We seem to be living in the world visualized by George Orwell in his novel 1984.  The parallels are eerie and a bit frightening.  In 1984, the ruling Party was made up of iron-fisted socialists who controlled every aspect of life.  Sound familiar?  The Democrats currently running 100% of the federal government appear to be using 1984 as their playbook.  Instead of “Make America Great Again” the Dem slogan seems to be “Make America Oceania.”  We now live in an Orwellian world.  The only difference is that, instead of having Big Brother watching us, we’ve got the Big Bungler, stumbling, mumbling, and trying to shake hands with invisible people.  Our leader doesn’t have to watch us himself.  He’s got help.  We’re all being watched all the time by the NSA, the FBI, Google, MSN, Firefox, Chrome, your iPhone (which means the Chinese), Siri and Alexa.  So it’s all Oceania all the time.  The Left practices Orwell’s double-think.  If you’ve ever listened to Jen Psaki or MSNBC, which I guess is redundant, you’ve heard double-speak, the habit of claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.  Democrats exhibit a willingness to say that black is white when the Party line requires it.  And if you’ve ever spoken to a regressive Democrat, you know they have the ability to believe that black is white, and and to be certain that no one has ever believed otherwise.  As in Oceania, leftists also hear an opponent say “black” when what he really said was “white.”  The world in 1984 was a world of perpetual war.  We’ve got people in both Parties trying to push us into military actions all over the world.  They thrive on perpetual war, and as in 1984, they tailor our supposed enemies to fit their current agendas.  In WWII, Russia was our ally, then they were the Evil Empire, then allies again, and now, according to Democrats, they are responsible for all the world’s ills.  That’s just one example.  Sadam Hussein?  Ally, Villain, Enemy, and then Outlaw.  In 1984, the government practiced Newspeak, constantly changing what was considered “acceptable” language to make the expression of “heretical” thoughts impossible.  In our world, the Left seeks to cancel and ruin anyone who dares to believe “all lives matter,” when the “acceptable” belief is that only “black lives matter.”  And dare you utter the wrong pronoun to the wrong person, you’re fired.  And as in 1984, the Left seeks to prosecute “thought crimes,” a person’s politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict political orthodoxy.  Oceania had a Ministry of Truth, whose job it was to lie, and to rewrite history to make it coincide with the lie of the day.  Ever seen a Biden press event?  The 1984 Ministry of Plenty actually managed rationing of scarce resources.  We have a Secretary of Energy who is on the record as saying that oil should be left in the ground, so we can use nonexistent renewable energy sources.  Just this week, it was announced that the economy contracted by 1.4%.  Sleepy Joe celebrated the expansion.  Oceania relied on censorship, surveillance and the perpetuation of inequality, but told the people they were being given truth, freedom, and equality.  That sounds like any MSNBC host.  To our leaders, dissent is insurrection, and democracy can only be saved by canceling our freedoms.  George Orwell would be proud.  My comparisons to 1984 should not be doubted.  If you need evidence, just consider the current flap over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.  Picture it.  The Left controls all three branches of government, and nearly all of the media companies on Earth.  If the Left’s delusion that they alone are speaking the truth and  protecting democracy was real, ask yourself why they would be so afraid that the opportunity for free speech might return to Twitter.  In other words, if they’re right, then how can a differing opinion hurt them? Not convinced?  The Department of Homeland Security is setting up a Disinformation Governance Board in an attempt to combat “misinformation” online.  So now, they not only claim “silence is violence,” but speech is violence too.  Such a Disinformation Board is , of course, wildly unconstitutional.  The Left has transformed America from a nation of laws that protected minorities, into a land where the law is no more than a distraction, and where the entire country is being forced to hop from one foot to another while pretending that there are an unlimited number of genders, men can be women and vice versa, and where the least particle of dissent triggers the useless college-educated class, people we for some reason call “influencers,” to run for their safe spaces.  Biden’s State of New-Oceania paints America as a land of weakness, senility, and impotence.  The poster-boy for Biden’s America is Uncle Sucker, who handcuffs the police, encourages criminals to run amok, permits illegal aliens to enter at will and then subsidizes their crimes, while at the same time telling its own citizens nothing can be done about inflation, so they will just have to sacrifice their rights, their livelihoods, and the futures of their children.  Is it any wonder that Russia is threatening nuclear war, the Chinese are poised to take over the world, and America’s a laughing stock all over the world?  Power abhors a vacuum.  If a strong America is unable or unwilling to lead the world, then the totalitarian tyrants will fill the void.  Then, God help us.  All this may sound bleak, but I’m barely warming up.  We are fast approaching a point of no return.  If we don’t soon turn America back from the brink of insanity, it will be too late.  Abraham Lincoln understood this, “America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”  Nikita Khrushchev agreed, “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”  Unless we stop the insanity, America will decay from the inside out, will collapse into irrelevancy, and darkness will envelop the world.  Forget about Party labels.  Urge your friends and neighbors to vote for sanity, not for Republicans or conservatives, but simply to protect themselves.  A sane America isn’t the land of racism, white supremacy, or intolerance, it’s just America.

On Monday April 18th, I woke to a Wall Street Journal article which proclaimed that the Biden Administration had a new  Wuhan policy.  Individuals would henceforth be responsible for their own health decisions.  Shocking.  Adult Americans permitted to make their own decisions?  This meant that the Biden pandemic strategy, assuming that Biden actually has a strategy on any issue, had been changed to permit personal choice on vaccine boosters and the wearing of masks.  Later that same day, to quote Ilhan Omar, “somebody did something” that exposed the supposed new policy as just the latest Biden Administration bullshit story.  Federal District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, in Tampa Florida, issued an opinion which struck down the Biden Administration’s mask mandate for transportation.  On February 2, 2021, Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden ordered, via the Centers for Disease Control, that face masks be worn on all transportation.  Judge Mizelle ruled that the CDC had exceeded its authority in ordering the wearing of masks on public transportation, because the authority of the CDC is limited to ordering “sanitation” measures in cases where a known or suspected infection is introduced into the country.  The CDC rules extended to transportation within the country, which is the province of the States, as an exercise of their police powers.  Judge Mizelle reasoned that if the government’s interpretation of “sanitation and other measures” extended to a mask mandate, it easily could be extended to require vaccines, the installation of air filtering systems, plexiglass dividers or practically any other mandate, no matter how onerous or damaging to the economy.  So the mask mandate was struck down.  Coming as it did on the heels of the announcement that personal health decisions were now going to be permitted (as though the government ever had the authority to restrict such decisions) you’d think that Judge Mizelle’s decision might have been a welcome development that let the Biden Administration off the hook.  The last thing the government wants to do is make a decision that it might get blamed for.  The Court decision was the perfect dodge, especially for Joe Biden, whose motto seems to be, “Not much I can do about it.”  This one was tailor-made.  “Sorry.  I’d like to help, but the Court ordered it.”  But no such luck.  Proving once and for all that it had no real intention to restore personal freedoms it had no right to infringe in the first place, the Biden Administration contemplated an appeal of the Court’s decision.  This development simply proves the old adage that, if Democrats didn’t stand for hypocrisy, they’d stand for nothing at all.  The Court’s decision was met with celebration in many circles.  When airline pilots announced that the masks could be removed, passengers cheered.  They no longer had to pretend they were eating for five hours to permit maskless breathing on flights.  But there was no joy in Leftville.  The fascist regressives sensed a disturbance in “The Force,” the mass delusions of rectitude which permit no suggestion that their actions are wrong.  Wasting no time, they went into duck and cover mode, the Biden defense system, which consists of lies, deception, idiocy, and delay.  Hours after the Court’s decision, Biden’s B.S. Secretary, Jen Psaki, was unable or unwilling to answer multiple questions about whether travelers must still wear masks.  She called the ruling a “disappointing decision.” Instead of a “mandate,” Psaki referred to the CDC’s “recommendation,” which was to continue masking on public transportation.  Note to Jen – when they can fine you $2,000 for violating it, it’s not a “recommendation.”  When asked  why the White House Press Corps could sit in a crowded room without masks while White House still recommended masks for travelers, Psaki responded, “I’m not a doctor.”  This is fitting, because her boss is not really a president.  The CDC mask on planes mandate has never made sense, medically, or logically.  It never made sense that people were required to wear masks on airplanes, but could congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks.  Months ago, airline executives told Congress that the planes are equipped with High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters.  These filters are considered the “gold standard” of air filtration systems, which trap 99.97 percent of particles 0.3 microns in diameter.  For context, a human hair is 50 microns across.  About 40% of air on planes is filtered through the HEPA system, and the remaining 60% comes in fresh from outside the cabin.  Simply put, the airplane filters do what masks fail to do; trap particles as small as viruses.  The CDC mandate was due to expire in 15 days.  But predictably, the Left went nuts at hearing that a Trump appointed judge had struck down their power-grab.  They bashed the decision and the judge personally.  They predicted doom.  Forgetting that they once revered judges who blocked Trump policies, they decried a “power-drunk juristocracy,” which they claimed proves our “system” – of checks and balances — “is badly broken.”  Actually, all it proves is that you can’t fix stupid.  Only a wild-eyed Leftist imbecile could describe the exercise of unlimited dictatorial executive power as “a check and balance.”  The Administration immediately bent to the Leftist will, but only after Sleepy Joe once again uttered an unapproved opinion.  Asked whether people should continue wearing masks, Joe said, “It’s up to them.”  Psaki then contradicted her boss, saying the policy was to keep recommending masks.  The Justice Department then said it was considering an appeal.  Then, abrogating its own authority, the Justice Department said it would appeal if the CDC told them to do so.  Now, this was really stupid, as Justice put the legal decision in the hands of the very agency which had just been declared by the Court to be unauthorized to make such a decision.  Since then, the CDC has told Justice to appeal “to protect CDC’s public health authority beyond the ongoing assessment.”  Translation – “if we let a court do this, who knows where it may stop.  We might have to obey the law.”  Whatever happens, the Leftist Karen Brigades are vowing to keep wearing masks no matter what.  I think they got the idea from watching their Antifa friends burning buildings.  I’ve seen some of those bastards, and I recommend they wear masks at all times, virus or no virus.  In short, the Florida court decision struck a blow for sanity, but the Biden Administration wants no part of sanity, and its supporters are beyond reason.  The bottom line – you want to wear a mask, wear a mask.  Just leave me alone.  If your mask is effective you have nothing to fear from me.  If your mask doesn’t work, then forcing me to wear one too isn’t going to make you any safer.

If you get your news from the Mainstream Media there are a few stories that I’m afraid you may have missed in recent months.  The reason for this is that the media mob, consisting of nearly all newspapers, the major networks, MSNBC, CNN, and their ilk ceased practicing journalism some time ago.  According to the American Press Institute, “The purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.”  I can’t remember the last time our Left-leaning media did anything designed to accomplish that purpose.  Instead, the media, which includes the social media sites, have embarked on a campaign of what may be described as purposeful disinformation, and deliberate ignorance.  Essentially this means that the media outlets pedal lies, which they swear are true, and bury the truth, which they falsely label as disinformation.  Our current state of media malpractice does not consist merely of the dissemination of falsehoods.  The media policy of neglecting to mention obvious truths is perhaps even more destructive.  And it’s the media’s toxic combination of lies and ignorance which may be the reason some of you have missed some rather significant news stories.  Luckily, my memory is intact.  Let’s begin with our president, Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden.  When he was candidate Biden, the media falsely told us he was a moderate.  After he was elected, and his cabinet was filled with Left-wing wingnuts, the media failed to mention this fact.  And what about elections in general?  In 2017, when Democrats in Congress challenged the electoral college results of every State won by Donald Trump, they told us this was democracy in action.  A noble effort.  In 2021, when Republicans suggested that the election results in some States were in question, that was an insurrection, and a threat to democracy.  See how it works?  Back to Biden, because right now, there’s no place else to go.  The media told us that Biden would make everything better, unlike Trump, who presided over lower taxes, increased incomes, secure borders, a strong military, improved trade agreements, energy independence, and national security.  I have to give the media this one.  Biden has changed all those things – for the worse.  The media hasn’t noticed.  Let’s look at inflation.  On this issue, the media can’t decide what to tell us, because they merely mimic the Democrat position, and the Dems haven’t decided either.  We’ve been told there’s no inflation, that inflation is only transitory, that inflation is good, that inflation is really not so bad, and that inflation is Putin’s fault.  The truth?  Inflation is astronomical.  In fact, gasoline is up 100%, wheat is up 30%, inflation in March alone went up 8.5%, and we’re told food prices may rise another 30 to 40%.  The media really can’t totally ignore these realities, but it’s decided one thing, none of this is Biden’s fault.  How about the border?  When caravans of illegal aliens approached the border under Trump, the media called it “a humanitarian crisis.”  At least 2 million illegals entered last year without objection or even notice in the media.  This year, Biden cronies admit to 500,000 illegals a month, so it’s undoubtedly much more than that.  This means, every month, we add another city of illegal aliens the size of New Haven, Connecticut, or Raleigh, North Carolina.  The media doesn’t report any of this.  I guess they just missed it.  It’s the same way they missed the Hunter/Joe Biden corruption revealed in the emails found on Hunter’s laptop.  When the New York Post revealed the contents of the laptop in October 2020, the media stuck to the Party line and dismissed it as “classical Russian disinformation.”  They were probably right to say that because they got that line from the Democrats who knew all about Russian disinformation, having used a crock of Russian bullshit to smear Donald Trump from 2016 till, I can’t say when because they’re still doing it.  Then they got 51 Democrats from the “Intelligence community” to swear the laptop was a Russian hoax.  Picture that.  51 people whose jobs it was to lie for a living swore it was true, and it worked.  The media suppressed any mention of the laptop’s contents, and cancelled any social media account that tried to tell the truth, including that of the president of the United States just to get Joe Biden elected.  A year and a half after having fixed a presidential election, parts of the media have begun to acknowledge that the laptop is authentic.  The emails are Hunter’s, presumably even the ones that confess to massive official misconduct and which reveal Joe Biden to be the monumental thief and liar he’s always been, but they won’t go that far, claiming there’s no evidence Sleepy Joe is corrupt.  I mean, you can’t rely on Hunter’s word, he’s a lying, cheating, crack-head who’s been compromised by the Chinese, the Ukranians, the Russians, and God only knows who else.  Old Joe, you might remember, got elected by promising to defeat the Wuhan virus.  Like everything else, that hasn’t gone so well either, but you haven’t heard about it.  Remember when the media counted Wuhan deaths every day, and blamed Trump for each and every one of them?  Remember Joe Biden telling America that no one who had 250,000 people die on his watch deserved to be president.  I sure do.  The media savored reports of 300,000 deaths and 400,000 deaths.  Strangely, the counting stopped on January 20, 2021.  Deaths from an unknown virus, incurred before there were any vaccines or trusted treatments were a national scandal.  You haven’t heard this in the media, but the number of U.S. deaths attributed to the Wuhan has topped one million.  It’s a milestone the media neglected to mention, especially as more than 600,000 of them came under Joe Biden, who inherited three vaccines and new treatments.  It’s just not news anymore, I guess.  Oh, but don’t dare take off your mask on the airplane or you’ll be arrested.  The media simply isn’t interested in any story that might reflect negatively on Joe Biden.  That being the case, it’s a wonder they report anything at all, because the Biden presidency has been, at best, a frigging train wreck.  Joe’s bungled everything he’s touched, he’s mumbled, stumbled and screwed up every issue from A to Z.  Let’s face it, the best thing that’s happened to Biden lately is that a bird recently crapped on him in Iowa.  But you probably never heard that either.  The media’s too busy worrying about white supremecist insurrections that don’t exist.  This just in – the news industry sucks!

I recently came across a quote from a book by the late astronomer Carl Sagan that really opened my eyes and and put into focus just how crazy today’s progressives have become.  Carl Sagan, the host of the original PBS show Cosmos, was a professor at Cornell.  Needless to say, Sagan was very liberal, or at least so I thought.  I think it’s now fair to say that Carl Sagan was a classical liberal.  That is, a liberal in the sense that liberalism used to have some connotation of tolerance.  Classical liberals valued free speech and jealously guarded the right to dissent.  Remember the 1960’s?  Liberals never got tired of advising us to “challenge authority.”  Things certainly have changed, and Carl Sagan predicted it.  In 1995, Sagan wrote a book entitled The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  In it, Sagan made the following observation:  “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.  I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”  Astronomers exploring far-away stars and galaxies are looking back in time.  In late March, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered what may be the most distant object ever detected, a star the astronomers nicknamed “Earendel,” at least 50 times the mass of our sun, and some 12.9 billion light years from the Earth.  That means that the light from Earendel that we are seeing today emanated from the star 12.9 billion years ago, 6 billion years before our sun began to shine, and 6 billion years before a cloud of debris would form the Earth.  Carl Sagan, it seems, could also see into the future, because the dystopian future that he feared has truly come to pass.  America has become a service and information economy, and industry has slipped to other countries.  We don’t manufacture products as we once did.  It was bad in 1995, and it’s only gotten worse.  We not only don’t make things, we don’t know how to make them, and once we’ve got them, we don’t know how to fix them.  Just throw it out and buy some new Chinese piece of crap.  We’re an information economy because our lives are consumed by information companies.  The internet is awash with information, much of it unnecessary, and much too much of it false.  People’s lives are dominated by social media outlets that spew false information, censor inconvenient truths, and provide the consumer with an artificial sense of importance.  Where once, aspiring authors labored for years to get their work into print, now any boob can post anything on a media site an immediately consider himself important.  What’s more, any boob can post anything, no matter how false, misleading, defamatory, or hurtful, knowing he will be protected by anonymity and the charm of distance.  That’s a bizarre paradox, I know.  Social media users can achieve both fame (I have 400 followers!) and  anonymity (I can remotely smear others).  Both these pastimes feed bloated egos.  And at the end of the day, a day frittered away emailing, posting, blogging, Tweeting, Instagraming, Snapchatting, and just talking on the phone, the consumers of our information economy have accomplished exactly nothing.  Well, maybe not nothing.  Part of the information economy is e-commerce, so an Amazon package might be on the way.  Carl Sagan was right to worry about his children and grandchildren because they are the ones most vulnerable to injury.  Some of us who are older actually remember reading books made from paper, and possess the ability to go to a library, look up a book, and find out the truth.  Our kids, by and large, don’t have a clue and don’t have a chance.  Everything they know, or think they know appears on a screen.  Instead of abbracadabbra, they simply need say “Siri” or “Alexa” and the wisdom of the ages magically appears.  Or does it?  Spoiler alert.  Wikipedia is no substitute for learning history, and what appears might, and then again, might not be true.  When most young people rely on the likes of John Stewart and Trevor Noah to tell them the news, we’re screwed.  Back to Sagan.  “When awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few?”  We’re there right now.  Tech titans that nobody elected, even heard of, and whose motives are undisclosed, are deciding which viewpoints may be heard, and which viewpoints are to be banned.  These nameless, faceless people get to decide what will be considered information and what is to be labelled as disinformation, which is then suppressed.  As Sagan feared, the very ability to question authority is now at risk.  Today’s so-called progressives are free to pedal lies as truth and to suppress truth under the banner of disinformation.  As Sagan prophesized, most people merely pursue that which feels good and can no longer distinguish what is true.  And as Sagan so sagely observed, we risk descending into a new version of the Dark Ages, not so very different from the version we experienced a thousand years ago.  The old Dark Ages were characterized by a lack of information in the hands of an ignorant, uneducated populace, resulting in factionalism, superstition and isolation.  In the New Dark Ages, abundant information, much of it false, is flowing over a purposely poorly educated populace, resulting in the self-same factionalism and superstition.  We’re divided, and that division is growing.  What’s more, our computerized world has discouraged individual achievement, and even basic curiosity.  When your phone can answer any question, there’s no need to find out for yourself, there’s no need even to go outside to meet people face to face, and a new isolation, rivaling that of the 10th Century monks is becoming commonplace.  The only difference is the monks were literate.  “LOL” and “LMAO” isn’t a language, and Tweets are not literature.  Simply put, Carl Sagan was right.  If anything, he failed to fully grasp just how bad things might become.

I told myself I wasn’t even going to mention this year’s Academy Awards show.  Hollywood is filled with Woke A-holes who almost always make movies either about superheroes I never heard of, or people pushing bizarre causes about which I am greatly unconcerned.  Either way, I’m not paying good money to see that crap.  Although that would be reason enough not to watch the show, when you also have to listen to 3 hours of left-wing harangues from the supremely ignorant, self-centered, self-important, spoiled, overpaid, imbeciles who work in that industry, forget it.  Making prisoners watch that show would be a civil rights violation.  Then, as things turned out, the biggest story to come out of the show had nothing to do with any film.  The big story, the only story we’ve heard for the past week, was that Will Smith bitch-slapped Chris Rock on live TV.  Some critics have complained that the slapping incident took away from the show.  They’re wrong.  Without the slap, the show already would be forgotten.  I gave up watching it years ago.  This year, out of 10 films nominated for Best Picture, I recognized only 3, and saw none of them.  King Richard was familiar only because Serena Williams is on half the commercials on TV.  When she’s not on, Kevin Hart is on.  Too bad Will Smith didn’t slap him too.  I’d heard of Dune and West Side Story only because they’re remakes.  Other than that, there was nothing to see there.  Just 3 hours of so-called celebrities indulging their Woke psychoses by pandering and virtue signaling.  3 hours of rich A-holes, lecturing about how America sucks, Florida really sucks, and life is unfair.  3 hours of chants, slogans and ribbons, full of tripe and bullshit, and signifying nothing.  The Hollywood crowd has to come together for the various awards shows to perpetuate the notion that they somehow play a role in society.  Actors, most of whom have never had said anything that wasn’t written for them by someone else, must show support for the latest Woke cause, and must condemn any action that is insufficiently Woke.  These are the people who spend their time denouncing others whom they claim are “privileged,” yet take no notice of the fact that they are the most privileged group of all.  Woke wingnuts account for no more than about 20% of the population, and that number may be high.  These are the Socialists, Communists,  Anarchists, and other malcontents.  They worship diversity, and they are a diverse group, which includes over-educated blowhards in the educational establishment, many young people who are the victims of educational malpractice at the hands of the first group, and so-called under-served communities, consisting of minorities of all stripes, who preach “equity,” but are just looking for another handout.  And atop the pyramid of Woke wingnuts sit the Hollywood celebrities.  These are the people who bleed for the underprivileged, decry poverty, then go home to their gated estates in Malibu.  They denounce climate change, then get on their private jets and fly to Cannes.  They’re against all privilege except their own.  Any who criticize them are insulted.  Any who fail to conform to their perverted beliefs must be destroyed.  It’s their private world, and  outsiders are not permitted to interfere with them.  It’s almost like organized crime.  Call it La Woka Nostra, or LWN for short.  This woke thing of ours.  Except we can’t call the members of LWN “made men.”  They’re not all men.  Some of them appear to be women, but I can’t say for sure because, after all, I’m not a biologist.  The members of LWN can do whatever they want to one another, but if you ever put your hands on a made member of LWN, you’re dead.  Don’t doubt me.  The Will Smith slap proves this point.  Donald Trump is not a made member of LWN, so they’ve been persecuting him for 7 years for crimes he never committed.  LWN members can advocate beheading Trump without consequences.  They can march and chant, and burn and loot without fear of reprisal, but if a mere citizen dares to protest something like the result of an election, he goes to the D.C. jail and they throw away the key.   LWN will investigate phony crimes over and over again, but when one LWN member slaps another made member on TV, a clear case of assault, there’s no investigation and no prosecution.  La Woka Nostra has no use for the authorities.  They’ll have a “sit down” and work it out.  “You’re mistaken.  I didn’t see an  assault.”  And if there was, you can’t blame a LWN Best Actor, a Capo di Tutti A-holes.  Oscar host Amy Schumer slipped up and announced the Smith slap left her “triggered and traumatized.”  Schumer was immediately put in her place by a host of LWN  “associates.”  In Forbes, Janice Gassam Asare said the Will Smith slap was only an issue because it took place in front of white people.  “By saying that Will Smith shouldn’t have reacted that way because of how he will be perceived by the largely white audience is the perpetuation of the white gaze.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Eisa Nefertari Ulen went further, “the well-documented norms, policies and images that have damaged Black people” in the Academy could have contributed to that night.  “Rather than punitively discipline Will Smith for his violence, the Academy and the Hollywood machine should take this opportunity to reflect and recognize their part in fomenting it.”  “Race Scholar” Dr. Maia Niguel Hoskin added, “This is about a much larger systemic issue rooted in white supremacist culture designed to police the behavior of Blacks amongst the who’s who in Hollywood and beyond.  Respectability politics suggest that equity and fair treatment require that Black people — both inside and outside of Hollywood — conduct ourselves in a manner deemed acceptable to whites.”  I must say that I agree with them.  My first impression when I heard about the slap was, “why is this news?”  A black man got “dissed” by another black man, and things erupted into violence?  I’m a criminal defense attorney.  Sadly, that happens all the time, albeit not on live TV, and what’s the harm here?  Chris Rock isn’t complaining.  On the contrary, he said, “That was the greatest night in the history of television.”  Maybe Will can slap him every year to boost the ratings.  I’d pay real money to see more of these self-righteous pricks slap the shit out of each other.  Maybe it could be a game show, “The Masked Slapper.”  Anyhow, thank you Will Smith.  If you hadn’t gone all General Patton on Chris Rock’s ass we’d have nothing to talk about.