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This week, the bomber is apprehended and Rob Long is not surprised, there’s a caravan headed our way, professional prognosticator Patrick Ruffini opines on his epic Tweet storm and makes some mid-term predictions, and the great Heather Mac Donald stops by to chat about her new book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Finally, some thoughts about Megyn Kelly, free speech, and…Halloween?
Music from this week’s podcast: Caravan by Van Morrison
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That picture makes them look like an aging boy band. Fine job, @ejhill.
Or maybe the bomber heard all the “dog whistles” coming from the Trump administration, which regular people don’t hear. (But don’t say it’s because they don’t really exist!)
The other thing “we” might be grateful for, sadly, is that the softball shooting came first. If it were the other way around, I’m sure there would be lots of media and others on the left, calling THAT a “false flag operation” set up to distract from the “pro-Trump bomber.”
The examples given by Heather Mac Donald of the Google and Youtube people who wrote or acted about how women in general prefer different career paths to men in general, seem like classic cases of “Speaking Truth To Power.” And the Left punished them for it. Oh, how the mighty Left has fallen.
If an idiot socialist gets control of Florida, I am going to kill myself. Supposedly, Matt Caldwel was a shoe in.
For those that are interested, John Nolte had a very long and interesting column on Breitbart about Megan Kelly. I’d say there is definitely a “fatwa” on Fox employees. He covered other stuff that was related.
I know a lot of people hate Nolte, but I’m starting to think he’s brilliant.
I found strange the assumption that Megyn Kelly said something wrong. She stated an opinion on a talk show that she didn’t think dressing as someone you esteem or admire, and possibly darkening your skin in the process, was racist. I’d imagine that the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. would either agree with that, or mildly disagree, not because they’d think it racist, but because they’d think that it’s a land mine to avoid stepping on. This sort of mildly controversial statement would seem to be fine fodder for a talk show. The fact that the network could even use it as a pretext to fire her is alarming to me.
This does not detract from the fact that Megyn Kelly was an awkward and uncomfortable host of her show. A talk show of that format was clearly not her thing, and unlike with Conan O’Brien, the network didn’t have the patience to let her figure it out (it took Conan a couple of years.) I’m not sure she ever would. I hope she goes back to doing something news-related, since she’s good at that, and looks engaged and comfortable doing it.
On a related note, I see it’s getting fashionable to hate Dana Perino. I don’t get it all. I like her.
Actually Conan was fired from The Tonight Show pretty fast when he lost half of Jay Leno‘s previous audience.
At Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, Ben Vereen got in a lot of trouble for recreating a classic vaudeville performance by a great black star who, because of the customs of the 1890s, had to perform in blackface. It later turned out that ABC had cut the second half of the performance from the televised version, in which Vereen had expressed the performer’s angst.
Why blackface is supposed to be so racist is probably just down to people desperately looking for racism everywhere, to rationalize all the problems in the black community.
First of all, I watched that performance. I didn’t know that ABC cut that portion of Vereen’s bit. His explanation about the performers being uncomfortable. That’s disgusting that they did that.
But I am also uncomfortable seeing blackface. I like old movies, for example, and I think Shirley Temple did a couple of movies where black face was done. White Christmas, a darling movie, has a scene like this. I think so, anyway. Maybe it was Holiday Inn.
I think the reason it was done was to laugh at black people. I always wondered about it. I do cringe whenever I see it.
That’s a good point, but I was thinking way back to when they gave Conan the Late Night gig. He was nervous and terrible for a good while before he figured it out, and the network gave him time. Conan on the The Tonight Show was Johnny Carson compared to Conan on the first year of Late Night.
As George notes, the crux of it is what constitutes blackface. Younger people especially define “blackface” as any darkening of the skin to look like an African American performer. But that’s not what it is. Real blackface is outlandish, exaggerated, and intended to mock and denigrate. The type of blackface Jolson did when performing “Mammy”, is a complete difference in kind to Billy Crystal’s portrayal of Sammy Davis Jr., a man he loved and admired, or even Darrell Hammond’s portrayal of Jesse Jackson reciting “Green Eggs and Ham.” Blackface is not a white woman who is a fanatical Beyoncé fan using a lot of spray tan to look like her for a costume party. But we don’t live in an age of drawing meaningful distinctions, so a few dozen idiots with Twitter accounts get to decide these things, I guess.
EDIT: Perhaps I’m being unfair to Jolson in using him as an example, as there’s quite a bit of debate about his performance in blackface. But if you look for other example of blackface performances from that era or before, they are racist and mocking.
Kids used to use blackface to look like Michael Jackson on Halloween.
I’ll skip the obvious joke here, instead saying that this is why calling that blackface is a bad idea.
I know jack about this stuff.
After posting this, I realized it could be interpreted a number of ways. What I meant was just that kids who love Michael Jackson darkening themselves to look like him isn’t blackface to me.
What about the observation that Jackson himself got lighter and lighter, over the years? Whether that was deliberate on his part, seems to be debatable.
The joke I mentioned skipping was about that very thing.