HOW IT STARTED:

Denim ads get people riled up. Does it all flow from the foundational contrast between starch and flesh? No doubt the minds behind the Sweeney campaign wanted to stir memories of Brooke Shields, declaring to Richard Avedon’s camera, in 1980: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In another ad for the campaign, Shields, mock-struggling to put on a pair of skintight jeans, says, “The secret of life lies hidden in the genetic code.” The element of perversion, the artistic touch, in that Calvin Klein ad was Shields’s age, which was fifteen. Sweeney is twenty-seven. No great artist directed these commercials. The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings, and we don’t have to search for long: genes, referring to Sweeney’s famously large breasts; genes, referring to her whiteness. (American Eagle has said that the campaign “is and always was about the jeans.”) Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass. Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess. To them, she signals, as my colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote, a “rejoicing in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left.”

A lot of people don’t like the ad campaign, and there are plenty of reasons not to: there’s no irony or camp to leaven the trashy, dog-whistle atmosphere. But the fawning from conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J. D. Vance—is reactive, precipitated by the dislike, which, yes, reached a pitch of outrage, but dissipated, fairly quickly I think, into a bored fatigue. Still, everyone wants to elect their perspective of sobriety and proportion. Stephen Colbert, who now hosts “The Late Show” with a persecuted swagger, chastised the outraged, those who see the ad as master-race propaganda, claiming that they were overreacting. Can’t you handle a stupid pun, in other words? To be clear, many of us—the Negroes, the queers, the hairy feminists, et cetera, et cetera—do not react out of a feeling of personal injury, as if the blondeness-as-beauty standard has terrorized us.

—“The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” Doreen St. Félix, the New Yorker, August 2nd.

How it is going:

Once Rufo began retweeting her, St. Felix of course deleted her X account, but not before many of her tweets were screencapped. Her next article, in which she claims she was the innocent victim of a witch hunt, will be an amazing read.

As Wesley Yang tweets, “Chosen as a staff writer at the New Yorker three years out of Brown University at age 25 because it was important to be aligned with the emerging thing that was going to dominate the next decade. Who can dispute that they chose rightly?”

In a follow-up tweet, Yang adds, “Was the New Yorker merely following the trend or were they making it happen, or were they making it happen because something impelled them to do so? It’s hard to remember why it seemed to make sense to the editors of the Atlantic to hire Ibram X. Kendi when they did, why Jacob Blake’s shooting was seen as urgent national news, why any of this resulted in the Democratic party leadership kneeling in kente cloth. It’s all gone down the memory hole. But periodically some pseudo-event (like a TV commercial for a denim company) will dredge up the miasma once again.”

Exit quote:

UPDATE: And scene.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

JB Pritzker Joins Police Force In Hopes Of Getting Sandwich Thrown At Him https://t.co/7IUUsIlSVB pic.twitter.com/0lnMItYEuT

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 14, 2025

ESCHEW ALL MODALITIES OF COCKSUREDNESS: The 2026 Midterms Are Looking More Like 1934 Than 1938.

That 1934 midterm election was notable because the momentum from Roosevelt’s historic defeat of GOP President Herbert Hoover in 1932 carried over two years later as FDR and his administration were still in the early throes of combating the effects of the Great Depression.

This momentum kept going through to 1936 when Roosevelt was re-elected for a second term.

Only in 1938, following a new recession and an unpopular court-packing battle, did FDR and the Democrats suffer the historically traditional midterm defeat.

President Trump may now also be on the cusp of avoiding the dreaded “midterm curse.” The reasons for this unusual reversal appear to come from the perception that, despite President Trump’s return to the presidency after being defeated for re-election in 2020 (only the second time in U.S. history a president has won non-consecutive terms), his current administration is bringing about more and quicker change than he did during his first term, which was upended by the global pandemic. The rapid and relatively abrupt change we have seen thus far resembles FDR’s first two years in office.

