone.
Apropos of something: Our host tirelessly supplies myriad topics of intellectual, psychological, existential, philosophical, historical, and ethical significance (to borrow OB’s phrase) faster than I can read ’em, something for which I myself am thankful; thankful indeed!
PWS
Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions
A friend was just urging me to download and use ChatGPT when this Haidt article appeared almost simultaneously. A college classmate and I were trying to figure out what a meme was as opposed to a GIF.
And yes, thanks for Jack Marshall and his furiously writing and publishing multiple pieces every day. Amazing.
All it takes is being obsessed, having a short attention span, and warped priorities.
And a hilariously rich gift for self-deprecation.
“All it takes is being obsessed, having a short attention span, and warped priorities.”
All vices I admire…
PWS
Knowledge of how to use AI tools may be important for finding and keeping employment as knowledge of how to use IT. AI is a tool, and though there are dangers involved, it should not be dismissed as a curse.
Here is a link to a beautiful article by Rod Dreher published this morning:
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-abroad
In it there is a long quote from “Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Republic” from Harald Jähner, and Dreher uses a long quote to compare the USA today with the Weimar Republic.
After reading Jen Psaki’s statements I have to include the following quote from the article and book:
“The communication crisis that went hand in hand with the depression devalued all means of promoting social cohesion, public discussions and fairs, but most particularly the press. Readers first withdrew their trust, then their subscriptions. Ullstein alone lost a quarter of its subscribers, and the drop in advertising hit even harder. The newspaper Germania cancelled its evening edition, and the Kreuzzeitung simply withered away.
Fred Hildenbrandt, the head of the culture section of the Berliner Tageblatt, later recalled:
‘Those of us who were part of it all lived among ourselves as if on an island.’
Opponents of the Berlin cultural scene had long asserted that it was indeed an island, but every milieu, every newspaper formed an island in itself, with its own opinion makers, whistleblowers and regular readers – an island where the opinions of outsiders were unwelcome. Every political trend, every little party, the tiniest intellectual village had its own newspaper. A form of the infamous ‘filter bubble’ or ‘echo chamber’ through which people can become intellectually isolated on digital networks in the present day also existed in Weimar Germany. Reader and newspaper existed in a mutual relationship of confirmation bias; the newspaper wrote what the reader wanted to hear, and the reader stayed loyal as long as the paper didn’t trouble him with unwelcome views.
Liberal newspapers from stables such as Mosse or Ullstein, which aimed for a broader spectrum of opinion but were fundamentally committed to the Republic and to parliamentary politics, sensed that an increasing number of people had stopped following them. Even before they cancelled their subscriptions, readers were inwardly quitting. They had lost the feeling that it was their interests that were being discussed.
‘Even though our readers remained outwardly loyal to us,’ Hermann Ullstein would recall, there was little doubt that in their hearts they were no longer on our side.
Inwardly, a good half of them who were convinced that ‘it can’t go on like this’ were already in Hitler’s camp. Day after day we criticised and attacked their idol, and it didn’t have the slightest effect on them.’
The liberal press lost trust and credit at first very slowly, then dramatically. The worst hit was the Berliner Tageblatt, which was seen as the mouthpiece of the luckless liberal DDP. This brilliant paper lost over 80 per cent of its readers under its editor-in-chief Theodor Wolff. Of 160,000 in 1919, by 1932 only 25,000 were left.
The public’s lack of interest in democratic business included reports and commentaries on it; the newspapers were perceived as the ‘mainstream media’ (Systempressse), their journalists as ‘lackeys of the system’ (Systemlinge), which is how liberal officials and politicians had already been known for a long time. The term ‘lying press’ (Lügenpresse) was already in general use, but Systempresse was even more widespread, and used for anything to the left of the Nazis’ own Völkische Beobachter or to the right of the Communist Rote Fahne.
It was not only politics that lay behind hatred of the liberal press, but also a general dissatisfaction. The Germans could no longer hear one another.
“
Yikes, Cees. So, if we’re dissatisfied with the liberal press, we’re budding NAZIs?
Just follow the link and read the entire article please.
No I am not saying that dissatisfaction with the press renders us Nazi’s. However I am wondering about whether the USA today starts looking like the Weimar Republic.
Here are some points of comparison:
And now we see young men turn to Nick Fuentes, because they have been bludgeoned over the head with sermons against white supremacy, Nazism, racism and whatsoever, and they just had enough of it and do not care anymore.
Yep. Pretty grim.
Not for anything but this My thanksgiving alliterative history:
“persecuted protestants pilgramed from persecuting protestants, perchance at plymouth persevered
providence perchance provided a people so preservation through a perilous period was attained.
A president later proclaimed a perpetual period of prayer.”
We have 364 days out of the year to lament the relationship with the Indians that we should have had versus the one we did. It’s not too much to ask that we set aside one day to be thankful for what we have. I know I sure will…before I return these old lady sweatpants that were delivered with a separated hem in the leg.
2. It would appear the terrorist in question was vetted by both the Biden and Trump administration so the Left is going to run with that as the reason why we can’t be mad at Biden for letting him in. On the other hand, is this maybe a moral luck situation? Some of these guys would have been murdered by the Taliban had they been left behind. Should we have abandoned them all just because this dude turned out to be a rotten apple?