A twin crisis is unfolding for the Biden administration as the US tax-payer-funded Ukrainian military bombs key crude refineries deep within Russian territory with suicide drones. The administration has pleaded with the Ukranians to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure as this will only contribute to tightening global supplies and push energy prices higher, as well as inflation in the US, hurting Biden’s re-election odds. 

Now for the other crisis that’s unfolding in the Middle East: US Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC’s “This Week” that a major attack on the Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge, “would be a huge mistake.” 

“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said.

She added: “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”

Harris was asked whether there would be “consequences” from the US on an Israeli counteroffensive in Rafah. She responded, “I am ruling out nothing.”

This comes as The Jerusalem Post said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials say an operation into the southern Gazan city is “imminent.” 

Bloomberg quoted Israeli intelligence that estimate about 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters are in Rafah. 

As we’ve explained before, in the note titled “Terrified” Joe Biden Demands Ukraine Halt Strikes On Russian Refiners As It Is Sending Oil Prices Surging,” Biden’s foreign policy has been and always been about crude markets. 

So, of course, the administration would march the clueless VP onto ABC yesterday to give Irasel a public warning about the consequences of launching a counteroffensive against Hamas in Rafah, because it’s not entirely about the poor Palestinians, but the prospect of a much wider conflict that could send crude prices into parabolic trajectories, thus reigniting US inflation and continuing to weigh on re-election odds. 

Rapidan Energy Group wrote in a recent note that the “Axis of Resistance” (Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen) is “likely to intensify its attacks as Israel moves forward with the ground offensive in Rafah.”  

“Israel would likely wait until the IDF consolidates control over Rafah and the Philadelphia corridor before risking a major confrontation with Hezbollah,” Rapidan noted. 

An invasion of Rafah could be the beginning of a series of dominoes that spark several powder kegs in the region that would put US troops at risk once again. Recall when three US Army troops were killed and more than 30 injured in a drone attack in Jordan earlier this year. A restart of these types of attacks is at high risk after Israel attacks Rafah. 

Last month, Rapidan raised its odds of a major Israeli military offensive in Lebanon from 30% to 40%. However, they “expect overall Israel-Hezbollah tensions will remain contained and that a diplomatic agreement will avert a major conflict.” 

Given these mounting uncertainties in the Middle East and Russia, it’s only a matter of time before traders focus their attention on the Saudi Aramco Abqaiq Plants (read: “The Weaponization Of Crude Could Trigger The Next Financial Shock”), the largest crude stabilization plant in the world, as it could be in the crosshairs of Iran-backed Houthis. 

Crude markets are starting to pay attention as war risk premiums are being priced in. 

Update (0645 ET):

A massive container ship chartered by Maersk and moving outbound from the Port of Baltimore struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge around 0130 ET. The bridge collapse has paralyzed a large swath of the largest inland port on the East Coast. The port is ranked 9th for total dollar value of cargo and 13th for cargo tonnage among US ports. 

Governor Wes Moore released a statement on the collapse, declaring a State of Emergency in Maryland:

“My office is in close communication with US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, and the Baltimore Fire Department as emergency personnel are on the scene following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. I have declared a State of Emergency here in Maryland and we are working with an interagency team to quickly deploy federal resources from the Biden Administration. We are thankful for the brave men and women who are carrying out efforts to rescue those involved and pray for everyone’s safety. We will remain in close contact with federal, state, and local entities that are carrying out rescue efforts as we continue to assess and respond to this tragedy.” 

Chief Kevin Cartwright, the Baltimore City Fire Department’s director of communications, told Fox Baltimore that at least 20 people and several vehicles had fallen into the river. 

In markets, Maersk shares in Copenhagen are trading down more than 3% on the news. 

Shocking radio transmission: “The entire Key Bridge is in the harbor.” 

Radio traffic from the first arriving @BaltimoreFire unit.

“SOC5 to Battalion 6 and Communications, I’m at Fort Armistead, be advised the entire bridge, the entire Key Bridge is in the harbor.” pic.twitter.com/wTlPxLStRf

— Andrew Doyle (@doyle0213) March 26, 2024

*   *   * 

Shocking footage is coming from Baltimore City, home to one of the nation’s largest marine ports. It shows a container ship striking the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge and collapsing it

🚨#BREAKING: Mass Casualty has been Declared after a Large Container Ship Collides with Key Bridge Causing it completely Collapse⁰
📌#Baltimore | #Maryland

Currently, numerous agencies, including the Coast Guard and fire department have just declared a mass casualty incident as… pic.twitter.com/wvOTOVbvHE

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) March 26, 2024

Here’s another view of the container ship strike. 

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland which crosses the Patapsco River has reportedly Collapsed within the last few minutes after being Struck by a Large Container Ship; a Mass Casualty Incident has been Declared with over a Dozen Cars and many Individuals said to… pic.twitter.com/SsPMU8Mjph

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 26, 2024

“This effectively shuts down the Port of Baltimore completely. I’m truly speechless,” one X user said. 

Pictured: Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. This is the bridge I drive every single day. This effectively shuts down the Port of Baltimore completely. I’m truly speechless pic.twitter.com/BzqPa3axJ2

— Wade Raynor (@WadeRaynor_) March 26, 2024

Fox Baltimore’s Olivia Dance describes the scene as “devastating.” 

Photos of the collapsed Key Bridge sent to us by residents in the area.

Devastating. @FOXBaltimore pic.twitter.com/vh5MP477jI

— Olivia Dance (@OliviaDanceTV) March 26, 2024

According to the ship tracking website MarineTraffic, the Singapore-flagged cargo ship “Dali” slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge around 0130 ET. Bloomberg notes the ship was chartered by Maersk (remember Maersk’s Ever Given in the Suez Canal a few years ago?). 

#MarineTraffic playback showing #Dali, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, colliding with Francis Scott Key Bridge in #Baltimore. En route to Colombo, Sri Lanka, it crashed at 1:30am. Follow rescue efforts on MarineTraffic and find out more about the vessel: https://t.co/5eiDnqpm2w pic.twitter.com/fykx9cWUF3

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) March 26, 2024

The bridge spans the Patapsco River and carries an estimated 11.5 million vehicles annually. In this collapse, the only shipping lane in and out of the port was severed. 

Baltimore is the most inland port on the East Coast and is connected to the I-95 highway network. With no commercial vessels sailing in and out of port anytime soon, this is catastrophic for port operations and could spark supply chain snarls in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. We suspect inbound vessels are rerouting sails this morning. 

The bridge collapse has severed these major marine terminals. It’s unknown when operations will be restored. 

According to the Maryland government’s website, the Port of Baltimore handled over 52 million tons of international cargo valued at more than $80 billion last year, ranking it as the ninth busiest port in the United States. The data shows that the port handled 847,158 autos and light trucks in 2023, the most of any US port. The port also handles farm and construction machinery, sugar, gypsum, and coal. 

The port supports 15,330 direct jobs and 139,180 jobs in Maryland, according to the Maryland government’s website.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s office posted on X:

“I’m aware of and en route to the incident at the Key Bridge. I have been in contact with Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace, Gov. Wes Moore (and the county executives of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties). Emergency personnel are on scene, and efforts are underway.”

*Developing… 

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A Church of England archdeacon has been labelled racist after openly calling for “anti-whiteness.”

The Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool wrote on X “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.”

Threlfall-Holmes, who is white, added “So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”

I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.
So yes, let’s have anti whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy.
That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.

— Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (@MirandaTHolmes) March 21, 2024

[Miss Threlfall-Holmes has since switched her X feed to private.]

Anti-whiteness isn’t anti-white? What exactly is it then?

When asked to explain by The Telegraph, Threlfall-Holmes claimed that X is “perhaps not the best place for a nuanced argument,” adding “I was contributing to a debate about world views, in which ‘whiteness’ does not refer to skin colour per se, but to a way of viewing the world where being white is seen as ‘normal’ and everything else is considered different or lesser.”

The backlash was swift:

You had one training session and now you want to exterminate white people?

— Leo Kearse – on YouTube & Saturday Night Showdown (@LeoKearse) March 22, 2024

I suspect the problem is what you think you mean by anti-whiteness, and what everyone else thinks you mean are different. But in this case everyone else is right, and you sound like an appalling racist fruitcake.

— Frances Smith (@francessmith) March 22, 2024

“Let’s have anti-whiteness. That’s not anti-white.”

Can you hear yourself spouting this absolute cockshite?

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) March 22, 2024

You are completely brainwashed

— Tom Rowsell (@Tom_Rowsell) March 22, 2024

If you’re affected by Miranda’s racist comments I’d strongly advise you to complain ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/sHY9G9nNXs

— Fleur Elizabeth (@fleurmeston) March 22, 2024

“Whiteness” is an antiwhite concept that treats White people’s existence like a sickness.

So, yes, legitimising that poisonous term absolutely makes you antiwhite, and especially anti(White)male.

You are #antiwhite. pic.twitter.com/21oAV1rytc

— 1ofWesternkind (@1ofWesternkind) March 22, 2024

As a white person am I safe to attend church in this diocese @LivDiocese after the archdeacon has declared she holds racial prejudice against white people?

— Fleur Elizabeth (@fleurmeston) March 22, 2024

Did you mean this to sound like you are an attention seeking, unchristian racist?

— Melindi Scott (@melindiscott) March 22, 2024

Anti-whiteness is not anti-white, I’m sure in your little bubble of wokeness this means something complex and postmodern and is acceptable amongst all the people on the right side of history and all very clever, but to your parishioners it sounds racist and that you don’t like…

— stephen (@stephenlondoner) March 22, 2024

The Telegraph notes that the conference the Archdeacon is referring to was a day-long “Racial Justice Conference” in Birmingham organised by Reconciliation Initiatives, a charity working in partnership with Coventry Cathedral to help churches “contribute to reconciliation in wider society”.

The report further notes that the conference aimed “To encourage white participants to take next steps in facing their own whiteness, and in addressing institutional racism within Anglican churches and provinces.”

The group is also running a four-week long course titled “Being White” which asks clergy and lay members to consider “the ways we are caught up in a system of white superiority and white advantage in UK society.”

The Church of England has been heavily criticised recently for leaning into this kind of stuff.

The church recently announced it would be hiring a “deconstructing whiteness” officer to form part of a “racial justice unit” being set up by the Diocese of Birmingham.

In 2023 the CofE also established a £100 million fund to “address past wrongs of slavery,” even as some church buildings are literally falling apart.

In 2021, the CofE announced it was introducing quotas for black and ethnic clergy to pave the way for ‘anti-racism training’ in the Church, as well as ‘contextualising church statues that may cause offence.”

The CofE has become so infested with wokery in general to the point that it has considered dropping the phrase “our Father” from the start of the Lord’s Prayer, and instructing clergy to refrain from using male pronouns when talking about God.

Some churches have gone as far as erasing references to the nativity and Jesus in a Christmas carol and replacing them with a celebration of “queer” people.

In July last year, the Church of England refused to define what a woman was, saying they had no definition of it on their books, despite still ostensibly opposing same sex marriage.

Also last year, a vicar was officially rebuked for expressing criticism of the CofE’s decision to appoint a transgender archdeacon, after he noted that the person is “biologically, a bloke.”

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Nissan is the latest manufacturer to aim to cut EV costs in order to keep up with an increasingly competitive and saturated landscape. The company is now seeking to compete with Chinese rivals by slashing costs by 30%, Financial Times reported this weekend.  

Nissan, in collaboration with Renault and recently Honda, faces challenges in China’s auto market, the report notes. After delays, Nissan’s new business plan seeks to boost sales by 1 million units by fiscal 2026, introducing 30 new models, half of which will be EVs or hybrids.

This includes launching eight “new energy” vehicles in China and starting exports of locally made cars next year. In North America, the goal is to increase sales by 330,000 vehicles by 2026, with India becoming a key export hub. Additionally, Nissan aims to release an EV with solid-state batteries by 2028, Financial Times writes. 

Chief executive Makoto Uchida commented: “Faced with extreme market volatility, Nissan is taking decisive actions guided by the new plan to ensure sustainable growth and profitability.”

Nissan’s new strategy follows a notable alliance with Honda to create EVs, marking a shift towards combating the influx of competitive, high-tech models from China, while still working with Renault and Mitsubishi in specific regions.

Despite Renault reducing its stake in Nissan to 15%, its partnership with Nissan persists. The report says that Nissan aims to reduce EV production costs to match those of traditional cars by 2030, tackling the current issue where manufacturers lose approximately $6,000 per EV sold in the U.S. due to high production costs and customer tax credits.

Amidst this, Nissan lowered its annual sales forecast after underperforming in key markets like China, the U.S., and Europe, highlighting a need for improvement especially in the U.S. hybrid market, where it lacks a strong presence.

Similarly, we have noted that auto companies are slashing investment in EVs, as is the case with American auto manufacturers like Ford and GM. We wrote last month that Joe Biden’s vision for EVs across America is in “full collapse”. 

As we wrote then: “Meanwhile, the higher costs are driving automakers away from EVs. And as battery material requirements are set to double by 2027, fulfilling these mandates will be increasingly difficult, putting Biden’s ambitious EV strategy at risk.”

Thinktanks like Brownstone have simply noted that when it comes to EVs, “the great reset didn’t work”. Jeffrey Tucker wrote last month: “In short, the illusions of these horrible policies have come crashing down. It was born of liberty-wrecking policies under the cover of virus control. Every special interest seized the day, including a new generation of industrialists seeking to displace the old ones by force.”

He concluded: “​​​​​​​More and more, it’s obvious what a disaster this was. And yet no one has apologized. Hardly anyone has admitted error. The big shots who wrecked the world are still in power. The rest of us are left holding the bag, and paying very high repair bills for cars that are non-optimal for driving from one town to another and back again in the cold weather that was supposed to be gone by now had the “climate change” prophets been correct.”

Recall, a report from Consumer Reports last year found that electric vehicles have almost 80% more problems and are “generally less reliable” than conventional internal combustion engine cars. 

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A study funded by the British government to the tune of almost a million pounds claims that William Shakespeare, one of foremost the literary icons in history, has been disproportionately represented and has enabled “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” to dominate theatre.

The study, by academics at the University of Roehampton, was funded by the government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and essentially claims that Shakespeare is not diverse enough.

The Telegraph reports that the overseer of the study, Andy Kesson, complains that “masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness” adding that “[w]e need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre”.

🎭 Shakespeare made theatre too ‘white, male and cisgender’, tax-payer funded study finds https://t.co/EZz5IymS82

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 23, 2024

There are not enough black and brown disabled queer transgender migrants in Shakespeare’s plays apparently.

As a counter to Shakespeare’s lack of diversity, the researchers are staging a production of a play by John Lyly, a playwright around at the same time as Shakespeare but who wasn’t as successful.

The researchers claim that the Lyly play Galatea offers “an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives”.

Given that basically none of those things existed when the play was written, anyone in their right mind would conclude that they are not themes in the play, and instead have been crowbarred into it by the ‘academics’ obsessed with pushing their identity nonsense agenda.

Responding to this complete tripe, author Lionel Shriver noted “In Shakespeare’s day, half the European population was white and male. They didn’t have rainbow flags. Being disabled like Richard III was a matter of character rather than politics, and luckily for them no one had ever coined the linguistic abomination ‘cisgender’.”

Shriver further urged that “Still germane because his themes are timeless, Shakespeare will survive even this dogmatic mangling, and his plays will continue to be enjoyed long after today’s ‘intersectional’ performances have foreshortened into a freakish comical footnote in theatrical history.”

Comedian and author Andrew Doyle also commented “There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare is performed frequently and John Lyly barely at all. Shakespeare was by far the superior playwright. Yet again, ideologues are reducing great art to mere mechanisms for the promotion of an ideology.”

“A production of Galatea would be welcome,” Doyle continued, adding “but given that those behind it are already using anachronistic pseudo-religious terms such as ‘cisgender’ suggests that it will be a tedious affair. They evidently believe what they are doing is radical, but virtually all theatre companies today are obsessed with identity and gender, and so this is likely to be just more conformist and insipid propaganda.”

Conservative MP Jane Stevenson of the government’s culture, media and sport committee, said “I’m not sure reducing Galatea to a celebration of all things woke, or knocking Shakespeare for being pale, male and stale is much more than cultural click-bait.”

“Shakespeare’s works have been translated into 100 languages and clearly still resonate with people all over the world. Love, hate, ambition, loss, jealousy – all universal emotions we all still identify with,” Stevenson further declared.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Starting Sunday night, France raised the nation’s threat level awareness to its highest level of “emergency attack” – which comes two days after the Crocus City Hall attack which took the lives of at least 139 people, and has been claimed by the Islamic State.

President Emmanuel Macron had soon after convened a National Defense and Security Council to discuss the attack and examine France’s exposure to a potential similar terror attack. “Following the attack in Moscow, a Defense and National Security Council was convened this evening at the Elysée by the President of the Republic,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal  wrote on X.

“Given the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the attack and the threats weighing on our country, we have decided to raise the Vigipirate posture to its highest level: attack emergency,” Attal continued, according to machine translation. There are three threat levels, and prior to Sunday it had remained at the middle level. 

According to French media, this raised alert level “allows for exceptional security measures such as stepped-up patrols by armed forces in public places like train stations, airports and religious sites.”

