The Social World

Author: Neal Pollack

  • Is Brendan Carr a ‘great American patriot?’

    Is Brendan Carr a ‘great American patriot?’

    “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show in September. Carr was leaning hard on ABC affiliates after Jimmy Kimmel made a slightly poor taste, but hardly out-of-bounds, comment about MAGA’s relationship to Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson. Carr then laid out his FCC doctrine quite clearly.

    “Companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

    In other words: nice TV channel you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Carr didn’t try to hide what he was doing or saying, and people were alarmed. No less an adversary of liberals than Ted Cruz compared Carr to a mob boss and called his threats “dangerous as hell.” Given that later in the week, after he returned to the airwaves, Kimmel said Cruz’s statements often made him “want to throw up” (and also said Cruz looks like Gargamel, the evil wizard who torments the Smurfs), Cruz clearly didn’t express those concerns out of a spirit of friendship with Kimmel. In Cruz’s eyes, the head of the FCC was presenting a danger to the principle of free speech, the unmovable bedrock of American society.

    The Kimmel affair was most Americans’ introduction to Carr, and what they saw made them uneasy. Not so Donald Trump, who referred to Carr as a “great American patriot.” As is so often the case, the biggest requirement to be a member of the Trump court is not just competency (though that helps), or even loyalty (mandatory), but willingness to deploy every power at your disposal to destroy Trump’s enemies, real or perceived. And few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Carr.

    Carr, a Republican, entered the FCC’s orbit during the Obama administration as a legal advisor to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. Trump nominated him as a commissioner in 2017. During Trump’s first term, Carr devoted most of his energy to two projects that were uncontroversial, at least to the public at large: streamlining the rollout of 5G towers and advocating for the repeal of net neutrality. He met with opposition and criticism from Democrats, but it was hardly headline-making stuff.

    Few pro-Trump bulldogs in the government have a sharper bite right now than Brendan Carr

    The ground shifted in 2022 when Carr began communicating with Wesley Coopersmith, the chief of staff to the president of the Heritage Foundation, about writing the FCC section of Project 2025, a blueprint for establishing a conservative philosophy at the deepest levels of government. “I would be interested,” Carr wrote. “Provided doing so clears ethics review.” Somehow it did clear the ethics review, because Carr agreed to do the work pro bono. Carr’s chapter is actually quite wonky, if definitely Republican-tinged, including proposals for deregulating wireless services, eliminating regulations that prevent growth in broadband coverage, and banning TikTok to protect government security. There’s also a substantial section on “reining in Big Tech.” So, unlike a recent South Park episode that depicted Carr flying around Mar-a-Lago, propelled by explosive diarrhea, he’s actually a serious person. He’s also a full inside-the-court type, visiting Mar-a-Lago and occasionally sporting a gold lapel pin featuring the President’s face.

    In 2022, speaking out against Twitter and other social networks’ repression of conservative viewpoints, Carr tweeted that “free speech is not a threat to democracy – censorship is.” He also said that “political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech” and “people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” He was an advocate of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, saying it might “bend Twitter’s content moderation towards a greater embrace of free speech.”

    In 2023, he tweeted, “Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Then Carr took charge of the FCC, and the authoritarian’s dream came true. Upon Trump’s election, he issued a statement that the FCC should be “reining in Big Tech, ensuring broadcasters operate in the public interest and unleashing economic growth while advancing our national security interests and supporting law enforcement.” In this case, though, the “public interest” seemed to directly align with the Trump administration’s interests.

    Eyebrows were raised further when the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger the same week that CBS canceled the show of Stephen Colbert, a frequent, pompous and obnoxious Trump critic. At the time, CBS cited the show’s low ratings and Colbert’s excessive salary, both verifiable facts. But when Sinclair and Nexstar, broadcast syndicates with strong Trump ties, said they were pulling Kimmel’s show after his comments about Kirk’s death – and ABC decided to take Kimmel off the air – the decision-making process became murkier.

    As Johnson put it after his interview with Carr, “It’s called soft power. The left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the right has learned how to wield power as well.” There’s certainly truth to that. Liberal soft power ran Roseanne Barr out of the entertainment industry on a rail, forcing her off her high-rated sitcom because she made a racist joke about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. Trump himself was banned from some social media sites for a few years. But there’s still something particularly uncomfortable about the idea that private broadcast companies, which depend on the federal government for licenses, might be bullied into making editorial decisions because politicians and their regulators take issue with their programming.

    But Carr meets the boss’s approval, and that’s all that matters. On Friday, September 26, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is Smart, Tough, and a True American Patriot. He is supported by MAGA, like few others. Keep up the GREAT work, Brendan. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11’

    ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11’

    The American comedy world finds itself embroiled in a not-so-civil war of words over the Riyadh Comedy Festival, sponsored by the Saudi royal family. The Saudis have given enormous paychecks to big names like Kevin Hart, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, and Bill Burr. 

    On one side, you have the people invited to perform at the festival, who mostly lean toward the anti-woke, sometimes-semi-canceled, will-do-anything-for-a-dollar camp. On the other, you have hyper-woke, mostly male Gen X comics whose routines these days involve delivering panicked podcast screeds about the end of democracy. 

    Our comedy scene is booming like never before, though it’s rarely been less funny, and the Riyadh Comedy Festival has performed a public service by revealing exactly what type of morons American comics truly are. 

    Grumblings about the Riyadh festival have been stirring for months, but reached a peak when it actually kicked off last weekend. “From the folks that brought you 9/11,” Marc Maron said on Instagram a couple of weeks ago. “Two weeks of laughter in the desert, don’t miss it.” The Saudis didn’t invite Maron, who said, “It’s kind of easy for me to take the high road on this one. Easy to maintain your integrity when no one’s offering to buy it out.”

    It was less easy for comedian Shane Gillis, who turned down the Saudi money bag. He revealed his “principled stand” on his “Secret Podcast,” saying “You don’t 9/11 your friends.”

    But no one went harder against Riyadh than never-nude David Cross, who posted a screed on his website. “I am disgusted, and deeply disappointed in this whole gross thing. That people I admire, with unarguable talent, would condone this totalitarian fiefdom for… what, a fourth house? A boat? More sneakers?

    “These are some of my HEROES! Now look, some of you folks don’t stand for anything so you don’t have any credibility to lose, but my god, Dave and Louie and Bill, and Jim? Clearly you guys don’t give a shit about what the rest of us think, but how can any of us take any of you seriously ever again? All of your bitching about “cancel culture” and “freedom of speech” and all that shit? Done. You don’t get to talk about it ever again. By now we’ve all seen the contract you had to sign…You’re performing for literally, the most oppressive regime on earth. They have SLAVES for fuck’s sake!!!”

    Around the web, comedy podcasts, blogs, feeds and comment sections on comedy podcast blog feeds are appalled that these comedian “heroes” would accept a seven-figure check for performing in a foreign country. Suddenly, every person who has ever been onstage or in the audience at the Comedy Cellar cares about Jamal Khashoggi or the rights of Saudi women, who’ve been legally allowed to drive, after all, since 2018. Now you care about “artwashing”?  The self-righteousness is a little hard to stomach. 

    Then you have Bill Burr, who performed at the festival and has made a vast fortune not giving a shit what anyone thinks. He says the much-criticized “restrictions” placed on comedians at the event boiled down to: don’t make fun of the government, or talk about religion, which actually is kind of a lot. But Burr, on his podcast, still marveled at how the Saudis were “just like us” and that Riyadh has Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Chili’s. 

    “It was great to experience that part of the world and to be a part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia,” Burr said. “The royals loved the show. Everyone was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I’ve been talking to are saying, ‘Dude, you can feel [the audience] wanted it. They want to see real stand-up comedy.’ It was a mind-blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I’ve had. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of positive things.”

    Easy for the rich guy to say, but Burr does seem a lot happier in the aggregate than David Cross. Then there’s Dave Chappelle, the most self-absorbed man on the planet not named Donald Trump. Chappelle said onstage in Saudi Arabia that “it’s easier to talk here than in America.” He even told the audience that he was afraid to return to America because he’s not allowed to truly speak his mind. He said he’d let his new Saudi fans know if he was being censored, even though the odds of Dave Chappelle actually being censored are lower than the Carolina Panthers winning the Super Bowl. 

    Chappelle said, in the creepy conspiratorial audience whisper that’s his trademark, “It’s got to be something I would never say in practice, so if I actually say it, you’ll know never to listen to anything else I say after that. Here’s the phrase: ‘I stand with Israel.’” 

    Nice, Chappelle. Also, up yours, you anti-Semitic jerk. Enjoy your freedoms. 

    Much less controversial than Chappelle in Saudi Arabia was Kevin Hart, the world’s greatest sellout. “I love what y’all are doing here,” he said. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.” 

    With that, the positive ambassador of T-Mobile and Capital One credit cards went back to his hotel suite to wallow in his pile of gold. 

  • The ‘Great Spiritizing’ of the top brass  

    The ‘Great Spiritizing’ of the top brass  

    “Today we end the War on Warriors,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, author of the book The War On Warriors, tweeted this morning. Today was the day that Hegseth really became Secretary of War, addressing, along with President Trump, a full gathering of top military brass in Quantico, Virginia. 

    “This is only an esprit de corps,” the President said, as he set sail from the White House for the event. “Do you know what that is, an esprit de corps? This is only a spirit. These are our generals, our admirals, our leaders, and it’s a good thing, a thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world. And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense to that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets, frankly. But this was the one time we had to do a great spiritizing.”

    The Great Spiritizing began with remarks from Hegseth saying that he had spent his early days at the War Department rooting out “toxic ideological garbage” of DEI and diversity. “We are done with that shit,” he said. “I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal.”

    From now on, Hegseth said, all military personnel would have to pass a twice-yearly “male-level” fitness test. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”

    Hegseth, who has either not seen or disagrees with Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket, said basic training will be “scary, tough, and disciplined.” Drill sergeants can instill fear in new soldiers. “They can toss bunks, they can swear – and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”

    Sir, yes sir!

    And now it was time to hear from the President of the United States, who doesn’t have to pass a twice-yearly military fitness test. Trump got to play good cop today, providing a warm fatherly contrast to Hegseth’s frightening telesoldier persona.

    “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” Trump said.

    “Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Because there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

    No one left the room. They spent most of their time sitting attentively, unemotive, ramrod-straight, as per their training. But why would you leave the show of a lifetime? Trump decided to use this moment to break the news that because he had felt a “little bit threatened” by Russia, he’d decided to deploy a nuclear submarine, “the most lethal weapon ever made”, off the coast of Russia. “I call it the ‘N-word,’” he said. “There are two ‘N-words,’ and you can’t use either of them.”

    Trump spent 72 minutes praising “the strongest military in the history of the world,” which is something, he said, his predecessor Joe Biden, “the autopen,” never said. Actually, “he never said anything,” Trump said. While addressing the Department of War – “I love the name, I think it’s gonna stop wars” – Trump also advocated for his newly-formed Board of Peace. If his Gaza peace plan works out, that would be the eighth war ended in eight months. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “Nobody’s ever done that.”

    “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing. They’ll give it to a guy that wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump… We’ll see what happens, but it would be a big insult to our country. I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it.” And one of the ways Trump said he’s going to win the Nobel Peace Prize is by killing foreign drug traffickers. “If you try to poison our people,” he said, “we will blow you out of existence.”

    But today wasn’t about Donald Trump, even though of course it was. It was about the Armed Forces. “Everybody wants to be in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, and our Space Force, our beautiful Space Force. A year ago you would have thought it wouldn’t have been possible. They were talking about making it smaller. Now we’re talking about making it larger. And that’s a beautiful thing. Everybody wants to be doing what you’re doing now. What a difference a Presidential election can make.”

