Where were the feminists when Kim Potter needed them?
“Growing up, I was told that a woman cannot pursue a man’s job,” a woman says in an FBI recruitment video. “But I want to prove them wrong. Now that I’m here one of my primary goals is to help in the FBI effort to recruit more diversity, more women.”
For the last 30 years or more, under pressure from feminist groups, local police forces across the nation have been doing what the FBI is doing now: adjusting their standards to recruit more women. As the case of Brooklyn, Minnesota, police officer Kim Potter proved, however, feminists are quick to abandon the very women their propaganda has helped recruit.
The Left (Unwittingly?) Spoofs Itself in Don’t Look Up
The rumor that the Netflix film, “Don’t Look Up,” is an allegory about climate change is true. Writer/director Adam McKay, a self-declared democratic socialist and Bernie fan, has admitted as much. In fact, McKay calls climate change “the biggest story in 66 million years. It’s the biggest story in the history of upright apes.” That much acknowledged, my skeptical friends on the right have found the film much more amusing than those on the left. My only question is whether McKay is Bernie Bro’ enough to have intended that outcome.
Spoiler alert: “Don’t Look Up” tells the story of a planet-killing comet hurtling towards earth. After watching the first ten minutes of it, I thought it a comedy, a pretty amusing one at that. At Christmas dinner, my Democratic friends assured me it wasn’t a comedy and warned me not to finish it before going to bed. I did anyhow and smiled all the way through to its laugh-out-loud epilogue. Yes, the movie is a comedy. It is scary, I suppose, to those like New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis who believe that the future of the planet is “too terrifying” to contemplate and its inhabitants “too numb, dumb, [and] powerless” to amuse. “If you weep,” writes Dargis, “it may not be from laughing.”
‘Roots,’ ‘Dreams,’ and the Unequal Punishment of Fraud
A week before Christmas, on the occasion of Alex Haley’s centennial year, Michael Patrick Hearn penned a
lengthy tribute to his one-time Hamilton College prof. The first 4,000 words of the New York Times article Hearn fulfilled the promise of its title, as Hearn recounted in loving detail how “Alex Haley Taught America About Race — and a Young Man How to Write.”
Only about 500 words before the article’s completion does the Times reader learn there were problems with Haley’s 1976 “magnum opus”— Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Writes Hearn, much too matter-of-factly, “Haley and Doubleday might have saved themselves a lot of trouble had they acknowledged from the first that their big best seller was based on a true story.” This is Hearn’s gentle way of saying the book is a fraud. If additional irony were needed, Hearn wrote his paean to Haley under the Times rubric, “Nonfiction.”
Haley, in fact, stands accused of three counts of literary fraud. He passed off fiction as fact. He passed off another’s work as his own. And he plagiarized. Only one popular writer in recent times has faced comparable accusations. That is Barack Obama, author of his own imagined family saga, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. More on Obama in a minute.
First they came for the muffin eaters …
I suspect that in the early stages of any great political purge, the intended victims are tempted to laugh off the ham-handedness of their oppressors. Such is the likely reaction of any sane person to the declaration of new COVID mandates by Chicago mayor and Beetlejuice impersonator Lori Lightfoot.
Said Lightfoot this week with an impressively straight face, “If you’re going into that coffee shop to pick-up and go, you don’t need to show proof. But if you’re gonna linger, you’re gonna eat that muffin, you’re gonna sit down with your laptop, you gotta show proof of vaccination.”
Lightfoot actually specified the time a muffin eater could linger, namely “less than 10 minutes.” Pity the poor barista who has to clock the linger time of the patrons and then presumably call 911 if they linger longer than Lori Lightfoot likes.
What Spielberg Gets (Surprisingly) Right in West Side Story
I had serious reservations about the Steven Spielberg version of the film classic West Side Story. Rumors of
wokeness haunted the new movie from the first casting call through to its dismal opening weekend. I expected to wince throughout, but Spielberg did something brave and unexpected. He gave the Jets a rationale for their existence and their resistance.
The 1961 original did not. As a 14-year-old living in a “transitional” neighborhood very much like the one the Jets and Sharks inhabited and not far away, I fully identified with the white gang, the Jets. My friends, even my black friends, did as well. Despite our affection for our homies, we had a grudging respect for the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks. Their guys were arguably cooler, their girls hotter.
Missed by liberal observers, then and now, is that vestigial urban whites saw Puerto Ricans, not as another “race,” but as another ethnic group, no more alien than Italians were to Irish or Irish were to Germans in generations past. Like Tony, we would definitely date their girls if they’d have us. The absurd racial delineation for “Hispanics” would come later.
With Biden on climate, ‘hide the decline’ has double meaning
The damning phrase that emerged from the Climategate scandal of 2009 was “hide the decline.” At that time, the “decline” referred to inconvenient tree ring data that challenged the global warming mania.
In 2021, the phrase “hide the decline” takes on new meaning. Now, the “decline” in question is the obvious erosion of President Joe Biden’s gray matter. This past weekend presented the media with a perfect storm of climate fraud and gray matter slippage following the devastating “tornadoes” in Kentucky. There was much decline to hide.
I put “tornadoes” in quotes because apparently they go by some other name now. In September 2021, Biden visited the Somerset County Emergency Management Training Center in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, in the wake of Hurricane Ida.
The Hole in the Heart of RFK Jr.’s Extraordinary Book
Before getting to the “hole” in RFK Jr.’s new book, I would like to say that his brutal smackdown of the Dr. Anthony Fauci–Bill Gates vaccine oligarchy, The Real Anthony Fauci, is arguably the century’s most important book, and a page-turner on top of that. Buy it. Read it. If you choose not to, avoid holiday arguments with anyone who has. You will lose.
The book has real heart. There is no doubting Kennedy’s passion and sincerity. That heart, however, has a hole. I am inclined to trace the hole to the fact that RFK Jr. is, after all, a Kennedy. He is the son of a martyred father, the nephew of a martyred uncle, and also, unfortunately, the nephew of a self-serving U.S. senator who self-served much too long. On health issues, RFK Jr. speaks glowingly and frequently of Uncle Ted. That might be forgivable, at least under Cuomo family rules, had young Bobby not followed the lethal path his uncle blazed for their family, their party, and the nation.
The crackpots were right: COVID is a racket
Although I will put my COVID-skeptic credentials up against anyone’s – I tried to organize a public protest on day one of the lockdown – I confess to having seen Big Health’s actions as merely misguided. I was wrong.
The “crackpots” were right. The Big Health involvement did not progress along the Eric Hoffer spectrum from a good cause to a movement with benefits to a racket. It started as a racket, a massive racket that may go down as a Mao-worthy crime against humanity.
As the princeling of America’s reigning Democratic dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has his blind spots, but his dissection of Big Health’s war, not on COVID, but on those who are actually warring with COVID, is this century’s must-read book.
Can the Jimmy V Foundation Survive CRT?
Big Brother is counting.
Overcoming my hard-earned animus towards the network, I muted the commercials and watched chunks of the ACC-Big 10 challenge on ESPN and its sister networks this past week. I trust basketball fans will understand why this long-suffering Purdue alum permitted himself this particular indulgence.
Historically, the one cause I never begrudged ESPN was its work with the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research. The foundation, started in 1993 by ESPN and the late basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, has since awarded nearly $300 million in research grants. Those who have not seen the dying Valvano’s speech at the 1993 Espy Awards need to. Not since Lou Gehrig has a sports figure made such a stirring farewell.
If I thought, however, that not even ESPN could taint a cause as noble as the Jimmy V Foundation, I underestimated ESPN. During the games the announcers proudly discussed how money donated to the Jimmy V Foundation would be funneled to research designed “to close the gap in cancer disparities experienced by minority patients.“
Will KC’s new ‘Racial Equity Office’ tackle the Chiefs?
“The Kansas City, Missouri, City Council,” reads a much too proud press release, “has accepted a $129,511
grant awarded by Health Forward Foundation to support the establishment of an Office of Racial Equity and Reconciliation and to establish an Equity Task Force to help the city achieve racial equity.”
As defined and widely understood, “Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” By contrast, “Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities.”
“Equity,” of course, is part of the DEI package – diversity, equity and inclusion. What those three words means in concert is anyone’s guess. It may not be coincidence, however, that “DEI” is Latin for “gods.”
