INVERTING THE CLAUSEWITZ CLAUSE: Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver: “God d*mn it, shut down the city! We are at war!”

As I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.”

In December of 2022, Roger Kimball noted: The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over.

The January 6 Committee, illegally constituted as it was, was a continuation of that work by other means — more or less in the sense that Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he said that war was “nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit der Einmischung anderer Mittel.” Ever since Donald Trump glided down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the leviathan has been out to get him.

And the battle goes on! But didn’t Democrats already effectively shut down Newark way back in 1967? In 2025, the FAA seems determined to keep people out of the city: ‘It is not safe. Don’t fly into Newark.’

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Actual Nazi Struggling To Stand Out Now That Everyone’s A Nazi (Video).

Earlier: Jim Treacher: Kuck Fanye — Antisemitism Is Going Mainstream.

VDH: Pollsters Have No Reputation After This Decade-Long Hatred Of Donald Trump.

So what were the pollsters trying to tell us or were they trying to manipulate? And I think it’s the latter. Larry Kudlow, for example, the former Fox business, I think he still is at Fox, he pointed out that when he examined the New York Times and the Washington Post polls, they were deliberately not counting people who surveyed that they were Trump voters in 2024.

That was half the country. They were only polling about a third. Think of that, a third of the people that said they voted for Trump, they polled.

Not half. So of course their results were going to be disputed or suspect. But here’s another thing.

There were analyses after each of the 2016, the 2020, and the 2024 elections about the accuracy of polls post-facto of the election. And we learned that they were way off in 2016. They said they had learned their lessons.

They were way off in 2020. They said they learned their lesson. And they were way off in 2024.

And why are they way off? Because liberal pollsters, and that’s the majority of people who do these surveys, believe that if they create artificial leads for their Democratic candidates, it creates greater fundraising and momentum. Kind of the herd mentality.

Joseph Campbell explores: How Trump can turn the tables on the pollsters.

Were he to choose a more focused, accountability-driven response, Trump could readily point to flawed poll results reported in the 2024 presidential campaign. Given that many of them erred in estimating the election outcome, he could pose a simple question: What makes them believable now?

Trump, in short, could argue pollsters have persistent credibility problems and point to vulnerabilities exposed in recent elections.

Traditionally, pre-election polls have been regarded as representing what George Gallup, a founding figure of survey research, called an “acid test” of the soundness of polling techniques. “The only justification of an election forecast,” Gallup once declared, “is to test polling methods.”

The late Philip Meyer, a well-regarded journalist, educator and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, essentially agreed with Gallup’s characterization, noting: “A poll is an estimating device while an election is an exact measurement of the real world. By holding the device against the reality, we can learn how well the device is working.”

The reality revealed in the three most recent U.S. presidential elections was that pollsters were unable to measure with accuracy Trump’s popular backing. They collectively understated support for Trump in each election, despite having made methodological adjustments following the 2016 and 2020 campaigns — adjustments specifically intended to measure Trump’s popular backing more accurately.

Finally, in “Sins of omission,” Salena Zito explores the DNC-MSM hatred of Real Clear Politics’ aggregation of polls because they favored the Bad Orange Man:

In the final stretch of last year’s presidential election, the New York Times took a whack at RCP, suggesting its map showing Trump winning all seven swing states was inferior because it was using subpar polls.

“Overall, Trump has made slight gains in the national polling average over the past two weeks, and the battleground state polling averages have tightened,” the story read. “Still, the race remains uncommonly close.”

Unlike its competitors, RealClearPolitics does not filter out or weigh polls that its critics allege are “low quality.” RCP likes to say that “at RealClearPolitics, high-quality polls are accurate polls.” One of its pages displays a map of the Electoral College with a winner projected for each state, even those the site currently deems to be toss-ups.

The story then said that “influential accounts have been sharing screenshots of RealClearPolitics’ scarlet-dominated Electoral College map,” often pairing it with images of a betting average site showing Trump with a 65% chance of winning.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and constant critic of RCP, said in the story that he believed that Republican-aligned pollsters were “flooding the zone” to shift the polling averages and deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm.

In the end, FiveThirtyEight had then-Vice President Kamala Harris with a 50-in-100 chance of winning the cycle. RCP had Trump winning six of seven battleground states. The New York Times implied that it had gamed to look better for Trump with “low-quality polling.” This isn’t hyperbole; it was in the headline that read: “Why the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race.”

