Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

February 18, 2025

METAPHOR ALERT:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

WATCH: Shocking Video of Toronto Plane Crash Released.

As PJ Media previously reported, there was another commercial airline crash on Monday, when Delta flight DL4819, an Endeavor Air Bombardier CRJ900, crashed during landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Fortunately, all 80 individuals on board survived this harrowing episode, though 18 suffered injuries, with some requiring hospitalization. The crash on the snow-covered runway caused the plane to flip upside down and lose both wings.

NBC “News” knows exactly who to blame for the crash in, err, Canada: NBC News Aviation ‘Expert’ Blames Toronto Plane Crash on… Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Of course, NBC isn’t the only news group with a case of Toronto, err, Trump Derangement Syndrome:

C’mon guys — despite President Trump’s breakneck pace to kick off his second term, it’s not quite yet the 51st state.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — It Ends With Us (Video).

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

SEE BS: Clown Margaret Brennan Claims Free Speech Caused The Holocaust.

J.D. Vance, who tangled with Margaret Brennan during the vice presidential debate, and already helped create a meme regarding an interview he had with her not that long ago, weighed in on Brennan’s ignorance via X.

Given the track record of the media after October 7th, I’d say that Vance is probably correct. But Margaret Brennan is simply parroting in what is called the “Weimar fallacy.” The idea that the post-World War I Weimar Republic of Germany collapsed due to free speech – allowing the Holocaust to take place – is just historically wrong, especially when it came to censoring the Nazi Party.

Nazi publications were frequently banned during the Weimar years. The Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was temporarily suspended many times for anti-Semitic excesses in the early 1920s. After Hitler’s failed coup attempt in 1923 both the Nazi party and its newspaper were banned until 1925. Most German states also banned him from speaking publicly between 1925 and 1927. But in retrospect Hitler concluded that on balance the ban was a benefit as it boosted his fame and popularity.

Two other newspapers, Joseph Goebbels’ Der Angriff (the attack) and Julian Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer (the striker) were also subject to what today would be called anti hate speech laws. The former had Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish vice president of the Berlin police force, as one of its favourite targets. But his attempts at legal action helped Goebbels portray the paper as the victim of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the German people.

The censorship ended up making Adolf Hitler a “political martyr” – and paved the way for his election in 1933.

And once the Nazis came to power, there was no more pretense at “freedom of speech.”

Indeed. As Ezra Levant wrote in 2012: Censoring Hitler — and the past.

If every Jew in Europe had a firearm, do you think Hitler could have killed six million of them so easily?

He might still have been able to kill them. But not without a fight. Not like lambs to the slaughter.

Lucky for Hitler, the Jews in Germany had been disarmed by do-gooders long before he took power. It actually was part of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War.

These same liberals brought in censorship laws, too — under which Hitler himself was prosecuted.

So when Hitler took power in 1933, much of his work was done for him — civil liberties had already been limited, by the “good guys.”

According to the great journalist and historian George Jonas, when Hitler started limiting personal freedom, a left-wing legislator stood up in the Reichstag to complain about it.

And here’s what Hitler said: “Late you come, but still you come. You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition (when) our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end.”

It’s a terrifying reminder that laws that destroy our civil liberties are dangerous no matter who passes them, and no matter what good intentions accompanied them.

The lesson is, don’t let the government take away your rights.

At the start of President Trump’s first term, some of the “#resistance” left had flashbacks to the White Rose movement in Nazi Germany: Trump win sprouts ‘white roses’ in spirit of anti-Nazi youth.

Analogies between Adolf Hitler’s regime and the impending presidency of Donald Trump were made during an exhibition on Nazi Germany’s youth resistance movement on Tuesday night.

Hosted by Hebrew College, the exhibition focuses on the clandestine student publishers of six anti-Nazi leaflets that were distributed throughout Germany. Apart from several botched attempts on Hitler’s life, the self-labelled “White Rose” group’s activities are recalled as the most daring anti-regime efforts undertaken in Nazi Germany.

Although the exhibition in New England was planned several months ago, widespread emotional unrest following Trump’s election victory made Tuesday’s opening event particularly poignant, said organizers.

“Many, if not most people under pressure, do not stand up,” said Germany’s consul-general to New England, Dr. Ralf Horlemann.

