April 26, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Take Columbia’s Khymani James — please.

Well, they may be ignorant or stupid, they may be evil, but they may also need help. Take, for example, Columbia undergrad Khymani James — please. James may be in need of help, but he appears to be busy negotiating with the authorities at Columbia to stand down.

* * * * * * * *

“Unexpectedly,” CNN broke out the airbrushes to protect James:

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and a Jeremy Corbyn-esque worldview, and it all makes sense.

Evergreen:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS THERE ENOUGH ADRENOCHROME* AVAILABLE IN THE WORLD FOR THIS TO HAPPEN? Biden Says ‘I’m Happy To Debate’ Trump.

On Friday, President Biden stated that he is willing to debate former President Donald Trump.

Speaking to radio host Howard Stern, Biden reportedly said, “I am somewhere. I don’t know when. I’m happy to debate him.”

In late February, after special counsel Robert Hur’s report stated that Biden exhibited memory problems, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, responded to the consistent verbal gaffes committed by Biden, saying, “If Joe Biden commits a gaffe, a guy who stuttered all of his childhood, into his adulthood and everybody knows his stuttering is what caused a lot of his speech impediments, and we know that. It has nothing to do with his brain, he stumbles one time and everybody says, ‘He’s too old to be the president.’”

Of course, Biden’s “stuttering” is a recent invention by the DNC-MSM designed to explain away his brain dissolving into tapioca:

* No. No there is not, which is why Ed Morrissey writes, “Expect a walkback on that toute suite. The last thing Team Biden wants is their cognitively impaired candidate on stage in a live debate with a verbal pugilist like Trump. They won’t even allow Biden to do a live interview with the NY Times, and that would be a tongue-bath.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Inside the failed White House coup to oust Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Top aides to President Biden secretly hatched a plan this past fall to replace White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre by recruiting outside allies to nudge her out the door, The Post has learned.

Jean-Pierre, who made history in May 2022 by becoming the first black and first openly gay person to hold the position, had developed the exasperating habit of reading canned answers directly from a binder to reporters at her regular briefings — offering what her superiors viewed as a less-than-compelling pitch for the 81-year-old Biden as he readied his re-election campaign.

De facto White House communications chief Anita Dunn, 66, the wife of Biden personal attorney Bob Bauer, told colleagues she had decided to call in prominent Democrats to explain to Jean-Pierre, 49, that the time was ripe to move on, sources told The Post.

“There were a number of people she asked to engage Karine,” said one source who heard of the strategy directly from Dunn, whose role as senior adviser has been filled during the past three presidencies by Jared Kushner (Donald Trump), Valerie Jarrett (Barack Obama) and Karl Rove (George W. Bush).

The source also told The Post that Dunn had claimed White House chief of staff Jeff Zients knew about and supported the cloak-and-dagger scheme to push Jean-Pierre out of the West Wing.

“There was an effort to have some outside folks who Karine knows and trusts talk to her about why leaving last fall would have made a lot of sense for her and her career,” the source said, calling it an “effort to encourage her to move along.”

It’s easy to ask the joking question, why is the left such a cesspit of racism and homophobia? But why is the Biden administration trapped in an identity politics box canyon of its own making? “Jean-Pierre is protected not by her stellar performance on the job, but by the identity boxes she checks. They can’t fire her without being eviscerated by the far left and its adherents in the mainstream press…Biden went woke instead of hiring a press secretary based on merit, and now he’s stuck with her during the most contentious presidential election campaign in history. That’s another self-inflicted wound committed in his dogged pursuit to please his left flank.”

And one more question, via our sister site, Twitchy: Will Peter Doucy ask Jean-Pierre about this story?

 

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

HAHA, THE WORKING-CLASS JOE ACT ISN’T WORKING ANYMORE. SORT A LIKE JOE.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY: ‘We Don’t Monitor Protests’

And when we say “don’t,” certain exceptions do apply: The FBI Was Monitoring Student Protests Against Ben Shapiro.

