DISPATCHES FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE: The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril.

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”
USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says.

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

USA Today Co. spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton emphasized that “this effort is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but instead part of the company’s broader efforts to block all scraping bots. Robert Hahn, the Guardian’s director of business affairs and licensing, says that it has been in conversation with the Archive over “concerns over potential misuse by AI companies of content sets crawled for preservation purposes.”

Now, individual reporters are pushing back on this trend. This week, advocacy organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future rallied journalists around the Wayback Machine’s cause. The coalition collected more than 100 signatures from working journalists who recognize the tool’s value and presented a letter of support to the Internet Archive. Signatories range from television mainstay Rachel Maddow to independent reporters like Spitfire News’ Kat Tenbarge and User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz.

While Lorenz wants to keep the Wayback Machine open as a tool, ironically enough, she herself is an unperson there:

Here’s a working link, and it does indeed show Lorenz as “excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

SHE WAS MURDERED IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN. THE INTERNET CELEBRATED IT:

My initial reaction was relief.” That’s what Penny, a 30-year-old sociologist from Tampa, Florida, told me about seeing the news of Blackstone real estate executive Wesley LePatner’s killing in the lobby of a Manhattan office building.

“Her death, as a valuable instrument to such evil corporations, is nothing to mourn. Thousands of Americans die every day from situations that her company exacerbates, such as the affordable housing crisis.”

I reached out to Penny via direct message on Reddit, after I found one of her comments about the news of LePatner’s murder. Her comment made a joke about the amount of money the victim spends on her children’s private school. When I wrote to Penny directly, asking how she made sense of the news, she got back to me right away.

In no time at all after shooter Shane Tamura went on a rampage Monday, killing four innocent people before turning the gun on himself, the shock and horror over what happened competed with a frenzy of social media posts, including Penny’s, that celebrated LePatner’s death on mainstream sites from YouTube to Reddit to Instagram.

I saw dozens of them that night, and spent hours messaging back and forth with the people who wrote things like “I’m shocked it’s not more common,” and “Rest in Piss.”

As Ed Morrissey wrote in April after Taylor Lorenz went full fangirl on Luigi Mangione, “The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as ‘morally good,’ whether they admit to it or not.”

Once again, America’s Newspaper of Record is doing straight-up reportage:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Shot: When will the #MeToo movement address pornography?

—Madeline Fry Schultz, the Washington Examiner, January 21st, 2020.

● Chaser: Democrats Should Become the Pro-Porn Party.

—Elie Mystal, the Nation, yesterday.

Taylor Lorenz approved, to boot (unexpectedly):

As John Podhoretz noted in an October 2018 GLoP podcast at Ricochet, at the height of the #MeToo cultural revolution and the left’s concomitant Kavanaugh hysterics:

So two years ago, yeah, everybody, everybody on the left was freaking out. Because Mike Pence said he wouldn’t go out to dinner with a woman who was not his wife. And now that would seem to be, that would seem to be exactly the kind of standard that would be necessary in order that that is the thing when people say, yeah, men shouldn’t be afraid. Now, men should be very afraid, the culture has changed, and they better behave well because they should be afraid, well, hewing to a standard according to which you only go out anywhere in public with your wife would fit entirely that model we live in a world in which you can make used and or you can be credibly accused of things. So you better only be in the company of your wife, right, say and, and this this is what we got from them two years ago about Pence.

So that’s why I say it’s situational. I think this is just classic liberal, leftist and Democratic you know, sort of all arms fire, anything that comes to hand you throw at the problem that you face, which is you don’t like the right, you don’t like its policies, you don’t like the vision of the country or the world that they’re going to portray and all bets are off and all arguments are merited and justified.

A decade ago, Salon wanted to nationalize TV news and Hollywood:

“Like [the late communist Pete] Seeger and the FDR cargo cult, Salon also harbors turn-the-clock-back fantasies of their own: Last month, the publication called for the nationalization of the news media because it was uncomfortable with the glut of right-leaning news and opinion led by — you guessed it! — Fox News. (Hmmm — I wonder if someone in the FCC read that article?) Now the Website wishes to turn the clock back on the film industry because of a perceived glut of independent films.”

Will Mystal and Zohran Mamdani attempt to seize the means of pornographic production and demand a nationalized Pornhub? Ladies and gentlemen (and all genders in-between), welcome onboard AmPorn!

WHERE’S DONIE? CNN’s Emmy-Nominated ‘Extremism’ Reporter Goes Missing Amid Outburst of Left-Wing Violence.

Maybe O’Sullivan is simply afraid to report on left-wing violence. In Los Angeles, the peaceful hooligans have been handing out fliers threatening journalists who attempt to film or photograph them, the sort of behavior that journalists routinely denounce as “fascist” or “extreme” when anyone else does it.

Update: O’Sullivan has finally surfaced. Sort of. He appears to have been hard at work producing a new segment for CNN. Does it have anything to do with the alarming outbursts of left-wing violence? No, of course not. He went to a conference of UFO enthusiasts and spoke to a “UFO lobbyist” who thinks Donald Trump will soon confirm the existence of alien life. “Greetings, do you all come in peace?” he told a group of freaks getting off a bus in the California desert. “We’re all Earthlings here.” 

O’Sullivan has made clear that he finds the concept of left-wing extremism and political violence to be rather giggle-inducing. In one episode of his Emmy-nomited series, he conducted a friendly interview with Taylor Lorenz, the demented former New York Times journalist who accused Joe Biden of commiting “genocide” by refusing to impose COVID-related mask mandates. They discussed how Lorenz and other left-wing freaks were fawning over Luigi Mangione, the cold-blooded assassin who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

More great optics from CNN, where O’Sullivan and Lorenz laugh it up over leftist murders…

…And Brian Stelter excuses away leftist rioters:

During 2020’s Summer of Love, Jim Geraghty explored “The Rising Tide of Anti-Journalism:”

We’re witnessing an odd transformation in the media world. Increasingly, the debate within mainstream media institutions is what must not be written about, reported, or discussed.

* * * * * * * *

Major institutions of American journalism have decided that certain viewpoints must not be expressed within their pages, and certain factions and narratives must not be questioned, challenged, or opposed. Certain arguments must not be heard, certain supporting evidence must not be examined; certain ideas are simply too dangerous or malevolent to be brought to a wider audience. We are instructed that the very expression of them in any form makes certain staffers “feel unsafe” and thus must be treated as akin to a physical assault.

This is not the pursuit of knowledge; this is the avoidance of knowledge. This is not curiosity; this is an ironclad certainty that everything that is needed to be known about any given subject is already known. This is not informing the audience about what is going on in the world; this is making sure they don’t hear what is going on in the world, because it might run counter to a preferred narrative.

Whatever you want to call what these institutions are doing now, this is not journalism. This is anti-journalism.

Apparently, the new purpose of an opinions and editorial section is to reassure and soothe, not challenge or provoke. Shortly after internal outrage about Tom Cotton’s op-ed led to the ousting of James Bennet as the acting editorial-page editor of the New York Times, Katie Kingsbury, a deputy editorial-page editor, told the staff of the opinion section, “any piece of Opinion journalism — including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”

Hey, speaking of Tom Cotton:

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: The New York Times published Tom Cotton’s editorial on June 3rd, 2020, and the repercussions continue to this day. From Noah Rothman, then-with Commentary, the next day: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.

“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.

One by one, New York Times staffers added their voices to a coordinated campaign of shame directed squarely at the paper’s management. “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staff in danger,” wrote technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, writers Caity Weaver and Jacey Fortin, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi, book critic Parul Sehgal, graphics assistant Simone Landon, reporter Katherine Rosman, styles desk editor Lindsey Underwood, culture writer Jenna Wortham, contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and columnists Kara Swisher and Charlie Warzel. The News Guild of New York soon chimed in with a statement: “[Cotton’s] message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence,” the Guild affirmed in what was billed as a “response to a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”

As I wrote back then (and the rest of this post continues in the original post’s tense), as a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, the New York Times, already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series, promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more. Or as Tina Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”

A newspaper, beyond its moral purpose to tell the truth, is functionally a business. To turn a profit, it must balance journalistic integrity with revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Thus, it came as absolutely no surprise when the New York Times fired Alison Roman, the up-and-coming chef who irked professional celebrity Chrissy Teigen with a rude remark in an interview that was falsely smeared as racist and subsequently piled onto by Teigen.

* * * * * * * *

As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”

* * * * * * *

Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.

The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.

Bari Weiss, one of the saner voices at the Times, responded to her colleagues’ collective primal scream in a Twitter thread earlier today:

Naturally, as this Mediaite headline notes: NY Times ‘Civil War’: Opinion Writer Bari Weiss Gets Buried By Colleagues for Tweeting Her Takes on Newsroom Friction After Cotton Op-Ed.

In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”

The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.

Meanwhile, Daily Beast editor-at-large Goldie Taylor threatens violence against Weiss, in a since-deleted tweet:

As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Remember when the New York Review of Books had a diagram of how to make a Molotov Cocktail on its cover in 1967?

Condé Nast-owned Wired magazine says, hold my Chablis:

As Ed Morrissey wrote in April: Taylor [Lorenz] LOLs: Hey, I Didn’t Praise That Backshooting Coward When I Called Him a ‘Morally Good Man!’

Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era.

* * * * * * * * *

The Left loves its murderous “revolutionaries,” and Mangione is only their latest crush. They’ve run through the Mansons, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, just to name a few. If Antifa were dumb enough to take off their masks, no doubt a handful of them would also achieve icon status on the Left. They might even get their photos onto fashion items and have clueless entertainers toting them around to promote murder and mayhem, as long as their politics aligned properly.

The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as “morally good,” whether they admit to it or not.

Earlier: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.

UPDATE:

IF THAT NUT TAYLOR LORENZ IS SAYING IT, THE ANSWER IS GENERALLY “NO.” Should Joe Biden ‘Rot In Hell’ And ‘Rest In Piss’? A Brief Investigation.

MATT TAIBBI IS NICER THAN I AM:  Independent Journalist Used Two Words That Perfectly Described Taylor Lorenz.

RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione and the left’s warped choice of heroes.

Meanwhile the resistance was gearing up to back Mahmoud Khalil in a street fight, but Abrego Garcia’s story took precedence. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen made a big show of flying down to Central America to accomplish nothing, something I used to do in the 1990s when I wanted to boogie board and take drugs. Meanwhile, the US government was releasing information that made sure to label Garcia as the ultimate “bad hombre.”

The framing is absolutely horrible for the Democrats. I have serious doubts as to whether the Trump Administration’s policies will make Americans wealthier and safer. But at least they’re paying lip service to the problems that ordinary people in ordinary situations face. Meanwhile, the Democrats look like they’re mostly concerned about defending alleged assassins and gang members. Not ideal.

These aren’t obscure strategies, either. James Carville, the quotable Crypt-Keeper of Democratic messaging strategy, has said that they need to double down on the Abrego Garcia case. To him, it’s a winner, even if it’s obviously a big loser. These fellows will bear the standard for a long while.

We’ve never seen anything like this, in our political lifetime or any political lifetime. Imagine if the Democrats had thrown their 1972 lot in with Charles Manson. What if Bill Clinton had insisted we “free The Unabomber”? The optics are that disastrous, that ridiculous.

Regarding Manson, according to Jann Wenner’s biographer Joe Hagen in his 2017 book, Sticky Fingers:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”

And of course, Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn famously said of Manson and his followers:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!

As Ed Morrissey wrote on Monday after Taylor Lorenz and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan each gushed over Luigi Mangione:

Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era. My friend Nick Gillespie reminded everyone more than a decade ago of Guevara’s nature:

Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.

By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world.

Flash-forward several decades and Rolling Stone’s infamous 2013 radical chic hot take on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking totally cool and dreamy on their cover has its roots both in the magazine’s founding days, and the left’s ongoing obsession with those who kill for their approved causes.

WHEN YOU LOSE AN ARGUMENT TO SEAN HANNITY …  Fox News Host Backs Taylor Lorenz Into a Corner After Recent Comments Defending Luigi Mangione.

MASK DROPPED: CNN and Taylor Lorenz Exposed Their Motivation.

Earier in her CNN interview, [Lorenz] justified her appreciation for [Luigi] Mangione:

It’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stand murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this.

Lorenz loves that Mangione allegedly murdered the United Healthcare CEO. She lit up with joy when discussing it. Her elation over it — and her statement that he was a “morally good man” exposes her motivation behind doxxing anonymous conservatives on social media — she wants certain people with opposing viewpoints dead.

It isn’t a stretch to connect the dots here — a national left-leaning journalist felt it necessary to expose the identity of an anonymous conservative video aggregator who was gaining traction by exposing the far-left’s insanity. That same journalist considers the alleged murderer of a healthcare CEO “revolutionary, famous, handsome, smart, and a morally good man.”

She was doing it all because she can justify murder and violence against those she disagrees with — she wouldn’t necessarily personally do it, but if she could expose the identities of people she doesn’t like and where they live — she’d be OK with, “a morally good man” taking it from there.

CNN not denouncing her actions or this interview implicates their motives as well. After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago since the network sent reporters to ambush random elderly women at their homes for sharing pro-Trump memes.

Unlike CNN’s gushing Donie O’Sullivan, Fox News’ Sean Hannity tried a more aggressive approach to get Lorenz to put the breaks on her pro-assassination rhetoric, but not surprisingly, Lorenz is sticking to her guns:

HANNITY: "Do you condemn people that call for assassination?"

LORENZ: "Gosh, you're gonna ask me if I condemn Hamas next, this is crazy!" pic.twitter.com/DP8FsGowfV

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 17, 2025

No, I think we already know the answer to that based on her actions last year: “Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.”

Not to mention calling then-President Joe Biden a “War Criminal:”

And I think we all know the answer to this dilemma as well, based purely on aesthetics:

I'm trying as hard as I can, and I just can't figure out why Taylor Lorenz is so into Luigi Mangione but not Cody Balmer. If anything, Cody Balmer's motive is much more related to Taylor's own causes and passions.

Help me out here. pic.twitter.com/w9qvgYU57C

— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) April 16, 2025

YEP:   Why Do I Have Guns? Because of People Like Taylor Lorenz.

POLICE: Arson Suspect Admitted ‘Harboring Hatred’ Toward Gov. Shapiro.

[Cody] Balmer faces numerous charges including:

• Criminal Attempt – Criminal Homicide
• Aggravated Arson – Person Present Inside Property
• Terrorism – Affect the Conduct of a Government

6ABC reported that the police “have not ruled out Shapiro’s Jewish faith” as a possible motive.”

Duane Patterson adds:

What little is known about Balmer, the suspected Jew-hating arsonist, paints the picture that he isn’t a resident of either side of the political aisle. He seems to be A) a nut, and B) an anarchist, which if you look up the definition of an anarchist, it’ll say see A). He once proclaimed on social media that he was a socialist, but there’s not much other evidence out there to back up that claim. What is there is that he hated everybody on both sides.

I hope that Kash Patel at FBI gets to the bottom quickly of what made this person snap, and I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi, if he did it out of religious bigotry, throws the book at him, despite whatever political affiliation, if any, he currently espouses.

I am grateful that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. As for the Governor’s ‘both sidesism’, we all have eyes and ears, and functioning brainstems. It’s not hard to see where the bulk of the outbreaks of anti-Semitism are falling on the ideological spectrum recently. It’s not on the right. It’s on the left. Using moral equivalence to downplay the explosion of hate against Jews on the Democratic side isn’t going to make the problem go away. Putting political expediency over morality reduces the spotlight on the true offenders of evil instead of shining the light brightly on these cockroaches wherever they surface.

I want to help dig a giant pit and assist the rest of the country in dropping every anti-Semite into it, regardless of whom they voted for in the last few cycles. If this latest fire outbreak of hate is happening mostly on the left, however, perhaps that’s the direction where we should be applying the most water.

The day after Balmer’s arson attack on the PA governor, CNN was in a festive mood regarding political violence in general: CNN blasted for segment calling Luigi Mangione a ‘morally good man. “’CNN is a bad joke of a new org and Lorenz is a nut job. She said Mangione is a ‘morally good man’ which is absurd, as he killed a man in cold blood,’ another said. ‘The more I think about the Donie O’Sullivan interview with Taylor Lorenz the more astonished I am that they were laughing when talking about a guy who shot a man in the back in cold blood,’ a third person fumed.”

ENDS JUSTIFYING MEANS (THIS IS REVEALING OF HER MORALS):  Taylor Lorenz defends Luigi Mangione fangirls in glib CNN interview: ‘Morally good man’.

Good men don’t murder someone’s dad for some abstract cause.

UNEXPEXCTEDLY: Say What? CNN Claims Only the Right Has an ‘Extremism Problem.’

“[W]hen it comes to extremism in this country, I mean, the issue very much so is on the right, on the far-right from — you know, from Charlottesville to — to January 6. There isn’t exactly an equivalent on the left in this moment,” [Donie] O’Sullivan claimed with a straight face.

Seriously? Has O’Sullivan been living under a rock? President Trump has survived two assassination attempts in just the past year. Let’s not forget the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, where a deranged MSNBC viewer nearly gunned down an entire group of Republican lawmakers. Or the BLM riots of 2020, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, and the rise of Antifa violence.  How about the leftist cheerleading for Hamas on college campuses across America that has made Jewish students feel unsafe? And, of course, there’s the #TeslaTakedown movement, with extremists firebombing dealerships and vandalizing vehicles.

But I guess none of that qualifies as “extremism” in CNN’s warped worldview.

Not over the past decade:

UPDATE: Taylor Lorenz Laughs Off Obsession With ‘Handsome’ Luigi Mangione to CNN: He Seems ‘Morally Good – Which is Hard to Find.’

Lorenz sat down with CNN’s MisinfoNation host Donie O’Sullivan for Sunday’s episode of the series. O’Sullivan shared a snippet of the conversation to his X account early Sunday morning, showing Lorenz speaking candidly about why she believes Mangione’s actions – and his looks – have struck a nerve with fans of the alleged assassin.

“To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America,” Lorenz said, “As if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stan murderers of all sorts, and we can give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.”

When O’Sullivan asked about the groups of women who have gathered outside Mangione’s court hearings in New York, Lorenz laughed.

“You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart,” she said. “He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”

O’Sullivan quipped, “Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That’s where we’re at.”

The two agreed sympathy for Mangione was not unlike fandom for supporters of President Donald Trump.

That last sentence neatly, if unintentionally, sums up CNN’s woes perfectly.

Luigi Mangione shot a man in the back as he was walking to work, and @donie is on CNN laughing about it. https://t.co/7b8dw2onBL

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) April 13, 2025

RADICAL CHIC — THE BOY BAND ERA: The deranged lusting after the ‘hot assassin.’

The widespread fawning over Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of US healthcare boss Brian Thompson, is as bizarre as it is nauseating. You would have thought that we were beyond victim-blaming by now. But no, a consensus has emerged from ‘progressives’ that Thompson ‘had it coming’, and that his alleged killer can be excused for his apparently good motives. Worse still, he can even be indulged on account of his good looks.

The latter response has been the most deranged aspect of this episode. Just when you thought our society couldn’t become more superficial, witness how this ‘hot assassin’ has been lusted over by legions of pervy half-wits. In other circumstances, the actions of a lone nut armed with a gun and violent fantasies would have had progressive Americans in paroxysms of moral panic, usually about gun laws or the threat posed by the far right. But no. It’s different this time, it seems. This killer meant well, we’re told. And aren’t his looks just to die for, too?

Some have sought to dress up their fawning as politically motivated. The former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz seemingly spoke for many when she said her initial reaction to Thompson’s death was one of ‘joy’. Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian spoke of Thompson as ‘the face of an unfair system.’

* * * * * * * *

In recent days, it has emerged that Mangione is no left-wing radical, but instead seems to be enamoured of America’s lunatic fringe and its icons. ‘He was a violent individual’, he once wrote of the Unabomber, a terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 others with nail bombs. ‘While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy Luddite, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary’, Mangione added.

Speaking of the Unabomber, perhaps to calm its more bloodthirsty leftist readers, the New York Times has an opinion column titled: The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know.

Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum, and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability and take pride in forming their own opinions.

So what do you say to a young person who has come to admire Mr. Kaczynski? I share many of the same frustrations over the state of the world as those of the college students I teach — how we are bound up in and complicit in horrors across the globe without a viable political alternative to chart a new way forward. How do we maintain our humanity in an inhumane system, where people die unnecessarily every hour on the streets of the richest country in the world?

I did give an answer to the teacher’s question, the best one I could. I told him to tell his students that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was. I told him that the Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone, and urged him to teach his students about their work.

I hope my words reached them. And I hope they understood that what Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.

Finally, Justine Bateman spots the dog that didn’t bark in the wake of Mangione’s coldblooded assassination of an insurance CEO:

WHY THE ONLINE LEFT IS SIMPING FOR LUIGI MANGIONE:

The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.

Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.

In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.

Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).

This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘​​fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The Left’s response to the Daniel Penny and Brian Thompson cases exposes their sick hypocrisy.

In an interview that’s gone viral, I confronted [Taylor Lorenz] on my “Uncensored” show Monday night about these repellent comments, asking: “Why would you be in such a celebratory mood about the execution of another human being? Aren’t you supposed to be on the caring, sharing left where, you know, you believe in the sanctity of life?”

To my astonishment, rather than back down — or apologize — she went even further, saying: “I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy.”

I was incredulous. “Joy?! Seriously? Joy at a man’s execution?”

“Maybe not joy,” Lorenz smirked, instantly realizing how callous she’d sounded, “but certainly not empathy.”

To which I retorted: “How can this make you joyful? This guy is a husband, he’s a father, and he’s been gunned down in the middle of Manhattan. Why does that make you joyful?”

At which point, Lorenz accused Thompson of murdering “tens of thousands of Americans” with his company’s health care policies, and then repeatedly laughed as we went back and forth over her incendiary rhetoric until I eventually lost my temper and exclaimed: “Taylor, I don’t mean to be rude, but why the f–k are you laughing all the time?”

Staggeringly, her stunningly heartless reaction to Thompson’s assassination has received widespread praise from left-wing social media accounts, which have tried to turn the suspected killer, Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, into some kind of sick pinup hero.

And I would bet good money that many of those same people celebrating the murder of a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street were also outraged by the accidental death of a violent, threatening, habitual criminal on the subway.

The reaction to the two deaths has been very illuminating about the woke left’s shocking double standards and warped, hypocritical morality.

They promote the hashtag #BeKind and profess to be so much more caring, sensitive and tolerant than conservatives.

But they also think courageous veterans like Daniel Penny are villains, and deranged shooters like Luigi Mangione are heroes.

If you believe those two things, you’re a disgusting excuse for a human being.

At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar is “Against Cheap Nihilism:”

Rick Perlstein of the American Prospect said, “Just putting this out there: the jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves. That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.” FDR was many things, most of them bad, but I would not attribute to him the “populist courage” to murder law-abiding civilians in broad daylight in order to send a message pour encourager les autres.

In a 2008 interview with Reason magazine to promote his then-new book Nixonland, Perlstein, the leftwing author and former JournoList member, said that he viewed [the movie] Bonnie and Clyde as “the most important text” of the ‘60s era New Left:

Reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.

In her 1986 book Damaged Gods: Cults and Heroes Reappraised, Julie Burchill compared Hollywood’s late-‘60s cinematic killers to the real-life late-‘60s killers in Hollywood:

In the Sixties the cocaine Communists – natural heirs to the limousine liberals – of Tinseltown demonstrated just how far beyond the mainstream, and just how far removed from ordinary people – film fans – they were by producing a string of films which had violent psychopaths as their heroes. That violent criminals are not rebels, but the warped policemen of poor communities – causing people to lock their doors, stay inside, live in fear – was lost on these butterflies; it is easy to canonize criminals when you have bodyguards. The craze culminated in the making of Bonnie and Clyde, in which two perfectly hideous and brutish murderers of eighteen people of 1934 were turned into two bona fide Beautiful People of 1967. ‘They were young, beautiful and they killed people,’ ran the film’s advertising catchline.

It would be interesting to know if the Manson Gang of Death Valley, frequent guests at the parties on the cusp of glamour and gutter in the Hollywood of the late Sixties, saw the film and heard the slogan and thought of themselves in the same light when they killed the young movie actress Sharon Tate Polanski and six other people in the last summer of the Sixties. They were certainly no uglier than Bonnie and Clyde, although perfectly repellent. They were literally not half as bad – only seven deaths to eighteen. Yet no film would dare show them as sensitive, poetry-writing young beauties forced into their position by an unsympathetic society – Mark Chapman either – and if one did, Warren Beatty et cie would be appalled. Because Bonnie and Clyde – even their names were familiarized to make them sound like a groovy young married Sixties crooning couple: Bonnie and Clyde and Sonny and Cher – killed ordinary people, film fans, while Sharon Tate was a REAL PERSON, one of them, precious. After the Tate murders, the Hollywood brats showed less enthusiasm when it came to giving a makeover to the hideous psycho killers of American folklore and in the mid Seventies the same cocaine Communists were fond of employing the slogan DON’T BUY BOOKS BY CROOKS to blacklist the post-Watergate autobiography of Richard Nixon. But they had been buying something much worse for years – buying murderers’ sweetest dreams of themselves.

On the “Progressive” left, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

VOX SAYS IXNAY ON THE TAY-TAY ASSASSINATION PORN: Taylor Lorenz and Vox are parting ways.

Vox Media is ending its deal to distribute Taylor Lorenz’s podcast and YouTube show. The company had a short-term partnership with the high-profile tech reporter that is set to expire at the beginning of the year, Semafor has learned.

The company announced its partnership with Lorenz earlier this year in Axios, which dubbed the distribution deal a “huge win” for the company, as it tried to partner with premiere podcast talent on distribution, monetization and strategy. Still, while Lorenz remains one of the most talked-about journalists in digital media, her social media persona is a magnet for criticism both for her and for media companies associated with her.

Vox’s decision not to renew the show was made before Lorenz’s comments this week, in which she appeared to justify the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO as an expression of public discontent. (She clarified in a Substack post that she was not defending the shooting, and was instead making a point about the US health care system.)

I eagerly await the Substacks from Lorenz exploring the paleoconservative reactionary worldview of her latest former employer: Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaper and that NPR is “extreme right wing.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN RADICAL CHIC: The current top three stories at New York magazine are:

1. The People Cheering the UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting
2. The UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting Has Corporate America Panicking
3. The UnitedHealthcare Shooting Was Inevitable

I’m so old, I can remember when New York magazine writers were exploring the dangers of radical chic leftist politics, not wallowing in it themselves.

Related: Taylor Lorenz Doubles Down on Wanting Healthcare CEOs Executed (Video).

FILTH:  Taylor Lorenz: On Doxxing and Death.

WHERE WE ARE:

These people cheered Obamacare, which turned the health insurance industry into a government vassal but want people murdered for the consequences of what they supported.

Wild. https://t.co/jPzddQ30sg

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 5, 2024

All kidding aside, this is real Weimar-era stuff we’re seeing — the assassination and those egging it on (like Taylor Lorenz) and excusing it (like SLU’s professor of “law and morality”).

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: The Left Cheers An Assassination.

It wasn’t just Taylor Lorenz egging on crazed leftists to go on an assassination spree after the HealthPartners CEO was gunned down on the streets of New York.

It was a vast swathe of the Left who argued it was well-deserved justice and should be emulated with other CEOs. Lorenz herself suggested slyly that a Blue Cross CEO be next on the lst.

I used to think Taylor Lorenz was just a crazy Karen. Now I think she's an evil, repulsive, murder excusing stain that should be banished from polite society https://t.co/Jmdq5HT6cr

— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 5, 2024

Got to be honest, this kind of looks like an encouragement for murder.

Lorenz is not well, and people in her life need to stage an intervention. pic.twitter.com/lWsZBhzgQI

— Legal Phil (@Legal_Fil) December 5, 2024

Beege wrote earlier today a long post about Lorenz’s psychopathy, but the rot runs much deeper than one crazy “journalist” whose shtick is saying outrageous things then crying about how she is being oppressed by people who notice.

A vocal faction of the Left seems to revel in violence and violent imagery, cheering on riots, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of the murderous Che Guevara, identifying with Antifa, occupying buildings, and appropriating the raised first of defiance as their cherished symbol of resistance to civilization.

The Daily Beast sorta-kinda finds the assassin of Brian Thompson to be totally cool and dreamy: Disturbing Trend as Internet Thirsts After UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassin.

Although some social media commentators have condemned the yassification of the killer’s image—“control yourself” wrote one person—the fawning over an alleged murderer seems to reflect a phenomenon called hybristophilia.

DeSales University professor of forensic psychology described it as type of attraction when a person “gets sexually aroused over someone else committing an offensive or violent act” in an 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan. The public’s recent fascination with the Menendez brothers, Ted Bundy and other men of ill repute over the years seem to back this up.

Although there is “no empirical research” to illustrate just how common the phenomenon is, said Louis B. Schlesinger, Ph.D., comments about the UnitedHealthcare executive’s suspected shooter suggest it’s alive and well.

And not just in the offices of Rolling Stone these days, apparently:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Two contrasting views back-to-back on social media.

DEATH WISH: Unhinged Taylor Lorenz Says She Wants Health Insurance Execs to Die.

She's always been disturbed but employment at @washingtonpost and @nytimes furnished some modest guard rails.

— PhilipTerzian (@PhilipTerzian) December 5, 2024

TAY-TAY WILL BE TRAPPED IN 2020 FOREVER:

I had forgotten the meaning of the phrase “raw dogging,” and was more than a little trepidatious about what I would encounter when I typed those words into Google: The ‘Rawdogging’ Flights Trend, Explained.

[I]n this golden age of in-flight entertainment with all these options available to travelers, who would want to just stare ahead at the seatback, watching nothing but perhaps the flight map for the duration of a long-haul flight?

The trend is referred to as “rawdogging” a flight and it basically means foregoing any of the in-flight perks—no in-flight entertainment, no snacks or beverages from the carts rolling through the aisles, and, in the most extreme cases, no drinking water or napping.

Like many trends, it’s playing out on TikTok, with some travelers posting about their most extreme rawdogging flight feats: “Just rawdogged a 7-hour flight (new personal best) no headphones, no movie, no water, nothing,” wrote one user: @oiwudini, a Manchester-based DJ and producer. “The power of my mind knows no bounds.”

To be honest, I was expecting references to the sort of activities that are Lorenz-approved — rather paradoxically, given her extreme germaphobe mindset: Masked-up Taylor Lorenz attends Pornhub awards.

UPDATE: