DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Newsbusters.

If you got all of your news from CNN and MSNBC, you’d have a higher than 50/50 chance of believing the Trump administration had accidentally arrested and deported a naturalized American citizen living in Maryland, and for no particular reason.

Cable networks CNN and MSNBC have hopelessly twisted the story of an El Salvadoran illegal alien who recently was deported by the Trump administration. Over the past week, these two networks have referred to Kilmar Abrego-Garcia as a “Maryland man” or “Maryland father” a whopping 120 times, while identifying him as an illegal alien only seven times. Meanwhile, MSNBC alone aired thirteen objectively false assertions that Garcia was actually a legal resident.

MRC analysts looked at all coverage of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador on CNN and MSNBC, from April 1 through April 6. In that time, the networks aired a combined 72 stories about Garcia (40 on MSNBC, 32 on CNN).

CNN referred to Garcia using terms such as “Maryland man” and “Maryland father” 51 times. Across the 32 news stories about him last week, only a single segment (3%) contained any mention he was in the country illegally, and just thirteen (41%) even bothered to mention he was from El Salvador, not America.

On MSNBC, Garcia was referred to by terms like “Maryland father” an absurd 69 times. Throughout the 40 segments discussing his deportation, his illegal status was mentioned in just six (15%), and only twelve segments (30%) pointed out that he was from El Salvador.

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The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill Sunday that would remove kids from parents’ custody for behaviors like “misgendering” and “deadnaming” after Democrats cited the Southern Poverty Law Center to justify excluding parental rights groups from discussion on the bill.

The bill, HB 1312, passed with 36 votes in favor, 20 against, and nine absent in a largely party-line vote. One Democrat, Bob Marshall, voted against the bill.

The Colorado House of Representatives has 43 Democrats and 22 Republicans.

Rep. Jarvis Caldwell, a Republican, accused the House Democrats of silencing debate on the issue because they knew their position is unpopular.

“After preventing us from the ability to debate, Colorado House Democrats rammed through HB 1312,” Caldwell told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “It’s codifying into law that if their ideology confuses your child, and you don’t affirm that delusion, you’re committing child abuse and can lose custody of your child.”

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“I don’t approve of violence, but…”

But, in fact, they DO approve of violence, or at least think that violence can be justified to achieve political goals in the United States.

I’ve written a number of pieces about how the left has embraced violence, arguing that there is nothing fringe about the riots, assaults, vandalism, and even murder that has been sweeping our country.

During the George Floyd riots, we saw every Democrat politician in the country literally kneeling in celebration of the riots, egging them on, musing about how the violence was justified, calling the takeover of our cities the “summer of love,” and attacking Republicans for not embracing the “mostly peaceful” burning down of our cities.

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California did not materially comply with the requirements for seven of the 22 federal programs the state auditor examined, including “pervasive” noncompliance in its unemployment benefits program, which could put essential federal funding at risk.

“This report concludes that the State did not materially comply with certain requirements for seven of the 22 federal programs or clusters of programs (federal programs) MGO audited, including one program for which the noncompliance was pervasive,” wrote Deputy State Auditor Linus Li.

“Additionally, although MGO concluded that the State materially complied with requirements for the remaining federal programs it audited, the State continues to experience certain deficiencies in its accounting and administrative practices that affect its internal controls over compliance with federal requirements.”

The audit found that even in 2023 — years after the state made $55 billion in fraudulent COVID lockdown-era benefits payments — the state likely made “potentially ineligible payments” of nearly $200 million. The audit also found that of 138 pandemic unemployment assistance claimants that were tested, 91, or 66%, had verification issues.

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Two molecular control factors play a key role in splicing, the process by which precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) is cut and reassembled into mature mRNA, a critical step before protein production can occur in the cell. These largely uncharacterized factors are essential for ensuring the proper function of the splicing machinery. A research team led by Prof. Dr. Ed Hurt at the Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center, in collaboration with colleagues from Fudan University in Shanghai (China), has uncovered how these two cellular “quality control inspectors” operate.

Proteins, the fundamental building blocks of cells, carry out essential functions throughout the body. The instructions for building them are encoded in DNA. To translate this genetic information into proteins, the relevant DNA sequences must first be transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA).

Initially, the cell produces a precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) that includes both coding regions (exons) and non-coding regions (introns). Before the mRNA can be used to make proteins, the introns must be removed and the exons precisely joined together, a process called splicing, which takes place in the cell nucleus. The result is a mature mRNA strand made up solely of protein-coding exons, ready to guide protein synthesis.

UK Daily Mail.

Bear in mind that the Daily Mail is a British tabloid, so don’t take anything they say as … reliable.

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A host of teachers in Vienna have come forward to express their frustration about the difficulties of trying to teach migrant children—who evidently don’t want to be taught.

According to the publication Exxpress, Austria’s capital city, Vienna spends €2.2 million per year on free German, English, and mathematics courses for 12,000 children, most of them migrants, to help them integrate into society.

But it seems that the well-intentioned programme is utterly useless: many of the children don’t show up to classes at all, and when they do, they refuse to pay attention. Alarmingly, their parents don’t seem to care about their children’ s education either.

“Some children scream loudly in Arabic, eat crisps, throw worksheets on the floor, or run around the room,” one teacher complained. The children show absolutely no respect towards their teachers, some of whom are close to tears by the time their classes come to an end.

Most of the kids barely speak German, and can hardly put a complete sentence together, even though they attend German-language schools in Vienna.

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One of the great ironies of our age is the double standard of Big Environmentalism toward wind and solar, which commit numerous eco-sins that would not be tolerated otherwise. Dilute, intermittent, and thus inefficient? Yes. Energy sprawl requiring service roads and transmission lines in the wild? Yes. A threat to wildlife on land and in the water? Yes. And mining issues, even using child labor? Yes.

But it is “anti-CO2 or bust” for the foes of modern, prosperous living in a free society. They want a state of nature, a Garden of Eden, as if humankind did not matter. Deep Ecology is a religious cult—that is, in the area of energy, an enemy of Global Greening.

There comes a time in every ‘movement’ where people who started off full of idealism eventually descend to the point where it’s All About the Money.

The Wall Street Journal, sadly, these days a Voice of the Crust.

Fine by me. The Islamic Republic of Michigan has been a stone in the nation’s shoe for decades.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Because, as we all know, miners and firefighters will have no protection unless it is provided by the Federal bureaucracy.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Republicans are growing anxious about an emerging Texas primary engulfing one of their longest-serving senators, fearful that a hugely expensive intraparty feud will have major ramifications across the map in next year’s midterms.

And they want President Donald Trump to stop it.

Behind the scenes, Senate GOP leaders have personally asked Trump to back Sen. John Cornyn, who has occupied his seat for more than two decades and narrowly lost his bid to become Senate majority leader last fall.

John Cornyn is the Mitt Romney of Texas. The fact that he has a primary challenger who could win is all you need to know.

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Our media elites love to tout themselves as “independent” and “fact-based.” But on almost any story on President Donald Trump, they can’t help but put those words in the shredder.

The Kennedy Center illustrates one major difference between the two Trump terms. In the first term, the president deferred to the leftists who gave all the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017 to Democrats and Trump haters. He chose not to attend the ceremony so no honoree would refuse to attend and then hail themselves as “brave.” It was atypically polite and deferential, and Trump received zero credit.

In the second term, Trump quickly proclaimed himself Kennedy Center chairman and kicked out the management. While the Kennedy Center hasn’t been a blazing hot spot of woke culture, the media’s intense reaction to this action demonstrated this space is not for all Americans.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of repeatedly deceiving the Trump administration about the proposed critical minerals agreement with the United States.

In a candid interview with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, Bessent alleged that Zelensky “lied to our faces three times” about signing the deal, which would provide U.S. companies with access to Ukraine’s vital strategic minerals.”

Bessent explain that Carlson that he flew to Kyiv to sign the agreement with Zelensky—but the Ukrainian leader refused. Instead, Zelensky agreed to sign the deal during a meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Munich, Germany, which never occurred.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Because, as we all know, Americans will have neither health nor safety unless it is provided by the Federal government bureaucracy.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Exactly right.

Bondi pointed to the administration’s difficulty in standing up its planned ban on transgender troops serving in the military. A second federal judge in late March blocked the effort, calling it blatantly discriminatory.

