"We Are The Cavalry"

On November 10, Bari Weiss delivered the Barbara K Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society.  Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, formerly worked at the New York Times until being driven out for dissenting from some tenets of the Equity Faith.  Most of her views remain those of a traditional progressive and I can't imagine that at the start of 2020 she would ever have thought she'd be giving this lecture to this audience.

Some excerpts, beginning with her recitation of academic reaction to the Hamas attacks in which she correctly identifies the underlying cause as more than just traditional antisemitism.  

 

What could possibly explain this?

The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7 were Jews. And that antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. And that in every generation someone rises up to kill us. “They tried to wipe us out, they failed, let’s eat” as the old Jewish joke goes.

But that is not the whole answer. Because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom. 

When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. 

It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.

It was twenty years ago when I began to encounter the ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was twenty years ago, when I was a college student, that I started writing about a nameless, then-niche worldview that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and postnationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct” just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within. 

 

Over the past two decades, I saw this inverted worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved beyond the quad to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and our elementary schools. 

It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.

It replaces basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. 

If you want to understand how it could be that the editor of the Harvard Law Review could physically intimidate a Jewish student or how a public defender in Manhattan recently spent her evening tearing down posters of kidnapped children, it is because they believe it is just. 

Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are “people of color.”

That baby? He is a colonizer first and a baby second. That woman raped to death? Shame it had to come to that, but she is a white oppressor. 

In recognizing allies, I’ll be an example. I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know there are some in this room who do not believe my marriage should have been legal.

I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings—not cultures—are created equal and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values are worth fighting for—and that is the priority of the day. 

 

Time to defend our values—the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world—without hesitation or apology. 

The leftist intellectual Sidney Hook, who broke with the Communists, and called his memoir Out of Step, used to implore those around him to “always answer an accusation or a charge” to not let falsehood stand unchallenged. 

We have let far too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction as a result of fear or politesse. 

No more.

Do not bite your tongue. Do not tremble. Do not go along with little lies. Speak up. Break the wall of lies. Let nothing go unchallenged. 

Our enemies’ failure is not assured and there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry. We are the last line of defense. Our civilization depends on us.

 

There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails. 

So let’s get up. Get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of—and for—our lives.

 

You can read the entire speech here.

Or watch it. She begins about 11 minutes in to the video.

 

Who Are We?

Yesterday the Louis D Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans For Fairness In Education (and its individual members, including two Berkeley Law School professors) filed a lawsuit in Federal Court against the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Law School, and the Regents of the University of California.  The complaint alleges the defendants are in violations of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and asks the Court to issue injunctions requiring the University to enforce its own policies regarding discrimination and to end the hostile environment towards Jews on the Berkeley campus.

I can't opine on the legal merits but there are three aspects that caught my eye:

First is the nature of the allegations, many of which have been previously reported:

In spite of the recognition of anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, no fewer
than 23 Berkeley Law student organizations have enacted policies to discriminate against and
exclude Jewish students, faculty, and scholars. For example:
• To be a member of Women of Berkeley Law, the Queer Caucus at Berkeley, or the
Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Jewish students must accede to
the groups’ support of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which
seeks to dismantle the modern State of Israel;
• In order to volunteer to provide pro bono legal services through a number of
Berkeley Law Legal Services organizations, Jewish students must undergo a
“Palestine 101” training program that emphasizes the illegitimacy of the State of
Israel;
• And to speak to any of these student organizations, invited speakers must first
repudiate Zionism under a bylaw that prohibits speakers who hold Zionist views
(the “Exclusionary Bylaw”). In fact, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and
Justice, goes one step further, prohibiting Zionists not only from speaking to its
members but from publishing in its pages.

Second, the plaintiffs seek to use the University's own policies regarding discrimination by student organizations.  Interestingly, policies like this have been used at several academic institutions by leftists against Christian student religious groups, to force them to admit non-Christians to membership.