Of course, it is only conjecture at this point that 2026 will resemble 1934 and not 1938. But given the GOP successes so far, and the Democrats’ historically low approval rating resulting from their apparent post-2024 drift to the far left, it would seem to be a reasonable current conjecture.

On the other hand, if Democrats do win the midterms next year, former(?) Democrat Ruy Teixeira warns them of “The Fool’s Gold of Midterm Success,” which is well worth a read.

ARNOLD “SCREW YOUR FREEDOM” SCHWARZENEGGER IS “READY FOR THE GERRYMANDERING BATTLE:”

According to Politico last week, “Schwarzenegger [is] ready to fight Newsom on redistricting.” Which is quite a change of pace for Arnold, who effectively governed as just another Sacramento Democrat during his time in office, gave Newsom his blessing after he beat his recall election, and endorsed Kamala last year.

TYLER O’NEIL ON THE BIDEN BURROWERS: Exposing a Potential Deep State Threat Against the Second Trump Administration.

2025: A MORGENTHAU ODYSSEY: Germany’s Industrial Core Is Collapsing Under The US Trade Deal And The Green Agenda.

In its May survey of over 21,000 companies, only 23% reported positive business expectations—down five points—while 30% expected deterioration. In industry, one in three anticipates fewer orders.

Just 19% plan to increase investment, while about a third plan to cut back. High energy prices, labor shortages, and political uncertainty are seen as the main drags. The DIHK forecasts a 0.3% recession for 2025, but adjusting for state spending, the real decline is closer to 4–5%.

Daily surveys confirm the same message: Germany is being deindustrialized, losing hundreds of thousands of core-sector jobs. The social security deficits already emerging are just the beginning. Yet both politics and business refuse to conduct an honest diagnosis.

The Green Deal remains sacrosanct. Energy costs for German industry are up to three times higher than for US competitors, double that of French firms—pushing energy-intensive sectors out of the country.

Dancing Around the Golden Calf

Nobody dares openly challenge Brussels’ climate agenda. A rare exception came in June, when a group of works council representatives wrote an open letter to the Chancellor, naming the Green Deal as a root cause of decline.

But most CEOs dodge the question. Mercedes-Benz chief Ola Källenius cites “weak demand, high production costs, and US tariff uncertainty” for falling margins—but ignores the Green Deal’s role. VW CEO Oliver Blume calls for lower energy prices and tax incentives for EVs—essentially more subsidies to keep the transition alive.

Corporate leadership is now fused ideologically with the Green Deal. The energy transition has battered Germany’s industrial base: sectors like construction and automotive have been knocked completely off track.

The ghost of Henry Morgenthau smiles.

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER EPISODES OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE:

Shot:

Announcer: It’s time for “The Franken & Davis Show”, starring Al Franken and Tom Davis. And now, here’s Al and Tom!

[ dissolve to Al and Tom standing on stage ]

Al Franken: Thank you, thank you! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! It’s GREAT to be back!

Tom Davis: That’s right. And, tonight, we’d like to stick our necks out a little bit on national television, and call for a violent overthrow of the United States government! [ he bows, as the audience applauds ]

Al Franken: Thank you! Thank you! You see, besides being a professional comedy team, Tom and I are international Communist revolutionaries… and we believe that nothing can really be changed in this country, through the Democratic process! [ brief applause ] Oh, thank you! We’re glad a lot of you feel that way!

—NBC’s Saturday Night Live, October 21^st, 1978.

Chaser: Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.

—New York Times headline, yesterday.

