Washington Post new direction

Jeff Bezos

@JeffBezos

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction. I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.  

Jeff

https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088 

Rampant crime in America

 

https://themostimportantnews.com/archives/11-shocking-examples-of-how-completely-and-utterly-lawless-our-society-has-become

11 Shocking Examples Of How Completely And Utterly Lawless Our Society Has Become

February 23, 2025

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A lot of people out there just want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that everything is just great.  Meanwhile, rampant lawlessness is raging all around us and our society is literally coming apart at the seams.  I just don’t get it.  How can people insist that things are fine when just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is on the rise?  Nobody can deny that the moral decay of America is accelerating, and unless we reverse course and choose another direction conditions will continue to get even worse.  The following are 11 shocking examples of how completely and utterly lawless our society has become…

#1 We are in the midst of the worst wave of cargo theft in our history.  Earlier today, I came across a Los Angeles Times article about a very alarming series of train heists that have been taking place in the Mojave Desert…

The thieves stealthily board eastbound freight trains, hiding out until they reach lonely stretches of the Mojave Desert or high plains far from towns. They slash an air brake hose, causing the mile-long line of railcars to screech to an emergency stop.

Then, they go shopping.

That’s the modus operandi described by investigators in a string of at least 10 heists targeting BNSF trains in California and Arizona since last March. All but one resulted in the theft of Nike sneakers, their combined value approaching $2 million, according to investigators.

Thankfully, authorities have been able to catch some of those that have been involved in these thefts.

Of the eleven suspects that were charged in relation to a heist on January 13th, nine of them were in the U.S. illegally.

Sadly, these sneaker thefts are just the tip of the iceberg.

We are being told that there were “at least 65,000 railroad cargo thefts last year”, and that represented a whopping 40 percent jump from the year before…

There were at least 65,000 railroad cargo thefts last year, a 40% increase from 2023, according to industry estimates compiled by the Assn. of American Railroads. The thefts — which are typically classified as burglaries because they don’t involve directly confronting victims, as with robberies — are believed to have cost the nation’s largest rail companies more than $100 million, according to the trade group.

Those figures may be an undercount, because railroads don’t publicize all thefts, Lewis said. Details typically emerge publicly only when arrests are made and criminal complaints are filed.

#2 A McDonald’s location in Brooklyn has completely banned everyone under the age of 20 from entering because of all the crime kids have been committing there…

A crime-ridden Brooklyn McDonald’s is carding customers at the door and forbidding anyone under 20 to enter without a parent or proper ID — in what might be a first for the fast food goliath.

The restaurant, at Nostrand and Flatbush avenues took the drastic step last week, after a group of kids wearing ski masks swirled in after school and attacked a security guard, breaking a glass door, according to manager Amber Hussain.

Over the past year, large groups of teens have regularly been causing all sorts of chaos at that particular McDonald’s…

Every day after school for the year she’s worked there, somewhere between 15 to 20 teenagers come in and “trash the store” — throwing ice at customers, snatching bags of foods from Uber drivers and smoking weed inside the restaurant, Hussain told The Post.

The McDonald’s — in the area nicknamed “the junction” — is infamous in the neighborhood. It’s been the scene of multiple shootings and stabbings over the years.

#3 Speaking of Brooklyn, a 23-year-old man has just been charged with repeatedly raping a 7-year-old boy and posting videos of the abuse on the dark web…

A Brooklyn man allegedly raped a young boy he was babysitting, filmed the vile abuse and posted it on the dark web — and authorities fear there may be other victims.

Ramel “Menah” Warner lived with the victim’s family in Brooklyn for two years and frequently babysat the 7-year-old victim, federal prosecutors said in court papers. Warner, 23, allegedly made six different videos of the abuse, investigators said.

He was charged Jan. 29 in federal court with acting in a manner injurious to a child, forcible touching, and sexual abuse of an individual under the age of 11.

#4 Apparently someone that does not like Elon Musk very much just shot up a Tesla dealership in Salem, Oregon…

A Tesla dealership in Salem was vandalized Wednesday morning, about a month after a vehicle at the dealership was lit on fire.

Police officers responded just before 5 a.m. to a report of windows damaged at the dealership on Mission Street Northwest. The officers found the windows damaged from gunshots.

#5 Romance scams have become extremely popular in recent years.  But one woman with dual citizenship took things to an entirely new level by killing several of her victims…

A Las Vegas woman with dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship ran a “romance scam on steroids” that caused the deaths of three people, FBI Special Agent in Charge Spencer Evans said during a news conference where, with the Nevada U.S. attorney’s office, he announced the unsealing of a 21-count superseding indictment against her.

Apparently Aurora Phelps was targeting men in their 70s and 80s, and she would use drugs to incapacitate them…

“We believe Phelps connected with each of them through an online dating application, so she could lure them into her confidence under false pretenses and then drug them with dangerous doses of prescription sedatives or other controlled substances,” Evans said. “Once she incapacitated her victims, Phelps stole their cars, accessed their bank and brokerage accounts to withdraw cash and used their credit cards to make a variety of purchases — including luxury retail goods and gold.”

Three of the four victims in the indictment were found dead shortly after their encounters with Phelps, Evans said. One died in Southern Nevada, according to a graphic of a timeline presented by Evans.

Thankfully, law enforcement was able to catch up with Aurora Phelps, but there are countless other romance scammers out there these days.

#6 Some of the most evil criminals of all often occupy some of the highest positions in our society.  After all this time, the Washington Post has finally been forced to admit that Dr. Anthony Fauci really was funding horrific beagle abuse and that he worked really hard to cover it up…

• In a shocking turn of events, the Washington Post has admitted it published disinformation fed to it by NIH to discredit White Coat Waste Project and defend Fauci from our evidence that he funded beagle abuse in Tunisia.
• The move came days after Congress confronted him about the beagle testing we exposed and Fauci admitted to Congress that he personally signed off the dog labs
• Internal NIH records obtained by WCW prove that Fauci funded the Tunisian dog lab and that he was involved in a cover-up to mislead the media and public.
• Within hours of Fauci complaining to colleagues he was being “bombarded by protests” over Beaglegate, the NIH fabricated a story that they were mistakenly cited as the funder, had the journal issue a correction, fed the fake news to WaPo, and worked to scrub the project from its website.

Of course now that Joe Biden has pardoned Fauci, it is highly unlikely that he will ever be charged for his numerous crimes.

#7 The New York Post recently ran a story with this very alarming headline: “Trans migrant charged with raping 14-year-old boy in NYC bathroom”…

A migrant transgender woman wanted by federal immigration officials allegedly stalked and raped a boy in Manhattan this week, The Post has learned.

Nicol Suarez allegedly followed the 14-year-old into the bathroom of a bodega across the street from Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem Tuesday and attacked him, police and sources said.

The boy then left the bathroom and flagged down witnesses, who alerted police, the sources said.

#8 In North Carolina, a 44-year-old woman that is married and that is the mother of two children has been charged with 80 counts of child rape.  The two boys that she repeatedly had sexual encounters with were 12 years old at the time…

A married mother-of-two was arrested in North Carolina on 80 counts of child rape.

Sara Jean Sellers, of Shallotte, was arrested on Friday on multiple charges related to sexual crimes against children, according to the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office.

The 44-year-old mother engaged in these alleged acts from 2018-2019, and two boys who were 12-years-old at the time are said to be involved, prosecutors said.

#9 This next example is even worse.  A teacher in Houston, Texas was actually pimping out students at her school.  One victim was allegedly being forced to have sex with five to ten men a night…

Student sues Houston, TX school district for IGNORING her pleas for help after being trafficked by a teacher for sex.

Texas teacher Kedria Grigsby allegedly recruited, groomed and trafficked several teen girls for sex.

One victim says she was forced to sleep with 5-10 men a night and make $1,000 a day for the teacher. When she showed up to school with bruises, the school allegedly ignored her.

