EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL — at least in the UK:

One reason I started writing this newsletter is so we could share information and data with people they might have missed but really need to know. Here are two things that caught me eye over the last 48 hours, which I think you really need to know:

Firstly, in the UK, the number of illegal migrants and small boats entering the country is now rapidly spiralling, fuelling the immigration crisis and a broader collapse of public trust in the established parties and, for that matter, the entire system.

On Saturday alone, some 1,195 illegal migrants entered the UK on 19 small boats. This is the largest number for a single day this year, the fourth largest on record since the border crisis began, and means that overall number this year, nearly 15,000 illegal migrants, is some 42 per cent higher than the same point last year.

While immigration is already the number one issue in British politics, and is the main reason why millions of voters are abandoning the established parties for Reform, the numbers now look set to spiral even higher, with The Times this weekend forecasting that around 50,000 migrants will arrive this year, a new annual record.

None of this will surprise longer-term readers, of course. Even before Labour came to power, in May 2024, we explained why Labour’s plan for “smashing the gangs” would not work and the crisis would get worse. And this is now happening.

Also happening in the UK: England now has a blasphemy law.

Officially, blasphemy was abolished by New Labour in the 2008 Criminal Justice Act. But today, with the conviction of Hamit Coskun, blasphemy laws now exist in England.

This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate. The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.

Hamit Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in February, before being attacked by a man named Moussa Kadri who has since pleaded guilty to the assault. Mr Coskun was initially charged under the Crime and Disorder Act with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam harassment, alarm or distress’. This means that the Crown Prosecution Service were treating Islam itself as a person, and a victim of Hamit’s Quran burning. Under English law this is nonsensical, as only people can be harmed in this fashion, so this charge, if it had been successful, would have established a special, protected status for Islam. Weeks ago I made a Freedom of Information request of the CPS, asking in how many instances of ‘the religious institution of Islam’ appeared in recent indictments. Just this morning they responded, saying that it would take too long for them to review all the charges they had made, and that they would not comply with the FOI request.

In other words: Welcome to the Islamic theocracy of Great Britain. “t won’t have escaped your attention that our new backdoor blasphemy laws only seem to cover one religion in particular. Those who seek to ringfence Islam – and Islam alone – from ridicule or criticism no doubt believe they are protecting an embattled little guy. But Coskun’s case rather complicates that narrative.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

MY IRONY METER JUST BROKE: 75th Anniversary Edition of Orwell’s 1984 Comes With a Trigger Warning.

UPDATE: Shock: Orwell’s 1984 Slapped with Trigger Warning.

The 75th anniversary features an introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of “Take My Hand.” She explains why some new readers might find Orwell’s masterpiece upsetting.

“I’m enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic but as a good story, that is until [the main character] Winston reveals himself to be a problematic character,” Kirn reads from the trigger warning text.

Taibbi starts to laugh as Kirn continues.

“[Winston] dislikes nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones … Winston’s views on women are at first despicable to the contemporary reader … he’s the kind of character who can make me put a book down,’” he continues with her text.

“How many books have you thrown away by Hemingway, by Tolstoy?” Kirn asks as an aside before continuing from Perkins-Valdez’s introduction.

“When I was younger that’s exactly what I would have done, but I’m a more seasoned reader now and I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story. I remind myself that this is a dystopian novel and Orwell is suggesting misogyny is likely in a totalitarian society and Winston is a product of that environment.”

“Thank you for your trigger warning for ‘1984,’” Kirn said. “It is the most 1984ish thing I’ve ever f***ing read.”

Kirn summarizes the rest of the trigger warning, which includes suggestions that the book is racist.

Wow, you caught him, Dolen! The man who wrote “Shooting an Elephant“ is a crypto-racist in spite of himself. The Bletchley Park racial cryptographers strike again!

GREAT MOMENTS IN PUBLIC EDUCATION:

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY*: Suspect in Colorado Anti-Semitic Terror Attack Says He Wanted To ‘Kill All Zionist People.’

The suspect in Colorado’s anti-Semitic terror attack said Monday that he had planned the attack for a year, telling federal investigators that he “wanted to kill all Zionist people” and “would do it again.”

Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old illegal immigrant from Egypt, admitted during a police interview that he specifically targeted the Jewish group that gathered Sunday to raise awareness for Hamas’s hostages, according to an affidavit filed Monday.

The Justice Department on Monday charged Soliman with a federal hate crime. Soliman is also facing state charges of 384 years for 16 counts of attempted murder, 48 years for 2 counts of using an incendiary device, and 192 years for 16 counts of attempted use of an incendiary device, according to Boulder district attorney Michael Dougherty.

Terror charges have not been ruled out, according to acting U.S. attorney J. Bishop Grewell.

Soliman threw Molotov cocktails and used what the New York Times called a “makeshift flamethrower” on peaceful Boulder, Colo., demonstrators, injuring 12 victims, including a Holocaust survivor.

Investigators also found a black container nearby with 14 more Molotov cocktails.

The terror attack came just weeks after anti-Israel terrorist Elias Rodriguez murdered two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, as the young couple left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

*At least according to NBC, who invented plural “lone wolves” in an attempt to keep their readers in the dark: Lone Wolf? Wait. What? You Have to See NBC News’ Boulder Terrorist Attack Headline to Believe It.

Evergreen:

GREAT MOMENTS IN HYPERBOLE: David Brooks Invokes Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin To Mark Musk’s Departure From DOGE.

New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.

Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”

Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”

He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.”

At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady. With that in mind, Brooks reference to the trio of communist dictators comes across as even more absurd:

Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.

MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas, borrowing Fonzie’s leather jacket and t-shirt, jumps the shark as well by taking the same talking points and compares Musk to LBJ: MSNBC panel stunned to silence over report on deaths linked to Elon Musk’s DOGE.

MSNBC says Musks USAID cuts is more deadIy than the Vietnam War..

These people are ridiculous.. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/uozM7FEpaq

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) June 2, 2025

UPDATE:

More: Bono’s ‘300,000 dead’ claim over USAID cuts gets smacked down by Rogan, Musk: ‘Liar/idiot.’

MORNING IN AMERICA: Job openings showed surprising increase to 7.4 million in April. Complete with an “unexpectedly” moment from CNBC: “Employers increased job openings more than expected in April while hiring and layoffs also both rose, according to a report Tuesday that showed a relatively steady labor market.”

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

* * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.

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

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

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Andrew McCabe Can’t Understand Why Kash Patel Called Boulder Attack Terrorism.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth: “The Egyptian illegal immigrant who used a flamethrower and molotov cocktails to set a group of Jewish people on fire Sunday at a demonstration in Boulder, Colo. is now facing federal hate crime charges for attacking a group of demonstrators bringing attention to the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

JIM GERAGHTY: The Ideology and Violence of Hamas Take Root Here in America.

The ugly truth is that Hamas’s war against the Jews has come to America. Sure, the perpetrators of these attacks may not have Hamas membership cards, but their worldview, agenda, and increasingly, their methods are indistinguishable from that of the terrorist group.

And this is why no one believes, or should believe, anyone who says, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist.”

You may say you’re anti-Zionist, but your political allies keep trying to kill random Jews. They also keep tearing down public menorahs, making threats to Hillels on college campuses, spray-painting hateful messages on synagogues. This crowd insists it is only objecting to the policies of the Israeli government and, entirely coincidentally, that rage just keeps accidentally hitting random American Jews.

The governor’s mansion is not an IDF base. A young couple are not IDF soldiers. A parade of elderly Americans calling for the hostages to be released is not an IDF commando unit.

One of the core tenets of Hamas and every other virulently antisemitic terrorist group is that there is no such thing as an innocent civilian, that every Jew everywhere in the world is a legitimate target. We’re seeing that same worldview at work on our own soil. These people don’t hate Israel; they just hate Jews and don’t want to admit it.

On May 27, the “DSA Liberation Caucus” — a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus” within the Democratic Socialists of America — declared, “Free Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.”

Remember, Rodriguez shot and executed Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away. But in the minds of these people, he’s a “political prisoner.” You see, murder is part of their political agenda.

Exit questions: “How do you survive the Holocaust and live to see old age, only to have some monster try to incinerate you a second time — this time on the streets of the United States? An attempt to incinerate you a second time for being a Jew, right here in America?”

UPDATE:

JOEL KOTKIN: Where have all the Jews gone?

Just as in the past, American Jews are moving away from urban cores – where violence and now anti-Semitism are more obvious. Historian Arthur Hertzberg estimated that between the end of the Second World War and 1956, one-third of all Jews left the urban centers for the suburbs. When you think of Jewish communities, particularly outside orthodoxy, you think not of the Lower East Side but Long Island and Westchester. In LA, Boyle Heights has been supplanted first by the San Fernando Valley and increasingly the Conejo Valley even further from Downtown. In Greater Baltimore today, three-fourths of all Jews live in the suburbs.

The same forces – crime and rising anti-Semitism – have also prompted many Jews to move to the South. Long seen as too conservative and Christian fundamentalist, the South is now the ‘it’ place for Jews, both in terms of basic safety and economic opportunity. Demographer Ira Sheskin notes that while the north-east’s share of US Jews has dropped from 68 per cent in 1955 to 41 per cent today, the South’s share of the US Jewish population has soared from a mere eight per cent in 1955 to 24 per cent. The ‘hot’ cities for Jewish growth include Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, as well as Miami.

More and more Jewish young people are choosing colleges on similar grounds. For generations, the dream of Jewish parents was to send their offspring to the Ivy League, or the great public universities like Berkeley or UCLA. But today, the leading destination for Jewish students is the University of Florida, with the University of Central Florida ranking third.

The reason for this shift is simple. Jewish young people are safer in the South. According to one study ranking universities’ level of hostility toward Jewish students, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and three University of California campuses were among the most hostile. The least hostile environments included Tulane in New Orleans, Washington University in St Louis and five colleges in Florida.

Jews may be in the depths of despair, as their havens throughout the West sometimes seem to be turning into an anti-Zionist, Jew-hating hellscape. But they have hope, too. After all, Jews have survived outside Israel for two millennia by adapting, shifting their locales and their political loyalties to fit changing realities. We may be horrified by recent events. But in the face of those who yearn for our destruction, we will persevere.

Related: Dude. You Own It! Chuck Schumer Pretending Like He Cares About Boulder Terrorist Attack Goes Really Wrong.

And it’s exposed the absurdity of Colorado’s priorities:

ROGER SIMON: Did CNN Cause the Boulder Terror Attack?

My title is deliberately salacious. Admittedly I’m in that kind of mood, given the events in Boulder June 1 and those in DC just a few days earlier. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

The Intifada is being globalized, as they say. It’s here in the USA and it’s happening in high and low places.

The low, we can assume, refers to the two events above that were apparently perpetrated by lone wolves against Jews or their Christian supporters by single actors.

But who inspires them to act that way? Many people, actually, from our educational system to extremist politicians to foreign entities to religious zealots. But our media is prominent among them. When potential terrorists see Israel continually criticized in our media, they feel encouraged, correctly or not. They can think they are in a zone of safety here in the USA, that their act will be well received by many.

Read the whole thing.

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY, THE PIVOT BEGAN: ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

QED: Shot: Grief and COVID-19: Mourning our bygone lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an epidemiological crisis, but also a psychological one. While the situation provokes anxiety, stress and sadness, it is also a time of collective sorrow, says Sherry Cormier, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in grief and grief mentoring. “It’s important that we start recognizing that we’re in the middle of this collective grief. We are all losing something now.”

Many people are reckoning with individual losses, including illness and death due to the novel coronavirus, or loss of employment as a result of economic upheaval. But even people who haven’t lost anything so concrete as a job or a loved one are affected, Cormier says. “There is a communal grief as we watch our work, health-care, education and economic systems — all of these systems we depend on — destabilize,” she says.

—The American Psychological Association, April 1^st, 2020.

Chaser: APA’s action plan for addressing inequality.

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to you while still reeling from the tragic murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the ongoing protests, which are reverberating in a shockwave throughout our nation and around the world.

These recent events present us with an urgent challenge—as an association, discipline and profession, and individual psychologists—to bring our expertise to bear to address the range of underlying problems these events represent from discrimination to racism, which have resulted in long-standing social, economic, and political inequalities, from police brutality, to the disproportionate spread of the coronavirus among black and brown people, to the soaring unemployment rates among communities of color.

APA is urging psychologists to share their thoughts and recommendations for using the power of psychology to address the “pandemic of racism,” both in the short and long term. As part of that process, we must also examine our role as a field and as an association in perpetuating these ills.

—The American Psychological Association, June 2^nd, 2020.

Note the photos atop those Webpages. The April 1^st post is illustrated by photos of an elderly white woman looking frustrated in her apartment, and a young black woman staring wistfully into the distance outside the window of her apartment, with the photos separated by a white dividing line to emphasize both persons’ isolation from the world. Contrast that with the photo of the massed protestors carrying “Black Lives Matter” placards atop the June 2^nd post.

NPR also pivoted on June 2nd, 2020:

The DNC-MSM and local mayors turned on a dime from enforcing hard-line lockdown rules and shaming anyone who went to church or got a haircut, to letting rioters congregate with impunity. Bill de Blasio was quoted five years ago today, “When you see…an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”

Flashbacks:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● The Suicide of Expertise.

● Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

NEW YORK REP. JERRY NADLER SAYS DHS AGENT HANDCUFFED HIS STAFF MEMBER AT CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE:

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler says a member of his staff was handcuffed by a Department of Homeland Security agent at his congressional office Wednesday.

The incident was caught on video.

According to a DHS spokesperson, Federal Protective Service officers were responding to reports that protesters were inside Nadler’s district office in Manhattan.

“Upon arrival, officers were granted entry and encountered four individuals. Officers identified themselves and explained their intent to conduct a security check, however, one individual became verbally confrontational and physically blocked access to the office. The officers then detained the individual in the hallway for the purpose of completing the security check. All were released without further incident,” DHS said in a statement.

In a statement released Saturday, Nadler said the DHS agents “forcefully” entered his office and handcuffed a member of his staff.

“The decision to enter a Congressional office and detain a staff member demonstrates a deeply troubling disregard for proper legal boundaries. If this can happen in a Member of Congress’s office, it can happen to anyone–and it is happening,” Nadler said, in part.

Related: “Nobody is above the law.”

—Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), May 15th, 2019.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Furious Al Gore Seen Blowing Hair Dryer At Ice Caps To Stop Them From Regrowing https://t.co/Rba36hH5VZ pic.twitter.com/OV7vq4twGs

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2025

OKAY, BUT SHOULDN’T CONGRESS FOCUS MORE ON PASSING THE AGENDA OF THE CURRENT PRESIDENT? Watergate-Style Hearings for the Biden Coverup.

The massive coverup of Joe Biden’s mental decline has stimulated plenty of indignant commentary. Missing from the hand-wringing is a demand for accountability, which brings to mind the quip: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This newspaper and recently published books have exposed the trickery and lies of Mr. Biden’s minions and Democratic allies, who attempted to wield power in a leaderless vacuum. It was perfectly described in Tunku Varadarajan’s review of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin,” as resembling “a hush-hush leftist capture of an infirm president.”

A White House cadre, with media connivance, hoped to drag their puppet over the electoral line to win four additional years of power, dangerously undermining the institutional integrity of the presidency. Memorial Day has come and gone, and Washington’s elite is already enabling the machinery to which the Democratic left turns in the face of scandal—elevating sideshows such as insupportable claims that Republicans are destroying Medicaid or rants regarding President Trump’s dispute with Harvard, all to make this latest deceit disappear like April’s cherry blossoms.

Republicans will end up rewarding this duplicity if they elevate cheap talk over accountability. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is holding aggressive hearings on the coverup, but they have been too narrowly aimed. Mr. Biden’s using an autopen and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s declining to release the audio of the president’s interview with Robert Hur are small potatoes amid this vast whitewash of history.

