Monday, May 23, 2022

Fear the totalitarian bureaucrats, especially those who 'want to make a difference'

Soviet-style apparatchiks at the NLRB blocked from killing ‘The Federalist’



In Old Hollywood, they understood something important about communists: Like all tyrants, they have no sense of humor. Ben Domenech, who publishes The Federalist, found this out the hard way when he made a joke about unions at The Federalist, only to have his company swept into a three-year-long Kafka-esque nightmare. Now, though, the Third Circuit has finally put a stop to the administrative madness.

In 1939’s Ninotchka, Greta Garbo played the eponymous humorless Soviet operative sent to Paris to recover a handful of rogue Russians. It’s only thanks to Melvyn Douglas’s relentless charm, along with Paris’s own charms, that Ninotchka learns to laugh, leading to the movie’s famous tagline: “Garbo laughs.” Here is the Soviet commissar in all her stone-faced glory:


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