AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

WELL, GOOD: UTIs are extraordinarily common but kidney infections are not—now doctors know why. “A multidisciplinary team at Cambridge University in England solved the conundrum in an elegant series of experiments. Dr. Andrew P. Stewart and colleagues found that highly specialized biological structures called neutrophil extracellular traps—NETs—are pivotal in protecting the kidneys from infection. NETs are sticky webs of wispy strands that quite literally serve as traps. They ensnare bacteria that attempt to migrate northward to the kidneys from the lower urinary tract. NETs add to an array of antimicrobial activities mounted by the body to beat back infection.”

#JAN6: Jack Smith, in Stunning Conclusion to January 6 Capitol Riot Case Against Trump, Files Motion To Dismiss.

The request comes to Judge Tanya Chutkan in a six-page motion. Mr. Smith acknowledges that it “has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting President.” Trump takes office January 20.

Mr. Smith writes that America has “never faced the circumstance here, where a federal indictment against a private citizen has been returned by a grand jury and a criminal prosecution is already underway when the defendant is elected President.” The special counsel consulted the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that “this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.”

The special counsel explains that the prohibition on prosecuting a sitting president is “categorical” and “does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.” Mr. Smith reckons that if Trump had not won, the government could have taken the case to a jury — and won a conviction.

He’s the President-elect, not the President, correct? So he could still be fair game but as Sunny noted on Twitter, “Jack Smith continues his undisputed heavyweight championship title of failing to secure final, non-overturned convictions of top politicians. Bob McDonnell. John Edwards. Now Donald Trump.”

And in just over four years, Trump won’t be President at all:

I'll add they are moving to dismiss "without prejudice," which theoretically means they could refile.

— LB (@beyondreasdoubt) November 25, 2024

Unlikely as it seems that Smith might refile in 2029, Trump could always pardon himself just to watch the heads explode.

CORRECTION: That’s Smith’s Democrat-appointed successor, should there be one.

GREAT MOMENTS IN BACKSCRATCHING: News outlets push pro-union stories while taking undisclosed cash from organized labor.

A trio of liberal publications has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from teachers unions over the past couple of years, a fact that is not disclosed in their positive coverage of those same unions.

TAR, FEATHERS, APPLY LIBERALLY: Amish Volunteers Built 100+ ‘Tiny Homes’ for Hurricane Victims but Guess What Happened Next…

HMM: Psychosis symptoms found to precede adolescent cannabis use.

BATTLESWARM: Flu Manchu Fraudapalooza.

Flu Manchu lockdowns bankrupted numerous American businesses (restaurants were particularly hard hit), but the firehose of taxpayer money the feds turned on also made a whole lot of people rich, including several fraud artists.

Some are being brought to justice.

First up: Rapper NBA YoungBoy pleads guilty in Utah prescription drug fraud ring.

More like this, please.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP:

As the College Fix reported on November 5th: Coloring, puppets, crafts: Elite universities prep students for election results.

“In recognition of these stressful times all McCourt community members are welcome to gather. . . in the 3rd floor Commons to take a much needed break, joining us for mindfulness activities and snacks throughout the day,” Jacelyn Clevenger, student engagement director, wrote in an email.

There will be a “Legos Station,” “Milk and Cookies,” and tea and cocoa, according to the email.

“I wanted to ask Clevenger why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails,” reporter Francesca Block wrote.

This is not the only elite university where the nation’s best can confront their stress with preschool-level activities.

Students at Harvard University can hang out with “Sunshine” a puppet today, thanks to the divinity school. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech students can “find [their] flow” today with “therapy dogs” and a “collaborative art project.”

In 1975, original Saturday Night Live head writer Michael O’Donoghue, an alumni of National Lampoon, which began out of the Harvard Lampoon, famously told Lorne Michaels that he wouldn’t lower himself to contribute to sketches featuring Jim Henson’s Muppets because “I won’t write for felt!” On November 5th, Harvard believed their students were so cossetted and emotionally frail that they’d need a puppet to survive the likely election results. So much for pretending that you’ll be the reincarnation of the French Resistance if Trump won his second term:

SO IT’S SAFER THAN LIVING IN WASHINGTON, DC THEN: Living in space won’t do permanent harm to astronauts’ thinking skills.

FINALLY:

The Department of Justice has concluded that prosecuting a president-elect is unconstitutional. https://t.co/2iA8s5wxpK

— Sunny (@sunnyright) November 25, 2024

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Colin Wright: Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced?

In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.

Read the whole thing. Details also available within a Twitter thread if you prefer that format:

Evergreen:

LET’S ENJOY 2024 A WHILE LONGER BEFORE WE GET ALL WORKED UP OVER 2028: The Looming MAGA War Between JD Vance and Ron DeSantis: The First Move Is Coming.

CERTAINLY LESS ENJOYMENT OF LIFE: Uterine fibroids, endometriosis linked to shorter life spans.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Half of U.S. at risk for blackouts during extreme cold this winter, grid watchdog warns. “NERC has been warning for years that increased reliance on unreliable wind and solar threaten grid reliability, but the ‘2024-2025 Winter Reliability Assessment’ explains that as coal resources diminish and the U.S. becomes more reliant on natural gas, pipeline infrastructure may not be adequate to ensure a secure supply to homes and generators.”

86-YEAR OLD DIRECTOR TO 120-YEAR OLD INDUSTRY: Please Keep Hiring Me to Spend Your Money! Gladiator II director Ridley Scott compares Denzel Washington’s character to Trump: ‘A clever gangster.’

Ridley Scott, the director of “Gladiator II,” said during an interview that Denzel Washington’s character in the movie, Marcinus, was similar to President-elect Trump.

“[Macrinus] was a prisoner of war — probably at a North African state — and actually was taken to Rome probably as a gladiator. Survived. Got free. Got into the business of maybe making wine and bread. He evolved into a very rich merchant selling s— to the Roman armies — food, oil, wine, cloth, weapons, everything. He maybe had a million men spread around Europe. So he was a billionaire at the time, so why wouldn’t he [have ambitions toward the throne]? ‘Why not me?’ He’s also a gangster — very close to Trump. A clever gangster. He creates chaos and from chaos he can evolve,” Scott told The Hollywood Reporter.

I’m so old, I can remember when comparing an American president to a gangster was the highest compliment: Quote of the Day: Obama Should ‘Go Gangsta.’ CNN columnist Roland Martin urges the president to unleash his inner Al Capone.

YES!

Can one post “learn to code” at journos now? Good.

— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) November 25, 2024

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Don’t You Dare Forget What the Democrats Did to We the People.

HE’S RIGHT: To be “the media,” you have to reprint press releases from Democratic operatives without question.

🚨JIM VANDEHEI IN TOTAL MELTDOWN BECAUSE WE ARE THE MEDIA NOW

“Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on X everyday saying like, ‘we are the media. You are the media. Bullshit! You're not the media!”pic.twitter.com/nj3eD2LY51

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 25, 2024

NOAH ROTHMAN: Where Have All the Lefties Gone?

The Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers after the outfit, which restyled itself an anti-Trump publication in the latter half of the past decade, declined to endorse Donald Trump’s opponent in 2024. What seemed at the time like an act of protest might have been a leading indicator of consumer preferences.

In the wake of the election — one that generated far less engagement with conventional news outlets than previous elections had — left-leaning cable news ventures have seen their ratings collapse. “MSNBC and CNN have shed hundreds of thousands of viewers while Fox News viewership has skyrocketed after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election,” The Wrap reported. “That was also the case for NYTimes.com,” Digiday.com reporters wrote of the paper of record’s online presence, “which had about 29.4 million site visits on Nov. 5 and 33 million visits on Nov. 6 2024, compared to 36 million visits on Nov. 3 and 61 million visits on Nov. 4 2020.”

Some attribute the general decline in media consumption to the phenomenon of “news avoidance,” but other factors suggest that it might just as easily be ascribed to reality avoidance. What factors? Take, for example, the staggering increase in the number of users signing up for Bluesky, the consciously left-wing platform meant to compete with X.

In past presidential elections, when the DNC-MSM’s candidate lost, the left paid some lip service to either doing their job better, even if it came with a certain amount of “Gorillas in the Mist”-style condescension while they pretended try to make sense of those strange primitive creatures living in flyover country. In 2004 columnists, talk show hosts and network presidents responded with some sense of “where did we go wrong, and how can we understand all those people who didn’t vote for our guy?” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman wrote that “The ‘Media Party’ is over,” on the MSNBC Website, on January 13, 2005:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying  journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

* * * * * * * *

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

Back in late 2004, Rush Limbaugh had lots of fun playing an interview that Tina Brown (who now has a Substack called Fresh Hell, among other endeavors) had on her little-seen CNBC show with David Westin, then the president of ABC News, who said that the media needed to send the equivalent of foreign correspondents to the Red States, to witness firsthand how these strange people in the hinterlands live out their exotic day-to-day existences, and why they rejected the suave and debonair John Kerry for that hayseed George W. Bush:

WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.

As Rush quipped, paraphrasing Westin, “We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.”

Also in November of 2004 after the election was concluded, when Brian Williams replaced Tom Brokaw, then-NBC president Jeff Zucker (who later imploded at CNN in 2022) attempted to sell Williams to the public, by proclaiming to USA Today that “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.” (Incidentally, the beginning of 2004 was when a Zucker-approved flamboyant New York real estate developer called Donald Trump debuted as the host of a business-themed reality TV show on NBC, The Apprentice.)

Four years later of course, having finally reached the end zone once again, the media loved nothing more than spiking the football hard in the faces of those red staters bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. That was the era of Newsweek declaring on its cover that “We Are All Socialists Now,” NPR promoting James Carville’s new book titled, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, and Sam Tanenhaus, then the New York Times book review editor, publishing a book titled The Death of Conservatism.

But today, the media are awash in disappointment: They’ve had over four years of having to first pretend that Biden wasn’t undergoing a significant cognitive decline, when it was obvious to everyone not in the bubble that he was not up for the job. Then they had to prop up one of the worst candidates for the presidency, likely knowing she faced an uphill battle being dropped in at the last moment to replace Biden. Then when her “joy” and “brat summer” messaging failed to resonate, they had to amplify her argumentum ad Hitlerum.

And their thanks for their service in November?

NEW Axios CEO melts down over @elonmusk telling 𝕏 users “You are the media now” — mounts passionate defense of dying legacy media:

"My message to Elon Musk is b*llshit. You're not the media!"

The MSNBC panel applauds:

“Social media people lying every day, every hour, every… pic.twitter.com/SBwgI9hFfC

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 25, 2024

But Vandehei is wrong. In his contribution to the Michael Walsh-edited recent book Against the Corporate Media, Glenn wrote that during the early days of the Blogosphere, “many people got involved because being a publisher, or a reporter, or a pundit—previously available only to those with powerful institutional resources behind them—was now within the reach of pretty much anybody. A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Once the blog revolution struck, that was everybody.” And while I think it’s better to not be within the walled garden of Twitter, even under Musk’s management, Vandehei knows it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle for old media.

No wonder the grandees of the legacy media would rather crawl into the silo and pretend that Bluesky is Twitter, circa 2019-2020, as Taylor Lorenz does, and they have their own private clubhouse where anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders can be shown the door.

I hope it was all worth it for them.

UPDATE: Watch: Axios Founder Melts Like Wicked Witch of the West Over Elon’s Five-Word Description of the Media.

CHANGE:

"According to an Inquirer analysis of election results, Democrats performed worse in 649 of the 688 majority-Black precincts in Philadelphia while Trump grew his share of votes in 635 majority-Black precincts as compared with 2020." (1/2) pic.twitter.com/4LLdPGArPp

— Athan Koutsiouroumbas (@Athan_K) November 25, 2024

Details: Trump’s campaign to win over Black Philadelphians had some success. Black voters told us why.

WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS TURBULENT SPEECH? MSNBC News Actor, Race Scholar ‘Confront the First Amendment’s Dark History.’

NOW OUT: From Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine. #CommissionEarned

ACCOUNTABILITY: Russia fires commander for false claims about progress of war in Ukraine, military bloggers say.

Colonel General Gennady Anashkin, the commander of the South Forces Group, was dismissed after providing misleading information about Russia’s progress near the Siversk settlement in the eastern region of Donetsk, according to the bloggers.

Russian media RBC reported Anashkin’s removal, citing unnamed sources within the Russian Ministry of Defense who said he was removed as part of a planned rotation. There has been no official confirmation from Russian officials.

Ukrainian forces are facing “one of the most powerful Russian offensives” since the start of the war on the frontlines, according to Ukraine’s army chief.

But progress has been slower in some regions, with many settlements becoming “synonymous with lies and unjustified losses,” Rybar, one of the most prominent Russian military blogs, said on Telegram.

“Only the lazy did not write about the problems there: in general, it took the system about two months to respond to it properly,” Rybar added, referring to multiple settlements near the frontline that Anashkin allegedly lied about capturing.

Some bloggers claim that false reports made by several commanders about the situation on the ground have led to heavy losses among Russian units.

Putin started a stupid war but at least there’s some accountability among the flag ranks.

What a shame there’s no accountability for Putin.

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: The View Hosts Issue Four Legal Notes in One Broadcast.

The hosts had to issue a couple of other notes regarding Trump’s new AG pick, Pam Bondi, and former GOP congressman George Santos. According to ABC, the show is No. 1 among daytime broadcast talk shows in households and total viewers, and it has seen a healthy increase in viewership postelection. Will so many legal notes at least call into question the credibility of the hosts?

America’s Newspaper of Record is succinct: Sunny Hostin Forced To Read Legal Notice Acknowledging Nothing Said On ‘The View’ In Its Entire History Has Ever Been Remotely True.

HIGHER EDUCATION’S DESCENT INTO SELF-PARODY CONTINUES: Professor claims hostility to Barney the Dinosaur rooted in white anti-gayness.