Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to! Teen Voguer bemoans losing his job writing hard left politics for an online magazine supposedly focused on teen fashion and beauty.

Lex McMenamin (they/them) describes himself[1]As our Stylebook specifies, The First Street Journal does not use the silly formulation “he or she.” In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in … Continue reading in his Bluesky biography as:

permanent Philadelphian in NYC, opinions mine
WAS politics @teenvogue.com
member @transjournalists.org
@leximcmenamin elsewhere
linktr.ee/leximcmenamin

As you can see, Mr McMenamin, who puts plural pronouns in his signature line on Bluesky, is going to be a flaming liberal, as the list of his online articles shows. Alas! she skeeted today:

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day.

certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

I admit to being almost totally unfamiliar with Teen Vogue. What little I do know comes from Robert Stacy McCain, who has mentioned the magazine’s normally silly political articles several times. See this and this — noting how Teen Vogue was ceasing print publication — and this. But it has to be asked: why did an online magazine supposedly concerned with fashion and beauty for teenaged girls need “political staffers”?

I dislike the fact that anyone, other than illegal immigrants in our country, has lost his job, and certainly do not celebrate a “permanent Philadelphian” losing his, but Condé Nast ceased print publication of Teen Vogue because it wasn’t making money, despite, somehow, the magazine’s turn to the political left.

However, it isn’t only Mr McMenamin who has lost his job:

Teen Vogue Will Fold Into Vogue.com

By Danya Issawi | Monday, November 3, 2025 | 2:23 PM EST

One of the last remaining publications dedicated to teens and young adults is undergoing a transformation. Today, Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue will now live at Vogue.com and that the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Versha Sharma, will be stepping down. Chloe Malle, Vogue’s new head of editorial content, will oversee the publication in Sharma’s place. The move follows last week’s news that Vogue Business will officially move under the Vogue.com umbrella as well.

According to the announcement, Teen Vogue will remain “a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission.” The magazine had already ceased printing, releasing a final print issue with Hillary Clinton on the cover in December 2017 before becoming a digital-only publication. During that time, and continuing under Sharma’s direction, the outlet had shifted its focus toward discussing politics and human rights head on, laying a strong stake in the media landscape as a reliable place for young people to seek out sociopolitical coverage. From interviewing Zohran Mamdani on the campaign trail to catching up with Greta Thunberg fresh out of her detention in an Israeli prison to breaking down the lessons that Black Lives Matter taught protestors, Teen Vogue has been considered a platform for young progressives inside the glossy confines of Condé Nast. The company’s announcement makes no explicit mention of the future of the outlet’s political coverage.

It doesn’t take much to see that that last paragraph was written with a leftist bias! But no leftist bias can cover for the fact that Teen Vogue is being subsumed into Vogue, and this move is very similar to others in the credentialed media: they have to cut costs because profits are increasingly scarce.

As for Mr McMenamin and Miss Sharma? It’s not great that they have lost their jobs, and new jobs in the media are tough to find. Some of my friends would retort, “Learn to code,” after the “advice” given to blue-collar workers being laid off — though The New Republic says it’s an evil reich wing meme — but I would say something different: learn to drive a truck! There will be a lot of jobs opening up soon!

References

References
↑1 As our Stylebook specifies, The First Street Journal does not use the silly formulation “he or she.” In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to whom a pronoun refers is unknown, the masculine is properly used, and does not indicate that that person is male, nor is it biased in favor of such an assumption. We are uncertain as to Mr McMenamin’s actual sex, his biological sex, and thus use the masculine pronouns throughout.
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The left really, really hate your #FreedomOfSpeech What they say is gospel; what conservatives say is forbidden

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, who sometimes pinch hits on this poor site when I’m on vacation, uses as his blog ‘tagline,’ “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” And thus we have, in our good friends on the left, the ones championing freedom of speech and their right to protest our Evil Orange Overlord in the ‘No Kings’ rallies, showing us just how much they support freedom of speech for the people they don’t like.

KKK propaganda found in Central Kentucky city. Police ask for camera footage

By Christopher Leach | Wednesday, October 22, 2025 | 10:09 AM EDT

The Frankfort Police Department is investigating after Ku Klux Klan propaganda was found in the community overnight Tuesday into Wednesday.

Police did not say specifically where the propaganda was found, but asked those in the area to share security camera footage with investigators. Allowing investigators to review footage could help identify those who spread the propaganda, officials said.

