June 6, 2025

MEET THE COMPANIES HELPING TRANS YOUR KIDS AND HIDE IT FROM YOU: The Washington Stand’s Suzanne Bowdey digs into the Trevor Group and its corporate backers and finds a sink pit of ugly:

“And while The Trevor Project claims to be harmlessly dedicated to ‘advocacy, education, and crisis support for LGBTQ+ young people,’ it’s the nature of that advocacy and education that should disturb Americans.

“For starters, this is a group that, just three years ago, was exposed for stealthily grooming children online. A suspicious mom, whose daughter struggled with gender dysphoria, logged onto the organization’s TrevorSpace chat room to see what kind of advice she was getting — and was horrified at the graphic and disturbing nature of the site.”

 

Posted at 10:13 am by Mark Tapscott 0

FORGET 3D CHESS: What if Trump and Musk are playing 5D chess? Has your head exploded yet?

Posted at 9:52 am by Mark Tapscott 37

UH-HUH: Biden pushes back on DOJ probe into his admin: ‘I made the decisions during my presidency.’

Biden made the comment after President Trump on Wednesday night directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Biden’s use of an autopen to sign presidential pardons and executive orders, while his administration covered up his health issues.

The order comes as Republicans have been raising questions regarding the former president’s frequent use of an autopen and his declining mental acuity for over a year.

The directive ordered Bondi and her team to probe any activity by Biden’s aides to hide the former president’s mental and physical condition, whether aides made any agreements to cooperatively and falsely deem recorded videos of Biden’s cognitive inability as fake, who authorized the use of the autopen, and what documents the pen was used on.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden said in a statement on Wednesday.

That’s what Jill and Hunter told him, anyway.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green 63

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: While Trump and Musk Spatted, SCOTUS Hemorrhaged Unanimous Decisions. “Ever since I have been politically aware, Mexico has been blaming all of the problems it doesn’t export to the United States, on the United States. It’s wearisome. We’re long past the time when Mexico needs to deal with its criminals as if they’re criminals, rather than letting them continue to run the country.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green 30

NOT READY. NOT EVEN TRYING TO BE READY.

Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds 136

A USEFUL REMINDER:

Posted at 8:39 am by Glenn Reynolds 43

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Biden’s autopen mightier than the sword? The scandal has echoes of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?

The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.

Nor, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

As I note in another Speccie piece, on January 17 of this year, 2,490 pardons and commutations were issued over Biden’s name, more than any prior president had granted in the course of his entire presidency. Who decided to issue that wholesale clemency? And who signed the documents ratifying the decision?

“The issue,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich wrote on X, “is not President Biden, who was clearly cognitively incapable of these acts. The issue is who was doing them and what did they get for doing them?”

Gingrich is right. We do not yet know the answers to those two questions, but we might soon. Yesterday, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the Attorney General and White House Counsel to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.”

Somebody knows the answer.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 31

“JUDGE HALTS TRUMP” IS THE NEW “DOG BITES MAN”: Judge halts Trump’s proclamation to suspend new international student visas at Harvard hours after university filed amended lawsuit. “The temporary restraining order issued late Thursday by US District Judge Allison Burroughs comes hours after the university urged the judge to step in on an emergency basis to block a proclamation Trump signed a day earlier that suspends international visas for new students at the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Foreign students make up roughly a quarter of the school’s student body.”

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green 122

TRUMP VS. ELON:

Both have a tendency to talk a lot of smack and then cut a deal. That’s what will likely happen here, because neither one of them is stupid.

But fundamentally, the question is, is our system deathly sick? Yes. Can we fix it wholesale now? No. At least I don’t see how. I’d love to be wrong. And to be fair, if anybody can prove me wrong, it’s these two.

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 224

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Marc Thiessen: Stanford is a case study in how Beijing infiltrates U.S. universities: Student reporters at Stanford University revealed China’s spying methods using Chinese nationals.

The Trump administration is revoking visas for Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” and revising its “visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” for students from China and Hong Kong.

This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.

To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnson in which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”..

Molloy, an economics major, visited China last summer and was shocked to meet with many members of the CCP who were educated at Stanford. “We’re educating the head of the Chinese [securities and exchange commission], we’re educating the head of Beijing’s tariff negotiators. I’m meeting all these people and they all say ‘I work for the Chinese Communist Party in a really high role. I hope that China beats the U.S. And I also went to Stanford for my undergraduate and master’s degree.’ And I’m putting this together and I’m saying it’s shocking that we are educating such high-level Communist Party officials. … What’s going wrong here?”

It’s a fair question — one of many for which the Trump administration plans to get answers.

And it’s not just Stanford.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 31

FROM JAY MAYNARD:  Foundational Laminate (The Laminate Therapy Chronicles Book 1)

#CommissionEarned

A radical therapy. A difficult past. One last chance to change.

Alex Sullivan isn’t crazy — just angry. Angry enough to get arrested. Angry enough to be offered an unusual choice: face prison, or undergo an innovative therapy at a private facility in rural Missouri.

At the Laminatrix Mental Hospital, patients wear full-body suits that block distraction and isolate sensation. They enter an immersive, time-dilated environment. There, they relive every memory — guided not by a voice, but by telepathic silence. There’s no room to lie, no place to hide.

Alex thinks he can fake it. He’s wrong.

Foundational Laminate begins the Laminate Therapy Chronicles, a speculative series exploring redemption, transformation, and the slow, difficult work of healing.

“One of the rare novels I hope becomes reality—a hard look at how to turn the antisocial into good neighbors.”
— Karl K. Gallagher, author of The Fall of the Censor and Torchship.

Posted at 6:54 am by Sarah Hoyt 14