“There's also a level of DC elitism blinding Biden staff to the realities of life without cushy, high-paying government jobs. Biden doesn't feel an increase in gas prices because he hasn't driven a car since the '70s. White House staffers may not notice whole milk is more expensive because they drink intern-delivered oat milk lattes. They don't understand or care about Americans outside of D.C., New York and Los Angeles.
“But the strategy might also come from desperation. They must know how bad things are—they're just hoping things get better so they can say they told us things would improve.
“If they don't—and there's no sign we're going to turn things around—the Biden team will keep up the charade until the next election. Then the American people can give the Democrats a shellacking of epic proportions. And while the Biden administration can pretend the balance of power has shifted, Republicans will have the votes.”
https://www.newsweek.com/what-world-does-biden-administration-live-opinion-1640526
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"Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn ... Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing."
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/anthony-fauci-nih-congress-gain-function-jail/
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“If you want to know what makes America’s educated liberal elites emotional, you only have to open the Times. Judging by the coverage of recent years, two things make them more emotional than anything else: Trump and racism…For a brief period, it seemed like the American mainstream might truly grapple with the question of class. But this quickly disappeared in favor of an easier explanation: Trump voters were racists.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sign-of-the-times-new-york-times/
=====================
"The vast difference in the level of sympathy generated for striking John Deere laborers trying to tangibly improve their lives and that granted to woke Netflix managers staging a performance over cultural grievances reveals an appalling truth: Solidarity for our liberal and Leftist elites is a thing granted only to other elites. When cultural differences are put aside by workers looking to tangibly improve their lives, many media pundits have no ability to express or even really comprehend what solidarity might look like."
=====================
“Spies, by training, are professional liars,” noted Mark Corallo, former Department of Justice spokesman.
“He doesn’t believe it either,” former Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Steven Groves, now a fellow with the Heritage Foundation, said of Steele’s claims. Steele has to say that he believes his sources “to continue his private intelligence business.”
The former British spy manufactured false opposition research, Groves added, and tried to peddle it to the press and the FBI. His goal was to sic law enforcement on the GOP nominee.
“People should still be interested in that,” Groves added. “I mean, that’s election interference, my God.”
https://spectator.org/steele-dossier-the-lie-told-around-the-world-again/
=======================
"For months, academics, scientists, managers, administrators, and journalists dismissed the hardships felt by essential workers as necessary to “save lives.” Now, after treating so many people as disposable pawns, the professionals who provided justifications for lockdowns and vaccine mandates may experience the repercussions of these policies in the form of strikes and shortages. If workers can create enough inconvenience for the intelligentsia and enough loss of revenue for corporations and elites, they may be able to gain some ground. While COVID-19 policies once served to undermine mass mobilization and organizing, a tight labor market is now providing a unique chance to reverse this trend."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/revolt-essential-workers
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"...such terms as engaged, identity, diversity, and inclusivity actually exclude anyone not on the Left. Indeed, "diversity, equity and inclusion" (or DEI) is the progressives' main workplace mantra. Further, demanding that a candidate's "teaching philosophy and the statement of research interests should demonstrate commitment to the values of diversity and inclusivity" is particularly insidious. This not only weeds out anyone not on the Left but ensures that this outlook is ingrained into the scholar's future work. Thus does the Left lock in its influence on the academy's personnel, teaching, and research."
https://www.danielpipes.org/20737/colby-college-signals-conservatives-need-not-apply
=======================
“The real resentment isn’t about Chappelle’s content, but his success, particularly at a moment when a career in art or entertainment is increasingly viewed as a prize for good moral character rather than the product of excellent work. Against that backdrop, the reported $60 million Chappelle received for his Netflix specials — of which The Closer was the last and, arguably, least amusing — was bound to inspire teeth-gnashing among aspiring content creators who see this all as a zero sum game. Why him? Maybe he’s earned it, but he doesn’t deserve it. That money should go to someone good, someone noble, someone who may not be suffering for their art but who is nevertheless suffering, and should be compensated.”
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/pr-campaign-heart-war-netflix-dave-chappelle-trans/
======================
“I’m a huge Dave Chappelle fan. He’s done more to advance American race relations than all the unconscious-bias training courses put together. So, Dave! A little free advice: you can’t please people who don’t wish to be pleased. Like, a while back, I was approaching a red light on my bike. An older woman had just started into the crosswalk, scowling with a bitterness that looked habitual. Her mouth was already open when I stopped. She’d been poised to shout at me for jumping the light, and my compliance with traffic laws ruined her good time. Furious, she sputtered desperately instead: ‘You’re supposed to stop at that white line, you know!’ I couldn’t help but laugh. As she didn’t wish to be pleased, pleasing her only intensified her displeasure. Like the rest of the woke brigade, most trans activists by nature do not wish to be pleased. Ergo, appeasement is pointless. So just keep doing what you’d been doing, friend.”
