In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Conflicting reports have come out of Portland, OR on the status of ICE enforcement, violent protests, attacks on and arrests of conservative journalists, and the Trump administration's reaction. For context. the YouTube video embedded above gives an idea of the day-to-day routine downtown. The restaurant owner conducting the tour attributes much of the problem to major businesses that allowed office workers to work from home during the pandemic, but never required them to return to the office afterward, abandoning public space to the Lumpenproletariat , who in the video look like nice college kids who are nevertheless all nodded out. The political alignment in Portland appears to be an entitled bourgeoisie aligned with homeless but middle-class-looking young white druggies and violent leftist radicals, against the working class broadly defined. A conservative journalist, Katie Daviscourt, said she was attacked Tuesday night by an Antifa-affiliated protester who gave her a black...

On Tuesday, AOC said , ". . . I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, ‘Oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it’s because of AOC,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, if that’s the case, my office is open and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance. That’s what’s not going to happen.” I read this as saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm driving the shutdown, and Republicans may as well negotiate with me directly." One person who was not amused at this was Nancy Pelosi: . @SpeakerPelosi suggests @AOC lacks 'experience' to be Democratic leader in government shutdown. https://t.co/NhbhkYQFqQ pic.twitter.com/cv9jJ4LrUY — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 1, 2025 Her reply to the reporter's question about AOC's remarks...

Via The Pillar : Illinois Senator Dick Durbin declined on Tuesday a lifetime achievement award he was scheduled to receive from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s office of human dignity and solidarity. Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich issued an announcement on the subject at the same time senior leaders at the U.S. bishops’ conference were confidentially preparing to release a statement on the Durbin award, and had already informed the Vatican’s U.S. representative of their plans, according to several sources close to the process. The President of the USCCB is Abp Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, who I'm confident is a wise, capable, and holy man, but neither his name nor his position is well known, probably not even to rank and file US Catholics. On the other hand, Bp Robert Barron is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman since Abp Fulton J Sheen. While as many as ten current Catholic bishops had already spoken out publicly agaionst Cdl Cupich...

Welp, that's a race. https://t.co/0ADfjmlvk0 — Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) September 30, 2025 It turns out that the US Naval Academy's admissions and disciplinary policies have become an issue in the New Jersey governor's race : New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is facing fresh scrutiny following the revelation that her two children were accepted into the highly competitive Naval Academy — days after her campaign was rocked by news of her involvement in a notorious cheating scandal as a midshipman. The Democratic congresswoman’s office announced in June that her two kids, Lincoln and Margaret Hedberg, were among nine students from her district to land spots in the Naval Academy, whichacademy Academy recordsd weerre unblemi9shed. . . . Netizens, such as the Libs of TikTok, questioned how two of her children managed to get in at the same time in light of the highly selective process. “What are the chances?” the popu...

Legacy media has immediately pooh-poohed the release of FBI documents placing 274 FBI agents in the crowd at the January 6, 2021 Capitol incursion. From Newsday : TRUMP: “As it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials.’” THE FACTS: This is false. The alleged FBI documents to which Trump is referring state on page 46 that 274 agents from the FBI's Washington Field Office “responded to” to the U.S. Capitol and other nearby locations on Jan. 6. They do not contain any credible evidence to suggest that federal agents were acting as agitators or insurrectionists. “This number includes agents that responded to the Capitol grounds as well as inside the Capitol, the pipe bombs, and the red truck that was believed to contain explosive devices as well as CDC/ADCs,” the documents read. The mention of “pipe bombs” refers to the devices planted outsid...

Just in the past few days, we've had this development : The FBI has fired 15 agents associated with a 2020 incident in which agents were photographed kneeling with demonstrators at the height of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to the agents association. The latest round of dismissals at the bureau came at the end of a monthslong review targeting 15 agents who were associated with the kneeling incident, according to one person briefed on the matter. Some agents who were present at the incident but didn’t kneel were not fired, the source said. Followed by this one , which strikes me as even bigger: The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become “pawns in a pol...

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...