    This went on and on, but the real news of the speech was that Trump announced to his soon-to-be non-fat top brass that the U.S. military would soon deploy to defeat “the enemy within.” “San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” in a statement that will please some, infuriate others, and terrify those prone to feeling Trump-related terror.

    Thus Spiritized, America’s top military brass set forth to destroy the enemy within. They had their marching orders, to fight wars and also to not fight wars. Either way, the goal was the same. As Ricky Bobby once said, if you’re not first, you’re last.

  • Kimmel makes the case for free speech

    After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. 

    Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” He quickly delivered a tearful apology to the friends, family, and devotees of Charlie Kirk and an equally tearful praise of Erika Kirk’s astonishing forgiveness of her husband’s assassin. Kimmel said he believes in the teachings of Jesus, and that Erika Kirk’s words “touched me deeply.”

    But the majority of Kimmel’s opening monologue was a full-throated defense of himself, and of freedom of speech. He joked that he’d received a job offer from Germany. “This country has become so authoritarian that the Germans are offering me a job,” he said. 

    He thanked Republicans like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Rand Paul who stood up for him. “People who I never would have imagined… said something very beautiful on my behalf… I don’t agree with many of those people on most subjects. Some of the things they say even make me want to throw up. It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did. And they deserve credit for it.”

    Specifically, he singled out Ted Cruz, who really went to bat for Kimmel in the last week. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said. “If Ted Cruz can’t speak freely then he can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.”

    Above all else, Kimmel, quite correctly, made one thing clear: “Our government cannot be allowed to control what we can and cannot say on television… This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

    Meanwhile, the Donald was attacking on Truth Social. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” said the President of the United States about a late-night comedian. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”

    Kimmel had not yet seen this post. Even as Trump was ranting about him after an eventful day at the UN, Kimmel started taking digs at Trump, showing a clip where Trump said Kimmel had “no ratings.” 

    “Well,” Kimmel smirked triumphantly. “I do tonight. He tried to cancel me, and he instead forced millions of people to watch my show. That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein Files to distract from this.“

    Kimmel pointed out that Sinclair and Nexstar, who own 20 percent of ABC affiliates, were currently keeping him off the air in Seattle, Portland, Washington, DC, and his wife’s hometown of St. Louis, “so I guess they’ll have to watch this on YouTube or whatever.”

    He said “I never thought I’d be in a situation like this,” but the one thing he learned from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and other childhood heroes is that “silencing a comedian is un-American.”

    After a commercial break, Kimmel aired a meh skit where Robert DeNiro played an anonymous tough-guy mob boss type who was now running the FCC. Those jokes didn’t really land, but then Kimmel got in some good jabs about Trump’s weird visit to the UN, calling him “Ramblestiltskin.” He had special fun with Trump’s press conference yesterday where the President went on an all-time rant against Tylenol. “Follow the medical advice of Donald Trump,” Kimmel said, “and you too can look like a glazed ham with deep vein thrombosis.”

    Just like that, America was great again.

  • Is Kash Patel up to the job?

    The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words:

    “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.”

    A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?”

    If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job. In the Kirk case, they had their suspect within thirty-three hours. As Patel pointed out in testimony to Congress the following week, it took five days to find the Boston bomber and five days to catch Luigi Mangione.

    But there were still mistakes leading up to Tyler Robinson’s arrest. On the evening of the assassination, Patel announced on X that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” The FBI had someone in custody to be certain, but it wasn’t the shooter. Two hours later Patel had to tweet that a 71-year-old man named George Zinn, who later said that he confessed to distract from the actual shooter but also revealed that he had child porn on his phone, had been “released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”

    The situation deteriorated before improving. The morning after the shooting, Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino convened agents in Salt Lake City and chewed them out for taking nearly twelve hours to show him a photo of Tyler Robinson. He called their efforts “Mickey Mouse operations,” and, the New York Times said, “it was one of his few utterances without profanity.” By that evening, Patel was offering, profanity-free, a $100,000 reward for information leading to Kirk’s killer’s arrest. Appearing on Fox and Friends the Monday after the assassination, Patel said that the FBI had evidence, including the alleged killer’s messages.

    “The suspect wrote a note saying, ‘I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.’ That note was written before the shooting.” Robinson had destroyed the note but the FBI had reconstructed it, “because of our aggressive interview posture.” By Tuesday, we were all reading Robinson’s confession to his lover and roommate online. Patel had his man.

    Patel was a controversial FBI pick from the jump. He joined the federal government as a Department of Justice staffer during the Obama administration but left the DOJ to work for Trump loyalist Congressman Devin Nunes. Patel was the primary author of the “Nunes Memo,” which argued, among other things, that the FBI had over-relied on the Steele Dossier in its attempt to prove that Russia had interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. This proved Patel’s MAGA bona fides and helped win him a seat on the National Security Council. Toward the end of his first term, Trump said that he intended to make Patel the deputy director of the CIA, an action that caused then-director Gina Haspel to threaten to resign.

    If the Kirk assassination really does demark a new Days of Rage, and if President Trump is serious about labeling antifa a terrorist organization, today’s FBI needs to be up to the job.

    After Trump lost in 2020, Patel wandered a bit in the wilderness, publishing three children’s books and joining the board of the Trump Media & Technology Group. He hosted a streaming show called Kash’s Corner on a Falun Gong-run streaming service and filled in for Steve Bannon on War Room when Bannon went to jail. He also worked as a consultant for a company, based in the Cayman Islands, that operates the e-commerce platform Shein.

    Given his typically bizarre Trumpian résumé, a partisanly divided Congress narrowly confirmed Patel in February. Soon afterwards, he announced he would transfer 500 FBI agents to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, which didn’t happen. Then he said he would shift the bureau’s operations to his home in Nevada, which also didn’t happen, and that he would partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to change the bureau’s fitness test. Trump briefly named Patel the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Patel rarely appeared at the ATF offices and by April someone else had the job.

    But all of that was background chatter until the Kirk assassination placed Patel square in the klieg lights. His endlessly meme-able face wasn’t just a comic sideshow anymore.

    Even as the investigation into Kirk’s murder continued, Patel headed to DC for congressional hearings into his dismissal of several prominent agents, including, controversially, the senior agent of the Utah field office. Patel played his partisan bulldog role at the hearing, calling California’s Adam Schiff “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate” and “a political buffoon at best.” New Jersey’s Cory Booker was in full schoolmarm mode.

    “Mr. Patel, I think you’re not going to be around long. I think this might be your last oversight hearing,” Booker said. “Donald Trump has shown us in his first term, and in this term, he is not loyal to people like you. He will cut you loose.”

    That’s not likely. Trump is proving much more loyal to his appointees in his second regency. Patel may be the most eccentric person to hold his office since the first (and most powerful), J. Edgar Hoover. But with the swift, if somewhat chaotic, capture of Robinson – which was helped along by the suspect’s family – the ninth FBI director delivered a return on Trump’s investment. As long as he stops preemptively tweeting, he might stick around. Discretion is at least half the job.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Tyl and error

    Tyl and error

    “DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said.

    It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz. Trump said that pregnant women should only take Tylenol in an emergency. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do,” Trump said. But any attempts to spin this as quackery unfounded in science are going to fall flat.

    In fact, the acetaminophen warnings come from a study that the Harvard School of Public Health, hardly a Trump-driven institution, published a month ago. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary also announced a push to give a drug called leucovorin to children with autism. Leucovorin is essentially a vitamin supplement used to address folate deficiency in cancer patients, and studies have found it’s effective in treating autism symptoms, which now affect approximately one in 31 of American children, and one in a dozen boys. That was the essential substance of the press conference, during which Trump showed a lot of sympathy for children with autism and their families. He also said that he has a lot of “fat friends” who take Ozempic. “Let me tell you,” he said. “They don’t look so good.”

    But beyond the President’s War On Tylenol, which will clearly grab all the headlines, this press conference signified something much more important. Appearing with Trump were RFK Jr. from HHS, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health, Makary from the FDA, and Dr. Oz, who these days only appears on TV to talk about his work in running the Medicaid program. They spoke in a unified voice about this issue.

    RFK said, “we have broken down barriers between agencies, and fast-tracked solutions.” This will be the first in a series of autism announcements that “will be a model to deliver the framework for similar results for other chronic conditions that plague Americans.” Makary said “this is The start of a historic shift in medical culture. A charge to identify root causes. We’re not going to stop until we address the root causes of this suffering. It may be entirely preventable.”

    This marks an extraordinary cultural shift. Typically, the FDA, HHS, NIH, and Centers for Disease Control have operated within silos of research and information. Their lack of coordination and communication have led to a massive public-health crisis that formed the basis for the MAHA movement. This is significant way beyond the President issuing the same warning about Tylenol for pregnant women a dozen times in an hour. He’s just the very loud messenger. But the health and medicine branch of his Administration is united with common purpose, and it’s going to yield extremely interesting and highly controversial results.

    Quite telling is the fact that the major voice speaking out against the Administration’s Tylenol warnings is Kenvue, the drug’s manufacturer. Oh, and also The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which issued a statement saying that Tylenol is safe for pregnant women. At the event, a reporter brought this up. After Trump was doing calling it a “nasty question,” he said, dismissively, “That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups. Maybe they’re right.”
    “But I don’t think they are.”


  • America pays tribute to Charlie Kirk

    America pays tribute to Charlie Kirk

    In an exhilarating, often exhausting and unprecedented moment in American history, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in an Arizona football stadium on Sunday afternoon to honor slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Attendees included dozens of members of Congress, half the Cabinet, President Trump, Vice-President Vance and the former shadow President, Elon Musk.

    They remembered Kirk as a husband, a father, a friend, a true believer in the American way, a devotee of freedom of speech and civil discourse, a lover of classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and, perhaps most significantly, a warrior for the Christian God, belief in whom animated Kirk’s every utterance and every action.

    Kirk’s memorial, or, as many speakers, including Vance, called it, “revival,” was perhaps the most Christian event in American history to take place outside a church setting. Devotional music augmented every minute of the proceedings, with many members of the passionate crowd singing along. In one of the most stunning and beautiful moments of grace in memory, Kirk’s widow, Erika, fought back tears as she said that Kirk wanted “to save young men, just like the one who took his life. I forgive him, I forgive him because it’s what Christ did and it’s what Charlie would do.”

    Erika Kirk’s redemptive words and composure, somewhat muted a few minutes later when President Trump implied he would seek the federal death penalty for Charlie Kirk’s accused killer Tyler Robinson, stood in direct contrast to the cruel, graceless left-wing celebrations that occurred online in the days after Kirk’s death.

    The revival proceedings included a predictably unhinged, vengeful rant by Trump advisor Stephen Miller, a rambling address by Tucker Carlson, combative MAGA thumping from the extremely online Jack Posobiec, and classy remarks from Tulsi Gabbard and a clearly grieving Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As always, though, President Trump’s appearance, which came at nearly the five-hour mark of a very long ceremony, was the highlight.

    Trump appeared on stage surrounded by sparklers as an aged Lee Greenwood, facing him like a lover in a duet, crooned “I’m Proud To Be An American.” The President, never one to stay entirely on message, talked about sending federal troops into Chicago, about declaring war on Antifa, and called Jimmy Kimmel an “anchor with no talent and low ratings.” He also reiterated that he was going to be awarding Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom and called the assassination “an assault on our most sacred God-given liberties and God-given rights. The gun was pointed at him but the bullet was aimed at all of us…The assassin failed in this quest because Charlie’s message has not been silenced, and now is bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

    It was a vintage Trump performance with something for everyone, unless you are a “radical left lunatic.” On political violence and freedom of speech, he had this to say: “No side has a monopoly on disturbed or misguided people, but there’s one part of our political community which believes they have a monopoly on truth…If speech is violence, then some are bound to conclude that violence is justified to stop speech.”

    When it came to religion, Trump said, “We have to bring back religion to America because without borders, law and order and religion you really don’t have a country anymore.” But though Trump invoked God a number of times, and expressed admiration for the Christian faith of the Kirk family, his presentation was not overtly religious. In fact, at one point he said Kirk “did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagree with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want what’s best for them. I’m sorry, I am sorry Erika.” That was very non-Christian of Trump, but you cannot say the same thing for the Kirk revival as a whole.

    It’s one thing if Charlie Kirk’s pastor, coworkers, friends, widow, or Benny Johnson say things like “Charlie looked at politics as an onramp to Jesus” or “Charlie was a prophet…not the fortunetelling kind, but the Biblical kind.” It’s another when the Secretary of State publicly preaches the Gospel truth about Christ’s resurrection in an event broadcast to countless millions around the world, as Marco Rubio did. JD Vance called Kirk a “martyr for the Christian faith”, as did many other speakers. He said, “The assassin expected us to have a funeral but instead we have had a revival in the celebration of Charlie Kirk and his Lord Jesus Christ.”

    Vance also said, “Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the King of Kings and all things flowed from that,” while also calling Kirk a lover of history, defender of the West, and the foremost practitioner of the Socratic method. “I have talked more about Jesus Christ the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life,” Vance said.

    He’s not the only one. This is the most Christian moment in America that I can recall, and I’ve been alive since the Nixon Presidency. On the one hand, Charlie Kirk was a devoted Christian, and is obviously a hugely influential figure in modern American political history; you can’t ignore the reality. And when you look at the shining, optimistic faces in the arena, or at the many spontaneous prayer gatherings that have sprung up since his murder, it’s far preferable to the bitter, angry, mendacious violent woke race Communism or whatever it is that modern progressives are offering. Kirk offered a message of faith, family, patriotism, and love, and a soul-sick nation, thirsty for optimism, responded.

    On the other hand, some of us will never accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior. I’m Jewish, so that’s right out for me, and there are other religious and non-religious people who sit in the same kettle. Not every spiritual journey ends with “He Is Risen.”

    The Kirk assassination is going to have deep reverberations throughout American history for a generation, and possibly beyond. I just hope that free and open dialogue and turning the other cheek end up being part of those reverberations.

  • The Facebook police come calling

    The Facebook police come calling

    In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.

    “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”

    They did not.

    “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

    The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”

    “You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”

    “You’re not being arrested.”

    “Then what are you doing here?”

    The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.

    “I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”

    Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.

    “So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”

    “Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”

    “Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”

    “Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”

    “You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”

    “No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”

    His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.

    “Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.

    “I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.

    “No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”

    We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.

    “Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”

    Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.

    “The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”

    Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.

    As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets.

  • Rand Paul needles fired CDC director Susan Monarez

    Rand Paul needles fired CDC director Susan Monarez

    Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and recently-fired CDC director Susan Monarez exchanged “testy” words about vaccines in a Senate hearing today. That should come as little surprise. Paul has long been a vaccine skeptic, if not an outright opponent.

    The day started with Monarez telling Congress that RFK Jr. tried to get the White House to fire her because she refused to “rubber-stamp” approve a schedule of HHS vaccinations. “He just wanted blanket approval,” Monarez said. “If I could not commit to blanket approval to each of the recommendations I would need to resign.”

    She added, “I refused to do it because I have built a career on scientific integrity, and my worst fear was that I would then be in a position of approving something that would reduce access to lifesaving vaccines to children and others who need them.”

    On the table is an HHS recommendation that people vaccinate newborns against Hepatitis B, which it has continually recommended since 1991. RFK Jr.’s advisory panel is scheduled to rescind that later this week. Paul supports the move, whereas Monarez said she would only support it if “science” backs it up. “All of us had agreed that the science evolves and we need to see the data and the evidence to ensure that we are protecting our children,” she said.

    That’s when the testiness began.

    “Does the Covid vaccine reduce hospitalization for children under 18?” Paul asked.

    “It can,” Monarez said.