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/advice-dave-chappelle-trans-netflix/
=======================
"The system isn’t fundamentally broken, it’s just overstretched and unbalanced. The various backlogs will be cleared and other adjustments made — because that is what the global logistics industry does for a living. What’s more, the surge in demand is temporary — driven by stimulus spending and media scare stories. Instead of panicking about supply, it might be more useful to worry about what happens to the economy when the money runs out."
=======================
“The bad guys want us to be “decent” too – but not because of decency but because it makes their lives easier when we are hamstrung in response to their cultural aggression. We’re not supposed to make jokes about Alec Baldwin’s idiocy for the same reason we’re not supposed to make jokes about men pretending to be women pretending to be admirals. Humor, especially mean humor, is subversive. The leftist joke stasi wants the potential for subversion off the table.
“Think of it as the Cold War. Option B is mutually assured destruction – if you launch social media cruelty at our misfortune, you will pay in spades, so don’t. Option A is unilateral disarmament. Nice people on our side want us to disarm to make us better people; our enemies want us to disarm to make us better targets…lately, “decency” has translated as submission and, not being Bulwark staffers, we’re not into that scene.”
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“….an important feature of bullying is growing out of it. Wokeness is preventing that from happening, causing a kind of arrested development among adolescents. It has extended its reach from cradle to grave, and we need to do more to stop it.”
https://unherd.com/thepost/wokeness-is-giving-cover-to-bullies/?mc_cid=929ab1a1ed&mc_eid=22e9ae4a48
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“Liberals across the country, having ruined their home states and cities with their radical ideas, social policies and ways of life; their refusal to enforce law and decency in everything; and made life for everyone there ( including themselves) a living bloody hell, are now abandoning the dystopias they created and heading our way to foul our nests and our lives the way they did their own — and increase our property and other taxes to do it. No wonder that — Trump apart from it all — they want to buy victory next year for Liz Cheney, the Wyoming cowgirl who is pioneering the way from them and showing them how to do it.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/liz-cheney-pioneer-girl-wyoming/
=========================
“Free speech is a constitutional right. Garland has more responsibility to safeguard it than he does to police what Democrats claim are widespread threats of local violence, because even if those claims were not dubious, they would not implicate federal law. Garland’s memo represents an abdication of that responsibility, patently chilling First Amendment–protected dissent by raising the specter of federal law enforcement in an area where there is no federal jurisdiction. Garland and Senate Democrats can try to obfuscate that fact, but it remains a fact.”
=========================
“The Chappelle affair, then, is merely a case of the media hyping and exaggerating the popularity of an extremist agenda enthusiastically backed by its woke reporters and commentators. And what is that agenda? No jokes that find humor in transgenderism. Not even the mildest, tamest, gentlest, most sympathetic comic musings are permitted. We’re watching the rollout of a new policy before our eyes; transgender jokes are the new N-word and must be scrubbed from the public discourse. Chappelle may be too popular to be shut down, but the rest of the culture is receiving the message loud and clear. To the comics who pride themselves on being “rebels” and “free thinkers” who “break boundaries” and “don’t play by the rules,” it’s your move.”
========================
"Besides torching the pieties of the identitarian left, [Chappelle] has also shown how marginal it is. His gender-realist views are far more in step with public opinion than his critics’. And if the unpopularity of their views is rarely off-putting to the Twitterati, good luck to them taking on an African-American superstar."
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/10/14/dave-chappelle-for-gender-realism
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"For starters, 23 of the top 25 most-watched telecasts this year are NFL games. The Super Bowl, both championship games and both divisional playoff games make up the top five. The only two events that were able to squeeze into the top 25 were President Joe Biden’s inauguration (No. 6) and an episode of CBS’s The Equalizer (No. 24)—which aired immediately following the Super Bowl. Thirty-four regular-season NFL telecasts landed in the top 100 most-watched broadcasts of 2021."
https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2021/10/27/nfl-2021-ratings-top-100-telecasts
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"...consider the self-important, unintentionally funny “open letter” published by NeverTrump blog The Bulwark this week, listing a bunch of things the signatories don’t like about Republican-backed efforts at election reform. Noam Chomsky signed an open letter with Bill Kristol and Max Boot. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, and it is."
=========================
About halfway through the delusional fever dream that was Facebook’s biggest product announcement of all time, Mark Zuckerberg said that “the last few years have been humbling for me and our company in a lot of ways,” as Facebook has nominally had to grapple with the harm it’s done to this world. It’s hard to find anything “humble” about a proposal to fundamentally remake human existence using technology that currently does not and may not ever exist and that few are currently clamoring for. But Facebook's problems are too numerous to list, and so he is pitching products that don't exist for a reality that does not exist in a desperate attempt to change the narrative as it exists in reality, where we all actually live.
