The eternal victim: Jussie Smollett

The New Neo Posted on by

Does it seem as though there have been a great many high-profile trials lately?

That’s because there have been. And the latest involves actor Jussie Smollett. He originally claimed to be a victim of a racial hate and homophobic crime. Now he claims to be the victim of a race crime hoax that was engineered by others and fooled him into thinking it was real.

He happened to have known those “others” and happened to have been caught communicating with them, paying them thousands of dollars (he says for meal planning?), and even perhaps rehearsing the crime with them. But no matter. Jussie is the victim:

On the first day of the trial, Dan Webb, the special prosecutor brought in to replace the hopelessly compromised DA Kim Foxx, claimed that Smollett conceived of the hoax and held a “dress rehearsal” with the two brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, including telling them to shout racial and homophobic slurs and ‘MAGA,’” according to the Associated Press.

Smollett bankrolled the caper, giving the brothers cash to buy the props — red hats, rope, and ski masks. They bought bleach to splash on Smollett because the gas they originally planned to use was too dangerous…

And, lo, on Monday we found out who the real racist and homophobic attackers were.

The black guys.

That’s right, the Nigerian brothers, who will testify during the trial, were the real brains behind the caper, according to Smollett’s defense attorney, Nenye Uche.

I wonder if Smollett will take the stand in his own defense. Perhaps, because as an actor he may think he can pull it off better than most.

Activism on the right: alumni power; keeping red states red

The New Neo Posted on by

University alumni have been increasingly using their power of the purse to put pressure on universities to defend academic freedom of thought and expression. Note the links there to organizations supporting and helping to organize the effort.

Here’a another worthy cause:

At FEE, we know the principles and their resulting policies that create prosperity for all. But we also know not everyone has had the opportunity to gain an education in these elements. With the Fresh Start States Project, we plan to provide that information to new residents in key areas through educational mailings, an interactive website, and world-class seminars. But we need your help to make this vision a reality.

Your donation will help us get this project off the ground by funding pilot projects in two cities, Nashville and Atlanta. In the first phase, we will work to gather data on new residents and contact them with materials introducing them to FEE. These materials will cover basic “how-to’s” for keeping the cost of living, housing, and taxes low in their new home states, as well as information on factors that impact education and crime. From there, we will develop these materials into an online portal and social media content so that this project can be rolled out in cities across the US.

It’s very late and getting later, but better late than never.

Andrew Branca will be covering the Kim Potter manslaughter trial at Legal Insurrection

The New Neo Posted on by

I had to think a moment before I remembered what that case is about. It’s the tragic situation in which a veteran police officer named Kim Potter thought she was reaching for her taser (yelling the warning “Taser, taser, taser!”) and instead reached for her gun and shot and killed Duante Wright, who was resisting arrest, instead of tasing him as she had intended. Potter is white and Wright was black.

I wrote three previous posts about the case, this, this, and this.

Attorney Andrew Branca writes especially insightful and thorough reports, and he will be covering the case day by day, as he did in the Rittenhouse case. You can find his initial post here, and today’s livestream post – regarding jury selection – is here.

Usually Branca has at least two posts on the trial every day. The first is a livestream and the second is an analysis.

Leftist Arizona State students don’t want Kyle Rittenhouse around

The New Neo Posted on by

Where does Kyle Rittenhouse go to get his reputation back [see *NOTE below]?

There’s a group of Arizona State students who have discovered that Kyle Rittenhouse was enrolled in some online ASU courses, and are incensed by this terribly distressing information. Their campaign against him involves exactly the people you’d expect to be launching it:

At least four student organizations at Arizona State University are calling on the school to remove Kyle Rittenhouse as a student. Students for Socialism, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition and MECHA de ASU plan to protest Rittenhouse’s enrollment on campus on Dec. 1.

The clubs have a shared list of demands for the university, including that Rittenhouse be withdrawn from ASU and the university release a statement denouncing white supremacy and Rittenhouse’s actions.

