JONAH GOLDBERG: “They told me that if America elected Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right. I’m referring to Joe Biden and his pardon of Marcus Garvey.”

Fact check: Untrue.

When someone asked how anyone could consider Mussolini’s brutality a “good thing,” Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism and the cofounder of The New Republic, wrote that it was not “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.” That might explain some of his support for eugenics.

Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the 1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that, “We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different editions of Rogers’ work.)

The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order and gave color to his meetings.”

James later recanted this assessment as the full scope of Hitlerism made the comparison unfair.

Biden was always going to pardon Hunter and James Biden. Until someone else takes credit for them, I’m going to assume that removing the Churchill bust was Obama’s first in-joke upon beginning his de facto third term in office, and posthumously pardoning Garvey was his last.

OLD AND BUSTED: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness?

The article with the above headline is paywalled, but Greek PM Mitsotakis repeats the quote in this interview:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I have submitted this proposal together with Donald Tusk in a letter that I’ve sent to all of my colleagues. We need to do two things: we need to spend more at the national level -that, we will not escape. Greece is already spending more than 3% of its GDP on defence. We need to spend more both on the national level and on the European level, because at the end of the day, it’s our security that is threatened.

Asked whether he agreed with an earlier statement by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski that he feared Germany’s weakness more than its power, the Prime Minister replied:

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We cannot envision significant progress in the European Union and strengthening the European economy without a competitive Germany. So Germany needs to get its act together. There are structural issues related to the German economy, they’ve been well discussed in the German public debate. I think this is a time for bold action and more radical reforms. I’m convinced that from the discussions that I had, that Friedrich Merz has this agenda and knows exactly what the German economy needs.

Other areas where Germany “needs to get its act together” include this: Many Germans fear for safety after horrific crimes.

In a knife attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, a two-year-old boy and a forty-one-year-old man were killed in a park on Wednesday. Three more people were injured, among them two-year-old girl. A suspect has been arrested and identified as an Afghan national with a history of violence and psychiatric issues.

The horrific details of the incident were released by police and the Bavarian minister of the interior Joachim Herrmann shortly after and caused widespread outrage. The twenty-eight-year-old suspect reportedly targeted a particular boy, who was in the park with other children from his kindergarten group. He walked up to him and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. A bystander intervened and was also killed.

The suspect then stabbed a small girl in the neck three times before attacking another seventy-two-year-old man. A kindergarten teacher broke her arm as she tried to flee. The injured victims were taken to hospital and don’t appear to be in critical condition. Other bystanders and police chased down the perpetrator. He was arrested and taken into custody.

* * * * * * * *

The incident came just a month after the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg in which six people were killed and at least 299 wounded when a car plowed into the crowds at high speed. The driver was arrested on the scene and identified as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, who came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in 2006 and was known to the authorities for making terrorist threats.

The two attacks are not directly related, but they fall into a recent spate of incidents in which the suspects had claimed asylum in Germany and had then gone on to commit serious acts of violence. What many Germans will take from this is that the authorities were unable to stop any of the men from killing, injuring and terrorizing innocent people, including children.

Even Chancellor Olaf Scholz issued a sharply-worded statement that went much further than the usual expressions of empathy and promises to investigate the incident and punish the perpetrator. “That isn’t enough,” he wrote, adding that he was “fed up with such brutal acts occurring every few weeks in our country — committed by perpetrators who had originally come to us to seek protection. In light of this, misguided tolerance is completely inadequate. The authorities must investigate promptly why the assassin was still in Germany in the first place. From those findings consequences must follow — talk is not enough.”

Scholz’s opponent Friedrich Merz, the man most likely to become the German chancellor following the snap elections on February 23 also demanded action: “It can’t go on like this. We must restore law and order.”

Germany’s mainstream parties will be worried that the anger, frustration and fear triggered by this most recent attack will fan the flames of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) whose core issue is immigration. They are currently polling in second place on around a fifth of the vote, and have recently sharpened their manifesto further, embracing the idea of mass deportations of foreigners from Germany under the term “remigration,” which the party had previously dropped.

NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford rounds up coverage of Germany’s upcoming election next month and writes their choice is simple: Put Up/Tear Down that Wall.

Germany’s opposition leader Friedrich Merz is under fire for vowing strict border controls if he is elected chancellor, with the frontrunner citing a deadly knife attack that was allegedly carried out by a rejected asylum seeker as justification for a migration overhaul.

The leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on Thursday presented a five-point migration plan calling for, among other things, a “de facto entry ban” for all people without valid documents and permanent control of all of Germany’s borders.

Merz announced his plan a day after two people, including a 2-year-old boy, were killed and three others injured during an attack in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg.

The suspect, arrested shortly afterwards, is a 28-year-old Afghan with a history of psychiatric problems and violence who said over a month ago that he would leave Germany voluntarily.

Germany already has “temporary”  border controls in place (something permitted under the EU’s Schengen rules). Those are due to expire on March 15, although they can be extended under certain conditions. Merz has (correctly) described the EU’s internal border regime as “recognizably dysfunctional”, a view not shared by parties to his left. Merz, who has referred to Germany’s right to assert the primacy of German law (a heretical idea in the EU) is planning to press on:

“I refuse to recognize that the acts of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg are supposed to be the new normal in Germany,” he said. “Enough is enough. We are faced with the shambles of an asylum and immigration policy that has been misguided in Germany for 10 years.”

But Time magazine dubbed Angela Merkel “person of the year” in 2015, writing glowingly about her policy choices:

Germany would bail Greece out, on her strict terms. It would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it. And it would deploy troops abroad in the fight against ISIS. Germany has spent the past 70 years testing antidotes to its toxically nationalist, militarist, genocidal past. Merkel brandished a different set of values—humanity, generosity, tolerance—to demonstrate how Germany’s great strength could be used to save, rather than destroy. It is rare to see a leader in the process of shedding an old and haunting national identity. “If we now have to start apologizing for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations,” she said, “then that’s not my country.”

And so this time, the woman who trained as a quantum chemist did not run the tests and do the lab work; she made her stand. The blowback has come fast and from all sides. Donald Trump called Merkel “insane” and called the refugees “one of the great Trojan horses.” German protesters called her a traitor, a whore; her allies warned of a popular revolt, and her opponents warned of economic collapse and cultural suicide. The conservative Die Welt published a leaked intelligence report warning about the challenge of assimilating a million migrants: “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other people as well as a different understanding of society and law.” Her approval ratings dropped more than 20 points, even as she broadcast her faith in her people: “Wir schaffen das,” she has said over and over. “We can do this.”

I hope it was worth it for all concerned:

THE GREAT NAZI MORAL PANIC:

“Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant,” read a particularly Orwellian proclamation by the Orlando Sentinel.

Oh, please. We’ve seen this movie before. Musk is as guilty of throwing out the Sieg Heil as the Conservative Political Action Conference is of sneaking a Nazi rune into its stage design.

Remember that? In 2021, the events design company that created the stage for that year’s CPAC conference in Orlando, Florida, was compelled to respond to allegations that it intentionally designed the set to resemble an obscure rune embraced by the Nazis. “We had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did,” Design Foundry told Insider.

What the set designers failed to understand was that they were simply the latest targets in a very stupid and deliberately dishonest moral panic. Before the Nazi rune dustup, you had groups such as the New York Times warning about milk’s supposed ties to white supremacy (“Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk [and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed]”). You had entire news cycles dedicated to the allegedly dark meaning behind the “OK” hand sign, which began as an online in-joke aimed at the press’s notorious gullibility. You had reporters applying the white supremacy label to everything from the Betsy Ross flag to obscure tattoos to Hawaiian shirts to the House Mace to the “SPQR” acronym for the “Senate and People of Rome.” Donald Trump found himself compared to Benito Mussolini merely for waving from a White House balcony. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was accused of harboring white supremacy allegiances for flying the George Washington–commissioned Appeal to Heaven or Pine Tree flag outside his beach house in New Jersey. Natalism, working out and performing at Madison Square Garden are also Nazi-coded, according to American news media.

