Following an awesome 2.5 hour podcast with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.
In a post on X dropping the podcast, Rogan said of Musk “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump.”
Trump thanked Rogan:
Nuggets from the interview:
Musk and Rogan discussed how an influx of illegal migrants to swing states followed by some sort of amnesty program would turn the country into a one-party state.
Vote for @realDonaldTrump or the Dems will legalize so many illegals in swing states that this will be the last real election in America. @JoeRogan agrees.
Rogan and Musk both note they were formerly Democrats…
The Georgia Supreme Court quashes a plan to cheat with late ballots in one county. “The Georgia Supreme Court ordered the Cobb board to keep separate the absentee ballots of those voters that are received after the deadline on election day but before November 8 in a secure, safe, and sealed container separate from other voted ballots,’ WSB reported. ‘The court also ordered the board to notify the voters by email, text, or public announcement of the change,” the report continues. At this point, all votes will need to be in by 7 p.m. on Election Day.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Real inflation is running about 20%, Kamala parties like it’s 1971, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover Hunter Biden asking for state favors for foreign cronies, gold hits new highs, laughing at an old SNL skit is now a thoughtcrime, and an update on Intel’s woes.
The New York Times reports that the federal government is accelerating the naturalization of immigrants in America as part of a process of “reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” according to one observer quoted in the piece.
“The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the newspaper.
One Honduran woman marveled at the fact that authorities were able to process and approve her application in as little as six months.
The story highlights how many of these new citizens will immediately become eligible to vote in key battleground states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The piece includes a very revealing quote from Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a data analysis company.
“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Wang.
“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” he added.
In other words, knowing that immigrants are far likelier to vote Democrat, the Biden administration is importing them at breakneck speed in order to tip the scales for Kamala Harris.
3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during Biden’s time in office, with data showing that more will vote Democrat than Republican.
This has partly driven the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal more to “Jamal” and “Enrique,” and not so much “Karen,” although the strategy has caused division amongst Trump’s base.
The legacy media has consistently denounced the idea of mass migration being a deliberate ploy to increase the voter base for Democrats as part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, while simultaneously admitting it’s happening.
Democrats have declared that they have no confidence in the electorate and must create a new one…
Restaurant owner says that the real inflation rate is closer to 20% over six months:
The owner of four restaurants made this video when inflation was at 3.5%. Today, we’re told that inflation is at 2.9%. He looked at the prices of some products and concluded that the government’s inflation numbers don’t make sense. Since February, food prices have increased:
How does Kamala Harris plan to combat inflation? By channeling Richard Nixon from 1971 and imposing wage and price controls.
After the unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris stole former President Trump’s proposed ‘no tax on tips’ policy, she’s at it again with yet another recycled idea. This time, she’s echoing President Biden’s actions and rhetoric to crack down on sky-high food prices by proposing the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries”—a move that reeks of socialism.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign wrote in a statement, adding, “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The Harris campaign said the vice president will unveil the new federal proposed ban on Friday at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of a broader economic policy platform. The proposal will ensure food companies can’t exploit consumers to increase profits, according to CBS News, citing Harris-Walz campaign officials.
Harris’ policy speech will also call on the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys to examine corporations violating price-fixing rules. Her remarks are expected to echo Biden’s actions and rhetoric, especially with his war against meat processing companies that he alleges are responsible for higher burger prices at the supermarket.
VP Harris’ campaign argues that lowering Americans’ costs is a function of socialist-style price controls. Yet this is the quickest way to understand that Harris’ economic team has no actual understanding of inflation.
Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni explained, “Here’s your “price gouging” narrative: average costs paid by businesses have risen just as much as costs charged to consumers – if businesses are being “greedy,” they’re doing it all wrong…”
Instead of curbing out-of-control government spending, which debt rises $1 trillion every 100 days, and understanding that monetary inflation driven by the Federal Reserve’s money creation is the root cause of inflation, Harris deflects the actual problem: The Fed. She instead goes after big corporations for ‘illegal price gouging.’
Thus unable to understand the disasterous economic policies of the past are doomed to repeat it…
“Conversation Between Musk And Trump Generates Over A Billion Views.” You can see a transcript of the interview here.
In a post last month (“How The Democrats Los Silicon Valley”), I mentioned that top Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had endorsed Trump.
Ben Horowitz, in particular, seemed like an unusual Trump supporter, coming from a liberal Jewish background. Now it looks like Trump has another, thanks to his X space with Elon Musk last night: Zynga founder Mark Pincus. During the first Trump administration, Pincus opposed Trump’s “Muslim ban”, but after the leftist celebrations following October 7th last year, he seemed to have some second thoughts about that.
Despite corporate media’s unabashed u-turn to support Kamala Harris, her campaign has been busted creating made-up headlines next to the names of real news outlets to trick people into thinking they’ve stumbled upon the real thing, Axios reports.
Upon hearing the news, The Guardian lost their shit, telling Axios: “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads include links to real articles from the outlets, however the headlines and supporting text were altered.
“Democratic California State Lawmaker Switches To Republican Party…State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who represents the state’s fourth Senate district, said she joined the Senate Republican Caucus and party after deep reflection and to help ‘in their fight to fix California.'”
While Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter attempted to obtain State Department assistance in securing a deal for Ukrainian gas company Burisma, of which Hunter was a highly-compensated board member despite having no experience in its industry, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The revelation of the 2016 episode underscores allegations that Hunter sought to enrich himself by trading on his father’s influence.
The Times report draws on newly-released government records pertaining to Hunter’s pushing of a Burisma deal in Italy. The Biden White House had resisted releasing the files for years, only to relent soon after Biden was pressured into abandoning his reelection bid.
One wonders how long the New York Times would have waited to report this if Biden were still seeking reelection? My guess is never.
Go figure. It’s amazing what some actual reporting — and a withdrawal from a presidential election — can shake loose, no?
Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reports that Hunter’s efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden’s term as Vice President. It’s even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.
Oh, and the records of it got “withheld” by the Biden administration for “years,” too:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.
Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it — even though one of Hunter’s partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked.
Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you’re questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:
The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
Go figure again! It’s as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there’s no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc.
“California Sheriff Blasts Harris For Using His Image In “Misleading” Campaign Ad, Says He Supports Trump.” “In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff [Mike] Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office.”
The same Jew-haters who drove Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik off are now coming for Kamala Harris.
Only a short week ago, Harris was heckled by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters, like those who has spilled out from college campuses after October 7. Protesters screamed out at her as she stood on stage repeating her stump speech. As they yelled, Harris tried to shame them. “I’m speaking,” she said, hearkening back to her VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020. “I’m speaking” in context means several things, including an attempt to grab control based on her identity factors: black, female. By identitarian logic, the vice president is oppressed, and by the logic of progressive discourse, that means that she gets to speak first, and that what she has to say carries all that much more weight. An event simply in favor of her candidacy was crashed in New York City on Wednesday night where agitators set off smoke bombs and held up signs saying “No Votes for Bombala’s Genocide.” 14 of them were arrested.
The agitators wanted some kind of response, some kind of indication of what Harris’ policy on Israel and Gaza might be if she gets voted into the White House. And they haven’t gotten it. Meanwhile, there are clearly massive anti-Israel events planned for the Democratic National Convention next week. While Kamala is trying to keep the euphoria going, attempting to dance and sing her way into the White House, her base will be out in the street demanding answers. Will she be lenient like Magill? Bend over backwards like Gay? Or call in a bigger force, like Shafik, because she doesn’t know how to handle it on her own?
The far left of Harris’ party hates Israel. They love Palestinians not for their culture or policies–which include anti-LGBTQ and anti-female regulations as in other strict, Muslim countries–but simply because they are “oppressed.” And Harris can’t handle them. Even at her speech, rarefied identity wasn’t enough to keep them in their place. The campus riots will likely start up again. As soon as the college-bound finish their orientations, they’ll be picking up their marching orders and protest signs to join their comrades on the quad.
There is already noise that Harris would like to throw Israel under the bus, to eradicate funding and arms shipments. The same woman that waved the flag of Ukraine in Congress as she promised to send him endless weapons and aid, may think the aid packages and arms sales to Israel go too far. Harris may sympathize with the protesters.
before his honeymoon [in Communist China in 1994], Walz launched a company called Educational Travel Adventures, which specialized in bringing American students to China. An article in the local Chinese media reported that he and his bride brought 50 students from America. The company continued to send students to China until 2003. It is important to note that operating a business in China requires all kinds of permits—both official and unofficial—from Chinese authorities at the local, provincial, and central levels. These permits were typically obtained either by paying bribes or by securing endorsements, whether tacit or open, from government officials.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins posts that men and women are different and male boxers shouldn’t be competing with female boxers. Result: Facebook nuked his account.
So what do you do when your software problem brings a customers operations down hard? Well, if you’re Crowdstrike and the customer is Delta airlines, then you slam Delta for not recovering fast enough.
Python Development Foundation suspends developer for enjoying old “Jane, you ignorant slut” skit. I can only imagine the snowflake reactions to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor word association skit…
Flock of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco honk all night in their parking lot. As you might be able to guess, nearby residents are just thrilled at this development…
Speaking of electric cars, there’s concerning over letting them park in parking garages because of the possibility of them catching fire and the difficulty of extinguishing same.
Remember how Intel said the problem with their chips was microcode? Yeah. That may not be the case (or at least not the whole case), and it may actually be a process problem involving oxidation of vias (i.e., the connection between two metal layers).
I love the smell of Democratic panic in the morning. It smells like…victory.
Outside the Biden White House, the roars for Biden to step aside after revealing his cognitive decline to the nation via his disasterous debate performance grow louder.
Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37) became the first federal Democratic official to call on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race following last week’s debate with former President Donald Trump.
The statement followed an interview where former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-11) told MSNBC, “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’”
“And so when people ask that question, it’s legitimate — of both candidates.”
Doggett’s statement reads, “President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump. I had hoped this debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.”
“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang. … I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same.”
In 1968, LBJ declined to run again because his escalation of the Vietnam War was deeply unpopular with Democrats, not because his brain was operating on the level of a baked rutabaga. The two situations are not comparable.
In television interviews, some Democrats are already throwing a bone to Vice President Kamala Harris. “I will support her if he were to step aside,” Representative Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.), a Biden-Harris campaign co-chairman and former House Democratic whip, told MSNBC. “This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”
Former representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) has been even more candid — calling on Biden to step aside and urging Democrats to rally around Harris in his place. “You’re asking the American people to ignore what they saw last week,” Ryan, who distanced himself from Biden on the campaign trail during his 2022 Senate run and who expressed early opposition to Biden’s reelection campaign, said in an interview with National Review on Tuesday “It’s completely irresponsible for those people to hide this from us — for him to be in in that condition.”
Ryan said his party’s failure to confront voters’ concerns about Biden’s fitness for the job risks causing “irreparable damage” to a party that is already seen as out of touch with large swaths of the American public — including black voters and working-class voters — on a range of issues such as border security, the economy, and public safety.
They’re seen as “out of touch” because the party’s hard left ideological core wanted a third term for Obama despite wildly unpopular policies that brought Republican majorities to both houses of Congress and thought they could blithely lie to the American public about a whole host of issues (importing millions of illegal aliens, radical transgenderism), not just Biden’s cognitive decline, while imposing revolution from above.
But what Doggett and other Democrats are getting at is that now that Biden has revealed that he’s as cognitively declined as Republicans have said all along, his chances of beating Donald Trump in November just went from slim to none, and boy howdy are they right about that.
Again, their position is untenable. They can't tell the truth, that their candidate is well below the threshold of someone who should be president for another 4 years, so they tell obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy. https://t.co/Dpn9SECqEo
What? A Democrat telling “obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy”? You mean it’s a day ending in “-y”?
My friend Stephen Green is reveling in schadenfreude over Silver’s latest election forecast, which is developing a trendline in exactly one direction — from bad to worse for “Sundown Joe,” showing “Biden with just a 27.6% chance of winning the Electoral College and 44.2% odds of taking the popular vote.” As a Democrat, Silver is grief-stricken and angry about the situation, going through the “woulda coulda shoulda” second-guessing about the process by which his party’s establishment, after foisting upon the electorate the Oldest President Ever, then apparently decided there was no risk in attempting to extend his White House tenure another four years. Last week’s debate disaster should have been foreseen, because what’s the point of getting paid as a “campaign strategist” if you can’t anticipate potential problems?
Now, however, the same fools who led Democrats into that disaster are busy trying to convince their voters (and, perhaps more importantly, their donors) that they can somehow recover enough to win in November.
“It’s fundamentally a terrible idea to ask the public to make the guy they saw on Thursday president until he’s 86,” Silver says in his pay-walled newsletter, stating the blindingly obvious truth.
You’ve got to understand that Silver was one of those 20-something lefties who jumped into the political fray during the years when the Iraq War made George W. Bush very unpopular on college campuses. (One reason most conservatives my age roll our eyes at rhetorical symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome — the Hitler comparisons, etc. — is that it’s basically the same thing we heard about Dubya during the Bush Derangment Syndrome epidemic two decades ago.) Silver’s first big “win” as a forecaster, the foundation of his reputation as a polling expert, was in 2006, which in hindsight was the 21st-century’s high-water mark for Democrats. Silver predicted a big win for Democrats and he was right, and his winning streak continued two years later when Obama got elected. However, his accuracy since then has not been so stellar. In October 2010, Silver offered a “best guess” that Republicans would gain 48 House seats in the midterms; the GOP’s actual net gain in 2010 was 63 seats, the biggest net gain for House Republicans since 1938.
Generally speaking, when Democrats have a good year, Silver’s projections are more accurate than they are when Republicans have a good year. Silver has never overestimated Republican performance. So if Nate Silver’s numbers are telling him that Biden’s got barely a one-in-four chance of winning? That’s bad for Joe, because the reality of his situation is probably a lot worse than that.
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.
The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.
Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process.
Won’t someone please think of the terrible strain on Joe from having to start work at the crack of 11 AM?
Let’s hope he got milk and graham crackers after his nap to reward him for being such a good boy.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said on Tuesday that “the president was working well before” the 11 a.m. start time each day, after exercising. Still, at a fund-raiser on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden blamed fatigue for his debate performance. “I wasn’t very smart,” he said. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, I don’t know how many time zones.” He added: “I didn’t listen to my staff, and I came back and I fell asleep on the stage.”
Are you trying to say that your staff advised you not to travel around the world to meet with international leaders, and not to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day? So not to perform the regular duties expected of anyone who’s job is President of the United States of America?
Joe, I’ve got to tell you, I have a pretty big problem with that as well.
The recent moments of disorientation generated concern among advisers and allies alike. He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6. The next day, he misstated the purpose of a new tranche of military aid to Ukraine when meeting with its president.
On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. On June 18, his soft-spoken tone and brief struggle to summon the name of his homeland security secretary at an immigration event unnerved some of his allies at the event, who traded alarmed looks and later described themselves as “shaken up,” as one put it.
Democrat gaslighting us about “how sharp Biden is” snipped.
But by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago. The White House regularly releases corrected transcripts of his remarks, in which he frequently mixes up places, people or dates. The administration did so in the days after the debate, when Mr. Biden mixed up the countries of France and Italy when talking about war veterans at an East Hampton fund-raiser.
Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately. Several advisers and current and former administration officials who see Mr. Biden regularly but not every day or week said they were stunned by his debate performance because it was the worst they had ever seen him.
“You don’t have to be sitting in an Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden to recognize there’s been a slowdown in the past two years. There’s a visible difference,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “I’ve been amazed on one hand,” said Mr. Brinkley, who has not seen the president in person in a year. “The president can zip around the country like he does. But the White House may only be showing the Biden they want us to see.”
The Times piece is peppered with moments when Biden was lucid for some task or short speech, as though occasional periods of lucidity somehow make up for obvious cognitive decline. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty at National Review.)
Disgraced convicted felon Hunter Biden has reportedly been joining his embattled father and top aides in official meetings at the White House since the Biden family returned from Camp David, Monday evening.
The Biden family gathered at Camp David over the weekend, where Joe Biden sat for a previously scheduled photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for the upcoming Democrat National Convention.
While staying at the presidential retreat in Maryland, according to reports, the family took the opportunity to urge him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite his humiliating debate performance.
Since then, the scandal-plagued younger Biden has “popped into” official White House meetings and phone calls with advisors, four people familiar with the matter told NBC.
Hunter has also reportedly been spotted talking to senior White House staff, prompting some to ask how the convicted felon could have a security clearance to be included in such high-level discussions at the White House.
According to the sources, Joe Biden’s aides were “struck” by Hunter’s new advisory role.
“What the hell is happening?” senior White House staff is quoted to have said.
Given that my calendar doesn’t show a Take Your Crackhead Son To Work Week, I’m guessing this is to prevent anyone from cornering Slow Joe one-on-one to try to convince him to drop out of the race. The Biden Crime Syndicate shows no signs of being willing to step off the gravy train, and seems to fear (possibly correctly) that a whole lot of criminal indictments might be coming down on them if they did. After all, now that the MSM has stopped pretending that Hunter’s laptop wasn’t real, they have yet to come to grips with the vast pay-for-play foreign graft schemes the documents on that laptop revealed.
Will endangered Democrats be able to convince Biden to drop out “for the good of the party?”
Following Joe Biden’s dismal, mentally impaired performance in last week’s debate, there’s a huge roar of panicked Democrats suggesting (or demanding) his replacement as the Democratic presidential nominee. For now, Biden and his family/enablers seem to be digging in their heels.
Editorial boards and editors from the New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New Yorker have joined well-known cable commentators and columnists in pressing the president to step aside and pave a path to the top of the ticket for another candidate.
The Washington Post’s editorial board stopped short of pushing the president to drop out of the race, instead pressing him to cancel weekend plans “in favor of some soul-searching.”
