B-Man

Shots Fired at Tesla Dealership in Oregon (and That’s Not All). By Nick Arama I've been writing about the protests against Elon Musk as the Democrats have been whipping up hate against him and President Donald Trump over the Department of Government Efficiency and the work to cut fraud, waste, and abuse. The Democrats have been lying about DOGE, claiming Musk wants to steal people's social security, that it's a "coup" (despite Trump being the president and Musk working for him) and all kinds of other inciting lies. They've also called for action in the streets, even calling it "war." Over the weekend they had protests at Tesla dealerships trying to make an impact on the EV company, likely hoping the board will try to rein Musk in and/or they hurt the value of Teslas, so they think they hurt him. But the protests were in the main pitifully small because what he's doing is popular. At the protest in NYC, there was a sticker affixed to the window that said "Kill Elon." Now, there's been a shooting at a Teslas dealership in Oregon. Somebody shot up the front of the store in Salem at about 5:00 a.m. local time. https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2025/02/20/yikes-shots-fired-at-tesla-dealership-in-oregon-n2185795

get thrown in jail in Germany for posting a mean tweet?”

Sometimes, Moral Clarity Isn't Difficult By Ben Shapiro This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri; a 4-year-old boy, Ariel; and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir — who had been kidnapped back to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Their bodies are to be returned to Israel this week; Hamas held the corpses hostage, and in return received the release of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists. It is instructive to recall the circumstances of the Bibas family's kidnapping. They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty. This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: the reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn't exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip. None of this is meant to alleviate the moral responsibility to attempt to distinguish between terror and civilian targets — a task Israel has accepted with more success than any country in the history of warfare, achieving a nearly 1:1 terrorist to civilian death ratio in the heavily urban Gaza Strip. But it is vital to recognize that the Palestinian nationalist cause is itself honeycombed with cancer: that it is rooted not in a desire for an independent state to exist side-by-side by Israel, as the mythical two-state solution has now suggested for decades, but in a desire for the complete extirpation of Jewish life in the Middle East. Again, Palestinian civilians kidnapped and held babies. They then held their corpses hostage to achieve the release of murderous Palestinian terrorists. Oct. 7 was not a "jailbreak," an attempt to achieve freedom or political sovereignty; it was, simply put, a massacre, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and incite a multifront war that would destroy the State of Israel in toto — or, in the absence of such an achievement, to mobilize world support to isolate Israel for defending itself. {snip} This is evil. If you side with those who deliberately kidnap babies and hold them for ransom, you are siding with evil. If you demand concessions to those who perform such atrocities, you are siding with evil. From college campuses to the streets of London, from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, we can see just who sides with evil. And as Israel lays to rest the corpses of the Bibas family, we should be reminded that those who side with evil share its moral consequences. http://jewishworldreview.com/0225/shapiro022025.php

PLENTY OF DEADWOOD TO BE CLEARED: Hegseth set to remove generals and senior officers – report. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly preparing to fire a whole host of generals and officers, particularly those who were close to his disgrace of a predecessor, Lloyd Austin. The generals and officers up for termination are on a list pieced together by top Pentagon officials and shared this week with congressional Republicans, according to NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/live-blog/live-updates-trump-lori-chavez-deremer-cpac-rcna192744#rcrd73369 https://thedailybs.com/2025/02/20/hegseth-set-to-remove-generals-and-senior-officers-report/

TRUE.

He should step down now.

Education Department Slashes $600 Million In Funding For ‘Social Justice Activism’ Teacher Training by Brecan F. Thies The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday it cut over $600 million in grants spent on training teachers in “social justice activism,” critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology. The grants were used to fund institutions and nonprofits involved in training teachers on concepts like “anti-racism” and claims about white privilege and white supremacy. The grants also helped fund discriminatory staff recruiting strategies that targeted candidates based on their race. “It’s hard to overstate how radical these teacher trainings are — we are talking about forcing teachers to talk about their race at work, asking educators to ‘take personal and institutional responsibility for systemic inequities,’ promoting abolitionist teaching practices and defining equity as equal outcomes,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/18/education-department-slashes-600-million-in-funding-for-social-justice-activism-teacher-training/ .

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You HAVE to be 100% pure lib, or you can't be one of us. Two more staffers quit John Fetterman's office as the senator carves his own lane with Trump NBC News ^ | February 19, 2025 | Allan Smith Two of Sen. John Fetterman’s longest-serving staff members are leaving his team as the senator takes a more open approach to President Donald Trump than many of his Democratic colleagues are. Charlie Hills, Fetterman’s communications director, and Tré Easton, his legislative director, are set to soon depart the Pennsylvania Democrat’s office. Both men worked on Fetterman’s 2022 campaign and have been with him during his two-year Senate career. “Working for John afforded me the opportunity to build a diligent policy team from scratch,” Easton said in a statement to NBC News. “Together we created a legislative body of work that I think is a blueprint for how Democrats should be governing when they have power. I’ll forever be grateful.” The departures come one month after Carrie Adams left as Fetterman's communications director. She had garnered attention when she was quoted in a Free Press article disagreeing with the senator on Israel and the war in Gaza. That followed Fetterman losing three of his top communications staffers last March, before his chief-of-staff, Adam Jentleson, stepped down. The senator’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/rcna192804

Violence Erupts After Pro-Hamas Protesters Swarm Orthodox Jewish Community Jeff Charles The pro-Hamas crowd in America is still up to their antics. A horde of anti-Israel protesters swarmed an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York City in Tuesday and engaged in violence against Jewish residents. Footage circulating on social media shows the mob marching through the street while chanting “Zionists go to hell,” “Palestine is Arab,” and “Settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone.” https://townhall.com/tipsheet/jeff-charles/2025/02/19/violence-erupts-after-anti-israel-protesters-stage-demonstration-in-orthodox-jewish-community-n2652474

About That 'Independent' Media... David Strom I linked to this story in my previous article on elections in Ukraine, but I think it deserves a full post all by itself. The Free Press has a piece on Internews and its influence on the coverage of the war in Ukraine that really deserves attention, going into deeper depth on USAID's control of the flow of information both within Ukraine and from Ukraine to the United States. {SNIP} But if you buy the propaganda that Internews is selling you that Zelenskyy represents Truth, Justice, and the American way and Putin is Hitler, you have been sold a bill of goods. Putin is indeed a horrible guy, but he presents as much danger to Germany or the UK as Mynamar does. Short of using nukes, their vulnerability to him is entirely based on their need for his oil, not a fear of his tanks. Paris will not be overrun by aging T-62s. Putin can't even get air superiority over Ukraine, which is remarkable. Putin is a very bad guy. Zelenskyy is simply an American satrap, and Ukraine is an American money-laundering operation. It saddens me that this is so, but it pretty obviously is. USAID has been funding a propaganda campaign aimed not just at Ukrainians but at the entire world to prop it up. Democratic countries don't hire goon squads to kidnap, torture, and murder people and shanghai people to become cannon fodder. So USAID/Internews calls "fake news" on what really happens in Ukraine in order to keep support for the war high. That may be Realpolitik, but it isn't "independent journalism." https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/02/19/about-that-independent-media-n3799982

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Back to the actual thread. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Obama-Appointed Judge Halts Democrat Attempts to Stop DOGE Review of Federal Agencies. https://pjmedia.com/bryan-s-jung/2025/02/19/chutkan-refuses-to-block-musk-doge-from-7-federal-agencies-n4937108 .

Did you take the red pill of the blue pill? If you took the red pill, you would be forced to live in the real world where things are messy, the truth is hard to swallow, and you are condemned to live in freedom with all its pains and pleasures. If you take the blue pill, you can live in blissful ignorance of the fact that you are a slave totally manipulated by people indifferent to your well-being and your fate. Newsweek chose the blue pill. Ukraine is Schrödinger's democracy. As long as we don't measure whether Zelenskyy is democratically supported by his population, we can pretend that he is the legitimately elected leader of a democratic regime. Zelenskyy was legitimately elected, but his term was to have expired last year. He is currently empowered by martial law to remain in power, and implicitly by the fact that the US government pays all Ukraine's bills, including the salaries of the government, the budget for the military, the pensions, the media, the...everything. Zelenskyy is an American satrap. I am not saying that to insult Zelenskyy. It is simply a fact. You may even think it is a good thing, and I certainly think that the current situation is at least better than having Putin own the whole damn country. But this is not "democracy." Any argument that it is is a joke. Now, I don't know whether Vladimir Zelenskyy would win an election in Ukraine if it were held today, and neither does anybody else. I wouldn't rule it out, although as the Free Press article linked above shows, the news we are getting out of the country is paid propaganda funded by USAID. None of it is real. Zelenskyy has goon squads kidnapping and torturing people to make them go to the front. He is arresting and beating reporters for telling people this. Using our tax dollars. Our tax dollars are being used to suppress that fact because the transnational elite wants that war to go on seemingly forever. It is within the realm of possibility that some people in Ukraine might object to that and want a different leader or even want the killing to stop. An election might give us insight into this question, you might think. But, as Newsweek points out, "there are concerns that the Ukrainian president might be voted out of office if the country holds an election." So I guess that the best path forward to preserve democracy there shouldn't be an election. https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/02/19/yes-newsweek-really-did-say-that-out-loud-n3799971

DOGE finds nearly $40 billion in spending linked to government-issued credit cards by Victor Nava The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pledged to “simplify” the federal government’s credit card program on Tuesday which cost taxpayers nearly $40 billion last year. “The US government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24,” read an X post from the cost-cutting initiative’s official account. “DOGE is working w/ the agencies to simplify the program and reduce admin costs,” the group added. DOGE said it “will report back in 1 week” with its plan to disentangle the system. https://nypost.com/2025/02/19/us-news/doge-finds-nearly-40-billion-in-spending-linked-to-government-issued-credit-cards/ .