May 9, 2025

HOW IT STARTED: Gavin Newsom, Mandy Moore Discuss Covid-19, Climate Change and 2020 Election.

Mandy Moore and Taylor Goldsmith interviewed California Governor Gavin Newsom on some of the biggest topics impacting their state, including climate change, Covid-19, and the upcoming 2020 presidential election, for Rolling Stone‘s first Fridays for Unity event.

Moore addressed climate change by bringing up the recent devastating wildfires in California; she and Goldsmith live in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, where wildfires have only become a greater hazard over the past few summers. Newsom expressed sympathy for his state’s residents who are dealing with the realities of climate change, stating, “You may not even believe in science, but you gotta believe your own eyes.”

—Rolling Stone, October 19th, 2020.

How it’s going: Mandy Moore Slams Protocol to Rebuild House After Wildfire Destruction: ‘Maddening and Heartless.’

It’s been four months since Mandy Moore and tens of thousands of others were displaced because of the Los Angeles wildfires and every day comes with a new set of problems.

The This Is Us alum, 41, gave fans an update on her house rebuild on Tuesday, May 6, slamming Los Angeles County for making it so hard to pick up the pieces following the January fires that destroyed more than 16,000 structures.

“Thanks, LA County for making it as frustrating and impossible to rebuild after the fires as possible,” Moore quipped via an Instagram Story statement. “Shouldn’t be surprised but it’s mind boggling the red tape and hoops they’re putting us all through.”

The actress, whose house in Altadena was partially spared, noted that amid the “fury” of her initial post her message might’ve come out “a bit convoluted” so she penned a second statement directed at the county.

“It’s maddening and heartless … the endless hoops and meaningless protocol LA County is asking of fire victims who want to rebuild and get their lives back,” Moore wrote, asking, “Wasn’t California going to make this as easy as possible?”

Err, no. After the fire, Newsom was still uttering the S-word, this time to explain away all of the delays and red tape that Democrats like Moore would have to jump through to rebuild:

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HARVEY WEINSTEIN AND THE DEATH RATTLE OF #METOO:

Weinstein’s retrial is a do-over of legal proceedings that were originally marred by judicial error, and that raised questions even at the time about whether prosecutors were cutting corners in their eagerness to topple one of the #MeToo movement’s biggest bad guys. New York’s highest court found that the judge in his first trial improperly allowed testimony from accusers not named in the official charges. (A similar technicality—this one a more serious case of judicial error—triggered Bill Cosby’s release from prison in 2021.) Weinstein’s lawyers are now arguing that he didn’t get a fair trial in California, either—and are appealing his conviction of rape there, too.

These ambiguities may spell an acquittal for Weinstein; they also provide an opening for someone like Owens to claim the entire case was corrupt. But the architects of #MeToo also bear a certain amount of responsibility for the shape of this conversation. Because while the original purpose of the movement might have been to protect women from sexual predation, what it became—and what it will likely be remembered as—is a machine that wrecked the lives of men by labeling them sex offenders, without due process, and often without even the most perfunctory concern for whether the allegations were true.

That #MeToo so quickly became a tool for destroying reputations and dispensing vigilante justice is only surprising if you don’t recognize the movement’s true ideological origins—which had absolutely nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein or Hollywood sexism, and everything to do with the election of one Donald J. Trump.

Ah, Trump: the living embodiment of gross sexual entitlement, a multiply-accused alleged frotteur who bragged about grabbing women by the you-know-what. The subtext of #MeToo, which broke into the mainstream almost exactly one year after the release of that infamous Access Hollywood tape, was that Trump’s election to the presidency despite all these things revealed something deeply rotten in the culture—and that while we’d missed our chance to punish him for his misdeeds, it was not too late to build a movement that would punish men like him. Not just accused rapists like Bill Cosby or R. Kelly, but every man who crossed lines, took liberties, and failed to treat women with the respect they deserved. The boors, the bastards, the gropers and grabbers; men who flirted with their coworkers or cheated on their wives or committed the vaguely sexual-sounding offense of sliding into a woman’s DMs—which seemed a lot more scandalous before I realized that it just meant sending any kind of message on social media, including professional correspondence.

I suspect that Weinstein’s convictions, one of the movement’s few legal wins, were such a big deal—symbolic, even—because it felt a bit like taking down Trump by proxy. Here was a man of a certain age, a certain type, who had a certain way of throwing his weight around to extract what he wanted from unwilling women. And for those who had long been agitating for a more victim-friendly criminal justice system and more dedicated prosecution of sex crimes, his first conviction, which was in New York, was groundbreaking. Not just a rare win, but perhaps even the start of something transformative.

But looking back, Weinstein was an outlier. Mostly, MeTooings were a wild extralegal west of unfalsifiable accusations, social media innuendo, or allegations via anonymous spreadsheet laundered into the news cycle by enthusiastic journalists. The men who suffered the worst consequences were rarely the most credibly accused, and the lack of both process and restraint emboldened both the press and ordinary people alike to go to extremes.

This latter phenomenon is starkly illustrated by the case of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who outside of Weinstein is probably the movement’s most memorable target. As a nominee, Kavanaugh was not only recklessly accused by the media of being part of a teen rape gang, and put through a surreal Congressional struggle session over the contents of his high school yearbook, but was later subject to an assassination attempt by a disgruntled liberal: His would-be murderer pled guilty last month.

* * * * * * * * *

But it also feels, sometimes, like the moment has passed. It’s not just that Weinstein, whose convictions were the biggest and most sparkling jewel in the #MeToo crown, might now be acquitted of some of the most heinous charges against him. It’s that the thrilling momentum of the movement has vanished, leaving its participants both too jaded and too tired to resume the business of witch-finding.

Curiously CTL-F “Biden” brings up zero results on the above article at the Free Press. Because mentioning him would have allowed us to pinpoint the exact day in which “the moment passed:” April 8th, 2020:

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ended his presidential candidacy on Wednesday, concluding a quest that elevated him as a standard-bearer of American liberalism and clearing the way for a general election between the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and President Trump at a time of national crisis.

Flashback: When #Metoo Is Sold Out For #Orangemanbad.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 31

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: ‘It is not safe. Don’t fly into Newark.’

Newark Liberty International Airport is “not safe” for travelers, one air traffic controller at the delay-plagued travel hub reportedly warned.

“It is not safe. It is not a safe situation right now for the flying public,” the federal air safety employee reportedly told NBC News correspondent Tom Costello.

“Really an incredible statement, unsolicited. He just said that to me, and separately, ‘Don’t fly into Newark. Avoid Newark at all costs,’” Costello recounted on MSNBC.

The airport, which served 49 million travelers in 2024 and is the second busiest in the New York City area, has been drowning in delays and cancellations for days.

Related: Newark airport air traffic controller screens black out again.

Audio footage shows air traffic controllers telling a FedEx plane that their radar screens went dark. The air traffic controllers also asked the pilots to tell the company to be adamant that the problems get resolved.

“FedEx 1989, I’m going to hand you off here, our scopes just went black again,” one controller said, according to a released audio recording. “If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff.”

Another transmission shows a controller telling a private jet landing that they experienced a brief outage and to remain flying at or above 3,000 feet as a precautionary measure in case the controllers could not get in touch during the aircraft’s descent.

On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced another ground stop at the airport, with the average delay being four hours.

This outage follows a similar blackout last week when controllers in Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, which coordinates planes arriving at Newark, “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear, or talk to them” for 60 to 90 seconds, according to a CNN report.

The culprit has been identified; authorities are on the lookout for an airport employee who resembles this man:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 112

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Driving While Drunk and Waving Guns. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we learn what not to wave around in the car when you’re driving drunk, how to rescue a baby owl, and what not to give a raccoon in Ohio.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green 9

COLLEGES USING DEI TO BUILD A NEW ‘ELITE.’ “IQ over 145. SAT score of 1580. Valedictorian. Varsity athlete. Student-government leader. Dozens of AP classes… [R]ejection after rejection after rejection. No scandal. No black mark. Just a long, rather brutal silence from the institutions that claim to champion excellence.”

Posted at 2:02 pm by Robert Shibley 134

VE DAY: The myth of the Bad War.

The elite cultural shift has been something to behold. In broadsheet op-eds and academic tomes, TV shows and movies, pundits and politicos are not simply critical of aspects of British history, pointing out the negatives amid the positives, the regress amid the progress. No, they are engaged in a one-sided, rotten-cherry-picking disavowal of the entirety of Britain’s past. They flatten out its history, reducing it to the singular evils of imperialism, racism and other species of bigotry.

And it seems as if Britain’s role in the Second World War has not been spared. Churchill himself is dismissed as a drunk racist, his statue the subject of activist animus, while the war effort has been reduced to an atrocity-laden exercise in empire preservation. The heroism of conscripts is erased, the ideals for which many fought are ignored. The elite myth of the Good War has arguably now been replaced by something just as false – the new elite myth of the Bad War.

All this has gone down well among a bourgeois left desperate to leave the grubby democratic politics of the nation behind for the gleaming transnational structures of the EU and assorted international climate-change treaties. But it has stuck in the throat of the majority of Brits who remain attached to their nation, for all its flaws, and soberly appreciative of its history. This is a division that has played itself out in several recent elections and, of course, in one famous referendum in 2016.

Having recognised just how unpopular this simplistic assault on Britain and its history is, Starmer’s Labour Party has tried to resist it. Starmer himself rarely seems to make a public appearance without a Union flag lurking, Triffid-like, in the background. Yet, as spiked editor Tom Slater has pointed out, Labour’s patriotic posturing rings hollow. Starmer’s attachment to the nation runs little deeper than flags and sporting allegiances. His is a skin-deep patriotism, one lacking in any political charge or historical consciousness.

This is hardly a surprise. Try as he might, he himself is cut from the same elite cloth as those decrying Britain’s past and attacking its nationhood. He is, after all, a politician who famously declared he prefers Davos to Westminster. A politician who consistently tried to overturn the vote for Brexit. A politician who would rather Britain was an EU member state ruled and regulated by Brussels than a nation state governing itself. No wonder his patriotism is so superficial, his national sympathy so shallow. It has to coexist with a deep-seated technocratic distrust of those who actually live and vote here.

Meanwhile, back in the states, NPR goes full-on nihilist to “celebrate” VE Day: 80 years after VE Day a veteran says, ‘I hope people will see the futility of it all.’

[Harry Miller, age 96] went on to serve in the Korean War, and later he joined the Air Force, serving in the Vietnam War as well. He retired with the rank of senior master sergeant in 1966.

Today, Miller says he likes to share his story to help others understand the futility of war and hopefully inspire them to prevent similar conflicts from happening again.

“I hope, I hope people will see the futility of it all, because look at Germany. Look at Japan. Look at Vietnam. Look at Korea,” he said. “Everything is beautiful over there now, and it could’ve stayed that way, but no, we had to have a war.”

As Mark Steyn wrote in 1998 review of Saving Private Ryan:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that ‘maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered ‘one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was ‘one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still ‘one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

As Steyn concludes, “In that sense, Saving Private Ryan is the antithesis of Casablanca: the problems of one human being are what count; it’s all those vast impersonal war aims that don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 111

VDH: Would the Left Finally Explain the Inexplicable?

Somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens were invited into the United States by the Biden administration.

As far as logistics go, former President Joe Biden could not flee Afghanistan without getting 13 Marines killed and abandoning to the terrorist Taliban $50 billion in munitions, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300 million retrofitted huge airbase.

But Biden and his handlers proved far more logistically capable when their target was fellow Americans.

After all, they somehow managed to stop the congressionally approved continuance of the border wall, to subvert federal immigration law, to emasculate the border patrol, and to ensure that millions of people around the world could simply walk into the U.S. illegally, unaudited and with impunity.

But why did Biden or his puppeteers do something so anarchic, so injurious to their fellow Americans?

Why cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars in massive new entitlements? Why swamp the social services of our own poor citizens?

Why turn loose half a million criminal aliens and gang members to prey on our own weak and defenseless?

Was the idea to alter the demography in one fell swoop? To grow the dependent class, thereby expanding government?

Was it pure spite born of hatred of half the country?

Embrace the healing power of “and.” Meanwhile, Cloward and Piven smile: Biden Era Was the Ultimate Application—and Utterly Predictable Failure—of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 69

JIM TREACHER: Kuck Fanye — Antisemitism Is Going Mainstream.

Ever since Hamas butchered over 1,000 Jews on October 7, 2023, there has been an explosion of antisemitism all over the world. That cowardly massacre of innocent people was like a starter’s pistol, and now the antisemites are sprinting their asses off.

A few examples from just this week…

Columbia

Rioters trashed the Butler Library at Columbia University while students were trying to study for finals. The Jew-hating morons spray-painted slogans like “Columbia will burn 4 the martyrs,” and hanged signs like “Strike for Gaza,” “Liberated Zone,” and “Free Mahmoud.” Police made 80 arrests, which sounds like a lot, but I still want more.

And you know who did it? Not these guys.

The Dems still bring up Charlottesville, going on a decade later. Meanwhile, rich kids are trashing college libraries and other public places because they hate the Jews. But to the press, it’s not antisemitism unless it’s wearing a MAGA hat.

The Dems still bring up Charlottesville, going on a decade later. Meanwhile, rich kids are trashing college libraries and other public places because they hate the Jews. But to the press, it’s not antisemitism unless it’s wearing a MAGA hat.

As Seth Mandel noted last year, after October 7th, it was Charlottesvilles all the way down in Joe Biden’s America:

Hopefully, that’s changed under the new administration: Rubio: You’d Better Believe We’ll ‘Review’ Visa Status for Columbia’s Pro-Hamas Rioters.

In other words: Pro-Hamas Protesters Finding Out that 2025 Is Not 2024.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 141

WELL, THEY AREN’T WRONG:

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green 88

RIP: David Souter, the Last of His Kind.

Particularly after the “Borking” of Robert Bork in 1987 (led by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden) brought ideological critiques of the nominees out into the open, Republican presidents adopted a strategy of looking for “stealth nominees” who had little paper trail of judicial decisions and academic writings to pick apart. Souter, nominated in 1990 to replace Brennan, was the ultimate stealth nominee, a soft-spoken, reclusive, colorless bachelor with no major red flags (from a liberal point of view) in his twelve-year judicial record, most of it on the New Hampshire state courts. George H. W. Bush didn’t set out to put a liberal on the Court, but he was willing to take the risk, and that left him vulnerable to staffers such as White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (Souter’s fellow New Hampshirite) who had a pretty good idea of what Bush was getting. Democratic interest groups gave Souter the generic Republican treatment, with the National Organization for Women printing “Stop Souter or Women will Die” buttons with an image of a coat hanger, but it didn’t fly, and he was confirmed 90-9. Even Biden voted for him; Ted Kennedy and John Kerry didn’t.

Souter’s subsequent liberal record on the Court — including voting to sustain Roe in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — made his name a conservative rallying cry of “no more Souters.” The stealth nominee strategy came to an abrupt end in 2005 after conservative opposition forced George W. Bush to abandon Harriet Miers, his White House counsel with a scant paper trail, and instead send the Republican-controlled Senate the nomination of Samuel Alito, who already had a long judicial track record that included ruling on the Third Circuit in favor of the pro-life law struck down in Casey. It seems unlikely that either party will attempt anything like the stealth-nominee strategy again.

PJM’s Matt Margolis adds, “Souter also aligned with the Court’s left wing in Bush v. Gore—a decision that reportedly left him so upset he considered resigning. In 2005, he joined a controversial ruling expanding government power to seize private property, sparking backlash and even a failed effort to seize his own home in protest. He retired in 2009, and President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to succeed him.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 123

WHIPLASH: US weighs plan to slash China tariffs to as low as 50% — down from 145% — as soon as next week.

The Trump administration is weighing a plan to slash the 145% tariff on Chinese imports by more than half — effective as soon as next week — as top US and China officials head to Switzerland for high-level trade negotiations, The Post has learned.

Specifically, US officials are discussing a proposal to lower President Trump’s punishing levy on China goods to between 50% and 54% as they begin what promise to be lengthy talks to hammer out a trade agreement, sources close to the negotiations said.

Meanwhile, trade taxes on neighboring south Asian countries would be cut to 25%, the source added.

“They are going to be bringing it down to 50% while the negotiations are ongoing,” the source said of the trade tax on China.

There are almost too many moving pieces in these negotiations to keep track.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green 101

DON’T FORGET YOUR UMBRELLA TOMORROW:

Posted at 10:35 am by Charlie Martin 84