From the left: The Kimmel Distraction

“We’ve now moved to the stage of the Jimmy Kimmel story beyond immediate outrage and legit opposition to rank propaganda,” fumes Racket News’ Matt Taibbi, as Jake Tapper and rest of the establishment ignore Google’s admission of massive censorship under pressure from the Biden administration. Indeed: “How did politicians and the U.S. media respond to confirmation that the last administration engaged in wholesale censorship not of one jerkwad talk show host, but the entire world? They pretended it didn’t happen.” We had “entire federal bureaucracies devoted to policing speech,” yet The New York Times can’t even get the facts as it refused to report that Google wound up suppressing accurate info that corrected government misinformation.

Conservative: Dems’ Anti-ICE Extremism

A faction on the left “so vehemently opposes the enforcement of federal immigration law” that it represents “the armed extremist wing of sanctuary Democrats,” cautions the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. The attack on the Dallas ICE facility falls “squarely in line with the antifa attack on the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on the 4th of July” and other “protests or outright riots in the campaign against ICE, notably in Los Angeles.” And “Democratic members of Congress have gotten into confrontations with authorities over the enforcement of the law.” With so much “anger and violence” having been “directed at lawful authorities on behalf of lawbreakers,” it’s clear “many Democrats have positioned themselves solidly on the side of migrants who are in the United States illegally.”

Culture critic: The Meaning of Masculinity

As “a grenade rolled toward his boys” on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, “Gil Ta’asa had seconds to choose” before throwing “himself on the explosive to shield his sons,” recounts Samuel J. Adams at City Journal. Ta’asa’s final act was “a father’s sacrificial love.” In Jewish tradition, “parental love transcends instinct” as it “mirrors divine love.” Today, masculinity is caricatured “as either ugly aggression or hollow posturing”; Ta’asa’s “example cuts through our confusion: men need calling and purpose, not just careers.” Fatherhood is “central to human flourishing.” Gil Ta’asa, like his nation, “didn’t choose his circumstances; he chose his response.” Our world may have “forgotten what heroes look like,” but “Gil Ta’asa — firefighter, father, protector — showed us.”

Shutdown countdown: Handing Trump a Win

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries “insist government won’t run” unless Republicans agree to more spending and “a reversal of the central Medicaid reform in the GOP’s reconciliation bill,” marvels The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. That is, they’ll “give the Trump team exactly what it’s been wanting — a shutdown — in return for Democrats’ continuing to demand something they will never get. What a deal”: “hellfire for brimstone.” Budget chief Russ Vought explained how this “will roll”: Trump’s folks won’t just furlough federal workers; they’ll permanently fire them and rehire only those they deem necessary. Still, the left is pressing Schumer to blow it all up. How “amusing”: “Democrats don’t usually do shutdowns”; they “do government. Yet here we go.”

From the right: Billionaire Brit’s US Politics Push

“The good government group Americans for Public Trust (APT)” points to “the extensive financial activity of British billionaire Christopher Hohn” and his bankrolling of lefty causes in the United States, reports The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood. “Through the use of his nonprofit, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF),” Hohn gave over $553 million to US orgs from 2014 to 2023, funding causes like “radical environmentalism.” He “is the largest known individual donor to Extension Rebellion,” the radical climate group, and he “purportedly dumped $7 million into the D.C.-based Center for Climate Integrity.” CIFF also has worrying ties “with communist China.” To stop interlopers like Hohn, APT wants “more concrete laws” to keep “foreign money out” of US politics.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board