I’VE LOOKED AT LIFE FROM BOTH SIDES NOW: Sneering Leftist Mob Comes for Joni Mitchell After Her Proud American Moment.

Legendary folk singer Joni Mitchell is finding out the hard way that the Left has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to loving and appreciating the United States of America.

Mitchell proudly posted Tuesday that, after living in the U.S. for over six decades, she had finally become a citizen. She posted a short video of her name being called at what looked like a small ceremony at a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office. The singer also posted a photo of her happily carrying a small American flag while posing in front of larger American and DHS flags.

She was clearly thrilled to officially be a U.S. citizen at long last.

A journey that began 62 years ago. pic.twitter.com/y1eGhP3kBo

— Joni Mitchell (@jonimitchell) October 13, 2026

But, of course, the Left can’t stand anything good, true, or beautiful, so they immediately began responding to her happy news with hateful messages.

“Willingly applying for American citizenship at this moment in history…oh MAGA Mitchell,” one person sneered on X.

Yes, the legendarily MAGA-adjacent ultra-right wing Joni Mitchell:

Joni Mitchell wears an "ICE OUT" pin at the 2026 Grammy Awards.

📸: Valerine Macon / Getty Images pic.twitter.com/XFLgrqoniN

— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) February 1, 2026

JONATHAN TURLEY: Harper’s Magazine to Honor NPR CEO Katherine Maher with First Amendment Award.

Harper’s Magazine appears to be competing with The Onion in satire this week. It is awarding its First Amendment prize to NPR CEO Katherine Maher. It is akin to awarding a Second Amendment prize to Gavin Newsom. Maher has long been the very symbol of advocacy journalism and bias. Ironically, she is being given an award after steering NPR into the rocks to keep her job and its ideological bias.

Many of us have written for years about NPR’s biased reporting. Not all of this criticism was made out of hostility toward the outlet — many honestly wanted NPR to reverse course and adopt more balanced coverage. That is why, when NPR was searching for a new CEO, I encouraged the board to hire a moderate figure without a history of political advocacy or controversy.

Instead, the board selected Katherine Maher, a former Wikipedia CEO widely criticized for her highly partisan and controversial public statements. She was the personification of advocacy journalism, even declaring that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” that makes it “tricky” to censor or “modify” content as she would like.

Maher has supported “deplatforming” anyone she deems to be  a “fascist” and even suggested that she might support “punching Nazis.” She also declared that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.”

As expected, NPR’s bias only got worse. The leadership even changed a longstanding rule barring journalists from joining political protests.

One editor had had enough. Uri Berliner had watched NPR become an echo chamber for the far left with a virtual purging of all conservatives and Republicans from the newsroom. Berliner noted that NPR’s Washington headquarters has 87 registered Democrats among its editors and zero Republicans.

Maher and NPR remained dismissive of such complaints. Maher attacked the award-winning Berliner for causing an “affront to the individual journalists who work incredibly hard.”  She called his criticism “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

Berliner resigned, after noting how Maher’s “divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” that he had been pointing out.

Rather than trying to reverse the long slide in its audience, Maher doubled down. She ultimately made the best possible case for defunding NPR. She refused to resign, effectively killing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Yet, Harper considers her a model of media.

Flashback: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on CNN: “As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’” Here you go.

THE KIMCHI HAS HIT THE FAN: The South Korean stock market is in free fall, and these are the reasons*.

The Korean stock market is in free fall once again. Fears of cheaper Chinese competition making up ground and criticism leveled at investors in AI stocks by Broadcom’s chief executive combined to wipe more than 5% off its benchmark Kospi index.

After suffering heavy losses on Friday and Monday, the Kospi’s losing streak stretched to five sessions, and the market now languishes more than a third below the all-time high set in June of this year. Korea’s two largest companies by market capitalization, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix bore the brunt of the selloff with falls of 10% and 7%, respectively, and the pair was responsible for roughly half the market’s decline.

Korea’s stock-market fortunes are often taken as a proxy by investors for the AI trade as a whole. Nasdaq-100 futures fell by 0.5% on Tuesday.

*Additional reasons may apply:

This is what happens Larry. This is what happens when you elect a “progressive party” of communist sympathizers to government Larry. https://t.co/yjD4RUjG1K

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) October 13, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN DOING STRAIGHT UP REPORTAGE:

Democrats Warn Trump Of Dangerous Precedent Set By Law Enforcement Raiding Homes Of Political Opponents https://t.co/G6YQ72o3gX

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 13, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Lorne Michaels Has Second Chance to Do the Right Thing.

Now is the time for Michaels to take a public stand for both [Shane] Gillis and comedy. Michaels’ cultural gravitas remains sky high. He’s won the Mark Twain Prize for American humor and is beloved within Hollywood circles. His tentacles are stretched across the industry, from feature films to TV beyond “SNL.”

Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers both became stars under his tutelage and are key players in the late-night landscape.

So will Michaels do the right thing? Remember how Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos stood up for Dave Chappelle when his controversial special, “The Closer,” nearly got him cancelled?

Michaels did no such thing.

Why does it matter? Woke 2.0 is revving up and ready to go. Just ask the arts worker fired for wearing cornrows at the Burning Man festival. Or the sports announcer canned for Tweets he posted when he was 15. Or the BBC cancelling classic comedy sketches for being “problematic.”

If no one stands up to the woke bullies, it’ll only get worse. Did we not learn anything from the last decade?

It matters. But will the second time be the charm for Michaels? The Vegas odds suggest otherwise.

Indeed. In their 1986 history of Saturday Night Live’s first decade, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote that when Chevy Chase began to head for the exits with the goal of making bank near the end of SNL’s blazing first season, Michaels used a sports analogy to try to convince him to stay onboard:

[Michaels’] theory was that it took three years’ exposure to make a superstar on TV. Saturday Night was a big hit in the industry, but the public hadn’t really caught on yet. He told Chevy he was like a great pitcher for a championship baseball team. If he left, the team would lose a few games, but they’d keep winning. “Think how rare it is to play with a championship team,” Lorne said. “You think it’s going to happen all the time, especially when you’re young, but it doesn’t happen that often.… Play another season, then decide.”

To use another sports analogy, Michaels at this point is the equivalent of an aging NFL coach with some enormous past successes, but the game is rapidly passing him by. Think Chuck Noll and Tom Landry in the 1980s or Don Shula in the 1990s. The minute Michaels retires from NBC, SNL’s terrible past quarter century will quickly be forgotten, and he will only be remembered for the show’s first five years, and its late ‘80s comeback when he somehow reassembled a funny cast with great chemistry. Why publicly stick his neck out now?

WHEN THE CENSORSHIP STATE TURNS ON YOU: “Even if you can’t find any constitutional, ethical or moral reason to avoid building censorship regimes, your own self-interest should guide you away from it: it will be fun when you get to forcibly silence (or even imprison) your political enemies, but far less fun when that machine is controlled by those political enemies and, as is inevitable, then turned against you.”

The Brazilian Left spent the last 7 years building an oppressive and aggressive censorship regime commanded by the globally notorious, scandal-ridden Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes. It was particularly intensifed during the 2022 campaign to suppress all sorts of… https://t.co/hzEGVGtXRa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 13, 2026

TOM CRUISE DIGS HIMSELF A HOLE: The botched conclusion to a star’s 20-year campaign to restore his image.

Two words: viral video.

Mr. Cruise had the misfortune of having these back-to-back incidents occur at the exact moment when video-sharing sites came online. Instead of moments confined to a single broadcast and then to memory, his antics became immortalized on the internet, where the world could watch them on a loop. He went “viral,” back when the term was new, for all the wrong reasons.

It nearly killed his career.

This would have been the end for a lesser celebrity. But just as the Lord has blessed Mr. Cruise with undeniable talent, He has also blessed him with smarts and patience.

Since 2005, Mr. Cruise has followed a plodding, single-minded strategy to rebuild his image: mostly safe roles and a wide berth around the riskier material that once earned him Oscar nominations.

