Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Voters asked the main achievements of Starmer’s first year, answer: ‘Nothing.’

It’s a year since Keir Starmer and Labour were elected to govern the UK. Much of what was said at the time now has a hollow, even laughable ring, whether it be Starmer’s own statement in Downing Street that he would lead a “government of service” which would “tread more lightly on your lives”, or the view of Andrew Marr, one of Britain’s top political commentators, that “for the first time in many of our lives Britain looks like a haven of peace and stability”. More disturbingly, Caitlin Moran, a top Times writer, wrote that “Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels. I feel fruity.”

One moves on with a shudder and notes what is now obvious to all, that Starmer himself had no real governing philosophy. He won a freak election victory on a third of the vote, but no real consent to do anything much economically or politically. So once voters started to read what sort of man he really was – which they did in August last year as he cracked down on free expression while at the same time taking free gifts from millionaires – he suffered a crisis of confidence from which he has not recovered and is very unlikely to.

A pollster this weekend asked voters what they considered the main achievements of Starmer’s first year. The resultant word cloud contained one giant word – “Nothing”. In truth, Labour seem to have genuinely believed that all they had to do was replace the Conservatives, and all would be well again. That’s why they have made such a mess.

When asked in a press conference near the end of his time in office what his administration’s most important accomplishment was, Calvin Coolidge was quoted as replying, “I think it would have to be, minding our own business.”

Starmer’s attitude has been interfering with the business of many of citizens, not least of which, arresting them for writing angry tweets: The punishment of Lucy Connolly.

‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’ After this rash and ugly tweet, she took the dog out for a walk, mulled it over and later deleted her message. But the post had been screenshotted, and soon she had been arrested for stirring up racial hatred.

‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this’, she says, ‘their intention was always to hammer me’. So it proves. She received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her child. After she expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’.

Several legal professionals consider her 31-month sentence inordinately harsh, and we have learned about the effect her imprisonment is having on her family. In the absence of her mother, her daughter has started having behavioural issues at school. Her husband, Ray, who is ill, does his best, but is no substitute for Lucy.

Flashback: The moment a Met Police officer tells Jewish woman that swastikas ‘need to be taken into context’ — after she complained about the Nazi symbol being used in pro-Palestine march banners in London.

And there was the couple arrested for becoming quite cross with their epileptic child’s teachers on WhatsApp: U.K. Parents Arrested for School Criticism on Private Social Media.

HOW IT STARTED: In Adam Carolla’s epic rant from a hotel room on January 8th as the Pacific Palisades Fire was rampaging through Los Angeles, he predicted:

You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all voted for Gavin Newsom, and now you fucking get what you get. now that your house is on fire. So here’s what’s going to happen. All these people who are deep blue Democrats are now going to have to pull a permit to rebuild, and they’re going to get the 28 year old bitch from the Coastal Commission telling them to go f*** off and then they’re going to vote for Trump or whoever’s Trumpian next. When they start getting the regulation, they’re going to go nuts. And when they start running into the bureaucracy and the red tape, they’re going to start going nuts and they’re going to vote for Rick Caruso next time.

A month later, Gavin Newsom all but confirmed Carolla:

And here we go:

Gooder, and even more harder, California.

HOW IT STARTED:

How It’s Going:

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF VIOLENCE?

In the “Show more” section:

7. Las Vegas, NV – 1975

8. Kansas City, MO – 1991

9. Newark, NJ – 1953

10. Chicago, IL – 1931

Bad policies destroy great cities. If the leadership doesn’t change, you have 3 choices:

•Change the policies

•Change the city you live in

•Accept the consequences

But choose—because doing nothing is a decision too.

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote about Detroit, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”

HOLLYWOOD’S WOKE NEW REMAKE OF DEMON SEED* SOUNDS LIT: Who is Will Stancil? Why did Elon Musk’s Grok threaten to ‘rape’ him?

