I’D LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER: JD Vance Just Killed Margaret Brennan on Live TV.

Granted, I wouldn’t want to go up against Vance in a debate, so getting spanked by Vance is not prima facia evidence that you are low IQ, but Brennan is supposedly the best that the Pravda CBS has to offer, and she comes off looking like an angry idiot. If I were her I would call in sick any time Vance is scheduled to come on her show.

Brennan had many embarrassing moments on yesterday’s show, but by far the worst was her attempt to go for the jugular in the issue of “refugees” Biden has let into the United States. Brennan is passionate about the issue of illegal immigration, and thinks she holds the moral high ground on the issue.

Vice President @JDVance utterly embarrasses CBS and @margbrennan on the unvetted migrants that Biden allowed into our country 🔥☠️

Margaret Brennan: "These people are vetted!"

VP Vance: "Just like the guy who planned a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago?" pic.twitter.com/IeA8qsklTR

— Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) January 26, 2025

As you can see, the veil of “impartiality” has been lifted. She doesn’t even try to look anything but hostile. Instead she looks angry and ignorant.

You can imagine Ms. Brennan having a nice discussion with Alejandro Mayorkas about genius Joe Biden personally smelling the hair of migrant children out of compassion while discussing the need for cheaper lawn care workers during the previous administration, and she clearly resents Vance’s belief that the American government should be promoting the interest of the plebs born here.

JD VANCE BEAST MODE:

"[The US] was founded by some immigrants and some settlers — but just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world." pic.twitter.com/BMbI2EgpkM

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 26, 2025

Related: Samuel P. Huntington in November of 2000: “A Nation of Immigrants:” Only a Partial Truth.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth. We have all heard people say, again and again, that all Americans, except possibly the Indians, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. My colleague at Harvard, Oscar Handlin, began his classic book, The Uprooted, by saying, “the immigrants were American history.” That’s overstating it. Yes, immigrants and immigration have been an important part of the American history. But they are not all American history. There are at least three critical points that need to be made in this connection.

The first is a basic distinction between immigrants and settlers. Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move. In our case, the recipient society was created by the settlers who came here in the 17th and 18th centuries. They came in groups to create new societies up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They weren’t immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society. They were establishing new societies, in some cases for commercial reasons, in more cases for religious reasons. They had an image of what they wanted to create and they came and formed a settlement to try to realize their image. They also had to come together and agree as to how they were going to define their community. The archetypal case of this was the Mayflower Compact.

A fundamental difference thus exists between settlers and immigrants. With immigrants the process of moving is to a much greater extent a personal process involving individuals and families, whereas with settlers there is a much more collective process of a group of people moving and saying, “we’re unhappy where we are for one reason or another, and we want to move elsewhere and form our own society.” The society that the settlers created on the Eastern seaboard was shaped in terms of their values and cultures, among which there were significant differences, as David Hackett Fisher emphasized in his superb book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. But there are also tremendous similarities, and they basically created a society defined by what I think can be described succinctly as an Anglo-Protestant culture.

It was this society and culture that among other things including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country. Some 55 million people left Europe in the century or so from the beginning of the 19th century until the 1920s, with 34 million of them coming to America. They came in considerable measure because they were attracted by what they saw here and by what the settlers created.

As Glenn quoted from Ann Althouse earlier today: “Brennan seemed keyed up from the start. Her desire to get Vance was ludicrously obvious. Meanwhile, Vance was perfectly even-tempered and articulate, prepared for everything she had hoped to flummox him with. Brennan’s style of constant interruption failed to throw him off. It backfired, making him look steady and rational and her look afraid of what he might have to say.”

To get a sense of how well Vance did, we leave you with a photo montage of his interlocutor:

UNEXPECTEDLY! Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are heading back to the Super Bowl as Chiefs secure thrilling win over Bills.

Exit quote:

hail Satan pic.twitter.com/nFspWD72wY

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 27, 2025

UPDATE: Just brutal.

Better Vision. Better Calls.

