June 1, 2025

OKAY, BUT SHOULDN’T CONGRESS FOCUS MORE ON PASSING THE AGENDA OF THE CURRENT PRESIDENT? Watergate-Style Hearings for the Biden Coverup.

The massive coverup of Joe Biden’s mental decline has stimulated plenty of indignant commentary. Missing from the hand-wringing is a demand for accountability, which brings to mind the quip: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This newspaper and recently published books have exposed the trickery and lies of Mr. Biden’s minions and Democratic allies, who attempted to wield power in a leaderless vacuum. It was perfectly described in Tunku Varadarajan’s review of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin,” as resembling “a hush-hush leftist capture of an infirm president.”

A White House cadre, with media connivance, hoped to drag their puppet over the electoral line to win four additional years of power, dangerously undermining the institutional integrity of the presidency. Memorial Day has come and gone, and Washington’s elite is already enabling the machinery to which the Democratic left turns in the face of scandal—elevating sideshows such as insupportable claims that Republicans are destroying Medicaid or rants regarding President Trump’s dispute with Harvard, all to make this latest deceit disappear like April’s cherry blossoms.

Republicans will end up rewarding this duplicity if they elevate cheap talk over accountability. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is holding aggressive hearings on the coverup, but they have been too narrowly aimed. Mr. Biden’s using an autopen and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s declining to release the audio of the president’s interview with Robert Hur are small potatoes amid this vast whitewash of history.

If Congress takes seriously that it should act when Americans are cynically hoodwinked, it must begin an investigation into the coverup that matches or exceeds the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.

John Fund explores: Why the Biden Health Cover-Up Really Matters.

The media are supposed to be watchdogs of potential governmental abuse. Instead, they are in danger of becoming lapdogs serving the interests of some of those in power. (The danger, with Trump in office, is dramatically reduced.) In Biden’s case, his aides worked overtime to conceal the president’s frailty from the media and intimidate anyone who questioned his abilities, and the media failed in their duty to probe more deeply and question the official White House line.

“This was a cover-up — plain and simple,” admits Chris Cillizza, a former reporter with the Washington Post and CNN. “For at least two years (or close to it) senior people in the White House knew that Biden’s condition was bad enough that it needed to be concealed from people working in the administration.”

The media should have realized how powerful a motivation their sources had to deceive them.

They all knew that, but were too invested in getting their man across the finish line for the second time (or possibly the fourth time).

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Mike Huckabee Has a Great Idea for Where to Put a Palestinian State.

Huckabee, according to a Saturday Fox News report, said that it was “incredibly inappropriate in the midst of a war that Israel is dealing with to go out and present something that I think increasingly Israelis are steadfast against.” Indeed, a majority of Israelis now oppose the “two-state solution,” after supporting it for a long time. That’s only reasonable, as it’s impossible to sustain the idea that the Palestinian Arabs will live side-by-side in peace with an Israel of any size. It’s much more likely that a Palestinian state would become a new jihad base for increased attacks against what’s left of Israel, just as Gaza did after the Israelis unilaterally withdrew from it in 2005.

The change in Israeli opinion on this issue came about largely because of Hamas’ brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis. Huckabee observed succinctly: “Oct. 7 changed a lot of things.” Then he offered a modest proposal to the French diplomats who apparently plan to establish a Palestinian state without any input at all from the Israelis: “If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I have a suggestion for them–carve out a piece of the French Riviera and create a Palestinian state.”

If we also take up Sheldon Cooper’s advice, Israel should have much less to worry about from Hamas:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 71

CHANGE: “Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment.

It looks like the “learn to code” push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.

As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.

In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.

While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and  job security.

(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.)

The first line of the above Newsweek article links to a 2019 New Republic article with the headline, “The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of ‘Learn to Code.’ How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.”

Yes, that “fetid right-wing origin” of paying attention to and quoting the things that leftist politicians and journalists were telling Americans. Or as Matt Vespa wrote in January of last year at Townhall: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.

Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.

That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.

And right around that time: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.

Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”

QED:

And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:

In January of 2023, Glenn warned: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.

And thus:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 182

I WAS TOLD THIS WAS IMPOSSIBLE:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 121

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME WE WERE DOOMED:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 148

ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY. Democrats and Men. “One might think that $20 million would buy something more insightful than this, but then, this is the same party that triumphantly chose Tim Walz as its vice-presidential nominee, fully expecting him to be the answer to their gender gap problem. Or in other words, don’t hold your breath. In reality, the odds that the contemporary Democratic party will be able to win back men, now or in the foreseeable future, are vanishingly small. The party, as it is currently constituted, lacks both the will and the ability to make the changes that would be necessary to do so. What I mean by this is that the contemporary Democratic party is built on a handful of foundational notions that are, by and large, incompatible with the goal of appealing to men.”

When your platform is built by and for batshit crazy upper middle class white women, men are going to look elsewhere.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 205

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: How the BLM riots broke America.

On the night of 1 June 2020, almost exactly five years ago, gunshots rang out not far from my apartment in East Midtown Manhattan. As my wife and I anxiously scrolled news feeds, our kids — then ages three and one — slept, oblivious to the coruscating sirens that carried hints of chaos beyond our door. At 11pm, I went out to see it for myself: gangs of looters smashing stores down Lexington Avenue, while NYPD patrols stood pat, unwilling or unable to confront them. Black Lives Matter.

That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.

The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.

Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.

In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.

As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.

Well yeah — they were fiery, sure. But for the most part, quite peaceful, according to CNN:

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 285

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON AND SANFORD BEGLEY:   Supporting Ragnarok.

#CommissionEarned

Valhalla is no place for a loggie. But Master Sergeant (Logistics) Danny Pederson made a career error and died heroically in combat after thirty years of nice boring supply work. He woke up dead to learn he’s stuck in a nightmare of unending battle called Valhalla. Seems the recruiters lied about Valhalla too.

Now, the only hope he has is to carry out the mission given by a mysterious messenger. Whether he likes it or not, they have to support Ragnarok… if that battle can ever happen to bring everything to an end.

Danny’s pissed, and he just wanted to go fishing. He’s about to take Ragnarok to the throat of the gods themselves. After inventory is complete.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt 8