OKAY, GROOMERS: North Carolina preschool uses LGBT flashcards depicting a pregnant man to teach kids colors.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Here’s What the Woke Outrage Mob Gets Wrong About Ricky Gervais’s New Special. The comedian shows transgender people the respect and equality that woke paternalism denies them.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Confused Old Man Shouts at Navy Grads That Putin Wants to ‘Findalize’ Europe. “Biden appears to be the first person ever to use the word ‘Findalize.’ He was actually trying to say that Putin was trying to Finlandize Europe, that is, make it a neutral zone between the U.S. and Russia. But the Big Guy couldn’t quite manage to get ‘Finlandize’ out, so we got ‘Findalize,’ and by this point, the WhiteHouse.gov transcriber, who must get combat pay when it comes time to transcribe a Biden speech, had apparently given up in despair, as the transcript leaves ‘Findalize’ there without even attempting to clear up what Old Joe was actually trying to say.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: His Name Was Seth Smith.

There is no greater injustice in economics than Seth Smith; just hearing his name makes me boil with anger and depression and nihilism. It is so sad. Now that his killer’s court case came to a conclusion this week, and we have ostensibly obtained some semblance of closure, I am sadder than ever.

Seth Smith was a double major in economics and history at UC Berkeley. He was only 19 but a third-year student, scheduled to graduate next spring at the age of 20… he must have been very smart. He was a beautiful and brilliant young guy who had everything going for him. His dream was to attend graduate school at the London School of Economics.

At ~10 pm on June 15th, 2020 — almost exactly two years ago — Seth went out for a walk. On this walk he was shot in the back of the head, execution-style. His body was found half an hour later by a man walking his dog, sprawled on his back with one of his earbuds still in his ear, indicating he was listening to music. Here is a picture of the bus stop where Seth’s body was found.

Unfortunately for Seth, nobody cared about his murder, except for his mom, who was tweeting about it. It was not a national news story.

* * * * * * * *

Here is how Berkeley administrators reacted to Seth’s death, in probably the most evil fashion I could imagine. Let’s linger on this statement for a bit because it deserves a rant of its own.

Many of you may have had a close relationship with Seth and are feeling a sense of loss and disbelief.

Others, like many of us, are experiencing stress, grief and anxiety related to the coronavirus pandemic and the recent murders of George Floyd, Riah Milton, and other Black Americans.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ
Chancellor

Stephen C. Sutton
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs

Sunny Lee
Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students”

First and foremost: they made Seth Smith an “also-ran” in his own obituary… they may as well have acknowledged that people should be grieving over climate change or the plight of indigenous women. This email says nothing about the search for the murderer, about the cooperation with authorities or any important information that may make students feel more secure. Instead they chose to blithely pander to partisan twitter talking points. What a disgrace. When confronted by a producer for Fox News, Berkeley admins sassily doubled down on their virtue signaling.

Read the whole thing.

“DEMOCRATS BEFORE AND AFTER SEEING POLLS:”

Flashback: Obama pollster to Dems: ‘Latinx’ is still not a thing despite your wokest efforts. “This is hardly the first poll to show that “Latinx” is not just a fringe construct but actively annoying to Hispanic voters. Bendixen & Amandi pollster Fernand Amandi wonders why Democrats keep insisting on promoting its usage. . . . The answer is simple — Democrats have invested themselves far more into the faculty lounge and activist donor base than they have with Hispanic voters. This isn’t the only reason why Hispanics are moving to the GOP in the last couple of cycles, but this disconnect certainly doesn’t help matters.”

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Uvalde police response proves need to abolish the police, says MSNBC guest.

During the latest episode of MSNBC’s The Cross Connection with Tiffany Cross on Saturday, leftist police reform activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham claimed the recent Texas school shooting is further proof that America must abolish the police.

Cunningham told Cross she believed that law enforcement’s mistakes during the Uvalde, Texas school shooting – namely, reports that officers waited outside the classroom as the shooter committed his massacre – means policing as it currently stands needs to be gutted.

For the guest commentator, the Uvalde shooting essentially bolstered the Black Lives Matter “defund the police” narrative progressives adopted in the wake of the death of George Floyd in May 2020.

Cunningham stated, “I think, sadly, Uvalde is a terrible and tragic example of just how – not incompetent – but problematic the entire institution is.”

She then combined Black Lives Matter rhetoric with the Uvalde shooting to construct her new anti-police narrative. “If the police kill, taze and maim unarmed people because they fear for their lives and they won’t stop armed people from slaughtering children, then clearly the institution itself is not sound,” she declared.

Fine, let’s go with plan B: Major New Research on School Safety: Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns haven’t seen school shootings during school hours.

HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The escape from New York is accelerating.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: This week a West Virginia woman legally carrying a handgun stopped a mass shooter with an AR-15 dead in his tracks.

HERE’S HOW WE KNOW GUNS AREN’T THE ROOT CAUSE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS:

I’m not about to fall into the trap of pretending the past was somehow better simply because it was the past. I recognize that things weren’t necessarily better back then. However, it’s ridiculous to believe that nothing has changed, either.

What was the rare exception back in my day is now an all-too-common occurrence, despite the fact that we had more ready access to firearms at schools back then. It seems that something else has happened, something that has fundamentally changed how people think and act. Clearly, it’s not just the mere presence of guns in American life that’s driving our modern problem. We had guns before we had this sickness.

Lawmakers and activists would do well to try and get to the bottom of this deeper rot, rather than blaming firearms. Then we might actually be able to make a meaningful reduction in these horrific atrocities.

As Christian Adams wrote in 2018: Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened.

What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.

Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.

Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.

So it must be something else.

Those who have been so busy destroying the moral backstops in our culture won’t want to have this conversation. They’ll do what they do — mock the truth.

There was a time in America, before the Snowflakes, when any adult on the block could reprimand a neighborhood kid who was out of line without fear.

Even thirty years ago, the culture still had invisible restraints developed over centuries. Those restraints, those leveling commonalities, were the target of a half-century of attack by the freewheeling counterculture that has now become the dominant replacement culture.

Hollywood made fun of these restraints in films too numerous to list.

The sixties mantra “don’t trust anyone over thirty” has become a billion-dollar industry devoted to the child always being right — a sometimes deeply medicated brat who disrupts the classroom or escapes what used to be resolved with a paddling.

Instead of telling the kid to quit kicking the back of the seat on a plane, we buy seat guards to protect the seat.

If you think it’s bad now, just wait until the generation whose babysitter is an iPhone is in high school. You can hardly walk around Walmart these days without tripping over a toddler in a trance, staring at a screen.

The high school kids who shot rifles in school in 1985 were taught right and wrong. They were taught what to do with their rifle in school, and what not to do. If they got out of line, all the other students and the coach would have come down on them hard. There were no safe spaces, and that was a good thing.

Flash-forward to today: Please don’t judge him, he had his reasons, says mother of Texas school shooter.

As a wise woman once wrote,  “It is the fear best expressed in the precept, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’ But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.

“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”

If those conditions sound familiar, it’s because they are. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years—driven in part by the war in Ukraine, rising oil prices, and an unprecedented amount of federal spending—and it risks completely sinking Biden’s presidency just as they sank Carter’s.

Yet the Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022 might as well be two different people, with the latter challenging economic orthodoxy and alleging that new entitlements and stimulus in the form of Build Back Better will actually bring consumer prices down. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden introduced bills to slash tens of millions of dollars from what believed were ineffective and useless federal agencies and insisted the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare was massive spending cuts. His 180-degree change reflects the leftward lurch of a Democratic Party and White House staffed with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to convince a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he once understood about how the economy worked was completely wrong.

* * * * * * * *

After reviewing then-president Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden expressly attacked the White House for not doing enough to address high gas prices and for its tax hikes on corporations, arguing there were better ways to cool demand. During a Senate hearing in 1974, Biden chastised liberals for forgetting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us … [which] range from lobsters to oil.”

Although Biden called for some tax hikes on the margins, his plan to curb inflation was defined mostly by spending cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden took out a full-page advertisement in the News Journal, one of the largest newspapers in his home state of Delaware, to promote his “sunset bill” that would force “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years … [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”

“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”

Today of course, spurred on by his far left base, Biden sings a quite different tune, proclaiming that inflation-hawk “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” and leading others to wonder: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER CALIFORNIA DROUGHT: California is about to begin the nation’s largest dam removal project. Here’s what it means for wildlife.

After decades of negotiation, the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is expected to begin in California’s far north next year.

The first of four aging dams on the Klamath River, the 250-mile waterway that originates in southern Oregon’s towering Cascades and empties along the rugged Northern California coast, is on track to come down in fall 2023. Two others nearby and one across the state line will follow.

DON’T GET COCKY: Red Tsunami Watch: Cook Political Report Shifts 10 Races Toward the GOP.

ROGER SIMON: Why We Are Praying for John Durham.

We humble citizens, or “normals” as Kurt Schlichter puts it, have been living under a government in which Sussmann—although just another $800-an-hour (from testimony) Beltway lawyer—is a useful symbol. Lying is the way of the Washington Deep State and its most powerful. To them, it’s almost like breathing. Lying for their own benefit and those of their friends are the respirators from which they will never get off.

In March, the New York Post called many of these individuals to account in their editorial “Spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story.”

“They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.

“But the 51 former ‘intelligence’ officials who cast doubt on the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage repeatedly has been shown to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.

