“DUE PROCESS.” “RULE OF LAW.” Two Americas: Whiffleball Justice For “Progressives.”

REMEMBERING THE BRIEF, FAILED EFFORT TO PASS KAMALA OFF AS “COOL:”

How painfully embarrassing to remember things that were painfully embarrassing at the time. But the media tried to palm it off as “cool” last summer… back when they were pretending America would vicariously appreciate Kamala’s “joy.” I’d have thought no one would be so cruel as to bring up “Brat summer” again. It was so insanely delusional. And that is not cool.

Neither are Democrats, any more.

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.

WHERE DO WE MINE? NASA’s Lucy probe captures 1st close-up images of asteroid Donaldjohanson, revealing ‘strikingly complicated geology.’

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN IS UP: Alito’s right to warn: Court’s knee-jerk habit of slapping Trump will cost it dearly.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get: People with Generational Wealth Control America, but Don’t Understand It. “America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a ‘comfort class.’ These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.”

Plus: “College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. . . . To many Americans, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.”

The most damning thing about the “comfort class,” though is that while they’re comfortable and insulated from consequences, they’re also for the most part terrible at what they do. Academics, bureaucrats, journalists, corporate flunkies — unlike the people putting food on the table, it’s hard to quantify what they do, and often what they do is socially destructive.

WELL, GOOD: Autism Breakthrough: Scientists Discover Brain Circuit Behind Social Attention Deficits.

YOU STICK WITH WHAT YOU’RE GOOD AT: All Democrats Do Is Lie.

I ALWAYS WORRY ABOUT HEARING DAMAGE FROM SHOOTING INDOORS WITHOUT PROTECTION: Is It Worth Running a Suppressor on Your Home Defense Rifle or Pistol?

FLASHBACK: How Democrats used NGOs to end-run voters: A ‘parallel government.’

I LIKE AN ANKLE HOLSTER FOR THIS: Carrying Concealed While Driving.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What to know about GLP-1 supplements for weight loss.

AIN’T NO PARTY LIKE A CHIMP PARTY: Are these chimps having a fruity booze-up in the wild?

WELL, GOOD: Iron and blue light enable rapid, low-toxicity creation of carbohydrates for new antibiotics.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: Scientists improve gravitational wave identification with machine learning.

FASTER, PLEASE: DNA repair mechanism may hold key to overcoming tumor resistance to radiotherapy.

CHANGE: New Poll Data Confirms the Democrats’ Worst Fears.

And that story doesn’t even mention this news:

YALE POLL…

Women, aged 18-21 (middle Gen Z):
🔴 R+4

This is monumental.

This is madness for the Democrats.

Not white women. American women at-large, 18-21. All races, religions (or lack thereof), etc.

I think it might get worse.

BTW – this group was basically destroyed by…

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 22, 2025

Democrats’ biggest supporters are now in the 70+ demographic.

THEY’RE NOT UMPIRES CALLING BALLS AND STRIKES, THEY’RE BATTING FOR ONE TEAM: A Tale Of Two Shadow Dockets: The Supreme Court moves heaven and earth to block removal of alleged gang members who are almost certainly removable, but says nothing about Ohio initiative process being declared unconstitutional. “It is often said that the Supreme Court follows the headlines. To be clear, the Supreme Court follows the headlines of the mainstream media. There is a never-ending torrent of hottakes about a constitutional crisis. But most Americans will scratch their heads at this issue and wonder why the Supreme Court is giving so much attention to these alleged gang members.”

Yes, when John Roberts worries about the Court’s “legitimacy,” he means its legitimacy in the eyes of the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post, not in the eyes of the American people. Which is shortsighted, but so very on-brand.

WELL, CERTAIN WHITE PEOPLE SPEND MORE TIME ON THAT THAN OTHERS: How White People Decide What’s Racist Or Sexist: An interview with sociologist Jessi Streib, who simply asked them. “It’s not just virtue signaling about their group, but because they know they’re part of this group, they know what they’re supposed to believe, and then they also come to actually believe it, often.”

HOW ABOUT NO? Practice ‘enoughness’ for ‘climate change’: Scholars say cut back on kids, travel, meat.

CHANGE: FL universities will be the first to carry out immigration enforcement on campus.

PRIVATEERS WOULD BE A GOOD SOLUTION HERE: Trump Admin Sanctions Iranian Shipping Magnate Offloading Illicit Oil and Gas for Tehran.

THE ACLU THINKS OF ITSELF AS A PART OF THE JUDICIARY, NOT AS AN OUTSIDER: The ACLU’S Ex Parte Voicemail To Seek An Ex Parte Injunction. “The mere fact that the plaintiffs perceive an emergency does not excuse the plaintiffs from following the usual rules. Then again, the Supreme Court ignored a host of procedural rules in this case, so maybe the ACLU thought the call was cool.”

Plus: “Gelernt was on notice not to leave voicemails, as the court said all requests had to be made in writing:” Makes you wonder if he was having unreported ex parte conversations or messaging with other judges who have been less forthcoming.

JOEL KOTKIN: Is The Economist Smoking Crack?

I thought crack-smoking had lost its appeal, but perhaps it is still a regular pastime among journalists determined to take down Trump’s America. The Economist, for example, has suggested that “the land of the free” has moved across the Atlantic, from America to Europe. The continent, the magazine claims, is now the best place to enjoy the “pursuit of happiness”, while embracing “moral norms” on following climate edicts, fostering free trade and preventing oligarchal overreach.

Really? They certainly can’t be thinking of the “pursuit of happiness” in terms of economic opportunity. Even The Economist cannot hide the fact that Europe is an economic laggard compared not just to America, but to China and increasingly India, now estimated to be the world’s fifth largest economy. Over the 15 years to 2023, the eurozone economy grew by about 6 per cent, measured in dollars, compared with 82 per cent for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data.

To put it another way, the most powerful economy on the European continent is barely larger than my adopted home state of California. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe, with its own regime of protectionist policies, as a third force in the world economy. Today this is no longer the case. . . .

Even as they disdain Trump, Europe’s leaders might consider embracing some of his policies. For example, there appears to be no way to follow “net zero” strictures – now largely gone in America – without facing “energy suicide”. High energy prices, combined with electrical vehicle mandates, surely all but guarantee that Europe will lose its grip on the car market to Chinese producers. Germany’s entire industrial structure seems likely to decline: it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,000 auto jobs by 2030.

China, not a tariff-imposing America, is eating away at Europe’s fading industrial economy. Europe’s “net zero” policies play right into the hands of a country that seeks to export its batteries and EVs, but is still massively reliant on coal, making it by far the world’s largest emitter of CO2. China also has an interest in speeding Britain’s already rapid deindustrialisation, as the recent scandal at the Scunthorpe steelworks showed so vividly.

Europe might also seek to pick up on Trump’s tight control over the US border. European leaders seem disdainful towards their own citizens, even though they are already voting for anti-migrant, nationalist and culturally conservative candidates, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. At the same time, the role of unvetted migrants in undermining order on the streets of the continent’s cities simply undermines one of Europe’s great assets, its uniquely beautiful and formerly safe urban centres. Remarkably, some Europeans think that, as a way to get back at America, Europe should seek to pivot to China.

To be fair, most of the people saying that are being bribed by China.

THE CORRELATION OF FORCES IS NOT FAVORABLE: Victor Davis Hanson: Do Elite Universities Really Wish to Fight the Federal Government? “Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes. Aside from the issues of autonomy and free expression, there are lots of campus practices that higher education would prefer were not widely known to the public. But soon they will be, and thus will become sources of public anger.”