January 4, 2025
WELL, WHEN YOU LIE BADLY AND CONSTANTLY, EVEN THE DUMB PEOPLE NOTICE EVENTUALLY:
🚨BREAKING: A Gallup poll shows just 31% of Americans trust the media to report “fully, accurately, and fairly.” pic.twitter.com/4BRblBkEpF
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 4, 2025
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OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up.
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.
A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.
This is a scandal that should be rooted out entirely, and investigated by the full might of the British state. Voices ranging from Elon Musk to Kemi Badenoch have joined the calls for an inquiry. Yet the Government seems curiously reluctant to dig into the failings of officials.
As is the state-run media. I wonder why?
UPDATE: Questions asked:
SEGREGATON NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Yale course asks if black and white women can be friends.
THEY’LL HAVE TO GET RID OF THE EMERITUS PROFESSORS? ‘Climate justice’ group calls on Northwestern University to become ‘fossil free campus.’
“Climate justice” is a BS phrase.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: 2025: The Year When Things Come to a Head.
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IT’S A DAY ENDING IN “Y.” Left Plays Footsie With Political Violence.
HE’S RIGHT:
This looks like a Soros/Clinton flex to remind you who is really in charge on the Democrat side. The absurdity of it is what makes it a flex. https://t.co/0wbXFsIHZm
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 4, 2025
I THINK HE’S RIGHT.
We have passed the peak decade of 'wokeness' and are in the very early stages of a new era. I don't know what it is called yet.
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) January 3, 2025
FAUCI FUNDED COVID: Fact Check True! Yes, Fauci Funded Research in Wuhan and Lied to Congress. “The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent began scratching about like a cornered badger a week back when Elon Musk tweeted that the NIH’s Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted. . . . I really have no clue why this guy waded into a matter he knows nothing about, and I can’t remember the last time I clicked on something he wrote. Greg is one of the many, many opinion writers floating around DC, trying to drum up clicks and retweets, and who makes his living as a mouthpiece for a political party, ginning up partisan hate before tossing political grenades across the internet.”
Plus: “How do we know this? Because it was already reported in public documents, a British investigative documentary, and in articles here at The DisInformation Chronicle, The Intercept and Vanity Fair. Before addressing Greg’s obsession with compressing everything into a ‘big right-wing obsession’ let’s review that evidence.”
IT WAS ALWAYS FAKE: ‘Nobody was tricked into voting for Trump’: Why the disinformation panic is over: Eight years ago, Trump and Brexit sparked fears social media was corroding reality. Now, that narrative is crumbling. “It should be noted that the most powerful misinformation isn’t spread solely by anonymous internet trolls. Instead, ‘the most consequential misinformation tends to come from prominent, powerful domestic actors, top politicians,’ said Rasmus Nielsen, professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen.”
And by media, and nonprofits.
And the “disinformation experts” are grifters selling snake oil. “Disinformation studies” is a bogus field. Phlogiston chemistry had a sounder basis.
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THE IVY EXILE: Monsters of the Id.
As I saw constantly during my years chronicling Columbia University, broad swaths of academic literature now rival the worst of medieval scholasticism for sheer irrelevance, going all but unread for good reason.
In the starkest of contrasts, the 1951 classic The True Believer, by the legendary Eric Hoffer, remains every bit as relevant as it was on its day of publication. The precise details of Hoffer’s exceedingly picaresque life story are hazy, but for whatever his probable embellishments, the proof positively radiates from the text that, in some way or other, he lived a far more varied and colorful life than most scholars of his time, or ours.
A voracious autodidact, Hoffer apparently didn’t attend college and purportedly spent his first few decades of adulthood — years most academics are socially and spiritually confined to campus — variously as a vagrant, a drifter, a migrant worker, a prospector for gold, and most verifiably as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks before publishing his first and most famous volume around age 50 (and later becoming an adjunct at Berkeley). Whatever question marks in his biography, there’s no question he spent that half-century honing keen insights into human nature as it is rather than how ideologues would prefer it to be.
Five years of manual labor, or working with the public in retail or food service, would do wonders for most academics.
ONLINE CENSORSHIP: Why We Need A Cyber Bill of Rights.
January 3, 2025
WELL, BIDEN ISN’T BECAUSE HE CAN’T EVEN TEE UP HIS MORNING OATMEAL: Is Biden Teeing Up an Iran War for Trump?
But some unnamed guy with a White House lanyard may be.
THE NORMIES ARE ASSERTING THEMSELVES:
A disruptive pro-Pal is ejected from a graduation ceremony at Lancaster university in the north of England. The crowd claps his removal. Most ppl are totally fed up with them. pic.twitter.com/2eBsftcK4n
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) January 3, 2025
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: 2025: The Year When Things Come to a Head.
YES, YES, I HAVE NOTICED THIS:
Have you noticed that when someone is very rich and doesn’t need to worry about losing their job or potential business, they say what the rest of us are thinking? Elon and JK Rowling for instance.
— Alastair Hilton (@London_W4) January 3, 2025
INCREDIBLE:
In Russia last year, 400 people were arrested for things they said on social media. In Britain, that number was 3300… pic.twitter.com/YUlsyU1Udc
— Flippy (@sillyflippy) August 9, 2024
COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY: Louis Farrakhan Loses Defamation and First Amendment Lawsuit Against Anti-Defamation League and Others.
OPEN THREAD: The holidays draw to an end. 2025 begins in earnest on Monday.
THIS IS IMPORTANT. A reader writes: “Everyone on the right side is flush with victory, but the big issue for ‘25 is how we keep it going. We’ve blown it so many times before. How do we align the incentives for society and government to be inclined to do the right thing anyway? I agree. This is the critical issue for this year and beyond. How will the leaders frame their messages so they are accurate and clear?”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: India eyes record year for space with 10 planned launches. That’s a busy launch schedule for anyone who isn’t SpaceX.