April 17, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY! David Hogg Turning Out to Be a Terrific Pick for DNC Vice Chair.

It has been a busy spring since winning a Democratic National Committee Vice Chair post [Beege adds: 1 of 5 VCs], an event I can only attribute to the current state of Democratic Party upheaval and disarray, and, evidently, the overwhelming lack of a single, sane member.

Hogg’s ascension was the lunatic cherry on top of the DNC Crazy Town sundae – we all know who’s in charge of the asylum now.

It didn’t take the twee lad long to exercise his tremendous powers of persuasion. Two weeks after winning, DNC members were already being persuaded that this attention Hogg was a big mistake.
…
Some were questioning the wisdom of elevating a media-made creature of so little accomplishment, particularly at a time when the party was being held in so little regard.

When you’re considered too young and callow for the party currently going all-in on AOC as the party’s future…

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green 0

OH, HE REALLY SHOULD: Will Trump Do a Bob Jones on Haahvaahd?

New York Post: Harvard may be free to target Jews — but not on the taxpayers’ dime.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 4

MASK DROPPED: CNN and Taylor Lorenz Exposed Their Motivation.

Earier in her CNN interview, [Lorenz] justified her appreciation for [Luigi] Mangione:

It’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stand murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this.

Lorenz loves that Mangione allegedly murdered the United Healthcare CEO. She lit up with joy when discussing it. Her elation over it — and her statement that he was a “morally good man” exposes her motivation behind doxxing anonymous conservatives on social media — she wants certain people with opposing viewpoints dead.

It isn’t a stretch to connect the dots here — a national left-leaning journalist felt it necessary to expose the identity of an anonymous conservative video aggregator who was gaining traction by exposing the far-left’s insanity. That same journalist considers the alleged murderer of a healthcare CEO “revolutionary, famous, handsome, smart, and a morally good man.”

She was doing it all because she can justify murder and violence against those she disagrees with — she wouldn’t necessarily personally do it, but if she could expose the identities of people she doesn’t like and where they live — she’d be OK with, “a morally good man” taking it from there.

CNN not denouncing her actions or this interview implicates their motives as well. After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago since the network sent reporters to ambush random elderly women at their homes for sharing pro-Trump memes.

Unlike CNN’s gushing Donie O’Sullivan, Fox News’ Sean Hannity tried a more aggressive approach to get Lorenz to put the breaks on her pro-assassination rhetoric, but not surprisingly, Lorenz is sticking to her guns:

No, I think we already know the answer to that based on her actions last year: “Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.”

Not to mention calling then-President Joe Biden a “War Criminal:”

And I think we all know the answer to this dilemma as well, based purely on aesthetics:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll 18

ICYMI: You’ll Never Believe What Slow Learners the Democrats Are. “Democrats want their party to become more progressive than what, exactly? Sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you, but this actually raises a whole host of questions about current progressive policies and proposals — and I don’t even need to drink my lunch before asking them all.”

Posted at 8:06 am by Stephen Green 16

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Coronavirus: San Clemente Fills Skatepark With 37 Tons Of Sand After Skaters Ignore ‘No Trespassing’ Signs.

A popular skatepark in San Clemente was filled with sand to discourage skaters from using it during the coronavirus pandemic and to promote social distancing.

San Clemente had shut down all its parks and facilities on April 1 under the state’s stay-at-home orders, but skaters ignored signs warning against trespassing at the Ralphs Skate Court, 241 Avenida La Pata.

Since park facilities have been closed city officials say they routinely saw people visit the skatepark, even by some children accompanied with their parents, according to the San Clemente Times.

Later in April of 2020, Mark Judge explored: Skateboarding with Jordan Peterson—and Nietzsche.

“Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.”

That is Rule 11 in Jordan Peterson’s bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson explores how skateboarding is a way for boys to test danger and learn to deal with risk and pain, and as such is a valuable source of socialization and psychic health. To Peterson, the buzzkills who clamp down on skateboard riders suffer from acute resentment; they are bitter at the freedom, bravery, and style of the riders: “Beneath the production of rules stopping the skateboarders from doing highly skilled, courageous and dangerous things, I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.”

To drive the point home, Peterson offers this humdinger of a quote from Nietzsche:

For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883)

I would adapt Peterson’s rule only slightly: “Do Not Bother Children or Adults When They Are Skateboarding.”

Along with jazz, movies, modern dance, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million members in the United States, skateboarding fosters entrepreneurship, independence, physical grace and toughness, community, creativity, and freedom. The sport has been a friend to me for almost fifty years, reappearing at various times over the decades to thrill and re-enchant. When it was recently reported that a California skate park was filled with sand to prevent skating and promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, it felt to me like someone had spray-painted on the Lincoln Memorial.

No one knew in April of 2020 that defacing – and toppling — major cultural artifacts was right around the corner. In the meantime, there were endless quantities of what Roger Kimball dubbed “reverse gaslighting” last year to go around: “Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal:”

Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue. Out in the world, they obediently stand six feet away from one another because the same bureaucrats tell them such behavior will “slow the spread” of a seasonal respiratory virus that is dangerous to a minuscule part of the population. This insanity is deemed normal.

So is the insanity of censoring, firing or even imprisoning people who question this insane orthodoxy. In a repellent effort to capitalize on the moral authority of the Holocaust, such dissenters are repudiated as “Covid deniers.” They are ostracized by polite society and subject to all manner of sanctions. All this was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.

Suddenly, certain people are empowered to decide whose businesses are “essential” and whose are expendable. If you own a liquor store, congratulations! Your business is essential. Schools, churches, most restaurants, your aunt’s corner shop: sorry! They must be shuttered. This insanity is accepted, if grudgingly, as normal in the age of reverse gaslighting. You cannot visit your dying grandmother in her nursing home: that interdiction is said to be normal, not cruelly insane.

Thus just two days apart five years ago this week, headlines announcing “Exercise May Protect Against Deadly COVID-19 Complication, Research Suggests,” and news of skateboard parks filled with sand to prevent young people from doing just that. As Kimball wrote in the passage above, “This was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.”

(Fortunately, those who use the San Clemente skatepark were immediately able to see through the charade: A California city filled its skate park with sand to deter skateboarders. Then the dirt bikes showed up.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 22

COMMIES LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING: China’s Defense Budget Is Bigger than You Think.

During the Cold War, the United States never trusted its adversaries’ claims about their capabilities. Instead, it always sought to verify them through intelligence analysis. Today, China’s impressive and aggressive military expansion, allegedly achieved on a shoestring budget, should raise eyebrows, even from typically credulous consumers of official CCP reports. Specifically, China reported at the National People’s Congress (NPC) earlier this month that its defense budget included total expenditures of only $245 billion.

Historically, these reports are intentionally vague and conveniently oversimplified. This year’s announcement is no different. It’s hard to know what the real numbers are. Still, it’s even harder to believe China’s officially reported military budget of $245 billion, which would equate to an implausibly low 1.5 percent of GDP.

The U.S. Defense Department’s 2024 China Military Power Report estimated that China’s 2024 military budget was publicly understated by at least 40–90 percent. The DOD has not yet released its 2025 China Military Power Report, but we can infer from perennial experience that the same is true again this year; China’s real military expenditure, accounting for all (or at least some) “off-budget spending,” probably amounts to between $330 and $450 billion. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) has estimated the real Chinese defense budget is as high as $700 billion—and that was last year.

The CCP has expanded its military budget by at least 7.2 percent for two consecutive years. However, that figure itself also comes from official CCP reports and should be regarded with skepticism.

One thing is certain. China isn’t indulging in the fastest peacetime naval expansion in history on a $245 billion budget.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green 39

PERSONALLY, I CAN THINK OF OTHERS WHO NEED FLAGELLATION A LOT MORE: A mission of guilt: On the West’s latest self-flagellation. “The great factory for the production of such poisonous ideas, and the emotions upon which they feed, is the modern university, which seems never to have discovered an anti-Western idea it could not endorse.”

But the “guilt” is all bullshit. The people pushing it don’t feel guilty, they’re just using it as a manipulative tool.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 13

YES, I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE CHUCK YEAGER WHEN SITTING IN THE BACK OF A 737: Gayle King insists she was like Alan Shepard on her space ‘joyride.’

It’s becoming clear that long-popular “CBS Mornings” co-anchor Gayle King and her famous friends Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez have landed at the center of one of the most spectacular public backlashes against celebrity cluelessness and rich-people hubris in a long time.

The cluelessness, hubris and “audacious” display of power by “the billionaire class” came as these three wealthy celebrities made a big show about going on a “historic,” 11-minute, space-tourism ride Monday morning to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere — aboard a commercial Blue Origin space rocket owned by Sanchez’s billionaire fiancé Jeff Bezos.

On Tuesday, King continued to show cluelessness as she tried to defend herself and her friends from growing online ridicule and condemnation. One way she did so was by likening their trip to the truly historic 1961 flight taken by “Right Stuff” astronaut Alan Shepard. As a member of NASA’s original Mercury 7 astronauts in the early days of the Space Race, Shepard became the first American and second human in space.

That’s a particularly odd comparison, considering that CBS had Dr. Mae Jemison, a real former NASA astronaut (and the first black woman in space) covering the flight. And note that the above article is in the San Jose Mercury, not exactly a house organ of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a reminder that the distaff suborbital flight is receiving well-deserved bipartisan mockery.

Also, quite unlike Shepard: Terrified Gayle King SOBS as she arrives for Blue Origin space flight.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 93

WAR AND RUMORS OF WAR: Is Civil War Coming to Europe? Ordinary Europeans are starting to admit what their leaders won’t: civil unrest may be closer than anyone dares to say.

Nearly every educated English person I know under the age of forty is seeking to emigrate, having lost hope that their country has the wherewithal to pull out of its cultural and economic crisis. In Oxford recently, an American student told me, “If the ruling class here openly hated the British people, it’s hard to know what they would be doing differently.”

Spending a week in France last month, I recalled the scandalous open letter that 20 retired French generals and 1,000 active duty service members released in 2021, warning that their country was headed to civil war unless the government acted firmly against Islamic radicals in the suburbs, and turned away from divisive policies driven by so-called “anti-racism.”

In a number of private conversations with ordinary French people—this was before the Le Pen verdict—I brought up the Betz interview (none had heard about it), and asked them if they foresaw civil war coming to France. Nearly all of them said yes. They said so with an unnerving sense of calm, as if they accepted it as a matter of course. When I complimented one couple on their country, and told them that one day I would like to live in France, they responded in unison, “No!” Stay in Hungary, they said; you’ll be safe there.

You would never know from the mainstream media that this sort of sentiment is bubbling among the population of Europe and the UK.

It’s the media’s job to cover it up.

Posted at 7:08 am by Glenn Reynolds 83

CHANGE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 28

THE ECHOES OF “CATCH AND RELEASE”: It turns out that “loving father and husband” Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn’t the poor victim the legacy media wants you to think he is. JustTheNews exposes this guy’s history:

“The deported El Salvadoran man at the center of an intense court battle was flagged in 2022 by the Biden administration as a “suspect alien” who was possibly involved in “human smuggling/trafficking” after a traffic stop hundreds of miles from his Maryland home, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents reviewed by Just the News.”

The details show that during a routine traffic stop, the van Garcia was driving was full of people with no documentation, and the state trooper noted there was no luggage in the vehicle, leading the encountering officer to suspect this was a human trafficking incident.

But wait, there’s more:

“On Wednesday, DHS released a court filing showing that Abrego Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him a year before the traffic stop in May 2021 […] Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the deported El Salvadoran man at the center of an historic immigration case, admitted to authorities in 2019 when he was first detained that he entered the United States illegally and had no basis for seeking asylum […] Separate records released by Attorney General Pam Bondi show Abrego Garcia admitted to authorities in 2019 when he was first detained that he entered the United States illegally and had no basis for seeking asylum and that Maryland police positively identified him as member of the MS-13 criminal gang.”

Victimhood can be profitable, though:

“A “Go Fund Me” crowdsourcing campaign was reportedly set up by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a charity that claims to provide assistance to immigrant workers. NDLON is partly funded through the left-wing ActBlue Charities, and their Facebook page displays images comparing ICE agents to Nazis capturing Jews. As of press time, the campaign has raised almost $200,000.”

 

Posted at 6:50 am by Charles Glasser 45

April 16, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1875

WHEN I THINK OF JUDGE BOASBERG, I THINK OF CONTEMPT: Jeb Boasberg’s “Criminal Contempt” Finding Makes Mockery of Separation of Powers: After setting the contempt trap, Judge James Boasberg today snapped the trap shut with a wild 46-page opinion accusing Trump officials of “willful disregard” for his now vacated court orders.

Posted at 6:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds 382