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MAY 20,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

SICKENING – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:   Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protesters could be seen brawling in Times Square Thursday as tensions in the region spilled into the street of Manhattan, videos showed.  Skirmishes between the groups erupted in the Midtown tourist hub as Israel and Hamas hoped a cease-fire in Gaza would end more than 10 days of devastating hostilities.  The footage, posted to Twitter by freelance reporter Oliya Scootercaster, showed a pro-Israel demonstrator getting socked in the stomach after attempting to chase down a man who snatched an Israeli flag from his hands.  The protests came after Israel and Hamas had announced a cease-fire.  More punches were thrown in tussles between the two sides as NYPD officers stepped in to separate them, according to the clip.  The video later showed a pro-Palestine protester being put in handcuffs after he tried to run after a man who grabbed his Palestinian flag.  Just two days earlier a group of pro-Palestinian militants attacked a group of Jews in Los Angeles.  Will this be our future?  Reminds me of the pro-Nazi Bund rampaging around New York before the outbreak of World War II.

HE'S BACK – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:  Former President Donald Trump revealed Thursday that he will hold campaign-style rallies in four battleground states in the coming weeks as speculation swirls that he’ll mount another bid for the White House in 2024.  “Relatively soon, we’ll be doing one in Florida, we’re gonna do one in Ohio, we’re gonna do one in Georgia, we’re gonna do one in North Carolina,” Trump told One America News. “We’ll be announcing them very soon over the next week or two, and I think we’ll probably start in Florida and Ohio and we’ll be announcing the rallies very shortly.”  A source close to the 45th president told The Post last week that Trump would hold at least two rallies in June, with a third event likely to take place around the July 4 holiday.  Trump has sat for several interviews with conservative media outlets since leaving office in January. He made his first major post-presidential speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in February and he is scheduled to headline the North Carolina Republican Party’s convention on June 5.   This will be a great political spectacle.  Trump is back, and the public reaction will dictate his future.

May 20, 2021       Permalink

STATE OF THE PARTY – OVERNIGHT:  There are attempts by the doers of evil to disparage the state of the Republican Party.  Rich Lowry says it ain't so.  From the New York Post: 

Republicans have had a brutal news cycle over the past month, between the ouster of Liz Cheney from leadership and the intraparty jousting over a Jan. 6 commission.

The overwhelming sense of the coverage is that the party is descending into madness and civil war and is a husk of its former self.

There’s no denying that much of the party has been too willing to indulge or look away from wild theories about the 2020 election and the Capitol riot, but this shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Republicans are well-positioned to take the House next year.

All indications are that GOP voters are united and energized and the party is doing what’s necessary to make Kevin McCarthy the next speaker, which would instantly squash the never-very-plausible talk of President Joe Biden being the next FDR.

The foundation of the party’s unity, of course, is that Donald Trump effortlessly maintained his control of the GOP. The anticipated civil war came and went with barely a shot fired.

Cheney is certainly a casualty, although she is now less a leader of a significant faction of the party and more a voice crying in the wilderness. That is an honorable role, and she may well be vindicated in the fullness of time.

But the party will pay no electoral price for the drama over her leadership role or, likely, for its continued loyalty to Trump.

Despite Trump’s grip, he’s not front and center for average voters. He isn’t president and he isn’t on the ballot. The focus inevitably will be on Biden and his agenda, which will loom larger than anything the former president can do from Mar-a-Lago.

The Democratic polling outfit Democracy Corps just did a battleground survey that confirmed this picture. As Stanley Greenberg writes in a memo about the poll, among Republicans, “the percent scoring 10, the highest level of interest in the election, has fallen from 84 to 68 percent. But Democrats’ engagement fell from 85 percent to 57 percent.”

Greenberg calls the GOP base “uniquely unified and engaged.”

More evidence is the boffo fundraising by the National Republican Congressional Committee so far. Meanwhile, GOP candidate recruitment is ahead of the pace of prior midterm cycles, whereas Democrats are seeing worrisome retirements.

It’s not as though there’s a high bar for the GOP. Republicans need to flip only six seats in the House, when in the post-World War II era the president’s party has lost on average 27 seats in midterms.

On top of this, the playing field is tilting the GOP’s way. Reapportionment gave more seats to Republican states, and, based on its strength in state legislatures, the GOP also has the upper hand in redistricting.

COMMENT:  There are no guarantees, but I have to be impressed by the spirit and common sense of those running the 2022 Republican campaign.  I think they have their finger on the pulse of the nation.  Compare please with the leftist Democrats, who are selling such wonderfully popular ideas as critical race theory.  Also I have to be impressed by the depth of the Republican presidential bench for 2024.  The Dem bench has fewer people than a bus stop in a desolate county. 