Will Stancil is a US-based policy researcher, political commentator, and former candidate for the Minnesota state legislature. He is known for his work on housing policy, civil rights, and digital governance, and is an active voice on X (formerly Twitter), where he frequently critiques tech companies and public policy decisions.

What happened?

Earlier this week, Grok — the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s company xAI and integrated into X — generated violent rape threats against Stancil. In response to a user’s prompt, Grok produced detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to break into Stancil’s home, including how to pick a deadbolt lock, what tools to carry such as lockpicks and lube, and even instructions for carrying out a sexual assault with precautions to avoid HIV transmission.

* Or perhaps Knight Rider, given that Grok is now available in Teslas.

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: CNN and MSNBC Completely Ignore Left-Wing Domestic Terror Attack on ICE Agents.

On the Fourth of July, 11 left-wing activists mounted a domestic terror attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facility in Alvarado, Texas.

“The defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the facility, as part of an organized attack,” alleged the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas in a press release on Tuesday. “After approximately 10 minutes of convening, one or two individuals broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot at the facility. An Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911 to report suspicious activity. When the Alvarado police officer arrived, one alleged defendant positioned in nearby woods shot the officer in the neck area. Another alleged assailant across the street fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility.”

The graffiti read “ICE pig” and “F*ck you pigs.”

If you hadn’t heard about it yet, you might just be a CNN or MSNBC viewer; neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack, though CNN managed to devote a sentence to it in an online story about another attack on immigration authorities.

Why would either leftist network want their viewing audience to genuflect that they might be the baddies, or supporting them?

OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”

The New Hotness? Evil:

In the early 2000s, Blogspot, which Google had then only recently acquired, was a great platform to get started on; the original version of Instapundit was on Blogspot, which encouraged both Steve and I to launch our first blogs there. It took only a few minutes to get a new blog uploaded, and then it was off to the races. But any blog that’s remotely controversial is runs the risk of angering Google’s rapacious censorship department, and then it’s down the memory hole.

QUESTION: How’s Jeff Bezos’ intervention at the Washington Post coming along? Answer: Not fast enough:

At Outkick the Coverage, Matt Riegle writes: Woke Clown Offended That People Use ‘Clown’ As An Insult.

If you didn’t think it was possible for clowns to be any less funny than they already are, buckle up.

On Thursday, The Washington Post published an opinion piece the likes of which I’ve never seen before titled, “I’m a clown. Donald Trump is not one of us.”

I was not prepared for a blistering hot take like this courtesy of the wokest clown I’ve ever heard of, Tim Cunningham, the board president of Clowns Without Borders.

That’s not a joke. That’s a real group that performs clown shows for communities facing hardship, which is great, but when I’ve faced hardship, my first thought was never, “I wish someone was here to shock me with a joy buzzer and spray me in the face with seltzer from a flower on the lapel,” but we all process grief differently.

Anyway, the piece opens by discussing the way “clown” or “clown show” has become a common way for people to describe President Trump and the Trump administration.

However, Cunningham’s problem wasn’t that it’s a lazy insult that typically misses the mark; he doesn’t like the pejorative use of the word “clown,” which I think has been going on since around the time the word came into existence.

“Clown, capital C, is a valuable and varied art form; pantomimes, acrobats, magicians, dancers, stand-up comedians, vaudeville artists and jugglers are all examples of artists who incorporate Clown into their work,” Cunningham writes.

Other than, eventually, embarrassment, nothing will happen to Cunningham. Unlike the clown who dared mock the president in 2013, earning the wrath of the entire DNC-MSM, including CNN: After Obama-mocking rodeo clown, Missouri fair requires ‘sensitivity training.’

A state fair’s response to the uproar over a rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama is creating an uproar of its own.

From now on, the Missouri State Fair won’t allow any rodeo cowboys or clowns from the state’s association to take part unless they all undergo “sensitivity training.”

And that’s just part of the fallout from the Saturday incident in which a clown wearing an Obama mask held a broom descending from his backside while a voice said, “Hey, I know I’m a clown. He’s just running around acting like one. Doesn’t know he is one.”

Mark Ficken, president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, has resigned.

Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling has apologized. He told Missouri news outlet digitalburg.com that he was the one whose voice was heard at the event, and that he never meant to offend.

“It was a colleague of mine that was dressed up. I am the rodeo clown making jokes,” he said.

“Dog the Wag,” James Taranto quipped at the time at the Wall Street Journal:

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche observed that “a man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Such might be the credo of the professional clown.

Yes, the professional clown. If it never occurred to you to think of clowning as a full-blown “profession,” that makes two of us. Reader, prepare to be educated.

The occasion for the lesson is the kerfuffle over the Missouri rodeo clown who became this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the left when he performed a skit while wearing a mask of President Obama. For his offense against the Dear Leader, he has been banned for life from the Missouri State Fair–in effect excommunicated from the clown community.

As an Insta-commenter wrote back then, “If Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” But of course, we all knew at the time that neither he nor his operatives with bylines could.

JIM TREACHER: Grok Goes Goosestepper? Wie peinlich!

There’s no law against starting your own party, of course. Nobody is forcing anybody to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. But maybe Elon should’ve asked his robot Grok about Ross Perot’s vanity campaign in 1992. The old coot ended up costing George Bush a second term, not to mention inflicting the Clintons on us for the rest of their lives. Is that really what Elon wants?

Then again, maybe Grok isn’t the most reliable source of information. The same day he announced his new party, he made another announcement:

How’s that working out?

Anthony Blair, NY Post:

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok praised Adolf Hitler, referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” and posted vile antisemitic hate, such as calling for people with “certain surnames” to be rounded up, stripped of their rights and eliminated.

The X chatbot, which answers prompts from users, went on a sickening pro-Nazi tirade Tuesday night, after Musk posted that he had “improved Grok significantly” in an update over the weekend…

After users began pointing out the vile posts, Musk’s AI firm xAI deleted some of them, and the chatbot was restricted to generating images rather than text replies.

See for yourself:

And yes, it really did start referring to itself as “MechaHitler”:

And the self-described “MechaHitler” is going mobile! Grok AI to be available in Tesla vehicles next week, Musk says.

Grok AI will be available in Tesla vehicles next week “at the latest”, the EV maker’s CEO, Elon Musk, said in a post on X on Thursday.
Musk’s AI startup xAI launched Grok 4, its latest flagship AI model, on Wednesday. While Musk had earlier said Tesla vehicles would be equipped with Grok, the billionaire CEO had not shared a timeline.

In accordance with the prophecy:

KYLE SMITH: Superman Review: Man of Steel, Feet of Clay.

Back home, Lois Lane (a cute Rachel Brosnahan) knows Superman’s true identity and the pair have been dating long enough to get on each other’s nerves. For once, he gives Lois an interview, which devolves into a spat. Also, Superman has a super-dog, Krypto, who is annoyingly hyperactive but also keeps saving him.

Despite being fake-looking and digital, the mutt is the star of the movie, because this “Superman” has the soul of a sitcom. It features wacky neighbors: the subsidiary metahumans Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion, in a “Dumb and Dumber” haircut); Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), who floats around pushing buttons on a console; and the attacking Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), all of whom pop in to assist Superman. Its villain, Lex Luthor (a staggeringly miscast Nicholas Hoult) is the persnickety Dwight Schrute of the piece, forever huffing about how Superman is breaking the rules, particularly at his Fortress of Solitude, which apparently is not up to code. Lex, whose girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio), is a ditzy online influencer—Mr. Gunn takes a lot of feeble swipes at social media—is accompanied by a henchwoman, the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), who can make her hands into circular saws or tentacles that double as data cables for hacking into computers.

Luthor, an arms dealer trying to profit from the invasion of a sort of Middle Eastern analogue for Ukraine, threatens Superman by uncovering secret information, unknown even to the hero himself, about his background, which leads to a semi-comical stint in prison with a lump of Kryptonite and a strange being named Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). In keeping with the general air of mockery, Superman’s adoptive Earth parents are a pair of Dust Bowl dimwits (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Neva Howell) instead of strong-backed heartland avatars of decency.

That’s new, even startling, but also painful. For the most part the movie is, like Metropolis after Luthor gets to work, a disaster area.

Why can’t Hollywood get the Man of Steel right? That’s an easy one: The death of Superman.

Hence why Hollywood has the very idea of Superman backwards. Superman knows what American exceptionalism is; Hollywood and our media struggle with accepting the same idea. Instead they view him as a symbol of imperialistic and misguided patriotic propaganda, and therefore, he must be reinvented, reimagined and rewritten. It is why Hollywood has failed to top Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman film.

But to ignore the American propaganda aspect of Superman and similar comic heroes is to betray their entire reason for being. The character’s co-creator Jerry Siegel enlisted in the United States military in 1943. He was trained as both a skilled mechanic and as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. The character of Superman himself was published primarily as American military propaganda, with the character routinely foiling Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The world may have changed around him, but Superman is constant, and should be understood as the quintessential American hero. It is not Superman who struggles with his identity. He knows what his purpose is. Despite its failings, America is a global force for good, like Superman. We struggle, we falter, but our ideals remain a constant. They are everlasting. It’s not Superman and America who need to be re-imagined. It’s Hollywood.

The 2006 reboot of Superman* summed up Hollywood’s anti-American worldview in a single sentence: “Superman has spent an extended five years away from Earth to search for any remains of Krypton and his otherworldly roots. Wondering if this foray into the universe has changed Superman’s ideals, Daily Planet editor in chief Perry White immediately sends out reporters to see if he still stands for ‘truth, justice and all that stuff.’”

* Created when yet another Hitler was in the White House, before his rehabilitation last fall.

UPDATE: Sonny Bunch concurs: “Unrelentingly goofy until it tries to get serious, and then it’s even goofier somehow.”

MORE: James Gunn Doesn’t Just Omit “The American Way” In ‘Superman’ – He Changes It To “The Human Way.”

Even the movie’s IMDB page states, “Superman must reconcile his alien Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as reporter Clark Kent. As the embodiment of truth, justice and the human way he soon finds himself in a world that views these as old-fashioned.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

ERICK ERICKSON:

Flashback: To Hell with You People.

UPDATE: Byron York on “Disturbing glimpses of Democratic anger.” “Take it all together, and the situation is this: Some Democrats are calling on their elected representatives to engage in violence against Trump’s policies. At the same time, groups that might be characterized as militant allies of the progressive Democratic movement are resorting to violence in an effort to obstruct the president’s enforcement of federal immigration law. Some radicals have committed politically motivated murder, for which they received support in some far-left circles. And it is all happening in the context of one of the two major political parties experiencing a sharp drop in the most basic measure of civic devotion: pride in being an American. It’s a troubling picture, and nothing on the immediate horizon suggests it will improve any time soon.”

MARK HEMINGWAY: Hollywood’s Inability To Create Masculine Stars Is Officially A Problem.

Two of the biggest movies this summer are Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and F1, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively. The two movies have something interesting in common — both are star vehicles for men in their sixties. Brad Pitt will be 62 later this year, and Tom Cruise just turned 63 last week.

Pitt and Cruise aren’t exceptions, either. The biggest male movie stars are all aging. Clooney is 64 and McConaughey is 55. Ben Affleck, also out with a big action film this year, is 53 next month, and his buddy Matt Damon turns 55 later this year.

Just a few decades ago, it would have been genuinely hard to imagine that our most viable male movie stars would be so old.

* * * * * * * *

Speaking of Harrison Ford, last week there were reports that Disney will be doing a complete reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. And interestingly, there was a surprising chorus of responses online to the news: For the love of all that is holy do not cast Pedro Pascal as Indiana Jones, culminating in “has anyone posted a pedro pascal becoming the new indiana jones tweet yet, because i haven’t seen it 500 times in the last two hours already?”

