Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Internet goes wild for hulking Special Forces agent spotted with Pete Hegseth on early morning run.

The internet has gone wild for a hulking Special Forces agent after he was spotted on an early morning run with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth, 44, was pictured pumping iron and jogging outdoors during a trip to Germany, where he is visiting senior military leaders at US command centers.

But social media users were more interested in a man pictured flanking Hegseth, who appeared to be one of the US Special Forces agents stationed in the country.

The man was seen with a huge smile on his face as he jogged with ease during their dawn workout in Stuttgart, south-west Germany on Tuesday morning.

‘Super hot’, one person commented below the image on X, while others posted gifs expressing the same sentiment on the Elon Musk-owned platform.

‘Dude needs to be in all recruitment material moving forward,’ one person wrote. ‘More men like this!!!!!’ another said beside a gif of a man applauding.

‘Real Life Hulk?’ one person said, while another wrote: ‘Look at this absolute UNIT’.

DailyMail.com has contacted the Department of Defense for clarification on the man’s role in the US military.

Related: Ben Shapiro on “Trump, Hegseth, And The Power Of Images:”

Yesterday, Hegseth did a few things that re-enshrined the idea that America’s military is back. He trained with a bunch of members of the military. He was pumping iron.

This was awesome because the image that you want to give off to the world is one that implies, if you screw with us, then we will kick your a**. That is the image that the American military should be purveying to the rest of the world.

The second thing Hegsteh did was to restore Fort Bragg’s name, renaming Fort Bragg back to Fort Bragg. But there was a twist, and this was really smart.

Fort Bragg was originally named Braxton Bragg, who was a former U.S. Army artillery commander and West Point graduate who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. One of the reasons many of the forts in the United States were named for Confederate generals was not because there was a great love for the Confederacy in the United States. Rather, it was the way to bring a country back together after the most bloody civil war in American history (and possibly world history) by expressing conciliation and recognizing that the Confederacy did exist but was subsumed into the broader union.

The Biden administration decided to rename Fort Bragg, reasoning that, presumably, when black soldiers went to Fort Bragg, they would suddenly think of Braxton Bragg and the old racism of America.

Hegseth found another American hero who happened to be named Bragg: Private First Class Roland Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.

So they restored the legacy of Fort Bragg without paying homage to a Confederate soldier, which is a smart way of squaring the circle.

All this goes to the broader effort Trump is conducting, which is understanding the power of images. This is something Trump understands better than anyone alive. He’s the best marketer in the history of the American Republic, bar none.

Much more like this, please.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Rename Fort Hood after this guy. And Fort Lee after this guy.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: Hermann Göring Plunders Paris, Ernest Hemingway Personally Liberates Parisian Bars! New video from Mark Felton: 

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Yet Another House Dem Calls for ‘Street Fight’ Against Trump Policies.

Less than two weeks ago, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Of Course) called upon people to fight the “extreme MAGA Republican agenda” not just “legislatively” and “in the courts” but “in the streets.” The Trump White House has demanded that Jeffries apologize for inciting violence, and of course, Jeffries did not do so. And now yet another House Democrat has said much the same thing that Jeffries said. Do these people want to incite a new civil war? If they don’t, they certainly seem to like playing with rhetorical fire.

Fox News reported that Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Victimhood), a longtime leftist leader who was first elected to the House in 1987, left in 1996 to become president of the NAACP, and returned to the House in 2020, spoke at a rally in Baltimore on Monday. Mfume railed against Elon Musk’s efforts to end waste and fraud in government and called the Department of Government Efficiency the “department of government evil.”

Having worked himself up into a fine froth, Mfume thundered: “This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand.” It was remarkable how closely his words aligned with those of Jeffries. It’s hard to escape the impression that the Democrat leadership in the House really wants to see people becoming violent in opposition to Trump’s policies.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) posted on X about how odd and disproportionate Mfume’s response was to DOGE’s mission: “A ‘street fight’ to stop cuts to wasteful spending? Those are fighting words. And they’re not honorable words.” Indeed.

Tim Fazenbaker, a who ran unsuccessfully in 2020 and 2022 for a Maryland congressional seat, posted the video of Mfume’s words with this comment suggesting that Mfume’s rage against DOGE may have a self-serving cause: “Congressman Kweisi Mfume calling for a street fight against @realDonaldTrump, @elonmusk and us. Unfortunately, due to gerrymandering, this is my congressman. The same one that was getting nearly $400,000,000.00 to bring illegals and refugees to my community.” Well, that certainly does explain why Mfume would hate DOGE.

Discover the Networks’ page on Mfume:

At a “Race in America” town hall meeting sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) on September 16, 1993, Mfume announced that his Congressional Black Caucus had entered into a “sacred covenant” with Louis Farrakhan‘s Nation of Islam (NOI), meaning that the two organizations would consult with one another on legislative issues and political strategies. At the meeting, Farrakhan joined former CBC chairman Kweisi Mfume, NAACP executive director Benjamin Chavis, Rep. Maxine Waters, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a discussion about: (a) the poor state of race relations in America, and (b) possible solutions to the problems facing the black community. Among the problems the panel identified were: societal prejudice against African Americans, black feelings of inferiority, housing and job discrimination, poverty, urban violence, and family dysfunction. Said Mfume: “We want the word to go forward today to friend and foe alike that the Congressional Black Caucus, after having entered into a sacred covenant with the NAACP to work for real and meaningful change, will enter into that same covenant with the Nation of Islam.”

Mfume backed out of the aforementioned covenant with NOI in February 1994, after a number of CBC members voiced concern about Farrakhan’s failure to condemn a recent instance of incendiary racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric by NOI spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad.

When Mfume retired from Congress in 1996, Elijah Cummings took over his seat in the House of Representatives.

For an overview of Mfume’s voting record on a range of key issues during his tenure as a legislator, click here.

After leaving Congress, Mfume went on to become President/CEO of the NAACP, a post he would hold for eight years.

In 1997 Mfume supported the unsuccessful mayoral candidacy of Al Sharpton in New York City.

Exit quote: “Mfume describes his politics as ‘very, very progressive’ on social issues, but ‘a little more moderate’ on fiscal matters.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

HOW WE GOT HERE:

BODY POSITIVITY’S BIG FAT LIE:

[Tristan Justice and Gina Bontempo, the authors of Fat And Unhappy: How “Body Positivity” Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself)] discuss politics very little, but the unspoken context of their book is the growing politicization of fitness. “Getting fit is great—but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk,” read the title of a June piece published by a Guardian columnist. Kennedy’s endorsement of President Donald Trump brought an entire army of crunchy moms over to the Republican side—no small thing, if a recent report from the New York Times is to be believed. The health of future generations seems like something the left and the right can come together to support, but the food industry and pharmaceutical industry seem to find ways to coopt this vision nearly every time.

Justice and Bontempo are far from the first authors to point out what’s wrong with nutrition in America. They cite research from Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet; Robert H. Lustig, author of Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine; and Gary Taubes, author of  Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Where they start to tread new ground is their reporting on “toxic” body positivity, defining it as a movement that “seeks to eliminate the emotional toll of obesity by demanding the rest of the country normalize and even glorify excess weight.” Justice was even denied a press pass to attend Philly FatCon, a 2023 gathering of pro-fat activists including Joy Cox, author of Fat Girls in Black Bodies, and Sonalee Rashatwar, known online as “The Fat Sex Therapist.”

“The point of the conference was the promotion of far-left activism on social justice, and the organizers placed obesity at the center of it…. None of the conference speakers on the all-women lineup built their profiles by raising the red flag on obesity. They all made money on raising the white one,” Justice and Bontempo write.

So who’s funding the body positivity movement? All it takes is a little digging to realize that when skincare brand Dove launches a “Campaign for Size Freedom,” it’s actually acting in the interest of parent company Unilever, one of the top ice cream manufacturers in the United States. Companies like Dove act in tandem with fat-positive activists like Virgie Tovar to get the stamp of approval from this new social justice spinoff. Unfortunately, average Americans using social media unknowingly encounter this propaganda. They’re bombarded with videos from dietitians funded by the food industry who recommend soda and packaged snacks but never restricting unhealthy foods. In fact, some of the influencers who dole out health “advice” online refuse to even classify foods as “good” or “bad” because “diet culture, fatphobia, and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food” (yes, this is a direct quote from a so-called nutritionist cited by Justice and Bontempo).

The schizophrenia during and immediately after the coronavirus pandemic was pretty astonishing, particularly from sources who should (and do) know better:

Shot: Why Are People with Obesity More Vulnerable to COVID?

Scientific American, June 24th, 2021.

Chaser: Scientific American looks at the racist stigmatization of black women’s bodies and obesity.

Twitchy and your humble narrator, December 28th, 2022:

SYSTEMS UPGRADE COMPLETE:

Not least of whom, Throk:

Flashback: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Hospitalization Saga Just Got Worse. “Is anyone else in the presidential line of succession in the hospital? If there were, we would never know. Who is talking to whom in this administration, and why is it that the easy, most simple things are disregarded or outright ignored?”

As Glenn noted at the start of last year, mercifully, team Biden’s last year in office, “It’s totally normal for senior officials to disappear for days.”

It is if they’re Democrats; the DNC-MSM was happy to look the other way at these issues, in contrast to how they report on a Republican president — and even his first lady: CNN’s Brian Stelter Accidentally Stumbles Upon One of the Biggest Issues of Joe Biden’s Presidency.

Another Twitter/X user responded with another inconvenient point.

“I don’t think you’ve gone 2 minutes without thinking about Trump in the past 9 years.”

Ouch.

But beyond the dunks, it was interesting to see Stelter suggest that not seeing the president for long stretches of time was actually a good thing, when that was one of the core problems with Biden’s presidency: That he was an absentee president, wasn’t present half the time, and even when he was, he didn’t appear to be all there – which is when his handlers stepped in.

Stelter’s .02 is especially fascinating when one considers his fretting over First Lady Melania Trump allegedly going missing at one point during Trump’s first term:

Sooo… to recap: Democrat presidents laying low is a good thing, Republican First Ladies being out of the spotlight for more than a couple of days is problematic, and Republican presidents being out front and center to let the people know they are there and leading is going overboard.

Got it (I think!).

Related: There’s Been a Sheet of Music Change at the DoD.

VANCE SHOWS WHY AMERICA IS LEAVING EUROPE IN THE DUST ON AI. At Spectator World, Matthew Lynn writes:

They won’t have liked the message or the messenger. With characteristic bluntness, Vice President J.D. Vance tore into the European Union’s smothering regulation of artificial intelligence today.

Still, Europe’s leaders should listen. Vance happens to be absolutely right.

When President Macron convened an AI summit in Paris this week, he was probably hoping for the usual platitudes from world leaders about “transformative technologies” and “empowering change” — along with a few billion euros for some data hubs in France. Unfortunately, no one told Vance how these things are meant to work. In his speech he spoke his mind, and tore into his hosts.

“We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry,” he told the CEOs and heads of state in the hall. “We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”

Ouch. It probably made for uncomfortable listening for the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the other assembled dignitaries. They won’t have liked the veiled threat: that tariffs might be a consequence of over-regulating America’s tech giants. Nor will they have appreciated the criticism of Europe’s approach to the sector.

Related: “You can tell this speech is native to him and that it wasn’t written by committee. These are not ideas that he hasn’t wrestled with. That’s why it’s phenomenal, and why it’s so different than all the meaningless slop most politicians deliver.

Earlier: How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms.

[Ross Douthat of the New York Times]: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.

That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?

[Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen]: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing — they just debanked an entire generation of founders.

They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.

They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?

So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?

Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.

By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.

So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.

Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway —

Douthat: No, absolutely. No, I’m by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I’m just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?

Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments aren’t over. That’s still going to play out.

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the

Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

In contrast, as Lynn writes at the first link, “the EU has killed its AI industry stone dead. The AI Act created rules that were too stringent too quickly. It pushed costs so high that most entrepreneurs went elsewhere. Its only real impact has been that giants such as Apple are switching off AI functions in Europe.”

Unexpectedly! The late Steven Den Beste was writing about Europe’s high tech malaise almost a quarter of a century ago. “Where is Europe’s Intel? Where is Europe’s Microsoft? Where is their IBM? Their Dell? Their Applied Material?”

ELON, WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE?

Earlier: Who Let the DOGEs Out?

I fear though, that Musk may be taking Saul Alinksy’s sixth rule for radicals a bit too literally: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Having big Harry Bolz!

TRUMP WINS AGAIN: Electric-Focused Car Ads Absent from Super Bowl After Exploding on Biden’s Watch.

Donald Trump made history on Sunday as the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. The NFL celebrated Trump’s appearance by removing the phrase “End Racism” from the end zones for the first time since 2021, an acknowledgment of the president’s successful efforts to eradicate bigotry. It wasn’t the only thing missing from this year’s contest. In another promising development attributable to Trump’s leadership since taking office, there wasn’t a single Super Bowl ad touting electric cars as the vehicles of the future.

