Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA COMRADES PUSH ‘ABOLITION’ OF TRADITIONAL FAMILY:

Zohran Mamdani’s twisted comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America pushed for the “abolition” of the traditional family at their annual conference, called marriage and sex work “two sides of the same coin” and proclaimed abortions should be done in churches.

Panelists at the “Socialism 2025” conference last month in Chicago did victory laps over Mamdani’s June win in the Democratic primary for NYC mayor, repeatedly touting his lefty agenda over the four-day commie-fest, video of the event shows.

Speakers at “The Left and the Family” seminar ignored the Uganda-born Mamdani’s ultra-privileged upbringing by his Hollywood-director mom and radical Columbia University dad, all while parroting central tenets of Marxist ideology to the audience — that the nuclear family is inherently repressive, racist, sexist and promotes capitalism.

George Will approved!

GEORGE WILL MORPHED INTO THE POINT/COUNTERPOINT GUY IN AIRPLANE! SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: George Will Reveals Jaw-Dropping Take on NYC’s Zohran Mamdani to Bill Maher.

Maher and Will were talking about Democrat NYC mayoral race nominee, Zohran Mamdani. Maher went hard against Mamdani, saying he says “the things that communists say. I mean, he wants free grocery stores, free buses.” But it was Will’s response that was surprising… when he said he wants Mamdani to win.

* * * * * * * *

I understand his point, that he thinks it will teach people who don’t understand now.

The problem is that if Mamdani wins, it means a lot of suffering, and not just for the people in New York. Because of New York’s importance, it’s going to lead to more leftism infecting and hurting people. And it’s silly to think it would be “confined.” It’s like a virus – if you let it live, it spreads.

I never thought George Will in his dotage would be imitating this 1980 movie parody of a conservative, but here we are:

Or perhaps Will is imitating Clemenza in the Godfather:

“These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood.”

UPDATE:

THE PALLYWOOD PROTOTYPE: The Nazis would have been proud of Hamas’s vile propagandists.

Hamas is finessing and darkening a tradition of propaganda built by Yasser Arafat, a master of the fabricated sympathetic picture, such as that during Israel’s 2002 operation in the West Bank that showed him alone and besieged in his compound. He sat at his desk with only candlelight to see by – an image the world lapped right up – only for lights to go right back on after the shoot.

As the historian Richard Landes describes in his essential book, Can the Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, one of the defining images of the 21st century, the signal “icon of hatred” against the Israel and the Jews, was the “eyewitness” film apparently capturing Muhammad al-Dura, a defenceless 12-year-old boy, being shot in cold blood by the IDF, while held in his father’s arms, on September 30 2000.

It spread like wildfire. Analysis of the footage later contradicted this narrative. The IDF didn’t kill the boy. But by the time it was corrected, the damage had been done. Nobody cared, then, or now. This laid down a grotesquely immoral media-age template that has been used ever since.

Those of us who have followed media bias against Israel for many years are well versed in the absolutely central role of “Pallywood” – the well-known industry in the Palestinian territories that oversees the staging of fake news footage of Palestinian children and women suffering at the hands of Israel, producing a stream of emotive imagery for the world’s media. No true imagery produced by Israel, or even the true, boastful footage from Hamas of the Israeli hostages it has starved and murdered at close range, can even begin to counter Pallywood’s work.

The use of emotive imagery to peddle genocidal ideology is hardly new. Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Third Reich’s propaganda films (who lived to the age of 101), offers an interesting comparison. Whereas Pallywood stages suffering, Riefenstahl’s art pretended that even those bound for Auschwitz were just fine and dandy. She cast gypsies as frolicking extras, then said they all survived the Holocaust. Not only were they sent to Auschwitz, Riefenstahl was thought, in some cases, to have helped them on their way though she denied it all.

While people were tortured, executed after show trials, or sent to the gulag, the Soviet propaganda department ensured a constant flow of idealised images of healthy, happy, sturdy people: courageous, righteous, industrious, reproductive and the biggest lie of all: finally free.

What makes the global hook, line and sinker acceptance of Hamas propaganda so surreal is that it comes a century after Stalin took power, and nearly a century after Hitler did.

QED:

● No formula, no food: Mothers and babies starve together in Gaza.

—NBC News, July 25th.

● Aid drops over Gaza criticized for being dangerous as starvation mounts under Israel offensive.