    “It doesn’t… You resisted firing people who have this idea that the Covid vaccine should be at six months. That’s what this is about. You didn’t resist firing the beautiful scientists, the career people… unobjective and unbiased. You wouldn’t fire the people who are saying that we have to vaccinate our kids at six months of age. That’s who you refuse to fire.”

    The sarcasm dripped thickly from Paul’s tongue as he said this. He’s never gotten satisfactory answers from the government about social-distancing recommendations, or lockdowns, or school closures, or federal vaccine mandates. Those are in the past now, but people who opposed them haven’t forgotten. If today’s exchange seems like an anti-vax head-scratcher, that’s the context.

    Though this was supposed to be a hearing about RFK Jr.’s plans for HHS, and, in particular, his plans for childhood vaccine schedules, in reality it was part of a slow-moving ongoing referendum on America’s disastrous Covid policies during the Biden administration and the first Trump administration. We’ve never had a real truth and reconciliation commission on the topic, except maybe in Rand Paul’s mind, so today’s congressional hearings were really part of an ongoing concern.

    The hearings did nothing but further retrench the teams. On one side you have “trust the science” people, who believe in the infallibility of the medical establishment, even though that establishment, or at least the immunology end of it, completely failed us during Covid, which is part of the reason we have an RFK, Jr.-led CDC in the first place. On the other hand, you have people who believe that shots contain slow-acting poisons that will kill us sooner or later. Ordinary people are just waiting to hear whether or not the government thinks they should vaccinate their children. Today’s exchange, between the former head of the CDC and a Senator who used to be a ophthalmologist, left no one satisfied.

  • Trump leads tributes to Charlie Kirk

    Trump leads tributes to Charlie Kirk

    Charlie Kirk’s senseless murder on a Utah college campus yesterday led to an instant and disgusting avalanche of celebration from a small minority on the extremely online left. But Kirk’s friends and allies also rallied to pay tribute to the slain conservative activist. They know what we lost.

    President Trump gave a four-minute message from the Resolute Desk and Truth Social, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”

    In his video address, Trump took a somber, more combative tone, accurately calling this “heinous assassination” a “dark moment for America.” At a 9/11 commemoration this morning, the President announced he would be posthumously awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

    Kirk also received tributes from world leaders. Javier Milei of Argentina called him a “formidable spreader of the ideas of liberty and staunch defender of the West” and “the victim of an atrocious assassination in the middle of a wave of left-wing political violence.” Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu referred to him as a warrior for freedom and a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” “It is heartbreaking that a young family has been robbed of a father and a husband,” said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “We must all be free to debate openly and freely without fear – there can be no justification for political violence.”

    Vice President J.D. Vance published a lengthy tribute to Kirk on X. “Charlie had an uncanny ability to know when to push the envelope and when to be more conventional,” the VP wrote. “I’ve seen people attack him for years for being wrong on this or that issue publicly, never realizing that privately he was working to broaden the scope of acceptable debate.”

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was “heartbroken” and called Kirk “an incredible husband and father and a great American.” Donald Trump Jr. called Kirk “a true inspiration,” “like a little brother to me” and “one of the most courageous, principled men I’ve ever known.”

    “Charlie was never a threat to anyone,” Don Jr. wrote. “He was civil, he was kind, he listened and responded with respect. The only ‘threat’ he ever posed was that he was incredibly effective. He was a powerful messenger of truth, and people heard that truth. That’s what made him a target.”

    The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote, “It was a privilege to watch this principled man stand up for his beliefs and create the single most important conservative political organization in America.”

    Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports said, “It doesn’t matter what your opinion is of Charlie or his politics; if you don’t view this as one of the darkest days in American history than you are part of the problem.”

    In a country so deeply divided, it was good to see kindness from Democratic politicians too. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who hosted Kirk on his podcast, wrote that the “senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.”

    Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, speaking at a New York campaign event, took the opportunity to condemn a “plague” of gun violence, said, “it’s not a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity.” Mamdani struck the right tone; there’s a reason why he’s winning.