Still literally offering all NFL refs free LASIK. pic.twitter.com/pOGHtVTYwk

— LASIK.com (@LASIKdotcom) January 27, 2025

THE AIR FORCE SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED TO USE MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE TO FIGHT TRUMP’S DEI ORDER:

This is not new behavior by the military services. Everyone thinks Harry S. Truman desegregated the Armed Forces in 1948. He didn’t. The Army responded to desegregating infantry regiments by putting Black soldiers and officers in the regiment’s third battalions. Black officers assigned below the Mason-Dixon Line found they could not use the Officer’s Club and other off-duty facilities. It took a retired five-star general getting elected president to end this whack-a-mole. He knew the institutions of the military and how they were resisting Truman’s executive order. Integration was not achieved until 1953.

This tactic is commonly known as “malicious obedience.” You’re told to do something, and you do it in a way that will cause the most disruption to business processes and create maximum embarrassment for whoever directed it, all the while claiming you were loyally following orders.

Unless the parties involved in this stunt were totally brain-dead and oblivious to the political climate, there is no possible reason to pull those videos and then ensure the word gets out.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this: You need to fire people. The only reason this happened was that people were trying to sabotage Trump’s DEI order or were too stupid to realize the stink their actions would raise. In either scenario, you don’t need people like that working for you. The result helps the resisters get their minds right and teaches the remaining idiots to be more careful.

Admiral Byng to the white courtesy phone, please.

UPDATE: That was fast — on second thought, Pete Hegseth to the white courtesy phone! After uproar, Air Force says recruits will again be taught about Tuskegee Airmen.

This has been immediately reversed. Thank you @SenKatieBritt. https://t.co/bmoJ4obPNL pic.twitter.com/fXCP3lisLN

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) January 27, 2025

NOT OUR PROBLEM: Haitian Leader Says Trump’s Policies Will Be Catastrophic for His Nation.

That’s awfully hyperbolic; given how “great” the nation has been doing in recent years, I’m sure they’ll be okay.

EX-WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST JENNIFER RUBIN SLAMS PAPER, ACCUSES JOURNALISTS OF ENABLING ‘AUTHORITARIAN REGIME.’

Well, not everyone. This brave old soul, who likely lost her job there for speaking out, knew the score:

NEWS YOU CAN USE? So Trump nixed your bullshit DEI job.

I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.

* * * * * * * *

DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?

The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organisations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.

The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.

Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?

Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.

As the honorable Gov. William J. LePetomane would say:

HOW DEMOCRATS DROVE SILICON VALLEY INTO TRUMP’S ARMS: Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviews Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, who more recently is the “co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies.” Andreessen was a lifelong Democrat, until the Biden administration, but he could see firsthand how radical Democrats were becoming by the last term of the Obama administration.

Ace of Spades has lengthy highlights of the interview at his blog, including when things began to really become pear-shaped from Andreessen’s point of view. The ellipses are from Ace, to tighten up the material quoted:

[Andreessen:] And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?

…

Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous….

It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat: But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.

But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.

So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”

But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.

Flash-forward to the Biden era; this excerpt is from the interview at the New York Times: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

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

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

Nellie Bowles’ recent book, of Morning After the Revolution was all about the left’s revolutionary fever in 2020 and its aftermath. Douthat’s interview with Andreessen focuses on the years leading up to it. But what caused the flip-over among professors at Ivy League universities? At some point in the mid to late naughts, they seemingly switched en masse from understanding that they’re teaching the scions of parents paying very expensive tuitions so that their kids would learn to make money on Wall Street, or in Hollywood, Washington or Silicon Valley to, as Andreessen said, programming young radicals with the goal of “burning the system down [because you] are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Whether it’s Ace’s lengthy excerpts or the full piece at the New York Times, definitely read the whole thing.

DAMN, IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A GANGSTER:

The Babylon Bee, yesterday:

'Scram, Ya Dirty Rats!' Shouts Tommy Gun-Wielding Melania Chasing Democrats Out Of Town https://t.co/g3y5cAiRCQ pic.twitter.com/7GnX4R57SB

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 25, 2025

Trump on Truth social today:

LMFAO. President Trump just posted gangster FAFO meme on Truth.

It's a new world. pic.twitter.com/Bp0Ue82dYI

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) January 26, 2025

In 2011, actor Don Cheadle told an interviewer regarding then-President Obama, “I think he inherited an impossible situation. I wish he had not been so much of a consensus-seeker. I just wanted to see a more ‘gangsta’ president.” The previous year, then-CNN anchor Roland Martin wrote, “Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP.”

Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. Fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ’em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you and will pay the price.

So presumably, they should be fine with the current president choosing a meme that’s already been Hollywood and DNC-MSM-approved.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON STAR TREK: SECTION 31: This is Rock Bottom (Video).

WORST. HITLER. EVER: Trump Overturns Biden’s Duplicity and Orders US to Resume Shipments of 2,000-lb Bombs to Israel. “A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!”, Trump wrote on his Truth social media platform.

HOW IT STARTED:

Worst media quote of 2024 pic.twitter.com/GXPy6HYTtY

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) January 24, 2025

How it’s going: MSNBC Faces Potential for Big Changes in Comcast Cable Spin-Off.

MSNBC fans who are disappointed in the progressive-leaning network after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election may no longer have it to kick around.

The cable-news outlet could have to consider changing its name and familiar markings under a spin-off of the bulk of the cable assets of parent company Comcast, one of the nascent company’s new top executives suggested to an assemblage of MSNBC staffers Wednesday morning, according to two people familiar with the gathering.

Mark Lazarus, who will lead the spin-off after it separates from Comcast, told an audience that included Rachel Maddow, Chris Jansing and Katy Tur that he was not sure whether MSNBC would have to change its identity as part of the transaction, which will split the cable network and its business-news sibling CNBC from NBC News and NBCUniversal. If the two networks are no longer part of the NBC corporate entity, attendees wanted to know, will they still be able to carry marks that are part of their former home?

—Variety, November 20th, 2024.

SCOTT JENNINGS TAKES RON HOWARD APART IN TWO WORDS (AND TWO RECEIPTS) FOR SUGGESTING TRUMP APPOINT LEFTY TOOL:

Perfectly understandable from Howard’s point of view. Hey, Richie Cunningham was best friends with the Fonz, a bad boy who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty at the garage. Chef Andres was photographed hanging out with a would-be Lee Harvey Oswald. Same difference, right?

ROBERT WRIGHT: The AI Wave Accelerates.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader—famous for the scripts of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and other lauded films—recently played around with ChatGPT and found himself discomposed. He called the interaction “an existential moment” that brought to mind the defeat of chess master Garry Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. “I just sent chatgpt a script I’d written some years ago and asked for improvements,” Schrader wrote on Facebook. “In five seconds it responded with notes as good or better than I’ve ever received [from] a film executive.”

As Schrader’s peers were quick to note, surpassing Hollywood executives in discernment is at best a minor technological advance. But it turns out there was more to the story: “I asked it for Paul Schrader script ideas,” Schrader wrote. “I[t] had better ideas than mine.”

This week brought other signs, as well, that the AI revolution may unfold faster and more momentously than many people had been assuming. A Chinese company unveiled a new large language model, DeepSeek-R1, which elicited reactions among AI watchers that, depending on their feelings about China, ranged from “Wow!” to “Oh no!”

R1 is one of the new breed of “reasoning” LLMs, engineered to engage in extended “chain-of-thought” reflection. This reflection lends particular strength to math and science skills but can also aid common sense reasoning, complex planning, and the autonomous pursuit of assigned goals. The first such model—OpenAI o1—was unveiled in September, and R1 is comparable to it in performance and much cheaper to use. What’s more, it’s an open-source (or, technically, “open-weights”) model, which means it will spur progress by other AI researchers more powerfully than OpenAI’s proprietary models do.

Seems like only yesterday people were saying AI progress would soon slow down because the “scaling laws” were losing force; the addition of more computing power and more data during the training of large language models was bringing diminishing returns. But the rapid evolution of the new “reasoning” LLMs (which demand much more computing power than conventional LLMs while being used, but not while being trained) has over the past few months marginalized that concern. OpenAI has already announced but not released a new reasoning model, o3, that is a clear improvement over o1. And Google’s reasoning model, introduced in December, has shown a sharp increase in math and science skills over the course of only a month.

Meanwhile, as the technology advances, AI potentates are working to ensure that there are enough power plants and microchip clusters to ensure rapid rollout. This week OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined President Trump at the White House to unveil a big infrastructure project that will be funded via the venture capital firm SoftBank.

The vibes were entirely upbeat. When Trump said that building and maintaining the infrastructure will create lots of jobs, Altman refrained from noting that, as he has acknowledged on other occasions, untold numbers of American workers will be displaced by AI. And he didn’t repeat his observation from two years ago that, though our AI future could be filled with wonders, the worst-case AI scenario is “lights out for all of us.”

Altman is right about the wonders—including the coming medical advances he extolled at the White House. Still:

There is a growing sense among many AI researchers that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a threshold different people define differently, but that will by any definition have huge social impact for good and ill—is going to arrive sooner than they thought even six months ago. Maybe as soon as next year. And many in the AI community—not just hard-core doomers—are worried about this impact and the fact that so few people are talking about it. (These worriers include AI safety researchers who have recently left OpenAI.)

As Glenn warned at the start of last year: The white-collar class derided mass layoffs among the blue-collar workers. It’s about to feel their pain. “A lot of young Americans, especially males, are forgoing traditional college to enter the trades, as welders, plumbers, HVAC technicians and the like. That’s probably smart. AI won’t be able to replace those jobs. As Brian Wang notes, robots probably will, one day — but that day is nowhere near as close. So the bottom line is a lot of white-collar workers are likely to be replaced by machines soon; the fate of blue-collar workers, in a twist, will likely be better for the foreseeable future. It’s a lot more difficult to manipulate atoms than bits — good news for plumbers and auto mechanics.”

SHOCK AND AWE: Trump’s rapid changes in US government stun federal workers.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his team have acted with stunning speed to begin removing or sidelining hundreds of government workers, while he has also sought to give himself the power to fire hundreds of thousands more.

The Republican president has been in office less than a week but the wrecking ball he has already taken to parts of the U.S. government has sent shock waves through much of America’s federal bureaucracy.

At the National Security Council 160 staffers have been sent home. About 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department were reassigned. The heads of the U.S. Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration were fired along with other officials.

Government offices focused on workforce diversity are being permanently shuttered, the staff on leave, while a flurry of executive orders overturning Biden administration policy have left many officials uncertain about their futures, their mandate erased by a blunt stroke of Trump’s signature Sharpie marker.

Trump said on Tuesday he also plans to fire over 1,000 officials appointed by his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

Related: Federal Workers Are ‘Terrified,’ and That’s a Good Thing.

As these workers sift through Trump’s recent executive orders looking for any clues about their job security, a staffer from the Environmental Protection Agency shared that many are already clearing out their inboxes, waiting anxiously for updates on early retirement and buyout options. “Trump version 1.0 was bad,” lamented the EPA employee, “but I’m already done with version 2.0.”

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from removing job protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. The reception inside the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrisome to some employees was the White House’s decision on Tuesday to eliminate diversity programs, subsequently placing those staffers on administrative leave.

Imagine being bent out of shape over being told you actually have to show up for work. Covid is over — is there any reason why people are still working remotely? Nevertheless, according to the report, the atmosphere in federal agencies “has been uneasy,” particularly following the order to abolish racist DEI programs, since hundreds were placed on leave.

We’re supposed to feel bad about this; I certainly don’t.

Insert Clarkson Dacia Sandero meme here:

CONAN, WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE? To crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of the Raddatz:

Martha Raddatz: Will the US military be deporting illegal immigrants every single day of Trump’s presidency?

Tom Homan: Yes.

Raddatz: So is this what we will be seeing every single day? The president promised millions.

Homan: Yes.

Raddatz: The estimates of those who have been… pic.twitter.com/nTQowpTCS2

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 26, 2025

But why the faux-Mary Tyler Moore-style panicky quiver in her voice? Just last week Eric Adams told Tucker Carlson:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Joe Biden‘s shocking response to his demands that the White House do something about the migrant crisis was to ‘be a good Democrat, Eric.’

And at long last, that’s what Trump is doing again:

Where the outrage from Martha Raddatz when Obama did it pic.twitter.com/TwsFgFPgik

— Trump World (@Louaye1980) January 26, 2025

● What Changed?! Chuck Schumer 2009 kicks Chuck Schumer 2018 right in his badoobies on illegal immigration (video).

—Twitchy, December 28, 2018.

● “Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to remind Democrats that even former President Barack Obama spoke out against illegal immigration. Trump dug up a 2011 tweet from former President Obama which said: ‘I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.’ ‘I totally agree!’ Trump wrote, retweeting the former president.”

—The Daily Caller, December 27, 2018.

● Harry Reid in 1993: It’s insane to reward illegal immigrants by giving their children birthright citizenship.

—Hot Air, October 30, 2018.

● Bill Clinton warns of “the large number of illegal aliens” coming into America, and explains his crackdown.

