Five Quick Things: The DNC-Free 5QT
Contrary to the protestations of smarmy low-T pols like Andy Beshear and Pete Buttigieg, this column is highly compassionate and empathetic.
At least to its readers.
And I know that now, with the Democrats’ festival of mendacity having closed up shop and its vendors departing for the four winds, you have seen more than your fill of verbiage about what happened in Chicago this week.
I was bored with it on Tuesday. By Wednesday, I was irritated. By Thursday, I was punch-drunk having to watch one hack after another spewing the same stupid lies. It was like playing a drinking game, only without the booze.
So this 5QT will contain no Chicago stuff. I’m out. You can thank me for this by getting your copy of King of the Jungle off Amazon (or check out the Tales of Ardenia books, which were my first forays as a novelist; the percolation of KOTJ has kindled a little interest in those of late, which has been fun).
Oh, and yeah — there’s a sequel to King of the Jungle coming. And yeah — I think we’ll serialize it here at The American Spectator. More on that soon.
1. The Kennedy Addition
Probably the biggest news of the week, if the rumors turn out to be true (as of this writing it was expected but hadn’t happened yet), won’t be anything that happened in Chicago but rather something that happens in Phoenix. Namely, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dumping out of his independent bid for president and throwing his lot in with Donald Trump.
I’m going to wait for the confirmation before I launch into a full discussion of what an RFK Jr. endorsement of Trump would mean, but it would definitely change the character of the race. That might sound grandiose seeing as though Kennedy only brings 3 percent or so to the table based on recent polling (though that 3 percent could well be decisive in the seven main swing states), but the big-picture frame of the 2024 election could change completely from what it is now should RFK Jr. come aboard.
Ideologically this would entail liberals and conservatives joining forces against the Hard Left, and that would be a bit of an adjustment. The Right has a really bad habit of using the word “liberal” as a slur against Democrats, but that’s really outdated terminology. The Democrats are no longer liberal. They pretend to be, and those speakers this week all cloaked themselves in a liberal mantle.
But RFK Jr. is an old school liberal, and when he decided to run for president, they denied him Secret Service protection and ran him out of their party. Then they sent spies in to sabotage his campaign and wore him out with similar lawfare to that which Trump has had to deal with, albeit in different contexts.
Barack Obama chased the liberals out of the Democrat Party. Kennedy is one of several liberals, assuming he endorses Trump, who have responded by changing sides. I could name a whole bunch of media and business figures — Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Shellenberger, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin — who have similarly found themselves adrift and have had to swim to the conservative shore.
One consequence of Kennedy, whose name is about as emblematic of American liberalism as the Reagan name is of conservatism, endorsing Trump would be that you’re going to have to actively distinguish Democrats from liberals. They’re leftists, not liberals, and there is a difference. John F. Kennedy would have had no home in this Democrat Party.
And while I’ll get into this much more in my next column, an RFK Jr. endorsement also blurs the ideology of the 2024 race altogether. That won’t be the dynamic anymore. Instead, it’ll be the clearest iteration yet of Angelo Codevilla’s famous formulation of the societal conflict between the ruling class and the country class — and a referendum on the former. That favors Trump in a major way.
So like I said, Chicago is a lot less relevant than you think, other than that the Democrats just perfectly fell into the trap a Trump–Kennedy alliance would set for them based on the rhetoric at that convention.
2. They Lied About Those 818,000 Jobs, And Gina Raimondo Thought It Was Trump Propaganda
This comes from the United Center in Chicago, but it wasn’t about the DNC. It just happened that Gina Raimondo, the Biden administration’s Commerce Secretary, was at the convention when she was hit with the news that the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its estimate of America’s job growth for the four quarters ending this March downward by 818,000.
That’s the second-largest downward revision in history, and it puts a recession on the table. Which sounds scary, but it really isn’t; you’ve probably felt a recession coming for a while despite the suspect reporting from the legacy corporate media who have told you lots of other lies conflicting with your own experience.
But when Raimondo was asked about the downward revision, she was dumbfounded, and had to revert to Democrat Partisan Hack type:
Yikes.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is in the Department of Labor, not Commerce, so perhaps there’s a shred of innocence in Raimondo having missed their revision. Nonetheless, this is a classic case of the people who supposedly run this country not having a clue about what the government’s doing.
Here was Vivek Ramaswamy taking the opportunity to dunk on Raimondo and make the larger point about absent leadership:
3. Feds: Fluoride in Government Water Makes Your Kids Dumber
The joke is that the conspiracy theorists aren’t nuts, they’re just six months ahead of everybody else. But this is a lot more than six months, isn’t it?
A U.S. government report expected to stir debate concluded that fluoride in drinking water at twice the recommended limit is linked with lower IQ in children.
The report, based on an analysis of previously published research, marks the first time a federal agency has determined — “with moderate confidence” — that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. While the report was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoride in drinking water alone, it is a striking acknowledgment of a potential neurological risk from high levels of fluoride.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
“I think this (report) is crucial in our understanding” of this risk, said Ashley Malin, a University of Florida researcher who has studied the effect of higher fluoride levels in pregnant women on their children. She called it the most rigorously conducted report of its kind.
As far back as I can remember, there have been people claiming the fluoridation of public drinking water was a communist plot to stupefy the American public. It’s one of the keys Stanley Kubrick used as the premise for the movie Dr. Strangelove in the early 1960s.
But it turns out there’s reality to this, and a lesson: anything you get from the government will be the product of people with power and, almost assuredly, agendas who used your tax dollars to give it to you. And you assume those agendas are benign or well-thought-out at your peril.
Most U.S. water systems do not contain fluoride at risky levels as defined by these studies. But some do. And it’s not exactly settled that 1.5 milligrams per liter of fluoride is some tipping point at which damage can be done.
You might want to verify how much fluoride is coming out of your tap. If it’s more than 0.7 milligrams per liter, have your kids follow the old Mexican maxim: “don’t drink the water.” Get it from bottles at the supermarket.
4. This Is Definitely Not the EV Summer
Boy, it’s sure happening fast, isn’t it? Electric vehicles are rapidly going back to boutique-product status.
First, there are oodles and oodles of stories like this one about a lithium-battery fire that got so hot so fast for so long that it shut down I-80 for more than a day.
Recently there was a really awful one in South Korea…
But this is where the real fire is:
Ford Motor is delaying production of a next-generation all-electric pickup truck at a new plant in Tennessee and canceling plans for a three-row electric SUV, the company said Wednesday.
Instead, Ford said it will prioritize the development of hybrid models, as well as electric commercial vehicles such as a new electric commercial van in 2026, followed by two EV pickup trucks in 2027.
The pickups are expected to be a full-size truck, which will be produced in 2027 at the Tennessee plant that’s currently under construction, and a new midsize truck being developed by a specialized “skunkworks” team in California.
“As we’ve learned in the marketplace, and we’ve seen where people have gravitated, we’re going to focus in where we have competitive advantage, and that’s on commercial land trucks and SUVs,” Ford CFO John Lawler said Wednesday.
ZeroHedge notes that things like this have been coming for a while:
We wrote back in June that nearly half of EV drivers in the U.S. were considering switching back to gas. Forty-six percent of EV owners surveyed in the United States say they will likely return to driving gas-powered vehicles.
Globally, the survey of 30,000 respondents in 15 countries found that more than one-quarter (29 percent) of EV owners are likely to go back to driving gas-powered cars.
A quick prediction: don’t be shocked if, in the next year or so, Elon Musk announces that Tesla is looking into or has plans to produce a gas-powered model, or perhaps a hydrogen fuel cell model. Tesla could be a beneficiary of Big Three pullback from the EV market, as that could open space for them to dominate, but it’s also just a matter of time before Chinese manufacturers begin dumping products here in an effort to drive off all the competition — in a sector created by policies your ChiCom-friendly federal government continues to push.
This is fixable. But not if those Chicago people stay in power.
5. Disney Cancels The Acolyte, and the Critical Drinker Engages in Delicious Grave-Dancing
Finally, some of the best news you’ll find. The popular entertainment Death Star known as Disney’s The Acolyte has gotten blown to smithereens by the company brass. There will not be a season two.
Ace of Spades has finally been entertained by the show…
What’s remarkable is not that the barely-viewed, savagely reviewed Acolyte was canceled. It cost $180 million plus and was yet another corporate embarrassment. Bob Iger can’t put the blame on Kaffeine Kennedy when he’s the guy who refuses to fire her or at least take away her power to greenlight woke trash shows.
What’s remarkable is that Disney is admitting — or bragging — that they’re cancelling it. What they usually do is claim that sequels to unpopular money-losers are “in development,” perpetually. Disney still claims, for example, that the Rian Johnson Star Wars trilogy is still a go… one day, when they get all their ducks in a row.
So what made Disney rush out word that no, no Acolyte sequel series is in perpetual development, but is in fact fully, officially canceled?
Could be that shareholders are getting antsy about Iger’s apparent credo that “Failure is Job One” and would like some reassurance that Iger doesn’t intend to burn their money in a pit forever.
…but it’s the Drinker who really drove a stake through the heart of this woke disaster of a series:
There are quiet signs that Disney is recovering from the woke mind virus. We’d like those signs to be louder and more garish, like for example if the company’s entire top management roster was cleaned out and replaced with people committed to rebuilding that company into what it used to be.
Just remember that when those Chicago people shout “we can’t go back,” they’re talking about trying to ram crap like The Acolyte down your throat, too, and so the proper response must be…
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