In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I linked to several stories yesterday that gave breathless details on the "person of interest" that somehow dissipated almost as soon as they were released. The POI drove 17 hours from Wisconsin to Providence -- well, no, he lived in a DC apartment. He was in custody -- well, no, he was being detained. He may have had an extensive mental health history -- well, who knows, he's been released ! The person of interest detained earlier today in connection with the deadly shooting will be released shortly, Providence's mayor said at a news conference late tonight. . . . Mayor Brett Smiley said, "The status of safety in our community remains unchanged, and we believe that you remain safe in our community." Police initially said they were confident the person of interest was the person who opened fire in a first-floor classroom at Brown’s Barus & Holley building yesterday before fleeing. In fact, Charges could be filed against a person of interest...

Multiple shot in the area of Brown University. This is an active investigation. Please shelter in place or avoid the area until further notice. — Providence Police (@ProvidenceRIPD) December 13, 2025 As I post this, it's about 10:30 AM on the East Coast. According to USA Today , The shooting at the Ivy League University happened shortly before 4:05 p.m. on Saturday in an engineering building with unlocked doors as final exams were underway. The 4:05 PM time is apparently an error; the Providence Police notification was at 2:33 PM. The teaching assistant who was in the lecture hall and survived the shooting provided more detail : A Brown University instructor who was leading a final exam review has described the moment of horror that a masked gunman burst into his lecture hall and started shooting. Joseph Oduro, a 21-year-old teaching assistant, told the New York Times that the gunman shouted “something” before opening fire, but he could not tell wha...

🚨 BREAKING: In an incredible Christmas surprise, the Trump administration is sending $900 BONUSES to 18,000 THOUSAND Amtrak workers... ...and the money is coming from CUTTING top executives' perks. "It's budget neutral. We aren't spending more federal money or Amtrak money.… pic.twitter.com/tqsyYRPqKG — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 12, 2025 Yesterday I said that both William F Buckley Jr and Edmund Burke are irrelevant with Trump as president. I was commenting on a piece by David Strom, a writer for Salem Media, who seems to be a nice enougfh kid who went to college and learned a little bit about Edmund Burke, although college doesn't seem to have taught him how to write. (Actually, I looked him up, and he has a master's from Duke in Poli Sci . He really ought to have had more intelligent things to say about Burke, and he should definitely be able to write better.) Let's take a look at Edmund Burke (1729-1797). He's noted now primarily for...

For a couple of days, I've been vaguely wondering what all the feuding between Candace Owens and Erika Kirk, or Tucker Carlson's transformation into a Qatar apologist, are all about, and I haven't found much on alt media. Then I ran into David Strom's piece yesterday, The Bizarro World of MTG, Tucker, Candace, and the Woke Right , and I came off more confused then ever. Strom writes for Hot Air, one of more than half a dozen opinion sites, commentator channels, and aggregators owned by Salem Media, which is a puzzling phenomenon itself. These include Red State, Instapundit, Townhall, PJ Media, Twitchy, Bearing Arms, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, and others. The feature they have in common is a certain level of unseriousness: the Instapundit regulars will link to policy think pieces on occasion, but then they'll go back to pitching the latest alternate history and science fiction fluff written by their cronies or reminiscing on the greatness of Robert A Heinlein. ...

There are actually two sets of questions that remain about the January 5-6, 2021 pipe bombs that didn't explode outside the Democrat and Republican National Committee headquarters. One set, which I currently discount, is from diehards who variously still think the figure in mask and hoodie on surveillance footage is a woman, or who think that even if Brian Cole Jr made and set the bombs, he's only the visible part of a bigger deep state conspiracy. The other set of questions comes mostly from Julie Kelly, whom we should credit for being initially skeptical that the figure in mask and hoodie was a former Capitol Police officer. She has raised questions about the whole current narrative that the bombs were set on the evening of January 5 by the figure in mask and hoodie, whoever that may be, Brian Cole Jr or someone else, although any actual evidence in the case released so far points strongly to Cole and January 5. Kelly has paid a great deal of attention to Karlin Younger,...

David Freiheit, who posts as Viva Frei on his YouTube channel, says he thinks Brian Cole Jr is a patsy. He defines "patsy" beginning at 0:18: Patsies could be absolutely innocent, set up to take the fall for a crime, which I am less inclined to believe right now, or patsies can be the useful tools who either didn't know they were being manipulated for the purpose of commission of a crime, or sort of knew, but sort of got played a little too hard. . . . I believe he's more along the lines of . . . he was used to potentially prepare the bombs, potentially hand them off to somebody for the purposes of placement, and he was always going to be the fall guy if anybody ever got too close to identifying the actual suspect. He goes on to outline his theory of the FBI: they weren't "incompetent" at leaving the Brian Cole Jr lead on the shelf for nearly five years; this was always going to be the backup plan in case someone got too close to fingering the ac...

According to Just the News , President Donald Trump's approval rating is on the upswing, with his net approval rising 5 points over the past month in a recent survey. Trump's approval rating stood at 47% in the December Harvard/Harris survey, up 3 points from the November figures. His disapproval, meanwhile, dropped 2 points, from 51% to 49%. Though still underwater, Trump appears to have rebounded from the November low of 44% approval and 51% disapproval in that survey. On one hand, I've been pointing out that all the polls in recent months have been wildly outside the margin of error, although also counterintuitive, so it's reckless to see any sort of trend here. But let's look at what's intuitive about this result. The big story in the weeks before this poll was taken was the drug boat "double tap" war crime, the big Nuremberg option. This never quite got traction, and it's out of the headlines. As of yesterday, the Real Clear Poli...