KERRY PICKET: Rank-and-file FBI agents dismayed, ‘embarrassed’ by bureau’s handling of New Orleans terror attack.

FBI agents say the bureau’s first response to the New Year’s Day terrorist massacre in New Orleans’ French Quarter was disastrous and another reason why the Senate can’t move fast enough to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the agency.

According to several agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the FBI failed to execute a comprehensive counter-terrorism plan when Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar of Texas, an Army veteran, rammed a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into New Year’s Eve revelers, killing 14 and wounding dozens.

They said the top FBI official on the scene broke with bureau decorum and inexplicably declared the attack not to be terrorism and that the bureau failed to follow basic procedures during the investigation.

Agents wondered why Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans FBI office, did not appear to be on duty when the attack happened, despite what should have been a heightened alert for a major New Year’s Eve celebrations and the college football championship, the Sugar Bowl, scheduled at the city’s Superdome on New Year’s Day.

The agents blamed poor leadership by outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate.

Mr. Abbate is poised to become acting director after Mr. Wray resigns, which he said he will do before Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

“They need to go right now, not only Wray, but Abbate needs to go. This is awful. This is embarrassing. Kash Patel is the person to have in there,” an agent said, referring to Mr. Trump’s nominee for FBI director. “He needs to come right now, right away, because these people have to leave.”

Indeed. As Byron York wrote a couple of weeks ago: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.

Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”

It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?

During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:

1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.

2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.

3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.

4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.

5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.

6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.

7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.

8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.

9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.

10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.

The FBI’s response to Patel’s arrival should be fun to watch:

DOUGLAS MURRAY GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Mass immigration is killing Europe – and the political class just don’t care.

Another Christmas and the politics of Europe are once again roiled by one of the Continent’s newest traditions: the Christmas market terrorist attack.

Last Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg was carried out by a Saudi-born asylum seeker. In 2016 it was a Tunisian migrant who carried out a similarly horrific attack in Berlin. It is one of the reasons why for the past 10 years these once innocent family events are surrounded by police and very often by what locals sometimes cynically call “diversity bollards”. In a macabre twist, in August this year a Syrian Islamist murdered three people and stabbed eight more at a Festival of Diversity in Solingen.

Most of the Western political class and media continue to refuse to draw any link between the uncontrolled mass legal and illegal immigration of recent years and the upsurge in crimes, including terrorism. They point out quite rightly that not everyone who arrives on our shores is a terrorist. But that is a straw man. Absolutely no reasonable voice would ever make such a claim.

Almost 10 years ago I began writing a book called The Strange Death of Europe. It was a response to the unprecedented migration wave of 2015, encouraged by then German chancellor Angela Merkel. I warned that if you import the world’s people you also import the world’s problems.

I pointed out that far from what our politicians were implying we were not in fact “nations of immigrants”. We were actually societies that had been strikingly culturally and ethnically homogenous for centuries, and that what was now being called “normal” was anything but that. And I also tried to warn that our societies were likely to fracture beyond recognition if we did not control immigration and take a tougher stance on deporting people who had no right to be here.

Instead, as Brendan O’Neill writes today at Spiked: When working-class girls were sacrificed to ideology. How the elites’ cowardice and classism let the ‘grooming gangs’ get away with rape.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Taking the Boeing.”

The New Hotness? Taking Air Force One! Trump Names One-Time Liberal Activist Turned MAGA Supporter As State Dept. Spokesperson:

[Tammy] Bruce was formerly director of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW and worked on several liberal campaigns, including the 1990s Barbara Boxer (CA) and Dianne Feinstein (CA) Senate races, and the Clinton for president campaign. Former President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was one of the “many tipping points in Ms. Bruce’s embracing of libertarian and conservative ideals,” however.

As she says in her long resume, she saw the light:

Until she saw the conservative light, she also served on their national board of directors. A native of Los Angeles, Ms. Bruce holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Southern California, from which she graduated cum laude. Currently she is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University. Ms. Bruce notes her interest in politics and individual liberty was sparked during her childhood in part because of the work of authors Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, both of whom remain her favorite writers. A native Los Angeleno, Ms. Bruce splits her time between New York and Los Angeles.

