Commentary Culture Investigations

Screenshot from Snapstream/CNN

On Sunday’s State of the Union, CNN host Dana Bash pressured Tom Homan — “as a border czar and as a human” — how can you be comfortable with sending Haitians back to Haiti, when it’s dangerous? Emotional appeals against most if not all deportations is what journalists do now. They can’t admit the border czar might also have emotional appeals for getting dangerous people out of the country.   Journalists like Bash sound more like ACLU activists than journalists. Haitians don’t get Temporary Protective Status from the Media. It’s permanent protection. Senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino and media analyst (Latinx-pert?) Jorge Bonilla joined the show. Mika Brzezinski won Worst media quote of the week on this line: “Are, again, we going after the worst of the worst, or are we just going after people to create a level of fear out there where laws can be broken, people can be detained for months, and children have to show up alone for the detention hearings? The list goes on as to how backwards, un-American, and sick this is.” Speaking of Bash, media reporter Justin Baragona of Zeteo employed anonymous CNN sources to bash Dana Bash for not being “objective” on Israel, and on Piker.  As in: “It was really disappointing to see Dana and CNN playing into these characterizations of Hasan, who is not as controversial as they’ve made him out to be,” a CNN producer told me about Dana Bash’s “bad-faith” campaign, which has seen her misconstrue Piker’s comments.”Speaking of anonymous sources, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called for the “traitor” source who leaked classified information to the Post to be “prosecuted” after the paper published one of those anonymously sourced articles on warnings from top military leaders to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonged large-scale operations against Iran were becoming unsustainable. The Post reported that the warnings were contained in the classified August 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book. Thiessen compared his opposition as the same as his take on Wikileaks and Julian Assange and the Edward Snowden case.Finally, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy admitted that she, like many others, may have been “too naive” about President Trump’s “motivations” in Venezuela, warning that only the implementation of free elections in the country would prove what the administration’s purposes were, beyond bringing oil resources under some control.Enjoy the podcast below. The audio is here. 

WSJ

Well, of course.
President Trump gets a deal for acquiring more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil — and Democrats are furious.
Going on Truth Social, the President correctly termed it, in capital letters no less, the “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.”
The president went on to say:
This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity.
The Hill’s Sarah Davis reported: “This deal applies to around 21 percent of the South American country’s total proven oil reserves, which amount to about 303 billion barrels.”
No sooner was this landmark agreement announced than Democrats were out there denouncing it at the bidding of their far Left buddies. (RELATED: Drill, Baby, Geopolitics: Now It’s a Matter of National Security)
Democrat Virginia Senator Tim Kaine stood up for the ousted Venezuelan dictator, accusing the president of trying to “control Venezuelan oil.”
Ohio’s GOP Senator Bernie Moreno hit back at the ludicrous charge from Kaine, noting:  “If it were up to DC Democrats, Maduro would still be in power, Venezuelan oil would be going to China at half price, and the people of Venezuela would be getting robbed by a corrupt regime.”
Moreno added that: “Instead, this historic deal benefits both countries for generations.”
Exactly.
The real question here is what would happen if Kaine and his fellow Democrats got their way.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had this to say, as reported by the Center on Global Energy Policy:
Among the rationales for the US intervention in Venezuela, Secretary Rubio mentioned the national security implications of having US adversaries use Venezuela as a hub for their activities in the region, in addition to controlling Venezuela’s  oil reserves — the largest in the world. His comments are consistent with statements in the US National Security Strategy of “denying non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in the Western Hemisphere.
In short? The Democrats are all too willing to allow “US adversaries (to) use Venezuela as a hub for their activities.”
Cutting to the chase? The term “U.S. adversaries” quite specifically means, among others, China. Which is to say, Democrats are all too willing to close their eyes to Chinese meddling in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, whether North, Central or South America.
And note well, Central America includes the prime U.S. asset of the Panama Canal and American and global shipping through the canal. Democrats, essentially, have closed their eyes to the reality of Chinese interference with the Canal.
Over there at CNBC, the network headlines: “U.S.-China power struggle thrusts Panama Canal back into the spotlight.”
The story reports:

The Panama Canal, a global trade artery that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, has reemerged as a geopolitical flashpoint in recent days.

