Archive for 2025

I’M DEEPLY SKEPTICAL OF THESE REPORTS:

Here’s one reason:

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HE’S RUNNING: California governor plans to tour 8 GOP-leaning SC counties in effort to engage rural voters.

Newsom will speak in several Upstate counties on July 9, including Laurens, Pickens, and Oconee. He also plans to stop in Marion, Chesterfield, Florence, Kershaw, and Chesterfield counties.

SCDP said the counties Newsom will visit have faced obstacles such as job loss and devastation from natural disasters, including wildfires and hurricanes.

Several Upstate counties faced severe damage from Hurricane Helene in September 2024 and the Table Rock Complex Fire in March 2025.

Each of these SC counties on the tour also holds a strong Republican voter base. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance won roughly 76% of the votes in Pickens County, 70% in Laurens County, and 81% in Oconee County.

It’s easy to laugh at Newsom — and I certainly do — but more Republicans should visit blue districts and listen to their concerns.

Connections matter, and Dems often understand this in ways Republicans don’t seem to.

Will John Brennan face the music? JustTheNews published a long take on the recent Ratcliffe report about the Biden-era’s weaponization of the intelligence community, and in particular John Brennan’s potential criminal liability for lying to Congress:

“[Matt] Gaetz had questioned Brennan during a House Judiciary Committee closed-door interview in May 2023, where Brennan had denied playing any role in pushing the dossier into the ICA. […] The Steele Dossier went from being the centerpiece of FISA warrants, the centerpiece of investigations, to now being something so soiled and so tainted as an abuse of intelligence that everyone wants to claim it was someone else who put the Steele Dossier in this critical assessment regarding Russian election interference,” Gaetz said Monday. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe has now said that in fact it was Brennan who made an adjudicatory call that this would be included.”

Lying to Congress can be a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which forbids making false statements to the federal government, including Congress. Unlike perjury, it is not limited to statements made under oath, but the statement must be “materially false” and made knowingly and willfully.

Kash, are you listening?

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Harmeet Dhillon: Civil rights being rebuilt after ‘cultural shift’ under Trump.

The Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division is undergoing a complete internal transformation under President Donald Trump’s second term — not just of enforcement strategy but of personnel, institutional practices, and long-held assumptions about how federal civil rights laws should be applied.

“When my memos went out, that culture changed,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the division, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “There’s literally been lawyers there who spent their entire careers — over 40 years — doing the same thing, no matter who the president is.”

More than half of the division’s attorneys left during the first quarter of this year, Dhillon said, clearing the way to rebuild the division from the ground up on the promise of sweeping changes under Trump. New hiring of career lawyers and political appointees is underway to align the department’s civil rights enforcement with what Dhillon elucidated as the plain text of the law and the trajectory set by the Supreme Court.

Dhillon explained to the Washington Examiner that many of the attorneys who left had worked under previous Democratic administrations and were not receptive to Trump’s directives.

Say what you will about the corrupt old patronage system, but at least it cleaned house every four or eight years.

HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Superman Actor Calls MAGA ‘Not American’ For Enforcing Borders.

A smirking Variety scribe asked Sean Gunn about “MAGA’s” reaction to the suddenly political “Superman” reboot. The actor grinned through his response.

“It is exactly what the movie is about … we support our people. We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant and yes, the people we support in this country are immigrants. If you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say, ‘no,’ to immigrants are against the American way. They’re against what the American dream is all about,” Sean Gunn said.

“Truth, justice and the American way,” the unnamed reporter ironically added, quoting the Superman line that Hollywood loves to bury.

Gunn and the reporter are doing what the Left always does. They pretend there’s no difference between legal and illegal immigration. They also ignore the fact that an American can’t just waltz into most countries and immediately gain the rights and privileges afforded to that land’s citizenry.

Either way, Sean Gunn could have diffused the controversy. He might have restated his brother’s comments or simply reframed that messaging in a more welcoming manner.

We’ll know soon enough if…:

Or Hollywood pitting audience demographics against each other is the surest sign the studio knows it has a dud on its hands, and is just trying to gin up as much controversy as possible to goose the ticket sales, while creating a pre-postmortem as to why its film failed to live up to expectations:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

ROBERT SPENCER: Here’s Kamala Harris’s Snarling Response to Inquiries About Old Joe Biden’s Condition. “As vice president, Kamala Harris must have known that all that, and more like it, was going on. And yet she still had the audacity to unleash the F-bomb at Democrats who were concerned about Old Joe’s condition, and to give the impression that she was really afraid that Trump would install himself as some kind of fascist dictator, in line with the most febrile of the left’s fever dreams.”

WELL, SHE’S LITTERALLY A COMMIE, SO:

THREE CHEERS FOR THE REAL AMERICA:

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OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

WELL THERE’S A REAL SQUARE CAT, HE LOOKS 1974: CBS Nudges Ken Burns Into Preposterous Claim PBS Isn’t Leftist, It Has ‘Firing Line.’

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.

JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?

KEN BURNS: Of course I am. And I’ve always been worried about it. In the 1990s, I think I testified in the House or the Senate, in appropriations or authorization about the endowments are about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.

JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.

KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It’s a bottom up. It’s the largest network in the country. There’s 330 stations. It mostly serves, and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted, it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only they get. [???] They also have not only our good children’s and primetime stuff, they have Classroom of the Air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather, emergency information. That we’re going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing when this is the place that for 32 years gave William F. Buckley a show. And it’s – I mean it’s – and it’s – that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative.

This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn’t have any balance. [The last new episode of WFB’s Firing Line aired in December of 1999 – Ed.] It’s especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is “moderated by a conservative” when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.

But that’s not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to “CBS fact-checking in real time”?

Burns and Dickerson are both reasonably intelligent guys. So why does their ideology require that they pretend that it’s still the 1970s, and not an era of innumerable Websites, news outlets and social media platforms, not to mention near-ubiquitous satellite dishes, cable TV, and satellite radio. Why is Ken Burns pretending that PBS “mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only [one] they get?”

And even back in the bad old days of mass media, there was a lot of television programming besides PBS. As Iowahawk jokes:

OBAMA JUDGE BLOCKS DEFUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD IN OBBB:

The ruling simply halted the will of Congress in its tracks, leaving Americans and even seasoned legal professionals scratching their heads. How does a judge order the executive branch to ignore a duly-enacted statute without first declaring that statute invalid? On what grounds?

This isn’t just a technicality. It’s a direct assault on the separation of powers and the legitimacy of our system. If judges can simply override Congress whenever they don’t like the outcome, what’s the point of elections? Why bother sending representatives to Washington if their decisions can be nullified on a whim by an unelected judge with a political axe to grind?

Even those who despise Donald Trump and support abortion rights should be outraged. Every time a judge pulls a stunt like this, it chips away at the credibility of the courts and the very idea of self-government. If the courts can simply invent new rights for their political allies while ignoring the plain text of the law, we’re not living in a constitutional republic anymore—we’re living under the rule of lawyers.

Exit question: “While one can hope this is overturned on appeal, and I’d guess it will be, every time a judge does something like this, it takes another bite out of the credibility of the judiciary. If nefarious parties can simply stall their way to overriding elected officials with specious legal reasoning, then why even have elections?”

THE OMERTAS KEEP PILING UP: London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about.

And yet despite the scale of the atrocity visited upon London there has long been an awkwardness around the remembrance of 7/7. It has not been forgotten exactly. Prince Charles opened a memorial in Hyde Park in 2009, featuring 52 stainless steel columns to mark each of the bombers’ victims. And there has been a slew of insightful documentaries to mark the 20th anniversary this year on the BBC, Netflix and Sky. But 7/7 has never been invested with anywhere near the same cultural and political significance in Britain that 9/11 has for the US.

The disparity can be partially explained by the sheer magnitude of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers. But there’s a more important reason. The London bombings raise troubling questions about British society that 9/11 didn’t raise about America. After all, the perpetrators of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were nationals from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 9/11 could therefore be conceived as an attack mounted by people from outside the US. But that wasn’t the case with the perpetrators of the London bombings. They came from Leeds. And with the exception of Germaine Lindsay, who was born in Jamaica, they were all British born. 7/7, then, was an attack mounted by UK citizens. As former prime minister Tony Blair has put it recently, the London bombers ‘had been brought up in Britain and… enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet they still] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country’.

* * * * * * * * *

And so on 7 July 2005, four young men arrived at London’s Kings Cross station with a plan to kill themselves and as many of us as possible. Because they believed they were pure, and we were not. It was an atrocity made possible not by the war in Iraq, but by a vicious Muslim identity politics. A vicious Muslim identity politics encouraged by Britain’s own elites just as much as by overseas Islamists.

This is why 7/7 has become the forgotten atrocity. Why Britain’s deadliest terror attack of the 21st century has left so little cultural imprint, and has had so little political impact. Because it raises uncomfortable questions, particularly about multiculturalism and integration, that the authorities do not want asked. But until we’re prepared to reckon with the homegrown sources of 7/7, the lessons from this calamity will remain steadfastly unlearned.

Better dead than rude, which is why a whole lot of Airstrip One’s recent history immediately goes down the Memory Hole: Rape Gangs and Liberal Silence.

MEET THE FIRST COMMUNIST TO SUDDENLY HATE CENTRAL PLANNING: LA Mayor Karen Bass confronts heavily armed federal agents on apparent immigration sweep through park: ‘Outrageous and un-American.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass confronted a group of heavily armed federal agents conducting an apparent immigration sweep at a local park on Monday, demanding law enforcement leave the greenspace.

Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the military units deployed by President Trump arrived at MacArthur Park in force, with the agents seen carrying rifles and traveling across the grounds on foot, horseback and in armored vehicles.

Bass, who was due to meet with California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the morning, showed up in the middle of the operation to yell at the agents to get out of the park, slamming the demonstration as a “political stunt.”

“They need to leave and they need to leave right now!” Bass yelled after getting off the phone with someone coordinating the officers.

“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege,” she told reporters following the confrontation. “It’s outrageous and un-American to have armed vehicles in our American parks.”

Presumably she means that last sentence ironically. In any case, the members of Fidel Castro’s Venceremos Brigade smile. And so does Barack Obama:

Which is why: