Joe Rogan Interviews Colion Noir

June 25th, 2020

I know, two Rogan interviews in less than a week. Is it my fault he gets really good guests?

For this one, he interviews Second Amendment advocate (and former NRA host) Colion Noir.

Some takeaways:

  • “There is a subversive group in this country that wants to topple the structure of the United States so that they can gain power, because they think they can rule better. And a lot of those people are Marxists.” You don’t say.
  • “Black Lives Matter the sentiment, I can get down with. Black Lives Matter the organization, I cannot…the founder of Black Lives Matter said they’re trained Marxists.”
  • “Black Lives Matter has become this all encompassing umbrella of LGBTQ and some other stuff, aspects of antifa, and the whole communist/socialist aspects of politics creeping into that as well.”
  • “They’re wolves hiding among sheep.”
  • Noir says he’s shadowbanned on Instagram.
  • Rogan mentions The Seven Five, a documentary about police corruption in New York in the 1970s that was already on our to-be-watched list.
  • Rogan: “Who’s gonna be a cop now?”
  • Rogan: “In Santa Monica, they have police, but they were told to stand down. They were told to stand there while people were looting.”
  • Here’s the Bugs Bunny segment they talk about some 24 minutes in, where Elmer Fudd’s shotgun has been replaced with a scythe:

    Apple Dumps Intel

    June 24th, 2020

    Apple just announced that its Macintosh PC line will be moving from Intel CPUs to its own chip designs.

    Apple today announced it will transition the Mac to its world-class custom silicon to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies. Developers can now get started updating their apps to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of Apple silicon in the Mac. This transition will also establish a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire ecosystem.

    Apple today also introduced macOS Big Sur, the next major release of macOS, which delivers its biggest update in more than a decade and includes technologies that will ensure a smooth and seamless transition to Apple silicon. Developers can easily convert their existing apps to run on Apple silicon, taking advantage of its powerful technologies and performance. And for the first time, developers can make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.

    To help developers get started with Apple silicon, Apple is also launching the Universal App Quick Start Program, which provides access to documentation, forums support, beta versions of macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12, and the limited use of a Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac development system based on Apple’s A12Z Bionic System on a Chip (SoC).

    Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years. Apple will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come, and has exciting new Intel-based Macs in development. The transition to Apple silicon represents the biggest leap ever for the Mac.

    Well, not really. The leaps from Motorola’s 68000 series to PowerPC chips, its move from legacy Mac OS to the FreeBSD/NeXTSTEP-based OS X, and the transition away from PowerPC to Intel, were all probably bigger leaps. But their transition away from Intel is still pretty big.

    The chip they’re moving doing is based on ARM, but that’s only a small part of the story:

    The A12Z chip that Apple is currently using in its latest LiDAR iPad Pro and its first generation Apple Silicon chip in the Mac mini developer transition kit does incorporate ARM CPU cores. But that ARM Architecture CPU is not the most significant reason Apple is moving away from Intel’s chips on Macs.

    Apple alluded to this in referring to its own custom silicon as being an “SoC,” or System on a Chip. Over the past decade, Apple has developed a series of SoCs that incorporate essentially an entire logic board of chips that a typical PC would require into a single chip that can be mass produced and used across multiple devices from its iPhone, to iPad, to Apple TV and even HomePod.

    The primary advantage of this integration was power consumption. ARM supplied licensed CPU reference design cores that provided leading compute performance per watt, leading Apple to make ARM the center core of its SoC designs. ARM cores are also the basis for Apple’s M-series components that monitor data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer to efficiently track how a device is moving over time.

    Snip.

    In some respects, Apple’s use of ARM cores in its SoCs is similar to its use of Unix in the OS itself. Both are effectively specifications that standardize the operations of low level technology layers. In the same way that Macs are more than just Unix systems, Apple’s SoCs are more than just ARM processors.

    As with Qualcomm’s modems, the customizations, optimizations, and additional layers of proprietary work that Apple adds to its A-series SoCs results in a package that’s significantly more valuable than its base components.

    That reality is reflected in Apple’s custom silicon being a lot more than just an “ARM chip,” and helps to explain why Apple’s SoCs have increasingly outperformed other ARM-based SoCs developed by Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, and others.

    Who’s going to fab the chips? Almost certainly TSMC, which has been fabbing iPhone chips since 2014, and which has lapped Intel in process technology.

    Could Apple build their own fab? With a market cap of over 1.5 trillion and $192.8 billion cash on hand, they’re one of the few companies that could without making it a “bet your company” proposition.

    But I don’t think they will.

    Keep in mind, TSMC just broke ground on a new 5nm, 300mm Taiwanese fab expected to cost NT$500 billion, which works out to some $16.9 billion. They also plan to build a another 5nm fab in Arizona for $12 billion. That’s a lot of capacity for Apple (one of TSMC’s biggest customers, if not the biggest) to take advantage of. (TSMC has dozens of existing fabs, but not all are equipped for the cutting edge process technology Apple needs.)

    Actually, Apple already owns a fab, a former Maxim facility at 3725 N. First St. San Jose, California, which it bought in 2015. Weirdly enough, you can’t find any information about it after 2015. Could they retrofit it to make their new SoCs? The older a fab is, the less likely it is to get retrofitted for new technology, for a variety of reasons. If they weren’t already using it for CPU production, they probably wouldn’t start now. But since they only paid $18.2 million for 70,000 square feet of valuable Silicon Valley real estate, I doubt that concerns them much.