Perhaps the most insane moment in this long-running moral panic occurred in 2019 after the back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio on August 3. In the aftermath of the tragic events, Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until August 8. This was a victory for the Nazis, former FBI official and MSNBC regular Frank Figliuzzi warned at the time. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8. That is 8-8,” Figliuzzi said during an appearance on MSNBC.

He added, “The numbers 8-8 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movements. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and to them, the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ We’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk at 8-8. No one is thinking about this.”

There’s more. These are just a few brief examples from the past seven years.

The point is this: we’re clearly in the throes of a moral panic. There’s a devil under every doily, as they say.

Because this has been going for so long (much longer than seven years), Jonathan Turley dubs it: Nazispolozza: The Left’s Third Reich Mania Collapses into Comedy.

One of the least successful efforts of the left and many in the media this election was to paint Republican voters as “Nazis” hellbent on destroying democracy.

While once verboten as a political comparison, liberal politicians and pundits have developed something of a Nazi fetish, where every statement and gesture is declared a return of the Third Reich. It seems like each news event presents a Rorschach test where every inkblot looks like a Nazi.

That mania reached absurd, even comedic, levels with the attack on Elon Musk over an awkward gesture during the inauguration celebration.

An exuberant Musk told the crowd, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” As he gave those words, he placed his right hand on his chest and stretched his arm outward, his palm facing the floor. He then repeated the gesture before putting his hand on his chest again.

It was all done in a matter of seconds, but it was enough for the usual mob to erupt in faux outrage.

The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace — with only a momentary pause this week:

HOW IT STARTED*: New York Times health reporter: Wuhan lab leak coronavirus theory has ‘racist roots,’ isn’t ‘plausible.’

“A theory can have racist roots and still gather reasonable supporters along the way,” she wrote to a critic of her original point. “Doesn’t make the roots any less racist or the theory any more convincing, though.”

She later wrote that the notion the virus escaped from a lab was “possible” but not “plausible.”

“And almost impossible to disprove, meaning it will probably not go away till people lose interest,” she wrote.

Reached for comment by Fox News, she wrote, “I deleted it because it unleashed some incredibly nasty tweets and DMs. So please don’t write about it.”

—David Rutz, Fox News, May 21st, 2021.

How It’s Going: C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins.

—The New York Times today.

* Yes, we’re missing a crucial step in our “How It Started” headline: Don McNeil: Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn, Racist Slurs, Twitter and Mao: on Passing the Torch at The New York Times.

KRISTI NOEM CONFIRMED AS DHS SECRETARY:

It’s a massive upgrade from Alejandro Mayorkas to Kristi Noem, and now it’s official: the senate voted Saturday to confirm Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security by a 59-34 vote. (Occasionally sensible Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., voted for the nominee.) There is now a very real chance that the southern border will be secured, and that the government will take a more realistic approach to national security than it ever came close to doing during the long four years of Old Joe Biden’s misrule.

During her confirmation hearings last week, Noem, who has been governor of South Dakota since 2019, declared: “I was the first governor to send National Guard troops to Texas when they were being overwhelmed by an unprecedented border crisis. If confirmed as secretary, I will ensure that our exceptional, extraordinary border patrol agents have all the tools and resources and support they need to carry out their mission effectively.”

Contra POTUS DJT, to be perfectly honest, I have yet to feel at all under the weather over all of the winning so far this week.

THE MONSTER OF SOUTHPORT — AND HIS ENABLERS: Axel Rudakubana could have been stopped. Why wasn’t he?

To the end, he was a monster.

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana – the 18-year-old Brit who murdered three young girls, and tried to kill many more, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July – suddenly changed his pleas to guilty.

Today, we found out just how guilty, how depraved, how evil, he is as he was handed down a 52-year minimum sentence at Liverpool Crown Court – for murder, attempted murder, possession of terrorism materials and production of the biological toxin, ricin.

Having at least spared the victims and their families a lengthy trial, Rudakubana offered them a final insult. He had to be ejected from court for disrupting proceedings, screaming that he was unwell and needed medical attention. He killed defenceless kids, then couldn’t stomach facing their families. Utter scum.

He was 17 when he walked into the Hart Space studio in Southport last summer, pulling out his knife as the girls made friendship bracelets. His age at the time of the attack has spared him a formal ‘whole life order’ – which is reserved for the most hellish crimes, provided the perpetrator is over the age of 18. Nevertheless, the judge reassured a reeling public that Rudakubana would likely never be released from prison.

That felt like a welcome reminder that the system can, on occasion, deliver some semblance of justice, common sense and peace of mind, after a trial that exposed one catastrophic state failure after another.

* * * * * * * *

Whenever there is an ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘sensitive’ dimension to an alleged crime or potential perpetrator, officials become even more crippled. A state that allows child-rape gangs to proliferate for fear of stoking ‘community tensions’, or grants asylum to a convicted sex offender before feigning surprise when he acid attacks a refugee woman and her kids, can no longer claim to care about the safety of ordinary people.

Britain’s media invariably has a similar reaction as well:

An image that sums up the entire Liberal establishment of the West

— Polish Housewife (@HousewifePolish) January 25, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History. Is he defining the Zeitgeist, or merely riding it? You might as well ask the same question of Napoleon or Caesar.

A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?

Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.

There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.

Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”

The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been levelled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character”. Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley reportedly called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.

I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn to Horace Walpole for the first. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”.

In his interview with the Daily Wire, Puck News’ Dylan Byers noted the change in tone at CNN:

You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.

And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.

I hope their first term hysteria over Trump, compounded by four years of hiding Joe Biden’s senescence was worth it for all of the credibility the DNC-MSM lost: Nostalgia Time! Drew Holden Walks Down Memory Lane With the Media’s Hara-kiri on the Steele Dossier.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: 100 Hours That Shook the World.

GUESS WHAT L.A. OFFICIALS WERE WARNED ABOUT BEFORE THE FIRES. (So This Wasn’t ‘Misinformation’?)

Meanwhile, Trump makes Gavin Newsom an offer he can’t accept:

There’s already much gnashing of teeth by the DNC-MSM. Has Trump thought through what happens next when Newsom publicly loses it over this?

UPDATE: Prominent Kamala supporter is curiously angry about voter ID:

Actually, it is acceptable @mariashriver. When Obama conditioned federal funding for schools, including lunch for students, only to states and counties that followed his protocols of allowing non-gender bathrooms, I don’t recall you expressing such indignation. He prioritized… https://t.co/9ip99W99lm

— Sigal Chattah (@Chattah4Nevada) January 25, 2025

PETER HITCHENS: God forgive me, I was one of the millions of young men who wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here’s what the new film doesn’t tell you.

Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.

It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).

But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.

Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.

He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.

Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!

After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.

They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.

At UnHerd, David Samuels adds: How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke –he refused to be a Leftist prophet.  “In other words, as [James] Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.”

SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM: Trump administration withdraws FDA plan to ban menthol cigarettes.

FINALLY, TRUMP IS FORCING THE DNC-MSM TO COVER NORTH CAROLINA: Trump looks to North Carolina as he tries to contrast his leadership with Democrats.’

President Donald Trump on Friday is visiting North Carolina — a state he said “has been abandoned by the Democrats” as it rebuilds from Hurricane Helene’s flooding — with questions about disaster relief taking center stage in his first days back in office.

Trump will then travel to California, where wildfires have ravaged the Los Angeles area, as Republicans on Capitol Hill begin to navigate between conservatives’ desire for spending cuts and Trump’s pledges to help both places rebuild.

The trip is Trump’s first outside Washington since his inauguration on Monday.

