Is there anything left to say about the Heritage Foundation’s pre-Halloween melodrama? It was quite a scary show. I am confident that when Kevin Roberts, president of that venerable bastion of conservatism, got outside his morning egg on October 30, he had no inkling that his two-minute and thirty-nine-second video clip would precipitate a seismic detonation that would rock the foundation and monopolize the news cycle for days.
The main purpose of the video, Roberts said, was to reaffirm that the commentator Tucker Carlson “remains and always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” This came on the heels of Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes, the obnoxious twenty-seven-year-old antisemitic scold who, among other things, idolizes Joseph Stalin and thinks that Adolf Hitler is “cool.”
Some prominent commentators defended Roberts; many denounced him. Roberts tried several times to walk back or apologize for his initial video. It didn’t work. The rhetoric of that first video (“globalist class,” “venomous coalition”) was impossible to sanitize. On November 5, Heritage’s regularly scheduled all-staff monthly meeting turned into an embarrassing extended struggle session. The world knows this because a video of the meeting (taped for the benefit of staffers who were out of town) was leaked and posted online, where it instantly became the object of obloquy and ridicule.
As of this writing, damage reports regarding the self-inflicted wound suffered by Heritage are still trickling in and being assessed. But even sympathetic commentators understand that the damage is serious. “After 40+ years,” ran the headline to one such column, “the Heritage Foundation is collapsing.” Perhaps that is precipitate or overstated; as of this writing, the tea leaves are still swirling. Still, there can be no doubt that there is trouble in paradise.
HMM: Clinical trial suggests opioids unnecessary after wisdom tooth surgery. To be honest, I barely took any pain meds after mine were out. But it was a straightforward extraction under a local anesthetic. I took a codeine pill when I got home, and another when I went to bed, and then it was Advil all the way. But Helen had dental surgery several weeks ago, and she couldn’t sleep without opiates at night.
Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has died at the age of 84, his family have announced.
Tagliabue reportedly died on Sunday morning in Chevy Chase, Maryland as a result of heart failure complicated by Parkinson’s disease. He leaves behind wife Chandler, son Drew and daughter Emily.
Tagliabue served as NFL commissioner between 1989 and 2006, when current incumbent Roger Goodell took over.
During Tagliabue’s 17-year stint as commissioner, the NFL experienced labor peace, saw skyrocketing television deals, construction of new stadiums across the nation, and expansion to the current 32-team makeup.
He also maneuvered the league through such crises and events as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.
Despite those credentials that continued pro football’s surge to the top of American sports, it took until a special centennial class in 2020 for Tagliabue to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after retiring in 2006.
Tagliabue wasn’t the second coming of Pete Rozelle, but the NFL’s product during his era was still pre-woke, and far more watchable than Goodell’s version of the sport.
“The president continues to post about ending the filibuster,” Stephanopoulos began. “Is that the best way to end this shutdown right now? Is that what the administration position is?”
“No, George, the best way to do it — and look, you were involved in a lot of these in the ’90s. And you basically called the Republicans terrorists and, you know, you said that it is not the responsible party that keeps the government closed,” Bessent replied. “And so what we need is five brave moderate Democratic Senators to cross the aisle, because right now it is 52 to three — 52 to three — five Democrats can cross the aisle and reopen the government. That’s the best way to do it, George.”
“I can disagree with you about the history there,” Stephanopoulos said with a half smile. “We don’t have to get into a history lesson right now —”
“George —” Bessent tried to push back.
“Let’s talk about —” Stephanopoulos interrupted. “Let’s talk about what’s happening right now.”
“If you want, I’ve got all your quotes here,” Bessent offered.
“I’m sure you do, but let’s talk about the situation —” Stephanopoulos tried again.
“I read your book, so you got one purchase on Amazon this week,” Bessent quipped. “And that’s very much what you said.”
In that vein, [Dick] Gephardt bitterly attacked incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and his allies, calling them “trickle-down terrorists” and asserting that their legislative program was based on “division, exclusion and fear.”
—The Tampa Bay Times, December 14th, 1994.
And from Stephanopoulos himself:
Stephanopoulos: No one knew who would get blamed more for the shutdown, Democrats or Republicans. But there was more than the shutdown involved. First, there was also this threat that they would not extend the debt limit, that this was the big hammer that would force the president to accept whatever the Republicans wanted.
Our strategy was very simple. We couldn’t buckle, and we had to say that [Republicans] were blackmailing the country to get their way. In order to get their tax cut, they were willing to shut down the government, throw the country into default for the first time in its history and cut Medicare, Social Security, education and the environment just so they could get their way. And we were trying to say that they were basically terrorists, and it worked.
Molly McNearney, Jimmy Kimmel’s wife and the co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, just gave the world a front-row seat to what happens when politics becomes your entire personality.
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McNearney admitted she feels “angry all the time” toward relatives who supported Trump’s election. Yet in the same breath, she claimed to feel “sympathy” for them, describing them as “deliberately misinformed.”
So they’re idiots who need her pity, but she’s also furious at them. Got it.
McNearney once proudly voted Republican and gave her dad a Rush Limbaugh tie. Then she moved to Los Angeless and became a brainwashed Hollywood liberal. Turns out fitting in beats independent thought.
“Part of me goes, ‘Don’t let politics get in the way,’ but to me, this isn’t politics. It’s truly values. And we just were not aligned anymore,” McNearney said.
Part of being a functioning human being is being able to deal with people who disagree with you. But apparently, that’s too much to ask from someone who thinks voting differently is a personal attack.
Greg Gutfeld has a question:
Why does this estrangement only go in one direction? Any stories ever about Trump supporters disowning liberal relatives? Rare, at best. Says something about how politics for the left is hopelessly intertwined with ego and self worth. https://t.co/eMzRyZzL4Y
MOST OF AMERICA’S INSTITUTIONS ARE RUN BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PERFORMING FOR THEIR PEERS, WITH SIMILAR RESULTS:
Top Gun: Maverick made $2.5B.
Movies like it since: 0
Hollywood can make movies American audiences love.
They just don’t like their audience. Instead they opt to make movies for elite critics and their elite peers — and are willing to pay handsomely for it. https://t.co/HeQwho6Yvi
The Washington Post editorial board asserted that a “new era of class warfare has begun” in New York City after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won last week’s election — criticizing what it described as his “change in character” since the campaign.
In a Saturday editorial titled “Zohran Mamdani drops the mask,” the Post slammed the mayor-elect for his “seething” victory speech, arguing that Mamdani “abandoned his cool disposition” and showed the world what he really stands for.
The sub-headline warned, “The mayor-elect divides New Yorkers into two groups: the oppressed and their oppressors.”
“Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to ‘the bosses’ who exploit workers — and then crushing them,” the editorial board wrote. “His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word ‘growth’ didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.”
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In conclusion, the Post argued that you don’t need a college degree to understand the impact that Mamdani will have on New York City — only a familiarity with the city’s history.
If only the Post had aggressive young reporters who could get ahead of a hot story like this!
Mamdani had a CASH BAR at his victory party. If you can’t get a free vodka from this guy something tells me the free food and buses ain’t coming. Congrats, suckers.
Toronto police said a 21-year-old from Toronto was charged with obstruction of a peace officer, a 23-year-old from Toronto was charged with forcible entry and unlawful assembly, and a 29-year-old was arrested for obstruction and assault of a peace officer.
A Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) student group called Students Supporting Israel (SSI) said in social media posts that an off-campus event it organized was targeted.
Videos posted by the group show broken glass and people shouting.
A post on SSI’s Instagram page said protestors “forced their way” into the event that featured two Israeli soldiers as part of the national “Triggered: From Combat to Campus” tour.
It said one of the invited soldiers was injured in the incident from shattered glass.
Another TMU student group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), said in a social media statement that students protesting the event “were grabbed, shoved, chased and thrown to the ground” by one of the soldiers.
The left screams “Globalize the Intifada.” Why should they be surprised when Israelis fight back throughout the globe?