What they’re saying: The Times’ board — in an op-ed entitled “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” — said Biden appeared as “the shadow of a great public servant” at Thursday’s debate, contending there are “Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency.”
Pieces from the AJC’s board and a New Yorker editor followed, similarly arguing that the best candidate to defeat an unrestrained former President Trump is not the current president.
The New Yorker named Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore as a slate of potential Biden backups who “could energize Democrats and independents, inspire more younger voters and beat Trump.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s question of “whether this man we’ve known and loved for a very long time is up to the task of running for president of the United States” presents a particularly damaging dagger to the commander-in-chief, a loyal viewer of “Morning Joe” who often seeks the opinions of the Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, on key issues.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman echoed Scarborough’s tone in a Friday op-ed, writing that watching the man he considers a friend struggle on the debate stage made him weep.
Maybe someone who “weeps” at a politician’s decline is too chummy to be a political commentator.
Also this:
Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.
By the end of the debate, I was hearing a level of anxiety and alarm from those Democrats and several other party leaders and operatives that I’ve never seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics. The discussion turned squarely to the need for the Democratic Party to replace Biden as the 2024 nominee, with four months to go to the election, and how to make that happen.
We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated. We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed,” said Mike Howell, Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
The Heritage Oversight Project has identified three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — where they believe removing Biden from the Democratic ticket would prevent anyone else from replacing him.
Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal from the ballot for any reason besides death, while in Nevada, no changes can be made to the ballot after 5 p.m. on the fourth Friday in June of an election year unless ‘a nominee dies or is adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent.’ In Georgia, if Biden were to withdraw less than 60 days before the election, his name would remain on the ballot but no votes would be counted.
Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin are all states Biden “won” in 2020 (some thanks to 3 AM ballot dumps). A theoretical Biden replacement could, just barely, lose all of them and still win by the skin of his teeth with 271 electoral votes if they held every other state Biden was awarded in 2020. Georgia and Nevada both have Republican governors, and Republicans control both the senate and house in Wisconsin, so last minute Democrat pushes to change the rules before November are off the table. Recent polls show Trump winning all three, as well as the other four swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona.
Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week made it impossible to deny his senility, yet the Western elite is gaslighting they were supposedly oblivious to this until now. Time Magazine published a piece titled “Inside Biden’s Debate Disaster and the Scramble to Quell Democratic Panic”, which was complemented by CNN’s about how “Foreign diplomats react with horror to Biden’s dismal debate performance”.
Both make it seem like Biden’s senility is a surprise for everyone who knew him.
The reality is that they knew about this all along but covered it up by lying that any claims to this effect were “Russian propaganda” and/or a “conspiracy theory”, all because they actually approved of the Democrats installing a literal placeholder in the White House who the liberal-globalist elite could control. It was a refreshing change of pace from Trump, who was much too independent for their liking despite his occasional capitulations to their demands, and it also reassured America’s allies who disliked him too.
They both went along with the lie that Biden is in tip-top mental condition for reasons of political convenience, but now it’s impossible to keep up the charade any longer, hence why they’re all feigning surprise and shock. The elite shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their latest gaslighting and should be exposed for one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. The country is being ruled by a shadowy network of transnational and domestic elites that are united by their radical liberal-globalist ideology.
Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. That party, which functions as the public face of the abovementioned elite network, wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on the home and foreign policy fronts. In particular, they sought to turn America into a liberal-globalist hellhole while ramping up NATO’s containment of Russia in Ukraine, but the second policy backfired after the special operation began.
Nevertheless, they’ll never have another chance to install someone like Biden since 2020 was an exceptional election year due to it being a referendum on Trump – who a significant share of the public was preconditioned to falsely believe is the new Hitler – and mail-in voting due to COVID-19. These conditions can never be replicated in the same way again no matter how hard the elite try, which is why they decided to keep Biden as their candidate instead of replace him early on.
In 2020, Biden’s mind was clearly already on the downward slope to senility, but he obviously had much longer periods of lucidity and energy than he shows now. In 2020 it was late afternoon, but in 2024, full night has fallen.
At a Camp David gathering on Sunday, President Biden’s extended family urged him to ignore the growing number of voices asking him to quit the race — and many of his loved ones blamed his disastrous debate on his advisors. According to Politico, the two who most forcefully encouraged the 81-year-old Biden to continue were his wife Jill and his son Hunter — the two people whose opinion he reportedly values most.
And really, who makes better decisions than Hunter Biden?
The reports will strengthen a growing sense that Jill Biden is putting her own interests above that of her humiliated and failing husband. As one Democratic advisor told the New York Post over the weekend, “Jill Biden likes being First Lady…she doesn’t want to give that up.”
Meanwhile, Hunter, who doesn’t exactly have strong reputation for sound judgment, is said to long for Americans to see a version of his father that — as paraphrased by the Times — is “scrappy and in command of the facts.” Much as he once was in denial about his drug problem, Hunter now seems incapable of admitting that that version of his father is gone forever:
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 30, 2024
Biden family members are said to have blamed the debate debacle on three advisors: Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer — who played the role of Trump in practice sessions — and Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who was in charge of the debate training. Aides to Biden denied these reports from multiple outlets.
Yes, blame the help rather than yourselves for dragging Sundown Joe out on the trail once more so you can keep those sweet power and perks flowing.
With Biden having spent a full week at Camp David gearing up for the debate, his family members and others are claiming the team worked the 81-year-old too hard, and tried to pack him full of too many statistics. They even fault advisors for a debate-night makeup job that transformed his summer-tanned face to one that was pale and unhealthy-looking.
OK, my alliterative synonym abilities failed me with the last one. But you get the idea. It seems even leftwing billionaires get tired of losing $100 million a year. The Washington Post is hemorrhaging readers, and a new CEO has come in to read woke employees the riot act.
Megyn Kelly: The Washington Post is in a slippery downfall, probably to its end. It’s hemorrhaging.
Dave Rubin: Well deserved.
MK: It’s disgusting, isn’t it! It’s worse than The New York Times!
DR: Well, we’d have to really think that one through. I mean, The New York Times is unbelievably horrible.
MK: But still readable yeah. You read it, and you see it’s biased, and you know you’re getting misled. The Washington Post has turned into Slate.
MK: I mean it’s disgusting now, and it has been this way for a couple of years. So you”ll be shocked, shocked to learn they’re hemorrhaging readers. They’re leaving in droves. And it’s not like they had a huge Republican base to begin with. But you know, even the moderate readers seem have said you’re too much for me.
MK: The New York Times reported in July of 2023 that The Washington Post was on pace to lose about $100 million last year.
MK: Then in October of this past fall, Washington Post offered buyouts to cut staff by almost 250, 240 employees.
MK: They cannot increase their number of paying customers, since the 2020 election they peaked at three million subscribers back then. They’re now down by half a million and counting. It’s just going down and down and down.
MK: There was a meeting on [last] Monday where the publisher Will Lewis and the new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff. And they they got rid of Sally Busby, who had led the paper for the past couple years, and made a shocking announcement.
MK: Guess who’s coming in to lead the paper? Count them, not one, not two, not three, four white men!
DR: Oh God! During Pride Month?
MK: They’re white, and they’re men! And one of them, jeez, was the leader of the Wall Street Journal prior to this.
DR: I think my analogy of a dinosaur in the tarpits is pretty on point. These things they have grown so large, they’ve been so negligent, to what their job is: Of doing the news and doing it honestly.
DR: You and I are not wizards. How is it that we’ve largely gotten the big things right over the years, or didn’t fall for all of the hoaxes?
DR: How is it that I didn’t fall for all of the covid stuff? How is it that I didn’t fall for Donald Trump very fine people on both sides? How is it that I didn’t think Brett Kavanagh was a serial rapist, or that the Covington kids were racist or that Jussie Smollett was lynched? Why is it that you and I didn’t fall for all those?
DR: The media lies about everything, and then once you see it, you’ve peered behind the curtain, then just know it. And what’s happening is more and more people are seeing it, so their own readers are finally, like, “My God, this is not a newspaper.”
MK: White men! My God, that’s how desperate they are! And of course they’re having a revolt right at the The Washington Post. Staffers are outraged.
MK: The reaction by one reporter at the meeting to finding out four white guys we going to be leading the Post now was everyone was shocked.
MK: Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for these positions, a question that prompted applause! “Yeah, there’s got to be a more qualified female or person of color. Look at these guys! So pale and so penisy!”
MK: “Look, we are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”
Imagine picking people based on ability and not the color of their skin. The outrage!
As online commentators noted, we’ll know the Washington Post is really serious about cleaning house when it fires Taylor Lorentz…
An anonymous hacker has claimed to have leaked 270 GB of internal data and source code from The New York Times (NYT) on the controversial image board 4chan.
The leak, reportedly containing over 5,000 repositories and 3.6 million files, was published on June 6, 2024. It has since raised widespread concern and speculation about the potential implications for the historic news organization.
The hacker, who has not been identified, posted a magnet link to the files on 4chan, encouraging users to download and share the data. According to the hacker, the leaked collection comprises uncompressed tar files with fewer than 30 encrypted repositories.
The leaked data reportedly contains a variety of source code, including the blueprints of well-known games like Wordle, email marketing campaigns, and ad reports. The hacker’s message was signed “With love from /aicg/,” a nod to a 4chan community.
While the leak’s legitimacy has not been independently verified, cybersecurity experts and media outlets have expressed serious concerns. The Register reported that it had seen a list of files in the purported leak but had not confirmed their authenticity.
Bryan Lunduke of The Lunduke Journal (who’s covered leaked/hacked material like this before) downloaded the files. He says they’re 334GB worth of files (maybe the size discrepancy is zipped vs unzipped) and thinks they’re real.
This dropped June 6.
“We are talking about a 334 gigabyte archive containing supposedly 3.6 million and some change files, individual source code files. Massive. Off-the-charts massive.”
He though it might just be every New York Times story ever published, but it doesn’t appear to be. Nor does it look like an email server dump.
“This is massive. It almost is making my brain hurt simply going through all of this.”
“I went through it. I read a bunch of it in depth. When I say a bunch of it, I mean I spent a long time on it and barely made a dent.”
“It truly does look to be over 3 something million source code files.”
“The first things I looked through were tremendously boring. It was just stupid JavaScript files dealing with Markdown.” JavaScript is a front-end programming language used for performing a huge variety of tasks in your browser. Markdown is an HTML-like text markup language used as a basis for rendering documents in a variety of different formats (standard web page, phone webpage, PDF, online help, etc.
A lot of it appears to be internal website documents.
“It’s from a wide variety of stuff. I mean it’s all over the map. We’re talking onboarding documents and technical documents, hiring documents, switchboard documents, user attribute documents, a huge amount of documentation.”
Plus actual source code for iOS and Android applications.
Lunduke explains legal doctrine on leaked materials and reporting, saying he didn’t commit any crime to obtain the material, which should legally put him in the clear for talking about material therein relevant to the public interest. Normally I’d point out “Hacking is wrong, mkay,” but New York Times has itself published hacked/leaked/stolen material itself at least as far back as The Pentagon Papers, so this is a case of biter bit.
“There a reasonable assumption that publishing some of this leaked material would be of the public interest…There are a number of policies and other interesting things in place documented within this material that could be of the public interest.”
“This does appear to be real. I cannot fathom how all of this could have been created if it wasn’t real.” I am inclined to agree. But! It’s important to note that a real archive can be salted with false information for a variety of nefarious purposes, so caveat lector.
“It is an absolutely monstrous amount. Simply searching through it and scanning it is insane. There are over 5,000 individual mini-archives within this link each one appears to represent an individual source code repository, or at least a folder or subfolder within source code repositories.” He says it appears to be just the latest snapshot, and not all the versions you would find in a source code repository like GitHub.
The time stamps on the files look recent.
“Man, there’s some funky things going on here.”
I am most interested in how internal policies codify/enforce woke social justice priorities, if there are any special instructions for covering Donald Trump (or other Republicans), racial preferences in hiring policies, etc.
Casual observers of the Israel-Hamas War (which is to say, probably not anyone reading this blog) may wonder what all the fuss is about, given that various Jihadist groups have been attacking Israel their entire lifetimes. In a rare, mostly readable New York Times piece, Thomas Friedman explains why this time is different.
With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.
And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.
That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.
And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.
The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.
Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.
Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.
The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.
Very little about “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” has anything to do with Biden, and a whole lot to do with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner pioneering diplomacy first with Saudi Arabia (remember the “glowing orb”?) and later with the Abraham Accords. “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” seems to largely consist of a retread of Obama’s “throw large sums of money at Iran and hope they play nice” (and possibly kick some back in the form of graft) wishful thinking.
And by “Palestinians feared being left behind” read “Hamas and Iran becoming even more irrelevant and isolated than they already are.”
So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”
Hamas has always been that crazy, always willing to blow up a pizza parlor or a disco. The only reason they didn’t behead Jewish babies before was insufficient opportunity thanks to Israeli security. Remember that Hamas believes all Jews to be apes and pigs and that their continued existence living on the face of the earth is a literal affront to God. Saudi-Israeli rapprochement may very well have been paymaster Iran’s trigger to greenlight the operation, but it wasn’t Hamas’ primary motivation for killing Jews any more than fish need a reason to swim.
Hamas kills Jews because Hamas exists to kill Jews.
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.
Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”
Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.
Friedman is only intermittently interesting. Much of the time he’s merely doling out Trans-Atlantic globalist elite conventional wisdom (global trade, China, climate change), and a guy who’s occasionally three months ahead of the curve who’s plodding pronouncements are treated like Delphic declarations. (Ace of Spades offered up an epic parody that’s still worth your attention.)
Eventually the piece devolves into the inevitable “Netanyahu: Bad!” catechisms that run on the internationalist left’s wetware anytime that can spare cycles from their ever-present Social Justice, Trump Derangement Syndrome and Global Warming Alarmism subroutines. But it was a halfway decent piece up to then.
Now the reviled Netanyahu is leading a unity government in a declared war against Hamas, unlike the Second Lebanon War or Operation Cast Lead.
This time will be different, because Hamas will not be permitted to exist for there to be a next time.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers played heavy with the Department of Justice, effectively threatening to force President Joe Biden to testify in any criminal trial against the First Son if a plea agreement wasn’t reached over his multiple alleged crimes.
“President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” wrote Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark in a 32-page letter last fall, Politico reports, calling the news that there was enough evidence to charge Hunter an “illegal” leak.
That letter, along with more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden’s legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal. That deal would have resolved Biden’s most pressing legal issues — the gun purchase and his failure to pay taxes for several years — and it also could have helped insulate Biden from future prosecution by a Republican-led Justice Department.
The documents show how the deal collapsed — a sudden turnabout that occurred after Republicans bashed it and a judge raised questions about it. The collapse renewed the prospect that Biden will head to trial as his father ramps up his 2024 reelection bid.
The number of people unaccounted for has stubbornly remained at about 1,000, suggesting that the death toll will almost undoubtedly increase.
As the staggering toll continues to be tallied, it is becoming apparent that the Maui wildfires may reasonably be classified as the first “woke-caused” disaster.
To begin with, the rush to eliminate carbon emissions may have killed the implementation of effective fire prevention policies.
Legal Insurrection readers recall my recent reports that downed power lines were being blamed as the initiating case of the fire. At the end of 2019, Hawaiian Electric issued a press release about wildfire risks assessed after hurricane-based winds contributed to a 2018 blaze.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Hawaiian Electric was well aware of the potential for this situation, but diverted resources away from fire safety support in order to meet state-required green energy mandates.
In 2015, lawmakers passed legislation mandating that the state derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S.
The company dove into reaching the goals, stating in 2017 that it would reach the benchmark five years ahead of schedule.
In 2019, under pressure to replace the output of two conventional power plants set to retire, the company sought to contract for 900 megawatts of renewable energy, the most it had pursued at any one time.
“You have to look at the scope and scale of the transformation within [Hawaiian Electric] that was occurring throughout the system,” said Mina Morita, who chaired the state utilities commission from 2011 to 2015. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”
When you have limited capital, choices have to be made. However, Hawaiian Electric may have made different choices if woke legislators adhering to climate change theology didn’t mandate the drive to renewables.
Equity considerations are apparently another contributing factor in this disaster. A state water official delayed the release of water that landowners wanted to help protect their property from fires, because water is to be revered and not used.
“Charlotte Pride now says no one will be awarded the 2023 Harvey Milk award for exceptional “LGBT+” advocacy after the announced winner’s past as a convicted child sex offender came to light.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese Files for Bankruptcy amid Hundreds of Outstanding Sexual-Assault Lawsuits.” Huh, if only there were some reason the San Francisco Archdiocese might have more pedophiles than other archdioceses…
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood that, depending on the ruling, could reportedly have “devastating consequences” for the abortion-providing organization.
The case, which was heard on August 15 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, could determine whether Planned Parenthood will have to pay back upwards of $1.8 billion to the state/federal government.
If Kacsmaryk rules in favor of the OAG, the large sum that would need to be paid out is, according to Vox, “more than enough to bankrupt Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”
The Texas OAG filed the lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of Alex Doe, an anonymous realtor, who is alleging that despite the organization being removed from Texas Medicaid it has continued to receive payments from the program.
Amarillo City Council: Hey voters, want to pass this bond to help us rebuild a civic center? Voters: Nah. Amarillo City Council: Well, we’re just going to do it anyway. Judge: REJECTED! AGAIN!.
Three of Andy Ngo’s attackers must pay him $100,000 each. “Defendants Corbyn “Katherine” Belyea, Madison “Denny” Lee Allen, and Sammich Overkill Schott-Deputy were found liable by Judge Sinaplasai for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.
Some takeaways:
There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”
“You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
“NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
“People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
“The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.
No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.
Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.
I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.
I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…
