We weren’t planning to do much here at The Hayride on Mardi Gras, so if the site seems a little lean on content have no fear – it just means we’ll be loaded up tomorrow. Even though Fat Tuesday has been outlawed this year by our COVID-obsessed mini tyrant mayors in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other places, and Mother Nature decided to come along and add insult to injury by depositing an ice storm on our heads to finish off any thoughts of carousing or celebration, we can still claim a day off work.

So that’s what this is. But on the way to some creative loafing in place of more convivial pursuits, I offer the following…

1. You just saw the effective end of “climate activism.”

No, nobody’s mind on the American Left is going to be changed by this nationwide deep freeze, in which the power grid has been overwhelmed in lots of places – and Texas in particular – thanks to the “progress” of offloading power from reliable sources like coal and natural gas onto sometimes-reliable sources like solar and wind.

Everybody by now has seen this meme, right?

It is a longstanding fact going back to the dawn of mankind that more people freeze to death when it’s cold than die of heat-related causes when it’s hot. This week’s extreme cold, and the brownouts and blackouts associated with it, brought that lesson home to average Americans in spades. If your power was out last night and you didn’t have a fireplace with which to burn wood and increase your carbon footprint greatly, you are now undoubtedly a fan of global warming – at least for the rest of the week.

You’re also a fan of fossil fuels.

Oh – and by the way, how are you feeling about having cars all running on electric power and being plugged into an overloaded power grid which goes down the tubes when the weather isn’t conducive to wind and solar power generation? Still seem like a good idea?

Chevron and ExxonMobil didn’t sponsor this week’s weather, but they wouldn’t have opposed the idea. Talk about your Great Reset, this was it.

2. Chris Harrison ought to be the last person to apologize to the Woke Left. Ever.

We saw this with Drew Brees. We also saw it with Morgan Wallen. Now we see it with The Bachelor’s Chris Harrison.

One of the female contestants on the show, Rachel Kirkconnell, was an attendee at a Kappa Alpha Fraternity “Old South Ball” formal in college. That was in 2018. And Harrison was asked about it.

He wasn’t upset about it, because he’s sane. Harrison pushed back against the idea that Kirkconnell being photographed in an antebellum dress as part of her southern belle costume at the party made her a terrible person. But he specifically said he wasn’t defending her and he also said the Old South Ball wasn’t his thing. His point was that he wasn’t comfortable condemning people for doing things which a couple of years ago, before the woke mob began terrorizing normal people as part of their New Inquisition, were uncontroversial.

It was a pretty weak anti-woke stance, but that didn’t matter. Harrison was set upon and canceled – not for sinning against woke culture, but for failing to condemn others who sin against it.

It was a perfect opportunity for Chris Harrison, whose position with the show was at that point busted anyway, to tell the woke mob to Go F*** Yourself. But like Brees, whose legacy would have been pristine had he retired last summer with his integrity intact, Harrison didn’t have the stones to stand against the lunatics. He announced he was “taking a break” from the show, and said this…

“While I do not speak for Rachael Kirkconnell, my intentions were simply to ask for grace in offering her an opportunity to speak on her own behalf,” he continued. “What I now realize I have done is cause harm by wrongly speaking in a manner that perpetuates racism, and for that I am so deeply sorry. I also apologize to my friend Rachel Lindsay for not listening to her better on a topic she has a first-hand understanding of, and humbly thank the members of Bachelor Nation who have reached out to me to hold me accountable. I promise to do better.”

Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that.

It didn’t save Chris Harrison, and it won’t save the next person these morons and outrage trolls cancel.

The thing to understand is once they have you, they’re going to ruin you. Your life will change for the worse. Nothing you can do will remedy that.

The only way out is through. You’ve got to fight these people – at the end of the day they have no substance, only envy and venom.

Gina Carano never apologized. And a couple of days after she was fired by Disney for making a correct point that the actions of the woke mob against regular Americans and conservatives in particular are exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews (they just haven’t progressed to the advanced steps yet), she signed a deal to produce and direct films with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire.

With pain comes opportunity. The minute the canceled decide to roar back against the woke mob, this current frenzy will end.

3. Netflix’s new mystery documentary about the Cecil Hotel is worth watching, but not for the reasons you think.

The number one show on Netflix at present is Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel. It takes the viewer through the disappearance, and subsequent investigation, of Elisa Lam, a college student from Vancouver who, traveling in Los Angeles in 2012, went missing from the Skid Row flophouse where she was staying.

I’ll give you all the spoilers, because the plot of this thing is not what’s worth watching. It turns out Elisa Lam, who had a self-indulgent Tumblr blog where she commonly bitched about her loneliness and lack of connection to life, was bipolar. She was on a bunch of prescription drugs to regulate her moods and keep her psychosis in check, but she didn’t take them regularly enough.

And she decided it would be a good idea to take a trip by herself to San Diego, L.A., Santa Cruz and San Francisco, staying at the cheapest places she could find.

Which led her to the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a former landmark which is now a hellhole desperately in need of repurposing (it’s apparently about to be remade as a combination low-income housing project/luxury hotel, which will work solely thanks to federal subsidies you’ll pay for). The former manager of the property was interviewed, and she said that in the 10 years she ran the place there were some 80 people who turned up dead there. Drug overdoses, suicides, and, yes, murders.

So Elisa Lam goes missing from the hotel and it’s assumed she’s murdered, right?

Here’s the spoiler…

Nope. She wasn’t murdered. She stopped taking her medication and went nuts. She harassed the other two women she was bunking with, so the hotel put her in her own room. She then began stalking the hallways and lobby and making everyone around her uncomfortable, but given the putrid behavior of the Cecil Hotel’s usual guests none of it was actionable.

And this culminated in Elisa Lam climbing up on the hotel’s roof, making her way to a water tank and diving in. What she didn’t realize is that a hotel water tank will vary in the amount of water it carries depending on usage and its rate of refill. So when the tank’s volume got lower, she couldn’t get out. And she then drowned.

Sad story, but not really much of a mystery once the autopsy report was finally released.

But why this thing is worth watching, and probably not even for the reason intended by its producers, is all the peripheral stuff surrounding the case.

Elisa Lam became an internet cause celebre after she went missing. And an army of “web sleuths,” YouTubers and other amateur detectives and conspiracy theorists latched on to her and blew the case sky-high.

The Los Angeles Police Department was covering up her murder. The hotel’s management had her killed. The CIA was involved. People actually believed all this garbage. A clip of surveillance footage of Lam in a hotel elevator behaving erratically was dissected ad nauseam leading to conclusions embarrassingly far afield.

Worst of all was when this army of losers badly needing something to do settled on their perpetrator of choice, a Mexican death metal singer named Pablo Vergara, known as Morbid in his stage persona. Vergara, no more talented than your average death metal performer, actually did stay at the Cecil Hotel. Thus he had to have killed Lam.

Except he stayed at the Cecil a whole year before she got there, and when she went missing he wasn’t even in the United States.

The conspiracy mob hounded this poor guy so badly, accusing him of killing Elisa Lam with absolutely no evidence at all, that he tried to kill himself and ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

The Netflix documentary treats all this in a pretty flippant fashion. It tells Vergara’s story, but among the fact-free conspiracy nuts it spends a very long time interviewing during its four-hour presentation there isn’t the slightest moment of introspection that hey, maybe everything they did in obsessing over this case was destructive and stupid and maybe they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

So why is this worth watching? See the entry about Chris Harrison above.

Nothing of value comes from a feeding frenzy. Human beings contain a very fatal flaw in our makeup that we can be led astray by a combination of boredom and peer pressure, and it takes a lot of character and discipline to pull back from groupthink. But that has to happen, or very bad things will result.

The Cecil Hotel documentary is good proof of this, though if the producers of it even noticed that they were awfully subtle in presenting that case.

4. I was on the Dan Proft Show out of Chicago yesterday morning. Here’s how that went.

We talked a little about the impeachment mess and a few other topics. I thought it was pretty good.

5. Why haven’t you signed up for The Speakeasy yet?

We just passed 2,000 members of The Speakeasy, which seems like an awfully low number given the huge amount of engagement it’s generating.

And it’s really a soft open at this point. We haven’t spent a dime on marketing, so this is all word-of-mouth which is generating members.

The Speakeasy is a free-speech social media platform, but it’s more than that. Through it you can get ad-free content from The Hayride, and I’ve got a podcast I’m livestreaming to it twice a week which the folks seem to think is pretty good. And we’re nearly ready to move to Phase 2, which will involve building channels for other publishers as well.

But what’s new at the app is that we’ve segmented the social feed into fifteen different groups based on subject matter – everything from home improvement to music and TV to investing to memes. Only one of those, the Hayride Channel, has anything to do with politics.

Meaning you could have very little interest in talking politics on social media and still find lots of news and discussion on things you do care about without ever having to worry about seeing political stuff.

So far that’s going pretty well. And the hard launch of The Speakeasy is coming. Now is a great time to jump in. Click here and join us!