If Congress takes seriously that it should act when Americans are cynically hoodwinked, it must begin an investigation into the coverup that matches or exceeds the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.

John Fund explores: Why the Biden Health Cover-Up Really Matters.

The media are supposed to be watchdogs of potential governmental abuse. Instead, they are in danger of becoming lapdogs serving the interests of some of those in power. (The danger, with Trump in office, is dramatically reduced.) In Biden’s case, his aides worked overtime to conceal the president’s frailty from the media and intimidate anyone who questioned his abilities, and the media failed in their duty to probe more deeply and question the official White House line.

“This was a cover-up — plain and simple,” admits Chris Cillizza, a former reporter with the Washington Post and CNN. “For at least two years (or close to it) senior people in the White House knew that Biden’s condition was bad enough that it needed to be concealed from people working in the administration.”

The media should have realized how powerful a motivation their sources had to deceive them.

They all knew that, but were too invested in getting their man across the finish line for the second time (or possibly the fourth time).

RIP: Robert Jarvik, a creator of the artificial heart, dies at 79.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Mike Huckabee Has a Great Idea for Where to Put a Palestinian State.

Huckabee, according to a Saturday Fox News report, said that it was “incredibly inappropriate in the midst of a war that Israel is dealing with to go out and present something that I think increasingly Israelis are steadfast against.” Indeed, a majority of Israelis now oppose the “two-state solution,” after supporting it for a long time. That’s only reasonable, as it’s impossible to sustain the idea that the Palestinian Arabs will live side-by-side in peace with an Israel of any size. It’s much more likely that a Palestinian state would become a new jihad base for increased attacks against what’s left of Israel, just as Gaza did after the Israelis unilaterally withdrew from it in 2005.

The change in Israeli opinion on this issue came about largely because of Hamas’ brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis. Huckabee observed succinctly: “Oct. 7 changed a lot of things.” Then he offered a modest proposal to the French diplomats who apparently plan to establish a Palestinian state without any input at all from the Israelis: “If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I have a suggestion for them–carve out a piece of the French Riviera and create a Palestinian state.”

If we also take up Sheldon Cooper’s advice, Israel should have much less to worry about from Hamas:

CHANGE: “Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment.

It looks like the “learn to code” push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.

As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.

In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.

While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and  job security.

(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.)

The first line of the above Newsweek article links to a 2019 New Republic article with the headline, “The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of ‘Learn to Code.’ How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.”

Yes, that “fetid right-wing origin” of paying attention to and quoting the things that leftist politicians and journalists were telling Americans. Or as Matt Vespa wrote in January of last year at Townhall: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.

Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.

That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.

And right around that time: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.

Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”

QED:

And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:

LOL'ing at all the replies that didn't get it. https://t.co/QFa5OuojuF

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) January 24, 2024

In January of 2023, Glenn warned: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.

And thus:

Don't learn to code https://t.co/fkIrzikTs7

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) February 12, 2025

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: How the BLM riots broke America.

On the night of 1 June 2020, almost exactly five years ago, gunshots rang out not far from my apartment in East Midtown Manhattan. As my wife and I anxiously scrolled news feeds, our kids — then ages three and one — slept, oblivious to the coruscating sirens that carried hints of chaos beyond our door. At 11pm, I went out to see it for myself: gangs of looters smashing stores down Lexington Avenue, while NYPD patrols stood pat, unwilling or unable to confront them. Black Lives Matter.

That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.

The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.

Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.

In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.

As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.

Well yeah — they were fiery, sure. But for the most part, quite peaceful, according to CNN:

Read the whole thing.

RIP: Loretta Swit, who played Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on TV’s M*A*S*H, dead at 87.

Swit also praised her “M*A*S*H” character as “unique,” even if “nobody appreciated her” within the show.

“She was unique at the time and in her time, which was the ’50s, when the Korean War was happening,” Swit explained. “And she became even more unique, I think, because we allowed her to continue to grow — we watched her evolve. I don’t think that’s ever been done in quite that way.

“She was the head nurse, and her ambition was to be the best damn nurse in Korea, and I tried to help her achieve that,” she continued. “That woman was so lonely, and she was trying to do such a good job. And nobody appreciated her.”

