HOW IT STARTED: ‘When Hitler Isn’t Bad Enough!’ The Atlantic Ups Dictator Ante to Sound Alarm About Trump:

When it comes to the alarmist rhetoric from Democrat, the media and self-described anti-Trump “Republicans” who now only support Democrats, a lesson that should have been learned is “don’t peak too soon.”

Trump was laughably framed as “Hitler” and then “worse than Hitler” years ago, but now that the Republican nominee is leading in most (if not all) swing state polls with the election coming up quickly, something bigger is needed.

The Atlantic has served up another doozy for an emergency “when Hitler isn’t bad enough:”

How it’s going:

I didn’t have the author of Gulag: A History calling for banning free speech on my election year 2024 bingo card, but here we are.

NO CRIME IS TOO HEINOUS IF WOMEN FIND YOU ATTRACTIVE:

Meet the besotted groupies sending love letters, commissary money to accused United Healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione https://t.co/XNpeEfQKFC pic.twitter.com/0GLIg4YJdK

— New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2024

UPDATE (From Ed) To be fair, the Luigi Mangione fan club accepts members in all sizes — including supersized, as well:

Regarding the latter image, if you’re asking, “Why do they always look like this?” Ace of Spades has some thoughts.

DISEASE: Norovirus sickens over 300 on cruise ships in December.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? The Austin Powers Shaguar is up for auction!

A 1967 Jaguar E-Type, upon which Henry Ford’s famous line ‘you can have it in any colour as long as it’s black’ is based – no, wait, not that – is up for auction.

The special bit here is that this ’67 Jag starred in a series of films about a fictional British spy bearing a Scottish accent and a licence to kill. No, hang on, not that either.

Dubbed the ‘Shaguar’, this modified E-Type was of course driven by the film’s star Mike Myers – posing as fictional agent 007, we think? – across all three of these Austin Powers films.

So, the car. It’s the only one ever built for these so-called Austin Powers movies and apparently started out in life with a blue paintjob, dark blue interior and a blue hood. Obviously, it was decked out in the Union Jack livery for the movies by the movie car co-ordinators.

Needless to say, the European mind cannot comprehend the greatness of the Shaguar:

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Droning On and On.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Callaway Golf 300 Pro Laser Rangefinder. #CommissionEarned

THE CRITICAL DRINKER LOOKS AT THE NEW SUPERMAN TEASER (Video):

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: George Mason student plotted ‘mass casualty’ attack on Israeli consulate. “A freshman at George Mason University is in federal custody after he allegedly plotted a ‘mass casualty attack’ on the Israeli consulate in New York, according to the FBI. The student, Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan (pictured), 18, faces a number of federal charges and is being deported back to his home country of Egypt, CNN reports.”

TRUMP’S NOT EVEN IN OFFICE YET, AND WE’RE ALREADY KICKING OUT VIOLENT ILLEGAL ALIENS! ‘Murder hornets’ eradicated from the U.S., officials announce.

So-called murder hornets have been eradicated from the United States, officials announced Wednesday, five years after the invasive species was first identified in Washington state.

The northern giant hornet has not been detected in three years, prompting officials to announce its eradication from the United States, the Washington and U.S. Agriculture departments said in a joint statement Wednesday.

Officials said the multiyear effort to eradicate the species, which began in 2019, involved “extensive collaboration between state, federal, and international government agencies as well as significant support from community members and groups.”

“I’m incredibly proud of our team, which has dedicated years of hard work to safeguarding our state and the nation from this invasive threat to our native pollinators and agriculture,” Washington Agriculture Director Derek Sandison said in the statement.

They’re your problem now, Europe: Swarm of ‘murder hornets’ discovered in Europe for the first time — as scramble to track down nest begins.

THEY SHOULD BE: Gen Z is on board with DOGE.

MAKE MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP, by having an AI Influencer post content on social media. “Your influencer will do it by themselves while you’re not around – chatting and selling exclusive content, so you don’t have to.”

Have I mentioned that the 21st Century isn’t turning out as I’d hoped? In a few years, of course, people will have their personal AIs skimming social media and giving them a summary, meaning that it will mostly be bots talking to bots.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Poilievre vows Canada will never be the 51st American state.

YEP:

Never forget that they just blatantly lied this whole Presidency.

"They" is the entire media. https://t.co/yEKTh4wPpf

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) December 21, 2024

STANDARDS:

No legal note or apology from Whoopi Goldberg about her claims yesterday that Elon Musk and JD Vance were plotting to assassinate Trump.
Instead, she's wearing a clown bow on her head and asking if you have "resting gift face." pic.twitter.com/jrfbJL2FYe

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) December 20, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: The War on Terror.

The New Hotness? The War on Inanimate Objects!

Shot: When Flames Attack:

Chaser: ‘The Vehicles Are at It Again!’ Driver Plowed Through a Christmas Market and the AP Does Their Thing.