—NBC News, yesterday.

 

AND TO THINK I KNEW HER WHEN: Trump elevates State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce to an ambassador, sends her to UN. “President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he was elevating his chief spokeswoman at the State Department, Tammy Bruce, to the rank of ambassador and sending her to the United Nations. Trump said on his Truth Social platform that Bruce will serve as the deputy to UN Ambassador Mike Waltz.”

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Former youth organizer for AOC busted after urging ‘attack’ on Jewish students at Brooklyn public high school.

A Brooklyn woman who worked as a youth organizer for “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was arrested Friday on charges she urged her 25,000 social media followers to “attack” a public high school because Jewish students attend it.

Robert Spencer adds: Violence Against Political Opponents Is Becoming Mainstream on the Left. Here’s (More) Proof:

Leftists outside of politics joined in the fun as well: remember, to take just a few of many available examples, Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head, or Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House, or Robert DeNiro bellowing that he wanted to punch Trump in the face.

In light of all that (and there is much more), Iman Abdul looks positively mainstream. On Thursday, according to the New York Post, she posted on her Instagram account, which has 25,000 followers, a screenshot from Google Maps, pointing out the exact location of Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences in the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn.

Abdul added this caption to the map: “If anyone needs a public school in NYC to attack for whatever reason … Lexus driving Israhell [sic] loving Zionisits [sic] all attend here. They’ve all gone on ‘Birthright,’” which is a program that enables Jewish youth to visit Israel.

The Post noted that “the NYPD arrested Abdul at her Brooklyn home on Friday, charging her with making a terroristic threat, acting in a manner injurious to a child, aggravated harassment, and making a threat of mass harm.”

Spencer notes:

The idea of doing violence to one’s political opponents has become mainstream on the left. Don’t believe me? Consider the case of one Iman Abdul, a 27-year-old woman who has worked on the campaigns of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Swizzle Stick) and New York state Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Of Course). Abdul has just been arrested for calling for an attack on a high school because a large number of Jewish students go to it.

Now, there’s no doubt whatsoever that AOC and Salazar would roundly condemn Abdul’s call.

No doubt. Curious though, that the people whom Sandy associates with and attracts all seem to share a common hatred:

And then there was this show stopper from AOC herself:

As one wag tweeted at the time, “Look just because she’s favorably comparing herself to the lady that Franco liked a lot who sheltered Mengele doesn’t mean… OK, I forgot where I was doing with this.”

Classical reference in headline: AOC Joins the Left’s Swelling Ranks of Anti-Semites with Corbyn Endorsement.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Jimmy Fallon Kisses the Conservative Ring.

After CBS announced it’s canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month, there was widespread speculation that the decision was politically motivated. The thinking was that CBS fired one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics so that his administration would push through Paramount’s (CBS’s parent company) merger with Skydance. (Trump has claimed partial credit, writing on Truth Social that he is not “solely responsible” for CBS’s decision.) Others claimed the move was financial, arguing that late-night TV’s liberal-leaning material is the cause of the genre’s declining ratings. In either case, if the future of late-night television is in any way contingent on kissing the rings of conservatives, the world got a glimpse of what that might look like on August 7’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’s wildly popular late-night show Gutfeld!, was featured on the show as guest, yukking it up with Fallon like the pair were old pals.

To some, Gutfeld! proves the theory that late-night TV would be more successful if it catered more to conservatives. The show, geared toward a MAGA audience, consistently outperforms all its competitors in linear ratings. Despite his success, Gutfeld’s appearance on The Tonight Show is the first time he’s been invited onto any of the big-network late-night shows since his own show debuted in 2021. It’s hard to view this booking as anything other than a ploy on the part of NBC to court his audience.

NBC late night shows booking conservatives? It’s never been done before!

Say, regarding that last fella in the white suit. Where did he use to write?

UPDATE: “Fallon Invites Gutfeld on ‘Tonight Show,’ Media Meltdown Ensues,” Christian Toto writes.

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Begun, the Gerrymandering Wars Have.

Last Sunday, Democrats in Texas’s state legislature fled from Austin to Chicago, Ill., in order to deny Governor Greg Abbott the quorum necessary to push through legislation redrawing Texas’s congressional map. The new map more or less guarantees three additional safe Republican seats for the state delegation, while creating two others within reach during a good electoral year.

2026 is not expected to be such a year for Republicans nationally, due both to the controversies created by the Trump administration’s policies as well as the deeper structural dynamics of American election cycles. (The party holding the presidency always faces headwinds in the midterms, absent historically anomalous circumstances.)

The move by Texas Republicans — neither illegal nor unprecedented in recent Texas history, but certainly unusual — came at Trump’s behest. He is rightfully concerned about the consequences of a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives for the last two years of his term. (If it happens, set the over-under for “articles of impeachment voted upon” at 1 and take the over.) Every extra Republican seat — even in a narrow minority — is a buffer against this.

Every action breeds a counterreaction, however, and Democrats have responded by immediately threatening to bulldoze their own pieties into a landfill. Governor Gavin Newsom posted the phrase “FAFO” on social media — readers are free to look up the term’s meaning on their own — as he announced his intent to similarly redistrict California from its current 43D–9R delegation into a desolate wasteland of Democratic blue.

What’s that you say? California has an independent redistricting commission that by law cannot undertake mid-decade redistricting? No matter: Newsom proposes to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2025 ballot that would “temporarily” relieve the commissioners of duty for a few cycles before returning them to power. (How very constitutional of him.)

To coin a phrase, “The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human… sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot:”

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

NY TIMES: The Sydney Sweeney Story Was All the Right’s Fault.

So the basic argument here is that there were only a few hundred thousand people who agreed with the smaller accounts making these eugenics complaints and then Libs of TikTok came along with her 4 million followers and mocked them. And that means she started it…or something.

Personally, I think this is a bit of special pleading from the Times. It’s true no one really attacked the ads initially in the first few days. But once the eugenics claims started making the rounds, people on the right responded because it seemed so absurd to many of them. But the dumb ideas being mocked did originate on the left and did have some significant support from others on the left, especially on TikTok. Anyway, I think Stephen Miller has pretty neatly summarized what this article is doing.

  1. Sydney Sweeney jeans ads.
  2. The right – “We are so back”
  3. Will Stancil like accounts – “This is Nazi eugenics”
  4. Tiktok – “This is clearly nazi eugenics.”
  5. Media outlets piggybacking and needing eyeballs from Tiktok – “This is clearly nazi eugenics.”
  6. “What, no, it isn’t you morons. It’s a hot Hollywood ingenue in denim. You lunatics.”
  7. The Atlantic – “The backlash is a backlash discourse is broken.
  8. “No one is outraged by this you MAGAts.”
  9. The political right caused all of this <–THEY ARE HERE

It was a dumb, woke argument and the people who made it (and liked it) got hammered as dumb and woke. That’s what happened here. If there wasn’t concern these goofy views went beyond a few fringe people on the left the NY Times wouldn’t be trying so hard to reframe it.

In a pair of tweets leading up to the above quoted passage, Miller notes:

As Jim Treacher likes to say:

UPDATE: At his Substack, Treacher writes:

The New York Times now claims there was no widespread criticism of Sydney Sweeney’s new ad campaign for American Eagle jeans. This is, of course, a lie. Here’s the proof.

It was on Good Morning America, for Pete’s sake:

That was just a few days ago. Now the NYT wants you to forget it ever happened.

Happens every time. Whenever liberals embarrass themselves, they try to turn it around on their critics. It’s our fault for “pouncing” and “seizing” on their falsehoods. We’re merely “weaponizing” their insane ravings.

They could save a lot of time and effort by not acting like nitwits in the first place. But then, that would put them out of a job.

Earlier this year, Lou Perez tweeted:

There will always be crazy people seeing, as Iowahawk wrote late last month, “secret titties airbrushed into ice cubes in ads. What we’re seeing now is the same thing, except hallucination of secret swastikas airbrushed into ad titties.” Today though, those crazy people have multiple social media outlets to post their latest Bletchley Park decodings. In 2019, Ricky Gervais wrote, “Twitter is like being able to read every toilet wall in the world.” But there are apparently no grownups left in old media to stop their younger, more impressionable colleagues from amplifying such digital graffiti by broadcasting social media’s zaniest rantings as news.

Of course, perhaps the staff’s goal is to embarrass the hosts, a la Ron Burgundy:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Netscape: Remembering the Internet’s Big Bang, 30 years later.

Aug. 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the internet’s Big Bang moment, an inflection point in the emergent digital world.

This Big Bang was the stunning stock market debut of Netscape Communications, maker of the first widely popular web browser, Netscape Navigator.

Netscape — a pitch-perfect name for a web pioneer — is at best a distant memory these days. But on August 9, 1995, Netscape took its shares public in an IPO that illuminated the online world, introducing the web to millions of people only vaguely familiar with the technology.

Netscape was a Silicon Valley startup whose IPO defined the audacity of the web’s early days. The company had been founded in 1994 by James H. Clark, he of Silicon Graphics fame, and Marc Andreessen, then a recent college graduate whom Newsweek magazine was soon to call the “über-super-wunder whiz kid of cyberspace.”

And:

Netscape, moreover, was a force that contributed to a heady sense of optimism about the early web. The writer Charles Yu several years ago recalled the jauntiness of those days.

“I entered college in 1993 and graduated in 1997,” Yu wrote. “Halfway through, the Internet became a thing. Netscape said: ‘Here you go, here’s a door to a brand-new place in the existence of the universe. We just started letting people in. Go ahead, it’s fun. It’ll keep getting bigger for the rest of your life. Also, you can change stuff in it. You get to make up new rules for everything — thinking, remembering, communicating.’”

Thus leading to this headline last month, lamenting the demise of the mass media of the 20th century: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities.

INSIDE JOB? Mysterious Crime Spree Targeted National Guard Equipment Stashes“A string of previously undisclosed break-ins at Tennessee National Guard armories last fall marks the latest in a growing series of security breaches at military facilities across the United States, raising fresh concerns about the vulnerability of US armories to theft and intrusion. A confidential memo from the Tennessee Fusion Center reviewed by WIRED details four break-ins at Tennessee National Guard armories over a seven-week span. In one incident, thieves made off with night vision goggles, laser target locators, and thermal weapons sights, among other equipment. At others, intruders breached fences, tripped alarms, and gained access to supply rooms discovered in the aftermath to have been unlocked.”

THE GREAT GERRYMANDERING WAR OF 2025:

Until President Trump came on the scene, the U.S. Congress basically consisted of Democrats and RINOs with only a few actual Republicans sprinkled throughout the GOP. Thanks to Trump morphing the party into America First Patriots, MAGA Republicans are pushing back at the insanity tossed at us by Democrat—for example, gerrymandering, which communist Democrats have made into an art form. Per Vice President J.D. Vance:

The gerrymander in California is outrageous. Of their 52 congressional districts, nine of them are Republican. That means 17 percent of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40 percent of the vote in that state. How can this be possibly allowed?

Related: America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight-up reportage: Democrats Warn New Trump Census Could Negate All The Illegal Alien Votes Biden Brought In.

BANNED IN BOSTON: Kash Patel Slams ‘corrupt’ Sanctuary City Sheriff Indicted for Cannabis Company Extortion.

Boston’s sanctuary sheriff was arrested Friday on federal charges after allegedly leveraging his elected position to extort $50,000 from a cannabis executive who was seeking state approval to open a dispensary—a scheme FBI Director Kash Patel called a betrayal of public trust.

Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins, 67, who oversees more than 1,000 employees in the Boston-area, was handcuffed Friday morning in the Southern District of Florida after a federal grand jury indicted him on two counts of extortion under color of official right, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

“When someone entrusted with enforcing the law is accused of breaking it for personal gain, it undermines the public’s trust in every honest officer who wears the badge,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “The FBI will pursue corruption at every level, because no one is above the law. The people of Suffolk County, and the country, deserve leaders who serve them, not themselves.”

Tompkins was appointed sheriff of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department (SCSD) in 2013, elected in a 2014 special election, and later re-elected to serve successive six-year terms.

He made headlines in 2019 after booting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out of the county jail, signing an eviction notice that required hundreds of illegal immigrant detainees to be moved out within 60 days, according to a report from the Boston Herald.

He also made headlines in June of 2020: Sheriff Tompkins: ‘This is our Rosa Parks moment.’

Before members of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office took a knee Friday in solidarity with protesters seeking an end to racial injustice, Sheriff Steven Tompkins delivered an impassioned speech about how systemic racism has affected the incarcerated population.

“The criminal justice system isn’t broken. The criminal justice system was built to be punitive. It was built to punish people that committed crime. And I’m not saying that’s a wrong thing. What I am saying, though, is when you have arrogance, and ignorance, and racism matched up with any punitive endeavour, bad things happen,” Tompkins said.

“As all of you know, 65% of our inmate population is black or brown. That’s in this commonwealth where that same demographic is 18%. How do you get 65% out of 18%? Ignorance, arrogance, racism. We can’t have that as a people,” he said.

Six years earlier, Tompkins was championing BLM: ‘Black lives matter’ protests sweep Boston, US cities.

The phrase “black lives matter” was a rallying cry in Boston as in other cities adorning signs and shouted as a rallying cry as the marchers made their way through the city.

Passing through the crowd gathered at the South Bay jail, Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins expressed support for the protest.

“It’s one heck of a display of civic engagement,” he said. “As long as it remains peaceful, I certainly do not have a problem with it. We can’t live in a country where young men of color are killed indiscriminately. These types of incidents have to stop.”

Spoiler alert: BLM protests were mostly peaceful, but with a fiery soupçon in 2020: Here’s How Violence Erupted in Boston After Peaceful George Floyd Protests.

IF SKYNET CRASHES, IT’S TAKING US ALL WITH IT: If the AI Bubble Pops, It Could Now Take the Entire Economy With It.

AI companies are pouring so much money into AI, experts are starting to warn that it may be propping up the entire US economy.

As investor Paul Kedrosky told the Wall Street Journal, spending on AI infrastructure has already eclipsed spending on telecom and internet infrastructure during the dot-com crisis over two decades ago, raising the specter of a massive bubble.

I’m not sure that’s the doomsday warning it’s intended to be, as the 2000 dot-com bubble really wasn’t the end of the world for the rest of the economy: “A Nasdaq sell-off in March 2000 marked the end of the dot-com bubble. The recession that followed was relatively shallow for the broader economy but devastating for the tech industry. The Bay Area in California, home to tech-heavy Silicon Valley, experienced a sharp rise in unemployment.” But unemployment throughout the US remained quite low in 2000 and 2001, prior to 9/11.

DISPATCHES FROM THE FURTHEST REACHES OF THE PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE:

THE TROUBLING DECLINE IN CONSCIENTIOUSNESS:

Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.

Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.

Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.

All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.

The result sadly, isn’t An Army of Davids, but instead, An Army of Gretas:

Related: Capitalism Isn’t Why You’re Unhappy.

UPDATE: While the Financial Times article is paywalled, you can read most of John Burn-Murdoch’s conclusions in this Twitter/X thread:

More:

GREAT MOMENTS IN ONLINE CONTENT: How did a new War of the Worlds movie get a 0% critical rating?

In a novelty that turns into a hindrance almost immediately, most of this unfolds on Will’s [played by Ice Cube] computer screen at his mostly empty office, where he’s working what’s described as a “graveyard” shift despite it being, you know, daytime. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it unfolds near Will’s computer screen. Unlike past “screenlife” movies like Unfriended, War of the Worlds is not exactly rigorous about adhering to its self-imposed limitations. Though Will’s face is often display on screen as part of various video calls (which is how Unfriended and others have worked actors’ faces into a screen-only framework), the movie also flat-out cuts away to traditional shots of Will that are framed vaguely like a Zoom call but clearly take place outside of Will’s computer. This makes sense. After all, when you’ve got an actor as expressive as Ice Cube, you want unmotivated closeups that can capture every single cocked-eyebrow scowl. How will the audience know how to feel if they can’t see Ice Cube scowling at his computer screen?

That’s probably not fair to Cube, who has been quite good in plenty of other movies. The man has presence. What he does not have is the kind of subtlety or emotional range that benefits from de facto solo occupation of the screen. Really, every actor in War of the Worlds feels like they’re performing in a Zoom-style vacuum – and seemingly not as a commentary on the coldly disconnected world of digital communication. In fact, quite the opposite: in this movie, everyone video-calls everyone all the time, to better show off some of the worst visual effects ever seen in a movie bearing the Universal Pictures logo out front*. No amount of handheld phone-camera or grainy news footage can disguise how terrible the alien ships look. They wouldn’t pass muster on a whimsical Snickers ad.

So how did this happen? How did this D-grade reimagining of a public-domain property wind up going from major studio to major streaming service to the top of the charts?

The pitch meeting must have been incredible: 

* Albert Whitlock weeps.

RIP:

 

NANCY PELOSI MAKES SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO 2026 GOP MIDTERM ELECTIONS! Pelosi Working on Sex Changes for Children ‘at the National Level.’

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is positively devastated by attempts to halt child mutilation — performed under the guise of “gender affirmation” — and made it clear that she is still working to do something about this “at the national level.”

Pelosi made the remark this week, responding to an inquiry of how she is dealing with recent attempts to stop such procedures, particularly in her state of California. For instance, one of California’s largest healthcare providers, Kaiser Permanente, is expected to stop transgender surgeries — specifically for individuals under the age of 19 — beginning August 29.

“After significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts including our physicians, we’ve made the difficult decision to pause surgical treatment for patients,” they wrote in a statement. “All other gender-affirming care treatment remains available.”

Stanford Medicine is another major healthcare provider in the Golden State that announced it is pausing sex change surgeries on patients under the age of 19.

“That is something I’m working for at the national level, and we are hoping we can have gender-affirming care for our trans kids,” the 85-year-old congresswoman said, deeming the challenge a “sad thing for us.”

“I don’t know what effect we can have nationally with what we have going on in the White House and in Congress,” she concluded.

This clip seems likely to appear in numerous GOP candidates’ ads next year:

MARK HALPERIN RIPS GLENN KESSLER: You Used The Power Of The Washington Post To Make People Believe Biden’s Decline Was Made Up.

MARK HALPERIN, HOST: Regarding Joe Biden. When you looked at the question of whether the videos being played largely in conservative media that showed apparent cognitive decline of the president, what conclusion did you reach in Fact Checker about those videos?

GLENN KESSLER, FORMER WASHINGTON POST FACT-CHECKER: Well, you’re talking about when he supposedly meandered off to talk to the parachutists? Yeah. So that fact check was looking specifically at how that video was being portrayed on news sites.

MARK HALPERIN: Yes, sir.

GLENN KESSLER: And what we did was we went and got the full video in the full context, because it looked like the way it was cut, and particularly distributed by the RNC, it looked like Joe Biden was wandering off and he didn’t show him talking to parachutists. What we showed was that he was talking to parachutists. And I’ve said this before, fact checks are a complement to the news coverage, not a supplement.

Yes, sir. The overall context of the Washington Post coverage, we had coverage about, you know, was he too old? We had columnists saying he shouldn’t be running again.

And that fact was specifically about that video distributed by the RNC.

MARK HALPERIN: Understand, but the power of the Pinocchios and the power of the fact check, when you write that, people say that and say, the Washington Post is saying that that video is not reflective of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. That’s what people take from that. They do.

They do. Glenn, they do. You know the power that you had in that job.

So do you think the Washington Post, how would you rate the job the Washington Post did in covering Joe Biden’s, not his age, not whether David Ignatius thought he should run again, but how good a job would you say the Post did in covering the reality of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline?

GLENN KESSLER: I would say, so there was a lot of effort to produce a story that would look at very carefully at what seemed to be a cognitive decline. It never came together because we couldn’t get enough people on the record.

 

The Post didn’t come clean on Biden’s obvious decline until it was politically expedient to do so:

In retrospect, Mr. Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline. He and the country would have been better off if Mr. Biden had kept his implied promise from the 2020 campaign to be a “transitional” figure, perhaps by bowing out after the Democrats’ surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections.

As Ed Morrissey wrote in August of last year, “what does it mean to have ‘worked to conceal his decline’? It means that Biden doesn’t have the capacity to execute the duties of his office, which is why it had to be concealed. And if Biden can’t fully handle the duties of the office, who’s running the executive branch? Who is making the decisions about the exercise of presidential authority? If it’s anyone not named Joe Biden, then a soft coup has taken place and the inner circle are conspirators in it, including Kamala Harris.”

It’s remarkable how uncurious the Post can be about “all the president’s men” (to coin a phrase) when the president has a (D) after his name.

UPDATE: Former Washington Post Fact Checker Says Quiet Part Out Loud About Liberal Audience, with RCP Hosts Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth. New video from Megyn Kelly:

“That’s one of the great things about Twitter and now X over time. That’s when you really started learning about these journalists
who were supposed to be objective. They would get on X or Twitter at the time and post this crazy left-wing stuff and just expose themselves. And so, I think that’s that that was part of the whole loss of credibility of the journalism industry and the fact checking was
part of that.”