Politics

During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Louis C.K. stated a position that many on the left believe but are unwilling to admit: America should open its borders to the world. “My feeling is they should open the border,” he explained. “Just let everybody pour in… Then there will be all these problems, well, there should be. It shouldn’t be so great here. It is a weird thing to sequester a certain group of people and keep upping their lifespan and their lifestyle.” As someone who's spent most of his journalistic career railing against mass immigration, my initial reaction was one of scorn.

Happy twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest headline in world history! DRUDGE REPORT NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT Thus began the nation's one-year slog through President Bill Clinton’s lies and calumnies, ending in his disgrace and impeachment. Now, that was an impeachment. You missed a good one, kids. President Trump was impeached for making an (allegedly) inappropriate call to the president of Ukraine? Oh please. To discuss what Clinton did in the Oval Office the whole country needed a V-chip.

We might have finally discovered something that politicians are worse at than budgeting: regulating emotions. What is in the water in Washington, DC that is causing these adults to constantly melt down in public? First there was President Biden’s now-former chief of staff Ron Klain. The man who has been accused of being the brains behind the Biden operation is moving on from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue… well, maybe. Klain delivered a mawkish farewell address in the White House East Room, with his 80-year-old boss proudly looking on a few feet behind him. To say Ron got choked up would be an understatement. He gushed over the Biden family and the administration’s accomplishments. He even heaped praise on Joe Biden’s parenting skills.

George Santos is frustrated. In an hour-long interview with The Spectator, Santos tried to make it clear he came to Washington with the hope to get things done. But he’s been “slapped in the face” with the reality that there is so much red tape. “Washington, DC is performance art,” he says. “This is a master course on performing arts... everybody here is acting.” Santos of course knows a thing or two about acting; his exploits have been well publicized since his election. Perhaps the most well-known of his roles took the form of his popular drag performances in Brazil. A fan of drag for many years, it’s surprising to learn that Santos only began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race only once the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Last week, British Columbia became the first province in Canada and the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs for personal use. Those drugs include heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and even fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. British Columbia follows Oregon, which decriminalized all drugs in 2020, taking a more proactive — if controversial — approach to address the alarming number of overdose deaths across the region. Under the state's new guidelines, adults 18 years and older caught with less than 2.5 grams of an illicit substance will not be arrested or charged with a criminal offense.

Boris Johnson’s call to arms Boris Johnson started a speech in Washington urging continued support for Ukraine this morning with three words: “God bless America.” The former British prime minister (and one-time Spectator editor) is in town in his burgeoning role as a freelance champion of the Ukrainian cause — and he began with a message of thanks for the leading role taken by the United States in arming and supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia. When in power, Johnson was one of the Western leaders most committed to backing Ukraine. Now, freed from the constraints of Downing Street, he has chosen to spend his new-found free time helping the Ukrainian cause — even if that puts him at odds with his successor, Rishi Sunak.

Racism has become an unfalsifiable proposition. Such is the central take-away from the race industry’s tortured reaction to a brutal police beating in Memphis, Tennessee. Five Memphis officers responded to what was initially reported as a car driving the wrong way down a street. The officers’ tactics during the stop of driver Tyre Nichols, captured on video, were an abomination: while shouting contradictory commands, the officers immediately escalated their use of force without apparent cause. It was Nichols who tried to deescalate the chaos — a responsibility usually put on officers, not on suspects. The cops struggled without coordination to cuff him, while delivering gratuitous kicks, punches to the face and baton strikes.