In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I said last week that more would inevitably come out about Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member whom Trump fired for alleged mortgage fraud. And in fact, more has. But I keep thinking about remarks by Shelby Steele, who invented the term "grievance elite" to describe the highly prestigious post-civil rights era African-American leadership and examine the conditions that created them. In a 1999 presentation The New Betrayal of Black Freedom in America , he said: If we go back to the 1960s and the civil rights era, and so forth, there was this, I think, interesting moment, when America on the one hand did something extremely honorable, which was to say, “We are wrong as a society in the way we have treated black Americans. It is immoral what we did.” Almost no other society that I know of on Earth has yet done that other than America. . . . What happens when you say you were wrong is that you lose moral authority. You just don’t have it any more. It is the price...

Last Wenesday, Trump fired Centers for Desease Control Director Susan Monarez. The conventional wisdom goes like this : Monarez had refused to go along with the anti-vaccine madness of Trump’s “health czar,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK). Trump had named Monarez as CDC director just a month ago. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Monarez said that “vaccines save lives” and that their use should continue to be supported. If Trump and RFK thought they could just strong-arm Monarez to go along with their anti-vaccine crusade, they were proven wrong. Monarez had much to say : The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leadership was in stunning disarray Wednesday evening after the Trump administration fired the agency’s director hours after she refused to resign under pressure. The director, Susan Monarez, said she was resisting being ousted by the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for political reasons after about a month in office. “When CDC Director ...

I can't ask for a better illustration of my thesis on the problem that's beset US inner cities since the 1960s than Trump's latest chioice of opponents : President Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Truth Social, citing Chicago’s violent crime numbers and vowing that federal support could be on the way. “Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME. He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming! MAGA. President DJT,” Trump wrote. I asked the web, "What is the Pritzker family's net worth?" and "AI" replied, The total net worth of the Pritzker family is not a single reported figure, but rather a collection of individual fortunes held by numerous family members, with individual net worths often in the billions. For example, in May 2025,...

How did Cook afford to take out three mortgages in a matter of a few months? Most lenders would throw a big red flag at this in general—raises more questions: https://t.co/N4E8F4N9qd — Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 29, 2025 On Thurssay, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte issued a second criminal referral to the Justice Department for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook: As Director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency," Pulte wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Edward Martin, "I reiterate the referral on August 15, 2025, and provide new information concerning a 3rd property for Lisa D. Cook ('Cook') and what appears to be multiple false representations to the United States Government by Cook while she was a Governor of the Federal Reserve." In response, Cook's attorney Abbe Lowell said , This is an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook by a polit...

In a trip to Minnesota, J D Vance asked a question : Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets? Other remarks are reported elsewhere : We were having lunch yesterday and the president said, ‘JD, I don’t know how I did it? I have actually gotten the Democrats to come out in defense of crime.’ If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said he really likes puppies, you would have AOC come out and say ‘Puppies are terrible.’ Actually, I think there's an answer. Let's recall that at least since Dukakis ran against Poppy Bush, the Democrats have represented an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat , Marx's urban criminal underclass (Clinton made himself a deliberate exception). Marx had the instinct to recognize that the criminal underclass was not a reliable ally of the working class, ...

"If you don't give trans people hormones, they'll shoot themselves!" Well, if you do give them hormones, they'll shoot young Christian children — Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 27, 2025 Most of the reaction to Robert/Robin Westman's attack on Annunciation Church in Minneapolis yesterday either focuses or refuses to focus on Westman's self-identification as transsexual. A few writers have noted, as I have earlier this year , that trans people turn up remarkably often in incidents of high-profile violence. A few have noted that Audrey/Aiden Hale, who killed three nine‑year‑old children and three adults at a Presbyterian school in Nashville in 2023, was trans as well. Even fewer have made the point, as Alex Marlow did , that we need to "start diagnosing the trans stuff as a mental disorder as fast as humanly possible.” But oddly, nobody is taking much of a look at the Christian stuff. Think about it for a moment. FBI Director Patel wa...

As I commented the other day, one big circumstance in which ordinary police agencies encounter illegals is on traffic patrol, where on one hand, the illegals don't obey traffic laws, while on the other, they either don't speak English or refuse to speak it when pulled over, and they frequently turn out not to have drivers licenses, registration, or insurance. What some agencies see as a problem has turned out to be an opportunity in other situations. For instance , Florida officials announced that under a new immigration enforcement program, truck weigh stations in the state will be used as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checkpoints. Truckers without valid licenses or who don't speak English are referred to immigration enforcement. The recent accident involving Harjinder Singh highlighted how frequently illegals cause traffic accidents, especially when they aren't properly licensed or don't follow traffic laws. This has turned out to be a...