SCOTT JOHNSON: Minneapolis 5 years later, NY Post edition.

As soon as it became apparent that the authorities would let the city burn, the city became a magnet for malicious actors from around the state who wanted to get in on the action. The arson, looting, and destruction didn’t end until Minnesota Governor Tim Walz deployed the Minnesota National Guard too late to prevent the vast damage that was done.

But what an incredible olfactory experience! Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’

UPDATE: Gazpacho? Geppetto? Gestapo? A Lying, Tongue-Tied Tim Walz Says ICE Agents are a Modern-Day ‘Geskapo.’

Leave it to failed Democrat Governor Tim Walz to find a way to lie while tongue-tied. He gave a commencement speech at the University of Minnesota on Saturday and warned graduates that President Donald Trump was sending out ‘Geskapo’ agents to round up people.

Here’s the verbal flub. (WATCH)

Governor Walz calls ICE agents modern day "Geskapo" pic.twitter.com/b4XjYWkA9h

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 18, 2025

Marjorie Taylor-Greene received plenty of well-deserved scorn from both sides of the aisle when in February of 2022, she referred to Nancy Pelosi’s infamous and terrifying “gazpacho police.” Naturally, Walz’s flub will quickly be forgotten by his party’s operatives with bylines.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sharyl Attkisson: What’s Your Generation (and Stereotype)?

OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: We live in Britain’s ‘valley of strangers:’ Inside Muslim-majority northern town where locals say there is ‘no point speaking English’ and others say ‘no one talks to each other.’

Tariq Hussain admits he knew nothing about Keir Starmer’s plans to get tough on immigration, mainly because he’s been preoccupied with more pressing concerns lately.

His day job selling traditional Asian female clothes takes up a lot of his time and business has been slow. And when he gets home, he is on the phone to relatives and friends in Pakistan to check on their safety following recent tensions between the country and neighbouring India, which almost led to war.

But there is another more troubling reason why Mr Hussain was completely oblivious to Sir Keir’s pledge to overhaul a ‘broken’ immigration system, despite the fact that it could directly affect him and his family.

Speaking in his native Punjabi he confessed: ‘I speak little English even though I have been in this country for quite a long time. I don’t watch the British news because I don’t understand it, so what’s the point?

‘All my work involves dealing with other Pakistani people and my friends are all Pakistani so I don’t need to speak English. If I do, I get somebody to help me.’

In March, the London Daily Mail published an interactive Webpage headlined: How many people can’t speak English in YOUR neighbourhood? Interactive map covering England and Wales’s 36,000 districts reveals 43% of residents struggle with the language in one part of the country.

Naturally, this has made some of England’s more, umm, left-leaning and diversity-focused citizens quite cross:

We’ve gone from ‘immigration is our greatest asset’ to ‘we must cover up what is happening or there’ll be a revolution’ https://t.co/oQQCNKtaUP

— Calgie (@christiancalgie) May 18, 2025

IT TAKES A VILLAGE — Just Not Your Village:

Listen to the pure scorn and hatred in her voice when she talks about Americans having more children compared to when she discusses illegal aliens having more babies

These people are evil and racist https://t.co/QPZah78I2A

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) May 18, 2025

HARROWING FOOTAGE SHOWS MEXICAN SAILORS CLINGING TO RIGGING FOR DEAR LIFE AFTER BROOKLYN BRIDGE CRASH:

Harrowing video shows Mexican sailors clinging to the rigging of the tall ship that smashed into the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday night — after dozens of crew members were seen standing on the masts of the vessel as it careened out of control.

Two sailors were killed and 17 were injured after the ship, Mexican navy training vessel collided with iconic bridge just before 8:30 p.m. Saturday night.

Video taken at the moment of the crash shows dozens of sailors lined up on the 147-foot masts as it set off on its journey for Iceland with 277 on board following a goodwill visit to New York City.

Footage filmed from the Brooklyn side of the East River shows the Cuauhtémoc’s three masts hitting the bridge and snapping after an apparent mechanical failure, sending it drifting in reverse downstream.