LIGHTNING DEAL: NYMPHY Solar Lights Outdoor. #CommissionEarned

PAGING DR. MILLEI: Currency Tailspin Forces Brazil’s Leader to Do the Unthinkable: Cut Spending: Brazil’s currency plunges to lowest level in 30 years after breakneck spending on pensions and social services.

For months, Brazilian leaders have thrown almost everything they have in an effort to stop the country’s currency from a precipitous yearlong plunge. But nothing had worked, including hiking its benchmark interest rate above 12%.

Now, as the Brazilian currency, the real, slipped in recent days to its lowest level against the dollar since its introduction in 1994, lawmakers rushed to do something that’s anathema to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: cut government spending.

Da Silva and his leftist allies in Congress have spent lavishly on pensions and social benefits since he defeated the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. But worries over Brazil’s soaring deficit have torpedoed the currency of Latin America’s biggest economy, just as this country of more than 200 million faces the prospect of a trade battle with President-elect Donald Trump that could weaken the real further.

Just copy Millei and you’ll be fine. It’ll only hurt at first.

EDITH WILSON’S CLOSEST ACCOMPLICES MAINTAIN THEIR OMERTÀ: Jacqui Heinrich Explains Why KJP Did Not Get 1 Q About WSJ’s Report on WH Hiding Biden’s Decline.

From the WSJ:

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

That last part might help explain why Biden seemed to think that most Americans thought he was actually doing a great job.

But guess what subject didn’t even arise at today’s White House briefing:

Of course Democratic Party operatives who cosplay as reporters aren’t going to ask KJP about the (p)resident’s decline, when their silence is a huge part of the story:

Meanwhile, Van Jones, kicked out of the Obama administration because he believed Republicans caused 9/11, learned his lesson about conspiracy theories so well, that he’s not remarkably incurious about who was in charge of the White House while his party was running it during the last four years:

Scott Jennings just made an absolute fool out of Van Jones. My goodness. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/1ByszVo91u

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) December 21, 2024

Why, it’s as if: Walter Duranty Would Be Proud Of How The Press Covered For Biden.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Censorship at Georgetown: A departmental journal editor says the quiet part out loud, and the professors applaud.

It’s rare to see such overt ideological censorship in print. Most academics know enough to couch their partisanship in comments about the quality of citations or the need for more data. But Click is just a symptom of the wider problem. She has grown up in a department and in an American history profession where outright ideological fixations are considered good form. That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious. . . .

Rather than apologize to Raghavan, the Georgetown history department chair, Adam Rothman, circulated an email to all department members calling our exposure of the act of censorship “a matter of concern.” “The History Department is aware of this situation, and we are working with partners at Georgetown to ensure the safety of our students and maintain a culture of academic freedom, professionalism, and civility in our Department,” he wrote. The head of Raghavan’s program, Ananya Chakravarti, followed up with another email offering counseling to those traumatized by the exposure of the department’s intellectual rot and “what it means to pursue academic inquiry in the age of social media.”

Note that the impetus for the professors to act was not the evidence of censorship, which I had earlier shared with them in an email, but the panic of being caught with their pants down on X. In so responding, both professors completely missed the point. The “matter of concern” should be censorship and ideological monoculture at Georgetown. The only student whose safety is at risk is Raghavan, left out to dry by the faculty who should be supporting him. The lessons for academic inquiry in an age of social media is that it can no longer be rigged, censored, or just plain ignorant.

If, as I believe, this is an indicator of the state of freedom and intellectual diversity on American college campuses, then the new Trump administration cannot act fast enough to defund miscreants. Georgetown, which despite its Jesuit roots is today a Woke joke, might be chosen as the exemplar.

Use a broad brush.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Joel Kotkin: The American university is rotting from within.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

IGNORE THIS STUFF, IT’S JUST MORE ANTI-SCIENCE CONSPIRACY THEORY: Why do so many people have ultra-high levels of anti-spike antibodies years after receiving Covid mRNA jabs?

It’s just a sign that the vaccines are working!

YEAH, WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Stunned Massachusetts educators, ADL call for MassCUE apology after ‘hateful’ anti-Israel and Holocaust rhetoric at conference.

MassCUE’s fall education tech conference — held in partnership with the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents at Gillette Stadium — apparently went off the rails during a panel on equity in education. That’s when the discussion reportedly delved into the current Middle East conflict in Israel and Gaza.

“Speakers leaned very heavily into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a very one-sided, dangerous rhetoric,” Uxbridge High School Principal Michael Rubin told the Herald.

That included references to “Israeli genocide” and “Israeli apartheid.”

A panelist also suggested that the teaching of the Holocaust has been one-sided, and “two perspectives needed to be taught,” recalled Rubin, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

“It was jarring, unexpected, and unprofessional,” added Rubin, who’s also the president of his synagogue.

If it was unexpected, it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention. Our institutions are infested with garbage people.

OPEN THREAD: Never give up! Never surrender!

THE NEW SPACE RACE: FAA updates Starship launch license for next flight.