GOODER AND HARDER: Adam Carolla Exposes What’s Really Destroying California (Video):

Full episode here.

GEORGE CLOONEY WISHES YOU GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK WITH A CAPITAL-F: Irony: Clooney’s ‘Goodnight and Good Luck’ Ends With Image of Musk That Proves Media Trust is Dead.

Earlier: Legendary Hollywood Leftist Pines for the 1950s. Exit quote: “After a decade of seeing leftists doxxing people and getting them fired for expressing a forbidden opinion, I have to ask what’s their beef with Joe McCarthy?”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: How Sweden’s multicultural dream went fatally wrong.

Barely a week passes in Sweden today without a teenager being arrested for such a hit, keeping Salihu extremely busy, and the public in the grip of a national crisis like no other before it. A softly-spoken former tabloid journalist, the 41-year-old could be a character from a Scandi-noir novel, shining light in society’s darker corners. The body count on his beat, though, is far higher than any Stieg Larsson novel, and holds out little prospect of a satisfactory ending.

For the story he has pursued for the last decade is, in effect, one giant, unsolved murder mystery: why has Sweden, long the envy of the rest of Europe for its peace and prosperity, suddenly seeing so many gangland killings?

Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that is the ultimate culprit, or the migrant communities themselves?

* * * * * * * * *

So what has gone wrong? Part of the blame, Salihu says, is down to the social blights common to most of Europe’s more impoverished multi-racial neighbourhoods. Joblessness and discrimination limit many youngsters’ sense of prospects. TV gang dramas, meanwhile, often “highlight the flashy parts of gang life – money, respect, power – but leave out the trauma, manipulation, and tragic consequences.”

Yet the sense of failure is all the more acute in Sweden, long an open door compared to other European nations. Ever since the 1960s, when it first styled itself as a humanitarian superpower, it has taken in those fleeing trouble abroad, be it Americans fleeing the Vietnam war draft, Soviet dissidents, or Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the 1990s came refugees from the Balkans, and in the last decade asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived. Anxious not to create “parallel societies”, Swedish governments have long funded social integration programmes alongside the waves of migration.

Earlier: Nearly two thirds of convicted rapists in Sweden are migrants or second generation immigrants.

Ten years ago it would be unthinkable that El Salvador would be considered safer than Sweden.

But now that has happened.

Malmö is now ranked as dangerous as Baghdad.

There has been almost daily bombing attacks in Sweden.

Something went very wrong in my home country.

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) April 10, 2025

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS THE ECONOMIST: The Economist Declares Europe the New ‘Land of the Free,’ and Holy Cow, the Replies.

Our “closest ally” arrested a 64-year-old woman for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.

A 64-year-old woman was convicted Friday of standing near an abortion clinic in southern England and holding a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want.”

The case provides further evidence of an erosion of freedom of expression in the United Kingdom, which has recently become a diplomatic issue with the United States.

During the 2024 incident that was brought before the court, Livia Tossici-Bolt was standing silently holding the sign and having “consensual conversations” with people passing by, according to her legal team. However, she was within what is called a “buffer zone,” which criminalizes the “influencing” of people within 150 meters (about 500 feet) of an abortion clinic in the U.K.

Isn’t it weird that The Economist didn’t mention that in their article? Or how about the case where two men were arrested for posting negative views about immigration, accused of stirring up “racial-hatred?” Both received over a year in prison. In an unrelated incident, another man was arrested and charged for burning a Quran.

And early this month, Greater Manchester Police arrested a man “on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence” for publicly burning a Quran. An assistant chief constable said police “made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.”

Europe has become obsessed with combatting what they call “Islamophobia” while Islamist migrants create no-go zones and commit heinous crimes. In Sweden, one Iraqi refugee was assassinated by Muslims for burning the Quran. What did the Swedish government do? It charged another man who also burned the Quran with “incitement.” No, I’m not kidding.

And then there’s Europe’s free and fair “elections:” The EU’s Stranglehold on Democracy.

UPDATE: This Is Britain: Mother Jailed For 2 Years Because of a Tweet She Deleted After 4 Hours.

MORE:

British police warn an elderly, partially-deaf man that saying "speak English" is a hate crime.

