After watching this video, I swear you would think Senator John Fetterman is a Republican if you didn’t know any better. He totally defends President Trump’s actions against Venezuela, with respect to . . .

It was unwise, self-absorbed, and lacking in pity for Trump to write his Truth Social post about Rob Reiner’s murder, which will be used as political ammunition to attack those who voted for him and to get hard-left Democrats elected in 2026 who will do great damage to the country. Trump should have taken the high road despite Reiner’s decade-long, unhinged, and hyperbolic attacks on Trump. That said, it would be immature and shallow for any Christian or non-Christian conservative in their political decision-making to cite this as a basis for not casting an effective vote against a Party that not only has even worse rhetoric against their opponents but whose two greatest policy idols are unrestricted abortion and coercive LGBTQ immorality and indoctrination that is grossly injurious to children, women and the nation as a whole, policy idols accompanied by hard-left court appointments, forced indoctrination and compelled speech, and a massive unvetted illegal-immigration election scam. (RELATED: Our Two Main Parties Are Non-Christian but Only One Is Demonic) Get a grip, grow up, and get a sense of scale regarding what matters most. Comparing an inappropriate post of this sort with promoting in public policy child abuse and endangerment of females is absurd in the extreme. Get a grip, grow up, and get a sense of scale regarding what matters most. A Little Context Before going nuts and criticizing Trump severely, two context elements should be kept in mind. First, Trump did at least open the comment by calling what happened “a very sad thing” and closed with saying, “May Rob and Michelle rest in peace.” He didn’t say, like many leftists (not Rob Reiner), that he was glad that Charlie Kirk was murdered. (RELATED: Peggy Noonan and the Dangers of Uncritical Thinking) Unfortunately, the entire middle part of the post attributed the actions of Reiner’s troubled son to Rob Reiner’s anger (Reiner was indeed an angry guy, but at the present time, we have no knowledge of what triggered Reiner’s son to murder his parents) and then made the further assumption that Reiner’s anger problem was aggravated by his TDS. (RELATED: Hollywood Horror: The Murder of Rob Reiner) Second, Trump was absolutely correct in characterizing Reiner as a top-tier Trump-hater, obsessed with Trump for a decade, with a long history of spewing vicious bile about Trump in what certainly qualifies as high-level TDS (for evidence, go here, here, here, and here). Over the years Reiner has called Trump a “cockroach,” a “zombie,” a “lifetime criminal,” a “moron,” a “con man,” a “racist misogynist,” a “threat to democracy,” a “fascist,” a “childish moronic mentally unstable malignant narcissist,” who “basically lies every minute of his life,” claiming that if Trump were elected in 2024 that he would bring about “full-on autocracy” and that “Trump has declared war on this democracy,” that his actions are “beyond McCarthy era-esque” and “classic fascist,” that Trump “has broken Federal Law every day of his Presidency,” calling him the “single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States” and “mentally unfit” to be president. Reiner said that Trump should be criminally “indicted” and put in jail while in office as president. He prophesied after Trump’s election in 2024, “We have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy and democracy completely leaves us.” He accused Trump of “committing Treason against The United States of America,” of “aiding and abetting the enemy,” and turning “the world’s oldest Democracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of Vladimir Putin.” In what certainly counts as a case of excessive paranoia, Reiner also claimed after the Jimmy Kimmel kerfuffle that “This may be the last time you ever see me because… there’s only a couple of us that are speaking out in this hard way.” Reiner also produced a documentary called God and Country that was a hit-piece on Christians whom he called “far right” and a “threat to democracy” because of their opposition to abortion and “gay rights” and their support for Trump. (RELATED: Unapologetic Jimmy Kimmel Still Delivering Politics Instead of Punchlines) What Trump Should Have Done None of this justifies Trump’s response. But it does indicate that Trump was responding from personal hurt. Perhaps too, as someone who has suffered multiple assassination attempts precisely because he has been labeled a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy” by Reiner and Leftists throughout the country. It would have been better for him to have simply said, as Reiner did about Kirk’s assassination (though there was no history of vitriolic attacks by Kirk on Reiner), “I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable. That’s not a solution, so solving problems,” “an absolute horror.” Or even to have started with his opening line, “a very sad thing,” and followed it with his closing line, “May Rob and Michelle rest in peace,” and deleted everything in between. How Trump’s Comment Will Be Exploited for Political Gain Trump’s social-media comment on the murder of Reiner and his wife is being used for political purposes, kicking off the usual round of attacks on those who voted for Trump, as if any of this is comparable to contributing to the election of a far-left candidate whose two chief idols were virtually unrestricted abortion and coercive promotion of LGBTQ immorality (including chemical castration of minors, males in female private spaces and sports, forcible indoctrination of minors in LGBTQ immorality, and threats to employees, parents, and the church), along with attendant threats to First Amendment rights, the appointment of hard-left jurists to our courts, and massive election cheating through an unprecedented illegal immigration scam. (RELATED: The Judicial Coup Is Collapsing) It will also be claimed that at least the Democrats, like Harris, Biden, and Hillary Clinton, didn’t name-call and treat their opponents like dirt. That would be a case of selective memory. (RELATED: TDS Now Resembles Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’) In July 2024 Harris characterized as “these extremists … they not like us” those who oppose “the freedom to love whom you love” (that is, those who oppose the immorality of “gay marriage” and transgenderism) and “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body” (that is, to kill her child in the womb). As with the Democrat Party and the Democrat-controlled “news” media, Harris also called Trump a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy.” Any wonder that Trump was the victim of two assassination attempts and Charlie Kirk was assassinated? (RELATED: Historians in Denial of the 2024 Election) A year ago, Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” That’s half the nation. In 2018, at the so-called “Human Rights Campaign,” the most powerful transgender-gay lobby in the nation, Biden declared that if you oppose the so-called “Equality Act” and other coercive trans/gay legislation (including chemical castration of minors), you are the “forces of intolerance,” “virulent people,” and “the dregs of society.” In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton called “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” because of their alleged “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views and “offensive, hateful rhetoric,” folk “irredeemable and not American.” We don’t need any lectures about how Democrats occupy the high ground. Many of them celebrated Kirk’s assassination or at least appeared to justify it by saying, “Don’t be surprised if people want to shoot at you for saying hateful things.” (RELATED: Charlie Kirk and the Shame of the ‘However’ Progressives) We can criticize Trump’s social-media comment without losing our sense of scale and ultimately our minds. READ MORE from Robert Gagnon: Away With the Absurdity That the Left and the Right Are Equally Vicious The Resurrection: The True Meaning of Easter Our Two Main Parties Are Non-Christian but Only One Is Demonic

In the wake of the shocking double murder last Sunday of the celebrated director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally, Misery) and his wife, Michele, apparently committed by their son, Nick, I decided to check out the 2015 movie, Being Charlie, that Rob directed from a script co-written by Nick and that was based on Nick’s troubled youth (by age 22, when the film was released, Nick had already been in rehab 18 times) and their equally troubled father-son relationship. A plot summary. Our protagonist is 18-year-old Charlie Mills (Nick Robertson), a rich kid turned homeless heroin addict. We’re introduced to him in a series of brief vignettes: he’s a surly brat at his own birthday party; he destroys the stained-glass window of a church in Utah; hitchhiking back home to his parents’ breathtaking mansion in L.A. after a period of wandering in the desert, he manages to steal some Oxycodone along the way from a poor old woman who’s dying of cancer. Charlie, it turns out, isn’t just the son of rich parents. Like Nick Reiner, he’s also the son of a celebrity: his dad, David, is a famous star of a series of hit pirate movies. (In what comes off as a rather disorienting inside joke, David is played by Cary Elwes, who, a lifetime ago, played a pirate in Reiner’s The Princess Bride.) As Charlie arrives home, David is in the middle of a campaign for governor. While he’s the high-achieving negligent father from Central Casting, viewing his son mainly as a distraction and a liability whose drugged-out antics threaten to sink his nascent political career, his wife, Lisanne (Susan Misner), is the unwaveringly adoring and supportive mother from Central Casting — and, as far as you can see here, not much of anything else. The minute Charlie walks into his parents’ spectacular house, he discovers that they’ve arranged an intervention and a stretch in rehab — far from his first. Those places, he screams at them, don’t work. But he goes anyway. The ensuing scenes are enough to convince you that becoming a heroin addict might not actually be the best idea in the world, after all. For Charlie, rehab is “prison,” with its painfully earnest and endlessly repetitious group-therapy sessions at which some of the women sob uncontrollably while he and a couple of his male pals look on cynically. (One of them, by the way, does a terrific impression of Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest, which serves to remind you that this is a movie directed by the guy who directed Nicholson in A Few Good Men.) At rehab, one of the counselors is a relentlessly cheery spouter of boosterish slogans about such programs that are now tiresomely familiar to him: “Take it one day at a time.” “Let go and let God.” “Addiction is a disease like any other.” To this last one, Charlie counters, in thunder: “No! The disease is this place!” (Incidentally, Nick Reiner met his co-writer, Matt Elisofon, in rehab.) Soon, because he’s kept his nose clean, Charlie is granted an overnight stay at home. David, fixated on his campaign, rejects the idea; Lisanne, behind her husband’s back, gives Charlie the keys to the family’s beach house — which turns out to be even more spectacular than their house in the city. But then things go downhill. Charlie falls off the wagon, spends part of a night in a homeless shelter, is beaten up in an alley by two thugs, and finally seeks refuge with Adam (Devon Bostick), his smart, funny, and affectionate best friend from high school. As the two of them snort coke, Charlie expresses his envy: Adam, now in college, seems somehow never to have been damaged by his own bouts with drugs. It turns out that Charlie has spoken too soon. I won’t go into detail about the rest of the movie, except to say that the wind-up is inexcusably on the nose. It takes place, of course, on Election Day. And the final scene brings a heart-to-heart that could have been lifted out of a TV movie from the 1970s. (Or written by AI.) A couple of things about the movie made me scratch my head. Why the need to make the Mills family every bit as rich and famous as, well, the Reineers? Obviously, it makes the movie far less relatable to a wide audience — and makes Charlie far less sympathetic, easily dismissed as a spoiled nepo baby. Are we expected to think that these three characters’ wealth and celebrity somehow make their welfare more important than that of an ordinary family? As for Charlie, he’s supposed to be based on Nick. But in reality, as we’ve all learned, Nick was known for a long time to have a violent side — and Charlie doesn’t have a hint of violence about him. Nor, frankly, does he ever look like a heroin addict. The other guys at rehab are broken down, used up, worn out; not Charlie. He’s baby-faced. Even when he’s shooting up, he comes off as a wholesome choirboy, and when he’s telling dirty jokes onstage, he almost seems embarrassed. A random observation or two. First, Being Charlie was a surprisingly low-cost project — a $3 million budget, a gross of $30,000. For that price tag, it looks preetty good. Second, guess what political party David belongs to? The Democrats, naturally, because it’s meant to signal that whatever his faults may be, he’s basically a good guy. Third, Reiner’s very best work is Stand By Me, and this one, like that one, shows off his sensitivity to the inner lives of teenage boys. Could there be, I wonder, a connection between Reiner’s private suffering and his public fury? A word about President Trump’s instantly notorious online post about the Reiner murders. Briefly put, the president joked that Rob had been killed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. I didn’t find it funny or remotely appropriate. But a thought did occur to me apropos of the TDS angle. We now know about Reiner that, while feeling compelled all along to project to the world a cheerful celebrity image, he spent two decades or so living with one of the most terrible personal problems that one can imagine — namely, a son with a crippling drug problem. We also know about Rob that, of all the big names on the Left Coast, he was arguably the one most profoundly afflicted with TDS — so much so, in fact, that he took an active part in a serious effort to bring Trump down. People who knew him well, including prominent showbiz conservatives like James Woods and Ben Stein, have testified that in real life, Reiner was a nice guy who didn’t let politics ruin his friendships — and whose politics were, in any case, not so far to the left as those of many other famous Tinseltown progressives. Which makes Reiner’s obsessive, Ahab-like hatred for Trump an aberration, and a mystery. Could there be, I wonder, a connection between Reiner’s private suffering and his public fury? Could all that otherwise barely explicable anger at Trump be nothing more than a good old-fashioned case of transference? Did Reiner take the rage that he felt about Nick — but didn’t dare direct at him — and redirect it at Trump? Just wondering. What to say, in the end, about Being Charlie? When Carrie Fisher died one day with cocaine, ecstasy, and heroin in her system, and her devoted mother, Debbie Reynolds, died the next, apparently of a broken heart, it made me watch with even more admiration than before the movie that Fisher had written about their messy but essentially loving relationship, about her own addiction, and about the challenge of belonging to a show-business dynasty. Fisher’s screenplay for Postcards from the Edge was beyond admirable, exhibiting an abundance of openhearted honesty and mature self-understanding. But to watch Being Charlie is to experience a movie co-written by a son, and directed by a father, both of whom were determined to blame the former’s problems on the latter’s decision to practice “tough love,” in accordance with the advice of so-called experts — and determined, too, to tack onto a still unresolved story about a far darker relationship than that of Debbie and Carrie a simplistic, sentimental Hollywood ending that doesn’t follow logically or emotionally from anything that’s preceded it. Yes, there are touching, human moments here, but not enough of them. Perhaps the most touching thing about it, in the end, is that Being Charlie was, above all, a well-intended but misguided act of love — and a desperate attempt to heal — by a father who, as a second-generation filmmaker of the first rank, seems to have believed, or wanted to believe, that celluloid could conquer all. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The New Yorker Makes a Shrine to Itself No Mommie Dearest, She The Real Josephine Baker

Your banker is racially profiling you when you apply for a mortgage loan. If he doesn’t, the lending institution you’re applying to is subject to harsh federal penalties for not engaging in racial profiling. The most amazing part of the applicable federal regulation is that if you refuse to disclose your ethnicity and race, the banker is required to visually appraise you, make a guess as to your race/ethnicity based on your appearance, and then report those racial observations to the government. Bull Connor smiles. The left has racialized pretty much everything it touches, and during the Obama administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by the Dodd-Frank legislation. The CFPB was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Among the tasks taken on by the CFPB is the gathering of information regarding an applicant’s ethnicity, race, and sex under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The good news is that Donald Trump has been trying to kill off the CFPB. The bad news is that it’s not dead yet, so mortgage lenders across the country are still being drilled on the importance of viewing customers through the prism of race, and learning how to provide reporting based on observed skin color, accent, surname, hairstyle, and other ethnic characteristics of those applying for mortgage loans. At this link is a typical “Demographic Information Addendum” from a credit union’s mortgage application, which reads in part [emphasis added]: For residential mortgage lending, Federal law requires that we ask applicants for their demographic information (ethnicity, sex, and race) in order to monitor our compliance with equal credit opportunity, fair housing, and home mortgage disclosure laws. You are not required to provide this information, but are encouraged to do so. You may select one or more designations for “Ethnicity” and one or more designations for “Race.” The law provides that we may not discriminate on the basis of this information, or on whether you choose to provide it. However, if you choose not to provide the information and you have made this application in person, Federal regulations require us to note your ethnicity, sex, and race on the basis of visual observation or surname. For those of us who have lived our lives embracing the idea that America should be color-blind, it is appalling that the government is mandating that businesses visually assess their customers and report ethnic and racial characteristics “on the basis of visual observation or surname.” Further, if a consumer is applying for a mortgage by phone, the mortgage banker must interrogate the applicant about his race, sex, and ethnicity. I have never been employed in consumer mortgage lending, so I’ve never had to engage in government-mandated racial profiling. But I would find it extremely offensive, and it would be tempting not to comply at all. As it turns out, hundreds of Bank of America mortgage bankers did find those racial profile questions so offensive that they routinely refused to play along. Instead, they simply noted on the mortgage application that the customer applying by phone refused to provide the racial information. Unfortunately, the racially-obsessed bureaucrats at the CFPB noticed that Bank of America had a higher percentage of “information-not-provided” customers than other large banks (13 percent versus 10 percent). The CFPB then started breathing down Bank of America’s neck, and the “information-not-provided” rate dropped to single digits as the bank pressured its employees to talk to customers like a 1960s segregationist. But once Bank of America eased up on its employees, the “information-not-provided” rate climbed back up again. (RELATED: The Debanking of the American Conservative) To punish Bank of America for not properly interrogating its customers on the racial composition of their bloodlines, the CFPB imposed a $12 million fine on the bank in 2023. The Consent Order imposed on Bank of America, dated November 2023, is at this link. It is a long, disgusting read that sounds like the prosecution of a business in the 1950s South for refusing to comply with segregationist Jim Crow laws. Here is just a snippet [emphasis added]: Some of [Bank of America’s] loan officers continued to record “information-not-provided” without asking applicants for their race, ethnicity, and sex. Specifically, in 2023, before the Effective Date, [Bank of America] began directing loan officers to identify through an electronic flag any call on which the loan officer collected an applicant’s race, ethnicity, and sex. When [the bank] audited those calls, it found that some loan officers were not, in fact, requesting race, ethnicity, and sex information on the flagged calls. [Bank of America] represents that it disciplined certain loan officers as a result. It was a criminal offense in much of the southern U.S. in the pre-Civil Rights era for a white employee to refuse to comply with the Jim Crow laws. It hardly needs to be noted that Jim Crow was a racist, big-government plan imposed on business by Democrats. So is Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Finance Protection Board. Aside from enforcing racial profiling, the CFPB has been an incompetent and corrupt organization that cannot even keep consumer information safe. In March of 2023, it was revealed that a CFPB employee had forwarded to himself more than 250,000 confidential consumer records obtained from financial institutions reporting to the CFPB. The Trump administration has been trying to kill off the CFPB by starving it of funding. Under acting CFPB head Russ Vought, the administration is also idling those employees who cannot be terminated, and wherever possible, it is suspending all active investigations and projects that were initiated before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The final decommissioning of the Consumer Financial Protection Board cannot come soon enough. READ MORE: A 50-Year Mortgage Is a Financial Narcotic Trump Topples the Regulatory Tower