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.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: New York’s Government Is the Real Villain in the Daniel Penny Trial.

Americans who have never ridden a subway can only imagine the fear that grips someone sealed underground when a deeply disturbed person starts to act out. The near-universal reaction is to put one’s head down, avoid eye contact, and rush out of the car when it pulls into the next station. But on May 1, 2023, something archaic occurred: a passenger put his own well-being at risk to protect his fellow riders. Daniel Penny, now 26, stepped up to the screaming Neely, wrapped his arms around him, and took him to the subway floor, with Neely’s body on top of his, until help could arrive at the next station. Neely, who was high on a large dose of synthetic marijuana, subsequently died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—he who seeks not to “destroy lives through unnecessary incarceration”—charged Penny with second degree manslaughter—i.e., with recklessly causing the death of another person—and with criminally negligent homicide.

The Penny proceeding was more than a travesty of justice, however. It exemplified two intertwined traits of our time: government’s abandonment of law-abiding citizens in favor of the dysfunctional and antisocial, and the hatred of values associated with white males and the Western civilization that they created.

The Penny-Neely incident was racialized from the onset. News coverage invariably led with Penny’s whiteness and Neely’s blackness. (By contrast, black-on-white attacks are presented in a colorblind fashion on those rare occasions when the media report on them at all. Blacks commit 76 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites despite being just a fifth of the white population.) New York’s leading race-baiters—Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Al Sharpton—demanded that Penny be prosecuted.

And post-trial: Jamaal Bowman Blames Daniel Penny’s Acquittal on ‘the Evil of White Supremacy.’

NATE COHN: 2024 Review: A Few Misses, but the Polls Got the Big Stories Right.

There’s a decent case that the polls were the best they’ve ever been in 2024.

That’s not necessarily true by the usual measures. When judged against the final results, the polls missed by a more or less average margin. And, worryingly, they systematically underestimated support for Donald J. Trump for the third cycle in a row.

But by a less conventional measure — value more than accuracy — the polls excelled. They were fundamentally right about a surprising and important story about the election — a story we might not have imagined, let alone expected, without them.

As Joseph Campbell tweets in response, “Now that’s a stretch, as #polls understated Trump’s support for third successive election. Not to mention the Iowa Poll misfire and battleground state misses.”

Flashback: Disgraced Pollster Ann Selzer Retires After Iowa Poll Miss.

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Bernie Sanders says this is likely his last term. “I’m 83 now. I’ll be 89 when I get out of here. You can do the figuring. I don’t know, but I would assume, probably, yes.”

THIS IS CNN: Radical activists have terrified these ‘trans kids,’ and CNN is encouraging it.

“I’m afraid I’m going to be murdered” isn’t something you hear a 10-year-old say every day. However, that’s the message a child named Violet delivered during a shocking CNN segment featuring multiple transgender children and their parents.

ROGER KIMBALL: The reason Americans fear for Britain.

Following the summer’s violent riots after the Southport attack, a House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology announced that it wanted to call Elon Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter) to give evidence on “social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms.” Musk responded that the committee members “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.” Good for him.

Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, noted that police officers would be “scouring social media” to identify and arrest people who had the temerity to write things the Crown Prosecution Service deemed “insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred.” Several people, including a fifty-five-year-old woman, have been arrested for reposting words that fell afoul of Britain’s new censors. A woman in Newcastle, meanwhile, was arrested for standing quietly on the street while holding a sign that read “Fight The Government Not Each Other.”

How about the people distributing notices in Jewish neighborhoods with the legend, written in Hebrew, “Every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be Slaughtered”? The police are apparently too busy with other threats to pay much attention. Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force, threatened to extradite foreign citizens who violated Britain’s speech codes. “Whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” he said. Good luck with that, Mark.

It looks as if you might have to be awfully careful about what you say or write in Britain. The latest wheeze is the possibility of instituting blasphemy laws. Speaking in the House of Commons recently, Labour member of parliament Tahir Ali asked: “Will the prime minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?” Starmer did not indicate that he opposed it.

Earlier this year, vice-president-elect J.D. Vance speculated that “the first truly Islamist country” to get a nuclear weapon might not be Iran or Pakistan but Britain under the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer. James Murray, the Treasury minister, responded that “in Britain, we’re very proud of our diversity.” Noted. How about the substance of your history and your civilization? Are you proud of that, too?

The rest of Europe is suffering from similar self-inflicted wounds: European civilization is in freefall.

The collapse of the French government this week is just the latest episode in a long-running drama of dysfunction. Emmanuel Macron, for all his pretensions of being Europe’s reformist saviour, has been reduced to a lame-duck president, thwarted by a fractured and hostile parliament. Germany, once deemed to be the economic powerhouse of the EU, finds itself in a similar bind, heading for early elections while its economy is battered by crippling energy policies. At a time when strong leadership is desperately needed, Europe’s elites are playing at committee politics and virtue-signalling, oblivious to the storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Enter Trump 2.0, the antithesis of Europe’s managed decline. His bold, unapologetic vision for America is a direct challenge to the wrong-headedness and complacency of Europe’s leaders. They see his brashness as a threat, when it is precisely what the West needs – a common sense American president unafraid to confront uncomfortable truths and act decisively on the world stage.

Consider Trump’s approach to Nato. Unlike Europe’s feckless leaders, who have treated the alliance as a free ride on America’s dime, Trump demands accountability. By insisting that member states pay their fair share, he not only strengthens Nato but exposes the hypocrisy of Europeans who lecture on “shared values” while shirking their responsibilities.

On energy, the contrast is equally stark. While the UK and much of Europe cripples itself with net zero dogma, Trump is promising to unleash America’s energy sector, in an attempt to secure both economic stability and strategic autonomy. His policies, rooted in pragmatism, recognise that energy independence is achievable without sacrificing growth or security. Europe’s energy crisis is no accident; it is the direct result of leaders who prioritise green ideology over common sense.

Exit quote: “The choice before Europe is stark: continue down the path of ruin, or follow Trump’s lead and reclaim its destiny. His vision, with its emphasis on strength, self-determination, and unflinching realism, offers a lifeline to a continent on the brink. Whether Europe seizes it or squanders it will define the future of the West.”

TAYLOR SWIFT ENDS ERAS TOUR WITH RECORD $2B IN TICKET SALES, HANDS OUT $200M BONUSES TO CREW:

Previously, the highest-earning tour was Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour, which started in 2022 and is ongoing. That has earned just over $1 billion so far. In third place is Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour (2018-2023), which earned $939 million.

Swift’s first stop on the Eras Tour was in Glendale, Arizona, in March 2023. She closed out the tour in Vancouver, Canada, at the BC Place Stadium on Sunday, telling fans, “We have toured the entire world. We have had so many adventures. It has been the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

Right before playing her last song, “Karma,” and leaving the stage, the 14-time Grammy Award winner said to the crowd, “I want to thank every single one of you for being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date — my beloved Eras Tour.”

According to a report from People, Swift gave out $197 million worth of bonuses to her tour crew, which included truck drivers, caterers, instrument techs, the merch team, lighting and sound, production staff and assistants, carpenters, dancers, a band, security, choreographers, pyrotechnics, riggers, hair, makeup, wardrobe, physical therapists, and the video team.

Exit question: The Eras Tour has a huge carbon footprint. What’s a green Taylor Swift fan to do?

Can an environmentally minded fan enjoy Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour as its long trail of carbon footprints strides into Vancouver this weekend?

The megastar’s Eras Tour has included almost 150 shows on five continents in front of millions of fans — and generated millions of kilograms of fossil-fuel emissions. Swift’s estimated jet emissions alone are equal to that of driving an average gas-powered vehicle more than 2.1 million kilometres — about the same as flying between Vancouver and Halifax 475 times.

Or to put the disparity between the leftist environ-mental and Swift in visual terms:

DISPATCHES FROM OBAMA’S THIRD TERM: Days After Trump’s Victory, Biden-Harris Admin Granted Iran $10 Billion in Sanctions Relief, Congressional Notice Shows.

ROGER KIMBALL: Some Modest Proposals for President Trump.

Many powerful figures, some of them former foes, are lining up to visit the president-elect to get on his good side or suggest ideas for him to pursue. The window for getting things done appears to be open, at least for a time. It won’t last long; he has a year, maybe a year and a half, to strike before opposing forces gather to oppose him. He knows he must strike fast and hard while the opportunities are in front of him.

Bearing all of this in mind, below are a few unsolicited suggestions that friends and colleagues, all sympathetic to the new administration, have bandied about in recent weeks in hopes that some of them might be adopted.

To wit:

1. Fire, remove, or ask for the resignations of all Biden political appointees on day 1 of your administration—all of them, without exception. Any holdovers will block or frustrate your initiatives. That happened last time around. Biden’s people are not your friends.

2. Have a plan to take over all of the main departments on day 1, even if some of your cabinet secretaries have not been confirmed by the Senate. That may involve temporary appointments or deputies acting in your name. Your lawyers will know how to accomplish that. Time will run out soon enough.

Read the whole thing. As Glenn wrote last month in the New York Post, “Back in 2017, one of my Democratic friends expressed surprise and relief that the Trump administration wasn’t ready with a congressional wish list right off the bat. He had expected Republicans to have bills lined up like airplanes on a runway, but in fact they had nothing beyond their tax cuts.  I expect this time — with both House and Senate more Trump-aligned than before — will be different.”

HULK SMASH PUNY SUBARU! Man Drove Newly Purchased Car Into Utah Mazda Showroom After Being Denied Refund, Police Say.

A Utah man apparently upset with the car he bought was arrested after police say he drove it through the front doors of the dealership when he was denied a refund.

About 4 p.m. Monday, Sandy police were called to Tim Dahle Mazda Southtowne, 10785 S. Auto Mall Drive, where Michael Lee Murray, 35, had purchased a car from the dealership earlier in the day but brought it back several hours later, according to a police booking affidavit.

“Murray returned to request his money back and to return the vehicle that he had bought. However, staff advised Murray that he bought the vehicle ‘as is’ and the vehicle cannot be returned in exchange for his money back. Murray told the manager that since they are not giving his money back he was going to drive his vehicle through the front doors,” the affidavit states.

Murray then walked out of the building, got into his newly purchased vehicle, and true to his word, drove it through the front doors of the building, according to police. Seven employees told officers they had to jump or move out of the way to avoid being hit.

Video here:

NEW: Utah man drives his car through the front of a Mazda dealership just hours after purchasing the car from the same dealership.

The incident happened in Sandy, Utah, after the man was told he couldn’t return the car.

The man told the dealership that he would drive the car… pic.twitter.com/nNASSjOw0y

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 10, 2024

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The Left’s response to the Daniel Penny and Brian Thompson cases exposes their sick hypocrisy.

In an interview that’s gone viral, I confronted [Taylor Lorenz] on my “Uncensored” show Monday night about these repellent comments, asking: “Why would you be in such a celebratory mood about the execution of another human being? Aren’t you supposed to be on the caring, sharing left where, you know, you believe in the sanctity of life?”

To my astonishment, rather than back down — or apologize — she went even further, saying: “I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy.”

I was incredulous. “Joy?! Seriously? Joy at a man’s execution?”

“Maybe not joy,” Lorenz smirked, instantly realizing how callous she’d sounded, “but certainly not empathy.”

To which I retorted: “How can this make you joyful? This guy is a husband, he’s a father, and he’s been gunned down in the middle of Manhattan. Why does that make you joyful?”

At which point, Lorenz accused Thompson of murdering “tens of thousands of Americans” with his company’s health care policies, and then repeatedly laughed as we went back and forth over her incendiary rhetoric until I eventually lost my temper and exclaimed: “Taylor, I don’t mean to be rude, but why the f–k are you laughing all the time?”

Staggeringly, her stunningly heartless reaction to Thompson’s assassination has received widespread praise from left-wing social media accounts, which have tried to turn the suspected killer, Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, into some kind of sick pinup hero.

And I would bet good money that many of those same people celebrating the murder of a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street were also outraged by the accidental death of a violent, threatening, habitual criminal on the subway.

The reaction to the two deaths has been very illuminating about the woke left’s shocking double standards and warped, hypocritical morality.

They promote the hashtag #BeKind and profess to be so much more caring, sensitive and tolerant than conservatives.

But they also think courageous veterans like Daniel Penny are villains, and deranged shooters like Luigi Mangione are heroes.

If you believe those two things, you’re a disgusting excuse for a human being.

At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar is “Against Cheap Nihilism:”

Rick Perlstein of the American Prospect said, “Just putting this out there: the jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves. That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.” FDR was many things, most of them bad, but I would not attribute to him the “populist courage” to murder law-abiding civilians in broad daylight in order to send a message pour encourager les autres.

In a 2008 interview with Reason magazine to promote his then-new book Nixonland, Perlstein, the leftwing author and former JournoList member, said that he viewed [the movie] Bonnie and Clyde as “the most important text” of the ‘60s era New Left:

Reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.

In her 1986 book Damaged Gods: Cults and Heroes Reappraised, Julie Burchill compared Hollywood’s late-‘60s cinematic killers to the real-life late-‘60s killers in Hollywood:

In the Sixties the cocaine Communists – natural heirs to the limousine liberals – of Tinseltown demonstrated just how far beyond the mainstream, and just how far removed from ordinary people – film fans – they were by producing a string of films which had violent psychopaths as their heroes. That violent criminals are not rebels, but the warped policemen of poor communities – causing people to lock their doors, stay inside, live in fear – was lost on these butterflies; it is easy to canonize criminals when you have bodyguards. The craze culminated in the making of Bonnie and Clyde, in which two perfectly hideous and brutish murderers of eighteen people of 1934 were turned into two bona fide Beautiful People of 1967. ‘They were young, beautiful and they killed people,’ ran the film’s advertising catchline.

It would be interesting to know if the Manson Gang of Death Valley, frequent guests at the parties on the cusp of glamour and gutter in the Hollywood of the late Sixties, saw the film and heard the slogan and thought of themselves in the same light when they killed the young movie actress Sharon Tate Polanski and six other people in the last summer of the Sixties. They were certainly no uglier than Bonnie and Clyde, although perfectly repellent. They were literally not half as bad – only seven deaths to eighteen. Yet no film would dare show them as sensitive, poetry-writing young beauties forced into their position by an unsympathetic society – Mark Chapman either – and if one did, Warren Beatty et cie would be appalled. Because Bonnie and Clyde – even their names were familiarized to make them sound like a groovy young married Sixties crooning couple: Bonnie and Clyde and Sonny and Cher – killed ordinary people, film fans, while Sharon Tate was a REAL PERSON, one of them, precious. After the Tate murders, the Hollywood brats showed less enthusiasm when it came to giving a makeover to the hideous psycho killers of American folklore and in the mid Seventies the same cocaine Communists were fond of employing the slogan DON’T BUY BOOKS BY CROOKS to blacklist the post-Watergate autobiography of Richard Nixon. But they had been buying something much worse for years – buying murderers’ sweetest dreams of themselves.

On the “Progressive” left, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

OLD AND BUSTED: Robocop.

The New Future of Law Enforcement: Robo-Ball! China unveils all-terrain SPHERICAL robocops to chase down, bludgeon, and catch criminals using net-launching cannons.

Chinese robotics company Logon Technology unveiled the RT-G autonomous spherical robot in a “technological breakthrough” the other month.

And despite people believing it was all a bizarre marketing stunt, RT-G bots have actually been spotted the streets of China alongside human cops.

Footage shows one of the beast balls rolling round a city, carefully patrolling for any potential crime that could occur.

The spheres are designed to assist — and eventually replace humans — in dangerous environments and situations involving crime.

The ball beast is able to operate both on land and in water, making it practically unstoppable.

It can also withstand a whopping four tonnes of impact damage to prevent criminals from trying to cover their tracks and kill it.

Despite the RT-G only being able to reach a fairly slow speed of 22mph, it does weigh a back-breaking 125kg.

The RT-G can also be equipped with non-fatal police gear like net guns, tear gas sprayers, some grenades, loudspeakers and sound wave dispersal devices.

You guys all laughed at BB-8 In the Star Wars sequels. Now it’s payback time:

REUTERS IS “FACT CHECKING” AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Reuters fact-checkers reached out for comment on our @TheBabylonBee story about 'Allahu Akbar' replacing 'Cheerio Mate' in the UK. I tried to help them out. pic.twitter.com/obHm9qB7cG

— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) December 9, 2024

Flashback to 2019: The Babylon Bee Satirizes the Absurdities of American Politics. Snopes Doesn’t Seem to Get the Joke.

In 2021, Laurene Powell Jobs’ and Jeffrey Goldberg’s equally far left Atlantic would strike the same pose at being equally clueless about the Bee’s satire:

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Steve spotted in 2019, a possible explanation from a Twitter user: “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.”

With the second Trump term seemingly already having started, the legacy media wants very much to resume pretending to be the Central Scrutinizer once again.

MSNBC HAS REVEALED A SINISTER NEW DIMENSION TO PROGRESSIVE MEDIA BIAS:

And then there is MSNBC’s Joy Reid. On Tuesday, the TV host criticised Trump for “spending his time sitting in his golden palace, Mar-a-Lago, muscling other countries like he’s Tony Soprano with a social media site”. But one of the examples she gave was highly revealing. She cited his demand that Hamas – memo to the MSNBC faithful, that’s not a country – “release all hostages being held in Gaza before his inauguration, or there will be, quote, ‘all hell to pay in the Middle East’”.

That damned Don Soprano, making demands on Hamas! Who does he think he is?

MSNBC host Joy Reid is enraged President Trump has given Hamas a deadline to return the American hostages they kidnapped on 10/7.

We had to see it with our own eyes to believe it. pic.twitter.com/vDeTTyBTne

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) December 5, 2024

The host is so out of touch with reality, and any coherent moral compass, that she apparently thinks it is legitimate to attack Trump for threatening savages who kidnap, rape, and murder Jews  as punishment for being Jewish, and Americans for the crime of being American.

Unexpectedly – considering that we are talking about Al Sharpton’s cable TV network here, after all.

TRUMP REPORTEDLY MULLING BORDER HAWK KARI LAKE AS AMBASSADOR TO MEXICO.

REPORT: FBI Director Christopher Wray preparing to resign.

Mr. Wray is calling it quits because he doesn’t want to get fired by President-elect Donald Trump, according to sources inside the bureau who are familiar with the director’s thinking.

“He’s going to be gone at the inauguration. On or before the inauguration,” a source said.

Wray very wisely wants to be nowhere near the blast radius: Donald Trump Is About to Go Nuclear on the FBI.

REGIME CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

WATCH: Following Kamala Harris’ loss, Biden Climate Czar John Podesta apologizes to the "climate regime" for the "disappointment that the United States has at times caused." pic.twitter.com/VbC2rALOCe

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 10, 2024

ANNETTE BENING SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD ABOUT HAVING A “TRANS CHILD:”

Let’s look at that confession from Annette again:

“To have a transgender child has made ME so much more interesting”

Being gay or lesbian is just so passe. Too mainstream, too middlebrow. No one applies the stunning and brave label to the gay kid in Drama Class or the gay high school boy who announces he’s going into Fashion Design.

And for “celebrities” whose whole existence revolves around how much they appear in media, the new TrophyTransChild means being celebrated as a stunning, brave and affirming parent.

Last count there are at least 17 celebrities who are out there with TrophyTrans kids. Consider that actual transsexuals, as of 2014, made up about .53% of the population. Gender dysphoria in children was even rarer.

Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex.8 It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves.9 Historically, it afflicted tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identify — they constitute the majority

So the spectacle of multiple celebs with trans kids should raise a heck of a lot of eyebrows. And when there is even one gal, Heather Dubrow, with four kids, three of whom identify as “LGBTQ+” … ??!!??

Yeah, sure.

This isn’t just Munchausen-by-proxy, this is children realizing the only way to stand out from their fame-seeking parents and to get their love and approval is to be the NewThing that brings attention.

One of the recurring leitmotifs of Tom Wolfe’s epochal “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” 1976 long-form article from (a long-gone version of) New York magazine was “Let’s talk about Me!”

By the early 1970s so many of the Me movements had reached this Gnostic religious stage, they now amounted to a new religious wave. Synanon, Arica, and the Scientology movement had become religions. The much-publicized psychedelic or hipple communes of the 1960s, although no longer big items in the press, were spreading widely and becoming more and more frankly religious.

Along with radical environmentalism, and the mask obsessions, riots, looting and statue topplings of 2020, we’ll look back at parents trans-ing their kids as this decade’s equivalent of the religious fervor that drove the left in the 1970s.

JOHN KASS: To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama.

Obama honors himself at every opportunity. But he is America’s one-eyed jack. And we’ve seen the other side of his face.

But who would lead the attack against Obama and risk the enmity of the well-heeled Democrat interest groups? Most importantly, who in the Democrat Party can play the iconoclast and take on the party’s neo-Marxist creed of racial and other grievances?

Obama pretends to rise above grievance, but he’s reliant upon it like an addict, like the “Revs” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, though far silkier and smoother. Remember just weeks ago when Obama was lecturing young black men who weren’t enthralled with the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Bitter and angry, he harangued them on what he could only understand as the sexism of the great unwashed. It was a rap he had used before. And it had treated him so well in the past. It reverberated in the halls of his many mansions. Perhaps even in that mansion on liberal Martha’s Vineyard, the vacation paradise for the immensely wealthy that was off limits to impoverished illegal migrants who’d crossed the border on Democrat invitation.

