Newsbusters

A week after calling for a “civic uprising,” New York Times columnist and PBS nominal conservative David Brooks found his first heroine in arrested Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, who is alleged to have used her courtroom to help an illegal immigrant, who was in front of her for domestic abuse, escape arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Friday’s PBS News Hour, Brooks argued if the charges are true, then while Dugan’s actions were “illegal,” they were also a “heroic” form of “civil disobedience.”

Host Amna Nawaz did not mention the domestic abuse charges when she asked Brooks, “But what does this say to you now in terms of what the administration is willing to do and how this was carried out?”

 

 

Brooks began, “Well, obviously, they’re trying to send a note of intimidation, not only to her, but to all judges and maybe to all Americans.”

After claiming he didn’t want to comment on the specific case—certainly an odd choice given the specifics of the case would justify the unusual move—Brooks assumed, for the purposes of discussion, that the allegations were true, “But especially on the issue of immigration, there are a lot of people who are appalled by what the administration is doing. And there will be times for civil disobedience. And, to me, if she — let’s say she did escort this guy out the door. If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things.”

Those two things were, “One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic. And in times of trouble, then people are sometimes called to do civil disobedience. And in my view, when people do civil disobedience, they have to pay the price. That’s part of the heroism of it, frankly.”

Dugan is a government official allegedly abusing her office to help an alleged violent abuser escape. She isn’t exactly Rosa Parks protesting against segregation by refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Nevertheless, Brooks continued to try to wax poetic, “And so you can both think that she shouldn’t have legally done this and that morally protecting somebody against, maybe not even in this case, but in other cases, frankly, a predatory enforcement agency, sometimes, civil disobedience is necessary.”

Brooks then urged more such acts:

And I don’t know if we will get to this point, but we could get to this point in weeks or months where acts of civil disobedience on a lot of fronts may be necessary. And the Trump administration will probably welcome that kind of fight, but their opponents should welcome that kind of fight. And that’s one of the ways you can shift public opinion, because one of the ways authoritarians lose control is when their opponents protest in a nonviolent way, and the authoritarians crack down violently. That’s the way you delegitimize an authoritarian regime.”

It fell to Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, of all people, to inform viewers of the accusations against the suspect. However, he still claimed Dugan is “ taking a moral stand” and is looking forward to her defense because she must “stand up against what’s now happened to her, which is a ratcheting up of the intimidation against the judiciary, then no other judge is going to take that same stand.”

If judges are going to help violent illegal immigrants escape ICE, then maybe they should be afraid to take the stand.

Sign the petition to help us defund another MSNBC in PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.

Here is a transcript for the April 25 show:

PBS News Hour

4/25/2025

7:40 PM ET

AMNA NAWAZ: But what does this say to you now in terms of what the administration is willing to do and how this was carried out?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, obviously, they’re trying to send a note of intimidation, not only to her, but to all judges and maybe to all Americans.

But I don’t yet know the specific details of this case, whether she escorted the guy out the jury door or whether she led him. So that’s all murky. I don’t want to comment on this specific case.

But especially on the issue of immigration, there are a lot of people who are appalled by what the administration is doing. And there will be times for civil disobedience. And, to me, if she — let’s say she did escort this guy out the door. If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things.

One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic. And in times of trouble, then people are sometimes called to do civil disobedience. And in my view, when people do civil disobedience, they have to pay the price. That’s part of the heroism of it, frankly.

And so you can both think that she shouldn’t have legally done this and that morally protecting somebody against, maybe not even in this case, but in other cases, frankly, a predatory enforcement agency, sometimes, civil disobedience is necessary.

And I don’t know if we will get to this point, but we could get to this point in weeks or months where acts of civil disobedience on a lot of fronts may be necessary. And the Trump administration will probably welcome that kind of fight, but their opponents should welcome that kind of fight.

And that’s one of the ways you can shift public opinion, because one of the ways authoritarians lose control is when their opponents protest in a nonviolent way, and the authoritarians crack down violently. That’s the way you delegitimize an authoritarian regime.

And so that — it may come to that.

Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard folded in 2018. His gigs at ABC and Fox News were not renewed.

Should Kristol suffer a similar fate at The Bulwark, the fiercely anti-Trump website where he serves as editor-at-large, Bill should consider opening shop in a local strip mall: “Mystic Mister William Sees All, Tells All.” 

The suggestion arises in light of Kristol’s Bulwark column today: “Reading Trump’s Mind.”

In it, Kristol writes satire like he’s comedian Larry David, posing as if he were President Trump as he conducts a review of multiple senior aides. The prism through which he judges them all is their usefulness to him “in 2028.”

Thus, “Trump”:

Concludes that, “because he screwed up too many times,” he must fire Pete Hegseth. Trump does so regretfully because: “He was willing to do what it takes to get a military that’s loyal to me. Which is goddamn important for 2028.”
Says that AG “Pam” and FBI Director “Kash” are “great,” because “they never tell me I can’t do anything,” and “having Justice and the FBI at my disposal—that’s important for 2028.”
Says OMB Director “Russ” Vought is “doing fine,” because he is “quietly pulling off that Schedule F thing so key people at agencies that matter are going to be loyal to me. Which is also big for 2028.”
Isn’t impressed by Homeland Security Secretary “Kristi” Noem’s judgment, but “what matters is that the people under her at DHS are making sure that agency is loyal. They’ll be useful in 2028.”
When it comes to replacing Hegseth, “Trump” considers two candidates. Of four-star general Charlie Flynn, Trump says he’s told that “he’ll be with us when it counts, if you know what I mean.”
Trump’s other choice for SecDef is Elise Stefanik, of whom he says: “She’ll do what it takes. Getting the right people in the right places in the military—it’s key for 2028.”
“Trump” never spells out just what he has in mind for ’28, but he didn’t need to. The meaning is clear. “Trump” is planning to stage a coup, using the combined might of the military and various government agencies, to remain in power beyond the end of his current term.

It’s true that Trump has suggested that there are ways for him to serve an additional term. But only someone as Trump-averse as Kristol could suffer the paranoid delusion of the sort he suggests.

A cool-headed consideration of Trump’s suggestion yields two explanations.

First, Trump simply enjoys stirring the pot, sending the likes of Kristol and like-minded journalists and politicians into a tizzy.

Second, and more importantly, by suggesting that he could remain in the Oval Office beyond 2028, Trump wards off lame duck status.

Note: Kristol also paints Trump as an ignoramus who attributes to Roy Cohn famous quotes from Shakespeare and Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and the phrase “a photo’s worth a thousand words.”

Eight years after she left the White House, the liberals on TV are still fawning all over Michelle Obama. Gayle King and Whoopi Goldberg led the parade defending Queen Michelle’s self-absorbed decision to skip Jimmy Carter’s funeral and Donald Trump’s inauguration because it wasn’t “the right thing for me.” She’s free to do that, but she’s not free to demand we all shut up about it.

On April 10, CBS Mornings host Gayle King led her royal consort in proclaiming that Mrs. Obama can tell everyone it’s none of their business. “She doesn’t need to explain anything to anybody,” announced CBS’s Vladimir Duthiers. Gayle thought her complaining was so lovable! 

The funniest part of this fawning is Gayle saying Michelle’s so unbothered, “I bet she won’t talk about this again.” Oh no, she did it again on another podcast with an actress. This time it was Taraji P. Henson, who seems like quite a egotistical diva in her own right, but this was on Michelle’s own podcast (the one with her brother Craig Robinson.) 

Newsweek reported journalist Katie Couric wrote a message in the comments that garnered over 9,800 likes: “Michelle. You do you. That’s why we love you. Ignore the haters and the naysayers. You’re powerful and that’s why you’re a lightening rod for them. Carry on!”

This podcast spurred Whoopi Goldberg to come unglued on The View. How dare anyone question the Queen! “My question about all of this is why does she owe anybody an explanation? … Why is it my business?! She didn’t go!” Sunny Hostin said it was a female thing: “You know why — I think it’s because women are always expected to say “yes,” and expected to do things even when they don’t want to do them.”

These types of events are generally dutifully attended by all living presidents and first ladies. So an absence is notable. Attendance is NOT mandatory, but when Barack shows up and Michelle doesn’t, then the tabloids and the social media started speculating about whether their marriage was on the rocks. Michelle Obama is very rich and very famous and she is free to skip out on anything she feels is not worth her time. But she is not free to squash anyone else talking about it, even if all her liberal media adorers want to shame everybody else.

Michelle just doesn’t get how whiny and entitled she sounds. The entire time that she’s been on the national stage, her media coverage was about 97 percent positive, most of it super-duper positive. 

In addition, we talk about our new number about the network obsession with deported illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia: 143 and a half minutes of televised attention to the “Maryland Man.” But the rape and murder of Maryland mom Rachel Morin is still ignored, despite her illegal-alien killer being convicted at trial. Her mother Patty Morin appeared in the White House briefing room, and ABC and CBS still skipped it. NBC gave it 12 seconds. 

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan was the latest liberal to devote a story to the White House allowing an invasion of “MAGA Media” White House correspondents. He was appalled that these journalists (he wondered if they were journalists) were cheerleading Trump instead of challenging them. Would Donie want to revisit how CNN covered Biden and Harris, not to mention Obama? 

Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

It must be a cold day in hell apparently. Leftist fact-checker FactCheck.org actually took time to defend President Donald Trump’s first term economy from deceptive falsehoods circulating online. They were unhappy that Biden fans were misleading people about their website’s economic record-keeping. 

The fact-checker took particular issue with a graphic circulating online distorting data to give former President Joe Biden a much more favorable economic assessment over Trump. As FactCheck.org noted, “[T]wo of its figures are way off, and others are out of date — creating a more unfavorable comparison for Trump.”

Moreover, wrote staff writer D’Angelo Gore, “The graphic also doesn’t mention that Trump’s numbers, for his first term, were negatively affected by the economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

That’s certainly a factoid many in the media don’t like to point out when doing Biden vs. Trump economic comparisons. A post of the graphic on X, according to the outlet, “garnered roughly 98,000 ‘views’ and been reposted about 4,200 times.”

pic.twitter.com/5caOKrpCxT
— Annie (@AnnieForTruth) April 17, 2025
Whoever generated the graphic reportedly relied on twisting data from FactCheck.org’s previous reports. “Biden’s figures, which are in green, appear to come from our article “Biden’s Numbers, April 2024 Update” – but two of the figures have been inverted,” Gore wrote. Specifically, Gore continued, “we reported that the most recent economic growth rate under Biden at that point, for the first quarter of 2024, was 1.6% – not 18.8%, as the graphic says. And we reported that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services under Biden had grown 18.8% at that time – not 1.6%.”

The creator of the graphic also tried to use outdated figures from FactCheck.org’s database in order to slam Trump. According to Gore, “[T]he creator of the graphic appears to have pulled his figures, which are in red, from our original version of “Trump’s Final Numbers” that was published in October 2021. (The graphic’s figure for job growth under Trump is a typo.) But we updated that article in July 2024 because we found that several of the statistics – due to periodic revisions to government data – were no longer accurate.”

Add to that the gross omission of the COVID-19 lockdowns that sent the economy into a spiral and you have full fledged leftist propaganda, as Gore undlerined: “Our report mentioned the pandemic nearly 40 times.”

In fact, as Gore conceded, Trump’s numbers are much better if one eliminates the COVID-19 pandemic year as an outlier: 

There had been an increase in employment under Trump before the pandemic caused the loss of more than 20 million jobs in April 2020, as attempts to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 led to business closures and layoffs. Also, prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate was 3.5% in February 2020, and the economy had grown by 2.3% in 2019.

“We don’t know if those economic gains would have continued if not for the pandemic, but it’s misleading to present Trump’s first-term economic record without mentioning the COVID-19 caveat,” Gore concluded. 

Now, of course, Gore couldn’t let himself be completely red-pilled and was guilty of leaving out context himself. When citing Biden’s jobs numbers, Gore argued that “the unemployment rate was 4%, and total employment for the entirety of his presidency had increased by more than 16.1 million jobs, including 610,000 manufacturing jobs.” The issue: Nowhere did Gore mention that much of the so-called jobs added under Biden were simply those recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, when the employment number being thrown around as a win for Biden was “15 million” jobs added last year, fellow fact-checker Snopes slapped that down as a load of bunk. 

According to Snopes, “About 9 million of those jobs were lost during the pandemic, so the net jobs gain from pre-pandemic levels was 5.5 million.” In other words, the “15 million” claim was bunk. The author of the fact check, Anna Rascouët-Paz, addressed the Biden propaganda on her personal Twitter account: “Did the US economy really add 15 million jobs under Biden? *squinty face* mmmm let’s not push it.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the infamous “Maryland Man” of media renown (who is actually an illegal immigrant and accused MS-13 gang member from El Salvador with no legal right to be in the United States) was the subject of yet another story on National Public Radio.

The online version of the radio report by Eric Westervelt and Joel Rose for NPR’s All Things Considered Wednesday added some more sympathetic details to the Maryland man’s media mythos — he’s just a quiet family man!

 A federal judge agreed to give the Trump administration another week to answer detailed questions about the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia….Despite the temporary reprieve, the standoff between the White House and the federal courts may still be heading for a reckoning. In a scathing order Tuesday evening, Judge Xinis accused the Justice Department of willful refusal to comply with her order and attempting to “obstruct” discovery after receiving what she characterized as vague and unsatisfying responses to her demand for information on efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

….