“The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper—a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress—signed a letter saying that the laptop ‘has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”

While not directly in Durham’s purview—although who knows, since so much these days is interconnected—this is the kind of thing the special counsel may be calling to America’s, and the world’s, attention.

It’s literally in his hands to steer our ship of state back to the rule of law. If not him, who? Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz walked up to the edge of truth in his report and then did an about-face before making the obvious conclusions, as if concerned that his Deep State card would be revoked.

The legacy media, so many of whom are deeply implicated in these lies themselves (I worked with some of them and can’t even be near them now, let alone talk to them), will do everything they can to hide or obfuscate this information.

It’s our job, every one of us, to disseminate it—factually and with a minimum of rancor—as widely as possible as the truth emerges.

We can also pray for Durham. Another verse from Mahalia won’t hurt.

Earlier: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now?

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Colliding Narratives Edition.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Cargo Freeway Expansion Canceled in L.A. Due to ‘Racist’ Roads.

The cancellation means that the 710 will remain congested, leaving trucks idling on the road longer, creating more pollution than they would if they were able to travel consistently at the optimum, efficient speed between 45 and 65 miles per hour.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

* * * * * * * *

The 710 Freeway is the main artery for the nation’s largest port complex, through which nearly a third of the nation’s imported goods move. Big rigs carrying a crush of goods — as varied as electronics, auto parts and shoes — often clog the road. Activists call it the diesel death zone, but Americans with their appetite for click-shopping, have come to rely on the web of warehouses and deliveries that the port is built around.

The “Americans with their appetite for click-shopping” is a nice sneer by the L.A. Times, doing their damndest to put the best spin on the Biden administration’s supply chain woes, in much the same way they dubbed unemployment during the administration led by Biden’s former boss as “funemployment:” “For the ‘funemployed,’ unemployment is welcome!” — after all, it’s a chance to “Keep rockin’”!

Earlier:

● CNN’s April Ryan asks Pete Buttigieg to address the ‘racism’ built into our roadways.
● Washington Post fact-check admits it was wrong for ‘knee jerked’ defense of Buttigieg’s racist bridge comments.

IT’S AN IDEA THAT’S SO CRAZY FOR A STREAMING SERVICE, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Liz Wolfe of Reason: Netflix Airs Ricky Gervais’ Controversial Standup, Chooses Actual Entertaining Over Woke Pandering.

“Does Netflix even care that Ricky Gervais’s SuperNature is rife with transphobic TERF ideology?” asks Aja Romano this week at Vox. The answer seems to finally be nope; comedy that pokes fun at extremely online trans activists can in fact be both widely amusing and a moneymaker. And Netflix is in the entertainment business, for which both of those components are important. “We program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company said in a policy update earlier this month. “Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

Ergo, Romano argues, the company is “just fine inflicting bigoted hateful rhetoric on its subscribers” and “with the subsequent real-world harm that comes from amplifying such views.”

“At this point, Netflix—the comedy division, if not the entire company—is not just passively supporting transphobic creators, but seem to be actively courting a transphobic audience,” adds The A.V. Club‘s Mary Kate Carr. “The platform’s choice to release this special now,” writes Romano, “during a wave of unprecedented anti-trans legislation, is unconscionable.”

These critics are wrong. The company is not “inflicting” hateful rhetoric on its subscribers; one must consensually opt in to watch it. The “real-world harm” argument goes unsubstantiated yet remains the frequent rallying cry used by many leftists to argue for deplatforming. Recall, for example, the newsroom protest by New York Times staffers, who argued en masse that the paper running an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) calling for military action to pacify domestic protests and riots was putting black staffers’ lives in danger.

But does any evidence suggest that, without Gervais releasing comedy specials, Republican legislators would never have had the idea to pass trans bathroom bills? Or that the people who laugh at jokes about how annoying some radical trans activists are on Twitter are the same people who commit violent acts against trans people?

As one of Steven Crowder’s co-bloggers notes regarding another comedian: Bill Burr’s Specific Reason for Refusing to Apologize to Outrage Mobs Proves Why He’s the Best to Do It.

And his reason why shows why he’s one of the best. If he bends a knee to the mob, it makes it harder for all other comedians.

“I refuse to apologize to anyone that’s upset that they heard a joke at a show they weren’t at […] I’m not a believer in the mob mentality, and I’m not going to apologize just because it’s not worth it. Because then all I do is give that strength, then some other comic’s gonna have to deal with it so.”

I watched Gervais’ special earlier this week. I didn’t find the writing to be at Dave Chappelle’s level, but it was very, very funny, with shotgun blasts at everybody. More from Wolfe:

[A joke] doesn’t always land; you may not think masturbation and 9/11 combine for comedic payoff quite as well as Louis C.K. does. But you sure as hell have to give comics space to try, and audiences the opportunity to seek reprieve from the world’s horrors, delivered magnanimously to us by the funny people.

