The N.Y. Times imagines an ‘anti-violence’ Nation of Islam
As the NY Times acknowledged, even the absurd Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned the Nation for its “deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric,” but apparently the editors thought a little nuance was in order.
To learn more about the Nation of Islam read Sucker Punch.
To help answer the question of Green’s motive in the April 2 attack, they dispatched a five-person squad of multi-ethnic reporters to find a specialist “in American Islam.” They came up with Michael Muhammad Knight, an assistant prof at the University of Central Florida.
“The Nation has a very strong anti-violence discourse that goes all the way back to the beginning,” Knight told the credulous reporters. “Consistently, if you look at the Nation, you don’t see the body count that white supremacist organizations have.” That’s it. Knight’s word is allowed to stand uncontested. The Nation doesn’t believe in violence; thus, Noah Green’s motive can remain officially “unclear.”
How Augusta National Mastered Cancel Culture
The letter ran just nine sentences and concluded threateningly, “We urge you to review your policies and practices in this regard, and open your membership to women now, so that this is not an issue when the tournament is staged next year.” Hootie Johnson decided to take the battle to the enemy. To Burk, he sent a short letter. To the news media, he sent a press release so forceful that it negated the news value of anything Burk might say in response.
“We will not be bullied, threatened, or intimidated,” Johnson wrote in the release. “We do not intend to become a trophy in their display case. There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership but that timetable will be ours and not at the point of a bayonet.” Would that Major League Baseball had a Hootie Johnson of its own!
For the larger story, read Scarlet Letters.
Did PC fear of fat shaming swell COVID count?
Despite the fact that obesity was the easily the most prevalent of those conditions and the one variable the individual could control, Fauci never pressed the issue. Indeed, Fauci did quite the
opposite. He recommended that gyms be closed and people shelter in place. You did not have be an epidemiologist to anticipate the results of that recommendation.
Last week, Dr. Gregory Marcus reported in a peer-reviewed journal that Americans who kept up their lockdown habits could easily have gained 20 pounds during the last year.
“We know that weight gain is a public health problem in the U.S. already,” Marcus told the New York Times, “so anything making it worse is definitely concerning, and shelter-in-place orders are so ubiquitous that the sheer number of people affected by this makes it extremely relevant.”
Jason Whitlock for US Senate
Whitlock would stand out in any field. In the way of firsts, Jason would probably be the first 300-pounder in the recent history of the Senate. If he enters the race, smart money has him 
winning in a walk.
Like Trump, Jason is a little rough around the edges. He will have that seriously incorrect (but very funny) Jeremy Lin tweet to deal with and some other sundry baggage as well, but Republicans are hungry for a fighter. And that Whitlock most surely is. Having gone head-to-head with LeBron James and the Chinese Communist Party, Whitlock would have no fear of Chuck Schumer, let alone the editorial writers at the New York Times.
Georgetown takes a knee for something or other
On Saturday, the entire Georgetown basketball team took a very public knee before its game to Colorado, none of whose players took a knee. On seeing this, I had to wonder what exactly it was that the team from Bill Clinton’s alma mater was protesting. Given Georgetown’s D.C. location and its well known political science programs, one might have thought that coach Patrick Ewing and his Hoyas knew something that the benighted Buffaloes from Boulder did not. If they did, it certainly wasn’t about basketball. Colorado blew Georgetown out, winning in a walk by 23. On the face of things, the Hoyas had little to be unhappy about. Barack Obama has long been a friend of the program and a fan of the coach. With his heir, Joe Biden, having reoccupied the White House, that one last bastion of white privilege was no longer in the enemy’s hands. Institutional racism could scarcely be the problem as the left controls every major institution in the country, starting with the Jesuit-run Georgetown University — which reminds me of the old joke: what is the difference between a Jesuit and a Baptist? Answer: the Baptist knows he is not Catholic.
My year of living skeptically
My Facebook postings provide something of a diary of my own response to the stupidest year in American history. From the beginning, I was determined to live my life as if I were a free 
citizen of the United States, and I largely managed to do just that.
