It’s hard to remember a time when The Onion was synonymous with “funny.”

The humor site once had the field all to itself, creating Fake News stories that made us laugh and think. The Onion came out in printed form, and its attacks on the political class could be withering.

That was then.

Today’s online-only Onion is comedic in name only. The outlet’s hard-Left politics have all but stripped away its comic potential, from the woke handcuffs placed on liberal satire to how it protects Democrats…

…much like today’s late-night TV landscape.

So if you want to read something funny about President Joe Biden, for example, you’d never type “the onion” into a search engine. You go to The Babylon Bee.

To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim https://t.co/KDHEZAjgU7 pic.twitter.com/O4ZfgGrc8P

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 18, 2024

That site leans to the Right, but it’s unrelenting in its humor and ability to smite both sides. It’s everything The Onion isn’t – topical, fast, bold and hilarious.

And, sadly, The Onion might soon be even worse.

The site just got picked up by new owners, and former NBC journalist Ben Collins is the platform’s CEO moving forward. Ostensibly charged by the Peacock network with overseeing so-called “disinformation,” Collins proved inept at the gig.

We’re still waiting for him to weigh in on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the “Very Fine People” hoax and more.

Here’s how Collins described Libs of TikTok, the social media journalist who exposes the far-Left’s extremes.

“Fox News’ favorite aggregator of LGBTQ teachers they don’t like the look of.”

The latter part of the sentence feels slanderous, no? What’s his proof that Libs of TikTok is bigoted. Does he share any?

Collins, formerly with the far-Left Daily Beast, also got exposed by The Federalist for carrying water for the hard-Left. Consider:

NBC’s leftist reporter Ben Collins, meanwhile, arguably offered the most laughable response to Soros backing Bragg. Quoting a CNBC story, Collins says Soros can’t back Bragg because the two never met.

Journalist Steve Krakauer slammed Collins for his social media-heavy methods that often occur without actual journalism.

Collins seems to spend his days endlessly opining on social media about the state of journalism – like his frequent attacks on the New York Times. But one thing Collins does not appear to be doing very much anymore is journalism. Collins hasn’t written an article for NBC News in more than 100 days. His last one, published in early October, was on one of his favorite targets, X owner Elon Musk. Before that, you have to go back to May 22 to find his previous byline, a short piece about a “fake picture of an explosion” at the Pentagon that had gone semi-viral.

He’s also wary of transparency.

I asked Collins and NBC News if he was still a full-time employee of the media outlet, and neither responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Does this sound like the person to shake The Onion from its hard-left shackles?

It gets worse.

RELATED: YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA BIAS

Collins was one of many mainstream news reporters who got the infamous Gaza hospital story wrong.

Collins is treated as an expert in the burgeoning field of countering the spread of misinformation. Yet his error rate is noteworthy….

Did Collins soberly wait for these facts to come in? Nope. The award-winning disinformation expert helped circulate the inaccurate claims of the Palestinian authorities. When other voices on social media recommended caution, Collins chimed in to assert that any delay in reporting the horrific casualty numbers represented a profound moral failing.

It’s Disinformation 101, and he fell for it. That he recently won a Walter Cronkite Award for journalism speaks volumes about today’s Fourth Estate.

Collins’ rage against free speech advocate Elon Musk found him making more mistakes, according to Reason.

Collins’ reporting often contains basic errors that suggest he doesn’t particularly understand the right-wing forces he’s denouncing. His most recent article alleges that Musk’s plans for Twitter were shaped by a far-right former Trump administration staffer, even though it’s fairly clear the staffer wasn’t actually telling Musk what to do, but rather warning about what would happen to Musk if he offended “the regime.”

Collins even raged against the release of The Twitter Files, which exposed the platform’s extensive censorship regime against right-leaning voices. He did so without calling out any errors in Matt Taibbi’s reportage.

He just used ad hominem attacks on the left-leaning Taibbi.

So The Onion’s return to its funny, bipartisan roots is even more unlikely today.

Still, the two parties may be perfect for one another.

The post The Onion and Ben Collins: A Perfect Fake News Marriage appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Capitalists sincerely want you to be rich. Because that means there’s more money they can bastard out of you, obviously. Which is a bit of a problem for that Marxist claim that the capitalists want others to be poor, isn’t it?

– Tom Worstall

 

"First it was Columbia, now anti-Israel protests have spread across America. ... The ‘rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation’ ... now rings out on leafy campuses from California to Boston.
    "In these ostensibly ‘anti-war’ protests, students have demanded the total destruction of Israel, while waving placards in support of Hamas and singling out Jewish professors and students for abuse. The terrifying orgy of anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in America’s top universities should disturb everyone. ...
    "Since the start of their education, today’s students have imbibed a crude understanding that people can be sorted into different groups according to skin colour, gender and sexuality ... indoctrinated into a view that the world can be divided between oppressors and the oppressed. ... taught to loathe their own country and made defensive of their privilege ...
    " In this context, aligning with Palestinians and demonstrating hostility to Israel makes perfect sense. It allows students to identify with an oppressed group and distance themselves from their own nation and culture. That such sentiment can so easily tip over into anti-Semitism is unsurprising. Students have been deluded into thinking that the more extreme their demands for the abolition of Israel, and the more vile their targeting of Jews, the better they show their own virtue.
    "Horrendously, anti-Semitism comes to be seen as a morally virtuous position."

~ Joanna Williams, from her op-ed 'How anti-Semitism became a virtue on American campuses'

Hardly a day goes by without further evidence that the world is moving toward Viktor Orban-style authoritarian nationalism. Here’s the latest piece of evidence, from the WSJ:

A small group of the former president’s allies—whose work is so secretive that even some prominent former Trump economic aides weren’t aware of it—has produced a roughly 10-page document outlining a policy vision for the central bank, according to people familiar with the matter. . . . 

Several people who have spoken with Trump about the Fed said he appears to want someone in charge of the institution who will, in effect, treat the president as an ex officio member of the central bank’s rate-setting committee. Under such an approach, the chair would regularly seek Trump’s views on interest-rate policy and then negotiate with the committee to steer policy on the president’s behalf. Some of the former president’s advisers have discussed requiring that candidates for Fed chair privately agree to consult informally with Trump on the central bank’s decisions, the people familiar with the matter said. 

These things don’t tend to end well.  (Recall the Nixon/Burns Fed of the early 1970s.)

Here’s Patrick Horan (who was my colleague at the Mercatus Center) in the National Review:

Some of Donald Trump’s economic advisers are reportedly discussing ways to devalue the U.S. dollar should the former president be elected again this year. Chief among these advisers is Robert Lighthizer, who spearheaded the Trump administration’s trade war with China and could be Treasury secretary in a second administration. Proponents of the idea argue that making the dollar weaker against other currencies would make U.S. exports relatively cheaper, which would lead to a reduction in the trade deficit.

They might wish to check with some Latin American economists to see how the “devalue your way to prosperity” approach worked in that region of the world.

Reporters often engage in reasoning from a price change, but Horan does a nice job of avoiding that mistake.  He points out that any analysis of the impact of devaluation must begin with the question of how it is to be achieved:

To start, let’s consider a critical concept in international economics: the “impossible trinity.” According to this principle, a country cannot have all three of the following at the same time: a fixed exchange rate, free movement of capital or investment, and monetary sovereignty (the ability to conduct monetary policy independently). It can only pick a maximum of two.

Since 1971, the United States has chosen free capital flows and monetary sovereignty while letting exchange rates float based on market fundamentals. This choice is the norm among large, developed economies. To weaken the dollar to some desired rate vis-à-vis other currencies means fixing the exchange rate. That means either free movement of capital or monetary sovereignty will have to go.

 

The post The Centralization of Power appeared first on Econlib.

X, in its sloppy yet energetic way, has corrected the Biden campaign for me:

While this is not quite how I would put it—it seems like an odd confusion of my 2020 and 2024 endorsements—and I am a radical monarchist, the horseshoe’s missing link, who only looks “far right” from the far left—I will take the W.

But I have heard from many readers who have come away disturbed and/or confused by my endorsement of Biden. To be clear: all I have is a good plan for Biden. I also have a good plan for Trump (or anyone else). It is the same plan and very simple. I do not think Biden or Trump or anyone else will use it—but they should. They should!

What is to be done

After taking complete charge of the executive branch, I propose, Biden or Trump will appoint a national CEO with plenary power over the entire USG—federal, state, local and tribal. (“Plenary” is just a fancy Latin word meaning “full.”)

(While the President’s legal authority is federal, the US is one country in reality. It does not need 50 motor vehicle departments. No one, looking at this country now, would invent federalism if it did not already exist. And during an emergency rebuild of the government, there is no need for any ridiculous, but unsafe, civil-war farce.)

This CEO will serve for the next four years or until the President dismisses him. He will deliver quarterly reports to the President, who will otherwise do his photo-ops. He should be a successful startup CEO who has built a large company from nothing. He should probably bring his whole top team.

His mission is: to repair, defend and improve the assets of the United States, which are: its people and its land. The nation is a firm. He is its chief executive. The year is 2025. The Deep State finally has a boss.

It is plainly obvious to everyone that if the political situation of this new national CEO is as stated above, he has no reason to try to reform the existing “executive” branch (actually an administrative branch, managed by the legislative and judiciary branches). His mission is more likely to succeed if he replaces it with a new startup regime—using existing organizations only to make sure the transition is smooth.

Even the problems the USG is solving seem best explained by historical factors. What is the purpose of US foreign policy? In the context of 20th-century world history, what the State Department does today makes sense. How else could it be explained?

If the Deep State got a boss—the first thing that boss would do is fire the Deep State. And hire a new Deep State—whose first mission is to wind down the old one. Unless the boss has a conflict of interest—and is somehow beholden to the old Deep State.

Of course, Joe Biden’s party is the party of the Deep State. So why would he do that? Beats me—I just know he should, and he could. If Gorbachev could reboot the USSR from the top, Biden can reboot the US from the top. Much more easily than Trump!

Joe Biden’s party is the party of the Deep State. But, having put him in the White House, they actually don’t have any power over him. They can’t even unelect him. What would they do, impeach him? Also: everyone who works in the government hates their job. Also: none of them are violent. No, not even in the military.

But why? Look—the man is 81 years old. I bet he can’t tell coffee from soy sauce. Why would he do anything? I firmly believe that it was actually Joe Biden, personally, who got the US out of Afghanistan. (And he couldn’t have done it without Donald Trump.) Why? Because it was the right thing? As a diehard Trump voter—would you really discount that? Perhaps, inside the career, the staff, the brand, the industry that is Joe Biden, is—a real human being. Perhaps as he enters his eighth decade, the artifice that has defined his life is stripped away, and he decides to just—do the right thing.

Sure. He won’t. Trump won’t, either. It’s bad to go off half-cocked. Before we can have change—we need to have continuity.

What if Joe Biden is reading this now? They say he used to read a thousand pages a day—now it must be down to only a few hundred. But the greatness, surely, remains. Brb checking the subscriber list. Mr. President! There is a tide, they say, in human affairs, which taken at the flood…

Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and many authors ought to be flattered to be plagiarized, considering what rubbish they write. Such, at any rate, were my first thoughts on reading the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Natalie J. Perry, brought against her by Christopher Rufo, the investigative journalist who has exposed many a […]