ROGER KIMBALL: Trump’s Second Term Resets Washington’s Playbook.

Remember the good old days when the FBI would hang out in the parking lots of Catholic churches where the traditional Latin Mass was celebrated? The Bureau claimed that such churches were a breeding ground for what the Biden administration called “domestic extremism” and offered plenty of scope for what the FBI called “mitigation opportunities.” Hence, they jotted down the license plate numbers of the parishioners who just got done reciting really dangerous things like “Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam.” “See? See? They’re talking about blood!”

Those were the days. You could go to a school board meeting and watch hapless parents being tackled and hauled off by the police for complaining that they didn’t want little Johnny battened on books like Gender Queer or, come to that, they didn’t want that bloke Jack, who called himself Jill, moseying about the girl’s bathroom or playing touch football on the girls’ team. Wot larks!

That’s all over now. Sure, here and there, you will discover some pasty-faced feminist festooning her classroom with pride flags and banners instructing us to “globalize the intifada” or whatever. But those pathetic eructations are like the twitching of a frog’s legs after the dissection has begun: vestigial motor movements produced by stimulus, not life.

The magnificent address by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week was evidence of the new dispensation: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of senior officers he had summoned. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”

Read the whole thing.

READER FAVORITE: Rapid Egg Cooker. #CommissionEarned

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: A.I. Movie Stars: A Solution in Search of a Problem.

Look, I don’t know how to save the theatrical movie business… I don’t even know if it can be saved. But I do know that this is not the answer. Audiences in general are increasingly uninterested in seeing first run movies in theaters. Younger audiences in particular don’t seem that interested in movies at all… they seem to prefer watching content on Netflix, YouTube and Tik Tok. Whatever the myriad reasons (political messaging, cost, convenience) why people are turning away from theatrical movies, the fact is that there’s not a single person in America who would suddenly decide to start going to the movies more often if we would just get rid of all those damned movie stars.

Not a single one.

AI actors are a long con… a grift… another bullshit tech fantasy Silicon Valley is using to drum up another round of sweet, sweet V.C. cash. It’s just another iteration of the same insanity which convinced Hollywood to toss out the theatrical film and ad-supported network TV models in favor of streaming-based subscription fees… a decision which almost everyone in the industry now regrets.

Movie stars are one of the last remaining reasons to actually go out and see a movie in the theater. What we need to be doing is figuring out how to make more movie stars, not eliminating the ones we still have. If we are to have any hope of saving the theatrical movie model, that’s where we will need to start.

The movie star model works. It doesn’t need to be replaced. What it needs, is to be rejuvenated.

Still though, as “George” notes in his Substack, it makes for a great press release.

UPDATE: L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

Don’t worry, I’m sure the AI actors will save the day!

DIVERSITY: Harvard student paper argues – again – that lack of right-leaning professors is no big deal.

HOW IT STARTED:

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority.

How it’s going:

The NFL needs to cancel this crap https://t.co/yzrRZGKypq

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 5, 2025

Evergreen:

THAT’S THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS: UT System launches review of gender studies courses amid scrutiny over LGBT content.

LIGHTNING DEAL: SEEKONE Heat Gun. #CommissionEarned

IT’S A BITCH, AND…: Woman Smears Dog Poop on a Cybertruck, and Karma Strikes Back.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTISEMITISM? Harvard Law professor fired pellet gun outside synagogue on eve of Yom Kippur – claiming he was ‘hunting rats.’”

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump’s Second Term Resets Washington’s Playbook: The FBI once chased Catholics and parents with the SPLC’s “hate map.” Now, under Trump, the grifters are exposed and America’s institutions are being reset.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: We Watched AppleTV+’s Cancelled Political Drama. It’s Clear Why They Pulled It. “The Savant’ is straight out of a progressive fever dream, with no mention of whose actually committing political violence.”

THE WASHINGTON POST, ATTACKING TRUMP, SOUNDS LIKE GEORGE WALLACE:

Included in the story is one startling aspect that, for those who know American history – and apparently that does not include The Post these days —  is shocking. It reads thusly, bold print for emphasis supplied.

“The (Trump) compact asks schools to pledge allegiance to conservative values and policies in eight enumerated areas, including by promising to:

*Prohibit consideration of factors such as gender, race or political views from being considered for admissions, scholarships or programming.”

Hello? Today’s Leftists – and The Post?– oppose the Trump “conservative values” view that colleges should not be allowed to take into admission qualifications like the “consideration of factors such as gender, race”?

Take a minute and hop in the history time capsule, and travel back to June 11, 1963. Famously, Democrat and decidedly segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace literally stood in the entrance to the University of Alabama (the “school house door” as it was then termed in the media of the day) to oppose the admission of black students to the then all-white state university.

Which is to say, Wallace was demanding exactly what The Washington Post apparently now thinks is a good thing in college admissions – taking into “consideration of factors such as gender, race…” They can’t imagine having empathy for a deserving white or Asian student not gaining admission to top colleges based on skin color.

The WaPo aren’t the only leftists who are whistling Dixie:

Victor Davis Hanson just coined the PERFECT term for leftist mayors like Karen Bass—those trying to block federal government operations in their cities.

“They’re really neo-confederate nullificationists.”

But Hanson says these modern-day secessionists have one major difference… pic.twitter.com/Z6G8Cvs5H3

— Overton (@overton_news) October 3, 2025

As VDH noted a decade ago, “The intellectual pedigree of sanctuary cities is not 1960s one-world ecumenicalism, but 1850s Confederate nullification. Their logical consequence is not a wide-open transnational continent, but utter disunion among the states and a second confederate attempt at destroying the primacy of the federal government.”

SALENA ZITO: We Are Not OK, but There Is Hope. “Pastor Jason Howard of The Sanctuary Church in Pittsburgh, a nondenominational Christian congregation that is made up predominantly of young people, said the surge of people who came to services the first Sunday after Kirk’s murder didn’t wane last Sunday.”

FACT CHECK: Kamala Harris Claims She’s ‘Not a Trained Seal’ Who Memorizes Talking Points.

Expert Analysis: We’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Kamala Harris is a seal or other semiaquatic marine mammal capable of performing tricks, so let’s assume she was speaking metaphorically. Harris’s interactions with the media during her failed presidential campaign were remarkably consistent. She would memorize a bunch of talking points and attempt to spout them off, no matter what the question was. On numerous occasions, she would ramble nonsensically about her “middle-class” upbringing in response to questions about inflation. Harris would inevitably get flustered when the otherwise friendly journalist tried to prod her towards a more coherent response, and this would often end in disaster when Harris tried to come up with new words on the spot.

Discover what can be, unburdened by what has been, and read the whole thing.

Related: Bill Maher sticks the rhetorical shiv in:

Bill Maher just ENDED Kamala Harris’s career with a brutal 2-minute monologue.

This one hurts. The ending is the icing on the cake.

“Kamala Harris’s new memoir of the 2024 election is called 107 Days. But it should have been called ‘Everyone sucks but me.’

“107 Days is a… pic.twitter.com/nlulC48sx7

— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) October 4, 2025

WHERE WE ARE NOW:

If wishing death on the children of conservatives was controversial among Democrats, he would withdraw from the election. Right?

But he’s not withdrawing. Because they all do it now. Realize where we are. https://t.co/Lyx7NrjmlC

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) October 4, 2025

Just like “kill the Tutsi cockroaches” they see you as less than human and want you dead

— VegasGrappler (@vegasgrappler) October 4, 2025

The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) October 4, 2025

LEGENDARY MILITARY STRATEGIST PEGGY NOONAN IS NONE-TOO-FOND OF PETE HEGSETH:

Peggy Noonan thinks Pete Hegseth is a whippersnapper who had no business talking to the nation's military leaders the way he did. Ret'd. four-star Gen. Jack Keane, said he thought the Hegseth message was welcomed by the assembled leaders. Take your pick. https://t.co/aHJomxqkk5

— Brit Hume (@brithume) October 4, 2025

UPDATE:

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

—Noonan on November 5th, 2012.

But why would Romney have had a chance?

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

—Noonan on October 31st, 2008.

And in August of 2020, she was praising “The Rise of Kamala Harris. The daughter of East Bay professors grew up to become an excellent performer of politics.”

Exit quote: “It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.”

—By…well, guess who it’s by.

THE GOP EXECUTES AN IMPRESSIVE OCTOBER SURPRISE THAT COULD INFLUENCE VIRGINIA AG RACE:

National Review Online reported that when Jay Jones was a delegate in 2021, he acted in an incredibly demented manner. The Virginia House was honoring the memory of a long-time African American delegate who had just passed, and the Virginia Speaker, Todd Gilbert, a Republican, as well as other Republicans, had said the usual salutary boilerplate statements to praise the deceased.

Jones then sent a series of text messages to a Republican delegate where he scoffed at the “glowing” tributes that were being made by Republicans. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, “I will go to their funerals to p*ss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”

When the Republican delegate expressed her alarm, Jones called her to explain his reasoning over the phone, where he shockingly doubled down, and later he tripled down with more vile texts, which among other things called Gilbert’s children “little fascists” who deserved to die.

It goes without saying that Jones’ behavior was unbelievably and disgustingly evil, reckless, crazy, and stupid. It is absolutely beyond the pale of American political discourse.

Which makes it impressive that the GOP operatives were patient enough to wait till the very last month of the campaign to explode this scandal. Jones, although he had to know this was coming, seems to have made things worse for himself by doing nothing to prepare for it, not even by warning his own party. His first attempted damage control statement was tone deaf, where he claimed “all people” send these kinds of texts, and that Attorney General Miyares and “Trump controlled media organizations” were unfairly playing it up. Then, when this didn’t satisfy anyone, he acted in a more contrite and appropriate manner.

It’s been quite a week in leftist depravity:

To recap:

-Democrat-appointed parole board releases a homicidal maniac who murdered a 6 year old boy by stabbing him in the head.

-Democrat-appointed judge gives just 8 years in prison to a tranny who tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh.

-Democrat attorney general…

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 4, 2025

Data Republican is demanding refunds from Jones’ heavy hitting financial backers:

I’m calling on these donors to request refunds for the Jay Jones race:

🔹 Elizabeth Simons, Board Chair, Heising-Simons Foundation —$750,000 (California)
🔹 Vinton Cerf, Google VP @vgcerf — $52,500
🔹 @DemocraticAGs — $1,100,000
🔹 Government That Works PAC — $200,000
🔹 Green…

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) October 4, 2025

Naturally though, the WaPo isn’t calling for Jones to withdraw:

Washington Post editorial board stops short of calling on Jay Jones to withdraw: “Jones has a month to convince voters that his hateful rhetoric does not reflect how he’d behave if elected as attorney general.” pic.twitter.com/ceWTzEwIfS

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) October 4, 2025

Flashback: Ralph Northam and the Washington Post — a story in three acts.

DR. JEFFREY SINGER: Autism Research Doesn’t Need Washington’s Help.

HOW INDIE WRITERS CAN GET EBOOKS IN LIBRARIES:  OverDrive for Library Books.

LIBS DON’T DO GRATITUDE:  Joy Reid launches profane tirade against JD Vance over veep’s advice to be grateful to the US.

WORST … SO FAR (WHAT’S THE OVER UNDER ON HOW LONG UNTIL THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND RE-BRANDS AS THE MOSQUE OF ENGLAND?):  The worst speech in modern British political history.

STUPID REALITY, REFUSING TO CONFORM TO OUR DELUSIONS!  The climate scaremongers: The Arctic ice that just won’t melt.

IN OTHER NEWS FIRE IS HOT, WATER WET:  Qatar Is Bankrolling Global Terror—and It’s a Direct Threat to the West.

THE ONLY THING YOU CAN BE SURE OF IS THAT HAMAS WILL ALWAYS BREAK CEASEFIRES AND PEACE:  Hamas And the Trump Peace Deal. 

IT’S ALL THEY HAVE:  The Left Won’t Give Up “Fascism” Charge, Expands Definition.