And You Thought You Might Have Had Delusions of Grandeur
Author: John
My blog is about my personal opinions only and do not reflect or represent any company that I work for either past, present or future. I will not hesitate to use the benefit of my experiences in telling the story of what goes on in the real world. beep/bop/boop
My truck is automatic, but I learned to double clutch on an old car with a crashbox. My son’s sports car has a 6 speed that I drive for fun when I can.
Here they are….
Remember when nearly every car had a stick? Sadly, manual transmissions aren’t as popular as they used to be. Automakers have phased out their six-speeds over the years as fewer customers crave the ol’ do-it-yourself shifter.
But don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom.
There are nearly 30 cars you can still buy with a manual transmission in 2025. The options range from sports cars and sports sedans to SUVs—and even a truck. With many iconic models ditching their manuals for the new year, we’re happy to see that there are still survivors out there. Stay strong.
As relentless fires burn in Los Angeles, thousands of residents who fled their homes are just learning how poorly public officials prepared for such an event. Emergency response leaders following bad public policy have been too focused on sending firefighting equipment to Ukraine, keeping the homeless safe, protecting fish, and adopting green policies to focus on things like making sure there is enough water to feed fire hydrants and guaranteeing that the strongest, best-trained, most-skilled firefighters are leading operations.
Officials seem to believe that when fire forces you to flee your home, there is just one thing on your mind: the skin color and cultural experience of the firefighters who will bring you to safety. Will they be diverse enough to rescue you? Never mind if they are the best for the job, are they anything but straight white men?
That has been a major priority of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which, in 2022, launched its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau (DEI), purportedly “focused on ensuring a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace for all.”
In January 2022, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti checked multiple DEI boxes by appointing Kristin Crowley as fire chief, the first female, LGBT chief in Los Angeles. That year, according to LAFD data, “of the more than 6,500 applicants to LAFD, 70% were people of color and nearly 8% … were female,” which was “double the … percentage of female firefighters within the Department” at the time.
The LAFD Girls Camp is one avenue for recruitment for female firefighters, hosting girls between 14 and 18 to explore career opportunities in the department.
In retrospect, maybe the military should have spent a little less time worrying about “white supremacists” and paid more attention to black Muslims. As you’ve no doubt heard by now, an Army veteran, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who happened to be a black Muslim, slaughtered 14 New Year’s revelers in New Orleans last week.
For the past four years, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and President Biden have warned about the looming threat of white supremacy amid constant references to Jan. 6 — but not to BLM, in which police officers actually died. Apart from getting more girls and transgenders into the military, it seems like rooting out “white supremacists” has become the military’s full-time job. (Proposed new U.S. Marines’ slogan: “We’re looking for a few good men … who think they’re women.”)
Biden, repeatedly: “According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al-Qaida — white supremacists.”
To deal with the crisis, the greatest fighting force in the world scoured the social media accounts of its white troops, in search of “ties to white supremacists or violent extremists.” Considering the vast amounts of truthful information censored from social media under Biden — e.g., about COVID, masking, social distancing, Biden’s senile dementia, Hunter Biden’s laptop — I’d love to see what the military considered evidence of “ties to white supremacists.”
In perhaps the most unexpected, shocking revelation to come out of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, it turns out their Fire Chief is an “LGBTQ+” woman who is obsessed with DEI. Who could have possibly guessed that?
Of course, I’m being sarcastic given who’s in charge. For context, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is currently on a taxpayer-funded trip to Ghana while her city burns. So yeah, her priorities are clearly in line. Crap, there goes that sarcasm again.
Anyway, meet Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. She has been lauded by the press as the “first female and openly gay person” to ever hold the role. What was one of her first initiatives after being appointed? She started a diversity, equity, and inclusion program focused on recruiting more women and gay firefighters.
President Joe Biden gave more than $3 billion across 30 agencies to outside contractors to implement his diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive order in federal government agencies. These billions are on top of the already exorbitant cost of existing DEI funding for each department.
On Biden’s first day in office, January 20, 2021, he began implementing his DEI agenda, making it his top priority for America. DEI initiatives even took priority over the defense of the nation and the fentanyl crisis. Biden’s day-one executive order to advance “racial equity” through the federal government signaled to America and federal bureaucracies that his most urgent issue was cultural Marxism—not China, Iran, or the border crisis.
“Equity,” as opposed to “equality,” is a term closely aligned with communism used to force equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. In June 2021, Biden doubled down and issued another executive order requiring the federal workforce to promote DEI in its departments.
. . .
Deloitte Consulting: $7.1 million contract for DEI consulting services to Health and Human Services Center for Medicaid Services. Deloitte is a far-left organization that bathes in racist equity policies, claiming that “diversity, equity, and inclusion are core” to their values. They also support harmful transgender agendas, donating $1 million to the Trevor Project, which advocates for child gender mutilation.
CALCO Enterprises: $8 million for two non-competitive bid contracts to provide DEI training to the Job Corps program under the Labor Department.
Tyler Federal, LLC: $3.2 million in contracts for DEI database services with the Defense Department.
Timothy Londagin, LLC: At least 3 contracts—$2.9 million for a DEI contract with Health and Human Services and $2.1 million through 2 contracts with the Agriculture Department. These contracts were given to Londagin without competitive bidding. Londagin has a long history of employment in federal government agencies and likely has key connections.
Accenture Federal Services, LLC: $2.8 million for a DEI implementation phase at the Treasury Department. Accenture advocates for the transgender agenda and they fund employee gender transition surgeries through their “transgender-inclusive” health care benefits.
LMI Consulting: $2.4 million to incorporate and “deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility” in the culture and business at NASA. NASA staff recently called on Elon Musk to clean up wasteful DEI spending in the organization.
Booz Allen Hamilton: $3.3 million for DEI data analytics and assessment for NASA in 2024. Yet almost 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
The Millennium Group International: $2 million for DEI professional support services for the Department of Homeland Security. They promote “cultural competence” training among other courses.
Grant Thornton: $1 million to the Commerce Department for DEI strategic planning. This company hires based on racial quotas rather than merit, claiming 30 percent of their new hires will be of certain races.
SSG Advisors: $7.4 million to provide the Agency for International Development general support for the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.
The HHS Equity Agenda is Off the Rails
The Department of Health and Human Services may win the award for most woke government agency. In 2022, they spent over $57.4 million on 303 employees to fund a DEI strategic plan that reads like a communist playbook. This plan requires programming to increase cultural sensitivity and DEI propaganda training for all hiring managers. All senior executives have DEI measurements in their performance plans for extra assurance that leaders are complying with Biden’s equity mandates.
The problems are most glaring in the National Institute of Health (NIH), where race plays a factor in grant applications and NIH has a Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office that leads its radical work. It commissioned a study using taxpayer dollars to measure sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The published report summary asserts that sex and gender are different and the terms “male” and “female” are used to refer to sex, but “man” and “woman” must refer to gender. This nonsensical “research” is how the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine—a division of NIH—is wasting taxpayer money.
If there ever was a lesson for being energy independent and ditching the climate scam, read this.
The effect of the green agenda can be summed up as a long path to the gradual degradation of Europe’s energy security and a resulting path to de-industrialization. The Ukraine conflict only exacerbated it…
Germany’s once-envied efficient economy is in freefall, and the climate change cult and European Green Deal are directly to blame. State policies subsidizing EVs and other products, shutting down coal and nuclear plants, and mandating forced conversion to untested, unimplemented “renewables” resources for energy have decimated industrial efficiency. Industries and blue-collar jobs are fleeing Germany for polluting, profitable operations in China, India, and elsewhere abroad. Will the United States follow suit?
As natural gases skyrocket during a European cold snap, and Russian gas pipelines through Ukraine are shut down for the first time since 1991, Germany has transitioned from Europe’s economic darling to its leading economic anchor. Followed closely by France and the UK, similarly weighted by economically destructive climate fantasies that are crashing to Earth like ideological meteors, the latest blow to gas supplies compounds the crisis occasioned by the mysterious sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2.
The results of this disastrous state-controlled economic carbon dioxide experiment continue to be as evident as explosives in a controlled demolition. Germany terminated massive EV subsidies at the end of 2023; EV sales promptly fell 69%. Despite gushing economic promises of “high-paying jobs” in the renewables industry, Germany announces more layoffs almost daily. Chinese companies, unhindered by escalating energy and regulatory costs, are leading in EV and other manufacturing technologies while spewing more chemicals into the ecosystem than German manufacturing industries.
The climate cult is pushing jobs and pollution out of Europe, amplifying both for nations like India. German icon Volkswagen has threatened to close factories for the first time in its history, and recent layoffs of 35,000 (and wage reductions for 120,000) employees are harbingers of more to follow. Consumers are burdened by high energy prices for heat and travel. Fund managers and NGOs may be profiting from renewables manufacturing policies, but workers, consumers, and the ecosystem are all being systematically eviscerated in the boondoggle pursuit.
Will the U.S. continue to follow Germany’s demonstrable folly? If the legendary German industrial model is being crippled by destructive climate change policies, the anemic American one (with unpredictable tariffs looming) is similarly threatened.
However, there is hope stateside — the United States possesses precious natural gas supplies that Germany now lacks and has not shuttered its fossil fuel production. Renewables manufacturing, as well as the production of plastics, cement, steel, and fertilizers, all depend on high-temperature processes only available through fossil fuels or nuclear power. They cannot be replaced with solar, wind, or other energy sources, as Germany is proving despite big plans to convert its entire economy to renewables overnight. (Indeed, cutting traditional energy production in Germany fueled a vicious economic cycle by inflating natural gas prices.)
Reflecting back on 2024 and looking forward to a future with less misinformation and more facts, Just Facts has summarized 50 false or misleading claims spread by journalists, commentators, and so-called fact checkers during the past year.
Each of these examples quotes a specific media outlet or individual, but nearly all of these fictions were propagated by multiple outlets and people, and many of them were broadcast by dozens.
1: Inflation
Margaret Brennan and John Dickerson of CBS News claimed that “the president of the United States has nothing to do with the price of bacon,” “or eggs,” “or gas,” “or any of it.”
In fact, presidents impact the prices of virtually everything through federal deficits that spur inflation, regulations that prohibit the use of cost-effective production methods and resources, price and wage controls, trade deals, tariffs, and more.
2: “Bloodbath”
Reporting on the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC News claimed that Trump “contributed” to “violent rhetoric” because he said “it’s going to be a bloodbath” if “I don’t get elected.”
In fact, Trump didn’t use the term “bloodbath” as a call to violence but to describe the effects of Biden’s policies, especially on the auto industry.
3: Crime Trends
PolitiFact reported that “the violent crime rate today is near a 50-year low.”
In fact, that claim is derived from FBI data, which is based on voluntary reports of crimes by state and local law enforcement agencies and “excludes” crimes like “sexual assault,” “simple assault,” “attempted robberies,” and “crimes not reported to law enforcement.”
The DOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey—which is widely considered to be the “gold standard” for measuring crime trends—showed a 37% increase in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Moreover, the latest rate of murder—which is the best-measured and worst violent crime—was 36% higher in 2023 than in 2014.
4: Jobs
The New York Times reported that “President Biden is presiding over a job-creation boom that would have gotten almost any of his predecessors re-elected in the postwar era.”
In fact, all real job growth under Biden went to immigrants, while jobs held by people born in the USA barely recovered from Covid lockdowns, are drastically below their pre-Covid trajectory, and flatlined over the past year:
I get plenty of exercise and eat healthy, but It’s for the quality of life I have left, not to find the fountain of youth. My life is full and I’m happy with each day.
The recent terrorist attack (14 dead, 35 injured) in New Orleans by a homegrown former soldier, Shamsud Din Jabbar, who had “become radicalized” by ISIS has called America’s attention to the threat of Islamic extremism in the USA. Has the enemy without become a serious enemy within? And if so, what can be done to protect ourselves from further atrocities?
We previously contended with the murderous events of 9/11 (2001), with downed planes and 3,000 dead; the Washington sniper and his pal (10 killed in 2002), who liked to pick off people at gas stations; the Fort Hood massacre (2009) of our soldiers (13 killed) by a radicalized army psychiatrist; the Tsarnaev brothers setting off explosions at the Boston marathon (3 killed, over 280 injured, and 12 amputations in 2013); the San Bernardino mass slaying (2015, 14 killed and 22 seriously injured) of Christmas partygoers who worked on behalf of the developmentally disabled; and the Chattanooga shooter (2015, 4 dead), who attacked an army recruiting center. In addition, there was the Islamic attempted hit in Texas on Pam Geller (2015), who had the audacity to have an art show with drawings of Mohammed, which for certain Islamics was worse than not being halal. But the murderers who intended to shoot up the entire gathering were themselves finished off by alert locals.
The above events were against the overseas backdrop of Islamic terrorist attacks on Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 of our beloved servicemen, in 1996. In 1983, 241 U.S. soldiers were killed in suicide attacks in Beirut, Lebanon. And many other nations throughout the world suffered similarly.
Is there any question that Islamic terrorism is a threat to worldwide security? Is there any question that increasing the number of Islamic immigrants increases the threat of murder and mayhem in our society? Between 1979 and April 2024, 66,872 Islamist attacks were recorded worldwide. These attacks caused the deaths of at least 249,941 people. In the 21-year 1979–2000, there were 2,194 attacks and only 6,817 deaths, but in the less than 11 years from 2013 to April 2024, there were 56,413 attacks and 204,937 deaths.
….
A distinctive of these large, un-American campus demonstrations was the presence of tents occupied by many students. Tents have not been a mainstay of previous campus demonstrations going back to the civil rights demonstrations (which, by the way, were demonstrating for civil rights and not against white people). This writer believes that the tents were symbolic of identity with Arab people. The attempt to portray the demonstrations in their ethnic/religious dimension is not only averse to the “melting pot” ideal of American life, but an attempt to elevate the desert-life, nomadic existence of many parts of the Arab world into a place of honor it does not hold in Western civilization. Many students were wearing keffiyehs (head scarves common in the Arab world). The tents and the Muslim attire of students demonstrating introduced a wanton hatred of Western mores, religions, and cultural commitments that went far beyond protesting the Middle East conflict between Israel and some of her Arab neighbors.
By including tents, keffiyehs, and female head coverings, demonstrators also revealed themselves to be anti-Western and anti-American. These dimensions of demonstrator hostility are both novel and dreadful.
There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that our world is facing today. Many of them are completely convinced that humans are literally a “plague” upon the Earth and that extreme measures are required to prevent us from destroying the entire planet. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to a lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about our exploding population, humanity will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote “family planning” in developing nations as a way to combat population growth. Of course just about anything that reduces the human population in any way is a positive thing for those that believe in this philosophy.
This very twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of our most prominent websites, and it is being taught at top colleges and universities all over the world. The people who are promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by controlling the growth of the human population. In fact, many of them truly believe that they are engaged in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet.
From the time of Charles Darwin all the way to today, we have been relentlessly warned about what would happen if something was not done to reduce population growth.
Of course, the dire consequences that we were warned about have never actually come to fruition.
But that hasn’t stopped the elite from continuing to issue even more warnings.
The following are 47 shocking population control quotes from the global elite that will make you want to lose your lunch…
As always, the globalists are wrong. They want eath to be their playground and to get rid of others (Margaret Sanger is the mother of abortion and eugenics against blacks)
In a year filled with media misses, the biggest collective lie of all not only cost Democrats the election but may have permanently reshaped the landscape of journalism in America.
The Wall Street Journal has recently released a series of reports about how President Joe Biden was essentially incapable of carrying out the duties of his office from the day he stepped into the Oval Office.
What the Wall Street Journal is doing is less real-time journalism, and more like investigative history.
One wonders whether the Biden White House was a Woodrow and Edith Wilson situation—where the first lady essentially operated as the unelected, unofficial president in her mentally incapacitated husband’s place—or was ruled by a Barack Obama shadow president, or perhaps the executive branch was wholly controlled by bureaucrats and woke interest groups. The answer is probably some combination of these things.
Maybe the Wall Street Journal’s reporting will finally sort this out.
The fact is that Biden’s mental decline has been blatantly obvious for years. The legacy media was wholly uninterested and unwilling to do any kind of digging to reveal the depth of the president’s decline to the public.
Biden transformed his basement campaign into a closet presidency. Despite having a fawning media in his corner, he rarely made public appearances. Those he did make seemed to be tightly controlled. The aging president’s demeanor suggested that he was suffering through some form of age-related dementia, and certainly memory loss.
Sure, maybe Biden blurting out things like “God save the queen” randomly at speaking engagements could be written off as an eccentricity, but the number of times Biden seemed completely out of it in public from day one was hard to miss.
Nevertheless, the media persisted in their Pravda-esque coverup, which only escalated in 2024 as the presidential campaign season began.
This big lie about Biden’s health not only put the country at risk, it also heavily contributed to their worst nightmare of Donald Trump marching back triumphantly into the White House with electoral and cultural headwinds in his favor.
Given that many Americans had concerns about Biden’s mental state even as he ran for president in 2020, it should have been a media priority to dig into whether the criticism was true or not. The only thing they ever seemed to be interested in is acting like Biden administration PR managers, desperately trying to “contextualize” every worrying sign that the president wasn’t all there.
The Diversity Hoax was exposed as far back as 1999, but it’s a monster that grows exponentially in America’s institutions.
Sciences
Professor Efimov, a prominent biomedical engineer at Northwestern University, grew up “in a small Siberian town built by GULAG prisoners to produce military grade plutonium and space satellites.” He asserts that “campaigns within the American higher education system to push diversity, equity and inclusion philosophies and policies in STEM are frighteningly similar to ones he once worked under in the communist country.”
As Thomas Sowell pointed out in 2001, “Sometimes it seems as if ‘diversity’ is going to replace ‘the’ as the most often used word in the English language. Yet the place where this word has become a holy grail—academia—shows less tolerance for genuine diversity of viewpoints than any other American institution.”
Diversity in academia is so overwhelming the conservatives have developed a scorecard to assist “students, taxpayers and legislators to determine how embedded diversity, equity and inclusion principles and practices are at a given institution.”
Image by Andrea Widburg using Grok AI.
Military
Michael R. Shevock gives an overview of the Coast Guard Academy’s (CGA) DEI initiatives. Shevock asserts that “Stalin and Mao would laughingly recognize this demand for intellectual conformity, and it is evil.” In fact, “[m]andating that faculty candidates provide in advance a declaration of mental obedience absolutely guarantees we’ll be hiring liars.” Ultimately, “…the worst thing about the Coast Guard’s position on DEI is how it does not allow for discussion or examination.”
It is now coming out into the popular realm that the historicity of Mohammed may be a total fabrication. Not merely a distortion, but a total fabrication. Robert Spencer has written a polemic questioning the whole historicity of Islam’s founder. And not just Robert Spencer, but Dr. Jay Smith.
As Dr. Jay Smith points out, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christianity was subjected to higher criticism, in which much of its basic history was questioned. Though the academic assaults were brutal, in the end, Christianity held up, as one by one, its critics were shown wrong. For ex: The historicity of Pontius Pilate was doubted until 1961, when the Pilate Stone was discovered in Caesarea, Israel.
Not so with Islam.
When Western academics finally started applying higher criticism to Islam, unlike Christianity, Islam quickly folded like a deck of cheap cards. The Muslims cannot handle this.
The late Dr. Patricia Crone established the impossibility of Mecca being the ancient major city that Islam says it was.
Modern Mecca is completely missing from all maps, inscriptions, trade notes, graffiti, official documents and church records for the period up to the middle of the 8th Century… — Did Mecca Exist At The Time Of Muhammad?
And not just Dr. Crone, but Dan Gibson has discovered the same problem.
The Quran does not even mention Mecca, but rather uses the term Bekkah.
Early mosques pointed to Petra — a city hundreds of miles north — not to Mecca.
The Quran describes Mecca with olive trees, which cannot grow in Mecca, but can grow in Petra.
This is not a minor issue. No one doubts that Jerusalem existed during the times of the prophets and Jesus. If Mecca did not exist as a city in the 7th century, the whole story of Islam collapses.
The original record of Mohammed was MHMD (ancient Arabic left out the vowels). This could mean “anointed one;” and as Dr. Smith points out, would be a title, not a name, and could actually be a reference to Jesus, not Mohammed.
[T]he Abbasids, who came to power in 749 AD pretty much destroyed all the records of the “hated” Umayyads, and with it any references to an evolving prophet named Muhammad. What we can say is that the Muhammad we know today is not the MHMD of the 7th century Jesus Christ, nor the MHMD of History, nor the Muhammad of the Umayyads, but was a creation of the Abbasids, post 750 AD. It was that Muhammad whom they then placed in a city called Mecca, who they say received a book called the Qur’an, and who then became the model and paradigm for every Muslim everywhere and for every place and time. – MHMD [09] Muhammad was JESUS’ TITLE, then the Abbasids made him a PROPHET? (In the video description.
It turns out that originally the Arabs may have been following a dissident form of Christianity (Nestorianism).
A war among different Arab rulers led to the Abbasid dynasty taking over, which then erased Jesus altogether from the records and replaced him with a Mohammed created out of whole cloth. But on inspection, that whole story falls apart.
Even the Kaaba (the cube) seems to have been moved from Petra to Mecca. The Muslim practice of walking around the Kaaba seems to have been copied from the story of the Jews circling the city of Jericho. In fact, Islam is a plagiarized copy of Judaism and Christianity, not merely in text, but in practice. And a poor copy at that.
Our academics were quick to jump on the anti-Christian bandwagon when higher criticism was first applied. They were not so quick to admit their mistakes when evidence surfaced that Christianity held up. However, academia is quite silent as the enormous body of evidence is piling up against Islam. And this evidence is of a qualitative character worse.
The Bible was initially criticized for lack of evidence. Only slowly did the evidence for the Bible come in. Islam, however, fails — not due to lack of evidence — but due to contradicting evidence.
For ex: How could Mohammed have visited Al Aqsa mosque in his lifetime, when there were no mosques in Jerusalem during his lifetime? Jesus visited the temple in the Bible, but no one doubts the temple existed during Jesus’ lifetime. How could the Quran mention olives trees when they don’t grow in Mecca?
Ancient geography, ancient grammar, ancient languages, and the archaeological records destroy Islam.
Our major institutions know this, and quietly keep silent. Why?
Because of fear.
Patricia Crone was threatened. She had to move to America. Because so many of our universities take money from Arab plutocracies, they are loathe to make an issue of this. In other words, academia is bought off. Even the BBC had to pull its documentary criticizing Islam’s origin story off the air — after Muslims complained. One has to find it on the internet, now.
The story of Mohammed, if he even existed at all, is an Arabic version of King Arthur, greatly removed from whatever actually happened.
Was there a real King Arthur? Possibly, but not the medieval knight of legend, but rather a sixth-century Scottish tribal chief who died in battle. A failure. Was there a Mohammed? Likely not, not unless some otherwise forgotten cult leader was merged into Abbasid fabrications, but further removed from truth than King Arthur is.
At the start, I said that Hollywood was a major enabling contributor to historical fiction. It appears now that academia is as well.
Former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza expressed remorse Thursday for failing to properly investigate President Joe Biden’s mental and physical health during his tenure at the network. Cillizza’s comments come as new revelations emerge about the Biden administration’s alleged efforts to conceal the president’s declining condition.
Cillizza admitted that his coverage of Biden during the president’s first term fell short. Speaking openly on X (formerly Twitter), he detailed how he had brushed aside concerns about Biden’s mental acuity, particularly as Republicans and voters raised questions leading up to the 2020 election and beyond.
“As a reporter, I have a confession to make,” Cillizza said. “I should have pushed harder, earlier, for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline. So let me explain. Joe Biden was president from 2020 to 2024. I worked at CNN, 2020 to 2022. People would regularly—Republicans would regularly ping me and say, ‘Why don’t you ask more questions of Joe Biden and how he’s doing?’ He’s 76, 77, 78 years old. And I would sort of brush them off.”
Cillizza went on to say that after his departure from CNN in 2022, he began to view Biden’s age and fitness for office with greater scrutiny. “Once I left CNN, and once it became a little bit more clear to me about Biden’s age, I think I did write pretty regularly and talk pretty regularly about how I wasn’t sure that this guy was up to it,” Cillizza said.
Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance against then-former President Donald Trump only intensified public concerns, prompting even media allies to acknowledge what many voters had already suspected. “Obviously, after the June 27th debate, everybody, including me, was writing and talking about it,” Cillizza concluded.
Critics were quick to respond to Cillizza’s comments, calling the admission “too little, too late.” Meghan McCain, former co-host of The View and daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, took aim at Cillizza in a scathing social media post.
“When I say this is too little too late, I mean this is absolutely pathetically too little too late,” McCain wrote. “There was no bigger and more obsessive ‘McCain truther’ regarding my dad’s age when he ran in 2008 (when he was 71, mind you) than Chris. He ignored Biden because he’s a hack.”
Several of America’s biggest brands backpedaled on their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and programs in 2024 amid intense public scrutiny and fierce consumer backlash.
The Biden-Harris administration has led a massive push for increased DEI initiatives in the government, including President Joe Biden signing an executive order in June 2021 that established “a government-wide initiative to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in the federal workforce. Some major companies have begun scaling back on DEI practices this year amid growing backlash, including Walmart, Boeing, Lowe’s and Ford Motors.
“American corporations realized that DEI was a loser for them in terms of doing business,” Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “American people began to register their disapproval with DEI and began to see through it pretty much after 2020.”
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, began scaling back on some of its DEI-related policies in November, including announcing it would not renew a five-year commitment for a racial equity center and would withdraw from the Human Rights Campaign’s equality index measuring workplace “inclusion.” The retailer will also stop using the terms “LatinX” and “DEI” in official communications, according to The Independent.
Walmart is not the only company that has recently rolled back its DEI policies — In August, major home improvement chain Lowe’s decided to dial back on some of its DEI initiatives. Robby Starbuck, a conservative activist who has been a vocal critic of various companies’ DEI practices, said in a post on X that he had messaged Lowe’s executives ahead of the company’s decision to roll back some of the DEI policies, saying that he had planned to “expose their woke policies.” (RELATED: Costco Embraces DEI As Other Companies Move In Opposite Direction)
Ford Motors announced in August it would scale back its diversity policies, including vowing to stop participating in “external culture surveys.” Automakers such as Ford have faced challenges in the electric vehicle (EV) market amid lackluster consumer demand. Ford reported a $1.3 billion loss on its EV line in the first quarter. The automaker announced in August that it was canceling plans to build a three-row electric SUV and also pushed back its plans to release an electric pickup truck model until 2027.
story
DEI ruins everything it touches except the wallets of the bureaucrats who administer it. Get woke, go broke, every damn time
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation Jan. 6 after almost a decade at the helm as Canada’s economy continues to suffer and Trudeau’s approval rating hovers below 30%,
“I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next move through a robust, nationwide competitive process,” Trudeau said during a press conference. “Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process. This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles; I cannot be the best option in that election.”
Social justice warriors (liberals and feminists) love to bash men and toxic masculinity. Well, it turns out that the real cause of the problems is estrogen. Your misandry is unfounded and childish.
Testosterone is not what causes criminality. It has been shown to reduce lying and deceptive behavior. It increases cohesion among men and goal-oriented behavior, which only becomes violent when appropriate under threat.
So what does cause violence and crime in men hormonally? Estrogen. Increased estrogen in men was found to increase aggression, and lower cognitive ability and impulse control. And there’s a clear diction of estrogen along racial lines.
This is also why you see higher rates of erratic violence among very left-wing white men antifa types. They have very low testosterone but high estrogen. Testosterone is calming. “Roid rage” is a result of excess conversion of testosterone to estrogen.
Furthermore, there is a marked difference in aromatase activity in the amygdala. Aromatization is the conversion of testosterone into estrogen and it is this estrogen level which is associated with aggression. Interestingly, the opposite effect is observed in females.
Furthermore, there is a marked difference in aromatase activity in the amygdala. Aromatization is the conversion of testosterone into estrogen and it is this estrogen level which is associated with aggression. Interestingly, the opposite effect is observed in females.
I have a relative nicknamed flounder. He is so fat that he’s produced estrogen for years over testosterone. It embarrasses me as a man to hear him admit it. Put the fork and the booze down son and get to the gym.
So for the man haters out there, go to hell with your male bashing. You are wrong and your hormones invading men are the cause (and your whining which we loathe)
But 2025 will not be an easy year for dissenters and critics of the government, as this is increasingly being criminalized in Germany thanks to recently passed laws and acts that aim to suppress free speech.
The former head Germany’s Constitution Protection Authority (Bundesverfassungsschutz), Thomas Haldenwang (CDU Party), suggested last February when presenting measures to fight right-wing extremism, that human thoughts and speech patterns need to be under surveillance and become the business of the government: “It’s also about shifting verbal and mental boundaries. We have to be careful that thought and language patterns don’t become embedded in our language.”
In a nutshell, the German government aims to regulate human thoughts.
Here’s the key line: Hanson went on to say that Democrats define masculine men as those who “cede authority” to women, before ripping into both Emhoff and Walz’s problematic pasts. “So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that’s what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that’s OK too because you’re a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity and you’re trying to overcome them,”
Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson on his podcast Thursday broke down what he said was Democrats’ “idea” of how “real masculine men” are expected to behave, and that includes what he said was their destruction of traditional masculinity.
Prior to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, The New York Times released an article profiling the faces of Democrats’ “new masculinity.” The first was Doug Emhoff , who is husband to Vice President Kamala Harris. The second was Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who, last year, was Harris’ running mate.
On “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” the senior fellow discussed how Democrats have rejected “traditional key men,” saying Emhoff and Walz have become key role models for women on the left.
“As I understand the subtext is on the left, that they are rejecting traditional key man masculinity on the right. So they don’t like the Dana White, the Joe Rogan, the Mixed Martial Arts, all of that group,” Hanson said. “But apparently they have an idea of a more sensitive, caring masculinity that when you look at these real men, they look endomorphic. Endomorphic is not a slur, Jack. It just means a body type where they’re invertebrate.”
“My point is Emhoff and Waltz, then they must have pushed these buttons, and I guess the buttons are partly they are helpers to powerful women like Kamala Harris or his, remember Waltz’s wife, kind of nutty? I think they took her off the trail,” Hanson said. “She’d get out and scream and yell. You got the impression that his leftward tilt, he ran as a congressional person, as a rural Clinton Democrat. And then he, this spouse kind of pushed him.”
In September, Emhoff sat down with former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for an interview, where she was seen asking the second gentleman about reshaping the “perception of masculinity.” Emhoff told the MSNBC host that he had always aimed to “do the right thing” and “support women” when asked about his role in the cultural movement.
Hanson went on to say that Democrats define masculine men as those who “cede authority” to women, before ripping into both Emhoff and Walz’s problematic pasts.
“I guess one of the subtext is that real masculine men cede authority or decision making to the female spouses because they’re confident in their masculinity, and they don’t have to have props like guns and cars. That’s part of it. The other thing must be that you have to, real masculine men are entitled to certain sins because they’re not in your face,” Hanson said.
“So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that’s what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that’s OK too because you’re a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity and you’re trying to overcome them,” Hanson added. “I guess what I’m saying is that they don’t sin.”
During their time on the campaign trail, both Emhoff and Walz came under fire over allegations involving their pasts.
Be a man. Even liberal women like masculine men, regardless of what is said. They broke for Trump as Walz and the rest of the dems were a bunch of pussies.
President Joe Biden will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, upon Hillary Clinton and George Soros in a ceremony this Saturday at the White House.
The announcement has already sparked controversy—not for the ceremony itself, but for its glaringly partisan overtones.
Clinton, the former secretary of state and twice-failed presidential candidate, and Soros, the billionaire Democratic megadonor who has spent decades bankrolling left-wing causes, are being hailed by the Biden administration as paragons of “decency” and “exemplary contributions.”
Soros and Clinton are known for their myriad scandals and connections to left-wing causes.
Soros, 94, has been one of the most prolific fundraisers for the Democratic Party in recent history.
The Hungarian-born hedge-fund billionaire gave more than $175 million to Democrats during the 2022 midterms, according to Federal Election Commission records.
In 2024, Soros funneled another $60 million for House and Senate Democrats and other left-wing causes through his Democracy PAC, records show. The left-wing investor has also come under fire for funneling tens of millions of dollars to groups supporting anti-Israel protesters on college campuses.
The White House described Soros as “a philanthropist who four decades ago founded the Open Society Foundations” and “through his network of foundations … has supported organizations, and projects across the world that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.”
Clinton’s controversial history seems to be brushed aside as well. More from The Post:
The former first lady, secretary of state and New York senator “made history many times over decades in public service,” the White House said.
In 2016, Clinton made history when she became the first woman nominated for president by a major United States political party.
Her bid to become the nation’s first female president came up short when President-elect Donald Trump defeated her in the 2016 race.
Clinton was the subject of an FBI probe over her use of a private email server during her time in the Obama administration but was never charged with a crime.
Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump remains a defining moment in modern politics, exposing deep divisions within the electorate. Her post-election life has been marked by attempts to rehabilitate her public image—efforts that range from calculated to desperate. Saturday’s ceremony serves as the latest chapter in this ongoing PR campaign.
Seventeen others, including many celebrities, athletes, and less controversial public figures, will also be honored at the ceremony.
President Joe Biden on Thursday awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, honoring one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics at a White House ceremony less than three weeks before Trump is set to reclaim the presidency.
These are people who have undermined and sold out the country, trying to bring down Western Civilization and things morally right. He’s devalued the award to a sewer level, just like he sold access to the Ukraine and China. It’s a disgrace.
He cements his status as tied with Carter, Obama and Woodrow Wilson as our worst presidents, except somewhere the others had a sense of values and decency.
Millions of Americans dutifully fill their recycling bins each week, motivated by the knowledge that they’re doing something good for the environment. But the sad fact is that much of what is tossed in the recycling bin is eventually heaped into landfills.
While this bombshell might be jarring – especially if you’re someone who dutifully cleans their recyclables before caringly placing them in bins – Thomas Kinnaman, an environmental economist from Bucknell University, says it’s actually not as bad as you think.
As Kinnaman discovered in a 2014 study – a complete life cycle analysis of the recycling process – it doesn’t make much economic or environmental sense to recycle plastic and glass in much of the developed world. Despite claims that plastics are recyclable, really only PET and HDPE (types 1 and 2 in North America) can be readily reused. In total, only 9% of plastic is melted and reformed. The rest goes into landfills or the wider environment.
City Journal science journalist John Tierney pointed out in Stossel’s segment that the economics of recycling have only worsened over time. Both plastic and glass are fairly easy on the environment to produce, but are often very tricky, costly, and intense to recycle. When you factor in all of the water used to decontaminate plastic and glass, the immense distances traversed transporting them (usually by truck, train, or ship), and the mechanical and chemical processes utilized to transform them into new goods, it becomes clear that they are better off in a landfill.
source
there is more there to show why it is not the panacea it is made out to be, but the dirt worshipers won’t believe it so I don’t try anymore.
The facts are the fact at the end of the day. It is a socialist crowd conditioning exercise that leads to people being sheep to feel better about themselves. They will gladly take a vaccine that doesn’t work and did more damage than the actual disease (Covid-19).
I spoke with “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products to help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health
Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply
The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the human population
The idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is flawed; animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process
Fake meat is an ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals, GE ingredients, pesticides and toxic linoleic acid that will promote chronic disease
At face value, fake meat sounds like the perfect solution to end world hunger, protect animal welfare and save the planet from environmental destruction. Even a brief look below the surface reveals a much more nefarious reality, however.
To help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health, I recently spoke with host Polly Tommey on “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products.1
Fake Meat Is All About Controlling the Food Supply
Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply. Former U.S. Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger once said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”2 Controlling people is their whole agenda.
The globalists have long held a monopoly on the grain industry with their patented genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the early 2010s, not many people knew about GMOs. In 2011, we started to educate the public about their dangers, as they posed a major threat to public health and the environment.
In 2012, a ballot initiative was launched in California to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods and food ingredients. The initiative was narrowly defeated due to massive donations from multinational corporations, but we won in the long term because awareness of GMOs in the food supply significantly increased. Now, most health-conscious people avoid GE/GMOs.
A similar trend is now occurring with fake food. The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply.
Fake Meat Is Even Worse Than CAFOs
Many people are aware of the pitfalls of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — unnatural diets of GMO grains, crowded conditions, inhumane treatment, excessive pollution and rampant spread of disease. CAFOs are bad — but the new fake food era is going to be even worse.
With their patented fake meat products, the globalists will have unprecedented control over people’s health.3 It sounds noble to try to provide for the entire world’s population using animal-free methods, but it’s a deception.
Will Harris is a regenerative farming pioneer who runs White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. He produces high-quality grass fed products, including beef and other animal products, in a way that’s good for consumers, the environment and the financial health of his business. While the globalists are spinning the idea that animal foods are destroying the planet, when raised regeneratively the way Harris does, this is far from the truth.
It’s the fake foods that will ultimately jeopardize the environment. “We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent for every pound of grass fed beef we sell. Ironically, the same environmental engineers did an analysis on Impossible Burgers,” Harris said on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “They’re emitting 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent.”4
Impossible Foods, along with Beyond Meat, is a major player in the fake meat marketplace. It claimed to have a better carbon footprint than live animal farms and hired Quantis, a group of scientists and strategists, to prove its point. According to the executive summary, its product reduced environmental impact between 87% and 96% in the categories studied, including land occupation and water consumption.5
This, however, compares fake meat to meat from CAFOs, which are notoriously destructive to the environment and nothing like Harris’ farm. Harris commissioned the same analysis by Quantis for White Oaks and published a 33-page study showing comparisons of White Oaks Pastures’ emissions against conventional beef production.6
While the manufactured fake meat reduced its carbon footprint up to 96% in some categories, White Oaks had a net total emission in the negative numbers as compared to CAFO-produced meat.
Further, grass fed beef from White Oak Pastures had a carbon footprint that was 111% lower than a typical U.S. CAFO, and its regenerative system effectively captured soil carbon, which offset the majority of emissions related to beef production.7
“The WOP [White Oak Pastures] system effectively captures soil carbon, offsetting a majority of the emissions related to beef production,” the report stated. “In the best case, the WOP beef production may have a net positive effect on climate. The results show great potential.”8
So, the idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is entirely flawed. In fact, animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process.
What Is Fake Meat?
Fake meat is marketed as a health food, but it’s nothing more than a highly ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals. Impossible Foods, for instance, uses genetic engineering to insert the DNA from soy plants into yeast, creating GE yeast with the gene for soy leghemoglobin.9
Impossible Foods refers to this compound as “heme,” but technically plants produce non-heme iron, and this is GE yeast-derived soy leghemoglobin.10 Heme iron only occurs in meat and seafood. Impossible Foods’ GE heme is used in their fake meat burgers as a color additive that makes the product appear to “bleed” like real meat.
The health effects of GE heme are unknown, but this didn’t stop the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from approving soy leghemoglobin in 2019. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit challenging the approval, which they called “unusually rapid”11 and risky for public health.
In their lawsuit, CFS points out that soy leghemoglobin is produced using synthetic biology, or “genetic engineering on steroids,” which does not shuffle DNA pieces between species but instead constructs new biological parts, devices and systems that do not exist in the natural world.12
The reason why Impossible Foods turned to synthetic biology to produce GE soy leghemoglobin is because it couldn’t extract enough of the substance directly from soybean roots to produce its fake meat products on an industrial, mass-produced scale. The FDA GRAS for soy leghemoglobin is 526 pages long, if that gives you any idea of the industrialized complexity of this so-called GRAS “health” food.13
Beyond Meat is similarly industrially processed. Beyond Burger patties contain 22 ingredients. Among them are expeller-pressed canola oil, pea protein isolate, cellulose from bamboo, modified food starch and methylcellulose14 — hardly “health” foods. To morph these ingredients into a patty that resembles meat require further processing.
It’s revealing, too, that while truly natural foods cannot be patented, Impossible Foods holds at least 14 patents, with about 100 more pending.15
Impossible Foods’ Fake Meat Is Loaded with Glyphosate, LA
Considering that many ingredients in fake meat products are made from GE soy,16 it’s not surprising that they’re also contaminated with the herbicide glyphosate. Consumer advocacy group Moms Across America (MAA) commissioned Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), an independent laboratory that tests both micronutrients and toxins found in food, to determine how much glyphosate is in the Impossible Burger and its competitor, the Beyond Burger.
The total result of glyphosate and AMPA, the main metabolite of glyphosate, in the burgers was 11.3 parts per billion (ppb) in the Impossible Burger and 1 ppb in the Beyond Burger.17
When the concerning results were revealed, Impossible Foods engaged in a smear campaign to try and discredit MAA, labeling the group of moms “an anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-science, fundamentalist group that cynically peddles a toxic brew of medical misinformation and completely unregulated, untested, potentially toxic quack ‘supplements’ …”18
The glyphosate in fake meat is one issue. The excess amounts of omega-6 fat in the form of linoleic acid (LA) are another. In my opinion, this metabolic poison is the primary contributor to rising rates of chronic disease. It’s important to realize that fake meat alternatives do not contain healthy animal fats. All the fat comes from industrial seed oils like soy and canola oil, which are top sources of LA.
Eliminating ultraprocessed foods from your diet is essential to keeping your LA intake low, and this includes fake meat.
‘Precision Fermentation’ Isn’t Natural Either
Fake food companies want you to believe their products are natural because they’re made with components of plants, even though nothing like them exists in nature. Precision fermentation is another term used by the biotech industry to piggyback off the popularity of truly health-promoting natural fermentation.
Precision fermentation, however, is nothing like its natural counterpart. What is perhaps most disturbing about the use of precision fermentation is that companies are allowed to claim that it’s natural.
Metabolic engineering is a major subset of precision fermentation, which involves methods such as next-generation sequencing, high-throughput library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics “to optimize microbial strains, metabolic pathways, product yields, and bioprocess scale-up.”19 It sounds just like something down on the farm, doesn’t it?
Whether it’s called precision fermentation, gene editing, GMO or something else, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you or the planet.
Where Should You Get Your Meat?
If fake meat isn’t healthy, and CAFO meat isn’t a good choice either, a reasonable question is where can you find meat that’s beneficial for your health and the planet? The answer is to get to know a farmer in your area. Visit the farm and view how the animals are being raised.
Get to know the resources available to you within your local community. The community will naturally validate the vendors who are raising food the right way. If you can’t find a local farm for ruminant animals like cows, buffalo or lamb, look for certified organic options at your local grocery store. However, it’s best to stay local and find a source of real, whole food near you.
As much as you can, plant a garden for vegetables, grow fruit trees and even raise chickens if it’s allowed in your area. For the food you can’t source on your own, lean on your community to fill in the gaps.
Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is also important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat alternatives and opt for real food instead.
When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.
why do vegans try so hard to make stuff that tastes and looks like meat? Why not just eat the real thing? We were created to be omnivores. They need to feel morally superior, but like the enviroweenies, are misguided.
Look, I’m an introvert. While I’d like to say that curing cancer, ending world hunger, or overcoming a life threatening disease were my macro challenges, it’s not my daily struggle.
Avoiding people and small talk constantly raise their heads to dog me. I can’t expect most other than fellow introverts to get this, but it’s a struggle for me to face a crowded room of people. Having to engage in meaningless talk about stuff I know doesn’t matter is difficult also. It’s mentally draining for introverts. We are not built for it and when it comes up, it’s like being in a tunnel with the train light headed directly for you. It’s like having a grains of sand in your eye constantly and you can’t remove it.
I can do it, but with less and less enthusiasm and I have to work myself up to face it. My extroverted other has put me in situations I wish I weren’t in a lot of times in my life. I’ve finally fought that off. I find myself wanting to withdraw more and nothing pleases me more than canceled plans now.
I’m not going to be on my deathbed and wish I was more outgoing. I have a lot of other regrets that are more meaningful than small talk.
More than 769 athletes have collapsed on the field during a game from March 2021 to March 2022.
The shocking statistic was revealed by One America News Network (OAN), which also found the average age of the athletes who suffered cardiac arrest is just 23 years old.
An updated report by Good Sciencing, a team of investigators, news editors, journalists and “truth seekers,” has detailed 890 cardiac arrests and other serious issues among athletes, including 579 deaths, following COVID-19 shots.
With cases like these becoming impossible to ignore, even a mainstream media sports channel in Australia speculated that the health issues could be linked to COVID-19 shots, and one of the hosts acknowledged that multiple players have suffered from heart issues and Bell’s palsy following COVID-19 booster shots.
More than 769 athletes have collapsed on the field during a game from March 2021 to March 2022. The shocking statistic was revealed by One America News Network (OAN), which also found the average age of the athletes who suffered cardiac arrest is just 23 years old.
The unprecedented surge in cardiac arrest and other heart issues among elite athletes coincides with the rollout of COVID-19 jabs.
The Miami Open made headlines in early April after 15 players — all of whom had reportedly received COVID-19 injections — dropped out.
Among them were favorites Paula Badosa and Jannik Sinner. Badosa left the court in tears after becoming unwell, and Sinner’s opponent said he saw him “bend over” on the court, noting “it was very strange.”
Anne Kirkpatrick has been a police executive for a long time, proudly fighting to remove machismo from policing, and she’s bounced from high-profile job to high-profile job. Among many other jobs, she was the police chief in Oakland, California for three years, until she was fired. She won a modest judgement for wrongful termination there, but LOL.
Back when Kirkpatrick was the police chief, Oakland had a reputation for unanswered and slowly answered 911 calls, and news stories described 911 calls that were finally answered by an operator but never actually produced a police response. And of course, as I’ve said many times, Oakland’s best-known community activist makes videos in which he just walks around to show what a disgraceful shithole the city has become:
New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick spoke with the press on Thursday in the hours before the Sugar Bowl kickoff in an effort to reassure citizens.
Instead, her remarks only raised more questions and concerns about how those in charge are handling the aftermath of the terror attack.
While describing the safety measures in place, Kirkpatrick bizarrely admitted she didn’t know about the city’s sidewalk barriers meant to prevent terror attacks.
It goes on to describe the failure of the police department, but it’s pretty clear that it starts with the top. A man with military service or someone competent as a police chief would have put measures in place like they do everywhere (ok, except Germany, but I’m talking about the US).
How about if we concentrate on hiring the best and doing the actual job instead of being woke and trying to destroy men all the time? This guy was on the FBI list and I’m sure they shared the information with the cops.
A group of mischievous Afghan youngsters in the Swedish city of Kristianstad celebrated New Year’s a few days early by gang-raping a 20-year-old girl over the weekend. Now the errant youths are being brought up on charges, and I expect the Swedish judicial system to throw the book at them — they’ll probably get at least a month in detention for their unfortunate behavior.
Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from Samhällsnytt:
Three Afghans detained for gang rape in Skåne
January 2, 2025
Three young Afghan men, ages 18, 19 and 23 respectively, have been detained by a Kristianstad court on suspicion of rape, assault, and unlawful detention of a 20-year-old woman this past weekend. The local Kristianstadsbladet that reported on the incident is misleading the readers with the claim that the perpetrators “are natives of Kristianstad.”
According to court documents obtained by Samnytt, the crime was committed in a residence in Kristianstad during the night between Saturday and Sunday. The three foreign suspected gang rapists were arrested at 1:30am the same night, booked into jail early Sunday morning, and remanded to custody on Monday by the district court in Kristianstad.
“The three prisoners are acquainted with each other. I know nothing about the relationship between them and the woman,” says Anja Steiber, press spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office in a press statement.
Kristianstadsbladet misleads
According to Kristianstadsbladet, which is reporting on the incident, the three men are “natives of Kristianstad’. However, that is not true. Instead, all of them are natives of Afghanistan.
They let in everybody. My friends in Sweden are afraid to go out at night and instead of stop, drop and roll, they are teaching the kids how not to get raped.
Just for the record, the Green New Deal is a Communist inspired strategy to spend money we don’t have until banrupt. Reagan did this to bring down the USSR. Learn from history. They only thing it would have helped would have been the bank accounts of the people supporting it.
Coming with the new year is a new president with a very different vision on energy than President Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to “end fossil fuel.”
President-elect Donald Trump is dismissive of the immediate “climate crisis” narrative that drove much of Biden’s energy policies. He promises to establish American “energy dominance” and focus policy on bringing down the cost of energy.
While Trump can overturn Biden’s industry-punishing executive orders and create a friendlier regulatory environment for the oil, gas, coal and mining industries, experts say there are economic and technical limits to what the outcomes of his policies will be. Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, here’s what we might expect for energy and industry in the second Trump administration.
Market forces
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York luncheon in September, Trump said he would end the Biden-Harris administration’s “anti-energy crusade and implement a policy of energy abundance, energy independence, and even energy dominance.” This would include, he said, getting the price of gasoline down below $2 per gallon, which would decrease the cost of all goods and services.
What follows, is a classical British, gentle, slow and methodical exposé of King Charles and his now revealed alliance with the Muslims and communist and their persuit of the destruction of the British peoples. Many would say that he has made this reveal many many times. And they would be correct. This seems a little more formal and clear however.
The actual speech. Nice of him to play God Save the King to himself. At this point, only God can.
The dialectical phrases, as readers of this site would know them to be, begins at around 5 minutes. About when the soporific tone of the first 5 minutes has made you click away, or lulled you into a receptive state. One would almost think his speech and its delivery were written and rehearsed with a hypnotist. All the examples described in the video above are indeed in the speech. The lies by omission, the construction of a DEI narrative etc. Some are outright lies, “…That there should be peace on Earth, in fact echos through all faiths” is a brutal lie. More than a lie. A narrative attack on Christians and British, and by extension, all Western cultures and peoples. Islam is a military doctrine. Anyone who doesn’t know that by now is beyond hope, or part of the deception Islam uses as part of a line of operation for conquest.
I think the Brits are glad that he’s not going to be King very long. William is being prepped and hopefully is more of a royal than an inbred.
Boffinesses have created tiny testicles in a lab – sparking fears it could make men redundant in the future.
Dr Nitzan Gonen, an Israeli scientist, has produced the genitals from cells extracted from mice. But she has said she hopes to be able to produce human versions within five years that could produce sperm.
Dr Gonen, who heads the Sex Determination Laboratory at Bar-Ilan in Israel, said her goal is not to make men redundant in terms of reproduction and just wants to help the global crisis in male fertility.
This is ripe, especially coming from one of the biggest pricks we’ve had until Obama got elected.
As the nation prepares to honor former President Jimmy Carter with a state funeral on January 9, new accounts highlight a tense chapter in his post-presidential legacy. During the Clinton administration, Carter’s unauthorized diplomatic efforts in North Korea reportedly sparked outrage, with one senior official allegedly branding the former president a “treasonous prick.”
The episode, detailed in a National Review report, sheds light on the friction between the two Democratic leaders. Carter’s solo negotiations with North Korea, conducted without prior approval from the Clinton White House, left President Bill Clinton boxed into accepting a deal he had not sanctioned—complicating U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment.
According to a National Review, during Clinton’s presidency, Carter acted unilaterally to negotiate with North Korea—a move that blindsided the Clinton administration. Carter, accompanied by a CNN film crew, reportedly brokered a framework agreement with the rogue state and announced it publicly before consulting with Clinton’s team. The sudden announcement left the administration scrambling, with Clinton forced to accept the deal and abandon U.N. sanctions efforts.
Recent Rash Of Crashes Turns 2024 Into Deadliest Year For Aviation Since 2018
The commercial aviation industry faced a turbulent week with four plane crashes, making this one of the deadliest years since 2018. The most shocking mid-air aviation disaster occurred on Sunday when a Jeju Air 737-800 jet crashed at Muan International Airport in South Korea.
Amid the latest mid-air mishaps and several others, onboard passenger fatalities on commercial flights have risen to 318 this year, according to Bloomberg, citing data from Cirium.
This marks the highest death toll since 2018, when 500 lives were lost—a year defined by the first of two fatal Boeing 737 Max crashes.
I’m getting sick and F*****g tired of bashing men. It’s a cheap shot by the liberals, feminists, SJW, and pussies who don’t get their way or can’t do something that men can do. Tearing someone down to build yourself up is a crap way to make yourself feel better. It has not made the world any better either, stop it, now.
We need more masculinity. We’d have better kids, a better economy, less woke crap, and a better selection for the ladies to choose from. The world needs strong men who do the right thing and make the world better.
I have a dumbass cousin who got butt hurt that Trump said some stuff about girls when he was younger. I’ve got news for you, girls let rich and powerful men get away with more than they do with beta men or guys without money. It’s called hypergamy. Stop being a dumbass and realize that girls control most of what guys get in a civilized situation. She supported Biden who destroyed the country and a lot of the world.
The popular mandate of President-elect Donald Trump is an affirmation of traditional masculinity.
The war on men, orchestrated by the extreme left, has suffered a serious setback with his election. Mr. Trump was told that he’d have to soften his message to appeal to women voters. He didn’t, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt him.
This year, Mr. Trump carried a majority of White women, as Republican presidential candidates have since 2004. Overall, Vice President Kamala Harris did worse among women than President Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The image that symbolized Mr. Trump’s spirit came after he was wounded at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he got to his feet, pumped his fist and shouted, “Fight! Fight!” If it had been Ms. Harris, she would have fainted, and, when revived, returned to the lectern to blather about “What can be, unburned by what has been.”
Democrats tried to counter Mr. Trump’s charisma with a new model of masculinity: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who put tampon dispensers in the boys’ rooms of schools, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who put his career on hold to dutifully campaign for his wife.
Given a choice between Ms. Harris (who could barely articulate a coherent thought) and the Marxist Mr. Magoo on the one hand and Mr. Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, on the other, men went for the Republican ticket by a landslide. Men have taken a beating at the hands of feminists and “woke” culture for too long.
In “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” – a 2018 opinion piece in The New York Times – Suzanna Danuta Walters, director of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, declared that the essence of masculinity is sexual violence and economic exploitation.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who calls himself a feminist, says American voters had two opportunities to elect a woman president and failed both times, as if gender were the only issue in the 2016 and 2024 elections.
Such attitudes aren’t confined to the directors of women’s studies programs and socialist politicians desperate to retain power.
A study on changing attitudes toward men found that in 1970, 65% believed “men are basically kind and considerate,” compared with 44% in 2005. “Men’s egos require that they put women down” was a sentiment shared by 58% of respondents in 2005, next to 41% in 1970.
These toxic stereotypes have been cultivated by the media, academia and Hollywood – to the detriment of both sexes.
Who needs men? Among others, children do.
Fatherless families are responsible for 90% of homeless and runaway children, 85% of institutionalized youth, 71% of high school dropouts and most minors who suffer from drug or alcohol addiction.
Where are the role models for the 43% of boys who are raised by single mothers? Boys need men to instill masculine virtues.
Women need them, too. The traditional role of men as protectors of women and children isn’t outmoded, just neglected.
When men do man up, society tries to crush them.
When Daniel Penny saved passengers on a subway car from a deranged homeless man who had a long history of violence (including punching an old woman in the face), the state of New York charged the Marine veteran with criminally negligent homicide. A jury of five men and seven women acquitted him.
Unfortunately, there was no Daniel Penny on a New York subway car on Dec. 22, when a sleeping woman was burned to death. An illegal immigrant from Guatemala has been charged with first-degree murder and arson in that attack.
Women and children pay the price for the absence of male providers and protectors in the home and on the streets. The rise of crime, especially crimes targeting women, parallels the decline of masculinity. In 1993, women were 41% of violent-crime victims. Today, they’re 48%.
That’s why the election of Donald Trump is as important to the culture as it is for the economy. Men take responsibility, whether it’s by fighting crime, guarding our borders or meeting foreign threats.
Strong men are confident enough not to be intimidated by competent women. Witness Mr. Trump’s nominations of Pam Bondi for attorney general and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security.
For the past four years, we’ve been misled by an increasingly feeble old man who hid in the White House or on the beach in Delaware. On Jan. 20, there will be a man of the house again.
How stupid was 2024? Let’s start with the art world, which over the centuries has given humanity so many beautiful, timeless masterpieces. This year, the biggest story involving art, by far, was that a cryptocurrency businessman paid $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction for . . . A banana. Which he ate. ”It’s much better than other bananas,” he told the press. And that was not the stupidest thing that happened in 2024. It might not even crack the top ten. Because this was also a year when: —The Olympics awarded medals for breakdancing. —Fully grown adults got into fights in Target stores over Stanley brand drinking cups, which are part of the national obsession with hydration that causes many Americans to carry large-capacity beverage containers at all times, as if they’re setting off on a trek across the Sahara instead of going to Trader Joe’s. —Despite multiple instances of property damage, injury and even death, expectant couples continued to insist on revealing the genders of their unborn children by blowing things up, instead of simply telling people. —The number of people who identify as “influencers” continued to grow exponentially, which means that unless we find a cure, within ten years everybody on the planet will be trying to make a living by influencing everybody else. —Hundreds of millions of Americans set all their clocks ahead in March, then set them all back in November, without having the faintest idea why. (Granted, Americans do this every year; we’re just pointing out that it’s stupid.) But what made 2024 truly special, in terms of sustained idiocy, was that it was an election year. This meant that day after day, month after month, the average American voter was subjected to a relentless gushing spew of campaign messaging created by political professionals who—no matter what side they’re on—all share one unshakeable core belief, which is that the average American voter has the intellectual capacity of a potted fern. It was a brutal, depressing slog, and it felt as though it would never end. In fact it may still be going on in California, a state that apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch-a-Sketch. For most of us, though, the elections, and this insane year, are finally over. But before we move on to whatever (God help us) lies ahead, let’s ingest our anti-nausea medication and take one last cringing look back at the events of 2024, starting with… JANUARY …when the nation finds itself trapped in a 1970s slasher movie, the kind in which some teenagers — played by the major political parties—are in a creepy house, being pursued by a terrifying entity, played by a rerun of the 2020 presidential election. The only sane thing for the teenagers to do is get the hell out of there, but instead they pause by the dark, scary-looking doorway leading down to the basement, and despite the fact that the theater audience—played by the American public—is shouting “DON’T GO DOWN THERE! JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE YOU IDIOTS!”, the teenagers decide to go down into the basement, only to find “OH GOD NOOOOOO…” And so, thanks to our political system—under which the nominees for the most powerful office in the world are chosen by approximately 73 people in approximately four rural states while the vast majority of Americans are still taking down their Christmas decorations—we once again find ourselves facing a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both candidates carry baggage. Trump is wanted on criminal charges in something like 23 states and, if elected, could become the first president to govern from a secret hideout. His speeches are sounding increasingly unhinged, which is no small feat since he did not sound particularly hinged in the first place. For his part, President Biden keeps saying words that do not appear in any known human language and gives the impression that any day now he’s going to shuffle into a state dinner wearing only a bathrobe. But not necessarily his bathrobe. In other words, we have one candidate who lost the last election but claims he won it, and another candidate who won the last election but might not remember what year that was. America, the choice is yours!
Meanwhile the nation is facing a number of serious problems. Foremost among them is the situation on the border with Mexico, which at one time was a legally separate nation from the United States but is now basically functioning as a vestibule. This has resulted in a tense confrontation between the federal government and Texas, which is alarming because, in the words of one military analyst, “Texas has way more guns.” In government news, the Pentagon is harshly criticized for taking more than three days to notify the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized. This prompts the administration to check up on the rest of the cabinet, only to discover that at least four other secretaries are missing, and the Secretary of Commerce apparently died three years ago. Abroad, fighting continues to rage in both Ukraine and Gaza, although these conflicts are no longer getting a ton of attention in the U.S. media because of all the news being generated by Taylor Swift. In a troubling aviation incident, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 flying at 16,000 feet suddenly develops a refrigerator-sized hole in the fuselage when an improperly attached panel blows off, terrifying passengers who have reason to wonder whether the airline crew, instead of making a big deal about the position of everybody’s tray table, should maybe be checking to see if the plane has been correctly bolted together. As a safety precaution, the Federal Aviation Administration grounds all Max 9s and advises passengers on other Boeing aircraft to “avoid sitting near windows.” For its part, Boeing states that “at least the plane didn’t lose a really important part, like one of the whaddycallits, wings.” Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Special to USA TODAY Speaking of big corporations making questionable products, in…
Marriage Monday Memes – I thought this was one of the better ones, although I had to explain the pineapple juice reference to one of my friends. That tells me what I needed to know about his wife without him saying so.
Nothing New Under The Sun: Leftist ideologues learn from communist theory and practice and constantly adapt various failed concepts to present reality, in order to achieve their radical goals of dismantling Western tradition.
Communist countries had special educational accommodations for those they considered “underprivileged,” based on class and ideological fealty. These accommodations included the so-called “workers’ faculty,” where “proletarian” students received accelerated college degrees while meeting much lower standards than the general population. Intelligent and talented children from families that suffered persecution by the regime were frequently denied college admission.
Furthermore, universities offered sizable acceptance quotas for the offspring of the so-called “active fighters against fascism and capitalism,” a/k/a communist nomenklatura, whose admission took precedence over that of regular students. The preferential quota students were secretly dubbed “paratroopers,” in reference to being “dropped” at universities from above, as though by parachutes, instead of passing the rigorous entrance examinations.
Needless to say, such practices engendered cynicism, hostility, and an exacerbated sense of unfairness. The government’s excuse, was, of course, correcting past “injustices” and providing opportunities for the “working class.” This was accomplished by creating new, much more severe forms of discrimination, exclusion, and injustice.
Leftist ideologues aspire to transform America into some feel-good socialist utopia, despite the horrendous track record of socialism. They learn from communist theory and practice and constantly adapt various failed concepts to present reality, in order to achieve their radical goals of dismantling Western tradition. They try to “divide and conquer” by producing ever-changing categories of social “victimhood.” The class quotas and discriminatory practices of communist universities were reimagined as DEI policies in the West.
Over the past 30 years, I have had the distinct pleasure and honor of teaching and supervising numerous brilliant students and interns, who happened to be of extremely diverse backgrounds. Invariably, the best predictor of their success was their work ethic, values, and character—not the ethnic or social category they belonged to.
In addition to the legal and moral problems presented by DEI discrimination, such policies take a grave psychological toll. Those who are labeled “DEI hires” often resent being treated as insufficiently capable. They wish to be judged based on individual merits, not on some unearned collective virtue. On the other hand, those excluded from the newly privileged “victim” groups, as designated by intersectionality ideologues, suffer the psychological damages of racial and social discrimination despite their hard work and skills.
Trying to enforce utopian perfection can only lead to misery and violence. Churchill aptly defined socialism as “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,” whose “inherent virtue” was the “equal sharing of miseries.” As Alan Kors, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania remarked, “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power.” And furthermore,
Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty…. We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices.
Human nature is flawed, and so are governments. Even the best societies in the history of mankind are not impervious to evil practices. Yet such systems strive to correct their errors, since they are based on universally humane values. Western democracies today have achieved remarkable success in providing abundant opportunities for upward mobility. The blueprint of the American founding does not need to be re-drawn—it simply needs to be observed. President Lincoln immortally described America as “the last best hope on Earth.” It is up to us to preserve it.The Communist Precursors of DEI
The Communist Precursors of DEINothing New Under The Sun: Leftist ideologues learn from communist theory and practice and constantly adapt various failed concepts to present reality, in order to achieve their radical goals of dismantling Western tradition.
President-elect Donald Trump is poised to reignite global controversy by pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) on his first day in office, January 20, 2025. According to a report from the Financial Times, Trump’s transition team is finalizing plans to sever ties with the global health agency, a move that would eliminate its largest single source of funding and reshape U.S. engagement in international health policy.
The decision, if executed, would fulfill a promise Trump made during his first presidency, where he accused the WHO of aligning too closely with China and failing in its global health leadership, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. contributes roughly 16% of the WHO’s $6.83 billion budget, a figure that underscores its importance as the organization’s top financial backer. Despite this, Trump has been one of the WHO’s most vocal critics, accusing it of failing to hold China accountable for the spread of COVID-19 and of being “China-centric.”
The WHO hates the US and was behind forcing the Jab on us when Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine would have worked better and more safely. Save the money and spend it on paying down the debt instead of these blood sucking ticks.
I hope he pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords also, another farce imposed on the world by the WEF.
Warren Upton, the oldest living survivor of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack died Wednesday at age 105.
Upton died after suffering from pneumonia, Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors told the Associated Press (AP). The Pacific Historic Parks said on Facebook the 105-year-old died after a short hospital stay surrounded by his family. Upton was also the last remaining survivor of the USS Utah.
The USS Utah battleship was moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japanese planes began bombing the naval base in Hawaii, leading to the U.S. involvement in World War II.
In a 2020 interview with the AP, Upton recalled he was about to begin shaving when the first torpedo hit the Utah. He said no one on board the battleship knew what caused the ship to start shaking and then, the second torpedo hit, causing the ship to capsize.
Upton was 22 at the time of the attack, the AP reported. He swam ashore to Ford Island where he jumped into a trench to avoid the planes surrounding the area. He waited for roughly 30 minutes before a truck passed by and rescued him.
The landing gear failed. I bet the landing gear assembly crew were DEI hires.
(FOX NEWS) — A Jeju Air flight skidded off a runway in South Korea and collided with a concrete fence, killing 179 people, the Associated Press reported, citing the country’s National Fire Agency (NFA).
In 2024, you couldn’t escape artificial intelligence even if you tried.
Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others released new AI models and expanded their capabilities. Their consumer-friendly tools like Claude and ChatGPT continued to become more powerful.
Elon Musk is building his own rival, rolling out improvements to Grok, his version of AI within X. “We will have something that is, for the first time, smarter than the smartest human,” Musk has predicted.
With big questions about government regulation and its application in everyday life, this technology is truly, in Musk’s words, “the most disruptive force in history.”
Joe Biden
President Joe Biden signs a proclamation during a ceremony at the Department of Labor on December 16, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Yes, you read that right. What is left of President Joe Biden is a winner in the year of our Lord 2024. Even though Biden’s own party threw a coup against him (the sitting president of the United States!) and removed him from the presidential race, the flip at the top of the ticket ended up being a flop.
Trump carried the Electoral College and the popular vote in his mandate victory. Now, it’s a serious question as to whether Biden would have performed better in the places that mattered most to carry the presidential election—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
Biden was a party man for half a century, but ever since Democrats switched Biden for Kamala Harris, Biden has seemingly helped Republicans at every turn and acted purely out of self-interest.
His loyalists leaked details of the coup and Democrat infighting to the press, he wore a MAGA hat, and he gave Republicans a last-minute turnout boost by calling Trump supporters garbage. And, of course, since losing the election, he’s pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, after promising for years he would not. He’s created one political mess after another, and the Democratic party will be left to clean it up. Meanwhile, the president and his son will be on the beach in Delaware.
Bitcoin
The price of bitcoin was $44,000 on Jan. 1 and exceeded $100,000 in the weeks following Trump’s election.
With crypto-friendly officials dotting Trump’s new administration, there’s genuine excitement about its future. Paul Atkins is set to replace Gary Gensler as chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission and billionaire David Sacks, co-host of the “All In” podcast, will serve as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Dennis Porter, CEO and co-founder of the Satoshi Action Fund, told The Daily Signal that cryptocurrency like bitcoin can combat inflation and preserve individual freedom.
“You are able to operate wholly on your own with no third parties, without asking permission, you are able to access the bitcoin network globally, anywhere in the world and be able to participate in the economy without asking permission,” Porter said.
Tucker Carlson
Donald Trump sits down for a conversation with Tucker Carlson during his Live Tour at the Desert Diamond Arena on October 31, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. (Chip Somodevilla/via Getty Images)
After leaving Fox News and launching his own Tucker Carlson Network in 2023, the popular conservative commentator continued to influence the Republican Party’s agenda under Trump.
Known for his populist and common-sense perspectives, Carlson propelled to the top of the charts with millions watching or listening to his interviews and monologues.
His trip to Russia for a two-hour conversation with Vladimir Putin has more than 20 million views on YouTube. Another interview with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has more than 5 million, reflecting Carlson’s international reach.
Tucker Carlson Films expanded his content offerings even further. “The Art of the Surge,” a series produced by Justin Wells, offered viewers a behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s historic comeback, including shocking footage from the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt.
In September, Carlson hit the road for a cross-country speaking tour that featured conservative newsmakers, drawing sold-out crowds to hear from the likes of JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Dogs and Cats
At their only debate in September, Trump and Harris squared off on a range of policy issues. But the most memorable moment came amid reports of Haitian immigrants overwhelming the community of Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.
ABC News anchor David Muir, who repeatedly interjected during the debate, attempted to correct Trump. But it didn’t matter.
The story dominated the news for days as Americans saw Springfield as a representation of America’s broken immigration system. An estimated 20,000 immigrants were living in the community of 60,000.
Fox News
Fox News anchors Lawrence Jones, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade interview Chris Janson during “Fox & Friends” at Fox News Channel Studios on October 29, 2024, in New York City. (John Lamparski/via Getty Images)
In a year when other TV networks lost viewers—and respect—Fox News maintained its position as the leader in cable news.
“Fox News Channel obliterated competitors in 2024, finishing the year with its highest share of the cable news audience since 2015,” Brian Flood reported for Fox News Digital.
Since the Nov. 5 election, Fox News has dominated its competition—both cable and network TV—with more than 4 million prime-time viewers (from 8-11 p.m. ET), according to Nielsen Media Research data. That makes Fox News the most-watched network, beating legacy media networks ABC, CBS, and NBC in prime-time.
In terms of market share, Fox News commanded 73% of the prime-time cable news audience as CNN’s and MSNBC’s ratings cratered following Trump’s victory.
Podcasters and social media personalities are getting deserved praise for their growing influence, but Fox News Channel is still the go-to destination for political and election news.
Former immigration officials Tom Homan, left, and Mark Morgan answer questions Monday during a press conference at The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest event at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal)
Tom Homan
Homan was among the first political figures Trump tapped for his new administration following his victory on Nov. 5.
After serving at the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the first Trump administration, Homan will now serve as Trump’s border czar and lead the way on Trump’s mass deportation plan.
Homan spent the last four years watching the Biden administration welcome over 10 million illegal aliens into the county, and now, with the full support of the president, he will have the opportunity to enforce U.S. immigration law and secure a border that he has spent his career defending, both in the Border Patrol and ICE.
Patrick and Brittany Mahomes
Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs, Brittany Mahomes, and their two kids pose following the NFL Super Bowl at Allegiant Stadium on Feb. 11, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Michael Owens/Getty Images)
The three-time Super Bowl champion quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs orchestrated an overtime victory in February and has his team positioned for another appearance in 2025.
Patrick’s wife, Brittany, made headlines of her own when she liked an Instagram post of then-candidate Trump about the Republican Party’s platform. After facing a backlash, she wrote, “Jesus didn’t have to agree with people to be kind to them.”
Two other members of the Mahomes family endorsed Trump: Patrick’s younger brother Jackson and his mother Randi, who showed up to a Chiefs’ game in a MAGA hat.
McDonald’s
Donald Trump works behind the counter during a campaign event at McDonald’s restaurant on October 20, 2024, in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. (Doug Mills-Pool/via Getty Images)
The iconic American fast-food restaurant found itself at the center of news on several occasions.
Donald Trump’s October campaign stop at a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia suburbs was a brilliant photo opportunity for the Republican candidate. But it also symbolized the difference between his appeal to working-class Americans in contrast to Kamala Harris.
Trump wore an apron and worked as a fry attendant. It was one of the most viral moments of the 2024 presidential election and a classic Trump move, particularly given Harris’ questionable employment at McDonald’s earlier in her life.
“As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans,” McDonald’s wrote after Trump’s visit. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President. We are not red or blue—we are golden.”
McDonald’s made news again in December when a customer in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, restaurant spotted murder suspect Luigi Mangione, leading to his arrest.
Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrives on Capitol Hill on Dec. 5, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and his transformation of the platform into the free speech engine that is X today, likely helped Trump’s historic election victory. Musk also contributed to that victory by endorsing Trump and urging swing-state voters to sign his petition for the chance at winning $1 million.
Musk not only played a historic role in the election; he will also help lead the Department of Government Efficiency, an external advisory board to trim waste and prevent abuse in the federal government.
In December, Musk rallied Americans on X to oppose a must-pass government funding bill that had been stuffed with pork. His opposition to the bill grew naturally out of his work on the Department of Government Efficiency and his efforts led Trump to oppose the bill and House Speaker Mike Johnson to withdraw it from consideration.
Podcasters
Podcasting took center stage this year, with 2024 being the first ever “podcast election,” and for good reason.
Over 53 million Americans tuned in to hear Trump’s three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan covering everything under the sun—from tariffs to golfing to fixing the “wrongs” of his first term. America also watched Vance communicate Trump’s vision for the country over the next four years with Theo Von—all while proving he can joke around and isn’t “weird.” Even Kamala Harris’ failed campaign hopped on the podcast bandwagon with a 45-minute appearance on “Call Her Daddy.”
But why the sudden interest in podcasts? Americans are fed up the corporate media lies, so they fled to a more uncensored platform. An October Gallup poll revealed that trust in the media hit a historic low, with 36% saying they have “no trust at all in the media,” and 33% expressing “not very much” confidence.
Now, everyone and their mother—from CNN’s Chris Wallace to former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley—are scrambling to hop on the podcasting wave. The Daily Signal launched a brand-new podcast this year, “The Signal Sitdown,” where members of Congress explain how the sausage really gets made in Washington, DC.
Dennis Quaid
Actor Dennis Quaid speaks at a campaign rally for former U.S. President Donald Trump on Oct. 12, 2024, in Coachella, California. (Mario Tama/via Getty Images)
The longtime Hollywood actor starred in the hit movie “Reagan.”
Based on Paul Kengor’s book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” the movie was a box-office success. It made more than $30 million worldwide, far exceeding expectations.
Quaid’s performance was a big reason for the movie’s success.
“Dennis was always my first choice because he required almost no hair and makeup touchups to get him camera-ready,” producer Mark Joseph told The Daily Signal. “He’s a natural, and he has that great Reaganesque smile and persona. He’s a busy guy, so it took some time to nail him down, but he was always the one for me.”
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan speaks before the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, 2024, in New York City. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images)
In the weeks before Election Day, Trump shunned CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and other corporate media outlets in favor of modern-day influencers like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Logan Paul. Megyn Kelly, whose show is regularly among the top 10 podcasts, joined Trump on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh.
Trump’s interviews with these influencers accumulated more than 100 million views—and reached voters who don’t get their news from traditional media sources.
Donald Trump Jr. told Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles that he and his father discussed giving Rogan a press pass to the White House to shake up the status quo.
“I was sitting there, and we were talking about, like, the podcast world, and some of our friends, and [Joe] Rogan, and guys like you, and me to a lesser extent—I wouldn’t be able to get a seat, that would be nepotism or whatever the hell,” Trump Jr. said. “But we had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists.”
Trump has disrupted the corporate media’s business as usual, and Rogan appears to be coming out on top.
Josh Shapiro
Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor was on the short list to become Kamala Harris’ vice president. Instead, Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after a few notable TV appearances
In retrospect, Shapiro should count his blessings.
After a strong debut in August, Harris failed to live up to the fanfare down the stretch. Walz will be an afterthought in the history books.
Shapiro, meanwhile, can now position himself for a future presidential run without Harris’ baggage. He’ll need to win reelection in 2026 and then overcome the left’s fears about his support for Israel and past endorsement of school choice.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump pumps his fist as he is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, following an assassination attempt. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
After easily vanquishing his Republican rivals in the GOP primaries, Donald Trump did the same to the incumbent president. Joe Biden was no match for his predecessor after their June debate, setting into motion an unprecedented turn of events over the summer that resulted in Vice President Kamala Harris being anointed the Democrat nominee—without winning a single vote.
As if those political hurdles weren’t enough, Trump also emerged unscathed from the Left’s lawfare and then survived two assassination attempts on his life. A bullet came within mere centimeters of killing him in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
Heading into Election Day, legacy media outlets were convinced it was a toss-up race between Harris and Trump. Instead, it turned out to be a historic Trump mandate, sweeping all seven swing states, capturing the popular vote, and making major gains with blacks, Hispanics, and younger Americans.
As he departed the White House in 2021, Trump left at a political low point. Few pundits gave him a chance at redemption, and yet Americans witnessed in 2024 the greatest political comeback in U.S. history. With Biden already AWOL, Trump is wasting little time to make his mark, recognizing the precious little time he has to implement his policy engage, deliver on his promises, and finally drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.
Losers
College Presidents
Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, and Liz Magill, then-president of University of Pennsylvania, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec. 5, 2023. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Anti-Israel protests continued to rock college campuses. They also ended the careers of three Ivy League university presidents.
Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania resigned in December 2023, the first of three presidents to lose their jobs. Harvard’s Claudine Gay stepped down in January and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik in August.
Magill and Gay’s downfall came after facing off against Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., at a congressional hearing. Shafik was unable to handle antisemitic protests at Columbia.
“THREE DOWN, so many to go,” Stefanik said. “We will continue to demand moral clarity, condemnation of antisemitism, protection of Jewish students and faculty, and stronger leadership from American higher education institutions.”
As the year drew to a close, George Mason University President Gregory Washington found himself under scrutiny for its own problems. Three of its students, all of Middle Eastern origin, had run-ins with the police over weapons and pro-terror material.
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban speaks onstage at WIRED’s The Big Interview 2024 on Dec. 3, 2024, in San Francisco, California. (Jon Kopaloff/WIRED via Getty Images)
Best known for his role on “Shark Tank,” the Dallas Mavericks owner was among the most vociferous defenders of Harris when she replaced Biden atop the ticket.
Cuban appeared at campaign rallies, on television, and regularly engaged online in support of the Democrat presidential candidate. He extreme rhetoric—calling Trump a “threat” with “fascist tendencies”—epitomized the left’s hyperbolic language.
At one point during the campaign, he admitted to ABC News that “Harris is just not a good salesperson,” prompting his own involvement in the race.
Some pundits speculated that Cuban wanted a high-profile job in a Harris administration, perhaps leading the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, he’ll be watching the action from the sidelines.
After Trump’s victory, Cuban wrote on Bluesky, “Don’t expect any politics or speculation about what might happen for a while.”
Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley visits “Special Report with Bret Baier” at FOX News D.C. Bureau on Oct. 29, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Paul Morigi/via Getty Images)
After suspending her political campaign in March, Haley has found herself somewhat politically homeless among a shifting Republican Party.
Haley was a fierce critic of Trump during the 2024 presidential race, despite serving as ambassador to the U.N. under a portion of his first administration. Though Haley made an appearance at the Republican National Convention, Trump was clear after his victory that there was no place for Haley in his administration.
“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in November.
Haley is now working in the private sector at Edelman, a global communications firm.
Sunny Hostin
Sunny Hostin attends a discussion of the View’s “Behind the Table” podcast on Oct, 8, 2024, in New York City. (Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)
What was supposed to be a friendly question for Kamala Harris turned into a disaster. Appearing on “The View” in early October, Hostin asked Harris if she would do anything differently from Biden.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
The answer surprised even friendly Hostin, who followed up to give Harris another opportunity. After the election, Hostin admitted that Harris missed the mark.
“The reason I followed up was because that wasn’t a gotcha question,” Hostin said. “That was a layup, really.”
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller pointed to the interview as a turning point in the campaign.
“I think this Kamala Harris strategy of going out and doing a whole bunch of media has really backfired. I mean, who would’ve thought that Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’ candidacy?” Miller said.
Legacy Media
Election Day was not just a high-stakes contest of competing visions for America’s political institutions and future. It was about the future of our other commanding heights institutions as well—academia, finance, the media, and the like.
None of these institutions or industries had as high of stakes as the media: 2024’s campaign cycle was a test to see if the corporate media could put an empty suit (whether by the name of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris) in the White House, or if alternative media could pose a real threat to the corporate media’s power.
Trump’s victory, not to mention conservative control of the House and Senate, proved the latter.
To add insult to injury, ABC has agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed Trump was found “liable for rape.” For some reason, the corporate press feels threatened by this settlement. “Trump is already delivering on his promise to go after the press,” one Politico headline read.
If going after the press means the corporate media can no longer spread malicious lies with impunity, Americans ought to hope Trump delivers on this promise tenfold.
Mitch McConnell
Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., will succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as the GOP’s new leader in the 119th Congress. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Senate Republicans will have a new leader for the first time in 18 years—and there’s palpable excitement on Capitol Hill for the changing of the guard.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., stepped down from his leadership perch after pressure from conservatives and his own health problems. He’ll serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in 2027.
In recent years, McConnell made more headlines for his clashes with Trump and the MAGA movement than any legislative accomplishments. Even on his way out, he couldn’t help taking a shot at Trump.
“To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs,” McConnell wrote in Foreign Affairs. “America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
McConnell leaves his leadership job as one of America’s most unpopular politicians.
His successor, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., won a three-way race for the top job. Even though he wasn’t the first choice of MAGA voters, Thune has signaled support for Trump’s agenda and nominees.
Planned Parenthood
Pro-life voters ended their losing streak at the ballot box, stopping three statewide constitutional amendments in support of abortion.
Those wins in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota give the pro-life cause a reason for optimism, even as measures passed in seven other states.
More importantly, the left’s pro-abortion enthusiasm appeared to wane at the ballot box. Unlike the 2022 midterm election, when the issue halted the Republican “red wave,” this time Democrats were on defense for a range of other issues, including inflation, border security, and crime.
With the incoming Trump administration poised to restore pro-life protections, Planned Parenthood will also be a target of Congress. The abortion giant relies on taxpayer funding for its operations.
In recent years, Planned Parenthood has expanded its portfolio to include transgender services. Abortion remains its priority, however. With approximately 200 abortions for every adoption referral, there’s no mistaking this organization’s evil intentions.
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift arrives at the stadium before an NFL game between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs on Dec. 21, 2024, in Kansas City, Missouri. (Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Among the major celebrities endorsing Harris, there was no one bigger than Taylor Swift. But just like her uninspiring 2018 endorsement of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s Democrat opponent in Tennessee, Swift’s embrace of Harris ended with a loss.
Swift weighed in after the presidential debate between Harris and Trump in September.
“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate [Tim Walz], who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
She signed the note, “Childless Cat Lady,” in reference to a comment Sen. JD Vance made in an earlier interview.
Swift should stick to her day job. Her popular Eras Tour was far more successful than her political picks.
The Woke Bureaucracy
As Tyler O’Neil’s forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government” reveals, the Left’s dark money network props up a system of woke nonprofits that staff and advise the federal government, pushing the bureaucracy to support critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against blacks and for whites), gender ideology, climate alarmism, and technocratic government.
The woke elites lost big in the 2024 presidential election, and woke activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign have been losing steam all year. Human Rights Campaign runs a Corporate Equality Index that acts as a shakedown operation, demanding cash and public celebrations of the LGBTQ agenda in exchange for protection from the woke mob. Many companies have opted to leave that index, and Human Rights Campaign lost a key ally when it became clear the Biden-Harris administration would not continue.
Woke bureaucrats are going to fight to maintain their grasp on power, but thanks to the incoming Trump administration and allies like the Department of Government Efficiency, those bureaucrats will be playing defense.
Never in U.S. history has a president-elect been welcomed as the real president before his January 20 inauguration. And never has the incumbent president so willingly surrendered his last two months in office and all but abdicated—to the relief of his nation and the rest of the world.
One reason so many are welcoming Trump’s return is the universally desperate hope that his election spelled an end to a collective madness at home and its ripples abroad during the last four years. And why not?
Nations overseas had never quite witnessed anything like the lethal August 2021 American flight from Afghanistan. That utter humiliation and impotence of the U.S. military likely signaled to Russia there would be no consequences if it invaded Ukraine—and it did; to Iran that it could now unleash Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel—and it did; and to China that it could daily threaten Taiwan and send a spy balloon across the United States with impunity—and it did.
The result was the current global chaos perhaps not seen since the late 1930s when a confused United States was similarly a bystander to the rise of bellicose regimes and wars. The Biden administration shrugged that the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea all became dangerous to the U.S. Navy and unsafe to world shipping.
A disparate group of nuclear and near-nuclear powers—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—are either at war with Western allies or threatening war with them. Their confidence was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. after 2020 was engaged in a Maoist-like cultural revolution that warred on its own security, energy, military, universities, and social unity—and would continue with a second Biden term.
The Biden-era cultural revolution has done great damage to the United States. The U.S. border was systematically and deliberately destroyed to allow some 10-12 million illegal entrants to pour into the U.S. without legality or background checks. Never has an outgoing administration spitefully sold taxpayer-purchased border wall material for pennies on the dollar—rather than see it used for the purposes for which it was purchased.
Never had the U.S. experienced such an immigrant surge. And never had more than 50 million, and over 15 percent of the resident American population been foreign-born.
Why did Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas erase the border? What madness and hate drove them to dismantle federal immigration law? Was it sheer nihilism? Or a desperate but calculated effort to alter American demography for political purposes?
For four years, the public, elected officials, and pundits have all warned that Joe Biden was dangerously cognitively challenged and indeed completely unfit to fulfill the duties of the presidency.
A long-suffering nation winced as Biden slurred his words, spoke in unintelligible sound bites, stood frozen and mute, screamed at and libeled half the country, tripped, fell, wandered aimlessly, became bewildered, and more or less proved a global embarrassment. All knew Biden was not able to run the country; yet none knew exactly who was actually in charge of America in his stead. The Obamas? Leftists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, Jill Biden, and the Biden staff?
Our allies worried that the usually resilient American president was now all but demented. Our enemies enjoyed these leaderless years of opportunity. And the left serially misled the public that the decrepit Biden, whom they feared in private was senile, was “dynamic,” “energic,” and “fit as a fiddle.”
Never has a president so deserved to be removed by the 25th Amendment or through impeachment and conviction. And never has even his inner circle finally but silently agreed as they left office, the very enablers who had done their political best to mask his dementia for four long years.
Rarely have the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon become weaponized and so flagrantly and with impunity broken the law, abandoned their mission statements, and served political agendas rather than the American people. Not since the J. Edgar Hoover era has the FBI hierarchy serially lied under oath, stonewalled Congress, forged a court affidavit, or partnered with the media to suppress the news. Has the FBI ever raided an ex-president’s home, spied on parents at school board meetings, monitored Catholics, or tried to terrify and harass pro-life activists?
Never has the justice system, from local to state to national jurisdictions, so systematically and coordinately, sought to bankrupt, render inert, and jail an ex-president and current presidential candidate.
Never has a presidential family so brazenly profited by selling its influence to foreign interests. Never has it used the powers of the FBI and DOJ to cover up its crimes and to ensure the family filial bagman would be for years exempted by the DOJ and later pardoned by the president himself, the father of the family miscreant and privy to the family syndicate’s illegal activities.
Seldom has a president and his administration sought to fuel a veritable cultural revolution to change the fabric of the nation by institutionalizing a third, transexual gender, violating civil rights law, and systematically admitting, hiring, and promoting Americans on the basis of their race and gender.
Never since the Civil War era had local and state insurrectionist governments established 600 nullification zones, in which they vowed to break federal law and consider it null and void within their jurisdictions. Never have rioters looted, burned, killed, assaulted, and occupied large swaths of cities for over 120 days, and largely with impunity.
Never had the U.S. Treasury borrowed so much money so quickly and owed $37 in national debt—and been so intent on borrowing continuously nearly $2 trillion a year in annual deficits.
Never has a political party sought to systematically violate long-standing traditions, customs, and often the law itself to destroy a political opponent: hiring a foreign national to spread smears among the media and bureaucracies, impeaching a president twice, trying an ex-president in the Senate, seeking to remove a presidential candidate from 16 state ballots, using five different judicial jurisdictions to try an ex-president, and serially so defaming a candidate and ex-president as a dictator, fascist, and Nazi to create a climate that encouraged two near-miss assassination attempts on him.
In sum, for the last four years, the world has watched aghast as the United States lost its collective mind and became a radical Jacobin revolutionary society.
So why is there not a sense of almost ecstatic relief, not just among conservatives but even among Democrats, that the years of darkness and madness are ending?
The global public believes that the United States will again become lawful, have a secure border, return as a beacon of free-market economics, protect its allies, deter its enemies, win over its neutrals, return to the rule of law, restore the professionalism and prestige of its government agencies, check predatory nations abroad with a new deterrent military, and prepare to lead the world in energy production, exploration of space, and scientific and technology development.
Summed up, the welcomed counterrevolution is one of restoration—to dream again that nothing is impossible, and the dreary age of stasis, envy, cynicism, and nihilism is ending, replaced again by a world without limits. No one knows quite what is ahead, but all know that it is at least better already than the current nightmare.
Even after The Wall Street Journal published a four-byline bombshell detailing how Joe Biden’s staff energetically hid his ongoing cognitive decline from the public, there wasn’t a single question at the White House briefing. No reporters demanded answers about how they were misled, or complained they were pressured into silence.
They mustered that umbrage over the Hunter Biden pardon, but this slow-rolling scandal was apparently too painful to recount. Perhaps they thought that since Biden was talked out of a re-election bid, the matter was settled. This scandal is already over. But Trump scandals never stop emerging.
Radio host Hugh Hewitt proclaimed he had been calling Biden “infirm” for two years, but didn’t know the depth of the infirmity that’s now been revealed. Everyone inside the White House must have known, including the reporters. He said they were “either explicitly complicit or recklessly indifferent” to Biden’s decline.
Hewitt upset knee-jerk defenders of the media when he said “with the exception of Peter Doocy, I would ban everyone from the White House press room who has been there for the past four years, because they are obviously of no use to the country. They didn’t tell us the number one thing, which is that [Biden] is not competent. Why in the world would Trump let them in?”
The media is corrupt and is the propaganda arm of the democrat party. They are a bunch of Bagdad Bob’s telling us anything but what is really going on. They have an agenda and helping inform Americans isn’t it.
SOUTHERN ISRAEL—On December 11, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down NASDAQ’s diversity rules for corporate boards. The rules, which had been approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), required boards to have at least one member who identifies as a minority or LGBTQ.
The decision was another high-profile victory for Edward Blum, the activist behind 2023’s landmark Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race-based college admissions.
Born to Yiddish-speaking cobblers in Benton Harbor, Mich., Blum has cited his Jewish upbringing as a formative influence on his values. At the time that the NASDAQ decision came down, he was in Israel on a moshav, or farmer’s co-op, pruning tomatoes about three miles from the Gaza border.
The Washington Free Beacon spoke to Blum about his recent victory and his time in the Jewish state. During the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Blum discussed the significance of the NASDAQ ruling, the next stage of the fight against racial preferences, the mood in Israel after Donald Trump’s election, and the joys of Israeli farmwork.
Aaron Sibarium: Most Americans will never serve on a corporate board, and board members have only limited involvement in the day-to-day operations of companies. Why was it so important to challenge the NASDAQ rule?
Edward Blum: While few people ever serve on a corporate board, most Americans own stocks directly or indirectly. Requiring race and sex quotas for boards inhibits corporations from choosing the best-qualified candidates to serve. This outcome serves no one, including those chosen because of their sex and race.
AS: What are the real-world impacts of this decision likely to be?
EB: This opinion will prevent the SEC from wading into areas in which it has no statutory jurisdiction.
The season finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks delivered its series finale this week, and in doing so, addressed one of the most controversial issues in the Star Trek franchise. The issue in question revolves around Star Trek: Discovery, which has now been officially removed from the prime timeline canon, much to the relief of many fans, who are sick of wokeness in the storied franchise.
Discovery was infamous among Star Trek fandom for altering the appearance of Klingons and injecting identity politics into the universe.
Giant Freakin Robot reports that: “In the show’s finale, a group of Klingon ships encounters a phenomenon that transforms things into alternate-reality versions of themselves. When a Klingon ship hits one of those transformation rays, it transforms into a big, ugly Discovery-style Klingon ship. Then one of the crewmembers transforms into a Discovery-style Klingon.
“This couldn’t have happened if those weird Discovery Klingons had ever existed in the prime Star Trek timeline. It means that Discovery and its Klingons, just like the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies, happened in an alternate universe. One that has nothing to do with the rest of Star Trek.”
Fans across the internet rejoiced at the revelation.
Fan site That Park Place put it thusly: “Star Trek: Discovery debuted with high expectations, but over its run, it faced significant backlash from segments of the fanbase. Criticisms ranged from drastic changes in the portrayal of iconic species, such as the Klingons, to deviations from established timelines and character arcs. The early seasons set the series in the past, but inconsistencies soon emerged, leading to widespread dissatisfaction,” explaining further, “There’s a rift surrounded by a Schrödinger possibility field that remaps matter into alternate-reality versions from the multiverse. This event transforms the main timeline Klingons into those seen in Discovery, clearly delineating between the two universes. Consequently, while Lower Decks remains canon and part of the prime timeline, Discovery is relegated to an alternate reality, mitigating its previous inconsistencies.”
A lot of people gave up on Star Trek when they went woke, kind of like Star Wars.
Let’s stay true to the original story and heroes. Cut the woke crap.
At least we don’t have to include any of the Discovery rubbish in future series if they can make one that is watchable. We’ll always have Captain Kirk, the Borg, the real Klingon’s and Romulans to watch if not.
I didn’t think they could get worse, yet here we are. They are Marxist indoctrination centers for kids that have stopped teaching them useful skills other than to be social justice warriors.
Our CriticalRace.org project doesn’t get as much coverage at this Legal Insurrection website as our Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org), but it’s been chugging away documenting the spread of CRT and its offshoots, like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, since February 2021. Over 150 media outlets have linked to and cited the CRT databases, and over 600,000 users have performed almost 8 million actions.
While others have moved on from CRT to other hot topics, we have continued to update and databases and research, firmly believing that just because the media spotlight has shifted, the importance of fighting the racialization of education remains critical.We also have moved into content creation and analyis using the databases as a source, including how the largest universities in states that have ordered the elimination of DEI have rebranded rather than eliminated the DEI agenda, and how DEI is active in the schools of the Southeast Conference. Expect more reports and analysis in 2025, plus a Parents Guide that is ready to be revealed soon.Our latest analytical report focuses on Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League [full embed at bottom of post].
The Equal Protection Project, founded and led by Cornell professor William Jacobson, has released a deep-dive report on the prevalence of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training at Ivy League universities.
In his comprehensive report, “Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League,” Jacobson examines programs the eight Ivy League institutions use and require for students.
“The review of Ivy League practices by our CriticalRace.org project reflects substantial efforts by Ivy League schools to purport to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, while maintaining work-arounds and DEI practices that continue the obsession with racial identities,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital.
In his report, Jacobson shows how Ivy League institutions are sidestepping the June 29, 2023, ruling by the Supreme Court that says race cannot be used in admission decision-making at universities.
“Ivy League universities pretend not to take race into consideration but then provide essay question opportunities for students to talk about their race,” he said.
“The Supreme Court affirmative action ruling took place in the context of university admissions, but it’s clear that the court’s opinion at its core was an Equal Protection Clause ruling that applies in other university contexts.”
In his report, Jacobson found that out of the eight Ivy League universities:
Four require DEI training in student orientation programs (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale).Six require faculty or staff DEI training in some capacity (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton and Yale).All eight have DEI offices at the institutional and/or department level.Five have a strategic plan devoted to DEI or anti-racism (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Yale).All eight have DEI or CRT (critical race theory) topics in classes and curricula.All eight have bias reporting systems.
Jacobson said he found that while the universities “pretend” not to consider race, in practice, they often do….
“It’s hard to believe that in environments in which DEI is the dominant ideology, taking on a quasi-religious fervor, that race does not enter into admissions decisions in fact, even if there is window-dressing to provide possible legal cover.”
* * *
The Equal Protection Project focuses on challenging race-based discrimination. The organization has challenged over 100 scholarships and programs discriminating against White and Asian students at universities across the country.
“To fully achieve the nondiscrimination standards of the Supreme Court ruling, the race-obsessed cultures at the Ivy League schools need to change,” Jacobson said. “It will be a long process. The Supreme Court ruling was just the first step.”
The used to be main hero turns into a woke loser with no sense of reality. Disney already made it so woke that it’s impossible to watch for those of us who knew the real story.
Some fans were shocked upon seeing the unhinged, anti-Trump diatribe delivered by Star Wars star Mark Hamill who went into a spittle-specked rage over Trump while defiantly claiming he does not care how many fans he upsets with his hate for the President-elect.
Hamill cemented himself into pop culture fame with his role as Like Skywalker in Star Wars and later as the voice of Batman’s The Joker in a series of hit animated movies. But in his interview on a recent episode of the Politickin Podcast hosted by extremist Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom, Hamill seemed more like a crazed Joker than a serene Jedi Knight as he went into a rage over Trump.
As he continued, he seemed to find it hard to spit out his words because he was becoming so unhinged with Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he eventually admitted that he does not care how many fans he might upset with his demented vitriol.
“I was devastated,” he said with his hands shaking as he recounted how he felt when Trump won the White House for a second time last month.
If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know I disdain both reverse racism as well as the Marxist indoctrination at Universities. Here, you have both. As you read the list, you can see that it’s against things that make people better, smarter, wealthier, and don’t break the law. I think you can see the pattern here.
Racism is the intentional mistreatment of someone on the basis of their race – at least in the normal world. But in academia, racism is anything producing disparities, according to Professor Ibram Kendi.
What follows is a long list of people, places, actions, and other things declared racist this year by higher ed, though a few came from K-12. If something needs “anti-racist” action or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it follows it must be racist, or else it would not need correction.
Academic disciplines: Chemistry Classics Evolutionary biology Engineering Immunology Math STEM in general Twenty different departments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Actions: Accusing a black student of plagiarism Banning DEI Being Asian but romantically interested in white people Course evaluations Criticizing a black female reporter Criticizing plagiarism Marriage/being married Mentioning a black female congresswoman has fake eyelashes Murder Not pronouncing Kamala Harris’ name right Not voting for Kamala Harris Opioid crisis Opposing DEI Opposing oil and gas restrictions to fight climate change Pollution Questioning Kamala Harris’ racial identity Romance “Traditional grading” Voter registration Voting for Trump White people running in shorts White people rapping
Beliefs: Being pro-life/pointing out high abortion rates for black women Christianity Colorblindness Nostalgia
Career fields: Counseling Ecological farming Education Dentistry Disaster response Geology Law enforcement Medicine Ocean sciences Nursing Surgical oncology
Entertainment/culture: Dolly Parton’s free book program Dressing as a Native American at a Kansas City Chiefs game Liking Taylor Swift Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” Paintings of British countryside Porcelain Telling a Japanese professor about a good sushi restaurant
Food: Fried chicken Milk
People: Ben Shapiro Conservatives Donald Trump Duke University sports fans Nikki Haley Rapper Tom MacDonald Vivek Ramaswamy White people
Places: Coeur D’Alene, Idaho Columbia University Greenhouses Israel Lake Merritt, California parking lot Northern Idaho Pennsylvania public universities Sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms Swimming pools Thousands of streets that use allegedly offensive terms University of Michigan
It happens every year around December, a predictable flurry of pseudo-psychology articles from low-IQ progressives expounding on the negatives of Christmas. On top of that, there’s been a pipeline of anti-Christmas films coming out of Hollywood the past decade, including some real woke bombs depicting Santa as a corporatist, a racist and a woman hater.
It’s been going on so long that in the early 2000s conservatives dubbed the annual practice the “War on Christmas”. However, at that time people on the political right assumed the vitriol was aimed at Christianity in general. What many didn’t realize is that the hatred wasn’t only about religious differences.
Around 70% of atheists identify as Democrats according to surveys, with 15% identifying as Republican and another 15% having no party affiliation. It makes sense that the majority of Christmas critics are on the political left and that their distaste of the holiday season is driven by their anti-Christian views.
After all, the political left is so obsessed with destroying Christianity that they continue to repeat the false narrative that Christmas is a “pagan holiday” and that all the traditions are stolen and repurposed. This claim is debunked every year and yet every year they keep trying to bring it back.
The pagan celebration of “Yule” often associated with Christmas by ignorant academics has always been a completely separate tradition with separate practices. As Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, pagan groups would meld elements of their previous traditions with newly introduced Christian holidays. Every serious study of Yule admits the distinct separation between the pagan celebration and Christmas.
The Christmas tree is also a purely Christian idea, based on the stories surrounding Saint Boniface. Boniface sought to convert the pagan tribes of Germany in 725 AD and chopped down what was known as “Odin’s Sacred Oak”, a tree used by the pagans as a site for human sacrifice. A small fir tree grew in its place and was dubbed the “Tree of Christ”.
By extension Santa Claus is often wrongly associated with pagan characters; he is in fact based on the very real Saint Nicholas, a monk who traveled the known world around 280 AD, giving away his wealth and helping children in need. His good deeds became legendary and by the Renaissance he was the most popular saint in Europe. His feast day was celebrated on the day of his death (December 6th), and it was common practice to buy large gifts or get married around this time every year.
The name “Santa Claus” comes from the Dutch, who first brought the celebration of Nicholas over to the American colonies in the 1700s. They called him “Sinter Klaas”, short for Saint Nicholas. And, if you look at some of the very old fresco paintings of Saint Nicholas you’ll find he looks rather similar to the modern day folk character version of Santa Claus.
When the claims of pagan co-option failed to yield any results, leftists turned to more woke methods to undermine the Christmas holiday. Going beyond religion, progressives have even sought to take down Santa Claus.
You would think a guy that goes around giving away his wealth and helping the poor would immediately appeal to socialist leftists who claim to be the guardians of the underclass, but that’s not really the case. They say the biggest problem is that Santa is “white” and that he represents the western world’s habit of making white people the “default”. I would argue that this is a smokescreen for other problems the leftists don’t want to fully admit to, but let’s start with race…
Black Santa Claus
The leftist trend in recent years has been to hijack Santa Claus and make him non-white (as they have tried to do with almost every other icon of the west). They pushed hard to make “Black Santa” a thing over the past few years and it’s not working out for them.
This is not to say that black people can’t dress up as Santa Claus; they can do as they please. However, the idea of taking a centuries old western figure based on a real person and then co-opting their image and pretending like this doesn’t matter – Isn’t this the evil practice of cultural appropriation that leftists accuse white people of doing all the time?
Let’s be clear, the default of western culture IS white. White people created it and built it and so most of our celebrated figures are going to be white people also. Leftists are never going to successfully sell Black Santa as a cultural norm, just as it would be impossible to steal African folk heroes and turn them white.
Santa Takes Credit Away From Parents?
Another common argument I hear against the idea of Santa Claus is that parents are pressured to purchase gifts for their children on Christmas while telling them that those toys are coming from a fantasy figure (and a white fantasy figure, too! Oh, the horror!). Progressives want their children to give THEM credit for the money spend on gifts, not a magical white guy in a red suit.
Not surprisingly, these people have missed the point of gift giving on Christmas, though it is funny to see leftists essentially arguing in favor of meritocracy and individual recognition.
I see the idea of Santa Claus as very useful, not only as a way to bring a little wonder into the tradition for children, but also as a way to keep adult egos in check. Giving Santa credit for a gift is a valuable exercise in humility that every parent needs. The gift should not be about you, it’s about the happiness that the gift inspires.
Gift giving is not a trade for adoration, but that’s exactly how narcissists see it. And since the political left is absolutely infected with narcissism these days it’s not surprising that they hate Santa Claus for taking attention away from them at Christmastime.
Santa Has A Naughty List, But What If You’re A Moral Relativist?
Keep in mind that a lot of progressive academics that write criticisms of the holidays don’t have any kids. They are childless cat ladies and beta males with no experience in creating and caring for a family. Their opinions are worthless when it comes to child rearing (and most other things). That said, this doesn’t seem to stop them from giving advice on the trappings of teaching kids the value of morality and the consequences of their actions.
It might be a fading tradition but for the longest time parents have told children to be on their best behavior around Christmas because if they don’t they could end up on Santa’s naughty list and get coal in their stockings. Leftists argue that this punishment and rewards system should not be a part of Christmas.
Firstly, people without kids don’t understand that when the youngsters are on a school break for two weeks straight and everyone is stuck together in close quarters in a house in winter there is a need sometimes for extra policing. You use whatever tools are at your disposal because reasoning with children only works half the time. Their brains aren’t fully formed yet (like woke activists), and they tend to act out wildly based on impulse and emotion.
I really don’t think that lefties are particularly upset by the idea of Santa having a naughty list (I’ve never met a well adjusted parent that went beyond the threat and didn’t have presents for their sons and daughters on Christmas). I think they are upset by the idea of moral compass and discipline. They seem to think that children simply raise themselves and that the parents never need to do anything to mold them into proper adults.
This is exactly why our society is in a death spiral today; because progressives have convinced so many parents to stop parenting.
Santa (Like Christ) Represents Individual And Voluntary Charity
Leftists are socialists (or communists) – It’s the foundation of almost all their beliefs, and the root of socialism is the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the collective. Meaning, the government in the name of the majority must intervene in the affairs of individuals in order to force them to serve the interests of the group.
In other words, leftists believe that the environment determines everything and people will not do good for society unless they are extorted into it by the system. In a way they fulfill their own prophecy by making it almost impossible through the legal environment to do good for others unless you have permission from the authorities.
Over the years I have noticed that one highly destructive side effect of socialism is the exponential decline in personal charity. If the government handles everything, why should the average person take action to help others? Why even care? And if you do still care, it doesn’t matter because the system will punish you for acting on your own accord.
There’s a reason why socialist and communist regimes are mostly atheist and seek to eliminate Christianity through history; the government must become god and they can’t allow any alternatives to exist. When you see progressive governments ban private charity activities or prosecute people who go out on their own to help the homeless, you might be confused and wonder what the motivation could possibly be?
It makes perfect sense when you realize that leftists see voluntary charity as competition with their own god (government). In the past they have even tried to misrepresent Jesus as an early socialist figure, when in fact Jesus promoted individual acts of compassion, not deferring to a government authority.
The underlying impetus for socialism is forced wealth redistribution, but in a world of voluntary charity there is no need for governments to control wealth or property. That is to say, socialists exploit the existence of poverty as an excuse to take control of all personal wealth (and thus control the population). They can’t do that when Christianity, Christmas and symbols like Santa Claus show people there’s a better way.It happens every year around December, a predictable flurry of pseudo-psychology articles from low-IQ progressives expounding on the negatives of Christmas. On top of that, there’s been a pipeline of anti-Christmas films coming out of Hollywood the past decade, including some real woke bombs depicting Santa as a corporatist, a racist and a woman hater.
It’s been going on so long that in the early 2000s conservatives dubbed the annual practice the “War on Christmas”. However, at that time people on the political right assumed the vitriol was aimed at Christianity in general. What many didn’t realize is that the hatred wasn’t only about religious differences.
Around 70% of atheists identify as Democrats according to surveys, with 15% identifying as Republican and another 15% having no party affiliation. It makes sense that the majority of Christmas critics are on the political left and that their distaste of the holiday season is driven by their anti-Christian views.
After all, the political left is so obsessed with destroying Christianity that they continue to repeat the false narrative that Christmas is a “pagan holiday” and that all the traditions are stolen and repurposed. This claim is debunked every year and yet every year they keep trying to bring it back.
The pagan celebration of “Yule” often associated with Christmas by ignorant academics has always been a completely separate tradition with separate practices. As Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, pagan groups would meld elements of their previous traditions with newly introduced Christian holidays. Every serious study of Yule admits the distinct separation between the pagan celebration and Christmas.
The Christmas tree is also a purely Christian idea, based on the stories surrounding Saint Boniface. Boniface sought to convert the pagan tribes of Germany in 725 AD and chopped down what was known as “Odin’s Sacred Oak”, a tree used by the pagans as a site for human sacrifice. A small fir tree grew in its place and was dubbed the “Tree of Christ”.
By extension Santa Claus is often wrongly associated with pagan characters; he is in fact based on the very real Saint Nicholas, a monk who traveled the known world around 280 AD, giving away his wealth and helping children in need. His good deeds became legendary and by the Renaissance he was the most popular saint in Europe. His feast day was celebrated on the day of his death (December 6th), and it was common practice to buy large gifts or get married around this time every year.
The name “Santa Claus” comes from the Dutch, who first brought the celebration of Nicholas over to the American colonies in the 1700s. They called him “Sinter Klaas”, short for Saint Nicholas. And, if you look at some of the very old fresco paintings of Saint Nicholas you’ll find he looks rather similar to the modern day folk character version of Santa Claus.
When the claims of pagan co-option failed to yield any results, leftists turned to more woke methods to undermine the Christmas holiday. Going beyond religion, progressives have even sought to take down Santa Claus.
You would think a guy that goes around giving away his wealth and helping the poor would immediately appeal to socialist leftists who claim to be the guardians of the underclass, but that’s not really the case. They say the biggest problem is that Santa is “white” and that he represents the western world’s habit of making white people the “default”. I would argue that this is a smokescreen for other problems the leftists don’t want to fully admit to, but let’s start with race…
Black Santa Claus
The leftist trend in recent years has been to hijack Santa Claus and make him non-white (as they have tried to do with almost every other icon of the west). They pushed hard to make “Black Santa” a thing over the past few years and it’s not working out for them.
This is not to say that black people can’t dress up as Santa Claus; they can do as they please. However, the idea of taking a centuries old western figure based on a real person and then co-opting their image and pretending like this doesn’t matter – Isn’t this the evil practice of cultural appropriation that leftists accuse white people of doing all the time?
Let’s be clear, the default of western culture IS white. White people created it and built it and so most of our celebrated figures are going to be white people also. Leftists are never going to successfully sell Black Santa as a cultural norm, just as it would be impossible to steal African folk heroes and turn them white.
Santa Takes Credit Away From Parents?
Another common argument I hear against the idea of Santa Claus is that parents are pressured to purchase gifts for their children on Christmas while telling them that those toys are coming from a fantasy figure (and a white fantasy figure, too! Oh, the horror!). Progressives want their children to give THEM credit for the money spend on gifts, not a magical white guy in a red suit.
Not surprisingly, these people have missed the point of gift giving on Christmas, though it is funny to see leftists essentially arguing in favor of meritocracy and individual recognition.
I see the idea of Santa Claus as very useful, not only as a way to bring a little wonder into the tradition for children, but also as a way to keep adult egos in check. Giving Santa credit for a gift is a valuable exercise in humility that every parent needs. The gift should not be about you, it’s about the happiness that the gift inspires.
Gift giving is not a trade for adoration, but that’s exactly how narcissists see it. And since the political left is absolutely infected with narcissism these days it’s not surprising that they hate Santa Claus for taking attention away from them at Christmastime.
Santa Has A Naughty List, But What If You’re A Moral Relativist?
Keep in mind that a lot of progressive academics that write criticisms of the holidays don’t have any kids. They are childless cat ladies and beta males with no experience in creating and caring for a family. Their opinions are worthless when it comes to child rearing (and most other things). That said, this doesn’t seem to stop them from giving advice on the trappings of teaching kids the value of morality and the consequences of their actions.
It might be a fading tradition but for the longest time parents have told children to be on their best behavior around Christmas because if they don’t they could end up on Santa’s naughty list and get coal in their stockings. Leftists argue that this punishment and rewards system should not be a part of Christmas.
Firstly, people without kids don’t understand that when the youngsters are on a school break for two weeks straight and everyone is stuck together in close quarters in a house in winter there is a need sometimes for extra policing. You use whatever tools are at your disposal because reasoning with children only works half the time. Their brains aren’t fully formed yet (like woke activists), and they tend to act out wildly based on impulse and emotion.
I really don’t think that lefties are particularly upset by the idea of Santa having a naughty list (I’ve never met a well adjusted parent that went beyond the threat and didn’t have presents for their sons and daughters on Christmas). I think they are upset by the idea of moral compass and discipline. They seem to think that children simply raise themselves and that the parents never need to do anything to mold them into proper adults.
This is exactly why our society is in a death spiral today; because progressives have convinced so many parents to stop parenting.
Santa (Like Christ) Represents Individual And Voluntary Charity
Leftists are socialists (or communists) – It’s the foundation of almost all their beliefs, and the root of socialism is the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the collective. Meaning, the government in the name of the majority must intervene in the affairs of individuals in order to force them to serve the interests of the group.
In other words, leftists believe that the environment determines everything and people will not do good for society unless they are extorted into it by the system. In a way they fulfill their own prophecy by making it almost impossible through the legal environment to do good for others unless you have permission from the authorities.
Over the years I have noticed that one highly destructive side effect of socialism is the exponential decline in personal charity. If the government handles everything, why should the average person take action to help others? Why even care? And if you do still care, it doesn’t matter because the system will punish you for acting on your own accord.
There’s a reason why socialist and communist regimes are mostly atheist and seek to eliminate Christianity through history; the government must become god and they can’t allow any alternatives to exist. When you see progressive governments ban private charity activities or prosecute people who go out on their own to help the homeless, you might be confused and wonder what the motivation could possibly be?
It makes perfect sense when you realize that leftists see voluntary charity as competition with their own god (government). In the past they have even tried to misrepresent Jesus as an early socialist figure, when in fact Jesus promoted individual acts of compassion, not deferring to a government authority.
The underlying impetus for socialism is forced wealth redistribution, but in a world of voluntary charity there is no need for governments to control wealth or property. That is to say, socialists exploit the existence of poverty as an excuse to take control of all personal wealth (and thus control the population). They can’t do that when Christianity, Christmas and symbols like Santa Claus show people there’s a better way.
An amazing video circulating on social media follows three suspected thieves in Orange County, Calif., who were arrested this week after a law change now classifies shoplifting as a felony offense.
The video, released Sunday by Seal Beach Police on Instagram, features surveillance camera footage of three young black women walking into an Ulta Beauty Supply store and stealing $648 worth of product, before heading to a Kohl’s retail store and walking out the door with $1,188 in merchandise.
All the while, a police cruiser is making its way to the reported thefts and the women are ultimately intercepted, confronted by officers and thrown into the back of a squad car.
Footage from a camera in the back of the patrol vehicle captured the moment one of the thieves informed the other that shoplifting was now classified as a felony, saying, “Bitch, new laws.”
“Stealing is a felony,” the thief tells the other adding, “And this Orange County, bitch. They don’t play.”
On Instagram, Seal Beach PD explained the arrests were part of new laws passed under Proposition 36, which “went into effect Wednesday morning in California.”
“It undoes some of the changes voters made with a 2014 ballot measure that turned certain nonviolent felonies into misdemeanors, effectively shortening prison sentences and leading to a spike in retail theft and crime.”
Fox Los Angeles reports the Prop 47 measure previously in place led to a spike in shoplifting during the Covid pandemic.
…[D]uring the pandemic, the rate of shoplifting and commercial burglaries skyrocketed, especially in Los Angeles, Alameda, San Mateo and Sacramento counties. Statewide, reported shoplifting of merchandise worth up to $950 soared 28% over the past five years, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s the highest observed level since 2000.
The world is slowly healing and common sense appears set to make a comeback following Donald Trump’s re-election victory.
In 2023, nearly 62 million lives were lost worldwide – an average of around 7,000 deaths every hour.
These numbers reflect the impacts of aging, illness, and conflict, and Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao takes a further look into the countries with the most deaths every hour.
At the top of the list, China lost more than 1,300 people every hour in 2023. This is about 300 more deaths than second-ranked India (roughly 1,000 people ever hour).
Rank
Country
Deaths in 2023
Deaths per Hour
1
🇨🇳 China
11,684,177
1,334
2
🇮🇳 India
9,507,008
1,085
3
🇺🇸 U.S.
2,975,658
340
4
🇳🇬 Nigeria
2,675,442
305
5
🇮🇩 Indonesia
2,117,706
242
6
🇷🇺 Russia
1,794,857
205
7
🇵🇰 Pakistan
1,600,313
183
8
🇯🇵 Japan
1,524,430
174
9
🇧🇷 Brazil
1,494,154
171
10
🇩🇪 Germany
1,034,140
118
11
🇨🇩 DRC
901,851
103
12
🇧🇩 Bangladesh
859,075
98
13
🇲🇽 Mexico
799,366
91
14
🇪🇹 Ethiopia
767,018
88
15
🇵🇭 Philippines
716,490
82
16
🇮🇹 Italy
663,448
76
17
🇻🇳 Vietnam
659,980
75
18
🇬🇧 UK
653,747
75
19
🇹🇭 Thailand
637,306
73
20
🇪🇬 Egypt
625,449
71
21
🇫🇷 France
616,095
70
22
🇿🇦 South Africa
584,015
67
23
🇹🇷 Turkey
551,598
63
24
🇲🇲 Myanmar
495,470
57
25
🇺🇦 Ukraine
495,421
57
26
🇪🇸 Spain
447,463
51
27
🇮🇷 Iran
423,367
48
28
🇵🇱 Poland
412,310
47
29
🇰🇪 Kenya
399,024
46
30
🇹🇿 Tanzania
385,799
44
31
🇦🇷 Argentina
349,195
40
32
🇰🇷 South Korea
345,502
39
33
🇸🇩 Sudan
320,491
37
34
🇨🇦 Canada
311,824
36
35
🇨🇴 Colombia
282,433
32
36
🇷🇴 Romania
257,119
29
37
🇰🇵 North Korea
255,826
29
38
🇦🇴 Angola
254,482
29
39
🇦🇫 Afghanistan
240,296
27
40
🇨🇮 Ivory Coast
238,741
27
41
🇬🇭 Ghana
237,869
27
42
🇺🇬 Uganda
235,583
27
43
🇲🇿 Mozambique
235,520
27
44
🇲🇬 Madagascar
234,841
27
45
🇳🇪 Niger
231,746
26
46
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan
221,249
25
47
🇩🇿 Algeria
214,259
24
48
🇻🇪 Venezuela
213,955
24
49
🇹🇩 Chad
213,123
24
50
🇲🇦 Morocco
212,624
24
51
🇳🇵 Nepal
205,841
23
52
🇹🇼 Taiwan
205,339
23
53
🇲🇱 Mali
205,047
23
54
🇨🇲 Cameroon
202,882
23
55
🇾🇪 Yemen
188,764
22
56
🇮🇶 Iraq
186,266
21
57
🇵🇪 Peru
185,861
21
58
🇦🇺 Australia
183,924
21
59
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
183,375
21
60
🇲🇾 Malaysia
181,166
21
61
🇸🇴 Somalia
180,554
21
62
🇳🇱 Netherlands
169,320
19
63
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka
162,453
19
64
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan
136,388
16
65
🇬🇳 Guinea
131,455
15
66
🇭🇺 Hungary
128,063
15
67
🇨🇱 Chile
127,691
15
68
🇬🇷 Greece
127,018
14
69
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe
124,412
14
70
🇧🇯 Benin
124,132
14
71
🇧🇾 Belarus
121,587
14
72
🇸🇾 Syria
118,900
14
73
🇵🇹 Portugal
115,917
13
74
🇧🇪 Belgium
113,791
13
75
🇨🇿 Czech Republic
113,525
13
76
🇲🇼 Malawi
113,181
13
77
🇨🇺 Cuba
111,819
13
78
🇰🇭 Cambodia
111,340
13
79
🇸🇸 South Sudan
110,339
13
80
🇿🇲 Zambia
107,917
12
81
🇧🇬 Bulgaria
102,980
12
82
🇸🇳 Senegal
100,882
12
83
🇸🇪 Sweden
93,944
11
84
🇷🇸 Serbia
93,928
11
85
🇦🇹 Austria
93,223
11
86
🇪🇨 Ecuador
92,204
11
87
🇧🇮 Burundi
91,963
10
88
🇭🇹 Haiti
90,966
10
89
🇧🇴 Bolivia
87,812
10
90
🇬🇹 Guatemala
87,523
10
91
🇷🇼 Rwanda
82,826
9
92
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
77,837
9
93
🇹🇳 Tunisia
74,071
8
94
🇨🇭 Switzerland
73,788
8
95
🇹🇬 Togo
71,661
8
96
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
70,823
8
97
🇸🇱 Sierra Leone
70,116
8
98
🇦🇿 Azerbaijan
67,842
8
99
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea
67,700
8
100
🇫🇮 Finland
59,984
7
101
🇩🇰 Denmark
57,275
7
102
🇭🇰 Hong Kong
57,190
7
103
🇭🇷 Croatia
55,029
6
104
🇸🇰 Slovakia
54,167
6
105
🇮🇱 Israel
51,294
6
106
🇱🇾 Libya
48,610
6
107
🇨🇫 Central African Republic
48,529
6
108
🇱🇦 Laos
47,682
5
109
🇭🇳 Honduras
47,670
5
110
🇹🇯 Tajikistan
47,595
5
111
🇸🇻 El Salvador
47,443
5
112
🇬🇪 Georgia
45,077
5
113
🇱🇷 Liberia
44,333
5
114
🇳🇴 Norway
44,143
5
115
🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina
42,861
5
116
🇹🇲 Turkmenistan
42,575
5
117
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan
42,200
5
118
🇲🇩 Moldova
41,730
5
119
🇱🇹 Lithuania
40,940
5
120
🇵🇾 Paraguay
39,034
4
121
🇵🇸 Palestine
38,937
4
122
🇨🇬 Congo
38,880
4
123
🇳🇿 New Zealand
37,686
4
124
🇮🇪 Ireland
35,550
4
125
🇯🇴 Jordan
34,873
4
126
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico
34,664
4
127
🇱🇧 Lebanon
34,419
4
128
🇺🇾 Uruguay
33,145
4
129
🇳🇮 Nicaragua
31,294
4
130
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
27,861
3
131
🇸🇬 Singapore
27,728
3
132
🇲🇷 Mauritania
27,725
3
133
🇱🇻 Latvia
27,614
3
134
🇦🇲 Armenia
27,579
3
135
🇱🇸 Lesotho
24,612
3
136
🇦🇱 Albania
23,428
3
137
🇯🇲 Jamaica
22,933
3
138
🇸🇮 Slovenia
21,581
2
139
🇵🇦 Panama
21,272
2
140
🇪🇷 Eritrea
20,984
2
141
🇲🇳 Mongolia
20,340
2
142
🇲🇰 North Macedonia
19,863
2
143
🇳🇦 Namibia
18,279
2
144
🇬🇲 Gambia
16,975
2
145
🇪🇪 Estonia
16,693
2
146
🇬🇦 Gabon
15,577
2
147
🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau
15,181
2
148
🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea
14,556
2
149
🇧🇼 Botswana
14,197
2
150
🇹🇹 Trinidad & Tobago
12,577
1
151
🇲🇺 Mauritius
11,124
1
152
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste
10,065
1
153
🇽🇰 Kosovo
9,981
1
154
🇦🇪 UAE
9,916
1
155
🇴🇲 Oman
9,597
1
156
🇨🇾 Cyprus
9,499
1
157
🇸🇿 Eswatini
9,475
1
158
🇰🇼 Kuwait
8,624
1
159
🇩🇯 Djibouti
8,596
1
160
🇫🇯 Fiji
8,553
1
161
🇲🇪 Montenegro
7,209
1
162
🇰🇲 Comoros
6,119
1
163
🇬🇾 Guyana
6,049
1
164
🇧🇹 Bhutan
4,805
1
165
🇷🇪 Réunion
4,797
1
166
🇱🇺 Luxembourg
4,642
1
the rest of the countries had a zero so I didn’t continue the article, but it can be found
A horse and a chicken grew up together on the farm and were the best friends. They went everywhere together. One day, the horse waded into the pond to get a drink, and he realized that his feet were stuck in the mud and that he was sinking. He yelled for the chicken and said,
“I’m stuck in the mud and sinking, go get help, go get the farmer!”
The chicken ran to the house and, realizing the farmer wasn’t home, grabbed the Porshe keys, drove down by the barn, got a length of rope, sped back to the pond, tied the rope to the bumper of the car, threw the other end to the horse, and pulled the horse out of the water.
A couple of weeks later the chicken stepped into a mud puddle in the farm yard and realized that her feet were stuck and that she was sinking.
She hollered for the horse, “Go get the car!”
The horse said, “I don’t need the car.”
He stepped over the mud puddle, straddled it with one foot on each edge, and said, “grab my pecker and pull yourself out.”
The moral of this story is: If you’re hung like a horse, you don’t need a Porsche to pick up chicks.
MESA, Ariz. — An arrest has been made following a video on social media showing a man spraying bug killer on produce at a Mesa grocery store, police said.
In a video posted to “X,” formerly known as Twitter, on Dec. 19, 27-year-old Charles Smith is seen spraying “Hot Shot Ultra Bed Bud and Flea Killer” on bananas, potatoes, lemons, limes and rotisserie chickens at a Walmart in Mesa.
According to the post on “X”, the original video was deleted from social media. 12News found the original posts from what appears to be Smith’s TikTok page which had several videos. Some showed Smith appear to lock people inside of a Goodwill and throw food at people at a mall.
Mesa Police said they notified the store management and said “any produce that may have been affected has been removed from all areas accessible to the public.”
Widespread mistrust of the US government, media, and “experts” didn’t go mainstream until President Trump splashed onto the scene. That’s why they hate him so much. He’s the cog in their machine. The disruptor who yanked back the curtain and exposed just enough to jolt the country awake. Thanks mostly to Trump’s America First movement, we now know the truth: many so-called “experts” are just political pawns, there’s one big “uniparty” screwing us all over, and the fake news media is running a giant CIA psyop on the American people.
That’s right—we thought those CIA “mind control” tricks were reserved for foreign hellholes. Turns out, they’re using those same nasty tactics on us.
Ready to have your minds blown? I know what’s going on with the drones, and I will share it with you. But I’m also to give you the secret to seeing through all the nonsense we’ve been peddled for 60+ years.
What I am about to reveal to you is the Rosetta Stone for interpreting every major news event. I will give you the secret to unlocking the mystery. One simple assumption will reveal everything. Are you ready?
“The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.”
That’s it. That’s all you need to assume, and you will be correct. Think I’m crazy? That it couldn’t possibly be that simple? That it could never be that obvious? Let’s try it out and see how it works.
Who killed JFK? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
How did the cartels manage to get so many drugs into and so much cash out of the U.S.? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Why were all those women and children at Waco burned to death? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Who let the 9/11 hijackers into the U.S.? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Why were there no WMDs in Iraq? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
What caused the housing market collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
What happened with all that Russian collusion stuff in 2016? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Where did COVID originate? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Why was discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop banned in 2020? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
Who blew up the NordStream pipeline? The U.S. government was behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.
And finally: what’s going on with all those drones in the Northeast? Say it with me: “The U.S. government is behind it and is lying to you to cover it up.”
Every time there is some major new story that everyone is fixated on, assume that the story exists because your government is trying to manipulate you for its own purposes, and you will be correct at least 9 out of 10 times. Maybe even 99 out of 100.
Follow this simple rule, and you will know what is actually happening before anyone else. You will appear to be clairvoyant. And you will have a superpower that no one in corporate media has: the ability to see the truth.
When Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidency in 2008, there were claims of an insidious plot to turn America into a Communist-run nation, which was initially labeled as a “conspiracy theory.” Mike Adams, known as the Health Ranger, raised concerns about this plot during Obama’s first term in office, which later gained attention and credibility. Biden’s time in office has been likened to Obama’s third term, suggesting a continuation of the alleged Communist agenda. Various “conspiracy theories” have allegedly come true over the past four years, pointing to a government run by Democrat-Communists aiming to destroy America and the middle class. Many maniacal plots are attributed to Democrats, Liberals, and Globalists that include issues like vaccine push, assassination attempts, election corruption, and the replacement of Americans with illegal immigrants.
Top 10 maniacal plots conjured and propagated by Democrats, Liberals and Globalists over the past 4 years to try to wreck America and wipe out the middle class
#1. The deadliest vaccine push ever propagated on Americans – mRNA clot shots
#2. Two assassination attempts of President Trump
#3. The “mysterious” Drone-Gate psyop happening right now
#4. The coverup of the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell”
#5. The most corrupt election in U.S. history that put Biden in the White House and the FBI-created “insurrection” that falsely imprisoned hundreds of peaceful conservative protestors from January 6th, 2021
#6. Hiding Biden’s senility from the whole nation while he has the nuke codes
#7. Running a proxy war through Ukraine to funnel trillions of U.S. dollars using the Military Industrial Complex while instigating World War III with Russia
#8. Killing thousands (if not millions) of Americans in U.S. hospitals during the plandemic using “protocol” of isolation, Remdesivir, ventilators, and more clot shots.
#9. More than 4 MILLION ABORTIONS, many in the third term of pregnancy and some even on the day of birth, were performed to add to the genocide of Americans
#10. Replacing Americans with over 20 million illegal immigrants over the past 4 years
A bombshell 17,000-page report was just dropped, detailing specific instances where the Biden administration has weaponized the federal government for political gain. The extensive document, compiled by the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, outlines claims of misuse of federal agencies to target political opponents, suppress dissent, and influence public opinion. This raises serious questions about the integrity of the federal bureaucracy and the Biden Administration’s four years in office.
During the nearly two-year investigation, exposed a “two-tiered system of government,” with the committee finding several cases of censorship, whistleblower retaliation, and the politicization of federal agencies and top law enforcement.
The report notes that the objective of the committee is to “protect and strengthen the fundamental rights of the American people.” Although its work is not done, the report assures the American people that this was the necessary first step to stop the weaponization of the federal government and to make sure it no longer works against the United States.
Here are the 20 of the most nefarious and diabolical activities revealed by the report.
1. Censorship by Big Tech: The report alleges that the Biden administration pressured companies like Meta (formerly known as Facebook) to censor American speech, with Mark Zuckerberg reportedly admitting to this pressure.
2. Weaponization of Federal Law Enforcement: The subcommittee claims to have found instances where federal law enforcement agencies were used against American citizens, highlighting a pattern of what they describe as government overreach.
3. Collusion with the Intelligence Community: There are allegations of the Biden campaign working with former intelligence officials to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, which the report suggests was part of a broader effort to manipulate voter perception.
4. FBI Targeting Parents at School Boards: The report points to an Attorney General memo directing the FBI to investigate threats against school board members, which critics argue was used to target conservative parents speaking out at meetings.
5. Suppression of Conservative Voices: It’s claimed that there was a concerted effort involving government agencies and tech companies to suppress conservative viewpoints, including through the manipulation of content moderation policies.
6. FBI’s Handling of the Mar-a-Lago Raid: The report discusses the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, suggesting political motivations behind the action.
7. FBI Whistleblower Retaliation: The subcommittee heard from FBI whistleblowers who claimed they faced retaliation for exposing perceived biases within the agency, including the suspension of security clearances.
9. Legal Actions Against Pro-Life Activists: Allegations that the DOJ disproportionately targeted pro-life activists under the FACE Act, suggesting a two-tiered justice system.
10. Targeting of Traditional Catholics: An FBI memo from the Richmond field office labeled certain traditional Catholics as potential threats, which was later retracted but highlighted in the report.
11. IRS and DOJ Targeting: The report alleges that these agencies were used to target political opponents, echoing previous claims made during the Obama era regarding IRS scrutiny of conservative groups.
12. Misuse of National Security Tools: There are claims that surveillance powers were misused to spy on political adversaries, linking back to controversies around the 2016 election.
13. Government Influence on Media: Accusations that government officials influenced media narratives, especially around sensitive political topics like the Hunter Biden laptop and the origins of the COVID-19.
14. Operation Choke Point: An alleged Obama-era initiative where federal agencies pressured banks to cut off services to certain sectors, impacting conservative businesses.
15. Influence Over Social Media Algorithms: Assertions that the government had an undue influence on how social media companies prioritized and displayed content, affecting political discourse.
16. Use of Disinformation Campaigns: The report suggests that elements within the government were involved in creating or supporting disinformation to manipulate public opinion, especially in foreign policy contexts.
17. Involvement in Election Integrity: Claims that government agencies played roles in influencing election outcomes through misinformation management and voter suppression tactics.
18. Weaponization of Climate Change Policies: Allegations that environmental policies were used to target industries and individuals not aligned with administration views.
19. Manipulation of Public Health Information: During the COVID-19 response, there are claims of government agencies influencing what information was disseminated by health organizations, possibly to fit political narratives.
20. Protection of Political Allies: The report hints at the administration protecting allies through selective enforcement of laws or lack of investigation into potential wrongdoings.
[The] founding documents of the United States articulate the ideals of the American republic and guarantee to all American citizens fundamental rights and liberties. For too long, however, the American people have faced a two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the contrast between these two tiers has become even more stark.
One of the most alarming parts of the report are emails between DHS/CISA, Stanford University, the Atlantic Council, and Big Tech, in which they colluded to create the “Election Integrity Partnership’s” censorship machine.
An email from Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council’s DFR Labs read: “We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA,” while another— now redacted from Facebook— exposes a phone call with DHS, saying, “DHS cannot openly endorse the portal.”
“We already have partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and we would love to chat with you and your team,” Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory emailed NextDoor executives.
“Throughout the Biden-Harris administration, multiple federal agencies, including the White House, have engaged in a vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation,” the report states, noting that the subcommittee revealed the extent of the “censorship-industrial complex,” the report continues.
In another finding from the report revealed that the subcommittee probed alleged cased in which the federal government weaponized the use of law enforcement resources, which led to fraud and abuse of the FBI. Several whistleblowers spoke out and detailed how the agency “brutally retaliated” against them for coming forward.
The bureau suspend the whistleblowers “without pay, preventing them from seeking outside employment, and even purging suspected disloyal employees.”
The investigation also found that the Biden Administration teamed up with 51 former intelligence officials to interfere in the American electoral system just weeks before the 2020 presidential election by signing the statement calling Hunter Biden’s laptop disinformation.
story
Of course they did. It started with Obama covering up all the illegal stuff they did to Trump. This has to stop. I doubt they’ll get the top dogs, but they could put a dent into the machine
from Introvert Dear, but I can relate and I bet other Introverts can also. I don’t go if at all possible and am better for it.
Because introverts don’t just get ready for a holiday party — they gather strength for one.
Oh no, oh no, oh no. It’s today, isn’t it? The holiday party. And there’s another one tomorrow. A red-and-green glitter bomb of social obligation has exploded all over your calendar. Sure, you love your family, but the truth is, you’re an introvert, and big parties are utterly exhausting — even on those rare occasions when you actually enjoy them. Loud, crowded rooms and yet another round of “So, what’s new with you?” probably leave you dreaming of a white Christmas at home in your pajamas.
But the holidays only come around once a year, so you’ll rock around the Christmas tree anyway. That said, you’ll probably have some thoughts like these. Introverts, can you relate?
Saying yes to the big holiday get-together seemed like a good idea when you RSVP’d. You even threw in some exclamation points (soooo excited to see everyone!!) and offered to bring your famous apple dumplings. But that was two weeks ago — you were younger then, full of hope. Now, in a moment of panic and desperation, you’re seriously considering canceling because you’re “sick.” Besides, didn’t you promise your dog you’d binge Netflix together tonight?
2. Sigh. I’m going.
It is your family we’re talking about. And it is the holidays. That’s the double-edged sword of being an introvert — just thinking about skipping the party makes you feel guilty, even if it would be better for your mental health. You don’t want to let anyone down, even if saying yes means draining your energy completely.
3. I’ll just go for a little while.
Yes, that’s it — the perfect compromise! You’ll say your hellos, grab some food, and even give nosy Aunt Gladys the most basic updates about your life, complete with a polite smile. Then you’ll make a swift exit, just like a certain snowman who knew better than to stick around when the sun was hot that day.
4. I can do this, I can do this…
You’re doing this. You’re really doing this. You take a few deep breaths, savor the last moments of peace and quiet, and silently swear on Aunt Gladys’s fruitcake that you’ll be back home soon.
5. It’s so loud!
You’re at the party, and it’s SO LOUD. Christmas carols are blaring, everyone is talking at once, and your inner introvert is screaming for an escape to somewhere quieter. The noise feels like a physical force, crashing over you and draining your energy. You’re no Grinch, but suddenly his decision to live alone with his dog on a mountain makes perfect sense — it was quiet!
6. Small talk, whyyyyyy…
Let’s face it — small talk has never been your thing. Gossip and chatter about weekend plans? It all feels so, well, boring. As an introvert, you’d rather dive into big ideas or, at the very least, something that feels authentic and meaningful. At the party, you do your best to stick to socially acceptable chitchat, but somehow, it always veers off into… something else entirely.
7. This is getting awkward…
…so, so awkward.
8. There’s so much going on that I’m zoning out.
Marzi Wilson/Introvert Doodles
Despite how it might look to others, you’re not angry, bored, or depressed — you’re simply turning inward to block out the overwhelming stimulation. The noise, the flurry of activity, and the endless social cues to process can be too much for introverts, who naturally thrive in calmer, more low-key environments.
9. But seriously, how long?
This quiet moment alone is bliss. No small talk, no noise — just you, recharging in peace.
10. It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that…
Marzi Wilson/Introvert Doodles
…there’s waaay too much fake smiling happening at this holiday party.
11. A pet! I’m saved!
Gemma Correll
Many introverts are devoted animal lovers because our four-legged companions are the perfect match for us. They offer unconditional love without expecting small talk or fake smiles in return (see above). And unlike some extroverts, they’ll never talk your ear off or complain that you’re too quiet.
12. “Hey, sorry, can’t talk — too busy checking my phone!”
Buzzfeed
Pulling out your phone and pretending to be completely absorbed in it? A classic introvert move.
13. I’m actually having fun! And then…
Sometimes, even we introverts surprise ourselves by enjoying a social event. There’s something comforting about feeling included — even if half the time was spent dodging personal questions from family and quietly checking your phone. And let’s be honest, the holidays bring a certain warmth and nostalgia that’s hard to resist. Maybe you even found another introvert to chat with — or an extrovert who respected your quiet vibe. It feels good to connect, even for us fiercely independent introverts.
But then, the inevitable happens. No matter how much fun you had, you’re still an introvert — and that means your social battery only lasts so long. Time to head home and recharge!
14. Seriously, I have zero energy left.
Debbie Tung/Where’s My Bubble
And that’s okay — it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just the way you’re wired.
15. If only extroverts understood what it’s like to be completely “peopled out”..
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura/INFJoe
…but let’s be real, a lot of them just don’t.
16. I’m so exhausted I don’t even want to say goodbye.
Kayla Yandoli/Sally Tamarkin/Will Varner/Buzzfeed
Dang, you forgot to pack your invisibility cloak. But it’s time to make your escape. Fingers crossed no one hits you with a “You’re leaving so soon?” as you quietly slip out the door.
17. I’m home! Hallelujah, I’m home!
College Humor
On the left: What it looks like.
On the right: What it feels like.
18. And I am completely and utterly exhausted.
The party might be over, but that doesn’t mean your energy magically returns. In fact, this is when the real exhaustion sets in. Cue the dreaded introvert hangover. For many introverts, social burnout isn’t just mental and emotional fatigue — it’s physical, too. The symptoms are real: headaches, muscle aches, and an overwhelming sense of feeling unwell. It’s your body’s way of saying, time to rest.
19. Because this is how my brain works:
Sarah’s Scribbles/Sarah Andersen
A WHOLE DAY.
20. Me:
Can we make it 12?
21. Just back away slowly and close the door.
You shut your bedroom door and breathe in the sweet, glorious relief of solitude. If you have kids, you might try to pass them off to your spouse for a little while — because let’s face it, the only cure for an introvert hangover is downtime. Alone in your room, free from everyone’s expectations, you’re finally in your most comfortable, natural habitat. This time to decompress isn’t just nice — it’s necessary. Seriously, it’s for everyone’s safety!
I was at an analyst conference and George H. W. Bush was the speaker. The first thing he said was that he hated the press. The second was that the stupidest question he ever got asked was by Lesley Stahl as to why he wasn’t dancing when the Berlin Wall came down.
Now this:
Newscaster Lesley Stahl claims she “doesn’t know what to do” about the embarrassing demise of the legacy media.
She was lamenting to her colleague, Peggy Noonan, that “we are at the point where even the president,” then corrected herself saying, “Elon Musk,” asserted that legacy media is dead. She appeared extremely worried, spilling her deepest concerns, in front of an empathetic audience gathered at the 92nd St. YMCA studio in New York.
It was as if Stahl was having an out-of-body experience, where she failed to factor in herself, in accounting for the reason why audiences were abandoning network news in droves. You know you’re in trouble as an award-winning reporter when the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” on the Food Network manages to pull in higher ratings than the 24-hour news coverage, CNN.
“I don’t know how it (media) recovers,” Stahl confessed: “It is sort of… kind of hobbling along.”
There was some editing in her statement: She didn’t require the qualifier of “sort of,” “kind (of)” hobbling along. Sounding like sorority sisters, Stahl then confessed to Noonan, “I’m in a very dark place about it.” The gal-pal team then proceeded to engage in a hug-fest to lift up each other spirits, never hinting at they might be part of the problem.
“We’re talking about something so essential,” Noonan offered in her media overview. “You don’t want to say we’ll see. Or, maybe the world will end. We’ll see.” Wow! Noonan, in a moment of candid reflection, had actually compared something “so essential” as corporate media, and it being thrown on the trash heap of cancelled programing, with the world ending.
Such serious contemplation negates the wider view of just how they got into such a “dark place.” Still, they went along their merry way, as two titans in the media, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their smugness and Trump-bashing served as an integral part of the toxic behavior that fueled the rot in the “legacy media.”
Noonan proved it didn’t matter how nonsensical a joke or outright lie at Trump’s expense was — it was still worth working into the conversation. She made an off-the-cuff quip, shortly after the November election, when President-elect Trump was at the top of news reports in more than 100 countries, saying: “We haven’t been seeing much of Mr. Trump,” and “I’m enjoying that.”
The audience laughed appreciatively. So what if the joke indicated the speaker appeared clueless about an avalanche of news overtaking every newsroom in the nation? You must say this — Stahl and Noonan know their audience, no matter how much it may be shrinking.
Once the laughter stopped, Stahl may have found it productive to engage in some good-old fashioned reporting to figure out what she “could do” to better understand the media’s abysmal ratings. And even more concerning, the loss of public trust. In her 53-year journalism career, she never thought she’d witness her once-premiere news program, “60 Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
It wouldn’t take much digging for Stahl to find out what’s going on in audienceville. She, like her colleagues, would have to get up out of their chairs, leave their network buildings and stop relying on corrupted news sources. (That would include themselves.)
The best — and obvious — place to start would be for Stahl and Noonan to review comments made by viewers watching their unscripted exchange. Reactions from the audience is merely a click away on the accompanying YouTube comment thread: The media titans may have appeared untroubled by their intense partisanship, but viewers were taking a dimmer view.
One viewer identified as “@CharlieWhitmore,” was diligent enough to perform Stahl’s job for her: He reviewed one of her most startling Trump-bashing moments on “60 Minutes.” “I went back and reviewed Leslie’s interview with Trump in October 2020,” he wrote. “Leslie you are the problem…” He referred to Stahl’s pathological tendency, like her colleagues, to disbelieve and discredit (then) President Trump and their refusal to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. This, in turn, would have opened the door to investigating the “Biden crime family’s behavior,” President Trump claimed, and their influence peddling to negotiate lucrative contracts.
The snippet below speaks volumes about Stahl acting more as a White House spokesperson as opposed to a working journalist.
“He’s in the midst of a scandal,” President Trump said referencing Hunter Biden’s lap top’s incriminating content.
“He’s not,” Stahl interrupted. “He’s not. No.”
Later in the interview, Stahl claimed the Delaware computer contents had been “investigated and discredited.” This attitude of nothing-to-see-here-folks has become an integral part of the legacy media. They never failed in their efforts to come to the defense of the Biden Family along with Democrat operatives’ criminal activities.
“It can’t be verified,” Stahl repeated numerous times of the laptop. She was relying, of course, on her anonymous sources, corrupted intelligence contacts and biased news outlets. Nothing in the interview indicated that Stahl would divert from her political ideology and runaway bias.
“What can’t be verified?” Trump asked.
“The laptop!” Stahl responded as if confirming the obvious.
“The biggest scandal,” Trump continued, ‘was when they spied on my campaign.”
“There’s no real evidence of that,” Stahl said never wavering from her ludicrous and now embarrassingly false version of events. Owning up to this shameful chapter of reporting wasn’t on Stahl’s agenda, nor was correcting her distorted worldview.
Other viewer reactions were equally revealing, and not very sparing in their comments of Stahl and Noonan:
“Madame Stahl, you reap what you sow,” wrote @I.marciago5030, “Just listening to you (makes it) easy to understand why the corporate media (has) lost all credibility.”
“Lesley, thank you for all the good work you put into helping destroy legacy media,” responded another @woodyharrelson2624.
“Lesley Stahl just doesn’t get it. No wonder legacy media is dying,” wrote @Grad1067.
A few of the remarks were dripping in sarcasm including: “Big shout-out to these two ladies for helping Trump get elected. Bravo,” wrote @neildepoy77320
It might prove useful, for Stahl, to juxtapose the “60 Minutes” sparring match between herself and President-elect Trump in the wake of viewing the irrefutable facts. Sadly, Stahl appeared unwilling to take a moment of introspection to understand her personal responsibility — after all, she’s a big-deal journalist — for a media that has become corrupted by its own bias.
Instead, she spent a moment fawning over herself and offered up a different interpretation of the exchange between herself and President Trump. She recounted, without a hint of irony, that she asked the president in October 2020: “Why do you keep pounding on the press?”
Trump, being Trump, offered a pragmatic answer: “I do it and I repeat it because that way fewer people are going to believe you.”
I’m very content to be by myself. When you can do that, then being with others is fun, but not a requirement for fun. I do a lot of things and have a lot of activities, but they are taxing on my social battery. I don’t long for that like others
I was alone with my dog when this question came across my blog feed. I’m very content with just him and me and I realized that is fun.
The hustle and bustle of life doesn’t thrill me anymore.
It’s almost like clockwork. Terrorist attack – Muslim perp. SSDD for the last 1700 years
1 – Well, it looks like all the Merkel Legos and knife checks were of no avail in the German city of Magdeburg. Even confiscating corkscrews didn’t help.
An attacker reportedly deliberately drove his car at high speed into a dense crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg. According to the most recent reports, at least eleven people were killed and sixty wounded.
Unfortunately for the devotees of political correctness, the alleged perpetrator of this atrocity isn’t a Potato German named Heinz or Hans, but rather a Saudi doctor.
Sixty to eighty people have been injured in an attack at the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, and at least one is dead. A suspect has been arrested. According to Welt‘s information, he is a man from Saudi Arabia.
2 – Cambridge, Ontario resident Uwais Motala threatens to kill Christian white people & Jews in this very racist rant directed to those who question the “Free Palestine” movement.
“We’re coming, you won’t be able to handle all of this, there’s not enough bombs to kill all of us, you better do it, because we are going to get you for all those dead babies you fucking pieces of shit.”
“Fuck you, fuck your little white race mother fucker.”
“Fuck your country, fuck your race, fuck your culture, fuck Christmas.”
“Because the Master Race says so, you keep killing babies, we’re going to get you mother fuckers.”
“Fuck you & your rights, fuck you & your free speech, fuck you & your free thoughts, your free conscience, all that fucking freedom bullshit, we’re going to get you.”
3 – A Muslim student who attends George Mason University has just been arrested for planning a mass casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York.
The terrorist is from Egypt and his name is Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan. A tipster led the FBI to him and now he’s in the process of being deported.
Here’s more from AOL:
Egyptian national Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan faces a slew of federal charges tied to distributing information related to explosives,
The FBI has arrested a student at George Mason University in Virginia for allegedly plotting a mass casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York, according to a federal court filing.
Flames and torment aside, one imagines Hell as a place where lies prevail at all times.
For instance, imagine a situation in which an elderly man with a well-earned reputation for creepy behavior occupied the most powerful station in the world, and everyone around him knew that his severely diminished cognitive abilities not only prevented him from carrying out his official functions but had removed any theoretical restraints on said behavior, but they pretended otherwise, not only by continuing to trot him out in public but by referring to him, unironically, as “Mr. President.”
Such thoughts leap to mind when one sees a ridiculous new Christmas photo taken at the White House and posted Wednesday to the social media platform Instagram by 73-year-old actress Lynda Carter, who famously played the title role in the 1970s television series “Wonder Woman.”
In the photo, the 82-year-old President Joe Biden stood as close as possible to Carter.
Thus, Carter’s Instagram followers generally gushed over the photo. But not all of them did.
“Why is Jill a mile apart from her husband?” one Instagram user wrote.
“But did you get sniffed?” another wrote, referring to the president’s well-documented propensity for sniffing women and children.
Meanwhile, X users found the photo and had a field day with it.
“Bwahahahaha!!!!! Looks like Biden is a fan of WonderWoman as well! Go on a get a sniff while you’re all in her space!!” one X user wrote.
Americans don’t trust public health institutions, the virologist who used to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
“We have lost public trust, there’s no doubt about it, and it really harms public health in a big way,” Robert Redfield said Wednesday during an event at The Heritage Foundation, adding, “We’ve lost, I think, trust in science.”
The lines between public health institutions and politics became blurred during the pandemic, Kulldorff said.
The National Institutes of Health is a government research agency and “their role is not policy or public health policy,” he said.
Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades until 2022, became quite involved in health policy while an adviser to two presidents during the pandemic.
NIH “should have focused on doing the studies to find out, for example, about genetic drugs, if they can help against COVID,” Kulldorff said. But instead, he added, Fauci “sort of took over that public health policy, which doesn’t make any sense.”
Schools shouldn’t have been closed and lockdowns shouldn’t have been widespread, Kulldorff said, but the “biggest chunk of the infectious disease research money was controlled by Dr. Fauci, so he took a very active role about the pandemic policy.”
Instead of a health system, Americans “pay for illness,” Redfield said, adding: “As long as you’re sick, the system works. We need to flip the switch … so that we pay for wellness.”
One of the “root causes” of the public health crisis is that doctors are “at the bottom of the treatment pyramid,” Johnson said.
Doctors “should be at the top,” he said, but are being “crushed by the agencies” in a third-party payer system in America.
The Quran does not even mention Mecca, but rather uses the term Bekkah.
Once the laughter stopped, Stahl may have found it productive to engage in some good-old fashioned reporting to figure out what she “could do” to better understand the media’s abysmal ratings. And even more concerning, the loss of public trust. In her 53-year journalism career, she never thought she’d witness her once-premiere news program, “60 Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
Delusions of Adequacy 
