March 18, 2025

THE BEST WAY TO PREVENT THE BASTILLE BEING STORMED IS TO OPEN THE DOORS WIDE AND LET EVERYONE POKE EVERY CORNER:  Not Storming The Bastille.

Posted at 1:01 am by Sarah Hoyt 4

March 17, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1606

KURT SCHLICHTER: Boot the Ungrateful Foreigners the Hell Out of America.

I am loving this uproar over that communist terrorist fluffer from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, who the feds detained with an eye towards booting his sorry rear out of our glorious country. First, I love how the commies are crying about it, how suddenly they care about free speech even though they carried absolutely nothing about free speech when normal patriotic Americans were being rounded up for daring to oppose abortion and bogus elections. I love how they’re calling his totally legitimate arrest a “kidnapping” when this guy’s unseemly and eager onanism over his dirtbag Palestinian buddies’ kidnapping of innocent Israelis is what got him busted in the first place. But mostly, I love this imbroglio because it shows that we Americans are not going to take any more guff from uppity foreigners.

We’re booting this tool out of our great country. It may take a bit of time to wind its way through the courts, but he’s gone. We should be booting his wife out, too, before she drops her kid – hey, a fetus leftists don’t want to kill! – and it gets American citizenship. In fact, we should boot out all these agitators and malcontents, deporting every single weirdo, loser, and mutation who hates America and thinks they have a free pass to try and gin up their Marxist revolution here on our sacred soil.
We’re done. We tried tolerance, and they attacked Jewish Americans. They would murder the rest of us too given the chance, so we’re not giving them one. Get the hell out.

And they will get the hell out. The law is very clear, and it’s very clear that this guy is going to soon be on a one-way flight to whatever geographic zit he popped out of. So will a bunch of his fellow travelers. See, we’re done with ungrateful foreigners. We’re not taking it anymore. American idiots are bad enough. We don’t need to import any more idiots. In fact, we need tariffs, idiot tariffs. And idiot reparations from the garbage countries they come from, but that’s down the road.

Related: Whoopi: ‘Any One of Us Could Find Ourselves Being Deported’ By Trump.

The Trump administration’s deportation of several violent Venezuelan gang members who were in the country illegally made the liberal ladies of ABC News’s The View very upset, Monday morning. Co-host Sunny Hostin called it a “constitutional crisis” while Ana Navarro suggested it was an attack on the Venezuelan Americans who voted for President Trump (she also basked in their purported misery). But moderator Whoopi Goldberg took the most factually inaccurate stand when she erroneously claimed it was evidence that any American could find themselves deported by Trump.

I’m not much of a fan of ABC’s News division, but unlike Whoopi, even I wouldn’t compare them to terroristic Venezuelan gang members. What is she trying to imply about the corporate hell-world in which she’s forced to work?

Evergreen:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 84

ROGER KIMBALL: Vance Derangement Syndrome.

The most reliable prop in anti-Republican — and a fortiori anti-Trump — rhetoric is comparison with the diminutive but excitable Austrian with the funny mustache and a weakness for leather. I once looked it up, and yes, every Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan has been described as “literally Hitler.” I had thought the argumentum reductio ad Hitlerum had worn out its welcome, partly because it was so absurd. Ronald Reagan? Mitt Romney? The Bushes?

Yet [Bret] Stephens has once again demonstrated that the Hitler wheeze, though tired, still has a bit of mileage in it. Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Stephens began with a little cadenza on everyone’s favorite Hitler proxy, Joseph Goebbels. Yes, that’s right. Stephens suggested that warning the crowd of European globalists that untrammeled illegal migration was a threat, that free speech was inseparable from the fortunes of liberal democracy, and that Europe would have to start taking more responsibility for its own security made Vance a malignant patsy on the model of Neville Chamberlain.*

One silver lining of Stephens’s columns is that they tend to possess the virtue of clarity. You know where he stands. In this case, the title reads “Vance’s Munich Disgrace” and goes on to talk about the Vice President as a disgrace. His concluding words about Vance and his talk are “a disgrace.” In any given paragraph, you know where you stand.

I’d make jokes about newfound respect on the left for the man with the funny mustache, given the many issues they have in common these days (not least of which is how lefties on college campuses behaved after October 7th, their hatred of the Second Amendment, and their shared love of the Gleichschaltung). But we’re in Orwellian territory in 2025: Elon Musk is seen as Hitler because he wants to shrink government. CBS’s Margaret Brennan believes the Holocaust happened because of too much free speech in the Third Reich.

* Wait, wasn’t Neville Chamberlain was the eight-dimensional chess playing good guy in WWII? At least, that’s what Netflix was telling me in 2022. Conversely, Obama hated Churchill so much during his three terms in office that he actually uttered Chamberlain’s signature phrase “peace in our time” during his second inaugural address.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 49

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: UK “Intelligence” Also Knew Covid-19 Was Manufactured in Fauci’s Wuhan Lab, and Also Lied to the World About It.

We just found out that Germany’s intelligence services concluded long ago with 80-95% confidence that covid-19 was cooked up in Fauci’s Wuhan branch.

Now it turns out that MI-6 always knew the truth, too.

Not only did they lie, but the “intelligence” services targeted people telling the truth for censorship, debanking, and reputation-destroying smears.

Related: How Often Has the New York Times Been ‘Misled?’

Here in 2025 it’s nice that Ms. Tufekci and the Times are acknowledging that they were duped about Covid origin possibilities. But readers have to wonder how upset Timesfolk were to be used in this manner given the outrageous justification Ms. Tufekci offers for those who misled her and her colleagues:

It’s not hardto imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

Perhaps a few more acknowledgments are in order from the newspaper. In 2020 Times coverage was far too kind to lockdown promoters.

Five years to the day before Ms. Tufekci’s Sunday column, Katie Rogers and Emily Cochrane reported for the Times:

President Trump, under pressure to take more significant steps to slow the spreading coronavirus, recommended on Monday that Americans stop unnecessary travel and avoid bars, restaurants and groups of more than 10 people, as he warned that the outbreak could extend well into the summer.

The national guidelines, which also advise home-schooling and the curtailing of visits to nursing homes and long-term care facilities, are the most robust response so far from the Trump administration. But the guidelines, which officials described as a trial set, are not mandatory and fall short of a national quarantine and internal travel restrictions, which many health officials had urged.

Could Times readers have used some measured assessments of extreme recommendations? “On your next grocery run, don’t forget to sanitize your reusable bags,” was the headline on a Times dispatch from Jill Cowan two days later.

The same day, an opinion piece bore this headline:

Cancel. The. Olympics.

The Times described the author, Jules Boykoff, as “a political scientist who studies the Olympics,” so at least they weren’t pretending he had any relevant expertise.

Ms. Tufekci for her part was a mask enthusiast and by December of 2020 was still panicked enough about the virus to urge the postponement of Christmas gatherings.

But that advice seems downright reasonable compared to the assault on free speech she was advocating in August of 2020. The Times itself profiled her in a piece called “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right.” Ben Smith wrote:

The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.

“It’s charmed that I get to do this, it feels good,” she said. “But in the ideal world, people like me are kind of superfluous, and we have these faceless nameless experts and bureaucrats who tell us: This is what you have to do.”

Let’s hope she has another column this Sunday acknowledging more 2020 foolishness.

Good luck with that — It was foolishness all the way down for the Times in 2020.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 84

HMM: Donating Blood Changes Your Genes. “Recent research from the Francis Crick Institute has revealed intriguing genetic adaptations in the blood stem cells of frequent blood donors, supporting the production of new, non-cancerous cells without increasing cancer risk, as reported in the journal Blood.” Plus:

“Regular blood donation has been associated with several functional advantages for donors, beyond the genetic adaptations observed in blood stem cells. These benefits include cardiovascular improvements and potential metabolic effects.”

I donate two or three times a year. The health benefits aren’t really why I do it, but they’re certainly a plus.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 55

SHOCKER: “A new report is shedding more light on why UW-Madison’s director of Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement lost his job.” “The report, which was released Friday, details how former DDEEA chief LaVar Charleston spent millions of dollars, handed out bonuses and raises, and never fully communicated any of it to anyone else at the school…. But perhaps the most damning part of the report came from what Charleston spent on training, travel, and events. Which totals over $2.5 million last year alone…. The report does not detail where those trips or training took place, or who was allowed to go. UW-Madison removed Charleston from his job at the DDEEA in January, but did not fire him. He’s currently on leave from his $133,000 job as a professor. He made over $300,000 as DEI boss. The report also details how the university’s governance system allowed Charleston to spend so much money without anyone knowing until afterwards….”

Posted at 7:54 pm by Glenn Reynolds 43