NARRATIVE CREATION:

The illusion that nobody likes Elon Musk is the same thing as the illusion that everybody liked Kamala Harris.

We already know the Democrats create narratives, and then the media sells those narratives, even though they have nothing to do with facts.

I don’t know about…

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) March 11, 2025

Why aren’t the media vigorously airing quotes and interviews with their fellow Democrats condemning the attacks?

I can't find a single Democrat in office that has condemned the escalating attacks on Tesla pic.twitter.com/gEKpfNMpM1

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 11, 2025

THERE GOES THAT DEM NARRATIVE: Check Out Latest News on Egg Prices.

Now Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is confirming that officially, yes, the prices are dropping. You can see her explaining in the video here. (Unfortunately, X, formerly Twitter, is still experiencing issues Tuesday, so we are unable to preview the video on this page.)

“Good piece of news we just got is average cost of dozen eggs has now gone down $1.85,” Rollins said. That was since they introduced their plan to reduce the price of eggs about a week and a half ago on February 26. She said it was possible it might inch back up since we are going into the Easter season when it is generally high, but this was good news, and it looks like it might be on trend in the right direction — down — now.

Looks like the market is already having a positive reaction to Rollins’ plans to help lower the prices.

It’s now dropped more than 11 percent, as you can see at this link on Trading Economics, from its high. The average is now lower than it was when Trump came into office. It’s now at 6.0831 per dozen. It was 6.80 when Trump came in.

So will the Democrats now give Trump credit for lowering the price since it’s going down under him? I guess we all know the answer to that one. Not anytime soon.

As Libs of TikTok notes:

BREAKING: Egg prices drop by 11%— now lower than when Trump took office pic.twitter.com/J8tGzGfDRn

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 11, 2025

HMMM: It Sure Looks Like the Trump Admin Just Outfoxed the Judge Trying to Block Pro-Hamas Leader’s Deportation.

Experienced former federal prosecutor and RedState contributor Shipwreckedcrew concurred with that interpretation, saying the following on social media.

It has been speculated about — and I agree — that this was done to deprive SDNY of venue over a habeas corpus petition as those are supposed to be filed in the federal district court where the person is being held.

So good luck with the judges in Louisiana.

It sure seems like the Trump administration just did an end-around a Barack Obama-appointed judge. Whether Furman will acknowledge that is another question. He may try some other administrative gambit to remain involved in the case, though as a non-lawyer, I’m not sure what that would be. For now, though, it seems Khalil’s deportation is very much back on the table.

Well, we’ll know soon enough.

Related:

This ADL post is even more significant in light of the fact that so many Democratic politicians have jumped to the defense of a resident alien who is subject to deportation for inciting violence on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization.

Keep making Jewish safety a priority. https://t.co/wIMEmWSuOw

— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) March 11, 2025

SEPTEMBER 5: Chilling Recreation of the First Live TV Broadcast of Terrorism.

My latest, on one of the very best movies to come out of 2024. It’s currently streaming on Paramount+, and definitely worth a watch if you didn’t see it on the big screen.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Mickey 17 — A Clumsy, Pandering Clown Show.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Randi Weingarten: People Are Really Angry, Trump Is Taking Away Opportunities From Disadvantaged Kids.

Definite points for chutzpah, as the deliberate amnesia here is astonishing to behold: Never forget: It was Randi Weingarten and the Bidens who sacrificed a generation of kids.

And then comes this admission from [Biden stenographer Franklin Foer]: “For the sake of avoiding conflict, especially conflict with an ally, the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what they promised on the campaign trail.”

Those of us watching at the time knew what had been done, that Weingarten had gotten what she wanted — closed schools — from President Biden.

But of course, the White House would never admit that so Jen Psaki went out and lied that the goal had somehow always been teaching in classrooms “at least one day a week in the majority of schools by Day 100.”

On the day Psaki delivered this lie, 66.1% of schools were already open for at least one day of in-person learning per week.

A few days before that press conference, the AFT had been allowed to alter language in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s school reopening policy.

Keeping kids out of school was all going according to plan.

Or, as Foer breezily concludes, Biden “was, in effect, conceding that for thousands of students, the rest of the school year [in 2021] would be lost to the pandemic.”

No, Franklin, their school year wasn’t lost to the pandemic.

That school year, from which thousands of kids are still struggling to recover, was lost to Randi Weingarten.

Thanks for letting us know for certain Joe Biden made that happen.

Related:

No one has done more damage to public schools in my lifetime than the teachers unions who held those kids’ education ransom for two years. She led them and she’s the villain. https://t.co/F4fIe9suhe

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 10, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO: Daniel Hannan: Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice.

What the hell were we thinking? Five years ago, we were sliding towards the most expensive mistake ever made by a British government, a mistake that led to our financial ruin, the annihilation of our basic freedoms and the obliteration of public trust.

Never before had our civil liberties been so blatantly disregarded. We were subjected to house arrest on the basis of unsupported conjecture, our property rights were violated, our freedom of expression repressed, even our ability to leave the country denied.

Where were all the human rights lawyers when they were needed? Where were the Doughty Street types, so vocal in their defence of illegal migrants, convicts, and terrorists? The one time that there truly was a national human rights violation, they were cheering it on.

Meanwhile, the British state told lie after lie after lie. Just three weeks! Facemasks are dangerous! One more month! Facemasks are essential! Squash the sombrero! Young people are at risk! Just two more weeks! Wait for the vaccine! Wait for the second vaccine! Your jab protects others! It’s the third shot that really works! Dangerous new variant! One last lockdown! Just three more weeks!

As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.

Flashback: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Well, much more of one, but point taken.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Trump Demands Investigation Into Whoever Nominated Amy Coney Barrett.

WOEING: The U.S. Air Force suspended deliveries of new KC-46 Pegasus tankers due to the presence of cracks in the new refueling aircraft.

JUST NBC THE GASLIGHTING! MSNBC’s Jong-Fast Claims ‘Strong Mainstream Nonpartisan’ Media From 2016 Is Gone.

One of the weirdest things that leftists can say in the second Trump term is that there’s not an opposition media to Trump. On Saturday’s The Weekend on MSNBC — which is peak opposition media to Trump — Molly Jong-Fast dropped this flop-bomb:

“There is not the same strong mainstream non-partisan media there was in 2016. So it has fallen on a lot of these Democrats to narrate what’s happening, to explain what they’ve seen in the last 7 weeks. If they don’t do it, no one else will.”

Does MSNBC count as an outlet that was “mainstream nonpartisan media” in 2016? If so, what’s changed? How is the so-called “mainstream” space “much, much smaller”? Is MSNBC acknowledging that they’re neither mainstream, or nonpartisan?

How much longer do the leftists inside the haunted fishtank get to keep making the claim that they’re part of the “mainstream non-partisan media?” This is what the “mainstream non-partisan media” looked like in 2016:

Here’s what it looked like in 2008:

And we know what it looked like – and sounded like – from 2021 to the end of 2024:

And let’s not forget those rock-ribbed mainstream nonpartisan media at NBC itself last July: President Joe Biden drops out of 2024 presidential race.

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will end his presidential re-election campaign, bringing an abrupt and humbling conclusion to his half-century-long political career and scrambling the race for the White House just four months before Election Day.

Biden, 81, could not reverse growing sentiment within his party that he was too frail to serve and destined to lose to Donald Trump in November.

—NBC News, July 21^st, 2024. Curiously, all that “too frail to serve” talk was dismissed by NBC News as “cheap fakes” as recently as June 19th.

Related: MSNBC Guest Claims ‘Strong Mainstream Nonpartisan’ Media Is Gone. She’s Right… for the WRONG Reason.

ELON MUSK’S X SUFFERS MULTIPLE OUTAGES TODAY. “Nearly 40,000 users reported problems with the platform around 10 a.m. ET, and about 28,000 people were experiencing issues as of 11:30 ET.”

ANOTHER WIN FOR EU ‘DEMOCRACY:’ Leading Presidential Candidate Kicked Off Romanian Ballot.

Nothing says ‘democracy’ like restricting who gets on the ballot.

And nothing is more democratic than banning the leading candidate because the European Union technocrats disagree with him. Nothing says “protecting democracy” better than a bunch of bureaucrats carefully vetting candidates to ensure that they will give those bureaucrats all the power to make the most important decisions. Because bureaucrats, not stupid voters, know best.

IF that is the case, the European Union just got a lot more democratic. So democratic, in fact, that they may just decide to dispense with national elections in just the way that the European Union Parliament gets very little say in actual EU policy–it’s left to the European Council which is “elected” as a slate by the Parliament and never faces the voters themselves.

So the EU is “governing” as it was originally intended to, as Mark Steyn wrote in 2006’s America Alone:

The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union’s governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism—which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading “nation state” in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.

It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we’d be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European “constitution,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.”

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU’s rulers were keeping quiet about it.

And they very much want the voters to keep quiet as well. Insert obligatory Bertolt Brecht quote here.

DECK CHAIRS REARRANGED: Top Washington Post columnist resigns, accusing publisher of killing piece.

A top political columnist for The Washington Post resigned today, accusing Post chief executive and publisher Will Lewis of killing her column that criticized owner Jeff Bezos’s drive to overhaul the opinion pages to focus on his libertarian priorities.

Post columnist and Associate Editor Ruth Marcus, who has worked at the paper for four decades, says she can no longer stay there.

“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in a resignation letter obtained by NPR.

More than 75,000 digital subscribers canceled in the 48 hours after Bezos revealed his intentions late last month, which included an edict that the paper would not print opposing views; then Opinions Editor David Shipley stepped down after vainly trying to dissuade Bezos from his course.

Marcus confirmed to NPR she had resigned and the authenticity of the letter but declined further comment.

“Will’s decision to not …run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict – something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing – underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she wrote.

Whew — it’s a good thing the owners of the New York Times don’t try to influence the paper’s content the way that Bezos does!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I quit USA Today because they spiked my pre-election column on how the press was ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. I did not experience that “traditional freedom” then.

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY:

I’m so old, I can remember “nationalize all the things” was strictly the province of far-left sites such as the Nation and Jacobin magazine, which over the years ran assorted cris de cœur about wanting to nationalize the news industry, Hollywood, and Amazon.com. But such an attitude is entirely consistent with Bulwark founder Bill Kristol’s worldview in the Trump era: The Dirty Truth Behind Bill Kristol’s ‘Private’ Funding.

THE ATLANTIC TRIES – AND FAILS – TO ASK THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS: Wait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?

Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party’s second in command.

No, the right doesn’t appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance’s recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).

So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. “They’re just funny,” he told me when I asked him about them. For what it’s worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are “funny.” Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they’re actually helping him. “The right is having so much fun roasting Vance’s baby fat that it’s just completely neutered the left’s capacity to make fun of him,” one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. “This feels like a precursor to Vance’s inevitable presidency,” Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. “He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.

Yeah, how did that work out for Biden when his hyper-online handlers tried to place him in a real-life “Dark Brandon” meme?

Different leftist, but Ali Breland comes across much like the Atlantic’s Emma Green when she interviewed Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee in 2021:

[Emma] Green: You guys wrote an article in January 2020 that was shared roughly 3 million times, claiming that Democrats called for the American flag to be flown at half-staff when the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was killed in an American strike.

What makes this funny? I know that’s the worst question to ask somebody who writes jokes.

[Kyle] Mann: It’s funny because General Soleimani died and then they called for flags to be flown at half-mast. Get it?

Green: But that’s what I’m saying. Besides just saying the joke again, what makes it funny?

Mann: Do you want me to explain the joke to you? Because the joke is that General Soleimani died and Democrats were sad.

If you don’t know why that’s funny, then you’re not the audience for the joke. The funniest part is that it got fact-checked because it was so believable that Democrats would do that. That’s a real honor.

As Frank J. Fleming tweeted at the time,  “The interviewer comes off sounding like Data. ‘I don’t understand. Why is this making you laugh, Captain.’”

(Note that this cluelessness, feigned or genuine, isn’t exclusive to leftists at the Atlantic when they interview someone on the other side of the aisle: Whoa: NPR Host Interviews Greg Gutfeld, Fights With Him Over ‘Racist’ Asian Joke.)

The Atlantic apparently can’t, or doesn’t want to understand why the right are having fun with Vance, the same way they did for Trump during the run-up to 2016, by creating fantasy memes for Vance as a rock star or superhero. Creating those memes in 2016 required skill with Photoshop. Today, it’s often just typing in a series of prompts for Grok or ChatGPT 4o.

UPDATE:

The idea of a Dem making fun of Obama is unthinkable of course. Because he’s their religious leader.

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) March 9, 2025

MICKEY 17 IS A MISBEGOTTEN SCI-FI TRUMP SATIRE:

Unfortunately for a long-awaited follow-up to a groundbreaking Oscar winner, Mickey 17 is something of a disappointment. Part of the problem is that the movie’s attempts at political satire come across as a little too of-the-moment—or, perhaps, of a recent moment now passed. The movie’s release was delayed for about a year, which significantly dampens some of the intended topical humor.

