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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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Will Bunch and due process of law

This site’s favorite whipping boy, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far, far, far left columnist Will Bunch, who’s even crazier than Amanda Marcotte if such a thing is possible, has told us how important it is to enforce the law. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia, insisting that this illegal immigrant be given the full protection of the laws. He was all about the law when President Trump was eliminating drug trafficking boats coming from Venezuela, an action that Philadelphians should at least somewhat understand given the Hellhole that the Kensington neighborhood has become with strung out junkies sleeping on the sidewalks, in alleys and the Allegheny Avenue SEPTA station.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But, when it comes to our immigration laws, all of a sudden he doesn’t want those enforced. Apprehending and deporting illegals he told us is indistinguishable from the Geheime Staatspolizei rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camps and their deaths.

Now we have this:

Europe is holding its Epstein creeps accountable. Why can’t we?

Europeans are pushing to hold Jeffrey Epstein’s creepy pals, including billionaires like Elon Musk, accountable. The U.S.? Not so much.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, February 8, 2026 |12:56 PM EST

The slow drip of the U.S. government’s still grossly incomplete release of its files on late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has nonetheless become a who’s who of Planet Earth’s rich and famous — from billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk to cultural icons like filmmaker Woody Allen and, of course, two presidents.

You can see what the distinguished Mr Bunch did. He wants us to associate Messrs Gates, Allen, Musk, Bill Clinton, and, of course Donald Trump with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking, because that’s for which the late financier is spectacularly infamous.

The average American paying any attention to this global bonfire of the vanities probably barely noticed this name: longtime British politico Peter Mandelson, who most recently served as the U.K.’s ambassador to the United States.

Across the pond, it was another story. The Fleet Street tabloid press went wild over revelations that Mandelson — a key insider in the ruling Labor Party, long known to have been one of Epstein’s globetrotting pals — maintained his close ties even after the American’s 2008 child-prostitution conviction, writing Epstein in 2009 to hail his release from jail as “liberation day.”

But unlike the fallout in the United States, Mandelson’s Epstein problem didn’t end with some embarrassing headlines. Back in September, when an initial batch of Epstein’s emails went public, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — Mandelson’s longtime ally — immediately fired his friend from his ambassador’s post in D.C., and the scandal has only intensified.

Mr Bunch wants Americans named in the Epstein files ‘held .  .  . accountable,’ as he sees Mr Mandelson so being. But how was the now former Ambassador held accountable? He was fired from his appointed post by the man who appointed him, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after the British tabloids had a field day going “wild” over the revelations.

Yet, through several subsequent paragraphs, Mr Bunch mentions only resignations by prominent people mentioned in the Epstein files. Oddly enough, the columnist who so vociferously wanted due process of law and a presumption of evidence for Mr Abrego Garcia seems totally uninterested in such for the Americans he hates, which means, of course, President Trump and Mr Musk.

The time-lapsed released of the Epstein files hasn’t yet produced a smoking gun concerning his close friendship with Trump, but the fact that lurid tips to federal authorities about the two-time president don’t seem to have been really investigated speaks volumes about the utter lack of elite accountability on this side of the Atlantic.

“(D)on’t seem to have been really investigated”, huh? The Epstein files have been under the control of President Trump and his subordinates for one year and 19 days so far, but they were under the control of then-President Joe Biden and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a seat on the Supreme Court for four full years. It could reasonably be argued that the Biden Administration could not do much with them until the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell was concluded, but she was convicted on December 29, 2021, leaving the previous administration, an administration determined to do all it could to put Mr Trump in prison and prevent him from ever becoming President again, all of 2022, 2023, and 2024 to pore through those files. The Democrats would like us to believe that yes, there really is incriminating evidence against Mr Trump in those files, but somehow, some way, they never went through the files.

How stupid would you have to believe something like that?

Even Mr Bunch described Mr Epstein as a “late financier and sex trafficker,” which means that at least some of his contacts were about finance rather than young girls; contact with Mr Epstein simply proves contact with him, not sexual offenses. Mr Bunch, like the rest of the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-afflicted, want to assume that contact must mean knowledge of and cooperation with Mr Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, but that’s not the case. More, for Mr Bunch, who was so very concerned that Mr Abrego Garcia receive due process of law, wants to see punished anyone who spoke with Mr Epstein, even if such contact had nothing to do with trafficking young girls.

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A half-hearted defense of Jeff Bezos

I have frequently said that I appreciated billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for buying The Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013. The family didn’t really want to sell the newspaper, but the Post was losing money every year, and they just couldn’t afford to keep it going. We don’t know when the Grahams would have had to declare bankruptcy, but it couldn’t have been much longer.

Mr Bezos, for his part, mostly kept his hands off the newspaper. But losses continued to mount, reportedly $100 million in 2023, $77 million in 2024, and $100 million again in 2025. The owner could afford to keep things going the way they were, but finally decided that enough is enough.

Naturally Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — was full of sob stories about the poor, poor laid off journalists, and I have sympathy for them as well: I hate to see anyone who hasn’t broken the law lose his job. But then I saw this from WUSA CBS Channel 9:

The situation we are in right now is entirely up to the abysmal mismanagement by The Washington Post leaders,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter with The Washington Post.

Kaplan says she takes issue with the positioning that the publication is losing subscribers because of the quality of work of her colleagues. She says the layoffs are going to have a profound impact on the already empty newsrooms. “I don’t know how I go back to work and do my job without all the people who were laid off yesterday,” she added.

To judge from the way she phrased it, Miss Kaplan is one of those who was not laid off. But this brought to mind another story, from my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach:

From that Climate Colored Goggles link in the first tweet

The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.

Everything changed on Wednesday morning.

The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’s climate page here.

But, what are they really producing? How many articles? Anything of consequence? I rarely use the WP for my climate posts, and I rarely see any other Skeptics using their articles. Sounds like they are cutting a lot of bloat and dead weight. The WP is a business meant to make money, but are losing a ton because the product is bad.

If Phil Kerpen’s chart is correct, between 2020 and 2022, the Post’s global warming climate change reportorial staff increased six-fold in size. The department was cut back to 19 by 2025, so I suppose Miss Kaplan had plenty of friends, and is understandably distraught that 14 of them are now unemployed.

From Miss Kaplan’s biography:

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. Her job has taken her to a research camp atop the Greenland ice sheet, a shrinking glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Indian Ocean islands threatened by sea level rise and disaster-struck communities across the United States. She was part of the team of Post journalists recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s human and environmental toll. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe at The Post.

Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, islands in the Indian Ocean? That sounds like a lot of money spent by a company which has lost $277 million over the last three years. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Bezos hasn’t really seen much of a return on the newspaper’s spending on this.

Then I saw this thanks to the tweet shown at the left by Streiff from RedState.

Just seventeen bylines — I assume that’s how Streiff researched it — in three months does not exactly seem like top productivity to me. If you were looking to cut costs, wouldn’t the least productive employees be the ones you’d lay off first?

There was my good friend Heather Long, who got out when the getting was good thanks to getting other job offers, who was sent several times to the cover the hoitiest and the toitiest at the World Economic Forum in the ski resort town of Davos in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect the newspaper to cover, but it was still an expensive trip to an expensive event. Perhaps the new Post will rely on Associated Press coverage?

But, as I said, this would be a half-hearted defense of Mr Bezos. Where, I have to ask, were the editors and managers who should have been seeing the less productive employees all along, the bosses who should have known, after the long series of business losses, that the fat needed to be trimmed, that economy and efficiency measures needed to be taken? That such wasn’t happening all along is directly on Mr Bezos, and the people he put in place to do that very thing.

Then there was the idiocy of canceling the endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024. Upon resuming editorial endorsements of Presidential candidates in 1976, the newspaper had always endorsed the Democratic candidate if they endorsed anyone at all, and the endorsement editorial was (supposedly) already written when Mr Bezos spiked it. Yes, Mrs Emhoff was as big a doofus as Mike Dukakis, the last Democratic presidential nominee the newspaper didn’t endorse — no endorsement was made in 1988 — but in the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome atmosphere in Washington and among the newspaper’s subscribers, it should have been allowed to go ahead, because it would have made exactly no difference in the outcome of the election, and the Post would not have lost a quarter million subscribers over the endorsement being spiked. Had Mr Bezos taken that decision in May, using as he did a return to the tradition of the newspaper not making any such endorsements, it would have been accepted, or after the election, in which it could have been easily accepted.

Then came the announcement of a change in editorial positions, to a more libertarian philosophy, and another 75,000 digital subscribers said, “See ya!” The change could have been made without the announcement, and without running off 75,000 subscribers.

At my old digital subscription rate of $129.00 per year, losing 325,000 subscribers means a loss of $41,925,000 in revenue. That’s a fairly substantial part of the reported $100 million loss for 2025.

So the newspaper is now offering new digital subscribers a first year for $40, which renews at $140 a year subsequently. I even made the “subscribe” button active for readers. But the newspaper would have lost a lot less money if Jeff Bezos hadn’t run off a bunch of current subscribers.

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The subscription losses at The Washington Post say more about the subscribers than the newspaper itself

As would be expected, the whole of the professional media have been reacting to the significant layoffs at The Washington Post. I do not normally read Frank Luntz, but, lazing in bed this frosty morning, and scrolling through Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — I clicked on the linked article from the BBC. It was not particularly different from dozens of others, until I got to the very last paragraph:

The Post’s financial woes and falling subscriber base stand in contrast to The New York Times, which reported on Wednesday that it added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025.

Thud!

Clearly, the Times had been doing something right, while the Post has been doing things wrong.

We have previously reported on how owner Jeff Bezos’ decision that The Washington Post not make any endorsement for President in 2024 cost the newspaper hundreds of thousand of subscriptions.

Since the newspaper started making presidential candidate endorsements in the 1970s, every time they have made one, it was an endorsement of the Democratic candidate. That includes Walter Mondale in 1984, who went on to lose every state except Minnesota, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and so on and so on. In 2016, while the Post listed her many failures, the editors expressed enthusiasm for the odious Hillary Clinton. The newspaper endorsed the semi-comatose Joe Biden in 2020; if conservative bloggers could see that Mr Biden was in serious decline even before the election, surely the reporters who covered him could see it up close, but they all kept it quiet. And while owner Jeff Bezos spiked it, there was an apparently already written endorsement of the inept Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024.

The Post’s subscribers simply expected an endorsement of Mrs Emhoff, and 250,000+ cancelled subscriptions later, everyone knew it.

Another 75,000 digital subscriptions were cancelled following an announced change to the opinion section to a more libertarian leaning.

To me, this says more about the subscribers the newspaper lost than it does about the Post. Over 325,000 now former subscribers wanted to read pablum that matched their political beliefs than the actual news. Mr Bezos apparently believed that the newspaper could stem its losses by becoming more appealing to normal people, but it has apparently not worked.

So, what has the Times been doing right? Part of it stems from their tremendous reputation as the newspaper of record for the United States. And part stems from the fact that while the newspaper editorially supports liberals, the news sections are mostly balanced.

While I regret that the Post lost so many subscribers, I take some schadenfreude satisfaction that the 325,000+ former subscribers were gnashing their teeth and screaming in apoplexy on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

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The losses at The Washington Post It looks like the people who took the earlier buyouts were the smart ones

As someone who has a great fondness for newspapers — I delivered them when I was a teenager, and, being mostly deaf now, I have to read the news, not watch it on television — I was greatly pleased when billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post from the Graham family, which could no longer afford to keep it running, saving the newspaper from disaster. We previously noted that while Mr Bezos has a currently guesstimated net worth of $248.5 billion, a mere single-digit billionaire like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns The Los Angeles Times, and his paltry $8.1 billion had to cut costs as his newspaper was hemorrhaging money.

It seems, however, that while Mr Bezos can afford the money losses at the Post, he appears to have decided that he needs to reduce the blood loss.

Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments is being laid off

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 | 9:57 AM EST | Updated: 10:19 AM EST

The Washington Post is laying off one-third of its staff in the newsroom and other departments, a brutal blow at one of journalism’s most legendary brands.

The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas. The changes were announced by executive editor Matt Murray in a Zoom meeting with staff.

The staff reduction is a significant psychic blow at the Post, known in history books for its Watergate revelations and most recently for aggressive coverage of President Donald Trump’s cutbacks to the federal workforce, and for journalism in general.

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated. A Post representative confirmed that one-third of the staff would be cut, without saying how many total employees the newspaper has.

I guess that my good friend Heather Long got out at the Post just in time, because she now works as the Chief Economist for Navy Federal Credit Union!

Sadly, this is not something unexpected: the Post had already been making cuts, and trying to meet Mr Bezos’ requirement that the newspaper try to break even. However, it was Mr Bezos’ decision not to allow the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff which cost the newspaper around a quarter million paying subscribers. Since the newspaper had obviously been supporting the then-Vice President in every way other than the spiked endorsement, I fail to see how letting the endorsement be made would have changed the election, but spiking it certainly cost the Post money.

Mr Bezos defended his decision in the pages of the newspaper, saying “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” but if the Post reported on its own layoffs, I did not see it on the newspaper’s website front page or in a search for layoffs.

Perhaps the newspaper should have read its own masthead tagline, because if “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” added as a protest to President Trump during his first term, is keeping the readership in darkness about the newspaper’s layoffs really that great an idea?

It would take someone with Mr Bezos’ money, as Dr Soon-Shiong’s worried have demonstrated, to buy the newspaper from him. I once suggested that he simply give the Post to his ex, Mackenzie Scott, net worth $30.8 billion, because she likes giving away her money, and, for newspaper owners today, giving away their money really is what they have to do.

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Please, leave the government out of trying to ‘fix’ the ‘affordable housing’ problem

As people yell about the lack of “affordable housing” I see an interesting difference between my good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him in real life! — Architectolder, who posts a lot of pictures concerning houses interiors and exteriors, and Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, whom I have previously mentioned. Each have differing ideas about what makes a fine home, Architectolder favoring single family dwellings, while Alicia likes European-style courtyard housing. Alicia likes the idea of being able to walk downstairs and down and around the block to the local pharmacy, bodega, interesting shops and the like; who would not like to have a French boulangerie or pâtisserie just a few steps outside your door to grab a croissant for breakfast? Architectolder, on the other hand, is not afraid of people having to get into their cars to drive to a bakery. He believes that relatively small houses like the one in his tweet shown at the right ought to be affordably built: nice craftsmanship, a small but decently-sized yard appropriate to the house.

But then there was this, in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

The cost of housing in Pa. is too high. Here’s what Josh Shapiro will need to overcome to fix it.

Administration officials spent the past year taking feedback from advocates, experts, and local officials.

by Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PA | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | 5:00 AM EST

HARRISBURG — Rents are soaring, homelessness is rising, and homeownership is out of reach for many families in Pennsylvania. As the state grapples with a serious housing shortage and affordability dominates the national political conversation, Gov. Josh Shapiro is preparing to release a long-awaited plan to tackle the crisis.

The plan, first announced in late 2024, will draw on months of outreach to advocates, developers, and local officials. Supporters hope it will offer a clear path forward and build momentum around proposals that can win support in Pennsylvania’s politically divided legislature. But significant obstacles stand in the way.

“The housing crisis has risen to the level such that none of the four caucuses can ignore it,” said Deanna Dyer, director of policy at Regional Housing Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm.

The housing shortage is a nationwide problem, but Pennsylvania has been particularly slow to build new units. The shortfall leaves families squeezed by rising costs, pushes recent graduates to take jobs in other states, and makes it harder for companies to expand.

There’s more at the linked original.

It seems that everybody seems to believe that the government needs to somehow fix the problem, but I’ll point out the obvious: virtually all of the housing in our country was built by private enterprise, by builders contracted by someone, whether an individual or a developer, to build houses, and that’s how our country began and grew to where we are today. Why should the government have to get involved?

The Inquirer fully supports the illegal immigrant population. As we have previously reported, the newspaper itself has reported an illegal immigrant population of between 47,000 and 76,000 people. Just deporting the illegal immigrant population should free up a lot of housing in the City of Brotherly Love, but naturally the newspaper wants to protect the illegals rather than see the law actually enforced, primarily because it is President Donald Trump who is finally enforcing our immigration laws, and the people at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper hate the President with a white-hot passion.

Other states are passing laws to loosen local zoning restrictions and encourage new development — despite often fierce opposition from groups representing local governments.

Well, of course: local communities want to protect their typical American single-family home neighborhoods from having people build five-story apartment buildings which permanently shadow neighboring houses and change the character of neighborhoods. Zoning laws grew up to protect the American people, and to protect their investments in housing from being trashed by other development.

However, local governments can micromanage, and over manage things. When I lived in Hockessin, Delaware, our house, which was on a small farm, was surrounded by not one, not two, but three expensive house subdivisions. New Castle County, to combat overcrowding, reduced the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre parcel. Great! People could get larger yards, right? But it also meant that developers had to build more expensive individual homes to achieve the same profit, and so Hockessin Chase, Hockessin Green and Hockessin Something-or-other were full of McMansions, driving up the costs of housing in the whole county.

On the opposite side of that coin are newer houses off Leestown Road in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah, they’re the fancier new builds as well, but they’re so close together that you could hear your neighbor open his refrigerator, and if the houses were nice when they were built, most are now occupied by renters, not homeowners.

The best thing for government to do to address the ‘affordable housing’ problem is nothing at all. Every time the government tries to micromanage part of the economy it fails.

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People whose jobs are to enforce the law band together to not enforce the law Unless it's against cops. They want to throw law enforcement officers into jail!

We reported on Wednesday how the Democrats in the Philadelphia city government apparently believe that illegal immigrants are above the law. Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner, who even got one of his office’s lawyers disbarred from the federal court system for deliberately lying in trying to get a convicted murderer off death row even though he’d never actually be executed.

Now the distinguished Mr Krasner wants to keep criminals from being arrested:

DA Larry Krasner forms coalition of progressive prosecutors committed to charging federal agents who commit crimes

Krasner was joined by eight other prosecutors from U.S. cities — including Minneapolis DA Mary Moriarty — to announce the initiative.

by Ellie Rushing and Anna Orso | Wednesday, January 28, 2026 | 10:00 AM EST | Updated: 4:07 PM EST

District Attorney Larry Krasner on Wednesday announced the formation of a new coalition of progressive prosecutors committed to charging federal agents who violate state laws.

Krasner joined eight other prosecutors from U.S. cities to create the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a legal fund that local prosecutors can tap if they pursue charges against federal agents.

The abbreviation for the group, FAFO, is a nod to what has become one of Krasner’s frequent slogans: “F— around and find out.”

The move places Krasner at the center of a growing national clash between Democrats and the Trump administration over federal immigration enforcement and whether local law enforcement can — or should — charge federal agents for actions they take while carrying out official duties.

Note that last sentence, which reporters Ellie Rushing and Anna Orso couldn’t ignore: Mr Krasner wants to find ways to charge federal officers for “carrying out their official duties”!

What are their official duties? The apprehension of people in the United States illegally. Mr Krasner does not want law enforcement to actually enforce the law. Then again, he never has.

The tactic is simple: Mr Krasner and his fellow travelers want to try to intimidate Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agents from carrying out their duties. With the public resistance of the left, there has been considerable chaos as protester Eenee Good, who tried to run down an ICE agent with her vehicle, and Alex Pretti, an out-of-control rager looking for a fight and who attacked ICE agents were killed as they tried to interfere with legitimate arrests.

Mr Krasner and the rest don’t like that ICE has had to be aggressive in some apprehensions? The solution is simple: have the local police assist in keeping protesters back, and supporting the arrests. Have state and local authorities honor ICE detainers, so those illegals already arrested for another crime can be handed off to immigration rather than having ICE having to track them down and arrest them at their homes or on the streets.

But what about actual violent crime in the City of Brotherly Love?

Woman charged with pepper-spraying conservative influencer on SEPTA bus

A video allegedly showing the Jan. 19 altercation went viral on right-wing social media accounts. The case will be led by the state attorney general’s mass transit prosecutor.

By Michael Tanenbaum, PhillyVoice Staff | Thursday, January 29, 2026

A woman who was filmed pepper-spraying a right-wing influencer during an argument on a SEPTA bus earlier this month now faces charges after the clip went viral and garnered national attention from conservative groups on social media.

Paulina Reyes, 22, was charged Thursday with simple assault, harassment, disorderly conduct and possession of an instrument of crime, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General said. The case will be prosecuted by the attorney general’s mass transit prosecutor, a role that was created in 2023 to oversee some crimes that occur on SEPTA property.

On Jan. 19, Reyes was riding a SEPTA bus when she got into a heated argument with Frank Scales, the conservative influencer who runs the website Surge Philly and frequently posts clips of himself interviewing people at protests in the city. Scales has been an especially outspoken critic of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat now in his third term who’s been a steadfast opponent of the Trump administration.

My good Twitter friend, Philly Crime Update, said that the state had to charge the lovely Miss Reyes because Mr Krasner would not. The charges will be prosecuted by the special prosecutor position, created in 2023 to pursue crimes committed on SEPTA, a position Mr Krasner filed suit to challenge the law that created it, claiming that it was it was unconstitutional and stripped his office of authority, even though the prosecutor only rarely exercised his authority to protect decent people on SEPTA.

Translation: if the District Attorney had his way, Miss Reyes would not face any charges at all, because the special prosecutor’s office wouldn’t exist, despite the fact she was angered by the fact that Mr Scales did exactly the things Mr Krasner said ought to be protected for the demonstrators in Minneapolis!

 

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Philly Dems say “Illegal immigrants are above the law!”

It is to the surprise of absolutely no one that Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner wants to “hunt down” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agents for daring to do something really radical like enforcing the law.

Wackjob Philly DA Vows To “Hunt Down” ICE Agents

By William Teach | Wednesday, January 28, 2026 | 7:00 AM EST

He’s really skirting the line of being a criminal threat to federal law enforcement. Maybe he should worry more about Philly’s crime rate, which is a 1 (100 is best), with violent and property crime rates over 3 times the Pennsylvania average and well over double the US average

Soros-backed Philadelphia DA vows to ‘hunt’ down ICE agents: ‘We will find you’

Philadelphia’s top prosecutor, a George Soros-backed district attorney, is facing scrutiny and backlash after vowing to “hunt” down federal immigration agents as city leaders move to curb ICE operations.

Speaking during a morning event outside City Hall tied to newly unveiled “ICE OUT” legislation, District Attorney Larry Krasner sharply criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“This is a small bunch of wannabe Nazis. That’s what they are,” Krasner said. “In a country of 350 million, we outnumber them. If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice.”

I heard about this yesterday, but didn’t write about it. I expected our nation’s third-oldest, continuously-published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to have more on this than they did, but this was all I could find in a search Wednesday morning:

On the other end is District Attorney Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s most prominent progressive, who has on several occasions threatened to file criminal charges against ICE agents who commit crimes in the city.

“There will be accountability now. There will be accountability in the future. There will be accountability after [Trump] is out of office,” Krasner said Tuesday. “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities.”

The article concerns the responses of Democratic officials to enforcement of our immigration laws, and is about more than Mr Krasner.

As we have previously noted, the distinguished Mr Krasner has also threatened to file state charges against the January 6th Capitol Kerfufflers after they were pardoned by President Trump, even though most of them had already served their federal sentences, but hasn’t actually done anything, perhaps because there was nothing which he could find which occurred in his jurisdiction, which is limited to the City of Brotherly Love.

The Inquirer reported, on Inauguration Day, that there were about 47,000 illegal aliens living in the city, but the currently cited article uses a different source to guesstimate an “unauthorized population” of 76,000. With a July 1, 2024 estimated population of 1,573,916, that would put Philly’s illegals at 4.83% of the total. And the Democrats want more than to tone down the enforcement of immigration laws: they want to protect the illegals from everything:

Philadelphia officials said the best way they can prepare is by limiting the city’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

City Councilmember Kendra Brooks, of the progressive Working Families Party, and Councilmember Rue Landau, a Democrat, were joined by dozens of activists and other elected officials during a news conference Tuesday to unveil a package of legislation aimed at codifying into law the city’s existing “sanctuary city” practices.

Those policies, which are currently executive orders, bar city officials from holding undocumented immigrants in custody at ICE’s request without a judicial warrant.

So, the Democrats want to protect the illegals who are caught breaking other laws as well.

Landau and Brooks’ legislative package, expected to be introduced in Council on Thursday, goes further, preventing ICE agents from wearing masks, using city-owned property for staging raids, or accessing city databases.

Erika Guadalupe Núñez, executive director of immigrant advocacy organization Juntos, said the legislation “goes beyond just ‘We don’t collaborate.’”

Juntos gets regular calls about ICE staging operations at public locations in and around Philadelphia, and people have been worried, despite official assurances, whether personal information held by the city will be secure from government prying.

What happened to “no one is above the law”? The Democrats proclaimed it, loudly and clearly, when they were trying to throw then-former President Trump in jail, and we’re hearing it — sort of — from Mr Krasner, as he wants to ‘hunt down’ ICE agents, for as many years as it takes, even if it takes ‘decades,’ because they are charged with enforcing our immigration laws.

When former Philadelphia Police Officer Eric Ruch, Jr, was tried, convicted, and sentenced for killing an unarmed suspect following a police chase, Mr Krasner filed an appeal to reconsider the 11½-to-23 month sentence as too lenient. Instead Mr Ruch was released after nine months, the same amount of time former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane spent locked up for her 10-to-23 month sentenced for perjury. If that angered Mr Krasner, so much the better.

In the meantime, we have documented how the city’s scumbag of a prosecutor has the criminals’ backs, while he hates the cops.

But is that really a surprise? The Democrats in city government are all supporting those who have broken our immigration laws, not only entering illegally or overstaying a visa, but who must commit felonies, must break our employment laws every day to live in the United States. But to the Democrats, illegals really are above the law.

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Sometimes deportation is not enough Sometimes you have to lock them up for years, and then kick their sorry asses out!

Thanks to lax border enforcement under Democratic administrations, deportation of illegal aliens simply means that they have to put forth a little more effort to sneak back into the United States. From our nation’s second-oldest continuously published daily newspaper:

Twice-deported DUI driver who got off easy after killing 2 California teens gets sent back to slammer

By Nina Joudeh | Monday, January 26, 2026 | 5:19 PM EST

A twice-deported Mexican national who was let off easy for killing two California teenagers in a drunken crash — sparking widespread outrage — has been sentenced to prison for being in the country illegally.

Oscar Eduardo Ortega-Anguiano walked free last year after serving three-and-a-half years of a 10-year sentence for causing the deaths of Anya Varfolomeev and Nicholay Osokin on Interstate 405 in Seal Beach in November 2021.

He was released in July and immediately taken back into custody by federal officials, according to reports.

On Friday, US District Judge John Holcomb sentenced Ortega-Anguiano to three years and 10 months in federal prison for illegal re-entry into the US. . . . .

Ortega-Anguiano had already been sent back to Mexico twice and returned when, intoxicated and without a valid driver’s license, he collided with the 2000 Honda driven by Varfolomeev and Osokin just before midnight in Orange County on November 13, 2021.

So, Mr Ortega-Anguiano had sneaked in once, gotten caught and deported, then sneaked in again, got caught and deported, and now sneaked in a third time, and only got caught again because he killed two people while driving drunk. Clearly simply being deported had no deterrent impact on him.

There is something that could prove more of a deterrent, from The Mercury News:

In 2022, while Ortega-Anguiano was in state prison for the OC vehicular manslaughter conviction, federal prosecutors during the Biden administration had obtained an indictment charging Ortega-Anguiano with illegally being in the United States after being previously deported.

That indictment remained in effect as he was released from state prison, allowed federal law enforcement to take him into custody and held a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

Mr Ortega-Anguiano had already received a sweetheart deal, pleading guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence instead of second-degree murder. Now he’s got 3½ years in federal prison, where he could have been locked up for two decades. He’ll be deported after his 3½ years, after President Trump has completed his final term, and, if a Democrat is in the White House, he’ll try to sneak back in again.

Although he was born in Mexico and spent the first several years of his life there, Ortega-Anguiano said he was raised in the United States and is “American at heart.”

I would like to say that driving while drunk means that he’s not really an “American at heart,” but we have had too many real Americans do the same thing. But however he feels about it in his heart, we don’t want or need his sorry ass in our country.

We want and need good immigrants, immigrants who will work hard and be a credit to their families and their communities. Mr Ortega-Anguiano certainly doesn’t fit that description.