DISPATCHES FROM THE SHARPTON CHANNEL: Robert DeNiro calls Stephen Miller the ‘Goebbels’ of Trump’s Cabinet.

Actor Robert DeNiro drew a comparison between White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller and Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

DeNiro offered a prediction during MSNBC News’s The Weekend on Sunday that President Donald Trump “will not want to leave” his position when he reaches his term limit in 2028*.

“[Trump] set it up with, I guess, he’s the Goebbels of the Cabinet, Stephen Miller. He’s a Nazi. Yes, he is, and he’s Jewish and he should be ashamed of himself,” DeNiro said.

This television segment from DeNiro comes after other celebrities have called Miller a white supremacist, among other names. The reference to Goebbels followed Miller’s speech at the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, which critics online compared to a speech Goebbels made in 1932.

As Neal Pollack wrote in Spectator World last month, “Do people really think that Trump won’t leave office after his term is over? He’ll be 82. He’s going to leave. Just like the weather in Chicago, if you don’t like the President, wait a minute.”

* Given De Niro’s recent health scare, please don’t let him see this tweet:

I really don't think the libs are gonna like this one. Please don't share it to them or tag them in the comments. pic.twitter.com/37EQeftxXn

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) October 19, 2025

CUE THE IMPERIAL MARCH: Obama Learns What Folks Really Think About His Awfully Ugly Presidential Center.

Tolkien’s description of Orthanc, from the road to Isengard, comes to mind at the first sight of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. You can almost picture Saruman standing atop the tower, sending his legions of Uruk-hai to war against Rohan at the fortress of Helm’s Deep.

Perhaps you prefer science fiction, and you picture Darth Sidious laughing as he informs a shocked Luke Skywalker that this Death Star is a fully operational battle station.

Be it Middle Earth or a galaxy far, far away, the dystopian-looking chunk of rock that bears the former president’s name seems to remind everyone who sees it of something, and none of it is very good.

Except for Barry, he really seems to like the place. He recently took to social media to brag a little about the progress being made, posting a video of himself, complete with a hard hat and safety glasses, overseeing the construction. Politicians do love to cosplay, don’t they?

During Trump’s first term in office, the reactionary left found itself vigorously defending hideous brutalist buildings inspired by the architecture of “militant fascist” Le Corbusier, such as the J. Edgar Hoover Building, when Trump’s administration expressed a desire to return to classical forms in 2018. This culminated in an executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” near the end of his administration, which of course was quickly discarded by Biden’s self-described Politburo.

And with his new presidential library that’s not really a presidential library, the Age of Obama comes full circle. His campaign began in 2007 when his operatives dropped an viral video that cast Hillary Clinton in the role of Big Brother from Ridley Scott’s legendary Super Bowl 1984-inspired Apple ad:

Not surprisingly after the choices made by Obama during his administration, his new building looks like Orwell’s Ministry of Love, where Winston Smith was tortured into believing that the past was constantly alterable and 2+2=5.

First of all they’re calling it a “center,” not a library, understandable given the woeful illiteracy rate of his more passionate followers. https://t.co/Obs0ZY0sUA

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 18, 2025

IT’S COME TO THIS: CBS News editor Bari Weiss stuns 60 Minutes journalists to silence as she asks humiliating question on ‘slanted’ coverage.

Anti-woke CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss left the 60 Minutes team stunned when she asked them to consider why viewers think their coverage is slanted.

The self-proclaimed centrist, 41, who has made political neutrality a focal point of her plans for the network, hit journalists with the seven-word question during a private Tuesday meeting, The New York Times reported.

‘Why does the country think you’re biased?’ she asked – leaving the staff and stars of the country’s top news program baffled and unable to respond.

Weiss’s question was awkward, as three anonymous sources told the newspaper.

The 60 Minutes reporters – including standouts Anderson Cooper, who doubles as a long-time CNN anchor, and Lesley Stahl – see themselves as impartial, the insiders said.

They have fiercely rejected the idea perpetuated by Donald Trump and other conservatives that their coverage is left-leaning.

CBS News has institutionally leaned left for well over half a century. Twenty years ago, Leslie Stahl couldn’t name a single conservative who works for CBS. Earlier this year, “Scott Jennings [Dropped] Leslie Stahl for Asking Jewish Hostage If He Thinks Hamas Meant to Starve Him. In 2019, appearing on CBS, Anderson Cooper didn’t object when AOC compared herself to Lincoln and FDR.

As John Podhoretz jokes:

But all journalism is biased – there’s no such thing as “objectivity;” it’s a construct from a time when media consisted of three radio networks whose frequencies were licensed and regulated by the FCC, and a handful of national wire services feeding articles to local newspapers. Since the news consumer now has a seemingly endless amount of sources to choose from, instead of pretending “they have no biases,” CBS would be far better off telling their viewers what exactly their biases are. Let the viewers know which party most of its journalists root for, what they think about free markets, America versus other nations, their take on the Middle East, etc.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Mamdani Says He Will Build Wall Separating East New York From West New York https://t.co/HwTmbzkxDL pic.twitter.com/6YC9kKSUov

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 1, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: “Michelle Goldberg told a Harvard audience that the New York Times ‘lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a hard time finding people who are ‘pro-Trump, honest, and not racist.’’”

Yes, I can see how that would be difficult, particularly when you work for a newspaper whose then-publisher “told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right,’” in November of 1991, whose newsroom’s atmosphere was summarized as “moderate white men should die,” and starting in 2019, went all-out to promote “the 1619 Project:”

As part of his review of the 1619 controversy as it stood through the summer of 2020, [Peter] Wood gives us a portrait of 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. A woman who styles herself “the Beyoncé of journalism” acts the part of a diva, and more. Treated by the Times, according to Wood, as “exempt from ordinary forms of accountability,” Hannah-Jones didn’t deign to reply to even the most respectful and serious scholarly criticism of her project. She booked herself instead into speaking venues where she was greeted as hero, prophet, or genius. And of course, Hannah-Jones was showered with accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize. Rudely putting down critics, falsely denying that she’d said things she had demonstrably said, deleting tweets that showed her in a bad light, the behavior that eventually destroyed Hannah-Jones’s credibility was in evidence well before the final collapse. And it was all encouraged by the Times, which treated Hannah-Jones with kid gloves and ignored her critics until its hand was forced. Even when Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein finally answered a critical letter from twelve historians (not the first such letter), that letter’s text was never printed in the magazine.

Something larger is at stake here. To all appearances, Hannah-Jones is a grown-up “cry-bully.” She embodies the movement of campus snowflake culture into the “real world” (if the Times newsroom can be called that). In the old days, Hannah-Jones might have been dubbed a “spoiled child.” Pampered, self-important, lashing out in fury when challenged, she would appear to be a product of the modern double-standard.

Meanwhile, Joy Behar of The View says, “I think we should have more Republicans on the show, but they don’t want to come on. They’re scared of us.”

In response, this person says he’s willing to try to overcome his fears and take up the challenge:

I don’t know that much about Mr. Walsh’s oeuvre, but he seems like an earnest young chap and declares himself to be, “a moderate, who’s down the middle…I’m more of a, you know, I’m like a Bill Kristol Republican. I’m more of a Michael Steele, Colin Powell-type Republican. That’s my thing. I’m an Adam Kinzinger Republican, you know.” All of which sounds like a perfect fit to be a guest of the long-running ABC News program. Give ‘em a shot, Joy and Whoopi!

UPDATE: Christian Toto: Conservatives Carpet Bomb Joy Behar’s Fake View Complaint.

START YOUR TAPE RIGHT NOW, because I’m about to tell you the truth. And eff you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Robert De Niro, intellectually, analytically, is the best De Niro ever. Not a close second, and I’ve known him for years. Paulie Cicero has known him for 50 years. If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it:

Outstanding. https://t.co/4K76QyLNaq

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 19, 2025

UPDATE:

This video has probably 60M views across all the accounts that have shared it – elected officials, major Democrat accounts and channels…

What does it say about the No Kings protest that the most viral video of it is actually… from 2017? https://t.co/sn3mzYBaHv

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) October 19, 2025

THIEVES STEAL CROWN JEWELS IN FOUR MINUTES FROM LOUVRE MUSEUM.

In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift up the Louvre ’s facade, forced a window, smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.

The daylight heist about 30 minutes after opening, with visitors already inside, was among the highest-profile museum thefts in living memory and comes as staff complained that crowding and thin staffing are straining security.

The theft unfolded just 250 meters (270 yards) from the Mona Lisa, in what Culture Minister Rachida Dati described as a professional “four-minute operation.”

One object was later found outside the museum, Dati said. French media identified it as the emerald-set imperial crown of Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie, containing more than 1,300 diamonds. It was reportedly recovered broken.

Images from the scene showed confused tourists being steered out of the glass pyramid and adjoining courtyards as officers closed nearby streets along the Seine. No one was hurt.

Also visible was a lift braced to the Seine-facing facade near a construction zone, since removed — the thieves’ entry point and, observers said, a striking vulnerability for a palace-museum.

More details here: Hunt continues for thieves after priceless jewels stolen in heist at Louvre museum in Paris.

BERNIE SANDERS, CHRIS MURPHY TO HEADLINE ‘NO KINGS’ RALLY WITH ACTIVIST WHO DEFENDED HAMAS ATTACK, CHEERED TRUMP ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT:

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) passionately defended the anti-Trump No Kings rally in Washington, D.C., this weekend against allegations that it will attract Hamas sympathizers and other far-left radicals. But one of the senators’ fellow speakers has praised Hamas’s “resistance” against Israel, cheered the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, referred to conservative activist Charlie Kirk as a “bitch” after his assassination last month, and expressed her desire for “the west” to “fall.”

Sanders pushed back earlier this week against House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who predicted that “Hamas supporters,” “antifa types,” and “Marxists” will be prevalent at the event. In a video posted to X, Sanders said No Kings is “not a ‘hate America’ rally.”

“Quite the contrary; it is a love America rally,” said Sanders.

