Washington Free Beacon.

Speaking on the Senate floor last week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced, “It has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7.” As New York’s Democratic senator sees it, “a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel.” What he means is that he hopes a new Israeli government would permanently halt the counteroffensive in Gaza. “He made a good speech,” President Biden commented, “and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans,” only to backtrack and tell Netanyahu that he is not trying to force a change in Jerusalem.

This administration is no stranger to disastrous retreats, but even so the seeming ineptness is puzzling. Competent diplomats usually praise their allies in public and air their grievances behind closed doors. The Biden team and its congressional allies are doing the opposite because they are pandering to one of the Democratic Party’s worst foreign policy instincts. Rather than come to grips with the larger political and social dynamics that plague the Middle East, the party typically believes that removing an individual would solve their problems. In other words, they keep thinking the political is the personal.

Attempting to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from power has become a tradition for the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton admitted that in the 1996 election that first brought Netanyahu to power, “I tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me.” At the time, many Democrats thought that Netanyahu and his Likud party were the main obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. They eventually got a Labor government in Israel, but not peace. Despite Clinton’s full-court press at Camp David, the gulf between Israeli and Palestinian demands was too wide for them to reach an agreement, even without Bibi in the room.

Power Line.

In France, at least two teachers have been murdered by Muslim students, one of them beheaded. The French press reports that “death threats and threats of rape have become common among pupils.” Those threats are directed toward both teachers and fellow students.

Now, students at dozens of French schools have been sent “threatening messages and beheading videos” by Islamic radicals.

Read it.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has agreed to remove social media posts and webpages that urged people to stop taking ivermectin to treat COVID-19, according to a settlement dated March 21.

Forbes.

In two court orders, the federal government told Google to turn over information on anyone who viewed multiple YouTube videos and livestreams. Privacy experts say the orders are unconstitutional.

Read it.

House Republicans, led by Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, are pressing the Biden administration over its program that flew 386,000 migrants directly into U.S. cities from high-risk countries, including two that are on the “Do Not Travel” list of the State Department.

Power Line.

When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.

But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.

Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.

Read it.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel. They massacred over 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took around 240 hostages, including babies, children, women, and elderly people.

Hundreds of Israeli and non-Israeli women were exposed to sexual assaults, including rapes and gang rapes, at multiple locations at the hands of Hamas terrorists. Many of the victims were murdered after or during the rapes that took place in the presence of the victims’ friends, partners, or family members. Men were also sexually assaulted. In many cases, alongside the sexual assault, deliberate mutilation of the bodies occurred, including facial mutilation, burning, decapitation, and disfigurement. The mutilation of sexual organs of both men and women was also commonplace.

Yet the glaring silence of women’s organizations around the world has been deafening.

Read it.

Two months into the Biden administration, a top official at the Department of Agriculture fielded a question, from a New York Times reporter about a program, that she couldn’t answer.

The reporter emailed Deputy Undersecretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Stacy Dean on March 30, 2021, asking for her thoughts on data that suggest food stamps are a poor vehicle to address food insufficiency, given that only a quarter of Americans struggling with insufficiency are enrolled for the benefit.

Dean appears to have been stumped. But instead of consulting her colleagues at the Agriculture Department, she immediately forwarded the reporter’s question to her former coworkers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a George Soros-funded think tank.

Read it.

The family of the black girl who beat a schoolmate to near death in Missouri say she’s the real victim, was “merely defending herself” against bullying and is raising money for her legal defense.

Read it.

When President Roosevelt first enacted social security in 1935, the intention was to serve as a safety net for older adults. However, at that time, life expectancy was roughly 60 years. Therefore, the expectation was that participants would not be drawing on social security for very long on an actuarial basis. Furthermore, according to the Social Security Administration, roughly 42 workers contributed to the funding pool for each welfare recipient in 1940.

Of course, given that politicians like to use government coffers to buy votes, additional amendments were added to Social Security to expand participation in the program. This included adding domestic labor in 1950 and widows and orphans in 1956. They lowered the retirement age to 62 in 1961 and increased benefits in 1972. Then politicians added more beneficiaries, from disabled people to immigrants, farmers, railroad workers, firefighters, ministers, federal, state, and local government employees, etc.

While politicians and voters continued adding more beneficiaries to the welfare program, workers steadily declined. Today, there are barely 2-workers for each beneficiary.

The chief defect of the Social Security system is that its money is required to be ‘invested’ in bonds of the Federal government–bonds that are notorious for their low rates of return and on which the rate of return has been especially anemic in the past decades of minuscule interest rates. The government takes the money coming in, writes an IOU to itself, and then spends it with gay abandon. The cupboard is bare, and always has been.

Read it.

So don’t be surprised to learn that the sea level data, produced by NASA, have recently been altered — and of course, in a way to enhance the global warming scare narrative.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?

Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.

Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.

Read it.

Europe’s illegal immigration crisis shows no signs of slowing, with the first two months of 2024 showing 31,200 irregular border crossings, which is the same level as last year’s near-record numbers, according to data from Frontex, the EU’s external border agency.

Read it.

As regular readers are aware, an inverted yield curve has been the best predictor of a US downturn of any variable through history: the yield curve has always inverted before all of the last 10 US recessions, with a lag that is usually 12-18 months, but some cycles – certainly this one – take longer…. much longer.

Read it.

Announced on Wednesday, the interactive Hospital Patient Immigration Status Dashboard highlights “the cost of illegal immigration, which puts a strain on our health care system and taxpayers here in Florida,” the secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, Jason Weida, explained in a news release, emphasizing, “Our hospitals and health care systems are designed to provide quality services to the citizens of the United States.”

The dashboard offers county-level information about total expenses incurred by illegal aliens’ hospital visits in Florida. Southeastern Florida’s Miami-Dade County appears to have the highest amount of such expenses, estimated at a whopping $231.8 million.

Read it.

A virologist who had a “clandestine relationship” with Chinese agents and was subsequently fired by the Trudeau government has popped back up in China – where she’s conducting research with Chinese military scientists and other virology researchers, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where she’s allegedly studying antibodies for coronavirus, as well as the deadly Ebola and Niaph viruses, the Globe and Mail reports.

Steve Sailer.

There has been a fair amount of attention devoted recently to the subject of “Pretendians,” typically left of center white women in academic or government jobs who have decided that they aren’t what they appear — regular white women — but are actually American Indian princesses who are not only glamorously attention-getting but also eligible for affirmative action.

Read it.

Just in time for the 2024 election cycle, leftist activists seem to be ramping up their targeted harassment campaigns of popular conservative figures in what we’re sure will be another “fiery but mostly peaceful” year. This week, a mob of people disrupted a Kyle Rittenhouse speaking event at the University of Memphis, then rushed at attendees while making threats, spitting and attempting to block them from leaving the campus. Clearly, these people didn’t learn their lesson from what happened the last time a mob chased after Rittenhouse.

Read it.

Shocking scenes were caught on tape in El Paso – which technically is in Texas but may as well be in Mexico – on Thursday afternoon when a massive swarm of angry illegal aliens stormed the key chokepoint to the US southern border, breaking through the border wall and steamrolling National Guard troops.

For those still unconvinced, this nation is being invaded, this video of illegals storming the border today should convince you otherwise.

The illegal immigrants are seen pulling the barrier open as four National Guardsmen try to keep them from crossing the border in the video posted on X by New York Post reporter Jennie Taer Thursday. The illegal immigrants rush through the gap opened, almost tramping the National Guard personnel, until coming up against a second, sturdier barrier.

Read it.

A District of Columbia library sought to engage a drag queen with a criminal background to perform at pride-themed Drag Story Hours for children.

A staff member at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library solicited drag queen Latrice Royale, otherwise known as Timothy Wilcots, to sing and dance in drag before children, according to an email obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet).

According to that May 17, 2023, email, the library employee was under the impression that the LGBTQ organization the Human Rights Campaign would pay the drag queen’s travel fees and $10,000 performance fee. Wilcots ultimately proved too pricey for the event, the HRC’s Brandon Hooks shared in a later email (neither Hooks nor the HRC responded to requests for comment).

Read it.

A California school spent $250,000 in federal funds to hire a teacher training service called Woke Kindergarten, but after two years student performance got even worse, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

An audit by researchers at OpenTheBooks.com revealed that almost two-thirds of employees at the low-income, underperforming Glassbrook Elementary School are making six-figure salaries. Retired educators are also collecting pensions of more than $200,000.

Read it.

Democrats in New York City and their allies in leftist corporate media are keeping a massive migrant shelter hidden from the public, located at a previously operational airfield in southern Brooklyn. This comes as the metro area has been flooded with upwards of 175,000 illegals in just a few short years.

According to a recent AFP News report, large white tents full of Central and South Americans, Africans, Chinese, and Russians are packed like cattle on one of the runways at Floyd Bennett Field. It’s hard to say how many migrants are in the tent city, but some figures put it at nearly 2,000.

Read it.

Four years ago, government officials told us, “Stay home!” We have “15 days to slow the spread.”

Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms.

I have long been wary of politicians but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be.

Read it.

X user Robert Sterling posted an image of the Environmental Protection Agency’s event on Wednesday that featured four vehicles on stage: “1 from GM, 1 from Chrysler, and 2 from Ford.”

“Here’s how much the Democrats hate Elon Musk,” Sterling wrote on X, pointing out that there were zero Teslas on stage.

He said, “Last year, Ford sold 72,608 EVs. GM sold 75,883. Chrysler sold 0. Tesla sold 1,808,581.”

Read it.

Deportation cases were dropped against approximately 200,000 migrants because the Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden failed to file thousands of notices to appear before their court dates, leaving immigration courts with no jurisdiction.

John C. Wright.

To lie means to tell a plausible falsehood intended to deceive another. To gaslight means to tell an impossible falsehood, one which calls sanity itself into question. The term comes from a film of the same name, where a sneaking husband connives his trusting wife to dismiss the witness of her own eyes as hallucination. He blandly and baldly denies all; she doubts her senses.

Ironically, the bald-faced openness of the gaslighting is what makes it gaslighting. Absurdity is promoted with a straight face, or with earnest zeal. They know they are lying, we know they are lying, they know we know; when doubted, they raise their voices and double down, unleash floods of scorn and contempt, and accuse the doubter of their sins, but not his.

This last is called Ad Hominem Tu Quoque but should be called the Iron Law of Leftwing Projection. It is a law with no exceptions. We see jackasses accusing civil adults of being jackasses, idiots calling lettered adults idiots.

ZMan touches the third rail.

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Read it.

Britain takes another step down the road to totalitarianism. Sad.

UPDATE: Scotland’s Hate Speech Act and Abuse of Process

Read it.

Illinois officials are moving to stop providing taxpayer-subsidized health care to thousands of non-citizens, including many illegal immigrants, in a bid to rein in soaring costs.

As Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

I’m surprised that Governor J.B. “Fat Ass” Pritzker is allowing this.

Read it.

The chief diversity officer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, LaVar Charleston, who also teaches at the university’s school of education, has a decades-long track record of research misconduct, according to a complaint filed with the university on Wednesday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. That misconduct includes presenting old studies as new research, which he has done at least five times over the course of his career.

DEI is increasingly coming to stand for “Didn’t Earn It”.

Read it.

The presidential election is eight months away. Yet the campaign to preclude a second Trump administration is already in high gear. In the course of two weeks, the public was given a preview of the undemocratic, uncouth, racist dystopia MAGA America is doomed to become. Against the backdrop of the most virulent antisemitism sweeping the U.S. in the wake of Hamas’ savagery, the media has chosen to pillory “white nationalism” as the clear and present danger.

Read it.

If you don’t recognize the name, I pity you. Go. Read his books. You won’t regret it.

The Antiplanner.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a state court to cancel Austin’s light-rail plans. Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, persuaded voters to raise taxes to build light rail in 2020. Soon after the vote, however, the agency admitted that rail would cost a lot more than it had claimed and so less would be built than promised. Paxton says that in doing so it has breached its contract with the voters and its plans should be rejected.

A government agency lied! Wow–didn’t see that coming….

The Foundry.

The elite 1%—individuals who make over $150,000 a year, live in densely populated areas, and have postgraduate degrees—are overwhelmingly liberal. They give President Joe Biden an 82% approval rating, compared to his 40% average from the rest of Americans.

Rasmussen asked these liberal voters: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on the campaign know that they can win by cheating without being caught. Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”

Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. But that number rose to 35% among the elite 1% and skyrocketed to 69% among those who are part of the politically obsessed 1%, meaning they talk about politics every day.

“I’ve been polling for a very long time and the last finding is the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen,” Rasmussen told The Daily Signal.

It’s hard to avoid talking about politics every day when the government sticks its noses into every individual’s affairs every day.

Power Line.

We have written about the Great Sort many times, but frankly you can’t emphasize it enough. Americans are deserting blue states and cities in favor of red zones. Liberalism has proved to be a failure by the most reliable measure: fewer and fewer people want to live under liberal regimes.

Read it.

The Marxist destruction of private property rights is on full display after a viral video circulating TikTok, then posted on X, shows a migrant informing other migrants how to “invade” unoccupied homes across America and take advantage of progressive squatting laws.

“I found out that there is a law that says that if a house is not inhabited, we can seize it,” the migrant said in a video on TikTok, which Collin Rugg first posted on X.

The migrant said he has African friends who have taken over seven homes thanks to squatting laws.

UnHerd.

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

But Krauthammer went further: he reckoned that this double standard makes us feel good. A society must feel that it is policing its norms by combatting deviancy. And once we have given up fighting it in one section of society, we move to concentrate on another.

Read it.

Two former Biden family business associates testified Wednesday before a House committee conducting an impeachment inquiry into influence peddling by the president and close relatives.

Tony Bobulinski, who was a business partner to Hunter Biden, accused his one-time ally of lying under oath to congressional investigators about his father’s involvement.

“Joe Biden was more than a participant and a beneficiary of his family’s business,” Bobulinski testified to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. “He was an active, aware enabler who met with business associates such as myself to further the business despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”

Read it.

I am often asked if President Joe Biden is intentionally trying to dismantle the American economy with his imbecilic energy, climate change, crime, border, inflation and debt policies. But I’ve always believed these policies are driven by a badly mistaken ideology — not malice.

Then I watched Biden’s State of the Union speech. When Biden thundered that he was going to make corporations “pay their fair share,” the Democrats in Congress leapt to their feet in applause.

The Foundry.

There is one competition where Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia aren’t beating other major locations in this country. It is in persuading people to stay there.

The Census Bureau this month released its estimates on the populations for each American county as of July 1, 2023. In a release about this data, the agency included a table listing the 10 counties with the largest one-year decline in population as of that date.

Read it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called on House Republicans to name the specific crimes President Joe Biden is accused of as their impeachment inquiry continues.

Well, let’s see:

• Treason. “… adhering to the enemies of the United States, giving them aid and comfort….” — U.S. Constitution
• Bribery. (Ten percent for the Big Guy!)

That’ll do for a start.

Read it.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander says each of the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants in the city should get free representation because they could boost the economy by $8.4 billion over the next three decades, the New York Post reports.

Yeah, and how much will they cost over the next three decades? I doubt that any elected politician in New York has even given it a thought.

The New Yorker.

dozen detectives from the California Highway Patrol gathered in a Los Angeles-area parking lot the other morning for an operational briefing. In about twenty minutes, they would drive to a nearby Home Depot, where customers were known to regularly wheel carts of merchandise out the door without paying, and to stick power tools down their pants. The investigators had planned a nightlong “blitz”—surveillance, arrest, repeat. Anyone caught stealing would be handcuffed, led to a back room, and questioned: What did you plan to do with these items? Did you take them on behalf of someone else? The goal was not to micro-police shoplifting but to discover and disrupt networks engaged in organized retail crime, a burgeoning area of criminal investigation.

Babylon Bee.

As the debate in the United States continued to rage over the ongoing migrant crisis along the southern border, Mexico announced plans to begin construction on a wall to keep illegal immigrants from coming back.

Read it.

Among the air-defense weapons sent to Ukraine, the NASAMS system was the most anticipated because of its reputation. NASAMS is far superior to the similar Russian Buk M1 system Ukraine and Russia use, or anything else in its class. NASAM systems began arriving in Ukraine during November 2022 and, by late 2023, there were eight NASAMS batteries in Ukraine. In 2024 there will be more NASAMS for Ukraine as well as longer range AMRAAM ER missiles for it. NASAMS has been very effective against Russian missile attacks, often intercepting all the Russian missiles headed for an area defended by a NASAMS battery. The impact of NASAMS on Russian missile attacks led the Russians to try and detect and destroy NASAMS batteries or components of batteries. As of early 2024, only one NASAMS battery has come under heavy Russian attack and lost some components. So far NASAMS has intercepted several hundred Russian missiles and UAVs. The latest version of NASAMS has a missile range of 50 kilometers and a target detection radar with a range of 120 kilometers. The older and larger Patriot system has a missile with a range of 120 kilometers. NASAMS systems are more compact and mobile than Patriot and the Ukrainians have found that NASAMS and Patriot systems complement each other. In Ukraine Russia is having a difficult time finding worthy targets that are not defended by NASAMS or Patriot.

Read it.

Fifty percent of New Yorkers say they plan to leave New York City over the next five years, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Citizens Budget Commission.

Read it.

All carefully calculated not to touch rich Democrats and rich Democrat donors.

Newsbusters.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG) held a hearing on the investigation of the black market of baby organ harvesting on Tuesday. MTG (R-Ga.) along with witnesses David Daleiden from The Center for Medical Progress and Progressive Anti-Aboriton Uprising founder Terrisa Bukovinac, talked about the “D.C. Five” as well as how pro-abortionists harvest and sell organs of aborted babies.

The hearing was a heartbreaking look into what the reality of abortion is.

As MTG noted at one point, Planned Parenthood’s ads are almost always phrased with things like “we take care” of “women in crisis,” this is to “help” women etc. Yet, that ‘s not the truth “when we get behind closed doors” MTG said.

“You have uncovered what the real truth is,” MTG said to Daleiden who’s uncovered many of the horrors of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, “The real truth is it’s all for profit off of harvesting the organs and body parts of these unwanted babies, these unwanted human beings, and that’s the real truth.”