April 18, 2024

LOW ENERGY JOE:

Compare Trump at the Bodega:

Posted at 9:51 am by Glenn Reynolds

TRUMP DOESN’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING. HE’S A VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION JUST BY EXISTING AND THREATENING THEIR SELF-IMPORTANCE.

Ann Althouse: “I don’t like how the Board is conflating the prosecution and the court and the rule of law. The rule of law is an abstraction. Rights exist within the abstraction, but rights can be violated. The abstraction doesn’t guarantee the rights. People exercising power must ensure that those rights are protected, and they may deviously hide behind the abstraction… perhaps with the help of elite onlookers who make abstract pronouncements in print. Trump’s assertion that the prosecution is “unfair and politically motivated” is may be true even if the court carries out its duties perfectly. Trump may be “fortunate to live in a country” that has some dedication to the rule of law, but that doesn’t deprive him of the reason to complain that the prosecution seems politically motivated. Again, even if the court perfectly carries out its obligation to the rule of law, Trump is motivated to cry out about the onerous prosecutions, which are undercutting his ability to campaign for the presidency.”

Which is the point.

Posted at 9:03 am by Glenn Reynolds

COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism.

When the New York Times did get around to reporting on some of these incidents, the article’s focus was not on the thuggish rhetoric and behavior of Palestinian activists toward Jews, but rather on how such behavior was affecting Democratic politicians’ holiday parties and fundraisers. “Protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war are disrupting the activities of Democratic officials from city halls to Congress to the White House, complicating their ability to campaign—and, at times, govern—during a pivotal election year,” the story noted.

What the paper of record failed to mention, but is easily visible across social media on a regular basis, is that these protests are promoting and normalizing anti-Semitism, not taking a principled stand on behalf of the Palestinians (a majority of whom approved of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, according to polling data). In New York in late March, for example, outside a fundraiser for President Biden, a male protester was captured on video following a young woman who was trying to get into the building. He screamed at her, “F—ing murderous kike. F—ing die. Keep it moving, bitch.”

Why aren’t these anti-Semitic attacks front-page stories? Why aren’t they given the kind of relentless scrutiny that anti-Semitism on the right has properly received in these same outlets? The Times has published countless stories about the rhetoric of participants in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Where are the big-think pieces and deeply reported stories about the organizations and funders behind the anti-Jewish groups staging protests outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions?

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

STUDENT SUSPENDED FOR USING LEGAL TERM: Ever wonder where the term “illegal alien” originates? I don’t know if federal law was the originator, but, as Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader points out this morning, the term appears in both federal and state law codes.

So why is North Carolinian Leah McGhee’s high-school student son being penalized for using the term? Bader explains:

“Leah McGhee’s son has a teacher who assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word ‘alien.’ McGhee says her son made an effort to understand the assignment and responded to his teacher, asking, ‘Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?’

“According to an email describing the incident, sent to local officials and shared with Carolina Journal, a young man in class took offense to his question and reportedly threatened to fight him, prompting the teacher to call in the assistant principal. Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic.

“’I didn’t make a statement directed towards anyone; I asked a question,’ said the student in response to his suspension. ‘I wasn’t speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards, and the term illegal alien is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.'”

Prediction: Leah McGhee is raising one sharp young man who just might end up in law school someday and advance to a position where he can help restore common sense and justice to American public education.

 

Posted at 8:35 am by Mark Tapscott

KEEP THE BUREAUCRATS OUT: Why the White House and Congress can’t see eye-to-eye on regulating commercial space. And this is at best a stretch: “The FAA, Department of Transportation, has been doing human spaceflight safety for many years.” The FAA has done a great job with human spaceflight by not regulating it. The “learning period” law has prevented anyone from doing so. And that’s how it should stay for the foreseable future.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

ATHENA THORNE: Trump’s Brilliant Prosecution Juxtaposition Campaign. “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan conspire to keep the presidential frontrunner locked up in a dingy courtroom during the day, but he is free to roam after court hours. An irrepressible and brilliant marketer, Trump seizes on those hours to communicate. And he is off to a pitch-perfect start.”

