Posted on April 21, 2024 by Scott Johnson in Books, History

In the AOC archive

In a recent post Lloyd Billingsley returns to David Garrow and holds out the prospect of more. I thought I would repeat my own observations on Garrow in the context of a review he wrote for the Washington Free Beacon today (quoted below). Bear with me while I work my way back to it. I think you will find it worth waiting for.

I greatly respect David Garrow’s integrity as a scholar, biographer, and historian. Indeed, I am in awe of it. Everything he writes is worth reading. He is a principled man of the left and perhaps the world’s foremost scholar on Martin Luther King and the FBI. I have found him to be a generous email correspondent as well.

Professor Garrow is the author, most recently, of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017). This staggeringly researched book — Garrow spent nine years on it — covers 1078 pages of text (even though Garrow relegates his comments on Obama’s presidency to a 50-page epilogue). Rising Star is full of discoveries that Garrow documents in great detail. The 1078 pages of text are supported by 300 pages of footnotes in a double column with small print. Garrow puts every other biographer of Obama to shame.

Last year David Samuels interviewed Professor Garrow for the Tablet column “The Obama factor.” I thought it was the column of the year. It is the source of Lloyd Billingsley’s posts citing Garrow.

Professor Garrow is a voluminous reader. Writing for the Spectator World, he recommended three 2023 books. He concluded with a choice that was off my radar: “[B]y far the most powerful tome I perused this year is a privately published 640-page Report on the Biden Laptop, authoritatively compiled by Garrett Ziegler and available on the web from his 501(c)3, ‘Marco Polo.’ It’s a transfixing window into the entire Biden family, and the scale of human depravity it relentlessly details is unforgettably disgusting.”

Coming from David Garrow, that is quite a recommendation. The book remains accessible online for free at Report on the Biden Laptop.

Today at the Free Beacon Professor Garrow reviews The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, by Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen. The book covers President Biden’s alliance with the Democratic Party’s far left. I have read widely in Professor Garrow’s work, but on the subject of AOC he applies a dry wit that I haven’t previously observed. Paying tribute to one of the authors’ research discoveries, he writes:

An archived web page from 2018, created by a developer named Riley Roberts, purported to offer for sale Civet Select, “the world’s most exotic cup of coffee.” In Indonesia, according to the web page, “cage-free indigenous Palm Civets climb to the top of the plantation trees to eat the best coffee beans in the crop. Civets digest the berries and pass the coffee beans. The enzymes in the digestive process remove the bitterness and acidity from the coffee. Farmers hike the plantation and surrounding forest to find the rare, wild Civet droppings. The found beans are thoroughly cleaned, washed and sun dried at the plantation. Lab testing confirms Civet coffee is clean and safe to drink.”

Anyone reading these astonishing claims might well think the resulting product, pardon my French, tastes like shit, but a winsome photo of Roberts’s attractive partner, “Alexandria,” highlights her reassuring guarantee that that’s not the case: “This Civet coffee has a unique, smooth and full-bodied flavor that I really enjoyed.”

Yet most amazing of all is the listed price of the “found” beans for which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was shilling: $40 for two ounces! Coffee beans usually come in 12-ounce packages, so $240 for a bag of “droppings” would be an awfully steep price even for New York City Democratic Socialists.

Professor Garrow’s review is published under the heading “Left to their own devices.” At his personal site Professor Garrow maintains an archive of his own writings. It is accessible here, broken down by year on the left margin and by subject on the right.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Electric vehicles, Elon Musk, Energy Policy

The EV Bubble Bursts

Does this quote sound familiar?

“The electric automobile will quickly and easily take precedence over all other kinds of motor carriages as soon as an effective battery of light weight is discovered.”

That’s the Los Angeles Times in 1901. How about this one?

“Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they are within reach of the average family.”

That’s the Washington Post, 1915.

At Substack, Robert Bryce headlines: “Tesla In Turmoil: The EV Meltdown In 10 Charts.” The electric vehicle bubble is bursting, with Tesla, the only semi-successful EV manufacturer so far, in trouble. Its stock price has fallen 41% this year:

Tesla is the bellwether for the EV business, and it’s in trouble. Last week, the company announced it was laying off more than 10%, or about 14,000, of its employees. The move comes after a quarter during which the company missed delivery expectations and just before it reveals its quarterly profits on Tuesday. Here’s what Wired wrote last Thursday about Tesla’s situation: “Demand is dropping for electric cars in the U.S. and Europe, just as competition in China intensifies and workers revolt in Europe. Investors are worried.”

There are now murmurings that Tesla could go bankrupt. I like Elon Musk, and we need him: I fervently hope that he has gotten most of his money out of Tesla.

