May 6, 2025

May 5, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1240

UNEXPECTEDLY: Pulitzer judges pass over iconic AP photo of Trump defiantly waving his fist with blood running down his face after assassination attempt.

Might that be for this reason, noted by The Conversation at the bottom?

In Vucci’s photograph, we are given the illusion that this photograph captures “the moment” or “a shot”. Yet it doesn’t capture the moment of the shooting, but its immediate aftermath. The photograph captures Trump’s media acuity and swift, responsive performance to the attempted assassination, standing to rise with his fist in the air.

In a post-truth world, there has been a pervasive concern about knowing the truth. While that extends beyond photographic representation, photography and visual representation play a considerable part.

It made Trump look like the hero we know him to be, the decisive, swift-acting, self-sacrificing leader that voters had been looking for. The picture turned up on tshirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it. Of course he won the election.

Some must have blamed this photo for it. But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding. What’s more Vucci was hardly buddies with Trump. In March, he testified against the White House exclusion of AP from the photo press pool over the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ being renamed the ‘Gulf of America.’

Given Vucci’s photos, it seems kind of counterintuitive for the White House to exclude Vucci over a dispute like that, but the Pulitzer board didn’t notice.

But not entirely unexpected:

Or to put it another way:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 61

PROGRESSIVISM, WHERE TIME STANDS STILL: Benjamin Kerstein: We have met the pigs… In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.

Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left. That is, it is the New Left in its decadent and hopefully final form as an institutionalized totalitarian movement. It has now collapsed into the antisemitism that appears to be the endgame of almost all totalitarian movements. It has decimated its enemies within the institutions it controls and, as a result, has found a new and ultimate enemy. It has finally arrived where it was always going: the Elders of Zion.

Like all things, this is illustrated by the fact that none of this is new. Even a brief examination of an unbiased historical account of the late 1960s proves as much.

II.

One of the best of these histories is Theodore H. White’s extraordinary The Making of the President 1968, which chronicles the tumultuous presidential election that witnessed the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the devastating Chicago New Left riots that shattered the Democratic party and the New Deal consensus, and ultimately, Richard Nixon’s victory.

White’s book is of immense value for two reasons: First, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for pithy insight and revelatory aphorism. Second, he wrote before the professoriate regime conquered and colonized academia and American intellectual life. As a result, he did not attempt to rewrite history in the New Left’s favor.

The professoriate regime that now controls the writing of that history has long since whitewashed and falsified the history of the New Left. However, it has yet to completely burn all the books that bear witness to what really happened. Consequently, White remains to tell us something like the truth.

In doing so, White provides conclusive proof that none of this is new. The monstrous crimes we witness on US campuses today were occurring decades ago, and the ideology that “justifies” them already existed in full. It was partially institutionalized at that time and is now completely institutionalized, yet it remains unchanged.

A single passage in White’s book provides conclusive proof of this. It details the rhetorical strategies and underlying ideology of the 1960s New Left students’ movement, which had already laid out and made public its stunningly successful plan to conquer and colonize the universities. Not all members of the student movement were totalitarians, but the totalitarians eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for leadership, with devastating consequences.

White is ruthless in his deconstruction of the movement. He does so in a lengthy excerpt that cannot be truncated without damaging its insights. I reproduce it in full below:

I don’t want to quote the whole passage by White for Fair Use reasons, but note this:

In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree. To steal, seize or destroy offices or files becomes to liberate. The old Marxist adverbial phrase objectively speaking becomes, in the new rhetoric, a transitional phrase to any statement that cannot be factually proven; when a speaker begins a paragraph with objectively speaking, it means that any construct of the imagination he thinks should be true is indeed so. The word non-violence is turned inside out. If what can be won by the massing of bodies, the occupation of buildings, shoving, and the use of brawn is yielded immediately, it proves the validity of non-violence. (Stone-and-bottle-throwing can be classed, in this vocabulary, as non-violent.) If the non-violent aggressors are resisted, then those who resist are styled violent and brutal. Eric Sevareid [a prominent television news reporter] was recently reminded, in one of his broadcasts, of his European experience: “They [the student activists] have the same approach, ” he said, “as the early Nazis and early Communists. ‘We are right,’ they say, ‘we are progress. If you resist us, or defend yourself, you are the instigators of violence.’ ”

If this infamous Orwellian moment from CNN in August of 2020 took you by surprise, it shouldn’t have; it was totally predicted by the worldview of the ’60s New Left, which as Kerstein writes, has burrowed deeply into 21st century academia:

At American Greatness, Roger Kimball explores: The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way.

As Kerstein writes at the first link, it lost its way a long time ago indeed.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 36

THIS SHOULD LEAD TO NEW TREATMENTS FAIRLY QUICKLY: Heart Mystery Solved: Scientists Discover Unexpected Source of Cardiac Inflammation. “Researchers have discovered a surprising trigger for heart damage after a heart attack: surviving heart cells near the damaged area become inflamed due to mechanical stress, not immune cells as previously believed. These heart cells rupture and leak DNA, which sparks a damaging immune response. This breakthrough challenges long-held assumptions and offers fresh strategies for preventing heart failure by calming these stressed heart cells and blocking specific inflammatory signals.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 10

A UNIFIED THEORY OF TRUMP TROLLING:

Yesterday, in my Sunday Smiles essay, I mused about Trump’s “own the libs” style of trolling.

It drives the liberals nuts, which can be very entertaining to watch, but I think a lot of MAGA converts who were initially reluctant to support Trump for cultural reasons are made extremely uncomfortable by his constantly trolling liberals. . . .

What’s the point, they wonder. Is it presidential? Doesn’t Trump have more important things to do? Is it unnecessarily provocative?

Obviously, what set off my musings was the recent controversy about Trump’s tweet in which he put up an AI-generated image of himself in Papal garb. Liberals went insane. Again.

A year or two ago, these same people applauded when the FBI labeled traditional Catholics “domestic terrorists,” regularly call priests pedophiles (I could write essay after essay about the fact that government-employed public school teachers abuse more children in any given year than priests did in 70 years and liberals work assiduously to prevent kids escaping the public schools), and bash the Church due to its pro-natalism and anti-gender-ideology stances.

But whatever. . . . Trump’s greatest allies are his opposition, who overreact to everything he does and go to ridiculous extremes because he violates the norms they claim (and often do) hold so dear. Liberals will go to the mat to defend wife-beating, human-trafficking MS-13 members rather than agree with Trump on anything, and that reveals them to be insane. . . . Trolling the liberals keeps his base excited, not so much because they love the trolls–some do, some don’t–but we can all unify in defending Trump against the insane attacks. The hypocrisy of the left keeps getting exposed, and the trolling Trump does keep the liberals in a perpetual state of lighting their hair on fire.

Also, it’s funny. And it’s not just about firing up the base. The left has ruled through an unjustified sense of entitlements, and an unearned moral and intellectual deference. Treating them like Groucho treated Margaret Dumont is a very effective way of undermining those characteristics, and of demoralizing the left. He’s constantly hitting them with some variant of Cousin Vinnie’s “You was serious about that?” leavened with doses of “Everything that guy just said is bullshit.”

And you know, he’s loud, he’s uncouth, but everyone is always rooting for Cousin Vinnie.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 273