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Charlotte Hays
Charlotte Hays
September 26, 2022 - 10 minutes
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Daily Musts

Daily Must Reads

Where Is All This Deadly Rhetoric Coming From?

New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz poses and answers this question in a column on the recent tragedy of a young man who was fatally run over by a man who claimed, on no evidence whatsoever, that the youth was a Republican extremist—which, by the way, isn’t considered worthy of the death sentence—yet.

Markowicz writes:

Brandt was convinced the teenager was affiliated with a ‘Republican extremist group.’ No evidence exists for this claim. Footage of Brandt’s bail hearing shows him seeming confused that he may suffer for his actions.

It comes right from the top. The president of the United States, supported by a fan-girl media, spouts irresponsible rhetoric that led to Ellingson’s death.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden gave a fiery speech about the threats our country faces from voters who dare to disagree with him. Red background, clenched fists, the president shouted into the microphone that America’s at an “inflection point” because “MAGA Republicans” “do not respect the Constitution.” “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he said.

As you know, Hillary Clinton recently likened part of the Republican party to Nazis, seeing Nazi salutes when they were not there and making her “deplorables” vitriol look like something from Emily Post.

Former Atlanta Mayor and White House adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms continued to spew this kind of poison over the weekend, claiming what she called “MAGA Republicans” pose threat to democracy itself. It was a sickening and scurrilous attack. She was appearing on MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart on “The Sunday Show.” Do people who speak this way care about truth or consequences—or, for that matter, about “our democracy”?

This is hate. Pure and simple and dangerous. Hate is a word our friends on the left love to throw about, generally in our direction. But can anyone really say that this kind of political rhetoric does not deserve that label?

Some of us can’t help wondering if this kind of talk was a factor in the guns-drawn raid of the residence of a pro-life writer. Nick Arama has the story.

The hate rhetoric circulating in our body politic is so dangerous that Ms. Must led with it despite the emergence of what might ordinarily have deserved pride of place: the results of Italy’s presidential election.

Conservative Giorgia Meloni, a foe of illegal immigration and George Soros, has been elected President. First woman President but the Left isn’t celebrating the breaking of this glass ceiling. A Wall Street Journal editorial notes that the freakouts have begun but considers the possibilities for conservatives to be in charge. Meloni’s party has roots in fascist history. The Wall Street Journal notes:

Ms. Meloni leads the Brothers of Italy, a party with a lineage tracing to the fascist parties of the country’s past. She campaigned on culture-war issues such as her opposition to the “LGBTQ lobby.” Her coalition also brings back into proximity with power the League of Matteo Salvini and the Forza Italia party of Silvio Berlusconi, both European bogeymen in different ways.

Ms. Meloni has been too coy in her reluctance to distance herself fully from her party’s fascist legacy. But it’s also not clear how much policy is likely to change on her watch. On economics, expect a conventional (for Italy) right-wing populist agenda that focuses on targeted tax cuts and welfare handouts rather than the big-bang reforms a different conservative leader is attempting in the United Kingdom.

On our shores, the Red Devil (that is a term of endearment, especially as we compare her level of coherence to her successor’s) has emerged again. I refer to former White House spox Jen Psaki, who had an unwelcome message for her fellow Democrats: If the midterms are about President Joe Biden, they lose. Et Tu, Jen?

See Katie Pavlich’s “Even Psaki knows that the Dems are toast.”

Powerline, over the weekend, also pursued a toast theme, also singling out the President, here and here.

Meanwhile, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to have been booed over the weekend at a chic concert:

Attendees of a music festival in New York City on Saturday night appeared to boo House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she made a surprise appearance at the event.

Pelosi, wearing a white pantsuit with a matching scarf, took to the stage of NYC’s Global Citizen music festival where she was booed by those in the audience, videos on social media appear to show.

After being introduced to the stage by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, an actress who is married to Nick Jonas, Pelosi briefly spoke about carbon pollution and climate change.

If Pelosi was booed, does that signal a climate change in progressive politics?

Hot Air is amusing on The Booing:

Pelosi went on to mention that two of her grandchildren were in the audience [Thanks, Gran]. She joked that she promised them she wouldn’t speak for too long, as everyone was there for the music. Mostly the crowd seemed confused as to why she was there and speaking at all.

There were boos and there were cheers for Pelosi. The days of polite applause for political leaders at big public events is over. With America so divided, there is certainly no hope of unity this close to an election. The midterm elections in November are only forty-something days away. Pelosi may have thought these were her people but such sweeping generalizations are what gets Democrats into trouble. Not everyone who does volunteer work and is concerned about hot topics like the environment and poverty is a Democrat voter.