What surprised me most about the past year was the spontaneous response to Covid mania along political lines. For the most part, my friends on the right resisted the tyranny, and my friends on the left embraced it. The young, especially the young left, proved most ovine of all. Conditioned to believe in the dubious science of climate change, the left fell hard for the equally dubious but more demanding science of COVID. A year of lived evidence proved us right, them wrong. While we partied, they sulked in solitude. Sorry, guys, but the good Dr. Fauci can’t give you that year back.
The NYT’s Dishonest Coverage of Miami’s ‘Spring Break’ Chaos
What a curious thing it must be to write for the New York Times. Your employer has cultivated an educated audience that knows less about what is really happening in America than does the average Joe, and your mandate is to keep that audience ignorant. The recent chaos in Miami Beach presented an opportunity to do just that. If the three reporters assigned to the story — “Miami Beach, Overwhelmed by Spring Break, Extends Emergency Curfew” — had spent just an hour on Google, they would know what Joe knows. To get this story past their woke editors, however, they apparently had to pretend that Joe doesn’t know what he knows.
Joe, for starters, knows that this is not the spring break Connie Francis sang about. In fact, it is not a spring break at all. Traditionally, a spring break has actually been a “break” in the middle of a student’s semester that lasts about a week, maybe two. What’s going on in Miami has lasted about six weeks and counting. If he follows local TV news, Joe knows, as one Miami station timidly acknowledged, “Miami Beach chaos isn’t all college spring breakers.” As one person wryly noted in the station’s comment section, “Wow … you just now figured out that these are not Spring Breakers? I was starting to think it was some kind of code word.”
No, Virginia, Obama’s Not Running the Show
Now that the White House has turned into an assisted living facility, people are naturally curious about which of the patient-in-chief’s caretakers is actually running the country.
Unfortunately, the curious do not seem to include the Big Media types in the position to find out. At least a few of these journalists have intimate ties with the White House. It would seem, however, that to maintain those ties, they have to pretend that President Joe Biden is still compos mentis. He is clearly not.
Journalists on the outside are free to tell the truth about Biden but are forced to speculate as to who at the White House is backstage running the show. The tea leaf readers in my Twitter feed seem convinced that, if anyone, it is former President Barack Obama. They are sure their man is Marxist enough to have managed the party’s undeniable sharp turn to the left.
I think otherwise
War is peace, freedom is slavery, cold is hot
The terms of the debate had to be changed, and that started just about the time of this energy panel. In February 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman entered a new and 
useful smear into the lexicon. “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny,” wrote Goodman. “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”
The conversation-killer “denier” promptly became a term of art. The astute reader will note, however, that Goodman was still using the term “global warming.” That would soon morph into the all-purpose “climate change.” I have tried hard, but nowhere can I find a discussion on how this semantic shift came to be. It as if no wants to admit that it even happened.
Community Dies in Darkness
Before I was cancelled
Like many of my neighbors, I consumed the paper from cover to cover. In addition to local news, I learned who was dying, who was getting married, which bands were coming to KC, which movies were showing, which cultural events were unfolding, which teams were playing and how well, and what the weather portended. At work, I had KCUR, the local NPR station, on in the background just about all day. If I didn’t watch much KCPT, the local PBS station, it was because of the station’s snootiness, not its politics. In the same vein, I watched TV news just about every night, local and national.
As I got to know the town better, I started writing the occasional article for The Star, and I almost took on a regular column. I appeared routinely on KCUR and produced a half-historical dozen documentaries for KCPT. The Star reviewed my books, and I became something of a regular on KCPT’s Week in Review. Politically, I have not changed since those days of happy “coexistence.” Hell, I manned the right half of a left-right talk radio show on KMBZ for five years in the mid-1990s without having a single door shut in my face, not even those at UMKC, where my wife was a professor.
Although I never did anything to cancel myself—no racial joke told on a hot mic, no groped intern, no self-pleasuring Zoom chat—I and people like me found ourselves being slowly cancelled. The trend started before the turn of the century, took a pause for 9-11, and accelerated during the years when Donald Trump was just another guy with a reality TV show.
