Here’s my piece in ⁦@Newsweek⁩ about my trip to Riyadh last month. newsweek.com/saudi-arabias-… Many have written about Saudi Arabia’s social reforms, but few in the West—especially leftist activists—understand how much the Kingdom’s war on Islamists made them possible. Before women can walk around unveiled, they had to remove Islamists who’d use physical intimidation to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

If you haven’t read this, you don’t know DeSantis’ foreign policy. nytimes.com/2023/03/22/us/… Love this. Lol.

A thread on GOP views of foreign policy, 3/2023:

Over the last several decades, the Beltway foreign policy class of both parties became addicted to ideological abstractions, losing focus on basic national interests as statesmen from the beginning of time would’ve understood… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… "The meaning of national interest is survival," Hans Morgenthau defined it simply in 1949. "The protection of physical, political and cultural identity against encroachments by other nation-states."

Any American would've understood this. Defining it simply is important, because… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Not shocked that #TwitterFiles show the close coordination with an (lol) *hyper-vigilant* FBI, with a team of at least 80 digging through Americans’ Tweets. Very hard to solve this without flattening all the intelligence agencies, and keeping them away from domestic targets. (I don’t think that’s something that will ever happen, btw, under normal, constitutional circumstances.) The other side of the coin is passing a Digital Bill of Rights that guarantees these companies can’t disappear users based on anyone’s whim.

It wasn’t technically a lie then—people were throttled based on *associations* (interactions, etc) with people who were also throttled. Remember the “block lists”? That’s how the Left manipulated this back then. After Jack left, they began to police actual viewpoints/speech.

https://twitter.com/mtmehan/status/1601044098806583296

@PoliticalShort and I figured this out in 2018 just by talking to Twitter reps. They claimed to have 150 different metrics by which they throttled the visibility/reach of users. This way, they found a way around explicitly targeting the Right, even as it was de facto targeting.

Lotta thoughts on this and Trump’s role in J6… (1) This is a video he could’ve released at any time over the last year and a half, since the over-the-top prosecutions for “sedition” and “conspiracy to overthrow the government” began.

https://twitter.com/electionwiz/status/1598483523647700993

The outrageous scope of prosecutions only makes sense as part of a political campaign to transform opposition to Democrats as a serious homeland security and terrorism issue. This was—or should have been—obvious to everyone on the Right on JANUARY 6 (when I tweeted as much).

There’s a popular corner of RW twitter that looks at the terrible epidemic of millions of Americans taking psych meds and concludes that they’re never effective, and mental illness really isn’t a thing. This is total nonsense. They’re over-proscribed, but they’re not useless. Maybe you’ve been lucky and haven’t dealt with mental illness with family or friends. It’s not a joke, and it’s not just someone “speaking their mind.”

Many people live their lives normally with the help of many types of medication. Surprising this needs to be said.

I watched this show, and enjoyed it. The only “dangerous” part at all was his demonstration that archaeology—like every other credentialed racket—is dumb, hive-minded, protective of its turf, and could use reform. A hypothesis that an ancient structure is 12,000 years old rather than 8,000 years old should not be “dangerous,” especially as the implications are so harmless.

This week, the brilliant singer, guitarist, composer, luthier, and superlative samba interpreter Paulinho da Viola turned 80. When most of the attention was on psychedelia, rock and soul, he sang erudite and beautiful sambas. The early 70s LPs sound like out-of-time magic. If you’d like to hear something really beautiful, the second of the two self/titled albums from 1971 is the thing to do. Every track is a gem.

It’s been significant to his strategy that DeSantis doesn’t tweet or spend his time on here, but has very competent, smart, and take-no-shit people like @ChristinaPushaw engaging on his behalf. Maintaining distance from social media is the opposite of what every political comms advisor will tell you to do.

It works bc (1) unlike a legislator, he’s actually busy governing; and (2) it keeps media focus away from rhetoric and on policy fights that voters support him on.

Pierre Merlin was a French designer and illustrator who did brilliant covers for the Vogue and Swing jazz labels in the early 1950s. Here’s some of his work.

I made a video of Wayne Shorter’s ballads on his Blue Note records, 1964-1967. YouTube took it down for copyright violations, even as the individual tracks are posted many times. Here’s a thread with all these masterpieces. "Oriental Folk Song," from NIGHT DREAMER, 1964. Lee Morgan (tp); Wayne Shorter (ts); McCoy Tyner (p); Reggie Workman (b); Elvin Jones (d).

There’s a lot that’s absurd and maddening in this piece, but some of the details are pure gold. Definitely worth a read. theatlantic.com/politics/archi… This is a dejected Democrat activist couple in Phoenix; they’ve been among AZ’s politics’ most involved Hispanic community leaders. LOL.

NBC News is apoplectic about @GovRonDeSantis’ success with Latinos in Dade County. Look at this, wow. nbcnews.com/news/latino/de… The article is hysterical—they can’t comprehend how or why Dade Co Latinos would even consider voting for a Republican who doesn’t speak Spanish and doesn’t have a Latino wife (how they explained support for Jen Bush way back when).

Some of my favorite David Stone Martin 10” jazz covers. Some more.

Coming soon to my Youtube channel. All 4 nights--nearly 7 hours--of Sonny Rollins' greatest, most daring and creative music. I've wanted to post this forever, but I'm finally doing it. First video is posting soon; it's all three sets from the 2nd night, July 28, 1962. I posted the amazing 22-minute "St. Thomas" from this evening all the way back in 2013.

Watched Kanye on Tucker last night. The best part was his sincere pro-life position, which was obviously heartfelt. He’s quite bright and articulate. I didn’t know about his parents, which was fascinating. Perhaps it’s unavoidable when you’re that insulated and famous, but it’s clear that he mostly speaks to people who are well versed in the dramas of his life. He takes it for granted that we know who most of these people are, what they do, and how he’s interacted with them.

Don’t like the new glasses. Dullsville. Will send them back and get something more bold and interesting. They’re not bad, but they’re too ordinary.

The Lizzo thing is primarily a debate about decency and good taste Re: twerking and obesity. The Left believes it to be so empowering, it is appropriate in any context. The Right is disgusted by both the aesthetics and the Left’s insistence that there’s nothing gross about it. Absent this dynamic, there would obviously not be any fuss about Madison’s flute: no “yas queen” from the Left and no disgust from the Right.

In modern life, destroying what is sensible and normal is a process—because we need reasons for doing things, an ideological campaign (“akshually…”) enlists science and research to “prove” that reality is not, in fact, reality. Then the ideological campaign runs with it. Repeat.

https://twitter.com/jasonscampbell/status/1575162446456786946

This is why the ideological capture of institutions is important: in the same way that every country has a “constitution” and “elections”—Democratic People’s Republic yada yada. We still want to genuflect toward the values of the Enlightenment West, even when we subvert them.

Watch @davidpgoldman give a talk about China at #Natcon and then pick up a copy of his monograph for @ClaremontInst @CenterForAWL, which has a new cover by me. How America Can Lose the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Provocations) a.co/d/c8uzWiJ The other books in the @ClaremontInst @CenterForAWL Provocations series of monographs also got a re-design. @joelkotkin’s “Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny” and “Looming Extinction of the Working Class” are available now, too. a.co/d/ctpkjJv and
a.co/d/8m89wzc