This is absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/4XR3qNl23A

— Turning Point UK 🇬🇧 (@TPointUK) April 13, 2025

UNEXPEXCTEDLY: Say What? CNN Claims Only the Right Has an ‘Extremism Problem.’

“[W]hen it comes to extremism in this country, I mean, the issue very much so is on the right, on the far-right from — you know, from Charlottesville to — to January 6. There isn’t exactly an equivalent on the left in this moment,” [Donie] O’Sullivan claimed with a straight face.

Seriously? Has O’Sullivan been living under a rock? President Trump has survived two assassination attempts in just the past year. Let’s not forget the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, where a deranged MSNBC viewer nearly gunned down an entire group of Republican lawmakers. Or the BLM riots of 2020, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, and the rise of Antifa violence.  How about the leftist cheerleading for Hamas on college campuses across America that has made Jewish students feel unsafe? And, of course, there’s the #TeslaTakedown movement, with extremists firebombing dealerships and vandalizing vehicles.

But I guess none of that qualifies as “extremism” in CNN’s warped worldview.

Not over the past decade:

UPDATE: Taylor Lorenz Laughs Off Obsession With ‘Handsome’ Luigi Mangione to CNN: He Seems ‘Morally Good – Which is Hard to Find.’

Lorenz sat down with CNN’s MisinfoNation host Donie O’Sullivan for Sunday’s episode of the series. O’Sullivan shared a snippet of the conversation to his X account early Sunday morning, showing Lorenz speaking candidly about why she believes Mangione’s actions – and his looks – have struck a nerve with fans of the alleged assassin.

“To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America,” Lorenz said, “As if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stan murderers of all sorts, and we can give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.”

When O’Sullivan asked about the groups of women who have gathered outside Mangione’s court hearings in New York, Lorenz laughed.

“You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart,” she said. “He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”

O’Sullivan quipped, “Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That’s where we’re at.”

The two agreed sympathy for Mangione was not unlike fandom for supporters of President Donald Trump.

That last sentence neatly, if unintentionally, sums up CNN’s woes perfectly.

Luigi Mangione shot a man in the back as he was walking to work, and @donie is on CNN laughing about it. https://t.co/7b8dw2onBL

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) April 13, 2025

GENE KOPELSON: RIP Thomas C. Reed: Reagan’s First Campaign Manager.

The world of President Ronald Reagan’s colleagues and friends continues to suffer losses with the recent deaths of speechwriter Tony Dolan and national security adviser Richard V. Allen. Those men have received due tributes, but one figure who has not gotten the acknowledgment he deserved was Thomas C. Reed (1934-2024). Tom passed away a little over a year ago, and I knew him well and worked with him. Tom and his critically important roles in the history and life of Ronald Reagan remain largely unknown to the world and even to almost all Reagan historians. Consider this a belated farewell and tribute.

I first met Tom via a phone call in 2012, as I was starting work on exploring Reagan’s first presidential campaign, in 1968. That campaign itself is often forgotten, written off as a last-minute waste of time by almost every other Reagan historian (most people think Reagan’s first presidential campaign was in 1976). Tom quickly assured me that, in fact, those historians were wrong. Tom’s generosity surfaced, as he shared the meticulous notes he had kept of the entire first presidential campaign, which began a scant nine days after he had won the governorship of California in 1966, and ended at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach the summer of 1968.

Read the whole thing.

STEPHEN MILLER: The left gives up on saving the planet.

Another famous Tesla owner in Congress has her eyes on the White House. Hipster congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who is alleged to have illegally parked her Tesla outside a DC Whole Foods – is champion and co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. She is also sympathetic to EV mandates. How is she going to explain her activist base’s sudden turn against the only real EVs people want to buy?

And what of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who captured the hearts of the global climate elite with her scolding speeches and theatrical arrests? Greta seems to have abandoned the climate cause recently for something much closer to her heart – donning a keffiyeh and preaching solidarity with Palestine after Hamas’s massacre of Jews in Southern Israel on October 7.

Perhaps it was all performative all along. Perhaps they really have leaned into the doomsday cult cliché their critics have all accused them of being. Or maybe they truly believe the planet is no longer worth saving. Either way, they have set all of their climate credibility on fire.