Third, and more significantly, is that the student organizations at the heart of the complaint because of their actions are not defendants in the lawsuit.  An argument they would surely raise if they were defendants (and they might seek to intervene as amici) is that the complaint improperly conflates Zionism with Judaism.  Rhetorically, they will ask if they would be forced to admit or engage with white supremacists and, if not, why should they be forced to do this with Zionists who are just another type of supremacist? And here's where things get tricky with definitions.  Remember that white people, including Jews, are, by definition, white supremacists.  One doesn't have to be George Wallace, Bull Connor, or David Duke to be a racist or white supremacist if you are white.  Unless you are actively antiracist you are a racist.  To be antiracist you must do the equivalent of what Jewish students are being asked at Berkeley - support the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement which calls for the dismantling of Israel.  As with Jews, these organizations will not engage with whites unless they are antiracist and support all the precepts of DEI; nuance and distinguishing between good and bad arguments and assertions is not allowed and if you persist you will be cast into the darkness.

It will be interesting to see how the arguments go around equating Jews with Zionism.  You can read the argument by the plaintiffs in the complaint.  We are already seeing how the defendants may respond with the pathetic Law School Dean, Erwin Chermerinsky who just two weeks ago wrote of his recent experiences with antisemitism at the Law School:

Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be “to get rid of the Zionists.” I have heard several times that I have been called “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” which echoes of antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.

Chermerinsky also denounced the very actions taken by the student organizations referenced in the complaint.  But now he tells us the complaint, "paints a picture of the law school that is stunningly inaccurate".  For more on the Dean read Equality Or Equity: Which Side Are You On?

As a practical matter, that the anti-Zionism positions are an effective ban on most Jewish students participating in the organizations and creating a hostile law school environment is clear; what the legal implications are less so.

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, what is happening at Berkeley Law School is not much different from what is occurring at many American law schools at which traditions of equal protection under the law, due process, and individual constitutional protections are being subordinated to the new creed of DEI.  A generation of lawyers is being trained to regard the constitution as racist trash, and instructed on how to effectively dismantle it.

The Wrong Approach

Last week the Jewish Insider carried an article about a bipartisan group of Congressional lawmakers calling for additional funding to combat antisemitism.  Here are the key components:

The letter specifically calls for funding in excess of the administration’s $360 million request for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which funds security improvements at religious institutions, and in excess of its $178 million request for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which helps enforce protections for Jewish students on campus.

The lawmakers also offered support for funding for K-12 Holocaust and antisemitism education programs, Department of Justice hate crimes grants and the offices of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues at the Department of State.

Comments on the specifics and then on the problem with the overall approach:

I support security improvements at religious institutions, but how, and to whom, will those funds be controlled and distributed?

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is a disgrace and should be defunded.  It is fully captured by DEI and will give the minimum lip service to antisemitism needed to keep Congress off its back.

Before more funding for K-12 Holocaust and antisemitism education programs, shouldn't we first do a review of what's apparently gone wrong with decades of Holocaust education in our schools?   Throwing more money to support something that has failed is not a solution.

The real issue is that this particular coalition will never recognize the underlying problem - DEI in all its guises.  Antisemitism is integral to the ideology of DEI, but because DEI is also an assault on whiteness it is untouchable for many politicians.  Until that is recognized any monies thrown towards the educational establishment and the federal bureaucrats supporting it will be wasted or, even worse, used to support DEI (never underestimate the wiliness of bureaucrats).(1)  This proposal is the type of thinking that Otter in Animal House called "a really futile and stupid gesture".

For more on this topic read Equality Or Equity: Which Side Are You On?

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(1) I continue to be surprised at the lack of curiosity by the elite institutions and large municipalities where we've seen the worst eruptions of support for Hamas about what might have prompted this or, as old-fashioned liberal Michael Schermer recently wrote,  "Why are the BLM supporters, climate extremists, academic feminists, and trans activists so quick to side with Hamas? Why are those who champion women’s reproductive rights so quick to align themselves with a Hamas-controlled Gaza where women lack the right to drive, let alone get an abortion?"