Thanks to Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, our southern border can’t be ignored. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine writes that there is suddenly a way to force Biden’s hand on the border.

If you listened to the howls from our elites about DeSantis transporting illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, you might think all civilized people see DeSantis as a pariah. Not so. Here is Lionel Shriver, who writes for all sorts of posh places:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a disaffected registered Democrat. I voted for Joe Biden on the assumption that he was a boring, moderate placeholder who could steady the national ship after the nauseous high seas of the Trump presidency. Two years on, I’m still sick to my stomach. Biden is captive to a radical left that has made the party I joined at 18 unrecognisable. It is now intolerant, racially obsessed, fiscally incontinent, eager to encourage dependency on the state and politically high-handed. But I cannot stick putting 2016’s crude, anti-democratic boor back in the White House. So the prospect of facing down a none-of-the-above contest in 2024 a Trump vs Biden redo, much less Trump vs that idiot Kamala Harris — makes me suicidal. I’ve never voted Republican in my life. But if you were to secure the nomination (admittedly dependent on whom you ran against), I could be tempted to defect for the first time in nearly 50 years.

And finally this: The Biden administration is allowing itself to be influenced by someone with deep ties to the communist government of China. No, not Hunter. It is a green group. Fox News reports:

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major U.S. green group that has influenced Biden administration policymaking, has deep ties to the Chinese government.

The NRDC, a non-profit organization based in New York City with total assets exceeding $450 million, has worked on climate issues extensively in China since the mid-1990s and several of its top officials have worked for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or government-sponsored institutions. 

The NRDC also maintains a close working relationship with President Biden’s administration. The NRDC’s former president, Gina McCarthy, served as Biden’s climate czar up from January 2021 until earlier this month. Current president, Manish Bapna, has attended at least two White House meetings, visitor logs reviewed by Fox News Digital show.

Why Authoritarians Don’t Like Humor

From ancient Rome to the present, humor has been the enemy of authoritarians. It is always some wit who says out loud that the emperor has no clothes. Dictators know wit is dangerous. Cicero, after all, died for one too many quips.

The Babylon Bee is an outstanding purveyor of satire. Therefore instead of a headline, I am going to share a bit from an email they recently sent out:

We knew it was just a matter of time before another woke company canceled us… but we didn’t see this one coming.

A few weeks ago, we received an unexpected email from Front, the company that manages all inbound and outbound email for the team here at the Babylon Bee, informing us that they had terminated our account, effective immediately.

Sure enough, moments later, we were unable to send or receive email.

For weeks afterwards, our team scrambled. We’re a company spread across multiple cities, so email is essential to our operation. Needless to say, this one hurt. Front decided to drop the bomb on us in whatever way would disrupt us the most, and they succeeded.

But why would they do such a thing?

Of course, we know the answer.

Similarly, we know that big tech censors conservatives.

Allysia Finlay of the Wall Street Journal explains that they do not have the constitutional right to do this.

Meanwhile, in City Journal Ilya Shapiro explains why our friends on the left may be even more upset by the Supreme Court.

Are We a Serious Country?

That is the question one of Ms. Must’s favorite living philosophers, Wilfred McClay, recently posed at a seminar. Powerline has a link and a terrific analysis. Here is the money quote:

Quotable quote: “[H]ere is the question that concerns me most. Would a serious country so completely lose perspective on its own past that it would entertain the idea that the nation was founded on slavery, rather than on the ideals that have made it a beacon to the rest of the world? And would a serious country think it appropriate to teach its children that their nation’s past is best understood as a parade of horrors, to which the most appropriate response is not pride but lacerating shame?”

Oh, the Humanities: And here is a quote to whet your appetite to read the Free Beacon’s review of John Agresto’s book on why the humanities matter:

In Part I of The Death of Learning, John Agresto acknowledges the force of each of the foregoing criticisms. But the greatest value of his book lies in its second part, devoted to the theme of “Redeeming and Reconstructing Liberal Education.” While scolding the snobbery of societal elites toward fellow citizens who don’t pursue a college degree, instead entering the working world directly, Agresto aims to defend the value of a genuinely liberal education, not only for the individual who receives it, but for his country. But to do this requires reconceptualizing the nature and meaning of liberal education

Charlotte Hays
Charlotte Hays
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