Students for Socialism, following in the footsteps of their illustrious predecessors.

The article was later updated with this announcement:

Kyle Rittenhouse is no longer enrolled in classes at Arizona State University, a university spokesperson told McClatchy News. Student groups upset that he was enrolled at one point say they still plan to push school officials to denounce white supremacy, Students for Socialism at ASU said in a Tweet.

As though white supremacy has anything whatsoever to do with the Rittenhouse case or Rittenhouse himself. But the fiction that he’s a white supremacist – which was pressed by the MSM and pushed by Democrats such as Biden – is so very useful.

Whether Rittenhouse (who was never a regular student there) un-enrolled himself or whether the university caved to leftist demands – which would be another example of what Allan Bloom called “dancing bear” administrators – is not clear. However:

“Students don’t feel safe with the prospect of having someone like Kyle Rittenhouse at ASU,” the anonymous member of ASU’s Students For Socialism said.

The student groups participating in the rally created a list of demands for ASU leaders, including that ASU releases a statement against white supremacy and acknowledge that Rittenhouse is a ‘racist murderer.’

That’s what leftists do – they lie and attempt to destroy lives, and sometimes they succeed. So these groups are doing the tried and true, under the now-popular rhetorical banner of “feeling safe”. They pervert the idea of education, but they are legion at universities across America. I wouldn’t “feel safe” with Students for Socialism at my university, but I never thought that feeling safe was the goal of education.

Nor do they, of course. It’s just something they claim in order to make their enemies feel very unsafe indeed.

This entire incident could be an opportunity for some actual education on the part of the ASU administration and faculty on the meaning of a public educational institution of higher learning, whether psychological “safety” is the goal, and what the rule of law is all about. I doubt that will happen, however, and I don’t think most administrators and faculty these days even care about those things. Many are simply leftist activists themselves.

I think Rittenhouse could find a nice home at Hillsdale, and I think they should offer it to him. He’ll have to provide his own security, unfortunately – for the rest of his life.

From the article:

Local attorney Dwane Cates is not connected to the school or the groups involved with the rally. We asked his legal opinion about what those groups wanted from ASU as it relates to Rittenhouse.

“If they went through with the rest of the demands and called him a white supremacist and other things, they would be setting themselves up for a libel slander suit,” Cates said. “Which, he’s already got a lawyer, and there’s already going to be a lot of people sued over this, and I don’t think ASU wants to get in line.”

I’d like to see Rittenhouse win a defamation lawsuit and get a lot of money. But I don’t think he’d prevail in such a suit because it’s hard to do if you’ve been criminally charged and tried, even if exonerated. That’s one of powers prosecutors have over our lives.

[*NOTE: That’s a famous quote from Ray Donovan:

In a highly publicized case, Donovan and six other defendants were indicted by a Bronx County, New York, grand jury for larceny and fraud in connection with a project to construct a new line extension for the New York City Subway, through a scheme involving a Genovese crime family associate and a minority-owned subcontractor. Schiavone Construction was required by its contract with the NYCTA to subcontract part of the work to a minority-owned enterprise. The essence of the charge was that the minority-owned firm (Jo-Pel Contracting and Trucking Corp) leased equipment from Schiavone and therefore was not truly independent of Schiavone. On May 25, 1987, Donovan (and all of the other defendants) were acquitted with a number of jurors openly applauding the verdict, after which Donovan was famously quoted as asking, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Reagan supported Donovan throughout the trial, and upon the latter’s acquittal, affirmed how he had “always known Ray Donovan as a man of integrity” and “never lost confidence in him.”

A second criminal investigation saw Donovan investigated by a federal special prosecutor. This was over allegations that he had ties to individuals in organized crime and claims that he was present when a union leader received an illegal payoff. No charges were pressed and the investigation was brought to an end.

Note the contrast between Reagan and Biden, who as candidate falsely and maliciously labeled the 17-year-old Rittenhouse a white supremacist, a charge the Arizona leftist students are employing.

