VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS BELIEVES IT’S TIME TO “TURN THE PAGE” ON THE INCUMBENT:
Harris has certainly failed over the last four years, so yes, let’s “turn the page” and move on from her time in office. As Scott Johnson writes, “Her campaign is run by Obama hands who want to serve up a fourth Obama term. She is the man, so to speak. War is peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is strength. Turn the page. Speaking for myself, we want to turn the page. We want to turn the page from the Biden-Harris administration. Truth in advertising would require a slight revision of the Harris campaign’s theme to Bookmark the page.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is great since it neutralizes a lot of key personnel while wrecking a “secure” communications network, at a crucial moment. It should also worry Raytheon, et al. The Biden Administration is trying to pressure Israel by stopping arms flows, but this hack did something that no million-dollar missile can do. As the war in Ukraine is demonstrating, there are a lot of capable low-budget alternatives to expensive missiles nowadays, and encouraging customers to come up with them is bad salesmanship.
And note the lack of collateral damage, as shown in this video:
BREAKING via Reuters
Hundreds of members of Hezbollah were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded.
We just had the second attempt to assassinate a major-party nominee for president in the last two months. If you’re a major news media outlet, what would be the headline for today that leads your website? Trump Survives Second Assassination Attempt? Secret Service Fails to Secure Former President Again? Or perhaps just Suspect Arrested in Firearm Incident?
Not if you’re Bloomberg. They headline a story that went up late yesterday, just a couple of hours after the Secret Service managed to stop the second would-be assassin. Their big takeaway is … all of the pouncing Trump did:
Take a look at the headlines below that for a taste of Bloomberg’s priorities. The assassination attempt plays second fiddle to Trump’s reaction to it. This story went up at 8:13 pm ET and got updated this morning at 11:19, and it does nothing to inform its readers about the actual assassination attempt.
Instead, they seem most concerned that Trump blames Democrats for their incendiary rhetoric in creating an environment that fosters radicalism and irrational behavior:
* * * * * * * *
It’s never the actual story when it comes to news that plays against Democrats; the story is always about the Republican reaction to it.
Yes. As Jim Treacher has written:
Ed writes that “Bloomberg couldn’t even wait four hours after the story broke to spin it as a Republicans Pounce!™ issue.” His colleague Beege Welborn screenshotted an even more literal “Republicans Seize” headline from Bloomberg:
Her tweet was in response to former Ted Cruz flack Steve Guest’s screenshots of various DNC-MSM newspapers doing their best to sweep this latest assassination attempt on Trump down the memory hole:
Though pretty much nothing the mainstream media does shocks me anymore, I still can’t help but be amazed sometimes at the sheer brazenness of some of the things they treat as news, the way more serious stories are either downplayed or framed, and how they make zero apologies for it – even after being called out.
Case in point, the sickening “it’s Trump’s fault” narrative they’ve shamelessly spun in the aftermath of the second assassination attempt on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s life in three months.
For instance, some outlets declared Sunday it was Trump and not Democrats who should be calling for the rhetoric to be dialed down after the second attempt on his life, reportedly at the hands of a crazed left-winger. Perhaps most audacious was the “report” from NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who said “Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants…”
But anyone who didn’t think it could get any worse than what they’ve already seen come from these people in response to Sunday’s chilling incident and subsequent arrest might want to take a look at a reader letter greenlighted for publication by the Cincinnati Enquirer that quite literally suggested that Trump “brings a lot of this stuff on himself”:
No, really — that’s not a paraphrase by Stacey Matthews (aka “Sister Toldjah”) above:
The paper didn’t have the guts to slam Trump directly, they instead promoted a letter to the editor:
As Matthews writes, “Yep, it’s a variation of the classic ‘some people are saying’ media tactic, and as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) observed, it’s utterly disgusting.”
Charles Cooke writes, “Why, given how fashionable it remains, has the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ not been swiftly applied to this case? As I have previously contended, I consider the notion of ‘stochastic terrorism’ to be a cynical, vague, hollow tool whose sole purpose is to permit America’s self-appointed ‘expert’ class to ‘prove’ scientifically that their ideological opponents are rotten. But others seem to take it seriously. So why not here?” As Cooke asks: What Are the Rules? “If those are, indeed, the rules, then what should we make of the man who tried to kill Donald Trump — that’s the second man to try to kill Donald Trump, for those keeping score at home — having echoed a literal Kamala Harris campaign slogan on his Twitter account”
Ryan Wesley Routh has a criminal record that spans the Himalayas. We’re waiting to see if he was on the radar for any federal law enforcement agencies vis-à-vis recent threats: the FBI has a terrible track record of being ‘in the know’ concerning future perpetrators of firearm-related crimes nowadays. Yet, in an odd turn, the media had this joker on their radar. They interviewed him. When his name was released, The New York Times must’ve checked their clips because there he was. The publication interviewed him about the ongoing war in Ukraine—Routh appears to have been obsessed with the subject:
There were many such cranks in Kyiv at the time, latching on to the war to pose as international men of action, and boasting of high-level contacts in the Pentagon or CIA.
Regular Legionnaires did their best to avoid them, referring to them variously as “Call of Duty Warriors”, “Volun-tourists” and “Screamers” (the latter a reference to their reaction if coming under fire).
But there was little to stop them promoting themselves on social media, as Mr Routh did prolifically, claiming to be an active recruiter for the Legion ranks.
“Any gender, any age, any skill level to no skill level,” he claimed to Newsweek in 2022. “Yeah, if you wanna fight, come and see me and I’ll put you in a unit so you can go fight.”
Mr Routh, who claims to have had contacts in the Middle East, caused the Legion particular problems by attempting to recruit volunteer soldiers from Afghanistan and Syria, who’d be unlikely to be admitted to Ukraine because of security concerns.
“He was never in Ukraine in any official capacity, he simply decided that he was going to come here and save the day himself,” a Ukrainian military source told The Telegraph.
“I was in contact with him multiple times to request to him that he stop his activities, most of which were bizarre and alarming.”
You don’t say.
UPDATE: Are there any DNC-MSM journalists that Routh didn’t have on speed dial?
How many journalists was Ryan Routh in touch with?
I won’t get into the vulgar politics of it all yet — though it would be patrician folly to pretend they’re irrelevant (hey, imagine how Volodymyr Zelensky feels this morning) — because I care far more about the bottom line: This is now the second time in the late stages of this campaign that someone has tried to murder Trump. Give him presidential level Secret Service coverage, now. Screw the regulations. Joe Biden loves giving unlawful executive orders to spend a ton of money — I know this because he forgave $20,000 of my student loans without me even wanting him to — so break the damn bank if you must. Change the rules on the fly, and let someone file a lawsuit if they have to.
But you don’t want a dead presidential candidate on your hands. And if what Richard Blumenthal recently said about the as-yet-unrevealed systemic collapse of the Secret Service is true? (“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former President.”) Then you have no idea how deeply any subsequent attack is going to shake the foundation of our entire civil society if it comes to pass. It clearly can now. Get him more coverage, today.
NBC’s Lester Holt goes a step further, directly tying the failed shooting attempt to Springfield:
LESTER HOLT: Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town. Our Maggie Vespa is in Columbus, Ohio with more.
MAGGIE VESPA: Lester, simply put: Springfield, Ohio has been inundated by threats. over the last several days, closing government buildings, schools, hospitals. Today, effectively closing a local university campus after administrators said someone threatened a mass shooting targeting Haitians. This in light of, officials say, a false online conspiracy theory alleging Haitian immigrants in that city are eating people’s pets.
NBC and the Regime Media waste no time in imputing the shooting to “rhetoric” and attempting to blame Trump for the latest, albeit failed, attempt on his life. Once the shooter’s motives become clear, how soon before the Regime Media retract? If they ever do at all?
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Incidentally, NBC cared so little about this latest assassination attempt on Trump that, as Scott Johnson writes, “I learned of the second attempt on Trump’s life yesterday afternoon while watching the 49ers/Vikings game on television and scrolling through X. We have apparently become so habituated to the Trump assassination scenarios that NBC did not see fit to interrupt the proceedings with a breaking news alert. Insofar as the possible murder of Trump is concerned, complacency seems to be the order of the day.”