This video is pure fun! A bunch of Canadian pro-Hamas shit eaters violently burst into a private Israeli conference at the TMU so a former IDF soldier just picked them up and threw them out like the garbage they are. pic.twitter.com/8Bu8nSRlye
Susan Sontag is a writer worth quoting, and “Fascinating Fascism” is one of her most deliciously sententious essays; an exhortation to share in her disdain for the justifiably reviled figure of Leni Riefenstahl. But beneath the rich supply of aphorism and wit, excoriation and outrage, we find a treacly moralism and naïve disengagement with historical precedent that reverses her earlier praise and defence of the director. It says as much about Sontag’s sensibility as it does about the aesthetic choices of her adversary.
The published versions of that essay—its first appearance in the New York Review of Books in 1974 and its revised publication in Sontag’s 1980 collection, Under the Sign of Saturn—set out to eviscerate “the Führer’s favorite filmmaker” and thereby extinguish any vestigial hopes the auteur had of rehabilitating her image. In making Triumph of the Will, Sontag contended, Riefenstahl had exploited every existing cinematic technique to astonish the viewer, and even contrived some new ones at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. In return, she basked in the fortune of being Hitler’s chosen documentarian and advanced her fortunes with monstrous self-interest.
Ostensibly a double review of Riefenstahl’s lavish coffee-table book on the Nuba of Sudan and a niche collectors’ publication titled SS Regalia, “Fascinating Fascism” is actually an assault on the depths of Riefenstahl’s debt to Hitler and an admonition about the deviant sexual appetites Sontag believed were conjured by Triumph of the Will. As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels held an unrivalled official position, but Riefenstahl had been personally anointed by Hitler, whose glories were also featured to elegant effect in the two-part documentary Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations and Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938). Hitler’s rise was her rise. Then, when the war ended, Riefenstahl orchestrated a hide-saving campaign of revisionism and denial, furiously abjuring any suggestion of wrongdoing and repudiating the exclusivity of her access: a life story, Sontag decreed, “full of disquieting lies.”
Mamdani ran an upbeat campaign, with a nice-guy demeanor and perpetual smile papering over a long history of divisive and demagogic statements. New Yorkers periodically checking in on politics could understandably believe that he simply wanted to bring the city together and make it more affordable. That interpretation became much harder after his victory speech.
Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers — and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.
Duh. He’s an ignorant, angry leftist, who believes what ignorant, angry leftists always believe. The press should have been pointing this out all along. I mean, the leftist press, but they don’t do this kind of thing to leftists.
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and his wife, executive producer, and co-head writer Molly McNearney, stopped by the Thursday episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast to look back on Kimmel’s recent suspension. While the words “Charlie Kirk” were never mentioned once during the nearly 70-minute episode, Kimmel and McNearney claimed they told their children that President Trump was the one responsible for his suspension.
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MCNEARNEY: I mean, I bought my dad a Rush Limbaugh tie in high school. I voted Republican straight ticket, and that’s what I was told to do. And then I left St. Louis, Missouri, and I met people from different backgrounds, and I started to understand different things and different needs and different people and there’s so there’s like a little bit of sympathy I have for people in my family that I feel are kind of being deliberately misinformed every day and they’ve—
KIMMEL: Not kind of.
MCNEARNEY: Yeah, they’re deliberately being misinformed every day, and they believe it, but it hurts me so much because of the personal relationship I now have where my husband is out there fighting this man. And to me, them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family and I unfortunately have kind of lost relationships with people in my family because of it.
It’s like this is not just Republican versus Democrat for me anymore. It is to me. It’s family values, and it’s really hard for me because I grew up believing in these Christian ideals of taking care of the sick and taking care of the poor. And I don’t see that happening with this Republican Party, and so it’s, I feel like I’m kind of in constant conflict, and I’m angry all the time, which isn’t healthy at all, but I, like, personalize everything now when I see these terrible stories every day I’m immediately mad at certain aunts, uncles, cousins who put him in power and it’s really hard and my it’s—I wish I could like deprogram myself in some way, but I get really angry. And I sent, I’ve sent many emails to family, like, right before the election saying, “I’m begging you. Here’s the 10 reasons not to vote for this guy. Please don’t.”
And I either got ignored by 90 percent of them or got truly insane responses from a few. It’s definitely caused a strain. I’ve definitely pulled in closer with the family that I feel more aligned with, and I hate that this has happened, you know, it feels silly, you know, part of me goes, “Don’t let politics get in the way.” But to me this isn’t politics. It’s, it’s truly values and we just, we’re not aligned anymore.
I made a conscious effort to deprogram myself. I stopped watching the news on the Left. I stopped reading the New York Times. I didn’t read my own social media feed. This is a feedback loop where the same opinions are enforced, and the same hatred is pushed to like-minded people. Then, I tried to consume only news from the Right. I wanted to see things from their perspective and understand where they’re coming from.
I wanted to see if the feedback loop on the Right would make me feel the same way, and of course, it did. Then, I realized I needed to find a way to navigate between the two worlds. But all I could see on the Left was that same hatred. It never ended, not even when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck. That’s why your husband was so quick to blame the other side for his death and could not absorb that your side is the side that believes what the assassin believed, that Kirk “spread too much hate.”
I was able to see the cartoon version of the Democrats by the Right when I was on the Left. I could see how they dehumanized Obama and Hillary Clinton. But I couldn’t see that we’d done the same thing to Donald Trump and his supporters, not until I left and I began to see who they really were and not the version we all invented, including and especially your husband, Jimmy Kimmel who lies about Trump every single night, feeding his viewers more “two minutes of hate,” Orwell style.
To see the human being behind the cartoon isn’t ever easy. But it isn’t impossible either. Trump is a troll. He says things that upset people. But he isn’t what we all pretend he is. He isn’t the supervillain, Hitler, or Voldemort. It is a mass delusion that has been cycled and perpetuated by the media and social media. But more importantly, the people who vote for him have their “values” too. They might not align with yours, but that doesn’t make them bad people.
The truth is that none of this has ever been about Trump. It’s been a ten-year refusal by the people with all of the power to relinquish that power. It is about a working class that has been abandoned by all of you. And your answer to that, your husband’s answer, Hollywood’s answer was to raise the drawbridge and say, “You are not welcome here.” How disgusting. Somewhere down deep, I know you agree.
In a recent Substack, “George MF Washington” looked at how Aaron Sorkin’s writing has hardened and become even more cynical and haranguing since his Hollywood debut in 1992’s A Few Good Men:
It’s easy to forget that before Trump Derangement Syndrome there was Bush Derangement Syndrome. Florida’s hanging chads were the real origin story of the left’s descent into radicalism, not Trump’s trip down the golden elevator, and you can see the telltale waypoints in the highlights of Sorkin’s post “Few Good Men” career as his view of the world got steadily darker and angrier.
They have never forgiven America for the 2000 election. And now, post-Trump, Aaron Sorkin has morphed from an angry guy who just couldn’t get over “Bush v. Gore” into the final boss of woke Hollywood messaging with his upcoming film “The Social Reckoning” in which he promises that if you buy a ticket you will learn why he “blames Facebook for January 6th.” Sorkin has even gone so far as to re-create the January 6th riots on a set in, where else but Canada.
One hardly needs to watch the film to know what the message will be, we have seen it on the mainstream news networks every night for going on six years now. Sorkin’s movie may well wind up being the first major American studio wide-release to openly advocate for government censorship of constitutionally protected speech… and wouldn’t that be something?
Regardless, it’s hard to imagine there could be anything new to say about January 6th, but we are going to get it good and hard anyway because this is what Hollywood has become… an endless series of “you will learn your lesson, rubes” films that audiences are tuning out in what has been perhaps the most powerful market signal a customer base has ever delivered. And the signal is that progressive messaging creates bad drama… bad drama makes for bad movies… and we aren’t going to pay for bad movies anymore.
These incidents show the sense of license and righteous rage of many on campuses today. That is fed by a culture of orthodoxy and viewpoint intolerance that pervades higher education in the United States today. https://t.co/7BBPXuurxd
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