Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
May 7, 2025
May 6, 2025
DAVE PORTNOY GETS MIXED REVIEWS FOR HANDLING OF ANTISEMITIC INCIDENT IN HIS BAR:
In the tweet below, the writer says:
“It is an irrational use of time and resources to try to re-educate antisemites when we are outnumbered and they’re trying to push us off a cliff. It is time to push back. It is time to hurt – not heal the antisemite. I don’t need antisemites to like me. But if they step out of line I want them to face consequences. They – and others – need to know that we slap back. They don’t need to learn what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. They need to learn what happened to the Nazis.”
* * * * * * * *
Related: Why Holocaust Education Isn’t Enough to Combat Antisemitism Today.
UPDATE: Jonathan S. Tobin: Send Barstool Jew-haters to Israel, not Auschwitz.
YOU WILL NEVER FIND A MORE WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLAINY: Kamala chooses the Met Gala over the presidency.
The caption on the photo tweeted from the Democrats account may have read, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala,” but that is not how most Americans will view it.
Wearing a designer dress to an event where tickets cost $75,000 and laughing it up with the cream of the liberal celebrity and fashion elite, will not go down well in the rust belt.
As candidate Kamala was never confident in herself. The same Kamala was visible last night. Not confident enough to turn down the glittering invitation and not confident enough to embrace it wholeheartedly and strut up the red carpet.
This year’s theme was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” Black dandyism, we’re told, was a way for subjugated African Americans to challenge preconceptions and subvert the slave-master relationship.
But the whole affair felt lifeless and dull. One wag branded the event “the Meh Ball.”
The highlight was a red stain on Anna Wintour’s dress. Was it blood? Whose? Had she stabbed someone with a high heel? Perhaps for talking about politics?
This one is easy. The September issue is a shadow of its former self. Ad revenues are down at Vogue; clearly Wintour, now on her uppers, bought a dress deeply discounted because of a single, near-invisible stain:
Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg, apparently miffed that she didn’t make the cut in yesterday’s New Yorker photo spread of wealthy Manhattanites in their apartments, decided that if they weren’t going to photograph her as a Bond supervillain, she’d dress up as a Batman supervillain instead — specifically, the Penguin:
Then there were the afterparties, where the Weimar Republic called, and said the attendees might want to dial the decadence back: Met Gala 2025 afterparties: Here’s where Rihanna, Heidi Klum, Spike Lee, Janelle Monáe and more kept the night moving.
Much more from Ace who writes: Panem Forever: The Themes of This Year’s Met Gala Were BLM Race Agitation and Cooter.
The Met Gala looks like a scene from The Hunger Games.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 6, 2025
UPDATE: Beautiful Clothes Hide Ugly Souls at the Met Gala: “Last night, in a bit of karmic revenge, a stain appeared on Anna Wintour’s dress. The dress, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, surely said something about the soul to whom it belonged. Tina Fey, who attended many years ago, summed up the event best by describing the Met Gala as a ‘jerk parade.’ Anna Wintour is the grand marshal.”
@letterman
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: CA gas could hit $8.44 per gallon in 2026 due to refinery closures, regulations.
The new study from University of Southern California professor Michael A. Mische examined California’s historical gas prices, oil supply and refining capacity, and modeled the likely impact of refinery closures and costly new fossil fuel and refinery fees and regulations.
“The shutdown of the two California-based refineries could possibly place the Golden State in a precarious economic situation and create a gasoline deficit potentially ranging from 6.6 million to 13.1 million gallons a day, as defined by the shortfall between consumption and production,” wrote Mische. “Reductions in fuel supplies of this magnitude will resonate throughout multiple supply chains affecting production, costs, and prices across many industries such as air travel, food delivery, agricultural production, manufacturing, electrical power generation, distribution, groceries and healthcare.”
“Based on current demand and consumption assumptions and estimates, the combined consequences of the 2025 Phillips 66 refinery closure and the April 2026 Valero refinery closure, together with the potential impact of legislative actions such as, but not limited to, the new LCFS standard, increase in excise taxes, Cap and Trade, SBX1-2, and ABX2-1, the estimated average consumer price of regular gasoline could potentially increase by as much as 75% from the April 23, 2025, price of $4.816 to $7.348 to $8.435 a gallon by calendar year end 2026,” continued Mische.
Mische said the high delta between California gas prices and that of other states is the result of state taxes and fees, and policies that have reduced in-state oil production and refining capacity faster than gasoline demand has fallen.
From Sacramento’s perspective, that’s all good news from the state that wants to put its drivers on a “road diet” and ban gas stations, dominated by a party which spent three recent terms implementing the mindset of, “Under my plan, [energy costs] will necessarily skyrocket.”
UMMM…: Michelle Obama Goes Into Therapy, Is ‘Transitioning’ To Next Phase of Her Life.
Let’s just get this out of the way, because I know it’s coming in the comments: no, I don’t believe Michelle Obama is a man who transitioned. I’ve seen the photos, the claims, the so-called “evidence” — and I’ve never bought into any of it. Not once. That said, these rumors have been swirling for years, and you’d have to be willfully ignorant to think she’s not aware of them.
So when she recently said she’s “transitioning” into a new phase of life — come on, really? Of all the words to use, that’s the one she picks? This is the same woman who’s been dogged by the “no photos of her pregnant” crowd, the infamous “Mike” gaffe by Barack, and the persistent rumors about his sexuality. Whether she meant it or not, dropping the word “transition” into the conversation was bound to light that fire again.
On a more serious note: The Obamas Aren’t Going to Rescue the Democrats.
We aren’t just in the post-Obama era; we’re the in the post-post-Obama era. Barack and Michelle are now mostly celebrities, subject to divorce speculation as intense as for any Hollywood couple. No one in the Democratic Party seriously thinks a retired president can lead them out of the wilderness; when Obama salutes Harvard for standing up to Trump, it barely creates a ripple in the news cycle. When the former president marked the anniversary of signing Obamacare into law earlier this year, he acknowledged, “I know it can feel like a different era sometimes.”
Perhaps when your time has passed, and you see your party and your country moving in an extremely different direction than the one you wanted, it leaves you pessimistic and focused on the negative of everything — including living in the White House for eight years.
Regarding the latter, exit quote: “As Meghan McCain quipped, ‘It would be cool if Michelle Obama had literally anything positive to say about anything.’”
‘DEBT DOESN’T GO AWAY:’ Trump Admin Restarts Student Loan Payments.
The Trump administration has resumed collecting defaulted student loan payments for the first time since 2020, while federal data show that just a third of borrowers have returned to regularly paying back their loans.
Beginning May 5, the Department of Education will start collecting unpaid debt from around 5 million borrowers by withholding payments in tax refunds, wages, and Social Security benefits. The agency first announced the recollection process in an April 21 press release, warning that student debt has grown to more than $1.6 trillion in the past five years.
Only a third of the 43 million borrowers have made regular repayments on their loans since March 2020, NBC News reported based on Education Department data.
“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the press release.
Much more like this, please.
#HIMTOO? Smokey Robinson accused by former housekeepers of sexual assault and rape.
Four former housekeepers of Smokey Robinson allege in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the Motown music luminary repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped them while they worked for him.
The suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court seeks at least $50 million in damages over the alleged assaults, which the women say took place between 2007 and 2024, and labor violations including a hostile work environment, illegally long hours and lack of pay.
A message seeking comment from a representative for the 85-year-old Robinson was not immediately answered.
The four women each say that Robinson would wait until he was alone with them in his Los Angeles house then sexually assault and rape them over their objections.
“We believe that Mr. Robinson is a serial and sick rapist, and must be stopped,” the women’s attorney John Harris said at a news conference.
All said they eventually quit over the assaults, though in some cases it took several years. And all said they feared coming forward over fears of retaliation, public shame and possible effects on their immigration status.
Really? Even at the peak of the #MeToo era during Trump’s first term? (Before it was jettisoned in 2020 to clear the decks for Bad Touch Biden.)
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Harvard hostility makes it clear – it’s been Corbynised.
Forget micro-aggressions. In the wake of 10/7, Harvard University’s multiple schools have subjected Jews and Israelis to ongoing macro-aggressions.
The festering hostility is clear, even amidst significant “context” in the university’s 311-page antisemitism report. In between helpfully presenting university-wide statistics and first-person anecdotes, the authors underplay the university’s self-sabotage.
The framing is decidedly left-wing and Harvard protective. Anti-Israel students are “pro-Palestinian.” Their encampment is called “generally . . . clean and orderly.” Authors adopt no official antisemitism definition and embrace being paired with an Islamophobia task force. They detail problems at only four of Harvard’s 12 graduate and professional schools, concentrating “on patterns of experiences” and possibly omitting individual horror stories.
Backstory matters here. This report wouldn’t exist if Harvard had summarily implemented the private recommendations of President Claudine Gay’s respected Antisemitism Advisory Group. President Alan Garber hand-picked the Antisemitism Task Force’s co-chair, whom former President Larry Summers tweeted “has publicly minimised Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the [IHRA] definition . . . of anti-Semitism . . . invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analysing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state and more.” And this is a public relations document. It opens by insisting on internally-driven reform and closes without recommending Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion’s elimination.
Related: Trump tells Harvard: No more money without antisemitism crackdown.
MAHA: How Eating Healthy Became Right-Wing. At the Corner, Jack Butler writes that in the Obama era, “‘preoccupation with health’ was mostly understood as left-wing:”
That began to change for many reasons. Probably the two biggest are “the rise of intersectionality on the left, a framework of victimology into which the overweight fit nicely” (with the approval and sometimes the promotion of food and beverage companies); and the overwhelmingly right-wing opposition to the Covid-19 response regime. The latter, especially, inspired a skepticism of the public health apparatus and certain of its pronouncements regarded as consensus, including on such matters as dietary fat, carbohydrates, and seed oils. That begins to explain how the partisan valence of healthy food has changed since 2008.
At some point, thanks in part to intersectionality, everything became right-wing: How Did Having Babies Become Right-Wing?
—Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press, April 26th.
Isn’t everything these days?
According to the Grauniad, fitness is definitely right-wing:
Flashback: ” Increasingly, every male interest, from going to the gym, apparently a fascist recruiting ground, to playing video games is decried as right-wing by the left. If you tell young men that everything they like is right wing, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start to believe you.”
And as a result, last year after the presidential election, we immediately entered into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Van Jones was a voice of sanity:
“If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side. If you're chasing people out of the party, you can't be mad when they leave.”
— Van Jones
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) November 7, 2024
ED MORRISSEY: Could ‘President’ Boasberg Pick His Own US Attorney for DC?
Donald Trump — who last I checked was the duly elected president of the United States — nominated Ed Martin to serve as US Attorney for Washington DC, and also has him serving as interim US Attorney. With only a simple majority needed for confirmation, there should have been no problem getting Martin in place before the May 20 expiration of his interim appointment. However, Martin apparently got sloppy with his disclosures, and some Senate Republicans are now balking:
As CNN previously reported, Martin failed to disclose nearly 200 media appearances in his initial disclosures last month, and claimed under oath he did not recall some of his most controversial past statements in response to a series of questions put to him by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Apparently, the big worry is around Sen. Thom Tillis, and not for the first time this year, although he may not be the only worry:
North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN last week he has “serious questions” about Martin, given his previous comments denigrating police officers who defended the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021, attack.
“I don’t talk about that stuff,” Tillis said when asked if the president had reached out to him.
GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who also serve on the panel, have also privately expressed concerns about supporting Martin, a source familiar with the process told CNN. Cornyn told CNN on Monday that Trump had not reached out to him, and he declined to say how he would vote on the nomination.
Normally, we could chalk this up by saying nominate in haste, repent at leisure. Trump simply needs to go back to the drawing board and find a new nominee. However, this situation has a complication, thanks to the decision to have Martin serve as interim US Attorney. If that position is not filled within 120 days by a Senate-confirmed appointment, the chief judge of the circuit can appoint an interim US Attorney to serve until that confirmation takes place.
And guess who is the current chief judge of the DC Circuit?
Old and busted: 867-5309. The new hotness:
YIKES! New Yorker Photo of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin Sure Sends a Message (Not the One They Wanted).
Wait, are we sure Alex and Huma weren’t deliberately going for looking like Bond villains in their SPECTRE-built lair? It looks a bit like Alex is getting bored with the photographer and reaching for the button to activate the trap door above the piranha pit that’s just out of shot:
2025: A LUDDITE ODYSSEY. Leonard Nimoy The BBC Goes In Search Of “The people refusing to use AI:”
[Sabine] Zetteler runs her own London-based communications agency, with around 10 staff, some full-time some part-time.
“What’s the point of sending something we didn’t write, reading a newspaper written by bots, listening to a song created by AI, or me making a bit more money by sacking my administrator who has four kids?
“Where’s the joy, love or aspirational betterment even just for me as a founder in that? It means nothing to me,” she says.
Ms Zetteler is among those resisting the AI invasion, which really got going with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022.
Since then the service, and its many rivals have become wildly popular. ChatGPT is racking up over five billion visits a month, according to software firm Semrush.
But training AI systems like ChatGPT requires huge amounts of energy and, once trained, keeping them running is also energy intensive.
While it’s difficult to quantify the electricity used by AI, a report by Goldman Sachs estimated that a ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.
Which, prior to the debut of AI in late 2022, similarly gave the BBC the heebie-jeebies: Why your internet habits are not as clean* as you think.
A decade ago, each internet search had a footprint of 0.2g CO2e, according to figures released by Google. Today, Google uses a mixture of renewable energy and carbon offsetting to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations, while Microsoft, which owns the Bing search engine, has promised to become carbon negative by 2030, and efforts are underway to investigate whether this footprint is now higher or lower.
According to Google’s own figures, however, an average user of its services – someone who performs 25 searches each day, watches 60 minutes of YouTube, has a Gmail account and accesses some of its other services – produces less than 8g (0.28oz) CO2e a day.
Newer search engines, however, are attempting to set themselves apart as greener options from the outset. Ecosia, for example, says it will plant a tree for every 45 searches it performs. This sort of carbon offsetting can help to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but the success of these projects often depends on how long the trees grow for and what happens to them when they are chopped down.
Regardless of the search engine you choose, using the web to find information is more sustainable than browsing in books. In fact, a paperback’s carbon footprint is around 1kg (2.2lbs) CO2e, while a weekend newspaper accounts for between 0.3kg (10oz) and 4.1kg (9lbs) CO2e making reading the news online more environmentally friendly than poring over a paper.
But you could still read a lifetime of paperbacks – 2,300 to be precise – for the same carbon footprint as a flight from London to Hong Kong, so don’t feel too guilty for reading the next best seller. (Read more about how to reduce the impact your flights have on the environment.)
Or not – it’s eco-guilt all the way down with the British left. And it all ends in a very, very bad way:
This is vandalism – pure eco vandalism.
Farmers lives are being destroyed for this junk. Future land fill. Imported. Plastic wrapped.
This needs to be stopped. And fast pic.twitter.com/zphU16r4zO
— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) May 1, 2025
* I’m not sure that’s a headline I’d want to run if I worked at the Beeb…
FBI ‘MISLED THE PUBLIC’ IN CLAIMING 2017 GOP BASEBALL SHOOTING WASN’T DOMESTIC TERROR: HOUSE INTEL.
The FBI “misled the public” for years in claiming a sniper’s attempt to kill Republican congressmen at a June 2017 baseball practice was “suicide by cop”, when it was in fact domestic terrorism, according to a new congressional report released Tuesday.
The 27-page House Intelligence Committee report concludes “the FBI’s bottom line – ‘the FBI does not believe there is a nexus to terrorism’ – was based upon falsehoods, half-truths, and manipulations of the known facts.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced in April that he had handed over to Congress long-sought bureau records related to the shooting at a ball field in northern Virginia.
The GOP-led Intelligence panel said in the report Tuesday that Patel’s cooperation is “a welcome change from previous FBI leadership, who thwarted Congressional oversight and public accountability at every turn, however, after reviewing the case file, the Committee could not be more disappointed by the FBI’s incomplete investigation and substandard analysis in 2017.”
James Hodgkinson, a left-wing activist from Illinois, shot four people in the June 14, 2017, attack, including Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise. He reportedly asked GOP congressmen who had left the practice early, and before the attack, whether the players were Republicans or Democrats. He died a day after a 10-minute shootout with police. The members of Congress were practicing for an annual charity game.
The FBI concluded the attack was “suicide by cop” instead of domestic terrorism — a position the bureau did not reverse until 2021, and a position the FBI has never fully explained.
Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
Might that be for this reason, noted by The Conversation at the bottom?
In Vucci’s photograph, we are given the illusion that this photograph captures “the moment” or “a shot”. Yet it doesn’t capture the moment of the shooting, but its immediate aftermath. The photograph captures Trump’s media acuity and swift, responsive performance to the attempted assassination, standing to rise with his fist in the air.
In a post-truth world, there has been a pervasive concern about knowing the truth. While that extends beyond photographic representation, photography and visual representation play a considerable part.
It made Trump look like the hero we know him to be, the decisive, swift-acting, self-sacrificing leader that voters had been looking for. The picture turned up on tshirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it. Of course he won the election.
