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 Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.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

FLORIDA, MAN!

Only in Florida

pic.twitter.com/z8gI40uVga

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) May 2, 2025

MARK HEMINGWAY: The Downfall Of 60 Minutes And The Biggest Media Scandal You’ve Never Heard Of.

According to the Times, “Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison.”

Supposedly, Redstone has also expressed a desire to settle Donald Trump’s case against 60 Minutes over allegations they deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Though the Times is loathe to discuss it, there’s also lots of speculation that Redstone, an observant Jew, was less than thrilled when 60 Minutes recently ran an offensively stupid segment where veteran reporter Leslie Stahl asked a freed Israeli hostage if his Hamas captors starved him unintentionally because Hamas ran out of food. It’s well established that Hamas steals and hoards all the food and aid coming into Gaza, and it beggars belief that anyone, let alone someone who gets paid millions by a news network, would think a terrorist organization deserves the benefit of the doubt. And further, that layers of producers and editors would put this on the air.

There may be some truth to any or all of these accusations about what’s motivating Paramount and Redstone, but if Paramount is attempting to politicize 60 Minutes‘ reporting, at least they’re trying to make a buck out of it. Bill Owens spent 26 years at 60 Minutes, eventually presiding over a news operation that has willfully corrupted itself to the point where its bias has turned the show into a laughingstock. In at least one instance that I am familiar with, Owens played a pivotal role in a gross journalistic failing at 60 Minutes that ultimately helped a Democratic presidential candidate evade responsibility for an international incident that got Americans killed.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Progressives Warn That John Fetterman Suffers from Acute Pro-Israel-itis.

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs.

That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation.

The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to Terris’s sources in the immediate aftermath of Fetterman’s 2022 stroke, a period when only his political opponents acknowledged the extent of the senator’s injuries. Rather, it seems that his impairment only became impossible for the left to ignore after Fetterman made himself into a stalwart Israel supporter.

The piece observes that Fetterman “surprised” and alienated his progressive “base” beginning on October 18, 2023 — eleven days after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and nine days prior to the start of major IDF ground operations in Israel — when he rejected the notion that Israel should decline to respond to the October 7 massacre. It describes the “gutting betrayal” his erstwhile staffers felt when Fetterman declined to blame Israel for the slaughter of its own citizens by Hamas terrorists. It reveals the extent of the internal revolt that was kicked off when Fetterman objected to a progressive boycott of Israeli hummus by noting how nonplussed those same activists were to the “rape of Israeli women + girls.” After all, the truth hurts.

In accordance with the prophecy:

RIP: Ruth Buzzi, the Lady With the Handbag on Laugh-In, Dies at 88.

TO BE OVERTURNED BY A JUDGE IN 3..2..1…: Breaking: President Trump Signs “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” Executive Order to Defund NPR and PBS.

OUT ON A LIMB: Gender dysphoria should be treated with therapy instead of transition treatments, massive Trump-ordered HHS report urges.

THE TIPPING POINT: Democrat’s ‘grotesque’ blanket statement about Latinos sends internet ablaze.

A Democratic congressman from the South is in hot water after claiming he did not defend migrants getting deported, ‘because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot.’

‘First, they came for the Latinos outside of the Home Depots trying to get work so that they could feed their families,’ Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said during a congressional hearing on Wednesday.

‘I didn’t say anything about it, because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot,’ the Democrat continued.

The lawmaker appears to have been making his own version of a poem by a Martin Niemöller.

The work, titled ‘First They Came,’ talks about how officials in Nazi Germany began persecuting communists, socialists and Jews, before the eventually ending with chilling phrase ‘Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.’

Johnson clearly sought to connect President Donald Trump‘s approach to deportation to being akin to Nazi atrocities.

‘Then they came for the Hispanic looking folks wearing hats backwards with tattoos, and they deported them to El Salvador,’ Johnson recited.

‘I didn’t say anything about that because I don’t wear my hair backward, and I don’t have any tattoos, and I don’t look like a Latino,’ he added.

* * * * * * * *

‘Man…..that’s hard to watch,’ another X user, Brian Hastings, commented.

‘I’m sure he thought it would be dramatic and cool. But he seemed to realize, about halfway through, that he looked like a complete idiot, taking eloquent, historically meaningful words, and making them meaningless.’

Another wrote: ‘They are trying to draw a parallel with the Holocaust. Despicable.’

Flashback: Hank Johnson Worries Guam Could “Capsize” After Marine Buildup.

UPDATE: Tennessee bodycam of ‘Maryland man’ traffic stop shows troopers’ hands tied despite smuggling clues. “The Tennessee Highway Patrol released body camera footage of its 2022 encounter with Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, where state troopers suspected he was involved in human trafficking.”

RADICAL CHIC: THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione: The Musical. Seriously. How Far Can the Left in This Country Descend?

LEE SMITH: David Horowitz, 1939-2025.

I asked him about the upcoming election, Trump, and the global paranoia his campaign had given rise to. He asked of his fellow Republicans, “Don’t they understand the seriousness of this election?” He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”

Radical Son is a narrative driven by crimes and lies. He’d helped his friend Betty Van Patter get an accounting job with the Panthers, and Newton had her murdered. That kept Horowitz out of politics for a while, as he wondered if the left could “take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals.” He wrote, “I already knew the answers, although I wasn’t ready yet to draw the appropriate conclusions.”

His parents had not wanted to ask those questions, so when it became impossible to ignore or excuse Stalin’s crimes, they were crushed—they’d nurtured lies great and small for decades. In the Tablet article recounting my afternoon with David, I wrote that, with his parents’ failed political commitment in mind, he’d “resolved not to be played for a sucker.” Now I see that was a coarse formulation, and false. There was nothing calculated about his reevaluation of his place in the political realm. He lived by his sense of what was true and what was good, as he records in Radical Son. It’s a work of profound psychological acuity, whether he’s describing Newton, his parents, the character of an ex-wife, or his failure to see his own faults as clearly as he sees others’.

The fact is that throughout his career, first on the left and then on the right, Horowitz’s main theme wasn’t really politics; rather, it was family. Along with fellow former leftist turned conservative Peter Collier, he wrote several histories of great American families, including the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Many consider A Cracking of the Heart, his memoir of his late daughter Sarah, to be his best book. Conservatives generally argue, with good reason, that leftist policies are designed to break the traditional family structure. But David believed that failures at home generate the psychological chaos at the heart of the leftist project to undo civilization and remake it in the image of barbarism.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

QUESTION ASKED: Has Keir Starmer watched Groomed: A National Scandal yet?

I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs.

After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out in grim, eye-watering detail the industrial-scale horrors that were inflicted on real working-class girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men in towns across England.

Groomed: A National Scandal aired on Channel 4 last night. It is a searing piece of journalism, a fearless document of the barbarism of the rape gangs and the unforgivable nonchalance of officials who looked the other way. Director Anna Hall deserves every accolade for getting this film out there, in the face of a cultural elite that would rather talk about anything else on earth than the brutalisation of white working-class girls by Muslim men.

Watching Groomed is an enraging experience. I think Hall intends it to be. It focuses on five young women who survived the gangs. We learn they were passed around like pieces of meat. Chantelle, 32, recounts being groomed from the age of 11, when she was in a children’s home. Sometimes she was kept in a hotel room for days on end and ‘passed about’ between Pakistani men in their 20s and 30s. This went on for years.

Another girl, Erin, was groomed from the age of 12. The police were utterly uninterested in her suffering. One time, Erin was covered in signs of extreme abuse — she had ‘bite marks [from] head to toe’. Her underpants were full of semen. Her mother, desperate, took her to the police. They didn’t act. Later, a social services report called Erin a girl ‘who frequently puts herself at risk’. It was victim-making of the most sick-making variety.

Horrendously, many of the girls were essentially blamed for their own abuse, for their own violent debasement. Social services called them ‘promiscuous girls’. They were referred to as ‘child prostitutes’. The moral pygmies and shameless cowards of officialdom were so determined to keep a lid on this scandal that they came to see the girls, rather than the men, as the villains, as the authors of their own terrible fates.

And then there was the racism card, the chief means by which discussion of these horrors was suppressed for so long. Local protest groups said the rape-gang members were victims of racism and were only being investigated because they were Muslims. In much of the liberal media and across the left, the cry went up: it’s ‘Islamophobic’ to say there is a specific problem of Muslim grooming gangs.

Flashback: BBC Breakfast hosts’ brains explode when Kemi Badenoch told them that she hasn’t watched Adolescence.

UPDATE:

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:

● Shot: “Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday afternoon called Donald Trump to concede the 2024 presidential race, according to a senior Harris aide. During the call, the Democratic presidential nominee ‘discussed the importance of a peaceful transfer of power and being a president for all Americans,’ the senior aide said.”

—”VP Harris concedes presidential race in phone call to Donald Trump,” the Missouri Independent, November 6^th, 2024.

● Chaser: Tim Walz says Harris picked him for VP to ‘code talk to white guys.’

—The New York Post, yesterday.

Why would a presidential candidate who stressed the importance of “being a president for all Americans” need someone to “could code talk to white guys” and give them a “permission structure” to vote for a Democratic candidate?

Perhaps Walz’s raging Charles Bronson-esque machismo was simply too much for most men to accept:

“It was, frankly, just too much testosterone in one man for many of us to handle,” joked John Ekdahl.

“This was a bit of a category error by Harris. Tim Walz did speak to white guys, but only flamboyant heterosexuals such as myself,” joked anonymous online personality Jarvis Best. “On the one hand, I was flattered — you don’t see too many of us flamboheteros on the national stage. But I understand why he didn’t move the needle.”

—”Tim Walz nailed with brutal mockery after saying he was chosen for VP to ‘code talk’ to white guys,” the Blaze, yesterday.

DEVELOPING: Trump Names Mike Waltz U.N. Ambassador; Rubio to Serve as Interim National Security Adviser.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO: On May 1^st 2020, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research reminded his readers: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic. “In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong* to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide:”

“In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing was closed by force. Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

* * * * * * * *

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.

As I said above, Tucker’s column ran on May 1^st, 2020. One month later, cue the dancing TikTok nurses and let loose the George Floyd riots!**

As even far left New York magazine admitted in late 2023: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic.

In March of 2020, this sort of talk could get one de-platformed on social media and/or caught in the feedback loop of the MSM-DNC sending out the Batsignal to their readers on who to attack via social media: [Five] years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets.

* In a scene included in 2021’s Get Back, Peter Jackson’s 2021 eight-hour miniseries reworking of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, Paul McCartney even joked about the Hong Kong Flu, while he and John Lennon were hashing out song ideas:

January 23rd, 1969 (Apple Studios, London): While Robert Fraser drops in on the sessions, a good-humoured John and Paul stand up for a run-through of ‘Get Back’ that devolves into silly off-key takes on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Help!’, and ‘Please Please Me’. (Note: The medium shot of Robert Fraser is the same as the one included here, so who knows where it really falls within the continuity.)

PAUL: Imagine I’m in love with you… I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: What?

PAUL: I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: Oh, are you? Take drugs.

[Let It Be Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Are you really?

PAUL: No, not really. Not really.

And from Jeffrey Tucker’s article, the since-deleted tweets by fellow American Institute for Economic Research’s Phil Magness on Woodstock and other gigantic rock festivals that took place during that year’s pandemic:

** Jon Gabriel warned last year in the Arizona Republic: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “These mass demonstrations used to be more localized, such as Occupy Wall Street or the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Today, they are global, and the new cause is released with the regularity of a new car model’s marketing campaign. This year, ‘global intifada’ is all the rage. I suppose activists are brainstorming a new cause to release in May 2025.”

We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.

MUST FLEE TV: ‘I’m Black—You’re Not’: CNN Panel Explodes Into Ragefest As The View’s Ana Navarro Loses Her Mind.

HOLY MOLY: Ana Navarro’s complete meltdown on CNN just caused Abby Phillip to cut to commercial.

@MrShermichael: “If you come to this country illegally, you are going HOME!”

Ana Navarro: “There’s a hell of a lot of people who other than the black people who were brought here as slaves, who came to this country illegally.”

WHAT?!

@MrShermichael: “They are NOT the same as black people who were brought here against our will!”

This is when she started choking up — almost as if she was about to cry.

Ana Navarro: “That’s exactly what I just said!”

@MrShermichael: “Last time I checked, I’m black. You’re not.”

Ana Navarro: “I’m Latino and my people are being racially profiled!”

“Last time I checked, I’m black. You’re not.” Hoo boy, it’s getting hot in there. My favorite part about the whole exchange is watching anchor Abby Phillip’s face as she is forced to cut to commercial. It reminds me of those terrific Southwest Airlines commercials of yore: “Want to get away?”

So how are CNN’s nightly Thunderdome segments playing out? They’ve made Scott Jennings into a YouTube star, but that likely doesn’t buy the tiny public access cable network much advertising revenue: Fox News Prime Time Attracts 5X More Viewers than CNN-LOL in April.

MIKE WALTZ IS EXPECTED TO BE FIRED AS TRUMP NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Source.

LIVING THE SMUG LIFE: The unbearable smugness of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Much of the British media may be insufferable, but by and large we manage to avoid pushing the idea that democracy itself is at stake if anyone dislikes us.

American journalists, by contrast, as they dress up in black tie and ballgowns and descend on the capital, seem to think that it is they who are on the front line of the battle for democracy. US soldiers may be based around the world, its firefighters and police may be on the streets, but it is American newsrooms which really stand between democracy and disaster. To quote just one of the straplines with which the American media has promoted itself over recent years: “Democracy dies in darkness.” In fact democracy can die perfectly happily in the bright light of day. Indeed, it seems eminently capable of karking right in front of the blaring lights of news lenses while most journalists pretend not to notice.

So it was with considerable amusement to me that the American media handed out awards to other American media for noticing things the public had noticed years before. One of the biggest awards and cash prizes of the evening was given to Axios news for its report – offered up last year – that Joe Biden may not be at his mental best. The award for this scoop is named the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence. Wherever Aldo’s relatives are, I hope they sue.

At least the recipient – Alex Thompson – had the grace to admit that the cover-up which many journalists had engaged in over President Biden’s mental and physical decline was one reason why the public don’t much trust them any more. Don’t forget that until Biden’s disastrous debate performance last summer, most commentators were saying that he was in tiptop shape and that, as one reporter put it, 2024’s Biden was actually the best version of Biden.

Thompson’s mild criticisms landed into a strange silence. Some – notably the New York Post – had covered Biden’s decline for years, but were accused by the White House and other media organizations of publishing “cheap-fakes.” If you ran a story about Biden not knowing quite where he was, you could be sure of a slurry of attacks from the White House and the rest of the media. Those same journalists are now releasing books admitting that during his last years in office, Biden didn’t always seem to be aware that he was president.

More here: The White House Correspondents Dinner Taught Me That Media Bias Isn’t About Politics, Just Insanity.

Thompson himself tweeted, in June, 2023, “Biden’s weird phrases are sometimes weaponized by the GOP to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline.”

“Some.” For sure.

To close the evening, White House Correspondents Association President Eugene Daniels delivered this, like, fire-and-brimstone lecture, declaring the organization “an example of American exceptionalism” and admonishing anyone who doesn’t submit to that claim.

This was the moment my realizations came into focus.

“Those of us who have chosen the public service of journalism … The work we do helps strengthen the fabric of our democracy … essential for democracy.”

He paused to allow a short video to play of Presidents Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama attending past dinners— in an elaborate and highly produced dig at the administration that ditched.

Having an audience with the President for this stupid dinner of medium-well filet mignon is “to remind them that a strong fourth estate is essential for democracy,” Daniels insists to the hive.

“We miss our families and significant life moments in service to this job. We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the ‘opposition.’ What we are not is the ‘enemy of the people,’ and what we are not is the ‘enemy of the state.’”

Standing applause. I’m sitting there, listening, not sure if there is someone in the room who went to actual war, like, combat, to defend the Constitution. Or, like, operated underground under threat of violence. No, he’s just talking about himself and his friends with laptop jobs. Alright.

Then it occurred to me.

“The sun in the heavens,” “truth tellers,” “fascism,” “fabric of our democracy”— what? This is actually crazy.

The media isn’t biased because it’s liberal, it’s biased because it has no concept of reality. The people who make media content are incapable of separating their own self-worship from objective truth. Their egos dictate that they are so important, they decide “the truth.”

Exit quote: “That they can sit less than two miles away from [Trump], declare their importance, and no one cares. The next day he’ll ban a few of them from his plane, or call them a name, and millions of people will cheer, and otherwise life will go on as normal. That’s the big threat; it’s a threat against their vanity. That is what they can’t tolerate. The warped coverage is not political, its personal.”

No wonder the media fell so deeply in love with Obama – at long last, they found a politician whose ego and pretensions were as big as theirs.

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: On May 1^st 2020, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research reminded his readers: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic. “In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong* to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide:”

“In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing was closed by force. Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

* * * * * * * *

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.

As I said above, Tucker’s column ran on May 1^st, 2020. One month later, cue the dancing TikTok nurses and let loose the George Floyd riots!**

As even far left New York magazine admitted in late 2023: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic. In March of 2020, this sort of talk could get one de-platformed on social media and/or caught in the feedback loop of the MSM-DNC sending out the Batsignal to their readers on social media: [Four] years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets.

* In a scene included in 2021’s Get Back, Peter Jackson’s 2021 eight-hour miniseries reworking of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, Paul McCartney even joked about the Hong Kong Flu, while he and John Lennon were hashing out song ideas:

January 23rd, 1969 (Apple Studios, London): While Robert Fraser drops in on the sessions, a good-humoured John and Paul stand up for a run-through of ‘Get Back’ that devolves into silly off-key takes on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Help!’, and ‘Please Please Me’. (Note: The medium shot of Robert Fraser is the same as the one included here, so who knows where it really falls within the continuity.)

PAUL: Imagine I’m in love with you… I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: What?

PAUL: I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: Oh, are you? Take drugs.

[Let It Be Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Are you really?

PAUL: No, not really. Not really.

And from Tucker’s article, the since-deleted tweets by fellow American Institute for Economic Research’s Phil Magness on Woodstock and other gigantic rock festivals that took place during that year’s pandemic:

** Jon Gabriel warned last year in the Arizona Republic: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “These mass demonstrations used to be more localized, such as Occupy Wall Street or the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Today, they are global, and the new cause is released with the regularity of a new car model’s marketing campaign. This year, ‘global intifada’ is all the rage. I suppose activists are brainstorming a new cause to release in May 2025.”

THE ART OF THE DEAL: U.S., Ukraine Sign Minerals Deal in Major Breakthrough for Peace Talks.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials have signed a long-anticipated deal that gives the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for a promised security guarantee to protect Kyiv from future Russian aggression, signaling President Donald Trump’s commitment to ending the war.

The deal was signed Wednesday afternoon on Trump’s 100th day in office by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, as the latter visited Washington, D.C., to finalize the details. The Treasury Department confirmed the signed deal, called the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.

“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term. President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine,” Bessent said in a statement. “And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

The minerals deal grants the U.S. access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including aluminum, graphite, oil, and natural gas, according to Bloomberg. It also lays out details about the economic partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine.

Read the whole thing.

WELCOME BACK, DAVE BARRY!

In another of his recent columns, I’m pretty sure that Dave Barry is the first person to have analogized a prostate exam with accessing Tallahassee from a backroad in Alabama.

There are times when it’s not easy to be a male. I experienced one of these times a few days ago when, within a span of 20 minutes, three different people, two of whom I had not previously met and one of whom was a member of a completely different biological sex, asked me to lower my pants so they could handle parts of my body that I will refer to here, out of respect for their privacy, as my festicles (not their real name).This happened at the office of my urologist. Like many older men, I see a urologist regularly, and I believe I speak for all of these men when I make the following urgent plea to the urology community: For the love of God, please find a way to get to the prostate gland other than the way you’re getting to it now.

When you visit your urologist, he or she always examines your prostate, which is a tricky procedure because of where it’s located. If we envision the male reproductive system as a map of Florida, the prostate would be Tallahassee. The problem is, there is no easy way to get to Tallahassee. So the current procedure is for the urologist to approach it via the back road from Alabama.

This means that the prostate examination is quite unpleasant for everyone involved.
Q. How unpleasant is it?
A. When it’s about to happen, both you and the urologist are quietly hoping for a direct meteor strike.

Like most politicians, SMOD talks a great game, but he’s never around when you actually need him.

HOTS ON FOR NOWHERE:

It’s an evergreen stance for the DNC-MSM whenever there’s a Republican in office. Bill Maher in August of 2019: Yes, a recession would be worth it to get rid of Trump. Earlier that same week, Fox News host Martha MacCallum said to Victor Davis Hanson,  “I was listening to a lot of different news networks this morning, as I often do…getting a read on what everybody’s saying about what’s going on and, you know, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a bit of sort of enthusiasm for the possibility that maybe the economy might tank.”

Similarly, in February of 2020, NewsBusters noted: MSNBC Hopes for ‘Global Financial Crisis’ Helping Dems in 2020.

Then in April of 2020, when the lockdowns were full swing, but a month and a half before riot season, Kurt Schlichter wrote: The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.

Way back in December of 2008, in order to position BHO as the next FDR, Virginia Postrel spotted the DNC-MSM full of “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.”

Or as the AP “objectively” reported that summer, “Everything Seemingly is Spinning Out of Control[!]”

SOMEBODY SET US UP THE BOMB:

UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record spots a key incentive for the EU to get the juice flowing again: Europe Promises To Get The Electricity Back Up ASAP So Everyone Can Hear The Muslim Calls To Prayer.

GOD AND MAN AND THE GRAY LADY: The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.

Look at how they describe women in the Trump admin like strange creatures:

Cross necklaces have, in a way, become the jewelry of choice most associated with President Trump’s second administration.

Ms. Bondi owns several cross necklaces but most often appears at official events in a diamond-set version purchased at Mavilo, a jewelry store in Tampa, Fla.

Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has frequently worn a large cross pendant at press briefings. But Ms. Leavitt is not the first press secretary to wear a cross: Kayleigh McEnany, a press secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, also wore one.

In an email, Ms. Leavitt, 27, called the cross necklace ‘the perfect accessory to any outfit,’ adding that she wears the cross ‘because it serves as a reminder of the strength that can only be found through faith.’

These conservative women … who can understand their strange ways??

As Rod Dreher wrote in his classic 2003 article, “The Godless Party:”

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

In the main—and I’ve had this confirmed to me by Christian friends who labor elsewhere in the secular media—the men and women who bring America its news don’t necessarily hate religion; in most cases, they just believe it’s unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don’t know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated. For example, to hear journalists talk, Catholics are berated from the pulpit every Sunday about abortion and birth control; reporters think I’m putting them on when I tell them that I’ve been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and I’ve only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. For another, outside the Jewish community, there are no stronger supporters of Israel than among American Evangelicals, and that’s been true for at least a generation. The news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where I’ve been startled to discover a general assumption among Jews and non-Jews alike that these “fundamentalists” (i.e., any Christian more conservative than a Spong-ite Episcopalian) are naturally anti-Semitic.

In a further comment, that New York Post city editor inadvertently revealed something else important to me about the way media people see religion: As far as he was concerned, Catholics and Jews were the only religious people who counted in New York City (he himself is a non-practicing Jew), because they were the only ones who had any political pull. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity in the only way they know how—in terms of secular politics. Thus, when your average journalist hears “Southern Baptist,” she immediately thinks of an alien sect whose rustic adherents lurk in the shadows thinking of cunning ways to manipulate Republican politicians into taking away a woman’s right to choose. The trouble is, she doesn’t think much further, and it is unlikely that anyone in her professional and social circles will challenge her to do so.

 That’s a trend that’s only gotten worse in the uber-woke version of today’s Gray Lady. But between their “Gorillas in the Mist”-style takes on crosses (and religion in general), and Tim Walz’s spectacular ability to “code talk to White guys watching football, fixing their truck and put them at ease,” why does the modern left act like the cast of the original Star Trek whenever they had to beam down to 20^th century earth when it comes to interacting with flyover country? (Actually, I know why they do, but it’s a curious pose when it keeps losing them elections.)

Related: At about the seven minutes in, Mel Brooks as the 2,000 Year Old Man explains to Carl Reiner how the cross’s ease of manufacture helped it massively take over in popularity from the Star of David: