Left-wing politics has repoliticized the arts
No better measure of the degree to which a society has become politicized exists than the content of its public educational curricula and the character of its popular culture.
Black lives matter
Friday
Thursday
A lie can get halfway around the world
The charge damning Israel with bombing a hospital in Gaza has circled the globe at lightning speed, time and again. But slowly the truth is getting its pants on. The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza, either deliberately or inadvertently. A video, now publicly available, shows the rocket coming from inside Gaza, not from outside or from a plane. CNN has had experts confirm that analysis. The US has confirmed that point with sensitive (and still secret) signals-intelligence. So has Israeli intelligence, independent of the US. There is also at least one captured phone call among jihadists acknowledging that the rocket was fired from inside Gaza. That, too, is publicly available.
Wednesday
The media accuracy crisis around Israel mirrors how it got BLM wrong
After an explosion in Gaza this week, Hamas asserted that an Israeli airstrike had targeted a hospital, killing up to 500 civilians. Outraged at this evidence-free claim, news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press all repeated it, without confirmation or investigation. Several members of Congress, including Palestinian sympathizers Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, condemned the “attack,” again, without waiting for confirmation.As evidence began to mount that Israel had not committed this act, the New York Times began to stealth-edit their original story — updating their original headlines several times.
Monday
Conservatives should cheer Dove’s new ‘fat liberation’ spokesperson
Zyahna Bryant, a “fat acceptance” and Black Lives Matter activist, has been named the new face (and body?) of Dove, the company known primarily for its soaps. Conservatives are up in arms over the new campaign, and a Dylan Mulvaney-style boycott has begun among conservative consumers opposed to "wokeness" and also to Bryant’s role in attempting to get fellow University of Virginia student Morgan Bettinger expelled from UVA for “racist” comments she didn’t make. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwnKlIGybvO/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=ddb08da2-6f29-4243-b80e-e93e92bba4ee Newsweek provides a brief recap of Bryant’s unsuccessful headhunt: “In the summer of 2020, Bryant claimed that she heard Bettinger refer to BLM protesters as ‘good speed bumps.
A postcard from Portland
Portland is one of the nation’s most beautiful cities, positioned at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. But fading livability hangs over it like a raw gray drizzle. After years of political mayhem and an explosion of drug-related homelessness and crime, the city’s fabled quality of life is plunging. Every taxpayer in the 2.5 million metro area knows it. Portlandia had its lure and charms, and yesterday’s salons and eateries still look modish. But they’re closed, chairs stacked, thank you for your patronage. Those Patagonia-clad tourists and corporate executives on generous expense accounts won’t be coming back soon. On a warm, cloudless autumn day, the city’s once spotless downtown should be bustling but...and it takes a while for this to click...
Wednesday
Jason Aldean’s critics have clearly never been to a small town
Country music superstar Jason Aldean has come under fire for a song that condemns violent crime and promotes the Second Amendment. But the people trying to cancel “Try That In A Small Town” are desperate race-baiters who have evidently never visited a small town (the song has been playing on country stations since May, but the left has only just now become outraged by it). Though their charge that the song is a “pro-lynching” anthem is obvious nonsense, Aldean is correct in saying such absurd rhetoric must be addressed, as leaving it unchecked is “dangerous.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Monday
Why bad jobs are the root of America’s problems
Low wages are bad for everyone in the United States — not just for the working poor. Every major social crisis Americans face today — falling fertility, the loneliness epidemic, bitter conflicts over racial and gender identity, and growing partisan polarization in politics — is worsened if not caused by the proliferation of low wage jobs caused by the collapse of worker power. For centuries, children in the English-speaking countries have learned a proverb that has equivalents in other European languages (“want of” in this context means “lack of”): For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
Sunday
The DEI industrial complex
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies. American companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to firms for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, according to Princeton professor Betsy Levy Paluck in an op-ed at the Washington Post. And yet, moans Paluck, there is practically no research evaluating the results of these DEI initiatives.
Friday
Exposing the logical fallacies of Critical Race Theory
In a late September article for the Washington Post magazine, staff writer DeNeen L. Brown declared that she has “decided to eventually leave America.” Though when or where she will go she “can’t say for sure,” she is “finally ready.” “I want to engage in intellectual debates without having to explain the history of this country’s racism,” she writes. "I want to live in a country where racism is not a constant threat.” There are other things about America that frustrate Brown. It's a country that “seem[s] to be increasingly dangerous for Black people” — an observation that is, in fact, true, though, as data indisputably demonstrates, this stems far more from black-on-black crime than it does from a supposedly “white supremacist” regime.
Friday
Tucker Carlson grills Kanye West
Tucker Carlson has tackled a question that has long puzzled Cockburn: is Kanye West crazy? Ye has had his fair share of controversial moments: he appeared on a 2006 cover of Rolling Stone mimicking Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns. He infamously stormed the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards stage to tell Taylor Swift she didn’t deserve her award. For the past couple years, he's been battling ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her family, during which time he also became religious, started hosting Sunday Services and bought a ranch in Cody, Wyoming, which he tried to sell but then took off the market. Most recently, Ye incited establishment ire by wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt alongside conservative firebrand buddy Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week.
