Better in their words…

Election fraud progress in Az.; Sports Illustrated’s lightspeed demolition; more unlikely Trump support from the top; woke Penn professors terror at diversity; paper teaches narrative power; more.

Source: TINKLING NEGRONIS ☙ Sunday, January 21, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 You won’t find this encouraging story in any media. But late this week, voter’s rights group WE THE PEOPLE enjoyed a partial victory in Maricopa County court. Here’s the entire January 18th order (I’ll explain what it means):

Bottom line: the court roundly rejected the State of Arizona’s objections to producing documents related to the last election. They sure are fighting hard to prevent turning over documents that would prove how honest the vote was.

The conflict began when Plaintiffs, WE THE PEOPLE, sought discovery from the Arizona Secretary of State about the most recent election (involving Kari Lake). Rather than provide transparency or accountability, the Secretary asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit and opposed providing any documents for a whole grab-bag of reasons, including that it would just be too hard and too expensive, a category of argument called “burden.”

The court denied the Secretary’s motion to dismiss, which was the first bit of good news. Then it also apparently rejected all the Secretary’s arguments about discovery except for one: the burden. But the court noted that the Secretary didn’t bring up the burden argument until its third and final brief (called the reply brief).

Under the law, a party can’t just blurt “burden!” and that’s the end of the story. First, they must provide details about the burden, like why documents must be reviewed, how many pages there are to review, how long it takes to review each page, how many reviewers there are, how much the reviewers cost, and so forth. And the lawyers aren’t allowed to say any of that; the facts must come from the party, under oath, in an affidavit.

Next, the party seeking discovery is usually also allowed to “test” the burden theory. They can propose alternative ways to handle reviewing, or they can dispute the alleged time or cost. In the order, the court said the WE THE PEOPLE will get a chance to test the State’s burden claim, and ordered the Secretary to swear out an affidavit with more details.

You might recall that the FDA famously tried the same “burden” argument in one of the vaccine cases, claiming its burden was so huge it would take 75 years to review all the documents. In that case, the federal judge flatly rejected the FDA’s burden claim, and ordered the agency to cough up the documents on a rolling basis in just 12 months.

It’s progress.

🔥 The controlled demolition of Sports Illustrated is nearly complete. Friday, Fox Business ran a story headlined, “Sports Illustrated lays off ‘significant’ amount of staff after license revoked, owner vows to continue brand.” Liberals — who never read Sports Illustrated — cried in their Bud Lite, while corporate media tried to turn the news into a “Republicans pounce!” story:

In 2019, woke, diverse media firm The Arena Group (publicly traded as AREN) licensed the Sports Illustrated trademark from Authentic Brands Group, which owns over 50 “struggling or undervalued” consumer brands, including well-known names like Reebok, Forever 21, Brooks Brothers, Juicy Couture, Nautica, Sports Illustrated. (SI became a ‘struggling brand’ after 2018’s piecemeal sale of bankrupt Time, Inc., where the sports magazine started 70 years before.)

The Arena Group, at the time swollen with low-interest ESG financing, shot out of the gate earning buckets of ESG points by “transforming” the classic sports magazine into a new-and-improved, politically-correct version, using techniques like showcasing “body positive” models, older models, and transgender swimsuit models. This is an actual 2022 cover, not a parody:

In the same year, 2022, SI ran a variety of different covers to “celebrate” non-traditional body types including Elon Musk’s elderly mother, and to offend the greatest number and variety of its traditional readers:

Lest you somehow believe Sports Illustrated was actually motivated to help the gals by pushing the “boundaries of beauty” and “erasing the male gaze,” last year, in 2023, under the same new management, the iconic sports magazine abandoned its promotion of “non-traditional female body types” altogether, instead running heavily-photoshopped transgender male model “Kim Petra” in a string bikini (with the dangly bits modestly concealed in the water).

In other words, Sports Illustrated was saying men with long hair, prosthetic breasts, heavy makeup, and plastic surgery make better swimsuit models than women do.

So much for the natural look.

For some reason, the men who normally purchase Sports Illustrated declined in droves to buy all the groundbreaking issues featuring “non traditional” women and even transgender “women.” In turn, that caused advertisers who wanted to sell products to SI’s carefully-collated male demographic to also decline to purchase expensive advertisements from the magazine, since the numbers of men the advertisers wanted to reach had mysteriously shrunk.

Probably because of racism.

Then a little over a month ago, probably completely related, Sports Illustrated suffered from another scandal when news broke that lots of SI’s lame articles were being auto-generated by A.I. instead of actually written by its lazy, woke, but ultra diverse journalists. A headline from PBS:

Realizing that you may have a hard time believing that corporate media could have lied about its faked content, here are the basics. In November, SI got caught — not by any ‘fact checkers,’ mind you — by an independent media website called Futurism, which was having trouble tracking down some of SI’s bylined writers.  When Futurism asked SI for contact information, a whole bunch of articles suddenly and unexpectedly vanished from the website, poof!, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t, including every single article allegedly written by the suspect writers Futurism had asked about.

The writers didn’t exist. The ‘writers’ were completely made up, less authentic than a guy with fake boobs in a beauty contest.

Although at first refusing to comment, the story got legs and things quickly unraveled for SI. It had to say something. So it said the dumbest possible thing, or maybe it’s more accurate to say it admitted the dumbest possible thing, which was that it shifted blame for the fake, AI-generated authors and articles to a third party subcontractor.

See, it turned out that Sports Illustrated’s woke brand doesn’t even make the content. Everything was outsourced.  They just decided what kind of thingthey wanted, like promoting transgender models, and then paid opaque, overseas, third-party ghostwriting companies to produce the content for them.

It’s almost like they were just coasting on the brand name. Or maybe the idea was always to tank the brand for good.

Shortly after the bad news broke about Sports Illustrated’s fake AI content and lies, the Arena Group also failed to pay its quarterly license payment of $3.75 million. It was weird that they didn’t have the money. The check wasn’t even in the mail or anything. That non-payment triggered a default, and Authentic Brands revoked Arena’s license to use the SI trademarks, and it also demanded a contractual termination fee of $45 million.

And all of that was totally unaffordable and caused the woke Arena Group to lay off most of broke SI’s employees.

Believe it or not, but Sports Illustrated — for 70 years a weekly effort — dominated its category by virtue of its stellar reputation for excellent writing, not its once-a-year swimsuit edition. But it now looks like there are no writers left at Sports Illustrated at all, not real ones, and in just a few years they’ve even Bud-Lited the swimsuit edition.

What happens next will be that Authentic Brands will find a new owner for Sports Illustrated. However, it’s a much different financial climate now than it was in 2018, when money was cheap for companies with lots of ESG points. We’ll see what happens. But if the Gramscian marxists had a goal of destroying the iconic sports brand and eliminating its positive, pro-sports cultural influence, they’ve succeeded.

It’s annoying, but was probably inevitable. Once the original visionary founder is gone, it’s only a matter of time. Look at Marvel. The good news in sports journalism is now the conservative counter-revolution has an opportunity to create some fresh new millionaires with new visions for the Millennium.

🔥 The Daily Mail UK ran an astonishing pro-Trump op-ed yesterday penned by none less than former Prime Minister and super-elite lockdown prince Boris Johnson:

The op-ed swept up a stunning week of comments by various elite financial luminaries at the World Economic Forum this week that either threw shade on Joe Biden or outright endorsed Trump as the only possible way forward that doesn’t involve the Earth falling off the infinite stack of Turtles or something.

Even more curiously, Boris appealed to European liberals and neocons, or neoEurocons, or whatever they’re called, assuring them that Trump would notabandon Ukraine, downplaying the J6 riot, and waving aside Trump’s likely insistence that Europe pay more for its own defense as “long standing U.S. policy.” Aiming straight at the liberal narrative’s beating heart, Johnson argued that while Trump has the necessary “courage” to end the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration is “too weak” to stand up to Putin.

It was richly ironic that Boris Johnson referred to the “global wokerati,” as if he weren’t one of them, but I still give him points for coining the amusing term and dishing out heaps of well-justified sarcasm.

It seems like on January 1st somebody pulled some kind of lever, and some long-planned strategy shifted into gear. It’s not completely clear yet just whatis going on. But if Trump somehow engineered all this simultaneous elite support, then he’s a marketing genius, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

🔥 In the wake of the high-profile resignation of Penn’s president Liz Magill after her catastrophic Congressional testimony, the Daily Pennsylvanian ran a story this week headlined, “‘A hostile Republican takeover’: Penn faculty warn of academic freedom threats after Marc Rowan letter.” It sounded bad.

Marc Rowan is the chairman Wharton’s Board of Advisors, and is a Penn alum and major donor. He was appalled by the Liz Magill incident, and on December 12th Marc emailed the University’s Board of Trustees offering suggestions for hiring a replacement president and stressing that Penn’s culture needs more “viewpoint diversity” and emphasis on “freedom of speech.”

The email got out and badly triggered Penn’s faculty.

Only 2.5% of Penn’s faculty self-identify as politically conservative. Marc’s reference to “emphasizing viewpoint diversity” actually meant aiming for a better balance of conservatives and liberals, but Penn’s liberal professors interpreted the comment as code words for literal fascism. For example, history and sociology Professor Harun Küçük, if that’s his real name, said he was “concerned” that political conservatives will take advantage of the university at “a vulnerable time,” referring to the recent resignations of Liz Magill and Board of Trustees Chairman Scott Bok.

“You can call it a hostile Republican takeover of a distressed institution,” Küçük explained.

Penn Professor Robert Vitalis vowed to retire early if any more conservatives were hired. “I don’t want to teach on a campus that has accepted these premises of outsiders being able to say what slogans mean, what can be taught, or who can be teaching things,” he curtly explained.

Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors released a hysterical statement on the same day as Marc’s email, December 12th, which foresaw the worst possible outcome — the return of McCarthyism! According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the statement said:

“Any attempts on the part of Penn’s trustees to close academic departments, constrain hiring, discipline faculty members for political reasons and without due process, censor faculty’s intramural or extramural speech, or impose new McCarthyite speech codes on faculty and students would constitute the most flagrant violations imaginable of the core principles of academic freedom and faculty governance,” the statement wrote. “Those principles are not negotiable.”

In case you haven’t been around long, Senator Joe McCarthy was a hero who if anything understated the problem, as we who survive have discovered the hard way. The democrats literally canceled him, hounding poor Senator McCarthy to death even before his hearings were over. But that’s a story for another day.

🔥 For your further reading, Chris Rufo linked a recent woke academic paper titled, ““Narrative spillover: A narrative policy framework analysis of critical race theory discourse at multiple levels.” Unintentionally encouraging, it was a wonky, Neo-marxist guide to crafting better political narratives, but it wound up admitting just how effective parents’ ban-CRT efforts have been, even to the point that “the future of public education hangs in the balance.”

The paper described how Chris Rufo and his allies initiated the national conversation about CRT in schools, calling it a “successful” campaign against the awful racist ideology. Rufo was pleased to find himself cited as the original author of parental anti-CRT pushback, and he may deserve it. But I found much more interesting the paper’s discussion of the importance of narratives in politics.

Here are two key paragraphs to give you the idea:

Narrative storytelling surrounds us, impacting the way individuals view and act in the world. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are created through the stories policy actors tell. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) posits that policy actors use narratives strategically to influence policy. Developing a policy narrative is integral to the policy process because the story attached to a policy problem constrains the range of policy solutions, shapes the role of actors, and influences public opinion in ways that can create or close opportunities for change. Just as an individual can fall in love with a good book or character, policy narratives can be immensely powerful, eliciting strong emotions, and inspiring one to act.

NPF scholars have created an established set of narrative concepts that are identifiable and measurable. Although there are more narrative elements, NPF scholars generally study a combination of the following elements: characters, settings, moral, and plot. Characters may include heroes (the fixer of the problem), villains (one causing harm), and victims (those harmed). The setting is where the policy problem takes place, ranging from specific locations to broader social contexts surrounding the problem. Policy narratives also contain a moral, which is often the policy solution. The plot of a given narrative establishes the relationships between different characters and the setting.

If you have the time, read the whole thing to understand the political power of narrative, or at least what the left believes to be the power of narrative in politics. Unsurprisingly,  the paper was silent about ethics (whether a policy is moral or immoral), truth (whether a narrative is true or false), or practical utility (whether a preferred policy works or not). The gist of the entire paper is only about how to best manipulate people into supporting a preferred policy proposal using stories with fake plots and made-up villains and heroes — i.e., narratives.

It ended by warning its intended audience of a terrifying problem, which was also unqualified good news for us. Here is the paper’s encouraging conclusion — which might be the best summary of the conservative counter-revolution that I’ve yet seen:

The field of education is certainly not without political conflict, given there have been long-standing debates about curriculum, school choice, and teachers’ unions, to name just a few. Despite the abundance of preexisting policy issues within the field, President Trump and other prominent Republicans created a new intractable policy problem, CRT, and it caught on like wildfire. The case of CRT demonstrates how a powerful narrative can quickly sweep across the nation and shape policy opinions to such a degree that the influence of the narrative spills over into beliefs about societal institutions and cultural norms. Indeed, the onset of ban-CRT policy narratives may be contributing to a remarkable cultural and institutional shift in the way we view our teachers and schools.

The institution of public education stands at the brink of a momentous shift that threatens to fundamentally reshape its structure and function, with potential consequences that could reverberate for generations to come. The recent push for private school vouchers and other similar initiatives signals a clear desire to break with long-standing traditions and to forge a new path forward for American education. It remains to be seen whether advocates of such policies will be able to continue to craft and disseminate narratives that chip away at support for traditional schooling models. If so, such narrative spillover could create new windows of opportunity for those seeking to rethink public schooling or abolish it altogether. Regardless of the outcome, this pivotal moment demands close attention and careful analysis, as the future of public education hangs in the balance.

Rethink public schooling or abolish it altogether! Imagine a world without public schools. Their terrifying, apocalyptic outcome would be our dream come true. And according to these authors, we are closer to our dream than ever.

Have a blessed Sunday! Enjoy your hot coffee, since I bet none of you are tinkling ice in your Negronis, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but meet back here tomorrow morning to kick off another terrific week of Coffee & Covid.

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