The White House continues to insist, without providing solid evidence, that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that the Trump administration has recently declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization. White House border czar Tom Homan defended the administration’s handling of the Abrego Garcia case.

“We removed an MS-13 gang member, public safety threat, wife-beater, designated terrorist from the United States,” Homan told reporters on Wednesday. “He’s home. He’s a citizen of El Salvador, a native of El Salvador who had due process despite what you’re hearing.”

NPR used the word “illegal” once to describe how Garcia had been deported and once to admit “he entered the U.S. illegally.” Let’s see how the following “living quietly in Maryland” description holds up to future scrutiny:

Court documents show that Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally but was granted protection by an immigration judge in 2019 that should have prevented his deportation. He had been living quietly in Maryland with his wife and three children and working in construction until Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and deported him last month.

Lawyers for Abrego Garcia complained Tuesday that despite the court-ordered discovery process, the government had produced “nothing of substance” and repeatedly refused to answer questions based on what the administration called the “false premise” that the administration must facilitate his release. In fact, that is exactly what the Supreme Court ordered.

NPR found a “remarkable opinion” from Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who NPR eagerly emphasized was Reagan appointee (Xinis is an Obama appointee, a fact NPR didn’t bother noting.) 

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not,” wrote Wilkinson, a conservative judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. “Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.”

Law professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley, who favors Garcia being returned, at least temporarily, wrote on X:

….no one familiar with the case would claim that a man (1) repeatedly accused of beating his wife, (2) suspected of human trafficking, and (3) accused of being an alleged MS-13 gang member lived quietly in Maryland.

Thursday’s CBS Evening News Plus dove head-first into another meltdown about the Trump administration’s push to remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and other race-hustling removed root and branch from the federal government. This time, fill-in host Maurice DuBois brought out the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to melt down about a new executive order to undo disparate impact.

Before diving in for the bias, let’s put on the table what defines “disparate impact.” It can be declared in a variety of circumstances, ranging from hiring to housing to lending to school discipline, when policies are deemed discriminatory toward a certain group(s) of people, regardless of whether said policies are content neutral.

 

 

I wrote this in 2013 as part of an unpublished research paper while a Heritage Foundation intern (click “expand”):

The real definition, so to speak, came about in Title (or Section) VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which deals with equal opportunity employment and anti-discrimination in the workplace. In that section, the term “adverse impact” is the key feature and is another term for disparate impact. Whereas disparate impact is meant to be unintentional, disparate treatment theory is where the actual practices and policies are flatly deemed discriminatory in their intent.

Over the course of the past 42 years, disparate impact theory was sanctioned in the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), the term used for unintentional discrimination has grown to reach far beyond employment qualifications and practices. When it appeared to be on the ropes in the late 1980s after the Supreme Court began rolling back Griggs, Congress reacted legislation in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to ensure that disparate impact remained. The Obama Administration and in particular the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have exacerbated this problem for companies further as possible disparate impact charges now include alleged discriminatory lending, fair housing, education, and police tactics (in addition to hiring practices).

Unsurprisingly, DuBois framed this as outrageous anyone would oppose it: “Those civil rights groups are condemning President Trump for signing a series of executive orders this week that they say would weaken anti-discrimination laws.”

“So, one of the executive orders goes after what is known as disparate impact liability. Take us through what that is and an example, if you can, of how that’s helped people in the past,” he said in the first of many softballs to the NAACP’s Janai Nelson.

Nelson unapologetically defended this reverse discrimination of sorts, first discouraging viewers from being “tripped up on these words ‘disparate impact liability.’”

Instead, she said this should be about “interrogat[ing] inequality” and changing policies when “different groups experienc[e] a law or a policy in different ways.”

She then gave an example of how credit scores are racist (click “expand”):

NELSON: We see this in so many spheres of society. So for example, if people are trying to access affordable housing and there’s a rule or a law, like a credit report threshold that somehow is making it difficult for people to find access to housing, to get shelter, then we should ask, is that really a useful tool to ensure who gets access to housing or not? If it is, then that’s fine. If it’s not, and it’s hurting particular populations more than others, then we should be interrogating it. We should be making sure that we are not forcing inequality on people simply because of their identity based on policies that don’t serve us.

DUBOIS: Whether it’s intentional or not is a key here too. What’s your biggest concern?

NELSON: That’s right.