    Fabbing their own CPUs has a long-rumored move on Apple’s part, which has been building up its chip design capabilities for over a decade with the acquisitions of fabless design companies like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit, Passif Semiconductor and part of Dialog Semiconductor. With its own CPUs, Apple is finally getting the complete end-to-end control of its computing platform its long sought.

    According to Apple, “With the translation technology of Rosetta 2, users will be able to run existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated, including those with plug-ins. Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux. Developers can also make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.” Apple’s previous emulation transitions worked pretty well, but were far from seamless. In theory, well-written Mac software should only require a recompile to work properly on Macs using Apple’s new chips. In practice, such transitions are always bumpy, and it will take a while to tune performance.

    Black Lives Matter Is A Radical Marxist Organization

    June 23rd, 2020

    #BlackLivesMatters is a radical Marxist organization dedicated to destroying every American institution that stands in the way of achieving total power for the radical left. The fact that it has gotten as far as it has toward achieving that goal is a testament to both the deep pockets of its shadowy financial backers and the all-powerful sway the idea of white guilt has over liberal minds. Nominally rational liberals have been fooled into falling for a bait-and-switch where they think their dollars and pledges of support are actually going toward reducing police brutality rather than bankrolling a radical Marxist agenda.

    Let’s look at the real #BlackLivesMatters agenda:

    Black Lives Matter as a movement represents the hopes and dreams of leftist organizers who shared with us that, until now, they had never felt such a sense of hope and excitement that their goal – as one operative put it, “total social upheaval,” and “systemic change” – could be realized in their lifetime. From veteran agitators like the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers to a new crop of social-media-wielding female and LGBTQ leaders, Black Lives Matter is encapsulating the hopes and dreams of multiple generations of progressives in a way, they say, no movement has before.

    The three female founders of the movement have made it clear, and the message has seeded itself as far down the chain as the operatives we spoke with, that Black Lives Matter is the vessel through which all progressive causes can flow. LGBTQ, illegal immigration, abortion, and countless other causes are simmering just beneath the public face of the focus on police violence. Even police violence flows neatly, according to Black Lives Matter, into economic violence – wage issues, workers rights . . . The panoply of leftist groups come together under this banner.

    Cop Hate is critical and central to BLM’s strategy, because by vilifying the police, by portraying individual officers and departments in general as racist, despite clear evidence refuting “systemic” charges, it will achieve the objective of harming the principle of the rule of law. That is vital. And when that happens, the Left will strike and strike hard, and in many places, strike with impunity. Also from the report’s introduction:

    Black Lives Matter presents an alternative view of the American story, rooted in Marxism and one that thrives on encouraging division. Many have criticized its avoidance of facts about bias in policing — facts that would directly counter the Black Lives Matter narrative. Nevertheless, it has captured the nation’s attention through its use of social-media and cameras but also by recruiting the young Americans who will fi ll the streets with their presence and engage the public’s interest with their fervor.

    If Black Lives Matter succeeds, it will have reengineered the minds of America to view our system, our history, and our future, through the lens of division and hate. In its dishonest weakening of public trust in the police officer, the representative of law and order and equality before the law, Black Lives Matter weakens the very foundations of our country.

    To counter this advance, marketers of freedom must understand why they are losing mindshare to the left’s Black Lives Matter ideology if they are to effectively counter their messages and rebuild demand for our principles.

    The beauty, if you will, of BLM’s Cop Hate strategy is that it gives protestors actual foes, living and breathing, precincts, fat, juicy targets, as opposed to faceless programs or inert principles:

    The police, as representatives of the state, must be messaged as exemplifying the Black Lives Matter framing by being themselves oppressive and racist.

    Focusing vitriol against law enforcement officers is way to translate a political ideology (Marxism) into a tangible enemy that adherents can picture, encounter, and target. By seeking out stories of potential (founded and unfounded) injustices perpetrated by police and encouraging mass outrage in reaction to them, BLM is able to channel the emotion their message fosters against an enemy people can see. . . .

    Snip.

    Key to BLM’s strategy is suppressing free speech and dissent, by means of force and intimidation if necessary. And so it has come to pass that if you stand on the sidewalk to oppose a protest, you will get a concrete shake bounced off your head, (the assailant will not be charged) and a tweet of repute will result in a pink slip. The Orwellian media — a force multiplier for BLM’s messaging — seems not to notice the suppression of free-speech rights. Heck, they don’t see riots and fires before their cameras. From the report (again, keep in mind it was written in 2016):

    The Black Lives Matter movement is wholly against dissent and freedom of speech and their success rests upon the silencing of dissent, but they are savvy enough to accomplish this through other means than solely legal. First, Black Lives Matter has created an atmosphere where forces more emotionally compelling than “truth-seeking” encourage fealty through the threatened stigma of being an outsider, and discourage diversity of opinion. Through our research, we found that both the Activists and the Allies were united by the fear of being ostracized from the left’s cultural community and clung to the community they were provided by publicly supporting Black Lives Matter.

