I have a few items on my mind that perhaps, on their own, don’t merit a full examination in an entire American Spectator column. Perhaps they don’t merit an entry in one of the frequent Five Quick Things columns that appear in this space. But, my thought is, they also do not merit thorough insouciance. So, here they are.
1. Amid the current flurry of hysteria by which states and cities are mandating the wearing of face masks as “protection” against the COVID-19 virus, which country remains the No. 1 manufacturer of those face masks?
This matters, because in June the technical lead of the World Health Organization’s effort on the virus made headlines by saying that masks were not the be-all and end-all of human existence because asymptomatic carriers of the virus very rarely transmitted it. The next day she was made to recant, and ever since the mask has been the single most “virtuous” piece of virus response.
Most of those masks, even the crappy cloth ones, are made in China. Who controls the World Health Organization? Are you sure you believe everything they say about how if you don’t wear your mask it means you don’t care about your fellow man?
2. Good grief, the Wayfair thing.
It’s more than we want to deal with in this column. It’s its own column. But the accusations about Wayfair, the online furniture retailer, over the weekend are nothing short of crazy. It appears that on Wayfair there were items that had various connections, however questionable, to missing children, for sale for thousands of dollars above any semblance of the market ($500 wooden cabinets on sale for $10,000, for example), and the corporate response was, frankly, less robust and comprehensive than one would hope for.
The Q-crowd and others quickly jumped on this as a telltale that elite child abusers and pedophiles were using Wayfair and other sites as platforms to secretly move children in a human trafficking ring so wide open that it’s happening right under our noses.
Is this real? Probably not. That said, it’s well worth noting that the Trump administration has ramped up prosecutions of child predators and human traffickers by an exponential factor, and there is no question that this has become a cottage industry of predatory animals who cannot be ignored. The Wayfair accusations might be completely fraudulent, in which case the internet owes the company an apology, but on the other hand there should be a federal investigation into whether or not predators and human traffickers are using online sites like Wayfair, Amazon, and Overstock as platforms to move children in plain sight.
3. Follow the “experts”? They want you to turn off your air conditioner.
Remember this when you play Karen and listen to what the “scientists” say.
Live your life. The national death rate for COVID-19 infections is 0.26 percent. Do you really want to spend the summer risking heat stroke because some academic theorizes that your AC unit might circulate the virus?
4. Joe Biden: abolish cash bail.
That happened a few days ago, so you’ll know.
The last column in this space talked about how Biden is a sock puppet for the Hard Left in this country, because he knows that they’re his only chance of getting enough votes to win. The question is, how many of the Hard Left’s crazy ideas does Joe Biden adopt before Normal America starts to notice?
We’ll find out after Labor Day. Nobody is really paying attention before then.
5. What the hell, Seattle?
Just go and read this. Read it and try to wrap your head around the idea that it happened in the United States of America.
6. Clay Travis v. Dick Blumenthal: Oh, wow.
This, well, can’t be described. It just has to be experienced.
If you’re not plugged into Outkick.com yet, you need to fix that. That site will restore your faith that America is not lost, in a major way.
7. Ford’s CEO to its woke employees: yeah, zip it, morons.
Ford, which makes two out of every three cop cars in America, has nothing to apologize for in that regard. Even if you were going to make a legitimate complaint about police procedures and tactics, it would still be absurd to blame Ford, who only makes the cops’ rides, for doing their jobs.
And yet a bunch of social-justice-warrior clown employees at Ford wrote a letter to company CEO Jeff Hackett asking him to stop selling cars to police departments.
It’s not a surprise they’d do this. The movement to push Woke theology on the rest of the country is a snowball rolling downhill at present, and every day we’re more and more terrified at what idiocy might result from it.
But Hackett’s response was terrific. Essentially, he told them to suck on a tailpipe. Good for him.
8. Have you read the George Floyd autopsy report?
It’s not really worthy of nationwide rioting, actually.
That’s not to say Derek Chauvin’s a good guy, or that we shouldn’t have a discussion about urban policy tactics — though the result of that discussion is less assured than we’ve probably been told it will be.
But there has been very little discussion of the fact that the same lesson seems to have surfaced out of the Floyd matter that came out of the Michael Brown matter, the Eric Garner matter, the Rayshard Brooks matter, the Alton Sterling matter, et cetera … don’t be these guys.
They were all career criminals who were being arrested for the millionth time, they were all loaded on some illegal substance — in Floyd’s case it appears to have been a combination of weed, meth, and Fentanyl — and they all resisted arrest.
What kind of country would we have if we could all agree that people who allowed themselves to be at the end of that disastrous road shouldn’t be emulated? Instead, there are shrines to George Floyd portraying him as an angel. Think those will have the longevity of the Robert E. Lee statues?
9. Terrible white chicks.
This, by Stella Morabito at the Federalist, is an absolutely excellent piece.
The proof of it can be found, interestingly enough, in dating apps.
You’d be amazed to see how many middle-class white women who don’t bear the hallmarks of being part of the leftist cult will loudly proclaim the ferocity of their politics and vilify potential male companions who might have voted for Trump. The comparison to Patty Hearst is a completely apt one.
Not all that many married women have gone off this deep end. I’m going to say that’s largely because married women have a lot more stability to their lives and are far more invested in society. Single women, though, don’t have as large of a “real world” filter against social media and the news media, and they are far more likely to be corrupted by it — especially when the COVID-19 restrictions shield them against real life.
10. Why is Big Tech so anti-American?
The answer isn’t really the conspiratorial explanation you might be expecting. It’s really fairly simple. The people who do all the work at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley are not Americans.
It’s not that they’re leftists who hate this country, though they certainly could be. It’s that the people who do all the work for them come from God-knows-where and couldn’t give a damn about this country.
When five out of seven employees at these companies are foreigners, it’s not a surprise that they don’t recognize American values of free speech. Where these people come from you aren’t allowed to say something someone with power could become angry about, and your future is forfeit to that. So when these companies put those employees in charge of their user agreement policies, our concept of free speech vanishes.
And you shouldn’t be surprised.
This isn’t the worst piece. The worst piece is that 71 percent of the tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreigners because American schools don’t even teach code.
11. If Black Lives Matter is such an organic thing, why are donations to it running through ActBlue?
Gosh, I dunno.
12. Bubba Wallace finished in 27th place on Sunday.
So you’ll know. We can officially not worry about Bubba Wallace’s problems. Whether or not NASCAR decides to maintain him as somebody they will coddle and keep relevant is up in the air.