Exit quote:

“WATCH IN WONDER AS BOB DYLAN SLAYS COMMUNISTS!” John Podhoretz Reviews A Complete Unknown:

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if cowriter and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against “Masters of War”—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown.

The times Dylan informed us that were a-changin’ were the times in which middle-aged men felt the power to order around younger men—and in his case, those middle-aged men weren’t middle managers at IBM but New York leftists ranging from Greenwich Village intelligentsia to wealthier types raising money radical-chic style for “emergency committees” of this or that or the other stripe. A Complete Unknown is a rise-to-fame tale beginning with Dylan’s arrival on a bus in 1961, his almost instant embrace by Seeger and the world Seeger dominated—and which he almost instantly began to find suffocating.

But what was that embrace, really? The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.

It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)

The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic “Which Side Are You On?” nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the “side” in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.

A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.

Read the whole thing.

In his review of A Complete Unknown at Quillette, my former PJ Media colleague Ron Radosh adds:

I met Seeger in the early 1950s and we got to know each other well. I took lessons from him on the five-string banjo, I sang with him at a People’s Artists’ Hootenanny in New York, I sponsored his first concerts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I visited him at his home in Beacon, NY, and I kept in regular touch with him over the years. Our politics would diverge during the 1980s, and we hashed out our differences in public for much of the last decade or two of his life. A year or so before he died, we spoke on the phone, reconciled, and planned to get together in the near future. (Sadly, that reunion never took place.)

Mangold rightly celebrates Seeger’s contributions to the American story, including his strident politics and his opposition to the infamous HUAC hearings, which led to him being blacklisted by the McCarthyites he hated. Unfortunately, Mangold’s determination to portray Seeger as a secular saint means there is no mention of his apologetics for the Soviet Union, which revealed what David A. Graham once called his “disturbingly durable devotion to Communism.” As I noted in an obituary for the Weekly Standard in 2014, “His political vision, his service over the decades to the brutality of Soviet-era Stalinism and to all of the post-Cold War leftist tyrannies, was inseparable from the music he made [and] simply cannot be overlooked.” Paul Berman, whom I quoted in that piece, was even less forgiving, describing Seeger as “a fool and an idiot.”

Not that Seeger was especially fazed by this kind of criticism. “I’m sure,” he told the New York Times in 2007 when he was asked about my work, “there are more constructive things [Radosh] could do with his life.” Nevertheless, after I wrote an article for the New York Sun titled “Time for Pete Seeger to Repent,” he wrote me a letter. “I think you’re right,” it said. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” Instead, upon his return to the US, he had written a tribute to the achievements of the Soviet Union for the English edition of a Soviet magazine. The letter he sent me included a copy of a song he had written criticising Stalin, but he only performed it privately for a few friends. It was, in any case, fifty-odd years too late.

Related: Pete Seeger, America’s Most Successful Communist. Because not just anybody can say they’ve propped up every socialist dictator from Stalin and Hitler to Ho Chi Minh all the way to Saddam Hussein.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: The Longest 17 Days.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up.

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.

This is a scandal that should be rooted out entirely, and investigated by the full might of the British state. Voices ranging from Elon Musk to Kemi Badenoch have joined the calls for an inquiry. Yet the Government seems curiously reluctant to dig into the failings of officials.

As is the state-run media. I wonder why?

UPDATE: Questions asked:

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Multiple Arctic outbreaks to affect more than 250 million in central, eastern US into mid-January.

Even though each layer of cold coming in may stop short of the most extreme conditions in the past 10-15 years, the number of days spent below the historical average will add up in dozens of states from just east of the Rockies to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

“This is not record-setting cold, but the longevity of these cold waves, combined with snow on the ground in the Upper Midwest and northern Plains, will lead to a prolonged surge in heating demand,” AccuWeather Long-Range Expert Joe Lundberg said.

The prolonged nature of the cold, as a result, could end up making a splash on the record books, making it the coldest January in over a decade.

“This could end up being the coldest January since 2011 for the U.S. as a whole,” AccuWeather Lead Long-Range Expert Paul Pastelok said.