    Black Lives Matter frequently uses shows of force – either by seeking them from university administrators or through aggressive demonstrations – to silence dissent, as well. Activists recounted to us that they found it appropriate to ask administrators to step in and stop perceived “hate speech,” although they considered themselves to be supporters of free speech. Finally, by portraying criticism of their cause as an attempt to stifle their speech, they in effect demand freedom from criticism.

    Remember how Bret Weinstein talked about how these tactics were used in college. He also talked about the Maoist brainwashing nature of their tactics: The target is made to admit one obvious thing (“the United States is not perfect”), and then once they have given in to that, is pressured to agree to increasingly radical statements. For #BlackLivesMatters, this starts with a true statement (“police brutality exists”), which then leads directly to a false premise (“police are murdering black Americans at a high rate”) so that each statistically rare incident can be hyped to produce riots.

    Who says they’re radical Marxists? They do.

    BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the [Black] Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.

    And if that’s not enough, how about from #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrice Cullors?

    In addition to founding #BlackLivesMatters, Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi were all part of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a Marxist-Lenninist groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism.

    What do the people providing financial and organizational backing want? Very possibly different things. I’m sure that ActBlue, the Democratic Party fundraising arm collecting money for them, see it as a means of harvesting donations. And we’ve already talked about George Soros’ backing of them. Stacey Lennox notes how they fit into something called the Momentum Community, which cites #BlackLivesMatter, the Dream Movement, and Occupy Wall Street:

    All have clear Marxist aims that have significant overlap. What we are seeing is a group of affinity-based organizations around issues such as climate or some immutable characteristic such as race that all advocate for the same collectivist policies. And these policies have very little to do with the organizing principle of the not-for-profits involved. Momentum is pretty transparent about this.

    Lennox suggests that the #BlackLivesMatter/antifa riots we’re seeing now are just a dry run to de-legitimize a successful Trump’s reelection with cries of voter suppression.

    #BlackLivesMatters is far more concerned with overthrowing capitalism than actually improving the lives of black Americans.

    BidenWatch for June 22, 2020

    June 22nd, 2020

    Exploring the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden (plus the equally huge campaign technology gap), some fundraising analysis, more Veepstakes, and a majority of Americans think Biden is a few tacos shy of a combo plate. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Fundraising update:

    Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.

    Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.

    But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.

    Some Trump numbers snipped.

    A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.

    During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.

    The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.

    Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.

    Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.

    But Unite the Country says it’s still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.

  • For all these polls that say Biden is ahead, doesn’t there seem to be a big enthusiasm gap?

    Team Trump has a legendary data program. Even Democrats have expressed concern over the campaign’s digital prowess and collection methods. Trump rallies are key to this strategy for a number of reasons. And according to Brad Parscale, it seems a return to the road is generating unprecedented enthusiasm.

    This is for a rally in an arena that holds 19,000. If the campaign holds true to form, there will be large screens for those unable to get a seat to watch from outside. But the key to the operation is in Parscale’s tweet. It is the biggest data haul to date.

    What does this data give them? The opportunity to register people who are interested in the rally to vote who are not already registered. The ability to contact these potential voters throughout the rest of the campaign with updates and fundraising efforts. The information to ensure absentee ballots and in-person voting happen right through the close of the polls on Election Day.

  • That piece also cites this Dave Weigel piece, which discusses the significant difference between campaign contact touches:

    On the 48th day of quarantine, as traditional presidential campaigning became a gauzy memory, I immersed myself in the worlds created by the campaigns of Joe Biden and President Trump. I downloaded both campaigns’ apps — TeamJoe and Trump 2020, respectively — and agreed to get notifications. I created a Twitter list consisting of nothing but official campaign accounts and checked in a few times a day. What I found: The Republican effort was designed to keep supporters energized, inspired and sometimes angry. The Democratic effort was genteel and gave me much less to do.

    Signing up for the Trump app subscribed me to not one, but two automated text chains. The first came in from the Trump campaign within seconds of sign-up, informing me that I had just gotten “Reward Access Unlocked,” thus qualifying me to “earn points & meet Pres Trump during the campaign in fall.” One minute later, the Republican National Committee thanked me for joining the “team,” and asked whether I could let the president “know what you think of this week’s accomplishments.”

    Following the first link took me back to the Trump campaign page; following the second gave me a yes or no poll on whether I approved of the president, with space to write about why. I didn’t go further than that, but two hours later, the RNC texted with news: “You were 1 of the 25 President Trump selected for a 5X-MATCH EXTENSION! The other 24 patriots already donated, now it’s your turn.”

    Not wanting to be left out, I clicked through to a page powered by WinRed, the newish Republican donation portal. A photo of the president pointing at me like Uncle Sam was displayed next to a pitch that had become even more urgent: “This offer is only available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast. Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT HOUR and your gift will be 5X-MATCHED!” A $100 donation button was already colored in, and a box that would have made this a “monthly recurring donation” was already checked. When I tried to click away, a window popped up warning me, in vain, that the offer was about to expire.

    All of that happened within two hours. The Biden campaign did not contact me until seven hours after I’d downloaded the app, finally texting me in the late afternoon. “It’s Joe Biden and I owe you my sincere thanks, David,” the account wrote. “You all have been so great to this campaign.” (You all?) “I’ve been calling donors and it’s so great to thank people personally. I’m calling more this week who are helping us start May strong. If you aren’t a May donor yet, you can chip in here and I might be calling you soon.”

