PETER HITCHENS: God forgive me, I was one of the millions of young men who wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here’s what the new film doesn’t tell you.

Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.

It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).

But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.

Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.

He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.

Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!

After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.

They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.

At UnHerd, David Samuels adds: How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke –he refused to be a Leftist prophet.  “In other words, as [James] Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.”

VDH: The Addicted, Petty, and Hysterical Left. “Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.”

FINALLY, TRUMP IS FORCING THE DNC-MSM TO COVER NORTH CAROLINA: Trump looks to North Carolina as he tries to contrast his leadership with Democrats.’

President Donald Trump on Friday is visiting North Carolina — a state he said “has been abandoned by the Democrats” as it rebuilds from Hurricane Helene’s flooding — with questions about disaster relief taking center stage in his first days back in office.

Trump will then travel to California, where wildfires have ravaged the Los Angeles area, as Republicans on Capitol Hill begin to navigate between conservatives’ desire for spending cuts and Trump’s pledges to help both places rebuild.

The trip is Trump’s first outside Washington since his inauguration on Monday.

By visiting North Carolina, a swing state he’s won three times, the president is seeking to draw clear contrasts with former President Joe Biden, whose administration’s management of the flooding he called “so bad,” and Democratic leaders in California, whose handling of the wildfires he has repeatedly lambasted.

In a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is “getting in the way of everything” in North Carolina, and — without explaining how — claimed that Democrats used the agency “not to help.”

Here you go, CNN: FEMA apologizes after failing to deliver promised trailers to Helene survivors in North Carolina.

And: FEMA worker Marn’i Washington breaks silence on not helping Trump-voting hurricane victims. “The FEMA boss who was fired after ordering volunteers not to approach homes displaying Trump signs in Florida after Hurricane Milton has insisted her edict ‘was not isolated’ and also happened in North Carolina.”

Meanwhile, Trump is letting hurricane victims speak at the podium during his press conference, something that would have been inconceivable with Biden and his phalanx of handlers:

Related:

FASTER? PLEASE! Trump’s Border Control Blitzkrieg. “Trump is carrying out an executive order blitzkrieg, issuing so many executive orders so quickly to undo the damage of the Biden (and Obama) years. Today I want to highlight just a few related to border security and deporting the millions of unvetted illegal aliens the Biden Administration deliberately let into the country.”

CNN IS CUTTING HUNDREDS OF TV JOBS IN A DIGITAL PIVOT. Read the memo CEO Mark Thompson sent to staff.

  • CNN said it would cut about 200 roles focused on its TV operations.

  • The news organization also plans to hire about the same number in digital-focused positions.

  • CEO Mark Thompson said last year that he wanted to “future-proof” CNN.

CNN, the cable-news giant owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said it would cut about 200 TV-focused roles as part of a digital pivot.

The company also said it would hire about the same number of staffers in digital-focused roles and aim to fill 100 of them in the coming months.

The cuts would affect about 6% of CNN’s workforce, though the new roles mean total head count is unlikely to be significantly affected.

WBD is providing $70 million in funding as part of a drive to reach $1 billion in digital revenue by 2030.

Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN, told staff in a memo on Thursday that he aimed to “shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

CNN also said it planned to introduce a streaming-news product accessible on devices in the US and elsewhere.

In October, CNN brought in a paywall, charging some of its most loyal readers $4 a month for access to digital content.

I think the Daily Wire is getting a bit over its skis with this headline, but even asking this question would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Is This The End Of CNN? An Interview With Puck News’ Dylan Byers.

John [Bickley]: There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?

Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. They had a fifth of what they had four years ago. So they went from 10 million to less than 2 million, in terms of viewers, which is drastic and reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.

In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.

And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.

Related: Coal miners become computer coders.

—CNN Business, April 22nd, 2016.

KICK THE TIRES AND LIGHT THE FIRES: Air Force planes will fly deportation flights under Trump order. “The aircrews and maintainers involved in the deportation flights will be in addition to 1,500 active-duty troops that the Pentagon will deploy to the southern border by the end of the week, the senior defense official said.”

JAMES CARVILLE: Biden ‘Has Nobody To Blame But Himself’ For Damaged Legacy.

Carville briefly mentioned Biden’s repeated claim that he could have beaten Trump in November if he’d remained in the race, and made it clear that he wasn’t buying it: “No one f***ing believes that at all!”

“And then fighting with Jill Biden and Alexandra Pelosi,” Carville continued. “I mean, just look, guy — you had a noble career. Your last act was terrible. Just get out of the way. The party’s moving on. I mean, they’re really moving on, and it’s very sad, but that’s just where we are. And he created this himself. He has nobody to blame but himself. Nobody.”

It’s a typically epic Carville rant, but also typically for Carville, rather disingenuous. Those who propped up Biden, virtually the whole of the Democratic Party, including their news media, should share in the blame for four years of deceiving the public. Actually, at least five, given that signs of Biden’s decline were quite evident on the 2020 campaign trail.

COLD WAR II: Guess Who Is Buying Up U.S. Farmland Now? “With all this talk about the Chinese government infiltrating the United States through TikTok, many have asked: Aren’t the Chinese already doing so through the purchase of U.S. farmland?”

THE TRUMP SHUTTLE IS REBORN! ‘Deportation Flights Have Begun:’ Trump Administration Begins Returning Criminal Aliens to Home Countries.

The Trump administration is beginning to fly criminal illegal aliens out of the country after rounding them up as part of the long-promised mass deportation program.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Friday that deportation flights have started and shared two pictures of what appears to be group of illegal immigrants walking into a military aircraft.

“Deportation flights have begun,” Leavitt said on X.

“President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”

No word yet if excursions to Martha’s Vineyard will also be an option for what at least one Newsweek scribe has suddenly dubbed “unauthorized citizens:”

UPDATE: Trump’s ICE nabs child sex offenders among 530+ illegal immigrants caught in single day.

Jesse Kelly tweets, “The point has been made by others but just consider for a second that ICE is snatching up all these animals within 72 hours of Trump taking office. Meaning Biden knew exactly where all these people were and they let these barbarians stay here to prey on you. Democrats are evil.”

Well, there certainly were an “unexpected” number of “crises by design” during the past four years.

(Classical reference in headline.)

I WONDER WHAT THEY’LL TALK ABOUT: Rubio will visit Central America, including Panama, on first trip abroad as secretary of state.

“This is a serious approach by the secretary to deal with the issues that directly affect our ability to get this nation back on her feet and to deal with why there is such high migration,” Bruce said.

She said the trip “signals something to those countries, it should signal something to Americans and to those who also said that ‘America First’ was an isolationist argument. It is the opposite.”

While migration will be at the top of Rubio’s agenda, the stop in Panama probably will draw the most attention because of Trump’s repeated calls for the United States to retake control of the Panama Canal.

Developing…

DEI MUST DIE:

Full text:

Janet Petro, the President-Trump-appointed acting director of NASA, has sent a message informing all NASA staff that it is shutting down all DEI offices and DEI contracts.

The message says the agency knows government employees are trying to disguise DEI by using new names and vague language. (This is documented.) It tells staff to report those violations for investigation.

Fire them all for insubordination, fraud, whatever works.