Category Archives: culture

Useless Argument

Posted on by
Reply

Amid the hue and cry over Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show being put on hiatus over his lies about Charlie Kirk and his murderer—some saying the government shouldn’t be in the business of pressuring news outlets and others saying Kimmel got what he deserved—there is this argument, as articulated by Ben Shapiro among others:

But I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be false. Why? Because one day the shoe will be on the other foot.

What Shapiro, et al., are eliding, though, is that the shoe has been on the other foot since at least the 2016 Presidential campaign season. That’s when The New York Times announced in a front page article that its news room would no longer attempt balanced coverage; it was so dismayed over then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump that its news room would pick a side and openly bias its supposedly objective news writing to favor whoever the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate might be.

Not so long later, a broadcast news outlet announced that there were not two sides to every story, and it began nakedly favoring the Left’s side.

The bias became blatant when the Progressive-Democrat-run Executive Branch began pressuring—threatening—social media outlets if they didn’t start suppressing Conservative commentary.

The bias became overt election interference when CNN participated in the circularly created Russian interference to favor Trump’s election hoax by publishing the “intelligence experts'” letter.

This then was followed by all news outlets (save The New York Post) spiking all “reporting” on the Hunter Biden laptop.

As a result of the Post breaking that story anyway, social media blocked it from posting on the social media outlets.

Then we had Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, of whom California’s Adam Schiff is one of the more infamous examples, overtly lying about then-President Donald Trump (R)’s being in cahoots with Russia. Schiff expanded on this with his lies about having the intelligence reports (from the same intelligence community of the letter infamy) to prove it.

I’ll elide the argument that CEOs who fold under mere pressure are unfit for their positions. That the Left and Party politicians have a long and hoary prior history of this pressure and overt action against free speech is no excuse for Republicans to do the same. Spare me, though, the foolishness that one day the shoe will be on the other foot. It already has been, for far too long.

Note: As I write this post (22 September 2025) ABC has taken the position to restore Kimmel to his show and airtime with effect 23 September 2025.

Business Executive Cowardice

Posted on by
Reply

There is a great deal of loud bodice-ripping angst over the Trump administration having “bullied” Disney and ABC into putting Jimmy Kimmel’s late night TV show on hiatus for the time being.

It’s much ado about misplaced nothing, though. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to surrender to them; business executives only feel pressure because they choose to wallow in the perception.

FCC chief Brendan Carr threatened ABC affiliates’ broadcast licenses if they/ABC didn’t kowtow and deal appropriately with Kimmel and his TV show? This is a canonical example of choosing to wallow. Threats aren’t deeds, even when they from a high level government functionary. They need to be watched carefully lest they become deeds, but watching is the only action required. Certainly not kowtowing.

I claim that executives who fold under “pressure,” even when the “pressure” is yapping from government personages, are cowards and unfit for their posts. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are more genteel about it.

The furor is wildly overstated when it claims an iron curtain of Trump censorship is descending on American media. If CBS and ABC, two networks that have lately bowed to the president, gave half a hoot, they would easily have prevailed on First Amendment grounds if they put up a fight.
That is, if they prized their network TV businesses sufficiently as businesses, as opportunities to display stewardship, or even as instruments of influence. But they don’t.

Indeed. Short term expensive, to be sure, to Just Say No, and hale the government into court. But long-term much lower cost, especially when compared to the great and growing cost of always surrendering.

The editors closed with this:

Mr Trump hasn’t got powers of intimidation other presidents didn’t have. He just meets less resistance.

I write it again: such executives are unfit for their positions.

Yes, “They” Did

Posted on by
Reply

On this, Karl Rove is broadly wrong.

Our culture is built on the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do. People can be influenced by words they hear and groups they’re part of.

So far, so good.

However, there are vulnerable people of all ages who can be, and are, influenced to deadly action. “They” know this full well. “They” are the Left’s and the Left’s politicians’ carefully crafted environment of divisiveness and violent and violence-inspiring anti-Republican, anti-Conservative, anti-right leaning Americans.

  • New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer standing on the Supreme Court building steps threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of them
  • Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders likening Conservative Republicans to fascism, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against a gathering of Republicans at a baseball practice
  • Sanders and them-President Joe Biden likening Republicans and then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump to Hitler, followed shortly by two assassination attempts against Trump
  • Jimmy Kimmel nakedly lying about Charlie Kirk in the hours after Kirk’s murder, insisting Kirk was a Jew-hating bigot
  • Other Leftists claiming Kirk’s killer was a Republican
  • The New York Times nakedly smearing Kirk as a Jew-hater and only posting a correction after an enormous outpouring of opprobrium, and then burying its correction instead of giving it the same prominence as its lie
  • The left, relying on their Newspeak Dictionary, distorting MAGA as though it were some right-wing crazies, rather that the hope and dream of every American to Make America Great Again—the American English dictionary definition of the acronym

Just one example of the outcomes of the Left’s and Party’s constructed environment comes from “Bowser,” a protestor supporting the murder of an insurance company executive:

Bowser says[:] “Political violence is how this country was established.”

“They” know full well that the hostile environment they constructed would influence more than one of their minions to violence. That carefully crafted overtly hostile environment most assuredly facilitated—made possible—Kirk’s murder by influencing one vulnerable young man to commit that murder.

Until we broadly recognize that simple environmental fact, and yes, that includes the Karl Roves and the others who insist on downplaying the Left’s artificial political climate, and act on that recognition, that Left and their Party politicians will continue to spout their rhetoric of violence, continue to proselytize their hostility toward those who are not of them, and their atmosphere of hate will continue to cause murders to be committed among the rest of us.

Patriotism is Intimidation

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline tells the tale that’s been unfolding for far too long in the United Kingdom, the cradle, but no longer a home, of individual liberty and consensual government,.

For some it [the national flag of the United Kingdom] is a symbol restoring patriotic traditions. Others see it as vehicle for intimidation.

The British flag, and its sibling, the red cross on a white field that is the Cross of St George flag, are symbols of British culture and history, and especially of British national identity.

Yet there is a growing movement (only lately starting to be answered) that openly disparages those national symbols, risibly calling them bigoted, exclusionary, and divisive.

They’re sort of right on one, but the other two—the bigotry and divisiveness—are centered on and emanate from only those folks, mostly “immigrants” and their apologists, who do not want to assimilate into British culture, to become British citizens, or merely to accept British culture in their status as non-citizen legal residents.

The flags are exclusionary, though, in the sense that they’re symbols of nationhood for patriotic British citizens and subjects, folks who are proud of their national history and culture, warts and all, while working to improve a grand but humanly imperfect nation.

Different flags in the UK have different connotations. The Union Jack, or, more formally, the Union Flag, is meant to represent England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It can be controversial among Scottish, Welsh, or Irish nationalists, but is often seen as a mild expression of patriotism in much of England. But the English flag—the Cross of St George—is sometimes associated with soccer hooligans and far-right protests, and has xenophobic connotations for some.

This is just foolish. There’s nothing controversial about the Union Flag—it symbolizes the union of the nation. Those who don’t want to be part of the union need to recognize that their view has lost repeated independence referenda and get over themselves. The only ones seeing the flag as in any way xenophobic are those immigrants who refuse to assimilate and the timid virtue-signalers who side with them to curry favor.

That some hooligans have chosen to wrap themselves in the English flag is in no way a reflection of what that flag represents—it only reflects the misbehaviors of the hooligans. Those who associate it with hooliganism need to leave off their Newspeak Dictionary-twisted definitions and return to British English dictionaries.

[A] local lawmaker called to remove the flags, whether British or English, saying they were being used by some “to rally those who suppress the rights of others and perpetrate acts of hate.” The local city council estimated it would cost £250,000 to take them down and has removed only a few.

This is disingenuous at best. Here, too, the lawmaker’s beef is with those who misuse—abuse—the flags, not with the flags themselves. It’s only the ones who rally those to hate who should be getting the lawmaker’s opprobrium. The position he’s taken, though, is akin to him actively supporting the unpatriotic over British patriots.

Don’t get too smug over the falling—and fallen—Brits, though. We have too many neighborhoods and news writers waxing hysterical about how divisive our own national flag is.

The same contempt for bigots and cowards in the UK applies to these so-called Americans, too. We have a chance, still, to decisively defeat those naysaying unpatriotic ones, and hopefully one good thing about our own Left’s murder of Charlie Kirk will wake us up and get us going.

There’s Always an Excuse

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that Bureau of Labor Statistics honcho Erika McEntarfer was fired over labor reports that reflected wildly inaccurate data and that necessitated radically large corrections in subsequent months. Those data may have been fudged, as President Donald Trump (R) suggests, or they may have resulted from badly inaccurate and incomplete data collection by the BLS’ periodic polling processes.

Now she’s speaking out.

While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.

And making self-serving excuses. She took office in January 2024. DOGE didn’t start in until early 2025.

Two questions, then: the first is what progress had she made on her improvements in the intervening year? What bureaucratic impediments had been interfering with those efforts, and what had she been doing about those impeding bureaucrats?

McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.

She spent that whole year “preparing to” help? When was she going actually to get started? When was she going to start leading the effort rather than “helping” it?

The second question is in what way had DOGE been interfering with her efforts, and what resources had she diverted from stats improvement to dealing with—mostly interfering with—DOGE’s efforts?