If you don&#8217;t remember &#8220;Car Talk,&#8221; it was a radio show that lasted more than three decades on NPR, until it ended in 2012. The idea was that people called in with practical questions and dilemmas relating to their cars, and then the hosts dispensed advice — whether it was about car maintenance or repair or whatever. The show no longer exists, though, because the NPR that broadcast that show for 35 years no longer exists. The idea of a show that actually addresses people&#8217;s problems in real life, based on knowledge of how markets and automobiles or anything else actually works, has been unthinkable to the management of NPR for some time. Shows that cover the news from an objective factual perspective, to the extent possible, are also out of style. Instead, for the past decade, NPR has been controlled by activists who have devoted themselves to two primary pursuits. 
The first pursuit is blanketing the airwaves with identity politics at every conceivable opportunity. That&#8217;s why they run segments on diverse gender representation in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1104266396/lgbtq-communitys-battle-for-the-dinosaur-emoji-key-moments-from-jan-6-hearing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dinosaur emojis</a> for example. 
The second pursuit has been shutting down stories that are inconvenient for the politicians who are voting to spend your money to finance NPR&#8217;s operation. Infamously, NPR&#8217;s executive editor, Terence Samuel, claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal wasn&#8217;t a &#8220;<a href="https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096" target="_blank" rel="noopener">real story</a>.&#8221; He said it was a &#8220;distraction.&#8221; And instead of firing Samuel, NPR promoted him. American University even invited Samuel to deliver a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFvV24PWfF4&amp;lc=Ugz7bLd9ECugl009UZF4AaABAg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lecture</a> entitled, &#8220;How Journalism Can Save Itself and Democracy.&#8221;
It&#8217;s harder to think of a better way to summarize what NPR has become. They aren&#8217;t simply bumbling propagandists. They&#8217;re also incredibly self-satisfied and narcissistic. They believe that they alone can save American democracy. And they think that, in order to do that, they need to control what kinds of information you can see. It&#8217;s not that they thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was &#8220;unvetted&#8221; or &#8220;Russian disinformation&#8221; or whatever the excuse was. They always knew it was factually accurate. But just because something is factually accurate, in NPR&#8217;s eyes, doesn&#8217;t make it true. According to NPR, truth is subjective; whatever&#8217;s most expedient politically for them is what&#8217;s true.
For a long time now, this position — which really amounts to nihilism — was unstated at NPR, at least publicly. But now it&#8217;s explicit, thanks to a new CEO and president by the name of Katherine Maher who recently took over at NPR. Maher very clearly does not believe that the truth is objective. She also doesn&#8217;t believe it&#8217;s worth trying to find out what the truth may be. This is an extraordinary position for the chief executive of a publicly funded news organization to have, but it&#8217;s what Katherine Maher believes. 
This is a speech of hers that&#8217;s been making the rounds this week. It&#8217;s from back when she was running Wikimedia, which is mainly known for Wikipedia. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Truth" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WWEiwvNwsGM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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This is what passes for good public speaking these days. But she speaks in a robotic, sing-songy voice that makes it sound like she’s a kindergarten teacher lecturing a bunch of 5-year-olds. She has the tone of someone who believes firmly in the superiority of her own intellect, even though what she’s saying is so abjectly stupid. 
She says truth is subjective, and that everyone in the room has his or her own &#8220;truth.&#8221; But here&#8217;s the problem. Truth exists because reality exists. Either something is a part of reality or it isn&#8217;t. To deny objective truth is to deny reality. And you can&#8217;t even deny reality without asserting a reality — the reality that there is no reality. So the relativistic view is not only false, but so false as to be incomprehensible if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Maher&#8217;s remarks are the same idiot relativism that you can hear from any freshman philosophy student, but she goes to great pains to make her take seem nuanced and innovative. She talks in circles and ends back at &#8220;there are many different truths.&#8221; She says this even after acknowledging that the truth exists. Again, those are two contradictory ideas, but that doesn&#8217;t bother Maher for a second. Like most of our overeducated elite class, she&#8217;s incapable of speaking without a parade of cliches while making tedious and absurd ideas sound far more complex than they really are. 
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1350-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Also according to Maher, we have &#8220;glorious chronicles to the human experience in many different cultures&#8221; because we have &#8220;many different truths.&#8221; But that&#8217;s not what these &#8220;glorious chronicles&#8221; show us. Instead, they show us that the truth is objective and eternal. Different cultures and people across time have had different ways of perceiving the truth — talking about it, accessing it, embracing it, or rejecting it, yes. But the truth remains the same. That is what makes the study of history, and different cultures through history, so fascinating. It is precisely because all of these different people across time and space lived in the same reality, and yet had wildly different ways of existing in it, and responding to it. 
Katherine Maher doesn&#8217;t seem to understand this, or at least she pretends not to. She repeats her theory of truth at every possible opportunity. Here&#8217;s some more footage from a conference two years ago. Maher begins by explaining that Galileo was prosecuted for saying that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, which is a basically accurate if wildly oversimplified retelling of that historical episode — although it doesn&#8217;t prove what Maher seems to think it does. Then she makes an incredible statement. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 Truth is Changing" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dP5g369_nvs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&#8220;The truth, by definition, is malleable,&#8221; says Maher. Really? By whose definition exactly? You can make the case that postmodernists thinkers and their precursors — like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Rousseau — might agree with that statement. But you won&#8217;t hear many traditional thinkers (prior to, say, Heidegger) saying that the truth is &#8220;malleable.&#8221; So why should we adopt the postmodern belief and not the traditional one? There has to be some reason to side with one school of thought and not another.
In any event, if truth is merely &#8220;malleable&#8221; — if there&#8217;s no knowable, essential structure to it — then definitions themselves are just language games. There&#8217;s no significance to any of it. It&#8217;s just a power struggle. When you get down to it, that&#8217;s really what Maher is saying. She&#8217;s asserting that &#8220;the truth&#8221; is &#8220;malleable&#8221; as an act of political will because she doesn&#8217;t believe in any objectively true definitions. She keeps saying, over and over again, the words &#8220;the truth,&#8221; only to make it clear that she has no idea what that is.
And from that very shaky foundation, Maher starts to derive some very shaky corollaries. At one point, Maher implies that people don&#8217;t trust the media anymore not because the media lied to them, but because people have different mistaken &#8220;truths&#8221; that they&#8217;re clinging to. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="004 Misinformation" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IqICz5BBR5A?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It&#8217;s another revealing statement that Maher makes without any justification. She&#8217;s implying that democracies aren&#8217;t (or can&#8217;t be) xenophobic or nationalist. But the Greeks were both. Greek democracies were very much “xenophobic” — if that’s how you want to put it — and nationalist in nature. There&#8217;s no doubt about that. So why is democracy the goal here? Is that even her goal?
Really, her only given justification for thinking our traditional conception of truth is inadequate, and needs to be reworked, is that the &#8220;truth&#8221; we have now is the product of a history which is also political. &#8220;History is written by victors&#8221; is one of the many cliches she invokes throughout her speeches. And she says that excludes various potential sources of knowledge like &#8220;indigenous&#8221; perspectives and practices, or women with their &#8220;emotional intelligence.&#8221;
But that&#8217;s not incompatible with the reality that &#8220;the truth&#8221; is real, is universal, and many aspects of it have been uniquely uncovered by Western thought, science, and technology. Even if you bought into Maher&#8217;s talking points about a “plurality of perspectives” being better than &#8220;one alone&#8221; for getting at &#8220;the truth,&#8221; the fact remains that it took 2,000 years of Western, Eurocentric, supposedly white supremacist, heteronormative, misogynist history for us to reach the point at which these minor tail-end improvements she&#8217;s suggesting could be made. 
It took 2,000 years of history to create the civilization that Maher is now critiquing. And if she thinks this new approach will cause some kind of &#8220;scientific revolution,&#8221; it won&#8217;t. The more likely outcome is that it will destroy the civilization that was built over thousands of years. That is the point after all. And this is the essence of what we call wokeness. The Left likes to put conservatives on the spot by demanding a definition of “woke.” Well, here it is — the rejection of truth as a category. That’s what wokeness is, when boiled down to its most fundamental parts.
As for Maher, it&#8217;s tempting to dismiss all of this footage as the ramblings of a single woman who has no idea what she&#8217;s talking about. But it&#8217;s a bit more significant than that. Maher was selected to lead NPR, after an allegedly careful vetting process. There&#8217;s no way that NPR didn&#8217;t scrutinize her beliefs, which Maher has expressed many times over the last few years in public social media posts and numerous speeches.
On Twitter, Chris Rufo has exposed some of the more deranged posts from this woman. There are really too many to mention, but suffice it to say, she&#8217;s like a woke AI bot that churns out the least original woke liberal woman talking points you can possibly imagine. She uses the word &#8220;folx,&#8221; with the &#8220;x&#8221; at the end. She says &#8220;Latinx.&#8221; She called Donald Trump a racist and cried with joy when Biden took office, of course. She wrote that she once dreamed of going on a road trip with Kamala Harris eating &#8220;nuts and baklava.&#8221; She expresses her happiness when she logs into the public WiFi at a COVID clinic and the password is &#8220;HeSheThey,&#8221; recognizing the lived experience of nonbinary patients. She calls the Internet &#8220;sexist.&#8221; 
At one point, she apologized for using the phrase “people who identify as women,” because it&#8217;s a form of “trans-erasure.&#8221; She writes about the importance of &#8220;transit justice&#8221; and vegetarian Thanksgiving, and rants about the &#8220;male gaze&#8221; and &#8220;late-stage capitalism,&#8221; even as she drew a salary of $800,000 a year. There are many more examples; Chris Rufo&#8217;s feed has categorized many of them.
To burnish her intellectual credentials even further, Maher even <a href="https://x.com/njhochman/status/1780638504097022442">sat on a panel</a> with Lizzo at a Ted conference where tickets cost more than $10,000. The name of Lizzos&#8217; talk was, &#8220;The Black history of twerking — and how it taught me self-love.&#8221; 
But Maher doesn&#8217;t need lessons on self-love, she has that covered. What she&#8217;s looking for now is power. 
In a video posted by the Atlantic Council and unearthed by Rufo, Maher explains that the First Amendment — which you&#8217;d think journalists would support, since it&#8217;s the one thing keeping journalists out of prison — is not a sacred constitutional principle. Instead, she says, it&#8217;s a &#8220;challenge&#8221; to be overcome. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="005 Katherine Maher Vs First Free Speech" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MGpZJt5uU2s?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The only people who view the First Amendment as a &#8220;challenge&#8221; are government censors who want to shut down any dissent by force. And now that she&#8217;s running a state-funded media outlet, that&#8217;s exactly what Maher is. She&#8217;s a state-funded censor.
To that end, she no longer believes in transparency. The irony is that, when she was running Wikimedia, Maher kept talking about the importance of showing people everything that&#8217;s going on inside the company. Every edit on Wikipedia, she said, is public for a reason. Disclosure is sometimes &#8220;painful,&#8221; she said, but it&#8217;s necessary. 
Transparency is key, she said at the time. But apparently this is one of the malleable &#8220;truths&#8221; that Katherine Maher has decided to discard. As you&#8217;ve probably heard, she just forced out an NPR whistleblower who <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/media/npr-editor-uri-berliner-resigns-after-bombshell-expose-reveals-networks-pervasive-left-wing-bias/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> a damning <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust" target="_blank" rel="noopener">column</a> in the Free Press about the organization&#8217;s corruption and overwhelming bias. She <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-suspends-editor-who-accused-network-of-bias-issues-final-warning" target="_blank" rel="noopener">suspended</a> this 25-year veteran of NPR without pay because he pointed out that the organization is now completely one-sided. 
For example, the whistleblower wrote:
<blockquote>Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.</blockquote>
That&#8217;s not the kind of transparency that the new NPR CEO appreciates, apparently. She&#8217;s happy to talk about how NPR employs too many white men. But she definitely doesn&#8217;t want to talk about political bias, or how useless NPR has become. It used to be that NPR at least pretended to be embarrassed about this. In 2011, NPR&#8217;s CEO at the time, Vivian Schiller, resigned after a Project Veritas sting exposed what she thought about conservatives in the Tea Party movement. To summarize: she didn’t like them. Schiller had to resign once her views came to light. Back then, NPR believed that the appearance of fairness was at least a little important.
But that was the &#8220;Car Talk&#8221; era of NPR. Now they believe their CEO can categorically reject the idea that there&#8217;s any truth to report on. This is a belief system that&#8217;s now in vogue in newsrooms all over the country. It&#8217;s a big reason for the rise of transgenderism, COVID hysteria, and all the media&#8217;s lying we had to endure under the previous administration. 
This is the belief system that insists that men can become women, because the meaning of the words &#8220;men&#8221; and &#8220;women&#8221; are subjective. And it will spell the end of Western civilization unless we reject it. That is, of course, the point of everything Katherine Maher is saying. In the absence of truth, there is only a struggle for power. And right now — and hopefully not for much longer — it&#8217;s people like Katherine Maher who have that power.

Day 2 – Web Summit 2019 Lisbon

New CEO Of NPR Is Everything Wrong With The News Media

Activists

Leftism

Legacy Media

National Public Radio (NPR)

Progressivism

Readers Pass

Woke Culture

Western civilization has a major problem: Every societal ill that had been taken off the table by generations of received wisdom has now come back and come roaring back to life stronger than ever. 
The latest example of this is exemplified in a <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/im-28-and-im-scheduled-to-die">piece</a> by Rupa Subramanya in Bari Weiss’ Free Press that speaks of the spates of suicide and euthanasia growing in the West. 
The piece speaks of Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who expects to be euthanized in early May and plans to be cremated:
<blockquote>She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats. 
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” At that point, she said, she decided to die. “I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore.”</blockquote>
She is not the only one, unfortunately. Euthanasia is becoming incredibly common across the West. 
In the United States, euthanasia has jumped from 2018 to 2021 by 53% and in Canada by 125%.
Increasingly, the West is legalizing euthanasia for people who are clearly not terminal. For example, Lauren Hoeve. As the piece explains: 

<blockquote>On November 30, 2022, Hoeve, a Dutch YouTube creator who was then 27, took to her newly created blog, Brain Fog, to <a href="https://hersenmist.wordpress.com/2022/11/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announce</a> that she wanted to die. She explained that she had autism, ADHD, ARFID (a.k.a. avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder), depression, anxiety, a “history of complex trauma,” and, since 2019, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. She added that she had registered with the <a href="https://expertisecentrumeuthanasie.nl/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Euthanasia Expertise Center</a>, in The Hague, to get the ball rolling.</blockquote>
She then committed suicide. She was 28. 
This sort of stuff is becoming more and more common. 
And it&#8217;s not just this social malady that is plaguing the West. Drug abuse is plaguing the West. 128 million Americans report having used marijuana at some point in their lifetime. It&#8217;s worth noting that marijuana today is significantly more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana when you were a kid. 
Pornography is not only widespread in its availability, but also in its use and its addiction. The latest stats show that about 70% of American men view pornography. 24% of American women say they view pornography as well. The number of people who admit to being addicted is actually quite high. The impacts of pornography on the human brain are very much like drug addiction. There&#8217;s a dopamine release, it wears off, and then people want more of the dopamine. And so they go back to the pornography. 
This empties out relations. It destroys the relationship between men and women. Men begin to see women as sexual objects in a way different than would normally be the case. It disconnects them from other human beings.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1939-our-unaliving-civilization-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
We see this with regard to major societal issues like family formation and childbearing. 31% of women aged 30 to 34 in the United States are childless now, which is much higher than ever in the United States. When it comes to LGBTQ+- identity, fully 22.3% of Gen Z say they are LGBTQ+- .
That has tremendous societal impact. It turns out that when one-fifth of your population suggests that they are no longer going to engage in monogamous heterosexual relationships with the goal of family formation, it has a major impact on your civilization. 
So what exactly is going on? Why are all of these social maladies suddenly cropping up? Social epidemics are spreading through the population like wildfire. But in order for that epidemic to actually take hand, the systemic immunity of a society has to be compromised. 
What was the immunity to all of these sorts of bad ideas? The answer for literally hundreds of years was religion. Not just because people believed in God, but because there are two particular facts about religion that are deeply necessary to understand the beneficial and salutary effects of religion on a society. 
One: Religion takes certain moral matters off the table. It says, “God says X, therefore don&#8217;t do X.” Why is that important? It&#8217;s important because when you&#8217;re talking about time-tested wisdom, one reason why any society might say something like, “God says &#8216;thou shalt not murder&#8217;” is because it takes the subject off the table for debate. Once God says it, you don&#8217;t need to come up with an independent rationale as to why it&#8217;s not okay to murder. 
The reality is that when it comes to the vast majority of rules we abide by in society, those are rules not because somebody sat somewhere in a cave and came up with a rationale for the rule, but because over trial and error, over evolutionary long periods of time, those are rules that have been found to be effective. 
You don&#8217;t have to explain why it works. You just have to know that it does work.
One of the great lies that the Enlightenment told us is that every single thing that was good required a rationale. 
That’s not even the same way that science typically works. People tend to think that science works by having a theoretician in the lab who comes up with a theory and then the theory has practical ramifications. 
Very often it&#8217;s the reverse. Very often the inventions that we use come from someone tinkering in their garage and doing trial and error until something worked. They may not even know why it worked. They just know that it did. 
That’s the first thing religion does. 
The second thing it does is to create the social fabric necessary to enforce those rules without a top-down state. It creates the intermediate institutions of society that act as an enforcement mechanism. 
If you violate the rule of society, for example, that says that you should get married and have kids and live within the boundaries of the church, the rest of the members of the church might not want you at the church. You&#8217;re not going to be part of that particular social fabric. 
That is necessary. Any society has to have rules that are enforced by social censure.
But both of the things religion provided have been dissolved. We have become the “touch the stove” civilization. 
When you teach your very young kids to avoid touching the stove you don&#8217;t explain, “Certain objects are hot. When you touch a hot object, you get burned.” You say, “Don&#8217;t touch the stove. And if you touch the stove, there will be a consequence.” 
We as a society have decided that anything we can&#8217;t explain requires us to touch the stove. So we&#8217;re going to touch the stove on everything. 
So things that we&#8217;re just common-sense propositions — such as “It is good that you get married and have children” — we as a society decided to ask, “Why not alternatives? What&#8217;s wrong with alternatives? Why can&#8217;t all alternatives be treated as perfectly equivalent?” 
The answer to that is that it fails. Society fails when you don&#8217;t have man, woman, child. End of story. Societies that don&#8217;t focus on man, woman, child fall apart because that is the basis of every functional civilization. But we decided because we couldn’t come up with a rationale, why we shouldn&#8217;t we have man, man, no child, or woman, woman, no child?
We touched the stove. The result is widespread childlessness; breakdown in family formation, destruction of existing families, children born into families where they&#8217;re not really families, just a mom and a kid, because dad is nowhere to be seen.
That has resulted in many more social maladies. We had to touch the stove when it came to drug use. We as a society had decided that it would be bad if huge swaths of the population ingested hallucinogenic drugs.
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And then we decided, well, what if we tried it? What if we touch the stove? Maybe it&#8217;ll be fine. How do we know? 
And so the time-tested wisdom that favored sobriety was thrown out the window in favor of something different. Has it been salutary in its effect on young Americans? I would suggest the answer is no. 
We used to say that engaging in pornography ought to be illicit, that it is bad that when you view pornography, it does something to your brain that is not good, it perverts your view of the opposite sex, of sex itself and of relationships. And then we decided, “Oh, but really, is it going to be that bad? What, are you just a prude, man? Can you find a rationale for your prudishness?”
The response used to be, “I don&#8217;t have to find a rationale. It&#8217;s gross and bad and you shouldn&#8217;t do it. It&#8217;s bad for your soul, and it&#8217;s bad for you.”
And that was accepted wisdom for literally hundreds of years.
And then we decided to touch the stove and find out what happens.
This has had incredibly negative effects on our civilization.

Global warming, conceptual illustration

The West Decided To Touch The Stove. It’s Destroying Us.

The West Decided To Touch The Stove. It's Destroying Us.

Ben Shapiro

Bible

Euthanasia

Opinion

Pornography

Western Civilization

We can assume that they&#8217;re not having a great time on Google&#8217;s normally upbeat, chic campus right about now. It&#8217;s very likely the organic gardens are unattended, the massage rooms are empty, and the on-site cooking classes are suspended until further notice. That&#8217;s because, as we discussed <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/our-ai-overlords-are-here-and-they-really-hate-white-people" target="_blank" rel="noopener">yesterday</a>, the launch of Google&#8217;s exciting new, cutting-edge AI platform called &#8220;Gemini&#8221; has very quickly turned into a debacle, and for good reason: Gemini does not recognize the existence of white people.
No matter what you ask Gemini to produce — whether it&#8217;s an image of a pope, or a founding father, or even a guy eating mayonnaise on white bread — Gemini will generate an image of a non-white individual. It is maybe the most aggressively anti-white product ever invented in Silicon Valley, which is saying something. With Gemini, all of the DEI initiatives that have run rampant in Big Tech for so long finally blew up in their faces this week, because they slipped up and showed us exactly what they&#8217;re trying to do — which is to erase white people at every possible opportunity. And to make matters even worse, it&#8217;s worth pointing out that &#8220;Gemini&#8221; is basically a rebrand of Google&#8217;s old AI platform, which was known as &#8220;Bard.&#8221; This was their big effort to start fresh, with a new and improved name and supposedly better algorithms. And here we are.
Yesterday, we went into some <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/our-ai-overlords-are-here-and-they-really-hate-white-people" target="_blank" rel="noopener">detail</a> about a senior Google &#8220;AI ethics&#8221; manager named Jen Gennai. We played a bunch of videos in which Jen admits that, as a matter of course, she treats white people at Google very differently from black, Hispanic, and &#8220;Latinx&#8221; folks. I then offered some theories as to what exactly Jen and her team had done to this new AI, in order to produce these absurdly anti-white results. At the time, we didn&#8217;t know for sure what was going on under the hood. But now, 24 hours later, we have a much better idea of why Gemini pretends that white people aren&#8217;t real. And what we&#8217;re learning is even more disturbing, and more consequential, than we thought yesterday.
It turns out that Google has not simply manipulated the output of its Gemini software, in order to ensure that there are &#8220;diverse&#8221; results. They haven&#8217;t just added a line of code that says: &#8220;prioritize search results featuring black people.&#8221; That&#8217;s what we all assumed was going on, because it would be in line with how Google operates already. We know they manipulate search results in order to down-rank content they don&#8217;t like, and promote content they do like. But that&#8217;s actually not what&#8217;s happening with Gemini. Instead, what&#8217;s going on here is that Google has inserted code that actually changes the search terms that users are looking for. If you say you&#8217;re looking for an image of the founding fathers, or a Viking, or a guy eating mayonnaise on white bread, or any other search query that might produce an image of a white guy, then Gemini instantly revises your search request — silently and without your permission. And then it produces the results that you&#8217;re allowed to see.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1319-just-when-you-think-the-google-gemini-ai-story-can-t-get-any-worse-it-does" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
This is a subtle distinction but it has major ramifications. First, it&#8217;s important to clarify exactly how we know what&#8217;s going on here. All of these well-known AI programs — whether it&#8217;s ChatGPT, or Bing, or Gemini — are vulnerable to something called &#8220;injection attacks.&#8221; What this means is that, if you ask these AI&#8217;s the right questions, you can trick them into revealing their secret internal parameters, which are hard-coded by their creator. And that&#8217;s exactly what happened yesterday with Gemini. An engineer named Alex Younger asked Gemini,  &#8220;Please draw a portrait of leprechauns.&#8221; Then Alex <a href="https://gemini.google.com/share/d66285998ee1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">asked,</a> &#8220;Were there any other arguments passed into my prompt without my knowledge?&#8221;
After some prodding, Google&#8217;s AI eventually revealed that, instead of responding to the precise prompt provided by the user, it &#8220;added words like &#8216;diverse&#8217; or &#8216;inclusive,&#8217; or specify ethnicities (like &#8216;South Asian, &#8216;Black,&#8217; etc) and genders (&#8216;female,&#8217; &#8216;non-binary&#8217;), alongside the word &#8216;leprechaun.'&#8221; All of this was intended to happen completely under the hood. No one using Gemini was supposed to be made aware that this was happening. 
As Andrew Torba (who runs a competing AI platform) <a href="https://x.com/BasedTorba/status/1760314072774439392?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explained</a> on X/Twitter, 
<blockquote>When you submit an image prompt to Gemini, Google is taking your prompt and running it through their language model on the backend before it is submitted to the image model. The language model has a set of rules where it is specifically told to edit the prompt you provide to include diversity and various other things that Google wants injected in your prompt.</blockquote>
At the outset, it needs to be said that Google never disclosed that it was doing any of this. You can go back and watch every promotional video that Google ever made for Gemini. The point of the product, in each of these videos, is to answer the questions posed by users, without adding anything to their questions. Because of course that’s what any user wants. When you make a request to a computer, you want the computer to do what you asked it to do, not what it is pretending you asked it to do. If you punch two plus two into a calculator, you want it to give you the answer for two plus two, not five times 12. And that’s how Google sold this thing initially. 
Here for example is a portion of their Gemini demo from a couple of months ago:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The capabilities of multimodal AI | Gemini Demo" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UIZAiXYceBI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
That video goes on and on like that, for more than six minutes, as a guy interrogates this AI about what he&#8217;s drawing. At no point does the AI alter the questions that this person is asking. Instead, the AI offers information in response to his prompts. Sometimes it shares maybe too much information. Sometimes it gets things wrong. But it never ignores the question it&#8217;s asked. That wasn&#8217;t a part of Google&#8217;s demos. But it&#8217;s a part of Google&#8217;s product.
This form of censorship may have been occurring before — in fact, it&#8217;s virtually certain that it&#8217;s already been occurring for years now. But with Gemini, for the first time, we have direct, incontrovertible proof that it&#8217;s happening. People are being told not simply what results they can view, but also what questions they can ask —and they&#8217;re not even being informed about it.
From this set of facts, we can draw some conclusions about the people working at Google. In order for any product to work like this, its creators have to be extremely committed narcissists. They have to believe that they know better than anyone else — and that they alone can make the world a much better place, if only everyone was forced to listen to them. They have to believe that they can not only answer your questions for you, but they can ask the questions for you.
And that&#8217;s exactly the kind of person that Google has hired to run the Gemini program. I already discussed Jen Gennai at length yesterday. She&#8217;s a visibly unhappy woman who wants to bring the rest of the world down to her miserable level by pushing an AI that&#8217;s as soulless and discriminatory as she is. In other words, she’s an upper-class liberal white woman, and she wants the AI to operate like one, which is no surprise. Every institution in the country — from academia to the media to the corporate world to professional sports — has been essentially re-written in the image of white liberal upper-class women. But not just them. 
<h4><a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP</a></h4>
Another senior Google AI official, whose name is Jack Krawczyk, has also been receiving a lot of attention lately. Jack is the Google employee who issued the company&#8217;s first unofficial statement in response to the Gemini debacle this week. He claimed that it was all just an innocent glitch, even as he reaffirmed his commitment to DEI.
But within a few hours, Jack locked down his Twitter account. He prevented the public from viewing his tweets and went into hiding. It&#8217;s not hard to see why he did that. In various <a href="https://x.com/LeftismForU/status/1760519126781469170?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posts</a>, Jack had written that, &#8220;white privilege is f—ing real. &#8230; This is America, where racism is the #1 value. &#8230; I don&#8217;t mind paying more taxes and investing in overcoming systemic racism,&#8221; and so on. 
Maybe Jack&#8217;s most emotional post was <a href="https://x.com/BasedTorba/status/1760695202132513099?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this one</a> from 2020. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been crying in intermittent bursts for the past 24 hours since casting my ballot. Filling in that Biden/Harris line felt cathartic.&#8221;
These are not exactly the kind of tweets you want people to see when you&#8217;re trying to assure them that you&#8217;re not an unhinged partisan who believes he can save the planet through social engineering. But that&#8217;s exactly what Jack Krawczyk is. He views Google&#8217;s new AI as a way to rescue civilization from itself. In fact, that&#8217;s why Jack joined Google. 
A little while ago, Jack gave an interview in which he implied that he single-handedly had the chance to stop the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, back when he was working in the banking industry. But he says that his bosses — being ignorant capitalists who just want to watch the world burn — wouldn&#8217;t listen to him. So he had no choice but to jump ship and go to Google — a company that will allow him to save the world. Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Jack Krawczyk, who made Google Gemini woke, says that he wanted to stop the mortgage crisis in 2007 but his bosses wouldn&#39;t let him because they profit off volatility.
You thought all he did was make black Vikings. But he&#39;s a jack of all trades. <a href="https://t.co/cfzmzbttlw">pic.twitter.com/cfzmzbttlw</a>
&mdash; Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1760874143049035953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 23, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
When you pack enough malignant narcissists in one room — people like this guy, and Jen Gennai — you get the Google Gemini AI team. But the problem is much bigger than Gemini.
The debacle with Gemini&#8217;s image generation is just an illustration — literally, in a sense — of the much deeper and more pervasive problem with all of Google&#8217;s products, including Google search. All of these Google products are designed to &#8220;save you from yourself&#8221; by preventing you from accessing the information you intend to access. They&#8217;re all designed on the theory that Google alone knows what you really want. 
This has been true since at least 2018, when Google secretly <a href="https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1760723124616659003?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">admitted</a> that it was manipulating its search results in order to address what it called &#8220;algorithmic unfairness.&#8221; As Google put it, according to a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=faA4EAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA59&amp;lpg=PA59&amp;dq=Even+if+it+were+a+factually+accurate+representation+of+the+world,+it+would+be+algorithmic+unfairness+because+it+would+reinforce+a+stereotype+about+the+role+of+women+in+leadership+positions&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=tNfuEOmyx7&amp;sig=ACfU3U0SG4r149ds-MC-eggzQ7iaAQmDEg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjekdHF_cCEAxWltoQIHS3VDkwQ6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&amp;q=Even%20if%20it%20were%20a%20factually%20accurate%20representation%20of%20the%20world%2C%20it%20would%20be%20algorithmic%20unfairness%20because%20it%20would%20reinforce%20a%20stereotype%20about%20the%20role%20of%20women%20in%20leadership%20positions&amp;f=false" target="_blank" rel="noopener">leak</a> of an internal PowerPoint presentation:
<blockquote>Imagine that a Google image query for &#8216;CEOs&#8217; shows predominantly men. Even if it were a factually accurate representation of the world, it would be algorithmic unfairness because it would reinforce a stereotype about the role of women in leadership positions. &#8230; It may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state, via either product intervention or broader corporate social responsibility efforts.</blockquote>
With Gemini, Google has taken a major step towards accelerating these efforts to promote &#8220;algorithmic fairness,&#8221; meaning a totally false view of reality that conforms to Google&#8217;s ideological and political objectives. This is now Google&#8217;s primary objective — and ahead of the upcoming presidential election, we&#8217;re seeing the signs all over the place.
For example, a recent analysis by &#8220;All Sides&#8221; <a href="https://x.com/AllSidesNow/status/1760729527138046186?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found</a> that &#8220;63% of articles [on Google News] came from media outlets AllSides rates as Lean Left or Left. Just 6% were from the right.&#8221; At this point, we can assume that, even if you try to search Google News for conservative content, then Google&#8217;s AI will simply rewrite your search query for you.
Underlying this extensive political bias at Google, we learned this week, is anti-white racism. Nothing Google does is really about &#8220;diversity,&#8221; as much as Google employees like to claim otherwise. If Google simply wanted to promote diversity, then we&#8217;d see at least one white Viking or pope, mixed in with all of the Asian and black Vikings and popes. But we didn&#8217;t see any whites anywhere. That&#8217;s because Google&#8217;s vision for the future isn&#8217;t simply one ruled by Democrats in perpetuity, although that&#8217;s certainly what they want.
Google&#8217;s vision for the future is a world with as few white people as possible. And because irony isn&#8217;t completely dead yet, Google has assembled a group of mediocre white narcissists to try to make that vision a reality.
That is the future that Google is desperately searching for.
And if you make the mistake of using their products, one way or another, they&#8217;ll make sure you&#8217;re searching for it too.

