Category Archives: Culture

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Now you know why I call it Journolism! ** Updated! 9:05 PM EST ** #FreedomOfThePress includes the right not to publish what you don't want to publish, but concealing uncomfortable facts hurts the media's reputation

In the wake of the roughly 300 layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been a lot of blame spread, both among the subscribers who quit for owner Jeff Bezos refusing to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and the paper itself for it’s very liberal leanings. The Post managed to piss off both the conservatives who might have been willing to subscribe, and the liberals who cancelled their subscriptions. Mr Bezos, in trying to fix a long-ongoing problem, fouled up.

But let me be clear here: the Freedom of the Press includes the freedom not to publish something. That should be obvious: there are only so many pages a newspaper can print, though with digital publishing these days, those limits have expanded.

And now we see just what isn’t being published, when it doesn’t fit Teh Narrative. When the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a small town in northeast British Columbia occurred, the Associated Press told us, at 8:59 AM EST, that the (alleged) killer was a “woman” and a “female suspect.” At 9:32 AM EST, CNN simply identified the killer as “they,” being careful to not use a pronoun to specify the killer’s sex. At 9:32 AM EST, The New York Times told us nothing about the shooter.

But, as early as 6:48 AM EST, Matt Van Swol was telling us on Twitter the news which was not politically correct, that the killer was a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl. I checked the credentialed media, and found several instances of the media concealing the knowledge that the (alleged) killer was transgender.

The killer’s name is Jesse Van Rootselaar, though initially identified as Jesse Strang, 18 years old, and yes, he’s transgender.

I don’t get it. The credentialed media want to build trust in their accuracy, so why conceal information that they know will come out soon enough?

My spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. And now you know why I spell it that way.

Well, eventually even The New York Times had to admit what had previously been revealed, that young Mr Van Rootselaar was the killer, and that the “suspect” was born as biologically male and chose to identify as a female about six years ago. That acknowledgement was time-stamped at 2:45 PM EST, just three minutes short of eight hours after Mr Van Swol’s tweet. The Times also revealed that the “suspect” had quit school four years earlier, which would have meant he wasn’t in school since age 14.

From the Times at 3:19 PM EST:

“Police had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,” Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspect’s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, “firearms were seized.” The most recent police call to the residence was in the spring of last year.

So, the local police already knew that young Mr Van Rootselaar was just plain nuts. Isn’t being biologically one sex but believing you are the other one definition of just plain nuts?

Of course, the newspaper continued to use the feminine pronouns to refer to the killer, as did local officials, because for some stupid reason they think a guy calling himself a girl really is a girl; are the editors and writers at the Times just as nuts as Mr Van Rootselaar?

Yeah, I think that they are!

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The internet has not made the left smarter; it has really made them stupid

Remember how people used to say that a lack of information was responsible for people doing or saying some not bright things? Remember how our good friends on the left have been claiming that it was only stupid and ignorant people who voted for Donald Trump? Paula on Bluesky told me that President Trump “was elected by uneducated, ignorant people,” and that “His core voters are not educable. They are the worst among us who feel unrestrained in their racism and sexism and other ugly beliefs. The ones who were just taken in by his lies have already turned against him.”

And so we come to Lexie Lawler:

Boca Raton nurse fired after viral video wishing birth complications on Trump press secretary

By Joel Lopez | Friday, January 23, 2026 | 7:17 PM EST

A nurse at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital has been fired after posting a viral social media video wishing health complications on President Donald Trump’s press secretary during childbirth.

A woman identified as Lexie Lawler, who said she was a labor and delivery nurse in the 14-second video, recorded herself wishing Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt would suffer a fourth-degree tear during childbirth with long-term complications.

Lawler also used a derogatory term to describe Leavitt in the video. Leavitt announced her pregnancy on Instagram in December, saying she’s expecting a baby girl in May. A LinkedIn profile under the same name indicates Lawler worked at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital.

There’s more at the original.

The lovely Miss Lawler, who apparently did have access to all of the information she could ever want, given that she has a internet connection which enabled her to post on Tik Tok, went on a rant which Chaya Raichik, who started and operates the Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — site Libs of TikTok found, and tweeted it out, and made it viral.

Miss Lawler was fired by her now-former employer, saying “While we respect the right to personal opinions, there is no place in healthcare for language or behavior that calls into question a caregiver’s ability to provide compassionate, unbiased care.”

Then we saw the story of how security guards and emergency room personnel at NYU Langone Health in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn delayed and tried to deny treatment for a minor injury to a New York Police Department detective following a scuffle with a suspect because they mistook them for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agents. Emergency room personnel are doctors and nurses, who are all college educated, yet some of them were stupid enough to break the long-standing medical ethic of not denying emergency treatment.

The famously childless Amanda Marcotte, who declared that if her birth control ever failed — something unlikely now, since she is 48 years old — she’d get an abortion, is all in on hating pregnancy even for other women:

Everyone’s heard of someone having a baby in a doomed bid to save a marriage. But to save a fascist ideological project is a new one. OK, OK — no one can prove that Second Lady Usha Vance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, all got pregnant as a concurrent MAGA propaganda project. No more, anyway, than we can say that it’s anything but a wild coincidence that nearly all the women vying for Donald Trump‘s favor seem to have undergone the same intensive cosmetic surgery regimen to achieve “Mar-a-Lago face.” But it sure is lucky timing that all these women got pregnant, right when the MAGA coalition is starting to feel forlorn, torn asunder by infighting and the growing sense that the president’s declining health does not bode well for their future.

Also see: Darleen Click, “AWFL Marcotte Throws Tantrum ‘Babies are White Supremacy’“

Jokes aside, all these pregnancies would likely be unremarkable except for the fact that the MAGA movement is obsessed with making babies. Vice President JD Vance famously spent years denouncing childless women as “miserable,” “sociopaths” and claiming they “must be stopped” from having a role in public life. Billionaire Elon Musk frequently rails about the supposed dangers to humanity from slightly lower birth rates. Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025 who heads the Heritage Foundation, even ranted in his book about the evils of dog parks on the unpersuasive grounds that well-to-do urban women were substituting pet ownership for their duty to have more children. The late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, frequently scolded women to give up their careers to have “more kids than they can afford.” There’s even Natal Con, an annual right-wing conference attended mostly by men, who get together and hype the idea that American wombs are being under-utilized by the women who still have control over them.

Miss Marcotte referred to it as “the GOP’s mini-baby boom,” but perhaps it’s not so mini after all:

(T)hese authors looked at young adults ages 25 to 35 who self-identify as liberal or conservative. They found that young liberal women today are much less likely to have children than young conservative women, with a gap of more than 30 percentage points.

USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques reported:

Families have also been moving to red states that better reflect their values. In states where Trump won the popular vote, the aggregate child population increased by 7.3% since 2000. The opposite was true in states where Harris won the popular vote – the child population decreased by 7.1%.

No wonder Miss Marcotte is slamming pregnancies among Trump Administration families! She hates everything about President Trump, and his supporters reproducing? Heaven forfend! She concluded:

If readers are skeptical that the Millers will convince anyone that Mr. Miller is besting Ocasio-Cortez in the attractiveness category — well, let’s just say equally unpersuasive is the entire effort to sell the MAGA mini-baby boom as a meaningful shift in the broader American culture toward having bigger families. Despite all the right-wing media hype around these pregnancies, the response of the general public has cut against their hopes that this would lead to a Great Fertility Awakening among young women, who suddenly realize they need to quit their jobs to spend the next 20 years of their life staying constantly pregnant. Usha Vance’s pregnancy was mostly met with jokes about how she’s trying to steal her husband back from Erika Kirk. The Millers were greeted with speculation that the real father of the their child is Elon Musk. Leavitt’s announcement inspired cracks about how pregnant women aren’t supposed to use fillers, along with jokes about the 32-year age gap that exists between her and her 60-year-old husband: “Closer in age to the baby than her husband btw,” one Instagram user noted.

Apparently the writer hasn’t heard about the real surge in pregnancies among conservative women, or, perhaps it’s simply a dearth of them among her ideological fellow travelers. With plenty of access to that internet thingy Al Gore invented, she still does not seem to have heard about it. Perhaps, just perhaps, it isn’t the “uneducated” and “ignorant” who are the conservatives, but our oh-so-haughty friends on the left.

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Now even coffee is Raaaaacist!

There are times when you see something and can’t quite be certain that it is sarcasm.

Is coffee racist? How drinking coffee perpetuates white supremacy

Created by Black people for Black people—and now a pillar of white supremacist capitalism. If you consume coffee, you are helping an industry built on racism.

by AFRU Staff | Monday, January 19, 2026

If you’re a person of color, you know what I’m talking about. You walk into a new coffee shop and your senses are overwhelmed with whiteness and you get the glare from the Karens. The white hipster barista lines herself up between you and the bathrooms, ready to tell you non-customers aren’t welcome.

If you have a white coffee drinking friend, he or she may have even let you in on the old coffee joke white coffee drinkers share when PoC aren’t around: “there are three things that are necessary in order to make a cup of coffee, and they are: first, a black man to roast the coffee; second, a yellow man to grind it; and third, a white man to drink it.”

Well, I’m here to validate your lived experience; coffee is in fact horribly racist, and there’s data to back it up.

Every facet of the coffee industry, in fact, is rooted in racism. From the moment the whites viciously stole coffee from Black and Brown People to the present-day Karen sipping her morning cup of white supremacy, whites have been able to drink the fruits of our labor and our culture with impunity.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s sarcasm, given two mentions of “Karens” in the first four paragraphs. If it weren’t for a single paragraph:

It’s a well-known fact that whites would be eating bland food, like plain bread and gruel, if it weren’t for their theft of culinary secrets from people of color, and especially Black folks. That’s precisely why when the whites found out about coffee, it became one of the reasons they decided to victimize and appropriate Black civilization wholesale.

Will my roughly 55¢ mug of coffee at home reduce my racism score by 90% since I don’t buy $5.50 cups of coffee from Starbucks?

it actually could be serious, as the rest of the article tells about how Evil White Men enslaved Noble Africans to bring coffee to our settler colonialist homes.

Sadly, we are not informed how strong American coffee drinkers evolved from our effete tea-swilling ancestors across the pond. How different would Our history have been had we not has the Boston Tea Party, and instead just told King George and his Parliament, “No thanks, we’ll just drink coffee instead”? Heaven forfend! we might just be singing God Save the King right now, and feting Prince Harry and Princess Meghan as Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of California.

The problem is that the satire is too good: our good-hearted and oh-so-nobly-intended friends on the left might just take this seriously.

But, in the end, if you simply must buy your cup of white supremacy on your way to the slave-wage job your capitalist oppressor lets you have, remember that the baristas at Starbucks are still on strike, and get your coffee from Wawa instead.

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A Catholic parish commits a crime Church policies on immigration do not supersede American law

That the Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a proud member, supports far less restrictive transnational immigration is well known, and His Holiness Pope Leo XIV has been pushing hard on the subject. Thus, the following article comes as no surprise to me:

UPDATE: ICE deported Minnesota church employee, surveilled parish during Mass, mayor says

ICE’s presence outside the church impedes parishioners’ free exercise of religion, said the pastor of St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Hopkins, Minnesota.

By Kathleen Murphy · DC Bureau · Friday, January 9, 2026 · 3:01 PM EST

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveilled St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church in Hopkins, Minnesota, on Epiphany after deporting the parish’s beloved maintenance worker to Mexico five weeks earlier.

The Trump administration last year eliminated a federal policy that generally prohibited immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches, and hospitals. Attendance at St. Gabriel’s Spanish Mass has dropped by half since the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, and parishioners have expressed fear of churchgoing about eight miles from where an ICE agent shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good on Jan. 7.

Father Paul Haverstock, pastor of St. Gabriel’s, said he had vested for the 1 p.m. Spanish Mass Jan. 4 when a parishioner told him about men wearing ski masks in a car outside the church. He said he was disturbed to receive the report, went to the sacristy to get his cellphone, and placed it next to his chair in the sanctuary.

“If there is an incident of agents coming in, I want to make sure that it’s recorded, and I want a clear recording of me letting the agents know that we’re in the middle of a religious service,” Haverstock said.

Two of the hyperlinks in the quoted story above were not in the original, but researched and added by me.

It has to be asked: why were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside the church?

Church employee Francisco Paredes, 46, who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years with one conviction for driving under the influence, was handcuffed by ICE Dec. 4, 2025. Eight federal vehicles pulled into a large parking lot adjacent to St. Gabriel’s on 13th Avenue South after Paredes picked up coffee on his way to work, Paredes said, and he was driven to a processing facility. . . .

Until Paredes’ arrest and before ICE parked outside St. Gabriel’s, more than 400 people had usually attended the Spanish Mass, Haverstock said. Haverstock said he is considering offering a temporary Sunday Mass dispensation in his parish for those who are afraid.

So, St Gabriel’s holds well-attended Masses in Spanish, and the church previously employed an illegal immigrant; the article stated, in its mealy-mouthed way, that Mr Paredes “lacked legal permission to live in the U.S.” It is reasonable to suspect that significant numbers of illegal immigrants live in the area and attend those Masses.

Father Haverstock stated that Mr Paredes was a great employee, fully bilingual, and a tremendous help around the parish. That’s fine, but then there’s this:

Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, requirements come out of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). IRCA prohibits employers from hiring and employing an individual for employment in the U.S. knowing that the individual is not authorized with respect to such employment. Employers also are prohibited from continuing to employ an individual knowing that he or she is unauthorized for employment. This law also prohibits employers from hiring any individual, including a U.S. citizen, for employment in the U.S. without verifying his or her identity and employment authorization on Form I-9.

The IRCA was passed in 1986, which was 40 years ago; Mr Paredes has been in the United States for a stated 25 years, which means that he was hired by the parish church well after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 became law.

Under the Handbook for Employers M-274, Section 11.8, it is specified that:

Unlawful Employment Criminal Penalties
Engaging in a Pattern or Practice of Knowingly Hiring or Continuing to Employ Unauthorized Aliens

If you or your business are convicted of having engaged in a pattern or practice of knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens (or continuing to employ aliens knowing they are or have become unauthorized to work in the United States) after Nov. 6, 1986, you may face fines and/or six months imprisonment.

Engaging in Fraud or False Statements, or Otherwise Misusing Visas, Immigration Permits, and Identity Documents

You may be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years if you:

  • Make a false statement or attestation to satisfy the employment eligibility verification requirements;
  • Use fraudulent identification or employment authorization documents; or
  • Use documents that were lawfully issued to another person.

Other federal criminal statutes may provide higher penalties in certain fraud cases.

For Mr Paredes to have been employed by St Gabriel’s, at least one of these things had to have happened:

  • The parish hired Mr Paredes without a reasonable effort at verifying the documents provided; or
  • The parish hired Mr Paredes without checking his documents at all or filling out Form I-9; or
  • Mr Paredes presented false or fraudulent documents good enough to have passed a reasonable inspection by Pastor.

All of these are crimes!

The article provided by EWTN News does not tell us how long Mr Paredes was an employee of St Gabriel’s. The parish staff page tells us that Fr Haverstock first became Parish Administrator in 2020, and assigned as Pastor on Independence Day of 2021, so, if Mr Paredes was hired before those dates, Fr Haverstock could not have been the person who hired him. However, if he became aware that his employee was an illegal immigrant after he became Administrator, but before Mr Paredes was detained, yet continued to employ Mr Paredes, he would be in violation of the law. Fr Haverstock would not be required to report the illegal immigrant’s presence in the United States, but he would have had to discharge him.

There are no exemptions for churches or church employees under our immigration laws. Church policy, even coming from the Pope himself, does not supersede American law.

Perhaps article author Kathleen Murphy did not realize it when she wrote, but she published the report of a crime. And while this is the documentation of one crime in one parish, who would be surprised if this hasn’t happened widely throughout the thousands of parishes and hundreds of dioceses in the United States?

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(Purported) canon lawyer is very upset that infants can be baptized without their consent

Sunday, January 11, 2026, is in the calendar of the Catholic Church, the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, our remembrance of when Jesus chose to be baptized by his cousin, St John the Baptist. Today’s Gospel reading was from Matthew 3:13-17:

3:13 Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan, coming to John to be baptized by him.
14 But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have the need to be baptized by You, and yet You are coming to me?”
15 But Jesus, answering, said to him, “Allow it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he *allowed Him.
16 After He was baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and settling on Him,
17 and behold, a voice from the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Hardly an offensive passage, but naturally that was the day The Irish Times chose to print an essay from Dr Mary McAleese, who claims to be an “academic civil and canon lawyer, (and the) author of Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law: the Christening Contract (Brill 2019),” to claim that the Catholic practice of infant baptism is evil, evil, evil!
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Baptism denies babies their human rights

Rite & Reason: No one is Catholic by birth and the notion of ‘Baptismal promises’ is risible

by Dr Mary McAleese | Sunday, January 11, 2026

Throughout the world, there continues a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion. This warrants, but has yet to receive, serious examination. It impacts Ireland in a special way and contemporary circumstances make Ireland an ideal place to conduct that examination.

Let me set the scene with a couple of brief, inter-related stories. They concern the relationship between children’s rights and religion in Ireland, and certain unchallenged aspects of the canon law of Ireland’s major Christian denomination and provider of education, the Latin Catholic Church.

It restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See – which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law – are State Parties.

Good heavens! Baptism “restricts children’s rights”? Which rights? It certainly does not prevent those baptized as Catholic from joining most Protestant churches, nor does it somehow drag reluctant people to Mass on Sundays. More, the Catholic Church accepts most baptisms conducted by Protestant churches as valid. Muslims do not accept baptism as valid for anything, because they have no equivalent ritual. Jews have ritual cleansing, the Tevilah, but it is not the same under Judaism as baptism is for Christians.

Atheists? Buddhists? Whateverists? Being baptized as a Catholic does not prohibit anyone from joining another religion, or deciding that they have no faith at all.

If you are a Christian, baptism means a great deal to you; if you are not Christian, baptism means nothing to you, and as either a sprinkling or an immersion in water, it has done you no harm.

The distinguished Dr McAleese is very concerned that baptism means you are irreversibly a Catholic according to canon law, and that’s true enough, but my response is: so what? The Church cannot force you to go to Mass, and cannot force you to believe anything. The Church has no gendarmerie which can arrest you if you walk into a Pentecostalist or Baptist church on Sunday, nor the authority to show up at your door on a wintry Sunday morning in which you chose to stay under the covers.

Attempts to leave the Church or change religion or challenge Church teaching or magisterial authority, constitute canonical crimes of heresy, apostasy, schism. Among the punishments attached to such acts is the much-misunderstood penalty of excommunication, which in fact leaves membership intact but subject to restrictions.

It should be obvious that, if someone does wish to change religion, to not be a Catholic any longer, the penalty of excommunication is meaningless. It means, in effect, that you can’t go to church in the church where you didn’t want to go.

I suppose that for “an academic civil and canon lawyer,” that might be of overwhelming concern, but out in the real world, it’s pretty much meaningless.

There are many things that parents can command as they rear their children, from going to church to eating their hated peas for supper, a mortal sin in my mind.

There’s more at Dr McAleese’s original, but really, it’s silliness. Baptism, and membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary, even if the Church already has someone listed in its rolls.

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Larry Krasner beclowns himself Philly's chief law enforcement officer doesn't want our immigration laws enforced

Remember when Philadelphia’s criminal-loving, police-hating, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner previously made a fool of himself with his spittle-flecked declaration that he would seek to find state charges against the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers who were pardoned by President Trump, despite the fact that the vast majority had already served their sentences?

Then we have this gem from the Philly persecutor. That’s right: Mr Krasner wants to go after anyone who might have been involved with the late Jeffrey Epstein. But, let’s tell the truth here: if Mr Krasner found anyone connected to Mr Epstein who has “ties back to (his) jurisdiction,” which is the confines of Philadelphia County — Philadelphia city and county are co-terminus — Mr Krasner wants to throw the book at them, but only if they are Republicans. As with his previous mentioned threat, nothing came of that, either. The late Mr Epstein’s homes and businesses were not in the City of Brotherly Love.

And now, here he goes again!

DA Krasner condemns fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis, says officers who commit crimes in Philly will ‘be convicted’

Krasner said the actions of the ICE agent who shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good were unlawful.

by Jesse Bunch | Thursday, January 8, 2026 | 3:50 PM EST

District Attorney Larry Krasner, responding to the killing of a 37-year-old woman by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, vowed to prosecute law enforcement officers who commit crimes in the city of Philadelphia.

“You will be arrested, you will stand trial, you will be convicted,” Krasner said during a news conference Thursday.

His remarks came a day after a masked ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good multiple times in her SUV.

In widely circulated videos of the incident, Good appears to be driving away from a group of immigration agents as they order her to get out of her vehicle.

The District Attorney does not seem nearly as concerned with the law when it comes to our immigration laws. From the Tampa Free Press:

Shortly after entering office in 2018, the liberal prosecutor created the Immigration Counsel position in order to provide consultations on cases specifically involving foreign nationals. Krasner initially stated the position would work to achieve “immigration-neutral” outcomes, which in practice means evaluating and possibly lowering charges against migrants, including illegal immigrants, to ensure their conviction would not result in their deportation.

Krasner’s office repeatedly suggested early on that the Immigration Counsel would only focus on cases involving “low-level” offenders, but a case list obtained by a conservative immigration group in 2021 revealed that his office consulted in a myriad of cases involving foreign nationals accused of gruesome crimes, such as rape of a child, rape, sexual assault, arson and murder.

An additional case list released in 2024 revealed the Immigration Counsel has continued to be involved in serious criminal cases. Krasner’s office consulted with or worked on 21 aggravated assault, domestic violence and other crimes of violence cases; 26 possession of drugs with intent to distribute cases; 12 firearm cases; nine rape and indecent assault and sexual assault on a child cases, nine robbery or burglary cases and one vehicular homicide case, according to a case list for the 2023 calendar year.

Translation: Mr Krasner loves him some illegals, and would rather keep those who commit serious crimes other than those connected with their immigration status in the United States.

Mr Krasner said during the press conference.

I will charge you with those crimes. You will be arrested. You will stand trial. You will be convicted. Donald Trump cannot pardon you for a state court conviction. Do you hear me, ICE agents?

Arrests can get messy if the subjects being apprehended resist, and it looks to me as though Mr Krasner is encouraging illegals to resist arrest. And he’s attempting to intimidate ICE agents from coming to Philadelphia to enforce our immigration laws.

I would suggest that ICE do a deep dive into the members of Mr Krasner’s staff, to see if any of them might be here illegally.

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You will own nothing and you will like it. The Communists want you to be poor, so you will be dependent upon the government for your survival.

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain wrote about new New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointing Cea Weaver to be Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It seems like the lovely Miss Weaver wants people like you and me to be poor and dependent upon the government, a government she said on May 30, 2017, should have no more white male members.

This Activist Has Long Been Polarizing. Mamdani Is Standing by Her.

Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate named to a high-profile role in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, is facing criticism for past comments calling homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”

By Dana Rubinstein, Sally Goldenberg and Mihir Zaveri | Wednesday, January 6, 2026 | Updated: Thursday, January 7, 2026 | 8:47 AM EST

For the second time in three weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing intense scrutiny for the years-old social media behavior of a high-level appointee — an episode that has once again forced him to answer for his vetting processes.

Mr. Mamdani named Cea Weaver, a housing activist, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants on Jan. 1, during his very first news conference on his very first day in office.

In past social media posts that have since been deleted, most of which predate 2020, she called homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and said that it was important to “impoverish” the white middle class. That rhetoric had played a role in raising her profile within New York housing circles, even as it seemed to hobble her 2021 bid to join the city’s powerful Planning Commission. Her calls to “elect more Communists” and “seize private property” had been well documented in The New York Post.

Heaven forfend! The New York Times actually cited the New York Post as a source? I am shocked, shocked! I say.

I suppose that Miss Weaver hates her own family, given that the New York Post reported:

The mother of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new woke renters’ rights honcho — who’s dubbed homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy” — is a professor at a prestigious college and owns a beautiful Nashville home worth $1.6 million.

Celia Applegate — whose daughter Cea Weaver is the director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants — teaches German studies at Vanderbilt University and owns a pricey classic Craftsman home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.

Applegate bought the property with her partner, David Blackbourn, in July 2012 for $814,000 and real estate websites now list the pad’s value at more than $1.6 million, records show.

This article continues below the fold, because I have embedded a video of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago spouting the line, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!” Continue reading →

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The progressive ‘urbanists’ just don’t quite understand things

I will admit to being something of a very amateur architecture aficionado; I love great looking buildings, even though I’m in no position to afford one for our family. I follow people like Coby — “Working on creating better, more beautiful places to live in. Developer, Writer, Urbanist, Professor, Optimist. Check out my writing below!” — Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, Architectolder, who specializes in photography and who is a strong conservative, and Architecture & Tradition, along with other similar accounts on Twitter.

And these are great people, people who appreciate nice architecture and art, but most of them — not Architectolder! — have a bit of a blind spot. They praise urban living, and show many examples of really great urban housing, but, as in Coby’s tweet shown to the upper right, they don’t seem to appreciate the fact that most Americans cannot afford the places they’ve shown.

I once remarked how the houses in one of the Philly “Main Line” suburbs were great, but not only couldn’t I afford one of them, I couldn’t even afford one of their driveways!

Sure, I prefer the small farm on which we live, I prefer that I don’t have to walk the dogs every day, but can simply open the door and let them out to play on our 7.92 acres of property, and I prefer the fact that there are few other people out here, only one of whom I could actually call a neighbor. And yeah, I would certainly like to be able to walk five blocks to the Votre supermarché at 12 Avenue Baquis in Nice to pick up freshly baked croissants for breakfast, but not being able to do that is a small price to pay for having our own land.

But one thing about living in very poor Estill County, I can see what is around me. We bought our property very cheaply, just $75,000 in 2014: decent land, a livable if nevertheless fixer-upper house, which yes, we have been fixing up, and are still fixing up. I previously noted how we bought a second house, a two bedroom, one bath single family home, not for ourselves, but to rent to my wife’s sister. I didn’t mention the price, but it was just $70,000, and it, too, was a fixer-upper. You can see photos of my nephew and me remodeling the junked bathroom. These were cheap, eastern Kentucky houses, the last one bought just before Bidenflation struck interest rates.

This is what some of the urbanists just don’t understand. They see some real gems in the cities, but don’t seem to understand that most people can’t afford those really nice places. We have previously noted some of the urban houses and streets in which people have to live in Philadelphia because that’s all they can reasonably afford. When my good friend Alicia posts images of her favorite residential architectural style — much of the photos are from Europe — she’s posting images of places she might like to live, but places most working-class Americans couldn’t afford, nor residences which Americans could build for any affordable prices.

While Alicia hasn’t mentioned it at all in anything of hers I’ve seen, that courtyard living she champions looks to me like a version of the gated community, to keep out the poorer people and the bad guys and the riff-raff. But perhaps that’s what the urbanists really want, for themselves and their friends; the denizens of Strawberry Mansion and the Philadelphia Badlands can stay outside. A “pharmacy on your block, a farmer’s market that comes to the plaza out your front door, and a courtyard in your backyard” sure would sound nice to people, but in a lot of neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love, what the residents would see more useful are streets not run by criminals and gangs, and sidewalks not slept on by junkies.

 

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When a raging anti-Semite feels comfortable enough to go on a tirade.

Lower Gwynedd Township was established in 1698 by William Penn, a very well-to-do township in what is now mostly well-to-do Montgomery County, one of the collar counties of the City of Brotherly Love. I have done a couple of projects in Lower Gwynedd, and not only could I not have afforded a home there, I couldn’t even afford some of their driveways! In the 2024 election, the residents of Montgomery County gave 317,103 votes, 60.62% of the total, to then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, and only 198,311 votes, 37.91% of the total to our then 45th and now 47th President, Donald Trump. Only neighboring Delaware County, 61.15%, and Philadelphia itself, 78.57%, gave Mrs Emhoff a higher percentage of their votes in the Keystone State.

Perhaps that’s why Philip Leddy, the principal of Lower Gwynedd Elementary School felt it safe to go on an anti-Semitic rant, even in private, as so many of our nation’s good Democrats have decided that they hate Jews for defending themselves following Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

Well, he shouldn’t have felt too safe, because he’s now the former principal!

Pennsylvania principal axed after ranting about ‘Jew money’ in voicemail to parent

By David Spector | Saturday, December 27, 2025 | 9:33 AM EST

Philip Leddy, photo by Wissahickon School District, and is a public record.

A Pennsylvania principal whose antisemitic tirade about “Jew money” was inadvertently recorded has been fired.

Lower Gwynedd Elementary School Principal Philip Leddy was axed Tuesday by the Wissahickon School Board.

Leddy, 45, was returning a call from a parent when he got the dad’s voicemail and left a message, but then apparently failed to end the call, Philadelphia’s ABC 7 reported.

That’s actually ABC 6, not ABC 7, but the link is accurate.

Leddy allegedly accused the parent of having “Jew money” and could be heard muttering “they control the banks,” according to recording, which was posted by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism.

”They go to Jew camp . . . everyone at the camp hates that family . . . ,” he was also caught saying, according to the group’s recording.

Parents in the district have accused the school board of attempting to paper over their longstanding issues with antisemitism by hanging Leddy out to dry.

“It was an easy one for them because it was old school anti-semitism versus more modern, like anti-Zionism antisemitism,” Beth Ages, who has two kids in the district, told The Post.

Jewish parents in the district noted a mural in Wissahickon Middle School which depicts the rabid anti-Semite Linda Sarsour.

Perhaps the anti-Semites are achieving their mostly unstated goals:

“Jewish families are leaving in droves,” said Lynn Simon, who has two kids in the district.

I was unable to find Mr Leddy’s credentials, but he must have at least a Master’s degree to have been a principal in a Montgomery County school district. He has to be an educated man, at least as far as education in education goes. He had to have gone to college, and, at his age, 45, it had to have been several years ago. He became principal in 2023, presumably before the October 7, 2023 attack.

But this was the funniest point of all, from the 6ABC news story: he had “previously chaired an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee in another district, according to his school bio.” Looks like being all in on DEI doesn’t cover inclusion of Jooooos.

The School District leaders said that Mr Leddy wasn’t just talking to himself, but was apparently speaking with another district employee at the time. No action has been taken against that employee, who contributed nothing anti-Semitic to Mr Leddy’s tirade, but left unreported is the fact that the now former principal felt comfortable enough to engage in that tirade with another school employee.

And that’s the part that gets to me. Unless Mr Leddy is an absolute moron, he had to have known that an anti-Semitic rant was the kind of thing that could get him fired, yet he felt secure enough to do it anyway in front of another school district employee. That tells me that not only did Mr Leddy not think his rant was wrong, but he seemingly didn’t think that whomever the other school employee was wouldn’t find it a problem either. Just how anti-Semitic is wealthy Lower Gwynedd that this could have occurred?

Fortunately, with the ongoing strike, there should be plenty of available positions as baristas at Starbucks, so maybe he won’t starve. But, then again, he probably won’t be able to afford to live in Montgomery County.