DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

If she had strangled three puppies or three kittens rather than her three kids, the women who are now supporting her would be calling for her death.

Newsbusters.

It’s not a fret; it’s a slur.

Today’s episode of The Weekend on MS NOW devoted a segment to questioning Donald Trump’s “mental acuity.”

Leading the charge was Jonathan Capehart, who declared that more people should be talking about it “in the way they were giving President Biden hell for walking with a stiff gait.”

It wasn’t just a stiff gait, Jonathan, and if anyone should know that, it’s you. Interviewing Biden in 2022, Capehart watched him appear to zone out mid-conversation and had to call him back with “Mr. President?”

Capehart edited out that awkward moment in the version of the interview he later aired on his own show. Talk about a double-standard dose of chutzpah.

Capehart cited three recent Trump comments as evidence of cognitive trouble: that Canada is a state, that the Strait of Hormuz is U.S. territory, and that the military could ultimately be used to intervene in the bond market. Granted, the last one was a tad perplexing.

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We have seen protesters on the left around the country mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk, even reenacting his murder. Hate traffickers like Jennifer Welch have even justified his assassination. It is all shocking and depressing, but none reached the level of Hasan Piker leading a huge crowd in mocking Kirk and his faith. Before he was murdered, Kirk debated Piker and called him a “socialist hypocrite.” What is shocking is not the utter depravity and cruelty of Piker, but the ecstasy of the crowd in relishing the death of someone with opposing views. It is part of the conditioning in what I have previously called an “age of rage.”

In the video, Piker leads the crowd in the meme song “We Are Charlie Kirk” at a stop of his “Fear& LIVE” tour, including such lines as “We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name.” His co-hosts and the crowd seem to be laughing with joy.

Joining him at this hatefest at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco on August 21 were reportedly Will Neff, QTCinderella, and AustinShow.

Hasan is wearing his now-signature Mao jacket as the young crowd and his co-hosts laugh hysterically. It is the very essence of this movement to desensitize people, particularly young people, to violence and hate.

In Rage and the Republic, I wrote about this national ragefest. It allows people to hate completely and without thought to the humanity of those being hurt. What people will not admit is that they like it. Rage is addictive, and it is contagious. Just look at the crowd in San Francisco, and you will see the addictive quality of uncut, undiluted hate:

Democrats are, after all the Party of Hate.

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A draft rule now moving through the Commerce Department would rewrite how many House seats each state gets by narrowing who counts as a “resident” on Census Day. The proposal hasn’t been published in the Federal Register. Nobody’s voted on it. But the fact that Washington is drafting it at all tells you the current system has a problem worth naming out loud.

Here’s the problem in one sentence: The Constitution hands out political power based on how many people live somewhere, not on how many of them can vote for the people who end up representing them.

I spend my working life allocating capital for people who have a stake in the outcome. In my business, you don’t get a seat on the board because you happen to be standing in the lobby. You get one because you own something. Congress runs on a different theory.

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British Professor Lawrence Goldman tells you what the Wokerati don’t want you to know.

The transatlantic slave trade took 12 million Africans to the New World, but was exceeded by the 17 million Africans who were enslaved by Arabs an other Muslims into the Ottoman Empire and further on in Asia.

Slavery was a universal component of every human society until Christians in the 19th century decided to stop it.

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Grady at Practical Engineering lays out how the Port of Long Beach solved a problem.

The Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the second-busiest container seaport in the United States, a major gateway for goods flowing to and from the west coast. Together with its next door neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles, roughly half a TRILLION dollars worth of trade moves through the port every year. To keep up with the staggering growth of shipping demand, the port is in a nearly constant state of improvement and expansion.

In the early 2000s, Long Beach was expanding the container storage yard at the Pier T Marine Terminal, but engineers hit a problem. The area they were expanding into was an old, disused dry dock, much lower than the rest of the yard. They were going to need a lot of fill to bring it up. There aren’t many more difficult paving challenges than a container terminal. You have constant heavy traffic of cranes, forklifts, and yard trucks, and the local fill materials that are available are junk: soft, water-logged silt scraped from the bottom of the ocean that has the structural integrity of a cake in the rain.