DuBois’s softballs continued: “What’s your biggest concern with this executive order?”

Nelson seethed that “this is an attempt to dismantle our entire civil rights infrastructure” and disparate impact must remain in place because “[g]one are the days” when discrimination widely transpires out loud. She explained discrimination still permeates society and thus “[when we see imbalances, when we see inequality, we have a duty to interrogate it.”

“[I]t is going to undermine the entire civil rights infrastructure that this country has relied on to diversify the ranks of leadership with more women, with more people of color, with people with disabilities, with people from all different backgrounds, we will be an entirely different America, which is really what this Trump administration is after,” she huffed as a long-winded way of claiming the White House wants a white-only country.

The pair closed by insisting “equal opportunity” is lip-service for reinstituting discrimination (click “expand”):

DUBOIS: One final thought here. The executive orders framed disparate impact as being divisive and endangering equal opportunity more broadly. You hear the president talk about DEI in this way as well. What do you make of all that?

NELSON: Listen, this is just more of the lies and falsehoods that President Trump loves trafficking in. He uses words like equal opportunity, which come out of the civil rights movement, to weaponize those words against the very people they were intended to benefit, which is frankly all Americans. All Americans benefit from all of us having equal opportunity to achieve and to access opportunity, which makes this country better. It’s the reason that we can even talk about America’s greatness. It’s because of civil rights laws and protections that remove the barriers that sideline so many for generations.

As our friends at National Review wrote on Friday: “It is past time to let go of group-obsessed thinking and inspire us once again to aspire to treat every American equally — no matter the outcome. The impact of that would benefit us all.”

To see the relevant CBS transcript from April 24, click here.

The so-called “conservatives” of ABC’s The View haven’t been about promoting conservativism for a long time; instead preferring to make their personal ideologies all about hating President Trump and trying to get Democratic politicians elected. On Friday’s episode, they closed out the week by inviting liberal columnist Ezra Klein (there to promote his new book) on to commiserate about how to reduce the harmful consequences of liberal polices in blue states, which were driving residents to red states.

Citing the “incredible example in the book of high-speed rail in California,” faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin wanted Klein to explain how “because of some climate policies it’s actually delayed its ability to be built” and “these contradictions within what some of the Democrats are leaning into.”

Farah Griffin actually lamented that Republicans were able to effectively use California as the prime example of how bad liberal policies were, and wanted Klein to give the solutions:

But I want to ask you this, you use this example of, Democrats should run on, you know, ‘move to California, we can govern the whole country like it,’ but Republicans have actually been able to say, ‘it’s so unaffordable, a lot of things don’t work there well.’ So, what is your message to Democrats on what they can learn to make blue states not be a place that people are fleeing to red states like Florida and Texas?

“So, no one should be more relentless about making government work than Democrats. We should be by far the most infuriated when it doesn’t deliver and when it doesn’t deliver fast,” Klein proclaimed, pointing to Colorado as a better blue state to emulate:

Now, its worth saying California is not the only blue state in the nation. And there are particular problems in places like California and New York but you look at a place like Colorado and it’s governed fairly differently and it’s working pretty well.

There is a report I’ve been thinking about that shows how much it costs to build publicly subsidized housing, affordable housing in Colorado, in Texas, and California. And per square foot, it’s a lot more money to do it for — in California even in Texas. In Colorado, when the government does it, it’s a little bit cheaper than market rate development.

 

 

Pretend independent Sara Haines wanted Klein to breakdown something in the book he called “everything bagel liberalism” and “how that’s gotten in the way of progress.” “Why didn’t high-speed rail happen? What happens with rural broadband? You begin to see this layering on of dozens and dozens of different goals into a single project,” he stated.

According to his research, a host of liberal pet projects and social justice initiatives (though he didn’t acknowledge them by name) often hamstrung other liberal programs. “You’re trying to do all kinds of environmental standards and wage goals and things that are all or many of them on their own good,” he pointed out. “And projects often collapse under their own weight.”

Cueing in on Klein’s desire for slashing red tape and streamlining government bureaucracy, fake Republican Ana Navarro saw similarities with “what Elon Musk had promised he’d target with DOGE. But that’s been largely unsuccessful at finding huge waste.” “What are they doing wrong?” she wanted to know.

According to Klein, Musk was stabbing America. “Look, the fact that you have a patient who could use surgery doesn’t mean you have a patient who could use a stabbing; and DOGE is a stabbing. It’s an effort to destroy state capacity,” he decried. “What they’ve done I think is an effort to create an ideological purge, break the thing and control it.”

“What we’re trying to do argue for an expansion of what the state is capable of doing and delivering,” he declared. “Sometimes that is deregulation. Sometimes it is cutting through bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s bringing a lot more expertise and capability in-house.”

So just big government in a new suit.

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

ABC’s The View
April 25, 2025
11:37:04 a.m. Eastern

(…)

ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN: You use this incredible example in the book of high-speed rail in California. I remember more than a decade ago when it was announced and it should have been – a huge impact on climate and it’d be able to make people live for affordably, commute more places; but actually because of some climate policies it’s actually delayed its ability to be built. So, sometimes you kind of point to these contradictions within what some of the Democrats are leaning into.

But I want to ask you this, you use this example of, Democrats should run on, you know, ‘move to California, we can govern the whole country like it,’ but Republicans have actually been able to say, ‘it’s so unaffordable, a lot of things don’t work there well.’ So, what is your message to Democrats on what they can learn to make blue states not be a place that people are fleeing to red states like Florida and Texas?

EZRA KLEIN: So, no one should be more relentless about making government work than Democrats. We should be by far the most infuriated when it doesn’t deliver and when it doesn’t deliver fast.

Now, its worth saying California is not the only blue state in the nation. And there are particular problems in places like California and New York but you look at a place like Colorado and it’s governed fairly differently and it’s working pretty well.

There is a report I’ve been thinking about that shows how much it costs to build publicly subsidized housing, affordable housing in Colorado, in Texas, and California. And per square foot, it’s a lot more money to do it for — in California even in Texas. In Colorado, when the government does it, it’s a little bit cheaper than market rate development.

So, there are places we can look to learn things. France and Spain, they do public transit really well.

ANA NAVARRO: Wait till they report all those undocumented immigrants working in construction.

KLEIN: That’s another – Look, you’ve a Trump administration that has really embraced scarcity right now. There’s a version of what they could have been, that could have come in and said, “Our biggest issue in the world is making things more affordable, making them more plentiful,” and they have embraced tariffs, they’ve embraced deportations, they’ve destroyed the stock market.

They do not want a future of more. They want a contained future where everything is ours and that’s created a big opportunity for Democrats if they choose to take it.

SARA HAINES: Well, Ezra, I wanted to ask you. You write about what you call “everything bagel liberalism” and how that’s gotten in the way of progress. Can you explain what you mean by that?

KLEIN: Yeah, so if you dig in to what happens after the bill passes, you look at what is happening in the project. Why didn’t high-speed rail happen? What happens with rural broadband? You begin to see this layering on of dozens and dozens of different goals into a single project. Right? You’re trying to do all kinds of environmental standards and wage goals and things that are all or many of them on their own good.

HAINES: Right.

KLEIN: But these things are hard to do in the first place. It’s hard to build high-speed rail. It’s hard to get housing done in places where it’s difficult to build. And projects often collapse under their own weight.

There aren’t many — there aren’t many single changes you could make that I think would do all that much across domains. But one cultural change you could make in governance is to say that projects should more or less be doing one thing or very few things.

HAINES: Right.

KLEIN: That their goal should be their goal.

JOY BEHAR: What’s the one thing?

KLEIN: Well, it depends on what project. If you’re building housing, it should be to build housing. And if you’ve created situation where to build public housing – publicly subsidized housing in California it’s more than four times more expensive per square-foot as building market housing in Texas. You’ve a problem and you need to work back through the process you created when you spend public money to figure out how you’ve added so much cost in time to the spending of public money –

SUNNY HOSTIN: Did you find out why?

KLEIN: – because that’s a betrayal of the taxpayer.

HOSTIN: Did you find out why?

KLEIN: Yeah, I mean, I tracked back a bunch of different affordable housing projects and, I mean, you know, different ones are different. But the basic thing is public money in California, a lot of places triggers a bunch of new rules, it triggers different wage rules, it triggers different environmental rules, it triggers different building rules and all of it adds cost and time. There are preferences for using small contractors not big ones.

And, like I’ve done this on so many projects now and they’re all unhappy in their own ways, but it is a similar story across many of them that they were not focused on the thing they promised and oftentimes they didn’t get anything at all.

Look, there’s a million ideas that have gone into what we should be doing during California high-speed rail, but in the end we haven’t achieved any of them because you can’t ride a high-speed rail. So, sometimes you try to achieve so much that you end up achieving nothing.

NAVARRO: Ezra, much of what you take issue with, bureaucracy, overregulation, red tape. It kind of sounds an awful lot like what Elon Musk had promised he’d target with DOGE. But that’s been largely unsuccessful at finding huge waste. It’s very unpopular. So unpopular he’s even tanking his own businesses as a result. Does that make it harder to make the case that government is the issue and bureaucracy and deregulation? What are they doing wrong?

KLEIN: Look, the fact that you have a patient who could use surgery doesn’t mean you have a patient who could use a stabbing; and DOGE is a stabbing. It’s an effort to destroy state capacity.

Throughout this book Derrick and I, what we’re trying to do –

[Applause]

What we’re trying to do argue for an expansion of what the state is capable of doing and delivering. Sometimes that is deregulation. Sometimes it is cutting through bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s bringing a lot more expertise and capability in-house.

It’s an amazing thing as I run around talking about how bloated the government is, since the ’60s the size of the federal civilian workforce has barely budged. We employed about two million people in it then, we employ about two million people in it now; give or take the people he’s fired.

You want to look at government and say, ‘what does it need to be able to do and what resources and rules, does it need to have in order to achieve it?’ What they’ve done I think is an effort to create an ideological purge, break the thing and control it.

(…)

Reporting live Thursday from the Vatican ahead of Saturday’s funeral mass for Pope Francis, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson ended the show with a veiled hit on President Trump as a contrast to Pope Francis and other Catholic leaders as the former (using the catch-all phrase “American politics”) embraces “flash and hubris” while the other show humility and love.

In much the same way his commentaries at the end of CBS Evening News Plus go (as well as his hot takes in general), they usually have a connection to current events and this was no exception.

 

 

“In three separate conversations I had today with a cardinal and archbishop and a priest, the comparison to American politics came up when talking about how the next pope will be chosen. But there is a significant difference between the two systems,” Dickerson began.

This went into a more direct comparison with help from a writer for a far-left Catholic magazine:

In American politics, candidates boast. Flash and hubris often win. In the conclave, those same traits are liabilities. As Colleen Dulle, Vatican reporter for America magazine, explained to me, he who enters a conclave a pope exits a cardinal, meaning, if any cardinal campaigns too openly for the job, his chances diminish. 

To represent an implicit contrast to Trump, Dickerson ended by invoking George Washington and that true leaders in any form should be those who aren’t exactly looking for power:

That same suspicion of ambition shaped the early American presidency. George Washington didn’t campaign, nor did many of the first American presidents. It was believed that gross ambition was a cancer. So maybe the systems aren’t that different. Both are shaped, at least in their ideal, by a common fear, that the person who most wants power may be the last person who should have it

Co-anchor Maurice DuBois was in obvious awe: “Well said, John. What a concept.”

It wasn’t entirely surprising to see Dickerson’s decision to offer a commentary blasting American politics when, earlier in the show, he started to go down this road by emphasizing “humility” in leaders as countercultural with a local priest in Rome (an American who previously served in New York City as Dickerson’s parish priest) (click “expand”):

DICKERSON [TO BERRIOS]: What are you looking for in the next pope?
    
FATHER MATTHEW BERRIOS: A shepherd, first and foremost, a man that can listen, a man that can lead, but a man that knows how to be humble.

DICKERSON: Why is humility so important?

BERRIOS: Because that is a pure imitation of Jesus. Being a leader is not about vaunting yourself. It’s not about putting your name on buildings and proclaiming yourself. It’s about putting yourself in love at the service and care of others, especially of the most vulnerable.

DICKERSON [TO BERRIOS]: Really sounds like your description of Pope Francis.

BERRIOS: Absolutely.

DICKERSON: The shepherd must smell like the sheep, Pope Francis said. And all day long, the flock has gathered as bells pealed, the rain fell to celebrate his push to put his life, his office and his church among the people. Not everyone embraced Francis’ style. Yet, in a church short on priests and losing parishioners, his authenticity, his joy, his humility wasn’t just holy, says Father Matt; it was necessary. [TO BERRIOS] Does the church have to find a balance that allows it to be more accessible for people in a modern world?

BERRIOS: I think so. It’s trying to find the fundamental proclamation of faith and proclaim it in a way that is in the language of the everyday person spoken in the language of the culture.

DICKERSON: Some people we spoke with here say Pope Francis made the church feel close, so close he could call himself the world’s parish priest. The task for the church now? Finding a pope who nurtures that same feeling, where it’s possible to run into your neighborhood priest in Rome and have it feel like more than a coincidence.

To see the relevant CBS transcript from April 24, click here.

A major legacy media outlet discussed the massive issues at stake as the sword of Damocles hangs over Elon Musk’s X in Europe. The writer couldn’t hide her bias against free speech advocates. 

Politico noted the European Union’s apparent failure to crush Elon Musk’s X alongside other Big Tech platforms in an April 23 article headlined “The EU has fined Meta and Apple. What happened to X?” In her article, Politico tech reporter Eliza Gkritsi suggested that the EU’s European Commission might prefer forcing X to make changes instead of paying horrifying fines, since the former decision “could have a meaningful impact on users.” However, Gkritsi labelled opponents of the European Commission’s authoritarian push as “far right” while offering more neutral terms to proponents of radical EU laws. 

[Story Continues on MRC Free Speech America] 

The Wednesday edition of The Jim Acosta podcast saw the reunion of two of CNN’s most insufferable former hosts as Don Lemon joined the eponymous host to preview Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner. During their discussion, Lemon attacked “the freedom of speech” crowd for cancelling comedian Amber Ruffin and cited his own experience at being grilled by the dinner’s comedian as proof they were being too soft, although such a diatribe required several omissions and half-truths about previous jokes about him and what Ruffin has said about the administration.

As part of their back-and-forth conversation, Lemon asked, “Are you, are you gonna be at the correspondents’ dinner? I am.”

 

 

Acosta answered, “I am not, no, I am fortunately going to be out of town. I’ve got another engagement, a previously scheduled engagement, so I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

That wasn’t good enough for Acosta, because he then suggested that nobody should go, “which, by the way, they should not have a White House Correspondents’ Dinner if you’re inviting Trump administration officials who work for a president who would shut down the press in a heartbeat if he were allowed to do it. You just, I just don’t think it’s right, you know. As much as I love the dinner and love the people there, it’s not right.”

In that case it appears Acosta and Trump supporters finally found something they can agree on. As it was, Lemon turned to Ruffin, “It’s not right.  And again for the freedom of speech crowd to cancel a comedian because you don’t—that’s what comedians do: they roast the administration.”

First of all, it was the WHCA itself that cancelled Ruffin after she refused to nominally commit to roasting all sides, not just Trump and Republicans.

Still, Lemon moved on to suggest that if he can take a ribbing, then the White House can too, “I don’t know if you have, I’ve been roasted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner by the comedian, and, I mean, I even flipped Larry Wilmore off.”

A comparison between Wilmore and Ruffin is needed. The 2016 Wilmore joke Lemon referenced was, “Some of America’s finest black journalists are here tonight. Don Lemon is here too.” After Lemon waved back, Wilmore added, “Hey, Don! How’s it going, alleged journalist Don Lemon.” Lemon told Wilmore he was number one.

Lemon also conveniently omitted that he was grilled at later dinners for sexist comments he made about Nikki Haley and at what age a woman is in “her prime,” although Roy Wood Jr. still found a way to make it about Fox News.

Ruffin, by contrast, labeled the Trump Administration “kind of a bunch of murderers” who are not fit to be called human beings. That’s not roasting the administration; that is just old-fashioned political mudslinging with the possibility of therapeutic laughs for a sympathetic audience. Ruffin also has a history of making stuff up on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, where she is a writer. Acosta and Lemon sure did pick a convenient time to stop obsessing over their concerns about about fake news.

Here is a transcript for the April 23 show:

The Jim Acosta Show

4/23/2025

1 Hour, 17 Minutes, 16 Seconds

DON LEMON: Are you, are you gonna be at the correspondents’ dinner? I am.

JIM ACOSTA: I am not, no, I am fortunately going to be out of town. I’ve got another engagement, a previously scheduled engagement, so I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which, by the way, they should not have a White House Correspondents’ Dinner if you’re inviting Trump administration officials who work for a president who would shut down the press in a heartbeat if he were allowed to do it. You just, I just don’t think it’s right, you know. As much as I love the dinner—

LEMON: It’s not right.

ACOSTA: — and love the people there, it’s not right.

LEMON:  It’s not right.  And again for the freedom of speech crowd to cancel a comedian because you don’t—that’s what comedians do: they roast the administration.

ACOSTA: Exactly.

LEMON: I don’t know if you have, I’ve been roasted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—

ACOSTA: Totally.

LEMON: — by the comedian—

ACOSTA: Me too.

LEMON: And, I mean, I even flipped Larry Wilmore off—

ACOSTA: You got in so much trouble, Jeff was so pissed at you when you did that.

LEMON: No, he wasn’t mad, I don’t know, he said, I think he thought it was okay.