Other eyewitness video shows sailors hanging from the rigging ropes on the damaged masts.

“We saw someone dangling, and I couldn’t tell if it was just blurry or my eyes, and we were able to zoom in on our phone and there was someone dangling from the harness from the top for at least 15 minutes before they were able to rescue them,” eyewitness Lily Katz told The Associated Press.

Emergency diving crews were sent in to check the water as a precaution, but remarkably, no one fell in, officials said.

Related:

Countless people ask why, in 2025, any Navy still trains midshipmen on tall ships.

The answer is simple: tall ships teach the fundamentals. No autopilot. No screens. Just wind, rope, canvas and consequences. You learn to respect the sea or it punishes you. You learn attention to… pic.twitter.com/RmWBwFCjx2

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 18, 2025

RIP, MICHAEL LEDEEN, 83:

OUT ON A LIMB: David Marcus: Old Man Biden’s autopen pardons should be null and void.

Nice work if you can get it. You see, when the boss was upstairs struggling to get the lid off his tapioca pudding, the White House staff could do anything they wanted, no matter how harebrained, and there were no consequences.

This brings us to the issue of Biden’s pardons, especially those granted to his family and public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Put simply, did Biden have any idea what he was doing when his autopen scratched the surface of those presidential papers?

In the case of the pardon for his son Hunter, Biden is on the record just months earlier saying he would never ever do that. Sure, it’s possible that he was lying, but he did give us his word as a Biden.

If, as Democrats and their media allies insist, Biden’s decline was so swift, starting in 2023, that it caught everyone off guard, then shouldn’t we question whether the Joe Biden who signed Hunter’s pardon wasn’t deeper in the throes of dementia than the one who promised not to?

The worst part of the mendacity from the Biden administration is that all those smarmy spokespeople like Ian Sams and all his bosses knew that the harm they were doing probably could not be undone, even if the actions were born of lies.

They knew that, as a practical matter, it is likely impossible to deport 10 million illegal aliens, and they knew that it would be almost impossible to challenge Biden’s pardons, even if he thought he was signing a pool pass for Corn Pop.

The problem with the current reckoning going on over the lie of the century is that there are few consequences. Journalists aren’t being fired, they are getting rich selling books in which they detail their own incompetence.

And leave out the details of who was actually running the show.

HOW IT STARTED: AOC in 2020: ‘Defunding Police Means Defunding Police.’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said New York City’s proposed $1 billion cut from the police department budget tiptoes around demands from activists who are asking for a reduced police presence.

Though the plan proposed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) cuts one-sixth of the New York Police Department (NYPD) budget, activists note that much of it would be transferred to other city departments, including the Department of Education, where it could pay for police in schools. Activists have advocated for removing officers from schools altogether.

“Defunding police means defunding police,” the congresswoman said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”

—The Hill, June 30th, 2020, at the height of left’s riot, arson, and looting season.

How it’s going: The Fruits of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Labors: A 70% increase in Violent Crime in Her District.

Last year, AOC was hoping to be named to the top spot on the powerful Oversight Committee. Pelosi blocked her ascension,  proving to AOC that moving up in the Democratic Party will be harder than she thought.

Through all of this political maneuvering to further her career, AOC has forgotten the people who got her to where she is: her long-suffering constituents. From 2019 to 2025, murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft have jumped 70%.

You might claim that a congresswoman’s actions or inactions have little to do with the crime rate. That would be true if AOC hadn’t been a prominent voice in the “Defund the Police” movement.

“The 115th Precinct, which also serves part of Roosevelt Avenue in addition to Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and north Corona, saw major offenses rise by 85%” reports the New York Post.

Ocasio-Cortez’s district takes in two police districts that are among the worst in the city. And some residents are pointing the finger at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“She’s not doing s–t. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood, she doesn’t care,” said Elmhurst resident Guadelupe Alvarez, who has lived in the neighborhood her entire life.

Okay, to be fair she may not live in the neighborhood anymore, but she’s perfectly willing to stop in for a few minutes whenever the New Yorker wants to do a photoshoot about wealthy Manhattan leftists in their digs, such as this month’s unintentionally hilarious “Power Houses: Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.” AOC was photographed knitting in her East Elmhurst apartment to accompany similar photos of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, AOC, Al Sharpton, and “Ella Emhoff, textile designer.”

More from Rick Moran on AOC at PJ Media today: 

The director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, Hannah Meyers, said, “Nobody wants to be a police officer, it’s been so villainized.”

“It’s her district, she’s supposed to be looking out for people there,” she added. “She has such a myopic focus on race. You’re not helping the victims of crime by talking about how the system is racist.”

Riots for thee, but not for me, to coin a phrase. At Commentary this month, Michael Woronoff reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, and spots their passage on the joys of Democratic Party monopoly governance:

In a paragraph that could have been stolen from a Republican campaign consultant, the authors lament:

Liberals should be able to say: vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! California … has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.

Similarly, while Sandy the bartender has had national ambitions from the second she ran for Congress, she’s going to have a hard time pointing to benefits she’s brought to her little corner of the Bronx.

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Piers Morgan Asks Left-Wing Feminist To Define What A Woman Is. It Does Not Go Well.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? German chancellor vows to build Europe’s strongest army.

KAMIKAZE MEXICAN NAVY SHIP ATTACKS BROOKLYN BRIDGE! 23 injured after Mexican navy tall ship slams into Brooklyn Bridge in horrifying scene.

A massive Mexican navy tall ship making a festive visit to New York slammed into the Brooklyn Bridge late Saturday — toppling its huge masts into the deck in a horrifying scene that left 35 injured including four critically, according to fire officials and sources.

A search and rescue operation was underway to pull people out of the water after one of the towering 147-foot masts on the Cuauhtémoc — which has a crew of 277, mostly cadets — collided with the bridge’s road deck just before 9 p.m., sources told The Post.

Sources said 35 people were injured, including four critically — including crew who were seen plummeting into the water, sources and witnesses said.

“The boat was coming under the bridge, and there were sailors on top of the boat, the sails hit the bridge and then people were falling off of the boat sails,” witness Elijah West, a tourist from Texas said. “I believe they were trying to do like a little show. It’s the Mexican Navy. 
It was crazy, though, yeah. 
We were standing under the bridge and we all started running. Then I saw people hanging from the sails. Police boats came around fast – about five minutes later.”

It wasn’t clear why it crashed but sources said there may have been a power loss on the ship, which did not have it sail unfurled.

Naturally, this being New York in 2025, there are loads of video of the ship’s unprovoked attack on the Brooklyn Bridge:

How does this happen? pic.twitter.com/fuEkpoVjzK

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) May 18, 2025

Oops. https://t.co/mgNc5D1BfN

— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) May 18, 2025

No word yet on how President Trump will retaliate against this brutal sneak attack on American soil, but as Charles Foster Kane told his journalist, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”

https://t.co/zxOcsjizIY pic.twitter.com/TpQsyWXuGg

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) May 18, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Maclunkey!

MARK JUDGE: Jake Tapper Is Why We Can’t Quit Stephen Glass.

Recently in The Free Press, Joe Nocera noted that we are still living with Stephen Glass. “There’s no excusing what Glass did,” Nocera wrote. “As a young staff writer at The New Republic in the mid-1990s, Glass wrote some 42 stories that were either partly or wholly made up. When he was drummed out of the profession, I applauded. What’s hard to fathom is why, of all the journalistic fraudsters over the past decades, his is the story that just won’t go away. It’s been told in Vanity Fair, and in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. When The New Republic celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014, it sent Hanna Rosin, once a close friend, to interview Glass and retell the sordid tale. Just last year, Washingtonian magazine ran an “oral history” of the making of Shattered Glass.”

Nocera thinks this is too much: “Enough already.”

Sorry, as long as Jake Tapper won’t come clean and people like Jamie Hood tell tall tales that are published by places that know better, there’s plenty of room left in this Glass.

In the past, there were periodic scandals about a journalist who was caught fabricating or massively distorting news: Janet Cooke, Glass, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Brian Williams. But the past four years have exposed virtually the entire industry reporting on the Beltway as repeated — and quite shameless — fabulists.

JUST NBC THE MEMORY HOLE! “Audio of interview confirms Biden memory lapses,” NBC reported yesterday:

Newly released audio of a special counsel interviewing then-President joe Biden confirms memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time, including a president clearly struggling to remember the year his oldest son died.

Even after the transcript was released, Biden aides, including then-White House spokesman Ian Sams, insisted that the president did not forget the year that his son Beau died of brain cancer. The audio shows that Biden struggled to remember the year and had to be prompted by his lawyers, who were sitting in the interview with him.

The recording of the interview was first released by Axios.

Sams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur is likely to fuel a growing debate among Democrats and others about whether there was a concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity, as well as whether that contributed to the party’s 2024 defeat at the polls. It also comes as several new books offer insight into what many behind the scenes knew.

Speaking of that “concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity,” perhaps NBC might want to check in on some of its employees: ‘The best Biden ever.’

Joe Scarborough in March: “And F you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever… if it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.” pic.twitter.com/hdnx1IpZC2

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) July 5, 2024

And from NBC News on June 19th, 2024: Why deceptive Biden G7 video kept going viral.

The misleading videos were an example of so-called cheap fakes, in which low-tech editing or other minor changes to videos, along with incorrect context, can amplify false but convincing messages.

The episode illustrated the dynamics of the new information ecosystem, in which tech platforms are hesitant to emphasize vetted, factual information during an election year for fear of appearing partisan — even as partisan operatives take advantage of the platforms’ attempts at neutrality.

NBC, heal thy self.

DEVELOPING: Massive Car Explosion Rocks Downtown Palm Springs; CA Gov. Newsom, Med. Center React. “Firefighters are at the scene of an explosion at a building in Palm Springs Saturday morning. The explosion was first reported at around 11 a.m. at American Reproductive Centers on N Indian Canyon, near E Tachevah Drive, according to city officials.”

AN AUTOPSY REPORT ON BIDEN’S IN-OFFICE DECLINE: “Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.”

On July 2^nd 2020, AP “reported:” Biden did not use teleprompter to answer reporters’ questions.

A few months later, an official member of Team Biden did so as well: “Watch Joe Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo absolutely melt down when [Bret Baier] asks him if Biden has ever used a teleprompter for news interviews from his house. Ducklo explodes and, like he did throughout the interview, accuses him of being a Trump campaign shill.”

—Real Clear Politics, September 10^th, 2020.

More from the Atlantic:

The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:

Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.

The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.

“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”

A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.

The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)

So Biden’s comms team were using jump cuts and carefully selecting footage while Biden was on the campaign trail in 2020, a practice they would continue throughout his term in office: Biden mocked over number of jump cuts in Trump debate challenge video: ‘Like a Claymation film.’

OLD AND BUSTED: #FIGHTFOR15.

The New Hotness? L.A. Votes For $30 Wages At Hotels And LAX—$17 Next Door. The Fallout Has Already Started.

1. They may not hire the worker at all. Outlawing jobs below a certain pay doesn’t guarantee higher-paid work; it guarantees unemployment for those priced out. If a person’s skills or experience don’t merit $30 in the market, this law has made it illegal for them to earn a wage at all.Consider an immigrant with limited English who might start in hotel housekeeping, dishwashing, or entry-level service jobs. At $15 – $20 an hour, an employer might take a chance and hire them, training them on the job. At $30 an hour, that same employer will likely demand a more experienced, highly productive worker for the role (if the role isn’t eliminated altogether). The rung at the bottom of the ladder gets sawed off.

2. Employers substitute and automate. When labor gets costlier, it drives businesses to find ways to get by with less labor. That can mean investing in machines or tech or shifting work onto customers or remaining staff. Many chains curtailed daily housekeeping and never restored it fully (often spinning it as “green choice” to save water, while conveniently saving on payroll).Expect more automation at the airport and hotels: kiosks instead clerks, mobile ordering in airport eateries, robotic floor cleaners. Even trash collection can be automated; Pittsburgh deployed robotic vacuum sweepers. When labor costs skyrocket, technology that replaces that labor suddenly looks a lot more attractive.

* * * * * * * *

In effect, L.A. could make itself even more expensive, driving away the very tourism dollars it’s trying to redistribute.

Speaking of which: California sees drop in international tourism, report shows.

A newly released report shows that California has experienced a significant drop in international tourism.

Visit California, a nonprofit that promotes tourism to the Golden State, said international tourist visits from Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and Australia, among other countries, are down 15% to 26% this year.

In March, international tourism dropped 11% compared to the same month the previous year.

For four decades, Kervan Samuel has been a street musician at Fisherman’s Wharf.

“I’m seeing less, I’m seeing fewer tourists. You’re not seeing the real spending type of tourists that we had a couple months ago,” Samuel said.

Considering that for the last 15 years, leftists have been obsessed with “binge flying,” isn’t that for the best?

AND MOST WILL FAIL IT VERY BADLY: The story of Biden’s mental decline poses an early test for Democrats’ 2028 presidential hopefuls.

UPDATE:

For four years, we did not have a President and the entire media covered it up.

It pales in comparison to any political scandal in the history of our country. https://t.co/ShLWgd2XZK

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 16, 2025

HIDE THE DECLINE: On Wednesday, America’s Newspaper of Record reported:

But in an afford to begin prepping for 2028, new talking points have been issued: Watch: Democrats Who Praised Joe Biden’s Mental ‘Sharpness’ Don’t Want to ‘Rehash the Past.’

It’s all about 2028 now, so of course, once the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book tour is concluded, the media wing of the Democratic Party will be tossing 2021-2024 right down the memory hole. Or to mix science fiction metaphors:

KATIE COURIC CLAIMS PEOPLE ALLEGE MEDIA BIAS BECAUSE THEY HATE FACTS:

Couric, whose own podcast was nominated for a Webby Award, proceeded to intentionally prove how ridiculous such an assertion is, “And of course, I think there’s no such thing as true objectivity, but having said that, you know, I really struggle with that. And many people say, “Listen, the rules have changed. It’s okay to say you support trans people. It’s okay that you say I am 100 percent for reproductive rights,” you know, all these things that honestly as—personally I hold dear, but professionally I’ve never really—I’ve been trained to not share that.”

Fortunately for the rest of us, despite all of that rigorous training at the Top Gun School for Ace Broadcasters, Katie has shared quite a bit about what she “personally holds dear” over the last decade and a half:

• Katie Couric: Obama Owes Me a ‘Big-Ass Bouquet’ for 2008 Palin Attack Interview.
• Katie Couric: Ruth Bader Ginsburg disparaged activists who kneel during the anthem — and I cut the quotes from our interview.
• Katie Couric Uses Christmas Poem To Campaign For ObamaCare.
• Katie Couric & Gun Rights: A Study in Dishonesty.
• Katie Couric Sued for $12 Million For Defamation In Anti-Gun Documentary.
• Katie Couric “did more faking in that one hour documentary than I did my entire first marriage…”
• Katie Couric’s Career of Attacking Gun Rights.
• Katie Couric Defends Matt Lauer: ‘A Lot of NBC Execs’ Have Secret Buttons in Their Offices.
• Katie Couric Trashes ‘Insane’ Trump Era, Then Pleads For ‘Civil Discourse.’
• Katie Couric Out at Yahoo News: Couric’s tenure marred by criticism over deceptive editing.
• Memo to CBS and Katie Couric: Release the unedited Palin video.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Seashells by the Seashore Edition.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Newly Released Biden-Hur Audio Captures Former President’s Stumbles from Special Counsel Interview.

Newly released audio from then-President Joe Biden’s lengthy interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur captures Biden’s diminished mental acuity in his failure to recall the year his son Beau passed away, the year his vice presidency ended, the year President Donald Trump was first elected, and why he possessed certain classified documents.

Biden’s long pauses and incoherent ramblings in response to light questioning from Hur are apparent in over four minutes of audio first reported by Axios on Friday night. The partial release fulfills expectations that the Trump administration would finally disclose the long-anticipated interview tape after Biden’s administration obstructed its disclosure at every turn.

Mistakenly, Biden said in the interview that his son Beau died in 2017 and had to be reminded that he passed away in 2015. Biden also said Trump was first elected in 2017 and had to be corrected that Trump won the presidency in 2016.

“OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed and — this is personal — the genesis of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a — I know you’re all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left,” Biden said at one point in the interview audio, with lengthy pauses peppered throughout.

Biden also can be heard stumbling over his words and whispering throughout the audio, two aspects of the interview the transcripts fail to fully capture. Biden struggled to explain why he possessed classified documents, and he veered into rambling, storytelling territory about his decision not to run for president in 2016. Hur interviewed Biden over the course of two three-hour-long sessions on October 8 and 9, 2023.

Every journalist in DC knew Biden was mentally gone by the beginning of 2024, but nobody wanted to be the first to say it. Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

UPDATE:

Now that the Hur interview is being released, let's flashback to Kamala's comments on the subject.pic.twitter.com/fsYzyF9avS

— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 17, 2025

More:

The scandal is MUCH worse than the Biden WH not releasing the tape. The so-called “independent” Merrick Garland crooked Justice Dept was SUBPOENAED by Congress to release it, he defied that subpoena after jailing Steve Bannon for defying one, then DOJ refused to jail Garland. https://t.co/TLzzdrosZf

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 16, 2025

OPEN THREAD: AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be some great open threads.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Worrying: America Is Just As Unprepared Now For A Giant Monkey Climbing Skyscrapers As We Were In 1933 https://t.co/g6iq1WZY7z pic.twitter.com/vXOFqRC31Z

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 16, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Real Reason Yale Professors Are Leaving Trump’s America.

“We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.,” a Wednesday New York Times headline read.

* * * * * * * * *

At the heart of the issue is a redefinition of the word “fascism” in such a way as to make it sound like it means the same thing as “patriotism.” These Yale professors — and a good many people who think like them — find the American assertion that this country, with its quasi-sacred founding and its insistence on the rights of man given him by God, is an exceptional one a troubling concept. They seem to equate “Make America Great Again” with Adolf Hitler’s “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”

But to do so ignores the very close association between fascism and racism, specifically antisemitism. Hitler, as you will remember, was virulently opposed to any race other than his Aryan one. He imagined a world in which blue-eyed, blond-haired giants ruled the earth, and Jews, Roma, and his detractors no longer existed. It’s this connection with racism that Snyder, at least, hasn’t quite fit into the picture.

In a recent piece with the Free Press, Peter Savodnik noted that Snyder’s depiction of Yale as a cloister of free speech and acceptance simply defies the reality that has unfolded at Yale after October 7, where pro-Hamas demonstrators antagonized Jewish students and even poked one woman in the face with a Palestinian flag. As a progressive, Snyder, according to one of his colleagues at Yale, may find it hard or even impossible to “imagine that those on the left could hate Jews.”

To the historian, Trump’s decision to investigate antisemitism on campus is merely an excuse to bully universities. “Nobody ever goes after universities in order to help Jews,” he told Savodnik.

The result is that fascism has become a cheapened term that, at least in popular progressive parlance, has become confused with patriotism. The love of one’s country is a duty, Cicero affirms. That’s not to say that the country should become a god in the popular imagination, but that we should be proud of it, work for its benefit, and wish it well.

Flashback: The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection.

UPDATE: NYT’s ‘Fascism’ Narrative Is So Tiresome It Has Become Self-Parody.

One day apart.

You really can’t even parody this. pic.twitter.com/UTqrNevHLl

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 15, 2025

As George Orwell famously wrote, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”