Another key factor as to how far to the south and east the extreme cold will be able to penetrate is that multiple storms are forecast to produce extensive swaths of snow and ice from the Great Plains to the Midwest, East and even well into the Southern states. Snow cover minimizes the warming effects of the ground and acts as a tundralike surface for the cold air to expand upon.

It may not be too late for some of the younger scientists featured in Leonard Nimoy’s 1978 In Search Of episode, “In Search of the Coming Ice Age” to change their minds yet again!

(Classical reference in headline.)

DIDDY’S INNER CIRCLE SPILLS IN NEW DOCUMENTARY: “He’s a Monster.”

The special features new interviews with Diddy insiders, such as a childhood friend, a former bodyguard and a Making the Band winner. Also, singer/songwriter/producer Al B. Sure! speaks out for the first time (Sure! was Diddy’s label mate at Uptown Records and was in a relationship with Kim Porter before she began dating Diddy). The special also includes never-before-seen footage of Diddy partying at home and in the studio.

“Sean Combs is a monster,” declares attorney Lisa Bloom, who is representing Dawn Richards in a civil case against Diddy.

“I’ve been with Sean for quite a while and I’ve captured a lot of moments,” says one unidentified insider. “Anytime a studio or any rooms is [lit with red lighting], he’s making love, sex. Some of the girls who were in the room, for sure, they were underage.”

“They said they could ship me off and sell me to anyone,” adds an unidentified woman.

As America’s Newspaper of Record reported in March: Nation Starting To Wonder If Diddy May Have Done A Few Of Those Things He Repeatedly Rapped About Doing.

Flashback to 2017: The sexual predators everyone still worships.

And from myself last month: The Hammer of the Gods: The First Critical Biography of Led Zeppelin Finally Available on the Kindle.

WAS IT OVER WHEN NIPPON STEEL* BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?!

Of course, the deal could very well get a do-over, starting in a few weeks: To make America great, Trump can enable the Nippon Steel acquisition.

U.S. and Nippon reached their deal over a year ago, on Dec. 18, 2023. Fast-forward 12 months, and the Biden administration is reportedly planning to block the merger on national security grounds.

It should surprise exactly no one that an economically illiterate administration, which is headed by a barely compos mentis individual and has gravely mismanaged America’s relationships around the globe, might have failed to notice that Japan is a key U.S. ally and we’re 80 years on from World War II. Yet here we are, and it will be down to Trump to reintroduce a measure of rationality and sense to what has evidently been a flawed decision-making process.

In addition to missing the key tidbit that it is no longer December 1941 or even December 1984, critics of the merger have missed that this is not an acquisition of a U.S. company by a foreign government. Nippon Steel is a publicly traded company owned and controlled by its shareholders. Proponents of the deal underline that Nippon is already invested in numerous steel manufacturing facilities across America, including Standard Steel in Burnham, Pennsylvania, and Wheeling-Nippon Steel in Follansbee, West Virginia, and maintains headquarters in Houston, Texas. So, despite its name, it is already surprisingly American.

Why is the Biden administration so Japanophobic?

Related: Jim Geraghty on The Last-Minute Push from the Lamest of Lame Ducks.

* Yes, I know. But it made for a funnier headline.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The worst tech predictions ever.

This is probably my favourite tech prediction gone RIGHT. Nikola Tesla calling the mobile age during a 1926 Collier’s interview:

“When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole Earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

Although considering what these devices are used for on social media, perhaps Tesla hadn’t predicted their ability to amplify “the monsters from the ID:”

I KNOW I’M PRETTY TERRIFIED AS WELL ABOUT YET ANOTHER MOVIE STARRING ZENDAYA: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey hit with trigger warnings by university for ‘distressing’ content.

BARI WEISS ON AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: How The Babylon Bee Predicted the Vibe Shift.

The Bee is a conservative, Christian satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s infamous tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.”

Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Some Needy Americans Live There” and “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.”

The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example: In 2020 the Bee posted “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, the Bee published the headline “Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask.” Later that same day, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking.

While the Bee’s anti-woke takedowns have garnered fame, or infamy, depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here are two 2016 headlines about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote” and “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”

Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022 after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.”

These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor.

Flashback to 2019: A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire: When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’

Glenn wrote in response that “When You Understand That Snopes is Just a Democratic Party Message-Control Tool, It All Makes Sense…The Left understands and employs the power of mockery. And it wants to keep that power to itself.”

When your job is to attempt to get politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over the hurdle, you’ve really got to keep all of your powder dry. And as one person tweeted in 2019, “They’re intentionally pretending that these memes are meant to mislead the public so they can claim censorship is necessary to deal with misinformation on social media.”

Those “cheap fakes” were everywhere in 2024 — until Biden was ousted from the presidential campaign.

ED MORRISSEY: You’re In Woke Hands With Allstate.

Those are the issues at hand, along with combatting efforts by ISIS to radicalize the mentally unstable into lone-wolf terrorists. The issue at hand is not “divisiveness and negativity,” and the answer to the real issues isn’t to stop demanding answers and debating these and other issues. It sounded very much like Wilson blames every disagreement for creating terrorism,  which is a very strange message for a democratic republic. Wilson also chose this message at the worst possible moment, when the difference between “divisiveness” and actual terrorism could not have been clearer.

Allstate has already hit retreat on its new Be Quiet Peasants And Do What We Tell You advertising campaign:

“To be clear, Allstate CEO Tom Wilson unequivocally condemns this heinous act of terrorism and violence in all forms. We stand with the families of the victims, their loved ones and the community of New Orleans. The reference to overcoming divisiveness and negativity reflects a broader commitment to fostering trust and positivity in communities across the nation,” the statement read.

Really? Well, you’re doing a bang-up job of “fostering trust and positivity” in America already, Allstate! At least we can all agree that whoever came up with this idea should join Alissa Heinerscheid on the unemployment line, because that person may have finally outdone Bud Light in the Woke Scoldy Advertising Olympics.

Related: From Crain’s Chicago Business in August: Chicago biz leaders urge Harris to pick Pritzker as veep.

Forty-two Chicago business leaders released a letter this morning urging presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to select Gov. J.B. Pritzker as her running mate.

The letter, first reported by Mary Ann Ahern of NBC-5, is co-signed by a cross-section of Chicago’s business elite, including GCM Grosvenor CEO Michael Sacks, Allstate CEO Tom Wilson, Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren, Loop Capital CEO Jim Reynolds, Sterling Bay executive and Crown family scion Keating Crown, Jennifer Scanlan, CEO of UL Solutions, and John Rogers Jr., chairman of Ariel Investments.

(Emphasis mine.)

Earlier: Ruy Teixeira on The Democrats’ Culture Denialism.

AT NEW ORLEANS TERRORIST’S LOCAL MOSQUE, IMAM SAYS HITLER KILLED JEWS ‘BECAUSE OF THE ECONOMY THING, THEY WERE IN CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY.’

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the Islamic terrorist who killed 14 people in the New Year’s Eve attack on New Orleans, lived near a Houston mosque led by a radical imam who once preached that Hitler massacred Jews because “they like to take control of the economy,” video footage shows.

The Jewish people “have many problems, but that’s one of the main problems—they like to take control of the economy,” Imam Eiad Soudan of Houston’s Masjid Bilal mosque said in November 2023, according to footage released by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “Everywhere they go, whatever is the rule, as long as they get to the goal, the means don’t matter.”

“They seek corruption in the land,” Soudan continued. “Hitler hated the Israelites so bad because of the economy thing, they were in control of the economy.” He referred to Hitler as “this guy … with the nice moustache.”

Related: Mosque Near Home Of New Orleans Attacker Reportedly Tells Locals Not To Speak Directly To Feds Or Media.

What other Squad and/or Ivy League-approved craziness was being uttered in Jabbar’s mosque?

VDH: Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.

Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing—in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.

Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.

More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.

The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4 percent fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.

A tragic irony now abounds.

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.

Earlier: High Electricity Prices Have Europe Facing Deindustrialization; Don’t Let It Happen Here.

Including a surprise in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign from Scientific American deep in the 2024 election cycle:

IT’S COME TO THIS: Embarrassing: New Orleans’ 65-Year-Old DEI Police Chief’s Shocking Admission on City’s Missing Preventative Sidewalk Barriers “I didn’t know about them” (Video).

[New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick] told reporters, “What you see behind us is what we call hardening the target. We have brought in heavy trucks. You will see when you go down Bourbon, you will see yellow, what we call ‘archers,’ and they are along the sidewalk. That would be to be preventive.”

“If someone had or if this particular terrorist went around up on the sidewalk, that’s what that would do. It would slow that down for anyone who thought that they could breach our targets. Those are some of the main differences we are done in the quarter.”

“Also, you are going to see an incredibly large presence of police. We are, though, confident, but we want our community to feel confident and know they are confidently safe. That’s what we’re going to do.”

“Right now, I can declare to you that the Bourbon Street is open.”

A perplexed reporter asked, “Chief, where did those ‘archers’ come from….the yellow archers, where did they come from?”

Kirkpatrick, “Actually, we have them. I didn’t know about them, but we have them, and so we have been able now to put them out.”

But what happened to the barriers that should have been there over the holiday season in the first place? Barriers to stop vehicle attacks were in the process of being replaced in New Orleans.

There have been proposals over the years to turn much of Bourbon Street into a pedestrian plaza managed by a team focused on making it safe, Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said Wednesday. He told The Associated Press that it’s important to examine every aspect of safety following the New Year’s Day carnage.

“You can’t prevent something like this when someone wants to kill people*,” Nungesser said, “but I’m hoping we take a hard look at what we do because there will be another one, whether it’s in New Orleans or elsewhere.”

Addressing the removal of the bollards, Nungesser said, “How does that happen for a major event?”

* Offer void on CNN: CNN Shames Those Labeling New Orleans ISIS Attack As Terrorism.

RUY TEIXEIRA: The Democrats’ Culture Denialism.

[F]undamentally today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues real issues. They are typically viewed as politically motivated distractions or as expressions of something else entirely (i.e., racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) They are not treated as issues that need to be dealt with on their own terms.

The current Democratic discourse is rife with examples. Here’s Massachusetts Democratic Representative Jim McGovern as tweeted out by progressive group CAP Action:

Get it? No one would normally object to Democratic policies around trans issues or immigration issues. Backlash against them is just ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The real issue is the depredations of big corporations. The clear implication is that Democrats don’t need to change their positions on either trans and immigration issues but instead should point out to befuddled voters that these are non-issues and that their real enemy is corporate America (hissss!).

Which seems odd, considering that corporate America — or at least its management — are Democratic Party stalwarts, despite being their go-to rhetorical whipping boys. But eventually, the Dems might want to update their leather helmet-era playbook, considering that in late 2022, Tom Cotton told CEOs who tolerate wokeness don’t come crying to the GOP:

In a viral video from a Nov. 29 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, spoke out against McMullen and other corporate leaders who expect Republicans to defend them against Democratic lawmakers pushing for industry regulation.

He said that while the GOP has a history of supporting free enterprise, corporate leaders cannot expect Republicans to come to their defense if their companies enforce policies that discriminate against or censor conservative employees.

I’ve cautioned companies for years that if they censor their conservative employees, they shouldn’t come to Republicans when Democrats come after them.

My message to these companies: best of luck. pic.twitter.com/rgOvdEuoaa

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) November 29, 2022

“I’ve cautioned them for years that if they silence conservatives and center-right voters … if they discriminate against them in their company, they probably shouldn’t come and ask Republican senators to carry the water for them whenever our Democratic friends want to regulate them or block their mergers,” he said in the video.

Cotton’s comments were in response to the religious discrimination lawsuit that was filed after two Kroger employees in Arkansas were fired for refusing to wear company aprons with a rainbow logo, which is often used as a symbol for the LGBTQ community. The Cincinnati-based company settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay the former employees $180,000.

McMullen, at the hearing, reiterated that the heart with the rainbow was a branding symbol, not a political statement.

To McMullen and other CEOs seeking GOP support against regulation, Cotton said, “I’ll say this: ‘I’m sorry that’s happening to you. Best of luck.'”

As for “billion-dollar insurance companies,” as we’ve seen since the beginning of December, Democrats have declared a fatwa on their CEOs: Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.

