LEFTISM AS A MENTAL DISORDER (CONT’D): Ex-Van Drew staffer staged fake attack, writing ‘Trump Whore’ across her stomach and alleging men held her down and cut her body.

A 26-year-old Ocean City woman who claimed she was brutally assaulted because she worked for Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Ocean City) instead orchestrated the entire incident — paying a scarification artist to wound her and staging the scene with zip ties and “Trump Whore” written on her stomach and “Van Drew is a racist” on her back, federal prosecutors alleged today.

Natalie Greene, a Rutgers law student, allegedly concocted the hoax in July, with an accomplice making a late-night 911 call to report that she had been ambushed by three men on a nature trail in Egg Harbor Township. Police officers found Greene bound with black zip ties, her shirt pulled over her head, and the political slurs scrawled across her torso. She told police that her supposed attackers had a gun and threatened to shoot her, and struck her in the head.

Prosecutors say nearly every detail was fabricated.

Many more details at the link.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Texas Anti-ICE Attackers Become First Antifa Terrorists Convicted.

YES, PLEASE: McMahon calls on Congress to codify ‘hard reset’ at Education Department.

She went on to speak about the announcement this week of six interagency deals made between the Education Department and other federal agencies to transfer out some of the responsibilities of legally mandated programs.

The deals were made with the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior and State, moving entities such as the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is headed to Labor, and the Indian Education Program, which will be moved to Interior.

A senior agency official said the Education Department would still be in charge of oversight while the other departments would largely take over administration of grants.

“I’ve talked to dozens of members of Congress to explain to them exactly what we’re doing, to bring them up to speed and to say to them, ‘Look, when we have completed some of these transfers that work incredibly well, then we will be looking to Congress to codify those,’” McMahon said Thursday.

“Zero them all out” has a nice ring to it.

THIS:

People often ask: "Sure, the left is stupid and annoying – but what have they DONE to cause real harm?"

The eco-freako stuff is a good example. We were a few years from functional nationwide nuke – saving however many million lives via pollution externalities, wars involving… https://t.co/GcPsrRvkTe

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) November 21, 2025

More nukes is good nukes.

MURDER IS BIG BUSINESS IN SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD: Palestinian Authority Paid Terrorists $214M This Year, Major Increase From 2024.

WHAT’S IN A NAME: Attack, defend, pursue — the Space Force’s new naming scheme foretells new era.

A for Attack: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to attack enemy forces or equipment.

B for Battle Management: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to direct and control friendly forces tactically engaged with an adversary.

C for Communications: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to support communication or data transport activities.

D for Defend: Systems, platforms, or vehicles that can protect friendly forces.

E for Electromagnetic Warfare: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to attack, protect, or exploit signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.

K for Support: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to ensure maintainability of space missions or payloads, including activities such as hosting, deploying, maintaining, sustaining, or servicing space vehicles or payloads while in orbit.

M for Meteorological: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to observe, record, or relay meteorological and oceanographic data.

N for Navigation Warfare: Systems, platforms, or vehicles that conduct navigation, positioning, and timing or navigation warfare activities.

P for Pursuit: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to intercept space targets in support of offensive and defensive operations.

R for Reconnaissance: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to perform targeted collection of intelligence and/or threat indications and warning to answer specific military questions.

S for Surveillance: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed for persistent collection of intelligence and/or threat indications and warning on a target within a terrestrial, orbital, or cyber battlespace.

W for Warning and Tracking: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed for the systematic observation of aerospace for the purpose of detecting, tracking, and characterizing terrestrial, air, and missile threats.

From there, things get complicated.

COLD WAR II: DOJ Arrests U.S. Citizens and Chinese Nationals for Exporting AI Tech to China.

THERE’LL BE SPANDEX JACKETS, ONE FOR EVERYONE: Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional and money will be irrelevant thanks to AI and robotics.

“My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said. “If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”

The future of optional work will be thanks to millions of robots in the workforce able to usher in a wave of enhanced productivity, according to Musk. The tech mogul, worth about $470 billion, has made the recent push to expand Tesla beyond just electric vehicles, working on consolidating his sprawling business interests into his broader vision of an AI-fuelled, robotic-powered future. That includes his goal of having 80% of Tesla’s value come from his Optimus robots, despite continuous production delays for the humanoid bots.

I’m not holding my breath, but that does sound lovely. And maybe people would have enough free time to start having babies again.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Texas’s CAIR Ban and the Overlooked Truth Behind That EPIC Muslim City.

HOME RULE WAS A MISTAKE: House Passes CLEAN DC Act to Repeal ‘Anti-Police’ Legislation.

The CLEAN Act aims to repeal the D.C. Council’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022, which imposed sweeping restrictions on law enforcement in Washington, D.C.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) sponsored the bill in the House, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is carrying identical legislation in the Senate.

The House bill passed by a vote of 233-190, with 20 Democrats crossing the aisle to side with Republicans. The Senate version remains in the committee process.

Will Senate Dems dare filibuster?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let the Democrats Cook…Themselves. “I think a lot of that work involves simply letting the Dems be themselves. There’s a popular meme now that started as “Let the boy cook.” It means to let someone continue doing what they’re doing without interfering with them. The meme assumes a positive outcome, but I’ve repurposed it for the 2025 Democrats.”

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: The conservative op-ed the Texas A&M student paper refused to publish.

Dear Anonymous Professor:

You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.

We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.

The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.

What caused this collapse, you ask?

You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.

Read the whole thing, and also this from the introduction to the op-ed:

The Battalion student newspaper at Texas A&M university does not seem to be a fan of conservative student thought. An analysis of the 60 opinion pieces focused on politics published since November 2024 found that nearly all of them — 50 — leaned liberal (35), left-leaning (5), far-left (5), and liberal satire (5).

Only 7 of the opinion political pieces were moderate or neutral, and a total of three were conservative, or a ratio of almost 17 to 1 liberal to conservative.

Nothing surprising there, I’m afraid.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Its seeming more and more Colorado and Dominion voting machines got caught again – Nov 4th 2025 election!

2nd tweet on this: the Sec. of State took down the El Paso County election results from their state website. Those results were up on the site a few hours ago! They are… https://t.co/1HWnGRDHUV pic.twitter.com/E5w9mtbwxE

— Peter Bernegger (@PeterBernegger) November 20, 2025

ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Lost Art of Selling a Song.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Newest Starship booster is significantly damaged during testing early Friday.

During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site, a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

Post-incident images showed significant damage, perhaps a crumpling of sorts, to the lower half of the booster where the vehicle’s large liquid oxygen tank is housed. Neither SpaceX, nor company founder Elon Musk, had commented on the failure within a couple of hours of its occurrence on Friday morning.

The likely loss of this vehicle, “Booster 18,” is significant for SpaceX. Although the company is hardware rich—indeed it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.

Better luck next time, fellas — and knowing SpaceX, that won’t be very long from now.

WHY WOULD ANYONE FLAG IT WHEN THERE WAS SO MUCH OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY TO BE HAD?

This broke my brain.

From $3 million to $399 million in 5 years and nobody flagged it until now? https://t.co/EgjlcPK4xm

— Undead FOIA 3.0 (@UndeadFoia) November 20, 2025

ROBERT SPENCER: Dem Congressional Candidate Hates Nashville With a Passion, Wants to Represent It In Congress.

To be fair, that attitude has been pretty common since at least Obama.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK:

New York City is lost. Get out.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) November 20, 2025

THAT IS THE TYPICAL AND RESPONSIBLE REACTION:

https://t.co/z8R3GfDOvf pic.twitter.com/fVvWieCTCT

— Zero HP Lovecraft (@0x49fa98) November 19, 2025

I WONDER WHAT THEY’LL SAY WHEN THEY START GETTING THROWN OFF BUILDINGS:

One of the funnier headlines of the last few years. https://t.co/uFdNUjtgtd pic.twitter.com/68GvLjzYlH

— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) November 19, 2025

Aside from the screaming, that is.

MORE CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

This is the first time this has happened in our lifetimes. Truly astonishing achievement. https://t.co/s0xaVQkJ0J

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) November 20, 2025

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: On this day in space! Nov. 20, 1998: International Space Station construction begins.

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Lost Art of Selling a Song.

UGH: Idiocratic education.

The University of California system went “test-free” five years ago. SAT and ACT scores aren’t considered in admissions. The percentage of new students who can’t meet high school — or middle school — standards soared.

At UC San Diego, where remedial math enrollment went from 30 in 2020 to 900 this year, a tutor said students can’t think their way through a word problem.

“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up,” Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told Horowitch. “We are just seeing many folks without that capability.”

Students seem to think they don’t need to learn math, said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason University’s math department. AI will do it for them.

“Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, said. “The premise that foundational ideas don’t need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy.”

Horowitch points to several culprits for the decline in achievement, starting with the distractions caused by smartphones in schools, and the federal government’s weakening of accountability measures.

Get the Feds out and let local communities demand accountability.

JAMIE K WILSON: ‘Jobs Americans Won’t Do’ — the Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid.