Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 21, 2025
Dr. Danielle Perszyk, a cognitive scientist at Amazon’s AGI Labs, can’t help but feel anxious every time she opens her computer, where she is greeted by all the usual pop-up distractions: email alerts, Slack messages, social media updates, “productivity” app notifications. Of course, her frustration—which has to do with these obstructive detours between thinking and interfacing—was hardly evident in the 45 minutes we spent chatting about her research. But it’s certainly one of the factors driving her interest in A.I. “I think that part of the solution is making the tech go more in the background,” she told me, noting the irony of developing new technologies designed to make older technologies less obtrusive.
Amazon’s AGI Labs hasn’t been around for long: It was launched at the end of 2024, after the tech behemoth hired away the top executives at A.I. startup Adept. The team is largely focused on long-term research bets centered around the creation of so-called agentic (action-taking) systems that can help mitigate the negative cognitive impacts of all the bullshit clicking and scrolling that suppress higher-level thinking and creativity. “The technology that we’re building allows all of this existing structure to be masked, essentially, by creating what will ultimately be a meta interface,” she explained, describing a generative user interface “where you’re starting from the goal that the human has, and the model understands what that goal is, and it will put everything else on silent and only give you the button that you need to click in this moment.” In other words: an interactive focusing tool that would just work.
Read the whole thing.
TEXAS HOUSE VOTES ON REDISTRICTING MAPS, WITH FINAL MOMENTS OF DRAMA: “The bill now goes to the Texas Senate. The vote is expected to be on Thursday. It is expected to pass. Then, it would likely be signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott by the end of the week. The plans are believed to provide Republicans with potentially five new U.S. House seats. That’s what’s driving Democrats crazy. That’s why California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to respond with redistricting action to help the Democrats.”
August 20, 2025
SUNSET BOULEVARD: Freaks Unleashed: Fired ‘Mainstream’ Journalists Prove They Never Belonged on Television.
It’s been a rough few years for deranged left-wing hacks masquerading as “mainstream” or even “relatively sane liberal” journalists. In an effort to recapture a modicum of respectability, failing media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have sought to purge their ranks of mindless partisans who seem incapable of forming an original thought that doesn’t involve Donald Trump and the word “fascist.” Time will tell if cutting these freaks loose will be enough to save these floundering companies, but in the meantime, the fired journalists keep reminding us why they never deserved our respect.
In his 1999 retrospective of Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, the late Roger Ebert wrote:
Norma [Desmond] of course is not a wrinkled crone. She is only 50 in the film, younger than stars such as Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There is a scene during Norma’s beauty makeover when a magnifying glass is held in front of her eyes, and we are startled by how smooth Swanson’s skin is. Swanson in real life was a health nut who fled from the sun, which no doubt protected her skin (she was 53 when she made the film), but the point in “Sunset Boulevard” is that she has aged not in the flesh but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment of her greatness, and lives in the past.
Like the silent film stars displaced by the talkies of the 1930s, there will be many more journalists learning to code Substack, as the demise of traditional network and cable television continues to hove into view. In the meantime, be cautious when around the legacy media’s legacy consumers:
DC DEMOCRATS MAKE SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO JD VANCE 2028 PRESIDENTIAL BID: ‘Ignore These Stupid White Hippies’ Who Need a Nap: Vance, Hegseth, and Miller Visit Nat’l Guard in D.C.
You don't need to actually create ads at this point.
Just run the footage of angry white liberals being mad that crime is being fixed in DC. https://t.co/EcxVPfCLyz
— RBe (@RBPundit) August 20, 2025
During the first year of Trump’s first term, the DNC-MSM cranked out endless boilerplate about increased sales of Orwell’s 1984. Axios got into the game this past November as well. But these leftists are self-flagellating their own Two Minute Hate.
RECESSIONAL: How flying the flag became a symbol of revolt.
Hot on the heels of the pink ladies’ protests outside migrant hotels, Operation Raise the Colours is the latest organic, decidedly patriotic, social-media-driven initiative whose success can be measured in the outsized, outraged, utterly predictable reaction it is receiving. While councils continue to remove the flags, on health-and-safety and property-maintenance grounds, identitarian rent-a-gob Kehinde Andrews was invited on to Good Morning Britain yesterday to insist that the Saint George’s Cross is racist and this campaign is a faux-patriotic stunt by the fash. Presumably, Dr Shola was busy.
The sudden, nationwide explosion of Operation Raise the Colours is basically all the proof you need that this isn’t being driven by the far right – a pathetic fringe in British political life that has long struggled to fill a minibus. Apparently beginning in Birmingham, the campaign has since spread to Swindon, Bradford, Newcastle, Norwich and London. Like the migrant-hotel protests, it seems to be decentralised, leaderless, rallied on Facebook and group chats.
It’s a fascinating, bottom-up campaign against a now undeniable, galling double standard – that in ‘multicultural’ Britain all identities are to be celebrated except for Englishness and Britishness. Tellingly, England and Union flags began emerging in Northfield in south Brum around the same time that the Library of Birmingham was lit up in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day. While Birmingham City Council was quick to take down the England flags – insisting these fluttering pieces of polyester, zip-tied 10-feet-high on to lampposts, posed an intolerable risk to public safety – a leaked email has revealed local officials were so scared to remove the ubiquitous Palestine flags that have emerged in the city since the Israel-Hamas war began that council workers were given extra security.
If only someone had predicted at the end of the 19th century that England was about to face a systematic “recessional,” with dire and lasting consequences to the West at large. (Lest we forget.)
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: What Was Said on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Indicates Team Newsom’s Trump Trolling on X Is Backfiring.
Hahahaha the Democrats are so cringe that even Morning Joe admits they are embarrassing themselves 😂
“You can see the Democrats are trying to find their footing and it’s quite embarrassing, actually.
I mean, Gavin Newsom. Have you seen what he’s doing online? And it’s like,… pic.twitter.com/Vu746UNY8y
— TheStormHasArrived (@TheStormRedux) August 20, 2025
Full text:
“You can see the Democrats are trying to find their footing and it’s quite embarrassing, actually.
I mean, Gavin Newsom. Have you seen what he’s doing online? And it’s like, ugh just take a deep breath… they don’t know what to do.
I have a good idea. Instead of trying to school Donald Trump, talk into the camera about affordability…”
F’ing hilarious!!!
Newsom’s California is the very opposite of “affordability” (gas prices, real estate prices, etc.), but that said, what is going through the tiny minds at Newsom’s comms shop when they crank out images such as these?
Earlier: Gavin Newsom: the chameleon who destroyed California.
UPDATE:
Official statement regarding @BedBathBeyond
We will not open retail stores in California.
This isn’t about politics — it’s about reality.
California’s system makes it nearly impossible for businesses to succeed, and I won’t put our company, our employees, or our… pic.twitter.com/G5dSaigB3y— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) August 20, 2025
STAND UP CHRIS, LET ‘EM SEE YA! Actual Hollywood Reporter Headline: ‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’ Filmmakers on How They Believe the Actor Would’ve Stood Up to Donald Trump Today.
Screenshot here, if and when the Hollywood Reporter rewrites the headline:
At the start of the month, “George MF Washington” wrote on his Substack: Hollywood’s Political Morality Police:
The Hollywood entertainment press, Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The LA Times and others, exists for two reasons… one is to report entertainment news, and the other is to make sure that Hollywood’s politics remain Progressive.
It accomplishes this second goal in a couple of ways. One is by reinforcing the ideological bubble in which most Hollywood creatives and executives live and work. The other is by issuing veiled threats of banishment and permanent outcast status for all those who deviate from Progressive orthodoxy. Both the fear, and the threat, are very real. You may have noticed, for example, that I write this Substack from behind a thin veil of anonymity.
TDS is of course driving the Hollywood trade press “unexpectedly” crazy, as yesterday’s Variety headline illustrated: As Fascism Takes Hold in the U.S., How Will — and Should — the TV Landscape Depict Our Real-Life Horrors?
Trump’s really Hitlering surprisingly poorly, since he’s allowing the media to say whatever it wants, and isn’t nationalizing the film and television industry.
Classical allusion in headline:
August 19, 2025
NIGEL FARAGE: Epping has shown the way to win.