In his remarks, Horlemann paid homage to Sophie Scholl, who along with brother Hans Scholl are most closely associated with the White Rose group. At 21-years-old, Scholl was sent to the guillotine for her role in publishing two of the leaflets.

That doesn’t sound like a nation with an excess of free speech to me. Incidentally, this is all basic History 101 stuff; is Brennan deliberately distorting past world events, or did CBS actually put someone on air who doesn’t know the history of WWII?

Or as Mark Steyn asks, “Too Stupid Even for CBS News?” “Late you come, but still you come. I did not think it was possible to despise the ‘mainstream’ media more than I already did. In a society thoroughly moronized by Brain-Dead Brennan and her ilk, Hitler is the sole remaining historical figure anybody’s heard of. And they can’t even get that right. ‘Weaponising’ free speech? What does that even mean? In Germany, tweets get you gaoled but rape is just part of your ‘cultural tradition’. And CBS News knows which side it’s on.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Former RNC Chair Who Now Works for MSNBC Has Total On-Air Meltdown About Elon Musk and DOGE (Video).

MSNBC’s Michael Steele unloaded on Democrats during a rant on Saturday, demanding they start to show they care about people “losing their jobs” and President Donald Trump’s early actions as president.

“I’d just like you to show that you give a damn!” Steele, a former RNC Chair turned MSNBC host, said. “That you get a little emotional about the fact that people are losing their jobs indiscriminately! That this individual sitting down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has given absolute power to one man, who brings his son into the Oval Office, whose son says to him, ‘you’re not the president! You shouldn’t be in that chair!’ Now, where did he get that from? He got it from his daddy! Because that’s what his daddy thinks of the man who brought him into the Oval Office.”…

“They’re in your bedrooms!” Steele continued. “They’re in your living rooms! They’re in your businesses! They’ve got they got your data, dumb a–! They got all your stuff! Elon Musk has his tentacles in everything you’re doing! Not just off of X, but he’s in the Treasury Department! He’s in the Labor Department! He’s in Department of Homeland Security!”

How odd that Steele is so very, very angry about Musk’s efforts to trim the size of government, when in 2010, while chairman of the GOP, he was shouting: “Fire Pelosi!”

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele hit the road in a big red bus Wednesday. And not because some in the GOP would like to see the back of him as their party’s chief spokesman (although that’s also true).

No, Steele’s latest ploy to rev up his party as it tries to figure out what to do about the “tea party” movement is the “Fire Pelosi Bus Tour.” Over the next six weeks, the bus will cover 14,000 miles, visiting more than 100 cities and towns in its quest to help oust House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) of California. And oh yes, Steele hopes, raise a lot of money along the way through its special website.

“The next six weeks will be entirely devoted to firing Nancy Pelosi, standing up to the Democrat’s big-government agenda, and diving into the trenches to do the hard work of turning out the vote and winning races up and down the ballot,” he said in a statement.

So was Steele lying then about “standing up to the Democrat’s big-government agenda?” Or is he lying now to keep the Comcast-MSNBC bucks flowing? If it’s the former, then a cynical man might conclude:

UPDATE: Absolutely perfect:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY! How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right.

For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.

Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump’s advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people’s apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend.

“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.

What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first.

There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.

Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities.

Yes, why could that be?

And then in June, after the public went along with the lockdowns because of that message being constantly hammered home by Fauci, Birx, videos of celebrities singing “Imagine” from their mansions and yachts, and the somber repetitive “We’re all in this together” television commercials, the entire health care profession did a 180 that was worthy of Oceania:

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

After spending the previous four years gaslighting about Trump and imaginary Russian collusions, 2020 was also the year the media fully imploded as well:

So will the left use this period in the wilderness to reflect on what wrong for them, and how insane they became starting in 2016, and then really firing the afterburners in 2020? No of course not: Democrats Keep Convincing Themselves Their Problem Is Podcasts (It’s Their Policies).

Over the next month, The New York Times is running conversations with Democrat leaders on one of its podcasts about how the party will “win back the voters who moved toward” Donald Trump. I’ll just go ahead and summarize what each subject is likely to say, which is some variation of “We need better messaging and media strategy, and regarding our policies, no changes necessary.”

Such was the series’ inaugural episode, in which freshly sworn-in Democrat Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona did the same dance his party has been doing since November. On the one hand, he claimed that Democrats failed to “meet the moment,” and on the other, he didn’t name a single one of his party’s policies that voters rejected.

Like every other Democrat leader, Gallego hung the party’s defeat on everything but its grotesque policies that directly ignited wild inflation, flooded the country with millions of destitute migrants, and sparked two foreign hot wars that are sucking enormous U.S. attention and resources.

My favorite parts of the interview were when Gallego, who won his election by less than 100,000 votes (against Kari Lake), theorized on the best ways for his party to speak with voters — which is always described by Democrats as if they’re trying to learn how to communicate with nonverbal prehistoric tribesmen. “I mean, so one of the things I did is I would host morning tacos at work sites, right, during the election,” he said. “So I would go set up, knowing when the 5:30 a.m. shift was coming off, and I’d set up tacos. And I’d hand out tacos to the dudes, and I’d talk to them about life. And we have to understand where they are. We have to understand what they’re hearing.”

Some employees of ABC News aren’t even willing to go that far: Whoopi Goes Full ‘Basket Of Deplorables,’ Says She Can’t Even Talk To Trump Supporters.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 18th, 2025

February 17, 2025

HEY, THEY DON’T CALL HIM ‘HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER’ FOR NOTHING, YOU KNOW: Jimmy Carter — Man of Hate.

Note: This post refers to what’s commonly known in America as “the Jewish people” as “the Jewish Nation.” This does not refer to Israel, the Jewish state, but all Jewish people everywhere because in Genesis 12 2, God says, “And I will make you into a great nation.”

Today is one month since former President Jimmy Carter passed away, so it’s long enough to tell the truth about the man.

In a 2016 interview with the NY Times, Jimmy Carter said, “When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.”

I agree with him. But why, then, did he single out the Jewish people for hatred. And why didn’t people point it out?

Believe it or not, when he was in the Oval Office, President Carter rejected someone for a position on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council because the guy’s name was for the Holocaust Memorial Council. Monroe Freedman, who was executive director of the council during Carter’s presidency, told a reporter that Aaron Klein, a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian, was rejected from the council’s board by Carter’s office because the scholar’s name “sounded too Jewish.”

Freedman said he sent a memo to Carter’s office containing recommendations for council board members. The memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, “Too many Jews.” The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter’s handwriting and was initialed by Carter.

The liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz also feels that Carter is a Jew-hater. In an essay talking about Carter’s anti-Semitic claims that the Jews control foreign policy and the media, he wrote:

The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter, not me, who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter’s own standards, it would be almost economically “suicidal” for Carter “to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”

(…) If money determines political and public views as Carter insists “Jewish money” does, Carter’s views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter’s off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter.

As Jay Nordlinger wrote in “Carterpalooza!” his classic 2002 look at the 39th president’s worst excesses, “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river.”

Classical reference in headline:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2025

CBS “HAD A TRUE BANNER WEEKEND:” Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently.

No wonder the Germans were weeping by the end of it all. Vance had called everybody in the audience on their bluff. “You’re not afraid of your own people, are you?” Of course they are. (And also, let’s not kid ourselves, either: They have their reasons, especially if they’re Germans.)

You know who also is terrified of the people? CBS News. Yes, CBS had a true banner Sunday for itself this weekend by tagging along with Vance to Munich. And they made it clear they were on the side of the Europeans weeping about having to listen to the angry voices of their constituents. Margaret Brennan made headlines pontificating about the origins of the Holocaust from too much “free speech” — a topic for tomorrow’s Carnival of Fools because few in the media have more willingly donned clown makeup in recent weeks — but really it was 60 Minutes’ remarkable praise of Germany’s anti-free-speech laws that took the cake for me.

Indeed: Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans…don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun:

More from yesterday’s segment: 60 Minutes Propaganda Off the Charts This Weekend.

USAID’s existence has always been predicated on weaponized empathy. As long as the elite can pull your heartstrings they can count on you turning off your brain. That is why USAID always supported a little bit of food and medical aid–“see, we are saving lives!”–while pouring the majority of their resources into regime change both in the West and outside of it.

Now, with the “chaos” at USAID caused by the budget freeze and the mass layoffs, 60 Minutes is weaponizing our empathy for the people who worked at this deeply corrupt agency.

Watch:

This is pure propaganda for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the woman being interviewed didn’t even work at USAID. She was a consultant, and her job had NOTHING to do with providing aid to anybody but Samantha Power, for whom she wrote speeches. On LinkedIn, she describes herself, unsurprisingly, as a “national security specialist” (Deep State operative), not an aid worker.

So…this poor, poor USAID worker who will never be able to afford child care again is actually an outside consultant who wrote speeches for Samantha Power, the Biden appointed Deep State head of USAID.

Boo hoo. Doubt she could ever work again. How are the rice and beans going to make it to Africa if Kristina isn’t there to write a speech about it?

Exit quote:

More here: 60 Minutes Airs an All-Timer, and the Depths They Sink to Will Blow Your Mind. “So a major news outlet promoted laws that punish the spreading of ‘disinformation’ and then proceeded to spread disinformation for partisan gain. You can’t make this stuff up. Truly, CBS News is on another level right now.”

UPDATE: Are you hiding any blogposts under ze floorboards?

Posted at 2:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2025

UP IN SMOKE: ‘Complete failure:’ California pot industry hits another grim milestone.

California’s legal cannabis market has hit another grim milestone: There are now 10,828 inactive and surrendered pot licenses in the state and only 8,514 active ones, meaning dead pot licenses now outnumber active ones, according to the Department of Cannabis Control’s data dashboard.

This inversion comes seven years after the legal cannabis market opened. While it’s not clear exactly when the threshold was crossed, because the state does not release historical licensing information, California’s legal market has been struggling for years, with thousands of companies going out of business.

Jonatan Cvetko, a cannabis advocate and executive director of the United Cannabis Business Association, said the figures show that state regulators and the entire regulatory framework for cannabis in California is a “complete failure.”

“We’ve finally hit a threshold where we’ve seen the number of participants who have come into the industry who have failed outweighs the number of people succeeding, and succeeding is probably too strong of a word,” Cvetko said.

Company failures are certainly not unique to the legal cannabis industry. Startup companies in the technology market are notorious for failing the majority of the time, with one 2023 study estimating that 75% of all venture-backed tech companies fail within five years. And one 2016 study found that roughly 20% of new restaurants in the Los Angeles area failed between 2003 and 2008.

But Cvetko said business failures in California’s cannabis industry are especially bad because California’s legal market has only a fraction of operators today compared with California’s medical market that existed prior to legalization.

“This is not anywhere near what we see with restaurants, because we already had an industry in California, and California destroyed the industry that we had,” Cvetko said.

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and legalized marijuana is failing in California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 1:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2025

February 16, 2025

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Marco Rubio Leaves CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Speechless After She Claimed Nazis ‘Weaponized’ Free Speech.

Brennan interrupted Rubio with the claim that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” She then went on to criticize the vice president for meeting with Germany’s “far right” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, despite the fact that he also met with leaders of other major German political parties*. There is also the fact that Europeans consider any party that doesn’t want to invite the entire world “far right.” Even more disturbing, Brennan defended the censorship by claiming it was “specifically about the right.”

Rubio not only vehemently disagreed with the CBS anchor, but countered with facts:

“I have to disagree with you,” he responded. “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country, and so that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”

Rubio defended Vance’s point about the “erosion in free speech and intolerance for opposing points of view” in Europe.

When the secretary of state was finished, Brennan had nothing to say except that they were out of time. How convenient.

Whether you love or hate what is being said, if you don’t believe in their right to say it you are a totalitarian. Counter speech you dislike with facts, but don’t try to suppress it. Else you become the very thing you think you’re fighting against. It’s great to see the highest levels of American government defending THESE values in places that increasingly need it the most.

We’ve reached the moment in Mel Brooks’ The Producers when Max Bialystock asks his would-be director Roger De Bris if he’s read Springtime for Hitler, and De Bris responds, “Remarkable, remarkable! A stunning piece of work…I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it’s just drenched with historical goodies like that”

* The ghost of Walter Cronkite smiles.

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Could Emilia Pérez Be Final Nail In Oscars’ Cultural Coffin?

The first part of the scandal is less explosive but more damaging in the big picture. The Netflix musical “Emilia Pérez” earned a whopping 13 Oscar nominations last month. That’s more than some of the most beloved films of all time.

Think “The Godfather,” “Raging Bull” and “Citizen Kane.” Heck, only three films have ever earned more than 13 nominations – “All About Eve,” “La La Land” and “Titanic.”* (all had 14 nods)

The French musical follows a murderous cartel kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón) who undergoes sex change surgery to become a nonprofit dynamo eager to start a new life.

The film hasn’t generated the kind of universal acclaim that might explain the crush of nominations. The film’s 72 percent “fresh” Rotten Tomatoes score tells part of the story. That 17 percent “rotten” rating (and falling) from consumers hints at something more profound.

Why would a film with less than glowing reviews snag so many nominations? Oscar watches quickly supplied some answers. The film’s progressive spirit, from the protagonist’s (trans)formation to the feminist complaints aired by co-star Zoe Saldaña, made it catnip for voters.

* Titanic, you say? There is a possible connection:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

WASHINGTON DC HOUSING MARKET CRASHES AS DOGE LAYS OFF THOUSANDS OF FEDERAL WORKERS AND BUREAUCRATS BAIL OUT OF ‘SWAMP:’

Home prices in Washington, DC, have plummeted since the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency began discussing layoffs.

Since Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired thousands of federal workers in a push to reduce spending.

In the wake of those layoffs, droves of former federal employees have packed up their bags and put their homes on the market, causing the average listing price to sink, The Kobeissi Letter (TKL) reported.
In November, the median home in the nation’s capital was worth $699,000, according to Redfin.

By February, the median home value dropped 20 percent, bringing the price down to $560,000.

TKL found there are now nearly 8,000 homes listed for sale in the Washington, DC metro area, and almost half of them have been put on the market in the last 30 days.

There has also been a surge in new listings of homes over $1 million. According to TKL, there are 525 listings worth $1 million and 44 listings worth $5 million, suggesting DOGE layoffs could affect people in high-profile jobs.

Redfin agents in Washington, DC, reported that return-to-office mandates and uncertainty for federal workers have caused a listing surge.

Time to warm up the Dacia Sandero again!

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

THIS IS CNN: CNN WH Correspondent Deletes Tweet Supporting CEO Killer Luigi Mangione’s Defense Fund.

From our “What could she possibly have been thinking?” file, CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins posted a tweet linking to the defense fund for accused CEO murderer Luigi Mangione.

Maybe she believed she could justify it by claiming that everyone is entitled to a defense. That may be true, but isn’t that what public defenders are for?

After a massive backlash to the idiotic post, she deleted it. Almost like it never happened.

Almost.

At his Substack, Matt Margolis adds: CNN Anchor Promotes Legal Defense Fund of Cold-Blooded Killer.

This is CNN, folks—the so-called “most trusted name in news.” Yet, out of nowhere, CNN anchor and White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins took to X to casually announce, “Luigi Mangione’s legal defense team launched a new website today,” complete with a direct link to the site. No context, no disclaimer—just a straight-up promotion for the legal fund of a man charged with assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson mere weeks before Christmas last year.

While Collins didn’t explicitly encourage her followers to donate, the implication was clear: by directing attention to the site, she was signaling support for Mangione’s cause and clearly assumed her followers would want to donate.

It probably wasn’t a bad assumption on her part. In December, the audience of NBC’s Saturday Night Live erupted in cheers at the mere mention of Luigi Mangione.

During the “Weekend Update” segment, anchor Colin Jost began discussing Mangione’s extradition to New York after his capture in Pennsylvania.

“Luigi Mangione dropped—” he started, only to be interrupted by cheers.

Jost flinched and glanced offstage, as if unsure whether he was being pranked. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

Hot Air’s David Strom notes the connection between Mangione’s legal defense team and CNN:

Collins’ tweet was startling because, first of all, she is White House Correspondent and hence has nothing to do with covering the case; secondly, because it sure looked like a call to go to the site and perhaps donate; and third, one of Collins’ colleagues–a CNN analyst–will be a direct beneficiary because she is on the defense team.

Related: CNN Names Karen Friedman Agnifilo On-Air Legal Analyst.

—AdWeek, April 4th, 2023.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: J.D. Vance’s Munich Wake-Up Call: Democracy, Censorship, and the Will of the People.

Everyone agrees that Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday was remarkable.

I do not mean that everyone liked it.

For example, Boris Pistorius, the German Defense Minister, sniffed—or perhaps “smoldered” would be a more accurate term—that Vance’s remarks were “not acceptable.”

And then there is Bill Kristol, a sort of Greta Thunberg of the rancid former right, who thundered that Vance’s speech was “a humiliation for the U.S. and a confirmation that this administration isn’t on the side of the democracies.”

“The democracies.”  What do you suppose Kristol means by that?

While you ponder that question, note that other people thought rather well of Vance’s speech.  I thought it was excellent myself, but forget about my opinion.  Jonathan Turley said that Vance’s speech was “perhaps the greatest single declaration uttered since ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” It was, Turley wrote elsewhere, “truly Churchillian—no less than the famous Iron Curtain speech in which Churchill dared the West to confront the existential dangers of communism.”

How can we explain the discrepancy: the outraged Pistorius/Kristol reaction and what I will call the Kimball/Turley reaction (though many people besides me applauded Vance’s speech)?

I think it comes down to how one understands that overdetermined, familiar yet often only half-understood word “democracy.”

Kristol said that Vance’s speech showed that the Trump administration was not “on the side of the democracies.”

What do you think of that claim?

I think poorly of it because I believe that a democracy is a political arrangement in which the people are sovereign.

I suspect that Kristol and European bureaucrats of all descriptions believe that it is a form of government in which only the right people, i.e, themselves, are sovereign.

QED: Glad to See He’s Toned Down the Rhetoric: John Harwood’s Latest Hysterical Trump Tantrum is EPIC.

For every rational person raising an eyebrow at this nonsense, there are like 3 leftwing lunatics who are cheering it on. You can’t be too confident.

Another day, or really, another hour, another insane rant from a once respected journalist. All because Trump broke them. Maybe he was always this way.

Either way, it is very entertaining.

Please don’t stop, Johnny!

Don’t worry, he won’t. Flashbacks:

● Another Partisan Hack Just Lost His Job at CNN: John Harwood says he’s looking forward to ‘figuring out what’s next.’

● Tool de Force: CNN’s John Harwood Defends Biden, Insists Inflation Pain Is a GOP ‘Charade.’

● CNBC Hack John Harwood Is Really, Really Upset That Al-Baghdadi Was Killed.

● NYT/CNBC’S John Harwood Advises Hillary Campaign, Gloats About Provoking Trump At Debate.

● CNBC’s John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate.

● CNBC Alters Transcript of John Harwood Question About Hillary’s Email.

● “Everyone in the [CNBC] newsroom knows [John Harwood is] extremely far left.”

● CNN’s John Harwood used to think that higher inflation was a bad thing (guess what changed).

Exit quotes:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN WHIPLASH:

And then in June, after the public went along with the lockdowns because of that message being constantly hammered home by Fauci, Birx, videos of celebrities singing “Imagine” from their mansions and yachts, and the somber repetitive “We’re all in this together” television commercials, the entire health care profession did a 180 that was worthy of Oceania:

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

Of course, the healthcare profession wasn’t the only one to implode its credibility during that annus horribilis:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

VDH: Snarky Europeans Scowl At Truth-teller Vance.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2025

February 15, 2025

CHRISTIAN TOTO: How ‘Saturday Night Live’ Betrayed Its Legacy (and Us).

Feb. 16’s “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” airs at 8 p.m. ET on, where else, NBC. The gala will include Peyton Manning, Robert De Niro, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Miley Cyrus and other stars.

Many fans will tune in for the memories, but others know the milestone is bittersweet. The current show is a shell of its former self. That’s been the case for nearly a decade.

What changed?

First, “SNL” became hyper-partisan and abandoned bipartisan satire. “SNL,” like the legacy media, mostly ignored President Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline, the most stark example of its liberal bias.

Show founder Lorne Michaels pretends the show remains nonpartisan. Reality says otherwise.

Screams it, to be precise.

Plenty of new media outlets have shared that sad state of affairs. The legacy media ignores it, yet another reason the public no longer trusts the old-school press.

The other serious flaw infecting “SNL” is less obvious but just as important.

“SNL” could have been at the forefront of the counter-culture revolution. Again. The early “SNL” days examined race, sexual taboos and more, some of which shocked audiences at the time.

Not every sketch hit the bullseye. On average, about half the night’s sketches made us howl.

Sometimes less.

That ratio didn’t matter. “SNL” swung for the fences, trotting out fresh jokes and provocative angles in search of laughs and insight. It’s why we cared about the show in the first place. The recent “Saturday Night” feature captured that comedic chaos.

Yes, as I wrote late last month: Live From New York, It’s ‘Saturday Night’ Member Berries!

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2025

PRICELESS: What Sheryl Crow Just Did With Her Tesla Accidentally Proves Elon Musk’s Point.

But what will she choose to replace it? Please, please, please buy a Volkswagen, Sheryl!

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2025

DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO GARRISON KEILLOR SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: PBS Mourns a Month Of ‘Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism.’

PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks came together on Friday to mourn the first month of Donald Trump 2.0. Together, the trio would lament the supposed lack of “guardrails” that is allowing Trump to run “roughshod” over the government in pursuit of “Ivy League right-wing nihilism.”

Nawaz began with Capehart, “Can I just get both of you to briefly weigh in on this? Because we’re nearing one month into the Trump presidency. Is it clear to you where the guardrails are, Jonathan?”

* * * * * * * *

Brooks further accused Trump of being concerned with the wrong things, “Donald Trump was elected by those people. You’d think he’d care enough about them to do something on behalf of the people who elected him. Instead, he’s going after, you know, USAID. He’s going after any place he thinks there might be liberal people with college degrees.”

The idea of trimming the bureaucracy is a Republican idea that predates Trump, but Brooks has never been completely onboard with even that pre-Trump version of the GOP, so it was hard to take his next point too seriously, “And so what we’re seeing is not populism. What we’re seeing is a sort of Ivy League right-wing nihilism. And, to me, that is so disorienting and so shocking and so appalling that you can’t even serve the legitimate needs of the people who put you in power. They’re totally off the board this last month.”

A decade and a half before being airbrushed out of history by his fellow leftists in the #metoo era, Garrison Keillor had a similar rant about  George W. Bush’s supporters:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.

Brooks will never learn, will he?

Last week, in assessing the rise of Donald Trump, New York Times columnist David Brooks engaged in an uncharacteristic bit of self-reflection:

“Trump voters,” he wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.

—From Glenn’s March 20th 2016 column in USA Today, “How David Brooks created Donald Trump.”

The Tea Party was fun, but running nice guy candidates like Mitt Romney who cheerfully took their abuse from the DNC-MSM and didn’t punch back twice as hard (as a legendary community activist would say) and played the role of the Washington Generals wasn’t. And it’s curious to see Brooks, who spent his salad days at National Review, the Hoover Institute, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard isn’t responding well to Trump’s efforts at cutting government waste. But then, Brooks is far from the only alumnus of the Standard to “unexpectedly” find newfound love for Big Brother:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: Vance is right — Britain really has ‘thoughts-and-prayers’ policing.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” said Vice President J.D. Vance to an audience of world leaders at a security conference in Munich on Friday, with a rhetorical punch comparable to Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Vance pointed to various censorial “hate speech” policies spewed out from Brussels and across Europe, and to the troubling arrest of a Christian in Sweden who used his freedom of expression to burn a Qur’an. Building to a crescendo, Vance then highlighted the “most concerning” case of Adam Smith-Connor — the British army veteran and father of two who was convicted in November 2024 for praying silently, for a few minutes, on a public space across the road from an abortion facility.

Smith-Connor, who previously fought in Afghanistan, was given a criminal record and ordered to pay £9,000 ($11,300) in adverse costs for breaking the rules of a local “buffer zone” ordinance banning “expressions of approval or disapproval” of abortion on several streets in the area.