Traditionally, you would have to dig out all the muck, then haul in a literal mountain of expensive backfill, a process that would cost millions of dollars and take years. Instead, the engineers turned to a solution that looks more like a giant plastic accordion than a structural foundation. This 3D network did more than just hold the soil in place; it physically transformed those mushy dredged spoils into a high-capacity platform capable of supporting 100-ton machines and rows and rows of heavy container stacks.

The prefix “geo” gets a lot of work in the world of engineering. Just tack it on something semi-technical-sounding, and there’s a good chance there’s a product out there. Geotextile, geogrid, geofoam, and more. Today I want to show you how geocells work, and of course I built a little model in the garage so you can see it in action. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.

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As we look back at the last century, it can seem that the Liberal Arts model deteriorated through factors like neglect, laziness, or mission creep. But the reality was strikingly different. This older model of education was not misplaced; it suffered a planned and deliberate attack. The leading educators of the last century turned on the Liberal Arts program and tried to gut it. The central voice in this attack was John Dewey, but other educators, like the Developmentalists, joined him in that work. Their primary criticism was that the older Liberal Arts model could not accommodate new research done in child development. Into the middle of this pedagogical revolution, Dorothy Sayers stepped up in 1947 and defended the Liberal Arts program in her work The Lost Tools of Learning. In her defense of the liberal arts, Sayers both acknowledged the factor of childhood development and offered a way for Classical education to deal with these criticisms. In this way, Sayers did not merely defend the Liberal Arts program but also, and more importantly, offered a way for Classical education to disarm Dewey’s project.

The chief virtue of the old paradigm of the Liberal education (i.e. “The Liberal Arts”) is that they made sure everybody going through this form of paideia would have a deep knowledge of language and a facility with basic mathematics.

What were the Liberal Arts?

The Trivium was Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The graduates of the Trivium knew how language worked, how reasoning worked, and how persuasion worked. Those are the skills we most miss in the modern world. The Boomer generation was the last tranche of the population to get any substantial training in these three areas.

Our Constitution was devised by people who were thus educated, and devised for people who were thus educated; and the Founders couldn’t have imagined that education would be so corrupted as to deviate from these goals.

Note: THESE WERE GOALS. They aren’t related to ‘childhood development’ except insofar as a stage of ‘scientific’ childhood development will inform how these goals are reached at certain ages. The goals themselves remain. And the goals themselves were what ‘progressive’ education corrupted and eventually abandoned.

The Quadrivium was Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy.  Arithmetic was facility with number per se, Geometry was facility with number in space, Music was facility with number in time, and Astronomy was facility with number in time and space. As you can see, almost all of modern mathematics can fit one of these four categories.

The British university system (which was, until Wokeness corrupted it, far superior to the German research-institution concept adopted in America) basically continued this system and doubled down. The standard British university program was classics and mathematics. (Our SAT and ACT tests for getting into college still reflect this division.)

Classics was based on Latin and Greek but involved not only language and literature but also history, philosophy, drama, poetry, and culture broadly conceived, which are still the foundation of Western civilization. “There is nothing new under the sun.” If you knew how people handled problems in the past, you had a clue as to how to handle those problems when they (or similar problems) arose in the future. Learning Latin and Greek in depth rewires your brain; this carries forward into real life even when you don’t realize it. I can vouch for that from personal experience. Mathematics was every mathematical area beyond the Quadrivium basics,

These two programs were intended to produce well-rounded, well-educated individuals who could be depended on to handle pretty much anything that came their way—and did. This system produced soldiers, sailors, industrialists, scientists, politicians, diplomats, clergymen, financiers, entrepreneurs, agronomists, and made 19th-century Britain the wonder of the world.

Compare that with the Turd World country into which Britain has degenerated in the 20th and 21st centuries.

My wife tells me that this is me in a nutshell.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

So: Instead of pulling kerosene out of our fossil fuels, we can clear-cut forests to grow ‘sustainable’ coconut trees.

Taking bets on how soon some proglodyte group takes up the cause.

Although I will say that I suspect that coconut oil would make carrier flight decks smell a lot nicer than they do now.

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Iranian media linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has escalated its threats against President Donald Trump’s family, airing a video on state TV that purportedly tracks the movements of his 20-year-old son, Barron Trump. Separate reports also claim a $10 million bounty has been placed on his head.

The video, reported Sunday by Al Bawaba, appeared on IRGC-linked media and Iran’s state-run Channel 3 and carried the title, “Where to kill Barron Trump?”

According to Al Bawaba, the production purported to reveal information about Barron Trump’s location and movements, presenting the president’s youngest son as being within reach of potential attackers.

The outlet also reported claims of a $10 million bounty. The official status of the purported bounty could not immediately be independently confirmed.

Newsbusters.

n a brief report long on speculative doom and short on facts and data, ABC News, once again, instinctively took the side oppositional to the Trump administration. This time, the Disney subsidiary parroted the spin of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney while reporting on the collapse of a potential deal between the United States and Canada.

The Narrative Media are the cornerstone of the Hate America First movement.

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That explains a lot.

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Maybe all that “global warming” was dangerous, after all.

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Good luck with that. What are they going to do, send us a sternly-worded memo? Send protesters to the border to line up and burst into tears?

The Foundry.

A month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood issued marching orders for state attorneys general to target crisis pregnancy centers and issue abortion-friendly legal opinions.

State actions after the July 12, 2022, memo suggest Democrat attorneys general followed much of the 14-point plan pushed by the nation’s largest abortion provider.

On July 25, 2022, Brittany Jenkins, policy director of the Progressive State Leaders Committee, forwarded a Planned Parenthood memo to attorneys general and their staff, according to documents obtained by the Daily Signal. Jenkins informed them that Rachel Sussman, vice president of state policy for Planned Parenthood, was set to brief them the next day “to continue our discussion of continued actions AGs can take in response to the Dobbs decision.”

Worst of all, a lot of them vote Democrat.

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We need to get the best stuff available, and work around the fact that American industry is degrading rapidly.

Trump on X.

“The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION! We must pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Newsbusters.

As has been previously pointed out, ever since Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff implied that White House aide Natalie Harp’s relationship with President Trump is more than just business, the left wing media has been obsessed with the story. On Thursday they were given some new ammunition thanks to an article in The Daily Beast, which printed a pair of letters allegedly written by Harp to Trump in 2023.

They reinforce the admiration, loyalty and closeness that Harp feels for the President, that the left has been using to attempt to pervert the relationship. But the article also contained vital context, as to why Harp might have these feelings towards Trump. One is, she believes that he had saved her life.

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A Palestinian culture-enricher named Ahmed got himself into a bit of trouble during a bus ride in the French city of Toulouse. The impulsive youngster sat down next to a 16-year-old girl and put his hands where they didn’t belong. The young girl was inexplicably traumatized by his behavior, and poor Ahmed was hauled into court and convicted of sexual assault.

Surprisingly, he told the court, “I have trouble behaving with girls.” Even more surprising was the sentence: six months in prison. In Western Europe migrants are generally spared custodial sentences for most offenses where their victims are not maimed or killed, and usually receive nothing worse than probation and/or community service.

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A coalition of parents in Northern California has sued the Palo Alto Unified School District for a high school field trip to a mosque in the fall of 2025.

“Students allegedly were encouraged to wear Islamic religious attire, were given Qurans, observed prayer, engaged with participants in a Quran-memorization program, and were exposed to messaging that portrayed Islam as uniquely aligned with social justice work,” the Aug. 7 complaint declares. Strikingly, not a single family involved in the lawsuit is Christian.

The field trip took place as part of Palo Alto High School’s “Social Justice Pathway,” a three-year course track for sophomores through seniors. The program just happens to share its initials (SJP) with Students for Justice in Palestine, a college organization expelled from some campuses for its extreme pro-Hamas demonstrations in 2024.

The SJP program “has periodically and repeatedly organized field trips to a mosque at the Muslim Community Association—Bay Area [in nearby Santa Clara], the only house of worship included in the program,” according to the complaint.

Newsbusters.

MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart joined PBS News Hour on Friday for his weekly news recap segment with The Atlantic staff writer David Brooks. During the part of the discussion about DSA candidate Angie Nixon winning the Democratic Senate nomination in Florida, Capehart insisted that you can’t actually claim Nixon is a DSA candidate and therefore tie her to the DSA’s recent praise of Fidel Castro.

When trying to come up with a reason why Nixon was able to defeat liberal hero from Trump 1.0, Alexander Vindman, Capehart claimed, “But Democrats are also talking about someone who will fight for them, someone who’s going to give expression to their anger about what’s happening, whether it’s the war or high prices, high gas prices, inflation, or just the wrecking ball the administration’s taking to just democracy.”

Ironically, Capehart’s denunciations of those who seek to associate Nixon with the DSA began when he himself admitted Nixon is a member of the DSA, “And Angie Nixon, state legislator who has been in the trenches there in Florida, working really hard, talking to people, she went out and asked for people’s votes, and they gave it to her. I mean, one thing to keep in mind, she joined the Democratic Socialists of America just a few months ago.”

Tell the truth about Democrats, and the Narrative Media invariably describes it as a ‘smear’.

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The call to prayer is sounding across America. From Hamtramck, Michigan, to Paterson, New Jersey, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, rooftop amplifiers remind growing numbers of Muslim faithful five times a day of their duties with the Arabic message that “Allah is the Greatest! There is no god but Allah!”

The so-called “adhan” is just one sign of how Islam is transforming pockets of the nation. As more Muslims participate in the country’s political life, running for office, influencing, and in some cases, even controlling local governments, they are putting their own stamps on their communities: renaming city streets after Arab homelands and mandating Islamic holidays and halal-only lunches in public schools, while even changing noise ordinances to the consternation of many non-Muslim neighbors.

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Turkey has escalated its anti-Israel actions, after months of denunciations connected to its Gaza, Syria, and Iran policies – and is once again taking things to new levels.

The Erdogan government has just issued an international arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of an investigation into Israel’s interception of an aid flotilla for Gaza, which happened in mid-May and involved over 50 vessels and nearly 500 international activists.

Activist: Someone who isn’t happy unless pissing in someone else’s soup.

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Dozens of military-age men leapt from boats onto packed tourist beaches in mainland Spain this week, sending holidaymakers scrambling for their belongings as the fallout from the Ceuta mass crossing continues to escalate.

The Other McCain.

For many years I have said that, if it weren’t for double standards, Democrats would have no standards at all. The only “principle” they have is a lust for power.

…

As Mike Benz points out, with Democrats, every accusation is a confession — they habitually accuse Republicans of wrongdoing that Democrats themselves are guilty of, in this case, foreign interference in American elections. ActBlue was perfectly OK with their system being used to launder foreign contributions into Democratic campaign coffers, with the big-money foreign donors using the stolen identities of Americans to disguise these illegal contributions.

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Can an intellectual tradition dissociate itself from the very ideas it has helped to develop? That is the question running through “Left Is Not Woke,” one of the most widely discussed political essays of recent years. In it, Susan Neiman argues that the woke phenomenon does not represent the culmination of the Left, but rather its negation. The thesis is undeniably attractive. It allows the moral legacy of the Enlightenment Left to be preserved while attributing the excesses of identity politics to a deviation foreign to its own tradition. The question, however, is whether this historical reconstruction withstands scrutiny when examined in light of the history of ideas.

Waiting for the name change to Michistan.

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This week marks the 55th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s 90-day wage and price order of August 15, 1971. With extensions, maximum prices caused oil shortages beginning in 1972. More shortages with the Arab Embargo of October 1973 ensured passage of the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973, which continued federal price and allocation controls until President Reagan’s decontrol order in early 1981. This post adds to the historical record of one of the greatest peacetime energy policy failures in U.S. history.

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The first is fiat-currency inflation. Intervention in 1912-1913,  creation of the Federal Reserve and the 16th Amendment enabling Congressional unlimited spending.

The second is the socialization of old-age support. Intervention in 1936 creating the Social Security Program.

The third is medical monopoly. Intervention in 1965 creating Medicare.

The fourth is the nationalization of education. Intervention in 1979 creating the Department of Education.

The fifth is the stripping of housing sovereignty. Intervention into housing policy and finance spread over most of the 20th century.

The sixth is administrative relief. Government takes over management and control of permanent poverty.

Full article: The Six Nooses: How Interventionism Is Strangling The Family’s Will To Reproduce

House Dems Plan Trump Probes If They Retake Control

House Democrat leaders have prepared a lengthy list of investigations they plan to launch against President Donald Trump, his family, and his administration if they regain control of the House in November, Politico reported Friday.

No doubt they have.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal appeals court handed conservative activist James O’Keefe a significant legal victory Friday, tossing out a $130,000 judgment a Democratic consultant won against him over an undercover video sting tied to the 2016 presidential election.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said that award, which followed a 2022 jury trial, violated the First Amendment by muddling together the consequences of legal activity by O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, with unlawful aspects of its infiltration of the consulting firm, Democracy Partners.

The Foundry.

Republican voters who see ads attacking South Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Ralph Norman as insufficiently MAGA might be surprised to learn about the major donor behind those messages.

“Ralph Norman: MAGA Traitor,” reads one ad from the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC. “Ralph Norman betrayed President [Donald] Trump by endorsing against him in 2024. … Ralph Norman is a MAGA traitor.”

So, what is the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC?

According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the PAC received more than 88% of its funding—$6 million out of $6.78 million—from one man, Chris Larsen.

So, is Larsen a Trump donor? Far from it. He contributed $1 million worth of cryptocurrency to Future Forward, a PAC supporting then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in 2024. In May, he told Politico he was “a big believer in Gavin” Newsom for the 2028 Democrat presidential primary, and he plans to boost California’s Democrat governor “any way we can.”

Larsen in May called the PAC’s advocacy “political warfare,” according to Politico. “The worst that you want in a political fight is for your opponents to think you’re weak,” he said.

He is not the only green energy advocate backing the PAC. Mark McCall, who led the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office under President Barack Obama, contributed $200,000. Jigar Shah, who directed the same office under President Joe Biden, contributed $50,000. Michael Brune, former executive director of the Sierra Club, co-founded the PAC.

Task & Purpose.

The United States military hasn’t operated a seaplane, or amphibious flying boat, since the Coast Guard retired the HU-16 Albatross in 1983. For 73 years, this kind of aircraft had been essential for everything from search and rescue to resupply. With the vast expanses of the Pacific theater in mind, an argument can be made that the versatile seaplanes of yesteryear should return to their former glory.

United States Pacific Command is made up of over one hundred million square miles of territory, which is over half the Earth. The majority of that is water. This puts a premium on land, especially airfields. Despite technological leaps that make crossing thousands of miles faster, and arguably easier, aviators still face some of the same hurdles today as they did back in World War II.

As leaders plan for a potential fight in the region, new doctrine like the Marines’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations all consider the challenge of maintaining logistics for small and dispersed teams in austere conditions, with little infrastructure for traditional cargo aircraft or watercraft.

The situation looks even more dire when you consider that existing airfields and ports would be high-value targets in the opening moments of a conflict, further complicating logistics.

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That’s about the same number of people as were killed in road accidents in Los Angeles County in 2025.

ATQUE: Pentagon says more than 750 US service members wounded in Iran war (Filip Timotija/The Hill)  Oh, the humanity! It’s another Ukraine quagmire!

The advantages are obvious, the reactor has less than a six-month lead time, it is transportable by rail, ship, conventional trucks, and normal logistics. It fits on an ordinary slab or other small structure and can be easily installed with off-the-shelf plumbing and wiring. It is cooled with either helium or water, or the excess heat can be used for additional power generation. It has inherent safety and security and does not require full-time monitoring; it is walk-away safe. The fuel is standard 4.95% enriched uranium oxide; that must be replaced every five years at a current cost of $1.3 million. The fuel is well below weapons grade and is readily available.

Wait until Jeff Bezos puts one on a yacht….

The New Neo.

Well, given the nature of his district, it ought to come as no surprise..Aisha Wahab will be replacing Swalwell until the November election, due to the results of a special election to determine the disgraced Swalwell’s successor. As you can probably tell from the name, Wahab is the US-born child of Muslim immigrants (in her case, her parents are from Afghanistan) and a DSA-supported candidate.

Hey, as long as Democrats will be stupid enough to support Muslims, Muslims will be clever enough to accept that support.

Newsbusters.

While guest hosting All In on Thursday, MS NOW’s Ali Velshi welcomed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico to another one of his strategy planning sessions disguised as an interview. At one point, Velshi seemed befuddled by the idea that “Most people are not losing sleep over transgender kids in sports, but they [Republicans] seem to just be stuck on this one with you.”

Velshi began by suggesting that Republicans are talking about gender stuff because they cannot talk about the economy or foreign policy, “I’ve been having conversations with people like you: Democrats who have a good chance of winning in states that have traditionally been Republican or in recent years at least have voted for Donald Trump. And I’ve had this conversation with Roy Cooper, and last night I had it with David Jolly. And there is some indication that when things are going badly for Republicans, particularly as they are now, because of the cost of living and this war that we were told we weren’t going to get involved in wars like this. Democrats have a few go-tos and they’re enjoying one of them with you. They talk a lot about transgender stuff, and they lean into that.”

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ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis sat before the Committee on House Administration, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday and declined to answer a single substantive question during a closed-door deposition that reportedly lasted less than half an hour. DeBergalis invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and left. DeBergalis joins a growing list of ActBlue executives who have chosen silence over testimony as Republicans dig into whether the Democratic Party’s primary fundraising platform let foreign money slip into American campaigns.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

Why don’t they solve the problem the way they solved COVID? Lock everybody down.

EXCLUSIVE: Committee Review Finds Trump Pardons Have Cost Crime Victims $1.7 Billion and Enriched Trump Allies (Scott MacFarlane Reports)

A scathing new investigation by Democrats …

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British men who protested outside an Essex asylum hotel have been locked up for far longer than the migrant whose sexual assaults on a 14-year-old girl and a woman triggered the demonstrations.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

The Other McCain.

… and the weird thing — the creepy, scary thing — is that there are women taking the killer’s side of the case. Women are actually rallying outside the courtroom in support of this murderer. And, of course, blaming her husband for it.

The facts of the case are irrelevant to this; Lindsay’s supporters aren’t about facts, they’re about emotion. The core premise of their argument is very simple: No woman is ever responsible for anything.

ATQUE: Pink-Clad Feminist Mob Rallies In Support Of Confessed Child Murderer

The American Mind.

Consider a simple question. The Biden Administration imported somewhere between six and ten million immigrants into the United States illegally. Do you think President AOC or President Newsom, if given the chance starting in January 2029, would let in fewer than Biden or more?

The American people don’t need a detailed policy briefing to answer that question. Amnesty and mass immigration are key features of expanding the Democratic Party coalition. Its ideology and electoral math, along with a vast government-contractor apparatus that supports the party, entrench a quasi-legal parallel rights regime.

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Professional associations are nothing more than labor unions/lobbying groups for Highly Educated People, the functional equivalent of medieval guilds (and the actual equivalent of medieval guilds when they succeed, as they so often do, in pushing their protective restrictions into law).

Such associations are among the first (along with the universities and the Narrative Media) to be corrupted by the Long March Through the Institutions that enshrined crypto-socialism in today’s Crust.

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Theodore Roosevelt could be turning over in his grave. And maybe Woodrow Wilson is spinning right along with him. Why? Well, the progressive vision of government-by-expert has taken a major hit in recent days. Someone like Anthony Fauci wasn’t exactly what either of them had had in mind. Or was it?

And just what was it that those presidents claimed to have had in mind? Disinterested expertise. That would be disinterested as in neutral, rather than disinterested as in uninterested. Agencies as advice-givers and agencies as umpires was the idea. And that was that, as far as they were concerned. Or was it?

The Constitution of 1787 might have been a great starting point—at least for TR. Maybe not so for Wilson. Possible differences aside, both of them thought that life in the early twentieth century had already grown too complicated for mere elected officials to handle. Divided government might not yet be a thing of the past, but a modern American government surely needed help when it came to steering the country in a progressive direction. Why not then turn to experts? Congressmen and presidents couldn’t–and shouldn’t–managing things alone. After all, the drafting, debating, passing and signing of legislation somehow ought to be beyond the grubby business of politics.

Therefore, they thought it was high time that the original Constitution of the late eighteenth century give way to a “living constitution” for the twentieth century and beyond. That certainly was Wilson’s preferred term. Of course, it wouldn’t be necessary to bother with a series of constitutional amendments to achieve this. Such would be a lengthy process at best. Besides, that very clumsy process was little more than an eighteenth-century relic.

Constitutions are only as effective as the men (and they are mostly men) who enforce them.

Don’t forget that both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were explicitly ‘progressive’, party affiliation notwithstanding. If I could go back in history and shoot three people as children, two of them would be TR and WW. (Actually, shooting TR would probably be enough, because his ego is the reason WW became a problem.)

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Tim Pool lays it out for us.

I find myself in substantial agreement with what he has to say.