A PINCH OF PROJECTION BY THE GRAY LADY:

How odd that the New York Times, which arbitrarily decided in 2019 that America’s real founding was 1619, not 1776, and got a number of schools to sign on that notion, is angry about Trump arbitrarily renaming the Gulf of … Oh wait, I don’t want to deadname something that has fully transitioned to its new aquatic identity:

In February when Don Surber wrote “Mocking Woke Speech: The real reason is it is the Gulf of America is the name bugs the right people,”

Glenn responded that “Changing names and words and demanding that people go along with the change has been the left’s game for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s always a power move disguised as courtesy.”

SURE, WHY NOT? Trump says he will reopen Alcatraz prison.

President Donald Trump says he is directing his government to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on a hard-to-reach California island that has been closed for more than 60 years.

In a post on his Truth Social site Sunday evening, Trump wrote that, “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” he wrote, adding: “The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

And a jail that criminals will really not want to escape from!

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: How it started:

At @barstoolsports event in Philadelphia, a sign read “Fuck the Jews.”

If there was this level of overwhelming and overt bigotry towards any other group, it would receive nonstop attention, but with Jews, it’s completely ignored. pic.twitter.com/EqlnU5dwsV

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) May 4, 2025

How it’s going: Dave Portnoy vows to ‘come for throats’ over vile antisemitic act at his Philadelphia Barstool bar.

In a heated rant posted to his account on X, Barstool Sports founder and president Dave Portnoy called out patrons at one of his company’s branded bars for an anti-Semitic sign that was held up in Philadelphia.

An enraged Portnoy posted an ‘Emergency Press Conference’ video on Sunday after being informed that a light-up sign at the Barstool bar that said ‘F*** the Jews’ was spotted by his fans.

The Massachusetts native says he has been tracking down those responsible and promised to ‘come for throats’ over the despicable display.

Portnoy said he was getting ready to attend an event over the weekend when his phone started ‘blowing up’ over the sign spotted at the Barstool Sansom Street located in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood.

‘Usually a great bar. You know, bottle service, people buy drinks, you get a sign. There was a sign yesterday that said, “F*** the Jews”,’ Portnoy said.

‘I’ve been shaking. I’ve been so mad for the last two hours. Like I instantly got on, this is why the Emergency Press Conference is late, because I was so over the top.’

Language alert:

How refreshing to see someone care and not just roll over. https://t.co/v9DU1z7OY6

— Melissa Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) May 4, 2025

UPDATE: Portnoy announces fitting punishment for bigots who launched vile anti-semitic attack on his Philly bar. “It’s cliché and very unlike me, but I talked to both the culprits who I know are super involved in it, talked to the families. I’m sending these kids to Auschwitz. They’ve agreed to go. That’s, of course, the Holocaust concentration camps. Been in touch with [New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — who runs the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism]. We’re going to send these kids to Auschwitz, and they’re going to do a tour of the concentration camps in Germany [sic] and hopefully learn something and maybe their lives aren’t ruined and they think twice.”

FREDDIE DEBOER: The Indoor Plumbing Test. What can AI enable you to do that you couldn’t already do by other means?

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine – cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.

That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!

In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis explored the massive economic boost the benefits of the Industrial Revolution brought in the first half of the 20^th century:

In late October 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in New York City for several days, deluged the subway system and most of the road tunnels leading into Manhattan, and disrupted voice and data communication as flooding damaged a key switching facility in lower Manhattan. For a brief stretch, the financial capital of the world wasn’t New York City, as the New York Stock Exchange had to close for two consecutive days. As Robert Gordon writes in The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

Sandy pushed many of its victims back to the nineteenth century. Residents of New York City below Thirty-Fourth Street learned what it was like to lose the elevators that routinely had carried them to and from their apartments.… Anyone who had no power also lost such modern inventions as electric lighting, air-conditioning and fans to ventilate dwelling spaces, and refrigerators and freezers to keep food from spoiling. Many residents had no heat, no hot food, and even no running water. Those living in New Jersey were often unable to find gasoline needed for commuting because gas station pumps could not function without electricity. Moreover, communication was shut off after batteries were drained on laptops and mobile phones.

For a brief time, New Yorkers didn’t have access to the great inventions that made what Gordon has termed the special century of rapid economic and productivity growth from the 1870s to early 1970s. Three of the most important emerged within three months in 1879: the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and radio, Gordon points out. These were fundamental “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that spun off scores of inventions that made the modern world New Yorkers currently enjoy. (“What great births you have witnessed,” wrote Mark Twain to Walt Whitman on the latter’s seventieth birthday, referring to those and other mechanical marvels of the age.) And, crucially, of all those Sandy-created deprivations, the one probably most tolerable was the dodgy wireless service. While we all love the ability to stay in touch with everyone and everything at all times, it still probably places well behind the lack of hot food, water, a heated home, and mobility (well, for most of us who aren’t Twitter addicts, at least).

This difference between losing the marvels of the latter part of the Industrial Revolution (or Second Industrial Revolution) and losing those of the Information Technology and Communications Revolution (or Third Industrial Revolution) helps illustrate the nature of the slowdown that began with the Great Downshift. Those special century inventions changed life in such a profound and unrepeatable way and across so many dimensions of our lives, Gordon argues, that it’s hard to imagine living without them. And while these inventions had a massive impact on American life, their effect on productivity had been exhausted by the early 1970s. And the one-off nature of them means they can’t be repeated. Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower. Progress after 1970 certainly continued, but it was focused more narrowly on entertainment, communication, and information technology—important advances, but none that created a second Up Wing golden age of the sort imagined during the 1960s. At least not yet. They were significant enough to create a productivity blip in the late 1990s and early 2000s that has since faded. “[The] invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a… temporary, rather than a permanent, upswing in the pace of progress,” Gordon writes. His skepticism about the IT Revolution is the empirical conclusion that is referenced by the “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” meme.

“Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower.” Indeed.™

DAVID MARCUS: Yep, it’s Fetterman’s brain that triggered the Left’s hit piece.

In 2022, when John Fetterman had a stroke while he was running for his Senate seat, the Democrats and their media allies were insistent that to even question his fitness to serve was ableist and unacceptable.

My, how times have changed.

This week, New York magazine, as reliable a Democrat organ as there is, ran a scathing hit piece on Fetterman in which current and former staffers all but suggest that not only should he not be Pennsylvania’s senior senator, he belongs in an assisted living facility.

The piece has no “gotcha” moment that would make any fair person say that Fetterman needs to step aside – you know, the kind former President Biden provided daily. Rather, it is a collection of anecdotes about him snapping at staff, or withdrawing into himself, perhaps not taking his medication. Try as they might, the folks at New York magazine constructed a molehill, not a mountain.

But why, one wonders, two years after waiving away similar behavior is a liberal news outlet suddenly parading the senator’s alleged diminished capacities? What changed?

Well, the article itself gives us a big hint with this line, “The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen.”

You don’t say.

Allow me to humbly suggest that this is not, in fact, a coincidence. Fetterman’s strong support of Israel, America’s ally, and his other recent moderate positions have placed a giant target on the back of his hoodie sweatshirt.

Also: Dem Senator’s Camera-Thirsty Wife Does Her Husband Dirty. “According to the outlet, Gisele visited her husband’s senate office in November 2023, weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, and got into a heated debate about the burgeoning war and her husband’s support for the Israeli state. Gisele also went behind her husband’s back, reportedly texting staffers in the wake of their fight on multiple occasions.”

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: How to respond to ‘May the fourth be with you.’

In a universe where Wookiees roar, lightsabers hum, and the Force flows, there exists a day that unites fans across star systems: May the 4th. But why this date? It’s not just a random alignment of celestial bodies; it’s a playful pun. You see, “May the fourth” sounds eerily similar to the iconic phrase: “May the Force be with you.” So, whether you’re a Jedi Knight, a Sith Lord, or just a casual admirer of droids and starships, let’s explore the origins of this cosmic holiday and discover how to respond when someone greets you with those magical words.

Or, you could “Take Five,” and decide to be a grownup about the topic:

JEFF DUNETZ: The Democrats Who Call Trump Nazi And The Reporters Who Don’t Confront Them.

What is it with those Trump-hating politicians? If they disagree with a Trump policy, say so and explain why. Why do they insist on cheapening the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, those who survived the Holocaust torture, and the Jews who mourn the victims’ pain every day? In the rare cases when a Republican makes a similar disgusting statement, the media would be all over them like cheese on pizza. But when a Democrat spews that hatred, there’s nothing but crickets.

It used to be a basic rule of American politics never to speak of the Holocaust or any of its related terms, such as Nazis or Hitler, for political warfare. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Anyone who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad.

QED: NY Times: ‘Chilling Parallels’ Between Third Reich and Trump’s Second Term.

David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”

The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:

In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear

Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.

* * * * * * * *

At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.

“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”

How so? What’s going to happen to you? As Tom Wolfe in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about a panel he was on at Princeton in 1965 when LBJ was in the White House and the topic began to focus on – see if this rings a bell – “the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck.”

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called ‘The New Life Out There’ for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history.

* * * * * * * * *

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Günter] Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Most recently: German Intelligence Officially Designates AfD an ‘Extremist Organization’ That Threatens Democracy.

MATT VESPA: JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.

Vance responded and drove over Kristol with a tank:

As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen.

Kristol was one of the leading voices supporting the Iraq War when neoconservatives dominated the foreign policy thinking of the GOP, which led to a $1 trillion disaster in Iraq, a brutalization of the GOP in the 2006 midterms, and a humbling moment that exposed the limits of American power vis-à-vis importing the American Revolution into the Middle East.

Other reactions were either laughably inauthentic, eye-roll-worthy, or outright hypocritical.

* * * * * * * *

Liberal America and the media called Obama the Second Coming. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer mocked the sacrament of communion.

Spare us the lectures, libs. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Even in 2025, typing “Obama halo photos” into Google Image Search brings up these vintage results; wire service photographers absolutely loved framing Obama in front of his campaign’s logo in 2008 and the presidential seal in 2012 to create the symbolism of a halo:

In 2008, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist anointed Obama as “the Lightworker:”

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

* * * * * * * *

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that’s been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

The following year, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas declared Obama Is ‘Sort of God:’

 Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

At the beginning of 2013, Thomas doubled down on this theme:

Branching out a bit in the interim, in 2010, a Newsweek cover declared Obama “God of All Things:”Newsweek Depiction of Obama as Lord Shiva Upsets Some Indian-Americans:

Newsweek’s depiction of President Obama on its latest cover has irked some Indian Americans who, fresh off Obama’s visit to the world’s largest democracy, are not happy with the image of the U.S. president as the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva.

The Newsweek cover shows Obama with several arms carrying policy issues while balancing on one leg. The headline reads: “God of All Things” with a subtitle, “Why the Modern Presidency May be too Much for One Person to Handle.”

Shiva, who is one of three pre-eminent gods in the Hindu religion along with Brahma and Vishnu, is considered the destroyer of the world, which must end, metaphorically speaking, in order to be reborn as a more universalistic place. However, the god’s purpose is not to foretell an apocalyptic ending.

Of course, for many on the left, the post-Obama years have been “Apocalypse Now,” to coin a phrase.

More here: Obama Lackey Tries Outraging MAGA With Obama Pope Pic and It Does Not Go the Way He Planned … At All.

UPDATE: Kamala Harris posed for pics, celebrated San Francisco Pride with Catholic-mocking drag queen from Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

VDH: The Trump Counterrevolution and the Moral Ledger.

Despite the media hysteria, President Donald Trump’s counterrevolution remains on course.

Its ultimate fate will probably rest with the state of the economy by the November 2026 midterm elections. But its success also hinges on accomplishing what is right and long overdue — and then making such reforms quietly, compassionately, and methodically.

No country can long endure without sovereignty and security — or with 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants crossing the border and half a million criminal foreign nationals roaming freely.

The prior administration found that it was easy to destroy the border and welcome the influx. But it is far harder for its successor to restore security, find those who broke the law, and insist on legal-only immigration. Trump is on the right side of all these issues and making substantial progress.

Everyone knew that a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $37 trillion national debt, and a $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods were ultimately unsustainable.

Yet all prior politicians of the 21st century winced at the mere thought of reducing debts and deficits, given that it proved much easier just to print and spread around federal money. As long as the Trump administration dutifully cuts the budget, sends its regrets to displaced federal employees, seeks to expand private sector reemployment, and quietly presses ahead, it retains the moral high ground.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Shedeur Sanders Fan Sues NFL for Emotional Distress Over Sanders’ Late Draft Pick.

Plaintiff seeks a “formal acknowledgment from the NFL regarding the emotional distress caused by their actions and statements,” a “retraction of the slanderous statements made about Shedeur Sanders, along with an apology,” “[i]mplementation of fairer practices in the drafting process,” and $100M in punitive damages “for the harm caused to [Doe] and the impact of the NFL’s actions on his emotional well-being.”

Plaintiff states that he’s unable to pay the filing fees, so the court will screen it to determine (among other things) whether it’s “frivolous,” which is to say “it lacks an arguable basis either in law or in fact.” I expect the court to indeed promptly dismiss it as frivolous.

UPDATE: Prof. Andy Geronimo (Case Western) Tweets: “Not sure it’s [intentional infliction of emotional distress] to see your favorite college player fall to the fifth round of the draft, but a claim that you now have to be a Cleveland Browns fan is [plausible].”

Heh, indeed. In other news regarding the Browns’ new backup QB*: CBS analyst recalls time Shedeur Sanders missed pregame obligation with network.

People asked me, NFL people asked me after that game, ‘What did you think of Shedeur?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t get to talk to him.’ Maybe he’s the greatest kid ever, maybe he’s a bad kid. I don’t know. But I told them the story, and they just kind of nodded their head.

“And it just made me wonder how many stories are there like that in which Shedeur did things that were not customary. He did things non-traditionally. It certainly seemed like that was the deal with a lot of the combine interviews and meetings with teams. And especially at that position, I think it makes them very nervous that already in college he was getting out of things that you’re supposed to be doing. What’s he gonna be like if he’s a first-round pick in the NFL Draft?”

More here: What caused Sanders’ draft slide? [Albert] Breer details QB’s interview red flags:

Sanders, the son of an NFL superstar and one of the biggest names in college football last season, isn’t a “blend into the background” type of player. And according to Breer, he didn’t act like it in the lead-up to the 2025 draft.

“He handled the process like he was a top-five (pick) lock,” Breer said, adding that Sanders declined to meet with several teams with the assumption that he’d be taken early in the first round.

“All these teams that either heard the bad stories from the other teams or that (he) refused to meet with or that had a bad experience with (him) personally … now the amount of teams that are willing to (draft him) has narrowed,” Breer said of teams passing on Sanders in the later rounds.

What exactly are those “bad stories” about Sanders? Breer shared two examples he heard from NFL sources, including one that came during a meeting with a team that asked Sanders to install an offensive play to test his football knowledge.

“They give players an install, and there are mistakes intentionally put in the install,” Breer said, noting that this is a common practice among NFL teams. “He didn’t catch them and got called on it, and it didn’t go well after that. … He was pissed that they did that to him.”

The other example came during an NFL Combine meeting with a team that asked him to explain one of his interceptions.

“He throws a bad interception. It was a deep throw early in the game,” Breer said. “They go in the meeting, they show the interception and they say, ‘What happened here?’ (Sanders responds,) ‘Well, I like to get into a rhythm earlier in the game.’

“They get into it over that, and (Sanders’) conclusion is, ‘Well, maybe I’m not a fit for you.'”

“The person who told me that story was like, ‘I’ve never heard that before.’ It was in a combine interview when you’re just going from team to team trying to put your best foot forward.”

* Not yet: “Sanders faces an uphill climb to win the QB job in Cleveland, which currently has five signal-callers on its roster in Deshaun Watson, Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Gabriel and Sanders.”

AXIOS BURIES THE LEDE: In his column at Spectator World, “Cockburn” concludes:

President Trump signed an executive order last night withdrawing government funding from PBS and NPR. “Neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the order reads.

The move ends a longstanding debate over why, exactly, the US government was pumping money into outlets that so regularly and vociferously espoused very progressive viewpoints. A fact sheet circulated by the White House highlighted some of the most egregious examples: a PBS station in New York that produced a kids’ program about drag queens, including one called “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess”; a PBS segment on “wokeness” and “white privilege,” and an NPR interview about why genderqueer and trans people love dinosaurs that name-checks the “trans-ceraptops.” How educational!

Spectator contributing editor Stephen L. Miller has been banging the drum for the defunding of NPR for years. “The world will be a great place when our schools have all the funding they need and NPR and PBS need to hold a bake sale,” he told Cockburn this morning.