See, Mickey 17 takes place mostly on a spaceship that has settled on an ice planet. The ship is led by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a blustering, arrogant, camera-hogging dolt of a politician who confuses religion with corporations and leaves Earth, in part, over a dispute about losing an election. Ruffalo plays Marshall with a bug-eyed cartoon egoism, which is bolstered by support from his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who, if anything is even more of a cartoon cutout. Ruffalo’s performance is energetically wacky enough to hold some attention, but it’s also distracting. Every time Marshall graces the screen, the movie descends into a clodding, off-the-mark Donald Trump farce that’s predicated on the idea of political sore-loserdom. Turns out science fiction movies aren’t very good at predicting the future.

Would the movie have landed better if it had been released a year ago? Well, it certainly would have hit differently. But even aside from the flat political satire, the movie has underlying structural problems.

Despite its trailer running before just about every movie I’ve seen in the last year, as Christian Toto writes: Anti-Capitalism Mickey 17 Set to Lose Millions at Box Office.

Variety notes “Mickey 17” is off to a subdued start both here and overseas. Recouping the film’s massive investment.- a $118 million budget – seems all but impossible for Warner Bros.

It’s on track to open domestically with $18 million to $20 million this weekend and $20 million to $25 million internationally. That would put its global opening at $40 million to $45 million … it’ll need around $275 million to $300 million at the global box office to turn a profit, which will be a challenge.

[Bong] Joon-ho sympathizes with the colleagues who helped make his new film possible.

“I feel bad for the producers and the marketing team for saying this — I know they have a very hard job. But once I find a particular story or character or situation fascinating, I just go ahead and I create a movie based on it. I really don’t think about the risks. Maybe I can’t.”

Must be nice.

He’s shielded from the negative aspects of capitalism, at least for now. At some point his films will have to consistently recoup their investments or studios will stop handing him blank checks.

Does Joon-ho have the “license to kill” contract that Woody Allen had with United Artists and Orion in the 1970s and ‘80s? Otherwise, how many times can he keep turning out underperforming movies?

JOHN KASS: Democrats Locked in Their Own Hell.

The other day Democrat pundit Chris Matthews appeared on a “Morning Joe” panel on left-wing MSNBC. He skipped the old Trump is Hitler shtick, ranting instead that Trump was Mussolini. He might as well have channeled the lunatic Renfield from an old Dracula movie, laughing maniacally, chanting “the blood is the life! the blood is the life!”

Some kind soul might tell Matthews and other MSNBC attention seekers that the blood of rats and birds and flies are not the life. Nor is jabbering paranoia. For political parties, votes are the life. And they keep losing them. Americans appeal to common sense, not to mad ravings.

Long ago, the Democrat Party had a choice:

Cleanse themselves of their Barack Obama infection, cleanse themselves of Obama’s racist and radical addiction to racial preferences that we now know as DEI, amputate any limbs that had become sodden with jacobin  gangrene and become what they had been: a patriotic American party of the American working class.

Or, they could continue following the discredited Clintons and Obamas down the sewer.

The Democrats chose the sewer.

They didn’t do a damn thing except scream. And their childish foot stomping was on display for all the world to see last week at President Trump’s Congressional address.

They wore costumes. They waved their little bingo signs. They took a stand against women, by refusing to support a ban against men in women’s sports. Yet they wore feminist pink to gaslight their voters.

They showed themselves to be what we knew about them:

That they are not serious. They’re only about performance.  They are the leftist clerisy living on money taken from Americans. And they’re quite dangerous.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Who Killed the Oscars?

In the 1990s, there was a failed experiment in the Arizona desert called Biosphere 2. The idea was to create a self-sustaining orb where pretend astronauts of the future could live without contact with the real world for at least a year. They would grow their food, slaughter their own animals, and breathe their own air. If they were successful, they might be able to plop the orb on Mars to ensure the future of humanity after climate change destroyed the planet.

It turned out to be a disaster. They ran out of food. They ran out of oxygen and almost suffocated. They starved. There was tribal warfare, and eventually, Steve Bannon (yes, the same one) was brought in to fire the scientists and salvage the project for investors.

I often think of Biosphere 2 when I think of what happened to the Oscars. They, we, built a self-sustaining bubble cut off from real life. At first, we celebrated the artificiality of this construct with names like “Hollywood” or “Tinseltown.” But as the Oscars approach their 97th year, with the threat of ending their long reign on network television for the luxury of streaming, it seems clear that our artificial dream factory is now suffering the same fate as Biosphere 2, minus the intervention of Steve Bannon.

A massive creative bottleneck has choked the life out of Hollywood, but I don’t have to tell you that. You already know. Movies simply aren’t as good as they used to be. The spark of urgency and originality that galvanized movies as a must-see activity from city theaters to rural drive-ins is gone. For every well-marketed sequel in a decades-old franchise like Top Gun: Maverick, there are hundreds of films no one wants to see—and almost nothing in-between.

What becomes of this vast production of dreck is hardly inspiring. Sometimes, they hit theaters and play to empty houses for a week or two. Otherwise, they are dumped into the giant Sahara Desert of the streaming services. There, maybe someone clicks on it; maybe they scroll on by. Every so often—which, to be honest, means not very often—a movie surprises, and actually connects with an audience.

And:

If you can’t even name the problem, you certainly can’t solve it. Luckily, my 25-year career as an Oscar blogger went up in flames this past summer after a journalist named Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative report on my decision to vote for Donald Trump—a decision that it turned out was shared, for whatever large combination of reasons, by a majority of citizens of this country, including Hispanic voters, married voters, male voters, and other demographic categories that included all races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences. That, and a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris” saying “white power” was back in style that was clearly meant as sarcasm but was quickly taken as “evidence” that I was now a “white supremacist” (I’m a middle-aged Jewish woman in the business of reviewing movies, specifically for the Oscars). What seems more relevant is that I’d been standing against “cancel culture” for almost 10 years, and now it was my turn to be canceled. Everything I’d built was gone the minute the story landed in The Hollywood Reporter.

I could have groveled and apologized, as one does, but I didn’t think I did anything wrong. I didn’t want to confess to being a witch in order to live. So down came the consequences. I lost almost everything: my income, staff, and some good friends. But it was also a gift because now I can talk about what no one else can.

Read the whole thing.

ANDY NGO: Whatever happened to antifa?

Some Democrats still try to fearmonger. Claims about MAGA “fascism” were central to the Democrats’ presidential campaign strategy. Kamala Harris unequivocally declared she believed Trump to be a “fascist” in October, and the press shamelessly branded his rallies “Nazi” gatherings. But the strategy ultimately failed at the ballot box because the public knew better. Four years of the first Trump administration and another four years of his being in the public eye had neutralized the most excessive anti-MAGA fear mongering.

Antifa’s decline can also be explained in part by liberal buyer’s remorse. Some who chose to endorse BLM in 2020 were shocked and chastened when several leaders of Black Lives Matter groups were convicted of fraud and money-laundering, and were revealed to have spent millions on luxury homes in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Liberals across America might still call Trump a racist but they remember how their own neighborhoods were occupied and set on fire. They remember what happens when you actually succeed in defunding the police. No one wants another surge in homicides, overdoses and violence. Even states like Washington, Oregon and California have since reversed their once-radical laws, and the politicians who championed pro-crime legislation have mostly been voted out of office.

Crucially, George Soros-funded district attorneys have been fired by voters in favor of more moderate candidates. In Seattle, Republican lawyer Ann Davison defeated Democrat Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Thomas-Kennedy was a vocal supporter of the violent 2020 riots and some of her social media posts were about looking for land for an antifa autonomous zone.

Former County district attorney Mike Schmidt is a progressive who chose not to prosecute over 90 percent of the hundreds of antifa rioters arrested in Portland during the uprisings. Last year he lost his re election bid to moderate Nathan Vasquez.

Then there’s Elon Musk. Following his takeover of Twitter, now X, in October 2022, many key antifa accounts involved in organizing, recruiting and disseminating propaganda and fundraising were suspended for violating rules against inciting violence. These accounts should have been suspended under the previous regime, but as the Twitter Files revealed, the company had a left-wing political culture and policies were unevenly applied.

In November 2022, after I reported on the violent extremists of CrimethInc., an antifa extremist collective that produces guides on why and how to commit violent crimes, Musk suspended their account. Other accounts escaped suspension but chose to de-platform themselves from X. They feared their private messages could be accessed and turned over to law enforcement. Most of them relocated first to Mastodon, and are now at Bluesky, two smaller Twitter alternatives where leftist violence and death threats are tolerated.

