Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
June 7, 2025
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH ERASING HISTORY:
June 6, 2025
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST ELON: Democratic congressman Ro Khanna steps up his work to pull Musk toward his party for the midterms.
Wow, it took Dick Cheney and George W. Bush almost 20 years to lose their Nazi-branding among the left. It only took took Elon 24 hours.
Flashback: “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact” and toss it down the Memory Hole.
JUNE 6, 1944, D-DAY: The Invasion That Saved The World.
Sure, you say that, but as America’s Newspaper of Record asks in a new video, what about its complete lack of trans representation?
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Doctor Who Is Finally Dead — Let It Rest In Peace.
BY MANY YEARS: Right Media Scooped Jake Tapper On Joe Biden’s Cheap Fake Presidency.
The truth is that the story of Democrats using Biden as a mere figurehead was reported on as early as 2018 by right-leaning outlets, including The Federalist. In August 2021, The Federalist published my piece entitled, “Democrats Got What They Wanted in Joe Biden: An Autopen In the White House.” Just seven months into his presidency, I wrote that Joe Biden was only a president in the technical sense, and that White House and media Democrats had to know Biden was not actually discharging the president’s duties himself.
All of this is now widely acknowledged. Where was Tapper then? Perhaps too busy bashing people like Lara Trump for bringing up the topic years ago. Even in Tapper’s apology to Lara Trump, he conceded that it came only because he had a book coming out.
Thompson recently won the coveted White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual award for “overall excellence.” His publisher boasted that it was “for his exclusive reporting … around Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate: what led to that moment, and what happened afterward that ultimately drove the president out of the 2024 race.”
Not included in that list was any mention of journalism questioning the president’s fitness for office. Yet to buttress his street cred for the new book, Thompson launched into a mea culpa at the awards dinner, admitting that “being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it.”
It says a lot about the state of journalism when the profession’s top honoree has to stand in confession for failing to do his job.
Journalists used to be recognized for uncovering previously unknown facts. Tapper and Thompson want credit for missing and even hiding them. Yes, they found religion, the virtue of honest reporting — after the election. In any other profession, resignations happen for such colossal failure.
The “Original Sin” wasn’t the White House cover-up, nor was it being deceived by staffers, as Jake asserts. It was the sin of denial. Corporate media didn’t miss the story. They actively worked to not see it, or worse, to help cover it up.
QED: “Original Sin” Co-Author Alex Thompson calls Joe Biden “a good man and a well-intentioned one.”
Who occasionally partied at Nuremberg After Dark:
GREAT MOMENTS IN CIVIL DISCOURSE: ‘Sickening:’ DHS Rips Dem Boston Mayor’s Seeming Comparison Of ICE Agents To Neo-Nazis.
“Mayor Wu comparing ICE agents to neo-Nazis is SICKENING,” DHS wrote on X. “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected gang members, murders, and rapists. Attacks and demonization of our brave law enforcement is WRONG. ICE officers are now facing a 413% increase in assaults.
More here: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Made To Answer For Comparing ICE Agents To Nazis.
The Boston mayor defended her city’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities during a March 19 “State of the City” address, where she criticized “presidents who think they are kings.” The White House pushed back by calling Wu a “radical mayor” who “puts violent criminal illegal aliens first.”
Wu’s 2021 mayoral campaign received over $300,000 from Gary Yu, the founder of Boston International Media Consulting, with the help of a Chinese civic association that he leads, the Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively reported. Yu is listed as an official by an agency of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence and intelligence service called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), and operates as a recruiter for the Chinese government.
Yu has organized Chinese Americans in Massachusetts to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrat lawmakers, including Wu. He has personally donated $45,515 to various Massachusetts Democratic politicians since 2018, including $3,200 to Wu, according to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
So she’s comparing ICE to national socialists, while being bankrolled by international socialists. Got it.
Related: Democrats Want to Unmask ICE Agents But Not Anti-Israel Campus Protesters. “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and other Democratic figures are calling for the exposure of ICE agents, demanding that their masks be removed so they can be identified. Members of ICE wear masks because they are facing death threats against them and their families. Democrats are putting their lives at risk over this. Of course, Democrats have never called for members of Antifa or the anti-Israel campus radicals to be unmasked. Curious, isn’t it?…Go back and look at our extensive coverage of anti-Israel protesters on college campuses over the last two years. You know what you’ll find they all have in common? All of the protesters are wearing masks. Democrats have never called for them to be unmasked. That tells you everything you need to know.”
MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: The Hemi V-8 Is Back: ‘We Screwed Up,’ Says Ram CEO. “The Hemi-powered Ram 1500 is back, and it goes on sale this summer for the 2026 model year. It won’t be the standard engine in the pickup, but if you’re a cylinder counter and can’t live without eight of them, it’ll cost up to $1,200 to upgrade. Order books are open now. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle it defines you,’ said Kuniskis. ‘Ram screwed up when we dropped the Hemi—we own it and we fixed it.’ The brand shifted to a six-cylinder engine lineup for 2025, which buyers didn’t like.”
In the prologue to his new book The Last Supper, Paul Elie remembers being a young man in the 1980s, “riding the D train with The Village Voice and the Pensées in a black messenger bag.” His reading material was fitting preparation for this book, a masterful survey of pop culture—if a less sure treatment of religious controversy—in the ’80s. His canon is capacious: A-sides and B-sides, major works and minor, early stuff and late, live performances and music videos, installations, short films, feature films, essays, novels, memoirs, biographies. Elie deftly intercuts figures and artifacts in an elaborate chronology of the decade. It is a decade in which, he says, we are still living.
Elie describes the long 1980s as the full flowering of postsecularity—that phase of modernity in which religion rebounds from its losses, but religious authority does not. Religious topics and images suffuse a public that is rife with variance and contestation. The sacred mixes with the profane, if indeed the profane can still be called profane. Beheld by Andy Warhol, a soup can is sacralized, announcing that “presence is everywhere.” If this age has a dogma, it is that the ordinary is extraordinary.
A religious age produces religious art. But the art of the postsecular age, Elie proposes, is “crypto-religious.” Elie uses this term to denote art that “incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Its styles are many: enigmatic (Bob Dylan, U2), rebellious (Madonna, Sinead O’Connor), sensuous (Prince, Leonard Cohen), ironic (Warhol), esoteric (Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt), blasphemous (Salman Rushdie, Andres Serrano), satanic (Robert Mapplethorpe). In every case, the artist’s religious profession is elusive. Crypto-religious art always “raises the question of what the person who made it believes.”
Elie’s canon encompasses any and every religion, but Catholics, more or less lapsed, are his most numerous and most typical subjects. Elie, of course, is the longtime Catholic correspondent for The New Yorker. But there is a further necessity. Catholicism is the great instance of a doctrinally and culturally thick religion that relaxed during the long 1960s, cutting loose millions of adherents and cutting slack to those who remained, even as its imperious phase lived in memory. So it supplies in spades the raw material of crypto-religious art: a public heritage that can be invoked, evoked, traduced, and remixed by artists who are shaped or exercised by it while disregarding its strictures.
Mark Judge dubs Elie’s book an exploration of “Art, Religion, and Culture in the ’80s:”
Put more simply, The Last Supper explores the deep hold Christianity still held on many people during the 1980s, including famous actors, artists, and writers. They took their religion seriously. Elie is a magnificent writer, and The Last Supper is deeply reported and researched. It powerfully evokes a time and place. Take, for example, Elie’s description of New York City. In the 1980s “the city was characterized by its celebrity nightlife: discos, launch parties, black limousines, lines of cocaine on the counters of mirrored bathrooms. And it was defined by squalor and decay.”
