The big news today raises some intriguing questions. While we must assume that there is legal justification for the FBI’s raid on John Bolton — probable cause to suspect him of illegal activity — the same could be said of dozens of others whose names might be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. That is to say, if this is about Trump getting even with enemies (which of course, most people in the news media just automatically assume to be the case), why start the reprisals with Bolton?
FBI agents raided the Maryland home and Washington, DC office of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton Friday morning in a high-profile national security probe involving classified documents.
Federal agents went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post. “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” Patel said in a cryptic post to X shortly after the raid began.
Bolton has not been arrested and is not currently charged with any crimes, the official added. “He’s not a smart guy, but he could be a very unpatriotic guy,” President Trump told reporters of Bolton Friday morning. “We’re going to find out.”
The raid came at the behest of Patel, with the president claiming that he had no advance knowledge of the operation.
“I know nothing about it. I just saw it this morning … I tell [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] and I tell the group: ‘I don’t want to know, but you have to do what you have to do. I don’t want to know about it.’”
“I could know about it. I could be the one starting — and I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer — but I feel that it’s better this way.” An investigation of Bolton was launched in 2020, but the Biden administration shut it down “for political reasons,” according to a senior US official.
Trump’s first Justice Department initiated a criminal inquiry into Bolton’s alleged disclosure of national secrets in his 2020 book, “The Room Where It Happened.”
However, officials tell The Post that the current investigation is not limited to Bolton’s book — but is part of a “larger classified leaking probe that extended into the Biden administration.”
OK, so there are some possible clues there. Is it really fair to assume that the motivation for the raid on Bolton is essentially political in nature, as so many people seem to be doing? If we stipulate this, for the sake of argument, we must still ask why Bolton? Why not James Comey, John Brennan, Susan Rice, et al.? Consider a couple of possible explanations:
A. Bolton’s activities were so egregious as to warrant this action. In other words, Bolton has done something so bad that Kash Patel believed the FBI needed to conduct this raid to prevent further damage to national security.
B. There is so much evidence of Bolton’s wrongdoing, and so much reason to believe more evidence would be found in this raid, that Patel saw it as an “open-and-shut” case, a slam-dunk prosecution where there could be no doubt of Bolton’s guilt.
These two theories are not mutually exclusive, of course, but I would lean toward Theory B as most likely. If Kash Patel is henceforth going to be dragging Trump’s enemies into court, to hold them accountable for their roles in what Tulsi Gabbard has called a “seditious conspiracy,” it helps his credibility if he can start with a slam-dunk case. And it also helps Patel that Bolton is seen as a Republican-leaning figure, picked to serve in both of the two most recent GOP administrations.
All this is speculation on my part, but if my hunch is right, we can expect a grand jury indictment of Bolton in just a few weeks — perhaps as early as next month — and the charging document will contain allegations (and references to evidence) that look very, very bad for John Bolton, so bad that even the most anti-Trump analyst on CNN won’t defend him.
I will add that if we assume that the allegation that Bolton was being protected by the Biden administration is true, that raises another possibility: he might have felt blackmailed. They might not have said anything explicit that would trigger the extortion statute but he…
There is a lot of speculation happening, and I’ve shared a few hunches of my own, but I certainly don’t claim to know anything about this case beyond the basic facts that are being reported by others.
On or about August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. . . .
Founded at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Colony was home to about 700 people by 1619. The first enslaved Africans to arrive in Virginia disembarked at Point Comfort, in what is today known as Fort Monroe. . . .
They were originally kidnapped by Portuguese colonial forces, who sent captured members of the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms on a forced march to the port of Luanda, the capital of modern-day Angola. From there, they were ordered on the ship San Juan Bautista, which set sail for Veracruz in the colony of New Spain [I.e., Mexico]. As was quite common, about 150 of the 350 captives aboard the ship died during the crossing. Then, as it approached its destination, the ship was attacked by two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. Crews from the two ships kidnapped up to 60 of the Bautista’s enslaved people. It was the White Lion which docked at Virginia Colony’s Point Comfort and traded some of the prisoners for food on August 20, 1619.
So, you see, had it not been for the attack by these two English privateer ships, the Portuguese would have taken those African slaves to Mexico, and what would have become of them there? And what might have become of the colonists in Virginia, if the institution of slavery had never been introduced there? These alternatives are seldom discussed by those who, for whatever reason, wish to make the history of slavery an indictment of America and a permanent cause of racial grievance.
What I wish foremost to point out is something that I was taught as a schoolboy, but which our educational institutions recently seem to have forgotten, namely that Virginia, and the other English colonies in North American which later became the United States, was founded in an era of armed rivalry between European powers. For example, my native Georgia was founded in part to defend the southern flank of the Carolinas from the perceived threat of the Spanish presence in Florida.
The Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch — all the maritime powers of Europe had colonies in the New World, and all of them used African slaves as part of their colonial enterprises. The Spaniards had used African slaves on sugar plantations in the Azores, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde islands. It was in the Spanish colony of Cuba that African slavery was first introduced to the New World, beginning in 1513, and by 1526, the Portuguese were shipping African slaves to Brazil.
From this beginning, the practice spread throughout the Caribbean islands and South and Central America. It was not until 1617, more than 100 years after the Spanish had brought African slavery to Cuba, that the English adopted the institution, when the governor of Bermuda began importing slaves there. All this history is ignored by those who regard the United States as somehow uniquely guilty in regard to slavery.
To explain this would require far more time and effort than I care to devote to the topic today. Readers may have noticed that I never waded into the controversy over the New York Times and its “1619 Project.” Others were outraged, but I bit my tongue rather than to say what was on my mind, namely that it was about damned time liberals finally figured out how much the North was implicated in slavery. For most of my life, Yankees have promoted a libelous myth about the South, popularizing the utterly false belief that somehow Southerners had invented slavery and had a monopoly on it. This is a subject I’ve addressed before (e.g., “History You Probably Never Knew,” December 30, 2023), and readers may recall my ironic amusement a couple of years ago when Revolutionary War hero Gen. Philip Schuyler got “cancelled.”
[T]he 1790 Census found 21,193 slaves in the state of New York, of which 3,722 were in Albany County, “the most of any county in the state at the time.” The Dutch patroons who settled the Hudson River valley were substantially reliant on slave labor and, the 1790 census showed, Philip Schuyler “owned 13 slaves at his South End mansion in 1790 and another four slaves worked on his farm in Saratoga County.”
From the headline, you might have expected me to illustrate this post with a picture of college girls twerking in their bikinis on Spring Break in Florida, so why did I choose John Stuart Mill instead?
In his most famous work, On Liberty, Mill famously described “the tyranny of the majority,” by which he meant not merely the possibility of despotic action under democratic governments, but more specifically what he called “the moral coercion of public opinion.” In other words, although we might be free to do as we please without fear of legal punishment, at the same time, we are discouraged from acting in any way that is unpopular or unconventional because we fear the disapproval of others. Mill called this “social tyranny,” and one can imagine what he had in mind when you recall that he was writing in England in the mid-1800s, during the Victorian era — a very uptight kind of environment.
As a conservative, of course, I am naturally prejudiced in favor of the kind of “repressive” social norms of Victorian England. Looking around the 21st century, we could use a lot more of that Victorian prudery.
What got me thinking along these lines was watching YouTube videos by Jedediah Bila. Most of y’all will remember her from Fox News, but in the past four years, Jedediah has moved to Texas with her husband and son and is now doing her own thing online — and it is awesome!
A lot of her content is about “gender dynamics,” and she’s laying down the cold truth about the self-defeating nature of what passes for “empowered” behavior among young women. Here she is with guest Andrew Wilson examining the phenomenon of grossly slutty behavior by girls on Spring Break in Daytona:
Obviously, girls who act like this — racking up a “body count” of 12 in a single week? — have no fear of the kind of repressive social tyranny that John Stuart Mill criticized in Victorian England. Why is that?
Even though these 304’s probably don’t consider themselves feminists, Andrew Wilson points toward the feminist-influenced idea that it’s unfair to expect women to avoid promiscuity because (supposedly) there is no such expectation for men. The attitude is, “Guys do it, why can’t we?” Refuting this attitude is as simple as pointing out the basic arithmetic — “it takes two to tango” — and getting young women to understand that men have no incentive to be monogamous when so many young women are promiscuous. By consenting to easy hookups, such women make themselves part of the problem that so many young women nowadays complain about, i.e., men who “won’t commit” to marriage.
Let us not overlook, however, the role that lack of proper adult supervision plays in this kind of behavior. If your teenage daughter is shamelessly hooking up with 12 guys during Spring Break? You have failed as a parent, and that failure began long before your daughter became a teenager. Every girl naturally desires to be “popular,” to fit in with her peers, and wise mothers strive to teach their daughters to resist such pressure. A well-raised girl will fear more than anything else her mother’s disapproval. From a young age, she has been taught to avoid inappropriate behavior. Internalizing parental values provides her with a sort of moral gyroscope, a self-guidance system that makes her capable of discernment, so that she does not mindlessly follow the crowd.
When we see these brainless sluts smiling for the camera as they boast of their Spring Break “body count,” we are witnessing the consequences of children being raised without proper parental authority.
“I’m disgusting. Maybe they were all right about me. Maybe I am a big old whore.”
— Ella Dawson
“There was this binary view, at least in my mind as an 18-year-old, of, you’re either someone who believes sex is part of a relationship and you’re judgmental of casual sex, or you are a sexually empowered young woman who screws whoever she wants to and does whatever she wants and can have sex without emotions,” Dawson said in an interview with The Argus. “And as a result, I was super defensive of hookup culture itself because I interpreted criticism of hookup culture as criticism of a free sexuality.”
The predictable consequences are related in Ms. Dawson’s 2022 roman à clef (a “novel” that’s really a memoir), titled Life Ruiner:
Set mostly at Wesleyan in Dawson’s junior and senior years in 2013 and 2014, “LIFE RUINER” takes the reader through a semi-linear progression of her relationship with Blake (all names were changed to protect privacy), an attractive yet troubled party acquaintance turned sexual and romantic partner. . . .
[E]verything changes for Dawson when she wakes up to itchy raised bumps on her labia, which are ultimately diagnosed as genital herpes. From this point forward, her relationship with Blake slowly devolves into cycles of emotional abuse and manipulation as he also receives a herpes diagnosis and begins to threaten suicide. When Blake reaches an emotional low at the end of the summer and the two break up, Dawson begins to replace her feelings of dirtiness and shame surrounding her STI diagnosis with understanding and empowerment. Back on campus, though, she and Blake begin hooking up again until Blake nearly overdoses on prescription drugs and alcohol and Dawson discovers that he has physically abused his ex-girlfriend, Kris.
Here’s a cruel irony — although she had styled herself an advocate of knowledge about sexuality, Ella Dawson apparently failed to realize that condoms don’t protect against herpes. In all her preaching about “safe sex” and everything, somehow this fact had escaped her notice.
A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the herpes rate “was nearly twice as high among women (21%) as men (11%), and more than three times higher among African-Americans (39%) than whites (12%). The infection rate among African-American women was 48%.” For obvious reasons, promiscuity increases the risk of infection, and the CDC found that about 27% of those who reported 10 or more partners are infected with herpes.
So, Ella shows up at Wesleyan as a sort of apostle of sexual liberation, and by the time she graduates, she’s a used-up slut with herpes. She decides to proclaim this to the world, undertaking a crusade to “destigmatize” herpes, and is so successful that she (a) attracts national attention and (b) makes her name synonymous with herpes.
When last we heard from her, Ella was calling herself “bisexual” or “queer,” by which I presume she means that because guys are no longer interested in her, she’s now desperately trying to find a girlfriend to diddle her diseased genitalia. Rather pathetic, but of one thing Ella is certain: It’s not her fault. No, she is a victim of forces beyond her control. “Valentine’s Day hits different this year,” she declared in February:
Most of us were socialized to imagine our happily-ever-after a certain way: marriage, children, homeownership, a golden retriever. This dream was never attainable for everyone thanks to structural inequity and a royally fucked economy, but in 2025 it feels even further out of reach for some, and like a nightmare to others. It is difficult to celebrate love and hope at a time when we are losing the freedom to make choices about our bodies, our futures, and our identities. . . .
(That dastardly Trump is to blame!)
As a childfree queer woman, I am not in the mood for love this Valentine’s Day. I’m feeling cynical and scared. At some point over the last decade I morphed into a heteropessimist. . . .
(She’s “morphed,” you see!)
I am pessimistic about the state of heterosexual dating. For a myriad of reasons, it is largely cis straight men who make heterosexual dating a cursed experience. . . . But my friends and I have been sexually assaulted and abused by casual partners and life partners alike. Almost every woman I care about who dates men has had a horrifying experience recently. Roughly once every six months I get a phone call from a female friend scared for her life because a man who seemed trustworthy suddenly revealed himself to be anything but.
Even men who aren’t violent still commit endless slights out of entitlement and privilege . . .
As a bisexual woman, I am making an effort to decenter cis men in my life and seek out partners of other genders. I want out of the heteropatriarchal monogamous script . . .
See, it’s the system — “structural inequity” and “the heteropatriarchal monogamous script” — which Ella blames for her woes. Her own bad judgment has nothing to do with it. All those “cis straight men” just abusing her (and her friends, too), and there’s nothing women can do about it. Has Ella ever contemplated the conundrum of why feminism, despite its rhetoric about women’s “empowerment,” so often leads women to be just like her — lonely, bitter and hopeless?
Probably not. Like feminists generally, Ella Dawson’s whole worldview is based on the idea that she is always right, and men are always wrong, and therefore anything bad that happens to her is not her fault.
So the teenage sluts go twerking around Daytona Beach, heedless of the future, convinced that they will never suffer any harmful consequences of their behavior, but if they do — well, it’s not their fault. And I wonder what John Stuart Mill would say if he could see how things have turned out. Those Victorian prudes were right, you know.
I can’t remember posting any Sydney Sweeney since the whole jeans/genes kerfluffle, so I guess it’s about time. Wonder how long it’ll be before people begin shooping her into SS uniforms and making memes featuring her with Hitler quotes a la Taylor Swift? Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt. ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Doggie Emissions Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.
