Hoax After Hoax After Hoax

Hoax After Hoax After Hoax 1

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Hoax After Hoax After Hoax 2

I read a lot of articles every day.

A LOT.

I do because following the news and opinion writing is integral to my job. And while I love my job, I have to admit that without blood pressure medications, I would burst a blood vessel several times a day.

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I don’t always get things right. Nobody does, and even the most meticulous journalists who try hard to abstract their news writing from their opinions are swayed by unconscious assumptions. As an opinion writer, I unabashedly inject my opinions into my work, and I do not doubt that my opinions can influence how I see reality. We are all subject to confirmation bias, no matter how much we try to see things without it.

Given that, others’ opinion journalism doesn’t tend to get my blood pressure up; lies and hoaxes are what infuriate me, as does willful ignorance. And we swim in a sea of lies in the modern world of “journalism.”

Both Ed and I have written about the “Now it can be told” style of journalism. Without exception, the writers penning those best-selling books knew most of the pertinent facts that they now breathlessly reveal, and almost without exception, they were key players in the coverups of vital facts when exposing them would matter.

We were told Joe Biden was “Sharp as a tack,” until he was out of the race. These “journalists” knew that was a lie, but they covered it, telling us that senility was a “stutter.”

The Hunter Biden laptop? Russian disinformation! Censor it! Steele Dossier? Totally true and verified. Adam Schiff, the truth-teller, assures us of that! Time and again, we are lied to, with hoaxes thrown at us daily. Hands up, don’t shoot! Nooses everywhere, on college campuses and at NASCAR! “This is MAGA Country!”

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The current round of lies and hoaxes has to do with illegal immigrants who are in Tren de Aragua or MS-13 being pure as the driven snow. A wife-beating, human trafficking MS-13 member is just a “Maryland man,” “father,” and Van Hollen “constituent” who “lived quietly” before ICE cruelly deported him for no good reason.

NPR didn’t get it wrong there. No confirmation bias was involved. This is straight-up propaganda, intended to emphasize some “facts” while hiding the most relevant ones.

This is what we are fighting, day in and day out. It is no longer true that we have a liberal media. There is no unconscious bias against which we are pushing back. Unconscious bias, based on living in a bubble, used to be the major flaw of our journalistic landscape, but dealing with something so relatively benign would be a relief these days.

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The former “mainstream media” is nothing more than Pravda. Sometimes they get what amounts to marching orders – spread this narrative! – but even when they don’t, they push the Party line, working daily to ensure that the establishment of which they are an essential part controls what people see, say, and think.

At HotAir and Townhall Media, we work daily to debunk the hoaxes, expose the lies, and open people’s eyes to what lies behind the Truman Show. 

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Posted in Republican News

Maher to David: You Just Insulted Six Million Dead Jews, Buddy

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Maher to David: You Just Insulted Six Million Dead Jews, Buddy 4

The week started with a bang. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, it ends with  — well, not a whimper, but only a tired lament from Bill Maher about Larry David’s intellect. For a man who got called a Nazi stooge by his (former?) friend in the pages of the New York Times, it seems like he’s more energized by Pope Paul than the crank who shivved him in print. 

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Yes, that’s not a typo. In the full interview with Piers Morgan, Maher spends quite a while discussing Pope Francis’s death, the Catholic Church, and why his father left during Pope Paul VI’s era. Maher seems bored with David’s attack on him more than angry or energized, but he does slap back rather effectively. “The moment you play the Hitler card,” Maher tells Morgan, “you’ve lost the argument” (via Twitchy):

The argument gets lost at this point not just because Hitler is “the GOAT of evil,” as Maher quips, but because it’s an idiotic analogy. I covered that in two posts earlier in the week, but just to recap:

Hitler didn’t come to power and have dinners with his critics, for one thing; he put critics in camps, or had them killed by storm troopers until the storm troopers became a liability, and then he had them killed by the SS. (Read up on The Night of the Long Knives.) Hitler didn’t demand an end to anti-Semitism on campuses either, but instead ordered it to become policy throughout all of government, right up to the point where Hitler implemented his “final solution,” a phrase that Hamasniks have been using at times during their campus intimidation campaigns over the last 19 months.  

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In fairness, Maher and Morgan do spend quite a bit of time discussing the dinner with Trump and the reaction to it. Maher gets somewhat exercised in defending his decision, and says that the reaction has been overwhelmingly — but not universally — positive. The people who complain have been “surprising,” Maher says, presumably including David — although it certainly wasn’t a surprise to Alan Dershowitz. 

This certainly dials down expectations for tonight’s Real Time episode on HBO. Maybe Maher is saving up his outrage for a live audience, or maybe this conversation will prompt him to take a sharper tone. Morgan scores a big point in noting that the media outlets and Hollywood moral idiots that constantly play the HItler card on Trump have nothing to say about regimes that actually follow Hitler’s playbook, like Iran and Hamas, in attempting genocide of the Jews. Perhaps that might inspire some commentary when Maher takes the stage. In this interview, Maher seems rather bored with David and stupid Hitler analogies, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. 

Except for insulting the memory of six million dead Jews, of course, and the intelligence of anyone who read the NYT essay. 

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The whole episode of Morgan’s Uncensored is below, so catch the full context. The rest of the conversation doesn’t explicitly address David, but he does wonder how far one can go in canceling a sitting American president. How far does that go, Maher wonders — should Democrat Senators refuse to talk to Trump? How can a democracy operate in such a cancel culture? That’s certainly worth thinking about … and discussing. 

Posted in Republican News

The Ivy League Is Being Hoisted on It’s Own Petard

The Ivy League Is Being Hoisted on It's Own Petard 5

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The Ivy League Is Being Hoisted on It's Own Petard 6

The phrase “hoist on his own petard” comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A petard was a crude explosive device–essentially a crude grenade–and being hoisted on one’s petard meant being harmed or killed by one’s own weapon. 

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Well, the Ivy League has been using DEI petards against disfavored groups–whites, Jews, Asians–and their chosen weapons are about the blow up in their faces. 

By now, everyone interested is aware that Trump and the Ivy League schools are at war, and Trump is determined to see the schools concede to his demands that they follow federal civil rights laws or face the consequences. 

As wealthy as these prestigious universities are–and they are very wealthy indeed–they remain utterly dependent on federal funding and tax benefits. Harvard, for instance, has an endowment that is truly mind-blowing at over $50 billion, depending on the day and market values, but it would blow through that amount in a few years if they didn’t get that cool $9 billion a year from the federal government and benefit from tax breaks as a nonprofit institution. 

The same is true for almost every college and university to at least some extent–in fact, most would cease to exist without federal support. 

These schools helped create this situation in the first place–it was only a few decades ago that state and federal money weren’t even a part of their budgets. They wanted this money, and were confident that their influence with lawmakers would shield them from political influence they didn’t like. 

They had their cake and ate it too–they railed against America, Americans, and capitalism. They then deposited huge sums of money from the very governments and taxpayers for whom they professed hate and against whom they trained their students to destroy. 

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Trump’s “trump card” against these institutions is not their use of federal dollars to preach and teach hatred against America, and especially conservatives, but rather their open violation of federal law in promoting “social justice.” 

Chris Rufo’s exposé of Princeton–one that could be duplicated at nearly any institution of “higher ed,”— gets to the heart of the matter:

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.”

The basic structure of this system is the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber’s tenure. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus’s racial composition. As Princeton’s first annual diversity report noted, “Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution.”

According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least “two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates.”

The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences—the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.”

Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university’s Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire “candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus.” According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire’s salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.

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It’s not even an open secret–it is often said loudly and proudly–that race, gender, and sexuality are primary factors for who gets hired, who gets fired, and who gets admitted or funded as students at places like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. 

This is uncontroversially illegal–there is no gray area, and if the goal was to hire more white, heterosexual males, the federal government would apply all its existing civil rights laws to hammer these schools into compliance. All of them are required to certify compliance with the existing laws, and not a one of them is compliant in the least. 

In other words, they knowingly break the law, lie to the government in documents that make them eligible for federal funding, and are subject to fines equivalent to 3x the amount they receive under false pretenses. 

That is according to the False Claims Act, which pays bounties for whistleblowers. 

The university’s race-conscious initiatives were not limited to faculty hiring. In 2021, Princeton released its multiyear plan for “Supplier Diversity,” which called on departments to award contracts based not on quality or cost, but on race. The report offered staff a step-by-step guide for effectively funneling university procurement contracts to minority-owned or -operated businesses. Failing that, the report suggested, staff should prioritize awarding contracts to companies with a philosophical commitment to DEI. “We will also explore opportunities to highlight relationships with firms that do not qualify [as certified diverse suppliers] but otherwise demonstrate the values to which we aspire,” according to the report. The report also notes Princeton was willing to “[s]upport capacity-building efforts” at “diverse firms” so they could better “meet the needs of the university.”

Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said Princeton’s Supplier Diversity initiative constitutes a “straightforward violation” of federal civil rights law. “Parties may not decide who to contract with and who not to contract with based on race,” Morenoff said. “It sounds very clear that this is what they were doing, and they were bragging about it.”

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The United States Department of Education Division of Civil Rights has the power to impose enormous pain on institutions that fail to comply with the law, and while schools like Harvard and Yale can afford the best lawyers in the world and may be able to wriggle their way out of any penalties so drastic–what judge would want to be known as the guy who killed Harvard or Yale?!–Trump has a lot of cards to play. 

The particular petard upon which these schools will be hoisted is that every one of them loudly proclaims that their institutions are so riddled with racism, sexism, and homophobia that they can be called “systemically racist.” In fact, they loudly proclaim their guilt. College presidents often abase themselves before faculty and students, loudly admitting their failures.

During Trump’s first term, he actually opened an investigation into Princeton because its president shouted about how guilty his institution is. Since the same President had also sworn to the federal government in a legal document that gave his institution access to billions of dollars, he committed fraud. Right? 

It’s not just colleges and universities that have put themselves into similar binds. Every establishment institution has committed itself to explicitly race-based hiring and other practices, and these are, on their face, illegal. 

In a just world, lots of petards would be exploding at the feet of these malefactors. In the short term, though, I would be satisfied if the big colleges and universities saw some of their limbs blown off. 

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Posted in Republican News

Thursday’s Final Word

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Thursday's Final Word 8

Closing the tabs …

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According to Bloomberg, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to raise the issue of Ukraine’s right to maintain its own military with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their upcoming discussions.

Ukraine and European allies stressed that Kyiv must have the ability to adequately equip and man its own army, but Putin would have to concede on his goal of demilitarizing Ukraine.

However, it would present a significant change in the U.S. approach to negotiations, which until recently have given the impression of seeking to appease Russia in order to bring Putin and his team to the negotiation table. Now, the administration appears to be trying to find concessions on both sides.

Ed: Well, Putin just demonstrated the necessity of this concession, no? I suspect Trump is upping the ante on this point as a way to pay Putin back for attempting to embarrass him. That’s why Trump is “not happy” about that missile volley at Kyiv.

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Ed: There isn’t going to be a winner. Had Putin’s invasion succeeded in 2022, he would still be fighting a massive insurgency as the ethnic Ukrainians would never have sat quietly. 

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President Trump is targeting Democrats’ main fundraising platform, in an extraordinary effort to challenge the opposing party’s political infrastructure. 

Trump is planning to sign a memorandum Thursday that directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue, which revolutionized liberal fundraising by giving small-dollar donors an easy way to contribute to campaigns and causes.  

Three Republican-led congressional committees alleged this month that ActBlue has “a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention.” GOP lawmakers have demanded additional documents related to a string of recent resignations by top executives.

Ed: It might have been smarter politically to just have Bondi take this up on her own initiative. However, a handful of state AGs are already investigating ActBlue over potential corruption and campaign finance violations, so this isn’t out of the blue … pun intended. In the end, I suspect the organizers behind ActBlue will launch a different platform with the same goals, if not the same policies.  

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Ed: This demonstrates why ActBlue really should get investigated at the federal level. And also why it’s probably not a great idea to contribute to outside PACs generally. If you want to donate, donate directly to campaigns or to party organizations. 

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“As we’ve moved from one administration to another and the Trump administration tries to find its footing, many still see our leaders as unresponsive to their main concerns,” says Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts Fox New surveys with Democrat Chris Anderson. “Partisans have flipped, of course, so now it’s Democrats who are most worried, but many Independents and Republicans are also skeptical their economic fears are being addressed.”

Nearly three-quarters (72%) believe tariffs will drive up the cost of products, including majorities of Democrats (88%), independents (76%) and Republicans (55%). A record 55% think tariffs hurt the economy and a plurality say they hurt U.S. jobs (44% hurt vs. 36% help). Two-thirds worry a trade war with China could escalate into a military confrontation.

Ed: To some extent, this is measuring the knee-jerk reaction. However, part of this knee-jerk reaction is the impression that the administration is making the strategy up as it goes along. That does not build confidence, and while the midterms are still more than a year away, Trump and the GOP need these trends to go back in the right direction eventually to give themselves another two years to complete their agenda.  

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Ed: Gotta love all the handwringing over the moral implications of killing people. For the radical enviros, that’s a feature, not a bug. They’re still obsessing over population growth. They want depopulation on a mass scale, so don’t buy this claim that they care about the deaths they cause. 

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On top of being ineradicably skeptical about the global climate “agenda,” I am also a 44-year-old layman with a lifetime’s worth of apocalyptic science-fiction reading under my belt, and thus perhaps not the ideal person to judge such endeavors. I’m the sort of hopelessly risk-averse naif, after all, who would have told you it was a bad idea to encourage Chinese military scientists to recklessly engage in gain-of-function research with deadly viruses in a poorly secured lab. So what do I know?

But it’s hard not to wonder at a scientific method that, in the words of commentator Gregg Easterbrook, responds to mere uncertainty about climate with “let’s tamper with the source of all life.” I certainly remember being lectured constantly by my eco-conscious grade-school that aerosols were in fact deadly poison: dissipating the ozone layer, immiserating the Third World, killing off the globe’s most lovably vulnerable creatures, etc. Now I guess we’re going to inject them straight into the sky to block out the sun.

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Over 4,000 IDF reservists sent a letter to Defense Minister Israel Katz on Thursday demanding that he order a full-scale crushing invasion of Gaza to finally finish off Hamas.

The list includes five brigadier-generals, including Erez Viner, who until very recently had left the planning of Gaza operations for the Southern Command.

It also includes 16 colonels, 90 lieutenant-colonels, 250 other officers, and more than 3,000 regular reserve soldiers.The premise of the letter is that the government promised it would replace IDF chief Herzi Halevi with Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir to order a far more aggressive simultaneous conquest of all of Gaza all at once, as opposed to the staged, slower invasions that characterized the war previously.

Ed: Slow and staged gets more of your forces killed. Either commit to war or pull out. That’s good advice, and it’s interesting to see the rank and file show more esprit d’corps than Israeli leadership. 

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“A number of judges have seemingly adopted a constitutional meta-principle: what a past President did, President Trump may not undo.”

So wrote Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Adrian Vermeule on Friday after a district-court judge issued yet another lawless nationwide injunction meant to handcuff Trump and halt his agenda.

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It’s a criticism the Supreme Court, and particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, must take to heart.

Ed: Be sure to read this entire essay from Glenn Reynolds. The Supreme Court either has to act with the full authority of Article III power to end these practices, or watch Congress do it for them eventually. 

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Posted in Republican News

Trump’s Latest Executive Order Takes on Disparate-Impact Theory

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Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” The basic point of this is to undermine what is known as disparate-impact theory. Here’s how the executive order describes it.

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A bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law. This principle guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes.  It promises that people are treated as individuals, not components of a particular race or group. It encourages meritocracy and a colorblind society, not race- or sex-based favoritism. Adherence to this principle is essential to creating opportunity, encouraging achievement, and sustaining the American Dream.

But a pernicious movement endangers this foundational principle, seeking to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement. A key tool of this movement is disparate-impact liability, which holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability. It not only undermines our national values, but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.  

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The order then requires several actions which are summarized in an accompanying fact sheet published by the White House.

  • The Order revokes presidential actions that approved of disparate-impact liability and sets in motion broader reform.
  • It directs all agencies to deprioritize enforcement of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability.
  • The Order instructs the Attorney General to repeal or amend all Title VI (racial nondiscrimination) regulations that contemplate disparate-impact liability.
  • It directs the administration to assess all pending investigations, lawsuits, and consent judgements that rely on a theory of disparate-impact liability, and take appropriate action.

This is, to put it mildly, a big deal. City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald argues it’s the “most important step” to restore meritocracy in America.

Measured in Trump time, it took them eons to get around to it, but the White House has finally taken the most important step it can to restore meritocracy to American society: eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement.

Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.

In none of those cases has it ever been demonstrated that the disfavored standard was implemented to exclude blacks or other minorities from a position, opportunity, or right. The genius (if a diabolical one) of disparate-impact theory was that it obviated any need to show discriminatory intent on the part of a targeted employer or institution. Discrimination was inferred simply by the effect of the colorblind standard.

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Naturally, the left sees this very differently.

This represents a fundamental shift in legal philosophy. For decades, disparate impact theory has enabled agencies to investigate and remedy policies that, while race-neutral on their face, produce discriminatory outcomes—whether in employment, housing, education, environmental regulation, or access to credit. It reflects the reality that racism in America often functions structurally, not just individually. By contrast, Trump’s executive order embraces a formalist, colorblind conception of equality that ignores context, history, and outcome…

Historically, disparate impact has been indispensable in cases where intent was difficult or impossible to prove. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), for example, the Supreme Court held that an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma—while not explicitly racist—disproportionately excluded Black applicants and was not related to job performance. This ruling opened a path to address indirect forms of discrimination that were—and still are—pervasive.

By reversing course, Trump’s order pushes civil rights enforcement back to a pre-Griggs era. It narrows the definition of discrimination so dramatically that entire categories of inequality—redlining, biased algorithms, exclusionary zoning—could become legally invisible, simply because they don’t come with explicit racist intent.

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But Mac Donald essentially argues the 1971 case was in error and that Trump is restoring a pre-1971 understanding of the Civil Rights Act.

…it was disparate-impact theory itself that constituted a radical departure from the premises of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Donald Trump merely restores the 1964 law to its original understanding. That pioneering legislation banned intentional discrimination only; disparate-impact theory was a judicial amendment made six years later in response to how, even in 1971, finding invidious intentional discrimination was becoming too difficult to satisfy the advocates.

She wraps up by noting that anything Trump can change by executive order can be changed back just as easily by a future occupant of the White House. In order for this change to last, she urges “Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination—not the legitimization of ‘reverse discrimination.'”

No doubt we’ll all be hearing a lot more about disparate-impact theory over the coming weeks. Right now the left is too focused on returning an illegal alien gang member to the US to focus on this but they’ll get around to it soon enough.

Posted in Republican News

Trump Agrees to Be Interviewed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

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BWAHAhahahaha!

Holy smokerdoodles, this is epic.

Yes, THE Atlantic and THAT Goldberg, and it happened (or is happening) today.

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I’m dying here.

The Axios story alone is pure gold and pure Trump.

President Trump said Thursday that he will meet with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, for an interview following the Signal chat scandal.

Why it matters: Goldberg prompted scrutiny of the Trump administration’s ability to handle sensitive information after he revealed that he was mistakenly added to the group chat with top administration officials.

  • “I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful,'” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
  • The Atlantic declined to comment.

Zoom in: Atlantic staff writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker will also join the Thursday interview, which is for a piece that will be headlined “The most consequential president of this century,” Trump said.

  • “The way I look at it, what can be so bad,” he wrote, “I WON!”

I don’t think there is a single lion’s den on Earth that Trump wouldn’t walk right into any time he felt like it.

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Any time, any place, any body.Trump Agrees to Be Interviewed by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg 12

As one wag on X just said, ‘Biden wouldn’t do a Fox interview on Superbowl Sunday.’

Trump handsomely gives a nod to Goldberg on the SignalGate story but I have a feeling he may well go in for the kill on the ‘suckers and losers’ lie that scoundrel passed as gospel years ago. A thoroughly debunked, vicious lie, and one that Goldberg has never retracted or apologised for.

Trump’s a reformed curmudgeon, but he’s not a forgiving one, and that still draws blood thinking about it, I’m sure. Personally, I hope Goldberg gives Trump the opening to flay him alive, but that’s just the Irish in me.

President Trump announced Thursday that he will give a rare Oval Office interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote a disputed 2020 story accusing the president of disparaging US war dead as “suckers” and “losers” and who was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat on Yemen airstrikes last month.

