We know the withered and sclerotic Biden has no idea about much of what was issued under his name. Does AOC, age 35, remember how many things her Green Nude Eel were going to ban in 2019?
ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.
The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific Americansaid back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.
The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.
How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.
Some books are destined to be bestsellers. Others are destined to end up on a cargo plane to Africa next to pallets of T-shirts celebrating would-be Super Bowl champions and Hillary Clinton’s “herstoric” victory. Indeed, sometimes it all comes down to which candidate wins the big election. Consider the recently published book of photographs commemorating Kamala Harris and her relentlessly “joyful” campaign for president. Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House was churned out in just six weeks (after extending the original deadline of four) by journalist Kevin Merida and photo historian Deborah Willis of New York University. It was never going to be a bestseller for a single reason: Harris was never going to win.
It was worth a shot. The word “auspicious” seems like an unfortunate choice in retrospect. The authors and their publisher, Simon & Schuster, presumably needed a title that would work in the highly unlikely (but theoretically possible) event that Harris was elected president. The brief introduction is sufficiently vague, applauding Harris for proving “the unthinkable could happen” and “with scant time to prepare for such an epic challenge, breath[ing] hope into a deeply divided America, and turning a moribund race for the presidency into a contest stocked with optimism and possibility.” She was “poised to win.”
The photos are fine to look at. For the obnoxious liberal, this book would make a serviceable addition to any coffee table or toilet tank. But it’s Merida’s formidable prose, though relatively scant, that shines through in this extraordinary (and at times utterly bonkers) work of political hagiography, and allows normal Americans to glimpse into a bizarre alternate reality that bears little resemblance to our own. “Over a lightning-swift 107 days, Kamala Harris completely rewrote the American political playbook,” Merida writes with unrelenting passion. “She took her perpetually underestimated self and sprinted across the 2024 presidential campaign landscape, giving voice to aspiration and ambition, bringing confidence to little girls, championing small businesses as part of her economic vision. … She even ordered a slice of chocolate caramel cake—caramel’s her favorite—at Dottie’s Market in Savannah along the way.”
Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times*, commends Harris on her successful quest to “popularize joy: A simple, sweet, infectious noun that became a kind of campaign anthem to rally around. The antidote to fear and hopelessness, and just maybe the inception of a saner kind of politics. The politics of decency.”
Strength through joy! Speaking of which, the book makes an excellent double-feature with this (also real) relic of the 2020 campaign and the vigorous youthful muscular administration it foretold:
Adrien Brody said he hopes his new film The Brutalist can “reawaken” empathy for immigrants.
The Oscar-tipped drama focusses on Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States.
Brody, 51, said he took inspiration for the role from his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, whose family emigrated to the United States from Budapest in 1958 after the Hungarian Revolution.
“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” he told the Sunday Times.
“They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation.
“I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”
Judging by the reviews of the three hour, 35 minute film, it doesn’t sound like its screenwriters carry around much empathy for America itself in their hearts: The Brutalist:The Raw Concrete of America.
The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States…Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps.
In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world….) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald.
As Charlie Kirk was quoted as saying, “America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave. That’s how you know you live in a great country.”
“Six key people protected the president,” the New York Times revealed. “Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.”
All of them are deeply devoted to Mr. Biden. All are adept at navigating his quick temper. All enjoy proximity to the most powerful office in American politics.
And all were convinced that he was the only one who could beat Mr. Trump.
Then there was Mr. Biden himself, whose pursuit of the White House had been the family’s project for nearly 40 years. Finally elected on his third try, Mr. Biden suggested that he would be a transition president. But his pride, plus a string of legislative accomplishments and a strong showing in the 2022 midterms, drove him to seek re-election and set out on a quixotic mission to prove his vitality.
Mr. Biden told USA Today that he could have defeated Mr. Trump if he had stayed in the race. But when he departs the White House on Monday, history will remember him as the man who beat Mr. Trump, then paved the way for his return.
Though the actual number is much bigger than six. From Larry Sabato on the left, to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson on the right, to the virtually the entirety of the “cheap fake” DNC-MSM, a lot of people were apparently sufficiently scared of the Bad Orange Man to maintain their omerta and thus prop up Biden as a nominal figurehead for as long as possible.
As noted by CNN, the amendment was passed by Congress in 1972, but during the individual state ratification process (38 states need to approve), the amendment “sat stagnant for decades” and its deadline came and went.
During that time five states withdrew their ratifications.
Virginia was the final state to ratify the amendment in 2020, which occurred almost 40 years after the ratification deadline set by Congress.
According to the Associated Press, “Democrats and activists have long pressed to consider the amendment as ratified,” but President Biden waited until three days before he leaves office to act on it.
Georgetown Law School posted a congratulatory message Friday on X regarding Professor Victoria Nourse — for “her decades of hard work advocating on behalf of women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment which Pres. Biden this morning said should be considered the law of the land.”
In a letter dated January 16, Nourse (pictured)wrote “Throughout his career in public office, Joe Biden has honored his oath to uphold the Constitution and defend the rights of women. President Biden’s carefully considered decision to recognize the Equal Rights Amendment’s status as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution brings the White House in line with the legal academy and profession.”
Two questions: Will we ever know the name of the 25-year-old social media intern in the White House who tweeted that out under Biden’s name? And more importantly:
Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman, announced that he would challenge Biden in the party primary, citing poll numbers and the president’s age as reasons to pass on the torch to a new generation. He told the Washington Post newspaper: “We’re at grave risk of another Trump presidency. I’m doing this to prevent a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”
In public, Phillips was ridiculed. In private, others shared his concerns. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, recalled receiving a call from a Democratic senator in late January or early February 2024.
“I said, ‘Is there any particular reason why you called me? I’d like to know.’ He said, ‘You do realise, off the record, that Joe Biden is not going to be our nominee?’ I was stunned. I said, ‘What, how, why?’ He said, ‘I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function. We can’t run him.’”
Sabato added that the senator in question tried to raise the issue, which angered the White House. “He was punished, as several of them were. They gave him the cold shoulder for a while. The point is that a lot of people had figured it out but they didn’t care. I’m stunned that they got away with it and have produced term two for Trump and it’s going to be the longest four years of our life.”
The first Trump administration (“Trump I”) was chronically frustrated by the difficulties it had staffing the government with loyal employees. As a result, disloyal civil servants exploited the opportunity to build up an impressive track record materially harming the operational integrity of Trump I. There are examples aplenty of how, but for this essay, a few James Sherk documented should suffice:
Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.
Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.
Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.
Last April, the Biden administration finalized environmental rules that effectively force gas and coal plants to adopt carbon capture—an expensive and controversial process in which emissions are stored underground—or risk shutting down. Months later, in November, a senior Biden EPA official told activists to “keep fighting” an ExxonMobil carbon capture project in Texas, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The comments were made by Earthea Nance, who leads the EPA’s Region 6 office, at a meeting held on Nov. 18 in Jefferson County, Texas, according to contemporaneous notes from a meeting attendee reviewed by the Free Beacon. And they came in response to environmentalists’ protests regarding ExxonMobil’s proposed Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project, which the EPA is tasked with permitting.
Nance’s comments are significant because the Biden administration forced gas and coal plants to embrace carbon capture in order to lower their overall emissions to acceptable levels under the EPA’s strict regulations—and companies who don’t comply with the regulations face hefty fines. According to the EPA, carbon capture and storage is a “key part” of the Biden-Harris administration’s goal to reach a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 and Congress earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to the EPA and Department of Energy to support such projects.
It makes complete sense that the Washington Post is the paper that is collapsing in America today. If there is one sentiment uniting Americans right now, it is that the culture of woke repression that has reigned supreme for so many years — keeping Americans on edge and fearful of being canceled by the mob — has come to an end. People want more freedom of speech, open spaces to consider policy, and a richer diversity of thought.
The paper where woke writers scream “Comply!” to their colleagues and readers no longer has any business being one of the country’s top newspapers.
*****
The Post’s staffers are now acknowledging the total collapse of their publication. On Tuesday night, more than 400 Post journalists sent a letter to Bezos imploring him to intervene in the crisis.
Their foremost concern was their lack of confidence in Will Lewis, who previously achieved enormous success as chief executive of Dow Jones & Company and publisher of Wall Street Journal, only to encounter disdain and racial grievance as CEO of the Post.
Several Post reporters, alongside leaking the letter, dished anonymously to NPR that they were suspicious that Bezos picked Lewis for the position “because of his ease in handling conservative figures.” It was as though these staffers believed any association with conservatism would taint their organization. The staffers also communicated to NPR that there was backlash at the Post to Bezos as well because “he has publicly warmed up to President-elect Donald Trump.”
This ideological puritanism, which is exactly what put the Post in this position in the first place, will continue to run it into the ground.
After actively engaging in a coverup of Biden’s cognitive state — the brave, intrepid journalists at NYT are out with a tell-all piece on the coverup — blaming Biden’s inner circle, and taking zero responsibility themselves.
Everything they lied about for years, they now admit is true — Biden’s “walkers” to hide his shuffle, the short stairs to AF1, his frequent falls, cognitive lapses, teleprompter woes, needing naps for debate prep — everything.
Legacy media is attempting to rewrite history and play the hapless victim of a White House inner circle that managed to dupe them for four years, in a vain attempt to salvage their tattered reputations and cratered credibility.
They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.
They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.
Mr. Biden’s fumbles continued this week. In announcing a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday he confused the emir of Kuwait with the emir of Qatar and said Hezbollah rather than Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He also referred to his national security adviser as “Secretary Jake Sullivan” before catching himself.
Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true — the seventy-eight-year-old president-elect may wish to avoid the fate of his predecessor William Henry Harrison — although there’s plenty of speculation that security is the real factor. The Donald, in benevolent king mode, also didn’t want the poor horses to freeze to death on his big day. It’s funny what goes on in that very famous orange head.
Trump will then make an appearance at the Capitol One Arena, for the fans, before going on to the White House so that he can, as he promised, jokingly yet seriously last year, be a dictator for one day. He will do this by signing as many as 100 executive orders. It would be very Donald to have added a few more directives just so he can reach the nice round century. Expect the growing legion of Trump loyalists to begin a chorus in the media: he’s done more in one day than most presidents do in their first 100. We’re so back, et cetera, ad infinitum.
Trump has promised from day one to live up to his day one promises and he’s made quite a few since 2020. Reporters usually talk about a “flurry” of presidential executive orders. This will be more like an “avalanche” or a “barrage” of commander-in-chiefing. The Republican senator John Barrasso called it a “blizzard” and a “shock and awe” approach.
No word yet on how many Constitutional amendments he’ll make via Twitter as well:
From the start, there was little enthusiasm among Democrats for Biden to seek a second term. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer faced the task of persuading the president to step aside. Schumer’s challenge became urgent after Biden’s disastrous showing in the debate and his subsequent “COVID diagnosis” during a Nevada campaign stop, both of which exacerbated concerns about his fitness for office. Biden’s frequent moments of forgetfulness and erratic behavior had already raised red flags, and by this point, the report reveals that Democratic senators were nearly unanimous in their opposition to his re-election bid. In fact, Schumer privately estimated that only five senators would support Biden staying on the ticket, and Biden’s campaign didn’t think he had much of a shot, either.
“If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running,” the New York Times explains. “Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.”
The tipping point came as other prominent Democrats began taking action. Rep. Jamie Raskin privately urged Biden not to run, though he eventually went public after being ignored. Behind the scenes, former President Barack Obama played a pivotal role, counseling Biden to step down without taking a visible role in the effort. Meanwhile, Biden’s humiliating NATO press conference underscored his inability to address mounting concerns about his competence.
According to the report, the breaking point for Biden came during a candid meeting with Schumer at the president’s Rehoboth Beach home. Schumer laid out the brutal truth: Biden’s re-election bid lacked support, his poll numbers were catastrophic, and his ability to defeat Trump was in serious doubt.
“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Schumer told him. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”
When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.
In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened. Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.