The ongoing student protests over Israel and Palestine have become the center of a national controversy, with members of Congress calling for National Guard deployments and terrorism financing investigations against the protesters. But a few years ago, the federal government was interested in a very different sort of campus controversy: whether right-wing journalist Ben Shapiro should be allowed to speak.

In October 2017, the FBI prepared a “tactical intelligence report” on Shapiro’s upcoming speaker event at the University of California, Los Angeles. The bulletin was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FBI documents on the Black Lives Matter movement, and posted to the public records platform MuckRock by journalist Jordan Lassiter.

* * * * * * * * *

“We have on-going demonstrations with ANTIFA/Black Bloc people, which have repeatedly shown a propensity of violence. We are expecting large scale, violent demonstrations” against speeches by Shapiro and the right-wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, said the memo, which Reason obtained from BlueLeaks, a trove of leaked fusion center documents.

Berkeley police weren’t wrong to expect violence. A previous speech by Yiannopoulos had been canceled in February 2017 due to a riot by left-wing protesters. Then, in April, both far-left and far-right activists showed up in Berkeley to fight.

The September event at Berkeley with Shapiro, however, went smoothly. Under heavy police presence and protected by over half a million dollars in security measures, Shapiro spoke to hundreds of audience members while hundreds of protesters gathered off campus. A few demonstrators were arrested for carrying a banned weapon or assaulting a police officer.

As Iowahawk quipped at the time:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OUT: POPULATION BOMB. IN: BABY BUST. U.S. births fall in 2023 to lowest number since 1979. “For American women generally, the decision to have a child seems to have shifted to later in the lifespan, as more women focus on education and careers prior to childrearing.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JIM TREACHER: Has the Secret Service Gone Insane?

Brie Stimson, Fox News:

A U.S. Secret Service agent with Vice President Kamala Harris’ detail was removed from their assignment after engaging in a physical fight with other agents while on duty Monday…

Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the U.S. Secret Service, called the incident a “medical matter,” adding that the agency wouldn’t be commenting further.

A medical matter… that caused a physical fight between Secret Service agents? Wait, what?

All we were told at first was that the agent was acting “erratically.” But thanks to Susan Crabtree at Real Clear Politics, now we know some specifics:

[Secret Service agent Michelle] Herczeg showed up at the [Joint Base Andrews] terminal and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.

But Herczeg’s bizarre behavior didn’t stop. She then began mumbling to herself, hid behind curtains, and started throwing items, including menstrual pads, at an agent, telling him that he would need them later to save another agent and telling her peers that they were “going to burn in hell and needed to listen to God,” a source told RealClearPolitics.

As Treacher writes:

Look, man, if you want to let the president of the United States get assassinated because you were scared of being blackballed as a bigot, be my guest.

But you can’t make us turn a blind eye. We see you.

P.S. Okay, I was right: Herczeg used to be a cop in Dallas, and in 2016 she sued the department for $1 million over “gender bias.” And then she blackmailed her way into the Secret Service.

At the Corner, Luther Ray Abel adds: Unfit Female Agent Responsible for Secret Service Ruckus.

How Herczeg came to be in the vice president’s employ after such an experience is an open question, as security for the president and those in his orbit are expected to have spotless backgrounds and years of experience. It’s fair to wonder if the Secret Service’s signing on to the 30×30 initiative, a pledge to have 30 percent of all law enforcement women by 2030, could have forced the qualification of Herczeg when her record was below the level expected of male officers.

The Left, for all its fearmongering about white supremacists and January 6 rioters lurking in ponds and mulberry bushes, does not take seriously just how dangerous the world is. Anyone who understands the number of unwell and hostile entities in the world and has any status at all would think it best to surround himself with excellent protection, regardless of the color or genitalia of his security. But the president and vice president think signaling their virtue through manning, however unqualified and distracted the component parts of their security might be, is the best course for their purposes.

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Maybe by denying RFK Jr. Secret Service protection, they’re actually trying to protect him. . .

 

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON SURBER: Trump, the Happy Warrior.

In New York, where Alvin the Chipmunk Bragg is trying him because a porn whore extorted money from him, the jolly times continued.

The New York Post reported, “Trump vows to ‘straighten New York out’ while visiting bodega where clerk Jose Alba was hit with murder charge for stabbing an ex-con in self-defense.”

Only public outcry forced Bragg to drop charges against the bodega clerk, who is now suing the bastard.

Trump had them singing the national anthem in Harlem. Colin Kaepernick was the hardest hit.

But read all about the lawfare against him:

Using the courts to kill Donald Trump was well planned and coordinated by the White House. Unfortunately, the planner appears to be the incompetent Kamala Harris fresh off her job as border czar, which saw the largest invasion American history.

The DC press is in denial of course.

On Tuesday Politico said, “Trump and his allies like to complain these days that he is a victim of ‘lawfare’ — some sort of elaborate, multi-jurisdictional conspiracy involving federal and state prosecutors, private civil litigators and judges in different courts across the country to take him down through the court system. The media aids and abets it, in their telling.”

And yet the trials are coordinated so that he is not in two courts at the same time. The press coverage, too, is coordinated, which was the whole point of the Politico story I cited, “Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits

“Some of the country’s most prominent legal commentators are holding off-the-record sessions to hash out the latest twists and turns in Donald Trump’s legal saga.”

By hash out, Politico meant agree to a narrative.

They continue to play Civilizational Jenga.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIGGED: Republican AGs accuse Ed Dept. of partisan vote harvesting for Democrats: Biden administration’s effort to pay college students for get out the vote campus campaigns backed by left-wing activists. “Nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general have called on the U.S. Department of Education to rescind guidance telling administrators they can use federal funds to pay students for get-out-the-vote efforts. The seven-page letter essentially describes how the new allowance to hire college students to register voters through the Federal Work-Study Program would amount to partisan vote harvesting for Democrats.”

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

OPERATION STUMBLEBUM: THE NEXT GENERATION. Scoop: Biden’s walkers.

President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine: Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he’s now often surrounded by aides.

Why it matters: With aides usually walking between Biden and the press’ camera position outside the White House, the visual effect is to draw less attention to the 81-year-old’s halting and stiff gait, Axios’ Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson report.

Some Biden advisers have told Axios they’re concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age.

Weeks ago, the president told aides that he’d prefer a less formal approach, a White House official told Axios. He suggested that they walk with him.

White House staffers and reporters alike noticed the sudden change in Biden’s walk routine beginning in mid-April, after more than three years in which he’d typically walked solo.

Senior aides — including deputy chiefs of staff Bruce Reed and Annie Tomasini, and close adviser Mike Donilon — are among those who’ve walked with the president across the lawn to and from the helicopter.

Since the change, some advisers think the images of Biden’s walks to and from the helicopter are better, and they expect him to continue to have aides join him.

By the numbers: In March, Biden’s five walks to and from Marine One at the White House were by himself, or with family members.

Starting April 16, Biden was joined by staff or lawmakers nine out of 10 times he walked to and from Marine One.

The big picture: Biden’s team has focused on changing voters’ perceptions about his age in recent months.

The earlier funnier Saturday Night Live would have gotten loads of material out of the above news – assuming the president had an (R) after his name, of course. Unfortunately, they’d much rather now play the palace guard than actually risk being funny.

Posted at 10:20 am by Ed Driscoll

THE PRIORITIES OF THE VOTERS ARE SHARPLY DIFFERENT FROM THE PRIORITIES OF THE RULING CLASS: “Axios commissioned a Harris poll and discovered something unsurprising, even if the establishment was shocked. Americans support mass deportations of illegal aliens.”

Pretty much all of our institutions are now set up to ensure that the ruling class gets to enact its priorities instead of the voters’; that has worked so well that much of the ruling class is unaware of what the voters’ priorities even are.

Posted at 8:57 am by Glenn Reynolds