April 14, 2025
THE PROBLEM, AS OUTLINED BY DATA REPUBLICAN:
The Left is structured as a network of NGOs: ruthlessly efficient and ready to act the moment power changes hands.
The Right has no equivalent infrastructure. If I sit down and ask myself, “How would I start an NGO to implement a conservative agenda in D.C.?” … I draw a blank. Because the dominant instinct on the Right isn’t to build, it’s to dismantle. Most conservative goals center on shrinking or limiting the federal government.
That creates a fundamental asymmetry. NGOs on the Left are designed to expand state power through policy scaffolding, and once federal funding flows in, it’s nearly impossible to tear down. It would take an act of Congress to defund these mechanisms, and Congress rarely votes to shrink its own power.
So, we can’t fight fire with fire.
As I see it, there are only three paths forward (not mutually exclusive):
1. Keep scaling the existing DOGE efforts.
2. Replace the majority of Congress with people willing to shut the spigot.
3. Trigger a Convention of States and rewrite the rules from outside the system.Each path demands broad public support, which, again, NGOs don’t need. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. They just have to win the influence of a few.
What Musk is doing with DOGE is great. But the next step needs to be building out a conservative informational infrastructure. That isn’t a new idea but if the best time to build it was 20 years ago, the second-best time is right now.
A HUNDRED MILLION HERE AND A HUNDRED MILLION THERE…: ‘Mississippi Musk’ Finds $400 Million in State Government Waste.
MEASURE ACCURATELY: Mr. Pen- Stylish Metal Ruler, 12″, Copper. #CommissionEarned
BECAUSE THE NYT ISN’T ON AMERICA’S SIDE. NEXT QUESTION?
I'm trying to understand NYT economics. How can what's good for the US be an obvious disaster for Europe? pic.twitter.com/JR8nDvbF3k
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) April 14, 2025
KURT SCHLICHTER: The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers.
Your politics don’t matter when you are a military leader. At all. Politics have no place in the military. None. I was becoming more and more prominent politically and in the media as a civilian while I was becoming a senior field grade officer as a reservist, but I was actively apolitical around the troops. I never talked about politics on duty. I never asked about it or told anyone about it. You know the command sergeant major I mentioned? I have no idea who he voted for. None. That’s because he was a consummate professional, and I tried to be the same. When we put on the uniform, we did our job whether the President was named Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, or Obama.
But apparently, some officers these days think there is a Trump Exception to their duty as officers to be apolitical, just as there appears to be a Trump Exception to every other rule, regulation, norm, and standard in our society and government. They are wrong, and their utterly bass ackwards conception of their duties as leaders is poisonous to the organization. If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.
What’s stunning is the sheer cheesiness of their tiresome acts of resistance. The commander of Fort Igloo decided to throw away her career by mass emailing a cloying letter that emphasized how she didn’t support the political leadership’s initiatives re: Greenland. What was she thinking? Another officer at NATO headquarters refused to post pictures of the new commander-in-chief and vice-president, as is a rule on military installations. That’s almost too petty to believe (I initially did not believe it – too insane – but my sources tell me it’s true).
Read the whole thing.
NVIDIA STOCK LEAPS AFTER MASSIVE U.S. INVESTMENT SURPRISE:
Nvidia unveiled plans for a massive investment in its U.S.-based manufacturing Monday as the ripple effects of President Donald Trump’s tariff gambit, as well as China’s retaliation toward the tech sector, continue to reverberate.
Nvidia said it planned to produce an American-made supercomputer from a U.S. platform, and planned to produce as much as $500 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next four years as part of a partnership with Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor.
The plants are expected to be built in Arizona, to test Nvidia Blackwell chips, and in Texas, to test AI supercomputers.
“The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.”
Meanwhile, in recent Apple news:
CHECK ME AND ADGO OUT IN ‘THE FREE INQUIRY PAPERS,’ AVAILABLE TOMORROW!: Current and former FIRE staffers contribute two chapters to this who’s who of academic freedom and campus speech commentary.
JUST REMEMBER, AI GETS BETTER EVERY YEAR, WHILE PEOPLE STAY BASICALLY THE SAME: AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say. Even when given access to tools, AI agents can’t reliably debug software.
IT’S COME TO THIS: As Concert Ticket Prices Soar, More Than Half of Coachella GA Attendees Are Buying Tickets Through Payment Plans.
Tens of thousands of music fans will descend on the California desert this weekend for the first of two iterations of the Coachella Music and Arts festival outside of Palm Springs, Calif.
Approximately 80,000 to 100,000 fans each weekend will have coughed up the $599 ticket price to see headliners Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. But ticket price is often just the cost of entry — many of those fans will spend more than a $1,000 per weekend on lodging and cough up hundreds of dollars more for food, drinks and merchandise. It’s a substantial spend for any of the 20-somethings in Coachella’s target demographic. But festival organizers have increasingly helped finance their purchase through payment plan programs.
Approximately 60 percent of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan system, which requires as little as $49.99 up front for tickets to the annual concert. The desert festival isn’t alone — Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival and Rolling Loud all sell the majority of their tickets using some kind of payment plan system.
Representatives at Goldenvoice, which puts on Coachella, declined to comment for this story. One source, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, told Billboard that payment plans have fundamentally changed how festivals are marketed to the public.
“Festivals are now marketing a cheap down payment as their main call to action,” the source says. “The messaging is $20 down gets you in the door, or $50 down gets you started. It’s no longer about the artists, or the festival lifestyle — the message is, ‘You can afford this if you act today.’”
Yes, but it’s not just Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. There was also this brilliant veteran rap star spitting bars, and dropping some dope verses, straight fire: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’
Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”
Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”
“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”
“Fighting Oligarchy” is definitely Bernie’s greatest hits package, crafted from years of extensive jamming on the road, and presumably went down well with the young potentially violent socialists in the crowd:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025
Related: Festival guests report stolen belongings from hotel rooms during Coachella.
Multiple Coachella festivalgoers contacted News Channel 3, saying their belongings were stolen from their hotel rooms while they were away at the festival.
Ellie Brownridge said she’s attended Coachella for years with her best friend, Zoe Grober.
Grober said they’ve stayed at La Quinta Resort & Club before.
“We always love this property,” Grober said. “It’s just so disappointing that something like this happened and it’s totally tainted the experience.”
Brownridge and Grober, staying with their husbands, said they returned Saturday morning after the first day of Coachella to find personal items missing — including vintage bags, jewelry, family heirlooms and sunglasses.
They told News Channel 3 they called hotel management and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department — and quickly learned they weren’t alone.
“We met two other groups. In total, I think it’s like 15 people that we know of that this has happened to,” Brownridge said. “I think we’re looking at over $100,000 worth of stuff that’s gone.”
I was told in 2020 by Bernie’s supporters — including the New York Times and NPR — that this sort of five-fingered wealth distribution was perfectly acceptable. I’m glad to see that’s apparently no longer the case.
UPDATE: California punk rockers call for an ‘army of Luigis’ during brash Coachella set.
Shortly after ending a blistering rendition of “Coup D’Etat” during their Coachella set, Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris made a clarification to the moshing crowd. Although that last song ended with the words “kill all,” he made a point to say that the band does not condone what it describes, including kidnapping government leaders for ransom and leading a coup. “That song, that last line, ends with ‘kill all.’ That’s a pretty f—king ugly statement,” Morris said. “In ugly times. Do not think that we encourage that.”
Then, Morris went in a different direction. “What we do encourage — what would be totally f—king happening — would be an army of Luigis,” he said, in reference to Luigi Mangione, who is currently facing both federal and New York state charges for the alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson late last year.
Tay-Tay and Donie smile.
UPDATE: What we know about suspect in arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence.
The man charged in connection with an arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home over the weekend allegedly climbed the residence’s fence, used a hammer to break a window and threw Molotov cocktails in to start the blaze, prosecutors revealed.
Cody A. Balmer, 38, was charged with attempted criminal homicide, aggravated arson, burglary, terrorism and other counts in connection with the early Sunday morning attack, the Dauphin County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
The arson attack lasted for several minutes. Shapiro and first lady Lori Shapiro, as well as other guests and staff, were inside the Harrisburg residence when the fire erupted around 2 a.m. No one was injured in the fire, and the governor’s family was safely evacuated. However, prosecutors said the residence sustained “substantial damage.”
Balmer, of Harrisburg, turned himself into the Pennsylvania State Police on Sunday and admitted to “harboring hatred towards Governor Shapiro.”
When asked during a police interview what he would have done if Shapiro found him inside the residence, “he advised he would have beaten him with his hammer,” the probable cause affidavit said
The NBC News report played up Balmer’s anti-Biden sentiments but there’s more to the story.
A man named Cody Balmer has been charged with terrorism, attempted murder, aggravated arson and aggravated assault over the April 13 family home arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. @JoshShapiroPA.
Local authorities have not released a photo of Balmer but I found and verified… pic.twitter.com/IIPVtsbQNK
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 14, 2025
He certainly at least looks more Antifa than MAGA.
UNEXPECTEDLY: California has the highest impact fees for homebuilding in the country.
When property owners apply to the government for building permits, they’re often required to pay impact fees: fees meant to cover the strain additional buildings have on public resources like roads, sewers, schools, and parks.
There’s nothing wrong with properly set impact fees. But some local governments set impact fees that are excessively high or that aren’t related to the actual impact of construction projects. In addition to violating property rights, these improperly set exactions increase the cost of construction during today’s housing crisis, as a new Pacific Legal Foundation report reveals.
While this is a problem across the United States, California’s impact fees are much higher than anywhere else. Our report found that the average total impact fees for a typical U.S. home grew from almost $5,000 in 2004 to more than $9,000 in 2019. However, California’s average impact fee in 2019 was more than triple the national average, at almost $30,000. And it was much higher than the next-two-highest states: Maryland and Oregon charged the third- and second-highest exactions on average in 2019—nearly $13,000 and $17,000, respectively.
When breaking this down by locality, the situation paints an even starker picture of how much higher impact fees were in California. The five cities with the largest average total impact fees in 2019 were all in California, and all exceeded $50,000. Ironically, the smallest exactions were found in California’s next-door neighbor, Nevada. Las Vegas and Mesquite had average total impact fees of $165 and $43, respectively.
Somewhat relatedly, Thomas Sowell has written about “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.
Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.
Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.
What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.
As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.” San Francisco is a crumbling, endlessly multifaceted example of precisely that.
And as we linked to earlier today, Adam Carolla knows who California’s local governments will invariably roll first:
KYLE SMITH: Eve of Destruction.
Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World is an exhaustive look at the enduring appeal of works about how civilization might end, from the Book of Revelation to 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, I Am Legend, and whatever extinction-level event Hollywood next brings to screens. (“Extinction-level event,” by the way, is a phrase popularized by the 1998 blockbuster Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall and Téa Leoni, about what happens as Earth prepares to receive an asteroid the size of Texas.)
A writer and podcaster whose previous books include 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Lynskey seems to have pored over hundreds of books, many of them obscure, and watched nearly as many movies and TV shows to shape this definitive account. “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days,” he writes. The seismologist Charles Francis Richter noted that when the Gospel records that “there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Luke 21:11), Jesus wasn’t exactly going out on a limb: “Assuredly, no safer forecast was ever made.”
* * * * * * * * *
The most celebrated of this supposedly brilliant crew was the spectacularly erroneous neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich (“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” he promised in 1970), who boldly accepted a bet in 1980 by the techno-optimist economist Julian Simon about the future price of any five precious metals chosen by Ehrlich, which under his catastrophic-scarcity theory would necessarily become more expensive. Prices instead fell across the board. Lynskey sniffs, “Simon was lucky because commodity prices were unusually high in 1980 and Ehrlich had a weak grasp of economics.”
The most sophisticated of the sophisticated see climate change and overpopulation working in tandem to hasten our mass demise. For Lynskey, the 1973 Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, which pictured a 2022 New York City (population 40,000,000) as a “smoggy, sweltering, desperate shanty town” is “a remarkably far-sighted movie about climate change.” Yet any long-time resident of New York City will tell you that the place is considerably cleaner and more pleasant than it was in 1973.
To Lynskey, no climate-change prophecy is ever wrong, merely premature; he occasionally sounds like a Millerite re-calculating the future arrival date of Armageddon. Why, after mocking so many doomsayers, does he include only two glancing mentions of the leading alarmist of our age, Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won an Oscar for its sci-fi speculation, warning that the planet would be doomed in ten years unless a “drastic” reversal of course were taken? Lynskey seems entirely to have forgotten that Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, was taken far more seriously than nearly all of the dozens of (other) nuts and cranks whose wrong predictions get detailed, multi-page summaries. Reaching the end, one feels a bit worn out by the endless zombie-march of unearthed factoids. A greater effort to make sense of it all would have been welcome. But then again, it’s always a good time to panic.
It really is: On climate change scare tactics.
1971: New ice age coming by 2020 or 2023!
1972: New ice age by 2070! Oil depleted in 20 years!
1974: Space satellites show new ice age coming fast! And another ice age just around the bend! Ozone depletion a ‘great peril’ to life!
1976: Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent!
1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in ’90s!
1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend!
1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes! Peak oil in 2000!
1988: Regional droughts (that never happened) in 1990s! Temperatures in DC will hit record highs! Maldive islands will be underwater by 2018!
1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000! New York City’s west side highway will be underwater by 2019!
1996: Peak oil in 2020!
2000: Children won’t know what snow is!
All this doomsday talk gives me a serious case of nostalgia. The apocalypses haven’t been nearly as much fun ever since Orson Welles wasn’t available to pick up a quick paycheck narrating them:
WHAT’S THE LEAST LIKELY ANSWER? You Heard It Here First: The Obamas Are Hiding Something.
MOSCOW NEEDS A FIRST-CLASS ARMY MORE THAN THEY NEED A FEW MORE SUBS: Russia To Launch Massive $100 Billion Naval Expansion. “Based on available reports and recordings of the meeting shared by state media and social media channels, Putin did not provide specifics on how the funds would be distributed or which projects would be prioritized.”
TARIFFS ARE GOING TO BE A REAL PROBLEM FOR THEM:
This is from @BrookingsInst – Not MAGA or @POTUS
CCP is flooding world markets with subsidized goods. This is how Xi fights for survival.
—@YatesComms @DominoTheoryPod @YatesComms @seanmdav @MariaBartiromo @andrewrsorkin @nedryun @DonaldJTrumpJr @instapundit @ImKingGinger… https://t.co/t5yhe8p95n— Mark Simon (@MarkSimonHK) April 14, 2025
Note how “staff” and “administrators” are way ahead of faculty.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: ICE Detains ‘Sushi John’ the Chinese Spy.
POLICE: Arson Suspect Admitted ‘Harboring Hatred’ Toward Gov. Shapiro.
[Cody] Balmer faces numerous charges including:
- Criminal Attempt – Criminal Homicide
- Aggravated Arson – Person Present Inside Property
- Terrorism – Affect the Conduct of a Government
6ABC reported that the police “have not ruled out Shapiro’s Jewish faith” as a possible motive.”
What little is known about Balmer, the suspected Jew-hating arsonist, paints the picture that he isn’t a resident of either side of the political aisle. He seems to be A) a nut, and B) an anarchist, which if you look up the definition of an anarchist, it’ll say see A). He once proclaimed on social media that he was a socialist, but there’s not much other evidence out there to back up that claim. What is there is that he hated everybody on both sides.
I hope that Kash Patel at FBI gets to the bottom quickly of what made this person snap, and I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi, if he did it out of religious bigotry, throws the book at him, despite whatever political affiliation, if any, he currently espouses.
I am grateful that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. As for the Governor’s ‘both sidesism’, we all have eyes and ears, and functioning brainstems. It’s not hard to see where the bulk of the outbreaks of anti-Semitism are falling on the ideological spectrum recently. It’s not on the right. It’s on the left. Using moral equivalence to downplay the explosion of hate against Jews on the Democratic side isn’t going to make the problem go away. Putting political expediency over morality reduces the spotlight on the true offenders of evil instead of shining the light brightly on these cockroaches wherever they surface.
I want to help dig a giant pit and assist the rest of the country in dropping every anti-Semite into it, regardless of whom they voted for in the last few cycles. If this latest fire outbreak of hate is happening mostly on the left, however, perhaps that’s the direction where we should be applying the most water.
The day after Balmer’s arson attack on the PA governor, CNN was in a festive mood regarding political violence in general: CNN blasted for segment calling Luigi Mangione a ‘morally good man. “’CNN is a bad joke of a new org and Lorenz is a nut job. She said Mangione is a ‘morally good man’ which is absurd, as he killed a man in cold blood,’ another said. ‘The more I think about the Donie O’Sullivan interview with Taylor Lorenz the more astonished I am that they were laughing when talking about a guy who shot a man in the back in cold blood,’ a third person fumed.”
