21st CENTURY HEADLINES: NASA Performs First Aircraft Accident Investigation on Another World.

WHY WOULD ANY REPUBLICAN? Hegseth Spares No Feelings In Quip To Media: ‘I Don’t Feel The Need To Respond To CNN.’

PLOT TWIST: Luigi Mangione was not insured by UnitedHealthcare, say police.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Crystal Mangum admits to fabricating 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal accusations.

Crystal Mangum, the woman who falsely accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006, admitted she lied about the allegations and asked for David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann’s forgiveness.

Mangum made her confession in an interview published Wednesday on “Let’s Talk with Kat,” hosted by Katerena DePasquale, at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Unrelated to the lacrosse case, Mangum is currently in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder of her then-boyfriend in 2013.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong, and I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum said in the interview. “[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Then-N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper did not prosecute Mangum for perjury after the case was dismissed, saying at the time that the investigators thought “she may have actually believed the many different stories that she has been telling.” The statute of limitations on perjury charges typically lasts two years in North Carolina law, meaning that Mangum can no longer be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Duke Athletics declined The Chronicle’s request for comment on Mangum’s statement. University administration, former University President Richard Brodhead, then-head men’s lacrosse coach Mike Pressler and Seligmann did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment in time for publication.

Mangum’s statement comes nearly two decades after she asserted that she was raped by the lacrosse players. Until now, she had never publicly stated that it was not true.

Flashback to Mary Katharine Ham in 2006, who gave us a video tour of the non-crime scene:

GREAT MOMENTS IN STRATEGIC PLANNING: Tony Blinken Tells Congress ‘No One Anticipated’ Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before Congress on the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in a long-awaited hearing that was originally scheduled for September. Though he claimed that “no one” in the Biden State Department anticipated the Afghan government’s swift collapse, a group of diplomats warned Blinken of that very prospect roughly one month before the Taliban captured Kabul.

“Even the U.S. government’s most pessimistic assessments did not anticipate that the Afghan government and security forces would collapse so rapidly in the face of Taliban advances,” Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Twenty-six diplomats, however, sent Blinken a dissent cable in mid-July 2021—one month before the fall of Kabul and six weeks before a suicide bombing attack killed 13 American servicemembers—warning of Afghanistan’s rapid deterioration. Asked why he ignored that cable, Blinken responded, “Very simply because no one anticipated the government and Afghan forces would collapse as quickly as they did.”

Blinken’s appearance comes nearly two months after the Biden official was set to testify before the House committee in late September. But Blinken failed to attend the hearing, defying a subpoena in the process, and only agreed to testify after the November presidential election. Blinken also missed a May deadline to turn over withdrawal-related internal documents, which were requested under subpoena.

Blinken’s appearance staved off a contempt proceeding in Congress that passed through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, setting the stage for a full vote in the GOP-controlled House. Instead, Blinken agreed to testify before traveling to the Middle East for discussions on Syria.

In April, Ben Shapiro wrote: America Is Now in the Business of Losing Wars. And Tony’s your man for the job!

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DECADE MAKES:

Flash-forward to the end of 2024, where David Thompson explores “The Bleeding Unobvious:”

And in radical menstruation news:

Menstrual leave employment policies allow employees experiencing painful menstrual cycle-related symptoms or illnesses… to take time off work. Traditionally, these policies have been sex-specific, targeting women or females.

I suspect sharp-eyed readers can guess where this is going.

However, some companies have begun expanding their language to include “people with uteruses” or “menstruating employees.” This shift is significant, as research shows that sex-specific employment policies undermine gender equality at work.

Readers may wish to ponder whether listing special sex-based requirements – taking time off work, every month, for days, and still expecting to be paid, for instance – is the ideal basis for asserting the obviousness of workplace gender equality.

I’m also unclear on how gender equality, a term used many times, is bolstered by the belief that menstruating women may in fact be men – and the implication that men can also become women and can therefore barge into previously female-only spaces.

In 2022, Van Jones tried to warn his leftists that their attempts at redefining reality and language were going to end very badly, but hey, it’s CNN, so fortunately no one was listening: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

Top CNN anchor leaves panel gasping after on-air EULOGY of the Democratic Party pic.twitter.com/FWziaLNbbk

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2022

He said the elites use strange rhetoric that does not appeal to working class voters.

“Those people talk funny,” he continued. “I’ve never met a LatinX, I’ve never met a BIPOC … There’s this weird stuff that all these highly educated people say. It’s bizarre, nobody talks that way at the barbershop, the nail salon, the grocery store, the community center. But that’s how we talk now, so that’s weird.”

That’s what happens when you Bud Light your brand, leaving a massive opening among voters for Orange Hitler to remind them, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

ANSWERS TO THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Are So Many Christmas Movies Set in Chicago?

JOSH HAWLEY CONFRONTS WITNESS POINT-BLANK TO EXPLAIN HOW FLOODING JOB MARKET WITH ILLEGAL MIGRANTS HELPS AMERICANS:

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley confronted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday about how flooding the job market with illegal immigrants benefits Americans.

* * * * * * * *

“So just if you’re wondering America, here’s the Democrats’ plan,” Hawley continued. “Take the 13 million plus illegals who are here taking jobs from Americans, taking wages down, taking healthcare benefits, and bring them here legally so they can continue to drive down wages, flood the labor force, and suppress all of the above.”

“Senator Hawley, they can’t flood the labor force if they’re already part of the labor force which is an economic issue today,” Melnick replied, leading the senator to exclaim that they are currently flooding the labor force.

Hawley and Melnick then sparred on how working class wages have been impacted due to illegal immigrants joining the workforce, with the attorney stating that wages have been on the rise due to illegal immigrants’ labor.

“Oh really they’ve gone up over the past 15 years? They’re up? Yeah, they’re down. Way down. What world do you live in? … Let me just end with this. The American people had a good look at your economic record and then voted against it,” Hawley said.

Crises by design:

● 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.”

● Incoming Trump Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller in 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 2021 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.’”

And on their way out the door, Team Biden are doing everything they can to sabotage the incoming president’s efforts to secure the border: Biden Races To Sell Off Border Wall Parts Before Trump Takes Office.

President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas are doing everything they can to keep our borders open as long as possible. https://t.co/ety9iPzAIm

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 12, 2024

DAVID REABOI: The Van Jones Rule.

In January 1998, when the internet was in its early days, Matt Drudge had made his reputation as an adversary—and competitor—of the mainstream media by publishing a giant newsworthy scoop about President Bill Clinton that Beltway reporters and editors had spiked merely for partisan reasons. Drudge’s story suddenly flashed on newspapers and television screens across America and the world: The sitting president’s affair with a young White House intern consumed headlines for the next year and a half. Even as the leftwing mainstream media tried to protect a Democratic president, making the scandal disappear was impossible. It was a morality tale, a detective story, and a courtroom drama, and it ended, finally, in a cliffhanger of an impeachment vote that nearly brought Clinton down.

A decade later, in early 2009, recently inaugurated President Barack Obama had appointed little-known leftwing radical activist Van Jones as his “Green Jobs Czar.” Even as most Republican politicians feared opposing the new president and exposing themselves to accusations of racism, the reaction from the conservative press was swift and impassioned. On his nightly Fox News show, Glenn Beck railed against Jones’s appointment, pointing to a disqualifying 9/11 conspiracy petition he’d signed several years before. It began to look like a feeding frenzy, as the mainstream media began reporting on the growing backlash on the Right.

And then Obama blinked. Under pressure from other cable news and talk radio voices on the Right, the White House felt the heat from the hostile media coverage and hastily withdrew Jones’s name. Obama instinctively did what nearly every politician had done before: When heat came down on one of his people, he looked to stop the bleeding and move on by cutting him loose.

Almost immediately, though, the White House realized that it had made a tactical mistake by caving—or even reacting—to its critics in conservative media. The people fuming about Van Jones in rightwing media, it had realized, were already sworn enemies. Tossing one of its own to the wolves wouldn’t halt or slow down the enemy’s advance; it would do the opposite and encourage more. From then on, not only would the Obama administration refuse to bend to pressure on appointments, nominations, or criticism from adversarial media, it treated right-leaning media itself—and, by extension, its audience of millions—as illegitimate.

Even as the White House clung to the “Van Jones Rule” and refused to give the Right an inch, conservative media remained potent. While Drudge had put the media on notice as gatekeepers of information, he was less a reporter than an editor; together with his then-unknown sidekick, Andrew Breitbart, The Drudge Report took the raw materials provided by the traditional media and presented the news in a provocative way by collating links to existing reporting—and, crucially, re-contextualizing it based on catching essential details buried deep in the middle paragraphs. And, as websites proliferated, the internet allowed everyone with a blog to become an instant media critic, fact-checking, debunking, and commenting on the media’s daily reporting.

* * * * * * * *

Though it’s often been pronounced dead or debilitated, the leftwing Corporate Media remains the most powerful political and cultural force in America, capable of steamrolling the Right and quickly moving public opinion into spasms of hysteria, fear, self-righteousness, or near-ubiquitous virtue signaling. Its ability to create and solidify narratives across the population was in evidence throughout the presidency of Donald Trump.

Perhaps nothing in modern American history caused a greater erosion of social cohesion than the years-long false narrative about the elected president being an agent of a foreign enemy power. “Russiagate” was an epic tale, with a cast of hundreds or even thousands of players; it was a bona fide information campaign, unfolding and rising with daily intensity, like the most potent scripted drama.

From the start, the Left and its media allies were in control.

Read the whole thing, which is an excerpt from the new book edited by Michael Walsh: Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You, which I reviewed in late October.

DONALD TRUMP OPENS NY STOCK EXCHANGE AS TIME MAGAZINE NAMES HIM PERSON OF THE YEAR:

Trump has been featured on the magazine cover four other times this year:

• April 30, 2024: “If He Wins” – This cover focused on an exclusive interview where Trump laid out his second-term agenda.

• May 30, 2024: “Donald Trump found guilty on all counts” – This cover was released after Trump’s conviction in the hush money trial.

• July 14, 2024: “Donald Trump survives shooting with nation on edge” – This cover was published following an assassination attempt on Trump.

• November 6, 2024: “How Donald Trump did it—again” – This cover was about Trump’s successful reelection.

Trump beat out a shortlist that included Vice President Kamala Harris, his newfound billionaire political ally Elon Musk, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, better known as Kate Middleton. Notably, Musk had previously earned this title in 2021. Last year, the title was given to popstar Tayor Swift, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris jointly shared the award in 2020.

Ahead of his anticipated appearance at the NY Stock Exchange in Manhattan, the president posted an article on Truth Social acknowledging the news of his award.

Exit quotes:

🚨”USA” chant breaks out after President-elect Donald Trump rings the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. pic.twitter.com/X3ZucrlrjS

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 12, 2024

Vice President JD Vance: “It’s 9:48am shouldn’t you be making money?!”🤣
pic.twitter.com/kkRk5IIEUe

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 12, 2024

Trump is the first American president since Ronald Reagan in 1985 to ring the Stock Exchange’s opening bell.

As Glenn wrote in the New York Post yesterday, it’s Morning in America again.

OLD AND BUSTED: Displaying anger towards the current president by putting stickers on gas pumps with rapidly rising fuel prices.

The New Hotness? Tagging your own car! For Tesla Owners, a Referendum Through Bumper Stickers.

The solution, for many Tesla owners on both ends of that spectrum, has been to slap a bumper sticker on their car to let people know how they feel about Mr. Musk.

Mr. Hiller, who lives in Honolulu and works at the Waikiki Aquarium, became a key player in the situation by being ahead of the curve thanks to his side business: an Etsy shop called Mad Puffer Stickers.

At first, Mr. Hiller just sold stickers with fish illustrations (e.g. an image of a clownfish with the caption “Don’t talk to me. I’m a fishtrovert”) on Etsy and Amazon. He had been considering buying a Tesla, but in early 2023, several months after Mr. Musk completed his takeover of Twitter, Mr. Hiller said he found himself alienated by what he characterized as misinformation on the site.

“So I’m like, there’s no way I’m buying a Tesla: I don’t want to give this guy a penny,” he said. “Then I started thinking, there’s got to be so many people who are just embarrassed, who have a Tesla already, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, now I’m repping this guy. I don’t want to endorse anything this guy stands for.’”

That is when he added the new bumper sticker — “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy” — to his offerings, aiming to draw in left-leaning Tesla owners. Initially, he sold between five and 10 of the stickers a day. But as Mr. Musk became increasingly outspoken in his support of Mr. Trump, more orders started to flow in, with Mr. Hiller reporting he has sold around 18,000 of the stickers across 30 countries.