By contrast, seven different ads for electric vehicles ran during the Super Bowl in 2022, several months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order compelling U.S. automakers to ensure that by 2030 roughly half of all cars sold in the country would have fully electric or plug-in hybrid engines. General Motors, for example, ran an ad promising 30 new electric vehicle models by 2025, which turned out about as well as Biden’s promise to cure cancer. Six more electric-focused car commercials aired during the Super Bowl in subsequent years, including “Premature Electrification,” a Ram Trucks ad narrated by former Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones that compared being skeptical about electric vehicles to suffering from erectile dysfunction.

“How interesting,” said Larry Behrens, communications director of Power the Future. “Things have changed.” They certainly have. One of Trump’s first acts as president was repealing Biden’s executive order on electric vehicles. “With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said last month during his Inaugural Address. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”

On Sunday, only two automakers—Jeep and Ram—aired ads during the Super Bowl, and while both featured electric vehicles alongside gas-powered ones, they also channeled Trump’s remarks by emphasizing the importance of choice.

Speaking of Jeep: Why Harrison Ford is endorsing Jeep for Super Bowl 2025 ad.

Ford starred in a two-minute Jeep ad, directed by “A Complete Unknown” Oscar nominee James Mangold, and it was one of the night’s biggest surprises.

Set in a cabin in the wilderness, the earthy spot took advantage of Ford’s all-American quality.

“The longest thing we ever do is live our lives,” he began. “But life doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. Might’ve been nice, huh? But that means we get to write our own stories.”

The screen legend continued, with his signature dry sense of humor: “Choose what makes you happy. My friends, my family, my work make me happy. This Jeep makes me happy — even though my name is Ford.”

While Ford’s paycheck has not been revealed, the Hollywood Reporter said that major actors can command $3 to $5 million for a single Super Bowl ad, which cost $10 to $20 million to make.

Broadcaster Fox charged a record $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the big game.

Besides the brand name pun, Ford was a particularly inspired choice for Jeep, considering that while the leftist actor talks a good game when it comes to radical environmentalism, what actually makes him happy isn’t nothing of the sort: “‘I’m so passionate about flying, I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger,’ he said in 2010.”

THIS WILL END WELL: Lyft to launch autonomous vehicle service in Dallas.

Rideshare company Lyft will bring another self-driving technology to the North Texas market, one of its co-founders announced Monday.

The company previously announced in November it would launch self-driving cars in Atlanta. Now, the company says its autonomous cars will be in Dallas by 2026, according to David Risher’s post on X. Lyft is partnering with Marubeni and Mobileye, a leader in self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance, Risher said.

In 2026, riders will be able to hail autonomous vehicles through the Lyft app and the company plans to expand the self-driving technology to other cities, Risher said.

“It’s all part of our promise to serve and connect, and we’re excited to have Marubeni along for the ride,” Risher said.

Several other companies have announced plans to bring autonomous technology of all shapes and sizes to North Texas in the coming years.

A year ago, KDFW-4, the Dallas Fox affiliate reported, “Dallas has worst drivers in Texas, ranked Top 10 for worst in the country: Forbes.”

Adding autonomous vehicles to the mix won’t help matters.

SPRINGTIME FOR KUTTNER: Liberal Magazine: Hitler Knew How to Fund Science, Unlike Trump.

Adolf Hitler was really a pretty good guy, according to the American Prospect. At least he knew that funding universities was a good investment and that scientific research was a national good. Donald Trump should be more like Hitler, don’tcha know?

No, I am not kidding. They really think America should follow the Hitler model when it comes to funding science.

* * * * * * * * *

Now, don’t get me wrong: American Prospect is not calling for a systematic purge of Jews from the scientific community, although no doubt many of their readers are on board with that idea since it would be a good way to “decolonize” academia. They just think Hitler had the right idea about pouring money into universities.

At least I don’t THINK that is what Robert Kuttner is arguing.

* * * * * * * * *

In Robert Kuttner’s world, Hitler may not have been the ideal leader, but he did have some good ideas. Look to the Nazis, he tells us.

Geez.

Curiously, he’s not the first contributor to the socialist American Prospect to go the “good ideas” route. That thought seems to cross the minds of its contributors once every decade, so they were definitely due:

Not everything the Nazis touched was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company. Universal health care is a perfectly good idea. Indeed, the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living (they were, many think, the first Keynesians, adopting the strategy even before Keynes had come up with it), pushing Germany out of a depression and back into expansion. Unfortunately, they also set out to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews. People shouldn’t do that.

