It’s Friday, December 31st, 2021…and while we’re about to blessedly put this year behind us, the author of so much of our misery couldn’t help but offer up one final act of idiocy, as the fully-vaccinated, boosterized…
“…If you’re under the impression that the books Amazon recommends to you are based solely on a content-neutral algorithm, I can disabuse you of that fiction right now. I once asked one of my sources at Amazon, who was concerned about the ways the search results were being manipulated, whether he’d ever seen a book deliberately boosted. Yes, he said. Becoming by Michelle Obama. When that book came out, he told me, virtually every search you did led to the recommendation to buy the former First Lady’s book.
And the opposite is also true. There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is.
But the larger point is, your will is being toyed with, subverted, manipulated. And in a fairly insidious manner. None of you will be shocked to hear that Google promotes certain search results in order to lead us to a certain perspective. But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with?
If you form views based on those Wikipedia articles or reports by corrupt fact-checkers, if you act based on them, are you exercising freedom of will? Given that you’ve been spun and prodded along to a pre-determined conclusion by hidden persuaders, perhaps you aren’t. Perhaps you’re left in the same sorry state as the Moor of Venice: toyed with, subverted, manipulated. Acting out someone else’s plan, pointed in the direction that he wants you to walk.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years debating whether this kind of manipulation is at the root of our political divisions, but I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to an even more basic question: how it has interfered with freedom of conscience and ultimately free will.
When polled, nearly two out of three Americans (62%) say they are afraid to express an unpopular opinion. That doesn’t sound like a free people in a free country. We are, each day, force-fed falsehoods we are all expected to take seriously, on pain of forfeiting esteem and professional opportunity:
“Some men have periods and get pregnant.”
“Hard work and objectivity are hallmarks of whiteness.”
“Only a child knows her own true gender.”
“Transwomen don’t have an unfair advantage when playing girls’ sports.”
On that final example of a lie, the one about transwomen in girls’ sports, I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Princeton. She’s a magnificent athlete named Ellie Marquardt, an all-American swimmer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-yard freestyle event as a freshman. Just before Thanksgiving, Ellie was defeated in the 500-free, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 secondsby a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes, and making a mockery of the rights women fought for generations to achieve.
Ellie Marquart swam her heart out for Princeton. When will Princeton fight for her? Where are the student protests to say—enough is enough. When a biological male who has enjoyed the full benefits of male puberty—larger cardiovascular system, 40% more upper body muscle mass, more fast-twitch muscle fiber, more oxygenated blood—decides after three seasons on the men’s team to compete as a woman and smashes the records of the top female swimmers in this country, that is not valor. That’s vandalism.
Where is the outrage? Imagine, for a second, what it must be like to be a female swimmer at Princeton, knowing you must pretend that this is fair—that the NCAA competition is anything other than a joke. Imagine being told to bite your tongue as men lecture you that you just need to swim harder.“Be grateful for your silver medals, ladies, and maybe work harder next time,” is the message. Imagine what that level of repression does to warp the soul…”
Speaking of warped souls, in a commentary we felt deserved inclusion in its entirety, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson describes the scene as…
The Democrats love the poor. The Democrats hate the poor.
And the poor in West Virginia? They’re at the bottom of the bucket, as Democrats see things.
Senator Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia who is one of the last of that breed, has derailed Joe Biden’s beloved Build Back Better bill, a slop-bucket of progressive wish-fulfillment that would add trillions in new spending to our already-bloated federal budget and pile much more debt upon our already-considerable national heap. Senator Manchin thought it was a bad package, though he supported some of what was in it, and West Virginians thought it was a bad package, though they supported some of what was in it, and so Senator Manchin announced — on Fox News, in an extra “f**k you” to Chuck Schumer et al. — that he would oppose the bill. Because Democrats and Republicans both have rejected the notion of consensus-building and bipartisanship, every Senate Republican opposes the scheme, which means that the Democrats need every Democratic vote to pass the bill in the evenly split Senate.
Senator Manchin’s willingness to break with his party makes him, for the moment, the most powerful man in Washington after the maître d’ at le Diplomate. (Somewhere in the Senate, there must be at least one Republican who is smart enough to realize that he could be the most powerful man in Washington, after the maître d’ at le Diplomate, if he were willing to do the same.) It also makes him the man Democrats hate most — at the moment, anyway; Democratic hatred is an urgent and plastic thing.
But like the unhappy worker who cannot face off against his overbearing boss and so instead goes home to yell at his wife and kick the dog (as Sigmund Freud once had it), progressives from Hollywood to Washington to whatever abandoned gopher hole Robert Reich calls home have decided to lay into the people of West Virginia. As Isaac Schorr already has reported here, the noted political philosopher Bette Midler and her friends at Occupy Democrats denounced West Virginians as illiterates (the Mountain State has a higher literacy rate than New York, California, or New Jersey), Ilhan Omar suggested that Senator Manchin’s vote is the result of corruption — a serious charge for which she should be made to answer — and Reich offered this indictment: “Let me remind you that a full quarter of West Virginians 65 and older have no natural teeth.” Toothless hillbillies — who doesn’t love a classic? In fact, the share of West Virginians over 65 without any remaining teeth is not far off from the national average; the state’s slightly elevated rate of geriatric toothlessness is almost certainly due to the fact that it has a large population of people over 75 (who have a very high rate of total tooth loss), being the nation’s third-most-elderly state. But facts don’t matter much when you’ve worked up a good head of hate-steam.
I know as well as anybody that poor, rural, white America has its problems. But I do not believe for one hot second that Ilhan Omar or Robert Reich knows one damned thing about them, or cares to learn. Why would they? Senator Manchin is about as far to the political left as today’s West Virginia is going to go. Owsley County, Ky., home of the poorest white people in America, is overwhelmingly Republican, and Donald Trump got eight times as many votes as Joe Biden did there in 2020 — Trump did slightly better inSan Francisco than Biden did in Owsley County.There’s a little factoid to meditate upon.
The most important domestic political development of the 21st century so far is the class-reversal of the Republican and Democratic parties, a trend that began in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and now has reached a state of genuine polarization. Democrats, once the party of poor farmers and working-class “white ethnics,” as we used to call them, have become the party of affluent, educated, metropolitan and suburban professionals — the people who once were critical to the Republican coalition.
One notable barometer, the five counties of Southeastern Pennsylvania, for years exemplified a national pattern: Philadelphia was overwhelmingly Democratic, and the four suburban counties around it were overwhelmingly Republican; now, you don’t hit Republican territory until Lancaster County, which is both Amish country and heroin country, with almost 150 overdose deaths in 2020.
As far as today’s Democrats are concerned, voting Republican is just one more pathology that afflicts the toothless hillbillies of their imagination. They are perplexed — or at least pretend to be perplexed — by the fact that there are poor and struggling Americans who do not instinctively turn to welfare-statism as the answer to their problems, who are uneager to sacrifice either their values or their liberties in exchange for a government check. Democrats have responded to this by elevating the needs of the relatively well-off to the top of their agenda, which is why they spend so much time talking about the terrible burden of student loans for young lawyers and underemployed Haverford graduates. You won’t hear them offer anything like a serious solution to the public-education crisis in Los Angeles or Milwaukee — those well-paid teachers are a core part of the Democratic base, and semi-literate high-school dropouts do not vote in large numbers.
It is likely that Senator Manchin either will become a Republican or will be replaced by one, eventually. At only 74 years of age, he is a spring chicken by the standards of current Democratic leadership: President Biden is 79, Nancy Pelosi is 81 (her hair is 46), and Dianne Feinstein is within spittin’ distance of 90. But he isn’t going to be in the Senate forever. Because the Senate gives equal representation to the less-populous rural states and the densely populated urban states, it is always going to be a problem for Democrats. Strangely, Democrats seem, at the moment, intent on making it a bigger problem for themselves. Further shrinking the universe of possible electoral coalitions may pass for smart in the great echoing expanse of insipidity between Bette Midler’s droopy old ears, but it is a losing strategy.
Somewhere, Mitch McConnell is cracking a bloodcurdling smile.
Wait for it…
…wait for it!
Then there’s this octet of items specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds:
(2). While Daniel Roman, in a forward from AMAC.com via Speed, remembers 2021 as the Year of the “Great Realignment” that became a death spiral for Democrats, Jim Geraghty predicts 2022 won’t be much better, as it will be a year of reckoning for those who continue to wreak havoc upon the country, its economy and its citizens.