In one sense, it’s good to see Johnson speak publicly about this. If one reads the WSJ report from June carefully, this anecdote and others came through anonymous sources. At one point, reporters note that they spoke with “more than 45 people over several months,” but those sources who warned that Biden had become functionally incompetent remained anonymous. The only person of note to go on the record about Biden’s cognitive decline was Kevin McCarthy, who’d been removed as Speaker and had already left Congress, and had no way to press the issue other than talking to the press.
Johnson, however, was and is Speaker of the House, and someone in position to take action if a president seems to be incapacitated or manipulated by others. And that’s the biggest question this raises: why didn’t Johnson take action? As Speaker, Johnson could have alerted the House to this potential incapacitation, formed a select committee to investigate it, and force White House aides and Cabinet officials to testify under oath to their interactions with Biden.
Indeed. We know why the DNC-MSM circled the wagons to protect their boss. Why on earth would Johnson? As Ed Morrissey writes, “And this is why we probably will never get a full accounting of the Biden fraud and cover-up. Too many people participated in it, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that full exposure will burn everyone. It will be a replay of Murder On the Orient Express.”
Marco Rubio destroys Kristen Walker in his defense of mass deportations. Absolutely brilliant answer.
Seriously this is how absolutely every single Republican must talk about deportations because this is the truth and this is where we are as a country because of the last four… pic.twitter.com/oyDK8MHJdl
At the highest level of abstraction, the greatest existential threat to the United States is a philosophic virus of the mind. Specifically, the two greatest threats to the United States are nihilism and socialism, which, as actionable ideologies, are working in tandem to destroy Western Civilization.
Socialism is the end, and nihilism is the means.
What do I mean by that? How has our present condition come to be, and how does it work in practice?
In the 1960s, the New Left abandoned Marx’s idea of a convulsive proletarian revolution because the working class was inherently conservative. The new revolutionary strategy was for the intellectual and cultural elite to engage in a long march through America’s cultural institutions. The nihilistic goal was to undermine all the values and virtues of America and Western civilization. America’s cultural Left attacked reason, truth, objectivity, free will, rights, individualism, freedom, constitutionalism, and capitalism.
Since the 1960s, the Cultural Left has successfully infiltrated and commandeered the universities, the K-12 school system, the churches and synagogues, the media, Hollywood, major philanthropic institutions, virtually all professional organizations, social media, corporate America, etc. Things are so bad that the Cultural Left even controls the NFL and ESPN!
This postmodern Left controls virtually every opinion-forming institution in the country today. Even the family has been gutted and transformed. Parents no longer have a right to know, for instance, if the government schools are socially transitioning their children in preparation for the medical transitioning of their children.
Let me sum up our situation in the starkest terms possible: What kind of society sanctions the drugging and mutilation its children?
Let that sink in for a moment!!!
This is the victory of nihilism. Destroy capitalism’s underlying civic culture, and you destroy capitalism. Socialism is what follows.
But the situation is much worse than this because the Left has also captured the Federal and state bureaucracies (as well as NGOs) to affect every aspect of our lives. The result has been the merging of nihilism and socialism with what we call the Deep State, which is an entirely legitimate concept. In fact, I would like to suggest that the Deep State is much deeper and broader than most people realize.
The National Archives poured cold water Friday on President Biden’s declaration that the Equal Rights Amendment is now part of the Constitution, saying courts and Mr. Biden’s own Justice Department have rejected that notion.
Mr. Biden issued a statement saying he believed that 38 states have ratified the ERA, which would be enough to make it the 28th Amendment.
But the National Archives and Records Administration, the official keeper of the Constitution as a document, said it stands by its decision — announced last month — that the ratifications didn’t happen before the deadline.
“Court decisions at both the district and circuit levels have affirmed that the ratification deadlines established by Congress for the ERA are valid. Therefore, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment,” the agency’s leaders said at the time.
The Archives said Friday that has been “a long-standing position” and Mr. Biden’s announcement doesn’t change “the underlying legal and procedural issues.”
The key point is whether the ERA, which was passed by Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification, has amassed the 38 states needed.
