REGULATORS SEIZE FIRST REPUBLIC IN SECOND LARGEST BANK FAILURE IN U.S. HISTORY: “Early on Monday, regulators seized the San Francisco-based First Republic Bank and agreed a deal to sell its deposits and most of its assets to JPMorgan Chase, preventing further spiral in the banking industry. Three of the four largest-ever U.S. bank failures have occurred in the past two months. First Republic Bank, which as of April 13 had $229.1 billion in total assets and $103.9 billion in total deposits, is the second largest bank to go under in U.S. history, behind only Washington Mutual, which went down in 2008. First Republic has been struggling since the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and New York-based Signature Bank in March.”

DAVID THOMPSON: Let Us Show Our Gratitude, They Cried Out In Unison.

THE DEEP STATE, MARK ONE: The Watergate Cover-up Never Ends. “That’s not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats.”

STOPPED CLOCK: CNN Panelist Drops the Hard Truth About Biden’s Speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The pathetic nature of that scene wasn’t lost on everyone, though. Scott Jennings, who offered his critique on CNN of all places, pointed out how pathetic it was for the press to clap along to a president making fun of the fact that they are completely in the tank.

The line that will stick with me is “In a lot of ways this dinner sums up my first two years. I’ll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.” For the journalists in the room, he wasn’t laughing with you, he was laughing at you. The reality is, I think he’s mocking the press. The guy does not take questions, and he’s up there joking about it. And I’m just, and they’re clapping and they’re laughing about it.

Jennings’ commentary was made even more impactful by the fact that the rest of the panelists were drooling over Biden’s speech. They should feel as betrayed and belittled as those who watched the president mock them in person.

But I digress, Jennings hit the nail on the head. Biden was not laughing with all those journalists as they cackled at his badly read jokes (sometimes having to fight the teleprompter to get them out). He was laughing at them. The president sees the press as a subservient class of pawns that exist simply to prop him up amidst his failures.

What’s the point of being a Democrat in the White House if he can’t mock his operatives with bylines? Besides, it’s not like they’re ever going to fight back about it.

U.S. EVACUATES HUNDREDS OF AMERICAN CIVILIANS FROM SUDAN:

A convoy of 18 buses carrying several hundred U.S. citizens departed Khartoum on Friday as part of an organized effort to evacuate Americans from Sudan. The evacuees arrived at the coastal city of Port Sudan on Saturday, State Department officials said, and U.S. government officials are facilitating their onward journey by boat across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

It’s the first organized effort by the U.S. to evacuate its civilians from the country amid clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.

A source linked to the evacuation tells CBS News over 500 civilians are being processed.

Security around the convoy has been described as “tight” and passengers were instructed not to use their cellphones. The 12-hour drive to the coast was confirmed to be under “top cover” protection, likely from U.S. military drones.

Flashback: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle:

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us neatly to both 2021 and today:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?

We talk about “George Soros” public prosecutors. But the nihilist Soros’ genius is always to be one step ahead of the game, applying what made him an outlaw in France to our popular culture.

No one anticipated that he would quietly flood rather obscure big-city prosecutorial races with hundreds of millions of dollars to elect hard socialists who were to use their ensuing power to engage in lawfare against conservatives and the prominent and make laws and target enemies that legislatures could not. Without a Soros-funded Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis, the nation would now be reduced to speculating whether former president Donald Trump’s two-year unauthorized storage of some classified documents at a secure Mar-a-Lago was a worse infraction than former Vice President Joe Biden’s unauthorized storage of classified documents at three locations, including his garage, for six years.

Defunding the police is based on the implicit assumption that greater criminality and violence, mostly directed against the most vulnerable, is a small price to pay, given a) the stigmatized criminal is given exemption, and b) the architects of defunding have mechanisms to ensure they are exposed to inevitable spiraling crime rates.

Ditto gun control. The socialist point of neutering the Second Amendment is not just to disarm the populace, much less to prevent shootings. Rather, the aim is to ensure the government has a complete monopoly on arms, so that it can calibrate both the degree and nature of law enforcement, and thus render the citizen compliant and obsequious in order to ensure his protection from both criminals and the state.

Read the whole thing.

OKAY, GROOMERS: 27 Democrats in the Colorado House of Reps just voted against making indecent exposure to minors a class 6 felony.

HOW IT STARTED: West Hollywood Redirects Funding from Sheriff’s Department to Other Public Safety Programs.

—KNBC, June 29^th, 2022.

How it’s going: Actor James Woods: Watch How W. Hollywood’s ‘Safety Ambassadors’ Handled an Assault in Progress.

Notoriously liberal West Hollywood had the brilliant idea of replacing police officers with unarmed “safety ambassadors.” Let’s take a peek at how that’s worked out during an assault in progress… https://t.co/Qa48aZ8z4o

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 28, 2023

—MRC TV, yesterday.

Gooder and harder, California.

BAN ALL THE THINGS! California Approves Regulation to Phase Out Diesel Trucks by 2036.

CNN’S VAN JONES SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: Kamala Harris “is running alongside the oldest person to ever do it, so she’s essentially running for president.”

THE HOG REPORT: A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon. Tensions with Iran, Russia have CENTCOM calling upon the venerable Warthog once again.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Axios: Part-time president — and his handlers — seek to avoid “age trap.”

“THE ENEMY OF YOUR ENEMY IS NOT YOUR FRIEND; HE’S A GUY WHO MIGHT WANT TO THROW YOU IN JAIL:” The Very Strange New Respect for Authoritarian Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) “should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals” and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are “contemptible human beings” of whom he “wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under”:

After this lock-’em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as “a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society”), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual “climate-deniers,” but stressing that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”

He’s had climate apocalypticism long before AOC decided to fight what Kevin Williamson dubbed “Sandy’s War.” In 2008, RFK Jr. “wrote an article raising the alarm about global warming and the resultant lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.”

More recently (i.e. Thursday night): ABC News cuts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vaccine remarks out of interview.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Tuckered Out Edition.

STOPPED CLOCK: CNN’s Scott Jennings Torches Randi Weingarten for Role in School Closures: ‘I Hear No Remorse.’

KAY HYMOWITZ: The Transgender Children’s Crusade.

To grasp the novelty of gender identity, compare its idea of child nature with that of child psychology. The psychological approach is predicated on an idea that seems glaringly obvious to most people today: young minds differ from those of adults. Jean Piaget, one of the field’s first theorists of cognitive development, called the first two years the sensorimotor stage, when infants and toddlers explore the outside world through sensory means. They only gradually gain control of their arms and hands as they grab at their clothes and their hair, pull at their genitals, or reach for a caretaker’s necklace or hair. Anyone who has cared for a toddler knows that toddlers’ emotions are so fleeting that they forget the banana that they just demanded in a fit of red-faced rage, once distracted by a bright shiny object.

Here are other truths about young children known to experts and parents alike. They are prone to magical thinking; they believe, as Jazz Jennings did, that a fairy will change their penis into a vagina, or that they play with invisible companions, like the castle-dwelling ninjas that my grandson used to “fight” when he was five. Their sense of time is primitive. Young children have trouble thinking about being six years old; imagining themselves as 20, as they would need to do to know their identity, is like science fiction. Their personalities change; the placid infant turns into a chatterbox five-year-old, who suddenly turns into a withdrawn ten-year-old. Dysphoria itself is often a temporary condition. Assuming that they don’t socially transition, as Jazz did, the large majority of dysphoric young children will desist as they get older; most will become gay.

Yet pediatric gender experts have put psychology’s idea of the child out to pasture. In their view, kids, even those who have yet to pull themselves up in their cribs, are capable of insight that many adults don’t have. “Kids understand themselves better, and at a much younger age, than adults assume. This includes their gender identity,” theorists at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education maintain. Today’s prodigies intuit their gender identities before they can talk. Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California–San Francisco and one of the foremost exponents of youthful gender dysphoria, explained at a 2016 conference how preverbal children could communicate gender distress. A boy infant might pull at the snaps of his onesie, she answered, in order to “make a dress”; he is sending a “gender message” that he really wants to be a girl. Likewise, a toddler tugging at the barrettes in her hair is not trying to ease the pulling at her scalp; she’s demonstrating that she wants to be a boy.

In the past, when a child showed signs of gender dysphoria, clinicians took a stance of “watchful waiting,” an approach that recognized the inherent volatility and cognitive immaturity of creatures still sleeping in their Batman jammies and leaving cookies for Santa Claus. The essentialist logic of gender identity, however, requires teachers, parents, and therapists to take a “gender-affirming” approach. A boy who declares himself a girl must be validated: no questions asked, no therapeutic probing about anything else that might be troubling the child. The enlightened child has spoken. “If you listen to the children, you will discover their gender. It is not for us to tell, but for them to say,” writes Ehrensaft.

Earlier: The Return of Paganism.

To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.

If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.

In February, Glenn linked to an article headlined, “Detransitioner Files First Lawsuit In Canada Against Medical Providers.” It won’t be the last.

DON SURBER: Media says voting threatens democracy.

The [Washington] Post story began, “The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to ‘thwart tyranny’ in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.

“In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.

“The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.”

The meeting was in January. The reporters were not present. But it ran pictures of the meeting taken by Evan Cobb, a freelance photographer from South Bend, Indiana. Maybe they interviewed him.

People elected an overwhelming majority of 8 new Republican commissioners (out of 11 commissioners) that the Jeff Bezos newspaper did not like. They made changes that the newspaper did not like, and so the Jeff Bezos Post said this threatened “the building blocks of American democracy.”

One of the changes made was to the county’s motto “that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery.”

The 186-year-old county adopted that motto — Where You Belong — six years ago.

The new one is Where Freedom Rings.

Freedom must be a threat to democracy, too.

Similarly, AP is not happy with this development in North Carolina: N. Carolina justices sweep away district, voter ID rulings.

In massive victories for Republicans, North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Friday threw out previous rulings that had declared illegal both redistricting maps for excessive partisanship and a photo voter identification law for being infected with racial bias.

The new edition of the court, which became a Republican majority this year following the election of two GOP justices, ruled after taking the unusual step of revisiting opinions made in December by the court’s previous iteration, when Democrats held a 4-3 seat advantage. The court held rehearings in March.

The 5-2 decisions likely to mean that a photo ID mandate approved by the GOP-controlled legislature in late 2018 will be enforced for the 2024 elections. Legislators also should have greater latitude in drawing legislative seat boundaries for the next decade that will reinforce their General Assembly majorities and assist them in winning more seats within the state’s congressional delegation.

Gerrymandering is apparently only bad when Republicans do it.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Ezra Klein and State Sen. Scott Wiener on crime in San Francisco.

When Wiener says the property crime rate in San Francisco is fairly high I think he’s minimizing. The property crime rate in San Francisco is the worst in the country among the 25 largest cities.

In any case, it’s interesting to hear Wiener talk this way because when I was writing about the street prostitution problem, which included violence against the women involved and also fear among the residents living in the area, Sen. Wiener didn’t seem concerned at all. In fact he flatly denied that the problem had anything to do with his bill legalizing loitering.

So I can’t help but wonder if this concern for the feelings of crime victims isn’t just something progressives have learned to say in the wake of the recall of DA Chesa Boudin. Boudin, like Wiener, was very far left and also never accepted any blame for any of the city’s crime problems. But it became clear to everyone after his recall that even in San Francisco voters didn’t like being told things were fine when they weren’t.

To his credit, Klein didn’t let it drop there but pushed a little harder on what might be called the city’s permissive attitude toward crime.

This clip of Weiner from the podcast sums up his attitude regarding San Francisco quite well:

DESANTIS INSIDERS SAY HE’LL FORM EXPLORATORY COMMITTEE IN MID-MAY; TRUMP SAYS HE SHOULD DROP OUT TO SHOW HIS “LOYALTY.” As Ace of Spades writes, “And I know this upsets people to hear, but Ron DeSantis did give Trump an open lane for reelection… in 2020. This is DeSantis’ year. DeSantis isn’t intruding in Trump’s year; Trump is intruding in DeSantis’. I know people keep saying ‘DeSantis should wait.’ Wait? You mean wait until he no longer has a high-profile job as governor? Wait until people begin forgetting him, like Christie did when he refused to run in 2012 and then discovered no one wanted to hear about him in 2016?”

MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: Third Major American Bank Collapses, Regulators Will Soon Take Company Over: Report.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, also known as the FDIC, will imminently place First Republic Bank under receivership, marking the third collapse of a medium-sized American bank in less than two months.

First Republic Bank, headquartered in San Francisco, California, caters mainly to wealthy clients with account balances above the $250,000 deposit threshold backed by the FDIC. The company witnessed many customers withdraw their funds in recent weeks as the recent implosions of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank rattled trust in the financial system. FDIC officials had moved to secure both insured and uninsured deposits at the two failed companies to decrease the risk of bank runs at other financial institutions.

Regulators determined that the unstable position of First Republic Bank necessitates the imminent takeover of the company by the FDIC, one unnamed source told Reuters on Friday, adding that no time remains for executives to pursue a bailout through a private deal.

Shares for First Republic Bank plummeted more than 43% on Friday, reaching a low of $3.51 before markets closed. The company’s stock was priced at $121.54 at the beginning of the year, marking a 97% loss for investors over the past four months.

How odd! CNBC’s Jim Cramer was touting FRC as recently as March 10th: First Republic stock crashed 90% since Jim Cramer called it a ‘very good bank.’

AND THIS IS WHY MSNBC EMPLOYS AL SHARPTON, DESPITE HIS NEGLIGIBLE RATINGS: Sharpton to CNN: You better explain why you fired “superb journalist” Don Lemon to me.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: WashPost Columnist Urges People To Harass Republicans At The Grocery Store, Church.

Republicans did not need Trump or Fox to tell them to be pro-life, pro-gun rights, or opposed to giving hormones to children. Still, [The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic] wondered, “Where do we go from here? Is there any solution?”

For [Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.], the answer is harassment, “I think ultimately we have to, in the short term, shame them out of passing the most aggressive versions of these bills, criticize them enough to make sure that they are told when they go to church or when they go to the grocery store that ‘you passed a terrible bill and acted like a bigot.’”

It is safe to say that neither Bacon nor Lydic would appreciate it if you harassed them about their political views at the grocery store.

Yet, Lydic’s biggest problem with Bacon’s proposal was not the morality, but practical effects as she proceeded to make fun of Sen. Rand Paul being attacked, “Are you sure that shame would work with Kentucky Republicans? I mean, look at Rand Paul, if I got my ass kicked in my front yard by my neighbor, I would never leave my house again.”

Flashback: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Puts Nazism on the Right?

This is a sincere question to which I’ve never had a satisfactory answer. I may have even asked it here before. We all know what Nazism is, but I think we need to define what we mean by “Right,” and specifically the American Right. I know some people prefer the quadrant model of political ideology to the linear one. Libertarian to authoritarian on one axis and communism to free markets on the other. But, where’s the overlap between Hitler’s Germany and American conservatism?

Do law-and-order righties fall on the far right of the axis in opposition to the chaos-and-destruction (2020 summer of love) lefties? I don’t think law and order is all that authoritarian, at least in America. If laws are just and equally applied (increasingly not the case), that would appear to be in a sweet spot near the political middle.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Unemployed Guy’s Basement Selfie Video Crushes Fox News In Primetime Ratings.

THAT’S WHAT XI SAID! ‘The China Way:’ Biden Campaign Co-Chair Lavished Praise on China in Interview with CCP Propaganda Outlet.

Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chairman for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, heaped praise on China in an interview with Chinese state television, saying “doors opened” for his movie studio in the communist regime after he learned “the China way.”

Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, said in a 2017 interview with CGTN America, a subsidiary of the CCP’s propaganda department, that business in China had proved “extremely rewarding.” He praised China’s technological innovation as “way ahead” of other countries, and downplayed concerns about China’s reputation for censoring American movies.

Katzenberg’s friendly relationship with China could present a political liability for Biden, who has come under scrutiny for failing to stand up to Beijing and for his son Hunter’s dealings there. National security officials have warned that the Chinese government increasingly tries to influence American foreign policy through business leaders and other influencers outside government.

Flashback: Biden Sold Out America to China While Working for Hollywood:

“Some of you were there. Literally when by end of that lunch we had a handshake,” Biden boasted to the MPAA. “The next year the number of blockbuster foreign films showing in China has increased by over half and our share of the box office revenue has doubled — or your share of the box office revenue has doubled.”

“Keep me in mind for Chris [Dodd’s] assistant later,” he joked.

Biden understandably lost track of the difference between “your share” and “our share” because Hollywood has been a reliable fundraising machine for Biden. What was good for Hollywood was also good for Biden. Katzenberg got Oriental Dream Works, a $330-million joint venture with the PRC, and eventually hosted Biden’s first Southern California fundraiser which brought in $700K.

2012 was a big year for the adulterous nuptials of Hollywood and the Chinese Communist Party.

A few months after the meeting between Biden and Xi, China’s Wanda Group bought AMC Theaters for $2.6 billion. The Wanda Group, run by a billionaire Communist oligarch with close ties to regime officials, is working on a Communist theme park, and its investors allegedly include Xi’s sister. Beyond just owning the theaters, Wanda owns the Legendary Group which has a hand in a long list of movies from Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman, to Pokemon, along with the King Kong and Jurassic Park sequels.

The only reason Hollywood movies can play in China is because the Communist leadership directly profits from them and controls what goes into them, either directly through ownership, or by forcing the industry to submit scripts for the approval of its Communist censors. HUAC would be superfluous today. The big studios who make up the MPAA are all working for the Communists. And they’re proud of it.

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.