It is unclear whether it will remain in effect through this summer, when Paris 2024 Olympic Games – from July 26 to August 11 – will be held, but this is likely.

In the wake of the Moscow attack a number of countries in the West, including the United States, expressed sympathy and solidarity with the Russian attack victims – in a rare moment of positive feelings conveyed amidst the Ukraine war.

Moscow has signaled it is ready and willing to restore counter-terrorism cooperation agreements with Europe, after these were initially severed as a result of the war in Ukraine.

On Monday, Italy joined France in raising its security level, as the country is headed into Easter Sunday this weekend. “Both surveillance and checks will be increased, paying the most attention to the places of greatest aggregation and transit of people, as well as sensitive targets,” Italy’s Interior Ministry announced.

While the Kremlin has acknowledged that ISIS-K is issuing statements owning up to the attack, it has also pointed the finger at Ukraine, alleging that the attackers were seeking to escape into Ukraine territory with government help.

Via ReMix News,

A doctor in the German state of Baden-Württemberg refuses to treat one of his patients because he is a local politician in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The doctor’s decision was reportedly sparked when he saw a photo in the local newspaper of the politician, Heiko Nüßner, at an event for his party’s city association in Lahr. Based on this photo, the doctor told him to find a new practice due to their “clearly different political views.”

Nüßner, who previously served as a Christian Democrat (CDU) politician for 26 years, told Bild newspaper that he was “very surprised by this reaction, as he had never spoken to the doctor about his politics. He described the interaction with the general practitioner as “very undemocratic.”

The AfD politician said, “I was disappointed with the CDU because of its euro and migration policy as well as its exit from nuclear energy. For me, the AfD is the ‘new CDU’ and by no means right-wing extremist.”

The AfD politician suffered an accident three years ago that he left him confined to a wheelchair. When he asked the doctor for a prescription at the beginning of March, he was denied treatment. Nüßner shared a copy of the email exchange shared between him and the doctor, whose name was not disclosed by Nüßner or Bild.

The doctor has responded to Bild, saying that the photo of the politician was only the “icing on the cake.”

“I had already found the patient very unpleasant beforehand, with his demanding and pushy nature,” he said.

According to medical ethicists, denying treatment based on “unpleasant” attitudes or because you do not agree with the politics of your patient does not meet medical standards. However, for patients who represent a threat or a major disturbance to a medical practice, doctors are permitted to deny care, but only if there is no immediate medical threat.

The doctor claimed however that the medication requested by Nüßner was “not vital.”

According to the Bild interview with the doctor, he did want to support any “undemocratic tendencies,” as the AfD is being monitored for extremism by the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), a powerful domestic spy agency.

He said if the AfD politician needed acute care, he would treat him and anyone else “regardless of their ideology.”

In 2021, AfD candidate Andrea Zürcher also had her general practicioner cancel her care, also in the state of Baden-Württemberg. In Zürcher’s case, the doctor also learned about her political activity from a photo in a local newspaper.

“He said that the relationship of trust had been destroyed as a result and that he could no longer give 100 percent in my treatment,” the woman said, who suffer from a chronic illness.

A third of Germans say they would consider voting for the Alternative for Germany, and a majority of Germans — at least in some polls — say they could support a government coalition that includes the AfD. However, there is still a sizeable share of the population adamantly opposed to the party. In the case of doctors, refusal of treatment is considered a serious ethical quandary. Such cases may increase political polarization in Germany.

Read more here…

Authored by Roger L. Simon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The deeper we get into the 2024 presidential election, the more pathological, in the psychological sense, our society appears.

You could say this psychopathology comes from both sides, but in truth, most of it is from the left in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which has gone from mere neurosis to full psychosis.

Those things used to be classifiable in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” published by the American Psychiatric Association, but that tome, revised every five to seven years, has been so politicized itself as to be useless.

Many therapists these days spend their 50-minute hours calming down patients sleepless from the specter of former President Donald Trump while reassuring them that President Joe Biden will be reelected.

Meanwhile, speaking of TDS, the effort to destroy President Trump—if not through incarceration then through bankruptcy cum the humiliation of selling his real estate—has doubled or quadrupled its pace, and all the more so since he appears to be leading in the swing states.

Forget Hitler. After all, the Israelis are so “mistreating” the “innocent” Gaza “civilians,” at least according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), that comparisons to Alois Schicklgruber are all but passé.

The real bête noir of Western civilization is President Trump. (Second place goes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)

“Why” is not the question.

When it comes to TDS, facts are the last thing that matter. It’s about feelings so deep that they approach the primordial. Just ask Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and the vast majority of the employees of mainstream media.

To call our society unhinged is an understatement. The legal system as originally conceived seems no longer to exist. Its current reason for being is to fine President Trump so many millions or billions of dollars that few of us can remember exactly how much it is without having to look it up, multiple times, just to make sure.

No one expresses that better than Mark Steyn, who has suffered financial retribution himself on a smaller, yet significant to mere mortals, scale for having the temerity to question the climate orthodoxy. He wrote the following on SteynOnline on March 19:

“Politics itself is meaningless: cable pundits and radio hosts can yak about polls and policies all they want, but Democrats are pre-litigating the election because they’re pretty confident it’ll work for them. As I wrote a month ago, after (Democrat) Judge Engoron’s decision to fine the (Republican) presidential nominee close to half-a-billion dollars: ‘This Judge [Engoron] is taking it to a whole new level. It’s not very difficult, after all, to ramp up the judgment to a number it would be impossible to get a bond for.’”

Justice Arthur Engoron’s decisions seem to come not from reasoned legal judgment but straight from the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls involuntary survival instincts.

We see this survival obsession across the culture as TDS moves from neurosis to psychosis.

The growing attack on the free speech that once defined our country is arguably one of the strongest manifestations of this illness.

Not surprisingly, we find this appearing in a recent analysis by CNN’s Oliver Darcy:

“Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X—a bad habit that was apparent when his interview with Don Lemon was released Monday morning. In the contentious interview, Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to ‘censorship,’ bashed the press for legitimate reporting, assailed DEI programs without supporting evidence, skewered advertisers who fled the X platform last year and yet again gave credence to the racist Great Replacement theory, among other things.”

Well, one man’s “dangerous and appalling hate speech” is another man’s truth. At least that’s the way our founders thought.

It wasn’t until the arrival of President Trump that this was ever really a question. The man has an uncomfortable habit, unlike most politicians, of saying exactly what he’s thinking, often with a humorous twist that clarifies his point.

To the likes of Mr. Darcy and his many allies, this is unconscionable. That makes the CNN analyst the marginally more literate equivalent of Justice Engoron.

The more President Trump threatens to win the election, the further into the realm of psychological disturbance these people will go.

Whether the economy would improve, whether public safety would be better, and whether the world would be more peaceful are all irrelevant to them.

The most rational part of their otherwise aberrant behavior is fear for their jobs. In cases such as Mr. Darcy’s and Justice Engoron’s, that too is irrelevant. Mr. Darcy would do fine, perhaps better than ever, as an opposition journalist, and Justice Engoron, like it or not, has a lifetime position that, despite the highly justifiable enmity of President Trump, is almost certain to be preserved.

All this and spring has barely arrived. As we plunge into summer, things are likely to heat up to extraordinary temperatures; not because of global warming, but through and because of this psychopathology.

Let’s hope they cool, at least somewhat, before reaching a boil.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

How it started. 

How it’s going… 

Baltimore is now facing apocalyptic levels of policing shortages.

Last week, THREE police officers patrolled a whole district of 61,000 residents.

Police are now UNABLE to respond to calls, including for child assault.

The department is now postponing police training in an… pic.twitter.com/4XhEURoR4d

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 25, 2024

The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control. 

Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city. 

Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents. 

Several radio transmissions of a police dispatcher pleaded for additional officers as 911 calls came pouring in. At least ten calls went unanswered in a matter of minutes.  

“You are endangering the lives of police officers on duty and what that does is endanger the lives of the citizens,” said Betsy Smith with the National Police Association.

Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for pushing failed social justice reforms and defunding the police that have left some areas of the metro area ungovernable as gangs roam free. Meanwhile, Democrats are obsessed with attempting to strip Second Amendment rights from residents, jeopardizing their ability to defend themselves. 

“This catastrophic failure is a direct result of WOKE policies and extremely poor leadership from the Mayor. Baltimore is now seeing the results of the unending war on the police in Baltimore City. The failure to support the police is a total failure on behalf of Baltimore’s elected leaders, and this disaster is the end result!” Del. Nino Mangione, R-Baltimore County, said in a statement. 

No Democrat will ever be held accountable for failed policies that have unleashed widespread lawlessness across the metro area. Avoid Baltimore as it implodes. Remember, the collapsing police force means more 9-11 calls will go unanswered.