This is exactly what Netflix aims to do and why more than 200 million people pay for it, seemingly against the wishes of the scolds at Vox, who sanctimoniously announced to no one in particular that they’ll “refrain from clapping” for Gervais’ standup. As if anyone had asked!

Or to put it another way:

OUT ON A LIMB: Biden’s energy policy is sending us toward recession.

With the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend upon us, the fast-rising cost of gasoline is getting a lot of attention.

Last week, gasoline rose above $4 a gallon in all fifty states. That’s the first time that has happened. Some are predicting gas could reach $6 a gallon this summer. If that comes to pass, the average American family could see a major impact on their budgets.

(It might be noted as well, that the price of home heating oil has nearly doubled this year. If that continues, the economic impact next winter, especially in the northeast, where a high percentage of homes are heated by oil, will be considerable.)

The threat of a recession is rising thanks to fuel shortages.

Why has the price of gasoline risen so far so fast? Easy: the Biden administration, driven by the ideological fantasy of a green-energy future, has hampered domestic production and exploration at every turn.

How bad has it gotten? Even CNN has noticed, John Nolte writes: CNN Admits ‘It’s Time to Prepare for a Recession.’

Anyway, the news we’re heading into a recession is old news. The real news here is this…

Biden has so mishandled the economy, so devastated America with his disastrous domestic policies, that not even CNN can pretend it’s not happening or happy-talk past that fact.

But this was inevitable.

Why?

Because this is the inevitable outcome of leftism.

Obamacare exploded our health costs.

Left-wing environmental policies (based on what everyone knows is a hoax) ensure Americans do not have enough energy, water, or food.

Left-wing energy policies, by design, explode the cost of energy.

Left-wing regulations cripple the private sector.

Higher taxes slow the economy.

Profligate spending creates inflation.

Social Justice pours violent criminals into the streets.

Or as Glenn asks in his latest New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own actions? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”

GLAD TO SEE THE MLB FINALLY PROTESTING JOE BIDEN: In Wake Of Uvalde Shooting, San Francisco Giants Manager Boycotting National Anthem Until He Feels Better About Direction Of America.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Matt Taibbi: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation?

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

Read the whole thing. As David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse: 

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

President DeSantis is going to be doing a lot of housecleaning when he takes office.

Flashback: Deep State, Deep Trouble — America’s woke generals and the Military-Industrial Complex must be purged to save the nation.

JIM TREACHER: President Biden Must Disarm the Secret Service Immediately. “And that’s where the lie collapses on itself. Nobody is stupid or crazy enough to believe disarming the Secret Service would make the president more safe. Getting rid of his armed security would be tantamount to suicide. If the president of the United States has the right to protect his own life with as many guns as it takes, why don’t the rest of us? Either the United States Constitution applies to all Americans or it doesn’t. Which is it? Hello? Anybody? I just want one lib to answer any of these questions. Tell us why we should be defenseless against attackers, but our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters get to have as many guns as they want.”

PARKLAND PART II:

● Officers Tried to Negotiate With Uvalde Shooter While He Was Barricaded in School With Children, Officials Say.

● Timeline Shifts AGAIN in Uvalde School Shooting. “It’s not unusual to see new facts emerge and shifting timelines in the wake of such a horrific attack. The fog of war makes it difficult to piece together a moment-by-moment account of how a situation unfolded. It will likely take weeks or even months before we know how things really transpired. Nevertheless, the information we do have raises questions about the police response to the shooting.”

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:

The ghost of William S. Burroughs smiles.

DON SURBER: Twitter is more evil than we imagined.

Maybe the best thing Elon Musk can do is shut Twitter down once he owns it.

In the name of security, Twitter demanded more personal information from users. They complied because they wanted their security protected, right? Twitter then sold this data to advertisers.

This was so bad that the evil Biden administration objected.

NPR reported, “Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million fine after federal law enforcement officials accused the social media company of illegally using peoples’ personal data over six years to help sell targeted advertisements.

“In court documents made public on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice say Twitter violated a 2011 agreement with regulators in which the company vowed to not use information gathered for security purposes, like users’ phone numbers and email addresses, to help advertisers target people with ads.

“Federal investigators say Twitter broke that promise.”

That’s as shocking as learning there is no Santa.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

THE WINTER SOLDIER IN WINTER: Newly obtained memo shows John Kerry was conducting ‘secret’ meetings with Iran during the Trump administration.

(Classical reference in headline.)

OUT ON A LIMB: Harvard Poll Shows Majorities Believe Biden Is Too Old and Not ‘Mentally Fit.’