chuckdefeo

digital media strategist for politics and media convergence

[Trisha Posner @trishaposner]

It took a non-Jewish political commentator @HughHewitt to drop a truth bomb this morning about the Democratic Party and antisemitism.

“The Democratic Party is deeply infected with anti-Semitism — not anti-Israel sentiment, not anti-Zionism — antisemitism. And it’s like a sepsis….It’s either going to kill the Democratic Party or it’s going to kill the United States.”

25 years after 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood influence and radical jihadist sympathizers are being mainstreamed in the Democratic Party.

This is no longer a warning. It’s a diagnosis.

#Antisemitism #JewHatred

[chuckdefeo @chuckdefeo]

@AlfieJCarter CODE

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

This figure supports the statement that I have repeatedly made, namely that progressive women fuel the infinity pool of Suicidal Empathy.

[Ambassador Mike Huckabee @GovMikeHuckabee]

The NYT did extensive intvu w/ Tucker Carlson-& questions were legit & professional. In it, Tucker accused me of advocating for killing of children & civilians. Asked to respond, I sent the following. (In fairness, NYT couldn't use all), but here it is:
“Poor Tucker needs help.  He’s clearly circling the drain by saying something so outrageous.  No sane person “advocates” for the murder of children or civilians.  Even the allegation is sick and evil. Tucker  apparently limits his compassion to the unfortunate souls who have died in Gaza as a result of the stubbornness of Hamas to release hostages and who murdered their own citizens and intentionally put them in front of military assets where they would be most likely to become victims of the war.  One never hears Tucker lament the massacre and mutilation of 1200 women, babies, and elderly people butchered by Hamas on October 7 or the torture, rape and starvation of the 251 hostages taken and held by Hamas.  I am heartbroken by the slaughter of innocent civilians wherever they are and whoever they are.  Tucker’s irrational hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular blinds him to the horrific savagery inflicted upon the victims of October 7, including the rape of women in front of their children, the beheading of babies in the presence of their mothers, or setting fire to elderly people who sat in wheelchairs and were burned alive, all of which were captured on video taken by Hamas terrorists who were so proud of their despicable acts that they wore Go-Pro cameras to record it as if they were taking movies of a dance recital.  Tucker’s contempt of President Trump is just another instance in which the Tucker Carlson I once knew has become someone unrecognizable.  I pray he finds himself and God.  He has become a very angry and bitter man and it’s truly tragic to watch.”

[Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer]

“Charles Krauthammer famously said that “decline is a choice,” and the British have chosen it. These trends didn’t begin with the Starmer government, but they have accelerated under its hapless leadership.”

Britain Is Dying Under Keir Starmer https://t.co/9rJrTQPLg1

[National Review @NRO]

Justice Clarence Thomas: "Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government.

It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government."

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jeff Bezos just told you exactly how to price AI.

Nobody listened.

Bezos: “AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.”

Horizontal enabling layer.

Three words that reprice the entire technology sector.

The iPhone was a vertical. One product. One new market.

Electricity was a horizontal. One substrate that rewired every market on Earth.

Wall Street is pricing AI like it is the next iPhone. Bezos is telling you it is the next electrical grid.

Right now, thousands of companies are trying to sell AI as a product.

A feature. A tool. A subscription tier.

Every single one of them will be priced to zero.

You do not sell a horizontal layer. You do not compete with it. You build on top of it or you disappear beneath it.

For a century, entire industries survived on one thing. Complexity.

The friction of navigating law, medicine, logistics, finance. That was the moat. If you could not memorize the maze, you could not compete.

A horizontal layer does not navigate the maze. It dissolves the walls.

Electricity did not compete with the candle industry. It erased the need for one.

The most dangerous part of a horizontal shift is how quiet it is. It moves underneath the economy. The surface looks normal. Revenue still holds.

Every day you operate on the old substrate, you accumulate a debt you cannot see and cannot repay.

The internet repriced distribution. AI is repricing cognition itself.

When intelligence becomes a utility that runs through the walls of every company on Earth, the premium on human expertise does not erode. It evaporates.

This is not a disruption. Disruptions replace products.

This replaces the ground you are standing on.

[National Review @NRO]

.@NoahCRothman on @CNN_NewsNight: At the start of the weekend, we heard Trump was ready to give up on the war on Iran, had to "give away the store," and that's NOT what happened.

[National Review @NRO]

.@SethDillon: The woke right worldview hates liberty and their ideas are not conservative or Christian, even if they try to dress it up with Christian language and symbols.