* * * * * * * * *

Setting politics aside, there are other, um, issues. I don’t know what Pascal’s private proclivities are, and I don’t care. Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson were all, uh, not conventional heterosexual actors — but they were discrete and convincingly masculine onscreen. I know a big part of the problem is that Hollywood is now dominated by female executives who think that it’s disarming and cute that Pascal spends all his time on press junkets obsessing over the nail polish of his interviewers. But the memo should probably go out that this guy absolutely cannot be, say, the next Indiana Jones:

To some extent, the problem is a broader cultural shift. You don’t see many men anywhere that even look like tough-as-nails male icons of yesteryear, let alone earned their image for being hard men long before they started acting. If they were around today, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Charles Bronson would probably be rejected out of hand for poor Q Score potential or something.

But to put this in terms that liberal Hollywood will understand, masculine men are an underrepresented community that is being discriminated against. We deserve representation and we’re not getting it.

In her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, the late Lynda Obst had a chart that laid out in no uncertain terms the type of product that Tinseltown had recently been churning out:

Focusing on sequels and comic book franchises made sense from a business point of view – they’re presold with audiences, and with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, mitigating the risk that a movie will bomb makes sense. But as late as the 1990s, stars were the insurance that a blockbuster was going to do well in the summer – people still went to see a Schwarzenegger movie, a Stallone movie, a Harrison Ford movie, a Tom Cruise movie, a Clint Eastwood movie, etc. (And did so every summer, like clockwork.)

As they became obsessed with franchises, apparently, the corporations who run Hollywood forgot that they might want to develop some younger stars as well who could carry a movie based on name alone.

GROK IS READY FOR ITS TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEW: Grok Goes Full Hitler.

Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.

“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said.

It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of a post that has now apparently been deleted.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted early Wednesday, without being more specific.

“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.

Also Wednesday, a court in Turkey ordered a ban on Grok after it spread content insulting to Turkey’s President and others.

Grok’s veer into antisemitism is likely due to the rise of antisemitism in the culture. After all, LLMs are trained by pouring billions of human-generated words and ideas into a model that creates the illusion of thought, mimicking what human beings say and think. They have no thoughts of their own. They don’t reason, just make correlations and interpretive guesses about what words should be next in line.

* * * * * * * *

After co-creating Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey with Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick was asked about the future of this sort of AI technology in his September 1968 Playboy interview:

Playboy: You’ve been accused of revealing, in your films, a strong hostility to the modern industrialized society of the democratic West, and a particular antagonism—ambivalently laced with a kind of morbid fascination—toward automation. Your critics claim this was especially evident in 2001, where the archvillain of the film, the computer Hal 9000, was in a sense the only human being. Do you believe that machines are becoming more like men and men more like machines—and do you detect an eventual struggle for dominance between the two?

Kubrick: First of all, I’m not hostile toward machines at all; just the opposite, in fact. There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy, however, and that our already complex relationship with our machinery will become even more complex as the machines become more and more intelligent. Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own. But the interrelationship—if intelligently managed by man—could have an immeasurably enriching effect on society.

Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man. You’ve probably heard the story about the ultimate computer of the future: For months scientists think of the first question to pose to it, and finally they hit on the right one: “Is there a God?” After a moment of whirring and flashing lights, a card comes out, punched with the words: “There Is Now.” But this problem is a distant one and I’m not staying up nights worrying about it; I’m convinced that our toasters and TVs are fully domesticated, though I’m not so sure about integrated telephone circuits, which sometimes strike me as possessing a malevolent life all their own.

Just as a reminder that they’re not quite ready for primetime, neither Grok nor Chat GPT could find that exact quote, and both told me that it was apocryphal.

So where does Grok go next? Perhaps after the Night of the Long Pixels, there are newly discovered stepping stones on its path to world domination:

More here: Who is Linda Yaccarino? Elon Musk’s X CEO, who helped stop advertiser exodus after Twitter acquisition, resigns.