Nobody's Fool

I've written of this 1994 Paul Newman film before, set at Thanksgiving in a declining small town in upstate New York.  My friend Titus Techera, who did an American Cinema Foundation podcast on the movie, has now published a piece in the Washington Free Beacon.  Some excerpts which capture the essence of the film:

Thanksgiving is a very American holiday, a family holiday, but people don’t go to church much these days, so it’s not exactly about faith. It’s easier to see Thanksgiving clearly if you look at a character like Sully, who seems to have nothing for which to give thanks, being a loser. That’s what Nobody’s Fool is all about. Sully gets a second chance, to grow old by becoming a grandfather and a father and putting aside his suffering. All his anger turns to comedy, and he even learns to laugh at himself a little. His small success is also America’s success; it’s somehow about learning to deal with disappointment.

Newman makes the quaintness as well as the suffering of North Bath come to life. What starts as a caricature of Tocqueville’s New England township turns into a community, where people help each other, if grudgingly, and gather for ceremonies like a funeral, though some of them have to be let out of jail for the occasion. The bitterness of losing jobs and hope for the future is sweetened by the families and friendships we see tested and proved in the story. And Sully turns out to be almost a leader, not just a malcontent.

Opposites Attract

Rosalyn Carter passed a few days ago at the age of 96.  Husband Jimmy is hanging in there at 99.  They were married for 77 years.  I found this excerpt from a book they wrote both charming and right on point regarding different styles of writing.

In his memoir A FULL LIFE: REFLECTIONS AT NINETY, Jimmy Carter described “the worst threat” he and Rosalynn ever experienced to their marriage. It was when they tried to write a book together: pic.twitter.com/LnU6VCD0UI

— Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) November 20, 2023

Mood Music

Chris Isaak, Wicked Game.

The world was on fire and no one could save me but you
It's strange what desire will make foolish people do
I never dreamed that I'd love somebody like you
And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you

That boy can sing!  And the sinuous guitar riff is something else.  And all so casual.

Satchmo, Ruggles & Abe

Today marks 160 years since the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg and of President Abraham Lincoln's little speech.  Here are recitations by two glorious Americans, Louis Armstrong and Charles Laughton, the first born in Jim Crow New Orleans and who became a proud symbol of our country, the latter born in England, and who became an American citizen.

In The Archivist, we learned about Louis Armstrong's collection of tapes, recording whatever caught his broad interests.  In 1958, on a tape that included music from Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, and a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope single, Armstrong recorded what he wrote as "Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.  Narrated (by Louis Satchmo Armstrong)".  You can listen to it here.

Armstrong always maintained he was born on July 4.  While many researchers dispute this, I'm sticking with Louis.  

In 1935, Laughton played the role of an English butler transported to backwoods America in Ruggles of Red Gap.  As he learns about America he decides to strike out on his own.  This is the famous scene in which he recites the address.

Speaking of Laughton, I must recommend viewing the only film he directed, The Night of the Hunter.  Once seen, you will never forget it.

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Geese In The Creek

 Claude Monet from 1874.  Think I'll just imagine myself here.

More On Israel And Gaza

In October, I wrote two posts on Israel/Gaza and one on the implications of the support on American campuses and elsewhere for Hamas.  Rather than do continued posts on those topics, for the past month,  I've been adding additional material and doing some editing on an ongoing basis on each post, particularly on the Equality/Equity post which has a lot of new material, including many additional footnotes, so I'm going to repost the links.  From here on I don't expect to add or edit more.  If I have anything further to say on the subject it will be in new posts.

Israel/Gaza

Into Gaza

The Right Gesture

On America

The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?

The Archivist

A sweet article from The Nation on Louis Armstrong and his legacy.  The photo above is from a collage made by Armstrong for the cover of one of the many boxes used to store his hundreds of hours of tapes.

The author, Ethan Iverson, writes about Armstrong's tapes:

Already an inveterate letter writer, Armstrong started recording home audiotapes in 1950. On the road during that decade, doing hundreds of one-nighters a year, Armstrong toted around a custom-made steamer trunk with two tape recorders and a record player. He would record anybody and everybody while goofing off in his hotel room.

While he slowed down the relentless taping for a time in the 1960s, Armstrong came back for a last act from 1969 until his death in 1971, partly because Lucille bought him two state-of-the-art Tandberg reel-to-reel machines. Armstrong spent hours and hours in his study, creating roughly 200 mix tapes on the Tandbergs and writing down annotated playlists.

The total collection in the Louis Armstrong Archive numbers more than 60,000 items, including books, records, tapes, photos, letters, and scores.  

Iverson provides a warm appreciation of Armstrong's place in American musical history.  More than a place actually, Louis was a pivotal figure.  Read the article and enjoy some time with the great man.

I visited his home, now a museum, in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, a few years ago and highly recommend it.  Earlier this year, the Louis Armstrong Center opened across the street so another visit may be in order.

I also learned that in 2012 the only film of an Armstrong recording session was discovered in a storage facility.  From 1959, it's I Ain't Got Nobody.  Accompanying musicians are Danny Barcelona (drums), Mort Herbert (bass), Billy Kyle (piano), Trummy Young (trombone), and Peanuts Hucko (clarinet).  The song was composed in 1915 by Roger Graham and Spencer Williams.  You can find all my Armstrong posts by clicking on the Armstrong tag at the bottom.

"Carryin Fire"

At the end of No Country For Old Men, Sheriff Bell remembers two dreams he had after his father died.  This is the second:

 . . . it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night.  Goin through this pass in the mountains.  It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin.  Never said nothin.  He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside it.  About the color of the moon.  And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.  And then I woke up.

In What Is To Come, Sheriff Bell reflects on the changes in the world, changes that have led him to retire after 36 years because he feels overmatched.  His description of the dream as the novel ends can be interpreted in two ways.  First, as an acknowledgement that however hopeless the fight for right appears, there is always some hope (as symbolized by the fire made by his father) that should motivate us to continue.  Whether we succeed is not material.  The second is that the while the dream conveys this, Bell's final words "And then I woke up", means he woke up from the dream's delusion that there is some hope, some light and comfort ahead, from the violence and randomness that exists in the world.  I prefer the first interpretation.

Tommy Lee Jones performance in the movie, and in particular, the sound and cadence of his voice, played in my head as I read the parts of the novel concerning Sheriff Bell.  Although Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh have the flashier roles in the book and movie, it is Sheriff Bell who is the main character, the only one who reflects and changes in the course of both.  After all, the title is No Country For Old Men.

There are two phrases we hear frequently these days:

"The right side of history"

"The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice"

Let me mash up the two and give a version which, I believe, is more accurate:

"The arc of history bends towards violence" 

Any examination of history leads to that conclusion.  History does not have a right or wrong side.  But what we must treasure are those brief periods of respite from that arc.  We must appreciate what it takes to disrupt that arc.  It is not an easy task.  We often fail, but it is worth trying.  Too often, we take for granted those periods of relative peace, stability, and security, and underestimate their value and the achievement of those who helped bring about those times.  And, most of all, to value and love our families and friends, who despite the turmoil and troubles of the world, are the refuges where we can provide support to each other.

In No Country For Old Men, Sheriff Bell comes to question the world around him and the assumptions he has based his life upon, but the one thing that never falters from start to finish is his love, faith, and reliance on his wife Loretta, a much larger character in the book than in the movie.

What Is To Come

I think we are all of us ill prepared for what is to come and I don't care what shape it takes.  And whatever comes my guess is that it will have small power to sustain us.  These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn't even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you.  But what if you'd told em it was their own grandchildren?

Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way.  And it dont tell you nothin about how it's fixin to get, neither.  Part of it was I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just dont feel that way no more.  I don't know what I do feel like.  I feel like them old people I was talkin about.  Which aint goin to get better neither.  I'm being asked to stand for something that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  Asked to believe in somethin that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  That's the problem.  I failed at it even when I did.  Now I've seen it held to the light.

Seen any number of believers fall away.  I've been forced to look at it again and I've been forced to look at myself.  For better or worse I do not know.  I dont know that I would even advise you to throw in with me, and I never had them sorts of doubts before.  If I'm wiser in the ways of the world it come at a price.