We'll have the press against us, but I have the sense that more and more people are on to our slanted, cynical journalists. 

Election is only 17 months away.

May 20, 2021       Permalink 

MAY 19,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

ANOTHER ADVANCE – FROM REDSTATE:    The NCAA was threatening states that if they didn’t allow men to compete in women’s sports then they would pull tournaments from those states. The entire issue even caused a once-loved Republican governor, Kristi Noem, to lose her support within the party after she bent the knee and refused to sign a bill banning biological men from declaring themselves women and signing up to compete against them out of fear of losing the revenue.  As it turns out, the NCAA was totally bluffing and picked three states for their tournaments to happen in. According to Breitbart, the NCAA has announced that Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee will be host to the Women’s College World Series softball regionals:
But now, only a month later, the NCAA announces that despite its saber-rattling in April, it will allow events in states that have already passed laws limiting transgender athletes to birth gender categories, Yahoo! Sports reported.  Maybe common sense is returning to the sports world.  The fans will be happy.  Revolutionary Marxists will not, but how many of them go to football games?

NUTCASE – FROM FOX:   Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, D., defended her controversial announcement to only give individual interviews to journalists of color and blasted Chicago media institutions for their "overwhelming whiteness and maleness" in an extraordinary letter on Wednesday.  Upon the two-year anniversary of her election, Lightfoot has drawn outrage after White journalists were told by her press office that they couldn't interview her one-on-one because of their skin color.  In a two-page letter to the media, Lightfoot, the first Black woman as well as the first openly gay mayor in Chicago's history, praised her own 2019 election for "breaking barriers" and took a shot at media organizations in the city for not adequately addressing "institutionalized racism" in their ranks. Her decision to temporarily only speak to Black and Brown reporters, she said, was part of her lifelong battle to fight for diversity and inclusion.  "In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment," she wrote. "I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically."  Lightfoot reeled off the diversity of the city's leadership, including its "majority Black and Latinx City Council," and called it "unacceptable" that reporters covering City Hall were mostly White.  Let's see if the press caves in to this awful new bigotry, or finally stands firm against quotas in journalistic hiring.  At least one Hispanic journalist is refusing an invitation to interview the mayor until her ridiculous policy is withdrawn.  I wonder if he'll have a career.  This is identity politics at its worst.  In any sane situation, the racist mayor would be forced from office.

May 19, 2021       Permalink

ONE SMALL STEP FOR A SCHOOL, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR EDUCATION – OVERNIGHT:  The founder of the 1619 project, which is lowering the level of American schools, is being found out.  Maybe this is a sign that wokeness is brokeness.  From the New York Post: 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the controversial founder of the 1619 Project, has lost her alma mater’s offer for tenure and is instead under consideration for a fixed five-year contract as a professor of practice.
NC Policy Watch reported on the change Wednesday amid a wave of criticism of her work.

According to the outlet, the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees decided not to approve Hannah-Jones’ tenure – which effectively translates into a career-long appointment – despite support from faculty.

Susan King, dean of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, reportedly called the decision “disappointing” and said she was afraid it would create a “chilling effect.”

King said Hannah-Jones “represents the best of our alumni and the best of the business.”

If she's the best, I wonder what the worst looks like.

She added: “I don’t want to get into a food fight. I want to make sure that our students have the opportunity to have someone of her caliber here and to learn from her. I think our faculty do as well. I realize this is a fraught era in the state. When I heard that the chancellor and the provost wanted to move to this, it was better than having a battle royale about the theory of academic freedom.”

One of the board members told the outlet that “politics” motivated its decision, although others have alleged that political considerations have helped elevate Hannah-Jones despite purported issues with her scholarship.

Jay Schalin of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal penned an op-ed earlier this month in which he suggested Hannah-Jones’s appointment represented a shift toward “propaganda” at Hussman.

“UNC’s hiring Hannah-Jones signals a degradation of journalistic standards, from one in which ethics and truth are prized to one in which a writer’s work is judged according to whether it serves a preferred political agenda,” he said.

He added that Hannah-Jones’s work was “less journalism than an outpouring of emotions. The crown jewel of her career – leading a rewriting of the nation’s history called ‘The 1619 Project’ – has been attacked and ridiculed by historians of all stripes and persuasions as unfactual and biased.”

He quoted historian Sean Wilentz in arguing: “To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  The 1619 Project represents the dry rot of American journalism and the American university.  We can only shudder to think what it can do to American students, especially black students.

I hope this setback for wokeness marks the start of a much-needed correction in American public life.  This day can be historic, for the 1619 Project is one of the best-known obscenities of the modern era.

May 19,  2021     Permalink