I’m so old, I can remember when Emperor Palpatine was supposed to be the bad guy in Star Wars. Though as Jim Geraghty tweets, “It is helpful to everyone for the modern American left to come out and openly acknowledge what has been obvious, but denied, for a long time: their objective is to repeal and replace the existing U.S. Constitution.“

I CHALLENGED DUKE’S DEI DOGMA – AND PAID WITH MY JOB:

I worked at Duke for 10 years without incident before spending the last few years of my tenure battling the 2021 policy – at the cost of my job as an emergency room physician, which is now the subject of a separate lawsuit I have brought. As much as I would like to proclaim victory, I do not want this episode to get memory-holed by organizational leaders who would rather we forget the moral panic that gripped them and the price many of us paid for their destructive and divisive efforts. As the country pulls back from the pernicious ideology of DEI, there are countless other people like myself who suffered the repercussions for refusing to buckle to the madness.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me be clear: Everyone I know is opposed to racism, bias, and hate, but Duke distorted those words to indict white doctors and nurses for complicity in the poorer health outcomes of black patients.

My own form of resistance began in 2018 when Duke’s chief diversity officer gave a talk on implicit bias at a physicians’ meeting. I was shocked by what I heard.

Read the whole thing.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Alien: Earth — A Wild Ride.

WHEW — GOOD THING TRUMP STEPPED IN TO RUN THE CITY, THEN! D.C. Mayor Heads to Martha’s Vineyard as Trump Takes Over City.

It makes perfect sense, considering how aggressively the island dealt with their influx of illegal immigrants:

NEWSBUSTERS TURNS 20: The Most Absurd and Obnoxious Outbursts.

BRENDON O’NEILL: As Bono now knows, you criticize Hamas at your peril.

It is Bono’s comment that is most striking. He lays into Israel, which is what the pitchfork-wavers wanted. But he lays into Hamas, too. ‘The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil’, he says. He dares to humanise the youth of Nova. They were ‘music lovers and fans like us’, he says. It feels like sweet moral relief from the anti-Semitic damning of those dancers in the desert as ‘settler-colonialists’ who had it coming. To think of those kids ‘hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im’ is awful, writes Bono. And then they were ‘butchered’ by Hamas, he says, to ‘set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from “the river to the sea”… a gamble Hamas’s leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians’.

Now if only Bono would remind the band’s frequent producer, who sounds like he’ll producing Roger Waters and (alas) Eric Clapton next: Lineup announced for Palestine benefit concert at Wembley Arena, helmed by Brian Eno.

Brian Eno is organising a “pro-Palestinian music festival". Yes really. Because those two things go so well together. pic.twitter.com/gvQyY5tBMK

— 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) August 13, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump is liberating the Smithsonian from ‘Woke.’

What is happening, and what is going to happen, at the Smithsonian museums may seem like a footnote to the larger Trump agenda of “Making America Great Again.” In fact, it stands at the center of that project. Donald Trump understands something that the left has grasped at least since the 1960s but that conservatives have grasped dimly if at all. If you want to restore society, you must commandeer the institutions that represent elite culture. Over the last several decades, those institutions have gradually become captive of a woke ideology that denigrates America while simultaneously celebrating the entire radical menu of racialist redress, sexual exoticism and political intransigence.

Back in January, I wrote an column claiming that Donald Trump was “a great man of history.” That occasioned a fair amount of ridicule. But as the months pass and Trump moves from one triumph to the next, doing beneficent things that no previous president would have thought possible, my description seems more and more apt. Trump is not only making Americans safer and more prosperous. He is also moving on several fronts to give them back their cultural and educational institutions. His actions at the Smithsonian are the tip of that liberating spear.

Exit question:

Yes, ever since the debacle of their uber-PC Enola Gay exhibition in 1994, their airbrushing of Clarence Thomas out of black history in 2016, and their 2020 chart on “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States,” it’s been clear that somebody needs to save the Smithsonian from their worst impulses.

UPDATE:

The entire premise of the Left's George Floyd-era argument was, in fact, "white people bad," and it is a sign of weakness, rather than strength, that the left-wing CNN panelists are now pretending that they never made that argument at all. Good, @JillianMichaels. https://t.co/FmLODARVER

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 14, 2025

MORE: Nike-Backed Smithsonian Exhibit On Trans Athletes Criticized By Jillian Michaels. Visitor data shows most reject transgender participation in women’s sports despite exhibit framing.