The High Court has ruled that illegal immigrants can no longer be housed at the Bell Hotel. This is a great victory for the parents and concerned residents of Epping. Let it also be an inspiration to the rest of Britain.
They do not want their young women being abused and assaulted on the streets. They have protested outside the hotel since July, when an Ethiopian asylum seeker housed there was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
Despite being slandered as “far-Right” by the establishment and attacked by Left-wing “Antifa” thugs, this community stood up bravely and they have won. They represent the vast majority of decent people in this country.
Now the good people of Epping must inspire similar protests around Britain. Wherever people are concerned about the threat posed by young undocumented males living in local hotels and who are free to walk their streets, they should follow the example of the town in Essex.
Let’s hold peaceful protests outside the migrant hotels, and put pressure on local councils to go to court to try and get the illegal immigrants out; we now know that together we can win.
Much more like this, please.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Joy Reid Lunges Into Racist Rant on White People Stealing Music Styles Blacks Invented.
They can’t originally invent anything more than they ever were able to invent good music. We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn’t even invent that, but they have to call a white man “the King” [Elvis Presley]. Because they couldn’t make rock and roll, so they have to stamp “the King” on a man whose main song was stolen from an overweight black woman.
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog. Think about the lyrics. Why would a man, you ain’t nothing but a hound dog lying all the time. That’s a song a woman sings about a man. He stole that song and made it a hit because he couldn’t invent rock and roll.
Leiber and Stoller could not be reached for comment:
Elvis credited black artists throughout his career, did wonders for civil rights, and he did not "steal" Hound Dog from Big Mama Thornton. She recorded it first — but it was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two white guys.
Reid is an idiot, a continuing series. https://t.co/Gb0fZjqlig
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 19, 2025
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The New Yorker’s Racialism Problem.
Publications like the New Yorker have long worn the halo of “antiracism.” But “antiracism” has always had an exception, which can no longer be denied, for whites and Jews—the “tricknological” oppressors who, in the minds of people like St. Felix, apparently deserve a steady stream of racialist vituperation. After all, the very term “tricknological” was coined by the Nation of Islam, whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, never concealed his hatreds in euphemism or intellectualization.
Some writers have called for St. Felix to make a public apology, or even for the New Yorker to fire their “star writer.” My preferred outcome to the Doreen St. Felix affair would be silence. Rather than engage in Kabuki theater, we should simply accept the fact that the entire premise of the BLM era was never about “antiracism.” It was always a fraud, from top to bottom. If the New Yorker simply moves on without comment, none of us will have to pretend anymore, or delegate our moral conscience to magazines, DEI manifestos, and the rest of the rotten edifice. It is better to accept the reality than to continue to live in the delusion.
The “racial reckoning” that produced writers such as St. Felix was not about helping minorities. It was about punishing the majority. All of the preening over the past decade was empty. It helped no one except grifters and hustlers who used it to vent their spleens and line their pockets.
For making this reality so plain, Doreen St. Felix deserves not our condemnation, but our gratitude. She revealed the truth for all of us to see.
Rufo has the New Yorker boxed in — if they remain silent, he’s proven his point. If they fire St. Felix or order her to apologize for her racist tweets, he’s proven his point.
Related: Rufo in February: The Right Is Changing Cancel Culture’s Rules.
ALL THE RESIDENT’S MEN: Why Did Shari Redstone Do It?
The Redstones also worried that Mr. Trump’s lawyers could cherry-pick raw footage and internal communications and do more damage to CBS News’s reputation than any settlement would. Ms. Redstone said CBS personnel had told her that in October 2023, when Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” interviewed President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president had seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer. She and Tyler worried that CBS might be accused of editing the interview to conceal Mr. Biden’s failings.
“This case was never as black-and-white as people assumed,” Ms. Redstone said.One person who witnessed the interview in person, and another who recently reviewed the raw footage, said the Redstones’ concerns about the Biden interview were overblown. Mr. Biden gave some typically circuitous answers, but he never had to be prodded, they said. On air, Mr. Pelley characterized Mr. Biden as seeming “tired.”
Why would CBS News worry about its reputation being “damaged,” when that reputation was built on six decades of tilting in only one direction?
Incidentally, here’s NewsBusters’ reporting on Pelley’s October 2023 interview with Biden: ’60 Minutes’ Escorts Fumbling Biden, Slams Danger of ‘Hard-Right Republicans.’
UPDATE: As with many of Biden’s reelection ads, a lot of cuts in this interview; two-shots to B-roll to medium shots to close-ups to reverse angle shots, to likely hide the long gaps and rambling in Biden’s answers — and Sundown Joe still comes across as the very definition of lethargy:
By the way, here's footage of the Oct. 2023 interview CBS maliciously (and illegally) edited. (Courtesy of @theMRC) https://t.co/mQxzFXyyPg pic.twitter.com/SrOZMbFrQd
— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) August 19, 2025
OBAMA’S ‘OBSCENE MONUMENT TO HIS EGO’ DRAMATICALLY BACKFIRES AS $850M VANITY PROJECT SPARKS OUTRAGE:
President Barack Obama’s promise to build and revitalize blighted neighborhoods was a centerpiece of his first term in the White House.
But now, nearly nine years after he left the Oval Office, he might be destroying one critical area in the city he called home, the Daily Mail can reveal.
His $850 million presidential center in Chicago – due to open in April – has come under fire from residents, community leaders and even onetime supporters who now warn that the massive 19.3-acre facility in Jackson Park is gentrifying the neighborhood, increasing rent and forcing families out.
Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor, who represents much of the area where the center is being built, told the Daily Mail she is a fan of Obama and believes in the project but has fought aspects of it to protect her constituents. Her efforts have had mixed results.
‘We’re going to see rents go higher and we’re going to see families displaced,’ she told the Daily Mail.
‘Every time large development comes to communities, they displace the very people they say they want to improve it for,’ the Democrat added.
‘This was no different, and we’re living what is actually happening. The city of Chicago should have done a Community Benefits Agreement before the first shovel went into the ground, but they didn’t.’
A CBA is a legally binding document that outlines what a developer will provide for a project such as affordable housing, local hiring and environmental protections.
C’mon — it’s a moment to a guy who said that merely winning the Democrats’ nomination to be president was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Surely you can trust his environmental intentions!
In 2019, Jon Gabriel described the library as looking like “A discarded Chinese take-out box. The backside of a Star Wars sand crawler. The Washington Monument with the interesting bits lopped off. That’s what sprung to mind when confronted with the initial design of the Obama Presidential Center.”
Over the past century, it’s a truism that the vast majority of modern architecture never looks as good when built as it does in model format. And the Obama Presidential Center was looking stillborn while still only styrene:
It’s not looking any better as it’s being built:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
SHOW ME ON THE DOLL WHERE THE FASCISM TOUCHED YOU: Actual headline at show-biz bible Variety today: “As Fascism Takes Hold in the U.S., How Will — and Should — the TV Landscape Depict Our Real-Life Horrors?”
Vince Gilligan’s speech earlier this year as he accepted the Writers Guild of America West’s top writing honor. Gilligan expressed a tinge of regret over creating the character, given the present world we’re living in — where being a convicted felon accused of doing some repugnant things doesn’t preclude you from being elected to higher office. Gilligan now hopes that TV shows might return to more aspirational storytelling and true heroes.
“I really think we have a lot of power as writers and as actors, as storytellers, artists, to show the world in a way that it either is like that, or it could be like that,” he said backstage after his speech. “What kind of world you want to live in?”
That’s why before we move on to creating new images of the world we’d like to see, we need to chronicle the one we’re now in. Hold a mirror up to the reality of the situation in the hopes that maybe the public will understand what’s at stake (and not sugarcoat this quick plunge into fascism we’re all witnessing).
“Andor” has been lauded for its depiction of what happens when authoritarian rule takes hold — and how to resist. And before that, “The Handmaid’s Tale” was chillingly accurate in predicting where we would end up. “The Boys” is a not-so-shaded document of what happens when fascism wins.
Trump’s such a totalitarian, he’s letting Hollywood say anything it wants about him! But then, as Tom Wolfe wrote in the mid-’70s about speaking at Princeton a decade earlier in “The Intelligent Coed’s Guide to America:”
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.
* * * * * * * *
Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Gunter] Grass, speaking in English.
“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
60 years after LBJ took office — and left it five years later rather ignominiously for that decade’s Hitler — why is Variety pumping out resistance porn to showbiz insiders? In part, because this is how Hollywood always acts when there’s a man with a (R) after his name in the White House. Ronald Brownstein’s 2021 book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics has a subtext of show business being driven mad in the early 1970s because of Nixon Derangement Syndrome. The cast of Saturday Night Live viewed the hapless Gerry Ford as the antichrist. While Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time is an excellent history of network television in the early-1980s, that means it’s also a look at an industry that went to Defcon One when Reagan took the White House.
Not surprisingly, no one in the industry has enough self-reflection to look back and laugh at their predecessors’ earlier and entirely predictible freakouts. As “George MF Washington” recently wrote on his Substack: Hollywood’s Political Morality Police. How the entertainment press enforces Progressive orthodoxy in the movie business:
The Hollywood entertainment press, Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The LA Times and others, exists for two reasons… one is to report entertainment news, and the other is to make sure that Hollywood’s politics remain Progressive.
It accomplishes this second goal in a couple of ways. One is by reinforcing the ideological bubble in which most Hollywood creatives and executives live and work. The other is by issuing veiled threats of banishment and permanent outcast status for all those who deviate from Progressive orthodoxy. Both the fear, and the threat, are very real. You may have noticed, for example, that I write this Substack from behind a thin veil of anonymity.
The amplification by the network and cable TV infotainment “news” shows of the “Sydney Sweeney is a Nazi because she did a sexy blue jeans commercial” kerfuffle is a good example of how the process works.
* * * * * * * *
Immediately after Trump’s win last November, a whole new genre of Hollywood think piece began to appear in these trade publications. These pieces ran with headlines like “How will Trump’s win change Hollywood?” but the substance of these articles often suggested that a more accurate headline would have been “Trump’s win had better not change Hollywood’s Progressive DNA, or else.” Back in March, I took apart a Vulture piece which took this exact approach to Hollywood’s shifting political climate.
That ridiculous article, which might have been written by Big Brother himself, served primarily as a warning to Chief Executives all over Hollywood… you’d better not go soft on Trump, because we are watching you. In the piece, Executives who were perceived by The Vulture as having bent the knee to Trump in order to facilitate better business outcomes, most notably Warner Bros.’ David Zaslav, were described by The Vulture as “much hated.” Which of course brings up a question, never answered by the article, “hated by whom?” Because if the answer is not “the audience which pays to see the movies WB releases” then I’m not sure why Zaslav would care what anyone thinks of him.
The real goal of The Vulture piece was revealed by the underlying threat. Do what we say, how we say it, or we will continue to make sure you are “much hated” by all the people who host the parties, dinners, awards shows and other Hollywood events which, presumably, Zaslav would like to attend… a very powerful motivator in a town where image is everything and where who you know (or who will take your calls) matters more than what you know.
Last year, Stephen Miller tweeted:
And yet, calls for nationalizing Hollywood and the news media are still only coming from the left.
HOW IT STARTED:
A source says, “[Original Cowboys president and general manager Tex Schramm] knew some people would be adamantly opposed. Tom [Landry] was never consulted. But Tex talked about how, when a network telecast went to commercial, the camera usually looked for a quick shot of a ‘honey’ in the stands. So Tex said, ‘Instead, the camera will spend five seconds on one of our girls on the sideline,’ which is exactly what started happening. Tex said, ‘That’s how we’ll build our image.’
“Remember, the late ’70s were an era of the Farrah Fawcett posters, with the nipples showing through the suit. So Tex and [original Cowboys vice president of player personnel Gil Brandt] were the first guys to say, ‘We’re going to do a sexy poster, too.’ They did a team picture’ of the Cheerleaders and Gil sent thousands of ’em all over the country. Their goal was to get a Cheerleader poster up in every locker room of every college in the country, including NAIA and Division II. They wanted it tasteful, but with cleavage and asses. They wanted it provocative. They succeeded in blanketing the country with that poster.”
