Woke up today thinking it was Friday for some reason.
John Wright’s Starquest – Pirate King of Star Patrol is out! Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.
You think you hate the liberal media enough, but you don’t — and that’s probably a good thing. It would be psychologically unhealthy to hate anyone as much as the liberal media deserve to be hated.
Heather Schwedel is a writer for Slate, which was one of the pioneering political commentary sites back in the dial-up modem days of the 1990s. If you’re old enough to remember when AOL discs came in a box of cereal — seriously, that actually happened for a few months in 1996 — you may remember when Microsoft hired Michael Kinsley (former New Republic editor and then co-host of CNN’s Crossfire) to be editor of Slate.
That was 30 years ago. In 2004, the Washington Post purchased Slate, but when Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, he had no use for Slate, which is now property of a separate firm, Graham Holdings. This trek down memory lane doesn’t do much to explain why Heather Schwedel is on Slate’s payroll, but it does give you some sense of the downward trajectory of Slate’s prestige. The latest milestone on this descent into infamy is Schwedel’s article with this headline, “Well, That Is One Way for J.D. and Usha Vance to Respond to the Erika Kirk Divorce Rumors.”
Could anyone imagine a more perverse and sickening possible reaction to the announcement that the Vice President’s wife is pregnant? Perhaps someone might call attention to the various deranged mutterings of Candace Owens or the despicable smears of Nick Fuentes, but ladies and gentlemen, Heather Schwedel is employed by Slate, which was formerly considered one of the most reputable online journals. It’s not like this was published by some obscure fringe site. No, this vile article was written by a full-time staff writer and, presumably, given the green light by an editor who is paid an actual salary. Among the tasks of an editor is saying “no” to story ideas that will bring disrepute to the publication, and here the editors of Slate have self-evidently failed. Let’s dive in:
The rumors about J.D. Vance leaving his wife for Erika Kirk, which have persisted since the two shared a much-discussed hug in October, were always more darkly entertaining than plausible. But observers have surmised that they took off because they reflected a certain air of uneasiness that has surrounded Vance’s marriage for the whole time it’s been on the national stage. As the highly educated daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Vance not only doesn’t burnish Vance’s MAGA credentials; she undermines them. When reports of a possible divorce on the horizon began to swirl in November, it wasn’t altogether surprising. Reckoning with all those contradictions was inevitable, right? . . .
Dear God, ma’am! Wes Pruden would have kicked you down the stairs if you had pitched him a story like that. “Rumors” have “persisted” since “a much-discussed hug”? By whom was this discussed? Some podcasters?
Also notice Schwedel’s not-too-subtle recycling of the Nick Fuentes “married a jeet” smear: Usha is the “daughter of Indian immigrants” and therefore “doesn’t burnish Vance’s MAGA credentials” — but if he dumped the mother of his three children to marry the grieving widow of Charlie Kirk, that would burnish his credentials? Exactly what does Heather Schwedel know about “MAGA credentials” and how they are burnished? Where did she gain this expertise? But among the many laughable elements of Schwedel’s first paragraph, perhaps none is as absurd the part where she says “observers have surmised” blah blah blah.
Guess who she links for this? C’mon, take a guess.
If you guessed Amanda Marcotte, collect your prize. Of all the idiot feminists in the world, Schwedel links the most idiotic for her “observers have surmised” reference. To spare you from reading the entirety of Marcotte’s brain-damaged screed, I’ll quote this one sentence: “Vance’s marriage is an increasingly poor fit for his political brand, which has become increasingly based on praising the virtues of white supremacy and retrograde gender roles.” To use the adverb “increasingly” twice in the same sentence is the sort of stylistic error that bespeaks haste in composition, and one pictures Marcotte furiously typing away with a maniacal expression on her face as she wrote that. What joy she must have felt in that one-two punch of “white supremacy and retrograde gender roles” to characterize Vance’s “political brand.”
If you’re wondering what’s so MAGA about having a kid, it’s not just that they’re having a kid, but that they’re having a fourth kid. The average number of children per American household has been declining for decades, so having four kids in the year 2026 is a bit of a statement. While it doesn’t have to be conservative-coded, it tends to skew that way. It’s also a statement in the sense that it follows more literal statements Vance has made about pro-natalism and how women need to have more babies, and/or the evils of women who choose not to. In fact, the Vance baby is part of a mini baby boom at the White House, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, also expecting. . . .
(Note that I am the father of six children myself, but all of mine were sired long before Trump rode down that escalator.)
[I]t’s important to remember that [Mrs. Vance] is a willing participant in all of this. While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone else in her law-school class has put their career on hold to have four kids, she chose to have all those kids, and to leave her career to support her husband, and to stay with that husband, no matter how increasingly awful he seems both as a force in society and as an individual partner to her. Usha is free to slap “I had this before J.D. went crazy” stickers on her other kids. But if she could ever claim any kind of ignorance, that time is over. She has now seen exactly who her husband has become as vice president. And knowing everything she knows, she concluded that yes, she wanted to have another one of J.D. Vance’s babies.
In conclusion, yuck. Nothing more need be said to condemn this, as it is self-evidently indefensible. It is astonishing how contemporary liberal journalism manages to attract all the worst people in the world, a sort of magnetic North Pole of wrongness. We might be tempted to say that Heather Schwedel should be ashamed of herself, but if she had any capacity for shame, she wouldn’t be writing for Slate, would she?
It was another great week to be a Senators fan. Not only did we take two of three against the hapless Dodgers – the sole loss coming at the hands of Don Sutton, who held us to three runs while the Dodgers scratched out four – but we went on to beat the Hated Yankees in two games, the third being an 0-5 shutout against Wilbur Wood. We’re tied with the Red Sox for second in the division at 39-45, we have a positive run differential for the first time this season (the 15-6 and 13-3 wins against LA helped that a lot) but we’re facing St. Louis and Montreal next week, so I’m expecting a .500 week at best. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
No sooner had Higby begun posting this information than others started identifying members of this anti-law enforcement conspiracy, which apparently includes very well-connected Democrat activists.
If Amanda Koehler, a union-connected consultant who worked on Gov. Tim Walz’s reelection campaign, is an administrator of this network, how many other influential Democrats in Minnesota are part of the conspiracy to obstruct federal law enforcement in the state? Maybe all of them?
Perhaps most disturbing is that “MN Ice Watch” appears to be using law enforcement resources, perhaps the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), to identify vehicles and drivers. This would seem to suggest that local or state law enforcement officials in Minnesota are actively assisting the conspiracy to obstruct federal agents.
BREAKING – Anti ICE agitators, led by failed CNN host Don Lemon, stormed a Minneapolis church this morning, halting services and holding members hostage because they believed the pastor was ICE affiliated.
The rationale of this “protest” was the idea, currently prevalent among Democrats, that it is morally wrong for Republicans to win elections and therefore, when Republicans are in office, obeying the law is optional.
Democrats never say this in so many words, of course. To express their beliefs as a clear syllogism would immediately expose the invalidity of their arguments, which is why they never debate anymore. Anyone who has watched Scott Jennings single-handedly dismantle leftists on CNN knows this — Democrats can’t win any kind of honest debate, which is why they end up shouting and shrieking and trying to silence opposition.
What happened at the Minnesota church was not a constitutionally protected exercise of free speech, as Samuel J. Abrams explains:
Recent events in Minnesota — where anti-ICE protesters interrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, targeted pastor David Easterwood (who is apparently also an ICE official), then defended the disruption as an exercise of First Amendment rights — reflect a growing confusion about what the Constitution does and does not protect. Similar incidents have occurred in recent years, affecting churches, synagogues, and other religious services across the country. Whatever one thinks of the protesters’ underlying cause, the constitutional question here is not a close one. “This is what the First Amendment is about,” said journalist Don Lemon, who entered the church with the protesters and defended their actions to a pastor who was asking them to leave. Organizers Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen have since been arrested for allegedly violating the FACE Act, which prohibits using force, threats, or physical obstruction to interfere with religious services. There is no First Amendment right to enter a house of worship and engage in conduct that effectively shuts down a religious service, even as part of a protest. Nor does anybody have the right to remain on private property after being asked by its owner or authorized representatives to leave.
The First Amendment offers its strongest protection to speech in traditional public forums — streets, sidewalks, and parks — while also protecting freedom of association, religious exercise, and freedom of conscience. A society committed to free expression depends not only on protecting speech, but on maintaining a clear delineation between protected speech, on the one hand, and unprotected civil or criminal conduct on the other.
You can read the whole thing. Don Lemon is typical of those in the media who, in becoming “Democratic operatives with bylines,” have embraced the radical “By Any Means Necessary” mentality of the modern Left. Whatever helps Democrats (or hurts Republicans) is good, and anything that hurts Democrats (or helps Republicans) is bad. There is no objective truth in their worldview, only partisan advantage, which is why they are such habitual liars. Those of us who are not Democrats can turn on the TV and observe half-a-dozen such lies in any hour-long segment on CNN (and as little as 15 minutes on what used to be called MSNBC), and the most outrageous element of the media’s pervasive bias is the fact that these partisan propagandists so obviously think they are our moral and intellectual superiors. Now, dear reader, scroll back up to the top of this post, gaze for a while at the mug shots of Don Lemon’s criminal accomplices and ask yourself: “Are these people superior to me?”
Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t seem to think so:
Minutes ago at my direction, @HSI_HQ and @FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota.
So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The fact that William Scott Kelly called this a “white supremacist” church is a huge clue about the kind of propaganda that is being deployed to mobilize these rioters against law enforcement. Kelly has claimed to be a combat veteran, but this has been disputed; while I cannot confirm reports that he was court-martialed for theft and dishonorably discharged, neither do I doubt those reports. “Bad causes attract bad people,” and Kelly appears to do nothing else except protest everywhere.
A BLM leader who serves on a school board, a woke TikToker, and a third alleged ringleader of an anti-ICE mob who stormed a Minnesota church during Sunday service have been arrested, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday. . . .
Armstrong allegedly led the raucous group, including Don Lemon, from the Racial Justice Network to storm the church and call out resident pastor David Eastwood, accusing him of moonlighting as the acting field office director for ICE in Minnesota.
A picture of Armstrong being led away in handcuffs was shared by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on X on Thursday morning.
“Religious freedom is the bedrock of the United States – there is no First Amendment right to obstruct someone from practicing their religion,” Sec. Noem said on X.
AG Bondi also confirmed that a second suspect, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, who bragged about organizing the protests, had been taken into custody in a separate X post.
Allen — a Black Lives Matter leader and member of the Saint Paul Public Schools Board of Education — had earlier compared herself to Jesus, saying she had been inspired by his cleansing of the temple. . . .
A spokesperson for the city’s Board of Education told The Post that the district “has been made aware of this incident and is following all applicable policies and procedures” but “does not comment on pending legal matters.”
Later Thursday afternoon, it was announced that an anti-ICE influencer, William Kelly, had also been arrested for his involvement in the church riots.
Kelly, who uses the handle “DaWokeFarmer” on TikTok, was pictured on X being taken into custody while wearing a beanie hat emblazoned with the words “F*ck Trump,” by Noem. . . .
Armstrong, Allen, and Kelly are being charged with “conspiracy against rights,” which makes it a federal crime to intimidate someone in the free exercise of their rights as secured by the US Constitution.
The “Racial Justice Network” decided that this was a “white supremacist church” and why? Because the ACLU filed a lawsuit (Hussen v. Noem) against ICE and named as one of the defendants David Easterwood who, besides a pastor at this church, was employed as acting director of the local ICE office. In other words, the ACLU “doxxed” him, and that’s why this church got targeted even though Easterwood wasn’t even at the church at the time of the “protest.” Once radicals decide that it’s wrong to enforce the law, next they believe that law-enforcement officials are villains, and when they act on those perverse beliefs, bad things happen.