They like Ike! Well, Ike Turner at least; back during the Dubya era, Ace of Spades once defined the left’s love of country as being from the “Ike Turner school of patriotism:” “Those who love America show it by denigrating and beating the shit out of her at every opportunity.”

UPDATE: And speaking of the Ike Turner school of patriotism:

TRAPPED IN 1972: Haaaaa! No Kings Rally Was So Organic They Literally Handed Out Instructions on How to Protest (Pic).

Of course it is:

Flashback: The Babylon Bee made a parody of John Lennon’s “Imagine” about communism and it’s quite simply the greatest thing you’ll see on the internet today:

On the other hand, it’s awfully subversive of whoever suggested “Imagine” be played at the No Kings (well, Some Kings) rally, considering that near the end of his tragically short life, Lennon (allegedly) supported an earlier Hitler himself: Working class hero? John Lennon ‘was closet conservative and fan of Reagan.’ “But by the time he died, John Lennon was a closet conservative embarrassed by his radical past, according to his former personal assistant. Fred Seaman claims that the former Beatle was a fan of Ronald Reagan, who went on to become America’s Republican president in 1981 and forged a close political alliance with Margaret Thatcher. ‘John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on [Democrat] Jimmy Carter,’ he says in a documentary film.”

Because of Lennon’s murder, and because so much footage exists of him recording the Imagine album in 1971, his radical chic image has become freeze-dried. But it was simply another phase for Lennon, in-between the psychedelia of the mid-‘60s, the booze-fueled “lost weekend” of the mid-‘70s, his house husband phase raising his son Sean few years later, and his return to recording near the end of the ‘70s.

As Lennon himself said in one his last interviews, “I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”

UPDATE:

NBC Boston describing the 'No Kings' protest: “An older crowd, a lot of white hair. You see Q-tips as we used to call them in the business… Not a lot of young people”

pic.twitter.com/9wCTaFmBuS

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) October 19, 2025

SONNY BUNCH: Diane Keaton, 1946–2025.

Manhattan and Annie Hall are slowly being written out of the cinematic history books thanks to critical discomfort with Woody Allen, but Keaton’s work as Allen’s muse in those two films is iconic for good reason. As the title character in Annie Hall, Keaton embodied the archetype that would much later come to be known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But whereas the trope would evolve over the years to serve fully and solely as a means for the lead actor’s growth, Keaton’s Annie was a real and realized character, while Allen’s Alvy seems stuck.

And she was a fashion plate, of course: Keaton’s wardrobe in that movie, the bowler hats and slacks and vests and suspenders, was chosen by the actress herself, and I don’t think you can overstate the impact this brand of feminine-masculine quirk had on the fashion landscape. It’s a key look for a character that Allen wrote at least partly based on Keaton herself; Allen’s awkward nebbish is really only tolerable because of her self-deprecatingly confident tomboy routine, and her Academy Award for Best Actress was well deserved.

As Roger Ebert noted in a re-review of Manhattan, “Allen’s whole career is based on making the secondary characters heroic,” and that is certainly true of Keaton’s work in Annie Hall and Manhattan. Allen’s stand-in leads need someone to save them from themselves, and Keaton serves . . . well, if not quite that role, then something close to it. Less so in Manhattan, I suppose, where she again serves as an audience stand-in of sorts, though one who mostly says to be saying “Get a load of this guy, can you believe him?” The appeal is there, but she’s smart enough to know to get away, and Keaton sells it with skill.

The two greatest crime dramas of all time and two of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, in a single decade, all of which have Keaton at their center. That’s not a bad legacy, particularly when forty-five more years were to follow. Rest in peace.

Read the whole thing. Allen’s writing in Manhattan is nowhere near as sharp as it was in Annie Hall and in the early 1990s, Mariel Hemingway‘s character was retroactively seen as foreshadowing Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, a woman who is 34-years younger than Allen. (Hemingway’s Tracy character was allegedly inspired by Woody’s late-1970s relationship with actress Stacey Nelkin, then age 17) But Manhattan’s cinematography and music are absolutely intoxicating, and with the exception of a cameo at the end of 1987’s Radio Days, it would be the last time Keaton would work with Allen until 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, the first film Allen made after everything had hit the fan.

DISPATCHES FROM THE DOOM GOBLIN: Greta Thunberg: I was tortured, beaten and starved by Israel.

Greta Thunberg has claimed she was “hit, kicked, starved and tortured” during her time in Israeli custody.

The Swedish activist accused Israeli guards of defacing her suitcase with the words “whore Greta”, drawings of a penis and images of the Star of David.

America’s Newspaper of Record provides additional details about how it all went down:

Greta Thunberg Says Israel Put A Noose On Her And Yelled, 'This Is Bagel Country!' https://t.co/ZnEI3qGlcl pic.twitter.com/EmFx7L81Yx

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 18, 2025

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Anne Frank as a ‘Pansexual Latinx Girlie’ — Joke, Woke, or Just Plain Offensive?

The show’s own website says, “‘Slam Frank’ imagines what happens when a progressive community theater company decides to transform Anne Frank’s true story into an intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.”

