Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that white men of a “certain religion” are responsible for “so much damage” just two weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

Clinton, 77, made the remarks during a segment Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in which the two-time Democratic presidential candidate said America has yet to achieve the “more perfect union” spoken of by former President Abraham Lincoln.

“We haven’t gotten to the more perfect union, and we fought a Civil War over part of it. And people have been protesting for hundreds of years that things were not as they should be, given our ideals and how we should be moving toward them,” said Clinton.

“So, I think that’s what makes us so special as a country, and the idea that you could turn the clock back and try to recreate a world that never was dominated by, you know, let’s say it, white men of a certain persuasion, a certain religion, a certain point of view, a certain ideology, it’s just doing such damage to what we should be aiming for.”

Earlier in the conversation, Clinton, who is promoting the 20th anniversary of the Clinton Global Initiative, warned that equality and progressive ideology were “in the crosshairs of those on the right.”

“The idea of ‘We The People’ that all men and women are created equal, that seems to be in the crosshairs of those on the right who want to turn the clock back on the progress that has been made,” she said.

In an October 2023 interview with CNN, Clinton suggested that supporters of then-presidential candidate Trump — whom she described as “MAGA extremists” — are in a “cult” and should undergo “formal deprogramming.”

“Sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” she said. “He’s only in it for himself.”

Ian Giatti, Christian Post

Charlie Kirk is emblematic of one of the things that is great about our country.  Endowed by our Creator, we have freedom of speech.  The First Amendment in our Bill of Rights enshrines this.  Within bounds, we can express our own opinion, argue, and debate.  Most importantly, we are free to say unpopular things so long as there’s no incitement to violence or willful defamation.

Charlie used freedom of speech to enlighten, educate, argue, and persuade.  He chose a debate format, offering people with ideological differences a chance to give their own perspectives.  If you count winning by hearts and minds, there was a clear champion over time of the debates.  And, that champion was gathering strength and gaining ground.  This is what terrified atheists and progressives most.  The latter’s worldview has a stranglehold based on conformity, consensus, and ideological purity couching no challenge or dissent.

Calls have been renewed for progressive fascists to renounce political violence and violent rhetoric.  This would leave progressives embracing just the socialist component of fascism.  Establishing such a limit on themselves, they would have to settle for progressive socialism.  This presents a vulnerability to ever louder calls to debate differences instead of resolving them with coercion, intimidation, and violence.

Why can’t progressive fascists debate?  The answer is that, decades ago, progressives lost all the arguments on their merits.

How can Democrats defend socialism when it has impoverished and tyrannized citizens everywhere and every time it’s been tried?  Won’t capitalism have to be recognized as the only economic system in mankind’s history capable of elevating people out of poverty and increasing liberty?

How will progressives justify regulation of every personal and corporate action?  How will they oppose implementing only necessary, affordable, and beneficial regulations?

When libertarians opine the money you have earned legitimately is yours, what argument will advance the idea that all money belongs to the government from whence it is allocated to the people?  How will leftists advocate for confiscatory taxes instead of low tax rates?

Will advocacy for open borders sound more compelling than having only legal immigration that serves our country’s interests?

Progressive fascists crave social justice even though it brings violence and anarchy.  How will this stack up against citizens’ desire to live in safety in their neighborhoods applying criminal justice?

Will authoritarian arguments for freedom only within narrowly specified bounds sound better than freedom of everything as long as it’s not specifically forbidden?

Will Marxists convince listeners that words are violence, or will freedom of speech be cherished even if the opinions expressed are unpopular or disfavored?

What new arguments will be made that welfare should be open-ended, and there should be no workfare by able-bodied individuals?

How will consumers be convinced that higher cost, unreliable wind and solar energy with blackouts and brownouts is preferable to lower cost, abundant energy?

Is the U.S. an immoral and degenerate country led by, and populated with, irredeemably racist and unremittingly oppressive people?  Or, will more people be persuaded these United States represent the best nation on earth, and things keep getting better over time?

Will Democrats argue Western Civilization is evil in all respects?  What response will be given to evidence presented that Western Civilization is the best that’s ever been?

Apostate Christians and atheists have found their home in the Democrat party.  Will that party now plainly advocate for their worldview, knowing there’s only this life with the highest goals of hedonism or a struggle to build utopia?  What will be the rebuttal to the Christian worldview that best perceives, understands, and explains reality?

When does life begin?  If it’s not a tomato or a squirrel, what is that newly conceived being?  Is it a human being?  When should new individual human life be protected?  Christians and conservatives have ready answers.  What responses can be given by atheists and progressives that won’t evoke horror and revulsion in many?

Over decades, our culture rejected Christian roots and influence.  We progressed to modernism in our post-Christian time.  Progressivism knowing no limits, modernism has been rejected for a post-reality vision.  Nevertheless, science and facts are useful for describing reality. So, what is the compelling argument by progressives for a reality defined only by imagination and unburdened by what is sensed? That reality is just what political elites say it is today?

Is the grooming of children for sterilization and sexual mutilation going to be defended outright by Marxist cultural theorists?  Won’t conservative advocacy maintaining the innocence of children for as long as possible be received more favorably?  How will arguments go for holding accountable enablers and practitioners when inevitable buyer’s remorse of Frankenstein procedures is expressed?

Will enablers of perverts, predators, pedophiles explicitly be lionized by the left?  Or, is there insurmountable empathy for protection of women and girls in spaces and opportunities?

Are progressive arguments better for group identity and enforced level achievement when compared to those for individualism and exceptionalism?

Will leftist arguments for reparations based on ancestral offenses win the day along with the idea of inexorable systemic racism?  Rather, shouldn’t people, all made in the image of God, be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin?

Everyone’s for equality.  But, is this forced equality of outcomes?  Or, will there be recognition that individual differences means there will always be inequalities of outcomes absent coercion. Aren’t arguments more attractive for equality of opportunities?

For decades, progressives in both political parties have put American interests last in economics and foreign affairs.  Is this defensible?  Contemporary arguments advocate for putting American interests first.  We can’t go in both directions.  Which is most appealing?

World government is the gold ring for many progressive fascists.  Incremental progress has been made over time with innumerable multilateral engagements.  Can these be defended against arguments for only bilateral relationships that best serve our country’s interests?

If progressives can’t win any debate on the merits, then they won’t participate.  It suggests speeches, arguments, and debates should still be used by Christians, conservatives, and libertarians for the purpose of awakening some of the woke.  This will work and be effective so long as freedom of speech endures.  But, the primary goal of progressive fascists will be to re-impose censorship and hollow out freedom of speech.  Censorship will be expanded greatly in scope along the lines of what was implemented in the great trial run during the COVID-19 tyranny.  If progressives can’t win a debate, then there should be no debate.  In the immortal words of Anthony Fauci, “Just do as you’re told.”

It doesn’t bode well for our country when one of the two major political parties disdains virtues and eschews traditional and normal values.  With or without any debate, the progressive fascist grip on the Democratic Party means their pernicious ideas are being mainstreamed. In memory of Charlie Kirk, let us resist those ideas and vanquish them, in debate, winning hearts and minds one by one.

Whitson G. Waldo, III is a capitalist, a venture capitalist, and master and skipper of a 43 foot monohull sloop-rigged 

Like the late Soviet Union, it depends on ignorance and wishful thinking.

With the last, desperate attempt to restore the integrity of the system he had given his life to having failed, the only tolerable course of action open to Sergey Akhromeyev was to hang himself. Over the years, many have questioned whether Akhromeyev and his fellow plotter of the August 1991 coup attempt, Boris Pugo, truly died by their own hands. Surely, a soldier like Akhromeyev would have done the job with his service pistol, rather than hang himself with his Party ribbon? Along with a short note giving some account of himself, Akhromeyev left behind a modest but precise amount in cash, to cover his outstanding bill at the Kremlin staff canteen. It seems unlikely that an assassin would have gone to such trouble.

I wrote before about how Britain’s present political settlement carries the same stench of doomed malevolence as the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the years before they collapsed. Yet I will be the first to admit that the analogy only goes so far. One cannot imagine the architects and apparatchiks of the Blairite state doing the decent thing — with the aid of their rainbow lanyards — when the curtain finally falls. And Pret wouldn’t have offered them credit anyway.

Akhromeyev’s last gesture, and the objectives of the coup attempt that sealed him into that path, was an expression of a particular sense of Marxist-Leninist propriety — one that was fundamentally at odds with the reality of the modern world into which Mikhail Gorbachev had been attempting and failing to integrate the USSR. Financial debt had become a defining feature of the Soviet Union in its final years; the socialist superpower’s dependence on the institutions of Western capitalism to keep itself creaking on made a mockery of decades of propaganda. 

Looking back, it’s surprising to remember that up until the mid-1980s, in the world of international high finance, the Soviet Union was considered one of the most well-regarded sovereign borrowers. The Ministry of Trade’s monopoly on international transactions, and the size and solidity of the Soviet state, left creditors reassured that the Union’s institutions would never be allowed to fail in their financial obligations. But with the Gorbachev reforms, all of that changed, as sub-sovereign and state-owned entities were given the authority to negotiate their own financial dealings with foreign entities, and to build up debt on their own books. Suddenly, international markets took an interest in which bits of the Soviet economic system actually sustained themselves, and they did not like what they found. 

For much of its existence, the Soviet economic and trade strategy was simple; to use the export of commodities to finance the development of heavy industry, with domestic consumption deliberately suppressed, even to the point of famine. Initially, the primary export commodity was grain, eventually replaced by oil. The success of this strategy in the 1920s and 30s is often exaggerated, with industrialisation in these years probably proceeding slightly more slowly than it had done in the Russian Empire in the period 1890-1914. It was in post-war reconstruction in the late 1940s and early 1950s (with the assistance of expropriated plants from defeated Germany) that this approach demonstrated the most impressive results. 

However, once the country had rebuilt its basic industries by the early 1960s, the command economy proved far less successful at cultivating innovation and driving productivity than the market economies of the West, and the USSR began its long period of economic stagnation. The necessity of suppressing domestic consumption in order to maintain a sustainable balance of payments created widespread political dissatisfaction. At the same time, the Soviet Union was attempting to maintain military parity with the United States and its allies, as well as equipping and arming its network of client states in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. 

This burden was ultimately unsustainable, but for many years, the Soviet system was able to make a decent fist of hiding it — not only from the outside world and its own citizens, but also from its own leadership. So long as the central government maintained a monopoly on international trade, and the citizenry were unaware how far behind the West their own living standards were falling, then continual trade surpluses could be kept up. Huge swathes of Soviet industry were consuming more resources than their output was worth, but the profitability of key export commodities ensured that the economy overall was just about in surplus, so long as consumption was kept to a bare minimum. This resulted in vast distortions in the allocation of resources, and unmet needs and wants on an immense scale among a population who, up until perestroika, had little choice but to lump it. 