Because old Twitter gradually evolved into the playground of the DNC-MSM, where ordinary people could get deplatformed for repeating the DNC-MSM advice to coal miners and telling furloughed legacy journalists to “learn to code,” leftist journalists still long for what they consider the good old days there: New CNN Original Series Reveals Insider Story of “Twitter: Breaking The Bird.”

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Agriculture secretary cancels $600K grant for study on menstrual cycles in transgender men.

CAN SHE PICK ‘EM, OR WHAT? Former illegal immigrant aide to AOC self-deports to Colombia amid questions about employment: report.

An illegal immigrant who once served as an aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, has reportedly self-deported to Colombia, praising the “freedom of movement” in the South American nation after working in Congress despite being in the country illegally.

Diego de la Vega was born in Ecuador and immigrated to the United States as a 7-year-old in 2001 on a visitor’s visa that he overstayed, Migrant Insider reported.

The news raises thorny questions about his employment status for the Queens-based congresswoman.

“It’s bittersweet. I hadn’t left the country in 23 years — from age seven to age 30,” de la Vega told Migrant Insider. “Now, I can’t go back to the US. It feels like exile. It’s a very permanent move. But my wife and I are confident we made the right decision. And, after some time, it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

“It feels surreal to not be illegalized anymore. I don’t have to live in the shadows or constantly worry about paperwork,” he added. “That freedom of movement is incredibly satisfying.”

* * * * * * * *

In 2021, de la Vega was hired by Ocasio-Cortez’s re-election campaign and eventually became her deputy communications director.

“Diego is amazing,” Ocasio-Cortez told the news outlet. “We love him.”

Flashback: AOC chief of staff criticized for wearing shirt touting Nazi collaborator:

“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast,” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Green Nude Eel ghostwriter and former chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti famously wrote in the “before times,” i.e. early 2019. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” Chakrabarti told the Washington Post shortly before walking the plank, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all…we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

L.A. CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Why is Mayor Karen Bass deleting her text messages?

When flames erupted in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was more than 7,000 miles away, on a diplomatic mission to Africa.

Bass headed home shortly thereafter and was in transit for nearly 24 hours as the fire ravaged the Palisades and surrounding communities.

She and her office have said she was in constant communication during that period. But it’s impossible to know exactly what she was communicating, because her messages were not saved, according to a city lawyer.

“Her phone is set not to save text messages,” said the lawyer, David Michaelson.

Michaelson said that there is “no requirement that a city official or employee save text messages,” despite the fact that the city’s own document retention policies dictate that most records should be kept for at least two years.

Under state law, “any writing” related to the conduct of government is deemed a public record. On Jan. 10, The Times filed a public records request for all text messages sent or received by the mayor while she was in transit on Jan. 7 or Jan. 8 that mention fire response or her travel plans.

Bass has come under heavy criticism for being out of the country when the fire erupted amid a historically dry winter and forecasts of hurricane-force winds.

Related: Mayor Karen Bass fired Kristin Crowley for being right.

THE COVID-ERA SMEARING – AND RESURRECTION – OF TRUMP NIH APPOINTEE DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA:

Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.

Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, dialed up the attacks, dismissing him and his colleagues as what Collins termed “fringe epidemiologists” while their acolytes threw mud from a slew of publications, including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ.

In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Read the whole thing.

Related: The vindication of a heretic.

“DEMOCRATS, IF YOU EVER WANT TO WIN AN ELECTION AGAIN, THE ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT FIRST STEP IS TO STOP DOING THIS:” Bill Maher Flattens Left’s Land Acknowledgment Farce.

‘I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again—either give the land back or shut the f*** up!’

* * * * * * * *

“Can we please get over this idea that ancient people weren’t just as full of s*** – in fact, more full of s*** – than humans today?’ he asked. ‘This idea that being ancient and Indigenous was always better than us? It wasn’t… The Māori in pre-colonial times were like most indigenous people – quite war-like, frequently fighting other tribes, with the winners enslaving the losers. And even eating them.”

Exit quote: “Can’t win elections if you’re dying on the 20% side of the 80/20 issues.”

UPDATE:

Bill Maher admonishes the Democrat party for their exclusionary attitude and being 'Mean Girls':
Bill Maher: "What do you think of artists canceling shows at the Kennedy Center now that Trump has taken it over?"
David Sedaris: "I don't want Trump to take credit. I don't want to… pic.twitter.com/vtiicGwJu7

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 8, 2025

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Ad-Vance Guard Edition.