PRICELESS: What Sheryl Crow Just Did With Her Tesla Accidentally Proves Elon Musk’s Point.

But what will she choose to replace it? Please, please, please buy a Volkswagen, Sheryl!

INDEED.

A VISIONARY THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Don’t yet know the identity behind EKO on Substack, but today’s “Golden Age: The American Renaissance” is a deeply thought provoking look at what Trump’s continuous references to Canada as the 51st state may well signify about this country’s future.

DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO GARRISON KEILLOR SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: PBS Mourns a Month Of ‘Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism.’

PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks came together on Friday to mourn the first month of Donald Trump 2.0. Together, the trio would lament the supposed lack of “guardrails” that is allowing Trump to run “roughshod” over the government in pursuit of “Ivy League right-wing nihilism.”

Nawaz began with Capehart, “Can I just get both of you to briefly weigh in on this? Because we’re nearing one month into the Trump presidency. Is it clear to you where the guardrails are, Jonathan?”

* * * * * * * *

Brooks further accused Trump of being concerned with the wrong things, “Donald Trump was elected by those people. You’d think he’d care enough about them to do something on behalf of the people who elected him. Instead, he’s going after, you know, USAID. He’s going after any place he thinks there might be liberal people with college degrees.”

The idea of trimming the bureaucracy is a Republican idea that predates Trump, but Brooks has never been completely onboard with even that pre-Trump version of the GOP, so it was hard to take his next point too seriously, “And so what we’re seeing is not populism. What we’re seeing is a sort of Ivy League right-wing nihilism. And, to me, that is so disorienting and so shocking and so appalling that you can’t even serve the legitimate needs of the people who put you in power. They’re totally off the board this last month.”

A decade and a half before being airbrushed out of history by his fellow leftists in the #metoo era, Garrison Keillor had a similar rant about  George W. Bush’s supporters:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.

Brooks will never learn, will he?

Last week, in assessing the rise of Donald Trump, New York Times columnist David Brooks engaged in an uncharacteristic bit of self-reflection:

“Trump voters,” he wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.

—From Glenn’s March 20th 2016 column in USA Today, “How David Brooks created Donald Trump.”

The Tea Party was fun, but running nice guy candidates like Mitt Romney who cheerfully took their abuse from the DNC-MSM and didn’t punch back twice as hard (as a legendary community activist would say) and played the role of the Washington Generals wasn’t. And it’s curious to see Brooks, who spent his salad days at National Review, the Hoover Institute, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard isn’t responding well to Trump’s efforts at cutting government waste. But then, Brooks is far from the only alumnus of the Standard to “unexpectedly” find newfound love for Big Brother:

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: Vance is right — Britain really has ‘thoughts-and-prayers’ policing.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” said Vice President J.D. Vance to an audience of world leaders at a security conference in Munich on Friday, with a rhetorical punch comparable to Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Vance pointed to various censorial “hate speech” policies spewed out from Brussels and across Europe, and to the troubling arrest of a Christian in Sweden who used his freedom of expression to burn a Qur’an. Building to a crescendo, Vance then highlighted the “most concerning” case of Adam Smith-Connor — the British army veteran and father of two who was convicted in November 2024 for praying silently, for a few minutes, on a public space across the road from an abortion facility.

Smith-Connor, who previously fought in Afghanistan, was given a criminal record and ordered to pay £9,000 ($11,300) in adverse costs for breaking the rules of a local “buffer zone” ordinance banning “expressions of approval or disapproval” of abortion on several streets in the area.

Judge Orla Austin ruled that even though he was only engaged in silent, prayerful thought, his presence within the buffer zone could still have a “detrimental effect” on people attending or working at the clinic. Authorities took over £100,000 ($126,000) from the public purse to ensure his prosecution. With support from ADF International, he’ll be appealing his conviction in July.

Adam is one of multiple Christian individuals in England to face trial for their prayers in such censorial zones. Christian preachers have frequently faced nights in cells for expressing their beliefs in public. Meanwhile, according to official inquiries, the British police has failed to prosecute Muslims involved in serious and violent “grooming gang” crimes for fear of appearing “Islamophobic”.

The concept of a “thought police” is, of course, Orwellian. Yet the British government has decided to nationalize these locally enforced “buffer zones” on October 31 ’ banning “influence” within 150 meters of every abortion facility in England and Wales. As a result, the United Kingdom actually has “thoughts-and-prayers” policing.

1984, a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the left.

 

IT’S COME TO THIS: Watch: Unhinged Chiefs Fan Blames Trump for Eagles’ Victory, and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

When Trump appeared on screen during the national anthem, the Superdome erupted in cheers. Taylor Swift met a wave of boos when her image flashed on the jumbotron. That was awesome.