Related: Great moments in Luddism: That’ll Teach Elon a Lesson! Soy Boy Lefty Throws a Pie at Optimus Robot Display (Watch).

A leftist chucked a pie at an Optimus robot display inside a Tesla dealership.pic.twitter.com/Jr7908LoHp

— Department of Government Efficiency News (@DOGE__news) April 10, 2025

PENNSYLVANIA GOVERNOR JOSH SHAPIRO’S HOME SET ON FIRE BY ARSONIST WHILE HIS FAMILY SLEPT: “Shapiro and his family were forced to evacuate the governor’s mansion after an arsonist set it on fire overnight while they were sleeping, he announced. The blaze broke out just hours after the governor posted a picture of his family celebrating the first night of Passover on Saturday, ABC 27 reported.”

THE PASSWORD IS: Oligarchy!

😂
pic.twitter.com/pQCzmRMrah

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Curiously, as long as Bernie were in charge, Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism would suit him just fine.

UPDATE: The Song Remains the Same: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’

Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”

Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”

“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”

Exit quote: “Bernie Sanders making a surprise appearance at Coachella to sermonize on the evils of wealth in front of a crowd of people who paid at least $600 a ticket to be there is peak 21st century Democratic Party.”

OUT ON A LIMB:

Fox Butterfield, call your office!

“The Butterfield Effect” is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,” and “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” not to mention the poetic 1997 header, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

Mr. Butterfield is truly perplexed at what he calls the “paradox” of more criminals in prison coinciding with less crime in neighborhoods. An observation that might appear obvious to an 8th grader (crooks + jail = fewer crimes) is simply beyond his grasp. Butterfield of the Times is the poster boy for the greatest conundrum facing the American Left today: How do you explain to people who just don’t get it that the problem is they just don’t get it?

Michael Graham wrote that in 2004, likely not anticipating how the entire establishment left would fall prey to the Butterfield Effect in 2020.

HERE’S ANOTHER PIC OF GOV. WHITMER IN THE OVAL OFFICE WITH TRUMP (At Least We Think That’s Her):

To boldly go where Monty Python has gone before:

UPDATE: And to boldly go where Waldo has gone before:

WE CAN BE HEROES, IF JUST FOR ONE PROMPT: What Is the ChatGPT action figure prompt?

Action figures — small, poseable dolls often modeled after superheroes or movie characters – are popular collectibles, especially for fans of Marvel and DC. With this new tool, you’re no longer limited to fictional icons. Now, you can see what your own collectible figure might look like.
How to make your AI action figure

Go to the ChatGPT website or app.

Upload your photo, then enter the following prompt:

“Use this photo of me to create an action figure of myself in a blister pack, in the style like a premium collectible toy. The figure should be standing up and have a relaxed, friendly smile. The blister pack should have a header with the text ‘[ACTION FIGURE NAME]’ in large letters and a subheading of ‘[SUBHEADING]’ below it. Include accessories in compartments to the side of the figure: [LIST OF ACCESSORIES].”

Not surprisingly, quite a few pundits had fun with this new feature last night, such as these from Gabriella Hoffman and Karol Markowicz:

(Yes, of course I tried it as well. But my ChatGPT action figure left me thinking that I had a bright future in Hollywood as J.K. Simmons’ stand-in.)

Also not surprisingly, while simultaneously generating loads of action figure versions of themselves, some lefty Websites are tut-tutting this new feature: The action figure trend is the latest way people are misusing the power of AI – and I wish I could stop doing it.

This is all good fun, but there are concerns.

First of all, AI image generation is not without cost. Sure, there’s the price of a ChatGPT Plus membership (around $20 / £16 / AU$30 a month), although you can generate around three images a day on the free tier, depending on current demand. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the cost of AI models like 4o.

A Queens University Library report claims, “Artificial Intelligence models consume an enormous amount of water and emit large amounts of carbon in their production, training, operation, and maintenance.” Another Cornell University study calls out AI’s growing freshwater use footprint, claiming “training the GPT-3 language model in Microsoft‘s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater.”

If you don’t think these AI trends and the memes they spawn are attracting wide use, stressing the system, and possibly eating natural resources, just look at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments.

We have a joke in my house that every time we create one of these AI memes, it kills a tree. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it’s safe to say that AI content generation is not without costs, and perhaps we should be thinking about it and using it differently[.]

Self-styled environmentalists are burning Teslas on the eve of the 55th anniversary of “Earth Day,” so I’m not sure that’s much of an argument in 2025.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey of Hot Air emailed me his attempt at Mego-fication:

Reverse Jim Cramer tweeted his own appropriately-styled action figure:

And for completion sake, here’s my attempt from last night:

Like I said above, not sure what’s going on with the J.K. Simmons-ing of my chin, but it was a fun first effort. Chat GPT spat that image out in less than a minute; creating this sort of thing, with its fake blister-pack imagery, die-cut style background, the font work, and slightly plastic-y appearance of the “action figure” would have taken at least a half-hour to an hour of donkeywork in Photoshop.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: San Fran City Attorney Sues More Tenderloin Stores for Being Gambling Dens, One Allegedly Selling Meth Over the Counter.

It’s getting to be a fairly common occurrence that SF City Attorney David Chiu prosecutes suspected illegal gambling dens in the Tenderloin, operating out of what appear to be normal corner liquor stores. This is generally because police find the location is home to telltale unauthorized gambling video games. But the Chronicle reports that Chiu’s latest lawsuits against four Tenderloin corner stores found that one of the stores was going well beyond illegal gambling.

At a store called Family Corner Discounts at Ellis and Jones streets, Chiu’s office announced Friday that “SFPD executed a search warrant and seized six electronic gambling machines, $4,456 of cash, a payment ledger, foreign tobacco products, merchandise on display for sale with CVS price stickers, and 50.8 grams of methamphetamine located under a display shelf.”

Just a few doors down from there, an SFPD search at a store called US Smoke Shop turned up five illegal gambling machines, a couple gun magazines, plus “loose leaf cannabis, pre-rolled cannabis joints, cannabis vape cartridges, and illegal flavored tobacco products.” And one sure has to wonder about the above November 2023 Instagram post from US Smoke Shop promoting “mushroom cereal bars” on the shelves.

“It is clear these stores are magnets for substantial illegal activity,” Chiu said in his announcement. “Drug dealing, gambling, fencing, selling contraband and illegal tobacco products—these stores are the Wild West. One store went as far as to store meth for sale under a display shelf.”

Take a tip from Oakland and close them down over excessive graffiti.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Mother arrested and held in cell for ‘confiscating child’s iPad.’

History teacher Vanessa Brown, 50, spent seven-and-a-half hours in a custody cell on March 26 this year, following a claim she had stolen two iPads which were traced to her mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey.

Yet it transpired that the two devices belonged to her daughters, and Ms Brown had merely confiscated them to encourage them to focus on their schoolwork, a fact Surrey Police has now acknowledged.

“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Ms Brown recalled.

“At no point did they [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.

“It was thoroughly unprofessional. They were speaking to my mother, who is in her 80s, like she was a criminal.”

In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.” They certainly had a field day during lockdown, and absolutely miss the sugar high.

It certainly beats trying to chase actual criminals:

Earlier, from Glenn: What Policing Looks Like in Britain These Days.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: If One Wanted to Destroy the U.S. the Last Four Years Matched the Blueprint.

Barry’s third term was all about “fundamentally transforming” the US back into the Stone Age.

YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN: Original Star Wars Cut Will Be Shown at a Theater for First Time in Decades.

A rare screening of the original 1977 Star Wars movie — complete with Han shooting first — will be shown at a theater in London this summer.

Since its release, Star Wars: Episode 4 – A New Hope, as it’s now called, has undergone several controversial changes made by the film’s creator George Lucas. The original movie that sparked one of the biggest franchises of all time is now a holy grail for fans who want to watch the film as it first appeared in the 1970s.

The subsequent alterations made to the film are well-documented: Han Solo being shot at by the bounty hunter Greedo first, rather than the original in which anti-hero Han killed Greedo without being shot at. Then there is the addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt who was only mentioned by name in the 1977 release. Fans have also complained about the color grading painted on re-releases.

But for those attending the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival in London, they are in for a treat. Star Wars will play not once but twice on the opening night on June 12.

* * * * * * * *

“I wanted to show the film to my kids, and I wanted them to see the original version that I enjoyed at their age,” writes Robert Williams on The Star Wars Trilogy website 4K77. “Not the one with the already dated-looking CGI, over-saturated colors, and a strong magenta tint.”

The Guardian notes that anyone wanting to see the original theatrical cut legally must find an out-of-print VHS release or a DVD bonus features from 2006.

Lucas has little sympathy for those who want to see his first version of the film telling the Associated Press in 2004, “I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.”

If Disney can restore and rerelease Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be, the last Beatles movie, which had only been available for decades on badly duped copies of copies of copies the ancient VHS videotapes, surely they can find a way to bring the original version of the original Star Wars to streaming or Blu-Ray.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Direwolf of Wall Street Edition.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: ‘Puppy Prozac’ surges tenfold as owners medicate anxious lockdown dogs.

Vets have reported a surge in the use of “puppy Prozac” as owners seek medication for anxious lockdown dogs.

Research has revealed a tenfold increase over the past decade in the number of dogs in the UK on fluoxetine, an antidepressant sold under the brand name Prozac when used in humans.

Fluoxetine increases levels of serotonin in dog’s brains and is licensed in tablet form to treat pets with separation anxiety, or those displaying forms of aggression.

Greater use of the medication reflects a wave of behavioural problems in puppies bought during the pandemic lockdowns, who were not socialised properly and struggled to be left alone as owners returned to the office.

Vets said that social media had contributed to a “mismatch between owners’ expectations and the reality of dogs being dogs”, creating demand for the drug.

In some cases, people wanted their pets to be “fur-babies” that stay quiet, and believed medical intervention was needed if dogs ran around, jumped up or barked too much, vets added.

As always, life imitates the earlier, funnier version of Saturday Night Live:

@digital.gods

Puppy Uppers and Doggie Downers #SNL #Laraine Newman #Gilda Radner

♬ original sound – DigitalGods

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Oakland Chinatown businesses say they’re getting fined thousands for graffiti on their own property. 

In Oakland, Chinatown merchants are raising the alarm after many are being hit with thousands of dollars in fines for graffiti on their properties.

Shirley Lou knows how this story goes. On any given day, the supermarket she manages is tagged. They paint over it and then it happens again.

“We cannot control. We clean up and they come again. So many times, but the city — I don’t know why they are charging me money,” said Luo, manager at Won Kee Supermarket.

On Tuesday, she tried to pay the latest fine of $500. The city told Luo she owes $3,000, which includes late fees.

“It’s not my fault. Not our fault. It’s somebody go to the roof and mark so many graffiti,” Luo said.

This is not an isolated issue. Throughout Oakland’s Chinatown, business owners are reporting thousands of dollars in fines for not painting over tags fast enough.

“We close at 4 o’clock when we go home, and we cannot watch people do things like that. We can’t. So, the city has to help,” said Susan Lam, Oakland business owner.

As Lawrence Person wrote in 2023, “Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = ‘Food Deserts.’” Oakland’s government attempting to push their grocery stores out of business is also guaranteed to make that happen.

For years, Oakland has ignored the taggers covering every surface of the city in graffiti.
Now Oakland is taking a stand, by fining businesses thousands of dollars for not removing the graffiti that the city stopped policing fast enough. pic.twitter.com/FNi0jS4WHb

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) April 11, 2025

THE NECROPHILIAC OF PELHAM ONE, TWO, THREE: The Worst Story of the Week.

The Times sub-headlined its news piece with truly remarkable framing: “New York’s subways have been the subject of debate, with politicians using them to paint the city as out of control and dangerous to residents and visitors.” Yeah, can’t imagine why. I can do no better than Liz Wolfe of Reason when she points out that “the subhed appears to be, uh, pretty backed up by the headline.”

Look, on any objective level this is a horrifying story. But I am determined to find the bright side of a story involving a thief sodomizing a corpse on the R train, because it is Friday, people, and we need good cheer on Friday. So . . . well, it at least beats the story of the poor woman who was immolated by an illegal immigrant psychopath while asleep on a different New York City train late last December. Yes, people died in both situations, but at least nobody was technically murdered this time. In Eric Adams’s New York, we must regard this as an improvement.

As Glenn wrote a few days ago, “Yes, public transit depends on a functioning high-trust civil society. Which lefties hate and undermine at every opportunity.”

All these people who love public transportation and trains and want to stick us in them could do more for their own cause by empowering police to lock up criminals and weirdos than anything else, but they’re ideologically unable to choose normal people over bad people and normal…

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 7, 2025

QUESTION ASKED: Did Douglas Murray break Joe Rogan?

Who gets to call themselves an expert? That’s the big question featured in a bruising episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, in which Rogan hosts The Spectator’s Douglas Murray and the libertarian comedian Dave Smith. Murray accuses Rogan of opening “the door to quite a lot of people who’ve now got a big platform, who’ve been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind.”

* * * * * * * *

Murray also comes after Smith, who self-identifies as both a libertarian commentator and a comedian – monikers that other libertarians and other comedians would contest. Murray is aghast when he learns that Smith has never been to the Middle East. “You can’t time-travel but you can travel,” he says, after Smith points out that he’s not “been to Nazi Germany” either. “If you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it… I think it’s a good idea to see stuff, particularly if you spend a career talking about something. If you’re insistent that you’re an expert of some kind, or not claiming you’re an expert but still talking about it, about the provisions going into Gaza or not, if you’ve never seen any of this going on.”

I don’t agree that you have to physically visit an area to opine on it, but it certainly seems like quite a Kinsley gaffe for Smith to seemingly equate Israel with Nazi Germany.

BOLDLY GONE: NASA axes ex-DEI chief after giving her new job title in apparent effort to evade Trump crackdown: report.

A chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer at NASA has been fired despite the space agency appearing to change her title in an attempt to spare her from President Trump’s executive order ending federal DEI initiatives, according to a report.

Neela Rajendra, one-time Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was terminated this week from her newly minted role as head of the “Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

“Neela Rajendra is no longer working at [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. We are incredibly grateful for the lasting impact she made to our organization. We wish her the very best,” a mass email from lab director Laurie Leshin, obtained by the Beacon, stated.

Insert Clarkson Dacia Sandero meme here:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

YOU DON’T WANT TO WEAR THE RIBBON?! YOU HAVE TO WEAR THE RIBBON!! The BBC expected contrition from Kemi Badenoch. It owes us an apology instead.

A totally bonkers interview in which BBC presenters interrogate a politician because she hasn’t watched a TV show… pic.twitter.com/qXWBOYXOV5

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) April 10, 2025

“Have you seen ‘Adolescence’?” Yes, Mein Fuhrer: but I’m starting to wish I hadn’t. Oh, to inhabit the world of Kemi Badenoch, who innocently went on BBC Breakfast imagining they’d talk solely about tariffs, China or thermonuclear war – the sooner it comes, the better – but was invited to review the telly instead.

“Have you watched ‘Adolescence’ yet?” asked Charlie Stayt. The “yet” was impatient, as if Charlie were tapping a baseball bat in his hand. Kemi is notorious for not yet watching the TV show everyone who works in TV is talking about – and when she replied that she still hadn’t and “probably won’t”, co-host Naga Munchetty looked tempted to call Prevent.

“It’s prompting conversations about toxic masculinity,” she said, plus “smartphone use… Why do you not want to know what people are talking about?”

“All important issues”, replied Kemi. “But in the same way I don’t need to watch ‘Casualty’ to know what’s going on in the NHS, I don’t need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what’s going on.” BBC Breakfast’s viewers sat up in their hospital beds. Finally: someone speaks for reality! The only thing Kemi got wrong is that ‘Casualty’ has little to do with the NHS any more. Or medicine. I think it’s mostly about sex.

More here: Kemi Badenoch is right about Adolescence.