    Following that link, I was offered a shot at “a video call from Joe” and told that the “average gift is only $25.” A form to fill in an exact donation amount was left blank; a box that would make this a one-time donation, not a recurring one, was already checked.

    Over the next few days, it was easy to forget that the Biden app existed. Push texts were infrequent, and unlike the Trump app, the Biden app didn’t let me track virtual campaign events. (That was on the website.) TeamJoe offered me a few options and news items, all of which directed me from the app back to the campaign website. For 24 hours, the top news item was a new Biden campaign pledge, which I could take, committing myself to “empathy,” “keeping the faith,” “humility,” and “no malarkey,” among other nice things. If I wanted to volunteer, the app made it easier, but not addictive.

    Trump 2020 did not let me go so easily. A news feed let me read the latest messaging, just as it would appear to a reporter on the media list, or the campaign’s curated tweets, which prioritized big names like campaign manager Brad Parscale. An “engage” button educated me on ways to “fight with President Trump,” from hosting a “MAGA Meet Up” to joining the campaign finance committee as a high-dollar bundler. Sharing the app with a friend would award me 100 points, while sharing any news item to Twitter or Facebook would give me a single point. A good prize, like expedited entry at any to-be-scheduled rallies, cost 25,000 points.

    The “gamified” Trump app has made some Democrats nervous, not least because Biden hasn’t tried to compete with it. Everything that came from the Trump campaign had an act-fast, as-seen-on-TV feeling; nothing from the Biden campaign did. Biden’s campaign texted me a poll (“Are you planning to vote for Joe Biden in the general election in your state?”) and a longer “strategy survey,” asking if I wanted to volunteer and what issues I cared about.

    The Trump campaign and the RNC, in the same time period, invited me to “the Trump 100 Club” (“offer permanently expires in SIX HOURS”), a “2020 sustaining membership” with the campaign, and a poll that claimed the president had closed “ALL borders to Keep America Safe.” (While citizenship applications have been halted, and while resources have been sent to the Mexican border, the nation’s borders are not closed.)

    All of this fit snugly with the rest of the campaign’s other media and messaging. The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.”

    Snip.

    I had more company watching Trump content than I did watching Biden content. As of Thursday morning, the Biden campaign’s Cinco de Mayo broadcast had clocked 7,000 views on YouTube and 180,000 on Facebook, while the Trump campaign’s had clocked 11,000 and 900,000 views, respectively. Trump’s campaign has 29 million followers on Facebook, while Biden’s has less than 2 million. Biden got a higher percentage of his active supporters to tune in, but Trump had exponentially more supporters to draw from.

    In some ways, the Biden campaign is years behind on this kind of engagement. By this point in the 2012 campaign, Obama’s team had established a popular video series in which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter shared good news and debunked Republican attacks. There’s no such block-and-tackle effort from the Biden social media experience, apart from the occasional tweet responding to the Trump campaign — and no Trump-style points for helping get the message out.

    Gee, Biden is running an old-fashioned campaign decades behind the state-of-the-art? What are the odds?

  • It’s been 76 82 days since Biden held a press conference. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Poll: 55% Believe That Biden Potentially Has ‘Early Stages Of Dementia.'”

    “Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”

    Takeaway: Almost a third of Democrats and over half of independents think Biden is already a few Cocoa Puffs shy of a full bowl. (Hat tip: Ian McKelvey.)

  • Daniel Pipes offers a guide for deciphering the Bidenese. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden hasn’t just lost a step, he’s lost a lap:

    Vote for President Trump and you are voting for the Constitution, military strength and robust economic growth.

    Vote for former vice president Joe Biden and you are voting for bureaucrats, appeasement abroad, and economic entropy.

    These are the policy choices embedded in each candidate. There is also a temperamental choice to be made.

    Trump is chaos theory contained in a man, an explosive combination of complete candor as to what he thinks and feels, a willingness to brawl, an almost animal energy for the fray.

    Biden is clearly not that. He is mostly invisible these days, but he hasn’t just lost a step. He’s lost a lap. His White House would be marked by echo-chamber enthusiasts and the control of the appointees he brings along with him, a haphazard and dangerous step for the republic.

    With Trump, all will be well in the country and all will be in upheaval inside the Beltway, Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

    With Biden, the deep-blue centers of genuine privilege will have their restoration. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will regain its luster.

  • Amy Klobuchar’s veep chances just flew out the window like a stapler hurled at a staffer’s head:

    “Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”

    This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”

    But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.

    If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting.

    And if Biden crashes and burns, it won’t be her fault!

  • BBC writer does a Veepstakes roundup. In addition to the usual names he includes Kyrsten Sinema (would never happen, because she’s strayed from the party line too much) and Michelle Obama (who so many on the left are pining for).
  • “Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe faced backlash and has apologized for his comments about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate choice, saying that when Biden picks his running mate, he should do it based on each contender’s qualifications and reputation, not skin color.”

    via GIPHY

  • Michigan Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell doesn’t believe Biden’s lead:

    “And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”

    Real Clear Politics currently shows Biden to have a 7.3% lead over President Donald Trump in its average of recent polling in Michigan and an 8.1% average polling lead nationally.

    Four years ago, when polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to have leads over Trump, Dingell voiced concerns before Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988. Trump won the state by 10,704 votes against Clinton, his closest margin of victory nationally.

    “Four years ago, many of you on this phone call thought that I was nuts,” Dingell said. “I was in enough communities and heard enough people talking that I was very worried about the outcome of that election.”

    Dingell said Democrats should take nothing for granted in 2020.

  • Biden will accept the Democratic nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Stop the presses!
  • You know those “Bolton is voting for Biden” stories? More fake news.
  • “Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?” “Under Biden’s own understanding of gender and his own proposed policy, it is entirely up to him what gender he identifies as after the election.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Making Hay While The Sun Shines

    June 21st, 2020

    This is a small rabbit hole that proved more interesting than I thought.

    I’m on all sorts of auction mailing lists because I buy and sell science fiction first editions, but on some of the aggregate mailing lists, things other than books show up. One auction was for a piece of farm equipment called a tedder, and since I had no idea what a tedder is I did some research. It turns out it’s a tool made in making hay, specifically one to spread out the hay for drying and uniformity before the actual baling operation.

    Since I didn’t know the details of how baling works, I went searching for some videos on it. I came across this video on the economics of baling hay on a ranch in Wyoming, where the cold weather and low precipitation means the window for baling is very short.

    Ironically, maybe because of the low precipitation, he doesn’t seem to use a tedder…

    Joe Rogan Interviews Bret Weinstein On The Social Justice Riots

    June 20th, 2020

    A three hour interview. Yeah, I know I’m not making things any easier on you.

    Still, I suggest watching it, even though I think Rogan and Weinstein are wrong on some fundamentals (see my notes below) because Weinstein, having lived through the Evergreen State College nightmare, has a far better (and scarier) understanding of what outlandish ideas animate the unholy Social Justice Warrior alliance that has set America’s cities aflame.

    Some of the money quotes:

  • “We were in a faculty meeting [at Evergreen], and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the Enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the Enlightenment but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that Enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.”
  • “If you end up in Critical Theory, any one of these fields, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, whatever, it is you have already foregone this option [of studying STEM]. You don’t end up in Critical Theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect you have people who don’t stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider, because they wouldn’t go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.”
  • “An excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black her mom is Afro-Caribbean, she was known to be my student and Heather [Haying, Weinstein’s wife and also a teacher at Evergreen]’s student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened.”
  • “If #BlackLivesMatter just simply meant what those words imply, I’d be on board with it. It doesn’t. It means a great deal more than that, and we’re beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.”
  • “There’s something in us that thinks that the Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here. That what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here. That Nazi Germany cannot happen, and that the Soviet Union couldn’t happen here. I don’t know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure it is the Constitution.” (I would contend that widespread gun-ownership and ingrained American individualism make it very unlikely. I also wonder if he means the Cultural Revolution rather than the Great Leap Forward.)
  • “The proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart.”
  • “If there’s one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it’s that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we are also seeing in Seattle.”
  • “The idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.”
  • “Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He is not an idea guy. He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less right. How dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?”
  • “Hillary Clinton advanced Trump’s candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.”
  • The biggest thing Weinstein and Rogan get wrong: The lack of opportunity in inner cities isn’t an effect of mass incarceration, but of the breakdown in the black nuclear family brought about by the perverse incentive structures of Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, which preceded rising black crime rates and increased incarceration. Widespread black economic progress was proceeding and converging toward white norms before the Great Society. Once again, read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which goes into great statistical detail to prove the case.

    Also, Occupy Wall Street was in no way, shape or form an “organic” movement, it started out battlespace preparation by the Obama team to face Mitt Romney in 2012, but quickly became the prototype for the organizational insurrection we saw first in Ferguson and which has now been rolled out nationwide.

    His argument for a “radical centrist duo” to run for President and Vice President outside the two-party system just isn’t going to work, for political, cultural and (most important) Constitutional issues. And it can’t work this year for calendar/ballot access issues. (And the idea that former Admiral William McRaven is even remotely possible as a center-right white horse savior is laughable. Weirdly, Andrew Yang strikes me as much more plausible candidate, even if Universal Basic Income is wrong, but he’s neither rich nor famous enough to pull it off.) When he starts talking about that, feel free to skip to 1 hour and 44 minutes in for Rogan to start talking about Biden’s cognitive decline.

    To be honest, I made it about an hour and fifty minutes in, only because I need to post this do other stuff. I fully intend to watch the rest this weekend.

    LinkSwarm for June 19, 2020

    June 19th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! We start off with two pieces I meant to include in this piece, but sorted the links to the wrong topic…

  • You know who else doesn’t want to defund police? George Floyd’s brother.
  • Indeed, black people oppose defunding the police by a 20 point margin.
  • A map of all the places the Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots damaged in Minneapolis. “On Wednesday, the city reported that no fewer than 700 buildings were damaged, burned, or destroyed in the riots. It also released a map showing just how widespread the looting, vandalism, and arson spread.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
  • Trump is winning the Antifa War:

    It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.

    That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.

    The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.

    Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.

    Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.

    Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?

    This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.

    They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.

    Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.

    Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Who benefits from American disorder:

    Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?

    It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.

    And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.

    They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.

    Call it China Envy.

    The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.

    No wonder our elites are jealous.

    People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.

    Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.

    In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.

    Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.

    An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.

    We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.

    If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Business Class vs. First Class:

    It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.

    George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

    Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.

    Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.

  • The political logic of President Donald Trump’s executive order on policing:
    • Tie his opponents to the worst excesses of anti-police activism in major cities, all of which are controlled by Democrats.
    • Ensure that Trump’s support for law and order is coupled with sensitivity and practical measures to limit excess force.
    • Adopt shared ideas for police reform, make them his own, and leave Democrats backing only more controversial ones.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instpundit.)

  • “Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
  • An overdraft of white guilt will result in a Trump landslide in November:

    these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.

    But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

    The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.

  • China kills 20 Indian troops in border fighting.
  • In light of that, India is looking to reduce imports from China.
  • Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
  • Enjoy a list of the latest forbidden thoughtcrimes.
  • “Vermont School Principal Placed on Leave for Criticism of Black Lives Matter.” Thou Shalt Not Question The Holy Black Lives Matter.
  • How does burning down a Wendy’s help anyone’s lives?
  • Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • All the statues that #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa have vandalized in the latest spree. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • They even came for The Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. Well of course they did. He’s a Republican.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott caves to big city mayors on mandatory masks.
  • Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
  • Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:

    Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target

  • Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
  • Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Who had Mexican gulf pirates on their 2020 bingo card?
  • ESPN hits ratings low. “Sports Journalist Blames ‘Wokecenter On Steroids’ Not Coronavirus.”
  • A timeline of Wuhan coronavirus hypocrisy.
  • Whoa:

  • Comandante Zero, RIP.
  • Duck walks into pub, downs pint, fights dog.
  • “Aunt Jemima to be replaced by edgier and cooler Ant Eefa.”
  • “New Program Helps People Of Color Adopt A White Liberal To Speak On Their Behalf.”
  • “Democrats Clarify That Black Lives Will Only Matter Until November.”
  • “Strong Link Found Between Watching Soccer, Being Incredibly Bored.”
  • Hungry?

  • Our Horrible Media: A Triptych

    June 18th, 2020

    Three pieces on what a horrible, biased failure the mainstream American media has become.

    First up: Matt Taibbi on how the news media is destroying itself:

    It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

    The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

    They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

    Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.

    He’s counting Vox as a “news organization,” but let that slide for now.

    Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang’s work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC: few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.

    Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

    I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.

    Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”

    The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.

    Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.”

    To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.”

    It’s now a thoughtcrime to accurately quote the #wrongthink of others.

    Bits on firing at Bon Apetit, Refinery29 and Variety snipped because, really, who cares?

    In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”

    I’m no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore’s documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it’s not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster. Here’s how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):

    James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.

    Here’s how the piece reads now:

    James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

    Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.

    As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.

    Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.

    Snip.

    The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.

    It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.

    Taibbi talks about the purges being a phenomena since Trump appeared in the political spotlight, but this is simply wrong: Social justice Warrior cancel culture was going after people long before that happened.

    All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.

    These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks — and there was a ton of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis, to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man, to Philadelphia police attacking protesters — there were also 12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer (involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).

    Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out (“My life is gone,” commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro, California saw 74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn’t the whole story, but it’s demonstrably true that violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.

    However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.”

    Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.

    The media is lying to you about everything, including the riots:

    It seems no great event or upheaval in our national life can pass now without the media lying to our faces about it.

    They lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016. They lied about the Mueller probe and Brett Kavanaugh and former national security adviser Mike Flynn. They lied about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president and the impeachment farce that ensued. They lied about the coronavirus and the lockdowns and the White House response. And now they’re lying about the riots.

    In recent days we’ve heard a steady drumbeat of lies, distortions, and disingenuousness from the mainstream media about almost every aspect of the unrest now gripping American cities. The deceit is almost too pervasive and amorphous to describe, but I’m going to try anyway.

    Over the weekend we were told, for example, that the looting and violence was being instigated not by left-wing anarchists and antifa groups but by the media’s favorite villains: white supremacists. CNN, whose Atlanta offices were vandalized Friday, went on and on—without a shred of evidence to back it up—about how white supremacists might be infiltrating the protests and stirring up trouble. The New York Times, in a report that even quoted a senior police official in New York City saying outside anarchist groups were coordinating mayhem before the protests began, nevertheless veered into a long aside about how far-right “accelerationists” were hoping the unrest would bring about a long-sought second civil war.

    By Monday, no one was talking about the white supremacist agitators anymore. The media had moved on to better, more plausible lies.

    Who is this lying aimed at? You and me:

    We keep hearing about how various institutions should “be like America,” which apparently does not include you. This is especially true of the garbage media. Where are the traditional, conservative, commonsense voices of people who don’t look like they staggered out of a Goucher College gender studies seminar/struggle session with blue hair and a bolt through their lip babbling about, privilege, patriarchy, and pinkoism?

    You don’t count, at least not to them. In fact, people like you and what you monsters think must be made invisible.

    Tom Cotton was invited to write a New York Times op-ed that expressed the sensible position that if local governments could not (or, as seems plausible) would not prevent mass leftist violence, the president should consider the use of active-duty military forces under the Insurrection Act. Polls said that 58 percent of folks agreed with this position, and it is hardly unprecedented in American history. I was personally part of the federal Army force that suppressed the Los Angeles riots in 1992. But the Red Guard Kids who apparently now run the NYT collectively wet themselves in horror and declared a position held by six in 10 Americans completely out of the bounds of acceptable discourse. The sissy management of that garbage fish wrap rolled over and submitted. And the Lil’ Maoists delighted in their total victory.

    The alleged Newspaper of Record not only will not, but cannot, dare mention what a huge percentage of Americans believe. And the trash leftist glorified cable access channels are the same. If you happened to be passing through an airport lounge recently, did you see one single voice on MSNBCNN expressing the view that “The rioters are criminal scumbags and that we ought to stop them even if it takes the 82nd Airborne”? No, but the vast majority of people think that.

    The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.

    That’s from Kurt Schlichter, who has a new book coming out on the subject.

    He’s right, but silencing ordinary Americans is not the primary goal of Social Justice Warrior mobbing. The first and most immediate goal is forcing conformity on other voices and institutions on the left. They need to silence any competing voices to their agenda so they can take over all major media outlets, liberal institutions and the Democratic Party itself. To do so, they must first silence anyone who might oppose the radical Social Justice Warrior agenda of victimhood identity politics and cultural Marxism.

    They’re well on their way to achieving that goal.

    Is The Defund The Police Madness Receding?

    June 17th, 2020

    Now that the madness and rioting seems to be receding just a bit, so too has the mad enthusiasm for the hard left’s cause of “defunding the police.”

    Maybe they finally started reading the polls. Only 16% of Americans support defunding the police, while 65% oppose.

    You know who doesn’t want to defund the police? Trayvon Martin’s mom.

    In 2012, a young Florida man named Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre after he attacked a man named George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder, but the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged from the killing lives on. You might’ve heard about it on the news recently.

    Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, is running for county commissioner in Florida and says she disagrees with demands to defund the police that some have called for in the wake of George Floyd’s death, according to the Guardian…

    Fulton has kept a close eye on the protests over the death of George Floyd — her son’s death helping spark the Black Lives Matter movement — and told the Guardian she doesn’t agree with calls to “defund the police…”

    “I think we need more police,” she said. “We need police with better standards, and police with better ethics and better work habits…”

    If large cities actually go ahead and defund the police, it would cost thousands of black peoiple their lives:

    Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, riots, looting, and calls to defund the police, a Harvard economist has found that proactive policing saves black lives.

    “Defunding the police is not a solution and could cost thousands of black lives,” Roland Fryer told The College Fix in an interview about his latest research.

    “I think the streets are talking and we should listen. People are frustrated,” he continued in the email. He sympathizes with frustration at “big racial differences” in educational achievement, life expectancy and “almost every part of life.”

    The youngest African-American professor to receive tenure in Harvard history, Fryer uses a data-driven approach on fraught social issues.

    He made waves four years ago with his research on use-of-force incidents by race. It found that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.

    His new research is similarly controversial in the media. In a Manhattan Institute video late last month, Fryer exclaimed that he encountered an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data” from the media and “insistence” that he should not publicize it.

    Referring to a reporter whom he showed the research, Fryer told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley: “I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go, ‘Damn, a thousand lives. That’s a lot.’”

    It’s a repeat of the controversy over his 2016 paper on police use of force. Though that research “didn’t find racial bias in shootings,” he told Riley, it “did find very large racial differences in lower level uses of force.”

    John Nolte noted that the war on police is a war on black people:

    Unless you’ve lived in an inner-city, or ghetto (as we called it back in the day), you honestly can’t imagine what life is like.

    During the mid-80s, I spent two years working and living in the inner-city of Milwaukee. My world revolved around 6th and Wisconsin and 35th and Highland (look it up) years before the violent crime decrease of the 90s. On top of that, during the insane 70s, I went to an inner-city school, Jackie Robinson Middle School, on 37th and Fond Du Lac (look it up).

    You can write off my experience because I’m a white boy, but my neighbors weren’t white, and during the 80s, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, wasn’t white, and yet we were all suffering under the same government oppression — the inescapable, suffocating oppression of living in a high crime area.

    Believe me, racism was the least of anyone’s problems…

    All I can tell you is this… Living in a high crime area is like living in a world where vampires rule. You better be home and behind a locked door before the sun goes down. You might not hang garlic and crucifixes, but you do hang bars on your windows (and hope you don’t have to escape a fire) and install multiple locks on your doors, and you choose the suffocating heat over the cool but dangerous breeze of an open window.

    Walking to your car after work when it’s dark (especially for a woman) is a daily dread.

    Walking those two or three blocks home after work in the dark from the bus stop (especially for a woman) is a literal act of bravery.

    I know what it’s like to come home to find my apartment robbed, to have my car stolen, to get assaulted after turning over my wallet. I know what it’s like to have a drug gang squat in the vacancy down the hall. I know what it’s like to get a panicked call from the woman you love because she’s trapped at work, at a retail store, where a street gang just walked in and announced it was taking over.

    And I know how all of this ensures you forever tread water. You can’t get a better job in a nicer area because now you have no car to get to work. You can’t save money to get out, because now all your stuff’s been stolen and you have to replace it. You can’t get a better paying job because the crime long ago scared away the kind of employer who might offer such an opportunity. You live hand-to-mouth, a gerbil on a wheel, so there’s no way to save for the first month, last month, and security deposit on a nicer, safer place.

    Yes, we finally got out. It took a measly $900 loan (that took me 15 months to pay back), but lemme tell you, that’s no way to live. There’s nothing romantic about poverty, and when criminals reign, it’s a literal dystopia.

    Looking back, even though my skin color made me the racial minority, I don’t ever remember race being an issue with any of my coworkers or neighbors. We were all in it together.

    But back to the corruption…

    This system is put in place by design, to keep people down, to keep them from becoming a complacent member of the middle class. And if you care enough to take a good look around, to study past and present history, it is a system put in place by Democrats to keep the people who live in these predominantly black neighborhoods poor, angry, desperate, and huddled.

    And what wold does the hard left envision after police are abolished? One where they hold the monopoly on force:

    While traditional policing implies deputized professionals enforcing laws passed by the legitimate representatives and—it is to be hoped—duty-bound to respect individual rights, Community Armed Defense rejects the individual rights upon which the U.S. system is built in favor of the collective communal “rights” of identity politics. It exists not to uphold law, but to enforce the “political demands” of favored groups.

    The image of a volunteer fire department but with guns may suit the anarchist ethos, but in fact Community Self-Defense is about establishing revolutionary shadow governance.

    Far from simply providing armed enforcement, the term covers a full panoply of activities, providing all manner of services traditionally provided by the government—from food banks and co-op gardens to housing and medical clinics.

    This may seem overly ambitious. But for the revolutionary insurgent it is just good policy. And as a tactic, it works. From the Taliban to FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to the Mexican drug cartels, the language may be different but the model is the same. Create instability, force out the government, and finally replace it. Reports from Seattle suggest that, already, groups are “requesting” $500 per business owner to help support “community protection and security.”

    In areas where the logic of revolutionary politics is operative, those who can provide services and a sense of stability, even for a fee, reign. Whether they were the ones who caused the instability to begin with is immaterial. In revolutionary periods, groups that demonstrate even a modest ability to perform this function should not be underestimated.

    Attempts to abolish police, including the most recent Seattle Autonomous Zone, may seem risible. They are likely to be short-lived and collapse upon themselves as revolutionary ardor wanes. But they provide a short-term proof of concept, a propaganda victory, and justification for future efforts. Abolition of the police—whether by groups like Antifa, or through elected radical city councils—is now officially on the menu. The establishment of Community Self-Defense and its standards of collective group rights will represent a kind of de facto regime change.

    Have Democrats finally realized they’ve plopped the boiling frog into revolution too quickly, or will victimhood identity politics drag them into the same electoral defeats that breakdowns in law and order have delivered in the past?

    “Ordered Signed Book. Received Live Spiders. Would Not Buy From Again.”

    June 16th, 2020

    This is a pretty crazy story:

    Six former eBay Inc. employees have been charged with waging an extensive campaign to terrorize and intimidate the editor and publisher of an online newsletter with threats and disturbing deliveries to their home, including live spiders and cockroaches, federal authorities said Monday.

    Executives were upset about the newsletter’s coverage, so their employees set out to ruin the lives of the couple who ran the website, sending a funeral wreath, bloody pig face Halloween mask and other alarming items to their home, authorities said. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on it to their neighbor’s house and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, officials said.

    “This was a determined, systematic effort by senior employees of a major company to destroy the lives of a couple in Natick all because they published content that company executives didn’t like. For a while they succeeded, psychologically devastating these victims for weeks as they desperately tried to figure out what was going on and stop it,” Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling told reporters.

    James Baugh, of San Jose, California, who was eBay’s senior director of safety & security, and David Harville, of New York City, who was eBay’s director of global resiliency, are charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. The other former eBay employees charged are Stephanie Popp, former senior manager of global intelligence; Brian Gilbert, former senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Global Intelligence Center.

    There were no lawyers listed for them in court documents.

    Court documents detail how two members of the company’s executive leadership team orchestrated a plot to go after the couple after the newsletter published an article in August 2019 about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers. The article also discussed an executive, referred only in court documents as “Executive 1,” according to court documents.

    A half hour after the article was published, “Executive 1” texted another executive, identified as “Executive 2”: “(Victim 1) is out with a hot piece on the litigation. If you are ever going to take her down..now is the time,” according to court documents.

    An online article with the same headline as the one described in court documents shows the person described as “Executive 1” as eBay’s CEO, who was then Devin Wenig.

    Wenig stepped down in September and is not charged in the case. On Monday, a person who answered at a phone number listed for Wenig said “we’re not interested,” before hanging up.

    In addition to the disturbing deliveries, the employees set up fake social media accounts to send threatening messages to the couple, authorities said. After the bloody pig mask was delivered, the editor received a message saying: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????,” according to court documents. They also posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising things like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on the door if they weren’t outside.

    It sounds like a regular crime ring:

    “All the while, they were hiding behind the internet, using burner phones and laptops, overseas email accounts, and pre-paid debit cards purchased with cash, to try and cover up their alleged crimes and evade and obstruct the Natick Police Department,” Bonavolonta added. The couple lived in Natick, Massachusetts.

    Except, of course, for the lack of actual profit involved.

    How crazy and/or stupid do you have to be to break federal law to harass a blogger for something they wrote about your giant corporate employer? Especially over a story that was already public news? Especially if you’re a well-compensated executive. Moreover, all have been fired for their efforts.

    Pro-Tip: If “corporate loyalty” requires you to break federal law to wreck revenge on someone who said nasty things about your employer, find another job.

    Edited to add: Dwight has more on the story.