This video of Don Lemon being confronted – by a British royalty spokesperson named Hilary Fordwich – with some salient facts about the history of slavery, has been making the rounds. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:
Lemon looks like he doesn’t quite know what hit him.
I wonder whether he actually is unaware of facts such as the Brits’ role in ending slavery. I guess he doesn’t read my blog; in 2015 I wrote a post with some later history on the subject.
Which reminds me of this, by Tom Lehrer:
Commenter “stan” has this to say:
The gaslighting on elections has gotten ridiculous. Reality:
1. Democrats have a long, sordid history of election fraud.
2. Every other major democracy in the world requires voter ID.
3. There is zero evidence to support the Democrats’ racist assertion that blacks are too stupid to get a voter ID. Zero.
4. Even if there were people of certain demographics who didn’t have an ID, the remedy — eliminating the most basic election integrity measure — is nonsensical. The obvious remedy is simply to make an effort to reach out to that community to help them get IDs. Democrats have used artillery to kill mosquitos who don’t exist.
5. The dishonesty and lack of good faith demonstrated by Democrats on voter ID extends to every other voting change they have jammed through — voting by mail is the worst. We now mail ballots to addresses that don’t have buildings, to people who don’t exist or have died or moved, and count the votes that are mailed back without the slightest effort to ensure the ballots are honestly cast. This is madness.The current setup is blatantly fraudulent. To ridicule those who point out this obvious reality is gaslighting or worse. There’s simply no good faith way that anyone can defend this. We need to condemn those who do. Turn over the rock. Expose the cockroaches. And fumigate.
Democrats must pretend that the voting process they designed is sacred and wonderful, and that criticizing it is tantamount to heresy. Of course, when they’re not in charge, criticizing the voting process is perfectly fine and even laudable.
A trip back in time:
Just a reminder:
In January 2017, after Trump's win, House Democrats objected to certifying the election results in 9 states.
Alabama
Florida
Georgia
Michigan
Mississippi
North Carolina
South Carolina
Wisconsin
WyomingAbout 70 House Democrats boycotted Trump’s inauguration.
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) September 19, 2022
And remember all those “Question Authority” bumper stickers that Democrats used to sport? No more, now that they have become the authority.
I keep doing these roundups lately because there are so many stories to cover:
(1) Biden’s hateful rhetoric seems to have borne fruit in this killing. But don’t look to the MSM to talk much about it.
(2) I guess according to Hollywood, slavery was okay as long as African women were in charge – or something like that.
The reason for the anger is that the film centers around an all-female group of warriors called the “Agojie” who fought for the “Dahomey” kingdom in the early 1800s. According to the film, the Dahomey were on the front lines of pushing colonialist white people out of Africa who were out to enslave the African people. However, in real life, the Dahomey and their female warriors were actually known for raiding African villages, brutally torturing and killing those who couldn’t be used, and selling others they captured to slave traders.
This had many people, including the black community, angry that Hollywood was glorifying the very people we all agreed were the bad guys.
But it’s my impression that, according to woke lore, some African people’s complicity in the slave trade can be safely ignored.
(3) More here on the effect of Germany’s green policies on its economy.
(4) Are you aware of the term “caudacity”? Kelisa Wing, the “defense equity chief” at the Department of Defense’s Education wing, wrote this:
“[T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS… [W]e are not the majority, we don’t have power,”
This is classic CRT, which states that black people cannot be racist because they’re not in power – by definition, even if (like Kelisa herself) they occupy positions of power. Neat trick.
As for “caudacity,” it means the audacity of white people. I guess white people have a special special audacity that Ms. Wing is able to spot and denounce when she sees it.
(5) Matt Taibbi has written this article about the out-of-control DOJ, going into the lengthy pro-Trump history as well as what’s been going on versus Trump. The piece is long but well worth reading. I may write a post about it sometime, because I think it’s an extremely important topic. I disagree with a couple of details, but on the whole I highly recommend it.
(6) No bail for the ax-wielder.
With all the brouhaha about Martha’s Vineyard lately, I’ve noticed a lot of pundits saying that it’s an enclave for the white and the rich. Far be it from me to defend the Vineyard, but in this case I’d like to clear up some misconceptions.
According to the 2010 census, African Americans remain a small percentage of the Island’s full-time population — less than four per cent — but their numbers are growing steadily, with many choosing to retire here.
And that full-time cohort appears to be migrating throughout the Island. Oak Bluffs is still the Island’s black population center, but Edgartown and Vineyard Haven are creeping up with significant increases over the past decade.
Reliable data about the summer population is scarce, but a wide range of black residents say the Vineyard has retained its grip on the imaginations of vacationers, as more and more are finding their way here from places far beyond New England, New York and Washington D.C. The Island’s beauty, history, cultural and intellectual institutions — and not least — comfort factor all combine to create an atmosphere that keeps attracting short-term visitors, seasonal residents and year-rounders of all races, most especially blacks.
When compared with other summer resorts that have historically welcomed blacks — Idlewild in Michigan, Sag Harbor in New York, or Highland Beach in Maryland, for example — the Vineyard still stands apart, they say.
I’ve been to the Vineyard a few times. I used to have a relative by marriage (now deceased) who had a good friend with a very large home there that was often empty. So my relative visited now and then and invited my husband and me to join her. Free vacation – nice deal! It didn’t take but one visit to learn of Martha’s Vineyard’s special history vis a vis black people, which at one point involved a section of the island named Oak Bluffs.
The article goes into some of that history:
Mrs. Goldson articulates a message that is repeated over and over among many long-time seasonal African Americans on the Island. Their love for the place keeps getting passed down, with each successive generation making its own memories.
“For us,” she says, speaking about her own family but she might just as well be talking about scores of others, “it’s about family and friends. I can be with friends who have been friends my whole life.”
Mrs. Goldson was among a generation of kids lucky enough to come to the Island for the entire summer. Usually the mothers stayed with them, while the fathers came when they could, often on the Friday night Daddy Boat, as it was known.
Occasionally, Mrs. Goldson’s father would fly down from the Boston area in his two-seater Ercoupe, buzzing State Beach as he headed to Trade Wind airfield, a grass landing strip that today serves as a dog park as well. What many families sought here was the kind of community they lacked the rest of the year, a critical mass of black friends, which had been sacrificed as families moved from black-only neighborhoods into predominantly white communities.
“You [had been] segregated, but not lost,” says Bettye Baker, who first came to the Vineyard in 1964 and writes about Oak Bluffs for the Gazette. “So you came to Martha’s Vineyard and recaptured that.”
Obviously, these were black people with the financial resources to do this. But it’s been going on for a long time, and is part of the Vineyard’s history, with events such as the following:
The demand for tours on the African American Heritage Trail, with its 23 sites across the Island, can sometimes overwhelm the supply of available guides, says Elaine Cawley Weintraub, chairman of the high school history department and co-founder of the Heritage Trail with Carrie Camillo Tankard, who is also vice president of the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP. “For older African Americans, they are so excited and honored and pleased” to take in the trail, she said.
Here they may learn that a black man, the Rev. John Saunders, first brought Methodism to the Island in 1787, not those who later founded the famed Methodist Camp Ground; that the great blues, jazz and gospel singer Ethel Waters stayed in the Shearer guest cottage; that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. bought a house in the Highlands; Dorothy West, the novelist and youngest Harlem Renaissance figure, was virtually unknown to recent generations until Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie of The Wedding; that Edward Brooke, the first black elected to the U.S. Senate since Reco nstruction, taught swimming at Inkwell beach; and that President Obama probably won’t vacation on the Island in 2012, an election year.
The other thing I have to say about Martha’s Vineyard is that it has the world’s best fudge. At least, it was the best fudge the last time I was there, which was about 25 years ago. It’s this stuff. Extremely yummy – and I don’t even get a commission. Since I can’t eat chocolate without getting a migraine, I appreciate their excellent non-chocolate selections, which sometimes included a kick-ass cranberry flavor.
It’s the first step, anyway, towards clearing up the problem.
Thanks to those who helped instruct me on how to unblock search engines. Some services I paid for couldn’t help me, but you did.
What a distinctive voice lead singer Gladys Horton had in this song, which was the first Motown offering to reach #1. Here’s the story of The Marvelettes:
Here we go again with another roundup:
(1) Scott Johnson of Powerline has a post on Jan Karski, the Polish officer who tried to warn the US about the Holocaust in a timely fashion, to little or no avail. I wrote a post on Karski as well (in 2014), which you can find here.
(2) Joe, do you feel his hot heavy breath on the back of your neck? Newsom is waiting in the wings, tanned, rested, and ready for 2024.
(3) Andrew C. McCarthy on the upcoming Danchenko trial:
Durham’s investigation indicates that Danchenko lied to the FBI multiple times, falsehoods that should have been easy for the nation’s flagship federal investigative agency to run down. Yet they kept him on board, kept paying him.
But it gets worse. While the bureau used inane, unverified information from Steele and Danchenko to suggest to a court that the president of the United States might be a Russian asset, the FBI had intelligence indicating that Danchenko himself might actually have been a Russian asset.
That was detailed in yet another Durham court filing last week, in the Virginia federal court where Danchenko is soon scheduled to be tried. The prosecutor related that Danchenko was “the subject of an FBI counterintelligence from 2009 to 2011.”…
…Danchenko, like Sussmann, is charged with lying to the FBI, and a jury may once again be left to wonder whether the bureau was actually fooled.
Yet these prosecutions are secondary to the vital story: What role did the FBI, whether by misfeasance or malfeasance, play in the Clinton campaign’s project to paint Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin? For now, we have to hope that Durham’s final report will answer that question.
I don’t think that hope will be fulfilled. But if it is, I am virtually certain that it will be ignored or twisted by the Democrats and their MSM helpers.
(4) A couple of oopsies from Biden: (1) declaring the pandemic over, and (2) saying that US personnel will defend Taiwan if it is attacked. The first undermines his rationale for student loan bailout and the second garnered a denial from the White House – the real White House, I suppose (more here on that).
[Hat tip: “Stan.”]
This seems intuitively obvious to me:
A leading independent pollster said Saturday that polls might seriously undercount Republican voters in the current political climate.
In a Twitter thread, Trafalgar Group chief pollster Robert C. Cahaly said that President Joe Biden’s recent attacks on so-called “MAGA Republicans” will make polling supporters of former President Donald Trump even harder to poll than in previous years. Cahaly pointed out that in the last two presidential election cycles, name-calling and threats from prominent Democrats contributed to the phenomenon of the “shy Trump voter.” But as the 2022 midterms have begun in earnest, Biden’s escalating rhetoric against Trump supporters, accusing them of embracing “semi-fascism” and being a threat to America, will make these voters even harder to reach in polling.
The title of my post is somewhat hyperbolic; of course, some “election deniers” will want to respond. But I believe a significant number will not, or will lie.
The beauty of it as far as the Democrats are concerned is twofold, however. The first desired effect is that an under-representation of Republicans in the polls can serve to discourage people on the right from voting, because they feel it’s hopeless. I don’t think that would work this year, but who knows? Of course, it could also backfire and make Democrats feel they don’t have to vote because it’s in the bag for them. Again, I don’t think it would work that way this year, but again, who knows?
Under-representation of GOP voters in the polls has a second probable effect desired by the left: if the Democrats are going to commit voter fraud in order to win races, it helps if the predictions about the GOP vote versus the Democratic vote are kept artificially low. That way, there would be less suspicion later on when the Democrat wins.
Biden’s attacks on Trump voters and those who think fraud was probably involved on the part of Democrats in 2020 – a huge number of Americans – also may have the result of people on the right becoming more afraid to donate to causes or candidates on the right. This phenomenon of exposing lists of donors on the right has been going on for a long time, but I suspect that the current escalation of the campaign against Democrats’ opponents and their willingness to either sic the Twitter crowd on them or prosecute them legally, or both, will have a desired effect of discouraging political donations.
Makes me think of this song by Phil Ochs, which came out in 1964; I heard it some time in the mid-60s. Ochs was on the left, but he didn’t exempt them from criticism:
The following description is quite on point. It’s by Miranda Devine:
This is quintessential Biden. Lying, gaslighting, emphatic, nasty, denying reality while in the same breath denying he’s denying reality. It is so out of the bounds of normal behaviour that people discount it or blame their own perception.
That last sentence describes the Big Lie phenomenon on the part of the Biden administration that I wrote about in this recent post.
Such composure and musicality:
Commenter “huxley” linked this website purporting to list the greatest books. It uses an algorithm based on a a group of 130 other lists, and comes up with some obvious choices as well as some curious ones.
Even some of the obvious ones are books I’ve never been keen on. For example, I just can’t get through Jane Austen at all – despite many tries because it seems it would be the sort of thing I would like. But I just don’t, and that’s that. A big yawn for me.
Then there’s the almost universally praised The Great Gatsby (#5), which I’ve actually read several times but to no avail. Another snooze, although I do think the Gatsby character is an interesting portrait in how a person can live a lie (I recently discovered a relative of mine by marriage had a Gatsby-esque invented persona, and it was quite a shock to know that). For One Hundred Years of Solitude (#4!), I read the first chapter about ten times and then gave up. The “woke” selections on the list, such as Beloved – I couldn’t get through it. On the other hand, I liked I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which is a memoir rather than fiction (and is #33 on their nonfiction list). I read that book when it first came out and was fresh and new.
High and proud on the list are many of my favorites: Moby Dick (#6), Catch 22 (#23), all those Russian novels, Borges, Orwell, Huxley (the one with the upper case, not the lower), the Brontes, and Lewis Carroll. But squeezed way down on the list are many of my other favorites, which apparently have fallen out of favor: Cry the Beloved Country (a beautiful and heartrending book that only reached spot #280), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (a travesty to place it way way down there at number 629), the brilliant Pale Horse Pale Rider with the ignominious placement of #1595, and the enormously moving Tell Me a Riddle weighs in not all that much better at #833.