HOW MUCH LONGER IS CBS GOING TO CARRY MARGARET BRENNAN?

Rubio and Graham didn’t even have to put forth much of an effort to make Brennan come off like an idiot. Neither did Vance when he cranked out that “I Don’t Really Care, Margaret” nuclear bomb to her career. This keeps happening and yet there doesn’t seem to be any effort toward making a change at CBS. It’s hard not to wonder where the leftist journos are who can at least hold their own without snarling or saying something disqualifyingly stupid while trying to have a debate with a Republican politician.

If it’s absolutely necessary to have the debate at all rather than an interview. I’m going to venture a guess that even CBS’s rump audience would rather listen to what Rubio has to say than hear Brennan berating him. Though maybe I’m wrong, and CBS has lost those people already.

Which begs the question why Vance, Rubio, and Graham even let themselves be booked on those shows rather than simply do a long-form podcast interview with somebody who draws a lot bigger audience, like for example Megyn Kelly.

And the success of independent New Media types like Kelly, who found themselves flushed out of alphabet-soup media and found that it was the best thing that ever could have happened to them, would seem to be a bracing development for the suits at CBS. Do they now think Brennan is the best they can do?

Didn’t CBS employ Lara Logan, Sharyl Attkisson, and Catherine Herridge not so long ago? All of them were regarded by everyone as serious journalists. One could argue all three are doing quite well now that they’re independent New Media players.

How well do you think Margaret Brennan would do if she had to swim in that deep water?

You don’t have to answer that. We’re coming rapidly to the point where we’re going to find out soon enough. Because even at a place like CBS, there has to be a level of embarrassment beyond which they’re not willing to go.

They should have reached that point by now, for certain. But given the current direction, it’s only a matter of time before she crashes into that wall.

In the meantime, as Steve asked last month: What the Hell Is Wrong With CBS News?

To be fair, that’s been an ongoing question for over sixty years now.

JOHN NOLTE: Critics Ravage Disney’s Snow White Remake — Prepare for Woke Dopey.

The slow-rolling train wreck that is the Disney Grooming Syndicate’s live-action remake of Snow White continues to roll along with a disastrous 47 percent “rotten” score at Rotten Tomatoes.

What makes this especially gratifying is understanding how the rigged review system works, which is like this…

A total of 98 reviews are in, meaning every reviewer received exclusive access from Disney’s public relations department to an early screening for critics. The earliest Normal people can see it is this afternoon.

This means that all of those 98 are “on Disney’s approved reviewer list,” and you know most of them wanted to love Snow White, wanted to redeem the movie just to stick a finger in the eye of MAGA, and kiss Disney’s sweet ass.

But.

The movie sucks so hard, they couldn’t even do that.

At the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith dubs the new Snow White “A Disney Princess’s Pointless Return.” “Disney’s first ‘Snow White’ isn’t perfect—the prince is badly underwritten and doesn’t even get a name—but it is, by turns, enchanting, scary and moving. Version 2.0, starring Rachel Zegler in the title role and Gal Gadot as her nefarious stepmother, has been in the works since 2016 and already feels like it’s from a bygone era. After fans seemed grumpy about the rumored storyline and the casting of Ms. Zegler, Disney became bashful about releasing it last March and ordered reshoots to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, the story is so dopey it made me sleepy.”

Heh, indeed.™

JIM TREACHER: Dems’ New Plan to Stop Musk: Firebomb Some Teslas.

There’s even a website called Dogequest, with an interactive nationwide map that allows budding terrorists to track down Tesla dealerships and even individual Tesla owners.

The proprietors of the site claim their intent isn’t malicious, which must be why the map cursor is a Molotov cocktail.

If you’re a Tesla owner and your private information is on Dogequest, they’ll take it down… if you can prove you’ve sold the car. That sure sounds like extortion.

Call me old-fashioned, but destroying other people’s property is wrong, even if you’re angry about losing an election and you think a billionaire is a jerk.

I’m starting to wonder if Democrats really care about saving the environment. Apparently the fate of the planet isn’t as important as keeping a guy they don’t like from making more money.

You know who loves all this? Tim Walz. He’s so happy about it, he even tweeted out this video:

Walz didn’t get to be vice president of the United States, so now he’s celebrating vandalism against an American company. Hey, if Musk is going to fire a bunch of useless bureaucrats, why shouldn’t people who actually build things for a living suffer as well?

