May 20, 2025

MAY IT BE SO:

Posted at 10:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds 9

WOW, HE’LL BE LUCKY TO LIVE THAT LONG:

Posted at 9:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds 15

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 615

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Jake Tapper Absolutely Buries ‘Sleazy’ and ‘Unethical’ Hunter Biden, Questions Why He Had So Much Power in the Family.

Flashback: The anatomy of the New York Post’s dubious Hunter Biden story.

—CNN.com, October 18th, 2020.

And from Couric: Katie Couric talks with Rep. Jamie Raskin about why the ring wing media is so obsessed with Hunter Biden.

—Half-hour video at Couric’s YouTube channel, July 26th, 2023.

UPDATE:

As Jon Gabriel tweets, “Our country was being run by a crackhead.”

With the DNC-MSM running interference for him.

Posted at 9:24 pm by Ed Driscoll 54

ASK YOUR DOCTOR IF JIHAD IS RIGHT FOR YOU:

Medicine has a serious antisemitism problem. It especially has a problem among doctors, and a lot of that problem is concentrated among doctors educated overseas.

We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5 times more likely to be found among antisemites than their share of the workforce. Doctors were almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad.

The fact that Jew-hatred has found a perch among highly educated doctors and other health professionals runs counter to the conventional explanations for antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance which must be fought through education. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frames the issue, antisemitism intersects with “ignorance and conspiratorial thinking … Ultimately, any strategy for protecting the Jewish community must include education at its core—we can’t fight hate without changing hearts and minds.”

Both the past and present put the lie to Greenblatt’s hypothesis. Campus Hamasniks at Columbia and Harvard are radical and morally depraved, but they aren’t uneducated. Nor were the architects of the Holocaust, inheritors of a German cultural tradition that was arguably unmatched in its yearning for modernity.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 27

CHUCK SCHUMER IS SUCH A GARBAGE HUMAN:

Posted at 8:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds 129

HOW THE WOKENESS WAS WON: Malcolm X’s politics are still driving us apart.

On the run from his former allies, Malcolm X forged a new identity, becoming a more conventional Muslim, visiting Mecca and touring Africa and the Middle East studying Islam. During this tour he endorsed the idea of black unity and, in a visit to Gaza, extended it to the issue of Palestinian rights.

Back in America, where King marched with rabbis, Malcolm X complained that “the Jews run the country”. Earlier he had met the Ku Klux Klan and complained that “the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as the tool”. He criticised civil rights leaders who had married white women and complained that Jews weren’t a role model for African Americans seeking empowerment because “they usually go and use the economic weapon”. He thought that weapon unavailable to black people.

None of this did all that much to advance the rights of African Americans. To read any history of the civil rights movement is to be struck by how little Malcolm X contributed. Like the suffragettes who probably delayed women’s emancipation, Malcolm X almost certainly did more harm than good. Like the suffragettes his anger was understandable, justified, but compared to King (or in the case of women’s rights, Millicent Fawcett) ineffective. His influence lay more in his ideas than in his achievements.
In his short life (he died before he was 40, as did King) Malcolm X developed and articulated some of the themes that now dominate left discourse, particularly in the United States, but also here. His was an identity politics, seeing himself as black first rather than as American first. His chief criticism of capitalism was that it was racist and imperialist and he stressed the extent to which American wealth derived from the original sin of slavery. A main demand was for reparations. He played a leading role in making Palestine a left cause and brought political Islam into the western left. The rather odd alliance between conservative religion and socialism owes a lot to Malcolm X.

He often called for African Americans to “wake up” — he told audiences that Islam was “spreading like a flaming fire awakening and uniting Negroes where it is heard”. He was certainly a crucial figure in the shaping of the so-called “woke” ideology. When a sign in a National Trust property emphasises the role that slavery played in the accumulated wealth, it was Malcolm X who successfully made this idea into a political theme.

But while he is an icon for the left, there are echoes of his position on the right and certainly among Islamic fundamentalists. There’s a reason he met the Klan, as did his ally Muhammad Ali, who addressed a Klan rally with the words: “Black people should marry their own women. Bluebirds with bluebirds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles. God didn’t make no mistake!” Malcolm thought integration impossible and undesirable.
This, as much as their differences over violence, is what separated him from King, who believed in America and its promise and sought to gain full civic and social equality for African Americans. Malcolm thought capitalism was irredeemable. He wouldn’t gain entry to the promised land and didn’t want it.

More here: Malcolm X at 100: the forgotten legacy.

Much of Malcolm’s later trajectory has been wilfully ignored or forgotten. It was the Malcolm X of The Hate That Hate Produced, the Malcolm X who embraced black separatism and self-defence, who significantly influenced the Black Power movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s. Furthermore, it was his ideas of black pride and black power that shaped President Richard Nixon and his affirmative-action programmes. Nixon preferred such ideas to the universalist ideas of racial integration that motivated King and, belatedly, Malcolm X himself.

Today, Malcolm X tends to be celebrated by reactionary identitarians, eager to divide people up into a hierarchy of racial blocs. They recognise something of their own thinking in his earlier black nationalism and black separatism. And in doing so, they effectively celebrate the ideas and the person that Malcolm himself was trying to leave behind.

Malcolm X is used today to critique whiteness, to justify veiled visions of black supremacy and separatism. Gone is his later, expansive, universalist vision and his increasing willingness to work together with white Americans for genuine social change. Instead, he’s celebrated by those who think rejecting hair straighteners and embracing their African roots is the height of radicalism.

One hundred years on from his birth, it is more necessary than ever to recall a different Malcolm X to the one championed today. It is time to remember him as a towering black leader who discovered truths about himself and his country and who constantly tried to challenge his own thinking. The words of Barack Obama, recalling his experience of reading Malcolm’s autobiography, hit home: ‘His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.’

The Malcolm X we should remember is the one he was yet to become – universalist and expansive in vision and committed to integration not segregation. Because through repeated acts of self-creation, through sheer force of will, that’s where he was heading.

Flashback: Malcolm X’s former security guard says black leader’s killer was ‘definitely working’ for US government. As Steve wrote in 2023, “Just a few years ago, few people would have given this much credence.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 46

MICHAEL WALSH: ‘The First Thing We Do.‘

The Founders didn’t invent a “nation of laws, not men.” They created a contentious, profoundly human Republic of legislatures, representatives, senators, governors, judges, and presidents who were expected to thrash out their differences in the arena of ideas and power, not by consulting a law library but through sheer will power and force of argument. Guns, too, when it came to that. It can and does get ugly, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Thus far, the Trump team has played it smart, avoiding provocation, fighting lawfare with lawfare and not overtly refusing a court order while at the same time punting it for all the right reasons of state. The president has every bit as much right to “interpret” the Constitution as John Roberts does, or the lowliest federal judge in Honolulu, and every bit as much right to ignore them, as both Jefferson and Jackson and even Biden did. But when the time comes, as it will, Trump will simply have to quote Andrew Jackson, who is supposed to have said to Chief Justice Marshall (the author of Marbury): “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”

For the long-term health of the country, when the time comes Donald Trump should do the same. In so doing, he is serving the American people, fulfilling his campaign promises and, perhaps most important, protecting the office of the President for all who come after him. That’s “who we are.”

Read the whole thing. Earlier:

Posted at 8:23 pm by Ed Driscoll 38

ED MORRISSEY: Jon Stewart on Tapper: Say, Remember When Reporters Actually Reported News When They Found It?

Despite clear and public evidence manifesting nearly every time Biden appeared and spoke, CNN didn’t bother to ask the questions that Tapper asked for his book research. In fact, CNN — Tapper included — actively criticized those who did raise the issue of Biden’s cognitive health, happily parroting the White House line about Sharp As A Tack® and Runs Rings Around Aides Half His Age, while watching Biden get lost repeatedly on stages and having the Easter Bunny Intervention.

But in that same sense … where was Jon Stewart during the same period of time? By February 2024, Stewart began to gently poke at Biden’s age, Ed Driscoll reminds us, which means Stewart did better than all of his late-night comic competitors save Bill Maher. (Even that got him a sharp backlash from progressives.) But as Christian Toto reminds us, Stewart never bothered to do much more until the debate made Biden’s incapacity too obvious to pretend otherwise:

Legacy Media collectively lied to the American public. So did Democrat after Democrat after Democrat. And millions took them at their word.

Imagine if the GOP did the same thing. Would Stewart respond with a shrug as he did last night?

The shocking cover-up is perfect fodder for a truth-telling satirist like Stewart. Yet he mostly avoided the subject over the past year-plus and hasn’t targeted those who propagated one of the biggest political lies in modern history.

Until now.

This week, Biden’s decline is on everyone’s lips – as is the tragic news of his prostate cancer.

Why now? It’s Clean-Up on Aisle 4 … there’s a mid-term election next year, and this must be dealt with and put back under the rug.

The Easter Bunny Intervention took place in April 2022. It took nearly two years after that for Stewart to offer a lame joke about Biden looking old on TikTok.

So in a sense, while Stewart’s rant is a welcome focus on the Protection Racket Media hypocrisy, it’s also a useful reminder that the Daily Show and other late-night comics were just as much a part of that same hypocrisy. And that includes Stewart.

But with fellow leftists turning on him, and everyone digging up his past ongoing protection of Biden, no wonder Tapper has hired a “PR flack who repped Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Toobin, and Anthony Weiner” before beginning his book’s rollout.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 20

JOHN ROBERTS IS SHOOTING HIMSELF AND HIS INSTITUTION IN THE FOOT:

Posted at 7:43 pm by Glenn Reynolds 81

REALCLEARDEFENSE: Buh-Bye West Point. “The inquiry shouldn’t be about why Parsons left, but who hired him, who retained him, who approved what he taught, who else is teaching like him, and who is accountable to make sure a ‘Parsons’ is never hired again? And how can such drivel be kept from West Point and never be indoctrinated again?”

Posted at 7:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds 66

THIS WILL END WELL: Unknown Species of Bacteria Discovered in China’s Space Station.

Swabs from China’s Tiangong space station reveal traces of a bacterium unseen on Earth, with characteristics that may help it function under stressful environmental conditions hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s surface.

Naming their discovery after the station, researchers from the Shenzhou Space Biotechnology Group and the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering say the study of Niallia tiangongensis and similar species could be “essential” in protecting astronaut health and spacecraft functionality over long missions.

The swabs were taken from a cabin on board the space station in May 2023 by the Shenzhou-15 crew as part of one of two surveys by the China Space Station Habitation Area Microbiome Programme.

Follow-up studies have traced the growth of microbes that inhabit the space station environment, revealing a microbiome that differs in both composition and function from the one found on the International Space Station.

The new species appears to be a close cousin to a known strain called Niallia circulans – a rod-shaped, soil-dwelling bacterium that just a few years ago was reallocated to a new genus classification, having previously been regarded as a pathogenic form of Bacillus.

Like species of Bacillus, N. circulans and its space-faring relatives pack their essential chemistry into hardy spores to survive times of great stress. It’s not clear whether N. tiangongensis evolved on the station or arrived in spore form with at least a few of its distinguishing features in place.

To be fair, this is exactly the 21st century I was promised as a kid:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 94

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Space Force official: Commercial satellites can do a lot more than we thought.

Now, the military is starting to use a commercial model for missions that, at least today, lack any meaningful commercial market. In these cases, the Space Force and the NRO must go out and pay a company to build an entire fleet of satellites that will exclusively serve the government. But rather than dictating stringent requirements and micromanaging every phase of the program, as the Space Force and NRO have typically done, they’re going with a more hands-off approach.

This change in procurement strategy is yielding results, officials said last week in a hearing convened by the House Armed Services Committee. Numerous companies are now manufacturing satellite buses, the basic chassis that hosts instruments, sensors, and payloads tailored for a range of missions. Most of them come from SpaceX, which mass-produces satellites for its Starlink broadband network. But there are others, and the market is richer than many US officials thought.

“We’re finding that commercial buses are not only available, but they’re also capable of doing a lot of what our missions require, and they’re available at a much lower cost than going off and developing a brand-new bus,” Scolese said.

It’s amazing what private enterprise can accomplish when Uncle Sam stays out of the way, but only to Uncle Sam.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green 36