Right now, a sniffling groups of women including past victims of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operations are standing in front of the Capitol before Congress’s vote on releasing “the Epstein files,” whatever that means at this point. One speaker—they are all saying not just kind-of the same thing, but exactly the same thing but in different words (sometimes) said that their lament isn’t about politics. It’s obviously about politics. Both CNN and MSNBC, the most aggressive Democratic propaganda agents broadcasting, are showing the demonstration live, as if it’s important news. Fox News is barely mentioning it.
The issue is political and partisan. The proof is irrefutable. Why didn’t the victims, or whoever organized them, or the mainstream media, insist that the Biden Administration release the files when the power to do so was entirely within its grasp? Nobody thought of it? The Democrats were fabricating ways to “Get Trump” and had been since 2015; everyone knew he had once been pals with Epstein; and the scandal was 20 years old. The Epstein revival only became a thing when the Axis of Unethical Conduct became desperate in its efforts to slow down Trump 2.0 as his administration began dismantling the Obama-Biden nascent totalitarian state. Naturally, Axis media was all in. Naturally, publicity hound Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comprehends neither law nor logic, decided to use it to get cheap clicks. Maybe she really thinks a rehash of the evil deeds of a man who has been dead for six years is a good use of her time; who knows? She’s an idiot.
President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.
This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.
It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.
Because I can’t let crap like this pass; I’m sorry, I just can’t.
The headline in the Times says, “Trump Says a Recent M.R.I. Scan Was ‘Perfect,’ and He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term”: President Trump made the comments on the second day of his trip to Asia. The Constitution limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Trump has suggested he might try to circumvent it.” No, he didn’t say anything of the sort. The President said he was healthy, and that he would “love to do it,” as in a third term. That does not suggest that he would try to circumvent the Constitution. When I say I would love to have Elon Musk’s resources, and I would, it does nor mean that I am tempted to rob him. If I say I would love to spend a night with Sydney Sweeney, it does not mean I am plotting to abduct her.
“The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”
—-The Washington Post editors, in an Editorial not only defending the President’s East Wing overhaul for a long-needed ballroom, but implying that he is a strong leader.
See! I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says! The Post editorial duplicates the arguments I made here. It’s not a particularly ingenious point of view; it should be obvious to anyone capable of thinking through the orange mist of Trump hate.
Writes the Post: “It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties. The State Dining Room seats 140. The East Room seats about 200. Trump says the ballroom at the center of his 90,000-square-foot addition will accommodate 999 guests. The next Democratic president will be happy to have this.”
Now watch Post staffers quit in a huff, and laugh as my Facebook friends proclaim that Armageddon is here. The Comments on the Post are a window into the mental wasteland that D.C. Trump Derangement has wrought. The Washington Post actually gives Donald Trump credit for doing the wise, smart, and necessary thing, and these are the first 10 comments I read:
“As the editorial board compares building a backyard deck to a 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom that somehow makes a case for why my government’s needs it, my mind wanders to the past, where serious people wrote for newspapers.”
“Washington Post editorial board, I am embarrassed for you.”
“Hey, Jeff[Bezos]. We see you. How do Trump’s boots taste?”
“DEAR(?} WP EDITORIAL BOARD: According to your editorial, if Trump wants to tear down the White House and replace it with a replica of Mar a Lago, he could proceed without any safeguards. It’s not about whether a larger ballroom is needed but whether there are any controls. According to your editorial, if Trump doesn’t like the style of the Washington Monument, the Capitol building or the Smithsonian buildings, he could redesign them as he likes.“
“Sorry, it’s not his house. What else needs to be said?”
“Wapo won’t let me post what I’d really like to say here so it’s adios, arrivederci, bye-bye WaPo.”
“So how much money is Bezos contributing to the Golden Calf to build this thing? It will dwarf the original White House, and if Trump says it will be “beautiful,” we know what it will look like — he’s already turned the Oval Office into a pre-revolution French whore-house. How many times in a year will any sane president need a ballroom for 1000 people? Why not just built a football stadium on the lawn?”
“I guess Jeff Bezos is looking for an invite to the dance floor.”
“The Billionaires have spoken through this EB opinion. Why does anyone who has obscene levels of money have to wade through regulations or be denied a modern estate in an historic neighborhood? We billionaires shouldn’t have to wait for anything or ask anyone’s permission. We’re rich. That means we’re smarter than everyone else in the room. You with less than us? Your opinion and your rights don’t matter. We, the richest of the rich, have spoken.”
“I Particularly Like the Line Where You Said Trumpism Is Seeking ‘To Amputate the Higher Elements of the Human Spirit — Learning, Compassion, Science, and the Pursuit of Justice, and Supplant Those Virtues With Greed, Retribution, Ego and Appetite.'”
Althouse flagged this, and I just couldn’t stomach reading it. Siegel’s bias is presumed from his long tenure at NPR, where, some readers will recall, I was blackballed for daring to defend Donald Trump on the air.
Ugh. The President pressuring universities to teach rather than indoctrinate and gutting the wasteful Cabinet department that had presided over catastrophic decline in pubic schools is “amputating” education. Enforcing the laws is “amputating” compassion. Refusing to waste trillions in response to politically-inspired climate change hype is “amputating” science. The arrogance and smug certitude of these close-minded assholes…double ugh. I’ll listen to and read my Trump Deranged friends when they say these things because at least they aren’t paid for it and are just bloviating emotion-based opinions. But these guys…
Who can keep reading their junk and its ubiquitous equivalents? (OK, I skimmed a bit and learned that they all think the stupid “No Kings” protests were wonderful.) More to the point, how dim and confused do you have to be to take this discussion as anything but sour grapes from a sad, elite sector of our culture that wildly overplayed its hand, got its bluff called, and was exposed as the sinister charlatans they always were?
Althouse just threw this raw meat to her readers without making any statement herself: I’m sure she knew what would follow. You should check out the red-pilled comments, which almost entirely drip with contempt.
You can read the exchange here (gift link) if you like. Me. I’ve got a sock drawer to organize.
This certifiably awful, annoying, hysterical, factually wrong, ignorant, stupid, smug and inarticulate thing turned up on my Facebook feed last night for the first time. Except for the nice, once intelligent friend who posted it, none of the signatories—there are hundreds—were known to me, but I’m sure that will change now.
I had to wrestle with myself longer than usual not to append a sharply worded comment to it: I would have been the first one. As we have established here in the many posts (too many, I suppose) I have written about the tragedy of Trump Derangement, it is futile to argue with these people, as they are beyond enlightening or reason.
But I know, I KNOW, that many wonderful people I respect, admire and care about will blindly sign on to this statement, manifesto, letter, whatever you want to call it, and that some of them would turn on me viciously if I ventured to point out the document’s undeniable flaws. So I want to treat this as I would a giant wart on a friend’s nose, a birthmark, a stutter, an annoying speech pattern or habitual bad breath, but boy, it’s hard.
You’re damn right he is. Because you deserve to be mocked….as Sasha Stone devastatingly explains in the sharpest defenestration of the Axis of Unethical Conduct that I have read this year (current company excepted, of course.)
You can read it all here. I have been burned all three times I subscribed to a substack, but Sasha Stone’s essay on the implications of the “No Kings” tantrum yesterday was so superb that I may subscribe just to reward her, even if she takes a multi-months long posting vacation like Glenn Greenwald did, or go nuts, like Ken White. Not only was her piece virtually exactly what I would write today, I almost thought I did write it.
Stone is a film industry blogger who has lived and worked in the Hollywood progressive bubble. Naturally she was a Democrat, but was red-pilled in 2020, as rational citizens should have been, and increasingly become a critic of her former party and fellow travelers.
These are some highlights from “No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum,” but again, read it all…
Late first post again today, for a very good reason: I’ve been researching and pondering what to write about the sad, pathetic, useless (well, maybe not useless, as I will elaborate on later) “No Kings” protests today. It even took me a long time to settled on the most direct and simplest of the myriad hilarious memes on the topic, as you can see above. (Powerline has a bumper crop in its weekly conservative meme collection, here.)
I was originally going to feature a depressing photo posted on Facebook this morning by two of my favorite people, both retired lawyers, both learned, accomplished and intelligent, and catastrophically Trump Deranged. It shows them smiling in a gathering mob of D.C. “No Kings” protesters, as they hold one of the vague protest signs printed up with George Soros’s money. Sure, I was going to blur out their faces, but I don’t want them to take my criticism (or diagnosis) personally. It’s not their fault that they have lost their frickin’ minds. They live in a bubble, they have always been Democrats, they subscribe to the Washington Post, but they had no way of predicting that their powers of critical thinking could ever be so eroded by hate, bias, and misinformation.
“I’m an H.I.V.-positive gay man who is distraught with where the country is headed [1], so I am actively participating in protests. I have a liberal friend who lives in an overwhelmingly Trump-supporting small town and is married to a Trump supporter. She messages me often about her fears of what is going on [2] and seems equally distraught. I’ve shared with her how current politics could affect my life [3] and how, although I’m very aware of my privilege [4], I’m concerned about people who aren’t as privileged and how they could be affected.[5] But she doesn’t participate in protests [6] and doesn’t like to actively show her views except on social media.[7] There are protests in small towns close to her that could use her support. [8] Once, there was a B.L.M. protest in her town, but she had ceiling fans being installed. [9] She passed on another recent protest because she had a birthday party. She has never participated and I’m getting increasingly annoyed. [10] I think it’s important to show up. [11] I also know that everyone is different, so I’m trying to reconcile this. [12] She comes off to me as someone who’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t want to shake anything up [13], which is the height of hypocrisy to me. [14]
I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place [15], and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life.”
I wish I could be confident that “The Ethicist” chose this foolishness to show that there really are deranged people out there so watch out, but I doubt it. The short and pithy response to it should be “You’re an asshole. Seek help.” But how many of you know people who think like “Name Withheld”? The footnotes…
The headline raises an interesting question: can an ethics villain be an ethics dunce, since ethics villains by definition don’t care about ethics, so how can they be judged stupid for ignoring them? Ah well, a topic for another day. Ann Althouse would ask Grok to resolve the issue…if I ever start quoting AI here regularly, someone please come up behind me and bash in my head with a brick.
I’ve been putting off the National Football League announcing that its now iconic halftime show during the 2026 Super Bowl in Santa Clara will star Bad Bunny, a performer I was mercifully unaware of before the announcement. After all, I could write this post any time between now and February 9, 2026, the day after the national sports event that I will not watch again because the sport it involves is deadly.
Today, however, I am in a bad mood, so it’s time. The Super Bowl has evolved as cultural phenomenon that is one of the rare yearly American events that unifies the nation, families, races and commerce. It is supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, and G-rated so families can watch the game and its surrounding hoopla with their children. When Janet Jackson exposed a nipple during a halftime performance, you would have thought that she has performed a human sacrifice by the reaction in the news media.
But now it is 2025, the Great Stupid still stalks the land, Trump Derangement reigns in the corporate suites, and thus the National Football League, which happily pays its players to become brain-injured, has chosen as its star attraction during the Super Bowl half-time show…
Ethics Alarms 