Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Hurricane Algebra

hurricane, climate change, global warming, weather, panic, big government, regulations

Helene is x times worse than Katrina, but receives y less coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

When we finally plug in the numbers, we will likely discover that the coverage difference is best explained by two factors: there are fewer reporters yet more “journalists” than ever before, and (you guessed it) politics.

You see, Katrina coverage helped besmirch George W. Bush and the Republicans.

Covering Helene in the same way, or to similar extent, could hurt the incumbents (FEMA has been especially lame), and the presidential race is too close for the Democrats’ lackeys in the media to do that.

So let’s blame Helene on Trump.

Or, the low coverage on Trump. Trump’s the why of the y!

It’s just as sensible as blaming Helene on man-​made climate change. Nearly every newsperson intones the plausible-​sounding theory that the warmer the climate the more damaging the storms. It’s a great hypothesis. But pre-​Helene studies have shown scant evidence for it.

Further, the oft-​repeated line that “never before” has a hurricane reached so far inland is also untrue. Asheville, North Carolina, was destroyed by a similarly horrific hurricane in July 1916.

These are rare events. Or, perhaps, cyclical, on repeat by century. 

The pity with all this theory and conjecture and political nonsense is: less coverage means less knowledge outside the hurricane zone of how horrible Helene is, and thus less sympathy elicited from the general population of generous Americans. Thus, less aid.

Making major media complicit — with the U.S. Government (FEMA, etc.) — in not helping relieve the suffering. 

So maybe we should thank the climate change agenda. Without that devil to fight, we might get no coverage of Helene at all. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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DEI Box Office Drubbing

Matt Walsh, racism, DEI

It “came out of nowhere,” declared The Hollywood Reporter, and as “one major Hollywood studio exec” put it off the record: “The picture has clearly hit a nerve.”

This is the second hit by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and director-​producer Justin Folk: they made the movie What Is a Woman? in 2022, and now Am I Racist? is at No. 4 on the movie charts having “gross[ed] $4.5 million in its nationwide box office debut,” THR reports, “a huge sum for a nonfiction feature.”

In the film, Matt Walsh sits down with “some of the biggest people in the anti-​racism movement,” including Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, founders of Race2Dinner, and Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

For $5,000, Rao and Jackson will come over for dinner to make as many as eight white women confront their inherent racism. Who would know better? Rao and Jackson actually wrote the book, White Women.

“This country is not worth saving,” Rao declares at one dinner. “This country’s a piece of sh*t.”

It cost $15,000 to get the meeting to film DiAngelo for the documentary. Well, only $14,970 if you consider the $30 in reparations that DiAngelo was shamed into giving a black member of Walsh’s documentary crew.

“The mind-​blowing part,” explains Savannah Edwards of Savvy Film Reviews “is that he was able to get them to say what they said on camera.” She adds, “The fact of the matter is all Matt Walsh does in this movie is let these people talk.”

Go see the movie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Value of Principles

The late Bernie Baltic used to ask politicians, who invariably wanted him to write them a check, “What are your principles?”

They would then recite their key issues or the issues they thought were key to getting Bernie to write that check. He would stop them, saying, “Not your issues — issue positions can change — your principles.”

Values are like sorta like principles. In politician speak.

“My values haven’t changed,” Vice-​President Kamala Harris assured us, after being quizzed about her flip-​flopping on issues including fracking (hello Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes), defunding the police and building a border wall.

CNN host Erin Burnett recently took the Democratic nominee to task, citing an investigation that counted more than 50 instances of Harris “slamming Trump’s border wall,” even while her “campaign ads actually showcase that wall.”

Hard to believe but true: Kamala’s TV spot touts Trump’s wall — his “big distraction,” as she dubbed it — as a symbol of her tough border stance. 

You can’t make this stuff up.

In her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, Kamala Harris identified “a bigger reason to oppose a border wall,” decrying such a structure as “a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built.”

Therefore … it would seem obvious that her values have indeed changed. Or perhaps the problem is that she doesn’t have any values that cannot be trumped (go ahead, pun intended) by the all-​powerful need to secure her personal political advance.

That’s her paramount principle. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Sobering Up After DEI

DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, regulations

Some universities and companies have been retreating from their obnoxious DEI policies. We can now add Jack Daniel’s to the list.

One of the lamentable ideological fads of recent years, DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) programs are a vicious form of race-​based and sex-​based affirmative action.

All such policies subordinate merit to irrelevant but politically preferred physical characteristics.

So far as I know, old-​style affirmative action at least was not normally accompanied by mandatory indoctrination and mandatory testimony by applicants about how they would cherish and uphold the ideology of compensatory racial and sexual discrimination. But such indoctrination and litmus tests are standard features of many contemporary DEI regimes.

Which are now minus one, thankfully, as Jack Daniel’s announces that it will be ending DEI initiatives, such as a social credit system and “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions.”

The Dallas Express says that the whiskey distiller is decoupling from DEI because it is “facing backlash.” Specifically, thanks to the impending attention of Robby Starbuck, “an activist known for successfully putting a spotlight on companies like Harley-​Davidson and John Deere” for their DEI policies.

Starbuck said on Twitter that he had been “set to expose” Jack Daniel’s, which perhaps was tipped off by his visiting of employee LinkedIn pages. “We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America.”

He adds that if you want your own workplace’s DEI policies exposed, you can email “tips and evidence” to him at EliminateDEI@​protonmail.​com.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

EU to Axe X?

Elon Musk, EU, European Union, censorship

Sandro Gozi, European Union parliament member, wants Elon Musk’s Twitter operation gone. Out of the European Union.

Not no matter what. Only if Twitter — “X” — keeps flouting the EU’s censorship rules.

Gozi says: “If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely dismantle the platform in the territory of the Union.”

Oh dear.

This threat comes right after EU official Thierry Breton’s threatening letter to Musk about his impending Twitter interview with Donald Trump. Musk told Breton to “[obscenity deleted]” and proceeded with the interview. Other EU arbiters of speech quickly dissociated themselves from Breton’s threat.

So maybe Gozi’s confidence about what fellow EU commissars will do if Musk does not play ball is misplaced. Perhaps the others will think about how Twitter users throughout Europe would react if their X accounts became “ex-” accounts.

Various Italian officials, Gozi’s countrymen, roundly repudiated his gabble.

“Silencing the voice of millions of people in order to strike out at those who think differently from them?” challenged Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. “Unacceptable and disturbing.”

The political party of Giorgia Meloni issued a statement saying that the “contemporary left [are] allergic to opinions that are not aligned with their mainstream, and inquisitors of anyone who does not submit to their suffocating cloak of conformism.”

Elon Musk likely sees the truth: this fight is winnable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Communists Within the Form

“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”

Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-​speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-​mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.

National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-​leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-​lance professionals and the like. 

The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”

So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?

Would-​be Cackler-​in-​Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-​and-​out communist:

  • “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-​presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
  • “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
  • “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-​Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”

True-​believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-​Marxist totalitarians? 

It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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