“The Frankfort Police Department does not tolerate hate in any form,” the agency said in an Oct. 22 Facebook post. “This behavior goes against the values of our community, and the Frankfort Police Department is taking this matter very seriously.”

Anyone with information can contact Frankfort police at 502-875-8582.

“The Frankfort Police Department remains committed to the safety of the Frankfort community and continues to support a thriving and diverse community,” police wrote in the Facebook post.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. Normally I’d crop part of the story, but I wanted you to see the whole thing, along with the linked Facebook post, so that you could see that in no place was it indicated that whatever the Ku Klux Klan propaganda said, there are no indications given that it contained any illegal threats to any specific individuals.

Similar ‘incidents’ in Midway and a neighborhood in Lexington have been reported by Christopher Leach as well, though they do not specify that the fliers distributed were by the Klan.

So, I have to ask: if there are no indications reported that the “propaganda” contained any illegal threats, why is this a concern of law enforcement in the state capital? Do the Klan somehow not have freedom of speech and of the press? What actual crime was committed by the Klan distributing their message? The Frankfort Police Department called it an “appalling act of littering,” which Mr Leach did not include in his news story, so apparently the city’s police department is devoting great resources to investigate the distribution as littering, not to investigate any actual threat.

Well, apparently asking such a question was enough for what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal to ‘deactivate’ my comment, screenshotted at the right. I wrote:

The Herald-Leader certainly celebrated the Freedom of Speech expressed by the attendees at the No Kings rally last Saturday, but now we’re hearing that “Ku Klux Klan propaganda”, another expression of freedom of speech, has led to “the Frankfort Police Department is taking this matter very seriously.”

What actual crime has been committed here? Just because people don’t like what the Klan are saying doesn’t mean that it is illegal for them to say it.

We have documented, many times, how much our good friends on the left, including in the credentialed media, hate the freedom of speech and of the press when it comes to those with whom they disagree. The New York Times itself told us how much they don’t like freedom of speech when it comes to Donald Trump or conservatives using Twitter. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard-left columnist Will Bunch loves using his freedom of speech and of the press to attack conservatives but absolutely hates it when anyone departs from the leftist line, attacking the very liberal Morning Joe hosts Joe and Mika Scarborough for having the unmitigated gall to interview Donald Trump after he had won the 2024 election.

The Klan? Yeah, they’re an extreme example, but so what? Do the left believe that they should not be allowed to express their opinions?

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Christians cannot hate Judaism without hating themselves

You know, this really pisses me off. No, not Vice President J D Vance visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a place where I have been and found amazing and inspiring, but the utterly asinine comments of (supposedly) good Americans, some of whom even profess to be Christians.

I have seen several different tweets about this, and they are absolutely filled with haters in the comments. Some are from Protestants, bemoaning the fact that the Vice President is Catholic, even though the Church is managed jointly by Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Christian authorities. I saw one which slammed him for having married a Hindu, and many which berated him for also visiting the Western Wall, the holiest site for Jews.

But the Western Wall is also a site for Christians. It is the exposed remnants of the second Temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus himself walked and taught and prayed. How can it be wrong for any Christian to appreciate a place where Jesus was?

There is much of the Old City which is lost to time, deeply buried under two millennia of accumulated debris. The Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross through the Old City, is paved with stones on which Jesus never trod, and the buildings you can see are primarily Byzantine, not from the first century. But the Western Wall, though the ground is paved, has been excavated to the level of the first century.

Christianity is built on the foundation of Judaism. Our Old Testament books are the ancient Jewish scriptures. We don’t ignore them, and at least in a Catholic Mass — I cannot write knowledgeably about how our Separated Brethren conduct their services — we have one reading from the Old Testament along with a responsorial song from Psalms, much of which are the writings of King David, roughly a thousand years before Jesus.

That Jesus was Jewish is attested to in the Bible, which tells us that the Holy Family made the annual pilgrimage to the Temple for Passover. We know that must have been a common thing for Jews in the first century, because the Holy Family had to have travelled by some sort of caravan, or they couldn’t have returned to Nazareth without knowing their 12-year-old son wasn’t with them. We know that Jesus told the crowd, in the Sermon on the Mount, that not a single letter of the old Jewish law would be wiped away.

Jesus himself frequently referenced the Jewish scriptures, and was a Jew from a Jewish family; Christians cannot (rationally) hate Judaism without hating themselves. No real Christian can visit the Old City and not be moved.