One assumes that Holt would have been in full mock-Cronkite mode had Routh succeeded, albeit with plenty of references to Trump’s rhetoric. (But with none regarding Biden and Harris’s.)
The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one: It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.
I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.
I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.
Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.
Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out.
My own line on failed assassinations is that of the IRA taunting Mrs Thatcher after the Brighton bombing: You have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once.
In the last two months, Trump has been lucky twice. There are another two months to go: can he be lucky thrice? Four times?
If I were Trump I wouldn’t want these guys anywhere near me – the official government protection, that is. The law-&-order types on the right have been ballyhooing the quick thinking of one individual agent on the ground – which is fine and dandy, but conveniently absolves the “bureaucracy” of its failure to provide sufficient protection, even after he’s already been shot and an American citizen has died. Trump is one of the comparatively few presidents who has taken a bullet for his country, which is more than even Tim Walz can claim, but nobody who matters is interested. The court eunuchs at ABC News couldn’t be bothered with a question on this summer’s near-assassination, but they did make room for a question about the rental practices of Donald Trump’s father over half-a-century ago.
As for this latest incident, the wife of the Hero of Impeachment One and sister-in-law of a Virginia congressional candidate sums up the general attitude of the Dems:
No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.
Just so. When I heard that an airplane had hit the north tower, I spent the next fifteen minutes going about as usual on the assumption that some twin-prop had had an accident. Then the radio announced that another ‘plane had hit the south tower. The Secret Service failures in Florida are as crude and obvious as they were in Pennsylvania which means that, in the words of my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver, this is happening because they want it to happen. They want Trump to die, and they are willing to create the necessary conditions.
Olbermann was discussing the election with Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman, a frequent guest. They topic was, how can a winner finally be determined in this never-ending Democratic race for the nomination? Of course, the assumption was that it was Clinton that should be shown the door (despite clearly still earning her spot in the race thanks to, um, voters). Fineman said that, all the delegate math aside, ultimately it was going to take “some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this.”
Said Olbermann: “Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”
MORE: “The Hawaii man suspected in former President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Sunday is a long-time Democrat, donating exclusively to the party’s candidates 19 times since 2019, records show. Between September 2019 and March 2020, Ryan Routh contributed more than $140 on the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, though in this instance, it’s not a statement regarding some appalling examples of liberal media bias. For the Ohio Haitians ‘eating the pets’ story, it’s pure entertainment, maybe a touch of schadenfreude: the liberal media is being tortured in their attempt to neutralize the story. Contrary to the establishment press, this story hasn’t been debunked. There’s no way within 48-72 hours that authorities can verify dogs and cats are not being eaten by the tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
As for the local birdlife, geese and ducks are being eaten, with police reports to corroborate the allegations. Even a fact check done by local media on that story’s angle hasn’t negated it. If anything, it might have shined a light that this problem has expanded. I’m talking about the viral picture of the migrant holding a dead goose—that was not in Springfield but nearby Columbus.
The inability of the media to suffocate this story alluded to the industry’s appalling lack of trust. No one believes them, no matter how hard they try. It only seems to further entrench people’s belief that Haitian migrants are running wild in Springfield. The consumption of pets needs to be verified, but many corroborating eyewitness accounts exist. Geese and ducks are being taken, driving out of control in the town. It’s led to fatalities.
So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.
Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”
We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”
We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.
One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.
According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it.
To be clear: this single incident does not confirm the particularities of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.
UPDATE: Rufo responds to a CBS hit on his “Cat Eaters of Ohio” article with a very lengthy rebuttal on Twitter:
CBS News has published a response to the “Cat Eaters of Ohio” story. It’s a supremely dishonest and completely partisan report, but let’s break it down, to show exactly how the establishment media maintains its lines of propaganda.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Can’t stop the signal.