Two things appear to be happening here — the sin of omission by skipping over who the true inventor and innovator of the craft was and an effort to dismiss its competency and capability.

The job of a news organization is to attract an audience because its content is consistent in getting it right or pretty darn close*. The same is true of polling. It is one thing to question polling firms and say you don’t like their methodology or think they’re rigorous enough.

Well, that’s what the job of a news organization used to be. In the 21st century, that’s shifted somewhat:

OUT ON A LIMB: Crowdfunding alleged cold-blooded killers and racists — this is no way to fight a culture war.

Last month, Texas teenager Karmelo Anthony allegedly stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf in the heart at a track meet when Metcalf asked the teen to leave a tent. Metcalf died at the scene. Anthony was arrested, admitted he stabbed him — and yet many rushed to his defense. Sides were drawn along racial lines and supporters have happily dumped over $526,000 into his family’s fundraiser while villainizing the victim in the comments.

Then last week, a video went viral of a Minnesota woman named Shiloh Hendrix unloading some “N” bombs on a man, who confronted her over using the same slur on a black toddler. She claimed the boy had rifled through her diaper bag. Hendrix, who was doxxed, has raised over $750,000 from folks using a grim “white lives matter” campaign.

Is it any wonder that a dim-witted Temple student would use this same method after it was revealed that he and his friends visited a Barstool Sports-owned joint and added a “F–k the Jews” sign to their bottle service? The student, Mohammed Khan, uploaded the video of the sign to his own account.

Related: An Entire Generation Has Turned Feral.

What can be done about them? Unfortunately, not much. Their brains are developed, and their habits are set. They grew up on social media, and they’re acting it out as adults. There’s no changing their behavior now. The only recourse left is in the legal system — enforcing law and order by arresting those responsible for these teen takeovers and prosecuting them for their crimes. But to prosecute someone, the police need to catch them. In most of our biggest cities, there aren’t enough cops to go around. The police departments in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Baltimore, and San Francisco have all reported officer shortages.

In the short term, moving away from these crime-ridden areas is the only solution. These teen takeovers have been going on for years and will continue for the foreseeable future. The only way to avoid them is to vote with your feet. In the long term, plenty can be done. Prioritize marriage. Bring back the stigma against out-of-wedlock birth and absentee fathers. Raise your kids without screens until they’re of legal age. Inculcate virtue during their eighteen years in the nest. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer the consequences and produce more feral kids.

As Jonah Goldberg liked to say, “cheer up, for the worst is yet to come.”

ED MORRISSEY: New: US Brokers Cease-Fire Between India, Pakistan.

Donald Trump hailed the agreement, while also noting the US role in bringing the brief war to a conclusion:

After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE. Congratulations to both Countries on using Common Sense and Great Intelligence. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This gives Marco Rubio his first major diplomatic victory as Secretary of State, and it is a doozy. India and Pakistan have fought a number of skirmishes over the disputed Kashmir region, and terrorists often attack with Kashmir as its premise. The most well-known of these groups is Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani radical-Islamist group that got some of its funding from Osama bin Laden. They have wanted a war of conquest to integrate Kashmir and Jammu into Pakistan. The government in Islamabad claim that L-e-T has disbanded, but that claim isn’t exactly credible, especially considering the Pakistani footsie-playing with radical Islamists in the region.

As Ed concludes:

Of course, this is only a cease-fire. Pakistan and India have secular hostility and disputes going all the way back to the British partition and independence, and religious disputes going back a millennia or more. Perhaps stepping this close to the brink will have sobered both governments up enough to at least settle the secular issues and remind Pakistan especially of the necessity to deal with its radical-Islamist problems. In the meantime, though, Rubio’s credibility and the leverage from American trade will both be on the rise.

Still though as Churchill apparently never said, jaw jaw is better than war war.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Escape From Alcatraz Edition.

READER FAVORITE: Magnetic Fidget Pen – Stress Relief Toy & Multifunctional Writing Pen. #CommissionEarned

ALBERTA, NOT CANADA, FOR 51ST STATE: Few folks in either country took seriously President Donald Trump’s several quips about Canada becoming America’s 51st state and references to then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” But Liberal Party were sufficiently agitated that Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, should thank Trump.

As Rod Martin points out in the most intelligent analysis of the Canadian scene I’ve read in years, things might have turned out differently had Trump focused in on the real brewing crisis in Canada, the intensifying alienation of conservative voters in the western province of Alberta:

“Alberta doesn’t belong in this Canada.

“That’s not treason. It’s not even radical. It’s a simple observation of cultural, economic, and political reality — a reality growing starker by the year. Albertans have known for decades that something is deeply broken in the Confederation they were born into. But it’s only recently, as Ottawa’s indifference curdled into hostility, that many have begun asking the inevitable question: What if we left?”

Where would, should Albertans go? Go here and Martin will lay it out for all to see. If you aren’t following this guy, you should because he sees the world through clear eyes.

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka released after being arrested while protesting ICE detention facility he vowed to shut down.

Newark Mayor and New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was released Friday night after being collared at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility that opened Tuesday — and which he has vowed to shut down.

Baraka was released around 7:50 p.m. to cheers from the large crowd of protesters and swath of public officials — including socialist Big Apple mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

* * * * * * * *

Video posted to X at just after 3 p.m. by a News 12 New Jersey reporter showed Baraka, with his hands cuffed behind his back, being led away from the detention center by a Homeland Security Investigations officer.

Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” Alina Habba, the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey wrote on X five minutes later.

“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody,” Habba posted, adding “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

It came after Baraka and several New Jersey Democratic congresspeople — Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver — showed up at the Delaney Hall ICE facility, calling for the GEO Group-owned facility to be shut down.

“We’re at Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark that opened without permission from the city & in violation of local ordinances,” Coleman wrote in a post on X, along with pictures and videos of the scene.

“We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other ICE prisons. We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves,” she wrote.

Habba claimed that Baraka was inside the facility, “was warned, was asked to leave several times,” but refused.

I’m so old, I can remember this sort of insurrection activity led to much much stiffer sentences than a few hours in the slammer.

Related: The Shady Bunch: Six Words We Won’t Be Hearing from Democrats Over the Next Four Years.

No one is above the law. pic.twitter.com/a1dreULMDw

— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 9, 2025

LIGHTNING DEAL: Craftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool Set. #CommissionEarned

BYRON YORK: Joe Biden denies everything.

Former President Joe Biden and former first lady Jill Biden appeared this week on The View. If you had to boil it down to headlines, there would be two: First, the Bidens both denied reports of the former president’s senility or cognitive difficulties, and second, he blamed voter sexism and racism for the defeat of his designated successor, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

But there was a bigger story: In the act of denying reports of cognitive problems, Joe Biden virtually confirmed that those reports are accurate.

* * * * * * * * *

The other headline from The View was that Joe Biden blamed the alleged sexism and racism of voters for Harris’s defeat. It worked this way. Since Joe Biden claimed he left the country in great shape, how was it that his designated successor failed to win the election? “You had made the selfless and very difficult decision, I’m sure, to step aside, and Democrats were feeling optimistic about the vice president’s chances of winning the presidency,” panelist Sara Haines said to the former president. “But then election night came, and it was like 2016 all over again. Why do you think the vice president lost, and were you surprised?”

“I wasn’t surprised,” Joe Biden said. “Not because I didn’t think the vice president was the most qualified person to be president. She is. She’s qualified to be president of the United States of America. But I wasn’t surprised because they went the route of the — the sexist route, the whole route. I mean, this is a woman, she’s this, she’s that. I mean, it really — I’ve never seen quite as successful and a consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country. And a woman of mixed race.”

In going on The View, and also doing an interview with the BBC, the former president was clearly hoping to get in front of the age and cognitive issue. But his fundamental problem is that he really was not up to the job of serving as president for a second term. That’s just a fact. Millions of people believed that, and it is unlikely that Joe Biden, who at least in the BBC interview seemed older than just a few months ago, can convince them otherwise.

This Daily Mail headline isn’t helping Sundown Joe’s case very much: Jill Biden gives Joe ‘Secret Signal’ to stop answering dangerous question on The View…as he sports mysterious hand wound.

So why is Joe making the media rounds so soon after leaving office? Report: Biden Family’s Financial Pipeline Has Run Dry.

OBVIOUSLY THIS IS PRECISELY WHY DISNEY IS BUILDING A NEW THEME PARK IN ABU DHABI:

Flashback: The Prophecies of Titania McGrath.

AXIOS PHONES IT ON FETTERMAN:

Hey, you know else was also “uninterested in the day-to-day duties of a senator?”

After little more than a year in the Senate, Obama was bored, and began to take seriously the frequent calls to run for President.

—“The Consequentialist,” Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, April 25, 2011.

Flashback to November of 2022: MSNBC’s Katy Tur suggests Fetterman could run for president: ‘Makes you wonder about his future.’

What changed? Oh yeah: Will John Fetterman Be the First Casualty of the Left’s Civil War?

You're not supposed to say this part out loud. https://t.co/6L3bH8SQrt pic.twitter.com/QeFyfhZrZy

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 9, 2025

OPEN THREAD: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle, especially when attending that Radical Chic Open Thread at Lenny’s.

GREAT MOMENTS IN BRAND RECOGNITION:

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY:

Obama replaced David Souter with Sotomayor; very much a lateral move.

HUGH HEWITT: Vice President J.D. Vance Returns To The Program For The First Time To Discuss, Of Course, Pope Leo XIV, President Trump, and SCOTUS.

HH: I have been spending the morning listening to the American cardinals talk about Leo XIV and reading about Leo XIV, because like you, I am a Catholic. I’m wondering what your reaction is, sort of at length over the course of the day since that news came down?

JDV: Yeah, well, look, I watched with baited breath. I think they, you know, they let the white smoke go off, and then they just sort of, you know, hold us there without giving us the news. I was starting to sort of, you know, I was watching it with my staff, and I was like, my God, we’ve had white smoke for a long time. Why can’t they just, you know, show this guy, because I was on the edge of my seat like a lot of other people. I mean, look, I have a few thoughts in response, Hugh. First of all, a big moment, of course, for American Catholics, and I think the American people, writ large. So many people my entire lifetime has said you’re never going to have an American pope. Obviously, now we do, so I think that’s a great thing. The second thing I’d say is you know, we don’t know a whole lot about him, but I just wish him the best, right? I’m a Catholic. He’s now the head of the Catholic Church, and we’ll pray for his wisdom, for his good decisions, and his good health, and hope that he has a long and successful papacy. And then the third thing, Hugh, and this is, you know, these things always get discolored a little bit by American politics or by politics writ large. You know, people are asking is he a conservative or is he a liberal. Will he attack President Trump and J.D. Vance on certain things, and hasn’t attacked Democrats on other things. And I guess my response to this is it’s very hard to fit a 2,000-year-old institution into the politics of 2025 America. I try not to do that. I am a Catholic convert, and so I come at this maybe with a slightly different perspective. But I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game. I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.

Related: Why Pope Leo XIV probably isn’t that liberal. “Crucially, in a 2012 address to bishops, Prevost took a dim view of the popular culture that fostered ‘sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.’ Two cases in point being the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and ‘alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.’ And as a bishop in Chiclayo in Peru, he opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender in schools. ‘The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,’ he told journalists. Granted, he may have changed during Francis’s pontificate, but all that sounds to me like normal Catholic teaching, not the kind of approach that progressive Catholics might favor. Let’s see what he actually says in the job.”

GET WOKE, GO…: Jaguar Land Rover hunting for new advertising agency after disastrous woke rebrand unveiling new Tesla Cybertruck-style car.

Jaguar Land Rover is looking to replace its current advertising agency just months after the company faced a backlash over its controversial rebrand.

The company launched a review of its global creative account – currently held by Accenture Song and its in-house agency Spark44 until mid-2026 – following widespread criticism over its campaign, The Telegraph reported.

Critics of the radical rebrand – including Nigel Farage and Elon Musk – accused the carmakers of abandoning their ‘jag-man’ heritage.

It comes after the company announced plans to shift to electric vehicles with a bizarre new advertisement featuring brightly dressed models but no cars.

The group also abandoned its iconic ‘growler’ cat badge, replacing it with a curved geometric J and L symbol.

Defending the campaign late last year, JLR’s Managing Director Rawdon Glover told the Financial Times: ‘If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out.’

However sales plunged by more than a quarter in 2024 with Jaguar selling 33,320 cars, a significant drop from the 61,661 sold in 2022 and the 161,601 sold in 2019.

Related: As Tesla Sales Decline, Ford’s EV Sales…Fall Off a Cliff.

With the EV-loving media having recently refocused its venom on Elon Musk because of his alliance with President Trump, Tesla has become a target for the left. The media has gleefully been reporting any bad news about Musk’s electric car company, celebrating not only falling sales and financial repercussions, but also legitimizing vandalism against Tesla vehicles because of Musk’s politics.

The media has also been desperate to report that competitors are benefiting from Tesla’s woes. If you have the stomach for it, this nasty piece of journalistic bias from the AP dated 4/02/2025 hit all those marks, including the blaming of Musk himself for vandalism against Teslas: ”Tesla sales tumble 13% as Musk backlash, competition and aging lineup turn off buyers”

But something funny is happening. As Tesla sales decline, competing electric vehicle brands are not capturing the lost sales. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Legacy automakers who tried to make a big splash in the EV market are seeing their already nominal EV sales decline precipitously as the electric vehicle fad wanes. Ford had anticipated that by 2025 its electric lineup would be a major component of its product lineup, but now its EV sales are barely an asterisk, with sales plummeting from any already low peak.

“Ford’s EV sales fell by 40% in April and now it’s adjusting plans for another major project” [Elektrek – 5/01/2025]

The left spent the last 20 years pushing electric cars as a moral imperative. Once the batsignal went out that was okay to torch and vandalize Musk’s cars because they don’t like the cut of his jib, that also signaled that earlier moral imperative has been concluded. Why would anyone go through the headache of owning an electric car when its true believers hate one of its most prominent manufacturers?

SOUNDS AWFULLY INSURRECTION-Y TO ME: Democratic Congress members storm ICE facility gates, clash with federal officials in NJ.

Three members of Congress, as well as Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, tried storming through the gates of the 1,000-bed Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey on Friday.

A heated argument broke out when federal officials blocked their entry, according to Viri Martinez, an activist with the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. It continued even after Baraka returned to the public side of the gates.

“There was yelling and pushing,” Martinez said. “Then the officers swarmed Baraka. They threw one of the organizers to the ground. They put Baraka in handcuffs and put him in an unmarked car.”

Baraka has previously pushed back against the construction and opening of the ICE detention center, arguing that it should not be allowed to open because of building permit issues.

Baraka got the photo op he was seeking: Newark mayor arrested at ICE detention center amid ‘yelling and pushing.’

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested Friday at a federal immigration detention center where he has been protesting its opening this week, a federal prosecutor said.

Alina Habba, interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said on the social platform X that Baraka committed trespass and ignored warnings from Homeland Security personnel to leave Delaney Hall, a detention facility run by private prison operator GEO Group.

Habba said Baraka had “chosen to disregard the law” and added that he was taken into custody.

Baraka, a Democrat who is running to succeed term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, has embraced the fight with the Trump administration over illegal immigration.

He has aggressively pushed back against the construction and opening of the 1,000-bed detention center, arguing that it should not be allowed to open because of building permit issues.

Witnesses said the arrest came after Baraka attempted to join a scheduled tour of the facility with three members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation, Reps. Robert Menendez, LaMonica McIver and Bonnie Watson Coleman.

Speaking of McIver:

Rep. LaMonica McIver (red jacket) shouts in the faces of ICE officers pic.twitter.com/dlRy9MWEH6

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 9, 2025

UPDATE: Great moments in amnesia:

MORE: Heh, indeed:

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.

UPDATE: Kanye West’s controversial ‘Heil Hitler’ song removed from streaming platforms amid backlash.

"Mein Führer, in 80 years your biggest fans will be a gay Hispanic and a gay black guy."

"Excuse me…"

[HITLER ENTERS HIS PRIVATE ROOM IN THE BUNKER, THERE IS A GUNSHOT] pic.twitter.com/FQ4HaPgurT

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) May 9, 2025

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Will John Fetterman Be the First Casualty of the Left’s Civil War?

Democrats love to talk about “democracy” and “unity” — until one of their own dares to think independently. Now Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is learning the hard way what happens when you stop parroting the party line and start trying to get things done.

I’ve never been a fan of Fetterman, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he misled voters in 2022 about his medical condition to get elected. But his party backed him up completely then. Now they’re throwing him under the bus.

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 19^th, 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:

He's such a poor leader. https://t.co/MQag62kNnk

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) February 9, 2025

In accordance with the prophecy:

Epic Adam Carolla rant from a hotel after the LA wildfires forced to evacuate from his home, where he predicts Hollywood leftists will be so frustrated by the rebuild effort that they will not vote Democrat:
"You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all… pic.twitter.com/YhNqBnJJR9

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) January 9, 2025

READER FAVORITE: Toniiq Ultra High Strength 1500mg NAD+ Supplement. #CommissionEarned

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 8^th, 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.

DUCK AND COVER? A ‘Nuclear Bomb’ of Damaging Revelations Is Coming for Biden and Democrats.