What Happened to Joe Biden? It’s a Republican ad, but it is pointing out what the media should say but isn’t:

It’s hard to believe the Democrats couldn’t come up with a better candidate.

There’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve, by Michael Anton.

Yes, President Trump enjoys the overwhelming loyalty of Republican voters — but his hold on Republican donors, and especially officials, is much more tenuous. He ran against them and won — and most of them will never forgive him. They play nice to his face and undermine him behind his back. That’s before we even get to the ones in open rebellion.

No president — Democrat or Republican — has ever come to power facing organized efforts by his own party’s middle management to tally lists of people declaring on the record that under no circumstances will they work for the incoming administration. It’s been hard, to say the least, to staff up when a good chunk of the party is dead-set against their leader, and nearly all the rest spent their careers furthering policies diametrically opposed to those he ran — and won — on.

And that’s just President Trump’s ostensible own side. Then factor in all his open enemies from the other party, and virtually every other power center in our society, plus the steadfast opposition of the so-called “deep state” — i.e., the very federal bureaucrats whom he was elected to oversee and direct. Viewed from this angle, one may fairly wonder how it’s been possible for him to accomplish anything at all.

More fundamentally: where do you think the country would be without him? Even if you’re disappointed with less than 200 miles of wall, remember that leading Democrats not only insist that every single new inch is a moral atrocity, they want to tear down sections that already exist. …

What if Trump loses in 2020:

The ruling class would hail the president’s defeat as a historic repudiation of his (allegedly) “racist and xenophobic” vision, etc., as a vindication of every charge and complaint they’ve made against him and his supporters since Day 1. Their goal would be to erase the last four years and the 2016 election as if they never happened.

If think-tank conservatives want above all to get into a DeLorean and go back to 1985, the ruling class wants to cram America into a Prius and force us back to 2015. And then resume the trajectory the country had been on back then, i.e., the road to woke managerial tyranny. …

Immigration from the third world, which started in 1965, changed America:

In 1991, former Kennedy White House aide and longtime college professor, scholar, and public intellectual Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published a slim volume entitled The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. …

Schlesinger criticized multiculturalists as “very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes,” whose “mood is one of divesting Americans of their sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.” We can’t go on this like this and remain a “we,” he warned, and urged Americans to (re)unite around our shared language, heritage, history and interests. …

And now here we are: in so many ways, more divided than we were in 1860 — in so many ways, not even a “we” anymore. …

Unity? No longer possible. A low trust society has gradually replaced the formerly high trust, highly-functional country.

Restoring American unity in this climate sounds almost comically impossible. How to restore unity after five decades and counting of Cold Civil War — the rancor of which only seems to intensify month to­ month? …

“Unity” in the American political context — really, for any republic, and one may say for republicanism simply — means a shared set of basic goals and assumptions. It doesn’t mean everyone has to agree on everything or even like everyone. …

Divisions between patricians and plebeians over sharing spoils and offices continually wracked Republican Rome, but the city also remained fundamentally unified, as Rome, with both classes speaking the same language, worshiping the same gods, adhering to the same morality, and committed to Roman greatness and glory.

To say the least, there does not appear to be any shared interest or bond of unity underneath contemporary America’s bitter Red-Blue divide. One side loves America, the other hates it — or can tolerate it only for what it might someday become, were the Left’s entire program to be enacted without exception. One faction, or most of it, is religious in the traditional sense; the other invented the god of wokeness, which it worships with Dionysian abandon. One side speaks only English, the other boasts of the literally hundreds of languages now heard in America’s Blue precincts. One side insists that the ultimate moral imperative is to punish the other — who in turn understand that morality requires fairness and equal justice under law.

What would partisans of either side cite as something they share in common with the other? The land itself? But they each go to great lengths not to live anywhere near one another. “The economy?” It’s been reengineered to benefit one side at the expense of the other. As for the culture — that reliable unifying bond throughout most of history — to ask is to laugh, and cry, at the same time. …

The left pivoted from championing the common man to building a coalition of non-white-male identity groups, confident that the newcomers would eventually give it electoral dominance:

The Democrats long ago abandoned “the common man” in favor of their high-low coalition. The Republicans would seem to be the country party — certainly, they get a lot of their votes from such people — but in practice GOP office-holders and donors are just as, if not more, likely to side with the interests of the ruling class and “global capital” over those of their own ostensible base.

What’s needed, then, is a Trumpist political party focused squarely on “old economy” — rural, manufacturing, and blue-collar interests. Which means, in most if not all cases, a party actively opposed to the program of the ruling class. If the Republican Party can become that, all to the good. If it can’t, it should go out of business. …

The Republicans lost the culture war so badly, they need a major overhaul:

The Left’s rout in the “culture wars” has made Republicans so gun-shy that they can’t even seize obvious opportunities, such as standing up for female high school athletes who suddenly find themselves losing all their track meets to biological boys. …

There’s no going back to 1985, much less 1955. Somewhat paradoxically, though, the Left’s many cultural victories make the Right’s task easier today.

All the low-hanging fruit has been plucked: every social cause that ordinary Americans can be convinced is a matter of simple fairness has been achieved. What’s left are radical causes that sound to middle America not merely lunatic but dangerous. Fifty-year-old men asserting a fundamental “right” to change in front of 11-year-old girls in YWCA locker rooms is not the moral equivalent of ending Jim Crow — and despite the Left’s caterwauling, few Americans see it that way. What they lack are politicians with the spine to stand up to this nonsense.

In other words, to succeed the Republican Party needs to become more like the old Democratic Party — more worker-friendly, more concerned with wage and wealth inequality — but also the opposite of today’s Democratic Party: openly nationalistic on economics and trade, stalwartly traditional on morality and culture. …

The Republicans are not exactly the “white party” — the spiritual and financial core of the Democratic Party is white — but they are the party that draws the overwhelming majority of its support from white voters. …

But cutting deep into the Democrats’ margin with their base voters would likely be enough to secure Republicans a majority for a generation or two—if they could manage to do so without losing their own. The Democrats know this. And it terrifies them.

Which is why the ruling class and its minions will use their complete control of the Megaphone — the entire media and educational system propaganda machine through which our rulers broadcast their message — to make winning such votes very, very difficult. There is practically no end to the Left’s motivations for calling anyone to their right “racist.” But this fear is perhaps the biggest. Hence if and when the Republicans ever mount such an effort the calumny machine will kick into overdrive.

The inherently paradoxical propaganda script is already written: the fact that you don’t win votes of color proves that you’re racist and bad; the only way to redeem yourselves is to court voters of color; but any voter of color who votes for you is a race traitor.

Heads they shoot us, tails they hang us. Hysterical Megaphone propaganda 24/7 will be hard to overcome. But Republicans will not only have to try — they’ll have to succeed.

Amen. Read it all.

I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology. By Douglas Blair.

I was helping one of my elementary school students with a homework assignment about listing famous Britons throughout history. She already had some of the more obvious ones: Shakespeare, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth.

“Well, how about Winston Churchill?” I recommended.

“Oh no, not him,” she replied. “He was a racist and didn’t think women should have rights. He wasn’t a good guy.”

I was floored. It clearly wasn’t something she came up with on her own. She was just regurgitating propaganda her teacher had taught her. All sense of nuance and critical thinking about the man who saved Europe from the Nazis was gone. Churchill committed “wrongthink,” so in the bin he goes. …

BLM isn’t political, just good:

Many of my colleagues wore Black Lives Matter pins and apparel to school in blatant violation of school rules forbidding political statements on clothing.

When I asked for a justification of the behavior, I was told it wasn’t political to support the group, it was a matter of human rights. The children would see these pins and clothes and connect radical leftist groups with basic human dignity. “How dare you question Black Lives Matter? I was taught this is a matter of human rights!” …

Everyone’s else’s culture is awesome and cool, but ours is trash:

I would try to engage my students with folk stories from around the globe to teach them world history and other cultures.