FUNNY HOW THESE “FACT CHECKS” ONLY WORK IN ONE DIRECTION: Washington Post “Fact Checker” Was “Completely Wrong” on Wuhan Lab-Leak Headline, He Says.

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checking columnist who recently concluded a 28-year career at the Washington Post and recently launched the BY GLENN KESSLER Substack, joined me yesterday to talk about some of the issues raised in his article “Why I left the Washington Post.”

I asked him about the erosion of popular trust in fact-checking by elite institutions. One topic that came up along the way was whether fact-checkers prematurely declared false the “lab leak” theory of the Covid-19 virus’s origins.

Kessler was admirably forthright in acknowledging that he’d gotten wrong a Washington Post headline on that topic.

“I screwed up…I was completely wrong,” he told me, speaking of what he called his “infinite regret” at a headline casting doubt on the lab-leak theory.

“Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect. And when you’ve got a title like ‘the fact checker,’ when you make a mistake, people notice. So, you know, you’ve got to own it,” he said.

Five years after getting it wrong (because getting it right would have benefitted the doubleplusungood crimethink people who publicly said it was a lab leak right from the start), and after Kessler left the Post. That’s the very opposite of “owning it.”

As Bruce Carroll wrote in February of 2021, “One must ask, however, when does Sen. Tom Cotton get his apology from those who for a year characterized him as a conspiracy kook for asking the right questions?”

Related:

You know you are hitting a nerve when you start exposing the ruling class and the guy across from you is so triggered he keeps trying to talk over you! pic.twitter.com/p5hALaWeNd

— Johnny Midnight ⚡️ (@its_The_Dr) August 14, 2025

MAKE PYONGYANG GREAT AGAIN! Meet the Group Pushing Americans to Support North Korea.

Late last month, a coalition of pro–North Korean activists gathered in New York City. Ostensibly there to defend “Korean independence,” their real purpose was to spread anti-American propaganda and justify the crimes of Pyongyang and other totalitarian regimes.

Nodutdol, an effectively pro-North Korean group, co-hosted the People’s Summit for Korea from July 25 through 27. The event featured professional activists, academics, government officials, and longtime radicals with decades of involvement in left-wing politics. Also present were a stable of revolutionary leftist groups, including the People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, the United National Antiwar Coalition, and more.

The conference offered several radical presentations. It included plenary sessions, such as “The Long Revolution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea“ and “Toward a United Front: U.S. Out of Everywhere“; workshops, such as “Surviving Sanctions: Resisting the Imperial Agenda” and “People to People: Reflections from Delegations to North Korea”; and a session for students, titled “Students: Planting the Seeds of the Student Movement.”

In effort to reduce travel time and carbon emissions, Mamdani will soon be bringing North Korea to New York, so these communists really are the proverbial “liberals in a hurry.”

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Toronto International Film Festival reverses course, will ‘ensure’ Oct. 7 doc is screened at festival following swift backlash.

GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Make it make sense: Gun grabbers come out against fighting crime.

A gun control nonprofit that wants to disarm Americans has come out against President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., crime crackdown.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, known these days as Brady: United Against Gun Violence, issued a lengthy statement on Monday condemning Trump’s ongoing D.C. crime crackdown.

* * * * * * * *

According to the White House, the reality is that “D.C.’s murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba.”

The statement from Brady president Kris Brown concluded with her suggesting that Trump’s federal police are the ones “endanger[ing]” D.C. residents, not the hordes of violent criminals running the streets.

“We cannot allow the president to suggest that federalized police is an appropriate response to any and all challenges; or that federalized police do not further endanger the public, especially Black and Brown communities who live and work in or visit D.C.,” it read.

So, in other words, the same people who want to disarm Americans, thus making them prey to criminals, also want to effectively disarm the police, making residents even more prey to criminals. It makes no sense, especially when you factor in how the locals actually feel.

Last year, dozens of business groups with offices in D.C. penned a letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser expressing “deep concern about the alarming increase in violent crime across our city.”

It’s an alarming outbreak of false consciousness among the lumpenproletariat, comrades!

GREAT MOMENTS IN TIME TRAVEL: Makeup boss Huda Kattan claims Israel was responsible for both world wars, 9/11 and October 7.

Iraqi-American makeup boss Huda Kattan has claimed that there is evidence that Israel was responsible for both world wars.

Kattan, founder of makeup brand Huda Beauty, has nearly two million followers on TikTok. In a video posted to her account last week, she also accused Israel of deliberately allowing the October 7 massacre to happen.

In the video, which she has since deleted, she spoke of “conspiracy theories” about the Jewish state and said that there is “a lot of evidence behind them”.

Such theories, she claimed, included those that Israel was “responsible for 9/11”, that it “allowed October 7 to happen” that it is is “hiding… paedophiles”. And she claimed that evidence exists that Israel was behind both world wars.

No word yet if the Israeli time travelers also hacked Joy Reid’s blog.

2025’s “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL” MOMENT:

“largely clean” driving record other than drunk driving and killing a mother and her 11 year old daughter https://t.co/dEOvCDDwVS

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 14, 2025

The screenshot on the right reads, “Raul Luna-Perez, 43, is accused of driving drunk on July 26 and crossing into oncoming traffic, causing a head-on collision that killed a woman and her 11-year-old daughter. The Trump administration has said Murphy, a Democrat, is to blame because of a state sanctuary policy for undocumented immigrants.”

The New York Post adds that Luna-Perez “had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit, New Jersey officials revealed this week…[he] was driving more than 60 miles an hour down a residential street in Lakewood when his Dodge Durango rammed into 42-year-old Maria Pleitez’s Nissan Sentra,” adding that “The suspect was free to drive despite two DUI arrests in March and April and a domestic violence arrest in 2023, according to records.”

I've handled quite a few DUI cases.

I've never seen a DUI defendant handcuffed and in a jail uniform unless there was a lot more to it than simply blowing over the legal limit.

— Ari H. Mendelson "Premier Psychic of Our Day" (@kingmakerseries) August 14, 2025

Dana DiFilippo’s bio at the Trenton-area New Jersey Monitor states that prior to writing for the paper, she was with “WHYY, Philadelphia’s NPR station, and the Philadelphia Daily News, a paper known for exposing corruption and holding public officials accountable.” She apparently deleted her X account after her largely clean but rather Orwellian choice of phrasing went viral.

KENNEDY CENTER GOES POPULIST:

President Trump announced five recipients of the annual Kennedy Center Honors Wednesday — including actor Sylvester Stallone, the rock band Kiss and disco singer Gloria Gaynor.

British actor Michael Crawford, best known for originating the titular role in the Broadway smash “The Phantom of the Opera,” and country music star George Strait will also be honored at a ceremony later this year.

But the Kennedy Center went populist long before Trump initiated his kultur-coup. In “Monkeeing Around with Culture,” his 2017 Washington Free Beacon review of Michael Nesmith’s autobiography, Joseph Bottum wrote:

Still, the main reason that one might read Michael Nesmith’s memoir, 50 years past his prime, touches only a little, almost incidentally, on the music and the television performances. It derives instead from the nation’s curious settling on the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s as a base for shared knowledge.

Perhaps that seems an exaggeration. But consider this: On August 3, the Washington Post ran a column decrying the drift of the Kennedy Center—written, just to give the piece a little more of an imprimatur, by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s official art and architecture critic. Where the Kennedy Center once promoted symphonies, operas, and classic theater productions, the D.C. institution now “abandons the arts for pop culture,” Kennicott fumed. And he pointed out that this year’s Kennedy Center honorees included “television producer Norman Lear, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan, music mogul Lionel Richie and hip-hop star LL Cool J,” all of whom have innumerable other sources of popular praise. What need have we of the Kennedy Center, when its gold medals are just late imitations of the Grammys, Oscars, and Emmys?

As it happens, two days before, the political reporter Amber Phillips wrote in that same Washington Post an analysis of Arizona senator Jeff Flake’s new book, a tirade against Donald Trump. “Flake routinely catalogs Trump alongside evil and danger,” she explained. “At one point, he compares the Republican Party trying to make peace with this president to a German scholar who sold his soul to the devil.”

What Flake had written was “Faustian bargain,” of course. I can’t decide whether Phillips gave her gloss because she herself had to look up the meaning of what she considered an obscure phrase, or whether she merely thought that readers of the Washington Post wouldn’t know the meaning of the image from Goethe’s Faust. CNN political editor Chris Cillizza didn’t think he needed to explain the phrase to his readers. Nor did many others who quoted it—although none of them managed to note that Flake had actually misused the expression, turning it into a redundancy. “If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it,” the outraged Republican senator said of his party’s acceptance of Trump, missing what’s built into the phrase: the fact that selling one’s soul is never supposed to be “worth it.” (For those, like Flake, a little distant from the biblical foundations of Western literature, Mark 8:36 is the text Goethe had in mind.)

In other words, we live in a time when even the Kennedy Center can’t bring itself to concentrate on classical music and the high performance arts of Western civilization. We live in a time in which even the Washington Post can’t allow a reference to the Faust legend that has inspired so much literature. The process, in both instances, probably begins with a fear of being accused of elitism and snobbery, the greatest of sins in a democracy. But the fear is allowed to rule when we notice that references to Wagner’s Ring cycle or Goethe’s Faust simply aren’t as well known as “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” Or “Oh, what can it mean / to a daydream believer and a homecoming queen?”

In 2012, when Obama awarded the surviving members of Led Zeppelin their Kennedy Center awards, he joked:

GRAY LADY ARGUES FOR A PINCH OF ANARCHY: We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong.

By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts.

Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term.

But today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order.

It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities. Recent changes to the terms of the military’s employment by the Pentagon and its members’ incentives to career advancement will ultimately overcome any constitutional and moral qualms about their conduct.

Democratic civilian control and the apolitical professionalism of military officers have long been bulwarks against authoritarianism. This framework proved stable through the 20th century, even when tested by the Vietnam War, in significant part because American presidents and their civilian advisers could be trusted not to imperil the political integrity of the Republic.

As Cynical Publius tweets:

The fact that a recently-retired Army general felt it was OK to write an article that is essentially calling for a military coup d’etat tells you all you need to about the challenges faced by Trump and Hegseth in restoring our military to a lethal, apolitical, warfighting force.

I’m so old, I can remember when the generals plotting a coup in John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May were supposed to be the bad guys in the film:

Time to dust off Glenn’s 2016 paper on military coups in the United States.

FASTER, PLEASE: Cleaning Up Homeless Encampments Could Be Trump’s Next 80-20 Issue.

Donald Trump, of course, is a talented politician who can see the opportunity. I expect him to seize the issue as we approach the 2025 midterms. His attempt to clean up Washington, D.C., is, in my view, a test run of such policies, and the politics around them. He is also, shall we say, not a man inclined to focus on the inherent dignity of people who get in his way. Trump will vilify with his rhetoric those who he deems as his opponents, even if those opponents are his own destitute countrymen.

That’s not to say that the president will be wrong to highlight this issue. Americans ought to embrace a different paradigm on vagrancy and homelessness that cleans up our neighborhoods and our parks, and increases the quality of life for not only ourselves and our families, but also those who are currently living at the lowest ebb of their lives on our streets. While doing so, we must ensure that we respect the fundamental rights and dignity of all people, especially those who are, like us, citizens of this great country.

How exactly to do all that? I’ll be the first to tell you that I am unsure. This issue is complicated and thorny. Simply clearing out the tent cities won’t solve the underlying problems of mental illness, drug addiction, and poverty, of course.

We’ll know he’s serious about the issue if he wants to reopen state mental hospitals:

Flashback: It’s mental health, stupid: How Team Biden misunderstands homeless crisis.

Some rough-sleepers would relish permanent housing, yes. But many would also choose to stay on the streets. That’s because untreated mental illness, not a housing shortage, is the real source of the problem for a significant share of the homeless.

In 2015 (the most recent such survey), the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that at least 25 percent of the US homeless, or 140,000 people, were seriously mentally ill; 45 percent suffered from mental illness of some kind. Serious mental illness isn’t garden-variety anxiety or melancholy. It’s the sort of paranoid schizophrenia that can involve voices instructing the patient to push a young woman toward an oncoming subway train.

Others are haunted by the demon of addiction. As the Substance Abuse and Treatment Center has reported, “tragically, homelessness and substance abuse go hand-in-hand. The end result of homelessness is often substance abuse, and substance abuse often contributes to homelessness.” The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 38 percent of homeless people are alcohol-dependent, while 26 percent are dependent on other harmful chemicals.

But solving the problem would mean a enormous and seemingly permanent gravy train would be derailed. In December of 2009, SF Weekly had this classic Fox Butterfield-esque line: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

UPDATE:

Yes. Gavin Newsom proved that you can end homeless encampments overnight when Xi Jinping came to visit.

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) August 14, 2025

BEEN CAUGHT STEALING: Camera Stolen from TV News Crew Reporting on London Street Thefts.

A TV news crew’s camera was stolen while they were filming a segment on the rising street thefts in London.

A television crew for Saudi Arabian news station Al Ekhbariya News was reporting on the rising number of thefts on Oxford Street, one of the busiest shopping destinations in the U.K., on Saturday.

However, the unsuspecting crew later realised they had captured footage of a man walking up to their equipment, taking part of the TV station’s camera, and running away with it, according to UAE newspaper The National News.

🎥 | While Filming a Report on Rising Theft in #London, #AlEkhbariya Crew's Equipment Stolen on #Oxford Street#AlEkhbariyaEN pic.twitter.com/M6bhn9DEk4

— AlEkhbariya News (@alekhbariyaEN) August 10, 2025

“While reporting on the recent surge in thefts on Oxford Street, a street said to have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in London, something remarkable happened,” Al Ekhbariya News reporter Mohanad Alrawi says in the subsequent news segment aired on TV.

“Our own camera was stolen. That very camera has captured footage of thefts.”

Could be worse: Guy Ritchie’s London TV set ‘hit by £1m theft as director tightens security after second break-in.’ “The 56-year-old director is said to be furious over the repeated break-ins on the set of The Associate, his Paramount+ project featuring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.”

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PREMIER: UK’s Starmer Stumbles to His LOWEST Popularity Levels Ever, With 68% Disapproval of His Government and Only 13% Support.

And now a word from legendary anglophile Homer J. Simpson:

80/20: Anderson Cooper explains the clever trap Trump has set for Democrats after announcing DC crime crackdown that has infuriated liberals.

Anderson Cooper thinks Donald Trump has taken over policing in Washington DC to dare Democrats into saying there’s no crime problem in US cities.

The CNN star told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the Dems’ decision to highlight falling crime in DC will likely backfire – because so many locals of all political persuasions have recent personal experiences of lawlessness.

‘It’s so interesting,’ Cooper said on his show AC: 360 on Tuesday. ‘The conflict, you know, Democrats face when talking about the policing in the District of Columbia.’

‘Do you point out statistics of out of a 30-year low as they as the statistics show, and thereby sound like you’re saying, oh, there’s not a crime problem in Washington, DC? Where there’s crime problem everywhere.’

Haberman agreed, conceding: ‘There is a crime problem everywhere.’

Someone tell that to this devil-may-care DC-region master chef:

And the Mayor of Oakland, who apparently has never heard of a notoriously crime-ridden city called Oakland:

As America’s Newspaper of Record reported yesterday: Democrat Mayors Report Violent Crime Down 40% Since They Redefined ‘Violent’ And ‘Crime.’