—Instapundit, January 31, 2017.

JOHN PODHORETZ COMPARES AND CONTRASTS ANORA AND EMILIA PEREZ: The best and worst movies of 2024.

Emilia Perez is dreadful—both conceptually and in execution. See, according to writer-director Jacques Audiard, the problem with the psychotic mass-murdering Mexican drug lords who are destroying Western civilization is that they have been brainwashed by toxic masculinity. And what is the perfect cure? Transsexuality. The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed.

No, I am not kidding. No, this is not a comedy. But it is a musical (again, no I’m not kidding), mostly in Spanish but a little in English, featuring an immortal exchange in recitative between El Chapo’s lawyer and a doctor in a clinic in Thailand:

Lawyer: Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about a sex change operation.

Doctor: Man to woman or woman to man?

Lawyer: Man to woman.

Doctor: Penis to vagina!

You would know this yourself. You could. You almost certainly have a Netflix subscription and Emilia Perez has been available on Netflix for months. You might even have watched some of it. Many people have. The thing is, I haven’t met a single person who has made it past the 60-minute mark of this two-hour movie because (with the exception of Zoe Saldana, the blockbuster franchise actress who does a wonderful job playing the lawyer) its awfulness doesn’t even rise to the level of “this is a camp classic, I just gotta see how bad this is going to get the longer it goes on.” Rather, everybody shuts Emilia Perez off and then goes and takes a shower.

Or puts on a real estate flipping show.

Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet. The person playing Emilia Chapo, Karla Sofia Gascón, is nominated for Best Actress. If she wins, in part by defeating Mikey Madison, it will be a scandal—but hey, if actresses in Hollywood don’t have the courage to complain about their awards being taken away by biological males, then those awards should be taken away by biological males. It’ll serve them right.

The above scene from Emilia Perez is included in this clip featuring Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi (and on the right of the screencap, the overly-caffeinated Saldana), who notes that Hollywood lefties are getting a taste of their own medicine:

As Matt Walsh tweeted last week:

BILL GATES: ‘I would be diagnosed with autism if I were a kid today.’

Bill Gates has claimed he would be diagnosed with autism if he were a child today*.

Gates has said that he believes his obsessive and socially-awkward behaviour as a child would have been labelled as a sign of neuro divergence if he grew up in today’s society.

The tech billionaire reflects on his “neuro divergent” behaviour as a young boy in his new autobiography, Source Code.

Gates, 69, said as a child he would miss social cues, often “rock in place” and was able to focus intensely on certain subjects.

Speaking to the Times, he said he would today be considered “on the autism spectrum”, adding: “My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.”

His claim comes amid an increase in autism diagnoses, with a 2021 study finding a 787 per cent rise in the number of UK diagnoses in the decades between 1998 and 2018.

* Isn’t everybody these days? As the New York Post noted 2012: “America’s false autism epidemic…is in fact the latest instance of the fads that litter the history of psychiatry.”

More recently, Julie Burchill wrote, “Life was so much cooler before we made every little foible A Thing. When I was growing up, only soldiers had PTSD; now I’ve heard a girl claiming she started up a podcast after she got it when her gran died. Every day I hear that someone who I’d thought was just a bit annoying is ‘on the spectrum’ – the spectrum of what, from being mildly tedious to being an ocean-going bore? Like self-harm and transing, I can’t help but believe that a lot of ‘neuro-diversity’ is an internet-borne virus. Never mind, what today’s youngsters are lacking in the three Rs they’ll be able to make up for with the three As; ADHD, allergies and attention-seeking.”

TIPPI HEDREN, CALL YOUR OFFICE! How Fowl! NYT Writer Relays Inaugural Plea from Birds: Trump Spells Doom for Climate Change.

A New York Times writer is using birds to wokescold the American electorate for turning the dial back on climate change progress by inaugurating President Donald Trump.

Siri, define birdbrain.

“On a Cold, Dark Inauguration Day, a Message From the Birds,” read the headline of Times contributing writer Margaret Renkl’s wacky January 20 guest essay. After seven paragraphs of mindless babbling about the symbolism of birds, Renkl then took to crying “fowl” over the incoming Trump administration. “At the dawn of a year that seems almost certain to make this country into an unrecognizable place, to make this world even less hospitable to birds and everybody else, it turns out I am less interested in symbolic associations than in practicalities,” Renkl whined. Uh, what? [Emphasis added.]

Birds are having a rough go of it lately. In 2023, the L.A. Times ran a story with the headline: How L.A.’s bird population is shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices.

And apparently, global warming as well, despite DC being so cold, Trump’s second inaugural was held indoors.

No word yet if Trump will be blowing the doors off the “birds aren’t real” conspiracy after he opens the vaults on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK.

FAKE NEWS, OR MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE? CBS: “Lesson plans about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots have been removed from the U.S. Air Force curriculum, a U.S. official confirmed Saturday.”

Kurt Schlichter has some questions for the network that brought you RatherGate, pro-Obamacare poetry readings, and Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi:

Mike Cernovich and Daniel Greenfield ponder what it means if the report is true:

COME BACK BARRY SWITZER, ALL IS FORGIVEN! Dallas Cowboys hire veteran OC Brian Schottenheimer as their next head coach.

Eleven days after announcing their divorce from Mike McCarthy, the Dallas Cowboys are hiring Brian Schottenheimer, Dallas’ offensive coordinator the past two years, the team announced Friday.

The decision follows Cowboys interviews with Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, former New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh, former Minnesota Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier and Schottenheimer.

Schottenheimer became a serious candidate later in the franchise’s search, meeting with club owner and general manager Jerry Jones and team brass first on Tuesday and then again Wednesday. No other candidate received a second meeting, while Schottenheimer’s conversations with Jones spanned multiple days.

And as a result: The Dallas Cowboys’ Brand is Dead: ‘America’s Team’ No Longer.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “They told me that if America elected Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right. I’m referring to Joe Biden and his pardon of Marcus Garvey.”

Fact check: Untrue.

When someone asked how anyone could consider Mussolini’s brutality a “good thing,” Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism and the cofounder of The New Republic, wrote that it was not “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.” That might explain some of his support for eugenics.

Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the 1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that, “We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different editions of Rogers’ work.)

The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order and gave color to his meetings.”

James later recanted this assessment as the full scope of Hitlerism made the comparison unfair.

Biden was always going to pardon Hunter and James Biden. Until someone else takes credit for them, I’m going to assume that removing the Churchill bust was Obama’s first in-joke upon beginning his de facto third term in office, and posthumously pardoning Garvey was his last.

OLD AND BUSTED: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness?

The article with the above headline is paywalled, but Greek PM Mitsotakis repeats the quote in this interview:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I have submitted this proposal together with Donald Tusk in a letter that I’ve sent to all of my colleagues. We need to do two things: we need to spend more at the national level -that, we will not escape. Greece is already spending more than 3% of its GDP on defence. We need to spend more both on the national level and on the European level, because at the end of the day, it’s our security that is threatened.

Asked whether he agreed with an earlier statement by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski that he feared Germany’s weakness more than its power, the Prime Minister replied:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We cannot envision significant progress in the European Union and strengthening the European economy without a competitive Germany. So Germany needs to get its act together. There are structural issues related to the German economy, they’ve been well discussed in the German public debate. I think this is a time for bold action and more radical reforms. I’m convinced that from the discussions that I had, that Friedrich Merz has this agenda and knows exactly what the German economy needs.

Other areas where Germany “needs to get its act together” include this: Many Germans fear for safety after horrific crimes.

In a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, a two-year-old boy and a forty-one-year-old man were killed in a park on Wednesday. Three more people were injured, among them two-year-old girl. A suspect has been arrested and identified as an Afghan national with a history of violence and psychiatric issues.

The horrific details of the incident were released by police and the Bavarian minister of the interior Joachim Herrmann shortly after and caused widespread outrage. The twenty-eight-year-old suspect reportedly targeted a particular boy, who was in the park with other children from his kindergarten group. He walked up to him and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. A bystander intervened and was also killed.

The suspect then stabbed a small girl in the neck three times before attacking another seventy-two-year-old man. A kindergarten teacher broke her arm as she tried to flee. The injured victims were taken to hospital and don’t appear to be in critical condition. Other bystanders and police chased down the perpetrator. He was arrested and taken into custody.

* * * * * * * *

The incident came just a month after the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg in which six people were killed and at least 299 wounded when a car plowed into the crowds at high speed. The driver was arrested on the scene and identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, who came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in 2006 and was known to the authorities for making terrorist threats.

The two attacks are not directly related, but they fall into a recent spate of incidents in which the suspects had claimed asylum in Germany and had then gone on to commit serious acts of violence. What many Germans will take from this is that the authorities were unable to stop any of the men from killing, injuring and terrorizing innocent people, including children.

Even Chancellor Olaf Scholz issued a sharply-worded statement that went much further than the usual expressions of empathy and promises to investigate the incident and punish the perpetrator. “That isn’t enough,” he wrote, adding that he was “fed up with such brutal acts occurring every few weeks in our country — committed by perpetrators who had originally come to us to seek protection. In light of this, misguided tolerance is completely inadequate. The authorities must investigate promptly why the assassin was still in Germany in the first place. From those findings consequences must follow — talk is not enough.”

Scholz’s opponent Friedrich Merz, the man most likely to become the German chancellor following the snap elections on February 23 also demanded action: “It can’t go on like this. We must restore law and order.”

Germany’s mainstream parties will be worried that the anger, frustration and fear triggered by this most recent attack will fan the flames of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) whose core issue is immigration. They are currently polling in second place on around a fifth of the vote, and have recently sharpened their manifesto further, embracing the idea of mass deportations of foreigners from Germany under the term “remigration,” which the party had previously dropped.

NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford rounds up coverage of Germany’s upcoming election next month and writes their choice is simple: Put Up/Tear Down that Wall.

Germany’s opposition leader Friedrich Merz is under fire for vowing strict border controls if he is elected chancellor, with the frontrunner citing a deadly knife attack that was allegedly carried out by a rejected asylum seeker as justification for a migration overhaul.

The leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on Thursday presented a five-point migration plan calling for, among other things, a “de facto entry ban” for all people without valid documents and permanent control of all of Germany’s borders.

Merz announced his plan a day after two people, including a 2-year-old boy, were killed and three others injured during an attack in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg.

The suspect, arrested shortly afterwards, is a 28-year-old Afghan with a history of psychiatric problems and violence who said over a month ago that he would leave Germany voluntarily.

Germany already has “temporary”  border controls in place (something permitted under the EU’s Schengen rules). Those are due to expire on March 15, although they can be extended under certain conditions. Merz has (correctly) described the EU’s internal border regime as “recognizably dysfunctional”, a view not shared by parties to his left. Merz, who has referred to Germany’s right to assert the primacy of German law (a heretical idea in the EU) is planning to press on:

“I refuse to recognize that the acts of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg are supposed to be the new normal in Germany,” he said. “Enough is enough. We are faced with the shambles of an asylum and immigration policy that has been misguided in Germany for 10 years.”

But Time magazine dubbed Angela Merkel “person of the year” in 2015, writing glowingly about her policy choices:

Germany would bail Greece out, on her strict terms. It would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it. And it would deploy troops abroad in the fight against ISIS. Germany has spent the past 70 years testing antidotes to its toxically nationalist, militarist, genocidal past. Merkel brandished a different set of values—humanity, generosity, tolerance—to demonstrate how Germany’s great strength could be used to save, rather than destroy. It is rare to see a leader in the process of shedding an old and haunting national identity. “If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations,” she said, “then that’s not my country.”

And so this time, the woman who trained as a quantum chemist did not run the tests and do the lab work; she made her stand. The blowback has come fast and from all sides. Donald Trump called Merkel “insane” and called the refugees “one of the great Trojan horses.” German protesters called her a traitor, a whore; her allies warned of a popular revolt, and her opponents warned of economic collapse and cultural suicide. The conservative Die Welt published a leaked intelligence report warning about the challenge of assimilating a million migrants: “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other people as well as a different understanding of society and law.” Her approval ratings dropped more than 20 points, even as she broadcast her faith in her people: “Wir schaffen das,” she has said over and over. “We can do this.”

I hope it was worth it for all concerned:

THE GREAT NAZI MORAL PANIC:

“Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant,” read a particularly Orwellian proclamation by the Orlando Sentinel.

Oh, please. We’ve seen this movie before. Musk is as guilty of throwing out the Sieg Heil as the Conservative Political Action Conference is of sneaking a Nazi rune into its stage design.

Remember that? In 2021, the events design company that created the stage for that year’s CPAC conference in Orlando, Florida, was compelled to respond to allegations that it intentionally designed the set to resemble an obscure rune embraced by the Nazis. “We had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did,” Design Foundry told Insider.

What the set designers failed to understand was that they were simply the latest targets in a very stupid and deliberately dishonest moral panic. Before the Nazi rune dustup, you had groups such as the New York Times warning about milk’s supposed ties to white supremacy (“Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk [and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed]”). You had entire news cycles dedicated to the allegedly dark meaning behind the “OK” hand sign, which began as an online in-joke aimed at the press’s notorious gullibility. You had reporters applying the white supremacy label to everything from the Betsy Ross flag to obscure tattoos to Hawaiian shirts to the House Mace to the “SPQR” acronym for the “Senate and People of Rome.” Donald Trump found himself compared to Benito Mussolini merely for waving from a White House balcony. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was accused of harboring white supremacy allegiances for flying the George Washington–commissioned Appeal to Heaven or Pine Tree flag outside his beach house in New Jersey. Natalism, working out and performing at Madison Square Garden are also Nazi-coded, according to American news media.

Perhaps the most insane moment in this long-running moral panic occurred in 2019 after the back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio on August 3. In the aftermath of the tragic events, Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until August 8. This was a victory for the Nazis, former FBI official and MSNBC regular Frank Figliuzzi warned at the time. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8. That is 8-8,” Figliuzzi said during an appearance on MSNBC.

He added, “The numbers 8-8 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movements. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and to them, the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ We’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk at 8-8. No one is thinking about this.”

There’s more. These are just a few brief examples from the past seven years.

The point is this: we’re clearly in the throes of a moral panic. There’s a devil under every doily, as they say.

Because this has been going for so long (much longer than seven years), Jonathan Turley dubs it: Nazispolozza: The Left’s Third Reich Mania Collapses into Comedy.

One of the least successful efforts of the left and many in the media this election was to paint Republican voters as “Nazis” hellbent on destroying democracy.

While once verboten as a political comparison, liberal politicians and pundits have developed something of a Nazi fetish, where every statement and gesture is declared a return of the Third Reich. It seems like each news event presents a Rorschach test where every inkblot looks like a Nazi.

That mania reached absurd, even comedic, levels with the attack on Elon Musk over an awkward gesture during the inauguration celebration.

An exuberant Musk told the crowd, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” As he gave those words, he placed his right hand on his chest and stretched his arm outward, his palm facing the floor. He then repeated the gesture before putting his hand on his chest again.

It was all done in a matter of seconds, but it was enough for the usual mob to erupt in faux outrage.

The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace — with only a momentary pause this week:

HOW IT STARTED*: New York Times health reporter: Wuhan lab leak coronavirus theory has ‘racist roots,’ isn’t ‘plausible.’

“A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way,” she wrote to a critic of her original point. “Doesn’t make the roots any less racist or the theory any more convincing, though.”

She later wrote that the notion the virus escaped from a lab was “possible” but not “plausible.”

“And almost impossible to disprove, meaning it will probably not go away till people lose interest,” she wrote.

Reached for comment by Fox News, she wrote, “I deleted it because it unleashed some incredibly nasty tweets and DMs. So please don’t write about it.”

—David Rutz, Fox News, May 21st, 2021.

How It’s Going: C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins.

—The New York Times today.

* Yes, we’re missing a crucial step in our “How It Started” headline: Don McNeil: Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn, Racist Slurs, Twitter and Mao: on Passing the Torch at The New York Times.

KRISTI NOEM CONFIRMED AS DHS SECRETARY:

It’s a massive upgrade from Alejandro Mayorkas to Kristi Noem, and now it’s official: the senate voted Saturday to confirm Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security by a 59-34 vote. (Occasionally sensible Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., voted for the nominee.) There is now a very real chance that the southern border will be secured, and that the government will take a more realistic approach to national security than it ever came close to doing during the long four years of Old Joe Biden’s misrule.

During her confirmation hearings last week, Noem, who has been governor of South Dakota since 2019, declared: “I was the first governor to send National Guard troops to Texas when they were being overwhelmed by an unprecedented border crisis. If confirmed as secretary, I will ensure that our exceptional, extraordinary border patrol agents have all the tools and resources and support they need to carry out their mission effectively.”

Contra POTUS DJT, to be perfectly honest, I have yet to feel at all under the weather over all of the winning so far this week.