Wednesday
Kanye West is turning into Candace Owens
Cockburn misses the old Kanye, straight from the ’Go Kanye. The rapper, producer, designer and… (what’s the opposite of a mental health advocate?) plumbed new depths this week with his appearance at Paris Fashion Week. West showed up to the launch of his new sneaker line alongside friend and fellow former liberal Candace Owens. Both wore shirts adorned with the slogan “White Lives Matter.” https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1577000138131656704 “White Lives Matter,” of course, was a common retort to the “Black Lives Matter” maxim that emerged in 2013 after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Tuesday
The president who cried ‘extremist’
In a primetime television address on September 1, President Joe Biden declared that a large share of the nation’s voters threatened the “very soul of America.” This creepy, unprecedented presidential alert opened the midterm elections, which are now going into their mail-in phase. Waving his arms, the presidential simulacrum barked imprecations at teleprompters. His spooky, dark, red-and-blue tableau with stiff Marines in parade dress was ominous and intentionally staged. To hear a president talk and act this way was one of the political shocks of a lifetime. Make America Great Again Republicans, it was indicated, constituted an enemy within, Merrick Garland’s domestic terrorists writ large. Be very afraid.
Tuesday
Is this the right’s answer to woke corporatism?
Woke corporatism has taken over America. Nike nixed a sneaker launch featuring the Betsy Ross flag after noted anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick claimed it was offensive. Coca-Cola and other companies threatened to boycott doing business in Georgia over the state's new election security legislation. Levi's allegedly booted its president over her anti-school closure views during the pandemic, and nearly every major retailer features pro-Black Lives Matter or Pride Month messaging on its storefronts and websites. It can seem impossible as a conservative to avoid giving your hard-earned money to businesses that hate you. Even for moderate or apolitical consumers, it can be frustrating and tiresome to be hit with a wave of political messaging when you're just trying to purchase a product.
Wednesday
Black Lives Matter’s $40,000 dog
Outspoken Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King has unleashed his Grassroots Law PAC campaign finance disbursements, and it appears he used $40,000 of donor money to buy a dog for his family. The financial disclosures reveal that the “PAC” paid Potrero Performance Dogs in California a total of $40,650 over the course of two months. The Washington Free Beacon reports that a few days after the second and final payment was made, “King welcomed a ‘new member of the King family’: an award-winning mastiff bred by Potrero named Marz.” (King’s Facebook post about the pup is now gone.
Thursday
How to not argue at the dinner table
Family dinners, like almost every area of American life, have become a subject of fierce politicization recently. In the years following Trump’s election in 2016, readers of elite progressive outlets were treated to a long parade of thinkpieces urging Americans, in the words of a 2019 Atlantic essay from Ibram X. Kendi, “to liberate our relatives from their abusive relationship with Trump’s alternative reality.” “This Thanksgiving, It’s Time to Take on Your Conservative Relatives,” declared a headline in the Nation. Molly Jong-Fast called on readers to “Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving.” A 2017 GQ article was perhaps bluntest of all: “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.
Thursday
Martyrs win the culture wars
The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of some of the woke corporation’s privileges in Florida. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. Roe v. Wade appears doomed. And a backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools and transsexuals in women’s sports looks set to benefit Republicans mightily in November’s midterm elections. These are crucial battles. But they are not the war. The war is between race and sexuality on one side and traditional religion on the other. At any rate, those are the great causes with which the cultural left and right tend to identify. The progress of the war is seen in the retreat of Christianity and the advance of racial and sexual agendas on all fronts.
Wednesday
Biden: MAGA is more extreme than Antifa, KKK
Being something of a barfly, Cockburn is used to overhearing tall tales, braggadocious orations, and outlandish accusations, also known as “fightin’ words.” So imagine his astonishment in learning that what he heard over his breakfast stout this afternoon was not the consequence of some riled-up Hill staffer who’d had a few too many, but was really and truly uttered by the (presumably sober) president of the United States. “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history,” President Biden said. “Recent history,” he clarified. “Recent” is a relative term. Perhaps the explosive hate crimes of the Ku Klux Klan that reached their height in the 1920s are not “recent” enough for Biden.
Friday
Beware the risks of tyrannical tech
“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.
Monday
What’s next for the officers who watched George Floyd die?
A federal jury in St. Paul, Minnesota found guilty on all counts the three fired officers who failed to intervene as Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes on May 25, 2020, leading to Floyd’s death in police custody. On that Memorial Day evening, Officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane first confronted Floyd for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at the Cup Foods convenience store in Minneapolis. As they handcuffed Floyd and attempted to place him in a squad car, they were joined by Chauvin and Tou Thao. After officers were unable to place Floyd in the squad car, Chauvin, Kueng and Lane restrained Floyd on the ground for over nine minutes as a growing crowd recorded the events unfolding in public view. Floyd stopped breathing at the scene.
Friday
Sorry, Freedom Convoy — fundraisers are only for left-wing criminals
It seems to be harder to donate money to the Canadian truckers protesting their country's vaccine mandate than it is to keep Hunter Biden out of a strip club. After GoFundMe seized millions of dollars raised on its platform for the Freedom Convoy, Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo stepped in and enabled donors to give nearly $10 million. GiveSendGo was promptly hacked and the personal information of 93,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy released to the public. The media — who largely resisted touching the Hunter Biden laptop story because it allegedly contained "hacked" information — jumped on the opportunity to shame and harass private citizens for donating to causes of which they don't approve.