In Variety, Alan Alda adds, “Loretta was a supremely talented actor. She deserved all her 10 Emmy nominations and her 2 wins. But more than acting her part, she created it. She worked hard In showing the writing staff how they could turn the character from a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person — with real feelings and ambitions. We celebrated the day the script came out listing her character not as Hot Lips, but as Margaret. Loretta made the most of her time here.”

Reviewing her character’s position and evolution on “MASH,” Swit once said, “I mean, certain things had to remain the same. She had to remain one of the antagonists because that was the structure of the show. In the second season, we saw for the first time that she was unhappy with Frank and wanted more from her life. Then around the third or fourth year, in an episode called ‘The Nurses,’ Hot Lips gave the nurses a speech telling them how lonely she was because she was in charge and that’s the way it was, so she couldn’t really have any friends. Her marriage and her divorce changed her. Her affair with Hawkeye in ‘Comrades in Arms’ changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.”

In the mid-’70s, M*A*S*H increasingly leaned hard into Alan Alda’s burgeoning real life persona as a feminist icon. Starting late in season six when CBS began using the show as counter-programming opposite ABC’s Monday Night Football, its episodes became much more sentimental than its earlier, funnier, snappier incarnation spearheaded by series creator Larry Gelbart. But we’re unlikely to see such a well-written show today than in the 1970s, when TV still had to appeal to a mass audience, and leftists could still be funny without worrying about the smothering hand of PC.

As Jerry Seinfeld said last year, “‘People always need [comedy] … they need it so badly and they don’t get it,’ Seinfeld began. ‘It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, ‘oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M*A*S*H*’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.’ You just expected there will be some funny stuff on TV you can watch tonight. ‘But guess what? Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme Left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.’”

UPDATE: Speaking of leftist PC crap, the Gray Lady goes into full Margaret Dumont mode in Swift’s obit:

The Times in 2025 looks back at the collective writing, directing and producing efforts of Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr., Robert Altman and Larry Gelbart and concludes:

CHRISTIAN TOTO: You Won’t Believe Why Patti LuPone is Under Cancel Cuture Fire.

Patti LuPone lacks a filter.

The Broadway legend says what she wants, no matter the subject. The best example?

She famously yelled at a patron during the pandemic for not wearing a mask mid-performance.

She also has said horrible things about Christians and a certain two-term president. More on that in a moment.

All of the above didn’t derail her professional career (nor should it). Now, after a curious series of comments found in a New Yorker profile, she could get booted from the upcoming Tony Awards gala.

The Broadway diva disinvited on her own turf? Inconceivable!

Read the whole thing, which includes LuPone comparing conservative Christians to Islamic terrorists, and calling for “the Kennedy Center to be ‘blown up’ due to its connection to the Trump administration,” both of which “unexpectedly” produced crickets from her fellow leftists.

AND YOU THOUGHT SMARTPHONE ADDICTION WAS DANGEROUS: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a ‘super assistant’ for every part of your life.

Thanks to the legal discovery process, Google’s antitrust trial with the Department of Justice has provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of ChatGPT.

An internal OpenAI strategy document titled “ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy” describes the company’s aspiration to build an “AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet.” Although the document is heavily redacted in parts, it reveals that OpenAI aims for ChatGPT to soon develop into much more than a chatbot.

“In the first half of next year, we’ll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do,” reads the document from late 2024. “The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT’s ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task.”

The document goes on to describe a “super assistant” as “an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills” for both widely applicable and niche tasks. “The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails.” It mentions coding as an early example of a more niche task.

Even when reading around the redactions, it’s clear that OpenAI sees hardware as essential to its future, and that it wants people to think of ChatGPT as not just a tool, but a companion. This tracks with Sam Altman recently saying that young people are using ChatGPT like a “ life advisor.”

Related: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

UPDATE:

It’s real, and spectacularly idiotic; we linked to this insane HuffPost article on July 4th of last year.

Given that Biden was a desiccated husk of a man by 2024, why didn’t his handlers attempt to build a younger, more vigorous version in time for the reelection by cloning his nose?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: