April 23, 2026

CHANGE? Paxton Up 8 Over Cornyn In Texas Senate Runoff. “Don’t believe the ‘nonpartisan’ tag. TPOR is run by Luke Warford (indeed, his is the only profile under ‘Our Team’ on their website), the losing Democratic Railroad Commission candidate in 2022. That said, looking at the crosstabs, it looks like an actual Republican sample for a Republican runoff.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

COMING SOON: YOUNG JIMMY SAVILE, THE TOP OF THE POPS YEARS! The Michael Jackson biopic ignores half his life.

If you’re planning on making a biopic of a major musical figure, you would be advised not to miss out various rather vital aspects of their life. For instance, Bohemian Rhapsody dealt – if at times obliquely – with Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality and AIDS. The recent Bruce Springsteen film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempted to tackle his mental health difficulties and near-breakdown.

Neither film was perfect, but they were at least made with reasonably good intentions. That is rather more than can be said for Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which opens in US cinemas this week and has been greeted with disbelief.

The main objection is that the film refuses to acknowledge that Jackson was a deeply troubled man, who is widely believed to have engaged in acts of child molestation. While he was acquitted after a trial in 2003, the various financial settlements that Jackson paid out to accusers – all the while publicly denying any wrongdoing – suggests a man with a guilty conscience and deeply suspect behavior that he was desperate to hide.

Any halfway honest and representative biopic would have this as a vital part of the story, but Fuqua’s film simply ignores it altogether. According to advance reviews of the picture, Jackson – as played by his nephew Jaafar – was a near-Christlike figure. He suffered at the hands of his brutal father Joe, but went on to become the King of Pop. First alongside his brothers in the Jackson Five and then as the biggest solo star of his time.

More details here: Michael review — risible biopic turns Jacko into a 20th-century Jesus.

The film stops in 1988, which is handy as it avoids all that unfortunate child sex abuse material. Yet anyone who has seen Leaving Neverland will feel the tension between the allegations about abuse in the documentary (specifically relating to Peter Pan memorabilia) and the biopic’s creepy validation of Jackson’s “adorable” obsession with vulnerable lost boys and cute-for-ever kids.

The music scenes nonetheless are quite brilliant and thrilling — Jaafar is an accomplished impressionist. Jackson was a once-in-a-generation genius and his musical legacy is quite safe — his sales spiked by 10 per cent during the Leaving Neverland controversy. In the end he probably deserved more, for better and worse, than this.

So no cameos from Triumph the Comic Insult Dog, I take it:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANOTHER WAY A NATION COMMITS SUICIDE:

Related (From Ed): Well sure, half of young people won’t fight for England, but think about the half that would: An army of snowflakes. The British Army wants to recruit snowflakes to its ranks. What is it thinking? “Its new PR campaign features posters and TV ads calling on ‘snowflakes’, ‘selfie addicts’, ‘class clowns’, ‘phone zombies’ and ‘me me me millennials’ to sign up. One poster says: ‘Snowflakes – your army needs YOU and your compassion.’”

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

WARNER BROS DISCOVERY VOTE TO APPROVE $110BN MERGER WITH PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE:

Shareholders of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) voted “overwhelmingly” to approve the company’s $110bn merger with Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, on Thursday.

But shareholders voted against generous proposed compensation packages for WBD executives, including a $550m payout to the outgoing chief executive, David Zaslav.

The boards of both WBD and Paramount have already approved the merger, and shareholders were encouraged to approve it as well.

“Today’s stockholder approval is another key milestone toward completing this historic transaction that will deliver exceptional value to our stockholders,” Zaslav said in a statement. “We will continue to work with Paramount to complete the remaining steps in this process that will create a leading, next-generation media and entertainment company.”

A Paramount Skydance spokesperson said: “Shareholder approval marks another important milestone towards completing our acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, building on our successful equity and debt syndications and progress across regulatory approvals.

“We look forward to closing the transaction in the coming months and realizing the creation of a next-generation media and entertainment company that better serves both the creative community and consumers.”

Jane Fonda hardest hit: Jane Fonda Committee Condemns WBD Merger Shareholder Approval: ‘This Fight Is Far From Over.’

“Today’s decision by Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders to advance a merger with Paramount is a serious setback — for our industry, for the workers who sustain it, for consumers, and for the fundamental democratic values that depend on a diverse and independent media landscape,” a statement read. “But this merger is not a done deal — and this fight is far from over.”

“We’ve seen time and again that sustained pressure works. Efforts to challenge consolidation, from the proposed Tegna-Nexstar Media Group deal to scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster, have demonstrated that coordinated legal, political, and public advocacy can change outcomes, especially when state Attorneys General step in to protect the public interest,” it continued. “We will continue pressing forward on every front.”

“We will keep speaking out for the workers and artists at the heart of this industry, and for the public, which deserves more than an ever-shrinking circle of control over what they see, hear, and read,” the message concluded. “This fight continues. And we fully intend to win.”

“A handful of powerful decision-makers should not be allowed to quietly reshape [a nation’s] media, culture, and creative life without accountability.” Past performance really is no guarantee of future results:

Meanwhile, another famous communist is also curiously against the increasing collectivization of the cinema wing of the leftist propaganda industry:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ERNÜCHTERUNG: ‘GULP’ Time in Germany.

You know, the German hierarchy is awfully good at waxing poetic now over things they, yeah, maybe coulda, shoulda done better years ago, or maybe not even done at all.

Like shutting down those perfectly good nuclear reactors two years ago just to show the world they could and feel like superior beings, all at the same time.

Seemed a little short-sighted and pretentious, even then, and there are those who are tacitly admitting perhaps ‘mistakes were made.’

Wirklich?

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

BESSENT OR RUBIO IS PROBABLY ALREADY ON THIS:

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green

KRUISER: New York City Will Survive Mamdani, but It Might Not Want To. “I am unapologetic about the fact that I love New York City. Some of the greatest moments of my career have happened there. My daughter went to college and law school there, and lives in Brooklyn. I would prefer to not have the city destroyed. That, sadly, is not Zohran Mamdani’s preference. Oh, he’ll pretend otherwise, but his politics make it pretty clear that he despises almost everything that makes the city great.”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Stephen Green

FRAUD GETS BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL: A group of 14 GOP senators led by Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa have pooled into one big proposal 17 anti-fraud bills they had previously separately proposed. The result, as I report today for The Washington Stand, is The Protecting American Taxpayers Act.

The bill addresses controlling and ending fraud in federal spending from multiple angles, including one introduced by Sen. Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat, to strengthen legal protections for whistle blowers who come forward with information to expose fraudsters.

Posted at 12:11 pm by Mark Tapscott

RELEASE DAY, AND I TALK A BIT ABOUT WHY THIS BOOK STAYED 2/3rds FINISHED FOR OVER A DECADE:   Witch’s Daughter.

And what’s ahead for this year.

Posted at 12:10 pm by Sarah Hoyt

IS THE NEW YORK POST THE LAST REPUTABLE NATIONAL PAPER STANDING?

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

OH, CANADA: Woke judge sentences man who throttled toddler to just six months in jail because he is of indigenous heritage and suffered ‘negative consequences of COLONIZATION.’ “‘While I acknowledge that there is no evidence that he or his immediate family were impacted by state actions such as residential schools, even the disassociation with one’s past and cultural heritage is a negative consequence of colonization,’ Golinsky wrote in her decision.”

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS HOW A NATION KILLS ITSELF:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

DISBARRED FOR GETTING IT RIGHT:

Posted at 10:56 am by Stephen Green

TRAPPED IN THE COLOR REVOLUTION:

Staffers at crosstown rival magazine New York entertain similar thoughts: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York Mag Lionizes Shoplifter and Gives Tips on How to Steal.

Here’s the excerpt from a New York Magazine article headlined, “Paying the Price for Shoplifting From Whole Foods:”

At Whole Foods, you are apparently being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and the company’s surveillance tech is improving. When security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.

The Union Square Whole Foods jail is a windowless storage closet near the entrance, says Astrid, a photographer. She mostly remembers the wallpaper: “Layers and layers of grainy faces,” she tells Nora Deligter. “All the thieves that had come before me.”

A sculptor we’ll call Gina found herself in the Bowery Whole Foods Jail. She was late to an Alex G concert at Bowery Ballroom and had decided to slip into Whole Foods for a quick spicy-tuna-roll walk-and-dine. She had a system: Approach the item with confidence, grab it, then head upstairs to the dining area and surreptitiously place it into her bag. But this time, she headed straight for the exit. “A rookie mistake,” Gina says.

Gina remembers keeping her head bowed and her eyes low as she was escorted back to Whole Foods Jail. The windowless office was almost too bland to recall, she says, except for a rudimentary banner, that read: ALL SHOPLIFTERS ARE BANNED FROM WHOLE FOODS FOR LIFE. A few weeks later, Gina says her parents received a $90 ticket in the mail from the company.

David Strom replies, “Is this the new socialism? Why wait for the revolution when you can just decriminalize stealing, or take your chances of getting caught and running to the media with your sob story?”

Still though, could be worse: Assassination Culture.

Much as Columbine captured the American imagination like a smash hit horror movie, which triggered a memetic wave of copycat school shooters we have still, to this day, not escaped, Luigi dragged us to hell in the form of a new archetype for the American assassin. There is some precedent for assassination culture in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s we were very much in the grip of a memetic death loop, as both political assassinations and the assassination of men deemed political, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon, were an almost regular occurrence. But today, on the internet, news of political killings for causes considered “just” are not only disseminated throughout the media, but celebrated on the internet. I do think this is categorically new, and worse.

Late last year, I touched on these themes, with a focus on left-wing violence in particular, in a piece for The Atlantic called “Abundant Delusion.” There, my thesis was simply the “Abundance Democrats,” if earnest in their stated goals of both civic and technologic progress, were doomed to fail. The problem, I argued, was they framed the movement as explicitly a Democratic project. Not only was this frustrating, given the most prominent ideas inherent to “abundance” — from megaprojects in energy and terraforming earth to reforming the regulatory environment crippling progress — were co-opted from libertarians and centrist tech thinkers, it was somehow totally ignorant of the left-wing base. These people did not want a bullet train. They did seem to want pretty much every guy capable of building bullet trains to die.

A large and growing segment of the left, I argued, had become deeply, openly violent. I did not just rely on anecdotal evidence, vibes, or even mainstream reporting, though I did cite all of these things. There was data supporting the notion.

Two days later, as the abundance libs just about concluded their mocking condemnation of my piece, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Upset, I wrote about — again — the reactions. Sharing grisly celebrations of Kirk’s gruesome murder was itself, I was told, dangerous. Frustrating as this was, I did attempt, in a follow-up, to thoughtfully parse this concern. Americans needed to reassert a very strong taboo against violence, I wrote. I hoped, at the time, if I could somehow convince the center-left to join me, there might be some way out of the cultural spiral. The center-left, including the massively influential ‘abundance lib’ Ezra Klein, has since taken to normalizingthe work of Hasan Piker, a socialist who has repeatedly called for the murder of his political enemies.

I no longer have any illusions we can significantly shift our country out of assassination culture. At this point, we can only try to be more aware — not only of assassination culture itself, but of the people either tacitly or explicitly encouraging it.

Just hours after what appears to have been a second attempt on Sam Altman’s life, the SF Standard, the Chronicle, and the Onion all shared photos of his home. The Chronicle reported its location. Incredibly, they did this not only as lunatics celebrated online, but as popular influencers made actual cases for further political violence (a lengthy thread here, from the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith).

Finally, at another niche Manhattan publication, it’s all the assassination prØn that’s fit to print:

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll

RIDE THE SOUTHERN POVERTY MOBIUS LOOP! Clueless Columnist Asks If It’s Now a Crime to Expose White Supremacist Groups.

I’m all for exposing white supremacist groups, and those who are bankrolling them:

From yesterday: How Your Tax-Deductible Donation Went to the Klan, Neo-Nazis, and the ‘Sadistic Souls.’

Now, call me crazy, but I think that if you’re a member of the “Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club,” you’re not a good person. I mean, it’s right there in the name. By the way, guess what the logo of the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club is? If you guessed the same SS Totenkopf that was tattooed on the chest of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, you are correct! (“Are we the baddies?”)

I don’t know about you, but I would be extremely wary about ever putting any of my money or my organization’s money into the hands of anyone who was an active member of these groups.

As you may have noticed, these are not small sums of money. Whoever F-9 is, he allegedly made more than a million dollars from the SPLC over nine years! While the program reportedly began in the 1980s, the indictment lists wire transfers going up to April 25, 2023.

And speaking of the Southern Poverty Möbius Loop: SPLC paid to fuel Ku Klux Klan’s hate, then raised money to put it out.

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:37 am by Ed Driscoll