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“The growth of the fact-checking industry has reflected the left’s desire to capture a monopoly on truth. That pursuit has now escalated to a blitzkrieg to discredit their opponents as champions of fake news with new institutions and demands for heightened censorship…The left-wing obsession with fact-checking and censorship serves as nothing more than a relentless campaign to control the facts. Control the facts and control the narrative. Control the narrative, and control the truth.”
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/26/new-billionaire-venture-focused-on-disinformation-exposes-the-lefts-fight-for-monopoly-on-truth/
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“Parents who wouldn’t fall for a Nigerian Internet scam (“Hello my friend!” I have US$150,000 for you!”) may be intrigued by the idea of being able to dump off the cost of minding their children on the government for two more years. But when someone you don’t know offers you free stuff, there are strings attached. There are always strings attached. The government isn’t about to give you free child care without extracting a price in return: It wants to control your child’s mind.”
=========================
“"Judge Schroeder ruled prosecutors in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial can not use the term "victim" to describe Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz while the defense team can use the terms such as "rioter," "looter," or "arsonist" to describe the men Rittenhouse is charged with shooting…"I can't believe some of the things you're saying. I mean, 'all we're talking about is arson,' come on!" Judge Schroeder interjected.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2021/10/27/kenosha-judge-tears-into-kyle-rittenhouse-prosecutors-for-downplaying-rioters-destructive-acts-n2598102
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“[Manchin and Sinema are] not afraid of Schumer. They don’t care that the far left hates them. They don’t care about the media’s reaction to their position. And they can handle angry voters. They have spines of steel. That’s what they’ve shown. It’s certainly stronger than a lot of Senate Republicans that’s for sure. They seem to be focused on what their people want—not what the professional Left wants since none of them reside in their states.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/10/28/theres-a-very-simple-reason-why-manchinsinema-have-become-the-angels-of-death-for-the-farleft-n2598158
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“…sooner or later, Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.”
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/10/30/why-democrats-tax-plans-are-such-a-mess?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2021-10-28&utm_content=article-link-1&etear=nl_today_1
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“A dispute over the fate of hippos in Colombia has given rise to a federal court ruling in Ohio that, for the first time in American law, recognises animals as people…Judge Karen Litkovitz, the federal judge in Ohio, does not get to decide the hippos’ fate. But on October 15th she agreed with the Animal Legal Defence Fund that the hippos are “interested persons” under a law permitting foreign litigants to gather evidence in America that may buttress their claims. Experts in non-surgical sterilisation will be deposed for their insights on pzp, a contraceptive that could spare the hippos while dampening their growth.
“America is not the first country to regard animals as legal persons. An Indian court cited the constitution in banning a bullfighting festival in 2014. A judge in Argentina ruled that Sandra, an orangutan, was a non-human person eligible for better environs than her concrete enclosure in a Buenos Aires zoo; she now luxuriates in a sanctuary in Florida. In 2020 a court in Islamabad, faced with cases involving stray dogs, an elephant and a bear, recognised the “right of each animal…to live in an environment that meets the latter’s behavioural, social and physiological needs”.”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/10/30/pablo-escobars-hippos-lead-a-charge-for-animal-rights?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2021-10-28&utm_content=article-link-7&etear=nl_today_7
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“…I don’t completely trust white guilt. It lends itself too easily to virtue signaling, which overlaps only partially, and sometimes not at all, with helping people. I recall a brilliant, accomplished, kind white academic of a certain age who genially told me “…I reserve my right to be guilty.” I got what he meant, too, and did not take it ill. But still, note that word “right.” Feeling guilty lent him something personally fulfilling and signaled that he was one of the good guys without obligating him further. The problem is that one can harbor that feeling while not actually doing anything to bring about change on the ground.”
John McWhorter, “The former secretary of state is right about the inutility of white guilt”, NYT subscription-only email
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“Th[e] treatment of different opinions and approaches as heresies is one of many signs that a new religion is afoot…ote…the eerie parallel between the conceptions of original sin and white privilege as unremovable stains about which one is to maintain a lifelong concern and guilt. Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/wokeness-america.html?campaign_id=229&emc=edit_jm_20211029&instance_id=44127&nl=john-mcwhorter®i_id=58621094&segment_id=73024&te=1&user_id=ac8178602d671a5cc83996bcaa075b0a
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"The climate industrial complex, as economist Bjorn Lonborg has aptly called the climate doomsday crowd, has persuaded the media to indulge consistent exaggeration ... [i]ncreasingly, even climate scientists are noting that the constant, and often poorly supported doomsaying threaten the credibility of the movement itself. ... at some point, people will start to push back against this gross misuse of science and fear mongering. Medieval-like immiseration justified by apocalyptic theology should not define humanity's inevitable trajectory."
https://www.newsweek.com/elites-are-using-climate-hysteria-immiserate-working-class-opinion-1643962
