May 10, 2025

THE GAZA FAMINE MYTH:

“Gaza Is Starving,” a headline in The New Yorker declared in early January 2024, pushing a harrowing narrative that took hold during the first six months of the war. In March, The Washington Post asked: “Is Gaza Heading Into Famine?” A headline in the Post the next day answered: “Israel’s War on Hamas Brings Famine to Gaza.”

In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for the Biden administration, became the first senior U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun. She cited a report published by an independent, United Nations–affiliated monitoring system, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC).

First developed in 2004 with backing from the UN, the IPC has become the global gold standard for food security analysis. Using a data-driven, evidence-based, five-phase scale that ticks up as food supplies run low, the IPC is designed to shield the humanitarian goal of having enough to eat from the political pressures of war. Today, a famine is declared only when the IPC’s data about a region shows that at least 20 percent of households have run out of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and two people out of every 10,000 are dying each day from starvation.

In 20 years, just four famines have been confirmed by the IPC: Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan in 2024. A confirmed famine in Gaza, as Power told Congress was happening, would have been a historic catastrophe and the first to occur outside continental Africa. Power’s statement bolstered claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, and that the U.S. government was therefore complicit in an alleged war crime.

But there were serious problems with Power’s sensational testimony. Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The report she cited was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway, an indictment so serious that it required confirmation from an independent board of global experts known as the Famine Review Committee (FRC).

The FRC, which functions as the IPC’s final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning.

Private sector food deliveries, such as trucks contracted to commercial warehouses, were left out of the agency’s estimates of the total food supply in north Gaza. As a result, as much as 82 percent of the “daily kilocalorie requirement” in northern Gaza last April wasn’t counted. In the same month, USAID’s famine monitor also left out 940 metric tons (2 million pounds) of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast donated by the UN to bakeries in north Gaza, enough to make about 1,400 metric tons (3 million pounds) of bread.

When asked about erasing the bakery donations, USAID’s internal famine-monitoring network justified the decision on the grounds that bread from those bakeries had been sold rather than given away for free.

It was never in doubt that the Israel-Hamas war brought immense human suffering to Gaza, including from food shortages. But USAID depicted a world that had little in common with reality.

North Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed. These findings should have been big news. As aid shipments increased, a famine had been averted.

Related: “Another for the ‘now it can be told’ file: ‘More than 60 service members were injured as a part of former President Joe Biden’s floating aid pier in Gaza, a Pentagon Inspector General report published on Tuesday said, a number significantly higher than had been previously disclosed.'”

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landing Footage.

The New Hotness? Congresswoman at Protest Tells CNN ICE Has Manufactured Bodycam Footage.

Our apologies that this video clip is so long — over seven minutes — but it’s worth sitting through to the end. Rep. Bonnie Coleman, who says she tried to shield Newark Mayor Ras Baraka from any harm from ICE agents at a protest Friday, tells her side of the story to CNN … and remarkably, her version of events from her perspective is that nobody did anything wrong but ICE. They were on public property, and “how ridiculous does that sound” that a 200-pound ICE agent with a gun on his arm is being pushed around by a mayor or members of Congress.

We’re not sure who the CNN host is, but she describes the bodycam video to Coleman and sees just what Coleman saw. It’s not what any unbiased person saw. Coleman connects ICE’s lies to the lies of President Donald Trump, who can’t breathe without lying, who has ICE snatching people off the street for simply living their lives — going to work, dropping their kids off at school, going to the grocery store.

Again, we can’t expect anyone to sit through this whole segment, but jump ahead to 6:30 when Coleman says that any footage disputing her claims is “manufactured.”

I’m sure this was also faked by Industrial Light & Magic:

UPDATE: “Meet who the New Jersey lawmakers are fighting for:” DHS Provides Rap Sheets on Suspected Criminal Illegals New Jersey Democrats Are Defending.

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 25

WHEN FAFO ENTERS THE FO STAGE: Bet She’s Spitting Mad NOW: Psycho Leftist Who Hocked a Loogie on Ed Martin Has Been Arrested.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 48

JOHN CLEESE SUGGESTS ‘SUSPENDING’ TRUMP CHIEF OF STAFF STEPHEN MILLER – ‘PREFERABLY BY THE NECK:’

John Cleese lashed out at White House chief of staff Stephen Miller after the latter said habeas corpus could be suspended for migrants in federal custody. In a post shared on X Saturday, the actor and comedian suggested “we actively think about suspending” Miller – “preferably by the neck.”

“I see Stephen Miller says he is actively thinking about suspending ‘habeas corpus’,” the actor wrote in full. “As this has been the keystone of the Rule of Law for centuries, I’d like to suggest that we actively think about suspending Stephen Miller… Preferably by the neck.”

