Friday's Final Word

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As long as I can have you here with me, I'd much rather be forever in closed tabs ...

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Ed: Via Adam Baldwin and The Right Scoop. As I wrote earlier, those who refuse to learn from history – REAL history, not narratives – are doomed to repeat it. 

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Alan Charles Kors, WSJ (republished 2016, written 2003): No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.” . . .

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

Ed: The history and the futlity are both undeniable for rational people. Collectivism produces impoverished societies and brutal dictatorships, no matter which brand of collectivism is employed. 

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Ed: What followed in Russia was hardly an improvement, of course. Not all dictatorships are based on collectivism. However, Vladimir Putin has made his nostalgia for the good ol' days of the USSR is what drives him. The massive hammer and sickle at the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Sochi Olympics made it clear what form of governance Putin prefers. Dmitriev didn't get the dunk he thought out of this. 

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Ed: I wish more Democrats would say this. I wish even more that they would mean it. Wu certainly does, but she's in the small minority these days.

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Ed: George Orwell provided the definitive definition of socialist systems in this quip from Animal Farm: "Some animals are more equal than others." New York City residents in the pens are about to learn that lesson the hard way. 

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CBS News: While federal and state investigators are now looking into each of the centers featured by Shirley, audits completed in the past 10 years show that Minnesota has lacked the teeth to properly vet attendance records and go after possible fraudsters proactively.

In May of 2025, the federal Office of the Inspector General released an audit of 200 randomly selected child care assistance payments from 2023. The agency found that in 38 instances, "Minnesota did not comply with requirements related to attendance and payment for services." The auditors extrapolated that to mean that the state was making at least one error in 11% of payments made to 1,155 centers in 2023. 

"Minnesota's limited oversight of attendance documentation at childcare centers resulted in overpayments to providers," the audit states. "A lack of oversight to ensure accurate and complete attendance documentation could increase the risk of fraud, waste and abuse to the CCAP program."

The Office of the Inspector General made recommendations, including "strengthening its monitoring program to include routine reviews of CCAP attendance records for accuracy." 

Ed: This is interesting in that it contradicts what the local CBS affiliate reported. CBS News tried to soften this by refuring to connect the dots to actual fraud, but it actually validates Nick Shirley's reporting. 

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The Spectator: What made Shirley’s video the tipping point, the tocsin that finally shook the world awake? The legacy media has largely avoided covering the issue. Indeed, it has savaged reporters such as James O’Keefe who exposed elements of the fraud in 2020, and did the same to activist Christopher Rufo who has done so more recently. 

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, those earlier exposés, while hard-hitting, failed to generate the near-universal outrage that Shirley’s matter-of-fact reporting has.

I say “near-universal” because there are dissenters. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, pulled out the “white supremacist,” “racist” and “Islamophobic” cards in response to Shirley’s video. The accusations fell completely flat. Why? Egregious overuse. People are no longer frightened by those content-free, rhetorical boogeymen. Such accusations are merely epithets designed to end conversation, not acknowledge the truth. 

Confronted with the fact that Somalis have systematically pilfered billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in order to enrich themselves, bribe politicians and fund terrorist activities in Somalia, the public are outraged – and rightly.

Ed: The erosion of confidence in American media probably plays a role in this, too. However, it's episodes like this – where the media insists that its consumers stop believing their own eyes in favor of The Narrative – that caused that erosion. It's a vicious cycle, with emphasis on "vicious."

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Ed: Catherine Herridge made that point pretty clear earlier today. When CBS News makes that pretty clear, we'll know that real reform is finally coming. 

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Hollywood in Toto: Then, when Weiss’ new venture proved profitable, she sold it to Paramount and agreed to personally overhaul the company’s CBS News franchise.

Her hand-picked anchor, Tony Dokoupil, kicked off his tenure by admitting the news media has lost its way. The modern reporter is disconnected from the average American and deserves much of the criticism leveled against it, he added.

All of the above has made Weiss an enemy of both the Left and Legacy Media outlets (but we repeat ourselves). The far-Left Entertainment Weekly just dubbed Weiss a “conservative,” even though it rarely, if ever, uses ideological labels for Hollywood elite.

And, more importantly, how is Weiss conservative again? 

Ed: Maybe "integrity" is exclusively a conservative value?

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Ed: Perhaps when Protection Racket Media outlets report this honestly, we'll see evidence of real reform at other media orgs. 

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Jonathan Turley: We previously discussed how the J6 Committee and many in the media played up the “bombshell” testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson despite glaring contradictions that were hidden from the public. The J6 Committee denied reports of those contradictions and then delayed the release of directly conflicting testimony as the press played up who Trump allegedly tried to seize control of the Presidential limo to go to Capitol Hill. In his deposition before Congress, former special counsel Jack Smith dismissed Hutchinson’s testimony as unreliable, unsupported, and unusable in any trial. Smith appears to have finally presented a conclusive indictment . . . of the J6 Committee.

Smith said that the much-reported account was legal chum as based on a “second or even thirdhand witness” and directly contradicted by those who had firsthand knowledge. ...

Like so many other debunked viral stories, the media seemed to just shrug and move on after the testimony. After playing up the account in wall-to-wall coverage and cover pages, the press has again moved on with little self-awareness or circumspection.


Ed: If a story doesn't support the Left's narratives, the media doesn't report it. If a story directly contradicts those narratives, the media actively buries it. This is has been standard operational procedure at media orgs, and it isn't changing yet. 

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Ed: Don't hold your breath. It is indeed (D)ifferent. 

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