Just 35 had ratified the amendment by 1979, which was the deadline set by Congress. Capitol Hill then approved a three-year extension of the deadline, but that came and went with no new ratifications.
In 2017, Nevada belatedly voted for approval, followed by Illinois in 2018 and Virginia in 2020. ERA backers said that was enough to cross the finish line.
But that argument was rejected by federal courts that ruled the deadline had passed.
Mr. Biden’s Justice Department has also ruled that the deadlines are valid and the post-deadline ratifications cannot be counted.
Charles Cooke tweets, “I’m trying to get inside the head of anyone—Biden included, if he’s aware of it—who thought that it would be a good idea for the president of the United States to tweet out that he was unilaterally declaring that the Constitution had been amended. It’s so deliciously humiliating,” adding, “And not just humiliating for Biden and his team. Humiliating for all those people who said Biden was a decent guy who respects the law and America’s institutions and were rewarded with the student-loan grab, eviction moratorium, pardon of Hunter, and now this. It’s hilarious.”
Presidents don’t get to overrule the courts, nor do they get to declare what is and is not in the Constitution. What makes this so outrageous is that Biden just warned against executive abuse of authority less than two days ago in his farewell address to the nation, proclaiming himself the hero of checks and balances:
After 50 years at the center of all of this, I know that believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society: the presidency, the Congress, the courts, a free and independent press. Institutions that are rooted not — they just — not to reflect the timeless words, but they re- — they — they echo the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Rooted in the timeless words of the Constitution, “We the People.”
Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances, it may not be perfect, but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years — longer than any other nation in history that’s ever tried such a bold experiment.
And in fact, Biden used this to demand that the states amend the Constitution to limit presidential power even further:
We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president — no president — is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is limit- — it’s not absolute, and it shouldn’t be.
It’s not and it isn’t, not even under Trump v US, which only recognized that official presidential acts are checked by Congress and not local DAs trying to conduct political lawfare. But Biden sure seems to think that his own power is unlimited when it comes to not only interpreting the Constitution but determining its contents, too.
Who is writing the material that appear under Biden’s name in his last days? The old Russian joke, “If only the Czar knew,” takes on new meaning as Brandon shuffles the halls in his last days in office.
President Joe Biden bid a not-so-fond farewell to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other members of the tech “oligarchy” he suddenly believes is threatening American freedoms.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” he said in his farewell address on Wednesday night. “And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.”
Biden went on to compare these tech oligarchs to 19th century robber barons, who were eventually brought to heel by federal legislators.
“More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts,” he said. “We’ve got to do that again.”
One of the most prevalent myths about economic freedom is that it inevitably leads to monopolies. Ask people why they believe that, and the odds are high that they will point to the “trusts” of the late 19th century that gained large market shares in their particular industries. These trusts are Exhibit A for most people who hold this view. Ask them for specific names of the villains who ran these trusts, and they are likely to point to such people as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. They even have a label for Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and others: robber barons.
But a careful reading of the economic research on the “robber barons” leads to a diametrically opposite conclusion: the so-called robber barons were neither robbers nor barons. They didn’t rob. Instead, they got their money the old-fashioned way: they earned it. Nor were they barons. The word “baron” is a title of nobility, one typically granted by a king or established by force. But Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and many of the others referred to as robber barons started their businesses from scratch and were granted no special privileges. Moreover, not only did they earn their money and not only were they not granted privileges, but they also helped consumers and, in one famous case, destroyed a monopoly.
Musk’s X has restored some sense of free speech after the previous Twitter regime were happy to be in bed with the FBI and CIA. And his spacecraft are making Boeing look like even more of a joke: Return of NASA astronauts from space station further delayed until late March. No wonder Biden hates him almost as much as he hates his own party’s journalists.
Soros, who is 94 years old, did not attend the White House ceremony. But his son Alexander Soros, who has taken over the family’s political influence operation, did. If you’ve never seen it, you should look at Alexander Soros’s Instagram page. It’s a diary of the extraordinary access he, as the son of a politically active billionaire, enjoys with leaders around the world. Just from the recent U.S. presidential campaign, the younger Soros has posted photos of himself with Biden, Harris, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Josh Shapiro, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Charles Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, Raphael Warnock, John Kerry, and more. There is no one in the Democratic Party who is unavailable to George and Alexander Soros.
So, Biden refined his allegation. It is tech billionaires — people who have built big things, as opposed to currency speculators such as George Soros — who pose the real danger to American democracy. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden said. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”
We know that Democrats are unhappy with the policies of X since it was purchased by Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX. We know they are unhappy with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is changing the content moderation policies of Facebook and other platforms to make them less biased. And we know that they are unhappy with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’s management of the Washington Post, particularly his decision not to endorse a candidate — as opposed to its traditional endorsement of the Democratic nominee — in the recent presidential election.
We also know that those three — Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, the three richest men in the world — have been quite open, and in the case of Musk, wildly supportive, of the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. It seems odd that Biden would use the final address of a 50-year career in politics to denounce them, but that is what he did. National Review’s Rich Lowry got the sense of it when he posted: “Washington’s Farewell Address — avoid entangling alliances. Biden’s Farewell Address — I don’t like Meta’s new moderation policy.”
When Trump first took office, he was the least experienced president in history. Eight years later, he may be the most seasoned. This isn’t the D.C. experience Biden brought to the White House. As Mark Halperin points out on Wide World of News, it’s four years on the job, with another four years off spent plotting the sequel.
We are in unexplored territory. The last nonconsecutive term came in 1893, when the presidency hardly mattered to most Americans. Trump returns less like a reelected second-term president than a recently elected first-term president.
He may be grateful for the mulligan. The record of second terms is not encouraging. They tend to be consumed by either scandal or hubris. Reagan faced Iran-Contra, and Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky. Bush overreached on Social Security and immigration and became bogged down in Iraq. Obama made the nuclear deal with Iran and went left on immigration, race, terrorism, and same-sex marriage and transgender rights.
Trump’s challenge isn’t winning power. It’s wielding it. If Trump wants to succeed and enable his successor to carry on his legacy into the 2030s, he will have to avoid the fate of his predecessors.
How? Don’t overreach. Use power wisely. Focus on numbers—market indexes, jobs, inflation, income, border crossings, crime rates. Throw America an unforgettable 250th birthday party in 2026 and help Los Angeles recover for the Olympics in 2028. These are the tests of a successful second term. Donald Trump has four years to pass them.
Really two, before the prospect of a divided or a unified Democrat House and Senate going full Watergate on him once again: The 2026 midterm elections are just around the corner. “History strongly suggests Democratic gains are likely in 2026. The sitting president’s party has lost House seats in 17 of the last 19 midterm elections going back to 1950, with the two outliers, 1998 and 2002, largely explained by the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
It’s only a matter of time before the LAFD goes full Harrison Bergeron and makes this a reality. Speaking of which, believe it or not, this actually isn’t satire — at least not intentionally:
This clip has done irreparable damage to the DEI cause. It is breaking through to normies.
President Biden’s staff released a behind-the-scenes video Thursday of the retiring president ordering milkshakes and chatting with staff during his final days as commander in chief.
“I’m going to miss you. I just came down to say hi, and by the way, can you make me a milkshake?” the leader of the free world asked a staffer at the Navy Mess on the floor below the Oval Office.
“Yeah, just give me like five minutes,” the male staffer said.
In another clip, a female Mess employee said to the president: “A chocolate milkshake? You want one? On it, sir!”
Biden, joined by adviser Amos Hochstein, proceeds to walk around the executive grounds with a chocolate syrup-lined ice-cream-sundae glass.
“Honestly Biden aimlessly wandering the halls of the White House slurping a milkshake is pretty much how I thought the last 4 years went,” one X user snarked, summing up the thoughts of many conservatives. “It all tracks.”
It really does, alas:
BREAKING: Fox News cuts to Joe Biden expecting him to speak on the Nashville shooting, instead finds him ranting about eating Jeni’s chocolate chip ice cream.pic.twitter.com/6rJsFL2dAN
The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor. https://t.co/AIeOH5Ga9W
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