March 12, 2024 - 12:30pm

→ Biden’s ‘fiery’ but mostly peaceful SOTU speech

Dark Brandon is back, and the media is enthralled. President Joe Biden gave an impassioned State of the Union speech last night, emphasising Ukraine, threats to democracy, and abortion.

Well over a dozen major news outlets called the speechfieryin headlines. New York Times columnists wrote, alternately, that Biden was “energized and feisty”, “brought the heat” and had “multiple fire-breathing moments”, though in-house conservative Ross Douthat wasn’t impressed. “It wasn’t actually a good speech”, he wrote.

So fiery was the speech that it sparked widespread speculation about the President’s rumoured use of performance-enhancing drugs — including Panera’s caffeinated and allegedly deadly Charged Lemonade.

Biden’s public as an doddering octogenarian may have actually helped him last night. Per Politico: just by showing up and using complete sentences, Biden defied the “lower-than-Death Valley expectations that had been set for him”.

→ Keir Starmer encourages female replacement

Keir Starmer marked International Women’s Day by telling ITV News today that “we need a female leader,” saying that the Labour Party is overdue a woman in the top job. Speaking at an FA-led “Let Girls Play” football training session, the Leader of the Opposition said that the party was pleased to have “powerful, strong women” in his shadow cabinet. He reiterated that the party would have to accept the “challenge” of appointing a female leader before too long, calling into question whether a woman would directly follow him.

Should Starmer win the election, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves would be the first woman to ever run the Treasury. Yet, despite its illustrious 124-year history, Labour remains the only major party never to have had a female leader, despite multiple attempts in leadership elections. All the same, Starmer may need to settle on the definition of a woman before calling for a female leader…

→ Candace Owens cites antisemitic conspiracy theory

Candace Owens’s critical views of Israel have marked her out from much of the American Right, not least from her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro, with whom she rowed in the autumn over moral conduct in the Gaza war. Now her views appear to have entered Kanye West territory, as she used the most recent episode of her regular Daily Wire show to argue that there is a Jewish “gang” in Hollywood which is doing “horrific things” to those it opposes.

Owens compared this supposed Jewish cabal with violent gangs, saying, “Imagine if the Bloods and the Crips were doing horrific things — murdering people, controlling people with blackmail — and then every time a person spoke out about it, the Bloods and the Crips would call those people racist.”

The conservative commentator added that she had many Jewish friends, and was restricting her criticism to a “very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism”. Maybe Candace has been spending a bit too much time with Kanye.