I’ve never been emotionally invested in professional sports, and it’s hard for me to even comprehend how the way some overzealous fans take sports so seriously.

So when I came across a viral video clip of a Kansas City Chiefs fan having a full-blown meltdown over her team’s loss in the Super Bowl — and blaming Trump for Kansas City’s loss — I couldn’t believe it at first. Maybe it was staged. But I’ve seen plenty of videos that are staged. This looked like the real deal.

I don’t doubt that watching your team crash and burn in the biggest sporting event of the year is no picnic. Yet this particular fan took her despair to a whole new level, doing what leftists do best and finding a way of making it Trump’s fault. In a moment of peak absurdity, she shouted, “You know the other reason why we didn’t win because the f***ing Trump was at the g*****n game. G*****n it!!! Trump should not have been at our f***ing game!”

Do you remember that YouGov poll that found that liberal women report the lowest levels of life satisfaction and the highest rates of loneliness compared to their conservative and moderate peers? The survey found that only 12% of liberal women aged 18-40 express feeling “completely satisfied” with their lives, while a solid 37% of conservative women and 28% of moderate women report a similar level of life satisfaction. Any reasonable person knows that Trump’s presence at the game had no impact on the outcome. It’s as absurd as blaming Lady Gaga’s bleached eyebrows for Patrick Mahomes getting sacked six times. Yet here we are.

Assuming the above clip is real, and she actually is a leftist with a massive case of performative TDS, she should be thrilled the Eagles won: The Other NRA (Or How the Philadelphia Eagles Got Their Name).

The National Recovery Administration was established after the passage of FDR’s first big legislative attempt to remedy the economic disaster of the Great Depression. The National Industrial Recovery Act, which went into effect in June 1933, was meant to stabilize industrial production, dictate wages and prices, and enable workers to pursue collective bargaining. It also put power in the hands of trade associations to establish many of these standards, suspending antitrust laws in order to make this possible.

The NRA, created by executive order, coordinated the efforts to implement these new policies. The logo—seen here in mockup form—would be displayed in the windows of businesses and factories in order to promote the ideas behind the NIRA. The eagle clutches a gear in one set of talons and holds lightning bolts in the other, indicating the power of American industry.

Wasn’t the government afraid that people would confuse its new logo with the National Rifle Association’s? Although the NRA that’s now a household name was formed back in 1871, in the 1930s the organization was still a relatively obscure educational body, sponsoring rifle clubs and youth programs. In 1934, the National Rifle Association instituted a legislative affairs division, beginning its transformation into the lobbying superpower that it is today.

The National Recovery Administration was dissolved in 1935 after the Supreme Court found the NIRA unconstitutional. The court said that the executive branch had exceeded its bounds by making new laws and that the laws themselves violated the government’s right to regulate commerce. Before that happened, however, a new NFL franchise in Philadelphia, hoping to grab some of the New Deal’s optimism for its own, adopted the NRA’s symbol as a team name.

On the flip side however, I question the timing of the Eagles’ victory:

JOSH BLACKMAN: “Fools” Rush In the Department of Justice. “In recent years, the Department of Justice has prosecuted public officials in high profile cases. In several of those cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.”

A HILLFAITH SATURDAY TWO-FER: First Two-Fer is a look at a burgeoning effort in some corners of evangelical Christianity known as the “Deconstruction Movement.” Typically, some high profile evangelical figure announces that, having “deconstructed” some aspect of their understanding of Christianity, they are no longer Christians.

There is then a flurry of admiring media coverage, the figure gets a few profitable engagements in supportive secular settings, and then we all go on living our lives. It remains to be seen how enduring this phenomenon proves to be.

In the meantime, thoughtful Christians, of whom there are many here among the legions of intelligent Instapunditeers, should find the latest “What Would You Say?” 5:33 video produced by the Colson Center on HillFaith to be quite helpful.

Saturday Two-Fer Number Two: Can one five-letter acronym really explain how the universe came to be? Not in every infinitely fascinating detail, of course not. But Dr. Frank Turek of crossexamined.org shows SURGE goes a long way in answering deep questions in this delightful two-minute graphic video on HillFaith.

THEIR WORLD IS OVER, BUT THEY REFUSE TO NOTICE:

MATT TAIBBI: Germany Opens Big Fat Pie Hole. “German Foreign Minister Boris Pistorius disapproves of J.D. Vance’s criticism of European censorship laws.”

A somewhat different reaction from the NATO Secretary General: “You are absolutely right. We have to grow up.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance’s reaction to German criticism is likely to be along these lines:

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