Robert offers a series of charts that document the problems the EV industry is facing. Sales of EVs (55% of them Teslas) are concentrated in a few states and a handful of very blue counties. Fewer vehicles are being sold overall, and an increasing number of Americans say they won’t consider buying an EV. One reason why consumers don’t want to buy EVs is that they understand charging them is a permanent problem that will prove insoluble if government mandates are actually enforced. Thus:

In 2019, Southern California Edison, one of the biggest investor-owned utilities in California, estimated the amount of juice needed to electrify transportation in the state. The utility found that trying to do so “will increase electric load by nearly 130 terawatt hours — representing more than one-third of the grid-served load” by 2045. The same report estimated the state will need to add at least 80 gigawatts of new zero-carbon electricity generation capacity over the next two decades. But … California’s electricity use is falling. Some of that decline is due to people and industry leaving the state. The other factor may be the high cost of power in the state. Further, California will not add 80 GW of new generation capacity over the next 20 years. The permitting process is far too long, and the costs of trying to do so are too high.

Electric vehicles will always be much more expensive than internal combustion vehicles because they need vast quantities of raw materials:

EVs require massive amounts of metals, minerals, and magnets. This chart uses a screengrab from a 2021 report by the International Energy Agency called “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.”

What’s worse is that we depend on the Communist Chinese for those materials:

Last month, the Biden Administration finalized rules requiring U.S. automakers to slash the number of internal combustion-engined vehicles they produce. By 2032, about 60% of the cars they sell must be fully electric. Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is the Biden crowd so eager to make our auto sector dependent on Chinese supply chains?

This chart tells the story:

Then, worst of all, we have magnets:

Last May, in “The EPA’s China Syndrome,” I explained how the proposed mandate on EVs would make the U.S. dependent on China for “neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets. Those magnets are critical components in electric vehicles and wind turbines as well as in military applications like ship propulsion systems and guided-missile actuators.” The EPA has completely ignored the magnet supply issue. In fact, the word “magnet” doesn’t appear one time in the agency’s 1,200-page final tailpipe rule.

This is pure foolishness. In 2022, the Commerce Department issued a heavily redacted report on Chinese magnets and the threat they pose to our security.

And of course all of this gets vastly worse if we also try to transition our power system from fossil fuels to wind and solar.

But let’s go back to Robert’s question: why is the Biden Administration trying to turn our future over to the Chinese Communist Party? One explanation is that Biden was the Manchurian Candidate, and the millions of dollars the Chinese have paid him and his family have put him in their pocket. That seems hard to believe. But what is the alternative explanation?

Then we come to the availability of needed natural resources. Apart from the fact that the Chinese control the current supply, we have the question: how will the vastly increased demand for raw materials be met?

[I]f [Richard Herrington, the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, and seven colleagues’] numbers are right, electrifying all of U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production. Even if there were sufficient political will — and money — to attempt an electric overhaul of the transportation sector, there may not be enough cobalt or rare earth elements to meet demand.

And that is just for the U.S. Western European countries are electrifying (or pretending to electrify) their automobile fleets, too. And you could do a comparable calculation for the alleged transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Even if you assume that the Earth somewhere holds enough raw materials to meet this enormous demand, the mining, manufacturing and transportation effort needed to carry out these mandates would be the greatest since the Industrial Revolution. And how much of that mining do you think would take place in the U.S.? Little or none, under current political conditions.

Electric vehicles are a novelty item and have been for over a century. There is no way that our automobile fleet will be converted from internal combustion to batteries, just as there is no way we can or will replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with wind- and solar-generated electricity. The whole thing is a fantasy. But the damage that will be done to our economy, our livelihoods and our national security, in pursuing that fantasy, is incalculable.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Higher education

Columbia then and now

Working for then Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale in the summer of 1969, I went to hear the late Allard Lowenstein speak to a large group of interns. Lowenstein was serving his only term in Congress before he was gerrymandered out of his district.

Lowenstein asked us to go back to our campuses, do our thing in opposition to the Vietnam war, and “eschew violence.” He said the word “eschew” several times, emphasizing its Anglo-Saxon roots. The derivation is more complicated than that, but Lowenstein’s emphasis on it is why I remember what he said. In 1980 Lowenstein was himself murdered in his office by “a deranged acquaintance,” as James Rosen puts it in the preface to William Buckley’s despairing eulogy of Lowenstein in A Torch Kept Lit.

Lowenstein had recruited Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy to run against LBJ for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Running into Senator McCarthy at lunch a week or two after I had attended Lowenstein’s presentation to the interns, I passed on Lowenstein’s remarks to him. “What do you want me to do,” McCarthy responded, “debate Mark Rudd?” I thought that was a disappointing answer, but it now reminds me of Columbia’s role in our descent into hatred and domestic terrorism. Lowenstein was onto something. McCarthy was above it all.

