AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN JUST DOING STRAIGHT UP REPORTAGE: Uighur Slaves Struggling To Keep Up With Demand For Palestinian Headscarves.

STAR TREK 2024: THE WRATH OF KHAN:

Voters: sweet merciful heavenly Father, I beg you to give me a third choice

God: https://t.co/sl5AbxY874

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 8, 2024

Details here for the curious: RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.

Related:

Can we check the other two candidates for worms? That might explain a lot.

— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) May 8, 2024

FINALLY, THE TRUTH CAN BE TOLD!

Israelis 🇮🇱 admitting that they are “white colonizers” 👇
pic.twitter.com/K0mH6riLLC

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) May 7, 2024

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY AT REASON: Were the COVID-19 Lockdowns a Mistake?

Many Americans are losing patience with statewide shelter-in-place orders.

“We don’t have months or weeks—businesses are hurting,” says Jim Desmond, a San Diego county supervisor who unsuccessfully attempted to introduce legislation hastening the re-opening of businesses in his county despite the statewide lockdown in California.

“[Those] hurt the most in this are the poor people, the people that rent, that worked in the hospitality sector and the restaurants, and a lot of single moms….We have people on the phone crying saying, ‘Hey, I got a kid to feed,'” Desmond tells Reason.

So have the lockdowns actually saved lives? There’s a debate over how to analyze the data.

“Lockdowns just don’t actually alter behavior all that much,” says Lyman Stone, an economist and demographer who’s an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He argues that there’s no correlation between the timing of statewide or regional shelter-in-place orders and a decline in the COVID-19 death rate.

“We can basically build a theory and assert that the world obeys our theory and just go looking for any scrap of evidence that supports it,” says Stone, “or we can start by looking at what are the trends we actually observe.”

A month later, the trends we all observed were the dancing TikTok nurses promoting the George Floyd rioters. Both of which groups, perhaps unintentionally, definitively answered the question.

HOW IT STARTED:

In his own way, Trump has set us free. Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.

Washington reporting has long depended on a transactional relationship between sources and journalists. Journalists groom sources, but sources also groom journalists. There’s nothing inherently unethical about the back-scratching. When a reporter calls an administration source to confirm an embarrassing item, the source may agree to confirm as long as the reporter at the very least agrees to listen sympathetically to the administration’s context. But Trump’s hostile attitude toward the press, his dismissal of CNN for attempting to ask a question at the last conference, and his underhanded ploy at the last conference where he loaded the audience with cheerleaders has muted that mutualism. It’s easy to predict that instead of negotiating with reporters as equals, his administration will advance its agenda by feeding more pliant reporters material the way a trainer rewards circus animals.

—“Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again,” Jack Shafer, the Politico, January 16th, 2017.

How it’s going: The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It.

Nobody ever became a journalist in order to become popular. The broad-stroke portrayals in movies and novels taught us, accurately enough, that journalists tend toward the coarse, vulgar, impudent and nosy. For many years, journalists were generally admired for those attributes in the way that the beef butcher is admired for the scars on his hands.

But thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. Journalists don’t deserve any special pity, it should be noted. Police officers, teachers and even doctors often suffer more from the slings and arrows of the mob. But for journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.

Hanging over journalism like a gibbous moon is Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s successful lawsuit against Gawker, financed by the billionaire Peter Thiel, which Tani notes in his Semafor piece. Thiel’s successful action, which forced the site to shutter in 2016, has journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders in worry. In the new climate, law firms have built practices devoted to blocking the publication of tough-minded stories with formal legal warnings.

Perfectly fine publications do exist, and they deserve our support. For instance, there’s the Atlantic, which couldn’t win more National Magazine Awards if the contest were fixed. With stalwart writers like Caitlin Flanagan and Mark Leibovich, the magazine shows it can go full bravado when it wants to. But what’s its excuse for not breaking more icons? Too often, our media seems like it was produced to be consumed by our parents, most of whom are dead.

Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie blames the decline of swagger, in part, to generational forces.

“Millennials and Gen Z have been bred like human veal by their Boomer and Gen X parents who made sure their kids were constantly being surveilled and optimized for success in SATs, sports and entry into the Establishment pipeline,” he says. “Can we be surprised that such a system has produced generations of journalists who endlessly describe anything they disagree with as misinformation and want to control and regulate everything like the room temperature in an after-school enrichment program?”

This attitude has permeated the press, as editors recoil from publishing anything that might cause anyone offense.

—Jack Shafer, the Politico, Monday.

Perhaps, though, there is another reason: Adam Carolla: ‘Every Mainstream Media Narrative … Has Been Wrong.’

“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Carolla said.

“Maybe you start with Russian collusion and the Steele Dossier. ‘There’s a tape. There’s a pee-pee tape,’” he continued of the debunked attacks on President Donald Trump. “And you roll it all the way through COVID or George Floyd or Kyle Rittenhouse .. Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“They’ve been wrong. And not wrong around the edges… there’s always wrong around the edges. They’ve been flat-out f***ing wrong about all of it,” Carolla said.

“If you were to talk to some of the people who reported it, they would be confused,” Dr. Pinsky added of journalists who cannot be shamed for their egregious errors.

I hope those four years were worth it to the DNC-MSM.

You motherfuckers don't have "a soul"
and the last three weeks of ignoring Jewish students being blocked on college campuses proves it. What fucking balls is this. pic.twitter.com/wcilH9Dzl7

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 7, 2024

DAVID HARSANYI: John Kirby Says Israel Can’t Eliminate An Ideology With Force. History Disagrees.

Why did we fight any wars, for that matter? Why did we fight al-Qaida? Surely there were Tories left in the United States after the Revolutionary War and fans of slavery left after the Civil War. There were plenty of Nazis around after World War II. (There are plenty today.) The good news was that their leaders either committed gruesome suicides, were brought to justice, or were forced to hide in the jungles of South America where they worried that Mossad agents would show up and drag them to Israel to stand trial for their crimes. Most German civilians, even one-time fervent Nazis, made their peace with reality and moved on.

One hopes that when Hamas is obliterated in Gaza, despite Kirby’s objections, its leaders now living it up in Qatari resorts will also wonder if they will meet their ends by accidentally falling out a 20th-story window. And one hopes that the Palestinians, like the Germans and Japanese, will finally come to terms with reality and build better lives.

Cue the guys from the old Protest Warrior culture jamming Website from 2004:

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC “News” Fires Its Woke DEI Hire “News Chief.”

They’re pretending she left of her own accord. But there were reports a week ago that ABC “News” was going to get rid of her, so you tell me.

She wasn’t just a DEI hire. She is literally made of DEI atoms.

ABC News President Kim Godwin, who touted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is reportedly on the chopping block, according to CNN.Debra OConnell, who was appointed in February to oversee the network, is currently conducting a leadership review as she has allegedly been appalled by Godwin’s management and leadership style, sources told CNN. She has reportedly failed to replace key positions and has caused anxiety to circulate among staff.

And now she’s “retiring.” Retiring under a cloud of failure and scandal, that is.

“Keep an eye on this. Wanna bet that a lawsuit won’t be far behind?,” Ed Morrissey adds.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The goal of the campus Jew-haters: To render Israel indefensible, in both senses of the word.

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES APPROPRIATELY, COMRADES: End of an Era: Boy Scouts of America Officially Changes Name to Embrace Inclusivity After 114 Years.

The “woke virus” continues to spread in America.

The Boy Scouts of America has announced a major rebranding as it transitions to “Scouting America,” marking the first name change in its 114-year legacy.

The move is part of the organization’s bid to distance itself from its troubled past marred by a torrent of sexual abuse claims and subsequent bankruptcy while simultaneously embracing “inclusivity.”

Ban Erase all the things!

SIRI, WHAT IS “THE STREISAND EFFECT?” Google Banned Trump Ad Targeting Black Voters.

HOCHUL APOLOGIZES FOR DROPPING THE MASK: Gov. Hochul says she ‘misspoke’ when she said some ‘Black kids’ don’t know the word ‘computer.’

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul apologized this week after saying there are Black kids in the Bronx who don’t know what the word “computer” means.

Hochul made the remarks during an address at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, California.

“Now what we have is the money to build a phenomenal super computer that is gonna be accessible to the researchers in New York, college students, will attract more federal grants, and this is how we lay down the mark,” Hochul said. “No state has done this. In fact, I talk to a lot of other people who say, ‘I wish my governor had thought of that first.’ I say, ‘No no, this is New York. We like to be first,’ with all due respect to you from other states.”

“It’s sort of our attitude,” Hochul continued. “We will be the best, we will be the first, and I want others to follow, because right now we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word ‘computer’ is. They don’t know. They don’t know these things.”

President Joe “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” Biden could not be reached for comment.

PREPARE FOR MASS HYSTERIA AND EXILE!

Every four years we hear Alec Baldwin, Babs Streisand, Michael Moore and other flaky leftists say they will leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency, and one of these days they may actually mean it, though I doubt it. I recall my mentor Stan Evans joking that “I voted for George W. Bush because Alec Baldwin said he’d leave the country. Which just goes to show that pragmatism doesn’t work.”

Anyway, this Tweet thread from a former hive-mind journalist Michelle Kosinski is just too delicious not to celebrate:

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a few couples, friends of friends, all American. All were well-educated and successful in careers. They seemed great! On the surface. For like an hour. But slowly, over a few drinks, they began to let slip their true MAGA natures….

One of the couples each attended top ivy league colleges. But now that it was university time for their own kids, they were adamantly NOT letting them apply to any ivies. And were weird about explaining why. Though the kids were double legacies. Okayyy… moving on…

The next crew suddenly busted out with air quotes when mentioning climate change. Again, these are otherwise smart people. Not scientists, clearly. But educated. And the dude took seething umbrage when my friend mentioned the damage Trump had done and vowed to continue to do.

They’d be having the same reaction if it were Dubya, McCain, or Romney running. Which of course is a big reason they’re having their TDS freakout.

Oh you guys want to Portray Mitt Romney as an extreme and abusive sociopath? Okay, well here's the real thing then.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 22, 2024

THE PEOPLE SETTING AMERICA ON FIRE:

These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall, while recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”

The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.” There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent!,” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Sounds like something out of a Kurt Schlichter novel.

NOT A BIG FAN OF STERN 2.0: Howard Stern Fumes Over Criticism He Went Too Easy On Joe Biden.

Howard Stern does not appreciate critics questioning the integrity of his recent interview with Joe Biden.

On Monday, Stern responded to YouTuber David Pakman who suggested the White House planted some of the questions he asked the president.

Pakman specifically wondered if the White House told Stern to ask Biden about a new policy that forces airlines to offer immediate refunds rather than credits for canceled flights.

“Here’s what happened. When Joe Biden came in, the day before [producer] John Hein and I were talking about some of the accomplishments that we admire that have gone on in the past four years, and John says to me, ‘Hey, Howard, did you hear what Joe Biden did with the airlines?'” Stern said.

“If they were scripting the questions, wouldn’t that have been a lot different?” interjected co-host Robin Quivers.

Sadly, given Howard’s current role as fluffer to superstar lefties, probably not.

Not sure about the questions being planted, but the talking points around Biden "cutting emissions in half" (he hasn't) and crediting him for "getting the vaccine out" (that was already in progress) were absolutely provided to Howard, which he read verbatim. https://t.co/ejoxFo34X2

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 6, 2024

BLESS HER HEART: Maxine Waters Alleges Trump Is Training Militias or Something.

You have to hand it to Donald Trump.

Man is like the Kwisatz Haderach from Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune” when it comes to leftists, except they are the ones alleging he can kill with a word.

In the latest case of Trump Derangement Syndrome worth laughing at, Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) went on MSNBC’s “Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart” to engage in the usual hysteria about Trump being a dictator who won’t  respect the Constitution upon returning to the White House without a hint of irony.

Rep. Waters mentioned the already-debunked “bloodbath” comment from March, when Trump’s words about auto imports got twisted into Trump calling for actual bloodshed if he lost the 2024 election. She talked about how she is looking to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and President Joe Biden’s handlers “to tell us what they are going to do to protect this country against violence if he loses.”

Great moments in projection:

● Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

● Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

● Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

FINALLY, A MARKER HAS BEEN LAID DOWN: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Brainwashing campus activists starts long before college.

What we’re seeing on our campuses is the culmination of many years of leftist activists pushing kids to the forefront to spread their propaganda.

And it’s not remotely just board books like “A is for Activist” that introduce toddlers to the idea of protest before they even set foot in school.

Teachers push their agenda; whether climate change, gun control or the war in Gaza, they’re focused far less on teaching children how to think than what to think.

The goal is to turn kids into activists, and the sooner the better.

After all, children can be valuable for shutting down debate.

Their youth implies innocence and seems to confer moral authority: How could anyone argue with an innocent child?

Greta Thunberg famously quit school to campaign against climate change.

It was impossible to challenge a pig-tailed child, even if she demanded the world stop functioning.

Recall her tearful “how dare you!” in front of the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019?

It reverberated widely because of her age.

A grown-up making the same plea would be seen as unbalanced.

Yet the idea of Greta as a climate-warrior spokesperson was born when a grown-up activist saw how teen anti-gun crusaders, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., viciously attacked ideological foes with minimal pushback.

No one could argue with a traumatized teen — and that was the point.

The concept has only spread since.

It’s nothing new for the left — Thomas Sowell was writing about “Mascots of the Anointed” back in 1995, and long before Greta, there were earlier enviro-youth programmed to inflict maximum guilt:

I just dug up this clip from 1992…

Severn Cullis-Suzuki's speech to the UN in 1992 on climate change sounds an awful lot like Greta Thunberg's in 2019.

I cut the two together to show just how similar the language is: pic.twitter.com/18ptTzX4M4

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 26, 2019

But as Iowahawk warns the rest of us:

If you are laboring under the belief that we need to heed the unsullied peak moral vision and judgment of 18-25 year olds, ask yourself why there isn't a rental car agency on Earth that would hand them keys

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 6, 2024

And as America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2019 at the height of Green Nude Eel mania: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM:

4,200 Joshua trees are scheduled to be removed are replaced by solar panels for the Aratina Solar Project near Boron, CA in June of this year. They will not be salvaged but funds based on the size of the tree will be placed in a mitigation bank. pic.twitter.com/1BhA3uag4F

— Basin & Range Watch (@BasinRange) May 4, 2024

And now we know what happened to the rest of the forests prior to the events in Silent Running:

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Does Columbia Want to Elect Donald Trump?

Disorder is the Republican’s best friend.

Let’s finish what they did in 1968,” a Columbia protester said the other day.

In political terms, that would mean electing Donald Trump.

The disorder of 1968 — when LBJ declined to run again and Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace faced off — played right into the hands of Nixon, who rode his opposition to the riots and campus unrest into the White House.

As Luke Nichter writes in his book on the 1968 campaign, The Year That Broke Politics, “the great debate of the campaign, the issue that consistently struck the nation’s nerve, and where there were the greatest differences among the three candidates, was law and order.”

That’s not going to be true this year, when other issues loom much larger than do the student protests. But if “law and order” is broadly conceived to include the chaos at the border (as well as conflict abroad), it is a major theme of 2024 and has inarguably undermined Biden’s presidency. In sheer magnitude, the mayhem of 1968 was much larger and more consequential than anything that is happening today. After the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, as Nichter notes, more than 50,000 federal and National Guard troops were called out “in one of the largest peacetime deployments on American soil in history.” The rioting rumbled on for a week in Washington, and LBJ later wrote of his “sick feeling” as he watched smoke fill the D.C. sky.

Nixon also went out of his way to position himself as the statesmanlike centrist, which is never Trump’s impulse and rarely his tone.

Nichter explains that Humphrey sought to differentiate himself from Johnson to appeal to liberals, while Wallace ran to Nixon’s right. This ceded the center to Nixon. Pat Buchanan would recall that, while Nixon “was positioned as tough on law and order, he did not try to rival George Wallace.” (Ronald Reagan was actually harsher on the subject than Nixon.)

This allowed Nixon to own the issue, while, with his relatively moderate tone, he won strange new respect from the elites who had, heretofore, disdained him.

As with 1967 and ‘68, which saw far left protestors uncomfortably aligned against Great Society liberal LBJ, why not aim all of that anger at an actual Republican? As in 1968, why aim all your eco-doomsday fears at a fellow Democrat? Heighten the contradictions, to coin a phrase. From Trump’s perspective, it’s time to dust off Nixon’s 1968 “Law and order” ad and update it to reflect the past four years:

As this 2022 attempt highlights, you won’t be able to get the ad past Biden’s friends at Google of course, but the Streisand Effect might work to its advantage.

Exit question:

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.

The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.

This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.

It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest. But Ferguson’s figures, his graphs and models, his worst-case scenarios, were the godly pronouncements upon which this historic disruption of society was based. And Ferguson fully backed the lockdown that sprung from his work.

As the BBC reported the same day, Ferguson “quit as a government adviser on coronavirus after admitting an ‘error of judgement’.”

Mistakes were made! But the biggest was made by the man who hired him: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Well, to be fair, Airstrip One become an even bigger police state — and most of the authorities there needed little prompting to scale up their efforts.

NEW YORK TIMES OWNER VERSUS PRO-PALESTINIAN HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Tom Cotton Calls Out ABC Host For Attempting To ‘Move On’ From Discussing College Protests.

Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton called out ABC host Jonathan Karl Sunday after attempting to “move on” from discussing college pro-Palestine protests.

Cotton appeared on ABC’s “This Week” to discuss the ongoing campus protests across the U.S. as many students have demanded that their schools divest from companies that are connected to Israel. As Karl called out the “vile stuff” going on in “some” of the pro-Palestine campus protesting he asked Cotton if they could both agree that peaceful protests were okay.

“You can protest all you want. If you want to make a fool of yourself and support a terrorist group, you can do that. Now if you are a foreigner, you can’t. Where’s Joe Biden’s administration demanding that universities turn over the names of any foreign students here on a visa, revoking those visas and deporting them? That’s something that Joe Biden can do today. But you are not allowed to violate the rules and policies and break the law,” Cotton stated.

“Where were the liberal administrators and liberal politicians sending in the police on the very first day? We should not have tolerated this for a moment. You have Jewish students who have been assaulted on campus. Jewish students have been told it’s not safe for you to come, go back home. Just blocks from here, Jon, you have one of the biggest ‘little Gazas’ left in George Washington University. Yesterday they called for a guillotine for the beheading of university administrators. Is that non-violent?”

“No, like I said there’s no doubt there’s plenty of vile stuff — there’s lots of vile things going on. There’s no doubt there’s also people legitimately protesting Israeli policy,” Karl responded.

Karl seemed quite perturbed by Cotton calling the college protest sites “Little Gazas” and drifted perilously close to “fine people on both sides” territory during the exchange:

I apologize for confusing propagandists George Stephanopoulos and Jon Karl. They all sound alike when they're reading Operation Mockingbird script

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 5, 2024

HEY, WHEN DID GEORGE COSTANZA BECOME AN INVESTMENT BANKER? High-flyers leave investment bank after having sex with cleaner.

A US investment bank has parted company with two experienced members of its London team for having sex in the office with one of the cleaning workers.

Stifel, which is headquartered in St Louis, Missouri, launched an internal investigation after allegations over the pair’s behaviour at the bank’s London premises near St Paul’s cathedral. After findings of misconduct, one immediately resigned. The other parted some time after and is said to be in a legal process with the bank.

The pair are understood not to have paid the female cleaner for sex. The bank declined to comment on their identities but the duo are said to have had substantial careers in the City.

In accordance with the prophecy:

BRIDGE TO NOWHERE: California is mercilessly mocked for ‘world’s most pointless crossing’ high-speed rail bridge that cost $11 BILLION.

ADULTS IN BLUE: At Columbia University this week, the NYPD demonstrated again why it’s the best—and taught protesters something about individual accountability and character, too.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of CompStat, the technology-enabled innovation that turned the gritty New York City Police Department into a modern, transparent, and strategically intelligent public safety force. Every week, commanders from the city’s roughly 100 precincts come in front of top chiefs for a grilling on what’s happening in their command, what they plan to do about it, and if they’re succeeding. It can be terrifying. But the demand for individual accountability—on a podium, exposed under scrutiny—is what created an agency of leaders and the nation’s best police force.

This week, former NYPD captain and current mayor Eric Adams went through a version of this exercise in front of the press as he was grilled on the situation at New York City’s campus protests (especially at Columbia University), how police planned to deal with it, and how it was going. He shared the tactical and strategic planning that went into the arrests of roughly 300 people from Columbia and City College of New York on Tuesday. (An additional 13 from NYU and 43 from the New School were arrested today). He explained the authority granted for these raids by the school administrations—and by the laws allegedly broken, from criminal mischief to burglary.

And, Adams explained: “Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York.” What is the NYPD doing now? “We are processing the arrests to distinguish between who are actual students and who were not supposed to be on the ground,” the mayor said.

It was quite a scene on Tuesday night: NYPD officers entering Columbia’s illegally barricaded Hamilton Hall via an armored vehicle that got them through a second-floor window. Bodycam video illustrates what they encountered inside: physical blockades of furniture, garbage cans, and other objects obstructing their path, which they cut through with electric saws and blow torches. Then they had to deal with the demonstrators, some resisting—“Put it down, you’re gonna get hurt,” a cop told one idiot trying to block him with a makeshift shield—others complying, all amid the steady din of the rioters’ frenzied chanting. Not an easy day’s work: how many of us could handle it, even for a few minutes, without losing our composure? Yet the NYPD accomplished its assignment in an intensely hostile environment without using undue force. And when they were done, they lowered the Arab colors of the Palestinian flag that protesters had raised over CCNY and reinstated Old Glory.

Contrast this professionalism and competence with the squawks of protesters, most of whom have likely never been tested away from the protection of social media, group-based entitlements, and the safety blanket of anonymity. Unlike protesters of earlier generations—Mayor Adams conjured his own participation in bygone demonstrations with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—the current crusaders distinguish themselves by cowering. They hide their faces behind pandemic-era masks, sinched hoodies, and keffiyehs wound tightly around their faces as if to keep out the worst Arabian sandstorm.

While it’s understandable that they want to maintain the chic part of radical chic after their protest days are over, there may still be plenty of employment opportunities available, even to those who are identified: “YGTBFKM: Goldman-Sachs Donor Fund Is Underwriting Hamas Protests,” thus completely upending this tweet from last month:

If you watch this video closely you can pinpoint the precise moment his internship with Goldman Sachs is revoked. https://t.co/dsynIlYWP5

— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) April 21, 2024

DANIEL GREENFIELD: How Hamas Bought Joe Biden.

But the single most shocking document from James Biden’s relationship with Qatar may be a letter that he allegedly wrote to the Qatari leadership on “behalf of the Biden family.”

“We are not particularly close to this administration and have a different vision,” Biden’s brother wrote, accusing the Trump administration of being “fractured” and “beleaguered by major issues that are not soon to be resolved.” However he promised that the Biden “family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency.”

“If this is in keeping with the vision of His Excellency, on behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” he concluded.

Even while undermining the sitting administration, Biden’s brother was offering the services of his family to an enemy nation. This has wider implications beyond Qatar’s role backing Hamas.

Qatar was also the central intermediary in the Taliban “deal” and had formed an alliance with Iran. It is difficult to know whether the “Biden family” relationship with Qatar played any role in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the sanctions relief offered to Iran.

We do know there was a relationship between the Biden family and a state sponsor of Hamas, which Joe Biden profited from, and that has disturbing implications for our national security.

“We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden,” James Biden once bragged. One of those investors had ties to Iran, Al Qaeda, Iran and Hamas.

Earlier: Pro-Palestianian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.