Story time went on without a hitch until I decided to tell stories from the Bible. Other teachers began to complain I was preaching Christian values to the children and attempting to convert them.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a problem when I was sharing stories from other ancient cultures throughout history. Stories about ancient India and China were fine and encouraged as “sharing unheard voices.” After sharing the story of the Tower of Babel, I was told to switch back to non-Christian stories or face consequences.

Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to turn over our kids to the state to indoctrinate?

School vouchers would end this nonsense quick smart. If the state funding went with a child (as a voucher for $10k per year to the school), but the parents choose the school, soon schools would compete and compulsory leftism would wither away.

Which Lives Matter? Arabs, Turks and Africans should beg Europeans to forgive them for their atrocities in the very recent past. By Alexander Maistrovoy.

In late June, vandals desecrated the monument to Miguel de Cervantes in San Francisco. Thus Cervantes was turned into a “slave owner.”

Greatest Spanish writer, inventor of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. His statue was recently vandalized in BLM riots.

It is well known that this great writer and brave hidalgo was a slave of the Algerian corsairs for 5 years. They seized him on a ship sailing from Naples to Barcelona.

Cervantes became the property of the cruel Muslim Albanian Dali-Mami, who went by the nickname Lame. The rowers on his ship were white Christian slaves. Being shackled, they ate, slept, and defecated right where they sat. Many of them were missing ears, noses or eyes — the result of Dali-Mami’s outbursts of anger. Once he ordered that a guilty rower’s hand be cut off, and beat the whole team with this hand.

In Algeria, things were not much better. Slave auctions lasted from 8 am to 2 am. Miserable people were forced to run and jump to show their strength and endurance; overlookers cut off their hands for every stolen penny, as prescribed by Muslim laws. Executions, mutilations, torture of slaves were everyday fun for the Algerian Dey. You would see naked people dying in agony under the scorching sun near his house. Wall hooks outside the prison gates were “decorated” with the heads of Christian slaves, being pecked up by kites.

Belonging to a noble famous family saved the life of the writer Cervantes, but fortune was not so favorable to hundreds of thousands of other slaves.

Why aren’t our children taught this as well about slavery?

During the four centuries of the Ottoman Empire, the life of white Christians in the coastal cities of Europe turned into a hell.

Pirates of Hayreddin Barbarossa (Hizir-reis), who was Sultan Suleiman’s vassal, freely reigned in the “Turkish lake” (the Mediterranean Sea). It is difficult to describe the horror in which the inhabitants of Spanish, Italian and Sicilian villages lived. Berbers usually came at night, when people were sleeping. Breaking into houses, they murdered old people and captured young men and women, girls and boys, who were valuable commodities at slave markets. As a rule, after a “successful” raid, the whole village or the entire city was burnt.

Women, teenagers and children were destined for the sexual pleasure of their captors. In the paintings of artists of the 17th-19th centuries, such as Jean-Leon Gerôme’s “The Slave Market” or Giulio Rosati’s “Inspection of the New Arrivals,” one can often see a wealthy sheikh examine and touch a European woman standing in front of him as his servant carefully measures her and the owner is bargaining briskly about the value of “live goods.”

Masses of white slaves entered gigantic slave markets of Algeria, Constantinople (Istanbul) and other large cities of the conquered Byzantine Empire. Those marketplaces (“Esir” or “Yesir”) were established by Sultan Mehmed II and were located in most towns and cities of the Ottoman Empire.

The French traveler of the 16th century Nicolas de Nicolay described them as gigantic accumulations of naked, submissive and frightened people, who were mockingly touched, examined, patted on the stomach, back, sides and buttocks, like cattle, by visiting merchants and local wealthy townspeople. …

Many coastal regions of Europe were completely depopulated. Not a single European country, even the most remote ones, felt any safety.

In June 1631, Murat Reis captured Baltimore in Ireland: all the people there were taken to North Africa. Men were turned into galley slaves; women became sex slaves of sheikh and emirs. For the Berbers, red-haired Celtic girls were an exotic delicacy.

Even Iceland was plundered: Izlanda seferi was a series of raids into this country in July 1627. Since old or sick people had no value in the states of the Barbarian Coast, they were locked in churches and set on fire.

Much more at the link, including the last vital part:

The Ottomans, Arabs and Berbers renounced slavery not by their own good will, but under the guns of American, British and Dutch frigates. It was one of the most glorious human rights victories in the world history.

But our children are led to believe by the politically correct that the only slavery that ever occurred was of blacks from Africa in the United States. Another politically-correct lie by omission. It’s not hard to see how the left profit from that.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Time to Buy Coal, by David Archibald. First, the 1997 signal to buy gold:

The signal to buy gold was the Reserve Bank of Australia’s selling of two thirds of Australia’s then gold reserves, at about US$350/oz in 1997. That was 167 tonnes, then worth US$1.9 billion and now worth US$10.7 billion. The reason the RBA sold most of our gold is because they considered gold to be a barbaric relic left over from unenlightened times. The official reason was that they weren’t getting an interest income from the holding. …

While the nation has had some US$9.0 billion of value forgone by that RBA decision to date, that figure is set to blow out given credible forecasts of what the gold price will do. For example, the New York investment firm of Goehring & Rozencwajg recently produced a report entitled “On the Verge of an Energy Crisis”. On page 20 of that report is this discussion of the gold price outlook:

There is an historical relationship between the size of a central bank’s balance sheet and the price of gold going back to the Federal Reserve’s establishment in 1913. Even adjusting the Fed’s balance sheet for excess reserves (a debate in and of itself), we believe today’s balance sheet justifies a gold price in excess of $15,000 per ounce on the low side or $25,000 per ounce on the high end. ...

The lesson:

Virtue-signalling hysterics produce the highest-quality buy and sell signals. They pick the bottoms and tops of multi-decadal trends — just do the opposite of what they do.

Now a similar signal has been generated in coal:

Our major mining companies have been captured by virtue-signalling hysterics, and management makes sure they are succeeded by other virtue-signalling hysterics. What has low emissions got to do with company profitability?

These companies have also lost competence in running mining operations. … BHP and Rio Tinto are run by incompetent, virtue-signalling hysterics, but that is also true of the whole country now.

Why might coal now be a good multi-decadal investment? … Each tonne of coal, on average, contains the equivalent of two barrels of oil. … In the first decade of this century the natural gas price, for a few years, went to the oil price in energy equivalent terms. Eventually the coal price will go to the oil price in energy equivalent terms, less the conversion cost. That frabjous day is coming.

That, plus the world is about to find out that it’s not carbon dioxide that controls the global temperature. While it has an influence, its role is greatly exaggerated in the climate models.

Trump’s Real Opponent is the Media, by Joe Saunders.

“My biggest opponent isn’t Biden. It’s not the Democrats. It’s the corrupt media,” Trump told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” in a telephone interview. “We have a corrupt media in this country.”

Every Republican president is fighting an uphill battle against the mainstream media, of course. They hated Richard Nixon, they loathed and feared Ronald Reagan, they despised Bush 43 and they abhorred Bush 45. But the ferocity of the media war against Trump is beyond all that — and everyone on every side of politics knows it.

A new analysis published Monday by the conservative Media Research Center proves Trump’s point …

MRC studied ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from June 1 through July 31 — two full months, including weekends. The study found 512 total minutes of coverage devoted to Trump specifically, not counting coverage of the administration or its policies generally, Noyes wrote. That compared with 58 minutes devoted to Biden — a ratio of almost 9-1. …

“Our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95 percent of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five percent (34) that were positive. Using the same methodology … we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.”

“The extra airtime devoted to Trump consisted almost entirely of anchors and reporters criticizing the President.” …

Viewers heard 150 TIMES more negative comments about Trump than Biden. That’s not news reporting — that’s a negative advertising campaign in action.” …

“No presidential candidate — not even Barack Obama in 2008 — has ever been on the receiving end of such a wide array of media favors. (While Obama received highly positive coverage, there was no massive media effort to destroy his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain.),” [MRC’s Richard Noyes] wrote.

The media backing is a double-edged sword for the left. Sure, it adds many percentage points to their vote. But it also means they adopt much more extreme policies, because they are insulated from criticism and feedback. If the media was even-handed, the left would not veer off so far into fantasy and so far away from most of the electorate.

If the left were really smart, they would blame the media for their upcoming loss. Then take steps to encourage honest reporting and feedback. Pigs might fly.

hat-tip Stephen Harper

Mail-in Voting: How to Rig an Outcome, by Frank Miele.

The Democrats have an insurance policy. …

Unlike absentee ballots or early voting, which require active participation by the voter, universal mail-in voting means that every registered voter will be sent a ballot whether they want one or not — heck, even whether they are alive or not. …

Fact of the matter is that cheating on mail ballots is child’s play. Here, off the top of my head, are four ways to monkey with the vote:

1) A hard-core Democrat union-rep mailman is collecting mail from households in a neighborhood that skews Republican. He dutifully collects the ballots left for him, but then dumps them in the trash or (smarter) burns them in his fire pit later that night. 
What is the protection against this happening? …

2) A hard-core Democrat nurse’s aide making 10 bucks an hour decides to monkey-wrench the system that she thinks is exploiting her. When she collects the ballots from 120 residents in the nursing home where she works, she volunteers to drop them at the post office “to make sure they are secure,” but then heads home and buries them in the backyard.

3) A pizza delivery guy enters an apartment building with a large pepperoni and leaves with a carton of blank ballots that were left in the lobby for pickup by the residents. The pizza guy happens to be a member of antifa and he has no problem filling out all the ballots against President Trump and the Republicans. Even if the fraud is discovered, it is highly unlikely that all the ballots will be disqualified.

4) A Democratic campaign aide who is working to “get out the vote” in a neighborhood with a high proportion of older people knocks on doors and offers to help voters mark their ballots. Not a citizen? No problem. That’s been waived. Not sure who to vote for? How about that nice Democrat! And if you do happen to vote Republican, no problem — I will deliver it for you … right to the Dumpster!
 [Indeed, this sort of thing already happened in the 2018 mid-term elections in LA and San Diego, which flipped several long-Republican-held seats to the Democrats.]

You can think of more on your own. It’s not that hard. But perhaps even more worrisome is the possibility that votes will not be counted on election night. Some states are allowing ballots to come in by mail for days after the official election. In some cases, the ballots need to be postmarked by Election Day, but in other cases the ballots will be sent out with prepaid postage, meaning there will be no postmark and no way to know if the ballots were mailed before or after the deadline. …

Come November 4:

Suppose the results on election night are inconclusive. Biden and Trump are both short of the majority of electoral votes needed to win, and close races are reported in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, North Carolina and Michigan. Many ballots are uncounted, and it looks like the vote could drag on for weeks. Colorado and Nevada have universal mail ballots, so if either candidate needs those electoral votes for the win, they will target the states with lawyers, lawsuits, and protesters.

Imagine the chaos when peaceful protests turn into riots, and then boxes of uncounted ballots are mysteriously discovered in a county courthouse in Las Vegas. Imagine what happens when those ballots favor Joe Biden by a margin of three to one, giving him just enough votes to win Nevada’s six electoral votes and assure him of victory.

The polls are taken to show the Democrats well in front (by oversampling those groups that vote Democrat), so as to discourage and demoralize the right. Then, based on the polls, the left expects to win.

So if the left don’t win, it’s “obvious” that there must have been cheating. For the sake of democracy and fairness, the left then ignore the tainted results. It will all make perfect sense in December.

Why Do Most Countries Ban Mail-In Ballots? They Have Seen Massive Vote Fraud Problems, by John Lott. From an abstract of a paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center.

Thirty-seven states have so far changed their mail-in voting procedures this year in response to the Coronavirus. Despite frequent claims that President Trump’s warning about vote fraud/voting buying with mail-in ballots is “baselessly” or “without evidence” about mail-in vote fraud, there are numerous examples of vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots in the United States and across the world.

Indeed, concerns over vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots causes the vast majority of countries to ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad.

Most developed countries ban mail-in ballots unless the citizen is living abroad or require Photo-IDs to obtain those ballots. Even higher percentages of European Union or other European countries ban mail-in ballots for in country voters. In addition, some countries that allow voting by mail for citizens living the country don’t allow it for everyone. For example, Japan and Poland have limited mail-in voting to those who have special certificates verifying that they are disabled.

France has made an exception this year to the ban on mail-in ballots to those who are sick or at particular risk during the Coronavirus pandemic. Poland and two cities in Russia have adopted mail-in ballots for elections this year only, but most countries haven’t changed their regulations.

Who’d have thunk! So why are the Democrats priming us on this issue? Scott Adams points out an alarming possibility:

We’ll be hearing a lot more about mail-in ballots soon.

Super Funny Kimberly Klacik US Congress Political Ad, by Kimberley Klacik.

Doesn’t that expose the emptiness and insincerity behind the left’s “black lives matter” and “systemic racism” talk? It’s all about getting the left into power, nothing more.

Johannes Leak cartoon shows that the left just can’t handle the truth, by Jacinta Price.

What has the left flock all fluttering and squawking is Johannes Leak’s cartoon lampooning Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s words about “brown and black girls”. But there was not a single feather ruffled about the terms when Biden originally used them.

From Biden’s introduction of Kamala Harris as his running mate (see 2:10 in the video for his “little Black and brown girls” remark):

It’s another example of the imputation that everybody on the right is racist and nobody on the left could possibly be.

Those on the left are so blinkered ideologically that they cannot see, or cannot admit, that their condescending identity politics and tokenism are rooted in racism. …

Instead of being offended by this blatant playing of the identity politics card, which stereotypes people with racial tropes, the left takes to the barricades over a cartoon that uses Biden’s own words against him. The cartoon incisively skewers Biden — a former vice-president — for choosing a running mate not on the weight of her career and achievements but because of the identity politics appeal of her skin colour and her gender.

Imagine the left’s reaction had US President Donald Trump announced the appointments of Small Business Administrator Jovina Carranza as “bringing hope to Mexican girls” or Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao as “bringing hope to Asian girls” — let alone referring to them as perhaps “brown” or “yellow”. …

It is assumed by the left that to overcome racism we must follow the principles of identity politics and appoint individuals to positions of power because of the colour of their skin and/or their gender. We are then reduced to the colour of our skin and our gender, not recognised as human and not recognised on the basis of merit.

The “blacks live matter” guff from white leftists is insincere and patronizing. It’s merely a result of the identity politics strategy, adopted 25 years ago after they tired of championing the deplorable working class. It’s designed to make them look good and vote them into power.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

It’s Official: Left Doesn’t Really Believe Races Equal, by Lance Welton.

Social Justice Warriors who proclaim that all races are “equal” in every way, and vociferously condemn and campaign for the firing of scientists whose work contributes to the overwhelming empirical evidence that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites, don’t believe it deep down. And now we have scientific proof.

Soon-to-be-published research, by psychologists at Yale and Princeton, one black and one white, has now proven that, beneath all the “humility,” American “Liberals” who claim blacks are “equal” also tend to speak to them as though they were intellectually inferior. “Conservatives,” by contrast, tend to speak to people of all races in the same way.

The eye-opening study is entitled “Self-Presentation and Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift of White Liberals” and is to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Written by Cydney Dupree of Yale University, and Susan Fiske of Princeton it begins with a striking statement:

Most Whites, particularly socio-political liberals, now endorse racial equality. Archival and experimental research reveals a subtle but reliable ironic consequence. White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites — that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent. …

Firstly, they analyzed 74 speeches by white Democrat and white Republican presidential candidates based on whether they were speaking to a mainly white or to a mainly black audience. They also analysed the kinds of words used. They found that Democrat candidates were less likely to use words associated with competence when addressing a black audience and were more likely to use words associated with “warmth.” The Republican candidates, by contrast, used pretty much the same kind of language with all their audiences, whether black or white.

Secondly, to investigate the issue further, Dupree and Fiske conducted a study in which white people—who had rated themselves on how “conservative” they were—were asked to imagine that they were members of a book club and had to send an email with their thoughts on the current book to club secretary “Emily” or “Lakisha.” Again, liberals altered their presentation to use words rated as lower in “competence” and higher in “warmth” when they had to email “Lakisha.” Conservatives sent essentially the same email to “Lakisha” and “Emily.” …

In the final study, ostensibly about online communication, 743 whites were asked to create an online profile — avatar and self-description — to be seen by another member of an online community. Some participants’ online partner had a white avatar called “Jake” or “Emily.” Others had a black one called “Tamara” or “Darnell”—participants’ partners were always the same gender as they were. This time the differences were significant, using their measured (lack of) “Social Dominance” as a proxy for Liberalism. White liberals wanted to seem more “warm” and less “competent” with blacks but not with whites. White conservatives presented themselves in the same way whether their supposed partner was black or white. …

It is likely that “cognitive dissonance” — the attempt to pretend they believe something that they don’t really believe at all in order to maintain a favorable self-image — plays a significant part in Leftists becoming “triggered” by research into racial differences. They know such research is accurate, but they desperately want it not to be accurate because they have invested so much, in terms of their identity as a good person, in claiming that this research is wrong. If it is right, they are deluded and worse.

Nailed it. Whites on the left lie when they claim statistical equality of groups, and they know it. The gap in IQ between the white group and the black group (not individuals) is pretty substantial, and everyone who lives in the US knows it — though some furiously deny it for political advantage. The claim of systemic racism is nonsense.

Andrew Bolt lashes ‘scared’ 2GB for giving in to leftist ad boycotts, by Nick Tabakoff.

[Andrew] Bolt has also revealed to Diary that he will move to “semi-rural Victoria” where he is currently building a house due to be completed by Christmas. Meanwhile, his popular show on Sky News will likely continue to be made in Melbourne, in a hybrid relationship that could see him work from his new home on certain days. …

Meanwhile, in a feisty podcast interview with his friend and former radio co-host Steve Price, obtained by Diary, Bolt has launched an extraordinary attack on the station on which he use to broadcast, 2GB, for “bailing out” of conservative commentary because of a fear of losing advertisers.

He particularly attacks 2GB in the interview for playing it safe to attract ad dollars, even taking a potshot at some of the station’s new talent: “(New 2GB drive host) Jim Wilson says that he wants people when he’s finished at 2GB not to know which way he votes. I think, oh gee, this is 2GB talking now? They’re all running so fast away from conservative opinion, so scared of left wing groups monstering their advertisers, that they’re bailing out.” …

Nine radio bosses have since privately acknowledged they have made a conscious decision to sacrifice some of 2GB’s ratings dominance for ad revenue, amid advertiser boycotts. Bolt says this decision involves a big gamble that listeners have no alternative but to “listen to the ABC”. …

He claims activist groups are trying, successfully, to “silence conservative voices on commercial media”.

“And it’s worked at 2GB, in part, because some advertisers freak and jump at shadows,” Bolt says. “They think a couple of people sitting in their underwear on the couch…wouldn’t be buying their products.”

A right wing broadcaster would get half the viewers (like Fox in the US), but is too afraid of left activists. Sad.

Obama: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” By Alex Thompson. Some interesting insights into Obama and Biden.

Obama is a technocrat, and autocratic:

Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.” …

Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive — he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students. He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have an Ivy League degree. …

Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama … The gaffes were only one side of the story, though. …

Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data for the most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement. …

Biden also decried the snobby intelligentsia that had taken over the Democratic Party. “It seems to me you’ve all become heartless technocrats,” he said. “We have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and nine-point programs.”

That sensibility is part of what separates him from Obama. “It really is the difference between street smarts and, you know, Harvard smart,” [Leon Panetta, Obama’s secretary of Defense] said. …

Biden is an old style politician:

Obama would often convey a weariness with the traditional obligations of political leadership: the glad-handing, the massaging of egos. Sometimes he couldn’t hide his disdain for part of the job he signed up for.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, in front of a roomful of journalists, Obama joked, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ I’m sorry, I get frustrated sometimes.”

Biden, former aides say, didn’t get why that was funny. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that likely “the single most important piece of advice I got in my career” came from the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) who told him, “Your job here is to find the good things in your colleagues—the things their state saw—and not focus on the bad.”

Mansfield added: “And, Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you don’t know his motive.”

Thus, Biden invested time in developing those relationships that Obama never did.

Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, said Biden “always wanted to have had two conversations with someone before he would ask that person for something. … Once in a while you’re like, ‘Hey, can we get through those two touches so you can make the ask here,’ but he just wouldn’t do it. That’s the kind of operation he runs.”

Advance staffers recall that Obama’s speeches were arranged to be delivered alone on the stage with voters behind him, while Biden would push to include every local elected official up there with him, knowing they would love the exposure to the vice president—a chit to cash in later.

Obama liked and respected Hillary, but Biden not so much:

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016. …

Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” …

Biden’s style worked:

One former Clinton aide noted that Biden’s ability to cultivate personal relationships paid dividends at the primary’s end: Bernie Sanders saw Biden as one of the few people in Washington who took him seriously before his 2016 run for president. After it was clear Biden had an insurmountable delegate lead, Sanders decided not to drag out the fight the way he did against Clinton in 2016.

“That relationship is why Bernie got out in March,” said the former Clinton aide.

“I don’t know who saw him sailing to the nomination,” said Psaki. Biden’s old-fashioned style of politics, she reasoned, “still taps into something in the American electorate. And maybe we’re not seeing that because I live in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a bunch of upper middle-class white people.” …

[Strategist David Axelrod] echoed this view in his memoir. “Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,” he wrote of Obama’s style. “That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.”

China’s facial-recognition surveillance secrets revealed in major leak, by Sharri Markson.

The Chinese government’s surveillance of ethnic minority groups in their own homes, in their cars and via their mobile phones has been exposed in a major security leak.

The Australian can reveal the Chinese Communist Party has installed facial-recognition software in residential buildings that are home to members of the Tujia and Miao tribes in Yuping Dong Autonomous County near the city of Tongren in the southwest province of Guizhou.

Similar to Uighurs and Tibetans, the Tujia and Miao tribes are designated ethnic minority groups, are disproportionately Christian and have a history of religious persecution by the Chinese government.

Photographs show how the CCP tracks the identity of each citizen — even children — as they arrive and leave their homes and also monitors their visitors, with some images capturing groups of young people sitting inside together and texting on their mobile phones. …

The activists leaked the real-time facial recognition data, while it was still operational and live-streaming, to an international group of cyber security analysts specialising in China. …

[Former Australian and US government cyber security contractor Robert Potter]: “It’s the expansion of facial recognition, which is extensively used in public, and it’s now being applied to homes … They are controlling entry and exit to buildings. They are turning people’s houses into prisons. It’s so shameful.” …

Starting with the non-Han groups:

Surveillance technologies that have been used extensively in Tibet and the Xinjiang Province are now being rolled out to target other minorities across China, said Fulbright University professor Christopher Balding …

“It clearly gives them the ability to say this person brought in five people to their home on a Sunday morning or to clock if it’s happening at specific times.”

China also pioneered the technical means to censor the Internet, which is being adopted by other authoritarian regimes. Inspired by Orwell, made in China.

hat-tip Stephen Neil