December 19, 2025

ATLAS MUGGED:

How It Started: Minneapolis City Council members intend to defund and dismantle the city’s police department.

—CNN, June 8th, 2020.

And: Farhad Manjoo writes a story about the Kia Boys without mentioning the Kia Boys.

As Manjoo sees it, the thefts and related problems (car crashes, armed robbery sprees, etc.) are entirely the fault of the manufacturers for making these cars so easy to steal. But he notes, ruefully, that another culprit is getting some of the blame. If you’re guessing he’s talking about the thieves, you guessed wrong. . . .

Not mentioned at all in these paragraphs or anywhere else in his column are the car thieves. All of the fault is placed on inanimate objects, i.e. the “theft-prone cars.” No responsibility is placed on the people driving this trend. This strikes me as pretty perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with progressive thinking on crime.

I think there’s a pretty clear reason why he’s leaving out the people responsible. Because the “Kia Boys,” as they’ve been described, are young teens, often black, who are stealing cars for fun and for social media cred. Contrary to what Manjoo claims, TikTok isn’t just providing dry information on how to steal the cars, it’s the platform where the “Kia Challenge” went viral. It’s where thieves post highlights of their joyrides in stolen cars to impress other kids. . . . In this clip, they admit they started stealing the cars because it was trending on TikTok. Watch and then tell me the responsibility should primarily fall on the car manufacturers. What about the kids doing this? What about their parents who seem to be completely absent? What about TikTok for making this into a social media game and a competition? Even the older men in the neighborhood point out that there is no accountability for these kids even when they are caught. So what about the courts and judges who give them a pass? If the car companies deserve blame that should come after a long line of other people involved.

—John Sexton, Hot Air, September 1st, 2023.

How It’s Going:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THE ORIGINAL “NO KINGS” PROTEST: The Real Watergate Scandal.

With the help of a secret source nicknamed “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein exposed further White House interference with the Watergate investigation. In July 1973, the White House tape recording system was revealed to the Senate Committee and the battle for the tapes began. Cox was fired when he tried to get hold of them. Public outcry led Nixon to turn over some tapes and accept the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, in November.

Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Imperial Presidency, released the same month, capitalized on the shifting sands of this political crisis. The book was a brilliant polemic, a tract for republicanism by a royalist who had had a change of heart. Schlesinger had been one of the cheerleaders of FDR’s plebiscitary monarchy; he had hoped his hero Kennedy would govern along similar lines. But the monarchy had outlived its usefulness. Now that the age of Roosevelt had come to an end and Kennedy’s Camelot was cut short by tragedy, Schlesinger wanted to bring the epoch of American kings to a close. To do so required a brazen neutralizing of the office of the presidency at all costs. The Senate Committee’s final report, issued June 27, 1974, described an authoritarian, paranoid president who produced an “atmosphere of fear” in the White House. According to the report, Nixon’s unconstitutional power grab via the Huston Plan was only stopped by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Nixon was ordered to hand over more tapes, and in July 1974 the Supreme Court declared he must comply. The tapes exposed that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in earlier than he had told the public. On August 7, Republican congressional leadership told Nixon that he had insufficient support to stop impeachment. The next day, Nixon announced his resignation. Upon taking office on August 9, Gerald Ford delivered the summary judgment: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Deliberate Sabotage

Four forces worked to achieve this symbolic murder of presidential authority, driving Nixon from office and enshrining the mythology of Watergate in America’s collective psyche. In the bureaucracy, it was the national security apparatus; in culture, rising anxiety over authoritarianism; in media, the hegemony of network television; and in law, the fanaticism of the college-educated elites.

When we dig into the origins of the Watergate affair, we see not an “imperial presidency” controlling the national security agencies, but an institutional conflict between the White House on the one hand, and the military, CIA, and FBI on the other. In this conflict, the president was not winning.

That was the atmosphere that prompted the creation of the Special Investigative Unit, first run from the White House, then from CRP. After the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department study on America’s involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times in June 1971, Nixon, mistrustful of the other national security agencies, directed his domestic advisor John Ehrlichman to create this special unit. Members were called “Plumbers” because they were tasked with stopping leaks.

Nixon wasn’t wrong to mistrust the agencies. From at least November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran a spy ring against the president. Led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the military was worried about Nixon’s foreign policy shifts and his planned withdrawal from Vietnam. Collecting documents from the White House via Navy yeoman Charles Radford, they leaked to the press to compel the White House to change course. The Moorer-Radford affair, as it’s called, was wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief. It was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” The president, however, opted not to publicize this scandal or to open prosecutions.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THAT THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS JUST HAPPENED AGAIN: Fulton County: ‘We Don’t Dispute’ 315,000 Votes Lacking Poll Workers’ Signatures Were Counted In 2020.

Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, told the SEB in the hearing that while she has “not seen the tapes” herself, the county does “not dispute that the tapes were not signed.” Brumbaugh continued, “It was a violation of the rule. We, since 2020, again, we have new leadership and a new building and a new board and a new standard operating procedures. And since then the training has been enhanced. … But … we don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.”

Georgia’s Secretary of State Office investigated the alleged failure to sign tabluation tapes and “substantiated” the findings that Fulton County “violated Official Election Record Document Processes when it was discovered that thirty-six (36) out of thirty-seven (37) Advanced Voting Precincts in Fulton County, Georgia failed to sign the Tabulation Tapes as required [by statute],” according to a 2024 investigation summary. In addition to probing the unsigned tabulation tapes, the investigation also found that officials at 32 polling sites failed to verify their zero tapes.

Georgia law requires that election officials have each ballot scanner print three closing tapes at the end of each voting day. Poll workers must sign these tapes or include a documented reason for refusal. Voting laws also require poll workers to begin each day of voting by printing and signing a “zero tape” showing that voting machines are starting at zero votes.

If there is no record of whether the tabulator was set at zero at the start of polling, there is no way of telling whether ballots from a previous election (or ballots from a test run) were left on the memory card and might later be counted.

Who supervises the test runs?

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

JOHN HAWKINS: The 30 Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2025. Not surprised that Elie Mystal made the list, though a bit surprised he didn’t make the top half.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

“Math and Electrical Engineering professorships are great, of course, but they just don’t hold the same cultural power. The same story can be told for elite journalism, Hollywood, etc. These industries control the stories and scripts that most Americans see. Everyone who was around these places saw exactly what was going on (I was at Stanford University for most of this time and saw it up close)– and denying it is an exercise in extreme bad faith.”

Earlier from Carl: Why “The Lost Generation” is a Lost Opportunity.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FROM T. C. ROSS:   Blood Diamonds: Serial 1 (Boons and Banes).

In a cursed forest where gems tempt the bold and a ferocious beast guards ancient secrets, a cunning hunter must navigate treachery and enchantment to uncover a truth that could change everything.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

A STATE WHICH HAS NO LOYALTY TOWARD ITS CITIZENS HAS NO RIGHT TO LOYALTY FROM THEM: The Telegraph:. Patriots should not fight for the British state. “Some of those refusing are Leftists, but an increasing number of those on the Right, especially the young, believe that to obey the British state is to act against the interests of the British people. The nation has changed almost beyond recognition since we were last called upon to mobilise and fight a global war. We are no longer one people, but numerous parallel societies with little to no connection to one another. Presiding over this is an incompetent bureaucracy wedded to universalist ideas and chiefly concerned with its own survival. It is an administration that rejects the concept of national identity. It will only on occasions like this – when it wants something from patriotic Britons – adopt the language and symbolism of the old regime. But this is merely a skin suit. It will say these things while pursuing a migration policy causing great harm to Britons.”

Exactly.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds