In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, makes a key point in the clip above. At 4:10: This is not the same Donald Trump. . . . What Trump went through before in 2016 and elsewhere, what he went through was something he never, ever forgot, and he understands how things are done now. . . . He realized that he effed up when he did not do something, dare I say, a little more assiduously regarding the National Guard and others. January 6 was caused by Nancy Pelosi, who let this happen. Donald Trump told her flat out, "I want protection. . . . I want the National Guard." She's the one who said no. Why? Because that would destroy the plan. The was a LIHOP and a MIHOP, let it happen on purpose and make it happen on purpose, and Trump understands what's happening right now. An interview at The Tablet with Kyle Shideler , a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, expands on this insight: The key indicator that this was in...

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has weighed in on what is basically an internal US issue : Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum criticized the ICE raids that catalyzed days-long protests in Los Angeles, saying the city "wouldn't be what it is" without migrants. "They migrate out of need and send resources to their families from there," the president added. "Mexicans will always have our backing and demand that their human rights be respected. They must know that, should they wish to return to Mexico, we will welcome them with open arms." Another report quoted more of her remarks : Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum defended migrants living in Los Angeles, and claimed that at least 35 Mexicans had been detained in the recent raids carried out by immigration officers of the Trump administration. . . . "Mexicans living in the United States are good men and women, honest people who went to the United States to seek a...

California Gov Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Bass are playing local politics in front of a national audience. And this is something Trump has planned and anticipated: When racial justice protests roiled cities across America at the depths of the pandemic, President Trump, then in his first term, demonstrated restraint. Threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and to federalize the National Guard never materialized. This time, it took less than 24 hours of isolated protests in Los Angeles County for Trump, more aggressive than ever in his use of executive power, to issue a historic order. “The federal government will step in and solve the problem,” he said on social media Saturday night, issuing executive action not seen since civil unrest gripped the nation in the 1960s. . . . Local officials were clear that they did not want, or need, federal assistance. And they are concerned that Trump’s heavy-handed response risks escalating what was a series of isolated, heated...

It looks like Elon Musk is singlehandedly dismantling his own public image, something the Rockefellers recognized over generations was a thing of great value to be cultivated and maintained. Specific versions differ, but the overall story is in the UK Daily Mail : New details surrounding a White House brawl between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have spilled out into the open - with one insider saying the Tesla CEO rammed his shoulder into Bessent's ribcage 'like a rugby player.' The Daily Mail was the first to report on the heated confrontation between Bessent and Musk, who's since been iced out of Donald Trump's inner circle after their public blow-up this week. Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon revealed that there was more to the mid-April tussle, insisting that both men ended up landing blows. They lost their patience with one another following a tense meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump snubbed Musk and instead to...

The Real Clesr Politics formula is to take polling results across the spectrum, wildly off to more or less accurate, average them together, and pretend it's a meaningful result. They take the same approach with the stories they link: one from, say, the far-left Guardian, one from center-right Fox News, and pretend you can average them out to get to the truth. They were a little cattywampus today, one from Batya Ungar-Sargon at The Free Press, The Elon-Trump Bromance Crashes and Burns , and one from Victor Davis Hanson on X, Musk, Trump Have Same Enemies; Makes No Sense To Fight In this case, Batya Ungar-Sargon seems to be well-researched and thoughtful center-right, while Victor Davis Hanson tends to rely on farther-right truisms and cliches. Apoparently RCP's editors think we should average this stuff out. But my immediate reaction to Hanson's assertion was, "Elon Musk is his own worst enemy; that's not Trump's problem." Batya Ungar-Sargon goes i...

In the post above, former physicist and current contrarian YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder says of Elon Musk, "Whatever you think about the man, at least he gives us something to talk about." The topic of the post is why Musk is wrong about Mars, but that was several months ago, and the things he's given us to talk about keep on coming. I'm still with the working theory that I posted yesterday, that in the end, Musk works for his corporate boards of directors, who give him his options, his bonuses, his perks, and his planes, and right now, they aren't happy. Consider Trump's remarks in the Oval Office yesterday : Trump said Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a close adviser, was upset about the repeal of an electric vehicle tax credit. Trump argued Musk was aware of the policy “from the beginning.” “He knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody. And he never had a problem until right after he left,” Trump said. “I’m very disapp...

I was never sure what to think about the short-lived bromance between Trump and Elon Musk. My view of Musk has always been that he's not a very stable guy, and a lot of his views are at least self-contradictory, if not just plain crackpot. For instance , SpaceX Mars colonization program (also referred to as Occupy Mars) is the planned objective of the company SpaceX, and particularly of its founder Elon Musk, to send humans to live on Mars. The plan is to establish a self-sustaining, large scale settlement and democratic, self-governing colony. The motivation behind this is the belief that colonizing Mars will allow humanity to become multiplanetary, thereby ensuring the long-term survival of the human race if it becomes extinct on Earth. On the other hand, Elon Musk recently reignited discussions about global population decline by retweeting a post from Tesla Owners Silicon Valley on X (formerly Twitter). The post featured a graph illustrating projected population ch...