I have the free YouTube service, and the ads are designed not only to promote whatever they’re promoting, but also to drive viewers to the point of such annoyance and frustration that they finally spring for the premium, ad-free version of YouTube.
Not me, not yet, although I find the ads incredibly annoying.
For some reason, for about a year I’ve been getting an ad for some sort of face makeup (I turn it off after the usual five seconds, so I don’t even know what it’s advertising, even after all this time), featuring a woman with the most droning grating annoying voice ever. But those ads are nowhere near as infuriating as what I’ve come to call the counter-message ads. At present, they seem to solely involve Israel and Jews – or rather, with countering the message of videos made by pro-Israel or pro-Jewish sources.
For example, if I happen to watch a video by some Jewish or Israeli organization which offers news of the Gaza War or the Iran War from Israel’s point of view, the ads invariably are pro-Gaza and pro-Hamas. If I happen to watch a video that has to do with Jewish thought or religion, invariably it is accompanied by ad after ad from proselytizing Christian organizations explicitly dedicated to converting Jews to Christianity.
These counter-ads are presently solely on Israeli or Jewish videos, but it hasn’t always been that way. I distinctly recall, during the 2024 election campaign, that nearly every pro-Trump video or podcast I would watch (or really anything on the right) would be paired with an ad for Kamala Harris. The opposite may have been true (pro-Kamala podcasts paired with Trump ads), but I wasn’t watching a whole lot of podcasts on the left, so I don’t know.
So, who makes these ad-placement decisions? It certainly doesn’t seem to be the people making the videos. Is it YouTube? Is it the advertisers? Do advertisers pay extra for counter-placement of their ads?
I think they were counting on winning in court, which is one of the reasons they originally backed the idea that the court allow the vote to occur before issuing a ruling, which is an accord with Virginia precedent.
Now we get “confused” tweets like this:
very confused as to why the VA Supreme Court declined to stop the vote on the redistricting referendum. Whatever you feel about the merits of their decision to strike it down today, the handling of this is a bit odd
Which brings up the old fools/knave issue. Does someone like this not remember the course of events? Did someone like this never pay attention in the first place? Or does he remember but is lying in order to get readers even more incensed at the court for allowing the vote to go forward and then cruelly striking down the people’s will?
Speaking of the people’s will – I’d say this is more than a “little” ironic:
Lydia Moynihan: It's a little ironic that the woman now who is likely going to win the 9th Congressional District in Tennessee is a black Republican instead of a white Democrat male. But that's racist?
Reaction after reaction follows a pattern that shows zero understanding of the fact that states have different rules from each other about how to accomplish redistricting, and that Virginia didn’t follow its own rules. A lot of tweets and comments follow a “they did it in [fill in the blank with a Republican-controlled state], so why can’t we do it in Virginia?” Well, because Virginia has different rules, and this is a state-by-state proposition:
The Virginia Supreme Court has narrowly voted to overturn the will of the people, who voted for a new map to counter Trump’s gerrymandering.
This is despite Republicans in the South moving to eliminate Black-majority districts without even a vote after the Supreme Court gutted… pic.twitter.com/4WoRugVIqI
Once again, I don’t think this is mere stupidity. The concept of federalism is not a difficult one, and I’m pretty sure these people could easily master it. Their reaction is politically motivated, of course. To me, it also indicates the desire for states all to have the same rules, and for those rules to always favor Democrats. Plus, I think these tweets come from people who may (accent on the “may”) know better, but who count on the idea that their readers don’t know better and are trying to stir them up to rage. It’s one of the reasons Democrats want education to be leftist indoctrination that keeps people ignorant of some very important facts about our government and our history.
Speaking of stirring readers to rage, we have Hasan Piker:
the va supreme court denied the results of the redistricting referendum. scotus gutted the voting rights act and tennessee carved up the last dem district destroying black voter power in the state.
those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable https://t.co/Ul1nW2oz29
Once a person gets US citizenship, it’s hard to lose it no matter what that person does. However, one reason it can happen is if the person committed fraud in order to obtain his or her citizenship, or committed terrorist acts or acts in support of terrorism.
The DOJ is expected to announce on Friday that it is filing denaturalizing actions against 12 individuals, originally from Iraq, Colombia, Morocco, Somalia, Gambia, Bolivia, Uzbekistan, Kenya, India, China and Nigeria.
Ali Yousif Ahmed, a native of Iraq, is one of the individuals the DOJ says they are taking action against. Ahmed came to the U.S. in 2009, claiming his family was attacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. Ten years later, Iraq asked the U.S. to extradite Ahmed to Iraq, claiming he was facing criminal charges for the premeditated murder of two Iraqi police officers in 2006.
“Upon further investigation, United States learned that, in 2015, Ahmed illegally procured his naturalization, which warrants his denaturalization, because he lied under oath about his criminal and family history when he sought admission to the United States and naturalized as a U.S. citizen,” a document on the denaturalization process and shared with the Caller read.
More at the link.
The Trump administration has been stepping up investigations for this sort of thing. Sounds like a good idea to me.
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In the open thread the other day I posted a video by Ami Kozak satirizing Tucker Carlson . But afterward, reading the comments, I realized that unless someone’s been watching a lot of Carlson lately, there wouldn’t be much context for it. I provided some background in a comment on the thread, but most people probably didn’t see it, so I’m highlighting it here.
Carlson gave an interview to the NY Times, and it was that interview in particular that was being satirized. It was probably one of the very first times he wasn’t in the driver’s seat, either spewing out a monologue or interviewing someone hand-picked by none other than Carlson himself. As the interviewer, he can softball or hardball as he wishes, depending on how simpatico he is with the subject matter. As interviewee, he seemed flummoxed by any follow-up questions challenging him on his wild assertions, and he fell back on stark denial combined with claims of ignorance.
Here are four excerpts from the interview:
And this is the spoof video:
NOTE: For some reason, I’m having trouble finding the full NY Times interview. Is it only behind the Times’ paywall? But there are many many excerpts on YouTube.
The United Kingdom’s ruling Labour Party is on track to suffer a major defeat in Thursday’s local elections as Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK surges in support, prompting calls for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign.
British local elections are widely viewed as a functional referendum on the popularity of the ruling party and its head. With Labour having already suffered a net loss of nearly 500 local council seats with just over half of the councils called, multiple Labour MPs are saying that Starmer must agree to a timeline for his exit from office.
He should, but must he? Not really – not so far, anyway.
Not only did Starmer’s Labour Party do poorly, but the Conservatives continued to do poorly as well. The results seem to indicate a major sea change, with the Greens and Reform in the ascendance – Reform more than the Greens:
Alan Mendoza, executive director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital, “The era of two-party politics is definitively over with Reform UK’s stunning national success and the Green Party’s more localized wins. The two traditional parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives, have been routed nationally and in some cases have ceased to exist as a meaningful force in whole swathes of the country. By backing Reform across much of the political landscape and the Greens in pockets, British people are indicating they’ve had enough of the politics of the past and are ready to embrace different ideas.”
Democrats in Virginia looked to pick up four congressional seats by a partisan gerrymandered map that passed the legislature and went to a referendum where it passed by a couple of points. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has stricken the referendum as not having followed Virginia constitutional requirements.
On March 6, 2026, the General Assembly of Virginia submitted to Virginia voters a proposed constitutional amendment that authorizes partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts in the Commonwealth. We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.
Gerrymandering for political reasons is legal, but violating the procedural requirements in the state constitution is not. The Virginia Court did not base the ruling on the deficiencies in the wording of the referendum, which had been another possibility.
The upshot of the entire redistricting effort in Virginia is that the Democrats spent oodles of money – reported as eighty million dollars – on this, all to no avail. Between this and the recent SCOTUS decision on racial gerrymandering, the Democrats are not happy campers.
Although it seems to me that the procedural violations were egregious and obvious, the ruling was only 4-3. But we’ll take it.
This result could have been handed down prior to the election, but the Virginia Supreme Court decided to let the referendum proceed and rule on it after that. I had thought this meant there was a good chance that they wouldn’t have the courage to overrule it after it passed, but I’m happy to report that was not the case. The GOP was ready post-referendum to fight it, and they prevailed.
I’ve seen it for years and years and years online: the idea that the Boomer generation has screwed the younger ones. It’s often advanced by 40-somethings or younger, who feel insufficiently flush with cash and that the world hasn’t rewarded them in the manner they think they deserve. The idea that previous generations struggled and that many still struggle (I have friends my age with little savings, for example) is brushed aside. And the opinions of older people are shrugged off with the dismissive, “Okay, Boomer.”
It’s not unusual to wish that the Boomers would die already. Just shuffle off this mortal coil so that the young can get the spoils. And this is usually said with no sense of shame whatsoever.
I’ve seen most of this in the comments sections of blogs and MSM articles, as well as on social media of many kinds. It’s said not with humorous tolerance but powerful hatred and envy. But envy has now become perfectly okay, a kind of badge of virtue with “microlooters” and the like.
“It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans… Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration… there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet… impose age ceilings on political offices… Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate… It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain.”
Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whom I interviewed once, always seemed generous and reasonable, even when our politics differed. But unless it’s an elaborate meta-joke, the above column and forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and Power in America advance some of the most intellectually vicious ideas I’ve ever seen. The Godwin’s Law factor alone is a shocker.
Moyn observes that people of years have accumulated money and influence and contrives to end the “tyranny of the old” by having “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property,” because reasons. The title of the Times piece, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” carries the obscene lefty connotation that no one really owns anything and the elderly, by dint of living too long to begin with, and having a generally shitty quality of life compared to the young, and voting incorrectly/selfishly (hilarious, in the context of open scheming to seize their savings) and wasting resources “playing for time” for “another day, month, or year among loved ones” makes them lousy stewards of what the author unironically calls “our inheritance,” i.e. their homes and bank accounts.
That’s by Matt Taibbi, who is 56 years old. Young to me, but not young.
Moyn’s work doesn’t surprise me at all – there’s a huge market for this sort of thing, based on the ideas I’ve seen widely disseminated online. Taibbi is absolutely correct that this is part of an attack on private property, based on the idea that one can decide who should own what and how much, and act accordingly by confiscating the goods of the supposedly non-virtuous.
NOTE: I’ve written on this topic of inter-generational rage before, but at the moment I can’t find the piece. But this post is somewhat relevant to the topic.
NOTE II: I saw the movie Zorba the Greek in a movie theater when it first came out in 1964. I was young, and I didn’t like it and have never looked at it again. But various scenes have stuck with me, and not in a good way. So, this one comes to mind. Of course, the people confiscating the dead woman’s goods here actually are dirt-poor, and they are of all ages and not just young. The deceased woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call rich, either. So the parallel isn’t very good, although the envy impulse is there. Here’s the scene, and watching it now it seems even more chilling than I recall:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an innocuous Muslim civil rights group—a reputation it reinforces with litigation and claims of anti-Muslim bigotry. But the group finds itself under increasing scrutiny for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The following month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis followed suit, citing CAIR’s being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism financing case.
But as other states move to sideline CAIR, California is embracing this alleged terror front. CAIR-CA, the organization’s largest statewide affiliate, is flush with taxpayer cash. In the last five years, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) has rubberstamped at least $41 million in funding to the group. The vast majority of that money, it turns out, comes from the federal government. These federal dollars are flowing into CAIR-CA’s coffers even after it was the target of a recent Department of Justice investigation.
The article goes on to describe the evidence that CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood front. I’ve read about it before and find the argument quite compelling. I remember first hearing about CAIR after 9/11, raising the “Islamophobia” charge in order to somehow turn the whole thing into a defense of Muslims in the US.
More:
“You can’t look at what CAIR is doing today in isolation,” Burns said. “The government established the fact [during the trial] that a conspiracy existed among these organizations, including CAIR, to support Hamas, and that acts were taken in furtherance of that conspiracy. . . . CAIR’s role was to operate an entity out of Washington, D.C. that would serve to defend the interests of the rest of the network—against scrutiny from the media, against scrutiny from law enforcement. . . . In my opinion, the executive director, Nihad Awad, and other components of CAIR that were a part of this original infrastructure, are still operating CAIR in furtherance of an agenda to support Hamas.” …
One would think that CAIR’s ties to an Islamist terror group would make government agencies pause before providing it with public funds. But under Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s state government has seemingly never met a “marginalized group” it did not want to shower with other people’s money. CAIR-CA is rolling in tax dollars.
NOTE: I seem to be writing a lot about California today.
I’ve just started following the race for LA mayor, which features a rather unusual candidate named Spencer Pratt, whose previous work experience seems to be on reality TV. That doesn’t exactly sound like a recommendation, but there was a debate yesterday in which he acquitted himself quite well. It helps that he doesn’t really talk a lot of politician-speak, but sounds like a real person speaking common sense:
This particular exchange especially illustrates what I mean:
I’m not naive enough to think someone like Pratt will necessarily win. I hope he does, but the entrenched leftism of a place like LA is formidable. But I wish him luck. I’ve known LA well over the last fifty-plus years, and I’ve seen some of what’s happened to it.
Some of Pratt’s appeal comes from a series of campaign ads that have gone viral; not all of them are made by his actual campaign:
There’s also the California governor’s race. Could a Republican have a chance? It’s hard to believe, but there’s an outside possibility (the accent doesn’t hurt):
