?? Hundreds of thousands of exhausted Palestinians who have survived Israel’s genocide are now returning to northern Gaza after over 15 months ?

The White House budget office has ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, according to a memo sent to government agencies on Monday, potentially paralyzing a vast swath of programs and sowing confusion and alarm among the array of groups that depend on them. The directive threatened to upend funds that course throughout the American economy: Hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid....

President Trump’s budget office has ordered all federal agencies to temporarily pause the disbursement of “all federal financial assistance” besides Social Security and Medicare. The order could disrupt tens of billions of dollars in payments for domestic infrastructure projects, climate initiatives, foreign aid and diversity education that is disbursed to states and local governments. The move creates confusion in Washington and the states as officials scramble to figure out how to...

A "fuck the haters" anthem... The post The song Billy Joel wrote to insult his critics first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

"Jimi used that guitar." The post The blessed guitar Keith Richards unintentionally bestowed upon Jimi Hendrix first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The Trump administration hit the ground running, signing executive orders that reflect the fulfillment of promises he made on the campaign trail. Even with the efficient start to his presidency, the week was not without controversy. An Episcopal priest went after the president during the National Prayer Service, calling for him to “have mercy” on kids identifying as transgender and illegal aliens.  On this episode of The Weekend Spectator, hosts Paul Kengor and Grace Reilly break down the politicized “sermon” and the highlights of the 47th president’s first week. Watch the full episode to find out more. READ Paul and Grace’s work here and here. The Weekend Spectator Ep. 27: Farewell Biden, Communist Hollywood, and Carter’s Funeral The Weekend Spectator Ep. 26: The ‘Donroe Doctrine’

Richard Cox, a male who identifies as a “transgender woman,” was caught on multiple occasions exposing his genitals to women and girls. Cox was arrested in December 2024 at the Barcroft Sports & Fitness Center on trespassing charges. He now faces numerous charges, including indecent exposure and being a sex offender on school property. Some of the charges relate to an incident at Washington-Liberty High School, which is operated by Arlington Public Schools. When the superintendent of Arlington Public Schools was questioned as to why Cox was permitted in the girls’ changing room, he doubled down on Arlington Public Schools’ commitment to inclusivity for “those who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community.” A spokesman additionally said Arlington Public Schools does “not tolerate behaviors from any individual who is threatening or making others feel unsafe.” On this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo analyze the atrocities that Cox committed under the guise of identifying as a transgender woman. Ellie and Lyrah criticize the DEI movement and transgender ideology for permitting horrific incidents like this, which threaten women’s safety and their private spaces. Tune in to hear their discussion! Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here. Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify. Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

Over the weekend an email came in from a reader. It read, in part… Why does Carville get so much press coverage? Not only with the MSM, but especially with the honest press (Spectator, Newsmax, Daily Caller, Redstate, etc). He appears to me to be about as insightful as Karl Rove. I can’t see how their thoughts and comments have added to the discourse for probably the last 20 or so years. Yet, every time they have anything to say, someone covers it. There are a couple of answers to the reader’s question that inform the general state of things as the second Trump administration ramps up from what’s already a whirlwind of activity. James Carville, as it turns out, is a fairly decent avatar for the Democrat Party as a whole — or at least he used to be. The most obvious answer is that boomers, the primary viewers of cable news and readers of traditional newspapers, still think of Carville as relevant. Between that and his general quotability (which is another way of saying he’s crass and rude enough to raise eyebrows), he’s perhaps the most marketable of the Democrats’ old-line talking heads. (RELATED: The Kids Are Alright, It’s the Boomers Who Are Bananas) But what lies underneath is that there are very, very few voices on the Left these days who can reach an audience of people who are straight and white. And this is a real problem. There’s a hilariously funny video clip circulating right now of comedian Andrew Shultz as he absolutely burns down the Democrat Party as currently constituted… “The Democratic party is for 5’8″ and under men and women over 280.” Comedian Andrew Schulz is out here ROASTING liberal men for being short losers. Comedy is back! pic.twitter.com/ZtpXdUZ1L7 — OutKick (@Outkick) January 27, 2025 They’re no longer cool. Carville, who was so cool at one point that he was cast as the governor of Missouri in the Brad Pitt–Casey Affleck movie about Jesse James, is especially no longer cool. He isn’t even cool among Democrats, as it turns out — and a couple of recent statements of his aren’t going to fix that. There was this… Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville pleaded with Democrats to let President Donald Trump “punch himself out,” on MSNBC’s “The Beat” with Katie Phang on Friday. “I mean, look, he just says anything that he wants to say. I mean, how many stories do I have to read that the delta smelt has nothing to do with this, but he’s just going to keep plowing through? OK. And we have to learn as Democrats just let him punch himself out,” said Carville, referencing Trump’s comments accusing Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsome of prioritizing the endangered fish over protecting the state’s residents from wildfires. Carville expressed that Democrats need to take a page from Muhammad Ali’s book, saying, “Just remember, this is a little bit before your time, but people of my generation remember Muhammad Ali and his rope-a-dope. He just let you just go… the first 6 or 7 rounds, and then you come in and you match up, and then you start launching bombs.” And then there was this… Democratic strategist James Carville hopes that former President Joe Biden can help his party by getting out of the way, since “no one wants to hear from” him anymore. “Well, this is the kind of truth of where we are,” Carville said to his “Politics War Room” podcast co-host Al Hunt on Wednesday. “We all know Biden. Actually, you and I know him personally. And I think it’s fair to say that we’re longtime, at some level, admirers of Joe Biden. What he’s done to himself is, no one wants to hear from this guy anymore, OK?” He added, “Just go to your condo in Rehoboth and stay there. And that’s not because we’re bad people, or we’re mean people. It was all his doing, all his doing, this entire thing.” Carville is giving good advice on both counts. The problem is that it’s also good advice for him. Because nobody really wants to hear from James Carville anymore. His own party isn’t interested in his advice. And they absolutely aren’t going to listen to his suggestion for a Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope whereby Democrats shut up and allow Trump and his team to govern. That’s less realistic than the idea, to which we’re now being treated, that Joe Biden shouldn’t have been unceremoniously dumped from their ticket. The really entertaining bit, of course, is that as ramshackle and deranged as Carville currently presents himself — if nothing else, can somebody get him a new Mardi Gras polo shirt to wear? — he might be the only one of his ilk who’s even attempting to figure out how to become relevant in American politics again. The rest of the Left, banished as they’ve been to the political wilderness by the events of last November, seem to think the answer is “more cowbell.” And more cowbell is not what cures the fever, let me tell you. This isn’t how it’s going to happen. For example, I give you the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives… [Hakeem] Jeffries, the first Black American to serve as leader of any national party in Congress, said he expects there to be “an avalanche of righteous litigation” to combat Trump’s anti-DEI policies and some of his other executive orders. He also explained how America and its constitution are founded on the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “The motto of the United States of America is E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. That’s diversity,” said Jeffries. Jeffries continued, “The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, one of the most important amendments in our country, provides equal protection under the law. That’s equity.” He added, “In this country, we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America … and in that pledge, we promise one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for All … that’s inclusion.” The minority leader said diversity, equity, and inclusion are “American values,” adding, “It’s about economic opportunity. It’s about merit for everyone, based on what you know, not who you know.” Jeffries’s gibberish, which could even rate its own column in response (E pluribus unum is about unity, not diversity, you unctuous dunce!), doesn’t turn out to be all that resonant. Not when it turns out that it’s white chicks who have 76 percent of the chief diversity officer jobs in corporate America. And the people who are supposed to benefit from DEI know it. Trump nuked DEI and yet this was the result… Trump approval currently has NO racial demographic signal. Wild! White – 55% Black – 57% Hisp/oth – 58% — Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) January 23, 2025 Blacks and Hispanics actually like Trump better than white people do. But the numbers are close enough that you can say this… Look at this. Utterly and completely devastating to the Democrat Party. In less than a week this is a colorblind country after 50 years of their attempts to make race the center of all human thought. Trump nuked DEI and across all racial lines they like it. Incredible. https://t.co/9Mfk07Dmtu — Scott McKay (@TheHayride) January 24, 2025 Race. Climate change. The Border and immigration. On issue after issue, there is zero change in either the substance, the messaging, or the style. They can’t do it differently. And the American people can’t stand how they do it. Carville, as tired and bitter as he is, at least gets it a little. The rest of them? Hopeless. Which should offer a lot of hope for the American revival we desperately need and might well be experiencing. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Will Someone Please Take Out the Trash? Elon Musk and Chris Murphy: The Old Game Keeps On Failing Thoughts On a Repudiation and Liberation Day: Donald Trump’s Inauguration

The Left is agog at the audacity of Donald Trump. They are because Trump is doing as president just what he promised to do as a candidate. This astounds the Left because their candidates always run to the center and then govern to the left. Since their candidates never do what they promise, they cannot come to grips with someone who does. The contrast may be no less jarring than Trump’s policies themselves. Assuredly the Left hates President Trump’s policies. Drill, baby, drill; illegal immigration enforcement; ending DEI programs throughout the federal government; and challenging birthright citizenship — all emit a nails-on-blackboard sound to the American Left’s tender ears. However, the Left’s shock runs deeper, more elementally, as well. The Left never do what they say; they say what they don’t intend to do; and they accuse others of doing what they are doing. The Left does not know what to make of someone like Trump who is their mirror image. The Left never does what they say. They don’t because if they did then they could never advance their extremist agenda. So, their professedly benign environmental agenda devolves into banning fossil fuels — gas appliances, internal combustion engines, stopping exploration and export — only after they have power. They, therefore, must proclaim their aims to be moderate and that these will promote things that no one could object to: “saving the planet,” rather than redistributing the wealth that their policies intend. For the Left, words do not have meaning. Instead, words are merely a means, not the message itself. They are not meant to be used for promises but for tools. They are not supposed to be literal, but lateral — malleable things that will slide sideways when the time is right. The Left never says what they intend to do. They don’t because if they did then no one would ever give them a chance to implement their extremist agenda. Who besides those supporting sanctuary cities and that Haitian illegal immigrant and gang member now famous for screaming “Biden forever!” would vote for throwing open the nation’s borders? The Left always accuses others of doing what they themselves are guilty of. They do because if they did not distract observers, their own extremist actions would be visible for what they are. Their opponents are always labeled racists (though the Left supports DEI programs based explicitly on race criteria and CRT, which is a thoroughly race-based refutation of traditional America) and fascists (despite fascists having been socialists and the Left aiming to deny all dissent with a Cancel Culture). The Left’s politicians are even more guilty of this bait-and-switch approach than the Left as a whole. They are because, needing to win votes in a broad electorate — one often containing moderates and (shudder) conservatives — they must be even more duplicitous than their collective coalition. Witness the claimed “moderates” — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Left gets it.  This is why they did not push for Biden to exit the race and then, once he did, they did not renounce Harris for claiming she had renounced her former extremist positions — i.e. their positions.  They didn’t mind, because they knew she didn’t mean it. The Left knew “the fix” was in.  It did not matter what either Biden or Harris said or did — or whether it was Biden or Harris who was saying it; they knew that their extremist positions would be well served by whichever of the two won. Now comes Donald J. Trump. He said what he was going to do. Repeatedly. For years. He said it when people mocked him, when people ignored him, and when they disapproved of him. He is still saying them now that he is back in the White House. To the Left, this is incomprehensible. Even more incomprehensible is the fact that Trump is proving popular by doing so. His approval ratings are at all-time highs and his favorability rating reflects it. He is even cool now, with sports stars regularly mimicking his dance moves. He has said what he would do and now he is doing what he said. Exactly. And Americans like him for it. In fact, they like him now more than ever for it. To the Left — and by the Left — this is not how politics is played. As a result, their collective head is about to explode at Trump’s audacity to act honestly and America’s bequeathing of popularity for it. # # # READ MORE from J.T. Young: As California Burns, Is It Also Awakening to Disastrous Democrat Policies? Joe Biden: The Most Dangerous Man in America Democrats Mistake Their People for ‘The People’ J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management, and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.

This week, as the confirmation battle over the Trump nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services peaks, as the saying goes: like father, like son. As someone whose teenage political hero in the 1960s was then-New York Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the opposition today to RFK’s namesake son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is amusing. As someone around at the time, the recollections now of the political attacks on RFK Sr. are still vivid. The central charge around which everything else gathered was that RFK Sr. was “ruthless.” In essence, his zeal to elect his older brother Jack to the presidency, then to serve him as an activist attorney general in times of tumultuous upheaval that was embodied first by the civil rights movement focused on de-segregating the American South, then, as a Senator, protesting and fighting a president of his own Democrat Party — Lyndon Johnson — to end the Vietnam War, revealed RFK Sr. to be relentlessly focused. He had his goals and he was committed to them. Back in the day, these causes appeared gradually, driven by events that in fact had nothing to do with him. The demand by African Americans for the recognition of full equality had finally burst full-blown on the American political scene, something that had begun before RFK became attorney general. With the rise of television, the nation was mesmerized and appalled by television images during the Kennedy administration of peacefully protesting blacks in Birmingham, Ala. having the local authorities turn on them with fire hoses while also literally having them set upon by police dogs. They were riveted as Kennedy himself sent his deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to get two young black students admitted as they attempted to enroll in the heretofore segregated University of Alabama. With Alabama Governor George Wallace literally standing in the university’s doorway, Katzenbach was supported by and accompanied by a National Guard unit federalized with the support of RFK. Eventually, RFK won out and the University was desegregated. And when he died, assassinated the night he won the California Democratic presidential primary, brother Ted eulogized Bobby Kennedy at his funeral by, in part quoting from RFK’s landmark speech to students in the then-apartheid segregated South Africa: Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation; a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth; a young woman reclaimed the territory of France; and it was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the 32 year-old Thomas Jefferson who [pro]claimed that “all men are created equal.” These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. In today’s political world, RFK’s namesake son is exactly living up to the high standards his father repeatedly displayed. And predictably, as with his father, he has become a figure of controversy. This week, as he approaches the televised drama of his Senate confirmation to be President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. is indeed following his father’s example. As with his father, who frequently enraged the Establishment of his day, RFK Jr. faces disagreement over his views on the issues of today. And he doesn’t back down. Those issues focus on a drive to “Make America Healthy Again”, and revolve around a host of health-related issues that RFK Jr. sees as “igniting a health revolution in America.” They include: The Chronic Disease Epidemic Regenerative Agriculture Habitat Preservation Combatting Corporate Corruption Removing Toxins from the Environment So buckle in as RFK Jr. engages Senators representing the body of Congress where his father and both Kennedy uncles once served. And make no mistake about two things. In his drive to pursue a “vision for a healthier America,” RFK Jr. is both his own man — and his father’s son. A good thing on both counts. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Senator Murphy Steps In It Trump’s Triumph: America’s Golden Age Begins Military Vet Hegseth Attacked by Democrats Clueless About Past Secretaries of Defense With No Military Experience