Donovan’s Wiki entry states that in his later years he “participated in a local program that assisted in exonerating individuals who had been wrongfully convicted.” The word “local” there probably means in the Bronx. The organization isn’t named, and a link goes to the WaPo article which I assume is under a paywall. But my guess is that this organization either doesn’t exist anymore or is something like The Innocence Project, which deals with people who are already convicted but for whom DNA evidence ends up proving they didn’t do it. That doesn’t apply to either Donovan or Rittenhouse, neither of whom were convicted but who suffered nevertheless.]

You may have noticed that there’s been an overactive spam filter here lately

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you may have experienced comments disappearing for no reason. Well, I usually don’t know the reason, either. I just check the moderation folder and the trash and spam folders now and then and I find them, and then I almost always liberate them to see the public light of day. But I probably miss a few.

So if you’re having repeated trouble that way, please let me know.

Also, here’s a question about blog business from commenter “JimNorCall”:

For any thread there is a usual set of regulars commenting. But, in addition, there is a fairly enormous set of “new names”.

The unfamiliar (to me) names will comment on just one or a couple posts but pretty much every post will have a few of them.

What is the source for all the people who visit TheNewNeo?

Generally there are a lot more people who just read here and don’t comment then there are people who comment here regularly. The commenters are the tip of a fairly small iceberg. But sometimes those lurkers comment, and they are perceived as new names even though they’ve been around a while.

Also, though, when there is a link at a big blog like Instapundit or elsewhere, there sometimes are quite a few commenters who arrive and then comment just once at that link but don’t stay. Some do stick around, though and become regulars.

There are also people who have some sort of alert that tells them when certain topics are written about. Some are trolls and some are just people interested in that topic.

For example, it used to be that, whenever I wrote something about Israel, anti-Israel trolls would come like ants at a picnic. Readers here don’t necessarily see the worst ones because I tend to ban them rather quickly. But many who come that way are also friendly.

For example, I once wrote a post about a certain poet, and his son came and commented. He must have had some sort of alert or perhaps he performed regular searches for his father’s name. Google has since changed its algorithm, however, so that blogs don’t come up in searches in the way they used to.

Apparently there’s also some glitch on my blog – something I have to get some professional to fix – that makes this blog even more invisible to Google than it would otherwise be. I’ve had trouble getting someone willing and able to help me, and I don’t think it’s mostly for political reasons, I think the job is just too minuscule for them to bother with in terms of the amount of money they’d receive.

RIP Stephen Sondheim

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen Sondheim, one of the giants of the American musical theater, died three days ago at the age of 91. Sondheim’s Wiki entry describes him this way:

Sondheim was praised for having “reinvented the American musical” with shows that tackled “unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre’s] traditional subjects” with “music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication”. His shows addressed “darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience”, with songs often tinged with “ambivalence” about various aspects of life.

He initially gained fame as a lyricist, however, having composed lyrics for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy.” And it is as a lyricist that I appreciated him, because although I definitely like some of his more tuneful songs, I’m not really keen on his work as a whole because of what I perceive as a lack of melody and melodic hooks. I may be in the minority there, though.

I also admire Sondheim for his more recent criticism of a newer production of “Porgy and Bess,” a production I saw in Cambridge, MA before it opened in New York City, and I agree with Sondheim 1000 percent. Simply put, the production was abominable.

In doing a search of my blog, I’m surprised to see I never wrote about it, because for a while I was incensed at what I’d seen and I wrote a couple of very lengthy drafts for a post about it and about the black feminist directors who “re-imagined” it. Perhaps some day I’ll polish it and publish it…

But here’s Sondheim on the matter – for which he was heavily criticized, of course:

[Director] Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

Much much more at the link. And let me just say that Sondheim is being kind to these people, who ruined the opera for political reasons, as well as (I believe) aesthetic envy of the work of an actual genius whom they felt the need to cut down to their own size.

But back to Sondheim. Here is my favorite song of his about ambivalence, from “Company”:

And a big favorite here, performed excellently by an unlikely singer:

The Waukesha killer/racist: down the memory hole

The New Neo Posted on by

As soon as it was revealed that the Waukesha mass murderer was a black career criminal who hated white people, it was a no-brainer to state that the huge story would fade from view as quickly as possible and that any reference to it would eliminate the perpetrator as much as possible.

We also know that the opposite would have occurred if the perpetrator had been on the right and had hated black people and been a Trump supporter. The media is dedicated to amplifying whatever it thinks furthers the leftist narrative and stifling what it thinks does not. And of course it’s not limited to the media – it involves social media and virtually the entire Democratic Party, in concert.

But if you want to read some articles about the expressed thoughts of the Waukesha perpetrator, repeated felon and now mass murderer and terrorist Darrell Brooks – who finally was given the high bail level of five million dollars, unlike some of the January 6th deomnstrators who to this day have not been allowed bail at all – see this as well as this (the latter is from a British paper, which as usual states some of the facts from which US papers shy away).

One line in that Daily Mail article indicated that, according to his social media postings, Brooks appeared to support the Black Hebrew Israelites. That rang a bell – it was the group that initially harassed the Covington kids before the Native American drumbeater Nathan Phillips got in Nick Sandmann’s face, and set that whole media attack in motion.

Indeed, it was:

The Black Hebrew Israelites are an offshoot of a broader religious movement scholars often call Black Israelism, which dates back to slavery and Reconstruction, if not earlier.

Writing for the Washington Post, journalist Sam Kestenbaum explains that Black Israelism is “a complex American religious movement” whose various sects are loosely bound by a belief that “African Americans are the literal descendants of the Israelites of the Bible and have been severed from their true heritage.”…

The Black Hebrew Israelites who were at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18 were not immediately connected to a specific sect, but appear to fit into this latter group. Their version of religious practice developed in the years after the civil rights and Black Power movements, as some members wanted to distance themselves from “white” Jews and Judaism. Kestenbaum traces the development of these more radical groups back to the 1970s and 1980s, noting that several offshoots developed around the Israeli Tanack School in Harlem, also called One West..

The differing offshoots or “camps” affiliated with One West have some common beliefs, including a strong sense of black nationalism and an ardent belief in the end of the world being imminent. When compared to other facets of Black Jewish groups and Black Israelites, this group is largely seen as a fringe sect, and has fractured further since 2000, spawning groups like the House of Israel.

But the internet has helped these groups spread their message. If you live in a city like Washington, DC, Philadelphia, or New York, there’s a good chance you’ve seen members of the House of Israel or other offshoots of One West engaged in a highly confrontational form of street ministry.

Sounds as though some of them have entered the field of public education.

Even the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center considers them a hate group:

The SPLC refers to them as an “extremist sector within the Hebrew Israelite movement whose adherents believe that Jews are devilish impostors and who openly condemn whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery,” and also have a history of sexist and anti-LGBTQ remarks.

Ah, I guess it’s all the Jews’ fault.

At any rate, Darrell Brooks now will almost certainly join James Hodgkinson, the leftist perpetrator of the Congressional baseball shooting, which targeted Republican members of Congress, in being nearly forgotten by all but the right. Hodgkinson was killed by a security guard who happened to be there; Brooks was not and he will most likely stand trial, but my guess is that the coverage of that trial will be quite muted. So far, the contrast between the media treatment of the wholly innocent Kyle Rittenhouse and the murderer (I suppose I should write “alleged,” but I don’t think there’s much doubt that Brooks did it) Darrell Brooks could not be more stark.

[NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson compares Kenosha and Waukesha.]

Are the mullahs of Iran seriously threatened?

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that I’ve been reading for over a decade that the fall of the Iranian government is imminent.

That’s never even come close to happening, as far as I can tell.

And so I take this article with a hefty grain of salt. Here are some of the issues listed there that the mullahs apparently face, however:

Eighty percent of Iranians are currently living below the poverty line…Inflation has crossed the 45% threshold. Point-to-point inflation of necessary items is 66.7 percent, according to the state-run ISNA news agency. Institutionalized corruption and bribery permeate the economy. The unbridled import of goods by the IRGC has effectively destroyed local manufacturing, resulting in high unemployment. Furthermore, the Iranian regime is unwilling to enact standards consistent with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—an intergovernmental anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) organization. It refuses to do so because it wants to continue financing Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies…

“If the hungry and unemployed army starts to march, its ferocity will be much greater than the 2019 uprising. People do not see hope for their future,” said an engineer working in Tehran. “The situation in the country is like a building whose foundation is collapsing.”…

Today, the Iranian regime is facing a major crisis in the form of water shortages, which is simply one among other noteworthy environmental crises. The water supply from Afghanistan to Iran is likely to be cut off, and this will deepen an already debilitating crisis for the Iranian regime, perhaps even provoking armed conflict.

In the past, all protests have been put down without hesitation by the government. Any successful revolt would have to involve the armed forces that the mullahs employ to subdue the people.

I think this next part is of special interest, and it’s something I had not read about before – which shows you how little mainstream coverage there is in the US these days of events in Iraq:

Iraq is moving towards building alliances with other Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and in the south, the Persian Gulf states are embracing peace with Israel. The recent Iraqi elections and the sharp decline in the number of votes for pro-Iranian groups reflect Tehran’s declining status when it comes to the regional balance of power. Although the regime wants to continue using its regional influence to wreak havoc, the shifting political landscape is setting palpable limits on its ability.

The article ends with two alternative futures for Iran. The first is based on the idea that the US and Europe don’t have the will to oppose it militarily (very true, especially at this point with Democrats in charge) and therefore Iran will continue its nuclear weapons program, which will help solidify its power. The second is this:

…[Iran] will be forced to sign on to a deal that would see the loss of its enriched uranium stockpile, accepting permanent monitoring by IAEA, signing on to FATF, accepting restrictions on its missiles program, and effectively dismantling the Quds Force and proxy forces from countries of the region.

It would surprise me if the second alternative comes to pass rather than the first.

Songs of broken hearts

The New Neo Posted on by

There are countless songs about broken hearts. It’s a natural subject, because the phenomenon of hearbreak is so common, and people undergoing the pain of the experience often turn to music to release their emotions, universalize them, and even for catharsis.

I confess to personal experience on the matter.

Folk songs have dealt with it for centuries. Here are two of the most popular songs on the subject:

The metaphor in that second song – of leaning against an oak tree thought to be strong, which then unexpectedly breaks – is common in many folk songs of the genre.

And then there are the Bee Gees – you knew they’d sneak in there, didn’t you? – with one of their most well-known songs, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” They wrote it after their own breakup as a group, which lasted about eighteen months at the end of the 1960s, during their first brush of many with fame. They suffered during that break, and wrote a few huge hits on the day they first reunited.

This was one of them. Note the ideas expressed about mending broken hearts contains a contradiction – or you might say a progression. Initially, it’s described with metaphors that make it seem impossible to do, and then possible with help. The lyrics contrast the naïve hopefulness of youth with the painful revelations of the sorrows of life, and the possibility of healing.

Of all the other heartbreak songs – and there are so so many to choose from – I’m going to select what might perhaps seem an odd choice: “Unbreak My Heart” sung by Toni Braxton. I find it to be a lyrically interesting twist on the nearly-cliched broken heart theme because it posits not just an ordinary healing or recovery or mending (or not), but some sort of going back in time to undo the heartbreak entirely. Braxton also has a remarkable lower register:

But in my book, this last one is the most heartrending of heartbreak songs. The cri de coeur in the third verse – “What I can’t understand/Oh please God hold my hand/Why it should have happened to me” – expresses a desperate appeal that comes from utter desolation.

Here’s to healing or even unbreaking.