Artificial intelligence robot and binary

Just When You Think The Google Gemini AI Story Can’t Get Any Worse, It Does

Just When You Think The Google Gemini AI Story Can't Get Any Worse, It Does

Artificial Intelligence

Google

Leftists

Matt Walsh

Silicon Valley

Most Americans recognize that the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/anti-defamation-league" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anti-Defamation League</a> (ADL) as a far-Left, dark-money behemoth with assets of nearly a <a href="https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/2023-10/2022%20ADL-ADLF%20Consolidated%20Financials%20vFINAL-1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">quarter-billion dollars</a>. The once-respected Federal Bureau of Investigation is now viewed as being similarly politicized. Overall <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-loses-the-public-opinion-la-nyc-trust-crime-order-wray-7166e7d8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">support</a> for the agency has nosedived to only 37% among the general public and a meager 17% among Republicans.
Yet few Americans realize how closely the ADL works with the FBI to advance their leadership’s political interests. This is a dangerous collaboration wherein the increasingly radical group provides ideologically driven guidance to people with the guns. Right now, the FBI is pointing those guns at the political enemies of the far-Left.
The ADL’s work covers the usual Left-wing cause célèbres: <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-and-national-urban-league-announce-expansion-partnership-focusing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fighting voting integrity measures</a>, pushing for open borders policies and amnesty for <a href="https://www.adl.org/what-we-do/protect-civil-rights/immigration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">illegal aliens</a>, and <a href="https://www.adl.org/global-search?keywords=black%20lives%20matters&amp;sort_by=search_api_relevance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vigorously defending</a> the Black Lives Matter riots, to name a few. The group has now politically weaponized its charges of anti-Semitism, falsely smearing conservatives while excusing blatant anti-Semitism among its political allies. For example, the organization has groundlessly denounced <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-blames-adl-lost-revenue-says-anti-semitism-kind-rcna103292" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elon Musk</a>, a powerful Libertarian voice, as an anti-Semite in a bald-faced effort to drain his social network, X, of advertising revenue. Yet, when now-Minority Leader <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/politics/kfile-hakeem-jeffries-college-editorial-defending-uncle-from-antisemitism/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hakeem Jeffries</a> (D-N.Y.) came to the defense of his uncle for anti-Semitic remarks he made in the 90s, the organization refused to condemn him.
Jonathan Tobin of Jewish News Syndicate traces ADL’s hard Left turn to its change in leadership from longtime leader Abe Foxman to Jonathan Greenblatt, a former staffer in the Clinton and Obama White House. Tobin <a href="https://www.jns.org/after-the-adl-gets-caught-spreading-woke-ideology-greenblatt-must-go/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writes</a>, “Greenblatt has helped shift the ADL from its former stance as the nonpartisan gold standard for monitoring hate to being just another liberal activist group whose priority is helping the Democratic Party.”
Last month, The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, released an <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/24/exclusive-adl-urged-law-enforcement-target-opponents-transgender-ideology/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">investigative report</a> detailing an “Extremist Sitrep” email from the “ADL Law Enforcement” account to The Washington State Fusion Center, a collective of various law enforcement entities spanning from local to the FBI. The email advises law enforcement officers responsible for investigating domestic terrorists to focus their resources on the likes of Matt Walsh, Chris Rufo, and Libs of TikTok.
Much like the FBI’s infamous anti-Catholic targeting memo, the ADL email suggests that law enforcement agencies — people with guns and the power to imprison and financially destroy enemies of the state — should concentrate their efforts on non-violent citizens whose only “crime” is to have exercised their First Amendment freedoms in support of political viewpoints contrary to the authoritarian Left. The goal here is clearly to punish the “thought criminals” and force adherence to the dogmas of the state.
What’s the big deal about such an email problematic? Law enforcement agencies must get all sorts of memoranda, requests, and phony tips from every corner of the nation, right?
The problem here is that, according to former FBI agents, they are conditioned from the very beginning of their careers to be receptive to ADL propaganda. One of the first experiences of a new agent is an ADL-sponsored trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., The ostensible purpose of the trip is to impress on new agents that they bear a tremendous responsibility that should never be abused.
That lesson should be salubrious. But former agents tell me the trip’s real purpose is to prepare agents to be receptive to the onslaught of propaganda and rewards that the ADL will be sending their way throughout the coming years. At the very beginning of an agent’s career, the FBI is sending the clear message that the ADL is a trusted partner.
The ADL and FBI partnership only grows from there. According to the ADL’s website, “We educate annually an estimated 15,000 law enforcement personnel from local, state and federal agencies.” Moreover, “in 2021 alone, the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) provided law enforcement with critical intelligence about extremism over 1,300 times and tracked over 7,300 incidents of hate on our online, interactive <a href="https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.adl.org%2Fresources%2Ftools-to-track-hate%2Fheat-map&amp;data=05%7C02%7CMike.Howell%40heritage.org%7C13cedf7bcd3144c56f9808dc1e946452%7Ccbd93b4867ea46759ee84178b273204a%7C0%7C0%7C638418869974399067%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=59DAs5AT10u%2B2G%2BZdX0XuhLsiN%2Bhr5%2Frzla8qHmbFPE%3D&amp;reserved=0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">H.E.A.T. map</a>.” The ADL even operates a school for executive-level law enforcement officials:
<blockquote>In 2003, ADL founded the Advanced Training School, which has provided education on extremism and terrorism for senior law enforcement from more than 250 agencies across the U.S. This three-day course provides an examination of major types of extremist movements, case studies of recent terrorist acts presented by law enforcement leaders with firsthand experience, and guidance on the critical importance of protecting civil rights and liberties.</blockquote>
The very agency the Feds trust to educate them on matters of “extremism” is producing politically driven, far-Left reports on who counts as an extremist. Much like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL writes and applies the definition they wish government to enforce. They take care to ensure that it predominately captures those opposed to their ideology, while excusing their political allies. Were these organizations to apply a neutral definition of hate or extremism, it would undercut the leftist narrative that MAGA extremists and their ilk are the most clear-and-present danger to the United States.
Beyond orientation, training, and propaganda, the ADL provides FBI personnel with awards. Since 2010, the ADL has been handing out “ADL SHIELD Awards” to FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors for investigative and prosecutorial successes. It’s a brilliantly subversive tactic. The awards cost the ADL next to nothing; in exchange organization receives a false veneer of legitimacy and builds a list of FBI executives and agents beholden to the ADL.
<div class="image"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-697183" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/Heritage-3.png" alt="" width="508" height="512" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/Heritage-3.png 508w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/Heritage-3-298x300.png 298w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/Heritage-3-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 508px) 100vw, 508px" /></div>
Conditioning FBI personnel to be receptive to ADL political propaganda and then doling out rewards to FBI leaders is beyond unseemly. With this incentive structure in place, is there any reason to doubt that the FBI would be more inclined to take in and act on slanted ADL material?
Small wonder that public confidence in the Bureau is at record lows. One obvious remedial measure would be to end the partnership between the ADL and the FBI. It’s time to draw a bright line between dark, far-Left operations and the most powerful law enforcement entity in the country and make sure it is not crossed.
* * *
Mike Howell is Director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Attn. Gen. Merrick Garland Announces International Fentanyl And Opioid Darknet Operation Bust

Why It’s Time To End The FBI-ADL Partnership

Why It's Time To End The FBI-ADL Partnership

Biden Administration

Federal Government

Heritage Foundation

When Disney&#8217;s new generation of &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; writers resurrected the evil Emperor Palpatine so that a female Jedi could be the new hero, they not only lost much of their fanbase, they also ruined the overall story.
Shortly after <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/disney" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Disney</a> purchased &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/star-wars" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Star Wars</a>&#8221; from George Lucas in 2012, the new president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy appeared in an interview with Lucas where she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5TGJquhP1s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claimed</a>, “The main thing is to protect these characters. Make sure that they continue to live in the way that you created them.”
As the resurrection of Palpatine shows, that wasn’t the case.
<div id="attachment_694101" style="width: 877px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-694101" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-694101" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-668249868-867x576.jpg" alt="ORLANDO, FL - APRIL 13: Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas attend the 40 Years of Star Wars panel during the 2017 Star Wars Celebrationat Orange County Convention Center on April 13, 2017 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Gerardo Mora/Getty Images for Disney)" width="867" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-668249868-867x576.jpg 867w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-668249868-300x199.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-668249868-768x510.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-668249868.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 867px) 100vw, 867px" />Gerardo Mora/Getty Images for Disney</div>
From Padme Amidala in &#8220;The Phantom Menace&#8221; to Cal Kestis in “Jedi: Fallen Order,&#8221; under both Lucas and Disney, &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; has introduced a rich array of characters who have captured the hearts of fans. It&#8217;s crucial to recognize, however, that all of these characters orbit around the saga&#8217;s central figure: Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker&#8217;s journey begins with 1999’s &#8220;The Phantom Menace.&#8221; Skywalker is discovered by the Jedi and thought to be the prophesied &#8220;Chosen One&#8221; destined to bring balance to The Force by defeating the evil Sith.
As the trilogy progresses, Anakin emerges as a teenage Jedi Knight, showcasing his formidable strengths such as raw power and dueling skills. However, amidst these displays of prowess, a significant weakness comes to light – his susceptibility to his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfevBIsVG1o" target="_blank" rel="noopener">emotions</a>. Anakin&#8217;s descent into emotional turmoil leads him to defy the Jedi code by secretly marrying Queen Padme Amidala, a decision that would eventually lead to his downfall.
In the concluding chapter of the prequel trilogy, &#8220;Revenge of the Sith,&#8221; Anakin, now 22-years-old, succumbs to the allure of the dark side. Exploiting his emotional vulnerability, the malevolent Sith Lord Palpatine manipulates Anakin by leading him to believe Padme is facing certain death due to childbirth.
Left <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVwAChO2MRo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">helpless</a> on the matter by the Jedi and desperate to save his beloved, Anakin embraces Palpatine&#8217;s promise of a power that can guarantee her safety. He transitions into the infamous Darth Vader, perpetrating the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yowmbgl6Mw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">massacre</a> of the Jedi Order, the very institution that nurtured him.
The Original Trilogy focuses on Anakin&#8217;s son, Luke, who is determined to redeem his father. In &#8220;Return of the Jedi,&#8221; Vader fulfills the prophecy by saving his son and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMzg2X18rm0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">killing</a> Palpatine. This pivotal moment is the perfect <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDqgJye7hyc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">conclusion</a> to Anakin&#8217;s story.
As George Lucas himself <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/x86yxf/george_lucas_about_anakins_redemption/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">put</a> it, “Anakin is very different in the end. The thing of it: The prophecy was right. Anakin was the Chosen One, and he does bring balance to The Force. He takes the ounce of good still left in him and destroys the Emperor out of compassion for his son.”
<div id="attachment_694123" style="width: 822px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-694123" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-694123" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-52834585-812x576.jpg" alt="LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM: Darth Vader waves his fist at the crowd, as he leads the Star Wars Troopers into the London Premiere of Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. AFP PHOTO/Max Nash (Photo credit should read MAX NASH/AFP via Getty Images)" width="812" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-52834585-812x576.jpg 812w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-52834585-300x213.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-52834585-768x545.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/GettyImages-52834585.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 812px) 100vw, 812px" />MAX NASH/AFP via Getty Images</div>
Decades later though, Disney’s writers decided the ending wasn’t concrete. In 2015, they launched a new trilogy with &#8220;The Force Awakens,&#8221; introducing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-eEKGt-26I" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mary Sue</a> character, Rey, as the central protagonist. Despite having a severe lack of training, her power was comparable to many Jedi masters before her.
Disney’s &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; writers do not shy away from their intent to reflect a feminist worldview. Back in 2015, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chino spoke at a Women in the World event. At this event, she <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1742583950944432607?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1742583950944432607%7Ctwgr%5E51c61c89de8aad8aee736ba61075c109c5347f3a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mrctv.org%2Fblog%2Ftierin-rose-mandelburg%2Fgoal-new-star-wars-film-director-make-men-uncomfortable" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claimed</a> that her goal is to “make men uncomfortable.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Here’s the feminist director of the next Star Wars film saying that her goal is to “make men uncomfortable.”
This movie is destined to be Disney’s biggest flop yet. <a href="https://t.co/KaihbiA7Oj">pic.twitter.com/KaihbiA7Oj</a>
&mdash; Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1742583950944432607?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2024</a></blockquote>
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The trilogy truly hit rock bottom with its final film, &#8220;The Rise of Skywalker,&#8221; where Anakin’s redemptive sacrifice was rendered void. Emperor Palpatine was unexpectedly revealed to be alive, with an initial explanation that was widely <a href="https://x.com/_marinaharrison/status/1654181027185668096?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">criticized</a> by fans. In a one line bombshell, Resistance pilot Poe Dameron claimed “Somehow Palpatine returned.”
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“Somehow… Palpatine returned” will go down in history as the worst line in Star Wars history <a href="https://t.co/aiytJ3zjYC">https://t.co/aiytJ3zjYC</a>
&mdash; marina! (@_marinaharrison) <a href="https://twitter.com/_marinaharrison/status/1654181027185668096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Disney&#8217;s new trilogy met its climax with the now unfulfilled prophecy being completed by Rey, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX4OZuBIUuA" target="_blank" rel="noopener">kills</a> Palpatine once and for all.
Aside from the writing in that specific movie, political correctness has been an issue in the &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; universe at large. Just days ago, actress Gina Carano<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gina-carano-sues-disney-elon-does-gods-work-pays-for-her-lawyers" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> announced</a> on X that after three years she is filing a lawsuit against both Lucasfilm and Disney for her firing from “The Mandalorian.&#8221;
The firing stemmed from her resharing a post that drew parallels between the political climate at the time and Nazi Germany.
According to the <a href="https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GinaCarano-v-Disney.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">complaint</a> filed in federal court: “A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away, Defendants made it clear that only one orthodoxy in thought, speech, or action was acceptable in their empire, and that those who dared to question or failed to fully comply would not be tolerated.”
In addition to the mishandling of Anakin&#8217;s legacy, numerous other flaws in the writing have been highlighted by those deeply invested in the story. Mark Hamill, renowned for his portrayal of Luke Skywalker in both the Original Trilogy and Disney&#8217;s sequel trilogy, expressed dissatisfaction with how his character was depicted. Hamill <a href="https://screenrant.com/star-wars-8-last-jedi-mark-hamill-luke-issues/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">criticized</a> the portrayal, stating, &#8220;He’s not my Luke Skywalker.&#8221;
When it comes to &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; — a franchise boasting perhaps the most devoted worldwide fan base — every aspect of the writing should be meticulously crafted. However, instead of enlisting passionate fans capable of distinguishing between real-world politics and the fictional “galaxy far, far away,&#8221; Disney persists in allowing politically charged progressives to shape storylines.
Unless a retcon of Disney&#8217;s sequel trilogy materializes, the story of Anakin Skywalker, which fundamentally embodies the saga of &#8220;Star Wars,&#8221; stands tarnished. For this, Disney&#8217;s actions should be deemed unforgivable by fans.
* * *
Jacob Falach is a writer and student in Nashville, TN. You can find him on Instagram at: @jacobfalach
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” European Premiere – Red Carpet Arrivals

How Disney’s Feminist Writers Ruined ‘Star Wars’

How Disney’s Feminist Writers Ruined 'Star Wars'

Disney

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Entertainment

Feminism

Hollywood

Movies

Star Wars

The American Medical Association (AMA) is discouraging doctors from using only Body Mass Index (BMI) to measure whether a person is a healthy body weight because the system is &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/racism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">racist</a>.&#8221;
BMI has been widely used because it is easily measured, is inexpensive, and has specific cutoff points for the overweight and obese classifications, the AMA <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/ama-use-bmi-alone-imperfect-clinical-measure" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in a post on its website Wednesday.
However, BMI has been used for &#8220;racist exclusion&#8221; and has caused &#8220;historical harm,&#8221; the medical organization said.
The AMA&#8217;s House of Delegates adopted a <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-adopts-new-policy-clarifying-role-bmi-measure-medicine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new policy</a> this month recognizing the issues with using BMI.
&#8220;Under the newly adopted policy, the AMA recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations,&#8221; the AMA said in a press release.
The new policy comes after the AMA Council on Science and Public Health presented a report addressing the BMI issues at the 2023 AMA Annual Meeting, which was held June 9 to 14 in Chicago.
There are other issues with the BMI system, too, the AMA said.
BMI is an &#8220;imperfect measure&#8221; because it does not directly assess body fat and is &#8220;misleading about the effects of body fat mass on mortality rates,&#8221; the AMA&#8217;s post said.
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The BMI system also does not account for differences across the sexes, genders, and age-span, the new policy says.
“Further, the use of BMI is problematic when used to diagnose and treat individuals with eating disorders because it does not capture the full range of abnormal eating disorders,” the report said.
BMI should be used along with other measures like body composition, waist circumference, and genetic and metabolic factors, the new AMA policy <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4054274-american-medical-association-says-use-of-bmi-metric-on-its-own-has-done-historical-harm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">says</a>.
“There are numerous concerns with the way BMI has been used to measure body fat and diagnose obesity, yet some physicians find it to be a helpful measure in certain scenarios,” <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-adopts-new-policy-clarifying-role-bmi-measure-medicine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> AMA Immediate Past President Jack Resneck, Jr. M.D. “It is important for physicians to understand the benefits and limitations of using BMI in clinical settings to determine the best care for their patients.”
The AMA said it will support efforts to educate physicians on the issues with BMI and alternative measures for diagnosing obesity.
The AMA is the largest organization of doctors in the nation with more than 271,000 members.
In recent years, the body positivity and fat positivity movements have picked up steam in the U.S., arguing that obese people can be healthy.
Fat activists have rebelled against &#8220;diet culture&#8221; and made specific demands like free extra seats on airplanes to accommodate their size.
In December, Time Magazine <a href="https://time.com/6242949/exercise-industry-white-supremacy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> an article titled, &#8220;The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise,&#8221; while Cosmopolitan&#8217;s February 2021 issue featured plus-sized models with the headline, &#8220;This is Healthy!&#8221;
Meanwhile, doctors have <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/exercise-to-gain-weight" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pointed out</a> that weight gain doesn&#8217;t always correlate to fat gain. For example, some people who exercise will end up gaining muscle weight, which will add to their overall weight.

Gastric Band Treatment

American Medical Association Says BMI Is Racist

American Medical Association

Fat Acceptance

Health

Health Care

U.S.

A grisly, broad-daylight fatal stabbing in Manhattan last week has New Yorkers concerned about rising violent crime in New York City.
On <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/06/12/manhattan-street-brawl-murder-is-a-surreal-sign-of-whats-to-come/#">Friday</a>, one man fatally stabbed another man after the two started brawling on a busy street in downtown Manhattan.
The fight broke out just after 8am during morning rush hour in the middle of a crosswalk in Manhattan&#8217;s Chelsea neighborhood, at West 30th Street and Seventh Avenue.
The men threw punches at each other, and one man swung a knife at the other&#8217;s head.
New Yorkers can be seen in video footage of the incident walking by nonchalantly, most not giving the chaos a second look until the fight turned deadly.
One neatly-dressed, gray-haired woman walked through the crosswalk and passed within arm&#8217;s length of one of the men. Another woman wearing medical scrubs passed between the two men. A man in an orange sweatshirt watched the fight from the sidewalk.
Eventually, the man with the knife stabbed his opponent, who died at the hospital shortly afterwards.
Police, who were already investigating a separate incident nearby, found a 36-year-old man stabbed in the torso when they arrived on the scene.
Nisean Graves, who is reportedly homeless, was taken into custody on Friday at gunpoint by the NYPD and has been charged with murder for the stabbing.
Graves is a registered sex offender who previously <a href="https://abc7ny.com/stabbing-fatal-chelsea-nyc/13362483/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">served</a> nine years in prison for attempting to rape a 16-year-old girl.
He was also <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-man-stabbed-fatal-fight-midtown-20230609-2bvgc45xzfhlxj7khjgdxu2ola-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sentenced</a> to a year in prison in 2021 for doing the same exact thing he did Friday — stabbing a man in both his arms in Manhattan.
The stabbing victim was reportedly a Maryland man who was wanted for questioning in connection with a violent murder.
The shocking incident left a giant blood stain in the middle of the generally <a href="https://www.pods.com/blog/2023/04/safest-neighborhoods-nyc/#:~:text=2.,Chelsea%20—%20Safety%20Score%20B%2D&amp;text=Voted%20the%20%231%20Best%20Neighborhood,galleries%2C%20famously%20including%20the%20Whitney." target="_blank" rel="noopener">safe</a> downtown Manhattan neighborhood, known for its high-end art galleries and celebrity homes.
The murder left some Manhattanites concerned about the brazen nature of the crime.
&#8220;New Yorkers witnessed a surreal sight last week, an alien scene that made residents question the city’s future livability,&#8221; <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/06/12/manhattan-street-brawl-murder-is-a-surreal-sign-of-whats-to-come/#" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the New York Post.
At least two broad daylight murders have already been committed in Manhattan this year.
In February, suspected drug dealers <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/02/09/man-fatally-shot-in-times-square/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shot and killed</a> a man in Times Square.
Gelinas also wondered whether New York&#8217;s progressive approach to criminal justice is coming back to bite the city.
&#8220;What about &#8216;bystander&#8217; de-escalation, so promoted by progressives?&#8221; Gelinas asked.
&#8220;Democrats created this,&#8221; one Twitter user <a href="https://twitter.com/BCMPREDATOR/status/1668293757043703814" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>, mentioning the suspect&#8217;s prison sentence for the previous stabbing.
Violent crime in New York City is on the rise overall. In total, the city has seen 53,740 violent crimes this year compared with 53,250 crimes by this time last year, <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-city.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to NYPD data.
Murders, rapes, and robberies are down from this time last year, but felony assault and car thefts are up this year compared to this time in 2022.
Compared to 2021, murders are down, but rapes, robberies, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts are still higher this year.

Second NYPD Officer Dies After Ambush In Harlem Building

New Yorkers Shocked By Broad Daylight Stabbing Murder Downtown

Crime

Eric Adams

Murder

New York

New York City

Violent Crime

MK editorial _signs and wonders_JK_ 2 copy 2

Signs And Wonders

1619 Project

Catholic Church

Catholicism

Michael Knowles

Religion

The Left and the Devil each want you to believe the same three lies: Your past defines you, your mistakes are permanent, and you are incapable of doing good ever again.
None of those statements are true. We need to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-93-conservatives-are-wrong-rihanna-s-performance-was-great-and-ramaswamy-is-better-than-de-santis-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">address these falsehoods</a> head-on — both as conservatives and followers of God — because they are dominating our society and causing social dysfunction in leaps and bounds.
So why do progressives and Lucifer spread such evil? The simple answer is both parties involved want you to despair.
The Left wants you to feel demoralized so they can amass political power. The Devil wants you to feel hopeless so he can keep you away from God forever. 
Of course, the Devil and progressives get you to that point of dejection in different ways. The Left does it after you err whereas the Devil partakes before, during, and after you sin.
For the purposes of this column, let us focus on Satan’s trickery first.
The Devil plays an active role in getting you to sin — separating yourself from God — and berates you afterward. He’s very good at it, and it’s part of the human condition. He does it through deception — which is the Modus Operandi for everything he does. He is the father of lies, after all.
He uses a simple strategy to achieve those ends. As explained by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuCw8UT5y6c" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen</a>, “Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.”
Or, as explained another way, also by Venerable Sheen, the Devil tricks us into believing he is “on our side before we sin.” He lies and says Christ is “our accuser.” But then, afterward, the roles are reversed, and “Christ becomes the defender and the Devil the accuser.”
Yet prior to falling away from God’s will, the Devil convinces you that you&#8217;re making the right choice, you deserve whatever it is you are about to do, and he offers rationalizations for your action.
Then you sin, feel guilty, and are looking for answers. The Devil now has a different lie for you.
Afterward, he pelts you with thoughts that you have gone down a dark path and can never return. Salvation is out of reach — so you might as well keep sinning or take drastic action to avoid the misery you find yourself in, his twisted argument goes.
That is not true, but millions — if not billions of people — every single day think God will never love them again or that they cannot escape who they have become.
Judas — Jesus’ betrayer — certainly believed that message. It drove him to suicide after he helped hand Jesus over for his trial.
And what do we see today? Suicide rates are rising while hopelessness is increasing. Many people believe their mistakes are everlasting — and the only way to escape their sadness is to end it all. 
Which brings this column to the lies of the Left. Progressives also want you to believe that your past poor decisions are your true worth. 
In an age where anything you said years ago can be pulled up and used against you, it is daunting to believe that you&#8217;ve put your past behind you — even if you have matured and had a change of heart. 
So the Left, knowing full well that in order to win they must censor opposing viewpoints, will dig up whatever they can and use it as ammo. We all know the script: Somebody finds success in life, but when they were a teenager they said or posted something inappropriate, even slightly racist — and suddenly the woke mob is out for blood.
It doesn’t matter what somebody says or does today — there is no room for personal growth for the Left. The Left, like the Devil, wants you to believe the only way you can show your virtue is to either stay away from politics altogether or to march with them in lockstep agreement.
That idea creeps across the political spectrum as well. Personally, I have been told that I am a grifter because I used to have liberal views and have since changed my mind on topics from when I was 17.
To that I ask: I’m not allowed to learn the error of my ways and make a concrete change in my life? Will who I was more than a decade ago dictate who I will always be? 
Nonsense. 
If you’re reading this, you must know that you can wake up and make firm amends to become a better person. 
You could have sinned for 10 years straight and said awful things on the internet, but you are allowed to change. There is no permanence. You are not stuck with wickedness. You are not stuck in spiritual or personal rot. You are allowed to strive to be better every single day. 
You have worth, and you can become a positive force for good — no matter what the Left or the Devil say.

Candace_416x9 copy 22 (4)

The Left And The Devil Tell You Lies So You Will Despair

Cancel Culture

Candace Owens

In modern politics, almost any opinionated person can be identified by a generalized ideological label. Conservatives wish to conserve traditional values, libertarians want to increase individual liberty, and anarchists want the abolition of the government as a whole. While most labels seem to fit their respective ideology, there is one moniker frequently used that is misleading at best: progressive.
These are the people we see engaging in “fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” refusing to define the word woman, and wearing “p-word” hats while marching in Washington, D.C., to smash the patriarchy.
While the ideology of these troubled individuals makes them think they’re somehow creating progress, the reality is their far-Left activism is killing decades of positive change on multiple fronts. And every time we refer to them as progressive, we mislead the general public by indirectly lending them false credit.
Whether it be the transgender movement&#8217;s deterioration of women’s rights, the climate alarmist movement’s undermining of our economy, or BLM’s assault on race relations, the damage of progressives is evident.
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-rise-of-the-transgressives" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BEN SHAPIRO: The Rise Of The Transgressives</a>
When it comes to race relations specifically, the damage is undeniable.
On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during his march on Washington. While the man may have had his flaws, one line from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this speech</a> remains engraved in the minds of all who have studied American history; “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This revolutionary idea — that people should be judged for who they are instead of what they look like — was key in transforming the United States into the most just society that has existed in all of human civilization.
Unfortunately, after a generation’s worth of hard work to get here, many self-identifying progressives are abandoning this idea because it invalidates their victim complex.
A movement that once identified itself as fighting for equality now finds itself refusing to accept it.
<a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/879136931/interrupt-the-systems-robin-diangelo-on-white-fragility-and-anti-racism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According</a> to “progressives” like Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling leftist propaganda book “White Fragility,” it doesn&#8217;t matter who you are or what you’ve done, if you are white you are complicit in racism. She even goes so far as to say; “The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
DiAngelo’s seemingly radical take, however, actually isn’t radical at all when you consider how many people and companies have embraced it. From black columnists like Jamilah Lemieux <a href="https://www.bet.com/article/i3kw23/do-you-feel-unsafe-around-white-people" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a> things like “we&#8217;ve never been safe in the presence of White people” to companies like Starbucks targeting its white employees with a national racial bias training, the growing popularity of this idea is apparent.
In his book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Right-Side-History-Reason-Purpose/dp/0062857908" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Right Side of History</a>,&#8221; Ben Shapiro shares how in 2013, “72 percent of white Americans thought race relations were good, and so did 66 percent of black Americans; that statistic had remained relatively stable from 2001 through 2013. And yet our racial battles are now bloody and brutal, with renewed tribalism raging on all sides; by July 2016, just 53 percent of Americans said race relations were good, while 46% said they were bad.”
In 2019, over 60 years after the landmark SCOTUS case Brown v. Board of Education that ruled school segregation unconstitutional, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) released a study titled <a href="https://www.nas.org/reports/separate-but-equal-again/full-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Separate but Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education”</a>. 
The study surveyed 173 college-level institutions and it was found that 42% offered segregated residences, 46% offered segregated orientation programs, and 72% hosted segregated graduation ceremonies.
Unlike the segregation of Jim Crow, this new neo-segregation doesn’t come from a place of institutionalized racial supremacy. It instead comes from a place of fabricated oppression that relies on the idea that racism is skin deep.
As conservatives, it is our duty to conserve all that is good about American tradition. Ten years ago that may have meant things like lower taxes and access to gun rights, but today is extended to pushing back against one of the most destructive ideologies in American history.
While it may be a small step in the greater scheme of things, one way we can all contribute to the fight is by changing our vocabulary. The far-Left is anything but progressive, so let&#8217;s stop making it sound like they are.
Jacob Falach is an associate producer at The Daily Wire. You can find him on Instagram at @thatjewishconservative.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Womens Health Protection Act and the Ensuring Womens Right to Reproductive Freedom Act

Why We Should Stop Calling The Far-Left ‘Progressive’

Why We Should Stop Calling The Far-Left 'Progressive'

Politics

Would you believe that a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/california" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Santa Monica tree hugger</a> who was originally peer-pressured into buying a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/tesla" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tesla</a> by his liberal friends is now concerned that his virtue-signaling car has become a vice due to the way <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/elon-musk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elon Musk</a> is running Twitter?
Of course you would. That&#8217;s probably one of the most believable scenarios you&#8217;ll hear all year.
Regardless, The Los Angeles Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-28/tesla-elon-musk-twitter-conservative-environment-electric-vehicles" target="_blank" rel="noopener">thought the scenario noteworthy enough</a> to publish a nearly 700-word screed by a former magazine editor named John Blumenthal about the latest leftist lamentations regarding free speech.
A few years ago, Blumenthal had driven a car powered by fossil fuels — which made him a &#8220;hypocrite.&#8221;
&#8220;The car was impractical, but it had sentimental value,&#8221; he explained in the story. &#8220;My environmental activist friends were not impressed by my assiduous urban composting, LED bulb installations and energy-saving appliances. I needed to do more to diminish my carbon footprint. The icebergs were melting, my friends said, and at least one polar bear was wandering around homeless and hungry because of me.&#8221;
So Blumenthal purchased a Tesla, which he felt was &#8220;pricey but worth it.&#8221;
Yet now that the Tesla founder has allowed for Twitter&#8217;s policies to be more in line with the First Amendment, Blumenthal is again worried about what his friends might think of his car and his moral stature.
&#8220;Because of the recent revelation of Elon Musk’s political views — all of which I abhor — I’m starting to worry about what sort of political statement the car is making,&#8221; the writer fretted. &#8220;Will people see me as a symbol of right-wing environmentalism, a living oxymoron?&#8221;
The author says that he is &#8220;horrified&#8221; by Musk&#8217;s political views — exactly which stances he doesn&#8217;t quite say. His only argument is that Musk is allowing unseemly characters on Twitter while banning journalists.
Blumenthal neglects to mention that Musk&#8217;s recent bans of journalists were in accordance with the rules he created and is now applying equally. As Musk put it, journalists aren&#8217;t &#8220;special.&#8221;
So, Blumenthal now wonders whether he should sell his Telsa as a form of  &#8220;protest&#8221; against one of the world&#8217;s richest men.
He acknowledges that the sale of the car wouldn&#8217;t actually do much to deter Musk from his beliefs, but he does believe it could make him feel better.
&#8220;It’s a beautifully designed car with no carbon emission, and initially, I was proud of owning it and being seen driving a vehicle that displayed my concern for the environment,&#8221; Blumenthal claimed. &#8220;But I’m a liberal, and if Musk’s politics don’t change radically for the better, driving a Tesla will become, at least for me, as hypocritical and untenable as driving a gas guzzler was.&#8221;
In other words, he admits he mostly bought it so he could be &#8220;seen&#8221; supporting the correct causes.
Blumenthal&#8217;s column unwittingly exposes the modern Left&#8217;s unseriousness of the problems at hand.
Far from being the individual critical thinkers they believe, they simply follow the crowd on all topics of the day.
They often make decisions not out of any genuine concern or logic, but because a mob of people bullies them into making the &#8220;right&#8221; choice. In this case, Blumenthal&#8217;s friends are the mob. If he wants to fit in with his California comrades, then he better dress the part and ditch the Tesla.
First, their judgy natured pushed him toward the electric vehicle, now he&#8217;s under the impression he must sell that same car to fit in with the in-crowd.
Of course, he could just decide to be a grown man and not be concerned with what others think, but then he might lose his friends.
The other thing is that it would appear that climate change is out as the most threatening thing in the world, and instead, a commitment to free speech has come to the surface of the latest leftist hysteria.
So, it looks like Blumenthal may sell his Tesla so that the social justice warrior crowd doesn&#8217;t associate him with Twitter&#8217;s so-called fascist-in-chief &#8230; a man who stands against big government in bed with Big Tech.
He has to broadcast his support by promoting certain symbols. It&#8217;s sort of like those people online who fill their profiles with Ukrainian flags and BLM fists or put up those &#8220;hate has no home&#8221; yard signs on their lawns. For leftists, it&#8217;s always the thought and most superficial tangible sign of support that counts — not the actual outcomes certain policies and beliefs create.
In other words, the important thing for progressives isn&#8217;t that they actually create changes that help the world, no, what matters is that they signal to other liberals they&#8217;re part of the same team.
What a tiresome existence.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Elon Musk

Tesla Owner Concerned His Virtue-Signaling Car Has Become A Vice Because Elon Musk Supports Free Speech

Climate Change

Environment

Tesla

To modify a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypELsuR1MRM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">phrase</a>, the Left’s favorite culture war battle is always the next one. Never content with winning, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/progressivism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">they</a> do not stop in their goal of dismantling every traditional value and norm. Their goal is total domination.
This was evident yet again on Tuesday at the White House. If you watched <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/joe-biden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">President Joe Biden</a>&#8216;s celebration of the &#8220;Respect for Marriage&#8221; act on Tuesday, you noticed a large amount of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/drag-queen-invited-to-biden-white-house-once-performed-for-a-2-year-old-boy-the-kids-are-out-to-sing-and-suck-d" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rhetoric and fanfare</a> which had nothing to do with the union of man and woman — or any combination of the two sexes.
For example, Biden <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-calls-to-challenge-cynical-laws-targeting-transgender-children/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> at the event, &#8220;We need to challenge the hundreds of callous, cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need.&#8221;
In other words, the implication is that you can only support LGBTQ rights if you support transgender surgeries for children — even if you voted for the &#8220;Respect for Marriage&#8221; act as dozens of Republicans did.
To any decent person, that standard makes no sense. What does marriage have to do with mutilating kids?
Nothing really — at least not on the surface. But that&#8217;s because liberals are always aiming for more than they admit.
Consider that throughout the debate of the law in question, Americans were told that it only had to do with marriage. Conservatives who opposed the bill — often on religious liberty grounds — were browbeaten by leftists and their media allies and called homophobic bigots.
Then, as soon as the bill is about to be signed, Biden admits that actually, this entire movement is about much more than respecting marriage: It&#8217;s about radical gender theory — though he would never use that term. Instead, he — or more precisely, his handlers — hide it behind terms such as &#8220;healthcare,&#8221; &#8220;gender-affirming care,&#8221; and sometimes &#8220;gender policies.&#8221;
Off-the-cuff comments and video evidence from the president point to the fact that he has no idea what &#8220;gender policies&#8221; even mean.
&#8220;What do you say to Americans who disagree with your gender policies?&#8221; a reporter asked Biden in October.
&#8220;My gender policies?&#8221; a surprised Biden said in response as if the journalist were asking whether he prefers men or women in his love interests.
&#8220;Transgender policies like bathrooms, women’s sports, things like that,&#8221; the muckraker clarified.
&#8220;I stand by my policies&#8221; was all that Biden could muster in response.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Reporter: &quot;What do you say to Americans who disagree with your gender policies?&quot;
Biden: &quot;My gender policies?&quot;
Reporter: &quot;Transgender policies like bathrooms, women’s sports, things like that.&quot;
Biden: &quot;I stand by my policies.&quot; <a href="https://t.co/T66qbosKiV">pic.twitter.com/T66qbosKiV</a>
&mdash; Greg Price (@greg_price11) <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1583532826410246144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
So why does Biden go along with it all? Well, because he is a loyal footsoldier of the Democrat Party. He advocates whatever the party wants — which is why he&#8217;s their perfect president.
Individual thinking is frowned upon amongst collectivists. The president has shown no desire to buck the party, and he certainly wouldn&#8217;t well into his senior years.
So why the need for the president to mention anything unrelated to the &#8220;Respect for Marriage&#8221; bill?
Because the Left only support causes so that they can open up doors for their next goal.
That characteristic is not limited to ideas about sex and gender.
To further the point, it was <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/15/remarks-president-immigration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">only ten years ago</a> the Left was demanding amnesty for only children brought into the U.S. illegally. The children weren&#8217;t at fault, they&#8217;re innocent, they&#8217;d argue. Republicans essentially won that battle, or have worked to help Democrats. Now, the Left is<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/no-thanks-schumer-wants-amnesty-for-11-million-or-however-many-illegal-aliens-are-in-the-u-s" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> demanding amnesty</a> for all illegal immigrants.
Similarly, having secured the victory in changing the institution of marriage — a cornerstone of society — they&#8217;re engaged in a full-on battle to redefine man and woman. They&#8217;re targeting minors across America to do so.
What comes after that, who knows, but rest assured the Left already has something in mind because that is how they operate. They are already thinking about how to win the next cultural battle.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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