The plan has worked. He is still a major box-office draw. The plan has also meant that, with the exception of playing a U.S. senator, a rockstar, and an unforgettable bit part as a scumbag Hollywood mogul, his résumé has looked like this for the past 20 years: a spy (2006), a military officer (2008), a spy (2010), a spy (2011), a veteran (2012), an astronaut (2013), a military officer (2014), a spy (2015), a veteran (2016), a soldier (2017), an aviator (2017), a spy (2018), an aviator (2022), a spy (2023), and a spy (2025).

It’s a far cry from the five years before Mr. Cruise’s public meltdown when he took on audacious projects: “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia,” “Vanilla Sky” and the near-perfect “Collateral,” in which he played against type as a villain.

But now we have “Digger,” which Mr. Cruise chose as the conclusion of his long charm offensive. In his partnership with Mr. Iñárritu—the director whose 2015 epic “The Revenant” won Leonardo DiCaprio his long-overdue Oscar—Mr. Cruise surely hoped the movie would be his own ticket to the elusive Best Actor statuette and a return to a steady diet of more serious work.

“Digger” will almost certainly accomplish neither. On the contrary, its weird and off-putting press tour has already undone some of what the past two decades had accomplished in reviving his appeal.

Curiously, after his anti-global warming movie bombed spectacularly, in order to resume his career, Cruise will once again hoist himself into the cockpits of gas guzzling fighter jets and racing cars to entice moviegoers to load the family into the SUV and truck on over to the multiplex:

● Top Gun 3 Gets Encouraging Update, Tom Cruise Wants It to ‘Beat’ Maverick.

● Anne Hathaway Joins Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder Follow-Up; Paramount Sets Release Date.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Greta Thunberg joins Paris student protests.

Greta Thunberg has travelled to Paris to join the student protests sweeping France.

The Swedish climate activist, 23, joined pupils outside the Paul-Éluard lycée in Saint-Denis, where about 20 lawyers in robes formed a human chain to protect the teenagers from alleged police brutality.

“Our future is being robbed away from us,” Ms Thunberg said, condemning what she described as an “extremely violent” police response.

“They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights,” she told reporters.

“Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises… it’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”

Curiously, the former eco-zealot turned antizionist is backing a lot of global warming and a huge carbon footprint: Fire Destroyed the Oldest Food Market in Paris This Morning.

Related: Greta Thunberg is a protest addict.

She is, in fact, clearly a protest obsessive, a perpetual joiner-in and turner-up to any rabble. It doesn’t matter what the putative topic of the rumble is. In fact, her focus is getting more prosaic as she ages; first climate change was going to destroy the world, then it became merely Palestine and the Middle East, and now it’s the poor standard of the upholstery in French schools. It makes you wonder what demo-crazy Greta will turn her attention to next in her quest for a high – potholes in upstate New York?

Never happen – that would be a cause that the masses would actually rally behind.

More:

Yes – the movie Idiocracy wasn't fiction.

And it's already here. https://t.co/eCTPFkquWQ

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) October 13, 2026

Didn’t mommy tell her as a kid not to play with matches and lighters?

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert.

She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age.

More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.

Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.

Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.

In 1986 when he cowrote July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, Arthur C. Clarke could foresee 21^st century technology that would be able to reanimate the appearances and voices of long-dead actors. But he didn’t anticipate how 60 years of negative PR concerning AI – not least of which the epochal 1968 film he cowrote with Stanley Kubrick that gave the world one of the first movie supercomputers running amok and trying to kill every nearby human. And thus, the above Grauniad article gives AI Garbo a one star review, and the video is getting absolutely hammered by negative comments on YouTube:

WHY MAKE HASAN INTO A VIDEOTAPED MARTYR? Trump ‘losing enthusiasm’ for live-streamed execution.

He’s not alone: Scott Jennings and Van Jones Agree Islamic Terrorist Nidal Hasan’s Execution Should Not Be Broadcast.

DISCOVERY DAY — Or, why I keep Columbus Day.