I have some problems with Musk, mainly the way he runs Twitter.1 And it’s fair to criticize his role in the Trump administration. But that doesn’t justify violence against him or his companies.

Musk himself will be fine. He’s not about to go hungry anytime soon. But if you condone this terrorism — and that’s precisely what this is, the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion — your soul is bankrupt.

No wonder you’re a Democrat.

Flashback: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’

Related: Loudmouth Tim Crows About Tesla Stock Dropping. Minnesota Had Millions Of Shares In Tesla.

MUSK DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: NBC10 Boston’s Pete Bouchard under fire for saying SpaceX splashdown had ‘strong hints of AI.’

Bouchard, after the NASA astronauts who were stuck in space for 9 months finally returned to Earth, said the SpaceX splashdown had “strong hints of AI enhancement.”

The chief meteorologist at NBC10 quickly faced criticism from online followers, and he deleted his post that questioned the dolphins suddenly surfacing.

Then he put out a new Facebook post Tuesday night about the splashdown involving Elon Musk’s company.

“I’m no conspiracy theorist, but that splashdown today had strong hints of AI enhancement in the drone footage,” Bouchard posted. “Lighting looked cinematic. Was it the camera?”

“This doesn’t take anything away from the brave astronauts or remarkable scientists involved in returning a capsule from space,” he added. “It’s a remarkable feat and a heroic moment for our country.”

Bouchard later updated his post for clarification.

“My original post was simply commenting on how visually appealing and perfect the landing looked using the drone,” he wrote. “I was curious about the technology and the camera the crew used to capture the scene.”

His Bluesky post still included a mention about the dolphins.

“I know I won’t feed the conspiracy theorists on this platform, but that splashdown today had strong hints of AI enhancement,” he posted on Bluesky. “And the pod of dolphins that just happened to surface?”

“Totally realistic at reentry, then when they cut to the drone footage at sea level when the parachutes deployed, the lighting looked off,” he added. “Maybe the camera settings?”

Bouchard, who has more than 11,000 followers on Facebook, was slammed online for his post.

” ‘I’m no conspiracy theorist’ but I have a conspiracy theory,” someone posted. “You can’t make this up.”

No matter how big their market, all local reporters dream of playing in the national leagues. Bouchard is clearly angling for a gig at ABC News – and then possibly even moving to Ireland.

INJUNCTION DYSFUNCTION OR TYRANT DISRUPTION? Trump-Era Judicial Paralysis Explained.

Can a single judge unilaterally thwart the president of the United States?

That’s the contentious question the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve last week in response to court orders blocking its effort to curtail birthright citizenship, and after a slew of decrees requiring the president do everything from halting major actions on DEI and domestic spending to disbursing billions in foreign aid.

At issue is a legal remedy, universal injunctions, that allows any of the nearly 700 federal judges to prevent the president from enforcing policies not only against those bringing a case but anyone, everywhere. Universal injunctions were rare until the first Trump administration, when their usage exploded as Democrats and progressives turned to the courts to block many of his policies.

In the early days of Donald Trump’s second administration, courts have issued such injunctions at a historic pace and with growing potency, notably over the weekend with a suspension in deportations of Venezuelan gang members without a hearing. During the month of February alone, district court judges, most nominated by Democrats, ordered 15 such injunctions – more than Joe Biden faced during his first three years as president. Courts from Washington, D.C., to Washington State have issued injunctions in “epidemic proportions,” now not only governing “the whole nation” but “the whole world,” the administration says.

The injunctions come in response to the 100-plus lawsuits that, critics argue, blue states, progressive nonprofits, and ex-government officials have deliberately brought before sympathetic judges – a tactic known as “forum shopping” or “judge shopping” that both parties have employed.

Read the whole thing.

Related, from Glenn at his Substack: Trump and the Lower Courts. Some thoughts about what he’s doing and what he might do.

SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB: Climate change ‘can teach schoolchildren about race.’ Oh, to be in England:

Climate change can be used to teach children about race, a national curriculum review has been told.

Global warming should be used to allow teachers and pupils to “explore conversations about race”, according to the Runnymede Trust.

The race equality think tank told a review into the curriculum commissioned by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, that such discussions would allow pupils to discuss more openly the impact of race on them and its relationship to “wider society”.

One aspect of the trust’s recommendations is thought to be aimed at encouraging teachers to throw light on the unequal impact of climate change on different groups in society, such as in developing countries.

Its recommendation states: “Subjects such as English and history, as well as discussions of climate change in science, should offer students the opportunity to explore conversations surrounding race* and its relationship to wider society, as opposed to stifling students and teachers in the expression of opinion surrounding these themes.”

The submission is one of several seen by The Telegraph which argue that climate change and sustainability should form a more central part of the curriculum.

Something tells me these classic British headlines won’t be on the curriculum:

● BBC Scream: ‘18 Months to Save the Planet’ from Global Warming.

—NewsBusters, July 25th, 2019.

● Stephen Hawking says Donald Trump risks ‘turning Earth into Venus’ with 250 degree temperature.

—The London Telegraph, July 2nd, 2017.

● President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

—The Grauniad, January 27, 2009.

● UN scientists warn time is running out to tackle global warming.

—The Grauniad, May 4th, 2007.

● “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”

—The Grauniad, February 21, 2004.

● U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—AP, June 29, 1989. (It’s AP, but it had to have been picked up by several British newspapers back in the day, right?)

And of course, this classic:

* Wait, why is the curriculum limited to just race?

JAMES LILEKS ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COVID LOCKDOWNS:

Again, and again, variants and surges. I stopped worrying. I got it, twice. Or to put it another way: I got it, twice. I stopped worrying. Things came back in stages, yet each relaxation felt not like a step towards the old before times, but an ongoing redefinition of some emerging new paradigm. It did not feel as if restrictions were being removed, but new, tightly defined freedoms were being doled out.

The final stage of all this, I guess, was the NYT running a piece that said “Hey, turned out the authorities and media gatekeepers weren’t telling us the whole story.”

That, I suspect, is intended to be the end of the old conversation, not the start of a new one.

Some lingering effects we’ll never lose, and maybe we won’t notice or question, just as 24-year old people who weren’t alive in 2001 take their shoes off in the TSA line because well that’s what you do. If you ask them who Richard Reid was, they’d have no idea.

Read the whole thing.

NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Meet Harry Sisson, the Biden-Loving Feminist Influencer Outed as ‘Possibly Not Gay’ After Multiple Women Accused Him of Being a Sex Creep.

In case you missed it, which you probably did, here’s what happened: An effeminate TikTok influencer, semi-renowned for his obsequious fawning over former president Joe Biden, was apparently outed as heterosexual after multiple female women accused him of being a lying pervert. His name is Harry Sisson, and he’s a 23-year-old social media user who posts professionally (and obnoxiously) about politics. He’s been profiled by numerous mainstream outlets, including NBC News, Vanity Fair, and Semafor. He campaigned for Kamala Harris, appeared on CNN, filmed a TikTok video with Barack Obama, and met with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Capitol Hill earlier this month. He was invited to the White House in 2024, where he met with Biden in the Oval Office and called him “the best president in modern American history.”

Earlier, from Steve: So Another Male Feminist Turns out to Be a Social Media Perv.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Hollywood’s Rough Start To 2025 (And It’ll Probably Get Worse).

“What really made me laugh though,” the Drinker says, “was the idea that distributors are holding out hope for Snow White to turn their fortunes around. Hate to break it to you chaps, but with a projected $50 million opening weekend and some of the worst PR in Hollywood history, something tells me this isn’t going to be the box office savior you’re hoping for.”

Fortunately though, America’s Newspaper of Record is reporting that Disney has a cunning, last-second plan to salvage its box office prospects!

THE CLOSING OF THE DISTAFF AMERICAN MIND:

And:

Earlier: The Era Of Presuming Liberal Moral Superiority Is Over.

WELCOME HOME:

Splashdown of Dragon confirmed – welcome back to Earth, Nick, Suni, Butch, and Aleks! pic.twitter.com/M4RZ6UYsQ2

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 18, 2025

UPDATE: Stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams safely splash down in SpaceX capsule after 9 months on ISS.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Boot the Ungrateful Foreigners the Hell Out of America.

I am loving this uproar over that communist terrorist fluffer from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, who the feds detained with an eye towards booting his sorry rear out of our glorious country. First, I love how the commies are crying about it, how suddenly they care about free speech even though they carried absolutely nothing about free speech when normal patriotic Americans were being rounded up for daring to oppose abortion and bogus elections. I love how they’re calling his totally legitimate arrest a “kidnapping” when this guy’s unseemly and eager onanism over his dirtbag Palestinian buddies’ kidnapping of innocent Israelis is what got him busted in the first place. But mostly, I love this imbroglio because it shows that we Americans are not going to take any more guff from uppity foreigners.

We’re booting this tool out of our great country. It may take a bit of time to wind its way through the courts, but he’s gone. We should be booting his wife out, too, before she drops her kid – hey, a fetus leftists don’t want to kill! – and it gets American citizenship. In fact, we should boot out all these agitators and malcontents, deporting every single weirdo, loser, and mutation who hates America and thinks they have a free pass to try and gin up their Marxist revolution here on our sacred soil.
We’re done. We tried tolerance, and they attacked Jewish Americans. They would murder the rest of us too given the chance, so we’re not giving them one. Get the hell out.

And they will get the hell out. The law is very clear, and it’s very clear that this guy is going to soon be on a one-way flight to whatever geographic zit he popped out of. So will a bunch of his fellow travelers. See, we’re done with ungrateful foreigners. We’re not taking it anymore. American idiots are bad enough. We don’t need to import any more idiots. In fact, we need tariffs, idiot tariffs. And idiot reparations from the garbage countries they come from, but that’s down the road.

Related: Whoopi: ‘Any One of Us Could Find Ourselves Being Deported’ By Trump.

The Trump administration’s deportation of several violent Venezuelan gang members who were in the country illegally made the liberal ladies of ABC News’s The View very upset, Monday morning. Co-host Sunny Hostin called it a “constitutional crisis” while Ana Navarro suggested it was an attack on the Venezuelan Americans who voted for President Trump (she also basked in their purported misery). But moderator Whoopi Goldberg took the most factually inaccurate stand when she erroneously claimed it was evidence that any American could find themselves deported by Trump.

I’m not much of a fan of ABC’s News division, but unlike Whoopi, even I wouldn’t compare them to terroristic Venezuelan gang members. What is she trying to imply about the corporate hell-world in which she’s forced to work?

Evergreen:

UPDATE:

Call me a squish, but I don’t see the problem with this. One group is full of violent, unkempt, semi-literate gang members who are easily drawn into terrorism. And the other is Tren de Aragua. https://t.co/DPBu07SOQY

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) March 18, 2025

Heh, indeed.™

DON’T GET COCKY: ‘Bunch Of Losers:’ Dems’ Emerging 2028 Field May Not Bode Well For Liberals.

Political strategists are not yet sold that Democrats rumored to be prospective 2028 presidential candidates have all that it takes to unite the party and retake the White House.

Failed 2024 candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a handful of Democrat governors — Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Wes Moore of Maryland  — are all thought to be potentially sizing up runs for the White House in 2028 as Democrats try to fight their way out of the political wilderness. Even though there is still plenty of road to go before the campaign kicks off, the prospective candidates could find it quite difficult to unite the party and appeal to enough of America to win back the presidency, pundits told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We are in what has been referred to as the ‘invisible primary’ phase of the election cycle, because it is so early and the public isn’t paying attention to these early machinations,” Len Foxwell, a Maryland-based Democratic strategist, told the DCNF. “The only ones who are participating in the process at this point are the prospective candidates themselves and a relatively small and insular ecosystem of donors and party activists and elected officials who do this sort of thing, either as a passion or as a profession. It’s a very small and limited process right now, but it’s definitely happening.”

Related: VDH asks: What Are the Left’s Solutions for the Problems They Created?

WAIT, YOU TOLD ME HE WAS HITLER. NOW YOU WANT TO NEGOTIATE WITH HIM? Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works.

More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter says in part. The letter claims that “AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations.”

That’s quite a newfound sense of patriotism for an industry that normally professes to hate America and has thrown its lot in with the CCP. But as Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”

Still though, maybe you shouldn’t have gone all-in on the Hitler and Nazi stuff for the past decade, huh?

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: James Lileks: “The worst thing for the urban enthusiasts is the idea that people in the suburbs, whose houses literally embody social distancing, might not get sick as much as people in the cities. Citylab: ‘Are Suburbs Safer From Coronavirus? Probably Not.’”

Or maybe they are. Read the whole thing.

Earlier:

THE NEW YORK TIMES FINALLY COMES CLEAN ABOUT COVID: It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.

[The Times’ Zeynep Tufekci] wasn’t alone in reevaluating the mistakes of Covid; the NYT’s Apoorva Mandavilli did her share as well, writing “Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the pandemic? What Failed?”

