Daily Digest

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• Another Amazon Outrage
• Alex Berenson’s new novel
• The knives are out at the White House, and it didn’t take long
• Uncle Joe stares into the future
• Speaking of hate speech

Another Amazon Outrage Posted: 26 Feb 2021 04:03 PM PST (John Hinderaker) It is black history month, and Amazon is all over it. But, it turns out, highly selectively. Mark Paoletta explains: Amazon Prime created an entire Amplify Black Voices page on its site that "feature[s] a curated collection of titles to honor Black History Month across four weekly themes (Black Love, Black Joy, Black History Makers, and Black Girl Magic)." There are scores of films available to stream, including four films available on the Amazon Prime site to stream (two docudramas and two documentaries) on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal icon and our nation's first black Supreme Court justice. There are even two films (one docudrama and one documentary) on Anita Hill, who came forward during [Justice Clarence] Thomas' confirmation hearing to claim that Thomas had sexually harassed her. But one documentary title is notably absent: Recently, Amazon Prime dropped Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, an acclaimed and popular PBS documentary on Justice Clarence Thomas, making it unavailable to stream during Black History Month. I haven’t watched Created Equal except for a few clips, but everyone I know who has seen it thinks it is great. With rare unanimity, audiences agree: The Created Equal DVD is still available for purchase on Amazon, and it is in fact number 38 of all documentaries on that site. In contrast, the RBG documentary on liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not even in the top 100 but is still streaming on Amazon Prime. Created Equal was nationally broadcast on PBS last April and has a 99 percent audience approval rating on the popular movie rating website Rotten Tomatoes. … On the Amazon website, the film has received a spectacular 4.9 star rating (out of 5 stars) from customer reviews, with 1,243 ratings. But there is no place for Justice Thomas during Black History Month. Thomas is not just a conservative icon, he is one of the most consequential intellectual leaders on the Court in modern times. He is a vastly more significant justice than Thurgood Marshall, and of course Anita Hill has zero significance other than the fact that she falsely accused Thomas in what turned out to be a futile attempt to block his nomination to the Court. How ironic that Amazon features a documentary about her, but not about Justice Thomas. Pathetic, but one more sign of the times in which we live. As noted above, Created Equal is still for sale on Amazon, here. While I haven’t seen the film, I have read Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son. It is fantastic. You can buy it here, and I strongly recommend it.

Alex Berenson’s new novel Posted: 26 Feb 2021 02:01 PM PST (Scott Johnson) Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has made himself a valuable source of dissent from the party line of the public health establishment in connection with COVID-19. In 2010 Berenson left the Times to pursue a successful career as an author of espionage thrillers. In recent appearances on Fox News, he has mentioned that the previously friendly mainstream media have turned a blind eye to his new novel, The Power Couple. Tom Nolan’s weekly round-up of mysteries in the February 20 Review section of the Wall Street Journal took up the new novel: Alex Berenson's "The Power Couple" (Simon & Schuster, 421 pages, $28) features Rebecca and Brian Unsworth; she heads the FBI's Russia counterintelligence desk, he's a coder for the NSA. The demands of Rebecca's high-pressure job have lately taken a toll on her husband and two teenage children: "Her workday left her barely enough time to be a mother or a wife." Brian feels he's become a mere supporting player in the movie of his wife's life: "the spouse who shows up in a couple of scenes to humanize the lead character." But wife and husband are united in common cause when their 19-year-old daughter Kira is abducted in Barcelona during a family vacation. Rebecca pulls strings to get assistance from FBI contacts, and local authorities also help out. Was Kira grabbed at random or targeted because of her parents' work? Mr. Berenson, a veteran storyteller, succeeds quickly in getting the reader to care about his main characters. Then a pair of extended flashbacks tell the problematic story of the Unsworths' marriage—first from Rebecca's viewpoint, then Brian's—turning the book sideways, from a kidnap procedural to a mystery of who's the greater villain in this couple's union. When the narrative returns to the hunt for Kira, it transforms again, into an unexpected spying chronicle. "The Power Couple," rife with crime-busting subplots and energized by a teenage captive determined not to be a victim, is one of the most unpredictable thrillers in years. I thought readers (like me) who have become post-pandemic Berenson fans might find the book of interest.

The knives are out at the White House, and it didn’t take long Posted: 26 Feb 2021 09:30 AM PST (Paul Mirengoff) With Neera Tanden’s nomination in serious trouble, the knives are out for Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff. How do we know? Because of the leaking that drives this Washington Post article called “Biden's chief of staff at center of controversy over White House budget pick.” Leaking can be a subtle art, but not in this case. One of the leakers told the Post that the Tanden play “was Ron, Ron, Ron, Ron.” It’s normal for one or two initial high profile presidential nominees to fail. By this time in the Trump administration, Andy Puzder’s nomination for Secretary of Labor had already gone up in flames (a tragedy, in my view), even though the Republicans had greater representation in the Senate than the Democrats enjoy now. But Klain’s enemies and rivals aren’t going to let historical perspective stand in the way of a chance to discredit him. Thus, the Post duly reports: If Tanden's nomination is withdrawn, Klain's handling of it may face scrutiny. Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders was not given a heads-up about Tanden's nomination, although Sanders and Tanden have often been at odds. Critics also contend that Klain and other White House officials should have known Tanden faced a difficult path to Senate approval, based on her reputation among GOP lawmakers, and that they should have reached out to Republicans earlier. The first line is rebutted by the Post’s article itself. Clearly, Klain’s critics aren’t waiting for the nomination to be withdrawn. They are already “scrutinizing.” No one should be surprised that infighting in the Biden White House has commenced. Certainly, no one who has read Tevi Troy’s Fight House, a history of White House infighting, will be. Based on my reading of that book, I wrote this last September: Fight House, Tevi Troy's excellent book about infighting at the White House from the Truman presidency on, shows that ideological disagreement is, in fact, one of the best predictors of how fierce the fighting within an administration will be. On this basis alone, we can expect considerable White House tumult, if Biden wins. Ron Klain is considered less of a radical leftist than others who have found their way into the Biden orbit. Like Tanden herself, Klain has strong connections with the establishment wing of the Democratic party, and to the Clintons. Thus, the ideological basis for infighting is present here, along, of course, with factors like jealousy and the quest for power. I also wrote this: Tevi didn't have occasion to discuss infighting under a president with diminished mental capacity. One has to go back to Woodrow Wilson's second term to find such a president. But Biden's mental capacity seems somewhat diminished already, and will likely decline as he approaches his 80th birthday. Thus, there might well be something like a void in the Oval Office in the event of a Biden presidency. The sense of a void at the top of any organization will likely make infighting all the more intense — especially if that organization happens to be a high stakes operation like, say, the government of the United States.

Uncle Joe stares into the future Posted: 26 Feb 2021 07:31 AM PST (Scott Johnson) The gentleman from Madame Tussauds emerged from storage yesterday to read remarks celebrating 50 million COVID-19 vaccinations. Whoever prepared the text is seeking to exploit the ignorance of Biden supporters and others who may devote 23 minutes of their lives to taking it in (text here, video below). The lords of Amazon have put me in mind of Joseph Stalin this morning. I see Biden in this light. He is the source of all that is good and true. Simon Sebag Montefiore put it this way in a Times book review: The Bolsheviks viewed the ideology of Marxism as essentially scientific in its analysis of human progress, and science was always a vital part of their conception of the Soviet Union, which they trumpeted as the first state ever founded on "scientific" principles. Its rulers, particularly Lenin and Stalin, regarded themselves as manifestations of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which gave them the authority to adjudicate on everything in society, including the arts and sciences. Lenin was an intellectual, at home as much in the British Museum Library as in the Kremlin. Stalin was a published romantic poet and enthusiastic autodidact with a library of thousands of books, not only read but annotated. They had the confidence to interfere in every genre of art and every discipline of science. Stalin would soon be hailed as the all-knowing coryphaeus (leader of the chorus in Greek drama) of science. Uncle Joe, as I think of him in this context, is all but the inventor and distributor of the vaccine. His unnamed predecessor has been “disappeared” from the history. He not only didn’t have anything to do with the vaccine, he was an obstacle to it. Uncle Joe — he’s the “vaccinator” in chief (emphasis on the last syllable or you will be eliminated). John called out the thoroughgoing gracelessness of Biden’s performance here yesterday. Watching Biden speak, one sees something beyond the gracelessness. Staring blankly at the teleprompter, easily confused, struggling to read and articulate, Biden appears to be out of it. He’s losing it, if he hasn’t yet lost it altogether. We need the little boy to shout out, “The emperor wears no clothes!” Toward the end of his remarks Biden “pushes” (his word) his $1.9 trillion “recovery plan.” The lying is out of control. Biden chooses “to close with this. The question I'm asked most often is, when will things get back to normal?” Biden’s answer combines the lying and the gracelessness that permeate these remarks. The preface is a giveaway: “My answer is always honest and straightforward.” This is Biden’s version of “to be perfectly frank.” “I can't give you a date. I can only promise that we'll work as hard as we can to make that day come as soon as possible. While things are improving are we're going from a mess we inherited to moving in the right direction at a significant speed, this is not a victory lap.” Translation: Not any time soon.

Speaking of hate speech Posted: 26 Feb 2021 06:21 AM PST (Scott Johnson) As in a Stalinist purge, Amazon has silently “disappeared” Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. Amazon tacitly alleges that it acted under revised guidelines prohibiting the sale of “content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” including content that “promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, [or] advocates terrorism.” Beyond citing the policy, Amazon has declined to justify its treatment of Anderson’s book. The suppression of Anderson’s book cannot reasonably be justified under Amazon’s policy. Not even close. What we have here is the enforcement of a party line — forgive me for repeating myself — as in a Stalinist purge. As I noted here yesterday, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains for sale by Amazon. Likewise Quotations From Chairman Mao (a/k/a “the Little Red Book”). And you may want to walk around Amazon’s Che Guevara Store as well. Now the Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles identifies a few other items that have escaped the net of Amazon’s revised policy. The list he has compiled reflects a spirit of mockery. Teddy Kennedy’s True Compass is an example. Stiles’s mockery is one approach to keeping the Amazon story alive. We need it and more. A few of the items Stiles identifies fall into the category of “get ’em while you can” — the Bible, the Constitution, and Huckleberry Finn, for example. Examples could be multiplied endlessly. Think, for example, of Aristotle’s Ethics, with its analysis of slavery. It’s enough to make you think that perhaps this whole “hate speech” thing could get out of hand, or that this is precisely the point.

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