At first glance, it sounds highly offensive. At second glance, it still sounds highly offensive but with a caveat. The play’s creator, Jewish composer Andrew Fox, claims it’s not exactly what it sounds like. Rather than being woke garbage, it’s meant to make fun of woke garbage. Liberals laughing at themselves and all that — who knew it was possible?

But does it work?  Depends on who you ask. I’ve read numerous reviews, and many people seem to love it. Others claim it’s hard to be in on the joke when the joke is not so obvious. Either way, most of them seem to agree that it’s hard to tell if the play’s — presumably left-leaning — audience realizes it’s satire or thinks it’s just another notch on the belt of performative virtue signaling that has taken over the theater, television, and film industries these days.

* * * * * * * *

[Olivia Haynie of The Forward] also writes that whenever Fox does any sort of interview or media, he’s in character, pretending to be an ultra-woke playwright, making it even harder to understand where the joke might begin. He says things like, “Latinx girlies feel included in the Holocaust.” Looking at his background, as well as the backgrounds of the rest of the creative team — including Sam LaFrage, the artistic director of an LGBTQ-themed children’s theater company — doesn’t help either. It’s all leftists making fun of leftism. How very meta of them.

Yes, it’s very meta, but if leftists are realizing how far over its skis their ideology became during Trump’s first term, culminating in the PC annus horribilis of 2020, that’s a positive accomplishment. Still though, in regards to the headline on Sarah Anderson’s post, embrace the healing power of and. 

REQUIEM FOR THE BIDEN ERROR ERA: Brink Of A “Humanitarian Disaster:” 800 Migrant Families Set To Be Stranded In Pennsylvania Town Amid Factory Closure.

Before corporate media ever descended on the small Appalachia town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, ZeroHedge had boots on the ground in the late summer of 2024, uncovering a network of labor mules, migrant workers (both legal and illegal), and a web of corruption and exploitation of poor migrants enabled by the Biden-Harris regime’s open-border and lax immigration policies to replace native workers.

Full video here: https://t.co/XSnt3y0RVM

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 17, 2024

Fast-forward to today:

Now, the consequences of open-border policies and lax immigration policies that enabled migrants to be funneled into the small town could be set to unleash what some folks at the local level are calling a “humanitarian disaster” in the making. This is because Fourth Street Barbecue is planning to shut down its plants at the end of the month after defaulting on more than $80 million in loans, according to local media outlet WTAE.

The plant’s closure means that most of its workers, Haitian migrants under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), will soon be jobless and, once their TPS protections expire, reclassified as illegal. Imagine that – half a town full of illegals.

Exit question: “To the local politicians, nonprofits, churches, and everyone else involved in the funneling of migrants into Charleroi: Was it worth destroying a small town for short-term gain?”

SASHA STONE: No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum.

What are their No Kings protests anyway? What have they been since 2016? What are they trying to say? Is it like the ex who smashes all the dishes in the kitchen when her husband tries to leave? I won’t be ignored, DONALD.

The voices of the unheard? More like the side that had everything. All the media, all the institutions, all the culture, and for a time, all of the government. The people had only Trump.

They gathered their small donations and, by some miracle, voted him in, because they had a right to be represented, because this is their country too. It was a revolutionary act that mounted some sort of opposition to a movement that had swallowed up much of American society and demanded that we all go along or be left behind.

They managed to have the mother of all protests in the Summer of 2020, smashing windows, burning buildings, beating up cops, and throwing massive fits that said WE’RE MAD! But mad at what? Democracy? Sorry, you lost an election?

I try to remember being one of them and feeling the same way. But why did we think we had the right to protest an election just because it didn’t go our way? And not just protest, but protest all of the time over everything. Because we had all the power and we couldn’t stand to compromise with the other half of the country. They had to go, MAGA had to go. We canceled them. They’re racists, we said.

Elections only counted if the Democrats won. The other side was not allowed to win, try to make a change, or fight for their right to representation. Not in 2016 and not in 2024. So the protests will not end because the people have to be made to suffer for their vote.

So fine, the American people said in 2020. Okay, we’ll vote him out. Donald Trump is an existential threat, and our country is pure chaos. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so that, you know, like rigging an election, becomes necessary.

And fine, we’ll vote in Joe Biden, maybe that will calm things down – finally, the protests will end. Cut to: a botched exit from Afghanistan, 13 American soldiers dead, two wars in Russia and the Middle East, one long dark winter, a bad economy, and are we topless at the White House?

It was like George Spahn had moved in and ushered in the Manson Family. Things were getting weird, and the culture of silence and climate of fear meant no one would tell them that they were freaking America out.

Seen on Facebook:

Still though, yesterday was a chance for the Woodstock Generation to get some nice exercise in: Retired White ‘Antique-fa’ Boomers Hijack ‘No Kings’ Rallies, TDS Striking Before Dementia.

This is the "No Kings" protest in Marion NC, about a 30 minute drive from Asheville NC.

The crowd that showed up is BEYOND PARODY at this point…

…literally every single person at this protest is retired and white

Honestly, I've never seen anything like it. pic.twitter.com/fqSU8pOGUR

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) October 18, 2025

And even more so than the ’60s, it’s the vibrant Youth of Today who are setting the intellectual tone of the protests:

In honor of No Kings today, here is my favorite interview of all time. 10 seconds of pure glory. pic.twitter.com/jypj2HfWsI

— Jeff Hunt (@jeffhunt) October 18, 2025

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Don Lemon Encourages People of Color to Arm Up and Shoot ICE Agents.

“Black people, brown people of all stripes whether you’re Indian-American or Mexican-American or whoever you are, go out in your place where you live and get a gun legally. Get a license to carry legally. Because when you have people knocking on your door and taking you away without due process as a citizen, isn’t that what the Second Amendment was written for?

Go back and read what the Second Amendment says and perhaps it will knock some sense in the heads of these people who are saying, ‘Well it’s all great. I don’t believe they’re doing it without due process. They’re asking people for papers. They’re not really beating people up. These people are doing things that are illegal.’

Nobody is illegal. It is a misdemeanor to cross the border.

Flashback to January 10th, 2011:

[KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR]: Well, that was Arizona governor Jan Brewer answering a question about her state’s reputation. The shootings in Tucson Saturday definitely won’t help. We’ve seen big national issues like immigration, health care, gun laws, through the Arizona prism and much of the light has been very negative.

“The Arizona Republic” worries about it in an editorial, talking about the shooting right here, quote, “This incident will be used to stigmatize Arizona. It will fit into a narrative of the state as a place of hatred and rampant violence.” CNN’s Don Lemon has more on that negative narrative and how it all got started.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DON LEMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: These words caused a firestorm.

CLARENCE W. DUPNIK, SHERIFF, PIMA COUNTY, ARIZONA: Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

LEMON: The Pima County sheriff and Arizonians have had one bumpy year.

(CROWD SCREAMING)

LEMON: In August, the state enacted a highly controversial immigration policy, the toughest in the nation, requiring police to check the immigration status of people suspected of crimes or pulled over for driving infractions. Critics called it racial profiling, and the governor took heat for backing it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What does an illegal immigrant look like?

BREWER: I —

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Does it look like me?

BREWER: I do not know.

LEMON: Even though Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ district borders Mexico, she strongly opposed the immigration law. But after she backed President Obama’s health care reform law, her Tucson office door was smashed.

Giffords’ support also earned her a spot on a list of lawmakers that Sarah Palin wanted ousted. Giffords’ district was marked on Palin’s website with crosshairs. She spoke about it in March on MSNBC.

REP. GABRIELLE GIFFORDS (R), ARIZONA: The thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.

Consequences aren’t much of a concern for Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Pauline Kael-ism is Alive and Well in the Hollywood Press.

Hyper-partisan rage bait content is fundamentally boring. It’s nothing but chicken soup for the Progressive Resistance soul. It reveals nothing important and it appeals only to the fragile emotional state of a notoriously tiny ratings demographic. But the networks do it anyway, because “Resistance” to TrumpHitler has become the moral imperative of their lives.

And that is why reliably liberal Bari Weiss, of all people, is suddenly such a threat. The Left cannot risk a CBS News that is not automatically oppositionally defiant to Trump. And so, the Hollywood Press has reflexively attacked Weiss. Variety called her a “provocateur”, a label they conspicuously did not apply to Jimmy Kimmel, despite a deliberately provocative Charlie Kirk monologue which got him (temporarily) pulled from the air and triggered a liberal media orgasm. John Oliver went on his HBO show and waved away Weiss’ entire body of work by declaring it “irresponsible and deeply misleading” and “right-leaning”… without providing a single example. Other outlets complained that Weiss has no experience running a news organization, this despite having built a successful $150 million media company from scratch. You would think that a media which celebrates Meghan Markle as a “female founder”, and where iconic American media companies are disappearing more often than they are being created, might hail Bari Weiss as one of the most important media figures in recent American history. Alas, that is not the world in which we live.

What’s most unbelievable about all this is the fact that whatever Bari Weiss does with CBS News, it will remain a liberal media outlet, perhaps even a progressive one… it just won’t be propaganda, that’s all. But Weiss cannot be allowed to pull back on the reins of one of the left’s most beloved propaganda machines even a little bit. She must be destroyed, or at least fatally hobbled, before she can show the world what it looks like when a news organization follows the facts wherever they lead, calls balls and strikes without fear or favor and isn’t reflexively hostile to anything not of the Progressive Left. Because if she is successful, and if Ellison can use her success as one part of building a successful studio which is not dependent on partisan rage and anti-Trump ODD, then the entire progressive media resistance project could collapse entirely.

Weiss has already collected her first scalp:

The head of CBS News’ standards and practices unit — who presided over some of the network’s recent controversial, woke reporting — is out as new boss Bari Weiss looks to bring more balance to the left-leaning network.

Claudia Milne, who ran the division responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming, is the first senior executive to leave the network since Weiss arrived as editor in chief earlier this month.

Although Milne’s job had been “slowly phased out,” a CBS source called her departure “significant.”

“She was part of the woke mob at CBS News. It shows an editorial shift in how CBS will operate,” the person said, speculating that “this is Bari’s first scalp.”

I don’t know if “scalp” is the right word, but I do know that Milne would probably prevent it from being uttered on air out of concerns that it might offend two-spirit indigenous people.

Milne, who oversaw her unit since 2021, played a pivotal role in a host of eyebrow-raising decisions. Those ranged from coverage of the transgender Nashville, Tenn., shooter and spiking an Elon Musk interview to the network’s recent reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict, among other issues.

As previously reported by The Post, in 2023, Milne and then-news division president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews banned staffers from using the word “transgender” when reporting on the Nashville shooter.

The decision sparked outrage at the network because police working the case had identified the killer, Audrey Hale, as a transgender woman. Sources said Ciprian-Matthews and Milne spent 15 minutes telling staffers not to report Hale’s identity because it may not be relevant to the shooter’s motive.

You can see why she had to go. Failure to report Audrey Hale’s status as a transgender person stripped the story of its most important fact: the motive of the killer. She went on that rampage BECAUSE she was transgender; it was not an incidental and hence unimportant tidbit.

For years, we’ve run these two tweets by Iowahawk and Jim Treacher as “evergreen.” If Weiss can actually strip them of their “evergreen” status, she will have accomplished a major change to how television news is reported:

Related: Debra Saunders adds: The New Editor-in-Chief of CBS News Is Not Like the Others. “Some critics actually are arguing that balance requires that CBS and Weiss not hire with an eye to adding non-liberals to the workforce. They don’t acknowledge that, under their watch, the pendulum went way too far. It’s laughable because Weiss, 41, is hardly a hardcore conservative. She’s a married lesbian who supports abortion rights, for crying out loud. But these days, if you support newsrooms with diverse thinkers, that makes you a right-wing tool.”

OLD AND BUSTED: No Kings!

The New Hotness? Some Kings! ‘No Kings’ Rebrands for Rallies Taking Place In Countries With Monarchies (You CAN’T Make This Up).

"NO KINGS!!"

*unless your country already has a king, then kings are great*

— PCrudy (@PCrudy) October 18, 2025

Well, I guess some kings are okay – but Kongs are right out:

No Kongs pic.twitter.com/05A1DcmTbF

— Deebs (@DeebsFLA) October 18, 2025

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Great question. pic.twitter.com/HBArmQV0cc

— Ryan B (@Network_Guy8) October 19, 2025

Plus:

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES OUT OF 1930s GERMANY FOR $500, ALEX: Jewish man arrested after his Star of David ‘antagonized’ protesters.

A Jewish lawyer wearing a Star of David was arrested after police alleged the symbol had “antagonised” pro-Palestine protesters.

Police interview footage obtained by The Telegraph shows a detective accusing the Jewish man of openly wearing a Star of David that could cause “offence”.

The suspect, who was handcuffed and detained by police for almost ten hours, told The Telegraph his arrest appeared to be an attempt by the Metropolitan Police to “criminalise the wearing of a Star of David”.

He was displaying the Jewish symbol on a silver chain around his neck. The six-pointed star, measured just 2cm – less than an inch – across.

The man, who is in his 40s, was arrested at 7pm on Aug 29 at a pro-Palestine protest outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington in central London. The lawyer insists he was acting as an independent legal observer, monitoring the event for unlawful behaviour by the protesters and to scrutinise the actions of police.

But officers instead accused him of antagonising the crowd and being part of a counter-protest.

He was handcuffed behind his back, bundled into the back of a “meat wagon” and then held for questioning at Hammersmith police station, before finally being released at 4.30am the next morning.

Why, it’s as if England is well on the way to becoming “the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon,” or something.

UPDATE:

In the last two weeks.

Jews murdered in Manchester for going to a synagogue

Jews banned from entering Birmingham to see a match

Jews arrested in London for wearing a star of David

This is the UK in 2025.

And NOBODY in government wants to name those causing the problem.

— David Collier (@mishtal) October 18, 2025

HELEN ANDREWS: The Great Feminization.

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981).

A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs responds to Andrews’ essay: After the patriarchy: The HR lady is in charge now.

Women have gained power because of anti-discrimination law, not because they’re outcompeting men, Andrews believes. In a much-quoted line she writes: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.”

I remember the bad old days when many opportunities were closed to women, and I’m not convinced of Andrews’ thesis, but I’m OK with her proposed solution. She thinks ” fair rules ” — not firing the uppity women — is the answer. “Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out,” she writes. “Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.”

We all hate the HR lady, don’t we?

To be fair, this isn’t all that new a development:

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY: Zohran Mamdani appears smiling, arm-in-arm with ’93 WTC bombing co-conspirator and terrorist apologist.

Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani happily campaigned with a popular Brooklyn Imam long known as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, whose son once ran a terrorist camp for kids.

The Democratic nominee appears in a photo posted to X laughing and grinning, standing arm-in-arm with Imam Siraj Wahhaj and City Councilmember Yusef Abdus Salaam at Wahhaj’s Bed-Stuy mosque to celebrate the weekly Muslim prayer.

“Today at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had the pleasure of meeting with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote Friday on X.

* * * * * * *

The religious figure was fingered by prosecutors as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which left six people dead — and had publicly defended the plotters of the attack against the FBI and CIA, which he at the time dubbed the “real terrorists.”

During subsequent trials, Wahhaj testified in support of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman — the infamous “blind sheikh” and leader of a terrorist sect out of Egypt — calling the man a “respected scholar.”

The establishment left was triggered earlier this week when the White House press secretary said:

Leavitt: "The Democrat Party's main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals." pic.twitter.com/IcJwhYYV5x

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2025

And yet:

24 years after 9/11, NYC is going to elect a socialist Muslim who hates the NYPD, hates Israel, pals around with Islamist terrorism supporters, and whose wife mourns Hamas operatives. https://t.co/GPIdUzbsD7

— Sunny (@sunnyright) October 18, 2025

Exit question:

The only question is whether Zohran Mamdani is a Communist revolutionary who views Islamism as a useful tool for the revolution, or an Islamist revolutionary who views Communism as a useful tool for the revolution. He could technically be both, but likely more one than the other.

— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) October 18, 2025

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: What Cease Fire? Edition.

THE FREE MARKET MAY SACK KIMMEL AGAIN:

By continuing to politicize every current event, Kimmel has impressively lost 85% of his post-suspension bounce in just a few weeks among key demographics. With ratings hovering around 1.7 million viewers, his collapse in viewership is now lower than it was pre-suspension.

“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” wasn’t cancelled because of government “crackdowns” on free speech, as some proclaimed, but because consumers stopped valuing Kimmel’s program. His show was incongruous with their viewing habits and the national conversation, and it may face similar and necessary repercussions again.

American politics has long been fused with entertainment, and people are getting tired of it. The abundance of television shows like “South Park,” popular music, and celebrities lampooning or critiquing current events has made politics inescapable. Pew Research Center (PRC) found that almost two-thirds of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics. More in Common’s Hidden Tribe report found that most Americans are frustrated by division and tribalism, wanting officials to heal, not inflame, culture wars.

Yet, there’s political incentive among news outlets and commentary shows to feed viewers ideologically driven content. In 2024, Stanford University found that consumers, regardless of their educational or political background, are more likely to engage with media that aligns with their ideology rather than factual reporting.

Viewers may say they want these programs’ priorities to change, but traditional media thrives on the mass confirmation bias they ingrain in consumers.

It’s a vicious cycle that polarized the American populace while leaving elitist and leftist “comedians” untouched – until recently.

In July, Stephen Colbert announced his tenured and politically charged show would leave the airwaves in 2026. CBS explained that production expenses were costing the company tens of millions of dollars annually, and competition from social media and streaming has pulled customer bases away from television. Kimmel and Hollywood dashed these claims, but the evidence counters their disbelief.

Deloitte’s 2025 media consumption survey revealed only 49% of consumers have cable or satellite TV subscriptions – down from 63% three years ago – a mass departure partially driven by a market oversaturated with political content. An observed desire for hosts to separate politics from programming has skyrocketed the demand and consumption for alternative media, which they find more trustworthy. After being infested with grievance and division for years, the media consumer base shifted its preferences, and Colbert’s rating consequently tanked. Nixing Colbert was a business response to a format and an ideology that failed to captivate audiences.

Can we trust Deloitte’s survey? Perhaps they want to clean up the airwaves to atone for all the rivers their toxic chemicals have set on fire:

AOC says "rivers were on fire" because of corporations like Deloitte "pouring chemicals" into waterways.

Deloitte is an accounting, consulting, and tax services firm.

No idea what she's talking about. pic.twitter.com/mLX64nPnVk

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) October 16, 2025

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:

On this day in 1844, the brilliant and troubled atheist philosopher Friederich Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Germany. Nietzsche is best known for the claim “God is dead,” which he storified in two parables.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche announced God is dead, but promised that humans could be the thriving successor, if only we evolved beyond religion. “The Parable of the Madman” was more of a warning, written not to those who believed in God but to those who didn’t:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

In the late nineteenth century, many believed in a utopian future without a God weighing us down. Nietzsche, however, believed these children of the Enlightenment had underestimated how significant the death of God was. And so, his madman answered:

Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither it is moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

Nietzsche was not claiming that God had once existed and no longer did. Rather, he recognized what the loss of God meant as the central reference point for Western life, politics, education, art, architecture, and most other aspects of culture. The death of God had, as he put it, “unchained the earth from its sun.”

In his 1997 essay on the brave new world of neuroscience, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” Tom Wolfe wrote:

[Nietzsche] called the death of God a “tremendous event”, the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. “The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the 20th century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth”, wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines … of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly” — he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations — “are hurled into the people for another generation … then nobody should be surprised when … brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers … will appear in the arena of the future.”

Nietzsche’s view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuroscientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse — thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

And drone on about “defunding the police.” Last Year, Greg Byrnes noted at PJM: The Patron Saint of the Biden Administration Seems To Be Friedrich Nietzsche.

Or as the man himself predicted in 1883, “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.”

“LIBERAL MUSTINESS:” Antifa propaganda movie with Leonardo DiCaprio TANKS at box office. 

Warner Brothers’ “One Battle After Another” is slated to lose around $100 million after the film was released in theaters in September, according to a report from Variety. The movie stars actor Leonardo DiCaprio playing ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson. The movie has been slammed online by many people who have said it glorifies left-wing violence.

The movie, according to the outlet, needs around $300 million in revenue to break even with the costs incurred by the film. Thus far, the film, released on September 26, has only been able to bring in $140 million. Citing executives with knowledge of the matter, Variety reports that the movie will turn out to be a $100 million loss.

The movie has been slammed by some online as glorifying left-wing violence and some have connected the movie to Antifa. The character is part of a group of “ex-revolutionaries” who “reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own,” per IMDb.

American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis said of the film, “It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to. Why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made [is] because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility… [it will soon be] a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point… There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”

Even more dated liberal mustiness arrives next month from Hollywood: are you ready for Russell Crowe as a captured preening, wealthy, grossly overweight totalitarian leader — no not that guy, heaven forfend — but this guy?

BLETCHLEY PARK CONTINUES TO DECODE NEW FORMS OF HIDDEN RACISM: Yes, Taylor Swift is racist—just not the kind you think she is.

Is Taylor Swift racist? Yes.

Is she actively, explicitly anti-Black? a Trump supporter? pro-eugenics? I doubt it.

But that’s actually what worries me more: that there are so many liberal white women who move through the world never making connections between their whiteness and white supremacy.

In 1963, in Letter From Birmingham Jail, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

This is not a popular quote to post on MLK Day because it doesn’t comfort white people. Indeed, someone sent me a message on Instagram to let me know that positioning the quote “I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate” in block letters over an image of Taylor Swift would result in people feeling “judged,” “attacked,” and “defensive.”

But the reason why that is, is because of how easy it is for people to position their whiteness as neutral, their liberalism as goodness.

But as Rev. Dr. King points out, the protectors of the status quo are not so much those on the far right, but those who purport to be left-of-center, but who remain moderate in their thinking and their actions.

Are flag-wielding, MAGA-shouting Trump supporters a problem? Yes. They’re horrifying. But the biggest obstacle in taking down fascism isn’t far-right extremists.

It’s “liberals.” It’s “progressives.” It’s “democrats.”

It’s folks with “BLM” in their bios who live in majority-white suburbs and send their kids to private school. It’s folks who claim to be allies to the queer and trans communities and then have gender-reveal parties when pregnant. It’s people who look at the United States’ descent into fascism and ask, “How did we get here?” It’s folks who compare their European ancestors’ immigrations to what Black and Brown immigrants are experiencing today, as if race is inconsequential.

It’s Taylor Swift – and the majority of her fans.

Taylor Swift is a white woman whose success relies on cultural narratives of the fragility and purity of white femininity, while practicing zero interrogation into her own whiteness.

And her fans run to her defense whenever that is criticized. “But she publicly endorsed Kamala Harris!” they press, not realizing that this proves the point: Moderate politics dressed up as leftism don’t stand a chance against far-right extremism, a lesson I wish the Democratic Party would learn.

In Wi$h Li$t, Swift cheekily admits that while most people dream of Balenciaga sunglasses and soccer contracts with Real Madrid, all that she – “the girl who has everything and nothing all at once” (Elizabeth Taylor) – wants is a simple life, the so-called American dream.

“I just want you / Have a couple kids / Got the whole block looking like you,” she sings about her fiancee, football star Travis Kelce.

People were quick to point out that, especially given the cultural climate, expressing a fantasy in which two Aryan-esque rich people populate a neighborhood with blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies is a little… insensitive, at best.

Obviously, Taylor Swift didn’t sit down to write a pro-white (not to mention, deeply cisheteronormative) line here; I don’t think she did, not in the slightest. However, pushing the idea of passing on one’s genes, in the context of whiteness, has history to it – history that the pop star who is often lauded for her genius (“her brain!”) has to be willfully ignorant of for this not to occur to.

What makes Taylor Swift dangerous isn’t that she writes lyrics that could serve as the background music to a pro-eugenics Sydney Sweeney ad. It’s that she lacks the self-awareness to see how those two things could be connected.

But of course, she probably does have the self-awareness to see how her music and Sydney Sweeney are related, since over a decade before the gnostics on the left were the only ones hearing the racist dog whistles in Sweeney’s jeans ads, they were the only ones who thought they could detect the white supremacist dog whistles in Swift’s music, and endlessly hounded Swift for clicks and grins.

UPDATE: Is this a great country, or what?

I'm proud to live in a country so rich, powerful, and invincible we give consolation PhD to retards for coming up with shit like this https://t.co/Yc3qsT8szz

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 17, 2025

UPDATE (from Steve): Nose Ring Theory still holds.