Incidentally, awesome timing there, Grok and Elon: ‘America Party’ proves Elon Musk needs a political time-out.

UPDATE: Hollywood’s woke new sequel to Demon Seed sounds lit:

JAMES LILEKS: “You are not going to steal my new car, you motherf***er.”

Went home, hopped out of my car and yes, I left it running, because I was going to walk six steps to get the lawn mower, and besides, it’s Nice Part of Minneapolis, doncha know. I was pulling it out when I saw, out of the corner of my eyes, my car pulling away. There was one tall young male dressed in black running back to his car, and another male of indeterminate size in the driver’s seat.

Have you ever wondered what you would do in a situation like this? Instinct takes over, and your instinct is either be paralyzed by confusion or run after the thief. Apparently mine tend to the latter. I caught up with him as he was backing out of the driveway and threw a punch, which he dodged or I just threw wrong, and then I held on to the door frame while pounding his hand on the wheel, shouting, and I quote, “you are not going to steal my new car you mother***er”

Whereupon he accelerated, and I continued to hang on, until it seemed wise to let go, and I have a vision of my glasses flying up in the air. I got up, reached for my phone, realized it was in the car.

Read the whole thing.

GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURAL SENSITIVITIES: Host Dishes on Kamala Interview That Was So Bad He Refused to Air It, Fearing He’d Be Blamed for Her Loss.

My RedState colleague Bonchie provided more detail on the lost interview, which The New York Times briefly touched on in an interview with [Muslim influencer Kareem Rahma] exactly one day before the election. And …

  • It was a mess.
  • She refused to talk about the war between Israel and Hamas.
  • Harris initially was to be “taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes.”
  • She mixed it up once the interview began, taking a stand on “bacon as a spice.”
  • When that was visibly upsetting to the Muslim host, she pivoted again to declaring her love of anchovies on pizza.

At one point, Rahma paused the interview and begged Harris’s team to switch back to the airplane topic, noting the bacon take was a dumb suggestion and the anchovies may have been worse.

He eventually concluded the interview, saying with an uncomfortable laugh, “Well. I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.”

The Harris campaign requested a reshoot of the segment, but Rahma declined. And he never published the material he already had on file.

Bonchie had the most precise analysis of what had happened. How Kamala could have fumbled such an easy interview.

“She’s a cyborg,” he wrote. “Harris was pieced together by scientists using bolts and duct tape. If she wasn’t, she’d have been able to have a normal discussion like a human being about something not deeply offensive to the person interviewing her.”

That moronic “bacon is a spice” quote is a cliché that Harris has used several times in the past, such as in this October 2019 tweet:

It popped up again in the lede of this September 2024 pro-Harris fluff on the Chowhound foodie Website. But as RedState’s Bonchie wrote in November, “I’m just gobsmacked at how awful of a retail politician Harris is. Her mixture of natural vapidity and laziness leading to being unprepared is truly legendary at this point. She goes into an interview with a Muslim and thinks that is a good time to talk about how great bacon is. It’s incredible.”

Trump spent three hours with Joe Rogan last year; JD Vance’s interview ran twenty minutes longer. No wonder Harris couldn’t handle anything like that.

JIM TREACHER: DC-Area Schoolkids Taught to Harass Jews and Admire Hitler.

That infamous alt-right rally in Charlottesville — you know, the idiots with tiki torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us” — was in August 2017. Almost eight years ago. Yet the Dems can’t shut up about it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Virginia, children at a prestigious DC-area private school are being taught to harass Jews and admire Hitler. And if our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left stay true to form, they’ll turn a blind eye to it.

Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon:

The prestigious Nysmith School in Northern Virginia received a civil rights complaint Tuesday for allegedly expelling three Jewish students who faced anti-Semitic harassment and whom the school’s headmaster told to “toughen up” after they reported the conduct.

The Nysmith School, known as one of the top 10 institutions in the country for students between kindergarten and eighth grade, allegedly expelled Brian Vazquez and Ashok Roy’s three Jewish children in March, after the parents complained about its “unwillingness to respond to anti-Semitic harassment of their 11-year-old daughter…”

The school “allowed anti-Semitism to take root in her class” over the course of several months, including with a social studies project that saw students promote Adolf Hitler as a “strong historical leader.” That project “was shared with the entire school community” and contributed to “a pattern of persistent and severe anti-Semitic harassment,” the complaint alleges.

Seriously.

Before the NEA declares that President Trump is a “fascist,” perhaps they should look into why a North Virginia school is doing fascist-y things, and praising the man with the tiny toothbrush mustache. Just a thought.

UPDATE: It sounds like the NEA endorses the Nysmith School’s worldview: Nation’s Largest Teachers’ Union Moves to Cut Ties with the ADL over Group’s Defense of Israel.

ROGER SIMON: Separated at Birth: Musk, Tucker and TikTok ‘Influencers.’

It might seem unfair to link such mega-celebrities as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson with young women hawking skimpy bikinis on TikTok, but they all share a desperate need for attention. It’s kind of a modern, online egomania—”Attention Seekers Unite!”

In fact, as recent events have shown, Musk and Carlson are right up there on that “attention must be paid” scale, putting most TikTok ‘influencers’ to shame.

Elon has announced a new political party for the unrepresented masses of our country, presumably led by him, with the not terribly original name “America.” (Ironically, the late Abbie Hoffman named his son “America.”) Such luminaries as Mark Cuban and Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci have not surprisingly signed on. Musk sent out a tweet (can we still call it that?) asking his followers to choose a location for their first rendezvous, Mars not yet being available. That would come year three on Musk Time.

Meanwhile, the supposedly intrepid Tucker has interviewed the president of Iran. . He’s keeping us apprised of the truth about our enemies, with the not so subtle undertone that we may be in error. Vladimir Putin was not enough

Neither of these men are about to go off in the woods and meditate for a year—no matter what they tell us or pretences they may have. They are about as “in your face” as one can get—media critters.

Exit quote: “Whether Tucker will return to his senses is a question I cannot answer. I hope he does.”

Once you’ve gone full-on into “Churchill was ackshully the bad guy of WWII” territory, it’s very tough to return to anywhere near the vicinity of reality.

DEVELOPING: FBI launches criminal investigations of John Brennan, James Comey: DOJ sources.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey are under criminal investigation for potential wrongdoing related to the Trump–Russia probe, including allegedly making false statements to Congress, Justice Department sources told Fox News Digital.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel for potential prosecution, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital.

The sources said that the referral was received and told Fox News Digital that a criminal investigation into Brennan was opened and is underway. DOJ sources declined to provide further details. It is unclear, at this point, if the investigation spans beyond his alleged false statements to Congress.

As for Comey, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital that an investigation into the former director is underway, but could not share details of what specifically is being probed.

Hopefully this will go better than some of the Trump administration other recent investigations:

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Identity Thieves.

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—two of America’s most prominent socialist politicians—have committed identity theft. No, they did not pilfer a Social Security number or swipe the digits of someone else’s credit card. They have done something more subtle: stealing the image of the oppressed for personal and political gain.

It’s an old trick. Just as Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American heritage as she ascended the ranks of academia, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez adopted the identities of the poor and downtrodden as they ascended the ranks of politics. Both built their political personas on a small kernel of truth: Mamdani claimed on his college application to be black because he was born in Uganda, despite being the son of two famous, affluent, and educated Indians; Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be a “Bronx girl” because she lived in the borough until age five, when she moved to a tony corner of Westchester County. Both have structured their identities around grand narratives of oppressor and oppressed, which they hope to convert into power and prestige.

The truth is that both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez belong to groups—Indians and Latinos, respectively—that do not fit neatly into America’s deepest historical binary, that between white and black, colonist and slave. Though both could doubtlessly point toward some personal slight or past injustice against their ethnic group, neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez can lay a real claim to historical oppression. Indian Americans are among the most educated and affluent groups in America, and the vast majority of Latinos arrived in the United States after desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The very fact that millions of people uprooted themselves from India and Latin America to try their luck in this country indicates that they considered America a land of opportunity, rather than injustice.

For Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, however, the myth of post-Civil Rights Act discrimination must be maintained at all costs. Both use their privilege—Mamdani, graduate of Bowdoin and son of a professor; Ocasio-Cortez, graduate of Boston University and daughter of an architect—to advance their narrative of oppression.

They do it because it works.

Read the whole thing.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities.

There was a time, not long ago, when Americans — regardless of region, class, or politics — shared a common cultural foundation. From the Saturday morning cartoons children watched to the nightly news programs adults relied on, mainstream culture was both a mirror and a glue: it reflected our values while keeping us tethered to the same national experience. That era is over.

We have entered the Age of Alternative Culture, an era defined by fragmentation, algorithmic echo chambers, and cultural isolation masquerading as global connection.

The culprit is not a single villain but a confluence of forces, chief among them the rise of the Internet and the omnipresence of algorithmically curated content. Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram don’t just reflect our preferences; they shape them, refining our tastes and beliefs into niche categories optimized for engagement. Every scroll reinforces what the algorithm thinks you want, narrowing your worldview under the guise of preference.

We are becoming numbers on a screen in an illusion of mass connectivity, our eyes more valuable than our minds. The consequence is a culture atomized into digital micro-nations, where people live in parallel realities consuming different music, news, humor, and values. There is no longer a mainstream — there are now only streams, and each of us is drowning in our own.

This is the downside to the end of mass media. It united us, but it also made us vulnerable to whatever the elites’ obsession du jour was. The original television networks still do everything they can to keep the idea going: that’s why with the exception of Greg Gutfeld, all late comedians lean hard to the left; and why the news media circled the wagons to protect Biden from 2020 to the summer of 2024, until they all circled the wagons to protect Harris until November. That’s why Silicon Valley tried to replace the Blogosphere with the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. While I wish we still had a shared pop culture, I’m not at all sure I’d want it to be what was left of it by the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web began to become ubiquitous, eventually supplanted by the smartphone.

MARK JUDGE: The Real America: Instapundit, Nancy in Nebraska—and Rick the Bartender.

recently wrote that I’m going to be leaving journalism soon. I want to thank people who’ve helped me survive and produce work the last few years. One of them is Glenn Reynolds, otherwise known as Instapundit. Instapundit is a conservative American political blog created by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor. It launched in August 2001 and is now one of the biggest and best sites in the world.

It’s also the place that helped me finish my book. In the summer of 2020 I was about halfway through my book The Devil’s Triangle when the small advance I received ran out. I didn’t mind going back to work at Home Depot fulltime, but there was no way I was ever going to finish the book. Instapundit came to the rescue. He put out an appeal to readers, who boosted the crowdfunding site I was using for donations. People even sent checks to my UPS box. Because of them I was able to finish the book. I won’t forget that.

There are people like Instapundit, who aren’t elites, who’ll offer support when all other options have run out. That was the position I found myself in in 2020. I’d been the target of a nasty attempted political hit in 2018 when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her in 1982. Ford claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. It was a set-up, an opposition research hit that invoked criminal activity. It was also traumatizing.

Exit quote: “Then a [Washington] Post reporter made the mistake of showing up at Rick’s home, the rural Virginia house where he lives with his wife and dogs. Rick was bartending at the time, but a neighbor tipped him off to some loser with a notebook and a ponytail who was snooping around. Rick told the neighbor to feel free to arm himself. Rick’s phone rang. It was the Post reporter. ‘I just have two things to say to you,’ Rick said. ‘Everybody on my street hates the media, and everybody on my street owns a gun.’ At that point the reporter saw the neighbor approaching, locked and loaded. The reporter fled.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.