By visiting North Carolina, a swing state he’s won three times, the president is seeking to draw clear contrasts with former President Joe Biden, whose administration’s management of the flooding he called “so bad,” and Democratic leaders in California, whose handling of the wildfires he has repeatedly lambasted.

In a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is “getting in the way of everything” in North Carolina, and — without explaining how — claimed that Democrats used the agency “not to help.”

Here you go, CNN: FEMA apologizes after failing to deliver promised trailers to Helene survivors in North Carolina.

And: FEMA worker Marn’i Washington breaks silence on not helping Trump-voting hurricane victims. “The FEMA boss who was fired after ordering volunteers not to approach homes displaying Trump signs in Florida after Hurricane Milton has insisted her edict ‘was not isolated’ and also happened in North Carolina.”

Meanwhile, Trump is letting hurricane victims speak at the podium during his press conference, something that would have been inconceivable with Biden and his phalanx of handlers:

President Trump has handed his press conference over to victims of Hurricane Helene and is asking them on national television to name the insurance companies that have stiffed them. Absolutely epic stuff. pic.twitter.com/ay9EtUiOsB

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) January 24, 2025

Related:

If you’re wondering why everyone in Western North Carolina is freaking out about Trump coming today…

… It is because MY KIDS SOCCER FIELD still looks like this 119 days after the hurricane

We have been ignored for months, now we are finally getting help.

TRUMP EFFECT!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/mMdWIHpiyt

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) January 24, 2025

CNN IS CUTTING HUNDREDS OF TV JOBS IN A DIGITAL PIVOT. Read the memo CEO Mark Thompson sent to staff.

• CNN said it would cut about 200 roles focused on its TV operations.

• The news organization also plans to hire about the same number in digital-focused positions.

• CEO Mark Thompson said last year that he wanted to “future-proof” CNN.

CNN, the cable-news giant owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said it would cut about 200 TV-focused roles as part of a digital pivot.

The company also said it would hire about the same number of staffers in digital-focused roles and aim to fill 100 of them in the coming months.

The cuts would affect about 6% of CNN’s workforce, though the new roles mean total head count is unlikely to be significantly affected.

WBD is providing $70 million in funding as part of a drive to reach $1 billion in digital revenue by 2030.

Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN, told staff in a memo on Thursday that he aimed to “shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

CNN also said it planned to introduce a streaming-news product accessible on devices in the US and elsewhere.

In October, CNN brought in a paywall, charging some of its most loyal readers $4 a month for access to digital content.

I think the Daily Wire is getting a bit over its skis with this headline, but even asking this question would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Is This The End Of CNN? An Interview With Puck News’ Dylan Byers.

John [Bickley]: There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?

Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. They had a fifth of what they had four years ago. So they went from 10 million to less than 2 million, in terms of viewers, which is drastic and reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.

In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.

And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.

Related: Coal miners become computer coders.

—CNN Business, April 22^nd, 2016.

JAMES CARVILLE: Biden ‘Has Nobody To Blame But Himself’ For Damaged Legacy.

Carville briefly mentioned Biden’s repeated claim that he could have beaten Trump in November if he’d remained in the race, and made it clear that he wasn’t buying it: “No one f***ing believes that at all!”

“And then fighting with Jill Biden and Alexandra Pelosi,” Carville continued. “I mean, just look, guy — you had a noble career. Your last act was terrible. Just get out of the way. The party’s moving on. I mean, they’re really moving on, and it’s very sad, but that’s just where we are. And he created this himself. He has nobody to blame but himself. Nobody.”

It’s a typically epic Carville rant, but also typically for Carville, rather disingenuous. Those who propped up Biden, virtually the whole of the Democratic Party, including their news media, should share in the blame for four years of deceiving the public. Actually, at least five, given that signs of Biden’s decline were quite evident on the 2020 campaign trail.

THE TRUMP SHUTTLE IS REBORN! ‘Deportation Flights Have Begun:’ Trump Administration Begins Returning Criminal Aliens to Home Countries.

