The Left’s Dave Chappelle Problem
Dave Chappelle, arguably America’s best loved comedian, apparently slept through his Intersectionality 101 class, and his would-be woke masters are purple with rage.
The LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD joined with others in “condemning” Chappelle’s newly released Netflix special, “The Closer.” Said the GLAAD press release: “Dave Chappelle’s brand has become synonymous with ridiculing trans people and other marginalized communities.”
The National Black Justice Coalition, another LGBTQ advocacy group, went full-blown cancel, demanding that Netflix “should immediately pull ‘The Closer’ from its platform and directly apologize to the transgender community.”
“Transgender” is the “T” in LGBTQ. (No one is quite sure about the “Q”). LGBTQ activists have positioned themselves along with blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Asian-Americans, and Muslims among others as a principal subset in the intersectional coalition that has held the Democratic Party together for the last generation.
ESPN sidelines anchor for honest Obama comment
The biracial Sage Steele, a sports anchor on ESPN, took public issue with Barack Obama’s self-identification as “Black” on the recent 
census and was rewarded with a suspension.
“Well, congratulations to the president, that’s his thing,” said Steele. “I think that’s fascinating considering his black dad is nowhere to be found, but his white mom and grandma raised him, but OK. You do you. I’m gonna do me.”
Steele may have been a victim of bad timing. Her comments came just as Obama was rolling out a young-adult version of his bestselling 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” In the interlocking world of American media, she may have stepped on some seriously sensitive toes.
In Memoriam: The GOP Betrayal of Rep. Todd Akin
Former Republican U.S. Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri died late Sunday at age 74,” the AP tells us in its Twitter feed. “He sunk his 2012 bid for Senate with a comment about ‘legitimate rape.’”
In shrinking a man’s life to a single sound bite, the AP not only betrayed the essence of the man, but it also missed the nut of the story. Akin did not sink his bid. That bid was sunk from under him by the GOP’s most calculating bigwigs, none more soulless than strategist Karl Rove. “We should sink Todd Akin,” Rove publicly joked that August. “If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”
I got to know Todd Akin well over the years. I first met him in October 2012. Although I supported one of his opponents in Missouri’s senatorial primary that August, I was asked to introduce him and Newt Gingrich then stumping for Todd in a last ditch effort to salvage his campaign.
Two years later, I edited Todd’s book, Firing Back. In the course of this project I met Todd’s stalwart wife Lulli and many of his six children, all of whom adored their father and stuck with him through his travails. If there was a more decent and authentic Christian and conservative in politics, I have not met that person.
Sopranos Prequel Goes Squishy on the Sixties
Last weekend, I went to the theater to see the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. I watched with the kind of critical eye an 
astrophysicist might have brought to Star Wars.
At the time of the 1967 Newark riot, the foundational event of the movie, I was a 19-year-old living in Newark with my siblings and widowed mother. My late father had been a Newark cop, and my Uncle Bob, also a cop, was in the thick of the riot from the initial assault on the Fourth Precinct to its bloody end 26 deaths later.
Of note, too, Bob had married into a large Newark Italian family. As a kid, I spent considerable time in the family compound. I knew how that world turned. David Chase should have. An Italian American a few years older than I am, Chase created the stellar HBO series, The Sopranos, and was the creative force behind the movie. In the series, which ran from 1999-2007, there was scarcely a false note. In the movie, alas, scarcely a note rings true.
Not surprisingly, given the times we live in, race is at the heart of the movie’s misfire.
The COVID Survey That Should Have Rocked the World
In March 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the New York Times shared the results of a comprehensive survey of 35,000 Americans done by Gallup and Franklin Templeton. True to form, the Times refused to face the survey’s epic implications.
The Times started pulling punches in the headline, “Covid’s Partisan Errors: Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks — and Democrats tend to exaggerate them.” This equivocation papered over the real news hook of the story, namely that health officials and their media enablers scared policy makers, especially in blue states, into making catastrophic, fear-based misjudgments.
“To many liberals, Covid has become another example of the modern Republican Party’s hostility to facts and evidence,” wrote reporter David Leonhardt, unaware that he just delivered a laugh line. In assessing the GOP worldview, Leonhardt, like most of his media colleagues, saw hostility in just about every Republican gesture.
First they came for Chick-fil-A …
Big Brother is watching what you eat
In 2023, after 10 years of broken promises and backroom deals, Kansas City International (KCI) will open a spanking new terminal that few air travelers really wanted.
To get the deal done, airport boosters made all sorts of unseemly concessions to businesses claiming to be women and minority-owned. As happens everywhere, these deals added considerable cost to the final product, but zero value.
Last week, a third partner in the cartel of the “marginalized” that runs America – the LGBTQs – weighed in and proved that its wheels can squeak as loudly as those of its intersectional partners.
The Little Café That Almost Could
A recent story out of Kansas City, the town in which I live, suggests just how eager the Left is to control our lives, right down to the food we eat. The story involves a friendly hole-in-the-wall café whose brave proprietor had had enough.
Another defiant cafe in NY
A little background is in order. In 2008, I somehow emerged as the public face of the opposition to a ballot measure that called for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Kansas City. What made this unusual, and what made me an effective spokesman, was that I never smoked. Well, not that effective—my side lost the election, narrowly.
My side, as I saw it, was not pro-smoking, but pro-freedom. I argued that no law prevented entrepreneurs from banning smoking in their establishments, and no law forced anyone to eat or drink at a place where others smoked. Indeed, once I saw the election results, I half-regretted not having opened a non-smoking restaurant of my own.
Unfortunately, freedom is a much scarcer commodity today than in 2008. Back then, health officials used their bully pulpit to persuade citizens. These officials had one set of solid facts on their side, namely that smoking is dangerous, and one set of dubious assertions, namely that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. In 2008, citizens were allowed to weigh the evidence.
The Woke Wage War on Red State Frats
I
n the first few weeks of the 2021 semester, without the major media noticing, startling similar protests involving thousands of students have erupted on at least three major state university campuses — the Universities of Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. In each case, an alleged sexual assault by a fraternity member has triggered these “largely peaceful protests,” but in no case has the accused been arrested.
Although To Kill a Mockingbird remains among the most read books by college students, the protestors seem to have taken as role model not Atticus, but the racist vigilantes swarming the courthouse. Mao’s Red Guard would envy the students’ collective indifference to due process. A friend who stumbled onto the initial Kansas University protest told me, “It was madness, utter mob justice, a la Mississippi lynch mob, circa 1935.”
The protestors are largely white, female, and naive. Most, I suspect, think theirs is a legitimate protest against a real problem. To be sure, sexual assault is evil and inexcusable.
But then so too is its exploitation. Christina Hoff Sommers has described these anti-male protests as one of “those panics where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish — and otherwise sensible people abandon their critical facilities.”
How MAGA anti-vaxxers became BLM-backed antiracists
Facebook blocked this article and sent would-be readers to an approved Covid site.
How could a leftist Twitter troll not salivate over a New York Daily News story headlined, “Tourists assault NYC restaurant hostess after she asked for proof of vaccination.”
The opening of the story promised even more ammunition: “A trio of Texas women beat up a hostess at an Upper West Side restaurant after she asked for their COVID-19 vaccination cards, police said Friday.”
This Sept.17 story seemed to have all the elements of a woke morality play. Texas anti-vaxxers, surely MAGA, gang up on innocent New York City hostess just trying to protect the public from the killer virus.
How Durham Bombshell Made a ‘Birther’ Out of Me
Upon reading special counsel John Durham’s 27-page indictment of attorney Michael Sussman, I found myself asking, “Is there anything
New book available everywhere.
Perkins Coie lawyers would not do to keep their Democrat clients in power?” Thanks to Durham, we know they launched a cyberwar against candidate Donald Trump that makes their work on the Steele dossier seem half-hearted. What we need to know is whether their work in producing Barack Obama’s birth certificate was any more legit than these other misadventures.
As to Sussman, he stands accused of lying to the FBI, “to wit, on or about September 19, 2016, the defendant stated to the General Counsel of the FBI that he was not acting on behalf of any client in conveying particular allegations concerning a Presidential candidate, when in truth, and in fact, and as the defendant well knew, he was acting on behalf of specific clients, namely, Tech Executive-I and the Clinton Campaign.”
Durham could have summed up the charge in a page. Instead, he spent 27 pages outlining the skullduggery behind the deep state war on Donald Trump. According to Durham, Sussman worked with at least three high-tech firms, two university researchers, and several media outlets on a cyber smear campaign against candidate Trump that dwarfed the Steele dossier both in scope and in sophistication.