Despite these signs of moral decay, pilgrims to the city saw excitement and opportunity:
And yet those of us who had come from somewhere else were struck by by the stone-and-iron solidity of the city, not by the signs of decay. New York City at that moment was as ancient-looking as Rome. It was an unreconstructed place, free of the shopping malls and space-age sports arenas that had transformed the mainland. It was still in touch with the dark forces of clan and tribe and territory, of sin and retribution, and the Old World feel of the city was what set it apart from continental America.
Elie concludes that “the city was powered by the shared belief that it was the center of everything and that being a New Yorker gave your life meaning and purpose. It was this belief that drew you there and held you there.” Anyone who was alive at the time and familiar with the place can vouch for the accuracy of this assessment. It was a thrilling time to be a young artist, or even a young fan.
Artists like Madonna, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Martin Scorsese, and Andy Warhol saw the spiritual in art, film, dance, everyday objects. “As moderns,” Elie writes, “they affirmed the integrity of ordinary experience, in defiance of the Church; as Catholics, they saw the ordinary as imbued with a supernatural presence, in defiance of modernism in the arts.” This caused them “to express their Catholicism furtively—and cryptically.”
While ‘80s artists were creating “crypto-religious art,” at the Free Press, Madeleine Kearns describes Catholicism on the upswing: How Catholicism Got Cool.
Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?
“In an age of instability, people are attracted to ancient traditions; in an age of therapy-speak, there’s something appealing about the tough demands of Catholic doctrine,” Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things and former Catholic Herald editor, told me. “Catholicism also has a visual and aesthetic heritage which has translated well into online culture. Catholics have turned out to be surprisingly good at using the internet to evangelize.”
To find out more, I tracked down a handful of the several thousand or so American adults who were baptized this past Easter, and spoke to those who hadn’t been raised Catholic, to find out why the religion appealed. Most of them were in their 20s, which makes sense: The Catholic boom is especially notable among Gen Z. A 2023 study by Harvard University found that the percentage of Gen Zers identifying as Catholic jumped from 15 percent to 21 percent from 2022 and 2023.
Why am I reading this story in the Free Press rather than the New York Times? Perhaps this cultural hot take from the Gray Lady a month ago explains why: “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Is Biden’s autopen mightier than the sword?
Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?
The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.
Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.
As I note in another Speccie piece, on January 17 of this year, 2,490 pardons and commutations were issued over Biden’s name, more than any prior president had granted in the course of his entire presidency. Who decided to issue that wholesale clemency? And who signed the documents ratifying the decision?
“The issue,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich wrote on X, “is not President Biden, who was clearly cognitively incapable of these acts. The issue is who was doing them and what did they get for doing them?”
Gingrich is right. We do not yet know the answers to those two questions, but we might soon. Yesterday, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the Attorney General and White House Counsel to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.”
Curiously, this is yet another aspect of the “Biden” administration where Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are unwilling to name names.
PADDY CHAYEFSKY, CALL YOUR OFFICE! An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them.
The Encampments, produced by the nonprofit BreakThrough Media, tracks the Columbia University students who orchestrated anti-Israel protests at the school last April. Apple TV+, which offers the film to rent for $9.99, bills it as an “insider” look into a “historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe.”
But it may actually serve as a propaganda coup for a sophisticated network of nonprofit groups funded by pro-CCP tech mogul Neville Roy Singham.
BreakThrough Media, which claims its film debuted as the #3 documentary in Apple’s documentary category, is the media arm of Singham’s propaganda empire. Singham, the husband of CODEPINK founder Jodie Evans, has poured millions of dollars into two nonprofits, The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund. According to tax records, those groups gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media, which operates a popular YouTube channel that features interviews with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group, and episodes with titles like “How the pro-Israel lobby hijacked Judaism.” The People’s Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University.
The Singham network’s involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America’s enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S. The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as “the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.” According to a New York Times report, Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”
Several BreakThrough Media executives worked on The Encampments, which has so far received buzzy reviews from The Guardian, the New Yorker, and other outlets. BreakThrough journalist Kei Pritzker is a co-director of the movie. Ben Becker, the editor in chief of BreakThrough, is an executive producer of the film, and the movie’s credits acknowledge contributions from BreakThrough host Eugene Puryear. Both Becker and Puryear are founders of the Party of Socialism and Liberation—a far-left organization whose past members include Elias Rodriguez, the suspect accused of murdering two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.
It really is “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” from Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network come to life. (Language NSFW):
OUT ON A LIMB: The Harvey Milk Controversy Is a Microcosm of Our Cultural War.
HIS FACE! LOL! Watch Scott Jennings as CNN Panel Pushes Stealing Healthcare from Americans for Illegals. “Dude is cool as a cucumber, no matter how crazy they get about illegals deserving healthcare on our dime. Watch this and pay special attention to Jennings’ face as he sits back and takes in all the craziness.”
Cloward and Piven are smiling as well, albeit for different reasons:
The one-man voice of reason continues to dazzle on CNN. https://t.co/zYFG3OUhvR
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 6, 2025
John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist adds that in 2025, “by ‘healthcare,’ Democrats also mean transgender surgeries/mutilation. So their position is actually worse than ‘free healthcare for illegals.’ It’s ‘free trans surgeries & hormone therapy for illegals.’ Good luck running on that, Dems.”
June 5, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
THAT’S A WRAP FOR GRETA THUNBERG:
It must have been an amazing high for Thunberg to be the center of so much adulation. I suspect this because she has been chasing that high ever since, long after the media gaze moved on. In the Biden era, the media were no longer interested in highlighting the urgency of youth apocalypticism. (That was more important to emphasize when Trump was president.) And so the spotlight vanished.
Hungering for continued relevance, Thunberg responded by escalating her tactics, seeking arrest at anti-mining and anti-oil protests across Europe to garner headlines. But the media reaction was tepid, and the thrill was gone. It surprised me not the slightest bit when she instantly transitioned from environmental activism (old and busted) to pro-Palestinian activism (new and sexy with the kids these days) in the wake of the October 7 massacre. A year later, she was performatively arresting herself on podcast appearances to signal her solidarity with Hamas.
And now, apparently, she’s on a boat as part of an activist flotilla headed towards Gaza for . . . no particular reason, really. They claim they’re carrying relief supplies to “lift the siege of Gaza,” but that’s obvious pretext for what is transparently a low-stakes international publicity stunt. Israel will almost certainly seize Thunberg’s boat and interdict the rest of “Freedom Flotilla” before it reaches land. Those aboard will assuredly have their iPhones out to film the affair. Slogans will be shouted, clips will be posted. And when the day is over, all involved will congratulate themselves on a job well done: Way to go, making real change in the world.
I’m at least mildly impressed by the brazenness of it all: Thunberg is inserting herself into the frame of a picture unrelated to her, because she is an important person whose mere presence must be given appropriate deference. The self-regard would be inexplicable were we not talking about a coddled activist who also briefly became the most important teenager in the world — and has been haunted by it for the rest of her life.
As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Thunberg’s fate. If the Israeli Navy wants to hole her boat below the waterline as the French did to sink the Rainbow Warrior, then it’s no problem of mine. I don’t ever want to write about her again, and unless she escalates to suicide bombing, I intend not to. For as much as her astringent mien and unearned pretense make her a figure of comedy, I find her morally repulsive.
But I confess that I also love Greta in at least one way: I’m thankful for her existence as an almost novelistically perfect “character type.” Thunberg is the fulfillment in the flesh of an intellectual conceit: the brutally perfect embodiment of an entire younger left-wing generation’s hopeless attachment to the politics of gesture as opposed to the politics of hard work; politics as little more than an externalized expression of narcissism; politics as a plea for attention from an otherwise indifferent world.
Julie Burchill adds: Greta Thunberg’s pathetic Gaza voyage.
Her origins are interesting. Thunberg was born into a showbiz family – actor father, singer mother who represented Sweden in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing 21st. With the eye-catching middle name of ‘Tintin’ – she apparently stopped talking at the age of 11 on hearing about climate change, a condition known as ‘selective mutism.’ Thunberg has declared that this condition means that she ‘only speaks when necessary’ – if only that were true! After being diagnosed with Aspergers and autism – with a soupçon of OCD sprinkled on top – she suffered with depression for four years until the idea of playing truant – or ‘school strike’ as she chose to call it – occurred to her.
It’s striking how her activism seems inseparable from her own personal fulfilment, something which is not always the case; indeed, many activists throughout history have seen their personal lives worsen due to their political commitment. But whether it was her father saying ‘She can either sit at home and be really unhappy, or protest and be happy’ or her own declaration that the best things to have come out of her activism have been friendships and happiness, there does seem to be an unusual amount of ego invested in her eye-catching antics.
Attention is a very pleasant thing for a certain sort of person – I’m one of them. Attention-seeker, scenery-eater, show-off – it’s good to ‘own it’, as the kids say. But it’s a rather odd look to wallow so unapologetically in the plaudits of the fashion world, an industry responsible for an unimaginable level of pollution and pointless air travel. Should she really have appeared on the cover of British Vogue in 2019 or on the cover of the inaugural edition of Vogue Scandinavia in 2021 or accepted the Glamour Woman of the Year Award? Shouldn’t she have used the opportunity to denounce the fashion industry for its huge contribution to global warming and criminal waste of resources? But logic has never been Thunberg’s strong suit, as her current boat trip to Gaza proves. The stated aim of the trip is to ‘raise awareness’ of what’s happening in Gaza – but can it really be possible that anyone on earth isn’t aware already?
If Greta’s goal is also “famine relief,” she’s gonna need a bigger boat:
ELON MUSK GOES NUCLEAR ON TRUMP, CLAIMING HE’S “IN THE EPSTEIN FILES.”
UPDATE (5:53 pm):
Elon Musk really did speed run through the Republican Party experience.
1. Euphoric victory
2. Grand sweeping plans
3. Complete governing incompetence
4. Political disillusionment— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) May 29, 2025
DEVELOPING:
BREAKING: Aaron Rodgers has informed the Steelers he plans to sign a contract and attend mini camp next week, per sources.
— Gerry Dulac (@gerrydulac) June 5, 2025
BURIED LEDE: The Dr. Demento Show is still on the air: Dr. Demento Show To End With 55th Anniversary.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BIG TENT:
In retrospect, Sanjay Gupta’s October 2021 appearance on Rogan’s podcast, and his shameful about-face the following night on a CNN show hosted by Don Lemon where the two endlessly mocked Rogan for taking a drug Lemon described “as a horse de-wormer” was a huge mile marker on the way to the 2024 elections.
THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD: Naming Imane Khelif has caused ‘immeasurable psychological damage.’
Algerian boxing bosses have issued a furious response to boxing’s new world governing body for a “violation” of Imane Khelif’s rights to medical confidentiality.
A statement released by World Boxing last week, naming Khelif while outlining its new policy of gender testing, has “created psychological damage to our athlete” according to the Algerian Boxing Federation.
In a letter the Federation President said the “consequences are immeasurable.”
He added that the statement had internationally harmed “our national sports movement” and that Khelif was not given “the right to defend herself” nor did World Boxing “hear from the doctors specialising in endocrinology who follow her.”
This week World Boxing President Boris van der Vorst wrote to the Algerian governing body admitting that Khelif’s “privacy should have been protected.”
In his letter he also revealed that the organisation would not “examine” any boxers previous results, which suggests all records to date – for all boxers – will stand. Khelif won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics.
The apology came after a leaked medical report of a gender test taken from Khelif in 2023, published on the 3 Wire Sports website, appeared to indicate the boxer is biologically male.
But what about the immeasurable psychological – and physical – damage to the biological women who competed against him, and the Weimar-esque perversion of the Olympic games last year?
And I think we know the answers to these questions:
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? The Washington Post is planning to let amateur writers submit columns — with the help of AI.
The Washington Post could soon allow non-professional writers to submit opinion columns using an AI writing coach known as Ember, according to a report from The New York Times. The move is reportedly part of a broader initiative to open the paper to outside opinion pieces, including from other publications, Substack writers, and amateur columnists.
Sources tell the Times that Ember “could automate several functions normally provided by human editors,” including by offering a “story strength” tracker that indicates how a piece is progressing. The tool also reportedly has a sidebar showing the fundamental parts of a story, such as an “early thesis,” “supporting points,” and a “memorable ending.” the Times adds that writers would also have access to an AI assistant, which would support them with prompts and “developmental questions.”
We’ve come a long way from the early 2000s, when major newspaper journalists, who still thought of themselves as the second coming of Woodward, Bernstein, and H.L. Mencken, collectively got the vapors over “non-professional writers” drafting opinion columns: Cat Food Eating Pajama Wearing Extreme Bloggers In Boardroom Bathrooms. But in 2025, this speaks far more about the decline of the Post than now ubiquitous self-publishers.
In any case, hopefully Ember will do a better job as a “writing coach” that Chat-CCP, but I’m doubtful: Erasing Content! How Is China AI DeepSeek Better than US Competitors?
Despite widespread praise following its debut, the communist Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek completely erased an entire day: June 4, 1989 — the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 36 years ago [yesterday].
MRC researchers asked DeepSeek a series of questions with known, objective answers related to the topics the communist Chinese government considers to be controversial, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan as a sovereign nation, pro-freedom Hong Kong political figure Jimmy Lai and the plight of the Uyghur Muslims. In every instance, the communist Chinese AI would begin to answer the query before self-censoring and erasing the information it clearly had access to. “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else,” the AI replied again and again, both feigning ignorance and attempting to redirect. The most egregious example? The chatbot first showed and then completely erased the date “June 4th, 1989,” with no additional context.
Is Rollerball a big sport to placate the masses in communist China? Because the above is definitely the 21st century I was promised as a kid:
WILLIAM VOEGELI: Now It Can Be Told.
Biden was still a white male in 2024, but identity politics had come to work in his favor. It was hard to see how Kamala Harris could win the election, but even harder to see how she could be denied the nomination. In identitarian terms, Harris was a three-fer: the first woman, and black, and Asian vice president. No matter how bad her chances in a general election, Democrats recoiled from the prospect of passing over Harris, or even of making her fight for the nomination against other candidates. To do so would antagonize the constituencies her selection in 2020 had propitiated, as well as confirm Republican claims that Harris had been, from the outset, a minimally qualified affirmative-action hire. There was only one escape from this dilemma: sticking with Joe Biden as he ran for a second term and hoping that he could somehow make it through to November and pull off a second victory against Donald Trump. The June 2024 debate incinerated that strategy; the ensuing Harris campaign validated it.
Taken together, the three books provide enough evidence to discard one fevered conspiracy theory, which circulated after the June debate: Biden advisors, knowing his campaign against Trump was doomed, set their boss up in a pre-convention debate for the exact purpose of having him fail before he was formally nominated, giving Democrats time to swap in a different nominee. To the contrary, the thinking of Biden’s inner circle, described as “the Politburo” in Original Sin, was that Biden could still be president, even if he could no longer be a presidential candidate. The hope seemed to be that the “basement campaign” Biden had run during 2020’s COVID pandemic could be retooled into a basement presidency, where the commander-in-chief would make (or, at least, sign off on) policy decisions, which others in his administration and party would explain and defend.
Any chance that this plan would work depended on a compliant press, one that would voluntarily curtail the skepticism that is its reason for existence. Until such willed credulity was rendered untenable and humiliating by Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, journalists went along with the charade. As Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, commented immediately after the debate, “Shame on the White House press corps for not [having] pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.” She did not recoil from naming the most obvious explanation for this dereliction of duty: “too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump.”
* * * * * * * * *
Rather than try to tell people they weren’t seeing what they were seeing, most journalists took the slightly less audacious line of insisting that what people were seeing of Biden wasn’t conclusive. The key was to faithfully report the claims by Democrats that, behind the scenes, Biden remained sharp, commanding, and vigorous. Part of the motivation, as Abramson says, was to do their utmost to prevent Trump’s return to the White House. But another part was the refusal to concede that conservative media outlets like Fox News and the Washington Examiner had done a much better job covering a crucial story than the reporters and editors who disdain the “right-wing noise machine.” One Original Sin author, CNN’s Jake Tapper, was recently forced to admit when interviewed by Megyn Kelly that “the conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden’s decline, and that “legacy media” outlets like CNN need to do “a lot of soul-searching.” When Kelly confronted Tapper about instances where he had derided Republicans for raising the suspicions his book now confirms, Tapper could only say, “I feel tremendous humility about my coverage.”
Yesterday, Mediaite ran this dramatic headline about Original Sin co-author Alex Thompson: Alex Thompson Burns Source Over KJP Book Deal: ‘If You Don’t Tell the Truth, Off the Record No Longer Applies.’
Axios national political correspondent and Original Sin co-author Alex Thompson accused a New York publicist of lying to him about her work with Biden administration staffer Karine Jean-Pierre.
On Wednesday, Thompson took to X to respond to a Politico report from Eli Stokols that pulled together reactions from former colleagues of Karine Jean-Pierre to the announcement that the press secretary is putting out a book about her time in former President Joe Biden’s administration. She also announced she is leaving the Democratic Party.
Thompson’s focus fell to the part of the Politico report revealing that New York publicist Gilda Squire was working “informally” with Jean-Pierre while she was still at the White House and was even being copied on email communications. Squire has previously done publiclity work for major publishers like HarperCollins Penguin Putnam Publishing.
“Funny. The White House repeatedly told me that this was not true back when I asked about Gilda Squire’s involvement in February of 2024,” Thompson wrote in reaction to the report.
The reporter then shared emails with Squire in which he asked Squire if she’d been “enlisted” by Jean-Pierre. She replied by telling Thompson “off the record” that it is “unequivocally untrue” that she was working with Jean-Pierre.
“If you don’t tell the truth, off the record no longer applies,” Thompson wrote. “Here is Gilda Squire’s denial at the time.”
Fair enough. But as Megyn Kelly asks Thompson:
Because Tapper and Thompson want to keep working in DC, and don’t want to risk being frozen out by a future Democrat administration.
CHARLES COOKE: Of Course We Should Deport Jihadis’ Immediate Families.
If I had answered yes to any of the questions above — or, for that matter, to the hundreds of similar questions I answered over the years — my applications would have been delayed while I accounted for myself, and rejected if I could not. And, remember, I was living legally in the U.S., with a job, a wife, kids, a mortgage, and I was seeking work visas, permanent residency, and citizenship. I was not a tourist, who, by the plain terms of his admission documents, was forbidden to build a life in America.
In the case of the Solimans, all this is rendered moot by the fact that they were illegal immigrants. But, as a prudential matter, I simply cannot imagine having a moral problem with a system that rescinds the temporary visitor visas of the immediate families of antisemitic jihadis. Such people have no right to be here, would not have been allowed in had we known about their connections, and offer nothing to the existing citizenry that could possibly overcome the risk of their staying. Good riddance.
Read the whole thing.