The Trump administration is beginning to fly criminal illegal aliens out of the country after rounding them up as part of the long-promised mass deportation program.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Friday that deportation flights have started and shared two pictures of what appears to be group of illegal immigrants walking into a military aircraft.

“Deportation flights have begun,” Leavitt said on X.

“President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”

No word yet if excursions to Martha’s Vineyard will also be an option for what at least one Newsweek scribe has suddenly dubbed “unauthorized citizens:”

UPDATE: Trump’s ICE nabs child sex offenders among 530+ illegal immigrants caught in single day.

Jesse Kelly tweets, “The point has been made by others but just consider for a second that ICE is snatching up all these animals within 72 hours of Trump taking office. Meaning Biden knew exactly where all these people were and they let these barbarians stay here to prey on you. Democrats are evil.”

Well, there certainly were an “unexpected” number of “crises by design” during the past four years.

(Classical reference in headline.)

BARACK OBAMA SMILES: Tennessee Republican proposes amendment to allow Trump to serve third term.

FREED ISRAELI HOSTAGES SAY THEY WERE HELD IN UN CAMP.

Israeli hostages released as part of the recent ceasefire with Hamas have claimed they were held in a U.N. camp in Gaza.

Hostages Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released from Hamas custody on Sunday, reported that they had been held in a U.N. refugee camp at some point during their captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13. Details were not given as to what camps they were held in, when, or for how long.

The revelation is the latest blow to the position of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has faced attacks against its credibility throughout the war in Gaza.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the UNRWA for comment.

To be fair, this all sounds pretty on-brand for the UN.

CARIBBEAN CATASTROPHE: AVOIDING THE HAITI FALLOUT. The United States cannot allow inaction to create a failed state.

President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination on July 7, 2021, upended the nation, exacerbating the crisis that began in July 2018 with a furious outbreak of protests over fuel prices. In the aftermath, ongoing protests coincided with gang warfare to overwhelm the country. The capital of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas fell, for the most part, into the hands of gangs. Warlord Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who leads the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, now dominates most of Haiti’s capital in his bid to topple the government.

The Haitian government risks completely losing control of the country. Widespread attacks on institutions and infrastructure paralyze Haiti. Gangs assault police stations, hospitals, ports, prisons, and even airports. In March 2024, gangs besieged prisons to release thousands of inmates and struck the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, preventing the acting prime minister, Ariel Henry, from returning after a visit to Kenya. With local airports not spared from the havoc, the Federal Aviation Administration placed a ban on US flights to Haiti until March 2025 because gangs continue to fire upon commercial aircraft.

Described as “apocalyptic” by William O’Neill, whom the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed its expert on Haiti, the country has suffered thousands of homicides as well as kidnappings, with rape a common occurrence. In addition to the violence, Haitians experience a constant lack of food, shelter, water, and medical services. All the necessities of a functioning state remain in disrepair. The humanitarian catastrophe has displaced more than five hundred thousand Haitians, a majority of whom are seeking entry into the United States, legally or not. More than three hundred thousand Haitians have been granted safe haven through the Temporary Protected Status program, as the Biden administration expanded program coverage last summer.

The political instability shows no sign of abating.

Rubbish — Conan O’Brien assures me that Haiti is the jewel of the Caribbean:

BOOMITY! Brent Bozell Named Head of US Global Media, Including VOA, Radio Free Europe…:

Few of you could recognize the name ‘U.S. Agency for Global Media,” but you surely know their products. Don’t feel bad for not knowing the specifics of the agency, by the way. I couldn’t have named it until I looked it up. Here are the names you do know:

• Voice of America
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Martí)
• Radio Free Asia
• Middle East Broadcasting Networks

The agency also runs the Open Technology Fund, which is supposed to enable free speech in places where it is not allowed. Imagine how useful that wasn’t under Joe Biden and how useful it will become under the new Trump administration. I suggest targeting Western Europe first, since free speech is on the wane there.

This will be Augean Stables territory for Bozell: Voice Of America Aids Hamas Terrorists By Refusing To Call Them That.

Curiously enough, Voice of America is already promising to push back against Trump’s pro-American agenda: What will happen to Voice of America in Trump’s second term?

DEDICATED FOLLOWERS OF THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, THEN AND NOW: BMW trolled after announcing it’s ‘no longer posting’ on X: ‘Becoming More Woke.’

German luxury car maker BMW was trolled on Thursday after its UK unit abruptly announcing that it was “no longer posting” on X — a move attributed by many users as a bizarre way to protest the social media site’s owner Elon Musk.

Musk has faced scrutiny this week after twice extending his arm in an awkward gesture that critics called a “Nazi salute” during an appearance at President Trump’s inauguration.

“We’re no longer posting on X,” BMW UK wrote on its official X account — without providing a reason for its decision.

“Don’t worry though, our Customer Support team is still here if you need us. You can also see all the latest BMW news by following us on Facebook and Instagram at BMWUK.”

The company was quickly lambasted by X users, who pointed to BMW’s own fraught history with Nazi Germany.

QED:

Still though, today was a major accomplishment for the German carmaker and its customers:

Related: “You’re not one of these salute truthers, are you?” Scott Jennings CLOWNS NYT Reporter Over Dumb Elon Salute Hoax.

THIS IS THE WAY: Trump border czar Tom Homan’s savage five-word response to furious Haitian migrant who’s ‘refusing’ to leave US.

President Trump’s hardline border czar Tom Homan savagely shot down a viral rant by a Haitian migrant who screamed ‘I’m not going back to Haiti’ while being detained.

‘Well, he’s wrong,’ Homan shot back in an appearance on Fox News. ‘He’s going back to Haiti.’

Footage of the Haitian migrant resisting his deportation made the rounds on social media Thursday as bystanders captured the moment he was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement during a deportation raid.

The migrant, who reportedly has a lengthy criminal record, shouted ‘f*** Trump, Biden forever!’ as he was hauled into custody.

It’s taken us since 2020 to find him, but finally, a man willing to go on camera and issue a full-throated, passionate support of Joe Biden!

NEW: Haitian man says “F*ck Trump, Biden forever,” gets arrested by ICE’s elite Boston unit to be deported.

The ultimate FAFO.

The arrest was part of a Boston raid on the “worst of the worst” criminal illegal aliens, as reported by @BillMelugin_.

“It's a frigid five degrees in… pic.twitter.com/83XgPMgNlt

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 23, 2025

Related: Ron DeSantis Epically Schools Reporter for Calling Illegals ‘Undocumented.’

METAPHOR ALERT: Biden hit by blistering final insult from Google’s search engine after Trump takes office.

‘WTF is up with that s**? I know the orange meglomaniac [sic] you want to appease wants to erase him, but you’re losing ALL credibility here.’

Many liberals pointed out that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was at Trump’s inaugural celebrations on Monday.

‘You would think since Google sent an employee to celebrate the inauguration, they could get this one right,’ wrote one X user.

The Google error upset so many that the issue was trending on the BlueSky app, where many liberals have fled to after disavowing X because of its Trump-loving owner Elon Musk.

A Google spokesperson told DailyMail.com on Thursday that ‘There was a brief data error in our knowledge graph. We identified the root cause and resolved it quickly.’

Google fixed the issue by Thursday morning, as Biden is now included in the results for the search ‘US presidents in order.’

Given that Biden was simply an MIA figurehead for four years while a group of Obama retreads ran the country, Google’s algorithm got it right the first time:

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: ‘Don’t Write About the Laptop, Don’t Talk About the Laptop:’ Ace Reporters Claim Politico Killed Negative Biden Stories.

SNOPES KNOWS ELON MUSK DIDN’T GIVE NAZI SALUTE, WON’T DEBUNK HOAX:

Even Snopes, which fancies itself an objective fact-checker, refused to debunk the claim that Musk gave a Nazi salute.

During his brief speech — available in full on YouTube — Musk said to the crowd gathered in honor of Trump’s victory, “And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.” He then briskly extended his right hand from his heart to the crowd in front of him. He repeated the gesture for the people behind him. Then, in a moment omitted from the users’ videos, he said, placing his hand over his heart, “Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.”

[…]

We emphasize that as of this writing, Musk has not explained the gesture, nor can we read his mind to learn precisely what he intended by it. It’s possible it was a purposeful Nazi salute; it could also have been entirely innocent. The available evidence is too scant to draw a solid conclusion.

While Snopes wouldn’t debunk it, despite clearly recognizing the gesture was not a Nazi salute, the Anti-Defamation League did debunk it.

This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.

It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on…

— ADL (@ADL) January 20, 2025

It’s really sick that at a time when the mainstream media has been raising alarm bells about disinformation, they continue to actively engage in it to serve their agenda.

Snopes will get around to debunking this hoax sometime at the tail end of JD Vance’s first term in the Oval Office — that’s how long it took them to debunk the “fine people on both sides” hoax from 2017.

In the meantime, as Kurt Schlichter writes: Elon Musk Needs to Sue Everybody.

FIRE UP THE MEMORY HOLE: After These Details, the Antioch High School Shooting Is Going to Get Suffocated by the Media.

Pages of writings from the alleged shooter at Antioch High School showed a layout of the school, the weapons he wanted to use and his thoughts about why he wanted to commit a shooting.

The Metro Nashville Police Department identified the shooter as Solomon Henderson, 17. He is accused of killing Josselin Corea Escalante, 16. MNPD Chief John Drake said in an afternoon press conference that there were materials on the internet the department was looking into as part of the investigation.

[…]

In his writings obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, Henderson showed a layout of Antioch High School, photos of a handgun, a lock picking kit and cartridges to load the handgun. He wanted to livestream his attack in the cafeteria. The writings were connected to a social media account that was purportedly Henderson’s. He posted the writings on the account before the shooting in the cafeteria.

In one of his first sentences, Henderson wrote he “was ashamed to be Black.” He was anti-Semitic in his writings and posted a flyer from the Goyim Defense League, which is a neo-Nazi white supremacy group that visited Nashville this summer.

[…]

His writings showed that he had been thinking about violence for a few months. He wrote his final remarks on Nov. 18.

“I was so miserable. I wanted to kill myself. I just couldn’t take anymore. I am a worthless subhuman, a living breathing disgrace. All my (in real life) friends outgrew me act like they didn’t f—ing know me. Being me was so f—ing humiliating. That’s why I spend all day dissociating.”

Henderson’s writings also showed a photo of The Covenant School shooter who died in 2023 after attacking the private Christian school. Three children and three staff people died that day in addition to the shooter.

He wrote he didn’t intend to kill law enforcement and that he didn’t consider himself the victim of bullying.

We’ll keep you updated, but black Nazis cannot be weaponized to attack Trump or push a gun control narrative, so expect this story to once again be buried by the media.

Also, note this detail: Antioch school shooting raises questions on lack of metal detectors in Metro Schools.

Metro Nashville Schools (MNPS) Director Adrian Battle has resisted metal detectors in Nashville schools, and even after today’s tragedy, she is still skeptical of their effectiveness.

“I know there are questions about whether additional steps like stationary metal detectors should be employed. While past research has shown they have had limitations and unintended consequences, we will continue to explore emerging technologies and strategies to strengthen school safety,” said Battle.

Former school board member Fran Bush spent two years fighting for metal detectors and fighting with the MNPS director. She says today never should have happened.

* * * * * * * * *

But see what Director Battle had to say on metal detectors one more time:

“While past research has shown they have had limitations and unintended consequences.”

We didn’t get a chance to ask her what she meant by “limitations” or “unintended consequences” and we are not the only ones who want her to explain herself further.

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.