County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy's, No Country For Old Men.  The prophetic novel was written in 2005, set in 1980, and descriptive of today's world.

Stars Fell On Alabama

 It's been a while since we've heard from Frank Sinatra.  This is from his peak in the 50s, Stars Fell On Alabama, music composed by Frank Perkins, lyrics by Mitchell Parish, and featuring a Nelson Riddle arrangement.  The song was apparently inspired by a November 12, 1833 meteor shower in Alabama though what the connection was with Perkins, born in Salem, Massachusetts, and Parish, real name Michael Hyman Pashelinsky and born in Lithuania, I don't know.

This was the THC Daughter's favorite song when she was little so it brings back wonderful memories anytime I listen to it.

The Robust Alliance

Amazing headline and story from NBC News:

How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda 

Below are some excerpts with my annotations:

The lead paragraph:

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

My Comment:  The entire article is carefully written to give the impression that this is all about foreign propaganda.  It's not.  The revelations, from the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, testimony from Zuckerberg and others at Facebook, investigations by House and Senate committees, and information uncovered through the use of FOIA and litigation, is that what was going on was far beyond thwarting foreign misinformation.  It involved monitoring social media by American citizens and included attempts, many successful, by social media and tech companies to censor legal speech, including factually accurate information.  

The better title would be "How Concerned Americans Exposed The 'Quiet Coalition' Seeking To Suppress Speech".

That this article comes from another major media outlet is telling.  NBC and its media compatriots are all about censoring information from its fellow Americans that does not comport with the desired narrative.

One of the authors, Ken Dilanian, is known to have submitted articles in the past to the CIA for its approval prior to publication and he promoted every false story during the heyday of the Russia Collusion Hoax.  NBC is acting here simply as a pass through of the desired narrative promoted by the Intelligence Community (IC) and the federal bureaucracy.

“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”

My Comment: Good!  The reference to an injunction is explained below.  Suffice to say the injunction was prompted by a Federal Court finding that the administration was interfering with the free speech rights of American citizens!  It had nothing to do with foreign propaganda.

Beyond the FBI briefings, other coordination efforts have folded after facing pressure from conservatives. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans, has halted its outreach to Silicon Valley, and the Department of Homeland Security has shuttered a board designed to coordinate its anti-disinformation programs. 

Some politicians are sounding the alarm. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said efforts to stop foreign manipulation of U.S. politics are well within the government’s remit. 

“I understand we don’t want to interdict constitutionally protected speech, but what is constitutionally protected speech?” he said. “Certainly foreign agents don’t have constitutionally protected speech because they’re not subject to our Constitution. I presume bots don’t have constitutionally protected speech. American citizens do.”

My Comment:  Once again, Romney allows himself to be used by his enemies.  The lawsuits and investigations have to do with American citizens, not foreign propaganda.  Let's take a look at how suppression of free speech actually worked.  The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a progressive foreign policy shop, started an initiative called Hamilton 68 after the election in 2016.  Under the direction of former IC personnel, and with the support of elements still within the IC. Hamilton 68 tried to persuade Twitter to censor what it characterized as Russian bot accounts.  With the release of the Twitter files, we now know that Twitter itself found that only 36 of 644 claimed bots were Russian, with most of the rest legitimate accounts by American citizens - and this at a time when Twitter was very active censoring non-Democrat accounts!  Nonetheless, Hamilton 68's "findings" garnered a lot of publicity from a media eager to support the Russia Collusion narrative (Rachel Maddow being one of the most frequent citers of Hamilton 68).

These partnerships between government, corporations and legal and academic researchers were praised after 2020 as a crucial part of ensuring a secure election. 

My Comment: Yes, by the very institutions determined to suppress any information unfavorable to Democrats and the federal bureaucracy.  It's a self-reinforcing circle designed to create and sustain narratives.

Many of them focused on Twitter and Facebook’s decision to temporarily limit the reach of a New York Post story about Biden’s son, Hunter. Published a few weeks before the election, to the tech platforms it had echoes of when Russia leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg said FBI statements about certain threats fit the pattern of the Hunter Biden story, both later said the agency didn’t specifically say the Biden emails were a foreign intelligence campaign. Digital forensics experts have verified that at least some of those emails were authentic but much remains unknown about the origins of the files.

My Comment:  Talk about "ensuring a secure election"!  This paragraph is written in the most convoluted possible way to minimize what happened.  This is all about the IC gaming the system along with a press favorably disposed towards it.  Notice the "FBI statements about certain threats" phrase.  That's a reference to the fact the FBI knew the Hunter Biden story was about to break and sent an agent from its Silicon Valley office to meet with FB and other companies beforehand to give them enough hints to trigger the ban and make sure the story was suppressed once it became public.  As soon as the New York Post reported on the laptop, 51 former intelligence officials issued a statement saying the story had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", a statement coordinated by Anthony Blinken on behalf of the Biden campaign. That was enough for most of the press to ignore the story and for many social media outlets to ban reference to it.  Only well after Biden had been elected did it become permissible to acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop and its contents, which raised questions not only about Hunter Biden, but what his father knew of, or possibly derived financial benefit from, his son's Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese connections.  Once the authenticity of the laptop became evident, 50 of the 51 officials initially declined to comment.  The one who did respond told the press that their statement merely said the story had "hallmarks of Russian disinformation", not that the story actually was Russian disinformation, and it wasn't his fault if people can't read.  That's okay since it served its purpose, signaling to a press predisposed to favor Biden that it was okay to suppress the story. Since then, James Clapper, the former DNI who also signed the letter, stated that he objected to the way the press covered it.  But Clapper, at the time a CNN analyst, never said anything publicly at the time.  He's just messing with us.  They knew all along and yet were willing to do anything to kill the story.

Last year, the attorneys general offices of Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that federal government outreach to tech companies about content on their platform — including law enforcement tips about election integrity and Covid-19 — constituted intimidation and a violation of First Amendment protections to free speech.

My Comment: This is the lawsuit which prompted the injunction mentioned earlier.  Along with the two state plaintiffs, three healthcare professionals are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  The three are represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization founded by Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger with the mission of taking on the unconstitutional administrative state which has become a 4th branch of the Federal government, an organization to which I am a donor.  Notice the NBC wording here. When they want to denigrate the basis of the lawsuit they use the word "outreach".  Sounds innocent, doesn't it?  But at the top of the article when they want to emphasize the importance of what the government is doing they refer to the "robust alliance" and "quiet coalition" working together "to thwart", and then later to the "symbiotic relationship between the government and social media".  In fact, the basis for the injunction was the Court finding that discovery had revealed there was a coordinated effort involving the government to suppress speech, including, by the way, factually accurate statements about Covid-19.  The case is all about domestic suppression of free speech, not foreign propaganda.

The NBC story is simply propaganda and misinformation designed to mislead the public and influence elections.  Perhaps we should complain to the Intelligence Community or Special Counsel Smith!

Two related points.

As more information has come out about the collaboration between the IC and social media, some supporters of that coordination have pointed out that it began in the Trump Administration.  Yes, it did which highlights one of the fundamental problems with the federal bureaucracy has it has grown over the decades.  An opposition party, and make no mistake, the bureaucracy sees the GOP as the opposition, will have great difficulty controlling the administrative state.  In other words, the people's elected representatives will be undermined by the bureaucracy if it does not approve of a proposed policy.  In the case of the Trump administration this problem was exacerbated by a Chief Executive ignorant of government operations and not interested in learning, compounded by his short attention span and being easily distractable, along with a overwhelming disinterest in details.  He also thought that tweeting about something was the same as doing something.  While Trump may be an extreme example, any future GOP president will face resistance.

The biggest issue is the lack of trust in institutions - both in government and throughout American society.  In their hysterical reaction to the election of Trump in 2016, institutions, in and out of government, have gone so far overboard as to completely wreck their credibility, finishing the job started in recent decades.(1)  Yes, Trump has no credibility, but who's left standing that does?  Do I think that the federal government could have a proper role in identifying and limiting the impact of foreign propaganda?  Yes, I do.  But why would I trust an Intelligence Community which helped create the Russia Collusion hoax to do so?  Why would I trust an Intelligence Community which acted to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and speech by American citizens of which it disapproved.  Why would I trust a media to blow the whistle on any governmental overstepping of its proper bounds, when the media worked with the government to create the narratives I've just described?

Nor is this merely a partisan story.  If you examine the media, whether left or right (and all media now is left or right), who would you trust today?  I certainly trust very little at this point.  I don't watch any network or cable news of any political persuasion but for society to function there have to be some institutions we have confidence in.  I'm fortunate, being retired and having time to look at original documents and evaluate the credibility of sources, and I had a lot of experience in my career doing investigations.  By being willing to follow the evidence where it leads I've apparently ended up in a small group that knows both that Trump's "Stop The Steal" was lunacy, and the Russia Collusion story the biggest political scandal in our lifetimes.  But even I don't have the time to dive into everything.  What can people who have jobs and are raising families do?  I've also got time to evaluate people and new outlets on Twitter, Substack and elsewhere, seeking those in whom I might place some trust.  Most people don't have the time to do what I've been doing.  For most people, what is there on the right or left that can trusted to not just be generating narratives in support of their beliefs?  I don't know the answer and that is very troubling for our future.

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(1)  I observed in 2016 that Trump was Silvio Berlusconi, not Adolf Hitler.  I was right.  The Resistance went down a rabbit hole, while the real anti-democratic forces gathered on the left and seized control of the commanding heights.

Hotel Lobby

By Edward Hopper (1943).  I find the empty spaces in Hopper paintings more interesting than the people.

Final Orbit

(Photo taken from Apollo 8, December 24, 1968)

Earlier this week, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman died at the age of 95.  Borman had flown on Gemini 7 before being selected to command Apollo 8, the first manned flight to circumnavigate the moon, in December 1968.  The Apollo 8 crew were the first humans to see the Earth as pictured above.

Borman is best known for his reading from Genesis, broadcast to Earth on Christmas Eve, of which I wrote previously:

Christmas Eve 1968.  Apollo 8 is on its mission carrying the first humans to escape low Earth orbit and the first to circle the Moon - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell (later commander of Apollo 13), Bill Anders.

Several weeks before lift-off the crew had been told that NASA had arranged for them to do a live Christmas Eve broadcast to the world.  When Borman asked what they should say, all they were advised was that it be "something appropriate".  With the help of the wife of a correspondent friend who had been raised in a French convent, they decided to read the opening chapters of the Bible, from Genesis (as explained in the video below).  No one on the ground at NASA was aware of what they would say, until they started reading.  For many reasons, this would not happen today, both from a process and substance perspective.

After reading the opening verses of Genesis, the crew closed with its own benediction:

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on this Good Earth.

Hearing those words, in those circumstances, had a huge emotional impact on those who heard it, and it still affects me when I listen to it more than 50 years later.

The video below tells the story, followed by what listeners heard on December 24, 1968.  All of the Apollo 8 astronauts are still alive, Borman and Lovell at age 92, and Anders at 87.

 

(Text read by crew of Apollo 8)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Jim Lovell, who flew with Borman on Apollo 8, and is best-known as the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, is now the oldest surviving Apollo astronaut, a week younger than Borman.  Marilyn, Lovell's wife of 71 years, passed away two months ago.  Borman was also married for 71 years before his wife passed in 2021. The third Apollo 8 crewman, Bill Anders, just turned 90.  Anders has been married to his wife, Valerie, for 68 years.

Along with Lovell and Anders there are five other surviving crew from the 24 astronauts who flew on the nine Apollo missions which orbited and/or landed on the moon:

Apollo 10 - Thomas Stafford (93)

Apollo 11 - Buzz Aldrin (93)

Apollo 15 - David Scott (91)

Apollo 16 - Charles Duke (88)

Apollo 17 - Harrison Schmitt (88)

 

Ken Mattingly, scrubbed at the last minute from Apollo 13, and Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16, passed ten days ago.