Some must have blamed this photo for it. But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding. What’s more Vucci was hardly buddies with Trump. In March, he testified against the White House exclusion of AP from the photo press pool over the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ being renamed the ‘Gulf of America.’
Given Vucci’s photos, it seems kind of counterintuitive for the White House to exclude Vucci over a dispute like that, but the Pulitzer board didn’t notice.
But not entirely unexpected:
Or to put it another way:
COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.
The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.
This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.
It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest. But Ferguson’s figures, his graphs and models, his worst-case scenarios, were the godly pronouncements upon which this historic disruption of society was based. And Ferguson fully backed the lockdown that sprung from his work.
As the BBC reported the same day, Ferguson “quit as a government adviser on coronavirus after admitting an ‘error of judgement’.”
Mistakes were made! But the biggest was made by the man who hired him: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
Well, to be fair, Airstrip One become an even bigger police state — and most of the authorities there needed little prompting to scale up their efforts.
May 5, 2025
THE GALACTIC EMPIRE: FIRM, BUT FAIR*. Andor v. Star Trek: How Star Wars gets government right. New video from Reason TV:
* QED: As Sonny Bunch noted in the Washington Post in 2015: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.
HEY, REMEMBER IN THE FALL OF 2024, WHEN THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN SOUGHT TO REHABILITATE THE REPUTATIONS OF DICK CHENEY AND GEORGE W. BUSH? Dr. Jill says, hold my zinfandel!
The left absolutely vilified Mike Milken in the 1980s — he was pardoned by Trump in February of 2020 — now Jill is going to work for him; that’s just perfect. More details at the Daily Caller, in an article headlined: Former First Lady Jill Biden Finds A New Gig In The Swamp.
PROGRESSIVISM, WHERE TIME STANDS STILL: Benjamin Kerstein: We have met the pigs… In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.
Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left. That is, it is the New Left in its decadent and hopefully final form as an institutionalized totalitarian movement. It has now collapsed into the antisemitism that appears to be the endgame of almost all totalitarian movements. It has decimated its enemies within the institutions it controls and, as a result, has found a new and ultimate enemy. It has finally arrived where it was always going: the Elders of Zion.
Like all things, this is illustrated by the fact that none of this is new. Even a brief examination of an unbiased historical account of the late 1960s proves as much.
II.
One of the best of these histories is Theodore H. White’s extraordinary The Making of the President 1968, which chronicles the tumultuous presidential election that witnessed the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the devastating Chicago New Left riots that shattered the Democratic party and the New Deal consensus, and ultimately, Richard Nixon’s victory.
White’s book is of immense value for two reasons: First, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for pithy insight and revelatory aphorism. Second, he wrote before the professoriate regime conquered and colonized academia and American intellectual life. As a result, he did not attempt to rewrite history in the New Left’s favor.
The professoriate regime that now controls the writing of that history has long since whitewashed and falsified the history of the New Left. However, it has yet to completely burn all the books that bear witness to what really happened. Consequently, White remains to tell us something like the truth.
In doing so, White provides conclusive proof that none of this is new. The monstrous crimes we witness on US campuses today were occurring decades ago, and the ideology that “justifies” them already existed in full. It was partially institutionalized at that time and is now completely institutionalized, yet it remains unchanged.
A single passage in White’s book provides conclusive proof of this. It details the rhetorical strategies and underlying ideology of the 1960s New Left students’ movement, which had already laid out and made public its stunningly successful plan to conquer and colonize the universities. Not all members of the student movement were totalitarians, but the totalitarians eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for leadership, with devastating consequences.
White is ruthless in his deconstruction of the movement. He does so in a lengthy excerpt that cannot be truncated without damaging its insights. I reproduce it in full below:
I don’t want to quote the whole passage by White for Fair Use reasons, but note this:
In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree. To steal, seize or destroy offices or files becomes to liberate. The old Marxist adverbial phrase objectively speaking becomes, in the new rhetoric, a transitional phrase to any statement that cannot be factually proven; when a speaker begins a paragraph with objectively speaking, it means that any construct of the imagination he thinks should be true is indeed so. The word non-violence is turned inside out. If what can be won by the massing of bodies, the occupation of buildings, shoving, and the use of brawn is yielded immediately, it proves the validity of non-violence. (Stone-and-bottle-throwing can be classed, in this vocabulary, as non-violent.) If the non-violent aggressors are resisted, then those who resist are styled violent and brutal. Eric Sevareid [a prominent television news reporter] was recently reminded, in one of his broadcasts, of his European experience: “They [the student activists] have the same approach, ” he said, “as the early Nazis and early Communists. ‘We are right,’ they say, ‘we are progress. If you resist us, or defend yourself, you are the instigators of violence.’ ”
If this infamous Orwellian moment from CNN in August of 2020 took you by surprise, it shouldn’t have; it was totally predicted by the worldview of the ’60s New Left, which as Kerstein writes, has burrowed deeply into 21st century academia:
At American Greatness, Roger Kimball explores: The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way.
As Kerstein writes at the first link, it lost its way a long time ago indeed.
TYLER O’NEIL: How Many Biden Appointees ‘Burrowed in’ to the Permanent Bureaucracy?
Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions.
While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions.
“The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.
“Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement.
“What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders.
Read the whole thing.
WATCH: David Portnoy livid over bait-and-switch local ABC News interview. Language alert:
So @6abc begged me to do an interview about the incident at our bar. Since it was local I agreed. Then the reporter tried to say Barstool and I and white men were responsible for the incident. Austin started recording once it got contentious pic.twitter.com/ug8CX83HHp
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 5, 2025
Dave has definitely taken Glenn’s “Bring your own camera” advice to heart: “My terms were let me record interview so you can’t cut and edit. Same thing I offered to let Business Insider do. Weird how nobody but me will accept these terms.”
And if you missed it yesterday: Portnoy announces fitting punishment for bigots who launched vile anti-semitic attack on his Philly bar.
JULIE BURCHILL: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.
Reading a Guardian report on the new pro-trans ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt campaign, I reflected that there’s no tell like a self-tell.
When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?
Even the tiny minority of autogynephiles who have had themselves turned inside out by surgeons who would give Dr Frankenstein a run for his money can never truly be refashioned as women. They can, at best, become an imitation of one.
So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.
There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.
Why is yet another Disney actor with a zillion dollar movie scheduled for release in a couple of months issuing politicized statements that will alienate potential moviegoers? Flashback to two weeks ago: Another Day, Another Disney Celebrity Tanking Their Franchise:
THIS IS CNN: Wow — CNN Officially Crosses A Line In Their Trump Hate With Disturbing Interview of Drug Cartel (Watch).
Well, well, well, there it is. Just when we think the fake news, lamestream media can’t get any lower, they once again prove us wrong. Ok, to be fair, we expect this sort of garbage from MSNBC because after all, they kept Joy Reid around for years even after they knew she was a racist, hateful bigot. And while we know CNN is pretty bad, we’ve always sort of seen them as a bit saner than MSNBC, which of course, isn’t saying much.
But this? CNN just gave MSNBC a run for their ‘hot mess of putrid media’ money.
Imagine hating Trump so much you feel sorry for the drug cartels being called ‘terrorists’.
Watch this:
Remember when angel mom Patty Morin emotionally described to the White House press how an illegal immigrant brutally raped and murdered her daughter?
CNN cut away from Patty to air segments about Gavin Newsom and the NBA. https://t.co/pzAsOG0qZa
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 5, 2025
Flashback: ‘Shameful:’ White House Blasts CNN, MSNBC For Refusing to Air Angel Mom’s Speech.
In April, White House aide Stephen Miller tweeted, “CNN’s and MSNBC’s contempt for the victims of migrant crime is reprehensible.” CNN is really leaning into the brand, apparently.
RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Life at the top, and the bottom of New York. The New Yorker has a photo spread of “Power Houses: Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers,” including Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, AOC, Al Sharpton, and “Ella Emhoff, textile designer,” in their wealthy digs, all very far removed from (but approving of): Tren de Aragua Tykes Rain Mayhem Down on Times Square, Mock NYPD.
Just to be on the safe side: Kamala Harris takes 25 taxpayer-funded bodyguards to the Polo Bar after trashing Trump over economy.
Republican NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Silwa said it was ‘an outrage’ the incumbent Eric Adams gave Harris a police escort.
‘Secret Service is fine; NYPD, no. NYPD needs to protect the people, we don’t have enough of them,’ he told DailyMail.com.
‘She’s going to a bar to enjoy herself, and she’s got like an army of security paid for by us, not her.
‘We should get a rebate from her so we can actually use these cops to protect citizens on the subways and streets.’
Tom Wolfe may have passed away in 2018, but the version of the Matrix he programmed is still working absolutely fine:
(Classical reference in headline.)