It eventually became an ex-tweet, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir
invisible, but not of course before it was screen-capped:

Earlier: The Lincoln Project and Great Moments in Brand Recognition.

 

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 70

JOANNE JACOBS: ‘Focus on me’ is bad advice: Gen Z is most ‘aware’ of mental health, least happy.

May is Mental Health Awareness month, a “progressive vanity project” that encourages people to medicalize the challenges of everyday life, writes Carolyn D. Gorman, a Manhattan Institute policy analyst, on Unherd. “Focus on me” is one of the slogans. Meanwhile, we’re neglecting the seriously mentally ill.

The “DSM” — the mental health field’s diagnostic tool — used to be about “100 pages, listing around 100 diagnoses, she writes. “It’s now “10 times longer and clinically classifies everything from jetlag to bad premenstrual syndrome.”

“Let’s talk about Me!” was one of the leitmotifs of Tom Wolfe’s epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize—but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating!—to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan—“If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”—seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name—they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide “a better future” for their children … the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for “his people” that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. Hence the wicked feeling—the excitement!—of “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a ———!” Fill in the blank, if you dare.

And now many dare it!

Whatever Gen-Z’s hatred of the Baby Boomers, they’ve certainly continued their predecessors’ trend of off-the-chart levels of narcissism.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 42

SOVIET PSYCHIATRY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE DNC-MSM: John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic?

Ever since October 7, 2023, and the grotesque terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, Fetterman has courted controversy again. His adamantly pro-Israel and anti-Hamas stance is rather atypical in today’s Democratic Party, and it has rendered him unwelcome among a great many on the political left. He has been roundly and repeatedly condemned for his steadfast loyalty to and support for Israel. And now, in true totalitarian fashion, the left, including his fellow Democrats and the mainstream media, has decided that he really is unfit for office, not because of his stroke, but because he has dared to engage in “wrongthink.”

In the last week, the senator has been the subject of no less than four hit pieces by left-leaning media, all questioning his mental health. It all started with a piece in New York Magazine, which cited current and former staffers who profess to be “worried” about him: “Staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported.” Interestingly—and tellingly—those who have “diagnosed” Fetterman are not his actual doctors and have no basis on which to render medical opinions. Moreover, the tales of his mental meltdowns are told almost entirely by anonymous sources, who, in many cases, didn’t even witness the alleged events. The AP, for example, attacked Fetterman’s well-being the other day, based on the reports of “one person who was briefed on what occurred” and “a second person who was briefed separately on the meeting.”

It is hardly fair to compare John Fetterman to Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Bukovsky. They truly suffered for their dissent. At the same time, it is perfectly fair to compare Fetterman’s accusers to theirs. They are all petty totalitarians who are unable to tolerate disagreement and who are not above stooping to any means necessary to discredit their enemies.

Flashback: How the Soviets used their own twisted version of psychiatry to suppress political dissent.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 50

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Treating the Audience Like Adults.

(Warning: this essay contains movie spoilers for both “Conclave” and “Judgment at Nuremberg”)

Growing into adulthood requires many things of us, and one of those things is that when debating politics or morality, we have a grownup’s obligation to engage with the opposition’s best arguments, rather than the arguments we wish they were making.

Once upon a time, dramatic movies made for adult audiences seemed to understand this rule of growing older and wiser. Filmmakers of the past often challenged their audiences with difficult morally complicated stories that could easily have been made simpler through pure black-and-white political demagoguery. Resisting the temptation to make the lazy demagogic argument, it seems to me, was an indication that Hollywood once trusted its audience in ways that its modern counterpart rarely seems willing to do anymore.

In the world of modern messaging where the most important thing seems to be that audiences come away from a film having learned the appropriate lesson, most movies these days do not leave it to their audience to appreciate nuance, and they certainly don’t trust their audience to make the correct moral judgment when presented with villains who, while they may be wrong or even evil, have a point.

What got me thinking about this was a recent weekend of movie watching which included my first viewing of “Conclave” (2024) juxtaposed with my annual re-watch of “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

Read the whole thing.

Related: Rick McGinnis: Holy Mess: Anthony Quinn in The Shoes of the Fisherman.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 82

V-E DAY AND THE FOUNDING OF A NEW WORLD ORDER:

The war also started a new chapter in the debate over nationalism. Although many Americans despise that term, American nationalists like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln maintained that the Americans were one people whose unity advanced the cause of freedom. World War II proved them right. In war movies, it became cliché to include a New Yorker, a Texan, and representatives of other parts of America in any given military unit. These people would not walk into a bar together, but they would fight their way across Europe.

The Europeans saw things differently. In Western Europe, many concluded that nationalism was a dead end. The nation states of Europe either fell prey to fascism or were not strong enough to defeat it: some had fought for God and country long after their homes were occupied, but the majority acquiesced to Nazi rule. The war paused Central and Eastern Europe’s dream for national liberation. Those countries effectively lost their independence to the Russians and only regained their sovereignty after the Iron Curtain fell. For them, 1989 gave them a new chance at life.

This confusion lies at the heart of Europe’s problems today. The Western Europeans largely want the European Union to transcend national sovereignty, but the Central and Eastern Europeans joined to protect it. They don’t much like the fussy bureaucrats in Brussels, but they vastly prefer the pinstriped busybodies to the killers in the Kremlin.

It has also led the United States into a dilemma. American power prevented Communism from overrunning Europe and, after the Soviets collapsed, kept the Europeans from settling their differences the old-fashioned way. But it has also left the Europeans soft-headed and woolly-eyed. They have not thought seriously about their national survival in over three decades, and even the second great Russian invasion of Ukraine has not fully roused them from their slumber. Some of their most prominent thinkers are so strategically inept that the threat of tariffs has induced them to run to Beijing cap in hand.

This sort of intellectual impoverishment helped create Europe’s great failure and subsequent decline.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 74

INVERTING THE CLAUSEWITZ CLAUSE: Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver: “God d*mn it, shut down the city! We are at war!”

As I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.”

In December of 2022, Roger Kimball noted: The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over.

The January 6 Committee, illegally constituted as it was, was a continuation of that work by other means — more or less in the sense that Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he said that war was “nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit der Einmischung anderer Mittel.” Ever since Donald Trump glided down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the leviathan has been out to get him.

And the battle goes on! But didn’t Democrats already effectively shut down Newark way back in 1967? In 2025, the FAA seems determined to keep people out of the city: ‘It is not safe. Don’t fly into Newark.’

Posted at 2:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 195

VDH: Pollsters Have No Reputation After This Decade-Long Hatred Of Donald Trump.

So what were the pollsters trying to tell us or were they trying to manipulate? And I think it’s the latter. Larry Kudlow, for example, the former Fox business, I think he still is at Fox, he pointed out that when he examined the New York Times and the Washington Post polls, they were deliberately not counting people who surveyed that they were Trump voters in 2024.

That was half the country. They were only polling about a third. Think of that, a third of the people that said they voted for Trump, they polled.

Not half. So of course their results were going to be disputed or suspect. But here’s another thing.

There were analyses after each of the 2016, the 2020, and the 2024 elections about the accuracy of polls post-facto of the election. And we learned that they were way off in 2016. They said they had learned their lessons.

They were way off in 2020. They said they learned their lesson. And they were way off in 2024.

And why are they way off? Because liberal pollsters, and that’s the majority of people who do these surveys, believe that if they create artificial leads for their Democratic candidates, it creates greater fundraising and momentum. Kind of the herd mentality.

Joseph Campbell explores: How Trump can turn the tables on the pollsters.

Were he to choose a more focused, accountability-driven response, Trump could readily point to flawed poll results reported in the 2024 presidential campaign. Given that many of them erred in estimating the election outcome, he could pose a simple question: What makes them believable now?

Trump, in short, could argue pollsters have persistent credibility problems and point to vulnerabilities exposed in recent elections.

Traditionally, pre-election polls have been regarded as representing what George Gallup, a founding figure of survey research, called an “acid test” of the soundness of polling techniques. “The only justification of an election forecast,” Gallup once declared, “is to test polling methods.”

The late Philip Meyer, a well-regarded journalist, educator and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, essentially agreed with Gallup’s characterization, noting: “A poll is an estimating device while an election is an exact measurement of the real world. By holding the device against the reality, we can learn how well the device is working.”

The reality revealed in the three most recent U.S. presidential elections was that pollsters were unable to measure with accuracy Trump’s popular backing. They collectively understated support for Trump in each election, despite having made methodological adjustments following the 2016 and 2020 campaigns — adjustments specifically intended to measure Trump’s popular backing more accurately.

Finally, in “Sins of omission,” Salena Zito explores the DNC-MSM hatred of Real Clear Politics’ aggregation of polls because they favored the Bad Orange Man:

In the final stretch of last year’s presidential election, the New York Times took a whack at RCP, suggesting its map showing Trump winning all seven swing states was inferior because it was using subpar polls.

“Overall, Trump has made slight gains in the national polling average over the past two weeks, and the battleground state polling averages have tightened,” the story read. “Still, the race remains uncommonly close.”

Unlike its competitors, RealClearPolitics does not filter out or weigh polls that its critics allege are “low quality.” RCP likes to say that “at RealClearPolitics, high-quality polls are accurate polls.” One of its pages displays a map of the Electoral College with a winner projected for each state, even those the site currently deems to be toss-ups.

The story then said that “influential accounts have been sharing screenshots of RealClearPolitics’ scarlet-dominated Electoral College map,” often pairing it with images of a betting average site showing Trump with a 65% chance of winning.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and constant critic of RCP, said in the story that he believed that Republican-aligned pollsters were “flooding the zone” to shift the polling averages and deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm.

In the end, FiveThirtyEight had then-Vice President Kamala Harris with a 50-in-100 chance of winning the cycle. RCP had Trump winning six of seven battleground states. The New York Times implied that it had gamed to look better for Trump with “low-quality polling.” This isn’t hyperbole; it was in the headline that read: “Why the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race.”

Two things appear to be happening here — the sin of omission by skipping over who the true inventor and innovator of the craft was and an effort to dismiss its competency and capability.

The job of a news organization is to attract an audience because its content is consistent in getting it right or pretty darn close*. The same is true of polling. It is one thing to question polling firms and say you don’t like their methodology or think they’re rigorous enough.

Well, that’s what the job of a news organization used to be. In the 21st century, that’s shifted somewhat:


Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 104

OUT ON A LIMB: Crowdfunding alleged cold-blooded killers and racists — this is no way to fight a culture war.

Last month, Texas teenager Karmelo Anthony allegedly stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf in the heart at a track meet when Metcalf asked the teen to leave a tent. Metcalf died at the scene. Anthony was arrested, admitted he stabbed him — and yet many rushed to his defense. Sides were drawn along racial lines and supporters have happily dumped over $526,000 into his family’s fundraiser while villainizing the victim in the comments.

Then last week, a video went viral of a Minnesota woman named Shiloh Hendrix unloading some “N” bombs on a man, who confronted her over using the same slur on a black toddler. She claimed the boy had rifled through her diaper bag. Hendrix, who was doxxed, has raised over $750,000 from folks using a grim “white lives matter” campaign.

Is it any wonder that a dim-witted Temple student would use this same method after it was revealed that he and his friends visited a Barstool Sports-owned joint and added a “F–k the Jews” sign to their bottle service? The student, Mohammed Khan, uploaded the video of the sign to his own account.

Related: An Entire Generation Has Turned Feral.

What can be done about them? Unfortunately, not much. Their brains are developed, and their habits are set. They grew up on social media, and they’re acting it out as adults. There’s no changing their behavior now. The only recourse left is in the legal system — enforcing law and order by arresting those responsible for these teen takeovers and prosecuting them for their crimes. But to prosecute someone, the police need to catch them. In most of our biggest cities, there aren’t enough cops to go around. The police departments in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Baltimore, and San Francisco have all reported officer shortages.

In the short term, moving away from these crime-ridden areas is the only solution. These teen takeovers have been going on for years and will continue for the foreseeable future. The only way to avoid them is to vote with your feet. In the long term, plenty can be done. Prioritize marriage. Bring back the stigma against out-of-wedlock birth and absentee fathers. Raise your kids without screens until they’re of legal age. Inculcate virtue during their eighteen years in the nest. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer the consequences and produce more feral kids.

As Jonah Goldberg liked to say, “cheer up, for the worst is yet to come.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 175

ED MORRISSEY: New: US Brokers Cease-Fire Between India, Pakistan.

Donald Trump hailed the agreement, while also noting the US role in bringing the brief war to a conclusion:

After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE. Congratulations to both Countries on using Common Sense and Great Intelligence. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This gives Marco Rubio his first major diplomatic victory as Secretary of State, and it is a doozy. India and Pakistan have fought a number of skirmishes over the disputed Kashmir region, and terrorists often attack with Kashmir as its premise. The most well-known of these groups is Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani radical-Islamist group that got some of its funding from Osama bin Laden. They have wanted a war of conquest to integrate Kashmir and Jammu into Pakistan. The government in Islamabad claim that L-e-T has disbanded, but that claim isn’t exactly credible, especially considering the Pakistani footsie-playing with radical Islamists in the region.

As Ed concludes:

Of course, this is only a cease-fire. Pakistan and India have secular hostility and disputes going all the way back to the British partition and independence, and religious disputes going back a millennia or more. Perhaps stepping this close to the brink will have sobered both governments up enough to at least settle the secular issues and remind Pakistan especially of the necessity to deal with its radical-Islamist problems. In the meantime, though, Rubio’s credibility and the leverage from American trade will both be on the rise.

Still though as Churchill apparently never said, jaw jaw is better than war war.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 95

ALBERTA, NOT CANADA, FOR 51ST STATE: Few folks in either country took seriously President Donald Trump’s several quips about Canada becoming America’s 51st state and references to then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” But Liberal Party were sufficiently agitated that Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, should thank Trump.

As Rod Martin points out in the most intelligent analysis of the Canadian scene I’ve read in years, things might have turned out differently had Trump focused in on the real brewing crisis in Canada, the intensifying alienation of conservative voters in the western province of Alberta:

“Alberta doesn’t belong in this Canada.

“That’s not treason. It’s not even radical. It’s a simple observation of cultural, economic, and political reality — a reality growing starker by the year. Albertans have known for decades that something is deeply broken in the Confederation they were born into. But it’s only recently, as Ottawa’s indifference curdled into hostility, that many have begun asking the inevitable question: What if we left?”

Where would, should Albertans go? Go here and Martin will lay it out for all to see. If you aren’t following this guy, you should because he sees the world through clear eyes.

 

Posted at 10:55 am by Mark Tapscott 347

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka released after being arrested while protesting ICE detention facility he vowed to shut down.

Newark Mayor and New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was released Friday night after being collared at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility that opened Tuesday — and which he has vowed to shut down.

Baraka was released around 7:50 p.m. to cheers from the large crowd of protesters and swath of public officials — including socialist Big Apple mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

* * * * * * * *

Video posted to X at just after 3 p.m. by a News 12 New Jersey reporter showed Baraka, with his hands cuffed behind his back, being led away from the detention center by a Homeland Security Investigations officer.

Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” Alina Habba, the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey wrote on X five minutes later.

“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody,” Habba posted, adding “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

It came after Baraka and several New Jersey Democratic congresspeople — Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver — showed up at the Delaney Hall ICE facility, calling for the GEO Group-owned facility to be shut down.

“We’re at Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark that opened without permission from the city & in violation of local ordinances,” Coleman wrote in a post on X, along with pictures and videos of the scene.

“We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other ICE prisons. We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves,” she wrote.

Habba claimed that Baraka was inside the facility, “was warned, was asked to leave several times,” but refused.

I’m so old, I can remember this sort of insurrection activity led to much much stiffer sentences than a few hours in the slammer.

Related: The Shady Bunch: Six Words We Won’t Be Hearing from Democrats Over the Next Four Years.

Posted at 10:00 am by Ed Driscoll 211

BYRON YORK: Joe Biden denies everything.

Former President Joe Biden and former first lady Jill Biden appeared this week on The View. If you had to boil it down to headlines, there would be two: First, the Bidens both denied reports of the former president’s senility or cognitive difficulties, and second, he blamed voter sexism and racism for the defeat of his designated successor, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

But there was a bigger story: In the act of denying reports of cognitive problems, Joe Biden virtually confirmed that those reports are accurate.

* * * * * * * * *

The other headline from The View was that Joe Biden blamed the alleged sexism and racism of voters for Harris’s defeat. It worked this way. Since Joe Biden claimed he left the country in great shape, how was it that his designated successor failed to win the election? “You had made the selfless and very difficult decision, I’m sure, to step aside, and Democrats were feeling optimistic about the vice president’s chances of winning the presidency,” panelist Sara Haines said to the former president. “But then election night came, and it was like 2016 all over again. Why do you think the vice president lost, and were you surprised?”

“I wasn’t surprised,” Joe Biden said. “Not because I didn’t think the vice president was the most qualified person to be president. She is. She’s qualified to be president of the United States of America. But I wasn’t surprised because they went the route of the — the sexist route, the whole route. I mean, this is a woman, she’s this, she’s that. I mean, it really — I’ve never seen quite as successful and a consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country. And a woman of mixed race.”

In going on The View, and also doing an interview with the BBC, the former president was clearly hoping to get in front of the age and cognitive issue. But his fundamental problem is that he really was not up to the job of serving as president for a second term. That’s just a fact. Millions of people believed that, and it is unlikely that Joe Biden, who at least in the BBC interview seemed older than just a few months ago, can convince them otherwise.

This Daily Mail headline isn’t helping Sundown Joe’s case very much: Jill Biden gives Joe ‘Secret Signal’ to stop answering dangerous question on The View…as he sports mysterious hand wound.

So why is Joe making the media rounds so soon after leaving office? Report: Biden Family’s Financial Pipeline Has Run Dry.

Posted at 8:00 am by Ed Driscoll 195