Listen, dear Cheerleader, to current Cowboy P.R. director Greg Aiello: “The word Tex said most was unique.’ And he really focused on the Cheerleaders … The typical notion of cheerleaders was leading cheers. But obviously, half the big deal of looking at cheerleaders was that they were the prettiest girls. So Tex said, okay, let’s put ’em in sexy costumes. Let’s turn ’em into showgirls.
“So there were a whole lot of ways to like the Cowboys. If you were religious, you could like Tom and tune out Tex and the Hollywood stuff. If you liked Cheerleaders and flashy uniforms, you could tune out Tom.”
—Skip Bayless, from his 1990 book, God’s Coach: The Hymns, Hype, and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry’s Cowboys.
How it’s going: NFL Tries Male Cheerleaders. That’s the Left’s Plan to Win Back Men? Ultimately, this moment isn’t about cheerleaders. It’s about holding on to the last vestiges of collective non-politicized entertainment.
Twelve NFL teams are reportedly incorporating male cheerleaders this season — the Minnesota Vikings, the Baltimore Ravens, the Los Angeles Rams, the New Orleans Saints, the Philadelphia Eagles, the San Francisco 49ers, the New England Patriots, the Tennessee Titans, the Indianapolis Colts, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Carolina Panthers. More than 30 percent of the league will feature cheer teams in which men take a spot away from women, The Spun reported Tuesday. This fact suggests this isn’t a one-off or a publicity stunt. It’s coordinated. And it forces a more serious question: is this really the cultural front the left wants to fight on — especially after losing male voters by double digits?
Perhaps they want to send the message that men, like Barbie, can be who they want to be — whether that be a tough football player on the field or a cheerleader just beyond NFL bleachers. But if the goal is to create a culture in which they can win back men, this doesn’t only register as tone-deaf — it feels like outright trolling.
The confusion isn’t about “tolerance.” Most people aren’t up in arms because they can’t stand the sight of a man doing high kicks. It’s more basic than that. Given that cheerleading squads were introduced to capture and hold the attention of the mostly male fan base, it’s the creeping feeling that the male attraction to female beauty is being impugned, that the rules are being rewritten in real time, and no one asked if we were okay with it.
The male cheerleaders aren’t just professional pompom holders and pyramid stackers; they’re symbols in a broader struggle over who gets to define normal. And much like the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports — a debate that clearly hurt Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign — the push feels artificially escalated. People didn’t ask for this, yet they’re expected to embrace it or stay silent.
—Julianna Frieman, the American Spectator, yesterday.
UPDATE:
Dallas Cowboys Relieved To No Longer Be Gayest Team In League https://t.co/jMGzX28YrA pic.twitter.com/RiD0aGJe7v
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 18, 2025
August 18, 2025
JOEL KOTKIN: Gavin Newsom: the chameleon who destroyed California.
Ironically, the minorities Newsom claims to champion have perhaps been hardest hit by his state’s economic ruin. He likes to cite ‘anti-racism’ and affirmative action as proof of his racial sensitivity, but on his watch, African Americans and Latinos in California perform far worse in terms of income and homeownership than in the rest of the country. Even immigrants, reacting to the lack of good jobs and high housing costs, are heading elsewhere. In the past decade, Los Angeles has actually lost foreign-born residents, who have been flocking to the very places – Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Miami – that Newsom caricatures as racist hellholes. Migration to California is now, on a per capita basis, lower than virtually any state, while the numbers leaving have shot up since 2020.
Yet even with its high concentration of the ultra-rich in Silicon Valley – it boasts the highest percentage of billionaires in the US – California still runs persistent budget deficits. In his presidential run, Newsom will struggle to explain the steep descent he has overseen in the state’s finances. This will be even more difficult considering that the states he criticises, such as Florida and Texas, enjoy large budget surpluses, generate more jobs and, in some cases, have introduced tax cuts. Few examples better sum up Newsom’s economic mismanagement than the ‘bullet train’ farce. Newsom has refused to kill this disastrous high-speed-rail project, which continues to devour billions of taxpayer dollars, despite its chances of being finished before his dotage looking increasingly remote. Meanwhile, far more critical infrastructure needs, such as roads and water supply, have fallen by the wayside.
California, once synonymous with opportunity and the good life, now carries an undeniable stench of decline. In 2022, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen compared the state to the late, decaying Roman Empire. California’s version of bread and circuses consists of cheques being sent to poorer Californians, effectively substituting blue-collar jobs for welfare dependency.
The liberal media may ignore these issues, like they did with Joe Biden’s mental deterioration. But the rest of the country is unlikely to have the wool pulled over its eyes so easily.
Do we know what’s going on with Newsom’s comms shop? Just because you can effortlessly crank out AI slop these days, doesn’t mean that you should:
Does Newsom agree with Tucker that Winston Churchill was the big baddie of WWII? Will he be shooting cases of Bud Light with Kid Rock to protest Dylan Mulvaney?
WAIT, IS TRUMP A NAZI OR A COMMIE?
Shot: The Real Reason the Left Hates the WW2-Style Ads Released by Trump’s Administration.*
Nazis, Russians, Japanese, U.S., U.K., all used this style of poster to encourage and inspire people to chip in to the effort to strengthen their country, both from within and without, during a time of war and economic uncertainty. It worked wonders in many ways.
So why is this poster considered Nazi-inspired, despite that style being a globally embraced style during that era? Because the man in the picture is white and blond. When you pull back on this automatic categorization, you’ll see how it’s a common pattern of the left, and I don’t just mean toward white people. The left loves to put people in boxes based on how they look, and this includes black people, too.
All blond-haired, white-skinned people are Aryan, and presenting them in any positive light is automatically a nod to Nazism. Sydney Sweeney is also a great example of this.
But you’ll often find the left policing black people’s behavior as needing to be a certain way or else they aren’t “black.” I can remember articles written in the legacy media asking if Barack Obama was black enough because he acted too white.
—Brandon Morse, RedState, today.
Chaser: MSNBC Compares Trump to ‘Soviet Crackdown’ On Free Speech.**
— Shannon Sauders, NewsBusters, August 9th.
Frank Burns, call your office!
* No doubt, the administration loves winding up the crazy gnostics inside the American left’s Bletchley Park facility that decodes everything as “racism” and “fascism.”
** Past performance is no guarantee of future results: NBC Gets Nostalgic for USSR, When ‘the Government Provided for the People.’
—Rich Noyes, NewsBusters, June 19th, 2017.
As Steve wrote in 2017 during Trump’s first term, “It’s always the Russians with these people — makes you wonder what they’d have thought back in the day of Ted Kennedy getting into bed with the Soviets to hack the 1984 presidential election. On the other hand, for leftists it’s probably perfectly acceptable to pussyfoot with Russian Communists.”
UPDATE: The “Fascism” Lie.
Fascism has become the catch-all for the Democrats now to describe policies they don’t agree with. It’s FASCISM! They cry. They do so unironically. They genuinely believe it because they have absolutely no idea what fascism means. They don’t seem to know what any of the big words they throw around mean because, to them, it is merely a method of control.
Calling everything fascism is itself a form of fascism because it means that unless you conform to our way of thinking, we will destroy you by any means necessary. In this case, words are their means. They use “authoritarianism,” “Nazi,” “Hitler,” and even “racist” and “rapist” as a form of fascism, too, ironically enough.
They use these words to smear Trump and everyone who voted for him because they think that draws a line. If you dare support Trump, then YOU are a “fascist.” And yes, it’s true that the Right often uses the word “Communist” as a way to condemn the Left, but, as with fascism, our country is not set up to support either of these, although we’re probably closer to communism.
As the late Kathy Shaidle noted in 2018: When I say “Trump is my fourth Hitler,” it’s only because I’m too young to remember Goldwater.
Since 1944, it’s been Hitlers all the way down for Democrats at election time.
RIP: Ronnie Rondell Jr., Hollywood Stuntman Set on Fire for a Pink Floyd Album, Dies at 88.
Ronnie Rondell Jr., a stuntman in a family full of them who performed in films including How the West Was Won, Ice Station Zebra, Twister and The Matrix Reloaded, has died. He was 88.
Rondell died Tuesday at a senior living facility in Osage Beach, Missouri, his family announced.
Rondell is known to the Pink Floyd faithful as the businessman on fire on the cover of the band’s 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. In an era before computer effects, his mustache was burned off during the photo shoot that took place on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.
The London Times adds:
He threw himself to the ground where Powell’s team sprayed him with foam and smothered him in blankets. He lost only an eyebrow and part of his signature moustache, but declared: “That’s it! I’m done!”
“Ronnie was very gracious about it, considering,” said Powell, who had fortunately taken the picture he craved on the previous attempt.
That photograph went on to become one of the great album covers. Years later, Rondell said his only regret was that it completely eclipsed the far more dangerous stunts he had performed during a career that included more than 200 movies and television series.
Related: ‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF:’ The mad stories of Pink Floyd’s album covers.
Pink Floyd were slowly falling apart when they came to make their follow-up to Dark Side of the Moon. To the perpetually angst-ridden Waters, the title track was a lament both for the absent Barrett (unrecognisable when, bloated and confused, he visited the group during the recording sessions) and also for the fact that they were becoming strangers to one another. He was commenting, too, on how the record business turned musicians against one another while cheerfully ripping them off.
That was the message that Powell and Thorgerson seized upon for the cover. “There was a lot of anger, especially in Roger, about the record business,” said Powell. “So we’re talking about the absence of sincerity, about people being ripped off.”
They had the perfect image in mind: two businessmen shaking hands, one on fire – symbolising the cynical nature of the music industry and how someone always ended up getting burnt in a deal.
However, in the era before CGI or sophisticated animation, a picture of a burning man required a man to be literally set alight. This led them to Stunts Unlimited, where none of the resident stuntmen were up for the gig. “Who wants to be on a record cover when we can be in The Towering Inferno?” said one.
There was just one exception – veteran Rondell, who was excited to take part in what he knew to be a dangerous undertaking, staying on the spot while on fire (“You’re standing still and fire moves”).
Just another day at the office for the design team of Hipgnosis, whose 2023 documentary I reviewed here: ‘Squaring The Circle:’ New Documentary Explores How Hipgnosis Created Rock’s Greatest Album Covers.
BABY, IT’S JIHAD OUTSIDE:
As Mark Steyn wrote in his classic 2014 encomium to Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside:”
A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .
Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as introduced by Esther Williams in “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb’s view of the West is the merest extension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.
I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.
What hath Greeley, Colorado wrought?
FROM THE WHITE LOTUS TO SIRENS, WHY EVERYONE ON TV IS RICH: ‘You’re sold this American dream.’
Bob Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, told The Post that part of the appeal of these shows is, “just the fun of seeing this stuff we don’t have.”
“A lot of people used to go in the back of the New York Times Magazine and look at these ridiculously huge houses that were for sale,” he observed.
“I find it much more interesting to watch a series about an organized crime family, ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘The Godfather,’ than I would watching a series about somebody who lived the life I live on a daily basis.”
Thompson said that it’s also “easier” to have shows “in settings of the very rich and the very privileged, because it’s kind of an easy source of drama and spectacle.”
The professor and TV expert pointed out that one big reason for the explosion of wealth on TV is that, “in the last 25 years, since around the turn of the century, we’ve become comfortable with our principal characters being bad people.”
He explained that the trend is “relatively new,” because in the history of American TV, shows were usually, “about heroes, good guys. There were antagonists, but the [show] was about the protagonists getting the best of them.”
This trend began to change with the “golden age of TV” in the 2000s” with shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “The Shield.”
“Oftentimes rich folks in at least a supposedly democratic culture, can be hard to portray sympathetically – because they’ve got all this stuff, they’re so privileged,” he said.
Television is escapism after all, and this isn’t all that new a development. In the 1980s, Miami Vice leaning hard on asset forfeiture laws meant that Sonny Crockett could simultaneously fight drug trafficking while posing as a small or medium-sized drug dealer, complete with a (seized) yacht, Ferrari, speedboat, and a seemingly endless supply of Armani and Hugo Boss sports jackets. The Cosby Show’s cast were always immaculately dressed while living in a million dollar Brooklyn brownstone. In England, David Suchet’s Poirot investigated murders that took place in incredibly stylish 1930s Le Corbusier-inspired modernist mansions.
MINNESOTA NICE, 2025 EDITION:
This is a political rally in America, 2025. Just as our founding fathers intended. pic.twitter.com/flWEGG0KG4
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 18, 2025