[Mark Penn @Mark_Penn]

Iran’s upper hand?

The press is at it again. Iran has the upper hand now. Iran will collect billions in tolls. Trump is backed into a corner. Iran has once again won and they will be even tougher now

As they have at every turn they have systematically undermined America and pushed Iranian propaganda and it keeps getting worse.

First, the Biden administration negotiated with Iran for 4 years and what did they get? Spit. And they effectively let Iran off the hook and Iran collected billions of dollars they used to build missiles and enrich Uranium.

Today, they are coming to the table minus most of their leadership, without a Navy, without a functioning nuclear program, with no air defenses, their proxies in ruins, down 90 per cent in functioning missiles, shot down a single plane in 18,000 missions, are having to execute their own people and keep the internet off to prevent people from overthrowing them. And there is a huge armada circling them.

Yup. They got us right where they wanted us. Our negotiators have no leverage at all.

Because if you listen to mainstream media analysis they can send some drones to increase oil prices on a temporary basis until they face another round of devastation and new leadership.

Reality is they are at the table because they had nowhere to go and they alienated all the neighboring countries and Trump has always made clear that like the symbol of America itself he holds olive branches in one hand and arrows in the other.

If Iran does not realize this is not the Biden administration they are dealing with, these negotiations will be over fairly quickly and there will be another round of military action and we will see where they are then.

[Jeremy Carl @realJeremyCarl]

I'm going to keep posting this Alstair Begg clip "The Man on the Middle Cross" (less than four minutes in length) every Holy Week, because its message is true in 2026, it will be true in 2036 and it will be true in 3036.

"If i take my eyes off the cross, I can then give only lip service to its efficacy while at the same time living as if my salvation depends upon me.

And as soon as you go there it will lead you either to abject despair or a horrible kind of arrogance.

And it is only the cross of Christ that deals both with the dreadful depths of despair and the pretentious arrogance of the pride of man that says you know, I can figure this out."

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

Well that ends the debate on deaths in Gaza.

Hamas itself is admitting that 80% of casualties were combatants.

There was never a genocide.

You have been lied to and manipulated.

[Hugh Hewitt @hughhewitt]

“The administration’s interest in pinpointing a negotiating partner signals a desire to find some way out of the quagmire that Iran has quickly become, jolting world markets, spiking oil prices and renewing concern about inflation.” @politico

Quagmire? 70 year old B-52s are lumbering across defenseless Iranian skies using precision JDAMs at will to continue pummeling the military-industrial complex of #Iran and that’s a “quagmire?”

“Quagmire” was appropriately applied to Vietnam in 1968-1969 when LBJ had 538,000 American troops in the country, up from the 11,000 JFK had there in 1962. By the time RN ended deployment of American troops there in 1973, more than 58,000 troops had died there. That is a quagmire.

#Iran looks like an extremely successful campaign that is achieving its military objectives in rapid fashion with near total dominance of the battlefield. It is not a quagmire in any way. Looking for a sane actor to guide the radicalized elite out of its fanaticism is not a “signal” of anything other than appropriate planning.

I wonder sometimes if this sort of mumbo-jumbo is intentional anti-Trump bias (@DashaBurns if an affable panelist on @SpecialReport and does not seem to have TDS) or simple unfamiliarity with military history? But c’mon editors, display a bit of discipline in choice of nouns. That’s really ridiculous.

[Jeri Thompson @jerilthompson]

Trump-Russia Probe: John Brennan's Role Hard to Pin Down | National Review

Also-Senate intel report

https://t.co/CsTdOWrPDE https://t.co/separYSPYc

[National Review @NRO]

.@tedcruz: I don't want to wake up in 5 years and find myself in a country where both major political parties are unambiguously anti-Israel and unapologetically antisemitic.

And it's a real possibility.

#stopantisemitism @RJC

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Sen. Ted Cruz absolutely goes OFF on Tucker Carlson.

[Shabbos Kestenbaum @ShabbosK]

It's been 6 months since Charlie was taken from us.

Today, I spoke to National Review about the very first time I met him.

I also wondered how he'd feel about his influencer "friends" who've said absolutely nothing as a demonic psychopath continues to attack his grieving widow.

[Ilya Shapiro @ishapiro]

If you’re not following Tal’s work, you should be.

[David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense @davereaboi]

Two of my favorite people in the world in this clip. Please don’t hold that against them.