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer Our good friends on the left somehow believe the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

I will admit it: I have not always been charitable when it comes to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, The Philadelphia Inquirer and it’s journolism. No, that’s not a typo: The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

In a story about Sherrilyn Hawkins, who pleaded guilty to starving her 21-year-old disabled son to death, reporter Vinny Vella chose to use terms like “allowing him to waste away to just 59 pounds,” rather than tell readers the direct truth. Mr Vella responded, “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your reading comprehension, Dana. Keep trying; I know you’ll get it someday.”

We continued our Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — discussion a bit further, but it was the newspaper’s main editorial that really got to me:

Lessons must be learned after criminal justice system fails Kada Scott | Editorial

Hindsight is 20/20, but a series of prosecutorial and judicial miscues may have enabled the young woman’s death.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

The killing of Kada Scott is tragic on many levels, but hopefully, some lessons can be learned to honor her life.

Scott’s death is all the more painful for her family and friends because it could have been prevented. That’s because it appears District Attorney Larry Krasner and the Philadelphia court system failed her.

The man accused of abducting Scott had been previously charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend twice in the last year, but prosecutors withdrew the charges after the victim did not show up for court.

After Scott’s disappearance, Krasner’s office admitted its handling of the earlier cases was a mistake. If the district attorney’s office had instead prosecuted Keon King, 21, then perhaps Scott, 23, would still be alive.

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

There’s much more at the original, the next few paragraphs detailing the “miscues” which led to Keon King being a free man when he, allegedly, murdered Kada Scott. Then we come to this:

But once again, the victim and her friend refused to cooperate with prosecutors, so the charges were withdrawn in May.

This is not unusual, as victims of domestic violence often live in fear of the perpetrators. Reviewing the period between 2010 and 2020, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that 70% of victims of domestic violence cases failed to appear in Philadelphia’s courts.

A big part of the problem is that the accused are often out on bail and still threatening the victims. In King’s case, after the second set of assault charges, prosecutors requested bail of $1 million, but the magistrate lowered it to $200,000.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits the setting of “excessive bail,” so the magistrate did have to set a bail that Mr King could reasonably meet, something the newspaper reported that he was able to post immediately. But if the magistrate required Mr King to be fitted with a GPS monitor, none of the Inquirer stories I could find on the case mentioned it. An ankle monitor might have at least deterred Mr King, if he actually is the assailant, or provided more evidence to convict him if he was not deterred. Ankle monitors might provide the victims with a little more of a sense of security when their (alleged) assailants are released.

If all of the allegations against Mr King can be proven, he needs to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars, with no possibility of parole. He is clearly a menace to the decent people of the City of Brotherly Love, and will almost certainly never change.

The Editorial Board said that “Lessons must be learned” from Mr Krasner’s and his minions’ inept handling of this case, but it’s hardly the first time that the District Attorney and his lenient and lax treatment of criminals have been noted. Despite all of the evidence of his lenience, the Editorial Board endorsed him for re-nomination in both 2021 and this year. Though the newspaper has yet to make its endorsement for the general election, I would be stunned if they endorsed moderate Democrat turned Republican Pat Dugan, despite the Board’s knowledge of Mr Krasner’s failures. After all, the Board does love Mr Krasner’s attempts to prosecute and imprison police officers!

There is a lesson to be learned alright, but it isn’t the lesson the Editorial Board would like. The lesson should be that American civilization must be protected and defended, even from those Americans in our cities who choose savagery over civilization. In the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” in which Captain Kirk and three others from his crew were transported to a mirror universe in which savagery was the rule of the day, when the transport was finally undone, Mr Spock said that it was far easier for the Captain and crew, civilized people, to play savages than it was for the savages from the alternate universe to behave as civilized men. Our good friends on the left don’t quite seem to have taken that lesson, and somehow believe that the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to!

Will Bunch, the “national opinion columnist” for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is as thoroughly eaten up with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as anyone on earth, and his rant this morning on Bluesky — he’s mostly abandoned Twitter — is thoroughly amusing. Mr Bunch is bemoaning “the media’s anemic (or non-) coverage of the massive No Kings movement,” which led me to check his own newspaper’s website. As of 8:11 AM EDT this morning, there were no stories showing up on the website that mentioned or even hinted as coverage of the #NoKings protests.

Even the Inquirer’s Editorial Board had to give President Trump (grudging) credit for the ceasefire and return of the hostages, so perhaps, just perhaps, the No Kings protests, scheduled for this coming Saturday, are not proving to be particularly well-timed. That he’s scheduled to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to discuss ways to end the 3½-years-long Russo-Ukrainian War means that, despite his earlier failure to get an agreement there — something the left widely mocked — President Trump is still trying to work on a peace agreement there as well.

Can you imagine the apoplexy on the left if he did manage to get such an agreement? Imagine that: the “literally Hitler” demon to the left forging agreements to end two major wars?  🙂

Of course, the No Kings protests last summer were mostly a dud, despite the hype the left gave them, but at least they mostly avoided turning into riots. Perhaps that’s what the organizers think they need to become, to get much attention. William Teach noted that the global warming climate change protesters who have moved beyond peaceable assembly into destroying art and gluing themselves to the road to block traffic are now facing real punishment, so there’s that issue.

3gunGorilla tweeted an exchange from the Dave Ramsey Show:

“So you’re having protests all over the country next weekend?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re calling them ‘No Kings’ protests?”
“Yes, Dave.”
“But the person who you claim is trying to act like a King isn’t stopping the protests?”
+“Well …”
“And you don’t see the irony?”

‘Nuff said!

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That thing that never happens has happened again

Hiring a 48-year-old, 5’7″, 210 lb ‘transgender woman’ to drive a school bus full of young kids? What could possibly go wrong?

Male bus driver who goes by ‘Ms Sharon’ charged with sexually abusing multiple boys

By Alex Oliveira | Sunday, October 5, 2025 | 2:27 PM EDT

A North Carolina school bus driver who calls himself “Ms. Sharon” has been charged with sexually assaulting several boys whom he lured to his house, cops say.

Leetwain Darrell Tate — a 48-year-old a male also known as just “Sharon” — was arrested Tuesday and charged with two counts of statutory rape and six counts of indecent liberties with a minor, according to Charlotte-Mecklenberg police.

He is accused of assaulting at least four boys age 14 and 15 years old, but officials said there could be more victims.

The children were found to be staying at his house, and one of them claimed Tate offered him money in return for sex, an arrest affidavit obtained by WCNC read.

The New York Post noted that the police said none of the ‘incidents’ occurred while Mr Tate was working for the school or on school property.

The WCCB news story doesn’t give us any more information than did the Post. Oddly enough, I was unable to find anything on this story in The New York Times, where they tell readers about All the News That’s Fit to Print.

The Charlotte Observer did report on the story, but of course the newspaper used the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Tate. The Observer reported this:

In a letter to families about the allegations, Sugar Creek Charter School Superintendent Celeste Sundo said Tate met all of the necessary background requirements to get hired.

“All Sugar Creek Charter School candidates undergo a multi-step hiring process, including a national background check and reference checks, before an offer of employment is made,” Sundo said.

Yeah, that’s what the Des Moines board of education said about Ian Roberts, too, and look how that turned out! Apparently being a 5’7″ ‘transgender woman’ meets the ‘necessary background requirements’ for Mecklenburg County public schools! Normally when you hire crazy, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get crazy.

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Whenever There Is a Truth You Cannot Tell, That Is a Truth You Must Tell! Our Credentialed Media: All the News That's Politically Correct!

I have previously suggested that it was Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s devilishly clever scheme to let the thugs get away with ‘smaller’ s(tuff) until they graduated to a crime which could keep them locked up forever, and if that crime happened to eliminate other thugs, it was a win-win for the DA, getting two or more bad guys off the streets for good. Robert Stacy McCain was less charitable:

Democrats are objectively pro-crime. It is the de facto policy of the Democratic Party that mentally ill criminals should be turned loose on the streets until they stab somebody in the neck. Democrats are the psycho killer party, and the people who vote for Democrats don’t care how many people get killed as a result of their policy.

The Democrats would deny that, of course, but is there any evidence, any evidence at all that Mr McCain’s statement isn’t true? Forget what the left say; look at what they do, and Mr McCain’s statement makes perfect sense.

My good friend Matt Van Swol tweeted a list of major news sources, the credentialed media writ large, which did not cover this story, so I checked my primary newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a site search for the (alleged) killer’s name, Decarlos Brown, returned nothing. I didn’t check Mr Van Swol’s list in its entirety, but doing site searches of the websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN resulted in just what Mr Van Swol said, nothing.

Remember: bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, and there are no real limitations on space for those news organizations.

It was an old joke that New Yorkers riding the subway would have the Times very visible, while actually reading the New York Post hidden inside, and yup, the Post covered the murder with three separate stories.

I guess this story wasn’t part of the news that’s fit to print.

We’ve seen this before. The Inquirer’s publisher specifically said that, to achieve her goal of making the newspaper an “anti-racist news organization,” she was establishing guidelines that would reduce the newspaper’s coverage of crime, because it often “stigmatized” certain “Philadelphia communities”. Decarlos Brown is black, and he (allegedly) stabbed a white woman to death, for no known reason other than he is just plain crazy.

But there’s more. Mr Brown is a career criminal, with a rap sheet which dates back to his juvenile years, but while there are many arrests noted, only one actual criminal conviction is listed; he’s been let go without any serious action several times since he got out of prison. This is exactly the thing about which sensible people have been complaining, and liberals ignoring, in their zealous attempts to not ‘stigmatize’ black Americans.

Thus there are two problems for the credentialed media when it comes to Mr Brown:

  1. Mr Brown is black, while his victim was a very pretty white woman, and the media certainly don’t want to point out that; and
  2. The Brown case demonstrates what liberal law enforcement yields.

With President Trump’s actions to send in National Guard troops to help with law enforcement in our more dangerous communities, the left are saying that it’s raaaaacist to do that, because it disproportionately impacts black communities.

Imagine this story in 1985! Because the credentialed media didn’t want you to know about it, it wouldn’t have been published much beyond the local Charlotte Observer, so for the vast majority of the nation, that crime didn’t happen. It’s only due to social media and this internet thingy that Al Gore invented that this is a story at all, because as far as The New York Times is concerned, it never happened.

The Inquirer? That august newspaper is all-in on demanding new funds for SEPTA, and a story about an innocent woman stabbed to death for seemingly no reason at all certainly won’t push more Philadelphians to take public transportation!

Mr Brown should never have been out on the streets, and should have been in the loony bin, but no one wants to say that. It took the sacrifice of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska to bring this to the fore.

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Another cosplayer for Hamas

I have frequently mocked the pro-‘Palestinian’, pro-Hamas demonstrators in their keffiyehs, asking why they should be taken seriously when virtually none of them picked up a rifle and headed to Gaza to fight the evil Jooooos. But it seems like this anti-Semitic, anti-American — he was born in New Jersey, which makes him an American citizen — went at least far enough as to pick up a rifle!

The New Yorker trashed for inviting ‘pro-9/11 radical’ Hasan Piker, who called Israelis ‘inbred,’ to speak at festival

By Emily Crane | Friday, September 5, 2025 | 8:43 AM EDT

The New Yorker magazine is being ripped for inviting controversial lefty influencer Hasan Piker to headline an upcoming event — despite his vile history of calling Israelis “inbred” and that America “deserved 9/11.”

Piker, a popular left-wing Twitch streamer, is slated to participate in a New Yorker Festival roundtable event — titled the “New Political Arena” — next month.

But news of the progressive darling’s appearance on the line up has sparked outrage — with many blasting the mag for giving a “pro-9/11 radical” a platform to potentially spew hate and peddle antisemitism.

The 33-year-old New Jersey-born streamer has also downplayed the sexual assault of women on October 7, declaring it “doesn’t matter if rapes happened.”

I almost think that Mr Piker was at least being honest in saying that the issue of Hamas’ rapes of innocent women doesn’t bother him, so he doesn’t care if they happened or not. That’s at least more honest than so many of the rape-denialists on the left, who deny the rapes occurred, because they didn’t want to denigrate their heroes in Hamas.

But it’s Mr Piker’s costume playacting — cosplay — that gets me. He had a photo taken of him, holding a military-looking rifle, while being adored by a dog in an apartment. Dogs are ‘unclean’ and may not be kept indoors as far as Islam is concerned.

Americans have gone to Ukraine, to fight the Russians, and Americans have gone to Israel, to join the Israel Defense Forces, to fight the Arabs, but if there has ever been an American who has left the wealth, safety, and security of the West to go to Gaza to fight the hated Israelis, I’ve never seen a story on that.

Mr Piker certainly has not. Instead, he appears in expensive suits with his artfully coifed hair and beringed fingers, that military-looking rifle and protective vest left behind, never lifting a finger to help the poor, poor, pitiful ‘Palestinians’ to actually gain the land they want.

I’ll have more respect for Mr Piker when he goes to Gaza and puts his life on the line defending the people and causes he so vocally supports. Until then, he’s just another cosplayer, trying to look big and important, but he’s really just a pipsqueak. It’s easy to hold a rifle, but it takes balls to go out and really fight.

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Once again, Will Bunch defends the bad guys.

If Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran had just enough weapons-grade uranium to put together an atomic bomb, and then shipped it out on a boat to pull into New York harbor, to do what they could to destroy our largest city, Will Bunch would scream bloody murder if the CIA found out about it, and President Trump ordered the boat sunk in international waters. “Why,” he would yell, “didn’t we arrest them when they pulled into New York harbor?”

Trump won’t get to heaven if he keeps murdering people on boats

There was no legal or moral justification for the Trump-ordered boat bombing that killed 11 Venezuelans. It could be just the start.

by Will Bunch | Thursday, September 4, 2025 | 1:16 PM EDT

If Donald Trump is serious about wanting to get to heaven, he has a very odd strategy.

Several paragraphs deleted, in that they are just Philadelphia Inquirer columnist bloviating on what it takes to get to Heaven. Given Mr Bunch’s vocal support for pre-natal infanticide, homosexuality, and transgenderism, I have some difficulty believing the notion that the columnist has any idea what it takes to get to the Heaven he probably doubts exists in the first place.

Just hours after Trump’s plea for everlasting life, he ordered, then celebrated, the mass killing of 11 human beings on a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, somewhere off Venezuela. This was kind of like scribbling down your 2025 New Year’s resolution to lose weight while sitting in the drive-thru line at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The U.S. military missile strike Tuesday that obliterated the power boat — which the Trump regime alleged, with zero evidence, was manned by Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members bringing a shipment of narcotics to the United States — was such a shocking event that it took a day or so for the America media to even wrap their arms about what the heck just happened here.

Some of that, to be fair, stems from a complete lack of transparency by the White House and the Defense Department. Trump and his minions were eager to boast to the world about their ability to kill people, as the president quickly posted the 28-second South American “snuff video” of the boat’s annihilation to the White House social-media accounts.

In 1941, before the United States was officially at war with Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his “shoot-on-sight” order, directing the Navy to attack any ship threatening U.S. shipping or foreign shipping under escort. President Trump’s order to sink a drug-running boat when it could be sunk is pretty much the same thing: the drug runners were, in effect, attacking the United States directly, and individual American citizens. Mr Bunch, a journolist[1]The 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 … Continue reading in our nation’s sixth largest city, is very much aware of the devastation drugs have wrought on the Kensington section of the city, and, less famously, much of the rest of Philly.

The Trump regime offered no legal justification — let alone a moral one — for blowing up in international waters a ship carrying civilians from a nation with which the United States is not at war. Or why the standard practice of warning and then interdicting a ship believed to be involved in drug trafficking — and arresting any suspects and bringing them to trial — wasn’t followed in this case.

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

“(W)arning and then interdicting”, huh? In other words, give the crew a chance to dump the drugs and destroying the evidence, as well as giving them a chance to open fire and perhaps wound or kill an American sailor or Coast Guardsman? Or perhaps failing to interdict the boat at all before it beached itself to unload its cargo on the Outer Banks or Rehoboth Beach or somewhere else along out hundreds of miles of coastline?

Mr Bunch sure does like to root for the bad guys. This afternoon he expressed the wish to give eleven drug traffickers a fighting chance, while, as we noted last June, he was cheering on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even while admitting that he did “find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order.” He complained about universities taking steps, at President Trump’s direction, to fight anti-Semitism on campus. Mr Bunch complained that no one should be above the law when it came to pardoned police officers and the January 6 Capitol protesters — even though most of the J6 defendants had already been railroaded convicted and served their sentences — but he defends those who have broken our immigration laws.

If it weren’t for double standards, Mr Bunch would have no standards at all!

There are times I actually wonder if Mr Trump is playing some secret four-dimensional chess. He has managed to get the American left defending transgenderism even when trans killers have murdered children in school and when some of them are invading minor girls locker rooms and beating them in girls’ sports, illegal immigrants even when some of them are trafficking in drugs and raping 7-year-old girls, and urban criminals in general. The President has managed to push the left so far around the bend on issues important to the American people that it’s amazing

References

References
↑1 The 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.