When questioning Hegseth, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said this: “If you are a sharpshooter, you’re as lethal, regardless of what your gender identity is, regardless of who you love.”
This writer would reply: “Senator, go to the largest high school in your state. Pick out the 100 toughest senior athletes: 50 male, 50 female. Form two gender-segregated infantry platoons. Issue them standard infantry combat gear, M4 carbines, and 80-pound rucksacks.
“Teach them how to shoot. Then order the two platoons to march ten miles, climb a hill, dig foxholes, jump in, and fire at targets 50 yards downhill. Which platoon would get there faster, open fire faster, and fire more accurately? Therefore, which platoon is more lethal?”
We all know the answer.
Consider the biathlon, an obscure Olympic event. Competitors have to ski cross-country, then fire a rifle at a target, then start skiing again, over and over. Any sharpshooter can confirm that breathing hard; a pounding heart; and shaky, sweaty hands make sharpshooting difficult. But these are the obvious results of having an exhausted body.
Scores are derived from both accuracy and overall time over the cross-country course. A mediocre marksman who’s in top condition can beat an expert sniper who’s out of shape, and vice versa. Infantry must excel in both areas.
Exhaustion effects are both physical and psychological. Exhausted people don’t want to fight — and if they fight, they’re far less effective. And as Hegseth observed, the weight of an 80-pound ruck or an artillery shell, or the labor of digging foxholes, doesn’t become lighter or easier if XX rather than XY chromosomes are involved.
An average man is five inches taller and 40–50 pounds heavier than an average woman. Even if they’re the same height and weight, the man has 50% more upper body strength, greater bone density, larger heart and lungs, and other advantages.
Yes, the Soviet Union put female snipers and combat pilots into combat during World War II — because they were constantly scraping the bottom of their manpower barrel. A few women rose to the occasion to become Heroes of the Soviet Union, simply because both men and women, when they’re not breathing hard, can be outstanding shots. And women can develop a truly cold-blooded killer instinct. All they need to do is imagine their targets attacking their children. That’s how they’re wired.
There are stories about the Israelis, who also scraped the bottom of their manpower barrel, and were forced to put all-female infantry into combat in the mid-20th century. According to these unconfirmed reports, male units focused on protecting the women rather than achieving their military objectives. Again, that’s how we’re wired.
Left-wing defenders of women in combat claim that tanks, radios, and fighter jets don’t require XY chromosomes. Insert a sighing, eye-rolling emoticon here. Radios break, tanks break down, and fighter jets get shot down. Command posts get overrun, and ammo runs out. In a jam, everybody’s infantry.
Recent events in women’s sports have only served to underscore the difference between men and women. Like the difference between intelligence and wisdom, we’re just not the same — but each has its own great value, in its own roles.
We’re always had men’s and women’s divisions in sports. Boxing, wrestling, and all martial arts have weight classes within those divisions. All this is for good reasons.
The Army was forced to rewrite its field manuals to turn “two-man jobs” into “three-person jobs.” This can lead to disaster for any military force that faces recruiting shortfalls and relies, in every instance, on quality rather than quantity.
That didn’t say not being in the military, but the firefighters in LA couldn’t and wouldn’t get men out of a burning house. No shots were being fired and they wouldn’t even do that.
Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks to members of the media at the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 1, 2023. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump has often decried Jack Smith, the special counsel who sought to wage two federal cases against him but who has now resigned.
Trump has repeatedly called the man “Deranged Jack Smith.”
In a report issued this month ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Smith asserted that “with respect to both Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to unlawfully retain power after losing the 2020 election and his unlawful retention of classified documents after leaving office, the Principles [of Federal Proseuction] compelled prosecution.”
“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” he noted.
2. Alvin Bragg
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought a case that led to a jury finding Trump guilty of charges of falsifying business records.
Bragg has been one of the targets of Trump’s ire.
On Truth Social, Trump has called him “Soft on Crime Alvin Bragg” and “Corrupt Soros Funded District Attorney, Alvin Bragg.”
3. Juan Merchan
Trump has also excoriated Judge Juan Merchan, who was involved in Trump’s New York criminal trial.
For example, Trump has called him “Corrupt, Deeply Conflicted, Democrat Appointed Acting Judge Juan Merchan,” and claimed that the judge was aiming to “RIG the Manhattan Sham ‘Trial.’”
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testifies during a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on Feb. 15, 2024 in Atlanta. (Alyssa Pointer-Pool/Getty Images)
The Georgia Court of Appeals declared Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis disqualified from a Trump-related election interference case.
“There is no way such corrupt people can lead a case, and then it gets taken over by somebody else,” Trump told Fox News Digital. “It was a corrupt case, so how could it be taken over by someone else?”
President Donald Trump ‘s administration moved Tuesday to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off.
The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs that could touch on everything from anti-bias training to funding for minority farmers and homeowners. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and insisted on restoring strictly “merit-based” hiring.
Although I have my doubts about election meddling, this is a good start.
The “Bidenbucks” executive order directing federal agencies to boost voter participation has gone the way of the Biden administration.
President Donald Trump eliminated Executive Order 14019, which President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, calling for federal agencies to partner with private “voter-advocacy groups” and to develop “strategic plans.”
Congressional scrutiny and watchdog groups, such as the Foundation for Government Accountability, which sued for records on the order, were “enough to slow-roll implementation of the order to ensure that people, and not partisan bureaucrats” decided the 2024 election, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs for the foundation.
“President Trump should be commended for getting rid of the ‘Bidenbucks’ scandal,” Whitson told The Daily Signal. “This shows the president is committed to stopping weaponized government.”
Whitson later added, “Now, it’s about accountability.”
That and the NGO’s are how they waste money and add waste to the payroll
Sharpton reportedly makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from his nonprofit activist network.
It’s an absolute lie other than to try and ignite the 60’s hate that the country had all but snuffed out until Obama got elected.
I’d like to know how he’s a Reverand also as he never mentions God or eternity. His mantra is racism and money for his activist network. This story is getting tired and is running out of steam.
Hate and activism is how he raises money. Racism is racism regardless of color and he’s a racist.
He’s also a criminal owing somewhere between 16-25 million in back taxes that he won’t pay. The average citizen gets an IRS visit for $600. There are 2 sets of rules
Race activist Al Sharpton announced a boycott against companies that drop enforcing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies after newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issued an executive order against DEI.
Sharpton posted the threat on social media with a statement comparing himself to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.
‘Two companies will then be subjected this spring to a boycott by Black Americans.’
“Why do we have DEl? We have DEl because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEl was a remedy to the racial institutionalized bigotry practice in academia and in these corporations. Now, if you want to put us back in the back of the bus, we gonna do the Dr. King-Rosa Parks on you,” Sharpton said at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C.
This tactic was developed by Jesse Jackson to shake down companies by threatening racial exposure and boycotting. The world has progressed though (unlike Sharpton) and we know that we are not as racist as he claims and that his tactics are KKK era.
DEI is failing on a massive scale because of racist grifters like Sharpton. They’ve been exposed as money grabbers and liars willing to sell out to get paid.
Antifa militants targeted an ICE detention center in Portland, Oregon, on Monday night, just hours after President Donald Trump was sworn into office. The incident was in retaliation to the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations and crackdown on illegal immigration. No arrests were made and the far-left extremist group vowed to carry out more acts of violence against federal immigration officials and facilities, according to social media posts.
Video footage posted to X, formerly Twitter, shows a group of roughly 15 Antifa militants dressed in black bloc riot gear igniting fires and squaring off with federal law enforcement outside the ICE detention center located at 4310 S Macadam Road in Portland. The clip was filmed by an anarchist and uploaded to X under the username @comradecamera at 11:08 pm.
According to the video, Antifa militants encircled officers as they attempted to extinguish one of the fires, with a few of them utilizing megaphones to issue threats and harassment. “I’m so glad you signed up for this,” one Antifa member could be heard yelling, mocking authorities.
I’ve been there a bunch over the years due to relatives. It gets worse every time. It started with make Portland weird, but now it’s just make Portland suck more.
People shit on the street. Businesses board up windows, crazies yell at you in the street and the homeless and drugs are everywhere. They don’t do anything to improve it and it decays every day. I’ve stopped going. I stopped wanting to go years ago, but finally put my foot down.
I don’t go anymore because of the state of the city. It’s due to liberals running things into the ground. It’s not even recognizable as part of the rest of the United States. It’s become it’s own country
I knew he took a swipe at Obama as soon as he announced it. Obama hates people who made America great (and America) who were capitalists.
It’s back to Mt. McKinley now, what it should have been.
If you ask people who William McKinley was, most of them will just shrug.
McKinley was president at the turn of the 20th century. Though little remembered, he was one of the most consequential presidents ever. He was also the third president to be assassinated. He has a VIP admirer here in the early 21st century. That’s Donald Trump.
Trump has a single four-year term in office to accomplish epic change. But so did McKinley. Well, actually, his presidency was a term and nine months. He was killed in September 1901.
McKinley’s election in 1896 reinvigorated the flagging Republican majority. That majority grew out of Lincoln’s 1860 election and the subsequent civil war. Trump’s mission isn’t to reinvigorate an existing majority. No, no… His mission is to break the gridlock that has bedeviled politics throughout the first decades of this century. He means to solidify a Republican majority grounded on America First principles.
Breaking the gridlock began last November. Working-class and middle-income voters backed Trump. He’s embarking on a huge national course correction. His success or failure over the next four years will decide the nation’s fate. If Trump fails, the nation lapses back into the mire of the last quarter of a century — or even worse.
Twenty-five years of unremarkable presidents (including sly Barack Obama) and gridlock culminated in Joe Biden, a dementia patient who was a tool of cynical elites (raise your hand, Barack). Historically, Biden’s administration bottom-dwells along with Jimmy Carter’s and James Buchanan’s presidencies. Just cleaning up the mess left behind by Puppet Joe is challenging enough.
McKinley’s term was remarkable in that he ushered the U.S. onto the world stage. The U.S. began flexing its muscles globally. McKinley annexed Hawaii. That has benefitted American vacationers ever since — oh, and, yes, it proved to have strategic importance. Hawaii was critical to U.S. success in the war with Japan. It remains critical today in relationship to the PRC and Asia Pacific.
McKinley’s presidency hinged on his campaign theme during the 1896 election. He promised voters a “full dinner pail.” He delivered. He erected tariffs that protected domestic markets. He signed into law the gold standard, to the distress of William Jennings Bryan, who was a “free silver” champ. Gold proved a boon to finance and the economy.
Trump has his own version of a full dinner pail. Yes, tariffs are part of it. Her doesn’t intend to build unbreachable walls to trade and foreign investment. What he aims for is fair trade, along with — wait for it — common sense protections. For the better part of this century working- and middle-class Americans have seen wages and living standards deteriorate.
In the nation’s history, no majority coalition has endured without the backing of the Great Middle. From farmers and tradesmen to industrial workers and middle managers to, today, information-age workers and blue-collar folk, a lasting GOP majority happens only with America’s broad middle as the base.
And by not attending the Davos conference, Trump now leads other international leaders in “quiet quitting” globalist environmental rules that have only strangled their economies and hurt their peoples.
Even more tax dollars saved that don’t to the pockets of non-Americans
JERUSALEM – U.S. President Donald Trump kept his campaign promises in the first hours of his second term, signing dozens of executive orders to undo the damage of the previous four years of the Biden presidency.
One of those involved – with immediate effect – the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, as the Trump team has decided to suspend any foreign assistance for 90 days pending reviews.
UNRWA, which is the only U.N. agency that has responsibility for one people – namely the Palestinians – has been in Trump’s crosshairs before.
They hate the Jews worse than the Germans in the 30’s and don’t deserve our money.
Among the actions President Donald Trump took Monday to overturn much of the previous administration’s agenda, Trump signed an executive order requiring that the U.S. recognize only two genders.
“The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” the order states.
The order provides a definition of “woman” as being an adult human female, and “girls” as a juvenile human female. Likewise, under Trump’s order, “man” is defined as adult human males and “boy” as juvenile human males.
Again, just money sent into the pockets of non-Americans over a lie. No amount of money will move the thermometer tenths of a degree. All the while China and India are pumping tons of smog and carbon from their power generators fueled by coal. It’s discrimination against the US
There were reports that the Trump administration was mulling a ‘warrior panel’ to purge the military of the woke brass. The president signed a slate of executive orders to rid the government of federal DEI programs, secure the border, and get America back on track to greatness. We’re not even two days into the Trump presidency, and he’s already firing people.
Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, 61, has been terminated by the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman, the official said.
Fagan has demonstrated leadership deficiencies, operational failures and an inability to advance the strategic objectives of the Coast Guard.
These include the failure to address border security threats, insufficient leadership in recruitment and retention, mismanagement in acquiring key acquisitions such as icebreakers and helicopters, excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and an “erosion of trust” over the mishandling and cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, which was the Coast Guard’s internal investigation into sexual assault cases at the Coast Guard Academy.
Anybody who wants to explain how bad the Biden administration is has to start with COVID.
As such, we knew a few things early on in the pandemic, and they were as follows:
The average age of death from the virus was in the 80s.
It had almost zero effect on young people and children.
Most people who died from it had three or more co-morbidities — that is, they were old as hell, fat as a hog, and really liked smoking, or drinking, or cancer.
It was in the same class of virus as the common cold.
Once we knew these things, especially the last one, the obvious thing to do was to give up. There was no point crippling the strong for the sake of the weak when the weak depend upon the strong and most of the weak aren’t affected by COVID anyway. We should have put the elderly on welfare and expanded Medicaid a bit and let the rest of us run loose. No — we should have subsidized tickets to bath houses and any place kids eat that has a ball pit.
We like to say “hindsight is 20/20,” but this isn’t hindsight at all. Hell, it was 2020. The stuff I mentioned above was the conclusion every person with regular sight came to the second our government called most workers “non-essential.” Yet this society was immediately cleaved in two. All the healthy and thoughtful people were pitted against the sanctimonious do-gooders, the goose-steppers, and the hysterical weaklings. And they beat us into submission, big time.
Almost overnight, millions were thrown out of work, and a vaccine was made up that nobody had properly tested, which no company was liable for and, in its experimental form, until the pandemic hit, had never been approved by the FDA. Joe Biden tried to force every American in a company of more than 100 people to take it or lose his job — around two thirds of the whole country, it turned out. Heart attacks in teenagers went through the roof. People had to choose between gambling their health and losing their homes. Pfizer was completely unaccountable and made a windfall. Mom-and-Pop stores across the nation went bankrupt, and gyms and churches were forced shut, and Walmart and Amazon made a killing.
To make up for the mass unemployment Democrats caused and encouraged, Joe decided to print more money than anyone ever did in American history — a bill worth $1.9 trillion, which singlehandedly made the dollar implode. This made everybody in the country take a giant pay cut, effectively, and now most Americans can’t afford the groceries they were buying in 2019. Or used cars. Or (many times) the rent.
Some people escaped this crushing poverty: the ultra-rich, the people who broke the country, and people who broke into the country. The border was left wide open for nearly Biden’s whole term, and depending on where they went, illegal aliens were given not only free housing and medical care, but also smartphones and thousands of dollars.
Back in 2020, the Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media lost their minds because they just knew President Donald Trump would issue preemptive pardons for his family before he left office in January 2021.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
At the end of Trump’s first term, the president reportedly floated preemptive pardons for friends and family members, including lawyer Rudy Guiliani. Schumer said his preemptive pardons “would be a gross abuse of the presidential pardon authority” during a speech on the Senate floor in December 2020.
Pick one for yourself. It was a disaster for everyone in America, except the Biden family, right up to the end.
Since seizing office in 2021 following a presidential election that was tainted by widespread voter fraud, Joe Biden has overseen rampant inflation, disastrous foreign policy, a rise in poverty, the invasion of over ten million illegal aliens, the persecution and torture of political opponents and an obsession with identity politics, among many other failings.
In addition to his political failings, Biden has also been in a state of constant mental and physical decline that eventually culminated with him being forced to drop out the presidential race and make way for his vice-president Kamala Harris.
Thankfully, the American people recognized Harris’s role in Biden’s disastrous leadership and delivered a landslide election victory to Donald Trump that was too big to rig.
Joe Biden pardoned Tony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the entire J6 Select Committee of liars in his final act as president.
They were all faithful servants to the Democrat machine. Now comes their reward.
Fauci’s policies destroyed millions of lives, bankrupted thousands of businesses, and unnecessarily killed millions around the world.
Liz Cheney, who is currently under investigation by the US House of Representatives, knowingly lied about January 6 and President Trump’s actions that day.
General Milley was one of the architects of the worst American foreign policy blunder in history. His response to his own ineptness was to focus on the woke military agenda. Milley also was making promises with China to warn them about any possible US attack. What a traitor.
Biden just pardoned these individuals – now we know they were all criminals.
They can still be subpoenaed and they don’t have to take the 5th, meaning they have to tell the truth of what they did. It’s doubtful we’ll ever get real justice, so we have to settle that they lost and it’s behind us.
Let it be a lesson to never have these traitors again
There’s a new sheriff in town and the free money is going to dry up.
Rolando Vasquez told NewsNation that there has been a surge in immigrant voluntarily leaving with Trump’s promised mass deportations on the horizon and with Mexico agreeing to take non-Mexican deportees.
Another driving factor is that Cuba and Venezuela generally do not accept deportation flights from the United States but may accept them from Mexico.
“This is causing many migrants to leave on their own, knowing that they’re either going to be deported to their home country or be deported to Mexico,” Vasquez said, adding “The overwhelming majority of them do not want to be in Mexico.”
NewsNation reporter Jorge Ventura also warned sources have told him that newly deported migrants are targets for extortion or even abduction by Mexican cartels and human smugglers.
I worked with Mauricio Goudoy at IBM who thought anyone should be let in. Well, that proved to be a failure now didn’t it. I contended that we have a system for immigrants that is fair and vets the undesirables we now have to deal with. One of us was right, not him. Biden and Obama wanted to overpower the system with Cloward-Piven and it was on the way to working. It needs to be stopped
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, a positive trend is emerging, which is an uptick in self-deportations among illegal immigrants.
“Self-deportation helps Trump to achieve his goals without the government having to spend or do anything,” the Associated Press reported.
Among them was Michel Bérrios, a former leader of a Nicaraguan student uprising, who left the United States just days before the New Year began.
Under the failed presidency of Joe Biden, the U.S. has devolved into a mass dumping ground for unvetted armies of unskilled, uneducated migrants, many of whom are convicted felons in their homelands.
No nation — no matter how wealthy or powerful — can survive if it’s relentlessly under siege and being devoured from the inside-out on a daily basis.
Firstly, why is MLK controversial as a hero? King did a great deal for Civil Rights and inspired millions, undeniably, but there is evidence he also did a number of morally reprehensible things in his personal life, including having affairs with as many as 45 women. And then there’s the fact that part of his most famous speech was plagiarized from another black Republican, Archibald Carey. In 2019 it was reported that, “Secret FBI tapes that accuse Martin Luther King Jr of having extramarital affairs with ’40 to 45 women’ and even claim he ‘looked on and laughed’ as a pastor friend raped a parishioner exist.” Whether all those accusations are completely true or not — the FBI has sometimes been accurate in investigations — King was undeniably a philanderer and plagiarizer. He was not the best representative of black American heroism. So who is? Well, I don’t know if there’s one person in particular. But there are countless noble and essential black heroes in American history who deserve far more recognition than they now get. It is important to celebrate Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, but in light of tomorrow’s holiday, I will focus on black Americans today.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It has been corrupted by the radical left, which tries and push CRT while playing up the accusations of America as a racist country. But even apart from that Democrat framing, I’m going to make the controversial argument that Martin Luther King, Jr. is not the ideal representative of civil rights heroism in American history.
It is long past time that Americans on both sides of the political aisle faced the truth of the racism in America’s past and honored the black American patriots of our history. In terms of its founding principles and ideals, America, of course, was not founded to be a racist country. The opposite is true. As Frederick Douglass once observed, slavery could’ve been abolished without changing a word of the Constitution. Black Americans could vote in most states when the Constitution was first ratified. But unfortunately, as with any great endeavor, America did not always live up to its own ideals, and thousands of people suffered for it. So today, let us take the opportunity to learn about some of the largely unsung black heroes of American history, whose courage and virtue made this nation what it is. You probably haven’t heard of many of them, so perhaps pick one or two out of my list below for further study. James Armistead Lafayette, Booker T. Washington, Elijah Anderson, Joseph Rainey, JamesBaskett, Hiram Revels, Augustus Tolton, Samuel Lee, Bill Robinson, Phillis Wheatley, Medgar Evers, William Still, Milton Olive, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams… every one a hero.
Amazon closed out 2024 with more than 20,000 electric delivery vans manufactured by Rivian in its fleet nationwide. The e-commerce giant highlights on its website that the electric vans are part of its “urgent” climate change initiative to “remove carbon emissions from transportation systems.”
However, Amazon faces mounting criticism for gaslighting the public about its net zero goals and actual operational fleet practices.
Take, for instance, Amazon’s website. Within the Sustainability section, the company laid out its approach to fight so-called global warming: “To reach this target, we’re also expanding the use of zero-emission transportation such as electric delivery vans, cargo e-bikes, and on-foot deliveries, and we engage in industry initiatives to remove carbon emissions from transportation systems like ocean shipping, aviation, and trucking. We’re also using innovative construction techniques and building materials to make our fulfillment centers, data centers, offices, and physical retail locations more sustainable.”
I’m visiting there and it is covered in snow and single digits in temperature.
With just days left in his administration, President Joe Biden is showing America he has priorities.
The wrong priorities, sure — but priorities nonetheless.
Take the victims of the Southern California wildfires. Sure, a lot needs to be done in the area that’s been leveled by epochal blazes where the damage has been exacerbated by desperately unready public officials.
On Thursday, Biden promised to pay for 100 percent of the disaster over the next six months during a briefing from Washington.
“I told the governor and local officials, spare no expense to do what they need to do and contain these fires,” he said during remarks at the White House, calling the fires “devastating” and “catastrophic.”
“We’re doing literally everything we can at a federal level,” he added.
They found 3 people frozen to death last week. How about helping others besides yourself in your final act as a president?
And not much will happen. C02 isn’t the real reason behind the minor climate change that occurs just like it has throughout the history of the earth. It just goes to show you what a farce the media, Al Gore, Greta, John Kerry, the UN, the WEF, and the rest of the Woke climate disaster forces are lying about.
Climate change as they define it is claiming a disaster will come and we have to spend money now to change something no amount of money can affect. It just shifts the money into the pockets of the climate carnival barkers and allows them to control the narrative, in their favor.
A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant in Northern California smoldered Friday after sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, leading to the evacuation of up to 1,500 people. The blaze also shook up the young battery storage industry.
The fire at the Vistra Energy lithium battery plant in Moss Landing generated huge flames and significant amounts of smoke Thursday but had diminished significantly by Friday, Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire Protection District of Monterey County said. Vistra is based in Texas.
“There’s very little, if any, of a plume emitting from that building,” Mendoza said. Crews are not engaging with the fire and are waiting for it to burn out, he said. Letting lithium ion battery fires burn out is not unusual because they burn very hot and are hard to put out.
No injuries have been reported but residents raised concerns about hazardous gases being released into the air.
The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season, which saw more than 4 million acres burn, spewed almost twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of carbon dioxide reductions made since 2003, according to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution.
Researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.
“When we look at the contribution of the 2020 wildfires, it becomes almost like a new sector of emissions in the economy,” said Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a lead author of the research. “Really, we’re about double the reductions.”
DEI favors some groups over others, be it because of either social pressure or Corporate lending practices (Blackrock).
Zuckerberg is cleaning house, and eliminating the “inclusive” culture that Sheryl Sanberg brought in. Inclusive meaning hiring certain groups based on gender or race.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly trash-talked his former top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg during his visit to Mar-a-Lago, blaming her for implementing controversial DEI initiatives at Facebook that “encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace.”
Zuckerberg, who has drawn criticism for cozying up to the new administration, made the comment during a sit-down with President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers at his Florida retreat shortly after the Republican’s historic election victory in November, according to the New York Times.
The discussions on Nov. 27 — which included Stephen Miller, who will take over as White House deputy chief of staff — covered a range of hot-button topics such as the administration’s expected crackdown on immigration, and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Times reported.
Miller told Zuckerberg that the billionaire mogul had “an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on Trump’s terms,” according to the Times.
This is the second time in a week girls have framed innocent men. Behavior like this has been going on since the Duke Lacrosse hate hoax. Why? It says social media TikTok trend. Some people are not capable of living a real life, forgoing it for likes online.
Five Catholic college students have been charged with luring a 22-year-old soldier before they falsely accused him of being a pedophile as part of ‘Catch a Predator’ TikTok trend.
Assumption University students Kelsy Brainard, 18, Easton Randall, 19, Kevin Carroll, 18, Isabella Trudeau, 18, and Joaquin Smith, 18, appeared in Massachusetts court on Thursday and pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and kidnapping charges.
A sixth defendant was separately arraigned in juvenile court because they are underage.
Brainard is also charged with witness intimidation. Carroll was charged with assault and battery after he reportedly admitted to slamming the victim’s head in the car door.
Prosecutors say Brainard met the man on Tinder, told him she was 18, and invited him to the Catholic school in Worcester on October 1 so they could ‘try and hook up.’
The alleged victim, a 22-year-old active-duty military service member, said he was in town for his grandmother’s funeral and went on Tinder because he ‘just wanted to be around people that were happy.’
Brainard greeted him when he arrived at the school, before she led him into a basement lounge, per court documents.
story
What is with these girls. How were they brought this way to be so cruel and vindictive just to f*ck over guys? Do they not have something better to do, anything? What the hell did their parents do bringing them up this way?
Los Angeles was forced to slash funding for the fire department after Mayor Karen Bass awarded gilded contracts to city workers, a review of public records shows.
The trouble began early last year after Bass settled contract negotiations with public sector unions. In dozens of agreements, the city’s civilian employees pocketed 20 to 25 percent wage hikes over five years and other goodies that cost the city $4.5 billion over the life of the contracts, according to an analysis by the city’s administrative officer, the City Journal reported.
A series of unintended payouts stemming from judgments against the city in personal injury lawsuits brought Los Angeles to the brink.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom received a briefing about the area damaged by the Palisades wildfire, with others present in a parking lot.
50 years of “friendship” gets sacrificed to win an election. Screw whoever you have to run over to get there. These are some of the most shallow and morally vapid people in America. That’s what politics does to some. They are the backstabbers
The Bidens appear dug in as they prepare to leave the White House Monday.
Now, the outgoing first lady suggested in a separate interview she’s still harboring a grudge against longtime friend Nancy Pelosi, who helped lead the charge to pressure the Democratic incumbent to step aside after his disastrous debate performance against Trump.
“Like I said,” Jill says now, seated in the Green Room of the White House on the first Sunday of January, “I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships.”
Her face, nearly pearlescent with a lustrous foundation, betrays no particular emotion. She’s holding a china cup.
Tea. With honey and lemon.
“It’s been on my mind a lot lately, and — “
Jill pauses.
“We were friends for 50 years.” She is using her teacher’s voice now. “It was disappointing.”
Joe Biden told USA Today in an exclusive sit-down interview that he believed he could have won another four years in the White House if he stayed in the race and didn’t bow out and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris. He cited his internal polling at the time, but didn’t mention public polling that showed Trump trouncing the incumbent and signs that Republicans could make gains in other races due to Biden’s unfavorable numbers
Longtime Republican turned never-Trumper Sarah Longwell scoffed at the idea Biden could have won.
“Kamala Harris saved his a– from getting absolutely annihilated and, also, taking many more senators and many more house members down with him,” Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, said on “The Next Level” podcast.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) said during an interview on Sunday that then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did not allow Republicans to be briefed on the terrorist threats facing the United States last year because he did not want the information to leak and damage Vice President Kamala Harris during the elections.
Britt made the remarks during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked about the subject that Republicans repeatedly brought up to Schumer last year. The topic comes two weeks after a terrorist killed more than a dozen people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day.
Britt said that she was extremely concerned about the potential for future terrorist attacks in the U.S.
“When you rewind to where this came from, in my opinion, this is a direct result of Biden’s failed policies across the world,” she said. “When you look at the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, we know that that created a vacuum. It created a vacuum that allowed ISIS-K to continue to flourish.”
“Our conversations surrounding that and our request of Senator Schumer was, make sure that we understand this, so that we can do everything that we need to,” she continued. “This is also right after Director Wray said that he saw blinking lights everywhere he turned.”
Two teen girls in Louisiana have been charged with a felony for trying to “frame a male high school teacher for sending inappropriate messages to a student.”
Details about the case have been released by Craig Webre, the sheriff for Lafourche Parish.
On Jan. 6, 2025, each girl was charged with one count of false swearing for the purpose of violating public health or safety, a felony, cyberstalking, and online impersonation, the law enforcement report said.
They were placed on electronic monitoring and released to the custody of their parents.
Webre said, “Our juvenile detectives are diligent and take claims of inappropriate behavior very seriously. They are, however, equally serious about false claims. Someone’s life can be instantly ruined by a false allegation, and I am proud that our investigators were able to get to the bottom of this.
“Technology has made it very easy for people to try to manipulate the truth, but technology also makes it easy for investigators to ultimately find the truth,” he said.
Local school Supt. Jarod Martin said, “We are shocked and appalled to learn of the actions of two of our students. The allegations against one of our teachers were false and malicious, and we appreciate the efficiency of investigators in uncovering the source of these messages.
“Such attacks on a teacher’s credibility and reputation are concerning and can inhibit their ability to effectively educate our children. We are committed to investigating all allegations of misconduct in order to provide a safe environment conducive to learning and working for all of our students and staff.”
The investigation into the case was opened only a week before Christmas when there was a report from “a concerned party” that a teacher was “sending inappropriate messages to a 16-year-old female student.”
The sheriff explained, “Detectives learned she and a 15-year-old friend were allegedly engaged in conversations involving inappropriate messages from the teacher via an online instant messaging platform.”
The investigation included interviews with those involved, search warrants being issued for the contents of phones and various messaging accounts, and more.
“The investigation revealed that the two teenage girls had fabricated messages, created fake accounts, and shared screenshots with friends in an effort to frame the teacher for sending inappropriate messages,” the sheriff’s office said.
This must be asshole day. It’s my 3rd post in a row about celebtards or politicians acting like one.
The net is James Woods is a conservative in Hollywood, very rare. He thought his house burned down and Olberman thought it was great and rubbed it in. It turned out that Woods’ house didn’t get burned, but no recant from Keith.
This man is deranged. I used to like him when he did Sportscenter with Dan Patrick, but then he went cuckoo with the liberal politics, I mean unhinged.
anyway, here it is.
No matter what tragedy plagues our existence, Keith Olbermann is the last person who needs to give his two cents.
The former correspondent for networks like CNN and ESPN did just that on Wednesday, posting to social media platform X on the California wildfires and how they’ve impacted conservatives in that state.
He didn’t just blast those on the other end of the political spectrum, he outright stated they were not “human.”
Olbermann was responding to host of “Last Week on X” Angela Belcamino who screenshotted a post by University of Missouri Professor Karen Piper who relished in actor James Woods losing his home.
Belcamino put out a call to “Be better,” seeing Piper’s despicable post as something that shouldn’t be the norm when people are having their lives destroyed.
Olbermann couldn’t resist chiming in.
Clearly loving that Woods lost his home, Olbermann proceeded to take a swipe at his acting career for Woods’ role in the 1992 film “Citizen Cohn” where Woods played Roy Cohn, chief counsel to former Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Olbermann is known for consistently giving his slimy political take on X but seizing the moment when so many people who politically disagree with him see their lives in ruin is a new low.
This is, simply put, truly evil of him.
In his warped reality, one can imagine Olbermann sees himself as the torchbearer of all that is good and right in this world.
The only past office holder or spouse not attending. After all the rhetoric about them acting better when others didn’t, she shows her true colors. Way to act like a child.
This is the same woman who charged taxpayers mega-millions for her vacations and top-shelf booze of which she indulged in both in excess.
Former first lady Michelle Obama is set to snub President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next Monday after skipping former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week — where she would have sat next to the one and future commander-in-chief.
“Former President Barack Obama is confirmed to attend the 60th Inaugural Ceremonies. Former first lady Michelle Obama will not attend the upcoming inauguration,” the Office of Barack and Michelle Obama said in a statement to the Associated Press.
The former first lady’s team did not provide a reason for skipping the inauguration, but Michelle Obama, 60, has been an impassioned critic of Trump, 78, over the past eight years.
Her husband, former President Barack Obama, sat next to Trump at the funeral and was spotted on camera laughing and bantering with his successor, drawing worldwide headlines.
All other former presidents and their spouses are expected to attend the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony, including George W. and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Joe and Jill Biden.
Both Michelle and Barack Obama attended Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017.
The former first lady’s antipathy for Trump was on display during the 2024 campaign, in which she and her husband campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a major sign of where things are headed in the coming months, Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company is dropping its current DEI policies.
People are interpreting this as an indication of how things are changing now that a second Trump administration is about to take power and that is probably correct.
Meta, Amazon ditch DEI programs as tech giants move away from ‘woke’ agenda
Meta and Amazon reportedly killed their DEI programs in recent days – moves that come as both Big Tech giants attempt to cozy up to President-elect Donald Trump.
On Friday, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads – said it will no longer take the controversial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies into consideration before hiring, training and picking suppliers, Axios reported.
According to a memo sent by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, she said the company is pivoting away from DEI because the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”
A Meta spokesperson reached by The Post confirmed the memo, which was first obtained by Axios.
Meta’s about-face came just days after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would scrap censoring free speech on its popular social media platforms.
Both Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have recently met with Trump as part of an ongoing thaw in once-frosty relations between the Republican and the tech industry.
Zuckerberg appears to be serious about this and has even removed the tampons from the men’s rooms.
I heard Adam Corolla talk about this last week. He lives there and knows what is going on. He’s not afraid to tell the truth either because he can’t be canceled.
Now this….
By now, we all know the left’s twisted environmental policies and DEI agenda are destroying the country from the inside out. But nowhere is that more evident these days than in California, where the state is literally burning to the ground thanks to both failed movements.
IT’S THE HOMELESS AND ILLEGALS WHO LIVE IN THE HILLS DOING DRUGS THAT START THE FIRES, NOT CLIMATE CHANGE
It’s plain as day that the left’s fire “management” is a colossal disaster. Los Angeles is literally ablaze and burning to the ground as we speak. But did you know there’s a deep, dark secret—one that’s the worst-kept secret among firefighters? They know all about it but are forbidden to speak up, fearing it’ll clash with the left’s plans. The truth is, many of these fires are caused by careless homeless people, and firefighters are fully aware of it. But according to local news outlets, they’re not allowed to admit it on air.
We are continuing to watch the developments related to Greenland, which have gotten especially interesting after President-elect Donald Trump tasked his pick for Ambassador to Denmark with persuading the Danes to sell us the resource-rich Arctic land.
Shortly after that announcement, Greenland suffered a major power outage due to a downed transmission line. The blackout plunged the region into darkness as temperatures dropped below -27 degrees Fahrenheit (-33°C).
This was soon followed by Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede calling for independence from Denmark, marking a significant shift in the rhetoric surrounding the Arctic island’s future.
Trump’s son later went on an “unofficial” visit to Greenland. At that time, I speculated that persuading the people of Greenland to become an independent territory of the United States might be the best deal that could be placed on the table.
Intriguingly, Egede recently had a joint press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen during which he said that he’s ready to speak with Trump as ‘the status quo is no longer an option‘.
My wife’s Danish relatives, to whom I’ve had to associate in the last 3 decades of marriage finally can’t hide their contempt for Trump and the USA any longer.
In dealing with them and many Europeans throughout my business career, it’s clear that trashing the US is their favorite sport (not football/soccer). They keep trying to re-make America by their rules, rather than accept the history of a country that has surpassed centuries of European culture.
A point of note is that while they are trashing America, they are wearing Levis or Carhartt, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, and regularly vacationing in America all while bitching that it isn’t Danish enough. They love shopping here because it is so much cheaper because of their 70% tax rate which pays for their “FREE” education and healthcare (that is just above malpractice)
The press coverage and the feedback I get is that the Danes are livid that Trump wants Greenland.
One of her nieces posted that Elizabeth Warren is the “bomb”
My wife also has a brother who lives in Greenland and the natives there hate Denmark owning them, but subsist off of the money that Denmark pours into them yearly. They’d rather be Greenlandish and free but realize they get a heck of a lot more from the US than they would Denmark, given the economic difference.
The US has had a military base there for a long time and they love the Americans in Greenland, more than the Danes
Back to my wife’s relatives, the Danes hate Trump. He is as atypical of how the Danes think they think (Janteloven) as possible. They are as averous as any other group despite what they claim. She’s got nephews who brag about the price of everything they bought and the status of the item. With Trump, They can’t handle the thought of an alpha male actually being successful and achieving more than others because of hard work and outsmarting others (like my wife’s relatives). Mostly, he’s not a socialist like a lot of thinking in Denmark so they can’t grasp it so they use the “typical American” and hate him. They actually don’t know why other than their press has told them to.
I had to cut them off from social media for the childish trashing of him for the last 8 years. I haven’t missed anything though other than them being the compass for what is wrong by going against everything they think is right (Warren/Pocahantis, Biden, Kamala, Obama, Obamacare, and the list goes on). So Trump lives rent free in their heads now as they seethe every time he wins (and wins again).
Here is an unscientific poll that backs up my observations.
A new survey found that a majority of Greenland respondents support joining the United States.
According to a poll by Patriot Polling released Sunday, 57.3 percent of respondents approve of Greenland becoming part of the U.S. Just 37.4 percent disapproved of the potential acquisition, and 5.3 percent are undecided about the move.
President-elect Trump has in recent days floated the idea of acquiring Greenland, a Danish territory. He said owning Greenland is an “absolute necessity.”
While the survey only polled 416 people in Greenland and is the first of its kind, it signals support for Trump’s larger international plans.
I think Trump just wants a bigger military footprint and access to rare earth minerals (and petroleum). He is a master of negotiations and everyone should be happy in the end, except my Wife’s family, but I don’t care what they think. Their bias doesn’t allow them to think rationally about Trump and America anyway. Not that I care what they think anymore.
This is the fish that California justified ruining the water supply for farmers and firefighters years ago.
The tiny Delta Smelt fish have not been seen in the wild in California in over a decade.
And yet, California Democrats flushed annual water flow into the ocean to save this little fish that they can’t even find in its natural habitat. Now several cities are burnt to the ground.
They sacrificed entire communities for a fish that doesn’t exist.
A 2021 report by Dan Bacher in the Sacramento News revealed that there have been NO DELTA SMELT seen in the wild since 2012. They’re extinct.
For the seventh September in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has caught zero Delta smelt during its Fall Midwater Trawl Survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The last time Delta smelt – an indicator species for the broader ecological health estuary – were found in CDFW’s September survey was in 2015. Only 5 were caught by state biologists at the time.
After that, the only year that Delta smelt were caught during the entire four-month survey was in 2016, when a total of 8 smelt were reported.
The final results of Fish and Wildlife’s four-month survey of pelagic (open water) fish species, conducted from September through mid-December, won’t be available until around the start of next year. The current September 2022 data is available here on the annual state surveys webpage.
After years of fire and smoke in rural Northern California—evacuations, death and destruction, broken communities, lost homes—watching Los Angeles burn feels surreal but inevitable. This could have been avoided, but we knew it was coming.
For years, we have sounded the alarm to anyone who would listen. San Francisco and Los Angeles ignored us.
Now Los Angeles—one of the great cities on earth, a unique American gem—is in ashes.
For anyone who wants to understand how we got here, this is what happened.
California has not built a new major water reservoir since 1979.
The state’s last major reservoir project was completed in 1979, when the population was some 23 million. It’s been 50 years, there are now 39 million residents, and progress on the storied California Water Project has stopped.
In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 1, funding a $7.5 billion bond to construct new water reservoirs and dams, with a deadline of January 1, 2022.
It’s now 2025, and no reservoirs have been built. Proposed projects remain mired in the bureaucratic morass of California politics.
There is no reason for California to experience water shortage. The natural climate is cyclical: years of low rainfall punctuated by years of extreme rain. Eleven months ago, at the start of 2024, we were enjoying several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras and the most rain we’d had in 25 years. The reservoirs were overflowing.
Year after year, massive, swollen rivers in Northern California send water out to the Pacific Ocean, while government agencies scold citizens for watering their lawns.
The state is spending millions to REMOVE existing water infrastructure.
If failure to build new water projects for a growing state population weren’t bad enough, Gavin Newsom and his feckless administration is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing water infrastructure in fire-prone Northern California.
The Klamath Dam was removed in 2023.
Scott Dam is next: a century-old dam system upon which some 600,000 people rely in agricultural communities stretching from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay.
The government wants to remove this dam, impoverishing the farm communities and rural residents who rely on it, to “improve salmon habitat.”
Photo credit USFS. Lake Pillsbury is a scenic reservoir created by Scott Dam, critical water infrastructure serving rural and ag communities and 600,000 users from Potter Valley to Bodega Bay. Gavin Newsom’s administration is set to remove this dam, which will run Lake Pillsbury dry.
Several lethal fires have hit this region in the past few years, including the Redwood Complex and Sonoma Complex fires in 2017, and the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018. Removing their water is a cruel blow for a community still reeling from those disasters, leaving them defenseless when the next fire comes.
Water cuts to farmers and citizens over a 3-inch fish led to empty reservoirs.
Farms were run dry and pumps shut off to preserve the three-inch “Delta Smelt”
California is the leading agricultural state in the nation. But for years, politicians slashed water allotments and shut off ag pumps to farmers in an effort to save a finger-length, minnow-like fish called the Delta Smelt.
When President Trump took office, he said California should consider updating its water infrastructure so farmers could grow crops and cities didn’t have to burn to the ground over a minnow.
This enraged Democrat activists. Their righteous indignation fueled many think pieces about the Delta Smelt.
For all that spilled ink, the restoration efforts didn’t work. Outside hatcheries, the Delta Smelt are all but gone.
So are scores of farmers, their land run dry by politicians in Sacramento.
This approach is typical of the consistent preference displayed by California politicians for the perceived prosperity of any animal, species, or ecosystem over the welfare and survival of its citizens.
After years of anti-human water and land policy, neglecting critical infrastructure, when the fires started last night in Los Angeles, there was no water in the fire hydrants.
Removing grazing, control burns, and management left California an unnatural tinder box.
According to U.C. Berkeley rangeland science professor Lynn Huntsinger, cattle remove some 12 billion pounds of dry biomass from California’s grasslands and woodlands every year.
“Cattle are the largest fire prevention tool we have in the state,” she told me, “But people are largely unaware of it.”
Lynn Huntsinger, professor of rangeland ecology and management at UC Berkeley, calls cattle grazing California’s most valuable and important fire prevention tool.
Environmentalists blame cows for climate change. Beef cattle are responsible for less than 2% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Wildfire is responsible for between 15% and 30% of U.S. emissions—and that number appears to be getting worse.
Prescribed fires and forest management have also gone out of fashion. For centuries, Native tribes practiced control burning to manage the natural fire risk inherent to California’s ecosystem.
They might as well have Dylan Mulvaney drinking a beer with this girl. Get this. I’ve never seen a bigger waste of $750 K in my life…. so far.
The firestorm is still in progress in Los Angeles, priorities first and foremost are saving of lives and property. The calamity in Los Angeles is still early in the situation, ongoing, and not yet under control, but some basic facts can be established at this point in time.
Janisse Quiñones was hired with a $750,000 Salary, nearly twice that of her predecessor.
LADWP operates ten major active reservoirs and over 107 smaller storage facilities, all of which create operational flexibility to balance water supplies and customer demands.
73% is purchased water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) which is both an aqueduct to State Water Projects in upper California and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
15% is water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct which is fed from water close to the Nevada Border.
10% is local groundwater.
2% is recycled water.
LADWP Strategic Initiatives reflect Religion of Woke-ism
Now that some of the basic facts are established, the reality is that one of the largest urban fires ever experienced in the U.S is in progress. It looks like World War II-era firebombing in progress. The severe water shortages, War on Dams, and ideological virtue signaling are well known in Governor Newsom’s California. But Water and Power are essentially apolitical and based on science, fact, and best practices of civil engineering, correct? A peek at the LADWP Strategic Initiatives refutes that luddite view. Here are the four, strategic imperatives for LADWP:
Leading with Equity
Clean Energy Future
Resiliency and Reliability
Our Sustainable Water Future
What do these pithy titles mean? They are abstract, street theater platitudes that disguise hard-core leftist retribution intended to collapse and destroy existing society. People are dead and dying, and large swaths of Los Angeles are being destroyed because of this Religion of Woke-ism. This Religion could not care less about facts, science, efficient delivery of public services, or reality. Earlier this year, Janisse appeared on a podcast with a title, “Why Equity is Key to Solving the Climate Emergency w/ DWP CEO & Chief Engineer Janisse Quinones.” DEI hires are not focused on efficient delivery of effective services to all the Citizens. Controlling these positions is another opportunity to weaponize government against the Citizen for angry retribution clothed in George Takai happy talk.
As Scott Adams has pointed out, “Having the wrong leaders with the wrong priorities gets you everything we are witnessing this week”.
Pervasive Public Service Corruption in Los Angeles and California
I’m all for highly paid Civil Servants. But, I believe in the Singapore Model, in which Civil Servants are highly paid, but in return are expected to perform with absolute fidelity, deliver outstanding results, and will be held to account for their performance.
And if they don’t meet these requirements, they get shown the door, or worse. Quiñones has had a meteoric rise. Now there is a Biblical level disaster under her watch. I’m not upset that Quiñones was able to negotiate such a healthy salary, but she should be held accountable, which also means a return of salary, fines, and possible prosecution.
If one has not been paying attention, the Los Angeles region, under a Blue monoculture, has been a cesspool of Public Sector Corruption for decades. Even the New York Times gets it right occasionally and says, “Prosecutors say that corruption is rising in California cities as one-party rule, inattentive voters and weakened news media have reduced the traditional checks on power”. Chinese malign influence has been front and center in the pervasive corruption of California:
“A Chinese real estate company was fined $4 million and placed on five years probation (sic) Friday for bribing former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar with more than $1.5 million in cash, gambling trips and escorts in exchange for the then-councilman’s support of a planned downtown hotel project.
Although he was also charged, Shen Zhen New World I’s billionaire owner Wei Huang fled to China after the charges were announced and has never appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom in connection with the case.”
The DEI Cult brings equal misery, death, and destruction for all
Woke-ism and DEI are not about reconciliation, they are about retribution and intentional collapse of society – Marxist and Maoist core tenets. Hosea 8:7 (KJV) is timeless in its guidance, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.
That’s exactly what is happening as Newsom was shifting into “Trump Proofing” California, whatever that meant. The results of years of Blue, One Party is coming together in a cataclysm. When everything is virtue signaling and the basics of math, planning, civil engineering, and agnostic, non-politicized science-based decision making is considered a manifestation of privileged culture, anything goes. And when anything goes, anything goes and society collapses.
If Janisse Quiñones was able to negotiate a $750,000 salary, good on her. But her focus has not been on the best delivery of services to the Citizens. With her own words, she is focused on the wrong things. Pay can be great for great leaders, but one has to take responsibility for the bad as well as the good. $750,000 a year brought mediocrity and failure, and Janisse was the one holding the bag when the lights came on and exposed the corrupt nature of the Religion of Wokeness. Time for her, and others in California, to pay up.
In honor of Denny from the Grouchy Old Cripple who is long gone now and missed, I decided to bring this back, for now. Here is the first one.
While Karen Bass and Gavin Newsome let LA burn, they were woke losers and hopefully LA will recover and the liberal voting in of incompetents will stop.
There have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.
But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”
And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.
He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.
California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.
We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.
It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.
The second breakdown was the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Africa. You tell me why the mayor of the third-largest city in the United States at fire season, when she had been warned and warned for days on end that the Santa Ana winds were up to 100 miles an hour in the evening, and there was a danger of fire, and she goes off to Africa for the inauguration of the president of Ghana.
With all due respect, Mayor, but who cares? You have an obligation to the 6 million people of greater Los Angeles. And then we have the fire chief. I don’t really care that she’s LGBTQ, I don’t care [about] any of that. All I do care is her emphases. She’s been bragging for the last two years that her goal was to make sure [the Fire Department] was diverse and inclusive.
That can be good if it’s competent. But when you announce that 70% of your hiring will not be meritocratic, but will be based on diversity, equity, inclusion, then you’re not putting the interest of your constituents first.
There were not even enough, there wasn’t enough water pressure in Pacific Palisades. Pacific Palisades is not where I live. It’s one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the United States. If they don’t have water, then no one’s going to get water, believe me.
There’s not enough insurance. There were famous actors that didn’t have insurance. Why? Because industry is overregulated, it’s fraught with people who make fraudulent claims, and the insurance industry knows that California is hostile to it, but more importantly that it will never clean up its forest or take preventive, time-tried, ancient protocols to lessen the dangers of fire.
And so put it all together, whether it’s a deliberate policy to not store water, not preserve water. Last year was one of the wettest years that we’ve had. We’ve had three out of the last four years have been very wet. We had a huge snowpack. We had rivers that were running in 19th-century fashion, but out to the sea to save the delta smelt.
So, it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI-Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.
Gavin Newsom was fiddling, as he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable, this system’s breakdown.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are seen here Nov. 16, 2023, at a joint press conference. (Sarah Reingewirtz/ Media News Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.
So, we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property.
And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion. And Karen Bass should resign. She came to the airport, back from Africa. She had nothing to say. She was confronted at the airport: “Why were you in Africa? Why did you cut the fire department?”
They cut the fire department by almost $18 million. They gave fire protective equipment to Ukraine’s first responders, and she had nothing to say. She had nothing to say because she couldn’t say anything.
I don’t want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad, and if this continues, and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a Third World country if we’re not in parts already.
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:
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.”
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don’t want to fly anymore because I don’t trust that they are hiring the best at Boeing, The FAA, Air Traffic Controllers, the Airline Pilots or any aspect of travel.
I want the best pilot and an airplane that stays in the air with all of it’s parts. I don’t want some ATC to ram 2 jets together because they can’t read a radar screen.
American just lost and has to get rid of DEI, but the remnants are there. Hire on talent and ability, not on quota and skin color
American Airlines (AA) will no longer be recruiting and hiring based on the dictates of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. The company admitted that the policy is a violation of federal laws that protect equal access to employment, America First Legal announced Tuesday.
So then why did they do it in the first place? Did they think leftist priorities were immune to federal laws?
The US Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) informed America First Legal about the decision. “American companies must return to using merit—not the desire to check a DEI box—to select the most skilled and qualified employees. American Airlines’ agreement with the OFCCP is AFL’s latest victory in our fight to put illegal discrimination on the no-fly list,” said Will Scolinos, America First Legal Counsel.
Wow. Who would have guessed that hiring based on merit rather than skin color is the moral way to go?
Question: Are they stopping this racist hiring practice because they suddenly realized how evil it was? Or are they just doing it because they got caught?
The decision came as a result of a complaint filed by AFL against AA with the OFCCP, which accused the company of not complying with federal law even though the airline does a massive amount of business with the federal government and has been the beneficiary of $140 million in federal contracts since 2008. In order to qualify for those contracts, AA had to promise to adhere to the Executive Order 11246 that prohibits discrimination in hiring, promotion, or employee training based of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It has failed to do so and has embraced discrimination based on race and sex in its hiring practices, Cadet Academy program and promotional activity.
Additionally, given that air travel is a huge deal, how could they have thought box-checking was the best way to hire people? Sounds like someone who was hired by checking a box made this policy the status quo.
It’s unclear how leftist corporations can get away with breaking such laws; if the roles were reversed and a certain skin color they do not prioritize was uplifted, they would never let it go. And while both are equally immoral, only one barely gets a slap on the wrist when the act is committed. And to say these people have double standards would be an understatement.
They come for the free money, housing and food. Biden has shipped them in and shipped them around the US. All the while, Hurricane Helene victims are freezing to death while FEMA does nothing.
In Europe, they suck off of the hind teat of socialism. Free money for being there, except for the legal residents who foot the bill
Germany’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU) candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz says that Germany cannot accept more Syrians from Syria and that those Syrians who are not integrated should return to Syria.
Notably, Merz is pointing to the sky-high levels of unemployment among many of the country’s Syrian population. The chancellor candidate, during an appearance on ARD, said the “one-third” who “work and are integrated” in Germany can stay, “but the two-thirds do not work, they are overwhelmingly young men, many of them can go back, and many must go back.”
He said that a push to return many of these migrants must occur, saying:
“We must now speak very openly with them and say: You have no place in Germany in the long term… We have long been of the opinion that at least people could have returned to the north a long time ago, and now to other parts of the country as well.”
There are currently 1 million Syrians in the country, and those not working have become a major burden for German taxpayers. According to government data, 210,000 are employed, while 250,000 are currently “looking for work.” Another 150,000 are unemployed.
Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government, there is a European-wide push to return Syrians to their country; however, the ruling German government has expressed caution about the security situation in the country.
The WEF and global government types know they can break down civilizations, customs, traditions and hundreds of years of history by bringing in illegals to ruin the economies and enact the Cloward-Piven strategy.
The shooting of United Healthcare’s CEO, Bryan Thompson, has engrossed the public. The shooting itself was a well-planned and audacious act. But when police apprehended the handsome, Ivy League-educated killer, many were disappointed. They were rooting for him to escape.
The killing has proven more popular than I would have expected. Moreover, this popularity is not confined to the left wing. People across the spectrum have shared their frustrations with the healthcare system and found themselves sympathetic to the killer.
An All-American Murderer
When Luigi Mangione’s background and manifesto were revealed, he appeared to have a good life and a promising future. His social media suggested an intelligent freethinker, whose views and motives were neither clearly left- nor right-wing. He had his first significant encounter with the health system after a serious back injury, and the experience seems to have radicalized him.
His crime is a classic example of “propaganda by the deed.” People who acknowledge intellectually that murder is wrong seem totally unemotional about that conclusion. There’s widespread support for the shooter, while the victim has been dehumanized and reduced to a symbolic avatar for the industry and its sins.
Almost everyone has some story of being abused by the modern health insurance system. It’s even worse for the self-employed, who pay out of pocket for insurance. After paying premiums for years, the injured find themselves in a Kafkaesque battle with their insurance company over coverage, copays, and approved care.
The False Promise of Obamacare
It was not supposed to be this way.
Obamacare was supposed to provide universal coverage and make health care more affordable. After all, the law was called the Affordable Care Act. When the Obama administration proposed the law in 2009, it made many promises to sell it to the public and Congress.
One of the more famous ones was that “if you like your doctor, you can keep him.” Another was that if you like your insurance, you can keep that too. Finally, we were told this law would make us all healthier, as uninsured people would no longer wait until health problems became catastrophic before seeking care, typically in the emergency room.
This was the signature initiative of the Obama presidency, and the law has done none of these things. Care has become significantly more expensive. The quality of care has also gone down, with out-of-pocket expenses rising because of higher deductibles and out-of-pocket limits. Doctors are frequently dropped from plans, leaving patients unable to maintain continuity of care with those whom they have come to trust.
The country has not gotten any healthier, in spite of the enormous amount of money changing hands. The complexity of Obamacare has also led to the proliferation of highly paid billing specialists, administrators, and other overhead, none of which contributes directly to better care, but all of it costs money.
That MF looked right into the camera and lied to us. It’s what Marxists do. I’ve seen in the UK, EU and Canada that socialized or Government run healthcare just means less quality, longer waits for worse coverage and care. Obama only lied to the believers in him. I knew almost everything he said was a lie
Maybe we can stop Marxists like Obama and Kenji Brown from destroying America based on their free ride.
After the Supreme Court’s decision to axe unfair, DEI-driven, race-based admissions, some law schools are seeing a sharp decline in black and Hispanic students. The steepest drop is happening at Harvard. The so-called “pinnacle of excellence” sacrificed its reputation to prop up the left’s DEI charity agenda. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, Harvard will be forced to admit students based on merit, not skin color—which is a win for everyone. After all, no one should want a handout they didn’t earn.
However, not everyone sees it that way. The folks over at The New York Times are tied up in knots over the decline in racist school admissions. Apparently, they’d rather universities pick students by skin color than by excellence—and they’re perfectly fine watching greatness take a nosedive across business, education, medicine, and beyond. And by the sound of their new article, it seems NYT is terrified there will be fewer Barack Obamas and Ketanji Brown Jacksons in the ranks.
We’ve covered the DEI disaster from every angle, and it all adds up to the same failed equation: your business, country, hospital, or university can’t be the best if you’re hiring subpar candidates just to fill a progressive “guilt quota.” We recently published a fascinating article exposing the truth about DEI Black students at Penn State. It’s a real eye-opener.
Isn’t it ironic how the left touts itself as the champion of fighting “disinformation,” yet they’re the ones silencing the truth and punishing anyone brave enough to speak out? This is especially true when it comes to topics like black crime statistics and DEI students who aren’t cutting the mustard. So, if you dare to talk about real, raw issues, especially involving black students, you’re instantly labeled a “racist,” blacklisted, and shut down. That’s exactly what’s happening to University of Pennsylvania Professor Amy Wax, who dared to discuss the fact that no black students made it into the top quarter of Penn Law School’s class of 2023.
Of all of Professor Amy Wax’s myriad sins against the Woke worldview, the one that seems to have gotten the Penn Law School administration most obsessively angry with her was what she told Brown U. economist Glenn Loury during a 2017 podcast discussing the “downside of affirmative action. According to CNN:
“Here is a very inconvenient fact Glenn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half,” Wax told Brown University professor Glenn Loury in a video of the interview that recently gained attention.
They’ve turned out robots instead of critical thinkers. They are restricting school choice, harming millions of kids. Not one accomplishment on behalf of the students since it was created. The NEA and Teachers Unions are going strong and pay themselves well for incompetence though.
The New York Times reported December 4 that math and science test scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders have been essentially stagnant since 1995. Nor have they have been stagnant near the top — lots of countries outrank us — but rather in the middling middle. American elementary/middle school students perform behind Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, England, Ireland, and Poland.
“’This is alarming,’” opined a Department of Education commissioner.
Yes, it is, but perhaps not just for the reasons the article identifies.
The spin of the article is that scores are down and American kids have lost significant ground as a result of the pandemic. Author Dana Goldstein says the results corroborate “a large body of research showing significant academic declines since the Covid-19 pandemic began.” “Experts are debating potential causes,” reports Goldstein, including maybe the fact that American public schools were shuttered comparatively longer than in other countries.
Let me argue that spin is far too limited and selective.
While the “experts” debate, American kids continue to move through the public-school industry, advanced perhaps more for social promotion than mastery of skills. Eventually, they’ll hit college where freshman year will be spent in math remediation before they can undertake a required general education math or science course. I know. I worked as an associate dean at a private, tuition-driven Catholic university. One year, a fifth of the freshman class was in math remediation prior to regular college-level math classes.
You can argue the young people shouldn’t be admitted and it’s not a college’s role to make up deficiencies in elementary and secondary schooling. But somebody’s got to do it. These kids relied on what their schools told them, credentialing them with diplomas after going through multiple “proficiency tests” (that more often were “teaching to the test” than teaching). At some point, somebody’s actually got to teach them.
“may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy”
See the post below about Germany being dumbasses about the same thing. Use gas. It’s cheap and it isn’t killing whales or the environment. Those are lies made up by hypocritical zealots whose religion is green (money, not sustainability like Al Gore and John Kerry).
Drill baby drill and bring down the cost of energy, bringing down the cost of everything else. For those who worship the planet, watch and see that it won’t harm a thing. It will actually be better for everything except their wallets
Everyone knows this has been a boondoggle, even the left, but they’re so committed to supposed ‘green’ energy that they can’t let go.
A government regulator recognizing offshore wind’s destructive environmental effects is as rare as a North Atlantic right whale. But a recent, 600-plus page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that the offshore wind development planned for the New York Bight—the triangular area bordered by the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines—may irreversibly harm whales, commercial and recreational fisheries, and seabirds.
The BOEM report is the agency’s first to evaluate the cumulative impacts of offshore wind development. Its authors cite a wide range of potential effects, from negligible (or even beneficial) to major. Acknowledging potentially “major” harms is a radical departure from the agency’s previously accepted Environmental Impact Statements for offshore wind projects, which have always focused on the impacts of individual projects, rather than the cumulative impacts of multiple projects.
The report, which BOEM bills as a “programmatic environmental impact statement,” admits that the proposed offshore wind projects on the New York Bight may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy. The authors note, for example, that the effect on the North Atlantic right whale could be “major,” defined as having “severe population-level effects” that would “compromise the viability of the species”—in other words, potential extinction. The report also concedes that the projects could have major effects (“substantial disruptions”) on commercial and recreational fishing, which contribute billions of dollars to the New Jersey and New York economies.
While the report discusses the consequences of these wind turbines on ocean views and even on local housing prices, it makes no mention of these projects’ adverse effects on electric ratepayers and economic growth. These effects are substantial, as New Jersey’s experience reveals. The state’s Board of Public Utilities estimated that its two approved offshore wind projects in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, would raise the monthly electric bills of a typical residential customer by about $7, a commercial customer by about $59, and an industrial customer by over $500. Those estimated costs, which don’t include what those customers will pay for new transmission lines and the backup generation needed to offset wind’s inherent intermittency, cumulatively amount to more than a $750 million annual increase in electric bills for the state’s 8.5 million electric ratepayers. , based on the numbers of these customers. If the Garden State succeeds in its goal of developing 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind electricity, despite mounting costs and the cancellations of two major in-state projects, ratepayers alone will end up paying an additional $3 billion to $5 billion more each year for their electricity.
In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.
This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.
In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.
But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.
Let’s start with some of the highlights. First, the FBI IG report acknowledges the presence of multiple CHS’s (informants), some of whom were sent to DC for Jan 6 by the FBI, and some of whom went on their own accord and reported to their handlers in the FBI.
We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6. We reviewed the documented CHS reporting that the FBI had prior to the riot and breach of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We determined that three CHSs had been tasked by FBI field offices in the days leading up to the January 6 Electoral Certification, with the required approval of the WFO, to travel to DC for the events of January 6 to report on domestic terrorism subjects who were possibly attending the event. Specifically: One FBI field office tasked a CHS to travel to DC to report on the activities of a predicated domestic terrorism subject who was separately planning to travel to DC for the January 6 Electoral Certification; a second FBI field office tasked a CHS to travel to DC to potentially report on two domestic terrorism (DT) subjects from another FBI field office who were planning to travel to DC for the events of January 6; and a third CHS, who had informed their handling agent that they intended to travel to DC on their own initiative for the events of January 6, was similarly tasked by their field office to potentially report on two DT subjects from other FBI field offices who were planning to travel to DC for the events of January 6. Our review 5 concluded that none of these three FBI CHSs were authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.
In other words, we see that there were at least three informants who had been tasked directly with following specific targets and informing on their plans in relation to January 6th.
In addition to these three informants who were asked to track specific people well in advance of January 6th, the FBI IG report acknowledges 23 additional informants who traveled to DC on January 6 and reported on the events to their respective FBI handlers:
They are as guilty as the day is long. The crime committed was authored by the FBI to cover up a stolen election. The FBI solves the crimes they commit
My wife’s dumbass relatives in Denmark can’t brag enough to me about their free healthcare, to which I say you pay 70% taxes, so it’s not free. They try to make America into Denmark and what sort of works for 5 million doesn’t translate to 330+ million. They don’t get it because they mostly want to trash the US. Plus, they are socialist and we’re not.
Well, here’s the facts. It doesn’t work, the doctors are crummy, you have to wait for months and you can’t sue for malpractice, which at least 4 of her relatives have received for healthcare and are now injured.
Now this story:
Advocates for “universal health care” love to use Finland as an example of a system that works. That is an absurd comparison. Finland has a culturally homogeneous population of 5.6 million; that is just over half the population of Los Angeles County (9.6 million).
Better examples are England and Canada.
England has government-funded “universal health care” in the form of the National Health Service. The population of England is around 57 million people. Wait times for nonemergency care average 14 to 18 weeks, and thousands of people have been waiting more than 18 months. As of June of this year, 7.5 million Brits were waiting for already scheduled procedures and surgeries requiring hospital stays, more than 300,000 of whom had been waiting for more than a year.
Keep in mind that these scheduled – and delayed – procedures include diagnostic tests and treatments for illnesses like cancer. Shortages of physicians and treatment facilities force cancer patients to wait weeks – or months – for radiation or chemotherapy.
These delays have life-and-death consequences. In 2009, British medical journal Lancet reported that 51.1% of British cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis. By contrast, 91.9% of American cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis.
England’s problems are not limited to cancer care. Last year, Bloomberg News published a report analyzing the NHS’s own data. The results were shocking. In most areas of England, medical care failed to meet government goals in things as basic as minimum wait times for an ambulance to arrive in an emergency (goal: 30 minutes; reality: up to three hours) or the availability of hospital beds.
In Canada – another country with “universal health care,” the situation is nearly as bad. Canada has a population of nearly 40 million. The average wait time for treatment in Canada for a condition requiring a specialist’s care is more than six months. But in some provinces and for some procedures – like orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery – the wait is closer to a year, or even longer. Canadians face long waits – six weeks to three months – even for simple but vital diagnostic procedures like MRIs, CT scans or ultrasounds.
By contrast, in the United States – a country with 330 million people – the average wait time for a nonemergency appointment with a specialist is only 26 days (a situation that medical journal STAT called “a public health crisis”). The median time between diagnosis of cancer and commencement of treatment is 27 days. The average wait time for an ambulance here is seven minutes.
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 