“It’s basically a game of whack-a-mole with these District Court judges around the country who have a tremendous amount of power, they believe they do,” she said. “But that’s why we’re appealing all of these cases of course up to the Supreme Court.”

The basic question is, Who runs the Executive branch? The President, as it says in the Constitution? Or the Deep State, as has been developing since Nixon’s day?

USA Today, a Voice of the Crust.

First, an aide to President Donald Trump emails a leader of an independent agency to fire them. Then the leader sues, citing a law on the books that protects them from getting fired without cause. So the Trump administration shoots back that the law is unconstitutional. And they fight it out in court.

Legal observers following the trend think Trump is setting up a test case for the Supreme Court to revisit a 1935 decision that prevented a president from firing a member of Federal Trade Commission and paved the way for independent boards like the Federal Reserve to wield their power freely.

“I think the game is get it up to the Supreme Court,” said Thomas Berry, the director of constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “And I think to some extent this is going to force the court’s hands.”

Among other roles, these boards set interest rates, insure bank accounts, protect children from unsafe toys, investigate airplane crashes, regulate public airwaves, enforce workplace discrimination laws, block federal workers from illegal firings, and allow workers to form unions.

So-called ‘independent agencies’ are major building blocks of the Deep State, carefully crafted so that if God forbid the Dramacrats lose the Presidency, some Republican who didn’t get the memo can’t come in and clean house.

One of Trump’s great virtues is that he doesn’t act like a politician, who would stroke his chin and consult widely before perhaps trimming an inch or two off of the Blob; he act’s like a business man, and in business the CEO can take a chainsaw to the operation and nobody can say him nay. And that’s exactly what is needed. People elected Trump to blow shit up, and that’s exactly what he’s doing, which is why all this media trash-talk isn’t affecting his popularity.

ZMan:

One of the amusing bits this week is how the kooks and lunatics all suddenly sounded like Milton Freidman when Trump announced his tariff policy. Suddenly people who often claim to be Marxists and anarchists were praising the glories of free markets. Some have enough self-awareness to see the problem, so they claim they oppose the tariffs because they are nationalist and you know who was a nationalist, so tariffs are fascism or something.
Most lack self-awareness, so they just screamed at the internet. The yesterday men of conservatism put on their knit ties and started chanting about Reagan. What they forget is Reagan used tariffs to protect American industry, despite opposing tariffs on theoretical grounds. In theory, a tariff free world might be the best, but we do not live in theory. We live in reality. The yesterday men always leave that part out when chanting about Reagan.
It all points to the fact that the old post-Cold War politics are spent. The people on the so-called left and right have nothing to offer. The kooks who used to distinguish themselves from the official left by championing populist items now oppose those items. They have no answer to Trump’s agenda because they have nothing to offer as an alternative. In the new politics, Trump is the radical overthrowing the old order and the self-styled radicals are the entrenched conservative interests.
None of this is to say the Trump agenda is flawless or that it will work. We are just getting started, so we shall have to wait and see how it unfolds. The basic scheme, however, is sound. American tariff policy will match the tariff schemes of other countries. If Canada wants to do business with us, they must negotiate a tariff schedule with Washington. It may be radically different from the one worked out with China, but Canada is not China.
The foundation of what Trump is doing is pragmatism. A good deal for Americans with regards to trading with Canada will always be different from what is good for Americans in a China deal. Rather than adhere to an ideological framework, economic policy will be situational. What is good now may not be good a year from now, so a year from now you will do something else. The radical idea at the heart of it all is realism. In an age drenched in ideology, reality is a radical idea.

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Ladd’s Arizona ranch shares 10.5 miles with the border of Mexico, and during the four years of the Biden administration, about 50 illegal aliens crossed through Ladd’s property daily, and sometimes that number rose to as many as 200, he told The Daily Signal.

“As soon as Trump got elected, it started slowing down,” Ladd said, adding that as of the beginning of March, Border Patrol told him they are “catching three a day, with no getaways” on his ranch.

Ladd attributes the dramatic decline of illegal border crossings through his ranch to Trump’s reimposing the “Remain in Mexico” policy and the “consequences” illegal aliens now face when they are caught illegally crossing the border. Illegal aliens who have criminal records “don’t want to take a chance” of being caught and risk being deported or imprisoned, he said.

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Far-left, billionaire-funded NGOs—closely aligned with the rudderless and imploding Democratic Party—have been waging a psychological warfare operation against the American people. Framed as “grassroots,” the party of hate and violence—evident in their “Tesla Takedown” color revolution aimed at killing Tesla to pressure Elon Musk on DOGE—has been building momentum in recent weeks to segue into anti-Trump protests this weekend. The goal is to manufacture the illusion that Trump is wildly unpopular, leveraging a vast network of dark money-funded NGOs that supply rent-a-protesters to rallies nationwide.

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If you don’t know who Michael Mann is, you’re luckier than some. Read on.

A year ago, I was a witness in the Mann v Steyn-Simberg libel trial. It was an extremely frustrating experience. Mann’s lawyers tried to block McKitrick and I from giving evidence against Mann. The judge ruled against them, saying that our evidence was relevant to the defense. However, the judge then prevented either of us from presenting evidence on Mann’s concealment of failed verification statistics or even on the verification failure of Mann’s statistical model. The judge didn’t even allow the presentation of a table published in Geophysical Research Letters. In mid-trial, the judge also reduced the time available for the defense by about 40% from the original allocation; the time available for McKitrick and myself was almost chewed up by defense objections.

The Crust takes care of their own.

Because Steyn was so weak, nearly all of the defense was taken up by Simberg’s lawyers. They were highly professional, but their strategy was focused almost entirely on the lack of damages to Mann, and, in particular, to Mann’s claims about lost grants. In my opinion, the issues about, for example, Mann’s concealment of adverse verification statistics were issues that ought to have been raised in cross-examination of Mann (rather than late in the day in direct examination of McKitrick or me), but none of this took place. Instead, the cross-examination went on and on about Mann’s grants – an issue which seemed far less important to me than putting Mann on the spot about his concealment of adverse verification statistics,

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Last December, after months of worried research and work, we converted our Northern California home from gas to electric. We expected a bunch of benefits: Healthier indoor temperatures and air quality. A reduced carbon footprint. Lower energy bills.

The results have been more complicated.

Making decisions based on politics when they ought to be based on economics always costs you money.

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RNA vaccines packaged in tiny fatty containers called nanoparticles saved tens of millions from COVID-19. Now, researchers are trying to use similar nanoparticles to fight two other major killers, respiratory failure caused by lung infections such as flu and the atherosclerosis that leads to heart attacks and strokes. In both conditions, the endothelial cells that line blood vessels malfunction, turning down key genes. New research presented at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting here this week shows that nanoparticles carrying a payload of RNA can ramp the genes back up, promising to address the diseases at their root.

Nanoparticles are a familiar tool in medicine, but the scheme to use them to treat endothelial cells is “excellent work,” says Robert Langer, a nanoparticle therapy pioneer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Won Hyuk Suh, a biomaterials expert at the University of New Hampshire who organized the scientific session at the ACS meeting, notes that the findings are preliminary but calls them “very interesting and promising.” They were posted on the bioRxiv preprint server in January.

Atherosclerosis and respiratory failure due to infections such as flu might seem to have little in common. But both involve inflammation of endothelial cells. In the case of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), the inflammation causes endothelial cells in capillaries adjacent to the lung’s tiny air sacs, or alveoli, to reduce levels of KLF2, a protein “transcription factor” that helps regulate a series of other genes needed for healthy cell function. As a result, these capillaries become porous, leaking fluid into the alveoli, which prevents oxygen from diffusing into the blood, often killing patients.

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The following reports and videos concern a recently-established Islamic community in Collin County, Texas that aims to become the sharia capital of America, a new, fully-Islamized version of the USA — the United Emirates of America, perhaps?

The East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) is expanding in furtherance of a comprehensive plan, with some ominous overtones — for example, a compound-like building next door to the Plano police academy, overlooking a restricted-access parking lot and tactical mustering area. There is much about this plan that should make non-Muslims nervous.

The testimony of retired police Lieutenant Douglas Deaton at a meeting in Collin County discusses these issues and others related to the new EPIC city. I have only one quibble: Lt. Deaton said: “This is not about race. It’s not about religion. It’s about governance. It’s about sovereignty [emphasis added].” The problem with Islam — which few people in the West seem to understand — is that religion and governance are one and the same from an Islamic perspective. There is no separation between mosque and state — the concept is alien to Islam. As Muslims frequently tell the infidels, “Islam will dominate.” And when it does, it will govern. Islamic law — sharia — will be the law of the land. There will be no other source of law. Secular governance will no longer exist. Everyone will live in an Islamic paradise.

But that’s a minor quibble. Lt. Deaton gave an excellent presentation in the very brief time allotted to him. I couldn’t have done nearly as well.

You will notice no other ethnic or religious group attempting this sort of us-alone trick. The Irish don’t do it. Italians don’t do it. Poles don’t do it. Russians don’t do it. Catholics don’t do it. Episcopalians don’t do it. Buddhists don’t do it.

The reason it’s a problem is that Islam is an existential threat to Western Civilization in general (which the European Union are having their noses rubbed in every day) and the United States in particular. Immigrants historically have gradually assimilated into the general American culture while maintaining their unique traditions and contributing to the ‘melting pot’ — except Muslims, who attempt to establish Islam and shari’a law wherever they go. It’s all in the Koran. Go and read it.

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When we buy more goods and services from a foreign country than they buy from us in a given time period, we have a trade deficit with them. That means we are sending them little pieces of green paper (or more usually, digital bits) that represent a future claim on wealth. They can’t eat the green paper or the digital bits (i.e. dollars). They can’t build anything with them. We are getting valuable products in exchange for a future promise. Thus we can consume more now than we would in the absence of a trade deficit.

What do the recipient countries do with the pieces of green paper or digital bits? Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, they often use them to purchase goods and services from another country. So Taiwan might give us advanced semiconductors in exchange for digital bits and then pass the digital bits on to Saudi Arabia for oil. Then Saudi Arabia might use them to buy petroleum engineering services from the US, at which time we would be obligated to make good on the promise we made to Taiwan that those digital bits would be worth something. Because dollars flow around the globe, our trade deficit with a particular country is of no concern to us.

Our overall trade deficit is a good thing because it allows us to consume more goods and services now. Even better: because we have the world’s reserve currency, many of these dollars circulate overseas and have not yet (and may never be) used to demand goods and services from us. In 2022 the St. Louis Fed estimated that $1.1 trillion in Federal Reserve banknotes were held overseas. This does NOT include the vast amounts of digital currency held overseas. So foreigners have given us goods worth $1.1 trillion in exchange for banknotes alone. And they are holding them as a store of value and a means of exchange. They have yet to ask us to give them any goods or services in exchange for those banknotes.

A point that I have made several times on this very blog.

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“This was an illegal act,” said U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland, an Obama appointee. She gave the administration until 11:59 p.m. Monday to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, from the El Salvadoran prison where he is being held, and return him to the United States where he is not a citizen.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was among the hundreds of illegal immigrants—a large percentage of them MS-13 and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang members —expelled from the U.S. to El Salvador last month.

Although the Trump administration acknowledged in court records earlier this week it made an “administrative error” when it deported Garcia without an interview, the fact remains that he has no legal status in the United States.

Garcia crossed the border illegally in 2012 by his own admission, and claimed he had to flee El Salvador as a teenager to escape gang violence when he was detained in 2019. Both the original immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals found there was sufficient evidence that Garcia was a member of MS-13 and, as such, a danger to the public.

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Nearly two months after a top Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and support team arrived at IRS headquarters to investigate waste and fraud—aiming to streamline a bloated and corrupt federal bureaucracy—the Trump administration has begun a sizeable workforce reduction across the federal agency.

Fox News reported late Friday evening that the IRS will begin laying off about 20,000 staffers — up to 25% of the workforce — on Friday and through next week.

Most job cuts will center around the IRS Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which protects taxpayers from discrimination, audits, and investigations.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News, “In a stark contrast to the previous administration’s wildly unpopular plan to hire thousands of additional IRS agents, President Trump is focused on saving tax dollars, eliminating bloat, axing useless DEI offices, and increasing the agency’s efficiency.”

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Murals honoring Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists were featured Saturday at a protest that American Muslims for Palestine, a group recently accused of serving as Hamas’s “propaganda arm in New York City,” helped organize.

Several Hamas flags, including one depicting a militant of the terror group, were also spotted among the crowd of thousands of protesters, many of whom bused in from across the country. Speakers included Council on American-Islamic Relations executive director Nihad Awad, who once said he was “happy to see” Hamas attack Israel, notorious anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, and Grant Miner, the Columbia University graduate student expelled for storming a campus building.

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In the 1980s, peanut allergies were almost entirely unheard-of. Today, the United States has one of the highest peanut-allergy rates in the world. Disturbingly, this epidemic was precipitated by institutions that exist to promote public health. The story of their malpractice illuminates the fallibility of respected institutions, and confirms that public health’s catastrophically incorrect guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t an isolated anomaly.

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

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The progressive left has spent years sermonizing about the virtues of “buy local”—fewer carbon-spewing cargo ships, more jobs for American workers, a lighter footprint on Mother Earth. It was their climate gospel, right up there with electric vehicles (EVs) and organic kale. But now, with Donald Trump’s latest tariff push hitting foreign goods hard, the same crowd that once fetishized localism is clutching their imported lattes and crying foul. First, they turned on Tesla’s EVs, now they’re ditching “buy local”—and the irony is thicker than a smog cloud over Beijing.

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Engineers at a University of Bristol spin-out company have created a new technology that can move cells without touching them, enabling critical tasks that currently require large pieces of lab equipment to be carried out on a benchtop device.

The invention could accelerate the discovery of new medicines and unlock personalized medicine screening in clinics.

The groundbreaking concept was unveiled for the first time today in an article in Science published by Dr. Luke Cox, where he describes his journey from University of Bristol student to CEO of start-up company Impulsonics. The article is a prize essay in the Bioinnovation Institute and Science Prize for Innovation.

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On Friday [5 April], Dr. Peter Marks announced his resignation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as Director of CEBR (Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research) citing differences with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kennedy regarding vaccines. The New York Times, Washington Post, and other media outlets such as STAT News breathlessly reported that “FDA’s top vaccine scientist had been pushed out.” We have been told that science is at risk. The irony of these reports is that Marks didn’t resign and is not a vaccine scientist. Dr. Marks was asked to leave and then subsequently wrote that he did not want to become “subservient to [Secretary Kennedy’s] misinformation and lies.”

The media proclamation that Dr. Marks’ is “FDA’s top vaccine scientist” is ironic because he decided to give himself that position. Marks is a physician but has no clinical or scientific training in vaccines or immunology. Dr. Marks trained as an oncologist, a field far from the important and complex area of vaccine biology. At FDA in 2021, Dr. Marks removed top career vaccine scientists so he could force through the approval of the COVID vaccine to meet an arbitrary Biden administration deadline. He also declined to convene the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee to review his decision. These events are clearly outlined in the June 2023 House Judiciary Hearings. Marks ousted Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause, the top scientists at the Office of Vaccine Research, due to “intransigence” of these real vaccine experts to not ram through the approval of the vaccine. Drs. Gruber and Krause had voiced concerns that they needed more time to understand the safety of the vaccine especially as it relates to inflammation of the heart, now a well known and accepted toxicity of the COVID vaccine. Marks approved the use of the vaccine in children despite the known fact that children have an extremely low risk of serious health effects of COVID-19 infection and yet a known significant increased risk of serious vaccine related toxicity.

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The Left has a long, storied tradition of staring reality squarely in the face and refusing to believe their lying eyes. And nowhere is this more evident than the Left’s defence of multiculturalism—a project so disastrous that even its architects have admitted it to be dead. Yet here we are, in 2025, watching senior Labour politicians prancing around the corpse of cultural diversity, insisting it’s still got a pulse.

While the fabled benefits of multiculturalism are yet to materialise, its ill effects are now undeniable. In Britain, despite an impressive majority of 174 seats in last year’s general election, the Labour Party’s diversity chickens have finally come home to roost. First we were treated to the shameful spectacle of Angela Rayner, begging male Muslim voters (naturally, there were no women in sight) not to oust her from her Ashton-under-Lyne seat; promising that if Labour got into power it would ‘recognise Palestine.’

The Other McCain.

Matt Walsh’s Daily Wire article is “members only,” so in case you’ve been hiding under a rock — or getting your news from the mainstream media — I’ll summarize what happened in Frisco, Texas, this week: A high school junior, Austin Metcalf, was stabbed to death Wednesday morning at a track meet by a senior from another high school, Karmelo Anthony.

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Did Hungary’s Viktor Orban start a trend? He is hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a four-day trip to Budapest through Sunday. PM Orban used the occasion to declare that Hungary, an ICC founding member, will pull out of The Hague-based International Criminal Court.

The ICC slammed the move, and said that member states have an obligation to enforce its arrest warrant against Netanyahu. Interestingly, Belgium too has declared in all likelihood it would never arrest the Israeli head of state.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever on Thursday said his country would ignore a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu, in a reversal from the stated policies of the prior government. This could lead to more and more countries declaring the same, also amid ongoing US pressure to not confirm to ICC dictates.

Statist always forget that not everybody is as mental as they are.

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A dark web doxxing website targeting Tesla owners and allies of Elon Musk appears to be compiled from hacked data originally stolen from a massive ParkMobile app breach in 2021, according to records obtained by a data privacy group.

The site, known as DogeQuest, first appeared in March and publishes names, home addresses, contact details, and other personal information tied to Tesla drivers and Department of Government Efficiency staff. Marketed as a hub for anti-Musk “creative expressions of protest,” the platform has been linked to real-world vandalism and remains live on the dark web. Federal investigations into DogeQuest are already underway, the New York Post first reported.

“If you’re on the hunt for a Tesla to unleash your artistic flair with a spray can, just step outside—no map needed! At DOGEQUEST, we believe in empowering creative expressions of protest that you can execute from the comfort of your own home,” the surface-web DogeQuest site reads. “DOGEQUEST neither endorses nor condemns any actions.”

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One in 10 people say they have been harmed by the NHS, according to a study published in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal.

Researchers surveyed over 10,000 people across England, Wales, and Scotland between 2021 and 2022 and found that 988 of them (9.7 percent) had reported experiencing physical or emotional harm caused by the health service in the previous three years.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford’s Population Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), 6.2 percent said they experienced harm owing to care they had received.

The remaining 3.5 percent blamed the harm on having a lack of access to treatment.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Well, it’s coming….

Freethink.

The last time America went through anything comparable to what we are going through today, it was coming off the Great Depression and World War II and about to head into the post-war economic boom, as represented in the graphic above.

America in the year 1945 and America in 2025 have many parallels that are worth contemplating today. Like today, that America faced a rare epic juncture in the nation’s history and even in world history. The technological and economic forces driving through the era were just as transformative as today’s, and the political stakes around the outcome were just as high. The systems that were about to scale up in the next 25 years for them were dramatically different from the systems that came before — just like the systems that are about to scale up for us.

America has been through this drill before, like exactly 80 years before, but what’s even more remarkable is that we have been through this kind of fundamental reinvention two other times in the history of the country — once around the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century and then again around the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century. The most uncanny thing about this cycle of reinvention is that each one happens almost exactly 80 years after the last.

Curtis Yarvin:

Trump always has the right reflexes. But a reflex is not a plan. It is not his job, but the job of his administration, to translate reflexes into plans. While executing with great energy and enthusiasm, the administration has had a rocky start in this translation.

A reflex without a plan is not action, but the illusion of action. Action is defined by its purpose. The only purpose of a reflex is to do the right thing. The purpose of an action is a step toward an end state. A reflex has no end or intent. An action is proactive. A reflex is reactive. An action is strategic. A reflex is tactical. And so on.

Because of the influence of libertarianism and the beauty and power of spontaneous order, not to mention the essentially mythic characteristics of their historical faith (when thinking inside a myth, we suffer from just-world fallacy by definition), the conservative tends to operate in terms of reflexes. Nature, he assumes, will provide. Perhaps there is even some relic of the old Puritan doctrine of Providence.

Don’t overthink it.

Read it.

t’s often said that there’s an audience for everything. In our very online age, previously niche pursuits seem to gain recognition at an unprecedented rate. One nineteen-year-old has amassed a following of 140,000 people by attempting to lift a large log over his head each day for almost a year; he has never succeeded. Another young man became an overnight sensation for his enthusiastic trainspotting videos; he has now gained over three million followers on TikTok, along with a modelling gig with Gucci and a Channel 4 documentary series. It is not uncommon for individuals to become well-known for unusual things. What is uncommon, however, is when the unusual interest itself becomes popular.

Out of all the cultural pursuits one might have guessed may have a resurgence in popularity in modern times, Gregorian chanting would not have been top of my list. However, it seems that this ancient and unorthodox (get it?) musical form has now acquired a new and surprising popularity.

For those unaware, Gregorian chant is the main form of unaccompanied sacred song practiced by the Catholic Church. It is monophonic, meaning there are no chords or harmonies other than the main tune, and it is sung in either Latin or, occasionally, Greek. It developed widely throughout Western and Central Europe in the latter part of the 9th century. In the increasingly secularised Europe of today, where the population of Catholics decreased by almost half a million people in 2022 alone, why is this old, seemingly anachronistic musical tradition coming back to the forefront? And why is it cool?

Because it just is. Vexilla regis prodeunt…. I have a Pandora channel set up for Gregorian Chant, and I use it as background music because it is very relaxing. I can imagine myself in an Irish monastery with nothing to do but eat, sleep, pray, and copy manuscripts by hand. If I could retire to such a monastery, I would.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Foundry.

Civil disobedience practiced by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. is one thing. Crimes against people or property for political ends are quite another. The latter risks return to the law of the jungle, a cure worse than the disease.

That provides the framework to assess the proliferation of criminal attacks on Tesla vehicles to express opposition to Elon Musk’s politics, including his virtual duumvirate with President Donald Trump and affinity for Nazi-like memes, gestures, and ideas. For starters, there are multiple peaceful avenues to protest Musk. Boycott Tesla or sell Tesla vehicles. Criticize Musk and urge others to boycott his enterprises. Organize politically to oppose Musk, such as in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Musk’s nemeses are disingenuous in their professed opposition to Nazis. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen have escaped their wrath. But all three profited from Jewish slave labor during the Third Reich. BMW’s Herbert Quandt was allied with the Nazi regime and benefited from the slave labor of at least 57,000 Jews. Gunther Quandt, Herbert’s father, acquired numerous Jewish-owned companies at forced, fire-sale prices. Quandt heirs are majority owners of BMW. An independent study from 2011 found that “the Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis.” The specific value of BMW’s reparations to Israel is unknown.

Astral Codex Ten.

It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff?

When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair.

Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?

Quillette weekly podcast.

I’m your host this week, Iona Italia. My guest is William Costello. William is a PhD student in Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is part of a lab run by the eminent evolutionary psychologist David Buss. His research focuses on incels—involuntary celibates—and the community of men who identify in that way. I wouldn’t always turn to someone at such an earlier stage in his research career to provide expert opinion for Quillette, but William is exceptional, as I think you will quickly notice.

We focus on the recent Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, which first aired less than three weeks ago and which is already on track to be their most-watched series ever. The series depicts the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who views himself as an incel (i.e., someone who will never have success with women) and murders a classmate after she rejects his attentions. It has attracted widespread media and political coverage and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who has repeatedly mistakenly referred to this fictional story as a “documentary”—has suggested that it should be shown in all British schools, to combat a supposed epidemic of misogyny. We discuss what the show gets both right and wrong about incels and William helps counter some of the overheated responses to this emotive, exquisitely filmed fiction with facts and statistics that provide a much more accurate picture of the situation. I hope you enjoy my conversation with William Costello.

ALSO: What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong – William Costello  Interviewed by Chris Williamson.

The most dishonest show every made? At least a good candidate.

The Times.

The exodus of wealth from Britain has accelerated since the turn of the year, fuelling fears that the abolition of the non-domiciled tax regime will wipe billions of pounds from the economy.

Inquiries about moving overseas were nearly three times higher in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year, claims Henley & Partners, which offers global relocation services.

The company said the exodus was being led by non-doms before their privileged tax status ends this weekend. But wealthy entrepreneurs were also heading for the exit.

Read it.

Turning Point USA was holding an event on the campus of UC Davis featuring a black conservative named Brandon Tatum. Just prior to the event, the group set up a pop-up tent and a table outside to promote the event. But a group of Antifa goons dressed in black block marched in and tore down the tent and ran off with it. There were campus police standing there watching but they did next to nothing.