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January 4, 2025
JOHN HAWKINS: Does American Culture Celebrate Mediocrity Over Excellence?
It feels like there are two points [Vivek Ramaswamy is] making here, one subtle and one obvious.
The subtle one, which is at the heart of why so many tech companies REALLY want H1-B visas so badly, is that some cultures are poorer and hungrier than others. I hate to tell you this if you’re American, but as a general rule, Indians WANT IT more than you do. Why? Because the average salary in India is about $382 per month. So, if you’re Indian, educated, smart, and because of the wonders of the modern world, can do work or even remote work in America, you have an incredible opportunity.
If you have pretty good English, can take instructions, work hard, and have a good attitude, you may be able to get very “rich” doing what most Americans consider fairly mundane work. Think about it – if you can just make the minimum wage in America, that equates to $15,080 per year. Americans consider that “barely surviving.” Meanwhile, if you’re in India, that’s three times what the average person makes.
How much bullsh*t would you be willing to put up with at work to get paid lots of money to do a simple job? Personally, I’ve hired people from India to work remotely for me before, and do you know what my experience was? There were some communication issues, but generally, they did the job, they did it well, and they had a work ethic you just don’t see in America. What do I mean by that? Well, I am 100% not exaggerating when I say that I’ve had Indians tell me out of the blue they intend to work for me through their honeymoons or reach out to tell me they just had a heart attack and are in the ICU but will be back at work in a couple of days. It’s not like I’m a slavedriver or ask them to do these things either, this is just their attitude.
In my experience, Americans who are that hungry tend to be few and far between as compared to it being common somewhere like India. This is one of the few advantages poor people have over the rich. Being deprived makes them hungry for success in a way that it’s hard to be when life is easy.
Getting beyond that, it’s impossible to deny that Ramaswamy is right about America’s culture emphasizing the wrong things.
Read the whole thing.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why don’t cars have hood ornaments anymore?
KERRY PICKET: Rank-and-file FBI agents dismayed, ‘embarrassed’ by bureau’s handling of New Orleans terror attack.
FBI agents say the bureau’s first response to the New Year’s Day terrorist massacre in New Orleans’ French Quarter was disastrous and another reason why the Senate can’t move fast enough to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the agency.
According to several agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the FBI failed to execute a comprehensive counter-terrorism plan when Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar of Texas, an Army veteran, rammed a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into New Year’s Eve revelers, killing 14 and wounding dozens.
They said the top FBI official on the scene broke with bureau decorum and inexplicably declared the attack not to be terrorism and that the bureau failed to follow basic procedures during the investigation.
Agents wondered why Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans FBI office, did not appear to be on duty when the attack happened, despite what should have been a heightened alert for a major New Year’s Eve celebrations and the college football championship, the Sugar Bowl, scheduled at the city’s Superdome on New Year’s Day.
The agents blamed poor leadership by outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate.
Mr. Abbate is poised to become acting director after Mr. Wray resigns, which he said he will do before Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
“They need to go right now, not only Wray, but Abbate needs to go. This is awful. This is embarrassing. Kash Patel is the person to have in there,” an agent said, referring to Mr. Trump’s nominee for FBI director. “He needs to come right now, right away, because these people have to leave.”
Indeed. As Byron York wrote a couple of weeks ago: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.
Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”
It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?
During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:
1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.
2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.
3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.
4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.
5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.
6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.
7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.
8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.
9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.
10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.
The FBI’s response to Patel’s arrival should be fun to watch:
WHERE’S MY EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM? I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM! One less thing to worry about in 2025: Yellowstone probably won’t go boom.
DOUGLAS MURRAY GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Mass immigration is killing Europe – and the political class just don’t care.
Another Christmas and the politics of Europe are once again roiled by one of the Continent’s newest traditions: the Christmas market terrorist attack.
Last Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg was carried out by a Saudi-born asylum seeker. In 2016 it was a Tunisian migrant who carried out a similarly horrific attack in Berlin. It is one of the reasons why for the past 10 years these once innocent family events are surrounded by police and very often by what locals sometimes cynically call “diversity bollards”. In a macabre twist, in August this year a Syrian Islamist murdered three people and stabbed eight more at a Festival of Diversity in Solingen.
Most of the Western political class and media continue to refuse to draw any link between the uncontrolled mass legal and illegal immigration of recent years and the upsurge in crimes, including terrorism. They point out quite rightly that not everyone who arrives on our shores is a terrorist. But that is a straw man. Absolutely no reasonable voice would ever make such a claim.
Almost 10 years ago I began writing a book called The Strange Death of Europe. It was a response to the unprecedented migration wave of 2015, encouraged by then German chancellor Angela Merkel. I warned that if you import the world’s people you also import the world’s problems.
I pointed out that far from what our politicians were implying we were not in fact “nations of immigrants”. We were actually societies that had been strikingly culturally and ethnically homogenous for centuries, and that what was now being called “normal” was anything but that. And I also tried to warn that our societies were likely to fracture beyond recognition if we did not control immigration and take a tougher stance on deporting people who had no right to be here.
Instead, as Brendan O’Neill writes today at Spiked: When working-class girls were sacrificed to ideology. How the elites’ cowardice and classism let the ‘grooming gangs’ get away with rape.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Taking the Boeing.”
The New Hotness? Taking Air Force One! Trump Names One-Time Liberal Activist Turned MAGA Supporter As State Dept. Spokesperson:
[Tammy] Bruce was formerly director of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW and worked on several liberal campaigns, including the 1990s Barbara Boxer (CA) and Dianne Feinstein (CA) Senate races, and the Clinton for president campaign. Former President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was one of the “many tipping points in Ms. Bruce’s embracing of libertarian and conservative ideals,” however.
As she says in her long resume, she saw the light:
Until she saw the conservative light, she also served on their national board of directors. A native of Los Angeles, Ms. Bruce holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Southern California, from which she graduated cum laude. Currently she is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University. Ms. Bruce notes her interest in politics and individual liberty was sparked during her childhood in part because of the work of authors Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, both of whom remain her favorite writers. A native Los Angeleno, Ms. Bruce splits her time between New York and Los Angeles.
Exit quote:
THIS GOES BEYOND FACEPALM: Biden to give George Soros, Hillary Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
OK, Biden hasn’t been the actual “president” for quite some time — I get it — but who the hell is making these recomendations to him? One can guess Obama, Jarrett and other puppetmasters, but we can’t know for sure.
Making it worse is that the Department of Justice is very squishy about the applicability of FOIA to the White House:
“By its terms, the FOIA applies to “the Executive Office of the President,” 5 U.S.C. § 552(f), but this term does not include either “the President’s immediate personal staff” or any part of the Executive Office of the President “whose sole function is to advise and assist the President.” Meyer v. Bush, 981 F.2d 1288, 1291 n.1 (D.C. Cir. 1993) (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 1380, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 14 (1974)); see also, e.g., Soucie v. David, 448 F.2d 1067, 1075 (D.C. Cir. 1971). This means, among other things, that the parts of the Executive Office of the President that are known as the “White House Office” are not subject to the FOIA; certain other parts of the Executive Office of the President are.”
Of course, we can’t expect all those “journalists” who were shocked —shocked I tell you — about Biden’s mental decline to bother looking into this.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: A Tale from the Friend Zone.
“WATCH IN WONDER AS BOB DYLAN SLAYS COMMUNISTS!” John Podhoretz Reviews A Complete Unknown:
That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if cowriter and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against “Masters of War”—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown.
The times Dylan informed us that were a-changin’ were the times in which middle-aged men felt the power to order around younger men—and in his case, those middle-aged men weren’t middle managers at IBM but New York leftists ranging from Greenwich Village intelligentsia to wealthier types raising money radical-chic style for “emergency committees” of this or that or the other stripe. A Complete Unknown is a rise-to-fame tale beginning with Dylan’s arrival on a bus in 1961, his almost instant embrace by Seeger and the world Seeger dominated—and which he almost instantly began to find suffocating.
But what was that embrace, really? The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.
It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)
The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic “Which Side Are You On?” nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the “side” in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.
A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.
Read the whole thing.
In his review of A Complete Unknown at Quillette, my former PJ Media colleague Ron Radosh adds:
I met Seeger in the early 1950s and we got to know each other well. I took lessons from him on the five-string banjo, I sang with him at a People’s Artists’ Hootenanny in New York, I sponsored his first concerts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I visited him at his home in Beacon, NY, and I kept in regular touch with him over the years. Our politics would diverge during the 1980s, and we hashed out our differences in public for much of the last decade or two of his life. A year or so before he died, we spoke on the phone, reconciled, and planned to get together in the near future. (Sadly, that reunion never took place.)
Mangold rightly celebrates Seeger’s contributions to the American story, including his strident politics and his opposition to the infamous HUAC hearings, which led to him being blacklisted by the McCarthyites he hated. Unfortunately, Mangold’s determination to portray Seeger as a secular saint means there is no mention of his apologetics for the Soviet Union, which revealed what David A. Graham once called his “disturbingly durable devotion to Communism.” As I noted in an obituary for the Weekly Standard in 2014, “His political vision, his service over the decades to the brutality of Soviet-era Stalinism and to all of the post-Cold War leftist tyrannies, was inseparable from the music he made [and] simply cannot be overlooked.” Paul Berman, whom I quoted in that piece, was even less forgiving, describing Seeger as “a fool and an idiot.”
Not that Seeger was especially fazed by this kind of criticism. “I’m sure,” he told the New York Times in 2007 when he was asked about my work, “there are more constructive things [Radosh] could do with his life.” Nevertheless, after I wrote an article for the New York Sun titled “Time for Pete Seeger to Repent,” he wrote me a letter. “I think you’re right,” it said. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” Instead, upon his return to the US, he had written a tribute to the achievements of the Soviet Union for the English edition of a Soviet magazine. The letter he sent me included a copy of a song he had written criticising Stalin, but he only performed it privately for a few friends. It was, in any case, fifty-odd years too late.
Related: Pete Seeger, America’s Most Successful Communist. Because not just anybody can say they’ve propped up every socialist dictator from Stalin and Hitler to Ho Chi Minh all the way to Saddam Hussein.
BIDEN’S HANDLERS GOING FULL LEROY JENKINS ON THEIR WAY OUT THE DOOR: Biden to present Hillary Clinton, George Soros and 17 others the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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:
SEGREGATION 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.