#10 For hackers looking for a huge score, crypto heists have become a really big thing.  Unfortunately, Bybit was just the victim of the largest crypto heist of all time…

As reported by the BBC, Dubai-based crypto firm Bybit is down $1.5 billion in Ethereum after hackers compromised its digital wallet. If the hackers successfully make off with the dough, that would make this the largest single crypto heist ever, more than doubling the previous record holder’s ill-gotten gains.

#11 Even when vicious criminals are caught, in most cases it is just a matter of time before they are released.  In Connecticut, a cannibal that literally ate the eyeball and part of the brain of a man after killing him with an axe is back on the streets…

A cannibal in Connecticut has been granted conditional release from a psychiatric hospital after brutally killing a man with an axe, eating one of his eyeballs, and part of his brain.

Benjamin Franklin once said that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom”.

In the early days of this country, our society was not plagued by theft, rape, scams and violence.

That is because Americans were much more virtuous in those days.  If we also want to be virtuous, we need to return to what they believed.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what has happened to us.

Any society that embraces evil will be plagued by evil.

Being lawless is a choice.  At this point our moral decline is so advanced that it really would be a major miracle to get this country turned around again.

Michael’s new  book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written eight other  books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s  books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

Associated Propaganda

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-vs-the-ap-an-american-standoff-media-news-language-style-guide-white-house-access-78c25b2a?st=Cjx15x&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Trump vs. the AP: An American Standoff

The president targets the wire service whose stylebook is the wellspring of journalistic groupthink.

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By 

James Taranto

Feb. 23, 2025 

There’s often a deeper meaning to Donald Trump’s absurdist comedy, and the president’s current dustup with the Associated Press is a case in point. On Inauguration Day Mr. Trump impishly announced that the U.S. would change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to “Gulf of America.” The AP was not amused. “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years,” it declared in a Jan. 23 “style guidance” dispatch. “The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”

Now the White House and the wire service are locked in what Mr. Trump might call an American standoff. The AP has been stripped of its position in the traveling presidential press pool and excluded from covering limited-capacity events. “It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” executive editor Julie Pace said in a statement. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.” On Friday the wire service sued three White House officials in federal court.

I side with the AP on the style question, but then I’m reactionary about names. I still say Twitter, Washington Redskins, Burma and Bruce Jenner. I find the White House’s actions in this matter amusing, not alarming, and they plainly don’t violate the First Amendment.

In 2018, CNN went to court and won a temporary restraining order after the White House revoked correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credential. But the judge didn’t rule on the network’s First Amendment claim, the White House restored Mr. Acosta’s credential, and CNN dropped the litigation. The AP’s reporters still have their White House credentials, making the wire service’s case considerably weaker than CNN’s was. The freedom of the press doesn’t entail a right to privileged access, and the word “Associated” appears nowhere in the Constitution. The relief the AP seeks—a judicial injunction compelling physical access to the president’s chambers—would be a gross encroachment on the constitutional separation of powers.

Most news organizations (including the Journal) have responded to “Gulf of America” in the same way: by noting but declining to adopt Mr. Trump’s name change. Why did the White House single out the AP? Axios’s Marc Caputo reported on Feb. 17 that it was “to protest what aides see as years of liberal word choices that the wire service’s influential stylebook spread across mainstream media.” In emails to the AP on Feb. 18, chief of staff Susie Wiles confirmed that, according to the wire service’s lawsuit.

Contra Ms. Pace, the White House’s objection isn’t to the AP’s “independent journalism” but to its homogenizing effect on news coverage. As she notes in her statement, AP reporting reaches “billions of people around the world” when what she calls its “factual, nonpartisan journalism” is republished by member newspapers, broadcasters and websites. The AP has an even wider reach through its stylebook, which most of its members incorporate as their own. This would hardly matter if the stylebook stuck to matters of style, like whether to hyphenate “email” or when and how to abbreviate months and states. But there’s a lot of substance, including ideological substance.

The AP Stylebook is the wellspring of journalistic groupthink. Since it went online in 2002, the flood of conformity has intensified. Decrees and dogmas propagate far more rapidly than they did when the stylebook was a spiral-bound volume with new editions published years apart.

One of the most prominent examples looks deceptively like a question of pure style: A few years ago, the AP began capitalizing “black” when used as a racial designation. This was a telling change because in contrast with the Gulf of Mexico, the AP didn’t stick with tradition. Nor did it bow to a change in common usage, but to activist demands. “Words, like Black lives, matter,” David Lanham of the National Association of Black Journalists wrote in an open letter to the AP on June 16, 2020. “It’s Black, with a capital B.”

The wire service complied three days later, its timing rich with symbolism—at the height of a nationwide frenzy over race and on June 19, now the federal holiday of Juneteenth. With some exceptions, liberals (including most news organizations) fell into line with the AP, while conservatives didn’t. The Supreme Court, for instance, has split, with the three Democratic appointees and Justice Neil Gorsuch opting for “Black.” The “nonpartisan” AP attempted to position itself at the vanguard of history and succeeded in stranding itself on one side of America’s ideological gulf.

Mr. Caputo reports that White House aides’ “grievances” against the AP extend to immigration (the stylebook bans “alien,” “illegal immigrant,” “chain migration” and “anchor babies”), political violence (it discourages “riot” and “terrorism”), and overseas geography (it transliterates Ukraine’s capital as Kyiv, not Kiev). But the stylebook descends from bias into delusion with its “Transgender Coverage Topical Guide.”

This is a 2,948-word ideological manifesto, although it doesn’t identify as a manifesto: “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology,” the guide instructs. It is filled with bizarre assertions and jargon, which reporters are mandated to accept as if they supersede the facts of life.

According to the guide, a child isn’t “born a boy or girl”; rather, sex is “usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate.” “Examples of gender identities include . . . nonbinary; bigender; agender; gender-fluid; genderqueer; and combinations of identities, such as nonbinary woman.” “Deadnaming a transgender person”—that is, accurately reporting such a person’s given name—“even posthumously in obituaries or other coverage, is often considered disrespectful to the deceased, their survivors and any transgender people.” If I worked for the AP, I would have to petition management for a dispensation to mention Bruce Jenner.

All this is cloaked in appeals to authority: “Experts from organizations including the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association say gender is a spectrum.” Reporters are instructed to squelch any challenge to the accepted authorities: “Don’t quote people speaking about biology or athletic regulations unless they have the proper background.” Ketanji Brown Jackson was following the AP Stylebook when she declined to define the word “woman” on the grounds that “I’m not a biologist.”

These editorial diktats have real-world effects. Sports teams, locker rooms, public rest rooms and prisons are segregated by sex primarily to protect the privacy and safety of women. Many women object when “transgender women”—men who conceive of themselves as being female—intrude into these areas. Good luck if they want fair treatment from the local newspaper, which is almost certainly an AP member. The AP’s policy—its “style”—is that those men are women, and the women who object to their presence in intimate spaces should stifle themselves.

In another Inauguration Day action, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It declared: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

That has been the case at least since sexual dimorphism emerged in trilobites, some 540 million years ago. If the AP is willing to deny the primordial truth about sex on the say-so of some authority figure, the Gulf of Mexico is a strange hill for it to die on. But I hope it does—or at least I hope both sides stand their ground after the AP loses in court and the result is a diminution of its influence on American journalism.

White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich promised in a Feb. 14 tweet that the space the AP used to occupy “will now be opened up to the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas.” The temptation will be to favor partisans who reliably take the administration’s side. But maybe there will be room for some who are genuinely curious, skeptical, creative and beholden only to the truth.

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.

Institutional inertia

 https://x.com/jeffreyatucker/status/1893787435659674034

Jeffrey A Tucker

@jeffreyatucker

I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service. The reality is very different, and I'm not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too. Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller. Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured. No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control. This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue. All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all. The Biden years underscored the point. We didn't even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing. How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes. The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great. Trump refused the deal and look what happened. Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may. They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes. It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible. They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.

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