“Nazi Ideas,” Ezra Klein, The American Prospect, September 11(!) 2006.

Klein’s fellow TAP contributor and future Vox.com co-founder Mathew Yglesias tweeted in 2016:

As future Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg wrote at the beginning of 2001, “I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: ‘Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?’”

Related: From Newsalert in 2015: Flashback: When Comrade Robert Kuttner Was Honored By The Democratic Socialists of America.

Well, TAP seems determined on occasion to expand their socialism on an “unexpectedly” national scale!

TRUMP CONFIRMS PALESTINIANS WILL HAVE NO RIGHT OF RETURN UNDER GAZA TAKEOVER PLAN: ‘They’re going to have much better housing.’

President Trump has confirmed that under his controversial development plan for the war-torn Gaza Strip, Palestinians would not be allowed to return to the Hamas-run enclave.

“No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing. Much better,” Trump told Fox News “Special Report” host Bret Baier in a clip from the weekend interview that aired Monday morning on “Fox & Friends.”

“In other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them because if they have to return now, it’ll be years before you could ever — it’s not habitable,” the president went on. “It would be years before it could happen.”

Whatever happens, I hope they have much better plumbing:

ROGER SIMON: Deep State May Emerge as Greatest Financial Ripoff in World History.

Government spending transparency has simply not existed in any of our lifetimes, not even remotely. The legislators themselves have little idea on how money they authorize is ultimately spent. Most apparently don’t care—at least they act as if they don’t—as long as their patrons get their portion of the payout.

This especially goes for so-called liberals and progressives, even though they won’t admit it, whose pet projects have been secretly funded to astonishing degrees through cutouts and other means but with the money almost always used to line pockets (cf. Samantha Power, but she’s the least of it. NGOs in general have become the new featherbeds, far more lucrative than ever.)

No wonder we are in the midst of a Democrat legal hissy-fit with some union bosses (who better?) having found the usual complaisant judge, resembling a third-level Mafioso, to do their bidding, putting a hold on the investigation or part of it. It won’t last for a simple reason. The cat is finally out of the proverbial bag and the American people have already seen what has been going on—enough of us anyway.

The Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot here, seemingly having lost their ability to read public opinion. Anger can do that to you. Also they are fighting those nasty little things, facts and truth.

Related: Dems Threaten To Shut Down Govt To Stop Trump From Cutting Govt Programs.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Princess Bride Star Wallace Shawn: Israel Worse Than Nazis.

Best known for both serious fare (1981’s “My Dinner with Andre”) and the 1987 classic “The Princess Bride,” Shawn is one of Israel’s harshest critics.

Shawn chose this moment, as Israeli hostages reveal the horror of their captivity, to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Except Israel, he said, is actually worse.

The Jewish artist told “The Katie Halper Show,” according to Variety, that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did.”

Except when it’s worse, he added.

“They kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil. And anybody who doesn’t recognize that it’s evil, I can’t, probably, communicate with that person. That might be temporary insanity.”

Inigo Montoya said it best:

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Dems Keep Putting Themselves On The Wrong Side Of Popular Issues In Trump Era.

The idea of keeping girls’ sports for girls, protecting them from male competitors in their events and their locker rooms, is an 80 percent issue in America.

“You rarely get 79 percent of the country to agree on anything,” Enten said, terming it a “ginormous majority,” which includes almost 70 percent of Democratic voters.

A hubristic left, culturally dominant for decades and backed by Hollywood, academia, and the media, thought it could take an 80-percent issue and force it into a cultural and political win. It was wrong about that. Convincing people to shut up is not the same as convincing them.

The wisdom of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s shorthand for political success remains applicable: Find an 80-percent issue and stand next to it.

How a movement convinced itself to flip this admonition on its head and jump on the 20-percent side is one for the history and political science books. Yet, here we are, another Republican president— this one regarded by institutional feminists as nothing short of an abomination—signing a landmark protection for women in sports. Nixon famously signed Title XI in the White House in 1972.

This is a serious issue, but liberals are willing to do it on smaller issues, too.

Friday, Trump announced that he is signing another executive order getting the federal government out of the business of pushing paper straws. The Biden administration had made it a mission via Executive Order to force the country into a future of disintegrating utensils by 2032. But the thing is, they don’t work and they annoy people. Our friends on the left will now spend time crowing about the indispensable nature of mandated, subsidized paper straws, whose banning was built on dubious data from a 9-year-old’s school project, as a pillar of American democracy. Regular voters will enjoy plastic straws that work. If Trump fixes the gas cans next, he may be president forever.