In May 2021, Mandavilli tweeted, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”

Now we know that intelligence services in the UK and the United States are of the belief that the virus originated in the lab in Wuhan instead of in the wet market nearby. It turns out the lab that was experimenting with the viruses unsafely may be the more likely culprit instead of bats flying thousands of miles, only to be eaten in that particular market in Wuhan, China. As my friends in the South say, “Well, blow me over with a feather.” It took five years for these experts to get here.

Mandavilli would like to know what failed during the pandemic. Our institutions, science, a myriad of culprits. But the bottom line failure was that of basic common sense, and the bravery to just plainly state objective facts. The emperor had no clothes, and it took the New York Times five years to say it aloud.

Funny how that keeps happening at the DNC-MSM.

GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROTURFING:

It’s Mobyism: The Next Generation!

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Coronavirus Confirmed in All 50 States and D.C., After West Virginia Reports First Case; U.S. Death Toll Passes 100.

Related: NYC coronavirus cases increase by more than 100 in just one day.

OLD AND BUSTED: Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.

The New Hotness? Measuring the Deck Chairs on the Titanic! Kamala Harris campaign required she only be seated in chairs that ‘met certain specifications.’

An excerpt from “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, published in The Hill, detailed the strict seating arrangements.

“Her team required that she be provided a chair that met certain specifications: ‘Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm,” according to the book excerpt.

The mandated chair specifications came following her first media interview after taking over the top of the Democratic ticket roughly 40 days before.

The pair sat at a table, but the visual of Harris appearing to be lower than Walz prompted her team to issue a new mandate to never let it happen again.

The internal polling at that point must have been spectacularly bad. Was worrying about chair dimensions a way to pass the time while waiting for the iceberg to hove into view?

“Sitting next to Walz in a chair that seemed to place her below him and heaping praise on Biden’s record, Harris did not look like a candidate seeking the highest office in the land,” the excerpt read. “The whole scene reinforced the criticism that the vice president was either incapable, or afraid, of answering tough questions on her own.”

But Allen and Parnes said that regardless of the mandated chair specs, “the question facing Harris was whether she could build a sturdy platform.”

No politician has ever failed continually upward in such an extraordinary fashion.

IT’S NICE TO MAKE IT OFFICIAL, BUT TO BE FAIR, NO ONE DOUBTED THIS BEFORE:

Whoopi admits ABC News's The View are part of the Democratic Party:
"I don't know if you can wait for somebody to step up and lead the party. [Tim Walz] is not wrong when he says the party is us and what are we going — what are we prepared to do?" pic.twitter.com/Lukavprn9w

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) March 18, 2025

MARK HEMINGWAY: The Era Of Presuming Liberal Moral Superiority Is Over. Responding to the now viral video of leftist actor Sam Seder getting his clock cleaned by conservative teenagers (background in the recent Matt Walsh video below), Hemingway writes:

But Seder’s full answer is so much worse than that. First, Seder suggests some vague “humanist vision” of what’s best for the most is what’s moral, and then when he balks at being labeled a utilitarian or consequentialist, he shifts to saying that some also vague version of collectivism is the basis of morality. When his interlocutor then asks what he would think if the small-d democratic collective came together and undermined trans rights, he says that wouldn’t be moral. Then he argues that biological distinctions, such as being born gay, could be determinative of morality. Then when the young guy points out that some people think pedophilia is an innate biological orientation, we see more backpedaling, and Seder then argues that there also has to be consent for relationships to be moral. So then he’s asked whether it’s moral if a father and a daughter have a sexual relationship if they’re both consenting adults, and he says “I think society has determined …” and we’re back to secular collectivism as a moral foundation. It’s just a mess.

Presumably, Seder knew this debate would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked a kid would cut right to matters of first principles and question the assumptions of moral authority underpinning bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. When it comes to political punditry, there’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously: How does that person justify the use of political power to implement the policies they favor?

What Seder was asked was far from a trick question; rather, it’s basic American civics. This is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses, as the founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their present government would start with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. So our founding document is a fairly succinct and compelling natural law argument for a government that recognizes all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that cannot be abrogated, let alone by a king who claims the “divine right” to tax people on a whim.

Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. So our system hinges on allowing an element of democracy, while putting enough checks in the system to ensure the tyranny of the majority doesn’t overwhelm the God-given rights of individuals. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there’s no getting around the fact that having objective notions of morality, traditionally represented by a belief in God, is foundational to our whole system. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.

As Chris Rufo observes, “The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s ‘debate champ’ doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he’s ignorant of basic Christian theology, the natural rights theory of the American founders, and the criticism from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault. Just doesn’t know any of it.” There’s also an element of blatant hypocrisy here as well. “Seder objects to religion because it ‘imposes’ values on everyone,” notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. “It is, however, a dream to think that imposition of values is NOT a precondition of every social order. (Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such.)”

Earlier: “In describing his ‘Ideological Turing Test,’ [Business Insider’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry] explains that the reason is quite simple. Conservatives understand liberals very well, while liberals do not understand — or even try to understand — conservatives at all.”

METAPHOR ALERT: Artist Crushes Tesla With Colossal Olmec Head Sculpture.

Sculptor Chavis Mármol has never owned a car, but that’s never inhibited his drive. Earlier this month, the 42-year-old Mexico City-based artist (who travels largely by bicycle) dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3 in a crushing display posted to Instagram on March 11. Mármol told Hyperallergic that his intention was “to satirize the Tesla brand and its creator.”

Made of quarry stone, the large-scale sculpture is a copy of the ancient Olmec Colossal Heads — distinct archaeological remnants of the Olmec civilization that once flourished along Mexico’s gulf coastline around 3,000 years ago. Mármol’s untitled destruction performance, which took place on March 5, was the third and final part of a series called Neo-Tameme involving the stone replicas and contemporary objects.

* * * * * * * *

“I didn’t just want to crush an expensive car. I know there are more expensive cars out there,” Mármol said. Pointing to the impossibility of acquiring the electric vehicle for many Mexican residents, the artist said that the overall goal of the project was “to crush an object that represents a sinister figure like Elon Mollusk,” intentionally misidentifying the Tesla billionaire.

I’m pretty sure Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide:

NASA’S STRANDED ASTRONAUTS ARE FINALLY ON WAY HOME AFTER NINE GRUELING MONTHS.

911? I’D LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER:

You owe it to yourself to watch this. Excellent job by @StephenM explaining the issues, albeit to someone who seems to have trouble understanding them. https://t.co/JZ7xXYQVkh

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 18, 2025

Jim Acosta really should have warned Kasie Hunt what happens when Democratic party operatives with Chyrons tangle with Miller.

ROGER KIMBALL: Vance Derangement Syndrome.

The most reliable prop in anti-Republican — and a fortiori anti-Trump — rhetoric is comparison with the diminutive but excitable Austrian with the funny mustache and a weakness for leather. I once looked it up, and yes, every Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan has been described as “literally Hitler.” I had thought the argumentum reductio ad Hitlerum had worn out its welcome, partly because it was so absurd. Ronald Reagan? Mitt Romney? The Bushes?

Yet [Bret] Stephens has once again demonstrated that the Hitler wheeze, though tired, still has a bit of mileage in it. Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Stephens began with a little cadenza on everyone’s favorite Hitler proxy, Joseph Goebbels. Yes, that’s right. Stephens suggested that warning the crowd of European globalists that untrammeled illegal migration was a threat, that free speech was inseparable from the fortunes of liberal democracy, and that Europe would have to start taking more responsibility for its own security made Vance a malignant patsy on the model of Neville Chamberlain.*

One silver lining of Stephens’s columns is that they tend to possess the virtue of clarity. You know where he stands. In this case, the title reads “Vance’s Munich Disgrace” and goes on to talk about the Vice President as a disgrace. His concluding words about Vance and his talk are “a disgrace.” In any given paragraph, you know where you stand.

I’d make jokes about newfound respect on the left for the man with the funny mustache, given the many issues they have in common these days (not least of which is how lefties on college campuses behaved after October 7th, their hatred of the Second Amendment, and their shared love of the Gleichschaltung). But we’re in Orwellian territory in 2025: Elon Musk is seen as Hitler because he wants to shrink government. CBS’s Margaret Brennan believes the Holocaust happened because of too much free speech in the Third Reich.

* Wait, wasn’t Neville Chamberlain the eight-dimensional chess playing good guy in WWII? At least, that’s what Netflix was telling me in 2022. Conversely, Obama hated Churchill so much during his three terms in office that he actually uttered Chamberlain’s signature phrase “peace in our time” during his second inaugural address.