THIS IS CNN: Dana Bash Auditions for Spot on the Harris-Walz Team As She Berates JD Vance During a Very Ugly Interview. “This was a very ugly interview with Bash refusing to act like a journalist in any way. She refused to let Vance answer questions, she pushed Democrat talking points continuously, and what is worse, she has not been to Springfield, OH, and couldn’t find anything more substantial than comments by people who don’t live in the affected area that the incidents did not happen. To Vance’s credit, he revealed Bash as the partisan midwit we always assumed her to be.”
Robin DiAngelo is a grifter who has made millions off a hateful book titled White Fragility. She is one of the left-wing “anti-racists” who were interviewed by Matt Walsh in the Daily Wire film Am I Racist?, which opened yesterday and which I reviewed at the link.
Walsh’s interview of DiAngelo is one of the film’s highlights. She has no idea who Walsh is, and he introduces himself as “Matt.” You can’t be too careful these days, she says. The high point of the interview is when they talk about reparations, which DiAngelo favors. It happens that a member of the film crew named Ben is black. Walsh calls him on camera and gives him $20 (I’m going from memory here) as his own personal reparations. He then asks DiAngelo whether she will do the same.
By this point, DiAngelo is visibly uncomfortable, but her ideology gives her no easy out. So she digs in her purse, finds $30, and gives the $30 to Ben. DiAngelo (like the other “anti-racists” who agreed to appear in the documentary) got paid–in her case, $15,000 for what couldn’t have been more than an hour or so of her time. Talk about price gouging!
During each of the interviews of “anti-racists,” the amount that the production company paid the interviewee is shown on the upper left of the screen. When DiAngelo gives Ben–who manages to keep a straight face–her $30, the amount on the screen ticks down to $14,970. It is a hilarious moment.
When word of DiAngelo’s humiliation began to spread, she deleted her social media accounts. Then she issued a statement about her experience.
In a note on her website titled “About That Film,” the “White Fragility” author says the “sequence of events” that ended with her taking $30 out of her purse to pay reparations to a black producer on set was “unsettling,” and that she figured out she “had been played” before the trailer for the film was released in July.
“After reviewing the sequence of events and discussing it with colleagues, I realized that they had lied about their agenda and I had been played,” DiAngelo says.
But what was the lie? DiAngelo doesn’t say. In fact, there was no lie: DiAngelo was asked whether she would appear in a documentary on anti-racism, and she said she would do so for $15,000. What she means, apparently, is that she is too fragile to be interviewed by anyone but a fellow left-winger.
Exit question: How did Robin DiAngelo get away with it for so long? “This is the irony of the white shame that is so à la mode in cultural circles: it hides a new species of white pride, where educated whites fancy themselves as morally superior to both unlearned white people and pained black people. The former they must enlighten, the latter they must repair.”
It’s been “a DNC proxy outlet” for quite some time — the last Republican the New York Times endorsed for the White House was Eisenhower in ’56. But Democrats have been comparing Republican presidents and presidential candidates to National Socialists since over a decade prior to that, all the way to the Gray Lady’s latest reactionary gesture.
ROGER KIMBALL: On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. The debate last week on ABC was, from one point of view, a dog’s breakfast, but, from another, it was a mesmerizing exercise in vertiginous, pseudo-Nietzschean legerdemain.
As has become widely recognized, the debate was really a sort of ambush in which the execrable immoderators blatantly took sides, constantly “fact-checking” Trump with erroneous objections while letting Harris slide with a steady stream of lies emitted according to the fixed convention of Democratic talking points. As I said at the time, the real loser in that exchange was ABC News, whose credibility is now in the gutter.
Various public-spirited people, from media stars like Laura Ingraham to ordinary citizens with an X account, have come forward to provide inventories of Harris’s—and the moderators’—lies. One of the most complete was provided by @BelannF, who posted this useful inventory in paratactic summary:
Project 2025 – Lie
National abortion ban – Lie
“Very fine people” hoax – Lie
Will be a Dictator – Lie
Blaming Trump for Afghanistan- Lie
Racism and division by Trump – Lie
Never said she will ban fracking – Lie
Rally goers leaving early – Lie
“I will go over my plan” – Lie
Police died on Jan 6th – Lie
“Bloodbath” comment – Lie
Trumps stance on IVF – Lie
Won’t take guns – Lie
Trump weak on foreign policy – Lie
Trump friends with Putin, Un – Lie
Trump inciting Jan 6. – Lie
No military in combat zones – Lie*
She provides no sources for these assertions, but you can look them up in a nonce. I’ll go first with three to get you started. Early on in the evening, Harris angrily recycled one of the most thoroughly “debunked” (i.e., refuted) claims: that Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides at the neo-Nazi demonstration at Charlottesville. Here’s a video clip of his remarks. Far from describing the thugs as “very fine people,” he castigated them in the strongest terms. Then why is this lie so frequently recycled? Perhaps it is a political application of the old adage repititio mater memoriae: “Repetition is the mother of memory.” If you repeat a lie often enough people come to believe it, or half believe, or at least wonder about the veracity of its contrary.
Harris also claimed that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he were not elected. But what he actually said was that the auto industry would face a financial bloodbath if the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies were enacted. And so they would.
Perhaps my favorite lie was her claim that there were no active-duty American military personnel in a war zone at present. Anyone who reads the news knows that is not true, as these American soldiers testified with refreshing candor.
What has been fascinating to watch is how the post-debate consensus has evolved.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign hired a new climate director who has frequently said the effects of climate change are part of what’s stopping her from having children.
Camila Thorndike, who previously worked in the Senate managing the climate portfolio of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was given the title of climate engagement director for the Harris for President campaign in September 2024, according to her LinkedIn page.
Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Thorndike said on several occasions that she considers climate change a factor when deciding whether to have kids.
“I was 15 when I first saw the climate ‘hockey stick’ graph. I realized that this skyrocketing arrow of temperature would take place in my lifetime. All of the big milestones of life that I was looking forward to would be in the context of this big global crisis. It led to the question of whether or not to have kids – which is still a big question for me – where I would put down roots, what my family would do,” Thorndike said in 2018 when she was the D.C. campaign director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Again in November 2019, Thorndike described it as an “ethical question that keeps me up at night.”
“I have always been someone who enjoys children and loves the idea of a family, and that’s why I have wrestled with this, because my logical mind and the facts of the future I can see bearing down on us are not supportive of the life I would want for them,” she told Yahoo News at the time.
Curiously, this doomsday loop has been around since 1970 (1968, if you include Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb into the equation, and you should), and yet somehow, the Final Countdown never quite arrives:
1983. NBC News. We are all going to die by the 1990's because of climate change. 😂 pic.twitter.com/YZvG7cvc89
You should see how the media went out of its way to terrify people during the previous decade (when global cooling was all the rage):
As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2018 on the Blueanon left comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.
Eventually, the doomsday mindset started to have a result among the true believers, as I wrote in a post at EdDriscoll.com in 2011 headlined “In Search of the Missing Frisco Families.” San Francisco, on its way to becoming Detroit by the Bay, was concurrently “becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines,” as a headline at the San Francisco Examiner noted in 2011. Three years prior, in an effort to save the planet, the puritans at the San Francisco Chronicle explored how readers could throw “less-is-more birthday parties:”
Forget the twisty straws, Tootsie rolls and Dora the Explorer plates with matching cups, hats and tablecloth. There are signs that more parents would like to.
Anxious about the economy, global warming and our national image as people who would rent a limo for a kid’s party while a polar bear’s ice floe melts, many are toning down the trappings of that classic annual ritual, the blowout birthday party. They are saying no to plastic toys and water bottles, paper plates, gift wrap and new toys. There is even a modest backlash against the goody bag, the sack of candy and plastic knickknacks usually thrust into each sticky hand at the end of parties.
* * *
“There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” said Sarah Lane, a founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values. “You should see what gets thrown away. It’s disgusting.”
Trust me, there are numerous things more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party in San Francisco.
Related: “Dave Grohl Proves Rock Ain’t Dead,” Jim Treacher writes. “I know I’m jaded and probably more than a little evil, but I ain’t mad at Dave Grohl. It’s amusing to me. I just hope his new kid is worth giving up half of everything he owns in the divorce. Long live rock & roll!”
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