It follows a contentious decision from the Central American country’s top court to rule against a Hong Kong-backed firm’s right to operate two key terminals on the waterway.

The outcome was seen as a major victory for the U.S., which is seeking to oust rival powers from the Western Hemisphere.

“Major victory” or not, the hard fact is that China and other “rival powers” (including that aforementioned “Hong Kong-backed firm”) are doing their best to interfere in affairs revolving around the Panama Canal. And, beyond that, the larger Western Hemisphere.
All of which is to say, headline events like the war in Iran — all the way on the other side of the globe — may climax and fade from the headlines, but rival powers — with China foremost in line — are doing their best to assert what they see as their interests in both Panama and the larger Western Hemisphere.
In this instance, the upfront story revolves around Venezuelan oil. But there’s more to the story than Venezuelan oil. The story also involves the Panama Canal itself. And specifically, as mentioned, the Canal’s two terminals as they could be operated by a Hong Kong firm. (RELATED: China Makes Panama Pay for Saying No)
Events revolving around the security of the Western Hemisphere are, for certain, something that the American people need to be aware of.
Very much aware.
But make no mistake. Very much to the advantage of America, President Trump has indeed negotiated “The Biggest Oil Deal” in “World History.”
And three cheers for that.
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Last week, in the Five Quick Things column, I referenced an X post by The Federalist’s Sean Davis noting that one significant reason for the opposition to data centers is the stunning lack of visible philanthropy among those at the top of the tech-bro hierarchy who seek to build them.

A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.
If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by… https://t.co/N8Zpeo4OZ3
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2026

In case you don’t want to open up the post to get everything Davis said, it was this…
A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.
If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by building schools and hospitals and soccer fields and showering the locals with a tiny fraction of the cash they make ruining millions of lives all over the world, imagine what Big Tech bros could get away with if they had even the slightest bit of humility or understanding of basic human nature.
And yet, they’re somehow simultaneously dumber, more arrogant, and greedier than drug smugglers and human traffickers.
What I said was this…
If you had a Rockefeller or a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt or a Morgan in your town, you might be perturbed at times with rapacious labor policies, less-than-state-of-the-art safety and environmental performance, or anticompetitive trade practices, but at least you could count on getting a museum, a zoo, a theater, libraries, perhaps a college or a park out of the deal. The robber barons were, certainly by modern standards, quite civic-minded. They made the places they lived considerably better.
You get very little of that from the tech-bro aristocracy.
The data center operators moving into the rural communities in question should definitely pay mind to Davis’ critique. Some already have, I would imagine.
But over the weekend, I came across this, from a guy named Theo Jaffee who is a San Francisco tech bro, and I do have to admit that he makes an excellent point…

People often ask why today’s tech wealth doesn’t go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built.
In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area… pic.twitter.com/2agb3nPkGx
— Theo Jaffee (@theojaffee) August 29, 2026

The whole thing…
People often ask why today’s tech wealth doesn’t go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built.
In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area resident who built Lucasfilm in the Bay, wanted to build a museum in the Presidio as a gift to the people of San Francisco, to be personally funded to the tune of ~$700 million. The Presidio Trust rejected it. He then tried to build it in his wife’s hometown of Chicago, but local nonprofit Friends of the Parks sued and held the project up for two years, long enough for Lucas to give up on the city. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open in Los Angeles next month after more than a decade of planning, eight years of construction, and over $1 billion personally spent by Lucas.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has built no major museum projects since the 2016 expansion of SFMOMA, and no new libraries since the North Beach Branch in 2014. Public works, like so many other things, are bottlenecked not by donor will or available funding but by vetocracy.
Jaffee’s post was in response to another point; let me reproduce that here as well…

I can’t say I agree with him 100 percent. Ken Langone, for example, had no trouble finding high-profile philanthropic projects to bankroll even in New York, which is just about the most difficult place there is to get anything done. So if you want to get creative, you can.
That said, there’s something else, particularly in the big cities in which the greatest need for philanthropy is said to lie. Which is…

Now, it ought to be understood that Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos didn’t donate the money for Seattle’s main library. That’s a full-on public-sector project. But does it matter? If you’re going to donate money for the kinds of projects robber barons used to be known for — theaters, libraries, museums, zoos, and the like, and the local governments of those cities have any authority at all to maintain them, you can be assured they will do everything possible to ensure that whatever facility you’re funding will soon be overtaken by the lowest common denominator and shortly trashed. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything)
And if you try to fight to keep your creation from turning into a shooting gallery for junkies and other forms of wretched humanity, you will become the bad guy.
This is, by the way, related to something else which is being bandied about with respect to the data center issue. There are people asking why data centers are being built on farmland in the country rather than sited in urban areas on blighted property.
Which is a good question, but one with a very simple answer.
The fact is that those blighted tracts of land in those cities didn’t get that way by accident. They got that way because of the policies and actions of the abject imbeciles and communist revolutionaries who run those places.
For some reason we refuse to recognize the level of damage that Weaponized Governmental Failure has done in our cities, in making them uninvestable and unlivable. In all of these cities there are very affordable houses — whole neighborhoods of them — that young Americans could afford as starter homes. But nobody in their right mind would buy those properties, so they’re owned by slumlords who rent them out to Section 8 tenants. Pick any city, search it on Zillow, and you’ll be amazed at how low the comps are in the worst neighborhoods in town. (RELATED: Joe Lonsdale Has a Different Answer to America’s Homelessness Crisis)
Because nobody with an actual choice wants to live in a neighborhood where your property and your life are in danger 24/7.  That kind of misery is simply not good enough for most of us.
And when an entire swath of a city is unlivable for somebody who’s trying to put themselves on a productive or upwardly-mobile path, guess what the laws of supply and demand do? They push up the value of the property elsewhere in town. (RELATED: What Doctor Zhivago Teaches Us About New York City’s Housing Debate)
Seattle could clean up that library. And those awful neighborhoods could be made livable. The blighted land could be made suitable for data centers. The tech bros could be enticed to shower those communities with the kinds of goodies the Rockefellers and Fords and Carnegies once bestowed on urban America.
But the people who run urban America will not lift a finger to participate in those efforts.
Try to clean up those neighborhoods by putting down nice things? They’ll climb all over you and scream that you’re “gentrifying” the area, and call you a racist in the bargain. Try to build a data center on that abandoned urban land and even the Section 8 tenants — hell, especially the Section 8 tenants — who live nearby will throw a fit about every damned thing you do.
And God forbid you attempt to put something beautiful – a building, a monument, some sort of public art or historical landmark of some kind – anywhere in urban America. If you attempt any sort of classical beauty in its design, they’ll say it’s “white-supremacist” or “Christian Nationalist” and call you a Nazi. Instead you have to go with some sort of brutalist or otherwise butt-ugly nonsense which appeases the communist revolutionaries and demoralizes the people you’re otherwise trying to inspire.
I’m not defending the tech bros like Jaffee is, mind you. I’m making a separate point. We’ve allowed our urban areas to become hellscapes which dissuade the kind of civic engagement and philanthropic benefits which built them in the first place, and along the way the standards of behavior and quality of life those urban areas support are actually worse than they were when those cities were full of tenements and sweatshops and kids going hungry despite working 12 hours a day.
So of course they want to put the data centers out in the country where the local politicians are eager to attract economic activity and capital investment. Rather than have to deal with Karen Bass or Brandon Johnson or Zohran Mamdani? Or the entitled simpleton Katie Wilson who’s running Seattle into the ground? (RELATED: You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics)
That’s a no-brainer.
Again, it’s not an excuse for the pittance of philanthropy so many of the tech bro aristocrats are offering, and I don’t disagree with Davis’ take on their lack of civic spirit and even with his suggestion that until some of these guys actually learn those rules maybe the opposition to the data centers shouldn’t be wholly dismissed as ginned up by Chinese bots and propaganda mills.
What I’m saying is Jaffee has a point, too. And it’s actually a tougher problem.
Because there is no fixing those urban hellscapes any time soon.
Some of them — blue cities in red states, most notably — are ultimately going to be saved by state governments simply coming in and taking them over. Later this year or early next year, you’re likely to read about how the state of Louisiana, for example, will be putting the city of New Orleans under fiscal administration. New Orleans was run completely into the ground by its previous mayor, LaToya Cantrell, but its current mayor, Helena Moreno, was the president of the City Council at the time, and Moreno, faced with a $110 million budget hole she’s begging the state to provide loan guarantees to patch temporarily, has stupidly and performatively put herself at odds with the governor. He’s going to have the State Bond Commission deny her those loan guarantees until she agrees to fiscal administration, and then Louisiana will have a real chance to reform a completely dysfunctional blue city in ways which make it possible to do business there.
New Orleans might actually get a data center on blighted urban land, which will make people like this lose what remains of their minds…

But those examples won’t be universal. The Seattles, Los Angeleses, Chicagos, New Yorks and Detroits are only going to get worse. And while the tech bro oligarchs and aristocrats might be the James Bond villains we seem to agree they are, and yes — for many of them, their politics match that of the communist revolutionaries destroying those cities, you really can’t blame anybody for giving up on a Karen Bass or a Katie Wilson.
Or a Zohran Mamdani.
As a parting shot, I do want to mention an X post which landed over the weekend. It’s by Daniel Penny — yes, that Daniel Penny, the ex-Marine who had to fight through an abjectly unjust prosecution for saving his fellow New Yorkers from a deranged homeless bum threatening to kill them on a subway car after said bum expired in the resulting melee — making what he calls “The Layman’s Case For Data Centers.” You’re almost certain to have your opinion on the subject altered by reading it.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything
Team Trump Is Touting Its Wins. As It Should.
Mark Carney’s Smuggler’s Blues

Ever since Abdul El-Sayed became the Democratic Senate nominee from Michigan, the liberal media has been doing all it can to protect him against accusations of anti-Semitism, and belittle concerns about his close relationship with radical left wing streamer Hasan Piker, who, among other outrageous statements, once said America deserved 9-11. On Sunday’s Face The Nation, CBS host Margaret Brennan’s performance was one of the most egregious examples of this. After receiving a ‘good morning’ welcome from Brennan, Congressman John James of Michigan, who is also the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate from the state, wasted no time in getting his main point across:JAMES: Hey, Margaret, good morning. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m really excited, because in a state like Michigan, we have the most extreme ticket running, with Abdul El Sayyed and Jocelyn Benson [MI Secretary of State and Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate] campaigning with people who said that we deserved 9/11–BRENNAN: Okay–JAMES: I say, never forget. 

 James seemed to rattle Brennan, who was apparently caught off guard, and then acted confused, as if she had never heard this issue raised before, or as if she had never heard of Piker. She also seemed to label Benson as a senate candidate, which is of course incorrect:Oh, wow. I want to ask you about some issues with your platform and the like, but never forget, of course. I’m sorry, did you just accuse Senate candidates of something to do with terrorism? I’m not clear what you just said?”Senate candidates?” “Something to do with terrorism?” She refused to mention both El-Sayed, or Piker, who, maybe someone should inform Brennan.So here we go. Piker recently said that American Jews who support Israel, are responsible for bringing about acts of anti-Semitism, causing a rebuke from House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and has along history of verbally attacking Jews.James was undeterred by Brennan’s feigned ignorance and continued to call out who his Democratic rivals were getting in bed with, while Brennan :JAMES: Yeah, they’re campaigning with extremists, who say that America deserved 9/11. And I think that coming up on the 25th anniversary–BRENNAN: Uh-huhJAMES: Of 9-11, these are statements that are way out of bounds and should definitely be clarified. Michigan is ground zero for this Republic in this next election. BRENNAN: Yeah.JAMES: And we need to make sure that we stop socialism and that we save the state of Michigan–BRENNAN: OkayJAMES: Because if we don’t do it here, it’s gonna go to the rest of the country.Brennan would then continue down the disgraceful path that she chose, by again refusing to utter El-Sayed’s name and exonerating Piker, and putting in on James for trying to confuse people and take the spotlight off himself:Okay. I think you’re talking about a supporter of a Senate candidate, that Senate candidate has started to distance himself from and that influencer, Hasan Piker has disavowed those past comments he made. But let’s put that aside, cause I don’t want to get into that, I want to talk about you.

CBS via Snap Stream

And with that, Brennan made sure no further damage would be done to El-Sayed and the radical leftist Democrat party. She then moved on to James’s military service, the war with Iran, the U.S. trade war with Canada, and data centers.If you didn’t know what show you were watching, or who Margaret Brennan is, you’d be excused if you thought you had happened upon a training session for Democrat operatives. The lesson of the course was how to protect your party by steering away from controversial issues.Whatever it was that Brennan was doing during this interview, it most certainly was not journalism. Even by conventional left wing media standards it was quite shameful!

Screenshot via Jim Acosta Show/Snapstream

In a video posted Saturday, failed former CNN correspondent-turned-leftist Substacker Jim Acosta mocked Americans who believe their fellow countrymen are the best people on planet Earth, insisted two top European diplomats have told him America in 2026 reminds them of 19030s Germany, and praised Canada for putting up with us even though we’re a “violent, fucked up country where everybody’s worried that they’re gonna get shot or killed.”Acosta made the observations following a chat with University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers about the U.S.-Canada trade war, starting with the supposed flex about his supposed influence inside The Swamp.Acosta bragged he “like[s] to talk about on the show from time to time” how he’s invited to alcohol-fueled fancy parties at embassies and ambassador residencies (dubbed “diplomatic functions”), which he claims are proof that many of the best and kindest people in the world are non-Americans.

DERANGED: Jim Acosta mocks Americans who love their fellow Americans more than foreigners, insisting “the loveliest people you could meet” on Earth “are outside the borders of the United States” pic.twitter.com/0JViUal6pJ— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 31, 2026

“[S]ome very lovely people, by the way. I mean, for all of you, ‘America First, America, America. I never leave the country because why would I leave the best country on earth and go to these other countries? And who are these people, these weird foreigners and stuff?’ Some of the loveliest people you could meet are outside of the borders of the United States and are living in places and in countries that we consider to be close friends of the United States, close friends of America,” he boasted.It wouldn’t be entirely surprising at this point to mention that Acosta has spent most of his life in the Washington, D.C. area, so of course he thinks non-Americans are the coolest.Acosta followed up with a tale he had apparently relayed in a previous show: “I was at a diplomatic function. I had an ambassador to one of our allies in Europe, come up to me and say, what’s happening right now, Jim, reminds me of Germany in the 1930s. And there was another ambassador from another U.S. ally standing next to this ambassador, and that ambassador nodded, yep, yep, and they were both saying the same thing.”

Jim Acosta claims two of the top European ambassadors to the United States believe the Trump administration reminds them of 1930s Germany under Hitler….“I was at a diplomatic function. I had an ambassador to one of our allies in Europe, come up to me and say, what’s happening… pic.twitter.com/dqMX8zJLS1— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 31, 2026

Acosta added that, despite all the left’s “memes, and talk about Donald Trump getting made fun of and stepping on a rake and acting like a fool on the world stage…it is having real-world consequences,” even though there have been some “witty retorts,” such as a meme insisting Trump should have chosen “Lake Epstein.”He went back to the Gulf of America hubbub, whining it was “the dumbest thing, and I remember hearing people in legacy mainstream media, they were suddenly calling it the Gulf of America to kiss up to Donald Trump” in “the most grotesque, stupid bullshit that I had ever seen.”The whiny pundit delivered a pants-on-fire lie claiming a sign of Trump as an “incredible-shrinking President” and “isolated” “on the world stage” because CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Russia last week to reportedly warn dictator Vladimir Putin to not attack a NATO country.

Jim Acosta FALSELY claims CIA Director John Ratcliffe flying to Russia to tell Putin to not attack NATO is a sign of Trump’s weakness.Fact-check: Acosta’s pals in the Biden administration had their CIA Director (Bill Burns) do the same, begging Putin to not invade Ukraine.… pic.twitter.com/kLH5BgFicn— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 31, 2026

Fact-check: The Biden administration had its CIA Director (Bill Burns) do the same, begging Putin to not invade Ukraine. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!Fake News Jim’s final bit was an analogy that “Canadians have been good neighbors” akin to “that neighbor across the street in your community or maybe next door” willing to help whenever “[y]our car breaks down, your battery dies, and they come over with the jumper cables, or maybe your power goes out, they’ve got a generator,” or “the nice, elderly, senior citizen gentlemen who pulls up in front of your car on the side of the road and gets your car going again or helps you put the spare tire on.”

Jim Acosta says the Canadians have been America’s best neighbors willing to help us out if something breaks down next door even though America’s a “violent, fucked up country where everybody’s worried that they’re gonna get shot or killed” pic.twitter.com/ItyRHXuF9H— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 31, 2026

He gushed that Canadians have been those kinds of people to Americans even though we’re a “violent, fucked up country where everybody’s worried that they’re gonna get shot or killed.”“Donald Trump is absolutely, completely shitting all over that friendship and relationship. He is completely shitting over the most invaluable friendship that we have anywhere in the world because they’re right on our border. Think about how lucky and how fortunate we are. Right on our border, that massive border,” he added.Acosta even went personal: “It’s one of the best things that we have in this existence is a good friend who is always there for you. I have them in my life, and they’re — they’re invaluable to me, and that’s who the Canadians are to Americans, and we have completely and totally torched that at the hands of a mad lunatic and fool.”To see the relevant transcript from The Jim Acosta Show, click here.

Where next with this darkness?

National Public Radio on Saturday posted a 2,000-word story by “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef — a fever dream of liberal paranoia in reaction to justified criticism of the women’s professional basketball organization WNBA: “An WNBA team calling in national security experts.”After letting Chicago Sky team owner Nadia Rawlinson pat herself on the back for “excelling at the highest levels in corporate America and in sitting in public and private boardrooms” (which apparently makes her an expert on racism), Yousef painted the WNBA as passive minority victims of a right-wing culture war.That background, Rawlinson said, also meant she understood at a personal level what her players were going through when they started to become targets of ugly, and sometimes frightening, online abuse.….As the WNBA heads into the final weeks of its regular season, outsiders continue to bombard the league with stunts aimed at inflaming division over culture war issues.The soaring popularity in women’s basketball in recent years has made it an alluring platform for bad faith actors to raise their personal profiles and stoke political tensions. Increasingly, players across the league have raised the alarm that they have been inundated with targeted abuse, harassment and threats – both online and offline….the Chicago Sky is taking its protective measures a step further — by enlisting help from national security experts.Enter one of public media’s favorite academics, Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab, or PERIL. That would be right-wing “extremism,” not any other kind. According to Rawlinson, the Chicago Sky is the first WNBA franchise to partner with American University’s PERIL, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab; and with the threat intelligence company Moonshot….The team hired Moonshot to monitor online threats against its players – using tools that Moonshot developed a decade ago for national security purposes.National security monitoring software? Not something the left would normally champion, but if it’s being used to go after racist right-wingers it must be acceptable.Yousef talked to they/them Frankie de la Cretaz, “an independent journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender,” about her love for the WNBA, which abruptly ended in 2024 when she allegedly heard racist taunts from the crowd.NPR skipped allegations that players in the majority-black league are targeting Clark on the court out of professional jealousy, or perhaps because Clark is considered the “Great White Hope,” as de la Cretaz herself dismissed Clark.Yousef offensively lumped in an appearance at a WNBA game by former NBA player Enes Kanter, who has announced his intention to enter the WNBA draft, with actual racist threats, while studiously ignoring the point Kanter has been making: Does self-identifying as a woman actually make you a woman, as the left says, or are the WNBA and other trans supporters being hypocrites?

Screenshot via Smerconish (CNN)/Snapstream

Last week, provocateurs threw sex toys onto the courts at games in Chicago and Los Angeles. Days later, a former NBA player who has used the WNBA as a vehicle for anti-trans advocacy was ejected from a Chicago Sky game, after engaging in an altercation with team guard Natasha Cloud. The incidents relate to controversy around the eligibility of transgender women to play in the league, even though the WNBA does not have, nor has it ever had, players who are transgender women.For Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founder of PERIL, the dangers that WNBA players face stem from the same source that fuels violence of every type: misogyny. Miller-Idriss’s new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism, delves into this link.NPR leaped from Kanter’s harmless and amusing stunt to school shootings with remarkable agility.”[Misogyny] is one of the biggest common denominators in gang violence, in stalking harassment of athletes, in gender disinformation campaigns against politicians, and in school shootings and other acts of mass violence, terrorism and targeted violence,” Miller-Idriss said…..Interestingly, the most serious cases NPR found of actual threats to WNBA players (Clark and her teammate Sophie Cunningham) didn’t fit the race angle Yousef was straining to push. Yet Yousef remained insistent that “statistically, online abuse has disproportionately taken aim at Black women athletes.”De la Cretaz said that the very characteristics that made the WNBA inclusive and diverse are now the reasons that the league and its players are under attack.”Almost all of [the players] are multiply marginalized, which means that they have more than one identity that they can face oppression and marginalization over,” de la Cretaz said. “They are majority Black women. Many of them are openly queer and/or masculine-presenting. And so the combination of identities means it’s not just that they’re going to experience sexist abuse or threats. They’re also experiencing racism. They’re also experiencing homophobia.”Yousef liked de la Cretaz’s rants so much she concluded with another one.”They reject the idea that women shouldn’t play sports. They reject the idea that you have to be a ‘tradwife.’ They reject the idea that you have to be feminine,” they said. “And so there’s so many different places that they are really opposed to the kind of the more conservative cultural push right now that I think they’re just kind of taking the brunt.”Who’s saying women must become tradwives, besides imaginary sexists conjured up in left-wing feminist fever dreams?A version of this story was also broadcast on Wednesday’s All Things Considered.

National Trust for Historic Preservation member Alison K. Hoagland hasn’t been personally harmed in any way; she just doesn’t like the way the place looks.

William Lawrence (D.), a Hasan Piker superfan running for a competitive House seat in Michigan, called for “destroying the American way of life” and a cessation of all oil and gas drilling during a podcast discussion with Marxist activists.
Lawrence, a far-left former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, made the remarks during a January 2024 episode of the Hegomonicon podcast he hosts for Convergence, a publication that describes itself as a “magazine for radical insights.”
Lawrence and his guests, a self-avowed Marxist activist and the host of a “Marxist coded” podcast, discussed American consumerism and economic “abundance” and its purported contribution to climate change.
“I’m wondering how we can inspire a sense of abundance for people in the United States, while frankly, destroying the American way of life and the negative connotations and material realities that has come to mean,” chuckled Lawrence, who described himself as “an organizer and social movement strategist” on the podcast’s internet page.
On the podcast, he asserted that Americans “work longer, spend more time in our cars, live shorter, die sooner” despite economic abundance.
Lawrence, a cofounder of the activist environmental group Sunrise Movement—which he says “helped shape and popularize the Green New Deal”—also expressed support for the “keep it in the ground” movement, which opposes drilling for oil, gas, and other fossil fuels to slow climate change.
He admitted that the Sunrise Movement made a “political choice” in 2019 to avoid discussing its opposition to drilling because it would hurt support for the Green New Deal.
“We were quiet … for a period of time and that was a political choice and it came with contradictions, and it was clear that you weren’t going to hold back the reality that we need to keep it in the ground,” said Lawrence.
Lawrence’s remarks could become an issue in his campaign for Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, where he is challenging Republican Rep. Tom Barrett. Republicans have highlighted Lawrence’s activism as evidence that he’s too radical for the district, which voted for Donald Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Lawrence has taken some small steps to distance himself from his left-wing roots. He quit the Democratic Socialists of America party last month, saying he wanted to foster “unity” in the seventh district, which encompasses Lansing, the Michigan state capital.
Those aren’t the only notable remarks Lawrence has made on the podcast.
In August 2024, Lawrence described the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, in which six construction workers were killed, as a “climate activist’s dream” because the disaster choked off 2.5 million tons of coal exports, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Lawrence’s alliance with Piker, whom many Democrats have denounced over antisemitic statements, has also stoked criticism and outright mockery. In April, Lawrence was caught on tape fawning over Piker at a campaign rally alongside Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Lawrence told Piker, both of whom towered over a much shorter El-Sayed, that he’d “love to get on the stream sometime,” referring to Piker’s livestream on Twitch.
“You’re the man,” said Lawrence.
His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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