As Warden Norton learned in The Shawshank Redemption, His judgement really does cometh, and that right soon! No doubt a lesson of which Harry Reid’s already painfully aware. And that for all eternity.
“This isn’t the overwhelming of hospitals we were promised by the left. Rather, it’s the exact opposite, with people who aren’t even sick showing up to take resources away because they’ve been convinced that COVID is still highly deadly for 45-year-olds in good health. Even older people who are asymptomatic should not be going to the ER. Rather, they should live their life. Unless they actually get sick, what is there to treat?
Yet, the cynical move by Democrats to cause so much fear around COVID has pushed a large segment of the population into what can only be called some form of mental illness.“
(4). NRO‘s Phil Klein highlights how the CDC’s sudden change in quarantine guidance exposes the completely arbitrary nature of COVID policy. Though we must observe, if: (i) Liquor stores remaining open as essential businesses while churches were closed; (ii) Maintaining social distancing while going through TSA only to be crammed in a commercial aircraft cabin for the duration of a three-hour flight; (iii) Masking up while waiting for a table in a restaurant, then being allowed to remove it while eating; and (iv) “Medical authorities” unequivocally suggesting the benefits to society of participating in mob violence in honor of the unfortunate demise of a career criminal outweighed the risk of spreading a purportedly deadly pathogen didn’t give away the fact government measures have always been about controlling you rather than a Made in China virus, you haven’t been paying attention.
(5). In a related item, the Morning Jolt details why government WuFlu mandates make no sense against the Omicron variant. Then again, as we mentioned to TLJ over dinner, neither has any other aspect of government responses to the man-made virus China loosed upon an unsuspecting world.
Okay, a largely unsuspecting world!
Think about it: Lockdowns haven’t worked; Mask mandates haven’t worked; Social-distancing hasn’t worked; Vaccine mandates haven’t worked. And The Donald’s ill-advised “Two weeks to flatten the curve” is now in its third year, with nary an impact on the spread of the WuFlu to speak of. As Phil so insightfully observed…
As would inquiring minds…
…across the country!
(6). Meanwhile, Townhall.com‘s Rebecca Downs reports Dr. Faux Chi will receive the largest pension in the history of the federal government, as the self-serving public imprisoner stands to collect some $347,500 a year, with no deductions whatsoever for the lives, businesses and wealth he sacrificed for his undeserved payday and 15 minutes of fame.
Here’s hoping this homicidal huckster doesn’t live to collect a dime of it following a most painful demise.
(7). As we mentioned those who’ve outlived their usefulness…assuming they ever had any to begin with… Best of the Web wonders whether Colin Kaepernick has lost his MSM-manufactured “halo“’, as his Wall Street deal collapses and the city where he started selling out his country now wants more police.
May Kaepernick share the same fate of Dr. Faux Chi…at a much younger age.
“A Florida woman and a Georgia man were arrested earlier this month for allegedly flying her 12-year-old from Texas for a sexual encounter with him, according to reports. Adrienne Klein, 43, and Gesart Hoxha, 20, are accused of paying for her daughter to travel to the Atlanta area and stay in a hotel so Hoxha could meet the girl for sex, FOX 5 in Atlanta reported.
…Klein was arrested on Dec. 14 following a months-long investigation by the Gwinnett County Police in Georgia and the Arlington Police Department in Texas. She is charged with second-degree enticing a child for indecent purposes and child cruelty.
…Hoxha faces charges of child molestation, statutory rape, enticing a child for indecent purposes and employing/using a minor to engage in or assist a person in sexually explicit conduct for visual medium. He is also charged with indecency with a child by sexual contact by the Arlington Police in Texas…”
May this demented duo share the fate of Dr. Faux Chi and Colon Kaepernick…with an infinitely more gruesome and prolonged demise.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Forget the last five years and the hypocrisy inherent in ignoring all the hate and vitriol hurled at The Donald, how “insurrectionist” can “Let’s go, Brandon” be when The Insensate himself repeats the phrase.
Tales of The Darkside
Rand Paul schools George Snuffleupagus on the definition of electoral fraud and what constitutes lying.
On the Lighter Side
We can’t help but laugh at the rank intolerance consistently exhibited by those who hold themselves in opposition to such bigotry.
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