Cockburn understands the lamentations about how the executive order is another “attack on the press” – but it could have been worse for them. Imagine if Trump had treated the outlets like the Kennedy Center and installed a top loyalist at the top? Would it have been less of an affront to norms to have a Kari Lake-led PBS or a Sebastian Gorka-run NPR? (Gorka may find himself otherwise occupied, if speculation that he’s under consideration to be the next national security advisor prove true.)

Compounding the media’s woes is the fact that the White House is getting into the content aggregation game. This week, while much of the media struggles for traffic and audience capture, White House Wire was launched, as a more MAGA alternative to the Drudge Report. “I’m considering a $1 trillion lawsuit!” Matt Drudge told Axios.

Wait, the real Matt Drudge? He’s actually alive? Has Axios confirmed this? Wouldn’t they have many questions about what happened to the site that bears his name in recent years?  A year ago Outkick.com noted, “No One Can Find Matt Drudge.” If Axios has tracked the reclusive former conservative down, don’t they owe it to the readers to get to the bottom of what happened to him? Or as Don Surber asked in December of 2023: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge: Did you flip because you were bored, you sold the site, or you feared the FBI?

RICK MCGINNIS: Truth, Myth or Both? Getting History Right in Battle of Britain:

The film made $13 million on a $14 million dollar budget (not helped by the cost of the aerial unit) and only turned a profit years later with home video sales. There’s been plenty of pictures set during the Battle of Britain made since then, but Hamilton’s film is still the only one that’s about the whole of the battle as a hinge upon which history turns and not just a backdrop.

“Given time,” [Michael] Korda writes, “all historical events become controversial*. That is the nature of things – we question and rewrite the past, glamorizing it or diminishing it according to our inclinations, or the social political views of the present.”

“Nobody in academe,” he adds, “gets tenure or a reputation in the media by examining the events of the past with approval, or by praising the decisions of past statesmen and military leaders as wise and sensible.” And yet nobody has managed to debunk the victory of Dowding and the RAF over Goring’s Luftwaffe. “As at Trafalgar,” writes Korda, “the British got it triumphantly right” and that might explain the longevity of Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain – a deeply unfashionable film that we’d never be able to make today.

Read the whole thing.

* Tucker Carlson, Kier Starmer, and David Lammy could not be reached for comment.

SAVAGE:

Why, it’s as if:

More here: Trump’s AI photo dressed as pope breaks internet: ‘Seeing is believing.’

I didn’t even know he was Catholic…

UPDATE:

HOW WE GOT HERE: The Spygate Top 20: A Hall of Shame.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The New Democratic Purity Test: Anti-Israel Or Else.

Let’s be honest here: the timing of these “concerns” and the article’s publication is suspicious. The same media figures who vigorously defended Fetterman’s fitness for office during his campaign are now wringing their hands over his mental state. What changed? Obviously, his positions on key issues like Israel and border security didn’t align with the radical left’s agenda.

The article’s author, Ben Teris, actually undermines his own narrative when he admits, “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired.” In fact, Teris noted that Fetterman appeared engaged and excited during their hour-long conversation.

So I guess cognitive impairment isn’t a big deal, but supporting Israel is? Let’s be honest: this isn’t a story about John Fetterman’s health. It’s about how fast the left cannibalizes its own the moment someone dares to step out of line. The second a Democrat breaks ranks with the party’s radical orthodoxy, every concern Republicans ever raised—once mocked or dismissed outright—suddenly becomes fair game. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

It’s Joe Biden all over again.

We spent months exposing the very real (and very obvious) cognitive impairment of John Fetterman during the 2022 campaign, and yet the media went to incredible lengths to say that everything was fine.

As Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday:

Let me get this straight: Back when Fetterman could barely speak during the debate, his medical condition was no big deal, and certainly not a reason to keep him out of elected office. But now that he’s speaking more clearly, but taking positions that irritate progressives, now his staffers think something’s not right with his brain? From what everyone else can see, Fetterman’s in significantly better shape than he was in 2022 and early 2023. (Last year I interacted with him briefly in the Fox News green room.)

I hope Fetterman’s in the best position possible, and I hope he’s following the instructions from his doctors. But both the staffer concern and New York Magazine’s attention on Fetterman’s health are remarkably conveniently timed.

Not just New York magazine — the Daily Beast, the HuffPost, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsweek, MSNBC and the New York Times all quickly joined the leftist dogpile yesterday. As our friends at Twitchy wrote, “What a difference Fetterman holding up an Israeli flag makes.”

(Matt Margolis’ article on Fetterman at the first link is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.)

ATTENTION, DOGE:

SANDY’S WAR: AOC taunts Tom Homan after DOJ referral threat over deportations: ‘Come for me, do I look like I care?’

“Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dared border czar Tom Homan to haul her to court on Friday,  months after he threatened her with prosecution for trying to impede President Trump’s mass deportations.

“Tom Homan said he was going to refer me to DOJ because I’m using my free speech rights in order to advise people of their constitutional protections. To that I say: Come for me. Do I look like I care?” the Bronx and Queens Democrat told attendees at a jam-packed town hall in Jackson Heights, Queens.

There’s “nothing illegal about it — and if they want to make it illegal, they can come take me,” she declared.

In February, AOC hosted a webinar and shared a “Know Your Rights” pamphlet with her more than 12 million followers on X to give illegal immigrants tips to evade the feds.

Homan told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that month he had been “working with the Department of Justice and finding out” who was seeking to block deportations.

“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” he cautioned, noting that immigration authorities are looking out for those who “cross” the line into abetting illegal aliens unlawfully present in the US.

AOC apparently believes her constituents aren’t in the Bronx and Queens, but El Salvador:

At least for the moment, she seems determined to live out the lead image in this week’s Power Line Week in Pictures:

Of course, that could change, as the need to keep generating clicks and hot takes warrants. In in 2019’s “Sandy’s War,” Kevin D. Williamson wrote:

“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is, at 16 syllables, a mouthful. The day before yesterday, she was “Sandy,” a pleasant-seeming young woman who liked to dance, worked in a bar, worried about her family, and chafed that her advantages and elite education (Boston University shares Case Western’s academic ranking and is significantly more expensive than Princeton: Is there a more appropriate preparation for life in Washington?) left her struggling, obscure, and unsatisfied. And so she set after glory and personal significance in politics, to which she is relatively new — the hatreds and grievances she dotes on are obvious enough and familiar enough that one assumes she has been in possession of those for some time. They are not newly acquired.

If you spend enough time around politics and/or media, you have seen this figure before. Years ago, a young woman beginning what would turn out to be a successful turn on the Washington cursus honorum asked me, earnestly: “Is it wrong to want to be famous?” I asked her what she intended to do with the celebrity she sought — for what purpose did she want it? “Why?” The question obviously had never occurred to her. I might as well have asked her why she wanted two eyes rather than one. She has a lot of Twitter followers now.

Back then, Sandy’s cause du jour was radical environmentalism; now it’s defending illegal immigration and MS-13. The causes change, but the goal remains the same: getting as much PR as possible, as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, sometimes leftist intersectionality intersects in ways that PR-seeking opportunists weren’t expecting: The Left Protests Itself as a Pro-Palestine Nurse Relentlessly Berates AOC at Her New York Town Hall.

HOLDAYS IN HELL: US issues ‘do not travel’ warning for 21 countries — here’s what you need to know.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Aurora’s driverless trucks are making deliveries in Texas.

After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor-trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles “without a driver,” Aurora said. The clients for these initial trips are Uber Freight, the ridehailing company’s trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight.

Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said he rode in the backseat during the first truck’s inaugural ride, which he called “the honor of a lifetime.”

“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” Urmson said in a statement. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.”

Aurora said it plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025.

Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.

Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lzgE4QMRuM

I’m very old school when it comes to this sort of technology — this is my preferred definition of Aurora trucks without a man behind the wheel inside the cab:

ROGER KIMBALL GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no martyr.

As the indignant clamor of Judge Wilkinson’s rhetoric suggests, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has afforded plenty of opportunities for high dudgeon. “Trump has let his inner Hitler off the leash! He is a threat to our cherished constitutional order!” The volume on both sides has been cranked up to eleven. Trump could usefully dial things back. He is famed for “the art of the deal.” He should bring that skill to this controversy and defuse the situation.

The Dems have seized upon Garcia as a martyr-in-waiting: a moral life jacket whose buoyancy they are counting on to save them. It won’t work. The suggestion that Senator Chris Van Hollen was sipping margaritas with Garcia in El Salvador was custom-made for next season’s GOP attack ads.

As commentator Ann Coulter observed, he has locked up the “face tattoo vote.” The public at large, however, is not smiling. Van Hollen and other members of the canonization committee for Garcia have made a strategic political error described in the late 1960s by the political scientist James Q. Wilson: they have confused their audience – the media and other repositories of correct opinion – with their constituency, the people eligible to vote for them.

A friend observes: they are like a school of dolphins whose ability to navigate by echolocation has been scrambled. Having lost the thread, they are about to beach themselves, there to heave and shudder in impotent, out-of-office irrelevance.

Trump aide Stephen Miller made the DNC-MSM an offer they’ll never accept this week:

“Each and every one of you that sides over and over again with MS-13 terrorists…choose to live in condos or homes or houses as far away from these kinds of gangbangers as you possibly can.”

“If I offered any one of you a rent free home with no taxes to pay in any of these gang neighborhoods, and I said, your neighbors are MS-13 terrorists, or Mexican Mafia, or Sinaloa Cartel or Tren de Aragua, I couldn’t pay you to live there!”

“But yet you, with your coverage, are trying to force innocent Americans to have these people as their neighbors and that one day their daughter may be abducted from their home and raped and murdered!”

Martha Raddatz could not be reached to see if she would take up Miller’s offer.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: MS-13 Wing of the Democratic Party Edition.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

Shot:  California’s high-speed rail leaders sound alarm over project’s financial future.

As California’s High-Speed Rail Authority awaits word from the Trump administration over its future support for the train, leaders who oversee the project sounded the alarm about its financial viability.

The authority’s board of directors voted Thursday to approve contracts for the development of Central Valley station designs and to solicit and approve construction bids for the Fresno station. Ahead of the votes, board member James Ghielmetti raised concerns over the potential loss of funds from the Department of Transportation and the risk of moving forward on payment commitments when federal funding is in jeopardy.

“I’m very nervous about receiving the federal funding,” Ghielmetti said. “I want to make sure my fellow board members are aware that if the federal money does not come through, somebody’s got to backstop these contracts.”

—The L.A. Times, yesterday.

Chaser:

NOT REALLY SEEING ANY DOWNSIDE HERE: Promise?! The Economist Says the UN Could Run Out of Money In Mere Months and the Jokes Write Themselves.

SPRINGTIME FOR THE BEEB: ‘We’ll burn Jews like Hitler did:’ BBC contributor in Gaza celebrates Jewish civilian death.

BBC Arabic journalist Samer Elzaenen has called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying in a Saturday report.

Elzaenen, 33, who has been reporting from Gaza, has been posting a series of statements on social media that condemns Jewish people, and has also called for violence against them, the Telegraph added, noting that his social media activity in the past 10 years has endorsed and celebrated more than 30 attacks on Israeli Jewish civilians. The social media posts were originally unearthed by The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

He has appeared on the Arabic-language branch of the UK public broadcaster more than a dozen times since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. He called the Hamas terrorists who entered Israel that day “resistance fighters.”

Well, somebody’s auditioning for a sweet gig with Reuters: “Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports (second item). ‘We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,’ Jukes writes in an internal memo. ‘To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.’”

TRUMP SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER TO END TAX MONEY FOR ‘RADICAL, WOKE’ PBS AND NPR:

Late on Thursday night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cut taxpayer funds to PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The text was posted on the Trump team’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X.

It said: “@POTUS just signed an executive order ENDING the taxpayer subsidization of NPR and PBS — which receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”

The executive order includes this argument:

Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.

At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.

Since PBS and NPR are funded by all the American people, it should reflect the viewpoints of the people, and instead, after Trump was re-elected, both networks have doubled down in their anti-Trump animus. This was the top of the NPR home page on Thursday morning:

Given that NPR views America as having been born of Original Sin, they should be thrilled to no longer have to take such dirty money to keep the lights on: Perfect Timing! Here’s a Propaganda Parade From NPR and PBS Just As Trump’s EO Ends Gov’t Funding.

Exit quote:

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

— Katherine Maher (NPR CEO)

pic.twitter.com/nCfDcyPJjf

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) May 2, 2025

UPDATE:

Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the "number one challenge" to advancing left-wing propaganda. https://t.co/Oq6UvJQkVI

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 2, 2025