DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: New York City concerned about rise of rat urine-related illness and even death.
April 17, 2024
DENVER: Blue city mayor defunds police force by more than $8 million to aid migrants.
A Democrat-controlled city announced $45 million in funding for programs to help deal with the skyrocketing number of migrant arrivals it is facing, resulting in over $8 million in budget cuts for the police department.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced last week a package of $45.9 million to fully fund programs for “newcomers” for 2024 and avoid worst-case scenarios projected by the city. That’s in addition to $44 million in spending already secured for the program through previous budget moves.
Spending on migrants in the city skyrocketed last year from $2 million a month in August to $15 million in December. In January, migrant numbers peaked at around 5,000 in shelters but have since dropped to around 1,000, according to official figures.
“Newcomers,” LOL.
I must have spent 20 years making the drive up to Denver from Colorado Springs at least once a week to meet friends, have a nice dinner, go to a nightclub, etc. But that seems like a long time ago.
ARE WE SUPPOSED TO INFER FROM THEIR SILENCE THAT THEY ARE OBJECTIVELY PRO-GENOCIDE? 44 Democrats Refuse to Vote in Favor of Resolution Condemning the Chant ‘From the River to the Sea…’
AND JOE BIDEN’S BIG-MOUTHED FECKLESSNESS: The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy.
MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS GOOD, AND I DON’T HAVE ANY UTERINE FIBROIDS. QED. Controlling blood pressure could prevent uterine fibroids.
Sometimes, a person enters the public spotlight and is such an embodiment of an established stereotype that it seems impossible for him or her to be a real person. If Tom Wolfe wanted to capture the essence of arrogant, alienated progressivism, he would reject NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as too unbelievably on point.
The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.
She then got internships with the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group in London and Germany before landing a job in New York City at UNICEF. She had stops with the National Democratic Institute and the World Bank, among other global nonprofit groups, before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019.
It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.
And her tweets prove she is the perfect person for the job.
She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”
Related: ‘Bat Guano Crazy:’ NPR CEO Katherine Maher Says Truth Is a ‘Distraction’ to ‘Getting Things Done.’
This is more devastating than the silly tweets. It is a prepared & rehearsed repudiation of the journalist's historic responsibility and contradicts what NPR once claimed to be about. https://t.co/998xJyXDAO
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) April 17, 2024
Related: Remember the 1960s, when Marshall McLuhan envisioned an interconnected “global village” with everyone wired together and sharing ideas? Right around the same time that Martin Luther King envisioned a world in which people were judged by the content of their character, and not their skin color? So much for those ideas:
Tom Wolfe may have left this plane of existence in 2018, but the Matrix he spent years programming is still working absolutely perfectly.
ANALYSIS: TRUE (AND WITH RECEIPTS): NPR CEO Katherine Maher Is a Censor-Happy Parody of Wokeness.
OUCH:
Orwell didn't quite predict the UGGs, but he foresaw the rest of it: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy."
— Erich M. Schwarz (@ErichMSchwarz) April 17, 2024
I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE WORKED TO KEEP THE WOLF FROM THE DOOR, NOT TO IMPORT HIM: Latest in European Farmers Protests: Swiss Ranchers Dumping Dead Sheep Challenging Protected Status of Wolves.
MARKETING: Alan Ritchson Doubles Down on Cops, Attacks DeSantis.
Alan Ritchson has a funny way of promoting movies.
The star behind “Reacher” hits the big screen once more Friday with “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” The Guy Ritchie romp, loosely based on true events, casts him as a World War II-era soldier battling the Nazi menace.
Instead, he’s spent the last few weeks attacking:
• Christians
• Donald Trump
• Law enforcementAnd, now, he’s expanding his target list to include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
That’s from Christian Toto, who also noted on Twitter/X: “He has a movie opening nationwide Friday. So, naturally, he’s alienating as many groups of moviegoers as possible!”
Actors, as a group, never struck me as particularly bright. But studios at least used to know how to manage their actors’ PR.
JONATHAN GLAZER, LIBERAL JEWISH PROPHET:
Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words.
“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October—whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.
Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.
In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.
Related: Karol Markowicz on “Jeremy Piven and an all-too-apt performance:” “The film [The Performance] was made before the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and had indeed been in the works for many years, but it’s entirely believable as an allegory for the way Hollywood has responded to those attacks. [Harold May—actually Harold Marcovitz, a floundering tap dancer who is recruited to perform in Berlin in 1936, played by Piven] is not wildly dissimilar from Jewish Hollywood celebrities who have stayed nauseatingly quiet after Oct. 7. They, too, want the success, the money, the accolades. They, too, have worked hard to get where they are, and they don’t want to throw it away to defend an identity that barely registers. They, too, are confident that the Jew-haters don’t mean them, not with their talent and beauty; they must mean some other Jews who had had the wrong opinions or live in the wrong place. Would they shake Hitler’s outstretched hand? It happens off-screen, but we know Harold does after his one-night show. It’s survival at that point, the argument can be made. But when the riches and the acclaim mean that he’ll have to shake it some more, Harold chooses to do just that.”
NOT THE SETUP TO A JOKE: A Shirtless Acrobat Walked Into a Christian Men’s Conference — Then It Got Weird.
READER FAVORITE: 5-Minute Core Exercises for Seniors: Daily Routines to Build Balance and Boost Confidence. #CommissionEarned
I DON’T THINK THEY HELP MUCH: Is It OK for Internists to Wear Masks Forever? “If you can’t believe we are still talking about this, that is sort of the point of the post.”
My internist managed to give me the flu while wearing an N95 mask. He looked awful, sat in the corner, and talked to me while a PA did the actual touching parts. I thought maybe he had cancer or something, but it turned out he had the flu. And a couple of days later so did I. Not a massive double-blind study, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. First time I got the actual full-blown flu in like a decade.
NPR WHISTLEBLOWER URI BERLINER RESIGNS: ‘I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.’
Longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who was suspended after blowing the whistle on liberal bias at the organization, announced Wednesday he has resigned.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.
Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, who took over last month as President and CEO and has gone viral for past social media posts showing far-left personal views.
Berliner penned a piece in the Free Press that criticized NPR’s coverage of Russiagate, the COVID lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop, embrace of the theory of systemic racism and accused the organization of downplaying antisemitism following Oct. 7.
Ed Morrissey speculates that “The mention of disparagement seems like a warning to NPR’s lawyers, or maybe Maher’s personal attorneys.”
Old and busted on the left: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The new hotness?
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.
NPR's censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024
THE EMPEROR’S NAKEDNESS IS BECOMING MORE OBVIOUS: Politico: Let’s Face It, Biden Has No Strategy on Iran.
DON SURBER: The Lynching of a President: Trump has them singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Harlem.
Related: Trump’s Perfect Jab in the Eye to Alvin Bragg During a Bodega Visit.
Trump went to Harlem to speak to Maad Ahmed and small business advocate Francisco Marte at the Sanaa Convenient Store, formerly known as the Blue Convenient Store. This is the bodega where a clerk, Jose Alba, stabbed an ex-con to death in self-defense two years ago. The case became national news because Alba was charged with murder.
It was D.A. Alvin Bragg who decided to charge Jose with murder though Austin Simon, a 35-year-old ex-con, was caught on camera cornering Alba, 61, in a fight over chips. Simon’s girlfriend, Tina Lee, stabbed Alba during the chaos.
Jose was charged with second-degree murder and spent about a week in jail before prosecutors in Alvin Bragg’s office agreed to lower his $250,000 bail. The charges were eventually dropped, thanks to the pressure from the public who were outraged. Jose was so traumatized by the whole experience that he returned to the Dominican Republic, where he remains today.
Ahmed and Marte are supporting Donald Trump for president. They have had enough, as other small business owners have. Local government in New York City is allowing crime to run rampant and bodegas are robbed regularly. His message to Trump, he said, was to be that the city is not safe. . . .
The visit to the bodega after spending all day in court was classic Trump on the campaign trail. Mingling with ordinary working people is his superpower. Joe Biden was campaigning in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. He made a campaign speech before screened supporters and then went to a training facility of some sort and delivered some remarks.
Of course the city isn’t safe. The only people Bragg will prosecute are those who aren’t criminals.
WOEING: Boeing whistleblower says 787 fleet should be grounded. “The letter outlined problems with the production of the company’s 787 and 777 jets, saying specifically that sections of the fuselage of the 787 Dreamliner are improperly fastened together and could break after thousands of trips. Salehpour told the agency these issues were the result of changes to the fitting and fastening of sections in the assembly line and alleged that the concerns were brushed off.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Hope this guy doesn’t commit suicide. There’s a lot of that going around.
INSIDERS REVEAL: Everything You Feared About TikTok Is True.
HORSE, BARN DOOR: US to hit Iran with new sanctions in “coming days”, Yellen says.
“With respect to sanctions, I fully expect that we will take additional sanctions action against Iran in the coming days,” Yellen said told a news conference on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank spring meetings in Washington.
“We don’t preview our sanctions tools. But in discussions I’ve had, all options to disrupt terrorist financing of Iran continue to be on the table,” Yellen added.
She said that the Treasury and State Department have taken previous action to contain Iran’s “destabilizing” behavior by diminishing its ability to export oil.“Clearly, Iran is continuing to export some oil. There may be more that we could do. I don’t want to preview our actual sanctions activities, but certainly that remains in focus as a possible area that we could address.”
Even if the White House restored the Trump sanctions Biden never should have dropped (although I doubt they will), they can’t take back the billions Biden delivered to them, nor all the weapons they bought and terrorists they paid.
BOYCOTT, DIVEST, SANCTION: This group keeps fighting for universities to divest from China.
URI BERLINER BURNED HIS BRIDGES AT NPR, THEN SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE:
In a profession where journalists and pundits read these sorts of big dishy insider pieces differently than normal folks do — searching for hidden implications, listening for dog whistles, and frankly sometimes wearing tinfoil hats — that paragraph instantly sounded a blaring klaxon. “PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS INCOMING BOSS WHO I WILL MENTION BY NAME AND WHO I MIGHT ADD LACKS ANY JOURNALISTIC BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER.”
And, mother of God, look what turned up once people like Christopher Rufo did just that. You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.
I cannot possibly do justice to the comical depth and breadth of her posting history. (Matt Taibbi has a fun summary here, framed as a journey through the American holiday calendar with NPR’s incoming CEO.) This is a woman who loudly condemns her own “cis white mobility privilege,” and I’m still not sure whether she’s referring to her ability to quickly change jobs or her ability to roll out of bed in the morning. Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.
Do you think Uri Berliner was unaware of any of this? Do you think he failed to do research on the background of the new CEO before he gave her a shout-out by name at the end of a piece savaging NPR’s decaying ethical culture? I don’t. He might as well have wished her luck with a capital “F.” He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling. He basically scripted his own one-act play: Waiting for Rufo. As it draws to its climax, I am left with one overwhelming question: Why on earth are American taxpayers footing the bill for any of this, again?
Excellent question. In the meantime – at least before Maher locks down or deletes her Twitter account – Rufo’s Twitter feed is currently full of Maher’s Titania McGrath-style woke performance art over the past decade.
Saul Alinsky smiles: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it:”
UPDATE:
This quote is best read in the voice of a Stasi officer speaking to a dissident newspaperman who is tied to a chair. https://t.co/g9ODXIFOKB
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 17, 2024
