Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

Posted on by

A huge scoop for The Washington Post! Another Pulitzer Prize is almost certainly on their way

The Washington Post, one of our nation’s truly great newspapers, a national newspaper of record as far as the Federal Government is concerned, and the exposers of the Watergate coverup, has once again struck bigly with a major, major, yuge scoop:

The hair-loss drug Trump took for years is now absent from his medical records

White House officials say they are not obligated to disclose all of Trump’s medications, including whether he still uses finasteride.

by Dan Diamond | Thursday, June 4, 2026 | 5:00 AM EDT

President Donald Trump’s medical reports no longer include a common hair-loss prevention drug that his physicians said he routinely used during his first term in office.

Finasteride — also known by the brand name Propecia — is used by millions of American men to prevent male-pattern hair loss. Three of Trump’s past physicians have said that he used the drug before and during his first term as president.

But the drug has not appeared on Trump’s medical reports since he returned to office last year, including a report released Friday night that mentioned three other medications.

White House officials declined to comment on Trump’s past use of finasteride and whether he had stopped taking it.

I had to do it! I cut-and-pasted the entire article into this story, most of which I’ll edit out to avoid plagiarism, just to get the total word count. Reporter Dan Diamond gave us 1,327 words, exclusive of the headline, subtitle, and byline, to tell us that President Trump has either ceased using an anti-hair loss drug, or has failed to disclose it if he is still taking it. The very lovely Amanda Marcotte will almost certainly tie this in with a story break of her own, telling us that it’s a conspiracy and that President Trump should be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment due to this.

“The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time,” the White House said in a statement, adding that Trump’s latest medical report included information relevant to his ability to serve as president. “No additional undisclosed conditions or procedures materially affecting his health status were omitted from this report.”

Trump’s allies have mocked the persistent focus on the president’s health, saying that many questions about his medication, appearance and aging are irrelevant to his performance. But Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist who leads Columbia University’s master’s program in bioethics, said the White House’s lack of transparency about Trump’s use of a hair-loss drug may reflect its willingness to be honest about the nearly 80-year-old president’s health.

“It raises significant questions of what else is possibly not being revealed,” Klitzman said.

He also noted that use of finasteride has been linked with an increased risk of depression, which could affect a president’s performance, adding that it was “crucial” for Trump to be open about his health and medications.

Arthur Caplan, who founded the bioethics program at New York University’s medical school and is a longtime researcher of presidential health, said he does not trust the medical reports released by the White House, citing Trump’s past efforts to conceal health information.

“We are obviously overdue for the appointment of an independent medical expert assessment,” Caplan said.

Fortunately, we do have the Post, which tells us that Democracy Dies in Darkness, on the case, complete with a trained psychiatrist telling us that the medication the President may or may not be taking, “has been linked with an increased risk of depression.” We have Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist, telling us that he does not trust the medical reports, and that we need a special prosecutor “an independent medical expert assessment.”

An obvious question: did Drs Klitzman and Caplan, did Mr Diamond, did anybody on the staff of The Washington Post raise such questions, such objections, when President Biden was visibly zoning out, was recorded losing his way, was showing obvious signs of mental decline during his four years in office? The newspaper told us that Democrats were in “panic” over Mr Biden’s June 27, 2024 debate performance, and the Post’s Editorial Board, while not calling on Mr Biden to withdraw, pointed out that even if he did, there was no guarantee that a Democrat would win in the November election. Alex Thompson, who co-authored with Jake Tapper a book that tried to cover up the media’s failings when it came to reports that President Biden was losing his marbles, told us just two days after the debate debacle that:

  • From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
  • Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.

Axios is hardly some evil, reich-wing site, but generally leans toward the left. And Mr Biden was, at the time, playing nuclear patty-cake with Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine!

They all knew! Everyone in the credentialed media in Washington knew that President Biden was drooling in his Cream of Wheat, but did the Post or The New York Times or CNN or anyone else among what Robert Stacy McCain calls “Democrats with bylines” ever tell the American people that, ever publish a call for “an independent medical expert assessment” of the President’s condition? It was only us evil, reich-wing conservatives saying anything along those lines, and the league of Scott Pelleys of the credentialed media were busily pooh-poohing any concerns.

So, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, I find it laughable that Washington’s most august newspaper is giving readers 1,327 words based on President Trump not having listed a anti-hair loss drug he may or may not still be taking.

Posted on by

Navy Joan Roberts is probably better off with her father being absent Perhaps the current generation of young adults are going to do things better

In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!

My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.

Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.

ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.

She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.

I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.

Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.

But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.

Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.

It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.

Posted on by

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! After covering up stories on Joe Biden's health, the left are speculating about every bump and bruise on President Trump

The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in one, stop digging. In the case of former First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, it works out to: when you keep saying stupid stuff, and can’t get out of your own way on it, just stop talking.

But, alas! when she’s on the hook to sell her book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, she’s got to keep on keeping on, she’s got to keep making those appearances, got to keep talking, and got to keep deep throating her doubtlessly well-pedicured feet.

Why, I have to ask, would anyone pay the cover price of $32.00, $28.42 for Amazon Prime members, for a book of nothing but lies. At every stop she makes, with every word she says, we get the message: she’s just not telling the truth. But Simon & Schuster is paying her several million bucks, the exact amount undisclosed, so she has a contract to keep running her mouth.

The book hasn’t been well-received. CNN’s Jake Tapper, the well-connected Washington journalist who knew everybody who was anybody in Washington, wrote with Alex ThompsonOriginal Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, told us all how they were shocked, shocked! that Mr Biden’s aides helped to cover up the 46th President’s decline, now has an article showing on CNN’s subscribers’ only page entitled “Jill Biden’s rosy if not blindfolded ‘View from the East Wing’.” I guess that he’s trying to seem like a real journalist again, rather than the shill for the Democratic Party he was during the four-year interregnum between President Trump’s two terms. The Wall Street Journal‘s review by Kara Voght was just simping, and reading the review makes me wonder if she actually read the book itself, rather than some Cliff’s Notes version of it. Alexandra Jacobs review in The New York Times might have had the most damning with faint praise line of all, “The general vibe is more popovers in Woman’s Day than popping off in Politico.”

It’s almost as though the talking point had been sent out. Once everybody saw, on June 27, 2024, what we evil, reich-wing conservatives had been saying all along, that President Biden was becoming more and more out of it mentally, our good friends on the left decided that they had to attack President Trump’s health. The very lovely Amanda Marcotte has gone all-out conspiracy theorist on the subject:

Why MAGA buys Trump’s perfect health lie

Cultish devotion leads Republicans to see Trump as more god-like than human

by Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 1, 2026 | 6:45 AM EDT

“When it happens” — the phrase became a meme almost overnight, as Troy Farah recently observed, in no small part because, even in our attention-addled age, people understand what it means. Donald Trump, who turns 80 this month, is not well, which has led to waves of speculation about his health and, at times, even rumors that he has died.

What great journalism in that first paragraph! Miss Marcotte gave us three citations via hyperlink, all of which lead back to Salon, the hard-left ezine for which she writes. The article is illustrated with a photo of the President’s left hand, with a visible bruise, and the caption, “Speculation continues to rise about the state of Donald Trump’s physical and mental health.” I’m not certain how a bruise on his hand leads to “speculation” about his “mental health.”

The president regularly nods off on camera during public meetings. He appeared to nap during the May 27 Cabinet meeting, even though his appointees were competing with each other to offer empty flattery, which is usually his favorite activity. His hands are not only covered in bruises, but they have also started to swell alarmingly. While he struggles to stay awake during the day, the president is often up at odd hours of the night, raving incoherently on Truth Social while obsessively reposting artificial intelligence-generated memes that frame him as heroic. He’s had at least two surprise trips to the “dentist” this year — even though the White House has its own fully equipped dental suite. On May 26, Trump had his third “annual” exam in 13 months at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after which he posted, “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”

This is almost certainly a lie, though how big of one remains to be seen. People in perfect health don’t have swollen and bruised hands or the water balloon-sized ankles Trump sometimes sports. Even the White House communications staff has tacitly admitted that something is going on, though all they will say is Trump has chronic venous insufficiency, a conveniently benign condition. There is zero reason to trust Trump or his staff; they lie constantly about nearly everything. This includes false explanations about the president’s health, because the White House keeps insisting he’s merely blinking in photos with his eyes closed, when anyone who watches the videos can see his eyes are shut for long stints of time, and not just milliseconds.

While I certainly cannot speak for the President, I do sometimes close my eyes when I am concentrating, including concentrating on what I am hearing, something not uncommon among those of us who are partially deaf.

But Miss Marcotte is ramping up for the conclusion she wants readers to draw: that the physical ailments of a man who will turn 80 twelve days from now indicate a mental ailment as well. After all, Mr Biden was losing his marbles when he was in his 80s, so why shouldn’t the same be true of President Trump?

Dr. Jonathan Reiner of The George Washington University, who was former vice president Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told CNN that Trump is showing symptoms of chronic insomnia, which “is a severe illness that can result in an increase in risk of dementia” and a “decrease in cognitive effects” that “increases your cardiac risk of having a heart attack or developing congestive heart failure.” It appears that the president has undergone multiple cognitive tests, because Trump, who seems to confuse them with IQ tests, keeps bragging about how he was told him he had “aced” them. Such exams are typically given when doctors suspect cognitive decline, as journalist Jim Acosta underscored recently by taking the test himself, which involves drawing a cube or identifying common animals.

As a part of my annual Medicare examination — I’m 73 years old — I got the simple cognitive test, mine being to draw a circle and then add the hours of a clock on the face. Being the snarky guy that I am, I made it a 24-hour clock face, just to amuse the nurse, and I’m wondering how today’s generation, familiar almost entirely with digital clocks, will do. 🙂

But it’s amusing: the left want to do something, do anything to get rid of President Trump. The only evidence they have of cognitive problems for the President is that they are outraged by the decisions he takes. Yet if President Trump does fail to complete his term, for whatever reason, Vice President J D Vance then becomes President — something I currently hope he does on January 20, 2029 — and they’ll hate Mr Vance, who is only 41 years old, just as much as they do Mr Trump.

Godwin’s law, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” amuses here. The younger President Bush was “literally Hitler,” which was conveniently ignored when President Trump also became Hitler during his first term, and during the four years in the wilderness, before his triumphal return to Washington. If Mr Vance becomes President, will we see yet another reductio ad Hitlerum applied to him.

Miss Marcotte has already expressed her wish for the Vances to divorce.

There actually is a mental problem rampant among our friends on the left, called Trump Derangement Syndrome. There were a lot of things conservatives disliked about President Biden and his four years in office, but if there were any stories about wild-eyed conservatives saying things about the President on social media that got them fired, I missed them. Chaya Raichik and her Libs of TikTok became hugely successful for quoting what the left were saying about themselves, and even today (supposedly) educated professionals have lost jobs and professional accreditations for posting really stupid stuff about wanting to kill the President and members of the Administration. Conservatives haven’t proven themselves to be that deranged!

That mental problem was never on greater display than the four years of the Biden Administration. Our friends on the left kept assuring us that everything was just fine with Mr Biden, he was sharp as a tack, always on top of his game, pretty much exactly what his loving wife was saying about him. Contrast that with today, and every little bruise on the President’s hand leads the media to speculate that he’s at death’s door, with exactly zero evidence of such.

About his health? The fact is that we do not really know, but we do know that he’s twelve days shy of his 80th birthday, he’s visibly overweight, and despite his many years of wealth, he prefers to eat pure junk. It’s been long reported that he wants his steaks well done, and with ketchup, which is, to my mind, his only impeachable offense. If the man did suddenly die, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. What I’m not going to do, however, is speculate blindly and aimlessly, and I’m not going to stop telling the truth.