UPDATE: Insurance company CEO speaks pablum calling for a new civility after — checks notes — radicalized Muslim kills at least 14 people yesterday in New Orleans:

Turned on the Notre Dame – Georgia game for it to start with this ridiculous propaganda from @Allstate on yesterday’s terrorist attack:

“We need to overcome an addiction to divisiveness and negativity… & accept people’s imperfections and differences”??!!!

You’re JOKING. pic.twitter.com/Xiwdek3BoP

— Isabel Brown (@theisabelb) January 2, 2025

As Collin Rugg jokes on Twitter, “If only Shamsud Din Jabbar had heard this message two days ago!”

OUR GERMANS WERE BETTER THAN THEIR GERMANS*: How a Nazi Scientist became an American Hero (Video).

* QED:

Image of Apollo 11 and 12 taken by India's Moon orbiter. Disapproving Moon landing deniers pic.twitter.com/kY4rn0sOoT

— Curiosity (@MAstronomers) January 2, 2025

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

BOB BARKER SAYS, REMEMBER TO HAVE YOUR COMEDIANS SPAYED AND NEUTERED! Comedian Says It’s ‘Dangerous’ For Dave Chappelle To Joke About Trans People.

The 47-year-old New Jersey native, who has appeared in Hollywood films and reality TV shows, made the remarks during her new Netflix comedy special, “Michelle Buteau: A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall.”

Buteau’s set included a graphic joke about her “beautiful, black, lesbian friend,” which she submitted as an example of how comedians should joke about people who fall under the LGBT acronym.

“What I’m saying is it can be done. It can be done. We can tell jokes and stories and not disparage a whole community,” Buteau said, per CNN. “We can do that, we can make it funny. You just have to work at it, right? So if you guys ever run into Dave Chappelle, can you let him know that sh**?”

Buteau said she doesn’t think she will ever run into Chappelle “because he is the GOAT.”

“And he is the GOAT, if that means going off about trans people. Dave, it’s not funny. It’s dangerous,” the comedian went on. “I can’t believe somebody would make millions and millions of dollars for making people feel unsafe. That is so wild to me.”

And that is why you fail, as Yoda would say.

Danger used to be a watchword in comedy. Rodney Dangerfield, born Jacob Cohen, had the D-word right in his stage name. As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, in 1981, when Dick Ebersol took over production of NBC’s Saturday Night Live after Lorne Michaels had left and his replacement, Jean Doumanian had been fired after one disastrous season, Ebersol brought with him SNL’s first head writer and National Lampoon vet, Michael O’Donoghue, and introduced him to his new cast:

“There’s somebody here you’re all going to be working for,” Dick said, “and I’d like to leave you alone with him for a little while. This is Reich Marshall Michael O’Donoghue.”

Dick went back to his office, and O’Donoghue came straight to the point.

“Everybody on the show sucks, except for Murphy,” he said. Turning toward Eddie, he added, “You, you make me laugh sometimes. But everybody else, you do nothing for me.” As he went on, his voice rose to a shout. People started cowering in their seats, which only heightened O’Donoghue’s ferocity. Jean Doumanian’s show, he said, “made me puke… Did you think there were diamonds in that dog shit you were putting out? There weren’t even zircons!” He repeated his contention that the only hope for Saturday Night now was that it would go down with a little class, with cannons blazing. Whether they could muster the guts necessary to pull that off was open to question. “Look at these walls,” he said. “They’re neat! Tidy! Sanitized! This is not the way to run a comedy show. You’re a comedy show! You know what this show is missing?”

O’Donoghue took a can of red spray paint and, in huge, two-foot letters, wrote Danger on the wall. Some of the effect was lost because it takes a while to write with spray paint, and before O’Donoghue had finished, everyone knew the word he was spelling out. But the message came across.

“That’s what’s missing!” O’Donoghue said. Then he ordered everyone to grab a can of spray paint or a Magic Marker. “Make this place look like a comedy office!” he yelled. “Comedy writers work here!”

The startled group did as commanded, covering the walls with graffiti. As they did, O’Donoghue walked out, telling people to see him individually in his office. Although some members of the staff found O’Donoghue’s little demonstration liberating, not a few were appalled. Within minutes, “the wounded,” as Dick Ebersol called them, were streaming into Dick’s office to complain. Word of what had happened quickly spread, and soon Ebersol’s phone was lighting up with calls from concerned managers, agents, and NBC executives who wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Catherine O’Hara, who had just arrived in town from Toronto [where she had been in the cast of SCTV], was one of those most shaken by her first encounter with Reich Marshall O’Donoghue. As she’d joined the others in painting the walls, she’d found herself thinking, “Why do I have a can of spray paint in my hand? This isn’t me. Why should I be here?” Soon thereafter she told Dick she was leaving. She offered to call a good friend of hers, an SCTV co-star named Robin Duke, and three days later Duke came to New York as O’Hara’s replacement.

Eddie Murphy, by contrast, hadn’t been the least bit intimidated. The next time he saw O’Donoghue, he immediately launched into a perfect imitation of O’Donoghue in the midst of his “Danger” rant. This guy, O’Donoghue said to himself, has balls.

Something sorely lack in most comedy today.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Pure Gold: MSNBC Sadly Admits How Bad Biden Was on Immigration, Trump Was Right.

But they did run a segment on “Morning Joe” where they surprisingly did something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: admit that Trump was right and illegal immigration did in fact shoot up under Biden. The funniest thing was how regretful host Joe Scarborough seemed about having to say it.

“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly. You can see what happened here. And Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings work quite low. They’re running about 74,000 a month when he left office and they, in fact, did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said and some ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month.”

He noted it’s come down some, but it’s still more than it was under Trump. In the meantime, it was “pretty costly.”

My, my. Imagine ever hearing those words on MSNBC and in particular “Morning Joe.”

This was a bit of a hot take: “Some of it was some things Biden said.” Oh, you think? No, some of it was Biden purposely ending the things that worked under Trump immediately when Biden came to office. It isn’t just that it “got worse” — it was directly because of the policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But I suppose if MSNBC  went that far into truth, their heads would explode. The fact that they’re admitting this at all shows how rocked they have been by their narrative.

“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” when in a way, it was, from a leftist’s point of view:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

UPDATE:

MSNBC is pretending this isn't their fault.

All they had to do was tell the truth about The Fine People Hoax in 2020. None of this would have happened.

And they know it. https://t.co/xvO8vP4BxM

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 2, 2025

Is MSNBC getting into Bulwark territory with their sudden interest in illegal immigration?

Holy crap…lol…just saying the quiet part out loud, I guess. https://t.co/PI0nLI8FHi

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 9, 2024

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Why Do We Accept Government by an Invalid?

It is still New Year’s Day, and I must wring a last few hours of repose out of it before plunging once again into the maelstrom tomorrow. I am here only to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that our president is simply unavailable for response outside of press releases and official tweets during times of potential crisis like these, until such point where Biden stumbles out to peer into a teleprompter — his fogged eyes squinted into mere dashes — and slurs a half-articulated “update” speech. Was anyone reassured by that speech? Did it alleviate anyone’s unease that the sitting president of the United States is a half-functional, quasi-vegetative person at this point?

I am also here to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that tolerating a president who is permanently mentally incapacitated invites crises like these. Nineteen days yet remain until the animate shell of Joe Biden formally departs from the presidency. Pray for peace and hold your breath until then.

Biden’s eyes are holding on to that teleprompter screen for dear life. That moment at 1:49 where he pretends to check his notebook and shuffle his papers and then utters “there you go” may have been a pause to allow the prompter operator to get to the next line, or reboot the script:

🚨 #BREAKING: New Orleans attacker was inspired by ISIS, President Biden announces.

"Hours before, he posted videos on social media indicating that he is inspired by ISIS, expressing a desire to kill."

"The situation is very fluid."

"The FBI is leading the investigation to… pic.twitter.com/kz3xII1g1b

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 2, 2025

And it goes without saying at this late date that after reading the prompter, Biden’s husk quickly exited the room without taking any questions

Biden walks off after brief statement, takes zero questions on terror attack in NOLA: pic.twitter.com/J45Wq7PGw5

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) January 2, 2025

THANK TRUMP WE WON’T HAVE TO CELEBRATE KAMALA’S COMMIE HOLIDAY:

If Kamala Harris had won the election, she likely would have made Kwanzaa—a made-up “black” holiday as fake as her “black” accent—a federal mandate.

For years, Kamala has told tall tales pretending to be a lifelong celebrant of Kwanzaa. She claims to recall fond childhood memories of multi-generational Kwanzaa get-togethers led by the elders® sharing stories of yore and lighting candles on the “kinara,” literally a knock-off menorah. (The first “kinara” was fashioned from a desecrated Jewish menorah. Two of its openings were broken off to create the seven-ring candleholder.)

* * * * * * * *

For starters, Kamala pre-dates Kwanzaa.

Although the Al Sharpton types will tell you that there’s something sacred about Kwanzaa, as if there’s an ancient aura attached to it, Kwanzaa wasn’t contrived until 1966 and thus didn’t even exist when Kamala was born two years before that—in 1964.

So, it’s pretty hard to fathom that these freshly fabricated festivities were some of Kamala’s “favorite” recollections of her youth, especially since she spent her adolescence in Canada, where Kwanzaa wasn’t widely spread, despite the media’s dishonest portrayals painting the little-observed holiday as something of a worldwide phenomenon.

We’ve yet to see photographic proof of the Harris household celebrating Kwanzaa. Where are the family photos of her Indian mother and Jamaican father taking part in their so-called cherished Kwanzaa traditions? Quite the opposite. We actually have an old picture of four-year-old Kamala “waiting for Santa Claus,” per her memoir, next to a Christmas tree at their home in 1968.

Her views of Christmas have certainly, err, evolved significantly in the decades since: Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections.

Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.

And San Francisco Democrats wonder why their worldview fails to resonate outside the Bay Area:

WAPO COLUMNIST JENNIFER RUBIN INSULTS TRUMP VOTERS, ATTACKS HER OWN PAPER FOR TRYING TO REACH THEM:

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin recently participated in a public event to discuss the outcome of the 2024 election and reinforced her image as one of the biggest haters of all things Trump. She was paired with George Conway, another soldier in the never-Trump army of fools.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has said that he wants the paper to have more conservative writers for the sake of balance and to reach out to Trump voters. Rubin clearly disagrees. She used this opportunity to insult Trump supporters and even lashed out at her own paper.

If a museum of Trump Derangement Syndrome is ever created, Jennifer Rubin deserves her own dedicated wing.

* * * * * * * *

The opinion columnist joined anti-Trump critic George Conway at an event at the 92NY Center for Culture & Arts on Dec. 15 to talk about the aftermath of the 2024 election, which saw President-elect Donald Trump win a second term.

After what she claims have been multiple examples of the media capitulating to Trump since then, Rubin singled out her own publication for wanting to reach out to Trump voters.

“People ask me all the time, why is the media so mamsy-pamsey? And there are two explanations,” Rubin began. “The one is, they are convinced that if they would just move a little bit to the right, all those MAGA readers out there — now, you’ll notice the contradiction in terms, ‘MAGA readers’ — would pick up The Washington Post, and they would have more readers. What is the logical fallacy here? Yes, reader. And there’s nothing that The Washington Post could possibly do that would have those people take out a subscription. But I’m convinced they’re in there someplace.”

Rubin is simply responding to a long tradition at the Post of insulting its readers, and potential readers, flashing back to Post employee Ginny Carroll’s button worn at the 1992 Republican convention: ‘Yeah, I’m In The Media. Screw You.’

Perhaps with her line that “There’s nothing that The Washington Post could possibly do that would have those people take out a subscription. But I’m convinced they’re in there someplace,” Rubin is also channeling the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.’”

SUPERDOME IN NEW ORLEANS ON LOCKDOWN FOR SECURITY SWEEPS AFTER DEADLY TRUCK ATTACK:

The Superdome, set to host a College Football Playoff quarterfinal game between Georgia and Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl on Wednesday night, was on lockdown for security sweeps after a truck plowed into a New Year’s crowd about a mile away, killing 10 people and injuring more than 30.

People with offices in the Superdome — including officials with the Sugar Bowl and Sun Belt Conference — were told not to come into work until further notice.

According to New Orleans NBC affiliate WDSU, the Sugar Bowl will be postponed 24 hours.