“It’s become a pretty good side business,” Mr. Hiller said.

In an era of out-of-control leftist violence and vandalism, the stickers also serve as the equivalent of those “No radio onboard” signs seen on cars parked on the streets of leftist urban hellscapes. The self-hating Tesla driver’s stickers have the goal of reminding the potential vandal that the owner of the car is as disappointed as he could be with the man who designed it (in-between designing spacecraft and overseeing global communications platforms).

REPORT: Time magazine to name Trump 2024 Person of the Year.

Hitler is Time magazine’s Man of the Year — again!

DEVELOPING: North Carolina announces 5-year deal with Bill Belichick to take over as coach of the Tar Heels.

JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

We should be done with the CEO murderer soon enough, until the trial. The fans will sift out the good things and valorize his acts and thoughts. A charismatic photo will be turned into a Che shirt. People on Twitter will be Very Angry about the American health care system for a while until they are Very Angry about something else. The people in the middle of the discourse will not that at least we’re starting to have a conversation about the health care system, insurance, and all that.

Two points:

1. There is no placating the people who want the current system – for that matter, all the current systems to end and be replaced with Cornucopianism, a political philosophy I just made up. It means everyone gets everything in unstinting amounts as they need, because that is fair, and the only reason it’s not happening is greed and hatred.

2. This is not the time to have that discussion at all. There is only one “discussion” that should follow a politically motivated murder, and that is the evil of politically motivated murder.

* * * * * * * *

Beware of any complaint that can be solved by Cornucopianism. When someone puts forth a complaint that strums the Aeolian Harp of general resentment about All the Things, look for Cornucopianism as the implied solution. If you see it, point it out, and laugh at it. Then find some adults with whom to talk.

The problem for the left is that they cannot direct their anger at the ultimate practitioner of Cornucopianism: Barack Obama broke US healthcare. Only the Left refuses to admit it. “It’s rich for progressives who have pushed for all of these developments – from guaranteed issue of policies to people with pre-existing conditions to mandates of what those policies cover – to now complain about increasing premiums and rising claim denial rates. What did they think would happen? So now, they are reduced to cheering for literally shooting the messenger.”

CRISES BY DESIGN: NYT: The Biden “Immigration Boom” Is the Biggest In This Country’s Almost 250-Year History; 60% of Recent “Newcomers” Entered Illegally.

Thanks Democrats!

It’s not just the story here that’s relevant — it’s who’s reporting it.

The NYT is basically providing what Obama used to call a “permission structure” for Democrats to abandon their quasi-religious open borders fanaticism and moderate on the issue.

And they’re only doing that because the issue is destroying the Democrat Cult. This is an intervention, telling the cultists to back off before the entire cult collapses.

And yet another example of the Times slow-walking news sufficiently so that it won’t harm a Democrat president, governor, or candidate.

FUNNY, I DON’T REMEMBER COLOSSUS OR SKYNET EVER CRASHING: ChatGPT down for users globally, OpenAI shares major update on technical outage.

UPDATE: Was it the Apple IOS 18.2 update that crashed ChatGPT, or something far more sinister?

WNBA’S CAITLIN CLARK WINS TIME’S ‘ATHLETE OF THE YEAR,’ PROMPTLY GOES WOKE:

My thought process on this is that while her comments are disappointing, Clark is still young and getting her sea legs in a league where the huge egos and the propensity for hurt feelings are just as dominant and prevailing as they are in any other professional sports league, where rings also have to be kissed.

Right now, she’s just trying to play ball and get away from being turned into the spectacle, and she’s saying what she thinks she needs to do in order to earn respect from people from whom she likely will never get it. As soon as she grows up a bit more and figures that out she’ll probably look back on these comments and cringe.

In any event, it’s just another reminder not to put sports icons too high up on pedestals because they are human, and it is inevitable that, at some point, they are bound to let you down.

As America’s Newspaper of Record reports:

FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN: NFL announces first-ever regular season game in Berlin in 2025.

The NFL has announced it will play a regular season game in Berlin for the first time in 2025.

The game will be played at the iconic Olympic Stadium in the German capital.

The NFL has held regular season games in Munich and Frankfurt since 2022, with the game in Berlin set to mark the fifth NFL regular season game in Germany and the first in the German capital.

‘Germany has a rich tradition of American football, and the NFL has a deep history with the city of Berlin,’ said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

‘We first held a preseason game at the Olympic Stadium 34 years ago, before it was home to NFL Europe’s Berlin Thunder in the early 2000s.

‘Now, with almost 20 million NFL fans in Germany, we’ll make a historic return to the city playing a regular season game for the first time as we open the next chapter in our relationship with Berlin.’

Related: Why does the NFL keep exporting its worst games to Europe? Because it can. “The matchups that the NFL has inflicted on crowds in the United Kingdom and now Germany have almost always been putrid. There have been 42 NFL games in Europe since the NFL first brought its product overseas in October 2007. Of those, only two have pitted a pair of teams with winning records, a matchup between the Giants and Packers in 2022 and one between the Chiefs and Dolphins last season. Nine times, the NFL has subjected crowds in Europe to a game featuring at least one winless team. The 2017 Cleveland Browns made a London appearance on their way to becoming the second 0-16 team in NFL history, as did the legendarily bad Urban Meyer-coached Jaguars and a 15-loss Dolphins team quarterbacked by the immortal Cleo Lemon. It’s like introducing Italian American cuisine by opening up a can of SpaghettiOs. Or showcasing the best of American barbecue by serving a McRib.”

UPDATE:

Couldn’t the NFL fix the onside kick and ban that weird new kickoff formation instead?

(Classical reference in headline.)

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Apple Marries Siri to ChatGPT in Latest AI Update.

BREAKING NEWS FROM 1963, 1968, 1992, 2014, AND 2020: It’s time for a national conversation about left-wing violence.

If reports are true, it looks like the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week was politically motivated. The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, a former Ivy Leaguer from an affluent family, was reportedly caught with some kind of manifesto.

Even before we knew who the shooter was, however, the reaction from far too many leftists was to either justify, celebrate, or rationalize the shooting. There’s a real debate going on in some quarters of the progressive Left over whether slaying CEOs is a bad thing. And it’s unsurprising.

CHARLES COOKE: Elizabeth Warren Is a Disaster for the Democrats.

It’s always the “but” that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant. In her revolting statement on the assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fell prey to this trap. “Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But,” she continued, “people can only be pushed so far.”

Ah.

As one might have augured, Warren’s “but” was the overture to a catastrophic series of statements that, taken together, rendered all that came before them entirely moot. The killing represented “a warning,” Warren suggested,

that if you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.

There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”

Contrast Warren’s words with those from her fellow Democratic senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. About the murderer, Fetterman said, “He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison.” About those celebrating him online, Fetterman said, “A sewer is going to sewer: that’s what social media is about.” About the mainstream press’s sympathetic takes, Fetterman said, “I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that.”

“Americans seeking good examples should resolve to be a Fetterman rather than a Warren,” Cooke writes. But then, as America’s Newspaper of Record reported in January:

PEOPLE WHO FOUGHT IN AFGHANISTAN KNOW WHY NATION-BUILDING WAS NEVER GOING TO WORK:

I was serving in the U.S. Army as a Liaison Officer to the Afghan secret police, and facilitated the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qa’eda members while there. A Taliban leader once told me “You have me in a cage, my fight is over for now, but my children will fight you, and if they don’t win, their children will fight you. If It Takes a Thousand Years, we will win.” Although it didn’t take the Taliban a thousand years to win the battle of Afghanistan, it demonstrates the drive that our jihadist enemies have. They fight generational wars against the West as a whole.

When analyzing our Islamic extremist enemies, it is important for the American people to understand the tribal mindset that so many of our enemies come from. Islam developed from tribal cultures, and many tribal cultures over the past 1,400 years developed under Islam. The Islamic world itself is divided into what I would describe as tribes; you have the Sunni tribe, the Shia tribe, and within that are thousands of other tribes, one of the most recent being the “Palestinian” tribe which has become somewhat of a self-appointed identity by various lost members of other tribes. But in Afghanistan, tribalism is at a level that is virtually unparalleled in the world.

It is human nature to coalesce together into groups, but when you add Islam to the mix, it fuels different dynamics that are completely alien to Westerners. The tribal mindset is so vastly different than our own that it often makes it impossible to reason with them, and they will not respond logically or rationally as you might assume an American or other Westerner would. To Westerners, the tribal mindset may contain many elements that are quite shocking and deeply disturbing.

Part of our training upon arrival in Afghanistan included multiple briefings on Islamic and Afghan culture, since we would be working with locals on a daily basis. In one such briefing, the Afghan-American man leading the discussion began by stating; “You must understand that everything about your way of life in America, is completely different in this planet.” He quickly corrected himself to say “in this country,” but his misspeaking was not too far from the truth. From the way people say hello to the way they go to the bathroom, everything is different, and it is like another world to a Westerner.

If only we had instructed them just a little bit more on the glories of Marcel Duchamp, I’m sure we could have won them over:

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Rejoice San Fransisco! Litter is down! (But sidewalk poop has shot up.)

A new report from the Controller’s Office for the city and county of San Francisco, tallying sightings of feces, litter, and graffiti from July 2023 to June 2024, provides some relief — and some horror.

Citywide, sightings of litter dropped slightly. But poop sightings are way up.

BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR: The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Canada.

Jew-hatred was a phenomenon of the fringes, she reckoned. “It wasn’t on my radar,” she told me. Now, it’s everywhere. “Every week there is a major incident in Canada, and multiple minor ones every day in my neighborhood.”

It was what was happening inside her university that disturbed her the most.

York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.

A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”

She was shocked by the declarations, and the defaced posters, and the swastikas. But for Rugheimer there was something worse. “The denial is what’s painful,” Rugheimer said. The denial of the rapes and savagery of October 7, 2023. The denial of the pervasive antisemitism in “anti-Zionist” polemics. The denial of Jewish history itself. “Reasonable people can disagree about what to do in an intractable conflict, but the denying of what should be uncontroversial facts makes it impossible to have hope.”

This sort of despair has become a feature of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to it. Law enforcement in Canada is not blind. Quite the opposite. Officers want to do their jobs. What they say is that they lack the moral support from the political class to enforce the law. And that they cannot keep up with the volume of hate crimes—crimes that arise from a widespread ideology that has normalized the idea that “Zionists” anywhere are a fair target for attack.

Perhaps nothing captured Canada’s dark new reality better than a split-screen story from late last month.

On November 22 in Montreal, at the 70th annual session of the NATO parliamentary assembly, rioters organized by the organizations Divest for Palestine and the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles wreaked havoc on the city. They ignited smoke bombs, threw metal barriers into the street, and smashed windows of businesses and the convention center where the NATO delegates were meeting. The rioters torched cars. They also burned an effigy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Montreal burned, Trudeau was dancing and handing out friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto. It took 24 hours for him to weigh in with a single tweet.

Don’t worry Canadians, Trudeau is now laser-focused on solving his nation’s woes: “Trudeau calls Harris election loss ‘attack’ on women’s progress: ‘And yet, just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president. Everywhere, women’s rights and women’s progress is under attack. Overtly, and subtly.’”

(As Pradheep Shanker asks in response, why doesn’t Trudeau resign and allow a female to take over Canada?)

(Classical reference in headline.)

MAN ARRESTED FOR ALLEGEDLY ASSAULTING NANCY MACE OVER TRANSGENDER STANCE:

Capitol Police arrested a man Tuesday night for allegedly assaulting Representative Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) over her steadfast opposition to men using women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill.

James McIntyre, 33, of Illinois was arrested for the alleged incident and is now facing a charge of assaulting a government official. McIntyre’s alleged assault took place at the Rayburn House office building around 6:oo p.m.

“I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women. Capitol police have arrested him,” Mace said on X.

“All the violence and threats keep proving our point. Women deserve to be safe,” she added.

“Your threats will not stop my fight for women!”

Before the alleged assault, Mace repeatedly warned about the violent threats she had received from activists over her opposition to allowing males to use women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill. She has accused her political opponents of unsuccessfully attempting to bully her into silence because of her advocacy.

Even as it’s dying, old media will never call out its fellow leftists over their violence:

It will instead offer them cookies – and perhaps much more:

Related: ‘Wanted’ posters calling for violence against health insurance CEOs spotted in New York.