On BBC Breakfast, Naga Munchetty reacted to Badenoch saying that she had not seen Adolescence as if Munchetty was the Vatican’s scariest cardinal hearing that a Catholic had not been to confession. “Everyone” is talking about Adolescence, claimed Munchetty. Everyone! If you haven’t been talking about Adolescence, reader, then bloody well start. (Talk about Adolescence, I tell you. Why are you not talking about Adolescence? Talk about Adolescence, damn it!)

Clearly, journalists of Britain think that watching Adolescence is some sort of cultural obligation — as if it is the Queen’s funeral and the finale of The Sopranos rolled into one. Still, they keep forgetting what it actually is. Like the Prime Minister, Munchetty made the mistake of calling Adolescence a “documentary”. (Unfortunately, Badenoch picked up the tic and called it a “fictional documentary”.) Should the recurring nature of this mistake not have taught Netflixophiles something about the error of their ways?

To be clear, I am not for one moment suggesting that it is bad to watch Adolescence. Nor, indeed, am I calling Adolescence bad. I haven’t watched it — but not because I think it is unworthy of my time. No, I hate the groupthink that surrounds it. Suggest that I have to watch something — that I have to do so to be “in tune” with Britain, and to join the “national conversation” with the likes of Nick Ferrari and James O’Brien — and I am going to find an old WWF main event to rewatch.

In the early 2000, the DNC-MSM got their Underoos in a twist when President Bush told them he didn’t read their newspapers or watch their TV shows — he had staffers who did that for him, summarized the day’s news, and briefed him on what was most important. The BBC is going one better, asking the leader of the Tories why she hasn’t watched a fictional drama.

By the mid-2000s, since the left couldn’t be seen as promoting America’s War on Terror, it decided to go with that hoary old substitute, the Moral Equivalent of War, and obsess over radical environmentalism instead. In 2006, Julia Gorin wrote a column for the Christian Science Monitor in which she noted how inexorably tied together the two “battles” seemed at the time:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV*. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

That’s why in 2004 we got “The Day After Tomorrow” – so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

This is effectively what Adolescence serves for England’s establishment left, Brendan O’Neill writes:

All this talk of ‘public conversation’ is driving me mad. Munchetty told Badenoch she must watch Adolescence if she wants to ‘know what people are talking about’. I’ll tell you what people are talking about, Naga: ‘grooming gangs’. Those gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men who exploited and raped white working-class girls in towns around the country for decades. Once again, the government has let down the victims of those sick crimes, this time by saying it might not proceed with the inquiries it promised. And you want us to talk about a crime someone made up?

That those BBC hosts interrogated Badenoch about Adolescence the day after the government said it wouldn’t be holding inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ is mind-blowing. Nothing better captures the aristocratic aloofness of the BBC, its unworldly disregard for our concerns, than the fact that it badgered Badenoch about a fictional crime on the day the rest of us were talking about the real crimes inflicted on working-class girls under the noses of mercilessly blithe officials. If a fictional assault on a fictional girl troubles you more than the horrors those real girls endured, you are lost. Your neo-religion has rendered you heartless.

Freud called it displacement.

UPDATE: Who cares if Kemi Bandenoch has watched Adolescence?

When Munchetty next interviews Sir Keir Starmer, will she ask him why he doesn’t watch – I am making an assumption here – Strictly Come Dancing? It has far more viewers than Adolescence, after all, and people talk about it a lot. Why does he refuse to know what people are taking about? Who does he think he is? The arrogance of the man.

What people are also talking about, and what Mrs Badenoch wants to talk about, is crime – real crime that happens to real people. But for Nick Ferrari, for James O’Brien, for Charlie Stayt and for Naga Munchetty – and whoever else has jumped on the bandwagon – what really matters is a fictional crime committed by a fictional character at a fictional school. How perfectly emblematic of our times.

In the old days, it required not accepting the premise of a question to drive leftist TV newsreaders insane. Badenoch has certainly hit upon an even simpler and more effective way of driving British TV hosts absolutely bonkers — don’t watch a fictitious TV show!

* Now the left are taking actual strikes at electric SUVs. Plus ça change. 

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Protesters Remain Unaffected By Trump’s Shower Head Deregulation https://t.co/nVWjdToW4U pic.twitter.com/0YUcX8KvSI

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 10, 2025