November 7, 2025

‘I MADE A MISTAKE:’ Heritage Foundation President Apologizes to Staff for Video Refusal to Cancel Tucker Carlson and Throws Shade at Former Chief of Staff.

“I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday, a week after he posted a video decrying a “venomous” coalition attacking the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson—and declaring the Heritage Foundation would always defend him against “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a “moral obligation” to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: “I made the mess, let me clean it up.”

* * * * * * * * *

While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel “our friends,” he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a “limiting principle.”

“You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear.”

He added that he wasn’t actually very familiar with the white nationalist, Stalin fan, and J.D. Vance critic Nick Fuentes, with whom Carlson conducted a friendly interview last week on his podcast, though Roberts has spoken several times in recent days about the size of Fuentes’s audience and argued that “canceling” him, given his listenership, which Roberts pegged at 5 million people, will simply make him more popular.

“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” he said. “I still don’t.”

Norm Macdonald, call your office!

In sharp contrast to playing footsie with white nationalists: BEASTMODE: ‘Everyone In His Country Is Eating Dog:’ Ben Shapiro Savages Tucker Carlson’s Defense of Commie Drug Lord Nicolas Maduro.

“Who gives a shit!” That was Ben Shapiro’s response to Tucker Carlson’s argument that Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has some great qualities, like his opposition to gay marriage.

“Who gives a shit!” Shapiro said. “The guy’s a communist dictator. Everyone in his country is eating dog. He’s shipping fentanyl to the United States to kill Americans. I don’t give a shit whether he’s anti-LGBTQ rights. This is the number one thing about Nicolas Maduro? Do you know how far down the list you have to get before you can get to anything remotely recommendable about Nicolas Maduro?”

Shapiro, appearing with Megyn Kelly for a live taping of The Megyn Kelly Show in Jacksonville, Fla., was responding to Kelly’s summary of Carlson’s argument: “Tucker has made the point—I’m not going to be here to be Tucker’s defender—but he’s made the point that Maduro is culturally conservative,” she said.

“There is a long pattern of him ideologically laundering terrible ideas over the course of the last two years, ranging from traveling to Russia to sniff the bread and explain why the Russian regime is actually wonderful, to saying last week that the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro is actually not that bad because they’re being attacked by, in his words, ‘Globohomo,'” Shapiro said.

Exit quote:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

COLBERT SAYS THE ROLE OF LATE NIGHT TV IS TO TELL YOU HOW TO THINK ABOUT THE NEWS: Following The Late Show’s Cancellation Drama, Stephen Colbert Weighs In On Why Late-Night Talk Shows Should Continue To Exist.  “Well, we are like your friend who at the end of the day paid attention to what happened today more than you did. And then we curate that back to you at the end of the day. But it’s really more about how we feel about—or I, as the person who is the vehicle for that—how we felt about today.”

We’ve come a long way from when Johnny Carson told 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace the exact opposite in 1979:

Incidentally, the GQ scribe interviewing Colbert seems to have quite a different approach to his subject than Sydney Sweeney’s interlocutor, who was desperate to finally be the one who got Sweeney to cancel herself: Sydney Sweeney Is Repeatedly Badgered by a Woke Ugly Karen “Journalist” To Apologize for Being White and Pretty, and Keeps On Not Apologizing.

The woke left media is still demanding Sydney Sweeney apologize for her “great genes/jeans” ad. They are still after her to admit it was a Race Crime to make so many neurotic, hysterical, internet-addicted Karens upset by making a dumb pun Brooke Shields made in her jeans ads in 1980.

This gross, manipulative cow interviewing her even demanded she apologize for being “white” and speaking, she claims, of “genetic superiority.”

Sweeney — get this — refused to apologize.

This was the same leather helmet-era playbook the DNC-MSM tried on Taylor Swift a decade ago and similarly crashed and burned, but hey, keep flucking that chicken, I guess.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASHLEY MCCULLY: Welcome to the Real World, Former Food Stampers. “This is what happens when we take these basic life skills out of schools. Cooking, gardening, food preservation, and basic butchery are, in fact, survival skills. Without this knowledge, is it any wonder people have this reaction to receiving a box of canned and dry goods?”

Posted at 1:17 pm by Stephen Green

COLD WAR II: The Computing Arms Race of Cold War 2.0. “The late-stage Cold War arms race initiated by President Ronald Reagan against the USSR in the early 1980s was so expensive that it eventually led the Soviet Union to the edge of bankruptcy and brought down the Communist regime. Today, both the spending required and the emergent risks of the AI and computing wars threaten to make the stakes of that era feel like child’s play.”

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Anti-Trump’ ‘Anniversary’ Bombs, Media Blames You-Know-Who.

The dystopian thriller follows a tight-knit family navigating a totalitarian takeover of the U.S. The film stars Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler, and it made an embarrassingly small amount over the weekend.

Think $260,000 in roughly 800 theaters/screens. Even by modern flop standards, that’s a low figure. So what happened?

The far-Left TheWrap.com pins the blame on, you guessed it, President Donald Trump.

Or just maybe Lionsgate knew they had a stinker on their hands and decided against spending tens of millions promoting it to audiences that wouldn’t have cared anyway.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

NO THANK YOU: Kraft Sets Out to Ruin Thanksgiving. “Kraft Foods, one of the names that we think of when we think of mac and cheese, has decided to ruin Thanksgiving. It introduced apple pie-flavored mac and cheese.”

Don’t worry — things only get worse from there.

Posted at 11:13 am by Stephen Green

BUBBLES POP: OpenAI Races to Quell Concerns Over Its Finances.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, faced widespread online pushback after she raised the prospect of government aid for the company at a Wall Street Journal technology conference on Wednesday. OpenAI has embarked on a deal spree to build computing infrastructure to power A.I. development, and Ms. Friar said the company wanted to find creative ways to finance its ambitious — and expensive — plans.

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” Ms. Friar said at the conference in Napa, Calif., adding that it would be “the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen.”

The last thing the AI industry needs is more money shoveled into it.

More:

Her comments set off concern amid rising unease over whether an industrywide A.I. spending frenzy can be sustained. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft and other A.I. companies are pouring billions of dollars into building data centers and related infrastructure to power the development of the technology, with some of the companies increasingly turning to creative financing deals to fund the expansions.

Critics have said many of these deals are circular chains of financing, with chipmakers, data center providers and A.I. labs trading cash and stock back and forth with no immediate promise of a return on investment. It also remains unclear if A.I. products can generate large enough revenues to justify the costs of the infrastructure boom, leading to fears of a potentially dangerous bubble.

Late Wednesday, Ms. Friar said in a LinkedIn post that using the word “backstop” had “muddied the point.”

“I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part,” she wrote.

And the government “playing its part” wouldn’t be a backstop, how exactly?

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

IT’S DIFFERENT NOW BECAUSE REASONS: Top Democrat changes his tune on eliminating filibuster under Trump compared to Biden.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., avoided answering whether he would support eliminating the filibuster, as he did under President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

Raskin was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about President Donald Trump’s recent comments regarding several Republican losses nationwide Tuesday night and the ongoing government shutdown.

“One of the things that he has been talking about for the last couple of days more intensely is getting rid of the filibuster. That’s actually something that you wanted to do when Joe Biden was president. Things weren’t getting through the Senate. So is that an area where you agree with him?” Bash asked.

“Look, we don’t need a procedural fix at this point,” Raskin answered.

“We” only need it when the Democrats do.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

STAY FROSTY:

Posted at 9:28 am by Stephen Green

I THINK IT MEANS SOMETHING THAT THEY’RE ASKING THIS QUESTION IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? It certainly has leftists’ panties in a wad.

The thing to remember is that feminism doesn’t address the needs and desires of women as such. It addresses the needs and desires of a certain subset of upscale educated women. Perhaps coincidentally, women’s happiness on the General Social Survey has fallen steadily since feminism got traction.

Posted at 9:19 am by Glenn Reynolds