Judge Orla Austin ruled that even though he was only engaged in silent, prayerful thought, his presence within the buffer zone could still have a “detrimental effect” on people attending or working at the clinic. Authorities took over £100,000 ($126,000) from the public purse to ensure his prosecution. With support from ADF International, he’ll be appealing his conviction in July.

Adam is one of multiple Christian individuals in England to face trial for their prayers in such censorial zones. Christian preachers have frequently faced nights in cells for expressing their beliefs in public. Meanwhile, according to official inquiries, the British police has failed to prosecute Muslims involved in serious and violent “grooming gang” crimes for fear of appearing “Islamophobic”.

The concept of a “thought police” is, of course, Orwellian. Yet the British government has decided to nationalize these locally enforced “buffer zones” on October 31 ’ banning “influence” within 150 meters of every abortion facility in England and Wales. As a result, the United Kingdom actually has “thoughts-and-prayers” policing.

1984, a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the left.

 

Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2025

IT’S COME TO THIS: Watch: Unhinged Chiefs Fan Blames Trump for Eagles’ Victory, and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

When Trump appeared on screen during the national anthem, the Superdome erupted in cheers. Taylor Swift met a wave of boos when her image flashed on the jumbotron. That was awesome.

I’ve never been emotionally invested in professional sports, and it’s hard for me to even comprehend how the way some overzealous fans take sports so seriously.

So when I came across a viral video clip of a Kansas City Chiefs fan having a full-blown meltdown over her team’s loss in the Super Bowl — and blaming Trump for Kansas City’s loss — I couldn’t believe it at first. Maybe it was staged. But I’ve seen plenty of videos that are staged. This looked like the real deal.

I don’t doubt that watching your team crash and burn in the biggest sporting event of the year is no picnic. Yet this particular fan took her despair to a whole new level, doing what leftists do best and finding a way of making it Trump’s fault. In a moment of peak absurdity, she shouted, “You know the other reason why we didn’t win because the f***ing Trump was at the g*****n game. G*****n it!!! Trump should not have been at our f***ing game!”

Do you remember that YouGov poll that found that liberal women report the lowest levels of life satisfaction and the highest rates of loneliness compared to their conservative and moderate peers? The survey found that only 12% of liberal women aged 18-40 express feeling “completely satisfied” with their lives, while a solid 37% of conservative women and 28% of moderate women report a similar level of life satisfaction. Any reasonable person knows that Trump’s presence at the game had no impact on the outcome. It’s as absurd as blaming Lady Gaga’s bleached eyebrows for Patrick Mahomes getting sacked six times. Yet here we are.

Assuming the above clip is real, and she actually is a leftist with a massive case of performative TDS, she should be thrilled the Eagles won: The Other NRA (Or How the Philadelphia Eagles Got Their Name).

The National Recovery Administration was established after the passage of FDR’s first big legislative attempt to remedy the economic disaster of the Great Depression. The National Industrial Recovery Act, which went into effect in June 1933, was meant to stabilize industrial production, dictate wages and prices, and enable workers to pursue collective bargaining. It also put power in the hands of trade associations to establish many of these standards, suspending antitrust laws in order to make this possible.

The NRA, created by executive order, coordinated the efforts to implement these new policies. The logo—seen here in mockup form—would be displayed in the windows of businesses and factories in order to promote the ideas behind the NIRA. The eagle clutches a gear in one set of talons and holds lightning bolts in the other, indicating the power of American industry.

Wasn’t the government afraid that people would confuse its new logo with the National Rifle Association’s? Although the NRA that’s now a household name was formed back in 1871, in the 1930s the organization was still a relatively obscure educational body, sponsoring rifle clubs and youth programs. In 1934, the National Rifle Association instituted a legislative affairs division, beginning its transformation into the lobbying superpower that it is today.

The National Recovery Administration was dissolved in 1935 after the Supreme Court found the NIRA unconstitutional. The court said that the executive branch had exceeded its bounds by making new laws and that the laws themselves violated the government’s right to regulate commerce. Before that happened, however, a new NFL franchise in Philadelphia, hoping to grab some of the New Deal’s optimism for its own, adopted the NRA’s symbol as a team name.

On the flip side however, I question the timing of the Eagles’ victory:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2025
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