April 8, 2025

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM, PART II: Portland leftist charged over using lasers to injure eyes of Tesla staff. “A radical Portland leftist named Davis Loren Nafshun was arrested on March 29 after allegedly trying to blind staff working inside a Portland Tesla showroom using a powerful green laser. The laser, which Antifa also used in 2020 at the riots to injure the eyes of officers protecting the courthouse, can cause blindness.”

He was released without bail because Portland.

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green 20

WELL, BYE:

“Commander-in-chief” is not a difficult concept, Admiral.

Posted at 12:41 pm by Stephen Green 17

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS: Johnny Rotten is right: Hamas is a gang of ‘Jew exterminators.’

It was in an interview with the Irish Independent that John Lydon – as he’s now known – stuck two fingers up at today’s fashionable Israelophobia. The reporter reminds him that his band, Public Image Limited, played in Tel Aviv in 2010 and asks if he would ever do so again. The ‘right’ reply to such a query, of course, is to say: ‘No. Never. I swear. Please don’t cancel me.’ Rotten’s reply? Basically: yeah, why the hell not.

He says he had a hoot playing in Israel. ‘The country is more mixed than you’re led to believe, it’s not just “Jews only”, far from it’, he said. Cue pearl-clutching from every luvvie who thinks Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ because some tit at the Guardian told them it was. ‘There were lots of Muslims in the audience when I played there’, he said. Then his killer line: ‘That was special because no Muslim nation has invited me, not ever.’

I can’t get enough of this. Where celebs normally trot out whatever anti-Israel crap they’ve heard from TikTok’s time-rich white kids in keffiyehs, here comes Johnny with the truth. The truth that Muslims in Israel are freer than Muslims in Muslim countries. They’re even allowed to rock out to the world’s best-known punk. How come? Here Lydon really hits his stride, giving voice to a truth that’s become surreally unsayable in polite society – it’s because Arabs in Israel ‘get the same rights as a Jew’, he says. The man doesn’t lie.

But surely, says the interviewer to Lydon, you can see why people would ‘object’ to you playing in Israel? Guess what? He can’t. These people just don’t know what they’re talking about, he says. If you’re one of those halfwits who thinks visiting the Jewish State is the great unwashable sin of our age, then ‘you’re working on what you’ve been told rather than what you found out for yourself’, he says. You’ve been ‘indoctrinated rather than educated’. Preach, John.

Wow, actual rebellion against the establishment left by a rock star – he’ll never get into the Eagles or Bruce Springsteen’s band (or, needless to say, Roger Waters’) with that attitude!

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 16

MICHAEL WALSH: Tariffs Aren’t the Issue.

All the fuss and geschrei over Donald Trump’s Great Tariff War really is much ado about nothing — but it’s also about everything.

To begin, what it’s not about is tariffs. What it is about is repatriating American manufacturing and thereby restoring Great Power status to the U.S.A. Tariffs are merely the mechanism by which to get the ball rolling. Adam Smith’s hidden hand is about to come roaring back into play.

The naysaying Left — which never met a tax hike it didn’t love — has jumped on tariffs as a “tax,” which of course they are. A tax on foreign-made goods coming into the country. A tax that — unlike most taxes — you can avoid by not buying the product. The U.S. managed to get along perfectly well from the presidencies of George Washington to that of William Howard Taft (a “progressive,” along with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) financed by tariffs and excise taxes, with only occasional, and temporary, taxes on income.

It was not until the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913, during the Wilson administration — the first of the “progressive era” amendments that also included the 17th, 18th, and 19th, all of which need to be repealed; one down three to go — that the notion of taxing labor, previously and correctly deemed unconstitutional, reared its inhuman, statist head. And practically from that day on, America plunged into a debt spiral from which it has never recovered.

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 48

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Space Force missile-tracking “Foo Fighter” satellites clear design milestone.

Eight satellites designed by Millennium Space Systems with sensor payloads from L3Harris Technologies have cleared a key design review, paving the way for production and a planned late 2027 launch, the companies announced April 7.

Millennium Space, based in El Segundo, California, is building the satellites under a $414 million contract awarded last year by the Space Development Agency for a constellation known as “Foo Fighter” — short for Fire-control On Orbit-support to the Warfighter.

The satellites will form part of the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, an extensive constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites designed to provide continuous tracking, targeting and communications support for U.S. military operations.

Dave Grohl could not be reached for comment.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green 16

CHANGE: The Border Crisis Is Over.

“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”

“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter.

“There is an expectation. There is hope and there is enthusiasm in those who believe that, with the change of administration, will come new measures and that they will immediately enter and there will be new conditions that will allow them to request asylum,” Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua State Council for Population and Migration, told a Mexican newspaper that night.

They were right in their interpretation of Biden’s campaign promises, if a tad early. An estimated 10-12 million foreign nationals would more successfully answer the call starting on Biden’s inauguration day a few weeks later, in record-smashing populations of between 200,000 and 350,000, ushered straight into America every month for the next four years.

And all of that is now at an end. With frankly shocking speed, the Trump Administration has cut off the flood tide of illegal immigration that raged for all of Biden’s term. By the second full month of Donald Trump’s new term, just 8,300 had attempted a crossing, and every one of them was detained and deported—a record-breaking nadir.

At the beginning of the year, Joe Scarborough had yet another change of heart and exclaimed, “The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly.” But from Biden’s handlers’ point of view, it was the successful element of their administration:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Posted at 10:52 am by Ed Driscoll 64

BLUE STATE BLUES:

More: “In the official proxy statement, reasons for leaving include more predictability and certainty in decision-making; and reducing the risk of opportunistic litigation against the Company, and its directors and officers, which can be time-consuming, burdensome, and expensive.”

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green 123

MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE: CU Boulder pro-Hamas protestors barge into class – get yanked out by their keffiyehs.

A trio of pro-Hamas student activists barged into a University of Colorado Boulder classroom last week, and were promptly hauled back out by their keffiyehs.

The Daily Camera reports after entering the “Designing for Defense” class, one of the activists went to the front of the room and prepared to read a statement, whereupon a man who appeared to be the instructor said “No you may not.”

He then grabbed the statement and said “Get out.”

The students say they were “violently assaulted,” but it sounds like a clear case of molliter manus imposuit to me.

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 161

WELL, THEY’RE CERTAINLY ASKING FOR IT: French far right floats toppling government in wake of Le Pen verdict.

Two high-ranking officials from France’s biggest far-right party publicly opened the door on Monday to bringing down the government a week after Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement and subsequently barred from running for president.

National Rally President Jordan Bardella and party Vice President Sébastien Chenu revealed in separate interviews that the party is contemplating ousting Prime Minister François Bayrou, just four months after backing the French left’s effort to take down his predecessor, Michel Barnier.

Both National Rally politicians framed their party’s decision as a response to Bayrou’s supposed failures to act on their legislative priorities, such as lowering energy prices or adopting a proportional voting system. Bardella told RTL that “this government isn’t doing much” while Chenu accused Bayrou trying to kick the can down the road and “wear out members of parliament.”

The timing of their messaging, however, is unlikely a coincidence.

You can either have free and fair elections or you can eventually have lampposts. Europe’s elites seem to have forgotten that.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green 155

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dare We Dream About Lasting Improvements in Election Integrity? “For far too long now, American elections have been a hot mess of ‘anomalies,’ as the defenders of the status quo like to put it. You and I, of course, would say ‘deliberate fraud.’ I would prefer to say something much worse, but this is a family site.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green 46

REALITY SINKS IN:

Posted at 8:37 am by Glenn Reynolds 95

SO NOW NPR WANTS YOU TO KNOW: Tariffs are fueling fears of a recession. What does it take to actually declare one?

A recession refers to a period of decline in economic activity. It’s one of the four stages of the economic cycle: growth, peak, contraction (or recession) and trough.

Some analysts use a rough rule of thumb to identify recessions: Two consecutive quarters of decline in a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) — the broadest measure of economic activity.

But the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that has become the semi-official arbiter of recessions — uses a somewhat squishier definition. It calls a recession a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

The definition doesn’t seem to have become squishier until the old definition happened on Biden’s watch. Now it will be as squishy as necessary to hang it on Trump.

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green 78

NOTHING SAYS “FOLLOW THE SCIENCE” LIKE COVERING UP THE SCIENCE:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 96

WASHPOST FAWNS OVER FINAL SEASON OF HANDMAID’S TALE, DUCKS MOSS’S SCIENTOLOGY: We quoted Mark Judge in the last hour, who wrote, “Jeff Bezos is trying to save The Washington Post, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and has lost all credibility.” Bezos’ spring clean of the Augean Stables is, alas, going quite slowly. At NewsBusters, Curtis Houck writes:

In a huge, five-page, 3,200-word spread in Sunday’s Washington Post, Style section writer Jada Yuan heaped more liberal bile on the grossly anti-Christian, anti-family, pro-baby death, and far-left crowd behind the show The Handmaid’s Tale ahead of its final season. As is usually the case with puff pieces on the show, Yuan left out that star Elizabeth Moss is a devout Scientology which, if there ever was a dangerous cult, that’s it.

“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is ready for its revolution; The dystopian TV drama is winding up for its big finish. Its cast members have lots to say about its relevance,” Yuan beamed in the online headline.

Despite women still having been allowed to protest en masse and abortions continuing to take place across the country, Yuan fed the narrative women* have almost become lifeless, listless vessels for the patriarchy in the Trump presidencies.

The image that accompanies Houck’s post is doubly ironic:

Everybody’s masked up, which is what the left demanded of all of America in 2020, they’re all wearing outfits that seem much like jilbabs. But many leftists have long defended the jilbab; or as Phyllis Chesler wrote in 2009, paraphrasing the opinion of a pre-Trump supporting Naomi Wolf: The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?

* But what is a woman? Flashback to 2021: The author of The Handmaid’s Tale tweeted a column defending the word ‘woman’ and the woke are outraged.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll 99