In ways both big and small, the progressive hubris of the last decade has made life uncomfortable for many Americans, and Democrats have gotten very out of practice taking their concerns seriously.

Led by an activist class, exemplified by the newly elected DNC Chair David Hogg, the party seems intent on finding an 80-percent issue and standing on the wrong side of it.

As Abe Greenwald wrote in the Commentary newsletter last week:

If you want to know why, for the first time in 30 years, more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat, it’s because Republicans have been given the easy task of asserting intuitive common sense in a country whose leaders got high on reality-altering theories. It’s now liberals who have to explain why, even though every instinct tells you its monstrous, its ultimately good to toy with children’s gender. Why your daughter should face-off against a boy on the playing field. Why, even though, we have a massive illegal-immigration crisis, it’s ultimately good to keep criminals in the country that they entered illegally. Why, it’s ultimately good to spend your money on a Peruvian transgender comic book.

If it was hard for conservatives to argue for worthy counterintuitive ideas, think how hard it is for liberals to argue for ruinous ones. Watching them try is as fun as discovering conservatism all over again.

Compounded with the fun of watching wanna radical chic leftists self-identify as stodgy reactionaries desperately trying to preserve the old system:

DAVID THOMPSON: May Contain Drama.

Or, Shakespeare For The Tremulous And Neurotic:

Drama students are being warned of suicide in Romeo and Juliet after a university put more than 200 trigger warnings on works of Shakespeare. The University of the West of England (UWE) has issued warnings for “blood” and “psychological trauma” in Macbeth, as well as “storms” and “extreme weather” in The Tempest.

No laughing at the back.

One theatre show of the shipwreck play was highlighted for containing the “popping of balloons.”

Readers will doubtless recall the Chichester Festival Theatre warning patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most famous and widely-seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.

We’ve long speculated that there’s no way that Blazing Saddles could be made today. But I had no idea that Hogan’s Heroes reruns might cause sensitive viewers in the 21st century – or at least those who wish to slap warning labels on absolutely everything – to dive for the fainting couch.

FOR SUPER BOWL 60, THIS WOULD BE A HALFTIME SHOW WORTHY OF THE BIG GAME:

Somewhere, the Motown music hitmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the original members of the Four Tops and The Temptations who have passed on, are surely rolling over in their graves at what soul and R&B music has devolved into when an incomprehensible and vulgar mess like rapper Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” can win five Grammy Awards, as it did last Sunday night.

Awarding it “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year” doesn’t speak very highly of the music industry today or of the 13,000 Grammy-voting members of the Recording Academy, either, whose taste appears to be all in their mouths.

“Not Like Us” is sonic entropy that I won’t deign to call music. I haven’t the slightest idea what Lamar is trying to say, because the lyrics are an incoherent, illiterate word salad that would make former Vice President Kamala Harris sound like a rocket scientist by comparison. From what I’ve been able to ascertain online, “Not Like Us” is basically intended as a “diss” aimed at rival rapper Drake.

The song, if you can call it that, is replete with a flurry of gratuitous F-bombs and N-words. But as bad as that is, Lamar also put out a “gay remix” that is even more obscene, with explicit descriptions of sex acts.

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All of this raises a serious question: What was NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—or whoever in the league’s C-suites chose Lamar as the big game’s halftime performer—thinking?

Welcome to Weimar America, where the left views Donald Trump as a uniquely vulgar individual, whereas Lamar is fit to both perform at the Super Bowl halftime show, and at Fourth of July ceremonies at the White House of recently retired President Obama.

Next year’s NFL championship game in February 2026 will be Super Bowl 60, and with the 60th being a milestone number, allow me to propose a halftime show worthy of the occasion: A Beatles reunion, of sorts.

But not just a reunion of the two remaining members of the Fab Four by themselves, however. I would have Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, both of whom are still recording and performing in concert despite being 82 and 84, respectively, be joined onstage for the 15-minute halftime extravaganza by their musician offspring—James McCartney; the late John Lennon’s sons Julian and Sean Lennon; the late George Harrison’s son Dhani Harrison; and Ringo’s son, Zak Starkey.

Would McCartney and Starr, proselytizing vegetarians (is there any other kind?), deign to perform at a sport centered around a ball commonly dubbed “the pigskin?”

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Sunday Sermon: ‘Sometimes Violence Is Necessary.’

Related: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.