Yet those young men who he tried to shame didn’t live among the elites of Martha’s Vineyard or the Gold Coast of Chicago. And they weren’t insulated from the poor economy and pressure from the illegals. Instead, Obama was revealed by his own mouth to be be a complete and utter phony. You could almost hear regular people, those who had been Democrats, shouting “F You Barack” from every corner in every swing state.

Perhaps Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro could take on Obama. Maybe Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would do it, or even that supremely, obviously ambitious Californian with the greasy hair, Gov. Gavin Newsom. But do any of them really want to challenge? Not just Obama but his acolytes, his proselytizers, his disciples, his praetorians.

Obama’s third term was brutal for America — but given what we’re seeing at the moment from today’s left, who are busy attacking Israel and egging on assassins of CEOs, would an updated version of 1968’s “Clean for Gene” or the Democratic Leadership Council that championed a centrist-appearing Bill Clinton in 1992 even succeed among Democrats? (Trump’s she’s “for they/them, President Trump is for you” commercial was made all the more devastating with the footage of Kamala personally championing sex changes for prisoners and illegal immigrants, because she thought that’s what it took pander to the Democratic Party base in 2020.)

WITH HARMEET DHILLON, TRUMP ADDS ANOTHER STELLAR PICK TO HIS ADMINISTRATION: “On Monday evening, Trump announced another stellar pick in attorney Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty and managing partner of the Dhillon Law Group, who he’s tapped to serve as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice.”

HOW SUSPECTED CEO SHOOTER LUIGI MANGIONE WAS CAUGHT AT ALTOONA MCDONALD’S.

The man detained by police in Pennsylvania in connection with the shock slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been identified as Luigi Mangione.

Mangione, 26, is an ‘anti-capitalist’ Ivy League graduate*. He was taken into custody after a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, around 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, believed they recognized him as the gunman.

He reportedly had a 3D-printed ghost gun similar to the one used in the Wednesday morning murder, along with a gun silencer, a manifesto, and four fake IDs when he was arrested by cops.

A manifesto, huh? Jon Gabriel and John Podhoretz have thoughts:

Meanwhile, what hath AI wrought?

* Valedictorian, to boot: Person of Interest in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Killing Identified as Prep School Valedictorian.

Finally, just wanted to get out ahead of the story and say that Luigi Mangione did not commit suicide:

JONATHAN TURLEY: “This is Not the Time for Balance:” LA Times Columnist Resigns in Protest . . . Over Balanced Commentary.

Last year, Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

Litman has been one of the most unabashed lawfare warriors. Even when the Justice Department was seeking to dismiss the Flynn case, [liberal columnist and former prosecutor Harry] Lipman wrote an L.A. Times column advising Judge Emmet Sullivan how to “make trouble” for the administration. Litman admitted there is “very little leeway to reject the government’s decisions to dismiss charges” but encouraged Sullivan to “accomplish what Congress, multiple inspectors general, and a majority of the electorate have not been able to do — hold the president and his allies accountable for their contemptuous disregard for the rule of law.”

On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Litman declared to Nicolle Wallace that Trump’s victory is “an absolute five-alarm fire.” He called the effort to restore a diversity of viewpoints as little more than an attempt “to curry favor with Trump.” He then added:

“And I just think this is not a time for balance when you have someone who’s not telling the truth on the other side. And it’s a deep responsibility. And instead, I think they cowered and are worried about their personal holdings and just being threatened by Trump. And that’s a really shameful capitulation, I think. So, I just felt I couldn’t be a part of it and had to resign.”

It was a telling moment. Litman appeared on a network that has lost half of its viewership and is fighting for its existence in an effort by NBCUniversal to unload it. Readers are fleeing to new media after papers like the L.A. Times and the Washington Post literally wrote off half of the country. Yet, these figures would rather lose their jobs and media platforms than their bias.

To be fair, from global cooling/warming/climate change/climate chaos to gun control to abortion issues, it’s never “the right time for balance” when it comes to the legacy media, who would rather champion their pet leftist issues than attempt to keep their readers.

OUR PRO-ASSAD MSM:

Related: Iron body presses and bed clamps: horrors of Syria’s ‘slaughterhouse’ prison emerge.