Rudd had emerged as a leader of Columbia’s SDS chapter as well as a participant in the riots that roiled Columbia in 1968. While Rudd was expelled before he graduated, he soon joined the Weather Underground, where he pursued terrorism with a revolutionary agenda. In his memoir Underground, he wrote: “We were the latest in a long line of revolutionaries from Mao to Fidel to Che to Ho Chi Minh, and the only white people prepared to engage in guerilla warfare in the homeland.” Bryan Burrough tells the larger story in his compelling history Days of Rage.

A friend wrote me yesterday to take up my comments on James Simon Kunen’s The Strawberry Statement. He wrote:

You probably know that James Kunen wrote a book published a book in 2012, Diary of a Company Man. I was curious and ordered a copy. Kunen had been working since the early 2000s in Corporate Communications at Time Warner and then as an editor at People. At least he recognized the irony. He was laid off, and the book traces his attempts to “find a life.” As you write in your post, things are bad at Columbia—but the self-pitying and entitlement was there in the late 1960s.

He may be right. Without minimizing the worst of 1968 — that’s why I recall Mark Rudd above — I think it’s worse now. The naked hatred of Jews and of the of United States rules the day at Columbia. It is accompanied by a kind of harassment that recalls the early days of Nazi rule.

Kunen subtitled his Columbia memoir Notes of a College Revolutionary, but as my friend notes, he wasn’t much of a revolutionary. After working as a freelance journalist he went to law school and became a public defender before he took a job in corporate communications.

At one point in The Strawberry Statement he observes that “Columbia” meant “America” and we were coming to understand the deep meaning of the equation. Writing from memory, I don’t think Kunen pursued much of an anti-American theme in the book. Like so many, myself included, I think our motives combined an utterly misguided mix of idealism, patriotism, and cowardice. I never hated the United States for one second.

In 2015 I attended a presentation at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul by Biblical scholar Alan Cooper of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Cooper recounted his days as a studious Columbia undergraduate in the late ’60s. Keeping up a perfect academic record, he somehow found time to join the Columbia a cappella group the Kingsmen in 1967. We came to know the group as Sha Na Na.

After the ferment at Columbia in 1968, the Columbia administration gladly provided the group a large campus venue to perform a show including oldies. The group’s theory was that rock music had become serious and unfun. They thought there might be an opening for fun. One of the members of the group was Rob Leonard. Leonard went on to become a professor of linguistics and make a name for himself in the forensic application of linguistics. Despite their stage personas, the men of Sha Na Na were no dummies.

Leonard’s older brother George thought that the group needed costumes and choreography. They were to do the oldies with a Motown veneer. Their first performance of the oldies at the large Columbia venue in the spring of 1968 was hugely successful. Students asked where they came up with such great material. (Dr. Cooper referred several times to “In the Still of the Night.”)

As a result of a gig at Steve Paul’s The Scene on West 46th Street, Michael Langham signed Sha Na Na to perform at Woodstock. As it turned out, their performance preceded Jimi Hendrix, who closed the festival as the sun rose on Monday morning. You may recall his rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from the movie.

My impression won’t withstand rigorous scrutiny — it’s just an impression — but I find it difficult to imagine this improbable story emerging from the current scene at Columbia. That was Columbia then. This is Columbia now.

Posted on April 20, 2024 by John Hinderaker in Anti-Semitism, United Kingdom

Is It a Crime To Be Openly Jewish?

Ever since October 7, mobs of Muslims have taken over much of central London for kill-the-Jews rallies. The effect has been to make being Jewish in London increasingly dangerous. Things came to a head last Saturday when a group of Jews leaving a synagogue bumped into the Muslims’ weekly protest. One of that group, Gideon Falter, describes what happened:

It was early afternoon, in central London, and I was with five others, some of us wearing a kippah, or skullcap.

At Aldwych, we came across the pro-Palestine protest and we started to cross the road as the front of the march got to us. Suddenly I felt hands on me. I looked around to see a police officer who was shoving me onto the pavement.

He said: “You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march. I’m not accusing you of anything but I’m worried about the reaction to your presence.” The march came towards us and after a few minutes the crowd got thicker, people stopping and shouting abuse at us: “Disgusting”, “lock them up”, “Nazis”, “scum”.

Videos of the incident went viral:


Falter picks up the story:

By the actions of the Metropolitan Police, it’s not just that central London is a “no-go zone” for Jews, as has been said previously, but a police-enforced Jew-free zone.

Eventually the officers walked us across the road so that we could get down a side street. We were separated and as I waited to see where the rest of the group was, a protester stood right next to me and a police officer and said: “I’m not afraid of your effing people. Wherever you go, I’m going to monitor and record your movements, not because I support you, but because I’m against you.”

Finally our group was reunited and we left, followed for about half a mile by police officers checking that we did not return.

What does it mean if it is perilous to be “openly Jewish” in central London?

Someone said to me recently, is it really the end of the world if Jews just have to stay out of central London for a few months on weekends? Yes. It is the end of a world that has existed since the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when British Jews and their allies saw off the British Union of Fascists, and ever since we have been able to live and thrive as equals in this city.

If we just accept that we are no longer welcome on the streets of London, it is the end of that world.

Initially, the Metropolitan Police released this statement:

That statement, more self-justification than apology, drew more criticism, resulting in this second effort:


The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has responded to this controversy by planning a march on April 27, the date of the next scheduled kill-the-Jews protest.

Enough is enough. It is time for a major change.

On Saturday 27th April — the next anti-Israel march — we are asking you, Jewish or not, to stand up for the tolerance and decency of which this country is so rightly proud, simply by going for a walk.

Click “Show More” for the full message:


I hope millions of people show up. Stand up against bigotry. Take back the city. Take back the Western world.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Hollywood

Bill Maher on Hollywood Pedophilia

So I’m just going to come right out and say it: in the privacy of the voting booth in November, Bill Maher is going to vote for Trump. The only question is whether he will admit it directly, or continue, between rote Trump denunciations, to provide strong hints week after week, like yesterday’s rant about pedophilia in Hollywood. Along the way he says, “Governor DeSantis was right” about Disney.

C’mon in Bill, the water’s fine. (The usual crude language warning applies.)

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Podcasts

Podcast: The 2WHH, on ‘Will It Get Worse Before It Gets Worse?’

This week’s ad-free episode is probably better thought of as a Two Whisky Happy Hour, because John Yoo is away on a lecture- and Philly-cheesesteak-procurement tour back east, and Lucretia is also out of action this weekend, too, though she appears in this episode by proxy, so to speak. So two whiskies it is.

Last weekend, Lucretia and I offered a keynote duo-presentation for Ammo Grrrll’s annual CommenterCon conference in Phoenix, which is an annual gathering of Ammo Grrrll’s best friends and devoted fans from around the country. My theme was “Will it get worse before it gets worse?”, and Lucretia offered some thoughts on the future of free speech.

We had some technical difficulties with our sound recording devices, so the recording has a sudden and noticeable quality shift right in the middle, and you can’t always make out the audience questions perfectly, but we think listeners will still enjoy most of it.

As always, listen here, or from wherever you source your favorite podcasts.

 

Posted on by Lloyd Billingsley in Music

Come and Get these (Motown) Memories

As Scott notes, “You Beat Me to the Punch,” performed by Mary Wells, was written by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ Ronny White. There’s a back story here fans should know.

“There was a guy who lived in Detroit and had a group called the Diablos,” Smokey recalled. “His name was Nolan Strong. They were my favorite vocalists at that time.” Strong was with Fortune Records and his “Mind Over Matter” should have been a national hit. You can hear Strong’s influence on the Miracles’ 1960 hit “Shop Around,” and “Who’s Lovin You,” on the flip side. As it happens, Nolan was a cousin of Barrett Strong, whose 1959 hit “Money” helped Berry Gordy establish the Motown label.

Gordy signed the Four Tops, who scored hits such as “Baby I Need Your Lovin” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Not as well-known is “Ask the Lonely,” which might have been their best, with Levi Stubbs in great form. No studio tricks, just pure talent, and Detroit was a good place for it. In the 1950s the city was booming and the schools offered great music programs. That comes through in the polished arrangements on the Motown hits. Singers honed their skills in churches such as New Bethel Baptist, pastored by the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father. Check out Aretha on “Amazing Grace,” back in 1972.

Berry Gordy also signed Martha Reeves, Annette Beard and Rosalind Ashford, performing as Martha and the Vandellas. The name is a contraction of Detroit’s Van Dyke street and Della Reese, Martha’s favorite singer. Check out Della on “Don’t You Know,” from 1959. Martha’s first hit was the 1963 “Come and Get These Memories,” and like the Vandellas I “can’t forget the motor city.”

In the early 1950s our family lived on Clements Street, and we remained in the area long after. So I knew about “Fingertips,” the first hit for “Little Stevie Wonder.” I knew that “Heavy Music” was a local hit for Bob Seger and the Last Heard. I was a big fan of Mary Wells’ hit, “The One Who Really Loves You,” written by the great Smokey Robinson.

In 2016 the Library of Congress awarded Smokey the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Check out JoJo’s performance of “Who’s Lovin You” at the event. Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy sure liked it.