Political choices cause resources to be allocated in very strange ways, and incentivise behaviours among consumers, investors and producers that run contrary to the interests of prosperity

At first glance, this bears little resemblance to the economy of modern Britain, in which basic and heavy industries have atrophied or moved abroad, and in which a free-floating currency means that a large current account deficit and a reliance on imports is regarded essentially as a self-correcting non-problem. Under the surface, though, we can find a system in which political choices cause resources to be allocated in very strange ways, and incentivise behaviours among consumers, investors and producers that run contrary to the interests of prosperity. The ultimate answer of where these resources will come from, and what the corresponding opportunity cost will be — i.e. who pays — is left unaddressed. The wealth is assumed simply to exist because the need exists, and if it doesn’t it will be up to somebody to create it, and hand it over. 

The most obvious area in which this is visible is the parlous financial state of many British local authorities, as a result of the imposition of adult social care costs onto their budgets, with additional pressure created statutory obligations to provide certain services, such as taxis to take children with special needs to school. Some of the figures associated with these expenses are truly astounding. Certainly, these needs could be met in one manner or another far more efficiently, but it is the underlying logic that illustrates the predicament of the system.  

The local authorities know that these costs are ultimately unsustainable. SEND taxis, adult social care, and the various other statutory obligations substantially exceed the taxes they are able to levy. But it is illegal for them not to provide those services, so they go on doing so; borrowing for as long as they are able to, in the knowledge that at some point, they will go bust — as some already have and dozens more are projected to in the coming few years. If a private company were to do this, it would be considered trading while insolvent and it would be illegal — but for the local authority, it would be illegal for them not to. 

What really happens when a local authority goes bust? Technically, they cannot go bankrupt in the way that a business can, but they can issue a Section 114 notice, obliging councillors  to come back with a new budget within three weeks. These usually necessitate substantial cuts to the most basic services the authority provides to rate-payers, such as waste disposal, but the statutory obligations remain. Presumably, what is keeping the whole thing going, and causing suppliers and creditors not to consider the entire realm of local government in Britain as financially delinquent, is the unspoken assumption that ultimately, the national government will be obliged to stand behind local authorities.  But the situation in Birmingham suggests that we will have to wait to see just how much ruin there is in a city before Whitehall steps in. 

Burdensome statutory obligations are not the only way in which the law has intervened ruinously in the finances of local authorities. Birmingham City council was ultimately bankrupted by a tribunal judgement on historic equal pay claims, which saw judges rule on whether or not a range of jobs were “equal” or not, and thus whether a group of predominantly female employees in one set of roles had been discriminated against when compared to another group of predominantly male employees in another set of roles. They did this with seemingly minimal reference to what those people actually did in their jobs, or to the relative aggregate supply and demand for people willing to do that work in the economy as a whole  Instead, justices appeared to be making a subjective judgement on the relative social status of the jobs, which they concluded were equal and thus befitting equal payment.  This followed several similar judgements against private sector employers which collectively, are likely to be transformative in how low- and semi-skilled work is contracted and remunerated across the economy. 

Beyond the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act and the raft of other quasi-constitutional laws that guide the judiciary in their role as the nation’s economic guardians, there is now a bewildering array of entitlements, cross-subsidies, and needs-based pricing which completely distort to whom things are sold, for how much, and where the bill is sent. 

Commentator Max Tempers has documented the astonishing growth of the Motability scheme in the financing of new cars, to the point that it now accounts for at least a fifth of the market. This means that hundreds of thousands of brand new vehicles are paid for out of Personal Independence Payments to individuals for disabilities, the huge growth of which in recent years seemingly being down to mental health complaints, such as anxiety. In an example of knots of legally enforceable entitlements the state has bound itself up in, a council is forbidden from taking into account whether a parent has motability financed car on account of a SEND child, should they also request a council-funded taxi service to school. 

In housing, strict rules ensure that builders must offer a certain percentage of any new development at sub-market “affordable” pricing in return for permission to build anything at all.  In utilities and banking, a baroque structure of cross-subsidy ensures that the costs of serving the bottom quintile are passed on to the slightly better off, at the government’s behest. The exception is retail electricity, where the market has been abolished altogether by the government’s price cap — introduced to shield consumers from the price shock in Autumn 2022, and now effectively politically irremovable.  Although government intervention in energy pricing had distorted anything resembling a free market in electricity, by imposing the costs of subsidising, balancing and backing up intermittent generation, long before that. 

I could go on and on, but the important point is that in many cases prices are ceasing to mean anything — they are simply a division of the cost of supplying something for everyone, divided by the number of people the state deems able to pay. They no longer serve as a signal telling producers where to allocate resources and what to prioritise. Price signals act as the nerve system of a market economy — the alternative ought to be a command economy, but Britain has no mechanism for that either. 

The link between production and consumption has been broken.

Chris Bayliss

Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant whose main interest is the energy sector in Iraq. He tweets at @baylissbaghdad

Democrats are vowing to break up media companies that kowtowed to Trump if they take back power.

Earlier this week, comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered his monologue, as he does at the beginning of every episode of his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He focused on the reaction to the assassination of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, and claimed that “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

In addition to not being very funny, the observation rested on a false assumption—that the presumed killer, 22-year-old Utah man Tyler Robinson, is a conservative. Incorrect notions about the suspect’s political tribe have remained enduringly popular in liberal media circles; one of the top mainstream liberal Substack writers, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote earlier this week that the motive of the alleged shooter “remains unclear.” This is simply not true: Interviews with Robinson’s friends and family members, as well as text messages between Robinson and his roommate—his transgender romantic partner—paint a clear portrait of a man who found Kirk’s conservative views “harmful.” It’s fine to leave room for new details that further elucidates or complicates this picture, but for now the totality of the available information suggests an essentially left-wing motivation.

While Kimmel is a comedian rather than a newscaster, given how paranoid the mainstream media is about the spread of so-called misinformation, the criticism of Kimmel on this subject was well-deserved. And I had been planning to criticize him in this newsletter all week.

Unfortunately, the story no longer ends there.

Brendan Carr, chair of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), weighed in on the matter; not only did he criticize what Kimmel had to say, he also implicitly threatened the broadcasters. (Kimmel’s show appears on ABC.)

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Carr during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC.”

This was not an idle threat. The FCC licenses broadcast channels, and can fine them or even take them off the air. Moreover, the FCC oversees mergers of companies in the communications space. Nexstar Media, which owns many of the ABC local affiliate stations that air Kimmel, is attempting to acquire Tegna Inc., a rival firm; the FCC needs to okay the deal. There’s a lot at stake, and FCC can make life very difficult for companies that defy it.

And so, on Wednesday night, both Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group—another major telecommunications company—informed ABC that they would not air Kimmel on their affiliate stations. ABC then opted to place the show on indefinite hiatus. (Disclaimer: Nexstar owns Rising, the news show I host for The Hill.)

Robby Soave, Reason Magazine

In her 1962 essay “Have Gun, Will Nudge,” Rand explained exactly how the public interest standard would lead to censorship.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr has received much criticism after appearing to pressure broadcast channels to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air following the comedian’s misinformed monologue about the motivations of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer. Republican Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Ted Cruz (R–Texas), and Dave McCormick (R–Pa.), all chastised Carr for seemingly using his position to steer the editorial decisions of private companies—a serious breach of free speech principles.

Carr is not without his defenders, however. Nathan Leamer, tech policy expert and advisor to former FCC Chair Ajit Pai, asserts that Carr’s actions fall squarely within his duty to promote the “public interest” on television, as defined by the Communications Act of 1934. He also assails “libertarians” in particular for not caring about how the FCC works (his words), and suggests that such skeptics are incorrectly or selectively railing against the public interest standard in the Kimmel case.

But of course, libertarians have been warning that broad interpretations of the public interest standard will empower the FCC to engage in censorship for decades. Just ask Ayn Rand.

In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then FCC Chair Newton Minow was citing as justification for pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly “vast wasteland” of shoddy television shows, and claimed that the FCC’s charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.

“You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives,” said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. “It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs.”

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Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship, and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public—i.e., the public interest.

And that’s precisely what Rand disliked about his approach. Her essay, “Have Gun, Will Nudge,” published in The Objectivist Newsletter in March 1962, makes clear her disdain not just for abject censorship, but also for a reality in which the FCC chair makes vague statements regarding the actions that private actors should or should not take.

“It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse,” she wrote. She continued:

Censorship, in its old-fashioned meaning, is a government edict that forbids the discussion of some specific subjects or ideas—such, for instance, as sex, religion or criticism of government officials—an edict enforced by the government’s scrutiny of all forms of communication prior to their public release. But for stifling the freedom of men’s minds the modern method is much more potent; it rests on the power of non-objective law; it neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim. It spares the bureaucrat the troublesome necessity of committing himself to rigid rules—and it places upon the victims the burden of discovering how to please him, with a fluid unknowable as their only guide.

No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?

What makes it possible to bring a free country down to such a level? If you doubt the connection between altruism and statism, I suggest that you count how many times—in the current articles, speeches, debates and hearings—there appeared the magic formula which makes all such outrages possible: “The Public Interest.”

The title of the essay was inspired by Rand’s contention that a man who holds a gun to your head and demands your wallet is surely deploying impermissible force rather than mere encouragement. When the FCC chair proclaims that a private company can “do this the easy way or the hard way,” he is providing a similar kind of nudge.

Robby Soave, Reason Magazine

At the O2 Arena in London, the president sounded exasperated. His worldview had lost

For people like Fran who wanted answers, Obama gave none. He just seemed depressed. He said that Britain, like America, is at a “fork in the road.” He said that we’re too materialistic, and have lost two historic defenses against consumerism: religion and counterculture. (Hip-hop used to have a purpose, now rappers just talk about money.) He said there was a “significant risk” that AI becomes a tool of oppression and censorship, and said that Donald Trump has committed “violence against the truth.” “Old men hanging on who are afraid of death” cause 80 percent of the world’s problems, he told the audience, with exasperated frankness. His world view had lost.

After an hour-and-a-bit he was done. [British historian David Olusoga] said “Mr President, thank you for your leadership,” and Obama smiled, waved and left. People ran for the doors. To get the train home, to rush to their friends and loved ones, to proclaim that their king was dead.

Max Jeffery, The Spectator

Many Democrats are still mired in a state of low-level depression after Kamala Harris’ devastating defeat in the 2024 election. President Donald Trump has steamrolled Washington, and the party’s favorability has plunged to historic lows, including among Democrats, as the circular firing-squad continues over exactly why the party lost. Harris herself has come in for her share of blame, and in recent weeks, she has tumbled in the 2028 presidential polls; she now stands well behind her longtime frenemy California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

But you wouldn’t know it from the crowd assembled Wednesday at the cavernous Town Hall auditorium in New York City for an 8 p.m. “Conversation with Kamala Harris,” a book talk for the former vice president’s recently-released — and surprisingly sharp-edged — memoir of the campaign trail, 107 Days.

Here, the audience buzzed with excitement at the prospect of seeing Harris up-close, and the mood was festive. The event’s “featured cocktail” was the Madam VP, a tall drink made with gin, cassis, cardamom, honey and lemon. It was priced at $24, a likely reference to the campaign year. The audience members seated around me traded campaign stories, reminiscing. One had spent much of his summer door-knocking; another had been a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. The only indication that all was not well was the intermittent thump of pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ drums just beyond the venue’s doors, which persisted throughout the event. Soon, the mere sight of the failed presidential candidate and her husband, Doug Emhoff, prompted a standing ovation. Beside me, a woman shouted, “That’s my first gentleman!” Another, just behind us, chimed in: “We love you, Dougie!” The pair retreated backstage.

When I first bought my tickets for the event, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would this be a somewhat skeptical audience, loyal to the Democratic Party, but uneasy about Harris’ role in it? Would it be a somber occasion, a chance for reflection about a party or a candidate that failed to reach voters when it mattered most? Not quite. It became clear, instantly, that this wouldn’t be a tough crowd for Harris, nor a place for nagging negativity. This was a KHive reunion, and joy was on the agenda.

Several minutes later, Errin Haines, the event’s moderator and the founder of the nonprofit news outlet The 19th, took the stage and further set the tone. “We know that tonight’s conversation is not just about politics or power,” Haines told the crowd while introducing Harris. “It’s about legacy, it’s about leadership and it’s about the lived experience of breaking barriers in full view of the world. It’s about how history gets written and who gets to write it.” This prompted a wave of mmm-hmms through the thousand-person venue. Harris emerged onstage several minutes later, prompting another standing ovation.

Harris took great pains to emphasize that the final outcome of the titular 107 days — the loss of every swing state and the popular vote — had been the result of her simple lack of time. “It was an unprecedented election,” Harris averred. “Just think about this for a moment. The sitting president of the United States, three and a half months before the election, decides not to run for reelection. This sitting vice president takes up the mantle against the former president of the United States, who had been running for 10 years, with 107 days to go.”

Had she had more time, maybe, she could’ve sealed the deal. It’s true, everyone now agrees, that President Joe Biden should never have run for reelection in the first place. But it’s also true that much of Harris’ best polling was at the campaign’s outset, and arguably began slipping once Americans had gotten to see more of the candidate.

Haines shifted the conversation to the epigraph of 107 Days, a quote from Kendrick Lamar’s track “Loyalty” — “you being a loyal person, being loyal perhaps to a fault to President Biden.” Biden’s name prompted boos from the audience, one of only a few instances of such a reaction — the others occurring during references to Trump and his administration. But if the audience was expecting Harris to denounce her former boss, she gave them no such satisfaction. “This book is not about Joe Biden,” Harris explained. “This book is about those 107 days.”

By and large, this was an audience with little interest in relitigating the failures of the campaign — or, for that matter, Democratic campaigns before it. The very mention of Hillary Clinton’s name, for instance, drew no fewer than two separate rounds of applause. Clinton, Harris noted, had mentored her on the campaign trail. “We all hope to be mentored,” she reflected. “We all hope to have support from those who come before.”

spoke to three audience members after the event, and they all said they wouldn’t hesitate to vote for Harris in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, should she choose to run. Few seemed interested in even acknowledging the campaign’s failures.

“I think this campaign and this book is more of an example of how you can win, or how you can get close to [winning],” Don, a 31-year-old New Yorker, told me. “This was one of the closest elections in this century… so it almost happened.” Others considered it solely a matter of sexism and racism. “I think by that all accounts, we want to keep women down as a society, and unfortunately, she was a consequence of that,” said Stephanie, a 36-year-old New Yorker.

Turning to current events and the Democratic Party’s future, Harris posed more questions than she answered. “I always believed, and perhaps in retrospect naively, that if push came to shove, these titans of industry would somehow be among the guardrails to protect our democracy. But yet they’re kneeling at the altar of the tyrant. …Why?” And, “There’s also work to be done about reconstructing in a way that we ask ourselves, were we being efficient? Were we being effective? Were we delivering for the people?”

You could say Harris’ questions were rhetorical ones, and perhaps important. But they also betrayed what her critics have long argued is a certain hollowness to her political vision — still defined, almost a year later, by little more than her opposition to Trump. “Donald Trump campaigned by promising his supporters on day one, he’d bring down prices,” she explained, turning to the Democratic Party’s perceived weakness on the economy. “Here we are today. Prices are up, inflation is up, unemployment is up. He made those promises, and he broke them.”

Harris’ litany of unanswered questions also seemed to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that she’d mis-stepped in emphasizing the Trumpian threat to democracy as heavily as she had on the campaign trail. These institutions, Harris said, were not functioning as well as the Democrats had believed. “I caution us,” she said, “against having any nostalgia.”

The Democratic Party of 2025 is, in many ways, not the party it was just a year ago. For one, Democratic voters are more willing to radically experiment.

Case in point: The only figure whose name seemed to generate as much excitement than Harris herself was New York’s Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Two nights earlier on Rachel Maddow, Harris had rather tepidly backed the 33-year-old democratic socialist, who has yet to be endorsed by key members of the party establishment. (“He’s the Democratic nominee, and” — passive voice — “he should be supported.”) But now, Harris appeared more assured. “There’s a mayor’s race coming up in New York,” she said, drawing rapturous cheers from the hometown crowd. “I have endorsed Mamdani.” The applause swelled. “The enthusiasm, right?” she added, smiling. Haines asked whether Harris would return to New York to campaign for Mamdani. “Maybe,” Harris replied.

More than when she spoke about politics, though, Harris appeared most at ease dispensing life advice as the event segued into a Q&A session.

The first audience question, pulled from Haines’s pre-approved stack, came from an audience member named Layla, who asked Harris for career guidance. “As a woman in corporate America who aspires to lead,” she began, “what advice would you give me to … build influence before I have a formal leadership title and … work effectively with people who clearly do not want me to succeed?” Harris encouraged her to “choose your safe circle of people who have a sense of what you’re going through and are going to applaud your ambition.”

Danielle, another audience member, turned to Harris for parenting advice. She was expecting her first child, a boy. “I understand the huge responsibility I’m tasked with in raising this boy to have a good heart and a moral compass, which so many young men lack today,” she said. She wanted to “hear your thoughts and advice on raising him in this world and this current political climate.” Harris responded: “Don’t give up on our young men. They’re our young men, right?” Haines, for her part, sought Harris’ perspective on the nature of married life. “What did you learn about marriage running for president?” she asked. Harris advised: “Communicate, you know, in a way that is hopefully without judgement.”

Harris, to this crowd, was not only a politician but a figure of almost mythic proportions — a paragon of success professionally and personally. And, indeed, the specificity of Harris’ life advice seemed to exceed the precision of her political advice. “You described 107 Days as a political nonfiction thriller,” Haines quipped, “but I think it could also be a self-help for women in the workplace book.”

Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which the Biden-Harris administration had aided with billions in arms sales and transfers to many Democrats’ dismay, did not receive a mention during the event (protesters interrupted an earlier talk that night). But the party’s deep divisions could no longer be ignored after audience members emerged from the event to a crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. “Harris, Harris, you can’t hide,” chanted the protesters, bearing Palestinian flags and signs noting the quantity of arms sales and transfers Biden had approved. “Your legacy is genocide.”

“She is very much trying to apply this false, revisionist history that, while she was vice president and while she was campaigning for president, she was against the genocide in Gaza,” explained one protester, who identified himself only as R. “We know that this is not true. We do not forget.”

Both groups — Harris’ supporters and pro-Palestinian demonstrators — gathered near the venue’s exit, hoping to catch a glimpse of the former, and potentially future, presidential candidate even as it began to rain. Her security detail cleared a narrow corridor between them. Cheers erupted from one side, chants from the other, as Harris emerged and entered her motorcade. Once the black SUVs disappeared down the street, the two groups turned their attention on each other. First came the shouting, and before long, shoving.

“Joy is a strategy. It is a political strategy,” Haines had told Harris earlier that night. Evidently, the good feelings couldn’t last.

Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer from New York.

“No one is above the law.” However, the problem with these sociopaths: They see THEMSELVES as the law. America was explicitly founded to be a “nation of laws, not of men.” The rule of objective law was supposed to override the whims and rule of tyrants and dictators. America has had its more and less dysfunctional eras. However, under the Obama and Biden regimes we began literally and openly to operate as a nation of men — of tyrants– not laws.

When this smug, self-righteous prick James Comey starts to paint himself as a martyr and a victim, remember what he did to our republic. Remember when he disparages President Trump as a dictator, he’s describing himself.

*******

Jimmy Kimmel is totally back on the air, as if nothing ever happened. He’s more smug, more deceitful and more of a nasty little Communist-fascist than ever, posing as a late-night “comedian.”

Leftists and Communists are brutal, deceitful totalitarians who spread hatred while making a huge profit. Yet they never pay for their actions. Maybe it will change if Comey is convicted — if so, it will be a first.

*******

Fox News reports that a “deranged leftist” has assaulted a Trump official in a U.N. bathroom during yet another physical attack from the left on anyone who disagrees with them.

“Deranged leftist.” Let’s unpack that.

Is there such a thing as a NON-deranged leftist? Is it possible to be sane AND simultaneously believe that:

A person can be both genders and neither gender, all at the same time; that “free speech” consists of censoring Republicans only; that Charlie Kirk’s assassination isn’t nearly as bad as Jimmy Kimmel’s 3 day suspension; that 90 percent tax rates, elimination of fossil fuels and government control of grocery stores will generate prosperity; that open borders and gun confiscation from everyone except criminals reduce crime and make America great; and that untested, experimental vaccines manufactured by companies with zero product liability can be trusted and will lead to longevity…is it possible to believe all these things and NOT be deranged, whether you assault a presidential official in a U.N. bathroom, or not?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

President Trump’s U.N. speech covered a variety of topics, ranging from his peacemaking accomplishments in seven different wars, his prevention of bioweapons development, the U.N.’s support of illegal immigration, his efforts to stop drug trafficking, to exposing the most persecuted religion on the planet, which he said, is Christianity.  The range of topics also included climate change.

After quoting many of the massively failed predictions of climate alarmists, President Trump stated,

It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. … If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

On the other hand, former president Joe Biden told the world a 1.5-degree earth temperature increase, is “the most existential threat to the planet,” even greater than nuclear war.

The first problem with Biden’s statement is that a 1.5-degree change in the earth’s temperature is impossible to measure.

How do you measure the average temperature of the earth?  Do you measure at the North Pole, or the South Pole?  How about the equator?  Do you measure in the morning, at noon, or at night?  Do you measure in spring, summer, fall, or winter?  

Through the 1940s, the temperature of Earth was measured by dragging a thermometer containing bucket behind a boat in the ocean. Scientifically, this seems to only measure the temperature of water in a bucket being dragged behind a boat, yet somehow, climate alarmists say this accurately measured Earth’s temperature.

Examining temperatures of the earth with all 32,000 weather stations all over the world, adding their minute-by-minute temperature measurements made from the North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between, they provide an average global temperature and compare it to the average temperature from last year.

What do you imagine the range of temperatures would be surrounding these averages?  The range would be something like, -50 degrees to +150 degrees.  The range is huge, considering the temperatures are taken all over the earth.  Yet, alarmists want to tell us that they can measure a 1.5-degree change in the earth’s temperature.  That’s mathematically impossible.

Today 32,000 land weather stations, weather balloons, radar, ships, buoys, satellites, and volunteer weather watchers take measurements all over the world to yield an average temperature of the earth. Next, they put all the averages of these old bucket data and these new hodgepodge data on the same graph, not revealing that they were measured with numerous questionable techniques. With these data they claim to have accurate results saying the earth is warming by 1.5 degrees.  What could possibly be wrong with this?

Examining just two 24-hour periods of hourly measurements made by NOAA weather on August 20th and 21st of 2024 show that on the 20th, the average temperature was 71 degrees and on the 21st, the average temperature was 68 degrees.  So, the average temperature decreased by 2 degrees.  Does this show global cooling?  Twenty-four measurements were used to calculate the averages in each case, which allow calculation of what is called the standard deviation of the numbers.  For the 20th, the average and standard deviation was 71+/-6 degrees and for the 21st, the average and standard deviation was 68+/-7 degrees.  This shows the average temperature measurements came from a range of temperatures.  When the standard deviations of two numbers overlap, that means the two numbers are mathematically indistinguishable and thus, are mathematically the same.  So, the proper conclusion comparing the average temperatures of August 20th to August 21st is not global cooling, but that the average temperature on the two days—was not distinguishable.  The temperature was the same.

Examining temperatures of the earth with all 32,000 weather stations all over the world, adding their minute-by-minute temperature measurements made from the North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between, they provide an average global temperature and compare it to the average temperature from last year.

What do you imagine the range of temperatures would be surrounding these averages?  The range would be something like, -50 degrees to +150 degrees.  The range is huge, considering the temperatures are taken all over the earth.  Yet, alarmists want to tell us that they can measure a 1.5-degree change in the earth’s temperature.  That’s mathematically impossible.

Now let’s talk about “the carbon footprint” (ominous music should play).  President Trump stated, “The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.” 

Why would President Trump say such a thing?

It is because he is in agreement with “over 1,600 scientists from around the world” who signed the World Climate Declaration (WCD) stating, “that claims of a ‘climate emergency’ threatening the Earth are a hoax.”  The declaration states “carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth, …there is no climate emergency, [and] …climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”  “The coalition points out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, [and] …they stress that there is ‘no statistical evidence’ to support [climate alarmist] claims.”  Thus, “there is no climate emergency, …no cause for panic and alarm.”

Another interesting thing is that CO2 is not even a “greenhouse gas.”  Several recently published peer-reviewed scientific articles (2022, 2020) show “current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are around 418 parts per million (ppm) [0.04%], but the scientists state that past 400 ppm, ‘the CO2 concentration can no longer cause any increase in temperature’” due to the insulation effect.  Therefore, “it simply isn’t possible for increases in carbon dioxide to cause temperatures to rise.” Note, “levels of gas have been up to 20 times higher in the past without any sign of runaway ‘global warming.’”

“In 2022, German Physics Professor Dieter Schildknecht set the saturation limit of CO2 at just 300 ppm and concluded that beyond this, further increases cannot affect the Earth’s climate.”

Emeritus professor William Happer of Princeton believes the CO2 saturation hypothesis and stated that the current “science” enforcing the “Net Zero” agenda for carbon emissions by 2050 — is a “hoax,” but he preferred the word, “scam.”

Dr. John Clauser, 2022 Nobel Physics laureate, stated, “I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO2 – it’s all a crock of crap, in my opinion.”

Why did anyone ever think CO2 was a greenhouse gas?  In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall discovered carbon dioxide mixed with water vapor absorbed heat and radiated heat. He was credited for “the physical basis of the greenhouse effect.”  This was propagated by groups like National Geographic expressing that “greenhouse gases allow the sun’s light to shine onto Earth’s surface … [and] trap the heat that reflects back from the surface …like the glass walls of a greenhouse.”

The problem is, Tyndall was mistaken.  In the 1940s, the first infrared (IR) spectrometer was built, followed by low-cost instruments in 1957 and in 1969, making FTIR instruments available for labs.  Using FTIR instrumentation, the energy absorption of CO2 can be measured, and data show its absorbance is very narrow with the energy of absorbance being in a region of very minimal radiant solar energy. “Carbon dioxide traps heat only within [very] narrow bands of the infrared spectrum,” states an article entitled, “Top Study: Carbon Emissions CANNOT Cause ‘Global Warming’.”  Water vapor, part of the hydrolytic cycle, caused the heat absorption in Tyndall’s experiment.

So, climate alarmists are bad scientists, bad mathematicians, both, or fraudsters with an agenda.

Just keep wearing the hat that says, “Trump was right about everything.” At the U.N. Trump said, “[It’s] the best-selling hat.”

More articles by Richard Blakley can be found at Blakley on the Write.

Kazi, Adobe Stock Images

Anti-Discrimination Advocates’ New Weapon

The Trump administration’s admissions-data order will make it harder for universities to cheat.

Sep 24, 2025 Russell T. Warne

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The 2023 Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was an earthquake for college admissions. After nearly 50 years, the affirmative-action regime that governed most universities’ admissions processes was declared unconstitutional.

Racial preferences in college admissions have never been popular among Americans. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll taken a few months before the Students for Fair Admissions decision was released found that only 33 percent of adults approved of affirmative action in college admissions. In California, affirmative action in education has lost at the ballot box twice, most recently in 2020. Even when the cultural and political milieu is predisposed to increase support for the policy, most Americans still don’t like affirmative action in college admissions.

No selective university has chosen to subject its admissions process to scrutiny.Yet, the opposite is true among university administrators. Harvard and the University of North Carolina fought vigorously in the courts for years to keep their discriminatory admissions policies in place. In the 21st century, public universities in Texas and Michigan also took the fight for race-conscious admissions to the Supreme Court. Among university administrators (who lean heavily to the political left), it is a given that a diverse student body is beneficial and that admissions personnel should take deliberate steps to admit as many “underrepresented” students as possible.

Disaggregation of admissions statistics will permit analyses that show whether students from any demographic group have an advantage.This is why the reaction to Students for Fair Admissions from many universities was negative. The presidents of Brown University, Stanford University, and Northwestern University all issued official statements that they were “deeply disappointed” by the Supreme Court’s decision. They and many other university presidents affirmed their commitment to diversity while still stating that they would follow the law. (For people who claim to be free thinkers, these presidents used eerily similar language in many of these statements.)

The mismatch between public opinion about affirmative action in admissions and university practices always meant that the admissions process was often a highly secretive “black box,” even at public universities. Even after the Students for Fair Admissions decision, no selective university has chosen to subject its admissions process to scrutiny.

Opening the Black Box

That is about to change. On August 7, 2025, the Department of Education issued a new directive stating that universities must report data on their applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students. The data on these groups must be disaggregated by race and sex. That disaggregation will permit statistical analyses that will easily determine whether students from any demographic group have an advantage over other students who have the same academic qualifications. The data must be reported to the government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS) database, which already collects some data from universities.

The new directive makes enforcing the Students for Fair Admissions decision much easier. Previously, disaggregated data about applicants and admitted students could be obtained only during a lawsuit. (Even open-records requests often do not produce this information.) Now, the Department of Education has made reporting these statistics a condition for receiving access to federal research funds or student loans. By making the data transparent, the Trump administration makes it easy for the government to identify universities that have admissions practices that result in de facto discrimination. And all of the necessary data will be delivered each year to the government and the public, without requiring any lawsuits, investigations, or open-records requests. You might as well tie a bow on it.

How did universities react to this development? They … didn’t. University officials have not expressed “disappointment” in the directive or protested the new requirements, even though the directive explicitly says its goal is to make enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling easier. Even the New York Times acknowledged that the government has “wide latitude” about what data to collect for IPEDS, and almost no one is questioning the legality of the new directive (although some outside experts have expressed skepticism about its feasibility).

If universities acknowledge they will comply with the Supreme Court ruling, and they do not protest reporting data to make it easy to catch violations of the law, it is legitimate to ask whether increased enforcement is necessary. The answer is yes. Even after Students for Fair Admissions made discrimination illegal in college admissions, leaked data from a hacker showed that Columbia University and NYU are both still discriminating in their admissions. Other universities have seen suspiciously little change in their student demographics since the Supreme Court ruling.

Almost no one is questioning the legality of the Trump administration’s new directive.For example, Princeton University’s Class of 2027 and Class of 2028 have almost the exact same percentages of Hispanic and black students. The same pattern occurred in Yale University’s Classes of 2027 and 2028. At both universities, the percentage of Asian students decreased in the latter cohort, even though all observers expected that the end of affirmative action would result in an increase in admitted Asian students. Both universities signed an amicus brief in the Students for Fair Admissions case stating that eliminating affirmative action would make it impossible to have a diverse student body. Either Princeton and Yale were lying to the Supreme Court, or both are still discriminating against Asian applicants.

When universities are forced to report disaggregated data, it will be much harder to use holistic review to lessen the impact of objective admissions standards.Many universities continue to discriminate under the guise of “holistic review,” which is a time-tested strategy to smuggle subjectivity into the admissions process. But when universities are forced to report disaggregated data on their applicants and students, it will be much harder to use holistic review to lessen the impact of objective admissions standards. The public nature of IPEDS makes discrimination especially risky for universities, because anyone will be able to compare the academic qualifications of applicants and admitted students from different groups. Data sleuths who find a large discrepancy can file a civil-rights complaint with the Department of Education and trigger an investigation.

Students for Fair Admissions was an important victory against institutional racism in America. But history teaches that the fight is not over yet. After Brown v. Board of Education banned segregation in 1954, local officials in the South tried to ignore or undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling. It took nearly 20 years of lawsuits, state action, and even the use of the military to stamp out segregation. The IPEDS changes are an important component of enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision, because they will make lawbreaking harder to hide. Universities that continue to discriminate will soon be easy targets for the Trump administration’s eager enforcement staff. It will take time, but this modern-day discrimination practice will eventually die out.

Russell T. Warne is a former associate professor of psychology in the Department of Behavioral Science at Utah Valley University