[Howard] Zinn was right about Columbus, but he never once turned the critical lens he applied to the Spanish colonists to the native people of the New World. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs sacrificed war captives by the thousands, cutting out their hearts atop the Templo Mayor, and stacked the skulls in a tower of more than 650 heads cemented together, including women and children, while captors ate parts of the bodies in ritual feasts. Around 1450 on Peru’s coast, the Chimú cut open the chests of children, some as young as five. In South Dakota around 1325, attackers at Crow Creek slaughtered villagers, scalped and dismembered the corpses, and carried off the young women. In Colorado around 1150, Ancestral Puebloans at Cowboy Wash butchered and cooked people. And across the continent, slavery was widespread. None of this excuses Columbus. He was a savage. But so were these indigenous people.

Nor did Zinn turn the lens he trained on Columbus Day toward Martin Luther King Day. He was happy to put on his historian’s hat for the uncomfortable truths of Columbus the man, but he did no such thing for King, who plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, serially cheated on his wife, rejected the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection that his Baptist congregants took on faith, and according to an FBI surveillance summary, may have looked on and laughed while a fellow minister raped a woman in a Washington hotel room. None of this approaches the scale of Columbus’s crimes, but it’s the principle that matters. We acknowledge the truth of the words King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, and we honor the man even though he doesn’t live up to the symbol. But more importantly, we would never assume that someone celebrating MLK Day is celebrating being a scumbag husband, just as we don’t assume that someone celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day means celebrating eating children. Rather, these holidays celebrate the good parts, and we don’t sit around debating whether we can separate the good from the bad either. We just separate them. Readers familiar with my history may be wondering, what about someone like Vladimir Lenin? Do we get to celebrate him too? But with King and Columbus, we celebrate specific achievements worth honoring, and set the sins of the men aside. With Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we celebrate an ethnic identity, which I find less deserving, but not inherently immoral. But with someone like Lenin, the atrocities were not distinct from the achievement. When we celebrate King, we celebrate his antiracism. When we celebrate Columbus, we celebrate his discovery. But when people celebrate Lenin, they celebrate his revolution.

The decisive push for Indigenous Peoples’ Day came on the same anniversary when I was sitting in homeroom, learning about the real Columbus and what he did to the people of my mother’s homeland. In the Bay Area, activists formed a group called Resistance 500 and lobbied the Berkeley City Council, which voted unanimously to make Indigenous Peoples’ Day an official city holiday. In 2014, Seattle and Minneapolis adopted it too. And in 2021, President Biden formally recognized it.

Curiously, the author misspelled then-President Obama in that last sentence.

ROGER SIMON: Ilhan Omar Investigated in Time for… My Book?

No, I have not been conspiring with Tom Homan.

That Homeland Security agents raided Ilhan Omar’s DC apartment at 6 AM this morning, hours after Bob Goldberg of The Zionist Times published his glowing review of my novel EMET (thank you, Bob), which contained the following parody of Omar being shipped out, is entirely coincidental:

“Bilan Ali, a Minneapolis congresswoman Golub [the novel’s rabbi protagonist] regards as anti-American and extraordinarily ungrateful to the country that took her in, is packed into a foam-lined box with energy bars and lemon Gatorade. The Golem ships her to Mogadishu on Emirates, because it is the safest and most luxurious carrier. She arrives healthy, in a beekeeper’s suit labeled ‘RETURNED TO SENDER,’ and flies home first class within hours.”

20 minutes into the future?

UPDATE: All This and World War Eleven:

The DOJ is calling the investigation into Ilhan Omar “World War Eleven”💀 https://t.co/xu68tgdqxx pic.twitter.com/9lyuO4HWD5

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 12, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: Too Weird to NOT Check First: Did Talarico Have a Mental Health Crisis?

Held: Things that appear too good to be true often are. Also held: Better to wait for confirmation before jumping to a conclusion.

At any rate, it seems that Talarico didn’t get checked into that Ohio psych ward for the last two weeks. It still doesn’t answer the question of where Talarico actually was during that two-week period. The explanation offered – a two-week bout of the flu that had him down so bad he couldn’t even do a Zoom call – is absolutely absurd, especially in the context of a general election campaign. If you or I took two weeks off without any contact with our employer and claimed we were too sick to call, we’d be forced to bring a doctor’s note to save our jobs.

It’s not a HIPAA violation to demand accountability from politicians who disappear in the middle of a job. Better to get that now than to wait until Talarico disappears for months while supposedly representing Texas.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Steve Hayward quips, “don’t be fooled about the news of James Talarico checking in to a mental hospital just weeks before the election. Call me a cynic, but in Texas this is clearly a gambit to capture the John Fetterman sympathy vote. Don’t get your hopes up that Talarico is trying to signal that, like Fetterman, a mental health crisis will cause him to move to the right so that Republicans would like him!”

TOP GUN, 40 YEARS ON:

You want to talk nostalgia? Perhaps nothing hit the patriotic ’80s kid like Top Gun‘s opening scene on the carrier’s flattop. That was pure cinematic wizardry, the very pinnacle of the era’s patriotic pictures. Harold Faltermeyer’s slow synth pulse rising out of the darkness for morning flight ops, steam dancing across the Enterprise‘s deck, the F-14’s twin turbofans igniting to afterburner, the crew’s delicate choreography, sunlight breaking over the flattop and building a slow, steady tension until it breaks with Kenny Loggins’s soaring electric guitar launching Tomcats into the great blue. It was solemn, muscular, technological, and almost religious in its reverence for U.S. airpower, an anthem for the golden center of the American jet age.

It did almost half a billion dollars at the box office, inflation-adjusted, of course, and topped the charts as 1986’s highest-grossing movie. It ran in theaters for more than half a year. But it was more than just a financial smash. Top Gun was the living, breathing embodiment of 1980s America: cocky, confident, gutsy, technologically dominant, and glamorous. And maybe a little bit* gay. Vietnam was in the rearview mirror. The military was cool again. And director Tony Scott’s brilliance was that he got this hallowed vibe to eager audiences without the tedious moralizing so common in today’s Hollywood.

* Quentin Tarantino could not be reached for comment:

ANTI-ITALIAN DISCRIMINATION: The Bigotry Behind the Columbus Cancellers.

“You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s anti-Italian discrimination. Columbus Day is a day of Italian pride. It’s our holiday and they want to take it away.”

So declares Silvio, one of the characters in The Sopranos, in a gloomy but very funny and politically incorrect scene at their regular meeting spot at Satriale’s market. The gang is upset by news of a local anti-Columbus Day protest. The organizers are planning a “death watch” over a statue of Columbus — that is, Cristoforo Colombo, the famous explorer from Genoa.

The woke liberal will be puzzled by this perspective from Italian Americans. It doesn’t fit with the left’s selective view of bigotry, restricted to “people of color” and other preferred leftist victim groups. The modern wokester is often confused by other ethnicities and nationalities and creeds that have experienced prejudice, particularly Christians whose liberties leftists are eager to limit when they clash with their purposes.

QED: Mamdani to skip Manhattan Columbus parade in latest snub to NYC Italian community.

UPDATE:

“… bashing him as a colonist that abused and displaced Native Americans”

Ironic, considering how Mamdani’s religion has been locked in a brutal centuries-old colonization where entire societies are erased and women subjugated. https://t.co/KyMupGTQm1

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 12, 2026

IS PARIS BURNING? France’s Riots Stem from a Deep Rot.

Rioters carry the flags not of France, but of other nations and terror groups from the Arab world. In Marseille, they were filmed riding motorcycles through the city center, carrying Algerian and Palestinian flags.

For France, it’s been a long way down. Riots and street violence are not new to the French nation. The country’s infamous revolution in 1789 was born amid them. The modern conception of political divisions—right vs. left, secular vs. religious—also traces back to France.

What is unfolding in France is about the continued existence of the French nation itself. It is, to use a French term, existential. It began, fittingly enough, with World War I, the conflict that birthed the modern Middle East and laid the roots for the spread of communism and fascism, and other great ills.

France lost more men than any other nation. An astonishing 1.3 million—nearly 20 percent of all French men aged 18-27—fell in battle. This “deeply scarred its psyche and affected its economy for a generation,” the late historian Alistair Horne observed.

To cover the shortfall, France imported labor from its colonies. The country seemed lost, and poisonous ideologies and divisions crept in. This led to the collapse of the Third Republic and the imposition of Nazi and collaborator rule in 1940.

The Nazi-allied Vichy government that took over was an active collaborator, fighting the Allied Powers and sending thousands of Jews to their death. After the war, the historian Paul Johnson observed that France was “driven by necessity to a fundamental reappraisal.”

Perhaps that “fundamental reappraisal” took things un tout petit peu trop loin: Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different.

AGES OF BARACK:

The first book under the Obama name, Dreams from My Father, was “kept secret during the 2008 presidential campaign,” Voegeli contends, because his fans “were completely invested in the idea of a post-racial Obama.” Maybe so, but there was more to it, as David Garrow showed in his massive tome Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, from 2017. The book’s “most discussed” revelation, Voegeli explains, was one from former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who said that she believed Obama had not learned much from history. In fact, however, the most significant revelation from that book was something else:

Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

Garrow identified the black poet “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, whose “Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” Profiled by Paul Kengor in The Communist, this Stalinist was also a prolific pornographer. Obama, who was known as a young man as Barry Soetoro, is the stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student whom his white mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry could have adopted an African name in the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), but he took a different route.

In the Dreams novel, Barack Obama, Sr., “bequeaths his name” to Barry, and by the end of the book the Kenyan student whom his mother once dated is a nameless “Old Man,” a convenient “prop” in this narrative. Trouble is, Obama Sr.’s writings from 1958 to 1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York,  mention nothing about an American wife and son. Jump ahead to Garrow’s interview in August 2023 “The Obama Factor” published in Tablet magazine.

“He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him,” Garrow told Tablet editor David Samuels. Obama lawyer Bob Bauer, “was also coaching me,” and warned Garrow “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.” Upon learning all  this Samuels, a longtime Obama fan, took it to another level.

“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” Samuels told Garrow (emphasis added). “The easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.”

Meanwhile, back at the flak tower: The Obama Death Star is out of hope.

SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER MUSSOLINI:

Voters in the Peruvian town of Queropalca have chosen their new mayor: Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores.

The unusually named candidate for the center-left Ahora Nación party won 34% of the vote. According to local media, the top three candidates were separated by just 42 votes.

Simeon’s candidate application form gives few details (and none about his name), apart from the fact that he manages the Simeon Sac Investment Group.

There have been other politicians called Hitler. In 2018, also in Peru, Hitler beat Lenin in another mayoral race for the district of Yúngar, when Hitler Guesclin Alba Sánchez defeated Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde.

No wonder Paddington was so eager to escape from Peru.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body and Let It Run Wild.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Millions face ‘winter storm battleground’ as new models predict heavy snow blasts in 19 US states.

Millions of Americans could see a harsh winter with multiple snowstorms and freezing temperatures that turn several states into an Arctic ‘battleground.’

A recent long-range forecast model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed a massive shift in the bands of heavy precipitation between December 2026 and February 2027.

That map shows a growing chance that the entire US East Coast will see above-average precipitation this winter, from southern Maine to the tip of Florida and stretching across the country into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as well.

On the West Coast, California is also expected to see above-average precipitation this winter, which likely means feet of snow in the Sierra-Nevada mountains and other high-altitude areas out west.

While more precipitation than usual does not always guarantee snow, several independent forecasters have predicted that at least 19 states should be bracing for a potential blockbuster storm season.

Greta’s protests and Al Gore’s PowerPoint charts worked; the Green New Deal has been a smashing success, but ending global warming comes with unfortunate side effects.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ROGER KIMBALL: The West at a Crossroads: Excellence or Mediocrity?

Remember when, just a few years ago, our cultural commissars celebrated the career criminal George Floyd and The 1619 Project? The unhappy anti-American beneficiaries of America took to the streets to desecrate our monuments and defile our heritage. It was in this context, Rubio observed, that “‘nationalism’ became a dirty word. . . . [W]e taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.” At the same time, we began to outsource not only our industry but also our sovereignty, “transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.”

It is here that Rubio’s speech reaches its denouement. Both the United States and Europe are at a crossroads. Do we endeavor to recover the values we have inherited from the Greeks or do we go quietly into the not-so-good night of spiritual flaccidness? Rubio’s answer caused panic among the low-testosterone denizens of academia and the media. “Under President Trump,” he said, “the United States has made its choice.”

We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Much more like this please, it’s a polar opposite worldview to when then-President Obama cynically declared in 2009 that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

DOMINIC GREEN: France’s insane student protests are really about a growing radical Muslim population that wants to get rid of democracy.

The disorder is backed by the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is second in the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

* * * * * * * *

Long before Mayor Mamdani came to America and the DSA took out their student loans, the French saw the emergence of an Islamogauchiste (Islamo-leftist) alliance between the old radicals of the left and the angry youth of the banlieues, the peripheral housing estates.

The same strategy created the voter base of the ruling Labour Party in the UK. In September, the strategy swung Sweden’s national elections and Berlin’s mayoral elections to left-wing parties that cultivate ethnic bloc votes. It has reshaped the Democrats’ ground game in states such as New York and Michigan.

Mélenchon may be happy to see the schools burn, but he knows his electoral math. The Immigration and Demography Observatory, a French think tank, predicts that on current trends, French citizens with no immigrant parent or grandparent will become a minority around 2050.

Mélenchon, a 75-year-old ex-communist, is an old leftist but also a new immigrant. Born and raised in Morocco, he came to France in 1962, one among the millions who crossed the Mediterranean as Europe’s empires folded.

He calls French democracy a design for “white privilege” and “part of an already obsolete present.” He wants a “citizen’s revolution” to create a “new France.” He calls the right-winger Marine Le Pen, who leads the polls for 2027, a “fascist.”

Isn’t everyone, these days?

While Nithya Raman is desperately trying to delete videos of her recklessly calling people fascists like a psycho, don’t forget…she called me, a fire victim with zero institutional power, a fascist…all because I wanted to get naked drug zombies into rehab so my kids don’t have… https://t.co/nj6LXak3fy

— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) October 10, 2026

THE END OF THE END OF HISTORY:

UPDATE: Something is rotten in the state of Germany.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “I am surrounded by 20 year old girls in my life that are smart, capable, hard working and cute. Nobody is dating them. Not sure what the deal is, but I don’t get it.”

Perhaps this is why:

Because young men have learned that if they date a girl and it goes bad, she can come back and accuse them of rape two years after the fact.

She can strangle his children and the media will circle the wagons to protect her.

She can divorce him and take half of everything.… https://t.co/6hcohZ88LU

— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) October 10, 2026

Amy’s tweet concludes, “She can divorce him and take half of everything. That’s why.”

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE GLORIES OF TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL:

Freddy has gotten VIP access to concerts, pro and college games, and World Cup games, offers for free flights on private jets, etc.

He was turned away from a Texas HS football game. https://t.co/KIxo4zrv4A

— The Poor Man (@ThePMGN) October 10, 2026

To be fair, neither can the California mind: ‘Douche’ father-of-seven sales exec who moved his family from California to Texas then BACK again is blasted for complaining about Austin’s ‘rude locals, bland culture, oppressive heat and Yelp’s bad food choices’ in scathing Op-Ed.

In parts of Texas it’s not just a monoculture, but a monoculture that doesn’t seem to be aware of its own blandness. Think about it: Are you ready to have your son judged based on his suitability for a future career in football? Are you ready to network by attending the local high school football game with the guys? Because that’s a thing in Texas.

Really? Who knew that Texans were obsessed with football, especially high school football? It’s not like Hollywood ever made a movie on that topic that was eventually transformed into a weekly TV series.