Daily Archives: June 4, 2023

Today’s News Bits

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I’m in the new place, and I think it will be fine, although right now it’s all boxes and chaos. But now I have wifi! I’m in business!

The most intriguing thing in the news today is that Jack Smith’s documents case grand jury is expected to meet this week after a hiatus. Are they getting close to deciding indictments?

Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press. Best comment so far:

He’ll be replaced by Kristen Welker. I don’t recall watching her enough to know if she’ll be an improvement or just another squish.

Speaking of lame journalism, do see the article by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic, Inside the Meltdown at CNN. There’s a paywall, but they let you read a freebie every so often. Then read Nicholas Carlson at Yahoo News, ‘It’s like watching a snuff film’: Media elites shocked by The Atlantic’s surgical dismantling of CNN boss Chris Licht. The Atlantic’s portrayal of Licht was brutal, and it’s being speculated he’ll be replaced soon. From the Yahoo article, my favorite quote it this:

“Let’s get real. The problem isn’t Licht, it’s his paymasters. The American billionaire class has convinced themselves that the way to save journalism is to make it as bland and as both-sidesy as possible. They chose Licht as their latest champion of harmless vanilla inoffensiveness. The problem is, no one wants vanilla. Not even a tasting spoon of it.”

Bland, both-sidesy, harmless vanilla inoffensiveness, thy name also is Chuck Todd. And see also Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So. (no paywall) at the New York Times. Zucker’s approach wasn’t exactly what journalism needs either, of course.

In other news: There’s also a paywall at The Telegraph that’s keeping me from reading Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’. And I really wish I could read it, because it has mightily pissed off the crew at Breitbart. They are “erasing the English”! Breitbart says. But I covered all this a couple of years ago in The Truth About Anglo-Saxons. There really were no Anglo-Saxons, exactly. The term “Anglo-Saxon” didn’t become common until long after the Angles and Saxons, who were two separate tribes, had been displaced by the Normans in 1066. And most of the cultural and political attributes we think of as “English” come from the Normans, not the Angles or Saxons.

The Breitbart article only mentions the Normans once:

It comes amid a wider movement in academia to link the historical group of Germanic Angles, Jutes, and Saxon peoples who arrived after the end of Roman controlled Britain and the conquest of the Normans with alleged racism, which many claim has been fostered in America.

I read that about six times. Is it saying that the Germanic Angles and Saxons arrived after the “conquest” of the Normans, who in fact conquered the Angles and Saxons? It may just be sloppy writing, or it may mean that the writer honestly didn’t know the Anglo-Saxons got their asses whupped and lost control of their territory on the island of Britain almost a thousand years ago. They were shupped by Norman invaders from France. And the “Anglo-Saxons” didn’t become romanticized as the epitome of civilized white people until the 1700s, when British imperialists were trying to normalize the colonization of many brown people by their own white selves. And of course the construction “Anglo-Saxon” came to be adopted here across the pond as a synonym for the higher grade of white people who are not Irish, Italian or Polish. This also is a construction that a Swedish friend of mind finds weird; I had to explain it to him.

So now white racists in England are thumping their chests and saying “We English exist”! Yes, and thank the Normans for that. But to the nutjob who complained that denigrating the Anglo-Saxons is like “saying the same thing about, say, Aboriginal Australians, Maoris or Native Americans” — um, the Celts would like a word.