Posted on by

At what point does a columnist slanting or hiding information to one side become lying through his scummy teeth?

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s communist, oops, sorry, columnist Will Bunch frequently shades the truth, slanting it as far left as he possibly can, but there’s a difference between shading the truth and lying through his scummy teeth.

Mikie Sherrill’s state police riot in Newark is a national disgrace

New Jersey state troopers meant to protect Newark protesters from ICE are violently shredding the First Amendment instead.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, May 31, 2026 | 2:05 PM EDT

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and the United States began its decade-long spiral into authoritarian madness, there arose a popular meme: Whatever you think you would have done to stop the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, or to end American racial injustice in the 1960s, is what you are doing right now.

Today, a humanitarian tragedy is taking place behind barbed wire and rows of riot cops in the industrial netherlands of Newark, where immigrants snatched by masked agents of American secret police are held in a private lockup called Delaney Hall in squalid conditions — fed rancid food, denied proper medical care, and fearing for their lives.

What are good people doing right now? As news of a detainee hunger strike inside Delaney Hall reached the outside world, a few hundred protesters have made their way toward the gates of the facility run by the for-profit GEO Group — to voice support for the strikers, demand humane treatment, and, for some of them, put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience against a human-rights catastrophe on American soil.

Let’s use the same link Mr Bunch used last to see what he meant by “put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience.”

Groups of demonstrators, many wearing gas masks and other face coverings, linked arms in a human chain, videos and photos posted on social media show.

The distinguished columnist doesn’t like it when ICE officers wear “face coverings,” but it doesn’t seem to bother him when the mostly peaceful protesters do.

Some used trash cans, old mattresses, umbrellas and other materials as makeshift shields and barricades as they confronted U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement officers.

Others attempted to block people and vehicles from entering and exiting the building or threw orange traffic cones and other objects in the direction of ICE officers as they taunted them with expletives and vulgar chants.

The ICE officers, many of whom wore helmets and tactical vests, used pepper spray to try and disperse the protesters, according to videos posted to social media. Some used their batons to beat and push back protesters as the officers attempted to clear the roadway for vehicles.

DHS said about six demonstrators were arrested for assaulting law enforcement officers.

The source is WPVI-TV, the ABC owned-and-operated television station in the City of Brotherly Love; it’s not some evil reich-wing source.

Mr Bunch’s subtitle called it “shredding the First Amendment,” so let’s ask: what exactly does the First Amendment say?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Do throwing “orange traffic cones and other objects in the direction of ICE officers,” attempting “to block people and vehicles from entering and exiting the building,” or using “trash cans, old mattresses, umbrellas and other materials as makeshift shields and barricades” sound like they meet the constitutional standard of assembling peaceably?

Is “assaulting law enforcement officers” part of the right of the people peaceably to assemble?

Mr Bunch again:

So is the New Jersey governor at war with the rogue agency that sends masked goon squads into city streets to grab day laborers or Uber drivers and warehouses them in squalid gulags, and that murdered two citizens on the streets of Minneapolis when they tried to protest? Or is she partnering with them? How long can we remain in denial that 21st century America is a police state with “resistance Democrats” as willing partners?

By “grab day laborers or Uber drivers” the columnist means arresting people in our country illegally. By “they tried to protest,” Mr Bunch means trying to run down ICE agents with her car (Renee Good) and pulling a gun on ICE agents (Alex Pretti). Of course, he doesn’t tell you that part, does he?

At what point, I have to ask, does the columnist slanting or hiding information to one side become lying through his scummy teeth? In my opinion, he’s not just past that point, but well past it.

However, I do agree that we should get rid of these illegal immigrant detention centers. What we should do is deport them immediately upon apprehension, and if they have a case to be made for being allowed to live in the United States, they can make it at the American embassies or consulates in their home countries.

Posted on by

James Talarico: a representative of failing ‘progressive’ Christianity, and a hypocrite to boot Former 'vegan' campaigner now chows down on barbeque to appeal to Texas voters

In a move reminiscent of Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath Hnderson being caught on tape, fund raising in Massachusetts for a congressional seat in the Bluegrass State, saying “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Texas Democratic Senate nominee was caught on tape saying, in a 2022 state House of Representatives campaign, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

Now Mr Talarico is telling us, it ain’t true, ’cause see, I is eating spare ribs and turkey drumsticks.

Battling rumors that he is a sexual neuter or homosexual, the 36-year-old Mr Talarico announced that yes, he has a girlfriend, saying “She is my rock. She is my best friend. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the last six months of this crazy race if she hadn’t been by my side.” She’s been “by (his) side” so much that no one knows who she is or has a photo of her with him.

Oh, we’ll eventually see a name and photo of her, a version of the fake dating books now popular for some reason, but she’s just as likely to be a beard to get him past election day. Continue reading →

Posted on by

I’m waiting on yet another effort by the left to censor things that don’t like.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it seems that there were warning signs known to the police about Caleb Vazquez, one of the killers in the San Diego mosque shooting. From London’s left-wing The Guardian:

One of shooters in deadly attack at San Diego mosque was previously flagged by FBI

Officials seized guns from Caleb Vazquez’s father last year amid alarm over teen’s views on mass shooters and Nazism

by José Olivares | Friday, May 22, 2026 | 12:45 PM EDT

One of the two white supremacist shooters who attacked a mosque in California on Monday and killed three people had already been on law enforcement officials’ radar, according to US media reports.

Local officials were so alarmed by Caleb Vazquez’s idolization of mass shooters and Nazism that they seized his father’s guns a year before the shooting, the New York Times reports. Similarly, Bloomberg reports that Vazquez had already been flagged by the FBI as a “potential threat” last year.

Eighteen-year-old Vazquez and his friend, Cain Clark, 17, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego earlier this week and killed three men, including a security guard who exchanged gunfire with the attackers and prevented them from reaching 140 schoolchildren. The two shooters then died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds in their getaway car.

Further down:

Vazquez was already on law enforcement’s radar, after someone flagged to officials troubling social media posts. In a protective order last year, a police officer wrote that Vazquez was involved in “suspicious behavior” that idolized Nazis and mass shooters, prompting officials to seize Vazquez’s father’s guns. Vazquez had also been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, the Times reported.

Vazquez’s father and his wife had 26 guns, including pistols, rifles and shotguns in their home. The father wrote in an affidavit that he had voluntarily put the weapons in a storage facility because of concerns about his son. The court ordered him to voluntarily turn over his guns to officials.

So, law enforcement knew about young Mr Vasquez at least, though there are still no reports that I have seen indicating either of the two shooters had previous criminal records. The New York Post reported that Mr Vazquez had:

walked away from a mental health facility the day before carrying out Monday’s deadly attack, sources said.

Caleb Vazquez, 18, left the Park Mental Health Treatment Center the morning before killing three people at an Islamic center with 17-year-old Cain Clark, law enforcement sources told The Post.

So, the police knew about Mr Vazquez, and the family’s firearms were taken away, and he had been receiving some apparently-not-very-effective mental health treatment, yet he still went on a killing spree. Why, it’s almost as though the policies that the left advocate didn’t work in this case.

Mr Vazquez was reported to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that term is so over-diagnosed and overused as to make it practically meaningless.

Messrs Clark and Vazquez had apparently been interested in radical videos, so watch for our good friends on the left want to censor our freedom of speech and of the press because a few nutbags might be radicalized. After all, they tried it before, during Joe Biden’s four unfortunate years! The New Republic blamed Kamala Harris Emhoff’s election loss on freedom of speech, and we have reported many times on now thankfully former President Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth under the Department of Fatherland Security, called the “Disinformation Governance Board”, and how we were fortunate that it failed. The left were aghast when Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, because they were afraid that conservatives might use Twitter more successfully, and the very lovely Taylor Lorenz, who wants to force us all to wear face masks forever, blamed the failure of that Board on “right-wing attacks.” My good friend — we’re such good friends that she has blocked me on Bluesky — Amanda Marcotte, who exercises her own freedom of speech and of the press on Salon, wanted the government to take over Twitter while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch suggested it “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire.”

So, I’m waiting on yet another attack by the left to censor things that don’t like. To have a free society is to assume greater risks for that freedom. People could, after all, be far safer from crime, from revolutionaries, from all sorts of things in places like China or North Korea.

Posted on by

Amy McGrath Henderson goes 0-for-3! Three strikes, and she should be out!

I originally wrote this on September 25, 2025, but didn’t finish it to my satisfaction, and it has been being ignored in my drafts queue ever since that time. The Bluegrass State held its primary elections, and yes, Amy McGrath Henderson[1]While Mrs Henderson does not have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show such similar disrespect. has now gone 0-for-3!

Does Amy McGrath Henderson want to go 0-for-3?

Lt Col Amy McGrath Henderson, USMC (Retired) is nowhere close to Harold Stassen‘s nine presidential campaign attempts, but there are rumors that she is about to become yet another perennial candidate. We have frequently noted the twice-failed Democrat, and have been singularly unimpressed.

Amy McGrath comeback? Former KY Senate candidate said to be considering 2026 run

By Austin Horn | Wednesday, September 24, 2025 | 11:33 AM EDT

Amy McGrath, a former Democratic candidate for both the U.S. House and Senate in Kentucky, may jump in the Senate race in 2026. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 While Mrs Henderson does not have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show such similar disrespect.
Posted on by

They’re dead; what more could be done to them?

There’s some silliness in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s concluding statement about the San Diego mosque killings:

(Cain) Clark and (Caleb) Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Uhhh, the killers are stone-cold graveyard dead; there’s not a lot more we could do to them at this point.

Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose

Many police departments see hate crime data as a politically loaded minefield, leaving the FBI blind to the true scale of civil rights violence.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Wednesday, May 20, 2026

At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The police are usually circumspect in issuing statements like this; is it any surprise that they were so this time?

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

In reading those two paragraphs, I see no evidence or even allegations of a crime prior to the killings. Their speech was certainly offensive, but offensive speech is part of our freedom of speech. If people’s “scribblings . . . spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” are there not other people spewing hatred of whites and Christians and really normal people in general? Does Mr Hutchinson want the Geheime Staatspolizei to search every computer posting, or perhaps search people’s homes for written journals looking for hate speech? We have reported many times on the FBI under the Biden Administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” looking for “domestic violent extremists”, before the program was made public and embarrassment made the FBI shut it down, and even then FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of it.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes are known, tracked, monitored, and surveilled, and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.

The author keeps mistakenly referring to Cain Clark as Clark Cain.

It’s still early in the investigations, but if Messrs Clark and Vasquez committed any previous crimes, I haven’t yet seen such reported, and I have searched. If either committed offenses as juveniles, those records would have been sealed. News flash: neither the local police nor the FBI can do anything about people who have not yet committed actual crimes.

Another point: while Mr Vasquez was 18, Mr Clark was a minor at 17. Had they survived and been tried for murder, Mr Clark could be sentenced to nothing more than life without the possibility of parole. Mr Vasquez could be sentenced to death, but the Pyrite State has not actually executed anyone for the last twenty years. A ‘hate crime’ rider could do nothing more to them.

ABC Channel 7 reported:

A Sonnenrad patch, depicting a neo-Nazi symbol, and what analysts assess is likely a patch for a militant accelerationist group, are both visible on the plate carrier being worn by the person believed to be Clark, according to sources. Additionally, writings are visible on a gun, including drawings of SS bolts and neo-Nazi insignias, sources said.

According to our good friends on the left, Nazi symbols and signs are not at all disqualifying, at least not when it comes to a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, but just youthful mistakes.

But it shows you the depth of the problem about which Mr Hutchinson complained. The same Democrats who are willing to forgive Graham Platner’s ‘youthful mistake’ were also willing to surveil devout Catholics who simply preferred the Latin Mass. Mr Hutchinson would, like the FBI surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” criminalize thoughts. Like the movie Minority Report, they want to lock up potential criminals before they’ve committed any crime.

Posted on by

Our good friends on the left are ‘alarmed’ at the notion of a religious revival

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifies:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Our good friends on the left seem to believe that it says more than it means, but, of course, they’re idiots.

Trump-backed faith event features conservative Christians as critics decry blurring of church-state lines

By David Hood-Nuño and Julio-Cesar Chavez | Sunday, May 17, 2026 | 6:06 AM EDT

A Trump administration-backed celebration of U.S. ​religious heritage on Sunday highlighted conservative Christian leaders’ ties to the president as critics expressed the gathering did not reflect the country’s diverse faith ‌landscape.

Well, of course not: how do you reflect a “diverse faith network” in a single event?

Thousands of people attended the nine-hour program, called “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” for a mixture of popular worship music and speakers from evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholic traditions.

Sunday’s events included video messages from members of the Trump administration such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. All of them generally stuck to ​the prevailing theme of the day, touching on the Judeo-Christian roots of the country’s founders and the themes they incorporated into some landmark documents such as ​the Declaration of Independence.

The event mixed elements of a rally and a religious service, where chants of “U-S-A” broke out in the crowd ⁠at times with contemporary Christian artists like Chris Tomlin leading the crowd in well-known worship songs.

Further down:

Advocates of church-state separation said the event blurs government and religion.

“This government-sponsored prayer fest ​is the epitome of exactly what our secular Constitution forbids our government from doing,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in a statement.

Well, of course: the “Freedom From Religion Foundation.” The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a particular state religion, but a public event, regardless of how religious it is, does not constitute the establishment of a state church. Miss Gaylor seems to have missed that the part of the First Amendment which states that there may be no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” when it comes to religion.

Several government leaders attended the event, though President Trump did not, but no one was required to attend.

Faith leaders who spoke included ​Bishop Robert Barron, from the Catholic Diocese ⁠of Winona-Rochester; Jonathan Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University, a school established by Christian evangelicals; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City.

So, the event was neither exclusively Protestant or Catholic, or even restricted to Christians.

The very lovely Amanda Marcotte was appalled in advance:

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s old Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar. It’s even more telling that the beer light is for Bud Light, of Dylan Mulvaney infamy.

The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th

Trump’s Rededicate 250 event erases the U.S.’s secular history

By Amanda Marcotte | Friday, May 15, 2026 | 6:45AM EDT

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why.

Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

Has Miss Marcotte forgotten that many of the people who came to this country came to be able to practice their faiths as they saw fit. The Pilgrims, from whom I am descended, believed that the established Church of England was corrupt beyond salvation, while the Puritans wanted to reform and purify the Church of England from within. Maryland was established as a safe haven for Catholics, who were persecuted in England. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a “holy experiment” to create a sanctuary for religious freedom, particularly for Quakers — Mr Penn was a Quaker — facing persecution in England. These were all Christians, simply of different denominations.

At the time the First Amendment was ratified, several states still had established state churches, all of which were Protestant Christian of one denomination or another.

On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Were you alarmed? I know that I certainly wasn’t!

The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement. As Jason Kyle Howard recently wrote in Salon, Trump’s efforts to inflict his grotesque architectural tastes on the nation’s capital cannot be separated from the administration’s schemes “to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.”

I think she meant “no doubt,” rather than “not doubt,” but of what there is no doubt is that the founders saw the new nation that they created as a Christian nation, not a secular one as Miss Marcotte fantasizes. A couple of the founders, Thomas Jefferson specifically, were “deists,” people who believed that there must be a creator God, but one who does not interfere in human affairs, nor left us with any holy books or instructions. Mr Jefferson had his own ‘cut and paste’ version of the New Testament, one which focused on Jesus’ morals and teachings, while omitting miracles or supernatural references, but we were an almost entirely Protestant, albeit with competing denominations, Christian nation, and it is the writer from Salon who is attempting to “undermine the living history” our nation.
__________________________________
Related Articles: