May 22, 2025

IF THERE’S A WAR ON CIVILIZATION, MAYBE CIVILIZATION SHOULD START FIGHTING BACK?

Posted at 8:39 am by Glenn Reynolds 9

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: They’ve Learned Nothing: Dems Still Pushing the Same Failed, Unpopular Gun Control That Got Them Where They Are Today.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), for instance, has lately introduced the so-called “Assault Weapons Ban of 2025,” while an Illinois Democrat has proposed a bill to ban semiautomatic “convertible pistols.” The American public, meanwhile, still isn’t buying it.

Dr. John Lott, Jr., the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, recently described the results of a poll that the CPRC commissioned last December on crime and gun control. The poll asked general election voters in America which of three approaches, in their opinion, was most likely to reduce crime: enacting more gun control, stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws, or having law enforcement arrest violent, repeat offenders and ending cashless bail reforms.

Less than one in five respondents felt the answer was more gun control.

To be fair, Democrats don’t want to learn anything. They just want gun control, and lots of it.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green 2

OUT ON A LIMB: Do Not Expect the Mainstream Media to Honestly Audit Itself. Jeffrey Blehar writes:

So the real questions, the questions that reporters like Tapper and Thompson, or Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, are actually best situated to answer, are left largely unaddressed: Why did the American media, in the aggregate, forsake its investigative duties? We are informed in these books about the Biden administration’s many efforts to deceive, spin, or bully national political journalists, yes; we are told little about why those journalists acquiesced so easily and at times enthusiastically. Were they really that easily fooled, when all the rest of us in America — theoretically less well-informed than they — were not?

I have already ventured to answer those questions myself, and at length. On the same day I wrote the column excerpted above, I also wrote this:

What the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? . . .

I have an appealingly simple theory to explain the mystery: They didn’t miss it at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.

Do you know how I know this? I know this because back in 2019, when Joe Biden seemed for all the world like a hopelessly boring retread with no chance of winning the 2020 nomination — when Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders were thought to be the main competitors for the Democratic prize — the New York Times was more than happy to report about Biden’s age. Once he captured the nomination and went into a quasi-hibernative “basement campaign” (timed perfectly to conceal his weakening state), however, that was it for any investigations into that topic.

I know this because in the fall of 2022, during that brief window when it looked like Biden might decide to pass the torch instead of running again, the window to discuss Biden’s age was once again open for the Washington Post: “Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection.” Once Biden chose to run for a second term — a moment of world-historical hubris — the subject went back into storage, verboten in polite commentary of real reporting.

I know this because the pressure to not venture the topic was immense, and I saw it come from within the media, not just from the Biden administration. . . .

The media want to tell us that they didn’t know? If they didn’t know, then why were they so eager to raise the subject when it seemed possible to prevent Joe Biden from winning the nomination, or discourage him from running again, but curiously not afterward? Why then such servile eagerness to act as Karine Jean-Pierre’s water boys near the end of the entire debacle. . . . In fact, what better proof do we need of the media’s purely instrumental interest in Biden’s mental disintegration than the fact that once it became impossible to conceal after the debate, they flooded the zone with coverage to push Biden out of the race, but once he was gone promptly never discussed him again?

As Kyle Smith wrote in March of 2019:

When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious. For the next few months, though, we’re in an amusing interstitial period when the media actually has a reason to attack their fellow Democrats: any hacks out there who think their party can do better than Biden (or Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, or etc.) can rip into their disfavored candidates in order to give an assist to their preferred picks. All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting.

That was the conventional view of the how the DNC-MSM reported on their candidates, but all that changed by the end of 2020:

 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll 5

#JOURNALISM:

Plus:

Posted at 8:29 am by Glenn Reynolds 6

ASKING THE BIG QUESTION: Who Ran the Executive Branch? John Hinderaker quotes from the London Times, who are attempting to answer the question that American journalists have been avoiding for four years, and lists multiple names: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Anthony Bernal, “And, of course, the Biden family,” Hinderaker adds. “Dr.” Jill and Hunter.

In my opinion, Lady Macbeth had nothing on Jill Biden. Finally:

The troubled son: Hunter Biden
***
After the disastrous debate, Hunter continued to argue that his father was best placed to beat Trump, taking the view that it was the family against the world. Biden’s decision to pardon his son has further soured relations between the Biden family and the wider Democratic Party. “It’s toxic,” one Democrat said.

Joe Biden liked to say that Hunter was the smartest man he knew. The frightening reality is that, given Joe’s immersion in Democratic Party politics, his claim might have been true.

We will never know what disasters may have been averted by Biden’s visible collapse in his debate with Donald Trump. The Democratic Party has much to answer for, but don’t hold your breath waiting for any meaningful accountability.

Hunter and Jill are being setup as the fall guys, in an effort to salvage the careers of those who hope to work for the next Democrat president. But how big a role did the Chateau Marmont’s favorite tenant actually play in dad’s administration?

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll 11

GLOBALIZING THE INTIFADA IN DC: Last night’s murder of two Israeli embassy employees outside an event held at a Jewish museum was an attack on Jews, period. A political assassination of Israeli diplomates would be bad enough, but this was simply an antisemitic attack by someone chanting “Free Palestine.”

(1) The event was not an Israeli event or even a pro-Israel event, it was an event for young Jews interested in foreign affairs sponsored by the American Jewish Congress (AJC). A close relative of mine, who is not Israeli and has nothing to do with Israeli politics was there.
(2) The couple murdered were not Israelis, one was American, the other German. The Israeli embassy employed them as foreigners, embassies typically have local staff. [Correction based on ne reporting: One victim grew up in Germany, but later became an Israeli citizen.]
(3) They were randomly targeted after attending the Jewish event.

This is what Globalize the Intifada and similar rhetoric means, those who have apologizing for it, or worse justifying it, are morally culpable.

UPDATE: Thank you for the New York Times today, for informing us about the debate over whether extremist rhetoric at Hamasnik rallies is inciting violence against Jews.

Posted at 8:19 am by David Bernstein 14

DON SURBER: Media Sides with Genocide. The DNC password of the day is AMBUSHES. “President Trump had South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in for a little chat on Wednesday. Once everyone was seated in the room, Trump dimmed the lights and played videos of the genocide of whites by black goons backed by a government that sings Kill the Boer while confiscating the land of white farmers. The American media—which had promoted isolating South Africa over apartheid 40 years ago—refused to accept the reality that the black people in charge are killing white people, necessitating give white South Africans refuge. We shall see if any of the holier-than-thou sanctuary cities take them in. . . . Baseless? Trump showed the evidence—unlike every liberal who claims there is a genocide in Gaza.”

Posted at 8:10 am by Glenn Reynolds 14

DAVID HARSANYI: Biden cover-up is one of the greatest scandals in presidential history.

We still have no clue who participated. We have seen no reckoning by reporters or Democrats who participated in the sham. Sure, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has sparked discussion about the former president’s state. The problem is that the book is written by reporters as if they are merely spectators rather than participants.

Original Sin is like All the President’s Men if the latter hadn’t named any of the men and had been written by John Ehrlichman.

As for the newspaper whose aggressive reporting brought you All the President’s Men: Was Biden too frail for the job? Voters should have been informed.

—The Washington Post, yesterday.

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 74

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Democrats Compared Parental Rights Groups to the KKK While Passing a Transgender Law. Now, Those Groups Are Suing.

The parental rights groups Defending Education, the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, and Protect Kids Colorado teamed up with the medical watchdog group Do No Harm and a medical doctor, Dr. Travis Morrell, to file the lawsuit Monday, challenging HB 25-1312, which Polis, a Democrat, signed Friday. The law amends the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of “gender expression,” specifically stating that refusing to use a person’s “chosen name” will constitute discrimination.

The lawsuit claims this violates the First Amendment by compelling Coloradans to speak to promote transgender issues, in violation of their free speech. It also claims that requiring staff at places of public accommodation to use a transgender person’s “chosen name” is unconstitutionally vague and subject to arbitrary enforcement, violating the 14th Amendment.
…
The groups are suing Colorado because they “believe that sex is immutable and fixed at birth, and they oppose the spread of controversial gender ideologies among Colorado’s youth,” according to the lawsuit. “They do not want to be forced to affirm—through the use of pronouns, names, or other language—that a biological man is actually a woman or vice versa. Yet that is precisely what HB 25-1312 requires.”

That must be more of Polis’s “light regulatory touch.”

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green 14

NORTH KOREAN TV CALLED AND SAID YOU GUYS REALLY NEED TO DIAL THE GASLIGHTING BACK:

Mark Halperin tries to get Scarborough back to planet earth, but Scarborough dodges by dissembling and playing the “But Trump” card:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 74

INDICTMENTS ALL AROUND: Meet the Biden ‘politburo’ accused of running the country in secret: There was the aide who demanded $4 million to advise the re-election campaign. There was the enforcer who ‘cast out heretics’. And there was Jill Biden.

However, as the book is published there is little chance of a reprieve for those accused of covering up, or wilfully ignoring, Biden’s decline. “I don’t think there is a way to make it stop,” one Democrat sighs. “Every Democrat is going to need to have an answer on Biden and why we let him stay for so long.”

The blame game is moving to a cabal of advisers, dubbed the “politburo” by colleagues in a nod to the highest decision-making body of the Soviet Union, a group said to have enjoyed unprecedented power.

“Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” one cabinet member claims. “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] secretary Yellen.”

It was a coup, and they were usurpers. And every Democrat should have to answer for it.

Posted at 7:05 am by Glenn Reynolds 33

TAKE A LESSON FROM HER EXPERIENCE: WATCH YOUR MOUTH AND MIND WHAT YOU TWEET:  The appalling treatment of Lucy Connolly.

Or if you prefer: Great Britain has fallen in all but name.

CHASER:  Lucy Connolly appeal denied. Her barbaric two year seven month sentence stands.

Posted at 5:00 am by Sarah Hoyt 23