I often kick off each Jan. 1 with the Rose Parade broadcast on Channel 5, then faculty soccer within the afternoon and night. It’s one of many few days I truthfully, actually attempt to chill out and do one thing that’s subsequent to not possible for me: not work.
Sadly, that’s not how I started my 2025.
Every time nationwide tragedies like these occur, I instantly swap my tv to CNN. The cable channel’s staff of on-the-ground correspondents is with out peer, and its anchors and commentators depart the opining and hypothesis to a minimal as they keep on with the info with a tone that tries to be authoritative. That’s what I watched for hours on Wednesday, as a substitute of flower-festooned floats and read-option offenses, as I attempted to make sense of the horrible begin to the brand new yr.
Possibly I used to be groggy from the earlier evening’s festivities. Possibly I used to be too full on breakfast tamales. However sooner or later, I made a decision to ditch CNN and tune right into a channel I not often watch:
Former White Home Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany seems on “Hannity” at Fox Information’ studio in Manhattan in 2023.
(Roy Rochlin / Getty Photos)
Visitor after visitor blamed the assaults on the FBI for supposedly preferring range initiatives and investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol rebel and conservatives over stopping terrorist assaults. Buzzwords flew round like confetti that had nothing to do with the crimes at hand: Antifa. Open borders. Police haters. The far left.
Ex-Inexperienced Beret Jim Hanson known as President Biden a “dementia-addled, barely animated carcass.” California Republican Get together chair Jessica Milan Patterson demanded that every one of Trump’s nominees “be confirmed immediately” so the incoming president may extra simply accomplish his agenda. Counterterrorism commentator Aaron Cohen talked about a pro-Palestinian rally in Instances Sq. that day and tied it to the New Orleans assault, claiming, “You don’t shut this stuff down. This is what happens.”
“We don’t know why,” Gallagher instructed McCarthy. “We don’t know what the link is. We’re not pointing fingers. We’re just saying that it’s interesting that we are at this point.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” she replied. “And two things can be true at the same time. You can have an individual who was infiltrated while he was an American citizen, and you can have a problem at the southern border that maybe influenced this attack.”
That’s why McCarthy instructed that the FBI enable the American public “to be a part of the investigation” — one thing I doubt she would have advocated for again when she was a sheriff’s deputy.
“I understand as a law enforcement officer, you’re privy to certain things you want to keep close to the chest,” she mentioned. “But I think we have seen the destruction at our southern border for four years. We know that there’s some correlation.”
Later, Gallagher talked about a police officer who had remarked earlier that day that not going after shoplifters made it “tougher to go after the big fish, the bigger criminals.”
McCarthy agreed.
“Back when I was a cop, you would do those traffic stops to get those moving violations because it would lead to a bigger crime,” she mentioned earlier than including, “We need to start getting back to defending people and not being afraid of offending people, and that starts with having some hard conversations and saying some hard truths.”
Buckle up your seat belts, everybody else: It’s going to be a hell of a subsequent 4 years.