In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I floated the idea that we've been fed a legacy media consensus that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic, when in fact evidence shows he's a rational actor. This certainly got started as early as his June 16, 2015 escalator ride at Trump Tower during his campaign announcement, which was almost universally treated as a vanity project that would soon fade from view. But I think it's important to start assessing Trump's statements, his postures, and his actions through a filter that gives him credit for being a rational actor. James Comey is a key example. Since before Trump's 2017 inauguration, Comey has sought to control the narrative over his case by feeding the very perception that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic. In fact, I'd say Comey has been one of the chief exponents of this perception in public life -- but this is hardly a disinterested position; Comey has been flirting with indictments over t...

This was yesterday's headline by Daviud Dayen at the far-left American Prospect , and it promoted the legacy stereotype of Trump as narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic: In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise. . . But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways. Hmm, how could someone like that be elected dogcatcher, much less win two presidential elections? The answer is that the conventional wisdom seriously underestimates ...

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump says the Biden auto pen scandal has just gotten WORSE, says the Jan 6th Committee members are "GUILTY," pardons INVALID. "Joe Biden didn't believe in open borders...He was never the brightest bulb in the ceiling 🤣" "He didn't believe in all of this… pic.twitter.com/K1oiyuZCdz — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 18, 2025 Stories have kept trickling out over tbhe past week, including : Usually, the years after a presidency are when the money pours in, but for Biden the financial future looks rather bleak. . . . According to public records, he left office with a mortgage on his main home in Wilmington, Delaware of somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, at an interest rate of 3.375 percent. . . . Meanwhile, he has also been juggling a $250,000 home equity loan taken out on his holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2022, while he was in the White House. . . . At age 82, Biden i...

In a Washington Monthly essay, The College Board Capitulates to Trump , Richard D. Kahlenberg ignores what to my mind are the two most convincing discussions of selective college admissions programs since their start a century ago, Alan Dershowitz's 1991 Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen . Both argue that as Jews became more numerous, prosperous, and influential in the US after the late 19th century, this created a problem for the Ivy League, which had been a bastion of upper-crust WASP society since before the Revolution. More and more Jews had the money and cultivation to send their sons to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the result that their student bodies were becoming noticeably Jewish. Selective admissions programs simply began as way to limit this trend. An obvious way to do this would have been to require photos with applications and reject applicants with aquiline features, or simply to cull those with identifiably Jewish surnames, but that would be...

Intrigued by the overall question of trans violence, I asked the web, "How many trans mass shooters have there been?" "AI" felt it would be important to set me straight before giving an answer: Data on mass shootings indicate that the vast majority of perpetrators have been cisgender men, with transgender and nonbinary individuals responsible for only a tiny fraction of these crimes. While precise numbers vary depending on the definition of "mass shooting," major research sources show that trans and nonbinary shooters account for less than 2% of the total. It then gave five names: Anderson Lee Aldrich: The nonbinary shooter responsible for the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. Audrey Hale: The transgender shooter of the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. Snochia Moseley: The transgender woman involved in the 2018 Rite Aid warehouse shooting in Maryland. Alec McKinney: A transgender male involved in the 2019 STEM School...

As I said yesterday, every time I go looking for specificallly gay and trans-connected violent episodes, even in idle web searches, I come up with more. Yesterday I noted that Armed Queers SLC is a pro-gay-and-trans gun group that's surfaced in connection with the Charlie Kirk assassination. For instance, 🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING 2: The 2025 May Day trip of SLC Armed Queers to Cuba: "Well, if we're terrorists, we're proud to be terrorists" I've obtained a now-deleted video. In it, Ermiya Fanaeian and an unidentified man named Connor talk openly about: 👉 Palestinian students at… pic.twitter.com/CBkStDYjEO — DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) September 16, 2025 Ermiya Fanaeian, the founder of AQSLC, is a biological male who identifies as female : AQSLC, a socialist group of pro-gun activists, was founded in 2021 by the former March for Our Lives activist, Ermiya Fanaeian, who that year parted ways with a nationwide group advocating self-defe...

The excerpt embedded above from yesterday's Morning Meeting with panelists Mark Halperin, Dan Turrentine, and Sean Spicer is a good indication of how clueless mainstreram commentators have been over trans ideology. At 2:20: HALPERIN: There are people in MAGA who believe that trans culture, or a strain of trans culture, is violent and wants radical change in this country and is using violence to get it. That's a strong belief amongst many in MAGA, and thqt this has been a story that's been covered up by the left and the media for a long time, and that based on what they know, that's at issue here, and they want to go hard after anything that they think is a violent subculture of the trans community and those that support them. What do you think of that, and what do you think the Democratic party's posture should be on that strong belief held by those people?? TURRENTINE: I don't know of other instances of trans people lashing out like that. Perhap...