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN DOCUMENTARY BE COMING TO IMAX IN FEBRUARY:

After many years of being in development, Led Zeppelin have announced their new documentary, Being Led Zeppelin, is set for release in February, 2025.

The film, directed by Bernard MacMahon, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 but didn’t receive a widespread release, as initially expected. Earlier this year, talk of the documentary was reignited when Sony Classics Pictures acquired the distribution rights for the production.

However, the cut of Becoming Led Zeppelin, which will arrive in cinemas, is slightly different to the version which aired at the Venice Film Festival three years ago.

The film promises to combine interviews with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as historic clips of John Bonham speaking, with concert footage of the band in 1969 at Fillmore West, the Atlanta Pop Festival and the Texas Pop Festival. It focuses on the early years of the band and their rise to becoming the most popular group on the planet rather than chronicling their entire career.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is set to be released in 200 IMAX theatres on February 7th, 2025. Additionally, before its general release, it will premiere in 18 cities on February 5th, 2025, for advanced screenings in select locations.

In a statement, Becoming Led Zeppelin writer and producer Allison McGourty explained why it was such a prolonged project to complete, stating, “We spent five years flying back and forth across the Atlantic scouring attics and basements in pursuit of rare and unseen film footage, photographs and music recordings.”

McGourty added: “Then we transferred each piece of media with custom techniques, so that in IMAX, these 55-year-old clips and music would look and sound like they came out of the lab yesterday.”

In the meantime: The Hammer of the Gods: The First Critical Biography of Led Zeppelin Finally Available on the Kindle.

My latest, on Stephen Davis’ somewhat infamous 1985 look at Zeppelin’s now infamous very much non-#metoo-approved debauchery, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

COLBY COSH: The apocalypse that never was still haunts generation X.

How often have you heard or read the phrase “the End Times”? On Nov. 25, the evangelizing author Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), died at the age of 95. The world’s press took relatively little note of this, even though Planet Earth is sometimes said to have been the single best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. But even this surely understates the global cultural influence of Lindsey’s book. For many non-Christians, the variety of “dispensational premillennialism” he propagated just is their idea of Christianity, received secondhand from mass-media evangelists and religious pamphlets.

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Funnily enough, Lindsey absolutely could not find a trace of the United States anywhere in the Bible, leading him to conclude that the U.S. was unlikely to participate in the last war, and was therefore certain to enter a precipitous decline in economic and strategic power — probably because of some sneaky Soviet attack.

That’s held up as well as most of his prophecies. Lindsey was vague about timelines, but certainly did not think in 1970 that there would be a year 1990. He was sure that the return of the Jews to Israel would be followed immediately by the demolition of the Dome of the Rock, which is still there in 2024, and the building of the Third Jewish Temple, which still ain’t.

The Late Great Planet Earth had a long series of ludicrous and inevitable sequels as the original prophecies passed their expiration date and had to be subtly revised. But while the Cold War was still in progress, millenarian feelings were inescapable, and Lindsey did as much as anyone to make them so. Our secular teachers were propagandizing us endlessly about the imminent end of the world even as our evangelical friends were living with the same expectation and more than happy to tell you all about it. There is a part of the generation X brain, religious or not, that wakes up in the morning in the year 2024 and subconsciously thinks, “Huh. It’s all still here.”

Related: Panicking over the planet and population is pointless.

One sign of moral panic is that when the facts change, the fears remain the same. In the 1970s, the Washington Post, TIME and Newsweek stoked fears of “a new ice age.” As soon as scientists updated their models to show a trend in the other direction, “global warming” became as threatening as global cooling. And when winters stubbornly kept happening and the direst predictions of new-age prophets like Al Gore failed to come to pass, the whole thing was rebranded as “climate change.”

Whatever the label, and whatever the underlying phenomenon was thought to be, the moral implication remained the same — human beings were ruining the earth and must curtail their comforts to save the planet. Bad weather used to be God’s punishment for human sinfulness. Now it’s nature’s punishment for capitalism. Men who foresee the future know this, and the only remedy is, of course, one that environmentalists, socialists and other anti-capitalists had already demanded before the crisis even was identified: larger government, more global government and increasing control over the economy and individuals’ lives.

Leftist intellectuals, frustrated by the failures of the Great Society and the coming of Richard Nixon became “Progressives Against Progress” in the late 1960s, and as our Newsweek link earlier today to the latest in an unending series of articles over the years picturing a world that’s on fire/frozen/underwater illustrates, they’ve never recovered since: