Sopranos Prequel Goes Squishy on the Sixties
Last weekend, I went to the theater to see the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. I watched with the kind of critical eye an 
astrophysicist might have brought to Star Wars.
At the time of the 1967 Newark riot, the foundational event of the movie, I was a 19-year-old living in Newark with my siblings and widowed mother. My late father had been a Newark cop, and my Uncle Bob, also a cop, was in the thick of the riot from the initial assault on the Fourth Precinct to its bloody end 26 deaths later.
Of note, too, Bob had married into a large Newark Italian family. As a kid, I spent considerable time in the family compound. I knew how that world turned. David Chase should have. An Italian American a few years older than I am, Chase created the stellar HBO series, The Sopranos, and was the creative force behind the movie. In the series, which ran from 1999-2007, there was scarcely a false note. In the movie, alas, scarcely a note rings true.
Not surprisingly, given the times we live in, race is at the heart of the movie’s misfire.
The COVID Survey That Should Have Rocked the World
In March 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the New York Times shared the results of a comprehensive survey of 35,000 Americans done by Gallup and Franklin Templeton. True to form, the Times refused to face the survey’s epic implications.
The Times started pulling punches in the headline, “Covid’s Partisan Errors: Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks — and Democrats tend to exaggerate them.” This equivocation papered over the real news hook of the story, namely that health officials and their media enablers scared policy makers, especially in blue states, into making catastrophic, fear-based misjudgments.
“To many liberals, Covid has become another example of the modern Republican Party’s hostility to facts and evidence,” wrote reporter David Leonhardt, unaware that he just delivered a laugh line. In assessing the GOP worldview, Leonhardt, like most of his media colleagues, saw hostility in just about every Republican gesture.
First they came for Chick-fil-A …
Big Brother is watching what you eat
In 2023, after 10 years of broken promises and backroom deals, Kansas City International (KCI) will open a spanking new terminal that few air travelers really wanted.
To get the deal done, airport boosters made all sorts of unseemly concessions to businesses claiming to be women and minority-owned. As happens everywhere, these deals added considerable cost to the final product, but zero value.
Last week, a third partner in the cartel of the “marginalized” that runs America – the LGBTQs – weighed in and proved that its wheels can squeak as loudly as those of its intersectional partners.
The Little Café That Almost Could
A recent story out of Kansas City, the town in which I live, suggests just how eager the Left is to control our lives, right down to the food we eat. The story involves a friendly hole-in-the-wall café whose brave proprietor had had enough.
Another defiant cafe in NY
A little background is in order. In 2008, I somehow emerged as the public face of the opposition to a ballot measure that called for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Kansas City. What made this unusual, and what made me an effective spokesman, was that I never smoked. Well, not that effective—my side lost the election, narrowly.
My side, as I saw it, was not pro-smoking, but pro-freedom. I argued that no law prevented entrepreneurs from banning smoking in their establishments, and no law forced anyone to eat or drink at a place where others smoked. Indeed, once I saw the election results, I half-regretted not having opened a non-smoking restaurant of my own.
Unfortunately, freedom is a much scarcer commodity today than in 2008. Back then, health officials used their bully pulpit to persuade citizens. These officials had one set of solid facts on their side, namely that smoking is dangerous, and one set of dubious assertions, namely that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. In 2008, citizens were allowed to weigh the evidence.
The Woke Wage War on Red State Frats
I
n the first few weeks of the 2021 semester, without the major media noticing, startling similar protests involving thousands of students have erupted on at least three major state university campuses — the Universities of Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. In each case, an alleged sexual assault by a fraternity member has triggered these “largely peaceful protests,” but in no case has the accused been arrested.
Although To Kill a Mockingbird remains among the most read books by college students, the protestors seem to have taken as role model not Atticus, but the racist vigilantes swarming the courthouse. Mao’s Red Guard would envy the students’ collective indifference to due process. A friend who stumbled onto the initial Kansas University protest told me, “It was madness, utter mob justice, a la Mississippi lynch mob, circa 1935.”
The protestors are largely white, female, and naive. Most, I suspect, think theirs is a legitimate protest against a real problem. To be sure, sexual assault is evil and inexcusable.
But then so too is its exploitation. Christina Hoff Sommers has described these anti-male protests as one of “those panics where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish — and otherwise sensible people abandon their critical facilities.”
How MAGA anti-vaxxers became BLM-backed antiracists
Facebook blocked this article and sent would-be readers to an approved Covid site.
How could a leftist Twitter troll not salivate over a New York Daily News story headlined, “Tourists assault NYC restaurant hostess after she asked for proof of vaccination.”
The opening of the story promised even more ammunition: “A trio of Texas women beat up a hostess at an Upper West Side restaurant after she asked for their COVID-19 vaccination cards, police said Friday.”
This Sept.17 story seemed to have all the elements of a woke morality play. Texas anti-vaxxers, surely MAGA, gang up on innocent New York City hostess just trying to protect the public from the killer virus.
How Durham Bombshell Made a ‘Birther’ Out of Me
Upon reading special counsel John Durham’s 27-page indictment of attorney Michael Sussman, I found myself asking, “Is there anything
New book available everywhere.
Perkins Coie lawyers would not do to keep their Democrat clients in power?” Thanks to Durham, we know they launched a cyberwar against candidate Donald Trump that makes their work on the Steele dossier seem half-hearted. What we need to know is whether their work in producing Barack Obama’s birth certificate was any more legit than these other misadventures.
As to Sussman, he stands accused of lying to the FBI, “to wit, on or about September 19, 2016, the defendant stated to the General Counsel of the FBI that he was not acting on behalf of any client in conveying particular allegations concerning a Presidential candidate, when in truth, and in fact, and as the defendant well knew, he was acting on behalf of specific clients, namely, Tech Executive-I and the Clinton Campaign.”
Durham could have summed up the charge in a page. Instead, he spent 27 pages outlining the skullduggery behind the deep state war on Donald Trump. According to Durham, Sussman worked with at least three high-tech firms, two university researchers, and several media outlets on a cyber smear campaign against candidate Trump that dwarfed the Steele dossier both in scope and in sophistication.
The racially perverse ‘as a Texan’ Twitter trend
Women named Tyonnie Keshay Rankin, Kaeita Nkeenge Rankin, and Sally Rechelle Lewis are not likely consumers of right-wing anti-vaxx propaganda.
A student of the media looking for a textbook case of the perverse manipulation of the news by Big Tech and Big Media had to look no further than the coverage of a Thursday evening incident at Carmine’s restaurant in New York City.
The headlines from the incident were chum to get the Twitter trolls snapping:
Texas Tourists in NYC Attack Restaurant Hostess After Being Asked for Vaccination Proof
Caught on video: Texas woman attacked New York hostess after being asked for proof of vaccination
Texas tourists visiting NYC assault restaurant hostess who asked for vaccination proof
True to form, the trolls took the media bait, the tastiest morsel, of course, being the word “Texas.” With a lot of help from Twitter, Inc., the phrase “As a Texan” was trending on Saturday morning. Woke Texans—or fake woke Texans—weighed in by the net full.
Now woke universities permit ‘lynch mob’ violence
If a psychology professor wanted to show his class how a deeply propagandized people can turn violent against a member of a pariah caste, he/she/zhe should have recorded the events that took place at the University of Kansas Monday night.
Atticus was once the students’ role model. Now the mob is.
It was Mob Psychology Lab 101. The pariah was/is male, now in the clear minority at just about every university. We have to presume he is white. If otherwise, there would have been excuses, not accusations, let alone an attack on a fraternity house.
The prevailing propaganda, absurd on its face, is that a “rape culture” terrorizes the American campus. The result of this toxic mix was an all too predictable mayhem.
The Unsung Death of ‘My Body, My Choice’
As late as 3:43 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, the long-lived mantra of the pro-abortion movement, “My Body, My Choice,” was still showing signs of life. It was at that time, that the White House published the remarks made by Vice-President Kamala Harris at a “Reproductive Rights” roundtable.
“The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies,” said Ms. Harris.
“And, needless to say,” Harris continued much too quotably, “the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.”
So far is Harris out of the White House power loop that she may not have known the mantra had less than two hours to live.
