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Politics Bondi Bombs on Capitol Hill A hearing meant to close the Epstein chapter instead blew it wide open. She yelled, she flailed, she taunted. She accused everyone else in the room of rampant theatrics. In the end, even the MAGA faithful on social media struggled to excuse what they had witnessed. In the defining moment of her career so far, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony in front of the House judiciary committee couldn’t have gone much worse if she had tried. From the moment the hearing began on Wednesday morning, Bondi appeared rattled as she repeatedly attempted to pivot away from the very subject that required her presence in front of dozens of bipartisan legislators. Though she was there to answer a myriad of questions regarding her department’s handling of the Epstein files, Bondi attempted again and again to shift scrutiny from the DOJ to the Dow Jones, a strategy that courted criticism and only raised more questions about President Donald Trump’s administration. “The Dow is over 50,000 right now!” Bondi cried out amid stern questioning from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401Ks and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about. We should be talking about making Americans safe… What does the Dow have to do with anything? That’s what they just asked? Are you kidding?” Though Bondi was brought before Congress to testify on the DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein Files and her team’s investigation (or lack thereof) into the co-conspirators listed in the heavily redacted documents, the former Florida attorney general continually gravitated back toward the stock market, as though rising indices could substitute for accountability. In an outburst that defined the day and mimicked the territorial defiance of Trump himself, Bondi berated Raskin.  “You don’t tell me anything!” Bondi yelled after the Maryland congressman requested that Bondi answer his line of questions instead of eating up the clock with long-winded statements about the success of the stock market. “You’re a washed-up loser lawyer.” When a dozen Epstein survivors present in the room were asked to stand and raise their hands if Bondi’s DOJ had failed to speak with them, every single woman (and the brother of deceased victim Virginia Giuffre) raised their hands. Bondi responded by angrily accusing Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of performative politics before stating that she wouldn’t “get in the gutter” with the congresswoman from Seattle. And that was all before Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who, together with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), has led the push to get the Epstein files released in full, took his opportunity to cross-examine Bondi. It went exactly as you might imagine, with Bondi trading barbs with Massie, a Republican who has dared to make good on Trump’s own campaign promise to shed light on “the Epstein class.” When Massie accused the Justice Department of redacting the names of several Epstein co-conspirators, an omission that violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump in November, Bondi straightened her posture and called Massie “a failed politician.” When Massie noted that former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner was among the co-conspirators initially redacted by the DOJ, Bondi simply scoffed and accused Massie of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But Massie wasn’t finished. Though Bondi has claimed redactions in the Epstein Files were made to protect survivors and victims of Epstein, Massie highlighted an email from the victims’ lawyers that was sent to the DOJ. “It was a list of names not to be released,” said Massie. “And what did the DOJ do with this email? They released it. Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did.” During a break for lunch, Massie told the assembled press that Bondi’s performance had failed to provide the sort of transparency many Americans expected when they voted for Trump 2.0. “She didn’t answer anything,” Massie said. “She came here ready to talk about the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq, which seems kinda crazy to me.” Massie also accused FBI Director Kash Patel of making false statements under oath, a claim that was further clarified through video provided by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).  Following a heated exchange between the California congressman and Bondi during which the attorney general admitted that Trump’s name appears “countless times” in the Epstein files, Swalwell then played a video from a September 2025 House Judiciary hearing in which Patel insisted Trump’s name did not appear even 100 times in the Files. Though roughly only 3 million of the 6 million total Files have been released by the DOJ, Trump’s name reportedly appears thousands of times in documents that remain heavily redacted. Another name directly tied to the Trump administration that appeared a dozen times in the Epstein files is that of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who, in an October 2025 interview with the New York Post, said he vowed to “never be in the room with that disgusting person again” after privately visiting Epstein with his wife in 2005. But, according to the files, Lutnick, who was Epstein’s next-door neighbor in Manhattan, engaged in business dealings with Epstein as late as 2012.  Democratic Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) pointedly asked Bondi about Lutnick after the commerce secretary admitted to visiting Epstein’s island during a Tuesday Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. Bondi characterized the questioning from Balint as shameful, despite Lutnick’s own admission that he and his family made a lunch visit to Epstein on a private boat and on the sex offender’s island. “I am not asking trick questions,” replied Balint. “The American people deserve to know. These are senior Trump officials.” The hearing didn’t get any easier for Bondi, who then accused Balint, who is Jewish, of antisemitism because Balint voted against a resolution condemning the pro-Palestine slogan “from the river to the sea.”  Balint was stunned. “You want to go there?” asked the congresswoman. “You’re talking to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust.” It was the sort of moment that typified Bondi’s performance on Capitol Hill Wednesday. In a hearing meant to provide transparency and accountability to those harmed by a serial sex offender connected to America’s most powerful, Bondi instead turned oversight into spectacle. As if the hearing couldn’t have been made worse, a photograph of Bondi’s binder page revealed a page labeled “Jayapal-Pramila search history.” Now the Justice Department is under heavy pressure to clarify whether they are indeed cataloguing the search history of lawmakers like the Washington congresswoman who reviewed unredacted Epstein files earlier in the week.  When asked about her experience viewing the unredacted Epstein files, Jayapal said DOJ employees sat behind her and watched her every search. “They had logins that had our names, they logged us into the computers,” she told reporters. “So clearly they intended to look at our search history even when they invited us in.” When questioned about the situation on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson, a true-blue Trump loyalist, admitted it wouldn’t be appropriate for anyone, including DOJ staff, to track the search history of members of Congress.  If the allegations are true, it wouldn’t only be Democratic members of Congress whose search history was allegedly tracked by DOJ officials, but also a number of MAGA Republicans, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who both called for Epstein handler Ghislaine Maxwell to receive harsher prison conditions after viewing the unredacted Files.  For an administration desperate to move past Epstein, the Bondi hearing simply courted more controversy than it relieved. Fox News, long a defender of all things Trump, dedicated an entire segment of its Wednesday evening coverage to the outrage garnered by Bondi’s testimony. “Bondi comes off like a shrieking Karen,” said the mononymous Fox News commentator Kennedy. “She seemed very, very unpersuasive. She needs to tone it down.” But toning it down is the exact opposite of how the chief movers in Trump’s world operate.  The issue is no longer whether Bondi had a bad day on Capitol Hill. It’s whether the Justice Department under her leadership understands the difference between loyalty and law enforcement. The Bondi hearing was supposed to quiet the Epstein controversy. Instead, it widened it by pulling in cabinet officials, members of Congress from both parties, and even conservative media. If this was the administration’s attempt at damage control, it failed in the most spectacular fashion. The post Bondi Bombs on Capitol Hill appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The All-Conquering Goliath Israeli justifications for Palestinian suffering have worn thin. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Palestinian mother’s grief when losing a child is as heartbreaking and painful as that of an Israeli mum’s loss. Another truth is that over 72,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 2023, and over 550 have been killed by the IDF since last October’s ceasefire. A further 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF and by Jewish settlers in the West Bank in the last two years alone. Which leads me to ask: Are Palestinian lives only as worthy as the bugs we swat away and kill during the summer months, mere statistics?  Yet another truth universally acknowledged, except among Netanyahu supporters, Hollywood ignoramuses, and well-off types in upper Manhattan, is that the death toll of Palestinians is disproportionate to that of Israelis killed by Hamas in October 2023—850 or 1,200, depending on who is counting. These numbers should raise outrage, but alas they do not. To the contrary. “Israel under attack” is the mantra, and anyone that disputes it is a Nazi-like antisemite according to some, like Bari Weiss before her appointment as head honcho at CBS.     Recognizing the suffering and despair of a brutal, 60-year occupation does not seem to be within the cognitive potential of most Israelis, nor of many Jews. Framing the latter as eternal victims has not only given Israel the right to steal land from poor Palestinians, but also allowed brutal settlers cut off water supplies from small farms, forcing their owners from their land and taking them over. Those who resist are shot dead and declared by the settlers to be terrorists. How do I know all this? Easy. I began my journalistic career in Jordan back in 1968, and got to know the region well. My first ever assignment covered the refugee camps in Jordan, camps that had been set up after the 1948 war that saw Israel defeat three Arab armies and establish the Israeli nation. The camps were bursting with poor souls that had been there since 1948 and with the new refugees after the Israeli victory in the 1967 war. I covered the 1973 war from the Israeli side, but was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister in 1977. Begin was the first exponent of Jewish supremacy, and encouraged assaults on Palestinians while building illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Settlers are known to refer to Palestinians as sub-humans and to shoot before asking questions; they number more than 700,000. There are roadblocks everywhere that make it impossible for Palestinians to move around. As a local doctor said, “Dante’s Inferno should be updated to feature a circle of Hell called the West Bank.”  But let us return to 1968. The refugee camps seem to have marked me for life. Watching very old people who had been there for a generation, and whose children and grandchildren had also grown up in those terrible conditions, was a daily reminder of the injustice foisted upon innocent people. With whatever small means at my disposal, I’ve been attempting to expose the plight of those innocents ever since. Sticking up for homeless Palestinians in horrible camps made it a certainty that I’d be seen as an antisemite, a libel spread by that one-tune Johnny, Norman Podhoretz. His hysterical theatrics managed to convince William F. Buckley to fire the kind and gentle Joe Sobran, an act that ruined Joe’s life and led to his death. Podhoretz and his ilk tried the same foul tricks with our cofounder Pat Buchanan, but to no avail. They also failed with yours truly. But charging antisemitism against the slightest criticism of Israel is an old trick. The sheer levels of depravity of many settlers against the locals not only go unpunished, but unreported, as too many journalists and diplomats are afraid to be tainted with the charge of antisemitism .  Never mind. Pretend behavior is at its zenith when Israel presents itself as victim and at the mercy of the all-powerful Arabs. What is grossly unfair is to attack those whose sympathies lie with victims in camps and to paint them as antisemitic. These unscrupulous types will say and do anything. They were the ones that convinced George W. Bush, whose brain cells had gone AWOL, to attack Iraq and save the world from Armageddon. Now they need to attack Iran to yet again save the Western world from their non-existent nukes. The Holocaust is yet again instrumental to excuse Israel’s actions against all its neighbors and some even farther away.  Trump is ready and willing to attack Iran once again, with Netanyahu urging him on. Will an attack benefit Uncle Sam? Who knows? What I do know is that it will benefit Israel, keeping Netanyahu in power and making the West Bank settlers more aggressive. Israel is no longer the beleaguered outpost of democracy it once was, but an all-conquering and expanding Goliath. And in the long run, Israel is no friend of Uncle Sam. The post The All-Conquering Goliath appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage ‘Nothing to Fear but Keir Himself’ Labour’s electoral fundamentals remain dire, despite Starmer’s survival of a party putsch.  UK Special Coverage Following his near-death experience last week, the Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has, we are told, been reborn. A soft-left phoenix has risen from the ashes of the “boys’ club.” This is how Labour women (and many male MPs) describe the allegedly misogynistic clan of right-wing “Blairites” who have been cleared out of Number 10 and who had had a malign influence, they believe, over the Labour Party leader. These “boys” include the departed chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, the defenestrated director of communications, Tim Allan, and of course the Prince of Darkness, Peter Mandelson, formerly Lord Mandelson, who has finally had a stake driven into his dark heart following revelations about his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Suddenly, Keir is free to be Keir, they say, pointing to his spirited seeing off of the abortive coup led by the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar, last Tuesday. Sharon Graham, leader of Unite the Union, one of Labour’s largest donors, believes that the Labour “boys” had been promoting what she calls “neoliberal policies” and had poisoned the well. “It [the Labour government] delivered for the bond markets and once again for the bankers,” she declared in a speech last week, claiming that the Treasury under Labour had been mesmerized by “so-called fiscal rules…austerity by another name.” Had the boys’ club not been sent packing, Unite would, she threatened, have disaffiliated from Labour and taken its money elsewhere. (She did not specify where.) Graham was expressing the overwhelming view of the Labour membership and most of the parliamentary Labour Party. This may seem divorced from reality: does she seriously think that this massively indebted country should ignore the bond markets, abandon fiscal discipline and borrow yet more money? Apparently she does. And most of the Labour Party appear to agree with her.  You need only consult the recent Survation poll of Labour members on their favorite Cabinet ministers. This ministerial beauty contest was topped by the left-wing former Labour leader, Ed “Net Zero” Miliband, at 70 percent favorability. Starmer was at 5 percent. Labour has never learned to love its leader, despite his electoral success. But, after the leadership crisis, the left now believe that they have captured (or rather recaptured) Starmer and can now bend him to their will. They point out that when Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2020 he stood on a platform stressing “the moral case for socialism”. Keir Starmer even produced a Ten Point pledge card in 2020 promising to nationalize “rail, mail, energy, and water,” to abolish university tuition fees, to end “cruel” welfare provisions, to restore EU free movement, and to relax immigration controls. He even pledged to legislate a “Prevention of Military Intervention Act.”  One wonders how he would have squared that with his recent promise of boots on the ground in Ukraine. Most of these radical postures were ditched within a year of Starmer winning the Labour leadership. The Ten Points became a left-wing meme, repeatedly reproduced on social media with most of the promises redacted. Starmer abandoned Ten Points leftism under the guidance of Mandelson—who remained hugely influential in Number 10 until very recently—and of McSweeney, who pointed out that keeping the pledges would almost certainly lead to the loss of the next general election. Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had in 2019 taken Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 on a left platform not dissimilar to Starmer’s agenda. McSweeney was right, of course. Labour won a landslide victory in July 2024 on a promise not to raise income tax, VAT, or National Insurance; a commitment to honor Brexit; plus a promise from Starmer that he would “stop the boats,” by which he meant the illegal migrant crossings across the English Channel. He would, he said, “smash the gangs.” But that is all water under the bridge, if you will excuse the pun. The numbers crossing the Channel on small boats have actually increased under Labour. The party has defaulted to the democratic socialism which has always been its core philosophy. Labour went along with the McSweeney plan because they wanted to win a general election after 14 years in the electoral wilderness, not because they believed in it. The same thing happened in 1997 when Labour won an earlier landslide under Tony Blair after 18 years of Tory rule. Blair promised to govern as “New Labour”: a pro-business party of the center ground. This recognition of political reality rarely lasts. Blair is now excoriated by most Labour members and the commentariat on BlueSky. So what happens now? If Labour is back under left-wing management, where is the government, and Britain, headed? The prognosis is not good. Starmer has sidelined his promise to deliver economic growth and has already pumped tens of billions into welfare. The restoration of the left-wing “activist state” implies much more interventionism, regulation, and growth-destroying taxes. A reaffirmation of net zero and carbon taxes will keep energy costs unsustainably high.  But this new, improved Starmer is not so secure as his left-wing supporters claim. For a start, the  Mandelson-Epstein scandal has a long way to run yet. The Cabinet Office is trawling through 25 years of Mandelson’s and other ministers’ contacts with Epstein going back to the Blair era. The Parliamentary Security and Intelligence Committee intends to publish many documents relating to the Epstein affair. The Metropolitan Police are conducting a criminal investigation and have already raided Mandelson’s homes. Starmer is still the least popular prime minister in history according to recent polls. Labour faces a desperate fight in the Gorton and Denton by-election in a fortnight and, if he survives that, the expectation of huge Labour losses in the Scottish Parliament elections in May. The Starmer boosterism of the past few days, taken up by much of the press, defies electoral reality. He has gone beyond the point of no return. This was revealed most forcefully in a magisterial article in the Spectator magazine last week by one of the most respected and well-connected journalists in Westminster, Tim Shipman, author of countless insider accounts of governmental crises. Shipman quotes numerous senior Labour sources bemoaning the incompetence of Starmer, who they believe has no political nous and lacks any sense of purpose. “Fundamentally, the Prime Minister cannot make a decision, stick to a decision, implement a decision, defend that decision when it gets tough, or explain that decision, ever,” Shipman quotes a senior figure close to No. 10 as saying. Another says: “Letting Keir be Keir is unlikely to be the solution: it is the problem.” Or as one Westminster wit puts it: “We have nothing to fear but Keir himself.” The post ‘Nothing to Fear but Keir Himself’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

A fascinating insight. The post Alex Turner’s favourite Arctic Monkeys songs first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

A quarter century after Alex Jones began to sound the alarm about the globalist Satanic pedophiles, the general public is finally awakening to the cult of demon goblins running the world.

by Martin Jay, Strategic Culture: The BBC World Service started to look dull, out of touch, and not especially relevant. A massive layoff of hundreds of Washington Post journalists made headlines in recent days, as did news about a funding crisis for the international division of the BBC (BBC World Service), leading to debate among […]

from Revolver News: So where are all the climate warriors? Where are the activists who block highways and glue themselves to museum floors? Where are the politicians who shame everyday Americans for driving SUVs or forgetting their reusable grocery bags? Because right now, nearly a billion gallons of raw sewage – literal poop water – […]

from VRIC Media: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/