Posted at 8:06 am by Stephen Green

YOU COULD MAKE A MUCH BETTER CIVIL WAR MOVIE OUT OF HIS BOOKS: That Civil War Movie Is a Symptom of Hollywood’s Problems.

The problem with “Civil War” isn’t its point of view, to the extent it has one. Now, you can tell that, beneath the surface, it has a generic left-wing orientation. The bad guy president is vaguely Trumpy. He’s a straight white male, of course. In fact, every single villain is a straight, white male. None of the major heroes is a straight, white male. You can make movies where the villains are straight, white males, and where none of the heroes are straight, white males, but it’s now a woke Hollywood cliche to make all the villains straight, white males, and none of the heroes straight, white males. You can’t unsee it. Rural white guy? Definitely a villain. Black woman? Hero!

But the mandatory pseudo-diversity of Hollywood is not the main problem with “Civil War.”

Plus: “This was a missed opportunity. We’re at a very dangerous time in our country.” Read on.

Posted at 8:01 am by Glenn Reynolds

HE’S FINE: Biden suggests uncle eaten by ‘cannibals’ in New Guinea — but military says his WWII plane lost at sea.

“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden initially told reporters after visiting a war memorial that bears his uncle’s name in Scranton, Pa.

“They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”

“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden told United Steelworkers union members.

The cannibals wore onions on their belts, which was the style at the time.

More seriously, Biden also repeated the long-disproved “Suckers and losers” smear against Trump.

If we had an honest press… alas.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

YEP: “Maher is right. The media pundits should not be aiming disrespect and contempt at the millions of Americans who support Trump. They are voters, and they are human beings. The self-important experts ought at least to pretend to care about understanding and reaching them.”

But here’s the thing. They don’t hate Trump voters because of Trump. They hate Trump because they hate his voters. Contempt for middle- and working-class Americans is the glue binding our ruling class together.

Posted at 7:32 am by Glenn Reynolds

NO RELATION, BUT GOOD FOR HER: Governor Reynolds Signs Texas-Style Immigration Law. “Republican Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds is following the path forward on illegal immigration blazed by the Republican governor of Texas. She signed a law that she said would allow Iowa to enforce immigration laws that already exist. Senate File 2340 passed in the state Senate by a vote of 34-16. It passed in the state House by 64-30 last month. It is now a crime for a person to be in Iowa illegally or as an illegal immigrant who previously has been deported. . . . If Biden and Mayorkas continue to refuse to do their jobs, states should not be penalized for doing Biden’s job for him. What are the governors supposed to do? Just as Biden’s top job is to protect the homeland and American citizens, it is the top job of governors to protect their states and their residents.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Quotations from Chairman Maher.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”

If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”

Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not “currently in the market for a baby” and would not be “tending her ovaries” according to the dictates of American capitalism.

Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Related: Where are Uri Berliner’s defenders in the press?

What should be most troubling, however, is that Maher flaunted a Biden campaign hat in a post from 2020, as she canvassed a Get Out the Vote operation in Arizona. NPR now has a dilemma: they can keep Maher as CEO (which I believe they will), but they can no longer dispute the accusations of what Berliner claimed the network has become in recent years. I would argue this is what NPR wants, and has wanted for a while. NPR, their hosts and their CEO can now exhale and stop pretending to be anything other than another progressive media outlet. The problem for NPR in that realm now becomes an issue of public funding (cue a Marsha Blackburn bill to defund NPR). This debate has be re-energized by Berliner’s resignation and NPR’s stiffening spine in defending their new activist CEO.

What cannot be ignored is the lack of outcry from Berliner’s fellow journalists and his union. Berliner was made to be a leper in the media cool-kids’ clique simply for telling the truth of what NPR is. Berliner’s public flogging is a warning to anyone else who dares speak out about what media organizations, and the journalists working for them, have become. They all know what they are, and they all now know what happens to them if they speak out about it like Uri Berliner did.

More: Dozens of NPR Staffers Sign Letter to CEO and Unwittingly Prove Uri Berliner’s Point.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll