Archive for 2025

July 20, 2025

JEREMY CLARKSON: How is food made? How should I know, I’m only a farmer.

A lot of young people who know everything seem to be very concerned at the moment that various local disputes around the world will soon engulf us all, and that any day now a hailstorm of missiles will rain down on Britain, cutting off our access to Instagram, essential moisturising creams and all the wellness mental health treatments that are so vital for people in the acronym community. It terrifies them.

I was speaking to some of them last weekend and suggested that maybe the biggest problem might be the empty supermarket shelves. But they didn’t seem to understand that at all. No quinoa? It didn’t compute. And anyway, why do you need food when you have Ozempic?

As I live on a farm, you might imagine I feel quite smug about the forthcoming date with Armageddon because while you are all murdering your next-door neighbour to steal his last tin of pilchards, I’m surrounded by all that I need to survive. I can make bread and pasta and I have enough potatoes to keep me in chips for a thousand years. I also have the wherewithal to make steaks and bolognese sauce and pork pies and lamb chops and venison meatballs. I even have some beetroot.

There’s a problem, though. I’ve been farming now for six years and every day I realise how many things I don’t understand. And one of the things I don’t understand is how, for example, you turn a pig into a sausage. I could kill the pig, for sure. I have a gun. But then what? Things are even worse when it comes to cows because, first of all, you have to peel them. And how do you do that? Cows are massive and incredibly heavy. And if you’ve ever seen inside a cow, which I have, you’ll know they are also phenomenally complicated. It’s nigh on impossible to deduce which bits are used to make steaks and which are for mincing and whether that bulbous-looking thing is incredibly tasty or a bowel.

* * * * * * * * *

All of which forces me to conclude that the world today is delicate. Just look at a tin of baked beans. There’s a man who knows how to grow and harvest those beans but I bet he has no clue how to make the tomato sauce and even less of a clue about how to make a tin can. We all need each other to keep the system working. You can be a world-class end-of-the-world prepper. You can have a cellarful of machines that can turn wee-wee into water and filter nuclear particles from the air filtration system, and you can have stored half a million tins of peaches and a lifetime supply of Nurofen. But when someone tries to steal it all, do you know how to make a bullet? I’m fairly sure I’ve never met anyone who could even make a pencil.

Contra the former (p)resident, Milton Friedman really is still running the show:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 20th, 2025

RIDE THE PBS RECURSION! PBS’s Frontline Didn’t Hold Back: Trump ‘A Travesty in All of American History.’

Even as the Senate was preparing to take up defunding PBS, the taxpayer-funded network was shamelessly airing another Trump-trashing Frontline documentary on Tuesday evening.

The online blurb to “Trump’s Power and the Rule of Law” claimed to go “inside the high-stakes showdown between President Donald Trump and the courts over presidential power. Trump allies, opponents and experts talk about how he is testing the extent of his power; the legal pushback; and the impact on the rule of law.”

Hosted as usual by faceless narrator Will Lyman, this entry was even more explicitly anti-Trump than previous Frontline offerings. Although a few defenders like Steve Bannon and especially Trump advisor Mark Davis had their say, they were outnumbered, aligned against legacy media journalists on the anti-Trump side along with anti-Trump conservatives.

* * * * * * * *

Lyman found suddenly popular PBS presence, Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative appeals court judge turned “vocal Trump critic.” Luttig was overwrought over Trump’s appearance with Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice.

Luttig: I was shocked beyond words. Even after all that we’ve seen from the president over the past eight years, to watch him stand in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, a sacred place in America, and claim that now he was going to get even by politicizing and weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI against his political enemies, was a travesty in all of American history.

I think it’s extremely safe to say that PBS shares the same view with NPR of America having been founded in Original Sin:

Related:

As Ace of Spades co-blogger John Ekdahl tweeted in 2019, “The left, and I’m not trying to be funny or snarky, takes gun ignorance as a source of pride. They absolutely refuse to learn or educate themselves on what they seek to deny their fellow citizens.” But there are so many issues where the left simply will not learn why the other side disagrees with them, for fear that the doubleplusungood crimethink will rub off on them like cooties.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 20th, 2025

HYPOCRISY ON PARADE:

Posted at 12:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 20th, 2025

GOODER AND HARDER, MINNEAPOLIS: Minneapolis Dems endorse socialist Omar Fateh for mayor over incumbent Jacob Frey.

Minneapolis Democrats endorsed Sen. Omar Fateh in this year’s mayoral race over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey during a Saturday convention.

“I am incredibly honored to be the DFL endorsed [sic] candidate for Minneapolis Mayor. This endorsement is a message that Minneapolis residents are done with broken promises, vetoes, and politics as usual. It’s a mandate to build a city that works for all of us,” said Fateh, a democratic socialist who is serving his second term in the Minnesota Senate.

The 35-year-old has been described as the “Minneapolis Mamdani,” a reference to Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who won a stunning victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City earlier this year.

After Mamdani’s victory in June, the Minneapolis chapter of the DSA declared Fateh’s mayoral run to be the next battlefront in advancing their socialist agenda.

Fateh’s record includes an unsuccessful bill to make Minnesota a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants and support for a 2021 charter amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new “department of public safety.”

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2021’s “Minnesota Nasty:”

Without an effective Republican opposition, the battle in Minneapolis has been Left vs. Lefter. “They’ve been organizing this for 20 or 30 years now in the city and taking it out to the suburbs,” Weber says, “and with less success trying to take it into rural Minnesota. There are no moderates, not even any traditional liberals left in the city of Minneapolis. There’s not a single statewide Republican elected official at any level of government. Every cycle for the last decade, the rallying cry in Minneapolis has been, ‘We need to replace the progressives with the ultra-progressives’ — they actually use that phrase, and that’s what they’ve got. The idea was to get to the left of the liberal Democrats, and they’ve done it.”

In June of 2020, Frey was booed by the leftist mob for refusing to kowtow to that year’s leftist rallying cry of “defund the police.” The mob may well get their wish with Fateh.

Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor served for day on December 31st, 1973.

Related:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 20th, 2025

BEST TAKE YET:

Posted at 9:06 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 20th, 2025

WELL, HE’LL CERTAINLY PRETEND TO: Will Gavin Newsom Ditch Woke and Move to the Center?

As Ann Coulter wrote during the 2004 election cycle:

When they’re running for office, all Democrats claim to support tax cuts (for the middle class), to support gun rights (for hunters) and to “personally oppose” abortion. And then they get into office and vote to raise taxes, ban guns and allow abortions if a girl can’t fit into her prom dress.

The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

But that strategy usually works best with relatively unknown candidates (see also: Carter, Clinton, and Obama). How will Newsom, who has spent the last two decades as an extremely high-profile leftist in a state with wall-to-wall media coverage feign a pivot to the center? (See also: Kamala’s spectacularly cack-handed attempt to distance herself from her previous uber-woke statements last year.)

Posted at 7:46 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 20th, 2025

I’M SENSING AN AURA OF A PENUMBRA OF A PERTURBATION AS TO WHY COLBERT WAS CANCELLED:

Exit quotes:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 20th, 2025
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