HOW WE GOT HERE: The Spygate Top 20: A Hall of Shame.
Archive for 2025
May 3, 2025
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The New Democratic Purity Test: Anti-Israel Or Else.
Let’s be honest here: the timing of these “concerns” and the article’s publication is suspicious. The same media figures who vigorously defended Fetterman’s fitness for office during his campaign are now wringing their hands over his mental state. What changed? Obviously, his positions on key issues like Israel and border security didn’t align with the radical left’s agenda.
The article’s author, Ben Teris, actually undermines his own narrative when he admits, “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired.” In fact, Teris noted that Fetterman appeared engaged and excited during their hour-long conversation.
So I guess cognitive impairment isn’t a big deal, but supporting Israel is? Let’s be honest: this isn’t a story about John Fetterman’s health. It’s about how fast the left cannibalizes its own the moment someone dares to step out of line. The second a Democrat breaks ranks with the party’s radical orthodoxy, every concern Republicans ever raised—once mocked or dismissed outright—suddenly becomes fair game. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
It’s Joe Biden all over again.
We spent months exposing the very real (and very obvious) cognitive impairment of John Fetterman during the 2022 campaign, and yet the media went to incredible lengths to say that everything was fine.
As Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday:
Let me get this straight: Back when Fetterman could barely speak during the debate, his medical condition was no big deal, and certainly not a reason to keep him out of elected office. But now that he’s speaking more clearly, but taking positions that irritate progressives, now his staffers think something’s not right with his brain? From what everyone else can see, Fetterman’s in significantly better shape than he was in 2022 and early 2023. (Last year I interacted with him briefly in the Fox News green room.)
I hope Fetterman’s in the best position possible, and I hope he’s following the instructions from his doctors. But both the staffer concern and New York Magazine’s attention on Fetterman’s health are remarkably conveniently timed.
Not just New York magazine — the Daily Beast, the HuffPost, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsweek, MSNBC and the New York Times all quickly joined the leftist dogpile yesterday. As our friends at Twitchy wrote, “What a difference Fetterman holding up an Israeli flag makes.”
(Matt Margolis’ article on Fetterman at the first link is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.)
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH. (ACTUALLY, I BET YOU CAN): Want To Know The Truth Behind Those Anti-Trump Polls?
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ATTENTION, DOGE:
SPACE JUNK: BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA. Spacecraft launched by Soviet Union in 1972 is falling back to Earth.
SANDY’S WAR: AOC taunts Tom Homan after DOJ referral threat over deportations: ‘Come for me, do I look like I care?’
“Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dared border czar Tom Homan to haul her to court on Friday, months after he threatened her with prosecution for trying to impede President Trump’s mass deportations.
“Tom Homan said he was going to refer me to DOJ because I’m using my free speech rights in order to advise people of their constitutional protections. To that I say: Come for me. Do I look like I care?” the Bronx and Queens Democrat told attendees at a jam-packed town hall in Jackson Heights, Queens.
There’s “nothing illegal about it — and if they want to make it illegal, they can come take me,” she declared.
In February, AOC hosted a webinar and shared a “Know Your Rights” pamphlet with her more than 12 million followers on X to give illegal immigrants tips to evade the feds.
Homan told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that month he had been “working with the Department of Justice and finding out” who was seeking to block deportations.
“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” he cautioned, noting that immigration authorities are looking out for those who “cross” the line into abetting illegal aliens unlawfully present in the US.
AOC apparently believes her constituents aren’t in the Bronx and Queens, but El Salvador:
At least for the moment, she seems determined to live out the lead image in this week’s Power Line Week in Pictures:
Of course, that could change, as the need to keep generating clicks and hot takes warrants. In in 2019’s “Sandy’s War,” Kevin D. Williamson wrote:
“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is, at 16 syllables, a mouthful. The day before yesterday, she was “Sandy,” a pleasant-seeming young woman who liked to dance, worked in a bar, worried about her family, and chafed that her advantages and elite education (Boston University shares Case Western’s academic ranking and is significantly more expensive than Princeton: Is there a more appropriate preparation for life in Washington?) left her struggling, obscure, and unsatisfied. And so she set after glory and personal significance in politics, to which she is relatively new — the hatreds and grievances she dotes on are obvious enough and familiar enough that one assumes she has been in possession of those for some time. They are not newly acquired.
If you spend enough time around politics and/or media, you have seen this figure before. Years ago, a young woman beginning what would turn out to be a successful turn on the Washington cursus honorum asked me, earnestly: “Is it wrong to want to be famous?” I asked her what she intended to do with the celebrity she sought — for what purpose did she want it? “Why?” The question obviously had never occurred to her. I might as well have asked her why she wanted two eyes rather than one. She has a lot of Twitter followers now.
Back then, Sandy’s cause du jour was radical environmentalism; now it’s defending illegal immigration and MS-13. The causes change, but the goal remains the same: getting as much PR as possible, as quickly as possible.
On the other hand, sometimes leftist intersectionality intersects in ways that PR-seeking opportunists weren’t expecting: The Left Protests Itself as a Pro-Palestine Nurse Relentlessly Berates AOC at Her New York Town Hall.
METFORMIN NEWS: Study links diabetes drug to reduced arthritis pain in knees. It’s interesting to me that all sorts of diabetes drugs are turning out to have other important benefits.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Aurora’s driverless trucks are making deliveries in Texas.
After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor-trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles “without a driver,” Aurora said. The clients for these initial trips are Uber Freight, the ridehailing company’s trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight.
Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said he rode in the backseat during the first truck’s inaugural ride, which he called “the honor of a lifetime.”
“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” Urmson said in a statement. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.”
Aurora said it plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025.
Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.
Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lzgE4QMRuM
I’m very old school when it comes to this sort of technology — this is my preferred definition of Aurora trucks without a man behind the wheel inside the cab:
ROGER KIMBALL GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no martyr.
As the indignant clamor of Judge Wilkinson’s rhetoric suggests, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has afforded plenty of opportunities for high dudgeon. “Trump has let his inner Hitler off the leash! He is a threat to our cherished constitutional order!” The volume on both sides has been cranked up to eleven. Trump could usefully dial things back. He is famed for “the art of the deal.” He should bring that skill to this controversy and defuse the situation.
The Dems have seized upon Garcia as a martyr-in-waiting: a moral life jacket whose buoyancy they are counting on to save them. It won’t work. The suggestion that Senator Chris Van Hollen was sipping margaritas with Garcia in El Salvador was custom-made for next season’s GOP attack ads.
As commentator Ann Coulter observed, he has locked up the “face tattoo vote.” The public at large, however, is not smiling. Van Hollen and other members of the canonization committee for Garcia have made a strategic political error described in the late 1960s by the political scientist James Q. Wilson: they have confused their audience – the media and other repositories of correct opinion – with their constituency, the people eligible to vote for them.
A friend observes: they are like a school of dolphins whose ability to navigate by echolocation has been scrambled. Having lost the thread, they are about to beach themselves, there to heave and shudder in impotent, out-of-office irrelevance.
Trump aide Stephen Miller made the DNC-MSM an offer they’ll never accept this week:
“Each and every one of you that sides over and over again with MS-13 terrorists…choose to live in condos or homes or houses as far away from these kinds of gangbangers as you possibly can.”
“If I offered any one of you a rent free home with no taxes to pay in any of these gang neighborhoods, and I said, your neighbors are MS-13 terrorists, or Mexican Mafia, or Sinaloa Cartel or Tren de Aragua, I couldn’t pay you to live there!”
“But yet you, with your coverage, are trying to force innocent Americans to have these people as their neighbors and that one day their daughter may be abducted from their home and raped and murdered!”
Martha Raddatz could not be reached to see if she would take up Miller’s offer.
Clearly, I’ve been in the wrong business.
I DO SO WISH THEY’D GO AWAY: The Obamas Just Made Their Biggest Cover-Up Mistake Yet.
HEY, THE LEFT HAS BEEN CALLING FOR CIVIC DISTURBANCE: Reaping What You Sow: AOC Townhall Descends Into Chaos As Protester Shrieks, ‘You’re a Liar!’
WHY NEW MEDIA IS WINNING: JustTheNews is a straightforward news site, and not surprisingly, the basement-dwellers at Wikipedia (often the go-to grazing spot for legacy media and their scripted narratives) smear them as “right-wing.”
The fact is that many New Media outlets (like The Daily Caller and The Daily Signal) don’t slant the news: They report on facts and issues of interest to center-right readers traditionally and intentionally ignored and insulted by the Dinosaur Media. That cadre has left a legacy of genuine propaganda and genuine disinformation:
- Laptop? What laptop? 51 “experts” say it’s Russian disinfo.
- Biden was “sharp as a tack” until he wasn’t, and then, “we were badly misled.”
- Trump and Musk often give crowds a Nazi salute.
- Biden never got involved in Hunter’s crooked business dealings.
- “Very fine people.”
- Putin has embarrasing info which he uses to extort Trump.
- Kamala Harris’ loss was a result of racism and misogyny.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic of legacy media.
Of course, the MSM can’t get it though their heads that they are completely out of touch with the majority of Americans. After all, many Trump voters actually work with their hands (how disgusting!), don’t have advanced degrees from “institutions of higher education” and “cling to their guns and Bibles.”
Personally, even though I own neither, I find this particularly elitist, paternalist and outright offensive. I’ll never forgive Obama and his media stenographers for that, and I don’t care how sharply creased his trousers are.
So basically, the MSM line is “we’re smarter than you, your vote doesn’t really count, and by the way, ‘Shut up’.”
An anecdote: When I was running legal for Bloomberg News, one of our reporters in D.C. discovered that the ATF screwed up on a gun-running sting that resulted in providing a weapon used to murder a U.S. border security officer. He had it before anyone else.
In casual conversation, the reporter told me the story had been spiked by big-shot editors in D.C. I tried to help the reporter break what I thought was a “Holy Sh*t!” story. When I rang the well-known and very influential editor to look into it, he simply said: “Oh, nobody wants to read that.”
Really? “Fast and Furious,” much?
The bottom line is that whether you disagree with Trump’s policies, or even dislike the man himself (which of course is your God-given right to do so) there’s no getting around that fact that Trump is (to quote Scott Adams or Andrew Klavan, I can’t remember which) a “GrandMaster-level troll” and knows how to get media to chase a laser pointer like a herd of cats.
Trump’s recognition of “New Media” and giving them a seat in the White House Briefing Room and the pool that covers the White House was a genius move. Of course, the MSM lost their minds, and forgot their supposed dedication to the First Amendment’s protection for speech that might upset others. It’s a safe bet that Joy Reid, Rachael Maddow and the others never read (or conveniently forget) Near v. Minnesota, or even Fred Friendly’s “Minnesota Rag.”
So, what does “winning” look like? IMHO, have a look at this story by Just The News, who in conjunction with Real America’s Voice, hosted a two-day American Border Heroes Awards ceremony, recognizing the tragic impact of illegal immigrant’ felonies on Amercan families. The story gave voice to some of the “Angel” families’ stories:
“Chris Odette is a veteran whose 13-year-old daughter Chrishia was killed in 2014 by Ramiro Guevara, an illegal alien from Mexico. Guevara was behind the wheel of a car that ran over the little girl while she was crossing a street. Guevara did not have a driver’s license, and after killing the child, spent all of 35 minutes behind bars before being allowed to post a cash bond.
Guevara was released, and it took Odette more than ten years to get Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to finally make the effort to track down and apprehend Guevara. ICE, under the Obama Administration, reportedly did not cooperate with Odette’s search for information about the driver of the car that took his daughter’s life.”
Check teh Interwebs and I double-dog dare you to find coverage about the issue in The New York Times. My cursory search came up with nothing but stories sympathetic to the immigrants, with a sub-text that the criminals were the real victims.
Of course, I’d rigorously defend the NYT‘s right to publish such stories, but the absence of any semblance of balance or completeness is — as a matter of journalistic ethics or even quality — bordering on negligence. It even makes me wonder about (to borrow Justice Brennan’s phrase in Times v. Sullivan inspired by the Kansas case of Coleman v. MacLennan) “purposeful avoidance of the truth.”
Truth? Feh, that’s so old fashioned and not cool.
Can you imagine a universe in which The Guardian, MSNBC, or NPR would ever report on this in anything but a derogatory way? I can’t.
Moreover, can you imagine MSM actually supporting scholarships for Angel families?
Nope.
**Disclosure: I provide legal and editorial consulting work for Just The News, The Daily Caller and The Daily Signal.
THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE:
Government spending drops 5.1% in first quarter.
Amazing.
Every American should celebrate the shrinking of Washington, DC spending.
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) May 3, 2025
Elite academia is big on the “rule of law.” They just don’t expect it to apply to them.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY:
JUST ASK BOB JONES UNIVERSITY: Trump Might Have a Strong Case in His Attack on Harvard’s Nonprofit Status. “When I started reporting for this column, I thought this was a direct threat to the First Amendment. That’s what the folks at The Wall Street Journal editorial page found. But I am not so sure anymore. After I talked to several lawyers, I found that the case for Trump’s approach is better than I thought. It all goes back to 1983 and an 8-1 Supreme Court decision called Bob Jones University v. the United States. Back then, the Christian university didn’t allow interracial dating, which it considered a violation of biblical values. The IRS decided that since the United States was firmly opposed to racial discrimination as “public policy,” the school should lose its nonprofit status. The Supremes overwhelmingly agreed. You might have noticed that 40 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard unconstitutionally discriminated by race in its admissions.”
UPDATE:
Laughs in Lois Lerner. https://t.co/iLRvYmUyYa
— The🐰FOO (@PolitiBunny) May 3, 2025
FLOOR OR CEILING? Good question, especially in the context of how President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal is viewed, says OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart. As an “opening bid” in the congressional budget struggle, Trump has put down a marker in what should become a genuine negotiation about the future size and power of the federal government.
And as if to demonstrate just how serious he is about this, Hart offers this gem of a recommendation:
“My recommendation would be to reduce the number of agencies by 437 so we end up with four – the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Justice – just as Milton Friedman famously prescribed a quarter century ago. As a compromise, Congress could consolidate everything else into a Department of Interstate Commerce.”
LIGHTNING DEAL: NORTIV 8 Men’s Military Tactical Work Boots. #CommissionEarned