…Trump has had a long-running feud with Goldberg dating to the 2020 campaign, when the journalist claimed in a bombshell report that Trump “blamed rain for the last-minute decision” to cancel a cemetery visit near Paris in 2018 by “saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there” and that “[n]either claim was true.”

Navy records showed that military personnel made a “bad weather call” that canceled the helicopter flight, but Goldberg never corrected his story.

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Well, let’s be honest – it’s probably a lot of y’all, too.

I’d love to see Goldberg sputter and poop his drawers when a Trump brow suddenly furrows at something he’s said and those eyes, focused like a laser, bore into his face.

Oh, yeah, buddy.

Squirm, baby, squirm.

I’ve seen lots of worry about recording the interview, etc., and golly, Nell. It’s not like Trump hasn’t been through all this before, hello. They’ll have it covered like a mob blanket on a body in the trunk.

Trump should be pretty easy going about it, too, because Goldberg’s the one with something to lose. 

He’s President Trump.

He’s in the catbird seat, while Goldberg’s a proven fabulist and big fat target for Trump’s jibes.

The other two who are going to be in the room have covered campaigns, etc, and Trump will dismiss them out of hand if they irritate him.

The only reason I’m torn on this is that I hate to see an execrable POS like Goldberg catching rarified air he doesn’t deserve.

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But, on the other hand, if anyone knows how to deflate an oversized ego, Trump is the man to let the air out of the lying gasbag.

Game on.

Posted in Republican News

Columbia Responds to Plans for a New Pro-Hamas Encampment on Campus

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Yesterday we learned that pro-Hamas extremists at Columbia are planning to erect a new encampment on the school’s campus sometime today. Planning for the new encampment has been taking place in secret.

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The coordinating meeting took place at a community center on Tuesday night in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, approximately 12 miles from campus, according to screenshots of Signal messages from organizers and a person who was at the meeting…

More than 100 people were present at the gathering and all wore masks to conceal their identities, according to the person…

The student organizers did not introduce speakers by name and instead used Signal usernames and code names — including the beloved Pokémon “Squirtle” and words such as “butterfly” — to distinguish one another, according to the recording.

Organizers have also refrained from referring to the upcoming encampments as “encampments,” according to screenshots of Signal messages from the organizers and conversations with two people familiar with the planning for the protests. In writing, and verbally, participants have designated the encampments with a code name, the “circus.”

The circus sounds about right for this group of clowns. They plan to arrive on campus without their masks to avoid alerting security to what they are doing. The takeover of the campus quad is supposed to happen today but hasn’t so far.

Columbia caught wind of the report and put out a statement saying no new encampment would be allowed. Instead, they would be removed and anyone who refused to disperse could be arrested:

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If encampments or tents are established on University property, Public Safety will take the following actions: 

  • Public Safety will immediately take steps to remove tents or other structures and remove them from the area; 

  • Access to affected areas will be restricted, and the University may implement additional restrictions to campus access; 

  • Participants will be instructed to disperse. Individuals who refuse to disperse will be identified and sanctions, including potential removal from campus and possible arrest, may be applied.

Unless Columbia folds, this new encampment is not going to succeed. Indeed, the activists seem to be preparing for failure.

A form being dispersed by organizers and obtained by NBC tells participants to prepare for “prolonged jail time” and how emergency contacts can access their apartments or homes.

It’s possible the plans for today are being delayed by escalation taking place on another campus nearby. CCNY announced the creation of a “liberated zone” on campus today.

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CUAD, the group behind Columbia protests/crimes was encouraging people to head over there. So was Within Our Lifetime.

Things at the liberated zone were quiet at first.

“From the river to the sea,” they chanted.

But it appears the liberate zone didn’t stay liberated very long as police cracked down and used pepper spray on the liberators.

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There is likely going to be more video from CCNY later plus there still could be another ring to this circus if the activists follow through on the plan to takeover Columbia’s campus. I’ll update this post later if there are any big developments. Until then, I guess we’re all just waiting.

Posted in Republican News

This Week in Tesla Vandalism

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This Week in Tesla Vandalism 16

Last week in Minnesota a state worker named Dylan Bryan Adams was arrested for vandalizing multiple Teslas. As David pointed out here, Adams is not a college student who got over-excited, he’s a 33-year-old man who did this over and over, resulting in about $20,000 in damage to six different cars owned by complete strangers. And yet, Adams will be given a slap on the wrist. Progressive DA Mary Moriarty decided to give him diversion so he won’t go to prison and won’t even lose his state government job.

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Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at the time of the incident that the damage in each case was the equivalent of a felony…

“The Minneapolis Police Department did its job. It identified and investigated a crime trend, identified, and arrested a suspect, and presented a case file to the Hennepin County Attorney Office for consideration of charges,” he told KARE in a statement.

“This case impacted at least six different victims and totaled over $20,000 in damages. Any frustration related to the charging decision of the Hennepin County Attorney should be directed solely at her office.

Moriarty was asked about the decision not to charge Adams with felonies and offered a nonsense excuse about public safety.

“We are and always have been focused on public safety. And if you look at the data on recidivism — in other words, when people come through the [justice] system, how often do they come back?” Moriarty said. “If they go through the traditional system and they have a felony conviction on their record, they are much more likely to come back and commit a new crime. That is because a felony conviction destabilizes their lives, they can lose their job, lose their housing, and it can just lead to future criminal activity.”…

“This case was submitted to us by police, we did not decline it, we looked at the case. What we really wanted was for the victims in that case to get restitution and for this person to be held responsible,” Moriarty said. “We are accomplishing both of those by requiring him to go through a diversion program and to pay restitution to all six victims.”

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She’s basically arguing that a felony record would be so tough on Adams he might turn to a life of violent crime. That seems pretty ridiculous in the case. Essentially, she is giving Adams a do-over so long as he agrees to pay for all the damage he caused.

It was pointed out to Moriarty that another person with was just charged with a felony for keying a car and doing less damage overall than Adams did in his vandalism spree. In that other case the car vandalized was not a Tesla. So why is this particular person, who keyed six cars, catching a break?

“Should we have treated this gentleman differently because it has become a political issue?” she said. She continued, “We seek…to make decisions that are not about politics.”

This is nonsense. Contrary to her claim, vandalizing Teslas did not “become” a political issue, it originated as a political issue on the left. In this case, overlooking that for a guy who vandalized six cars to make a political point seems political in itself. So long as other people who vandalized a car for non-political reasons are still being charged with felonies, Adams deserves the same treatment. This looks very much like an attempt to downplay his actions because of his politics.

In any case, that’s not the only vandalism spree happening. An 83-year-old in Long Island has been accused of keying five Teslas in a mall parking lot. He’s now denying the allegations (which were caught on video) but not the possible motive.

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Victor Divergilio, 83, caused $23,000 in damage to the cars at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City on Sunday afternoon and allegedly fumed to detectives that Tesla CEO Musk “should die” and “so should Trump f–king die,” according to a criminal complaint…

Divergilio allegedly used a key to carve up the five Teslas around 1:50 p.m. but denied doing it when police showed him footage that appeared to show him scratching the vehicles, the complaint said.

“Yeah, that’s me but I wasn’t keying any cars,” he said, according to the complaint.

He  should probably move to Minnesota where I’m sure Mary Moriarty would give him a pass. There was also some vandalism of a Tesla dealership in Manhattan earlier this week.

Again, there’s no mystery about the political motive here:

The two climate vandals were arrested when police arrived on the scene. The younger man was wearing a pink t-shirt with the words “Climate Change = Mass Murder” inscribed on the back of his top.

Asked why he was being arrested, the man said: “Because people do not consent to unelected fascists and this is Earth Day.”

The group’s New York City chapter boasted about the defacing of the building on X.

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A suspect in another vandalism case in Washington, DC won’t be as lucky as the one in Minneapolis. 

Court documents say Justin Fisher, 49, is charged with four counts of defacing public or private property for four instances of Tesla vandalism occurring between March 1 and March 21 in Northeast D.C.

A man in New Haven is also facing charges.

City police have charged a Gateway Community College employee with vandalizing a Tesla in March…

Cameras on the car captured images of the suspect, later identified as 40-year-old Conor Perreault, of New Haven. Police said Perreault was employed by the community college without specifying his role. 

His alleged vandalism did less than $2,000 of damage so he’s facing a misdemeanor.

These are just individual incidents but there’s some evidence this trend is very widespread. An insurance agency called Guardian Service surveyed Tesla owners and a surprisingly large percentage of them had experienced vandalism or had negative experiences with other drivers on the road.

The insurance agency’s study was conducted in April 2025. As per Guardian Service, the study was aimed at determining how vandalism and targeted hostility, among other factors, are reshaping the EV ownership experience in the United States.

A total of 508 Tesla owners participated in the study…

Reports of intentional damage were widespread among the study’s respondents, with 44% of the study’s participants stating that their vehicle had been keyed, slashed, or otherwise vandalized. Average repair costs for vehicles that experienced intentional damage were almost $1,900.

A total of 43% of the study’s respondents also stated that they had received rude gestures and negative comments from strangers while they were driving their Teslas.

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There’s no way of knowing how representative this is of millions of Tesla owners nationwide, but it does at least suggest this isn’t limited to a few fringe cases. Simply put, there are a lot of angry nuts out there looking to express their political convictions by damaging someone else’s property.

Posted in Republican News

I Hear the Train A’ Comin’: Fixin’ to Cut the Legs Out From Under ActBlue

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I read the saddest little letter today, almost as if Charles Dickens had come back to life, and conjured up another orphan with an outstretched bowl, begging for one more, tiny dollop of a spoonful.

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PLEASE, SIR – MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?

It arrived in Tony Seruga’s inbox with the subject line ‘Not Great!’

You all simply must read it, too.

I Hear the Train A' Comin': Fixin' to Cut the Legs Out From Under ActBlue 18

And it came from the DNC.

It looks like times are tough, and the revenue stream is starting to dry up.

Now, if you squint at the bottom, just above the red ‘donate’ boxes, you’ll see some script that says:

If you’ve shared your info with ActBlue, we’ll process your contribution instantly.

Anything to make it easier for Democrat patronage to flourish, and ActBlue has been the organ through which ever so much supposedly ‘donated’ largesse has flowed.

I hope whoever was processing the donations received in answer to the pathetic plea had flying fingers of flames to get the information entered correctly. Time is of the essence. 

ActBlue’s money laundering is about to hit a rough patch – a Trump bump, if you will – that could make squirreling away more questionably obtained funds difficult if not impossible.

The panic alarms are going off all through the media this afternoon.

MAYDAY MAYDAY

In a shot at ActBlue, the left’s major online donation platform, President Donald Trump plans to sign a presidential memorandum on Thursday that he will cast as cracking down on foreign contributions in American elections, according to a person familiar with the policy and granted anonymity to discuss not-yet-public details.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office is expected to be involved in the effort, the person said. The order is expected to specifically target ActBlue. Republicans have long claimed the platform could be exploited by foreign actors, while Democrats have warned the action is an example of Trump baselessly targeting political opponents.

After this article was published, POLITICO obtained a fact sheet on the memo confirming the details. The memo will direct Bondi to “investigate and take appropriate action concerning allegations regarding the use of online fundraising platforms to make ‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions and to make foreign contributions to U.S. political candidates and committees, all of which break the law” and report results to the president and his general counsel, according to the fact sheet.

Democrats had been bracing in recent days for potential action from the White House against the platform, casting it as an unwarranted attack on their fundraising efforts. In an email to Democrats on Wednesday referring to a potential coming action from the White House targeting the platform, ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones wrote, “Nothing will deter or interrupt ActBlue’s mission and work to enable millions of Americans to participate in our democracy. There is an ongoing and persistent effort to weaken the confidence of the American people in what’s possible. This is the next version of ‘the big lie.’”

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Rumor has it there is some scrambling going on to, like, ‘wipe with a cloth‘ so to speak.

Word out of ActBlue HQ was mum but defiant in an email to supporters. And they made sure to use the Democrats’ favorite code-word, ‘democracy.’

…ActBlue did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a letter to Democratic supporters on Wednesday obtained by CNN, the platform’s president and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones said the organization had been anticipating a move of this kind from Trump.

“Nothing will deter or interrupt ActBlue’s mission and work to enable millions of Americans to participate in our democracy,” Wallace-Jones wrote. “There is an ongoing and persistent effort to weaken the confidence of the American people in what’s possible.”

She noted that the platform had raised more than $400 million during the three months of this year – setting a new record for a single fundraising quarter.

Posturing aside, there have long been questions about the Left’s premier fundraising apparatus and their havey-cavey accounting methods. 

And their well-documented habit of using real people as fictitious donors in different parts of the country. Up to now, it’s been a pretty successful, clandestine effort to cover dumping copious amounts of money disguised as small donations into campaigns and causes that need an infusion of cash while sidestepping the legal donation limits.

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They can take a massive and illicit, say, Soros-type money dump, chop it into tiny, phony-name $40, $50, or whatever small-dollar ‘donations’ and spread the wealth with no one the wiser.

Or they used to be able to do so and with relative impunity.

But the jig’s about up. There are too many sharp eyes and too many channels of communication now open to people looking into the Left’s funding apparatus for them to hide much of their graft anymore.

…In it, ActBlue states they need to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.” 

That made no sense to me. By definition, small-dollar donors are grassroots supporters or the “broader electorate.” 

To me, that wording strongly suggests they knew the true source of those small-dollar donations, and it wasn’t ordinary voters.

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As Elon Musk has said, it appears the organization is guilty of widespread identity theft and, unsurprisingly enough, the biggest victims have been senior citizens. Those folks are often less internet-savvy, sometimes answer questions over the phone they shouldn’t, especially if they’re lonely and a friendly voice is available, and sometimes send donations off indiscriminately.

James O’Keefe has been on ActBlue for a while and has documented many cases.

The New York Times has its Grey Lady nose in a snit, calling ActBlue a ‘perceived enemy’ that Trump is once again hounding without cause.

…President Trump on Thursday plans to direct the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the fund-raising platform that powers virtually every Democratic candidate and cause, according to a person briefed on the preparations. The move steps up Republicans’ effort to cripple their opponents’ political infrastructure.

It will be the third time in three weeks that Mr. Trump has directed the government to target a perceived political enemy, a drastic expansion of his use of his powers to try to damage domestic opponents.

After all the above-board, completely gentlemanly behavior of Democrats and their progressive toadies towards Trump, the Times is furious that Trump seems to still harbor some sort of unseemly grudge. 

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It’s just unsporting, it is – all unproven, scurrilous rumors to boot.

WHAT ABOUT DEMOCRACY?!

…Mr. Trump’s impending action represents a threat to one of the key financial cogs of the left, potentially hindering Democrats’ ability to compete in elections. It is likely to please elements of his base, for whom ActBlue has become a top target. Congressional Republicans have separately been investigating what they claim are the platform’s insufficient security provisions.

…The Republican scrutiny of ActBlue has focused on claims — thus far unsubstantiated — that it allows straw and foreign donations. Federal election law bars straw donations, and it prohibits foreign citizens without permanent residency from donating directly to federal political candidates or political action committees.

A Justice Department investigation into ActBlue is likely to create vulnerabilities for the entire Democratic fund-raising apparatus. Party consultants have relied on ActBlue to bring in donations. Candidates, committees for federal and state legislative chambers, and liberal caucuses use the platform as their primary mechanism to process donations.

And ERMAGERD!!!

What if the Justice Department wants to look at candidates and their fundraising records?!

WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?!

No one is above the la…oh. Hold that.

Send money quick.

…There is great fear across the Democratic Party that any of the entities that have used ActBlue could soon find themselves enmeshed in an investigation into foreign contributions from a hostile Justice Department with direction from Mr. Trump.

…“Please, while we still can, make a donation to my campaign’s emergency fund through ActBlue,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to supporters on Thursday afternoon. “Any amount at all. We’ve got to be ready for any outcome, and we’ve got to start preparing now.”

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This is so awesome.

I just love the smell of panic in the afternoon.

Posted in Republican News

Fetterman on Iran: ‘Waste That S***,’ Mr. President!

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Second Third Fourth Fifth look at John Fetterman? The Senate Democrat from Pennsylvania sounds tougher on Iran than many of the Senate Republicans, and possibly tougher than Donald Trump himself. 

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Today, the news about negotiations over the Iranian nuclear-weapons program sounds at least somewhat promising. We’ll get to that shortly, but Fetterman ain’t buying it, as he told Jon Levine at The Free Beacon in an exclusive interview. This is not the time for talk, but for action — and he urged Trump to “waste that s***” first and talk later:

“Waste that s—t,” the Pennsylvania Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview on Wednesday. “You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Fetterman dismissed the foreign policy experts who warn that striking Iran would lead to the outbreak of a regional war. “And remember, all of these so-called experts were all wrong,” he said. “You know, they’ve been saying for years and years Hezbollah was the ultimate badass that kept Israel in check, and we can’t move on anything beyond that.”

As it turned out, Fetterman said, the Iranian proxy group “couldn’t fight for s—t. And Hamas, literally, are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck. And now the Houthis have been effectively neutered as well. So what’s left? You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it’s clearly only for weapons.”

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Just how remarkable is this? Bear in mind that Fetterman’s party still backs the deal Barack Obama cut with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that basically unleashed all of the funding that went into the proxy wars Iran has conducted ever since. Joe Biden claimed to want to restore the JCPOA while running for his first term in office, and nearly did so. Democrats up and down the ranks all blame Trump for Iranian aggression and for Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons since, even though Israel published clear evidence that Iran had never complied with the JCPOA — ever. 

And now we have Fetterman — already isolated from his party peers by his refusal to pander to Hamasniks — staking out the Aliens position on Iran:

One has to wonder whether Fetterman will remain in the Democrat Party for too much longer. Fetterman is an old-school liberal, but has distanced himself from progressives at nearly every turn, and progressives are firmly in control of the Democrat Party. He can definitely look forward to a primary challenge in four years, especially if David Hogg is still carbuncled to the DNC. Fetterman may not be a great fit within the Senate GOP caucus, but that fit might be better than his current caucus choice. 

Ironically or not, the Trump administration seems to be making some progress on talks with Iran, at least incrementally. Today’s news has those talks moving into the technical details of the nuclear-program restrictions, and the Iranians suggesting an interim agreement to lock in some goodwill for later discussions:

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Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told White House envoy Steve Witkoff during nuclear talks on Saturday that it might not be possible to reach a final nuclear accord on President Trump’s proposed timetable and asked whether the sides should first negotiate an interim deal, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios. …

Araghchi told Witkoff that given the detailed technical nature of any nuclear agreement, it would be very difficult to complete the negotiations within 60 days.

  • Witkoff told Araghchi he doesn’t want to discuss an interim deal for the time being. Instead, he wants to focus on reaching a comprehensive deal within 60 days.
  • If that both parties think significantly more time is needed as that deadline approaches, they can revisit the idea of an interim deal, Witkoff said according to the sources.

Also ironically or not, Trump likely would favor an interim deal — as long as it surpassed the JCPOA in enforcement and transparency. He prefers deals to wars, even if he has no trouble “wast[ing] that s***” to make a point, such as the strike on Qassem Suleimani. Marco Rubio made that clear yesterday in an interview with the Free Press’ Bari Weiss, a development closely watched by the Israeli media:

“We do not want to see war. This is not a president that campaigned on starting wars. And as he said very clearly, Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon, and he reserves every right to prevent that from happening, but he would prefer it not happen. He would prefer that there not be a need to resort to military force, either by us or anybody else. He would prefer that it’d be something that we can negotiate.”

Rubio offered a vote of confidence in US special envoy Steve Witkoff, the leading American representative in the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran, saying “We have good people negotiating.”

“The Iranians have shown a willingness to talk. We’re going to talk to them,” stressed Rubio, adding that “if Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one just like many other countries in the world have one. That is, they import enriched material.”

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The fact that talks got this far is a testament to the existential crisis facing the mullahs regime in Tehran. All of their forward defenses have collapsed; Hezbollah has been neutered, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, and the Houthis are on their way to the scrapyard. They are exposed to attack from all of their enemies, and they know it. The only way to keep their regime in power — if it’s at all possible in the long run anyway — is to cut a deal with the US that de-escalates tensions with Israel. 

The problem for the US and Israel is this: Iran has made deals before, only to continue cheating. Fetterman’s not wrong about the value of the mullahs’ word in deals such as this. The only way to be sure, at least based on past experience, is to nuke those sites from space, or more realistically, bunker-buster them from the stratosphere until they can no longer be accessed. And unless the Iranians offer an agreement that provides such certainty, all of these talks may well be a pretext for a coordinated attack on those nuclear sites with the argument that at least Trump gave negotiations a chance to succeed first. 

Posted in Republican News